Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Where’s Nyela?’

‘Went in there with Kenny,’ said the bald man, in a thick Irish accent. He motioned with his gun towards the swing doors. Vogelaar didn’t spare him a glance as he walked through the dining area and into the kitchen. The gunman followed.

‘Jan!’

Nyela wanted to go to him. Xin held her back, a hand on her shoulder.

‘Let her go,’ said Vogelaar.

‘You can say hello later. What happened, Jan? Your kitchen looks like it was hit by a herd of elephants.’

‘I know.’ Vogelaar looked at the chaos left behind by his fight with Jericho, his face expressionless. ‘Do you want to clean up, Kenny? Put everything back? You’ll find all you need under the sink: scourers, cleaning spray – I know that you can’t bear to look at a mess.’

‘That’s in my own world. This is yours. Where’s the crystal?’

Vogelaar reached into his jacket pocket and put the memory crystal on a clear spot on the worktable. Xin picked it up in his fingertips and turned it this way and that.

‘And you’re sure that this is the right one?’

‘Dead sure.’

‘I want to go to my husband,’ Nyela said, softly but emphatically. Her eyes looked sore from weeping, but she seemed to be keeping it together.

‘Of course,’ Xin murmured. ‘Go to him.’

He was gazing at the crystal as though under a spell. Vogelaar knew why. Crystals were one of those forms that Xin loved. Their structure and purity fascinated him.

‘You’ve got what you wanted,’ he said. ‘I kept my promise.’

Xin looked up. ‘And I never even gave one.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I was just talking through the options. It’s really too risky to let the two of you live.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Jan, you disappoint me!’

‘You promised to spare Nyela’s life.’

‘Either he lets us both live or neither.’ She hugged herself close to Vogelaar’s chest. ‘If he kills you, he can shoot me straight away as well.’

‘No, Nyela.’ Vogelaar shook his head. ‘I won’t let that—’

‘Do you really believe that I’d just watch this bastard shoot you?’ she hissed, her voice dripping with hate. ‘He’s a monster. How many years he came and went at our home, accepted our drinks, put his feet up on our terrace. Hey, Kenny, do you want a drink? I’ll mix you a drink that will make the flames shoot out of your eyes.’

‘Nyela—’

‘You leave my husband alone, do you hear me?’ Nyela screamed. ‘Don’t touch him, or I’ll come back from the dead to have my revenge, you miserable wretch, you—’

Xin’s face clouded with resignation. He turned away, shaking his head, tired.

‘Why does nobody listen to me?’

‘What?’

‘As if I had ever minced my words. As if the rules hadn’t been clear from the start.’

‘We aren’t here to follow your shitty rules!’

‘They’re not shitty,’ Xin sighed. ‘They’re just – rules. A game. You played too. You made wrong moves. You lost. You have to know how to leave the game.’

Vogelaar looked at him.

‘You’ll keep your promise,’ he said quietly.

‘One more time, Jan, I never gave you a—’

‘I mean the promise you’re about to give.’

‘That I’m – about to?’

‘Yes. You see, there’s still something you want, Kenny. Something I can give you.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about Owen Jericho.’

Xin spun about. ‘You know where Jericho is?’

‘His life for Nyela’s,’ Vogelaar said. ‘And spare me the rest of your threats. If we die, we die without a word. Unless—’

‘Unless what?’

‘You promise to spare Nyela. Then I’ll serve you up Jericho on a silver tray.’

‘No, Jan!’ Nyela looked at him, pleading. ‘Without you I couldn’t—’

‘You wouldn’t have to,’ Vogelaar said calmly. ‘The second promise concerns myself.’

‘Your life against whose?’ Xin asked threateningly.

‘A girl called Yoyo.’

Xin stared at him. Then he began to laugh. Softly, almost silently. Then louder. Holding his sides, throwing back his head, hammering his fists against the tall fridge, quivering with hilarity as though he was having a fit.

‘Incredible!’ he gasped out. ‘Unbelievable.’

