The Ghosts of Altona Read online

  So now he sat alone, in an otherwise empty row that was too close to the screen.

  The movie was not like the book.

  It was unsurprising that he watched a lot of films about the undead. Most were nonsensical: vampire movies, always camp and comical, had become vacuous teen romances. Zombie flicks in particular were stupid, crass and repetitious: the undead invariably stumbling about clumsily, soullessly, thoughtlessly; sinking blackening teeth into the flesh of the living and turning them to their own creed.

  It wasn’t like that at all.

  No one had ever thought of what it was really like to be dead but still animate, to be at the centre of the experience; what it was like to become the ultimate social outsider. Zombie still ate – vague feelings of hunger stirred occasionally but infrequently – but he ate without savour the food everyone else ate, not human flesh, as the movies would have it. In any case, he ate less than the living and was now stick-thin. People at work – his job one of the many routines he performed to create the illusion of life – said he was wasting away and needed to feed himself properly. But Zombie knew his emaciation wasn’t just the result of poor nutrition, it was because he was rotting away. Decaying from the inside out. But he couldn’t tell them that. Like when a colleague had joked about Zombie’s overuse of cologne, asking if he bathed in the stuff – Zombie could not tell him that it was to mask his corpse stench from the world.

  In public Zombie affected the similitude of life: the absurd routines of the living. In private he dropped the pretence, lying for sleepless hours in his darkened room, unmoving, barely breathing, imagining the earthy, wormy rest denied him. But there were two things that persisted from his life: ghost habits. He read books. He watched movies. The films he watched were mainly classics, especially, like this one, classics of German Expressionism. Gothic. Films he watched to understand himself.

  The medium of film in itself reflected his condition perfectly. Most of the movies he watched had been made in a time and by people long gone. He had got to know the players – Paul Wegener, Brigitte Helm, Conrad Veidt, Henrik Galeen, Elsa Lanchester, Lyda Salmonova, Olaf Fønss, Emil Jannings – as if they had been his contemporaries, his friends. Like him, they were all dead. Also like him, they were all still animate in death, moving around for his entertainment long after their demise. Monochrome ghosts imitating life across a screen.

  But this movie was special: watching it was a quest for self-understanding. This film spoke so eloquently, so perfectly, about Zombie’s state of being-nonbeing.

  The movie was not like the book.

  Zombie had known that before coming to the cinema. He had read the book twice; he had seen the movie more times than he could count. He had enjoyed the book, considering Meyrink underappreciated, even the occasional – but only occasional – equal of Kafka. While the book had stimulated his mind, the movie stirred something deep inside every time he watched it. And he had long considered himself far beyond vital stirrings.

  This cinema in Rotherbaum was different, specializing in classic, cult and art films. Unusually for Germany, it screened foreign films wherever possible with subtitles, rather than a dubbed soundtrack. It was important to him to hear the real voices of the actors, not that this movie had voices. This movie was silent, yet it sang to Zombie.

  The Golem – How He Came into the World.

  Mary Shelley had been inspired to write Frankenstein after a visit to Prague and hearing about the legend of the Golem; Wegener’s Expressionist on-screen performance as the giant automaton shaped from clay had similarly been the inspiration for every movie Frankenstein monster that followed. Zombie saw his own struggle reflected by Wegener’s lifeless, soulless man of mud seeking understanding in a world of the cruelly vital. A dead thing, devoid of a soul, condemned to play a lifeless part in a living world. And like Zombie, the Golem looked on the world of the living with a combination of longing and hatred.

  Paul Wegener totally convinced as the Golem: the actor himself had been a giant of a man, nearly two metres tall, and with the additional height of the Golem’s huge block boots he towered above the rest of the cast. A monument brought to life.

  On the screen, the Rabbi completed the anthropomorphosis of his clay statue by rolling up the sacred word, placing it in the talisman and pushing it into the huge barrel chest of the clay man. Golem opened his eyes. Pale eyes in a grey face moulded from Vltava mud darted from side to side, taking in a world in which they did not belong. A confused birth into a lifeless existence.

