"No, not those bozos – DEA." The man grimaced in pain.
"Help's coming," said Fitzduane. He looked down at the man's stomach. The large-caliber hollow-nosed bullet must have hit bone and ricocheted. The entire lower part of his torso seemed to have been ripped open. He had his hands folded across his intestines in a reflex attempt to kept them in. Fitzduane wanted to hold his hand or somehow comfort him, but he knew if he did so, it could add to the pressure and cause more pain.
The man closed his eyes and then opened them again. They were unfocused. "I can hear the dustoff," he whispered. Fitzduane had to bend down and put his ear to the man's mouth to hear him. "Those pilots have a lot of balls."
The man gave a little rattling sound, and for a moment Fitzduane was back in Vietnam watching another man die, the sound of the medevac chopper arriving too late. Then he knew that the sound of the helicopter was real and that it was circling somewhere outside the building.
The Bear looked down at the American. "He's dead," he said. As he had with Siemann, he put his hand on Fitzduane's shoulder, but this time he didn't say anything. Fitzduane, still kneeling, stayed there looking at the man's body, the hands already folded as if in anticipation of an olive green body bag. The blue eyes were still open; they looked faded. Fitzduane gently closed the lids, then rose off his knees.
From outside the Youth House, a heavily amplified voice boomed at them: "YOU INSIDE, THIS IS THE POLICE. LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP."
"Assholes," said the Bear. "It's the Federal Police from the building next door. They must be back from their coffee break."
Examining Magistrate Charlie von Beck – wearing a large, floppy brown velvet bow tie to go with his cream shirt and three-piece corduroy suit – was talking. The Chief thought von Beck looked like a leftover from a late-nineteenth-century artist's colony. He wore his fair hair long so it flopped over one eye. His father was an influential professor of law at BernUniversity, he was rich, had connections in all the right places, and he was sharp as a razor. All in all, thought the Chief, Charlie von Beck would have made an ideal person to hate. It irritated him that he liked the man.
"Well, it doesn't make the crime statistics look too good, I admit," said von Beck, "but you have to agree: it's exciting."
"Don't talk like that," said the Chief Kripo. "We haven't had this many violent deaths in Bern in such a short period since the French invasion nearly two hundred years ago – and all you can say is ‘exciting.’ I can see the headlines in Blick or some other scandal sheet: CHAIN OF KILLINGS EXCITING, QUIP BERN AUTHORITIES."
"Relax," said von Beck. " Der Bund, in its usual discreet way, will come out with something to balance the scales, like EXAMINING MAGISTRATE COMMENTS ON STATISTICAL ABNORMALITY IN CRIME FIGURES."
"They don't write headlines that sensational," said the Chief. "So far, including Hoden, we have seven dead, two seriously injured, and eight or so slightly injured."
"At least there's an explanation for the fracas in the Youth House," said von Beck. "I'm still poking around, but we've interviewed most of the parties involved and had some feedback from the Amsterdam cops and the DEA."
"I wish they'd keep their cowboys off my patch," said the Chief Kripo in a grumpy voice.
"Don't be a spoilsport. Anyway, it looks fairly straightforward. Van der Grijn had some heroin stolen from him. He reckoned it had happened in the Youth House, so he came back with two heavies to try to find the culprit. The American DEA man was tailing him. Van der Grijn got out of hand when the Irishman walked in, and then all hell broke loose."
"It never used to be like this in Bern," said the Chief Kripo. "I don't care about explanations. I want it to stop."
"Well, don't hold your breath," said von Beck. "I've only been talking about the easy bits so far. We have an explanation for the Youth House deaths, and I guess Hoden's heart attack is no mystery under the circumstances."
"Poor Hoden, what a lousy way to go. You know I served under him for a while."
"So did my father," said von Beck.
"We're still left with a few questions about the Youth House," said the Chief. "For instance, who stole van der Grijn's heroin in the first place – and why? Is the thief selling it or has he some other motive? What was that Irishman doing there? Not content with flinging people off bridges, he seems to gravitate toward trouble like…" He paused, thinking.
"Do you want help on this one?" said von Beck politely.
"The Chief shot von Beck a look. "And lastly, " he continued, "is the Bear going to be in any trouble for killing van der Grijn?"
"I don't think so," said von Beck. "I don't see what else he could have done. He had seconds in which to judge the situation, he called it right, he put himself at risk – and he pulled it off. What's more, he didn't shoot a local, which always raises a stink regardless of the circumstances. It's all show biz in the end."
The Chief surveyed von Beck's sartorial splendor. The magistrate was himself no slouch when it came to show biz – and the bow tie always photographed distinctively. It was the kind of thing that photo editors left in when cropping a print.
The Chief tried to concentrate. He looked across at von Beck. "What about his using a. 41 Magnum?"
"It doesn't look tactful in the media," said von Beck, "for a policeman to shoot a suspect six times with a cannon like the Magnum. On the other hand, the evidence is that van der Grijn, a large, powerful man hyped on drugs, was still a threat after being shot no less than four times." He shrugged. "In Heini's place, I'd have done the same thing – and fired again."
"Heini's talking about getting an even bigger gun," said the Chief gloomily. "He says to have to shoot someone six times before he goes down is ridiculous."
"If I was being shot at, I might feel the same way," said von Beck. "What was your first point?"
"Who stole van der Grijn's heroin?"
"The finger seems to point at Ivo."
