Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

"That was good, Kurt, that was very good."

Siemannn didn't know what to say. He looked away and stroked the injured girl's forehead with his bloody hand. After twenty-five years on the force he no longer felt he had just a job: he felt accepted; he felt like a real policeman.

The Bear reached down to help Fitzduane to his feet. "What was that all about?"

"I'm fucked if I know." Fitzduane walked across to the bearded man, who was lying on the floor surrounded by a circle of people. Someone had put a folded coat under his head. His face under the beard was very white.

Fitzduane knelt down by his side. "You'll be all right," he said gently. "That was some piece of shooting."

The man smiled weakly. "It's a paycheck," he said. His eyes were going cloudy. "The agency expects nothing less."

"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."