  It had been like that for Zombie. Waking up in a hospital after he had died, no one believing him when he told them he was still dead, the medicines they gave him, the therapy they insisted on useless. Tools for use on the living.

  They had sent Zombie to see a psychiatrist, who had told him about Cotard’s Delusion, explaining how, because of trauma, brain injury or lesion, otherwise perfectly rational people believed themselves to be dead. It was made worse in Zombie’s case, the psychiatrist had explained, because he had had a near-death experience, which compounded his belief that he had really died.

  The psychiatrist had tried to convince Zombie that he was delusional, that he was really still alive. The more the psychiatrist sought to explain, the more Zombie protested, until it became clear that he could perhaps end up losing his job or, worse still, be locked away in an institution for his own safety. Cotard’s delusionals often tried to destroy their ‘corpses’ to liberate the ghost trapped within. So for the first of many times, Zombie faked it: pretending to make progress and accept that he was really alive.

  But he knew he was dead, and he had spent months seeking an answer as to why he was being denied his rest. Then it came to him. A slow, hot ember that became the only thing vital and real within him: the need for revenge. He remembered what had been done to him; how he had died. He remembered the knife in his chest that ended his life and he remembered the hands that had held it. This crime, this injustice, had gone unpunished and until he set it right, Zombie would be forced to walk the world as a corpse.

  He watched the movie. As the Golem strode, inexorable, relentless, through the jagged-edged architecture of an Expressionist Prague, the guilty and the unjust were crushed between his massive, unfeeling hands.

  This, Zombie realized, was what he needed to create: a Golem of his own to do his bidding. An unstoppable weapon of vengeance.

  7

  The parents were both dead.

  Henk Hermann returned Fabel’s call to the Murder Commission and told him that Paul Krone had died of a heart attack in 2006, and his wife of cancer two years later.

  Fabel remembered them both so very clearly. Herr and Frau Krone had been in their fifties and as unremarkable as it was possible to be, but their earnest, almost beseechingly attentive faces from fifteen years ago – desperately focused on Fabel’s every word as he had gone through the routine questions and procedures of interviewing next of kin – were burned in perfect detail in his memory. He had sought to reassure, to encourage hope. Back then, Fabel had still believed that the faces of the missing were not yet the faces of the dead; had not yet come to recognize the telltale elements that distinguished a runaway from a victim, the misplaced from the misused. Back then, he had held all possibilities in his head until a body was found.

  Monika Krone’s parents were both intelligent, both professionals – he an engineer, she a physics schoolteacher – but they had become innocently, artlessly, desperately helpless in that most primal of crises: a child lost. Fabel had never found their twenty-five-year-old daughter, alive or dead. He had visited them each week, then each month. Then other cases had intruded, other victims’ families had turned pleading faces to Fabel.

  Fabel remembered their faces, all right. He also remembered a third face, a sad ghost sitting between them who, no matter what she did from then on, would always haunt her parents, be a daily reminder of their pain and loss.

  ‘There was a sister . . .’ said Fabel.

 
‘Yep . . . I’m on to it. She’s a science teacher,’ said Henk. ‘I’m digging for a home address or the school she teaches at and I’ll call you back or text the details to you as soon as I’ve got them. I think she still lives and works in Altona.’

  *

  The school was in Eckernförder Strasse.

  Spring was now yielding to summer and the sky was cloudless. As Anna drove them both across town to the school, Fabel had watched the sun-etched Wilhelmine architecture of Altona slide through the viewing screen of his passenger window. There were police everywhere, black knots of overalls and vehicles gathered at intersections like shadows in the bright sun. Some roads had already been closed off in preparation for the parade. He knew that the route – the hotly debated, protested and negotiated route – would bring the far-right marchers past both the memorial to fallen German soldiers and the memorial to the victims of Altona Bloody Sunday. The original route had been an almost identical path to that taken by the Brownshirts on Bloody Sunday in 1932, but the Polizei Hamburg’s objections had been heeded by the city council and a compromise solution found. Even with that, the route was punctuated with potential flashpoints.

