His cell phone rang as he was heading for the exit at the customs checkpoint. Lars Terlinden switched his briefcase to the other hand and took the call. All day long he’d been at the beck and call of the board of directors in Zürich. A couple of months ago they’d been celebrating him like the Savior Himself for this very same deal, and now they wanted to crucify him. Damn it, he was no prophet. How was he to know that Dr. Markus Sch?nhausen’s real name was Matthias Mutzler, that he wasn’t from Potsdam, but from some village in the hills of southern Germany, and a con man of the worst sort? Ultimately it wasn’t Lars’s problem if the legal department of his bank didn’t do their homework. Heads had rolled, and his would be next if he couldn’t figure out a way to make up the loss, which totaled in the hundreds of millions.
“I’ll be at the office in twenty minutes,” he told his secretary as the milky glass pane slid open before him. He was exhausted, burned out; his nerves were shot and he was done with the world. All by the age of thirty. He could only sleep by taking pills, and eating was difficult, but drinking was okay. Lars Terlinden knew that he was well on the way to becoming an alcoholic, but he would worry about that problem later, when this crisis was over. Although there was no end in sight. The world economy was shaky, the biggest banks in the States were going broke. Lehman Brothers was just the beginning. His own employer, still one of the biggest Swiss banks, had let go five thousand workers worldwide in the past year. In the offices and corridors, naked fear about the future was the rule. His phone rang again, so he stuck it in his pocket and ignored it. The news of the collapse of Sch?nhausen’s real estate empire six weeks ago had come out of the blue; just two days earlier he had met with Sch?nhausen at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin for dinner. By that time the man had known for a while that bankruptcy was looming, that slippery weasel. At this very moment he was being sought by Interpol because he’d skipped out. After much effort Lars Terlinden had at least succeeded in securitizing a large part of the credit portfolio and selling it to investors, but 350 million euros were gone.
A woman stepped into his path. In a hurry, he tried to go around her, but she resolutely stood her ground and spoke to him. Only then did he recognize his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in eight years.
“Lars!” she implored. “Lars, please wait!”
She looked the same as always. Petite and immaculate, her golden blond hair cut in a perfect pageboy. Light makeup, a pearl necklace on her suntanned décolletage. She smiled meekly, and that instantly made him see red.
“What do you want?” he snapped. “Did your husband send you?”
He never deigned to say the words “my father.”
“No, Lars. Could you stop for a moment? Please.”
He rolled his eyes and did as she asked. As a boy he had adored his mother, even worshipped her. He always missed her terribly whenever she went on trips for a few days or several weeks and he and Thies were left in the housekeeper’s care. He would have forgiven her everything in return for her love, but he never got more than a smile, lovely words, and promises. Only after a very long time did he realize that she could give him nothing more because she had nothing left to give. Christine Terlinden was an empty vessel, a shallow beauty with no personality to speak of, who had made it her life’s work to be the ideal wife for the successful CEO Claudius Terlinden.
“You’re looking good, son. A bit too thin perhaps.” Even now she was true to herself. After all this time she could only come up with this hackneyed phrase. Lars Terlinden had begun to feel contempt for his mother when he realized that all his life she had deceived him.
“What do you want, Mother?” he repeated impatiently.
“Tobias is back from prison,” she told him, lowering her voice. “And the police have found Laura’s skeleton. At the old airfield in Eschborn.”
He clenched his teeth. Suddenly his life raced backward at time-lapse speed. Here in the middle of the arrival hall at Frankfurt Airport he had the horrible feeling of shrinking to a pimply nineteen-year-old with naked fear breathing down his neck. Laura! He would never forget her face, her laugh, her carefree joy that had all come to such an abrupt end. He hadn’t had a chance to speak to Tobias again. His father had made all the decisions for him so fast, banishing him at once to the farm of some acquaintance in deepest Oxfordshire. Think about your future, boy! Stay out of this and keep your mouth shut. Then nothing will happen. Of course he had listened to his father. Had stayed out of it and kept his mouth shut. It was too late by the time he heard about Tobi’s conviction. For eleven years he had done everything he could to avoid thinking about any of it: that awful night, his horror, his fear. For eleven shitty years he had worked almost round the clock just so he could forget. And now his mother came sashaying up in her little fur coat and tore open the old wounds with her doll-like smile.
