You (15 page)

“Please,” says Eric.

You recognize your phone. You love that glow, it pulses like a light under water, you set it that way on purpose.

“Take it away,” you say.

“Turn it off, Ruth.”

“Put it under the pillow and let me sleep!”

Eric pulls the covers away.

“The fucker is vibrating
and
lighting up. Turn it off!”

You would like to strangle him.
Too dumb to turn off a phone
, you think, and grab it from him. You look at the message that’s just come in and see double and then triple and then double again. You rub your eyes and look again. Your thumb taps in your PIN and the phone stops lighting up. Eric sighs with relief, but his happiness lasts only a few seconds.

“Shit, what are you doing now?”

You pick up your clothes from the floor and are about to clear out when you realize that you’re far too drunk to negotiate a zebra crossing. You look back at the bed. Eric has his arm over his eyes. No, you can’t rely on him.

Maybe it was just an illusion
, you think,
maybe I’ll turn my phone back on and there’ll be nothing there
.

You go into the bathroom, drape yourself over the toilet bowl, and stick your finger down your throat. After that you feel better. You slap water in your face and rummage in your purse. Five euros. That’s never going to be enough. You go back into your room. Eric is asleep, his arm still over his eyes. You take his wallet out of his trousers. Nothing, just a few coins. You drop the wallet, take a deep breath, and look at your phone again.

You knew it wasn’t an illusion. Phones don’t lie. You pull on your boots, and then you run.

Of course there’s an idiot in every story. Someone who does everything wrong, backs the wrong horse and gets caught in the rain. Someone like you, disappearing on a stolen Vespa and grinning to themselves as if they’d won the jackpot. You’re the idiot, you’re the marked card. At the same time you’re the only one lying contentedly in her bed tonight. Your head is heavy from those two cocktails, the barkeeper probably slipped something into your glass. You hate it when guys flirt and then get nasty when you slap them down. If you said yes to every barman, you’d have died of alcohol poisoning years ago.

Eventually sleep overwhelms you and you dream of Neil going down on one knee in front of you in the disco and saying he isn’t bothered by your flowery underwear. You also dream of Nessi, bobbing away like a water lily and disappearing into the distance, even though you call her name. It’s a good thing you have a brother, otherwise you’d probably have slept through the rest of this story.

“Get up!”

The light goes on and off, on and off.

“Are you deaf or something? Get up!”

You wish you were deaf or something. You roll over. Your brother won’t let go.

“One of your stupid girlfriends has been ringing up a storm, how can’t you hear it?”

That’s enough. You kick the covers away, bickering like a washerwoman. You swing your legs out of bed and a whole universe of
stars explodes in front of your eyes. You feel dizzy and you bend down and look at your toes until the explosions subside. You didn’t hear any ringing. Good thing your aunt’s on night shift tonight.

“God, Paul, I didn’t hear it ring,” you murmur.

“Yeah, right.”

Your brother slams the door behind him, you sink back.

Maybe it’s all just a dream? Maybe I can just go back to sleep—

Your bedroom door flies open again.

You raise your head.

Ruth is standing there, and she says, “I hate it when you don’t charge your battery.”

And as she says it you know something has happened.

Something bad
.

The clock by the door says ten past three.

Whatever it is, it’s definitely bad
.

The realization reaches your brain like a shock wave, your ears pop, you have to rub your nose because it’s suddenly itchy.

“My goodness,” you say, like a grandma whose shopping bag tears on the way home, then you totter to your feet and get dressed while Ruth tells you about the message she got.

Five minutes later you’re sitting on the stolen Vespa, your hair blowing in the wind, Berlin is in a coma, the streets are deserted and the traffic lights have a weary pulse that looks a bit like slow-motion Christmas lights. How you hate Christmas, how you love the city at night.

III

And then you disappeared.

Without a trace.

And chaos was left in your wake.

The special crimes unit has been searching tirelessly for you. They said you wanted to be caught after they found your blood on the corpses. They said you were losing your concentration. They were now as familiar with your DNA as they were with your fingerprints.

Did that worry you? Were you even aware of it?