  It was an undecided thing, that which was yet to unfold that day in Altona. What Fabel had come to believe after he had been shot two years before, was that every day was full of limitless possibilities. Everything could happen and the destiny that seemed certain one moment could change drastically because of the slightest alteration of course: just one decision, a moment’s hesitation, or a choosing to go right instead of left and everything changes.

  The day he had been shot was an example: there had been a succession of decisions and choices that led to just one of an infinite number of possibilities. If Fabel had stayed in the living room and Anna had gone along the hall, if he had asked Schalthoff what was in the drawer, if he had not asked for tea and the killer had not had reason to go into the kitchen – all of these things had been possibilities left unearthed; pasts and futures left undiscovered. And today, as Fabel watched Altona brace itself, he realized that there were countless possible outcomes to the day.

  At the moment, none of them looked good.

  *

  On arrival at the school, Fabel and Anna were conducted to a waiting room and informed that Frau Krone was just finishing a class and would be with them shortly. The waiting room was the usual combination of the functional and the brightly informal that tried, but always failed, to look less institutional. Fabel stood at the noticeboard on the wall, examining the hopeful, earnest and purposefully cheerful scraps of other lives: debating societies, environmental projects, after-school activities. Anna sat somewhat stiffly, gazing out of the window.

  ‘You look nervous.’ Fabel turned to her. ‘Bring back memories?’

  ‘You don’t know how right you are. This reminds me so much of my old school. You’ve no idea how many times I was stuck waiting for the School Director in a room just like this.’

  ‘I can imagine . . .’ Fabel smiled. ‘A born troublemaker, I’ll bet.’

  ‘This sister we’re seeing,’ asked Anna, ‘did she have anything significant to say at the time of Monika Krone’s disappearance?’

  ‘Nothing that helped much. The focus was on her because she is the last known confirmed contact with Monika. Monika phoned her an hour after she had left the party.’

  Anna was about to say something when the door swung open and a woman entered. Even though he had known what to expect, Fabel was surprised how much her appearance struck him. It wasn’t just the beauty of the pale ghost from fifteen years before that hit him. Older, dressed differently, but no less sad. The magnificent blaze of red hair she had shared with her sister had darkened to a rich auburn, had been cut much shorter, as if deliberately muting its impact, and there was a hint of some other colour streaked through it, but Fabel would have recognized her anywhere. The same pale complexion, the same bright green eyes, the same faintly cruel arch to her eyebrows. The same face. Exactly the same face.

  Kerstin Krone was, Fabel knew, exactly 174 centimetres tall, exactly forty years old, although she looked younger. And her face was exactly the face that Monika Krone would have had if she too had lived to see forty.

  Fabel asked Monika Krone’s identical twin sister to sit.

  *

  ‘Is there any doubt?’ Kerstin Krone asked when Fabel had finished explaining about the body found under the asphalt of the mini-market’s car park.

  ‘It will take time for us to make a definite formal identification—’ Anna began to explain but Fabel cut her off.

  ‘It’s Monika,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it.’ Fabel ignored Anna’s meaningful look.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ said Kerstin, emptily. Her pale, slender hands rested on her lap and she sat looking at them for a while. When she looked up again, she was smiling, sadly.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘today I was explaining, or at least trying to explain, the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment to a class. Are you familiar with it?’

  Fabel nodded. ‘I understand the principle. Well, sort of.’

  ‘Schrödinger’s cat?’ Anna shrugged.

  ‘Erwin Schrödinger came up with it to illustrate the concept of superposition,’ Kerstin Krone explained. ‘A cat is placed in a sealed box with a vial of lethal poison and some radioactive material. The box has a monitor that, if it picks up any changes in radioactivity, shatters the poison flask and kills the cat. We don’t know until we open the box if the cat is alive or dead. So, until we do, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Both possibilities. It’s only when we open the box and see the cat that the possibilities collapse into a single reality. Do you understand why it came to mind, Herr Fabel?’

