It’s at this moment both my feet land with perfect accuracy into the small of his back, launching him forward into the cell. He crashes across the floor, the pistol tumbling from his holster and bouncing across the concrete to the far corner.
I release my grip on the copper pipe from which I’ve swung and seize the door. He scrambles toward me, but I slam the door closed and throw the bolt into place just as his weight hits it. I hear a sound, like a car horn far away, and realize it’s his scream of rage, barely audible through the cell’s insulation and finding an outlet only through the narrow PVC vent.
The cobwebs are still laced thickly across my clothes and face and hands from where I’d hidden myself between the joists in the ceiling, suspended there horizontally, my ankles over a copper pipe while my hands gripped another pipe, my whole body high above the floor. As Paulus had descended the staircase, I’d climbed atop an old filing cabinet and wedged myself in the tight space, worried the pipes would give out, or that my legs would, or that he’d hear my breathing. But as he entered the room and approached the cell, I was silent and still as the dead.
I pull a battered wooden chair to the side of the cell and stand on it so that I’m close to the PVC vent.
There’s silence at first, then a little chuckle. “Do you know what a Yellow Notice is?” he says in English. “It’s what Interpol issues when someone goes missing. Like the missing American teenager Gwendolyn Bloom.”
I ignore him. It’s just his theory. He can’t be certain. “Who is that?” I say in Sofia’s accented German.
“Not you, then? Well, if you see her, tell Gwendolyn they have turned it into a Red Notice. ‘Wanted for questioning in relation to a murder,’ it says.”
“What murder?” Sofia says.
“The murder of Christian Leitzke.” His voice trails off. I hear the clicking of a cigarette lighter, and a moment later, the smell of smoke drifting through the vent. “I’m sorry, hadn’t you heard? Found suffocated by a pillow in his hospital bed an hour or so ago. A friend of mine found him and phoned me straightaway.”
I close my eyes. Poor Christian. Poor hapless, smitten Christian. Sorry it had to be you. There’s no use anymore in pretending. “You do it yourself, Paulus?” I say in English. It’s the first time I’ve heard my natural voice since arriving in Berlin.
“So it is Gwendolyn Bloom I’m talking to!”
“Why’d you kill Christian, Paulus?”
“Had I killed him, it would be for telling you where this building was. But the police have a different idea. A nurse was shown your picture. She said you were a few kilos lighter and your hair was different, but she had no doubt it was you. Congratulations, by the way.”
“For what?”
“Losing the weight.”
He’s trying to egg me on, make me stupid with anger. But I won’t let him. I’ve got him now, and every move I make has to be calculated. I can almost hear the clock ticking on what will be my last chance to bring this whole thing to its conclusion, yes or no, alive or dead. “What did you do with him?”
“Christian?”
“The American.”
Silence as Paulus thinks. “He’s your family, yes? Same last name.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Uncle? Father? He’s your father, I think. Who seeks revenge for an uncle?”
“I’m not after revenge. I want to find him.”
“Find him?” A little laugh from Paulus. “Then I’m afraid today there is more bad news.”
I pinch my eyes shut and bite hard into the palm of my hand to stop from screaming.
“The end for him was bad,” Paulus continues. “Schmuddelig. How to say in English?”
Grimy. Filthy. Nasty. Messy. Horrible. “How did it happen?” I say, my face wet.
“I did it myself. With a knife. Here. In this room. About the body, we drove it east. To a swamp by the border with Poland.”
I have to lean into the wall, grab the edge of the cell to keep from falling.
“He spoke of you, you know. Right before I did it,” Paulus calls out, clearly enjoying this. “He was begging. ‘Please don’t,’ he said to me. ‘I have a wife and children,’ is what he said. Screamed it. Crying like a girl.”
My eyes flicker open, and I repeat Paulus’s words in my head. “What did he say exactly?” I ask Paulus. “The exact words.”
“The usual, ‘Please don’t,’ things of this nature. Begging,” he says.
“And after that,” I say.
“‘I have a wife and children.’”
Wife. Children. Dead. Plural. “You’re certain?”
“Genau,” Paulus says. “Precisely this. How could I forget? He was just so goddamn sincere.”
I force myself to focus on the texture of the steel wall of the cell, force my breathing to slow down. Paulus lied. Or maybe not. I have to muster the rationality to pull on this thread and find where it leads. But he’s also playing a game—keep me listening, keep me talking, keep me here until his friends show up.
I lean in to the vent and speak. “Now I have to kill you, right? Isn’t that the way this is supposed to work?”
Another of his confident laughs. “With what? I’m the one with the gun, and even if you had one, there’s two centimeters of steel between me and you. Besides, you’re not a killer, M?dchen. You’ve got tits but no balls.”
I think of the crates of Brens. Can I even get the crates open? Do they come with bullets, or are they sold separately, like batteries? Not that it matters because I have something else in mind anyway.
“Very solidly built, this cell of yours,” I say. “So if I plug up this pipe, how long do you think your oxygen will last?”
He’s quiet for a moment, absorbing the prospect of suffocating, calculating the cell’s volume, his rate of breathing, dividing it all by the number of hours. “At least a day or two,” he says finally.
“See, I was thinking a few hours, but then again I’m just a M?dchen with tits and math is so very hard for us,” I say. “Which is why I thought—let’s add fire to the mix. Old building, oily old timbers, lots of shit that can burn. Mind passing me your cigarette lighter through the vent?”
“My friends will be here any minute.”
“Your friends love you enough to save you from a burning building, Paulus?” I pick up his jacket and start rifling through it, removing a wallet and a nasty-looking folding knife, both of which go in my pocket. Then I find a pack of gum, car keys, and finally exactly what I was looking for. “Never mind about the lighter. I found matches.”
I grab a piece of paper from the floor, a shipping manifest, and twist it into a torch. “Auf wiedersehen, Paulus,” I say, then light the end and stuff the torch into the pipe.
A muffled scream, terrible and high-pitched, comes out through the pipe. I remove the torch and stamp it out on the floor. “What did you say?”
“It wasn’t true,” Paulus shouts. “The story about killing him. He’s alive. Or he might be.”
I freeze in place. A stretched and contorted fool’s grin breaks across my face, and I rest my forehead against the wall of the cell. But then, of course that’s what he would say. What choice does he have now? I make my voice calm. “What did you do with him?”
“We traded him,” he says instantly. “For some guns, other things.”