“I’m not interested in that anymore, Mother,” he snapped. “It has nothing to do with me.”
“But—” she began, but he didn’t let her finish speaking.
“Leave me alone!” he snarled. “Don’t you get it? I don’t want you to contact me ever again! Just stay away from me, the way you’ve always done.”
With that he turned on his heel and left her standing there. He strode to the escalator that led down to the S-Bahn commuter train station.
* * *
They stood in the garage drinking beer out of the bottle, just like before. Tobias felt uncomfortable, and all the others looked like they did too. Why in the world had he come here? Much to his surprise his old friend J?rg had called that afternoon and invited him over to have a beer along with Felix and a couple of other old pals. In their youth they had often met in the big garage that belonged to J?rg’s uncle to tinker with their motor-assisted bicycles, later with their mopeds, and finally with their cars. J?rg was a gifted auto mechanic who had dreamed since he was a boy of becoming a race-car driver. The garage was just as Tobias remembered it, smelling of motor oil and lacquer, of leather and polish. They sat on the same old workbench, on turned-over beer crates, and on piles of car tires. Nothing around them had changed. Tobias stayed out of the conversation, which had an air of forced camaraderie, no doubt because of his presence. Each of the men had greeted him with a handshake, of course, but the joy of seeing each other again was somewhat constrained. After a while Tobias, J?rg, and Felix found themselves standing together. Felix had become a roofer with his father’s company. Even as a teenager he was powerfully built, and the hard work combined with avid beer consumption over the years had turned him into a colossus. His jovial eyes almost vanished in a layer of fat when he laughed. Tobias was reminded of a raisin bun. J?rg, on the other hand, looked almost the same as he used to, except that his hairline had receded quite a ways.
“So what did Lars wind up doing?” Tobias asked.
“Not what his old man had hoped.” Felix gave a malicious grin. “Even rich people have problems with their kids. In this case one of them is a moron and the other one told his father to fuck off.”
“Lars has really made a cushy career for himself,” said J?rg. “My mom told me, she heard it from a relative. Investment banking. Big-time money. He’s married with two kids, and he bought a huge villa in Glashütten after he got back from England.”
“I thought he always wanted to study theology and become a pastor,” said Tobias. To his amazement it still hurt to think about his best friend who had disappeared from his life so suddenly.
“Well, I never wanted to be a roofer either.” Felix popped another bottle of beer with the opener on his key chain. “But the army didn’t want me and the police didn’t either, and I gave up on the bakery apprenticeship shortly after … uh … you know…”
He broke off, lowering his eyes in embarrassment.
“And after my accident I could write off my career as a race-car driver,” J?rg hastened to add before the silence got even more awkward. “So I didn’t wind up in the Formula 1, but at the Black Horse instead. You know that my sister married Jagielski, don’t you?”
Tobias nodded. “My father told me.”
“Ah.” J?rg took a swig from the beer bottle. “It seems like none of us got to do what we dreamed of doing.”
“Nathalie did,” Felix countered. “Man, did we ever laugh when she said she wanted to be a famous actress!”
“She always was ambitious,” said J?rg. “The way she used to boss us around. But I never thought she’d turn into such a celebrity.”
“Well, yeah.” Tobias smiled wryly. “Just like I never dreamed I’d learn locksmithing in the joint or study economics.”
His friends hesitated for a moment, embarrassed, but then they laughed. The alcohol was loosening them up. After the fifth bottle of beer Felix turned talkative.
