Frank Schätzing - Limit

To his surprise his telephone did ring, just as he raised the coffee to his lips. He got up, balancing the cup so that he could take it across with him, glanced at the display and saw that the call wasn’t from the bank foyer at all. It was Nyela’s number. He sat down again, picked up the call and spoke, expecting to see her face.

Instead, Leto was staring at him.

Straight away he realised that something wasn’t right. Leto seemed distraught about something. Not quite that. Rather, he looked as though he had got over whatever had upset him, and had decided to keep that look on his face to the end of his days. Then Vogelaar realised that the end had already come.

Leto was dead.

‘Nyela? What’s up? What’s happened?’

Whoever was holding Nyela’s phone stepped back, so that he could see all of Leto’s upper body. He was leaning, slumped over the bar. A thin trickle of blood ran down his neck, as though embarrassed to be there.

‘Don’t worry, Jan. We killed him quite quietly. Don’t want you getting into trouble with the neighbours.’

The man who had spoken turned the phone towards himself.

‘Kenny,’ Vogelaar whispered.

‘Happy to see me?’ Xin smirked at him. ‘You see, I was missing you. I spent a whole year wondering how the hell you managed to slip through my fingers.’

‘Where’s Nyela?’ Vogelaar heard himself ask, his voice dwindling and dropping.

‘Wait, I’ll hand you over. No, I’ll show you her.’

The picture lurched again and showed the restaurant. Nyela was sitting on a chair, a sculpture of sheer fear, her eyes open wide with terror. A pale, bald man clamped her tight to the chair, his arm stretched across her. He was holding a scalpel in his other hand. The tip of the blade hung motionless in the air, not a centimetre from Nyela’s left eye.

‘That’s how things are,’ Xin’s voice said.

Vogelaar heard himself make a choking noise. He couldn’t remember ever having made a sound like that before.

‘Don’t do anything to her,’ he gasped. ‘Leave her alone.’

‘I wouldn’t read too much into the situation,’ Xin said. ‘Mickey’s very professional, he has a steady hand. He only gets twitchy if I do.’

‘What do I have to do? Tell me what I have to do.’

‘Take me seriously.’

‘I do, I take you seriously.’

‘Of course you do.’ Xin’s voice suddenly changed, dark, hissing. ‘On the other hand, I know what you’re capable of, Jan. You can’t help yourself. Right now there are a thousand plans racing through your head, you’re thinking how you could trick me. But I don’t want you to trick me. I don’t want you even to try.’

‘I won’t try.’

‘Now that would surprise me.’

‘You have my word.’

‘No. You won’t really understand why you shouldn’t even try until you’ve grasped the basic importance of saving your wife’s sight.’

The camera zoomed in closer. Nyela’s face filled the screen, twisted with fear.

‘Jan,’ she whimpered.

‘Kenny, listen to me,’ Vogelaar whispered hoarsely. ‘I told you that you have my word! Stop all that, I—’

‘One eye is quite enough for anyone to see with.’

‘Kenny—’

‘So if you could grasp the importance of saving what remains of her sight, then—’

‘Kenny, no!’

‘Sorry, Jan. I’m getting twitchy.’

Nyela’s scream as the scalpel struck was a mere chirrup from the phone’s speakers. But Vogelaar’s yell split the air.

Jericho blinked.

Something had woken him up. He turned on his side and glanced at the clock display. Almost ten! He hadn’t intended to sleep this long. He leapt out of bed, heard the room’s phone ringing, and picked up.

‘I’ve got your money,’ Tu said. ‘One hundred thousand euros, just as our dog of war demands, not too many small-denomination notes, you’ll be able to get through the museum door.’

‘Good,’ said Jericho.

‘Are you coming down to breakfast?’

‘Yes, I— Think I will.’

‘Come on then. Yoyo’s making a spectacle of herself with the scrambled eggs. I’ll keep some warm for you before she eats it all.’

Yoyo.

Jericho hung up, went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror. The blond man with the three-day beard who stared back at him was a fearless crime-fighter who put his life on the line, but didn’t know how to use a razor or even a comb. Who didn’t even, come to that, have the decency to say No loud and clear, not even when he really wanted to say Yes. He had a nagging feeling that last night he had screwed everything up again, whatever ‘everything’ meant here. Yoyo had come along to his room, drunk as a skunk but in a chatty mood, she could hardly have found her way there by accident, and she’d wanted to talk . The pimply kid inside him hated that idea. But what was talking, except a little ritual that might lead who knows where? It was person-to-person, it was open-ended. Anything could have happened, but he had taken umbrage and had let her scurry off, then stubbornly watched the re-make of Kill Bill right to the end. It had been about as abysmally bad as he deserved. This arrested adolescence was like lying on a bed of nails, but at last he had fallen comatose into a restless sleep and dreamed of missing one train after another at shadowy stations, and running through a dreary Berlin no man’s land where huge insects lurked in cavernous houses, chirruping like monstrous crickets. Antennae waved at him from every doorway and corner, chitinous limbs scuttled hastily back into the cracks in the wall in a game of halfhearted hide-and-seek.

Trains. What heavy-handed symbolism. How could he be having such ploddingly obvious dreams? He looked the blond man in the eyes, and imagined him simply turning away and walking off into the mirror, leaving him alone there in the bathroom, sick and tired of his inadequacies, the inadequacies of that pimply kid.

He had to get rid of the kid somehow. Anyhow. Enough was enough!

His shout burst through the lounge like a nuclear blast, tearing to shreds all conversation, all thought. Sleepy jazz muzak tinkled away in the sudden silence. On the low glass table in front of him, an abstract composition in coffee and foamed milk surrounded a jagged heap of shattered porcelain.

He stared at the display.

‘Do you understand me?’ Xin asked.

His knees gave way. Nyela’s muffled sobs sounded in his ear as he sank back into the leather chair. Nothing had happened. The scalpel had not plunged into her eye, had not sliced through pupil and iris. It had simply twitched, and then stopped dead still once more.

‘Yes,’ Vogelaar whispered. ‘I understand.’

‘Good. If you play by my rules, nothing will happen to her. As for what will happen to you though—’

‘I understand.’ Vogelaar coughed. ‘Why all the extra effort?’

‘Extra?’

‘You could have killed me by now. As I left the building, on my drive across town, even here in the bank—’

The picture vanished, and then he saw Xin again.

‘Quite simple,’ he said, back to his chatty old self. ‘Because you’ve never worked without a safety net and an escape hatch. You believe in life after death, or at least you believe in lawyers opening deposit boxes and releasing their contents to the press. You’ve made arrangements in case you die suddenly.’

‘Do you need help?’

Vogelaar looked up. One of the lounge staff, with a startled look on his face, a hint of disapproval. No screaming and shouting in banks. At most, they were places were you could contemplate a dignified suicide. Vogelaar shook his head.