Thursday, November 6, 2008
He didn’t say “See you later.” Nobody who was let out of the slammer ever said “See you later.” Often, very often over the past ten years, he had imagined the day of his release. Now it occurred to him that he’d only thought as far as the moment he would walk out the door into freedom, which all of a sudden seemed threatening. He had no plans for his life. Not anymore. Even without the droning admonishments of the social workers he had realized long ago that the world was not waiting for him, and that he would have to deal with all sorts of obstacles and defeats in a future that no longer seemed so rosy. He could forget about a career as a doctor, which had once been his ambition after he passed his A-level exams for the university. Under the circumstances the training he’d received to be a locksmith, which he’d completed in prison, might come in handy. In any case it was high time he looked life straight in the eye.
As the gray, spike-topped iron gate of the Rockenberg Correctional Facility closed behind him with a clang, he saw her standing there across the street. In the past ten years she was the only one who had written to him regularly, but he was still surprised to see her. Actually he had expected his father to come. She was leaning on the fender of a silver SUV, holding a cell phone to her ear, and puffing nervously on a cigarette. He stopped. When she recognized him, she straightened up, stuck the phone in her coat pocket, and flicked away the cigarette butt. He hesitated for a moment before crossing the cobblestone street, carrying the small suitcase with his possessions in his left hand. He stopped in front of her.
“Hello, Tobi,” she said with a nervous laugh. Ten years was a long time. They hadn’t seen each other in all that time, because he hadn’t wanted her to visit him.
“Hello, Nadia,” he replied. It was strange to call each other by these unfamiliar names. In person she looked better than on TV. Younger. They stood facing each other, hesitant. A brisk gust of wind sent the dry fall leaves rustling across the pavement. The sun had slipped behind thick gray clouds. It was cold.
“Fantastic that you’re out.” She threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. “I’m glad. Really.”
“I’m glad too.” The instant he uttered this cliché, he asked himself whether it was true. Happiness was not the same thing as this feeling of strangeness, of uncertainty. She let him go because he made no move to return her embrace. In the old days she had been his best friend, the neighbors’ daughter, and he had taken her presence in his life for granted. Nadia was the sister he’d never had. But now everything was different, and not only her name. The tomboy Nathalie, who had been ashamed of her freckles, the gap in her front teeth, and her breasts, had been transformed into Nadia von Bredow, a famous actress who was in great demand. She had realized her ambitious dream to leave behind the village where they’d both grown up, to climb all the way to the top of the social ladder. He, on the other hand, could no longer put his foot even on the lowest rung. As of today he was an ex-con. Sure, he had served his time, but society was not exactly going to welcome him with open arms.
“Your father couldn’t get off work today.” Abruptly she took a step back, avoiding his eyes, as if his feeling of awkwardness was contagious. “That’s why I’m picking you up.”
“That’s nice of you.” Tobias shoved his suitcase into the back seat of her car and got into the passenger seat. The light-colored leather didn’t have a mark on it, and the inside of the car still smelled new.
“Wow,” he said, genuinely impressed, casting a glance at the dashboard, which looked like the cockpit of an airplane. “Cool car.”
Nadia smiled briefly and pressed a button without putting the key in the ignition. The engine sprang to life with a subtle purr. She expertly maneuvered the powerful automobile out of the parking place. Tobias glanced briefly at a pair of enormous chestnut trees that stood close to the prison wall. The view of those trees from his cell window had been his only contact with the outside world for the past ten years. The way the trees changed through the seasons was all that had remained of the world that had otherwise vanished in a diffuse fog beyond the prison walls. And now he, the convicted murderer of two girls, had to step back into this fog after serving his sentence. Whether he wanted to or not.
“Where should I take you? To my place?” Nadia asked as she turned the car onto the autobahn. In her most recent letters she had offered several times to let him stay with her temporarily—her apartment in Frankfurt was big enough. The prospect of not having to return to Altenhain and confront the past was tempting, but he declined.
“Maybe later,” he said. “First I want to go home.”