“To this day I blame myself for telling the cops that we’d gone back to your place, man,” he said to Tobias, dropping his hand on his shoulder.
“You guys just told the truth.” Tobias shrugged. “Nobody had any idea what it would all lead to. But it doesn’t matter now. I’m back, and I’m really glad that you guys don’t cross the street when you see me, like most of the people here.”
“Bullshit.” J?rg slapped his other shoulder. “We’re friends, man! Remember how we fixed up that old Opel that my uncle spent a thousand hours restoring? And how we drove the shit out of it? Man, those were the days!”
Tobias remembered, and Felix did too. So now they’d reached the Remember when phase. The party at the Terlindens when the girls got naked and ran around the house wearing Mrs. Terlinden’s furs. Micha’s birthday when the cops showed up. The tests of courage at the cemetery. The trip to Italy with the junior soccer club. The bonfire on St. Martin’s Day that got out of hand because Felix had used a canister of gasoline to get it going. They couldn’t stop laughing and recalling the old days. J?rg had to wipe away tears of laughter.
“Do you guys remember how my sister stole my old man’s key ring and we raced around inside the old airplane hangar? Man, that was cool!”
* * *
Amelie sat at her desk surfing the Web when the doorbell rang. She closed her laptop and jumped up. It was a quarter to eleven. Damn. Had the old lady forgotten her front door key? In her stocking feet she rushed downstairs before the bell rang again and woke the kids up after she’d coaxed them into bed an hour ago. She cast a glance at the little monitor that was connected to cameras on both sides of the front door. The fuzzy black-and-white picture showed a man with blond hair. Amelie tore open the front door and was surprised to see Thies standing there. In all the time she’d known him, he’d never once come to her front door, and he certainly had never rung the bell. Her surprise turned to concern when she saw the condition her friend was in. She had never seen Thies so upset. His hands were fluttering here and there, his eyes were flickering, and he was twitching all over.
“What’s the matter?” Amelie asked softly. “Did something happen?”
Instead of answering, Thies held out a roll of paper that was carefully tied with a wide ribbon. Amelie’s feet were turning into blocks of ice on the cold steps, but she was truly worried about her friend.
“Wouldn’t you like to come inside?”
Thies shook his head vigorously and kept glancing around, as if afraid that he’d been followed.
“You can’t show these pictures to anybody,” he said suddenly in his slightly hoarse-sounding voice. “You have to hide them.”
“Got it,” she said. “I will.”
The headlights of a car crept up the street through the fog and caught them for a moment as the car turned into the Lauterbachs’ driveway. The garage was located only five yards below the stairs Amelie was standing on—alone now, as she suddenly realized. Thies seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. Daniela Lauterbach turned off the engine and climbed out.
“Hello, Amelie!” came her friendly greeting.
“Hello, Dr. Lauterbach,” Amelie replied.
“Why are you standing there on the porch? Did you lock yourself out?”
“I just got home from work,” Amelie said quickly, without quite knowing why she lied to her neighbor.
“All right then. Say hello to your parents. Good night.” Dr. Lauterbach waved and opened the door of the two-car garage with the remote. She went inside and the garage door came down behind her.
“Thies?” Amelie hissed. “Where are you?”
She jumped when he came out from behind the big yew tree next to the front door.
“What’s all this about?” she whispered. “Why—?”
The words stuck in her throat when she saw Thies’s face. In his eyes she saw naked fear—what was he afraid of? Deeply worried, she reached out her hand and touched his arm to calm him. He flinched.
“You have to take good care of those pictures.” The words came out in a stammer, and his eyes were shining feverishly. “Nobody can see those pictures. Not even you! You have to promise me!”
“Okay, okay, I promise. But what—”
Before she could finish her question, Thies had vanished into the foggy night. Amelie stared after him, shaking her head. She couldn’t make any sense out of her friend’s behavior. But that was no surprise—Thies wasn’t like anyone else.
* * *