Tretjak (13 page)

It was indeed a rather special kind of letter. At first the content seemed to be some sort of certificate. A sheet of paper, but not really paper, finer, thinner, like parchment. Decorated on all sides in colour. Yellow and red lines, heads of animals, a coat of arms. And in the middle stood a number and a few words.
Room 242
, it said, and:
Dear Maria, please tell the police the story of Gabriel Tretjak. No signature, nothing else
. The letters seemed to have been written with a fountain pen, sweeping, almost a bit over the top, somehow antique.

A few minutes later Max called the police. First the local station, which knew them, as it was the one they often called when tourists blocked their entrance without being guests of the hotel. The man there connected Max with the police headquarters. When the connection was made between the strange letter and the murder of the scientist, everything moved very fast. Maria was supposed to come to the headquarters as soon as possible. The inspector himself wanted to talk to her.

Maria quickly went home first. She changed from the dark navy-blue dress with the blue apron into the black dress she wore at funerals. That seemed appropriate to her for a visit to an inspector. Black dress and the topic of death, that's only right and proper, she thought.

Inspector Fritz Innerhofer was on his fifth cup of coffee of the morning. His secretary knew that this was an indication of how the current investigation was progressing. The more coffee, the worse it was. Five cups this early in the morning could mean only one thing: it was going very badly. The conversations with the family had not led to anything, nor had the forensic examination of the hotel room, except for the realisation that this was the work of a professional killer – the room had been cleaned of evidence perfectly, leaving only the large amount of blood everywhere. There was no decent clue so far, no suspect. There was only this name: Tretjak.

They had very quickly connected the murder on the Bavarian motorway to the one in the hotel room in Bolzano. The inspector from Munich had mentioned a dubious businessman called Tretjak, who played some role in the case, but he was still completely in the dark as to how he was involved. Innerhofer remembered the name – he was an ice hockey fan, and there had been a legendary Soviet goalkeeper with the name Wladislaw Tretjak. He had mentioned that straight away in his conversation with Maler, but his colleague knew nothing about ice hockey and said only: ‘My Tretjak's first name is Gabriel. A very odd man.'

And then he had received the call this morning. When his secretary popped her head through the door and announced that Mrs Unterganzner was here now, Innerhofer said: ‘Good, she should come in straight away.'

Maid was probably not really the right term for her, he thought, when the small, petite, old Maria took her seat opposite him. She handed him the envelope. Innerhofer opened it and carefully took out the page of parchment. He read the text and then said: ‘Well, Mrs Unterganzner...'

‘Please, Inspector, call me Maria. Everybody calls me Maria. I never hear my last name, it makes me nervous.'

‘With pleasure. Well, Maria, tell me the story of this Gabriel Tretjak.'

‘There is nothing to tell. I haven't seen him in 30 years. I know nothing about him now.'

In these moments Innerhofer hated his job. First his expectations were raised, and then dashed. Outwardly he didn't show any reaction, he just looked at Maria.

She said: ‘I only knew him when he was still a child.'

It took another three cups of coffee for the inspector from Bolzano – Maria didn't drink anything – to get the full story Maria had to tell about Tretjak. It was not always very easy to follow; the old lady was not a natural story teller. The sentence she repeated most often was: ‘Gabriel, he was such a lovely boy!'

Gabriel Tretjak's mother was a capable Turkish woman who with her husband took over the management of the hotel Zum Blauen Mondschein back in the Seventies. She was intelligent and hard working, in contrast to her husband Paul, who was a good-for-nothing, always chasing after skirts. There was also a son from Paul's first marriage. Must have been a nasty character, causing trouble every time he came to stay. He was about 10 years older than Gabriel, and Gabriel had always been afraid of him. Maria didn't remember his name.

Then the mother got sick, cancer of the brain, the illness worsening very quickly. And Gabriel's father, the shifty Paul, cleared out of there very abruptly. He deserted his family, the dying wife and the little Gabriel. The mother had to ask her family in Turkey to help out. Her two sisters arrived with their entourage. All of them only spoke Turkish.

