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.
Only when you’ve passed Fennried do you realize how small the village is. You turn around and drive back. One minute twenty-six seconds from one end to the other. Half the streetlights don’t work. It’s nine in the evening and almost all the windows are in darkness. The light of a television flickers here and there.
You drive through the village a third time. The wind tries to push your car off the road. You lower the driver’s window and enjoy the cold. You stop by a derelict farm and wait. A strange car in a tiny village on a desolate winter’s day. The snow starts enfolding you. The lights in the windows go out. It’s a bit like that night when you were stuck in the traffic jam. Calm. Solitude. And it reminds you a little of the silence of the motel. Both times you surprised yourself. You knew your potential, but be honest, you didn’t know what you were really capable of. Your new knowledge gives you a feeling of certainty now. As if a racing car knew its own strength.
Shortly after one o’clock you get out of the car and walk up to the first house.
What are you looking for? What makes you kill? Is there a medical background to it? A tumor, perhaps, pressing against your cerebral lobe? A sickness that makes you bare your teeth? Did you learn it from somebody? Did somebody take you by the hand and show you that killing is liberating? Is it liberating? Is that why you’re on the road? Are you looking for salvation, purification, absolution? Is it instinct? Is it desire?
Even though the shutters are down over all the windows and terraces, most of the doors are unlocked. You go from house to house. You ring the doorbell if necessary. Sometimes a dog barks at you, and sometimes there’s a chain on the door. You’re always polite and friendly. They let you in, you kill them quickly and efficiently. Most of the people who live here are pensioners. You happen upon two women under fifty. One is a nurse, the other a retired doctor. The doctor’s bell is surrounded by dried flowers and her door is the only one that opens at the first ring.
A village, thirty-eight houses, fifty-nine inhabitants.
You don’t leave a single soul alive.
The house smells horribly of rotten meat, and you wonder where the stench is coming from. The kitchen is surprisingly clean, even the floor has been mopped, while the living room is a rubbish dump. The sofa is shoved across the floor, there are toppled chairs, broken crockery, and vomit on the floor. The table is scattered with colored straws, drink cans, and plates with dried-on leftover food. There’s white dust in the cracks and you assume it’s heroin. It looks very much as if there’s been a party here.
“Looks like they had a party,” says Leo.
“That’s what I thought,” you say.
Leo points outside.
“I thought we might sit in the fresh air.”
The table on the terrace is laid. Leo has fetched pastries, coffee, and rolls from the bakery. There are napkins beside the plates. Leo knows what you like. Even if the situation doesn’t call for it, you want to maintain a clear line. Your men must not think anything’s different just because your brother is sitting dead in the basement and the merchandise is gone.
Tanner and David are already seated. David has opened his notebook. Leo pours the coffee. If your brother came out right now and asked who wanted freshly squeezed orange juice, everything would be the same as ever.
“Have you got a connection?”
David turns the display to face you. Tanner comes around the table with Leo. The picture is in color. Your brother always loved these electronic toys. The cameras are hidden in various places around the rooms, the picture definition is pin-sharp and vivid. You know some private porn movies have been made with them. Your brother knew no shame. Motion detectors activate the cameras as soon as someone walks through the picture. A two-terabyte hard drive collects the movies. David says he doesn’t know how full the drive is, and how many days back the recordings go, but he’s going to look into it.
“Show us the basement,” says Tanner.
David zaps through the rooms—kitchen, living room, for a moment you see yourselves sitting on the terrace, the downstairs bathroom, the upstairs bathroom, bedroom, loft, garage, and finally the vaulted basement. You see the swimming pool and the boy staring at it as if the pool were an oracle. He hasn’t moved from his chair. This is not going to take long, you think and