  Fabel nodded. ‘Yes I do. I’m sorry. We’ve opened the box.’

  Kerstin Krone’s eyes glazed with tears. ‘It’s stupid, I know. I mean, I always knew Monika was dead, that something terrible must have happened to her, but I kidded myself there was a chance that she was alive and well somewhere. And it helped. It was silly, but it helped. I kept all sorts of possibilities, no matter how ridiculous or unlikely, alive in my head. Now you’ve opened the box they’ve collapsed to one reality. Monika’s dead, and that’s a fact. When I wake up tomorrow, Monika will definitely not be in the world.’

  ‘It’s not at all silly,’ said Fabel. ‘I understand. I’m just sorry that we don’t have better news for you.’

  ‘You’re just telling me what I already knew, really. But a little self-deception is a great analgesic.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Anna. ‘We can come back some other time.’

  ‘I’m fine. If you have any questions, ask them. But the answers will be the same as they were fifteen years ago. Maybe not as clear . . .’

  Fabel explained, quietly and clearly, how the finding of Monika’s body not only confirmed her death, but added a dimension to the investigation. A new point of reference.

  ‘Someone put her body there. That means we have another location. In fact, it’s the only place and event that we can place her killer for sure. There is a history, a chronology to that event: a before, during and after. It’s something we didn’t have before.’

  ‘But it was fifteen years ago. Who’s going to remember where they were and what they saw so long ago?’

  ‘It’s a start, Frau Krone. A fresh start. A new lead.’ Fabel smiled reassuringly. ‘Can we go over it all again?’

  Kerstin Krone nodded, but Fabel could see her mind was elsewhere, dealing with the new certainty of a long-suspected reality.

  ‘If you need time,’ he said, ‘like Commissar Wolff says, we can come back.’

  ‘I’m fine . . .’ She looked down at her hands again, and Fabel began the routine deconstruction of long-past events.

  *

  ‘That all got a bit too metaphysical for me,’ said Anna when they got back to the car. ‘I never was much good at science and was always goofing around in class – one of the rea
sons I spent so much time waiting in a room like that for the School Director.’

  ‘I knew exactly what she meant by the Schrödinger’s Cat thing,’ said Fabel. ‘It’s what we do – open the box for people all the time, remove the uncertainty and with it remove the last shred of hope. I even think of it every time we question a suspect. Another box to be opened to expose someone either as innocent or as a murderer.’

  Anna remained quiet for a moment.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘I don’t know . . . I mean, I know it’s all nonsense, scientifically speaking, but the way she talked about pretending Monika was still alive. I thought identical twins had this kind of special bond. I would have thought she would have had . . . I don’t know . . . some kind of instinctive feeling one way or the other.’

  ‘Telepathy doesn’t exist,’ said Fabel. ‘Whether you’re a twin or not. She’s just like countless other victims’ relatives I’ve seen over the years, hanging on to any hope, no matter how vague.’

  ‘You’re probably right. I didn’t really hear anything else of much use.’

  ‘Like she said, they were the same answers she gave fifteen years ago. I just hoped that Monika being found might have jolted some memory into place.’

  ‘She’s a striking-looking woman,’ said Anna.

  ‘They were both beautiful,’ said Fabel. ‘Monika Krone had this amazing head of red hair, longer even than her sister’s at the time. Everyone we talked to mentioned her hair. Most of them said the same thing: that her hair, her particular type of beauty, her figure and her pale complexion all made her look like she was living in the wrong century. Maybe that’s why she was so interested in Romantic and Gothic literature. She even dressed in an odd way. Not a Goth, as such, but more authentically Gothic. Vaguely Victorian – she studied English Gothic literature at Hamburg University.’ Fabel gave a small, humourless laugh. ‘It’s the only murder inquiry I’ve been involved in where the word “pre-Raphaelite” cropped up in descriptions of the victim. In fact, it was something that stuck with me for a while. She was the kind of woman that men would go crazy for and I seriously pursued the line that she may not have been a random victim, but had been killed by some rejected lover or spurned admirer.’