This was the story Maria Unterganzner had to tell about Gabriel Tretjak: the development of a horrible childhood. She remembered two scenes in particular. Once little Gabriel had fallen down the stairs and hurt his knee and was crying. Gabriel was about 10 years old back then. His knee was bleeding, and he cried and cried, and then suddenly he called for his father, ‘Daddy, Daddy, where is my Daddy?' And the only one who was there was one of his aunts. She was nice, for sure, tried to calm him, comfort him, and she also said something like ‘Daddy later, Daddy later'. But the maid Maria, who was observing the scene, had the feeling, a feeling she remembered over 30 years later: The boy was afraid of his aunt, the woman with a headscarf, who he didn't understand.

The second memory wasn't much better. Little Gabriel was sitting on his bed in his room, totally motionless, unresponsive, with his stuffed animal in his lap, a white tiger. Maria shook him, took him in her arms. No reaction. Outside you could hear his mother scream, in such great pain that no medicine could ease it. This time it took hours before the morphine finally worked. When his mother eventually fell asleep Gabriel was still sitting on his bed, totally frozen. Maria remembered calling the paediatrician. He gave the boy an injection, and then finally things returned to normal.

Horror stories, absolute horror stories. And then Maria told another story, a beautiful one, actually. After the mother had died, there was nobody who could take care of little Gabriel. The Turkish family he didn't really understand? The father, who had taken off? No. So the hotel and the city took over the responsibility, if you like. The mayor back then became his guardian. One of his relatives had a farm in the hills above Bolzano, with a big family who took Gabriel in. After school every day at noon he came to the hotel, where Maria cooked him lunch. Thus he was a son of Bolzano, and people were of course a bit disappointed, as Maria put it, that he didn't keep in touch with anybody after he left school. But she, said Maria, she had understood him. ‘He had to go and start a new life for himself.'

Inspector Innerhofer thanked Maria for her statement and took her to the door.

One thing was clear now: somebody wanted the story of this childhood to be known.
Please tell all this to the police
, this somebody had written on the parchment. And this somebody could be a double murderer. Innerhofer stood at the window in his office and looked at the dirty-brown wall of the building opposite where the plaster was coming off. He was convinced that this was the ugliest view in the whole of Bolzano. But for a moment he didn't mind all that. The solution to the murder of the professor had moved closer through the evidence the maid had just given, which established that the killing had some definite connection to Bolzano. The hope that it would be a case of a murder of a traveller just passing through town, killed here by strange coincidence, that hope had been dashed.

What was the purpose of the message to Maria? For a brief moment the inspector wondered whether the old lady was somehow in danger, whether he had to do anything. But then he thought not. Why would anybody want to hurt a little wizened lady?

Innerhofer had the switchboard connect him with the man Maria had mentioned: Gabriel Tretjak's paediatrician who had been called out to treat the distraught boy. ‘He was also called Innerhofer.'

Innerhofer was a common name in Bolzano. When Innerhofers talked to one another, they had a certain routine. ‘Well,' said the paediatrician on the phone, ‘in this case it's simple, you are Inspector and I am Doctor.'

Doctor Innerhofer was a young man back then; today he was old, but still practising. He remembered poor little Gabriel well. ‘What ever happened to him?' he asked.

‘Businessman in Munich, apparently quite successful.'

‘What do you want to know, Inspector?'

Innerhofer didn't really know himself. The doctor said that he had been impressed how the child had set himself against the difficult reality. Gabriel, in a way, had turned inward. What fitted into that picture was also the fact that the little one had started to be interested in the stars. ‘He looked inwards and upwards, but definitely away from the life that he saw day by day.'

The inspector asked whether this kind of childhood could somehow be significant in any way. The doctor laughed and replied: ‘Certainly. This childhood could be a definite explanation for anything that happened later.'

Inspector Innerhofer placed two calls after this one. He left a message on Inspector Maler's voicemail, informing him about the evidence the maid had given. And he called his colleague in the art theft division, who he had passed the envelope with the parchment to. Yes, said this expert, it hadn't been very difficult to recognise: it was a page from a medieval illuminated manuscript from the city of Udine from the 16th Century. The complete manuscript, some 100 pages, was of immeasurable value. This page alone was probably worth 10,000 euros. He had already contacted Udine to find out where the manuscript was at the moment.