* * *
Detective Inspector Pia Kirchhoff was standing in the pouring rain on the site of the former military airfield at Eschborn. She had done up her blond hair in two short braids and put on a baseball cap. With her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her down jacket she was watching with a blank expression as her colleagues spread a tarp over the hole at her feet. During the demolition of one of the dilapidated aircraft hangars, a backhoe operator had discovered bones and a human skull in one of the empty jet fuel tanks. To the dismay of his boss he had then called the police. Work had come to a standstill for the past two hours, and Pia had been forced to listen to the insulting tirades of the ill-tempered foreman, whose multicultural demolition crew had instantly fled in alarm when the police showed up. The man lit his third cigarette in fifteen minutes and hunched his shoulders, as if that would prevent the rain from running down inside the collar of his jacket. He kept swearing to himself the whole time.
“We’re waiting for the medical examiner. He should be here soon.” Pia had no interest in either the blatant use of illegal workers at the site or the schedule for the demolition work. “Go ahead and tear down another hangar in the meantime.”
“Easy for you to say,” the man complained, pointing in the direction of the waiting backhoe and dump truck. “Because of a few bones we’ve got a big delay on our hands, and it’s going to cost us a fortune.”
Pia shrugged and turned her back on him. A car came bouncing over the uneven concrete. Weeds had gnawed through every gap in the taxiway and had turned the formerly smooth surface into a regular mogul run. After the airfield had been shut down, nature had emphatically proven its ability to reclaim every man-made structure. Pia left the foreman to bitch and moan and went over to the silver Mercedes that had pulled up next to the police vehicles.
“You certainly took your time getting here,” she greeted her ex-husband, not sounding overly friendly. “If I catch a cold it’ll be all your fault.”
Dr. Henning Kirchhoff, acting chief of Frankfurt forensic medicine, appeared unfazed by her remarks. He calmly donned the obligatory disposable coverall, exchanged his shiny black leather shoes for rubber boots, and pulled the hood over his head.
“I was giving a lecture,” he countered. “And then there was a traffic jam near the fairgrounds. Sorry. What have we got?”
“A skeleton in one of the old underground jet fuel tanks. The demolition crew found it about two hours ago.”
“Has it been moved?”
“I don’t think so. They removed only the concrete and dirt, then cut open the top of the tank because they can’t transport those things in one piece.”
“Good.” Kirchhoff nodded, said hello to the officers in the evidence team, and prepared to climb down into the pit underneath the tarp, where the lower portion of the tank was located. He was undoubtedly the best man for the job, since he was one of the few forensic anthropologists in Germany; human bones were his specialty. The wind was now driving the rain almost horizontally across the open taxiway. Pia was freezing. Water was dripping from the bill of her baseball cap, and her feet had turned to clumps of ice. She envied the men of the demolition team who had been idled, as they stood around in the hangar drinking hot coffee from thermoses. As usual, Henning worked meticulously; once he had some sort of bones in front of him, time and everything else lost all meaning for him. He knelt down at the bottom of the tank, bent over the skeleton, and examined one bone after another. Pia stooped to look under the tarp, holding on to the ladder so she wouldn’t fall into the pit.
“A complete skeleton,” Henning called up to her. “Female.”
“Old or young? How long has it been here?”
“I can’t say exactly yet. At first sight there’s no tissue remaining, so probably a couple of years at least.” Henning straightened up and came back up the ladder. The men of the evidence team began their work by carefully securing the bones and the surrounding soil. It was going to take a while before the skeleton could be transported to the forensic medicine lab, where Henning and his colleagues would examine it thoroughly.
Human bones were always being discovered at excavation sites. It was important to establish precisely how long the corpse had been buried there, since the statute of limitations on violent crimes, including murder, ran out after thirty years. It didn’t make any sense to check the missing persons files until they had determined the age of the victim at death and how long the skeleton had been in the ground. Air traffic at the old military airfield had ceased sometime in the fifties, and that was how long it had been since the tanks were last filled. The skeleton might belong to a female American soldier from the U.S. base located next to the airfield until October 1992, or it could have been a resident of the former home for asylum seekers on the other side of the rusty wire fence.
“Why don’t we go somewhere and get some coffee?” Henning took off his glasses and wiped them dry, then peeled off the wet coverall. Pia gave her ex-husband a surprised look. Café visits during working hours were simply not his style.
“Is something wrong?” she asked suspiciously.
He pursed his lips, then heaved a sigh.
“I’m really in a jam,” he admitted. “And I need your advice.”
* * *