"He's a dealer?"
"On the contrary," said von Beck. "He seems to hate the stuff. The word is that he destroys it."
The Chief raised his eyebrows. "Odd," he said. "What doest he say?"
"Therein lies a problem," said von Beck. "By all accounts he was on the side of the angels during the gunfight – and then he seems to have vanished."
"Angels do that," said the Chief, "which brings us to the Irishman."
"Yes, well," said von Beck, "he may be innocent, but somehow – and don't ask me how – he's tied in with just about every phase of our little crime wave."
"Including Klaus Minder and the chessboard killing?"
"Yes, in a sense. According to the BKA, the chessboard girl was the partner of the man Fitzduane threw off the KirchenfeldBridge. Fitzduane identified her from a photo sent by the German authorities in Wiesbaden. She was also present when he was attacked but backed off when he threatened her with a shotgun."
"And how does Minder fit it?"
"That's more tenuous," said von Beck, "but it's what my English police friends would call a ‘hopeful line of inquiry.’" He tapped the desk with a gold Waterman fountain pen to emphasize each point. "Point one, forensics thinks that Minder and the chessboard girl were sliced up by the same person. Point two, and I have no idea of the significance of this, Minder and Ivo were close friends. Point three-" The Chief flinched in anticipation but instead von Beck unzipped a leather container the size of a small briefcase and perused the row of pipes displayed within.
"Go on, go on," said the Chief impatiently. "Point three?"
"Klaus Minder was a close friend and sometime lover of the young and recently deceased Rudi von Graffenlaub." Von Beck closed the pipe case with a snap and zipped it up slowly.
"And our Irish friend is looking into the death of young Rudi with the forceful backing of Beat von Graffenlaub," said the Chief.
"The rest is details," said von Beck. "It's all in the file." He made a grandiloquent gesture.
"But you do have a theory about all this?"
"Not a one. This thing is so complicated it could go on for years."
"I thought you were supposed to be smart."
"I am, I am," said von Beck, "but who says the bad guys can't be smart, too?"
The telephone rang, and the Chief gave a sigh. He listened to the call, saying little, then turned to von Beck.
"They found the other half of the chessboard girl in a plastic bag inside the Russian Embassy wall," he said. "The Russians are livid and are complaining it's a CIA plot to embarrass them."
"Explain that we're neutral and will regard both them and the Americans with equal suspicion." Von Beck stood up to leave. "Now all we've got to find are Minder's balls."
"And Ivo," said the Chief.
Kadar was working his way through a pile of medical textbooks, and he had a splitting headache. The telex chattered again, exacerbating the headache. He rose, washed down two Tylenol with brandy, and decoded the message.
His headache subsided to an acceptable dull throb. He was knee-deep in medical tracts because the thought he might be suffering from some kind of psychiatric condition. In lay terms -he had not yet stumbled on the correct medical diagnosis – it seemed not unlikely that he was going mad. No, that conveyed images of Hogarthian excess, of twisted faces and dribbling idiots, of barred windows and straightjackets and padded cells. That was too much. He would not accept that he was going mad. He revised his analysis. As a result of sustained stress, he was behaving irrationally. He was doing things that were out of character, that he had not consciously planned, and of which he had scant recollection later.
It was worrying. He was glad that it would all soon be over. He would no longer have to live with the strain of a double existence – if indeed his life could be summed up in such a simple way. His existence was not merely divided in two. It was fragmented into multiple personas, and he had been sustaining this complex life for years. Really, a certain amount of aberration on the margin was to be expected, and possibly was a good thing. It was like letting off steam, a natural release of tensions, a purification through excess. That wasn't the real problem.
It was the periods of amnesia that concerned him. He was a man with an astonishing ability to manipulate and control other beings – up to and including matters of life and death – and yet his underlying fear, a fear that bordered on panic, was that he was losing his ability to control himself.
It was the incident with the girl on the chessboard that had persuaded him that he must get himself under control. Previous incidents, like his killing that beautiful boy Klaus Minder, were unpremeditated and perhaps a little excessive but could be rationalized in context of the needs of his advanced sexuality. Killing Esther was a matter of routine discipline. The killing and the manner of the killing were not the problem. But why had he suddenly taken the notion to draw attention to his presence by planting the torso in such a public place as the Rose Garden's chessboard – not to mention dumping the legs in the Russian Embassy?
Did he subconsciously want to be caught? Was this some sublimated cry for help? He hoped not. He'd put far too much effort into the last couple of decades to have some programmed element of his subconscious betray him. That was the trouble with the childhood phase. In your early years anyone and everyone has a go at programming you, from your parents to religious nuts, from corporations that bombard you with unremitting lies on TV to an educational system that trains you to conform to its values and does its level best to crush your own natural talent.
But Kadar had been lucky. From an early age he had sensed the realities of life, the lies, the corruption, the compromises. He had learned to have only one friend, one loyalty, one guide through life: himself. He had learned one key discipline: control. He had mastered one vital pattern of behavior: to live inside himself and to reveal nothing. Externally he appeared to conform; he knew how the game must be played.
He lay back in his chair and started the ritual of creating Dr. Paul. He desperately needed someone to talk to. But hours later, drenched in sweat, he admitted failure: the image of the smiling doctor wouldn't appear. His headache had escalated into the full, terrible agony of a serious migraine.
Alone in his soundproofed premises Kadar screamed.