 

Kochel am See, 11am

In the end, it had been easier than she had thought. In the end, it is always easy. Charlotte Poland decided to remember that sentence. Maybe she could use it in her next novel.

Shortly after 10am, still from her hotel room, she had called her husband and had ended her marriage. It had lasted seventeen years, three months and eleven days. She had done that calculation just before pressing the call button on her mobile. ‘Markus,' she said, ‘I want a divorce. It's the best thing for both of us. I know it and you know it, too. In fact we have both known it for a long time.'

Markus replied, rather quickly: ‘Maybe you are right.' And then he attempted to jest, as he so often tried to make light of a depressing situation with a joke: ‘At least we don't have to fight about the custody of Lars.'

Celebrity couples often named as a reason for their separation the fact that they had drifted apart over the past few years. Charlotte Poland thought this was not a bad description: two people go separate ways, though at the beginning they are always close by, within shouting distance and clearly visible by the other. So they don't notice at first that through forks in the road the distance between their paths becomes ever bigger, so big in fact that they end up in different worlds. Charlotte was 25 when she met Markus, who at that time was approaching his 50th birthday. She was a student who wanted to be a writer or a journalist or something that had to do with writing. He was an IT entrepreneur and had just sold his company for an eight-digit figure. They had met by chance in a hotel in Düsseldorf. He had slipped a note under her door in the middle of the night. He had written two short romantic poems for her. Maybe that was the moment that they had been closest in all those years.

Charlotte liked his generous nature, his distant character. He never quizzed her, never pestered her. Then she noticed that he treated everybody the same way, friendly, vague, like a charming host of a television show. She suddenly realised that in truth he was not interested in anybody, not even in their son Lars, who was born three years after their marriage. Markus had a few hobbies: he renovated Tuscan villas, bred French bulldogs, and somehow his family was a kind of hobby as well. He kept his distance emotionally, neither cold nor warm. But he was always friendly and tried to fulfil all Charlotte's and Lars's wishes. Charlotte was too clever to want to change Markus. She chose a different route: in his way Markus was the perfect husband to equip her with a structure for her life. It was now up to her to live within that structure the way she wanted.

Her first affair was with her publisher. She had published a few racy articles in some magazines and now wanted to try her hand at writing a novel. She wrote 30 pages, the beginning of a psychological take on a relationship, and sent the manuscript to the most famous publisher in Munich. He liked the pages, and liked Charlotte Poland even better. He met her for dinner and told her after the second grappa that he was going to publish her book if she went to bed with him. She sat there thinking this was a bit too much like a scene from a trashy novel, but on the other hand she was old enough to know that life sometimes is like a trashy novel. So she looked at the publisher, who was a bit portly but still rather good-looking, and said: ‘OK, where shall we go?'

They went to the big hotel at the airport, and kept up that routine even after Charlotte Poland's books met with success after success. Every two months, they met at the Munich airport and spent an afternoon together.

Other affairs followed, numerous and quite varied. Sometimes it felt good, sometimes not. Sometimes cheap, sometimes less so. She believed she was happy. This was exactly how she had imagined her life, a life of many shades. She was aware that sometimes it appeared that she was mistaking her stories for her real life. But why not? She even saw a psychotherapist and in many a session internally examined her life. And if she had to take personal stock of these sessions she would say: yes, she needed the play with lies to round off her life. It was not really evil; it suited her.

But then there was that little boy, who was growing up, and with him grew the problems he created – yet she loved him so much. No matter how much she suffered for it, how angry he made her, and how she hated him for brief moments. Soon after the problems with Lars began, she started to imagine that he had turned out the way he had because of her, that he had in effect become the metaphor for her life. Her son, the monstrous liar, presented her with the reckoning for her own hypocritical and deceitful life. This thought took hold of her more and more. Not only was she responsible for Lars's fate, it was also up to her to save him. For that, she was prepared to completely change her ways. She wanted her son back. The termination of her marriage was the first step. She was determined to act, at all costs.