Craig Russell - The Carnival Master

Every now and again Maria would smile, but Fabel knew it was at nothing he had said, rather at something in the deep and distant inner world that she now inhabited.

It rained in Hamburg that day. Fabel met Susanne in the bar around the corner from his apartment in Poseldorf. Neutral territory.

‘Susanne, I wanted to talk,’ he explained. ‘I think we need to straighten things out.’

‘I thought we had,’ she said flatly. ‘At least, I thought you had. I mean when you phoned me before you went off to Cologne.’

Fabel pushed his beer bottle around the table top contemplatively. He thought back to those three calls he had made weeks before: to Wagner at the Federal Crime Bureau, to Roland Bartz, and to Susanne.

‘Listen, Susanne,’ he said gently, ‘when I was down in Cologne things were supposed to be confused. The whole point of Karneval, I suppose. But they weren’t for me. They weren’t for me as soon as I found out Maria had gone off on this personal crusade that’s cost her her sanity. Down there I was surrounded by people who were being someone else… Vera Reinartz who had become Andrea Sandow who claims to become this killer clown whom she has no control over… then there was Vitrenko, stealing one identity after another and manipulating everyone around him. But me… I knew who I was. The funny thing is I didn’t know who I was before. Or I denied it, I don’t know.’

‘So who are you?’

‘I am a policeman. Just like that poor kid Breidenbach who got shot rather than let a gunman walk onto the street… just like Werner or Anna or Benni Scholz in Cologne. It’s who I am. It’s what I am. It’s my job to stand there between the bad guys and the innocent. What I didn’t realise until now is that it’s more than a job. It’s often ugly and it’s invariably unrewarding, but it’s what I was meant to do. I’ve always pretended to myself that I’m a historian or an intellectual who’s stumbled into this job and who doesn’t really fit. But that’s wrong, Susanne. Whether I found the job or the job found me, it was meant to be.’

‘So you’ve accepted this nationwide brief? This Super-Murder-Commission thing?’

‘Not really. I’ve said I’ll help out elsewhere if I’m needed. Lend my “expertise”. But that’s the other thing I’ve learned. I belong here. Hamburg is my city. These are the people I want to protect.’

‘So where does that leave us?’ Susanne’s voice was cold and hard. Fabel reached over the table and took her hands in his.

‘That’s rather what I wanted to ask you…’

Cologne. Six months later

Andrea sat on the edge of the bed. No make-up, no lipstick, platinum hair scraped severely back in a ponytail and dark at the roots.

There was nothing in the cell other than the bed and the combined desk and bench, all of which were bolted to the floor. No free weights to work with. That would be a major problem for as long as they kept her confined in this cell. But Andrea was, she knew, on suicide watch and she would be moved from this empty space eventually. Until then, she could use her own body weight to exercise the main muscle groups. She knew that without free weights she would lose mass, become leaner, but at least she could maintain tone. She stood up and went to the corner of the cell, braced her feet against the wall to maximise the load borne by her arms, and started a set of push-ups. She knew that a nurse was watching her through the spyhole in the door. They wouldn’t deny her access to a gymnasium for her entire confinement. There would be weights or resistance machines in the gym. Then she could start building muscle again. And strength. In the meantime she would do her press-ups: sets of twenty, six sets a day, three days a week. A total of nineteen thousand press-ups a year. Every other day, while her arms and upper body rested, she would run through a similar routine with sit-ups.

She would time her routine so that it would not conflict with therapy sessions, work details, meal breaks, communal exercise. She would be a model patient – or prisoner – whichever it was she was supposed to be in this place. They would let her out one day. Not for a long time, perhaps, but she would convince them she was healed and no longer a danger. That she had, once more, become someone else.

One thing that Andrea had learned during her earliest days of bodybuilding was that to focus your body you had to focus your mind. Set a goal. Concentrate on it. She clenched her teeth as the final repetitions of her set strained her arms. When she had first started, it had been the face of the Karneval clown who had beaten and raped her, half-strangling her with a necktie. She had burned that image into her mind with each exercise, every day for seven years. It had given her the focus that she had needed.

But now she had another focus. With each push-up she repeated in her head a new mantra: the words she would say into herself with every exercise, every day of her confinement.

Jan Fabel.