‘Is everything all right, Kenny?’ The bald man furrowed his brow. ‘Are you okay?’

‘All right?’ spluttered Xin. ‘That girl, Mickey, that detective, the two of them should get a medal! What an achievement! They took those few scraps of text and – incredible, it’s just incredible! They tracked you down, Jan, they—’ He stopped. His eyes opened wide, even more astonished. ‘Did they actually come to warn you?’

‘Yes, Kenny,’ Vogelaar said calmly. ‘They warned me.’

‘And you’re betraying them?’

Vogelaar was silent.

‘You try to find fault with my morals, you reproach me with some promise I’ve supposedly made, and then you rat out the people who came to save your life.’ Xin nodded as though he had just learned a valuable lesson. ‘Look at that, just look at that. Unredeemed man. What did you tell the two of them about our adventure in Africa?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’d like to be,’ Vogelaar snarled. ‘In fact I offered them a deal. The dossier, for money. We were just about to make the exchange.’

‘That’s priceless,’ chuckled Xin.

‘And? What now?’

‘Sorry, old friend.’ Xin wiped a tear of laughter from the corner of his eye. ‘Life doesn’t offer all that many surprises, but this – and do you know what’s the best thing about it? I even considered that they might come and find you! Just as you consider the possibility that perhaps next week you’ll be hit by a meteorite, that perhaps there’s a God. I fly off to Berlin in a tearing hurry to prevent something that I never really – never! – thought would actually happen, but life – Jan, my dear Jan! Life is just too wonderful. Too wonderful!’

‘Get to the point, Kenny.’

Xin threw his hands in the air in a gesture that said, let’s all have a drink. A baron among his minions.

‘Good!’ he guffawed. ‘Why the hell not!’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s a promise. It means you have my promise! If everything runs on rails, no hiccups, no tricks from you, not even thinking about tricks, not even a wrinkle in the skin – then the two of you can live.’ He came closer and narrowed his eyes. His voice took on that hissing note again. ‘But if, contrary to my expectations, anything from that dossier becomes public, then I promise that Nyela will die by inches, you can’t even begin to imagine how! And you’ll be allowed to watch. You’ll see how I pull her teeth out one by one, see me cut off her fingers and toes, gouge out her eyes, I’ll flay the skin from her back in strips, and all that while Mickey here rapes her over and over again until there’s nothing left for him to fuck but a whimpering lump of bloody meat, and by then she’s still a long way from dead, Jan, a long way, I promise you that, and I’ll keep every one of these promises.’

Vogelaar felt Xin’s breath on his face, looked into those cold eyes, dark as night, felt Nyela tremble in his arms, heard his heartbeat in the sudden silence. He believed every word that Xin said.

With a dry crack, the faulty neon tube gave up the ghost.

‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘It’s a deal.’

In satellite images of Berlin, the Museum Island in the river Spree stuck out like a wedge, a kilometre and a half long, driven slapdash into the neatly laid parquetry of the city’s boulevards. An ensemble of imposing buildings, linked by broad paths and walkways, housing exhibits from over six thousand years of world history. Visitors could pass from huge halls the size of cathedrals, through quiet cloisters, to great courtyards flooded with light, could get lost in the megalomaniac grandeur of ancient architecture or lose track of time in silent galleries full of more human-scale artworks. At the northern end of the island, the Bode Museum towered above the water like some baroque ocean liner, its columned prow crowned with a great dome, while at the southern end of the whole complex a Classicist façade churned out crowds of visitors in its wake. Most imposing of all was the Pergamon Museum, a vast building like something glimpsed in a dream – if a bewhiskered German patriot of the nineteenth century had nodded off dreaming over a book of Greek myth. A huge, glowering central hall was flanked by two identical wings to either side, colossal rows of pillars marching off to end in Doric temple façades. The ground plan had originally been a U-shape, but in 2015 a fourth wing had been added, glassed-in, that made the building into a square. Here, as in no other museum on Earth, visitors could walk through millennia of human history, Egyptian, Islamic, Near Eastern and Roman.