You were aware of it, the way you’re aware of things because people are talking about them. They said the Traveler was getting careless, and would soon fall into the special unit’s clutches. It didn’t occur to anyone that the Traveler didn’t care what he left behind. You were moving forward. The past remained behind like the vague memory of a dream or a smell that gets blown away by the next breeze. Not that you woke up drenched in sweat and wondered what had happened. Things like that are stupid. That’s what psychopaths do. The past was behind you, it wasn’t pursuing you.

You’re like a shark that always has to keep moving or it’ll sink. In a flowing forward motion. There is no going back. And just as a shark has no swim bladder, you have no morals. If you hesitated, you would sink to the bottom of our society in an instant and disappear.

Stasis is corruption, so you stay in calm motion.

For six years no one heard a thing from you. On the internet they wondered if the Traveler had reached his destination. You’re responsible for over sixty corpses. All inquiries have led nowhere, no one saw anything, the investigations washed out and the special unit was called into question. There was no pattern and no connection between the victims, there was no apparent motive. Even though the special unit would never have admitted it, they were waiting for your next step. They wanted mistakes. They looked at psychograms of serial killers, studied the behavior of frenzied attackers, and tried to force you into a category. They really had no idea who they were dealing with.

In 1998 you were offered a better job and moved to a bigger city. Your son turned seven and wrote his first letter, asking you if you couldn’t have him for the summer. You wrote back to say it was a good idea, he should ask Mom. Mom said no. Life took its course.

Your girlfriend split up with you because the long-distance relationship was too uncomfortable. You started spending your evenings in theaters and at concerts. You started reading more books, and built up a collection of documentaries on DVD. You discovered culture and met a woman who shared your passion for architecture. Otherwise hardly anything in your life changed. You weren’t calmer, you didn’t drink to excess or call your existence into question. Your friends didn’t notice any changes either. You were balanced. You traveled a lot throughout those years. Sometimes as a couple or in a group or on your own. And you never left any corpses behind.

When the new millennium was ushered in, your name was a legend. Someone wrote a book about you, someone put up a website that not only offered a forum for discussion but listed all your victims and was regularly checked by the special unit with the agreement of the provider. And of course someone tried to copy you and was promptly overpowered by his first victim. The day the two passenger planes flew into the World Trade Center, people started forgetting about you. The world was heading toward a new chaos. You
grieved with the Americans, spent that afternoon in front of the television, and then got on with your life like the rest of us.

Year after year after year.

It was once again winter when you traveled across the country with a lot of snow and a storm at your heels. The papers said:
The Avenging Angel strikes again
.

Avenging what, is the question.

You keep quiet.

It is November.

It is 2003.

It is night.

Fennried is a tiny village on the river Havel between Ketzin and Brandenburg, so insignificant that there’s no phone booth and no public mailbox there. A main street and a side street, thirty-eight houses, eight run-down farms, two cigarette machines. The bus stop is by the entrance to the village, a van parks outside the bakery twice a week, and once a week a van selling frozen food drives through the streets and honks its horn. It seems like the village is all the time asleep, the tallest building is a dilapidated church with a little cemetery, in which the gravestones have either fallen over or lean wearily against one another. In the run-up to elections the parties don’t bother to put up posters along the two streets. It’s an in-between place. It doesn’t get bigger, it doesn’t get smaller, it stagnates in its insignificance.

One of your fans wrote that the challenge was so great that you couldn’t resist it. He wrote that after lengthy planning you had finally decided to pay Fennried a visit. He made a sketch of your journey through the town, as if he’d prearranged it with you, and published the sketch on his blog. He spent four days in custody
for that. He knew too much. The special unit let him go when they found out that he’d got the details from a policeman who’d been part of the investigation in Fennried.

It’s Thursday. After work you get into the car and drive toward Berlin. You had a premonition this time. Like a scratch in your throat. After you woke up you drank coffee and sensed the change. As if the wind had turned. You spent the day in the usual rhythm, you’d even gone jogging for an hour after work, and it was only then that you set off.

Just before Berlin you leave the highway and stop at a gas station. You eat a baguette with smoked salmon standing at a table and talk to the cashier. You learn that her husband doesn’t want to see the children anymore, and that fourteen years after the wall came down hardly anything has gotten better and lots of things have gotten worse. But the cashier smiles when she says that. You like her optimism. She gives you an openness that she hopes will be reciprocated. You smile back and then you laugh together and you drive on.