Melanie Raabe - The Trap

Victor Lenzen is a murderer.

“It’s just…” he says, and leaves the rest of the sentence hanging menacingly in the air.

Victor Lenzen is a murderer.

“Have we met before?” he asks at last.

I look Victor Lenzen in the eye and see someone quite different opposite me. I realize what a big mistake I’ve made. Victor Lenzen is not stupid: he is mad.

He hurls himself across the table at me. I tip backward off my chair, my head hits the floor hard and I have no time to work out what’s happening, or even make the slightest sound, because he’s on top of me and his hands are on my windpipe.

I thrash about, trying to break free, but he’s too heavy, and his hands have closed around my throat and he’s squeezing hard. I can’t breathe, and immediately the panic is there, rolling over me like a wave. I kick and struggle, nothing but the will to survive. I can feel the blood in my veins, heavy and hot and thick, and I hear a rushing in my ears as it swells and subsides. My head is bursting. I open my eyes wide.

He’s staring at me, his eyes watering from exertion and hatred. He hates me — why? His face is the last thing I see. Then it’s over.

I am not naive. That’s how it could happen, or something like that. I know all about Victor Lenzen, and yet at the same time I know nothing. But I’m going ahead with it. That much I owe Anna.

I pick up my phone, feel its weight in my hand. I take a deep breath. I enter the number of the Munich paper that Victor Lenzen writes for and ask to be put through to the editorial department.

Through my study window I look straight out onto Lake Starnberg. I am glad I was wise enough to make sure of a nice view when I bought the house. God knows there aren’t many people as reliant on a view as I am. I only have the one — though that’s not quite true because it changes every day. Sometimes the lake seems cold and unfriendly, sometimes enticing, and at other times it looks positively enchanted, so that I have no trouble at all imagining the water nymphs of local legend swimming with one another below the surface.

Today the lake is a mirror for a few coquettish clouds in an otherwise pure blue sky. I miss the swifts that in summer grace the sky with their giddy acrobatics. They’re my favorite creatures. They live and mate and even sleep on the wing, never still in an unending sky — so wild, so free.

I’m sitting at my desk, thinking over the things that I have set in motion. In a few months, the journalist Victor Lenzen will interview mysterious best-selling author Linda Conrads. They’ll talk about the new book — her first ever crime novel.

An interview with Linda Conrads is in itself a sensation.

For years, the press has been asking for interviews and offering ridiculous sums of money, but the novelist has always declined. No wonder the media are so keen to talk to her; almost nothing is known about the writer concealed behind the name. She hasn’t given readings for years, turns down interviews, lives cut off from society, doesn’t have a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter account. If it weren’t for the books that are published with such pleasing regularity, you might almost think Linda Conrads didn’t exist. Even the author’s photo and biography on her novels’ jackets reveal nothing, unchanged for a good ten years. The black-and-white photo shows a woman who is maybe pretty, maybe ugly, who could be tall but then again could be short, a woman with either blonde or brown hair, and eyes that are green or perhaps blue. It shows her from a distance, in profile, and the brief biographical note states only her birth year and that she lives near Munich with her dog.

That the former foreign correspondent Victor Lenzen is to have an exclusive interview with Linda Conrads is going to cause quite a stir.

I plan to challenge my sister’s murderer with the only means at my disposal — literature. I am going to haul him over the coals with this book. And I want him to look me in the eye with the full knowledge that I have seen through him, even if no one else has. I am going to prove Victor Lenzen guilty and find out why Anna had to die. No matter what it takes.

That is the momentous task I have set myself. I am working on a crime novel in which I describe a murder that resembles the murder of my sister down to the last detail.

I have never had to write such a complex book: on the one hand, I want to stick as closely as possible to the truth; on the other, I must invent a story that leads to the murderer’s arrest — an ending that has so far been denied to me in real life.

I’ve never tried to re-create reality in my books before. I would have considered it a waste. I have always had a prolific imagination, a head full of stories wanting to get out.

If my parents are to be believed, I was fond of making up tales even as a child. It was a catchphrase in our family: Linda and her stories. I remember once telling a primary school friend that I had been for a walk in the woods with my mother and that, as we’d been picking wild strawberries, we’d caught sight of a small, spotted fawn in a clearing, asleep on the grass. I’d wanted to go up and stroke it, but my mother had held me back and told me that the fawn would smell of human afterward and its mummy might reject it, so it was better to leave it to sleep in peace. She told me how lucky I was to have found a little fawn like that — it was very rare.

I remember how impressed my friend had been by the story. She went to the woods often and although she sometimes saw deer she’d never seen a fawn. I was so proud — I really had been tremendously lucky. I remember my mother taking me aside when my friend had gone home and asking why I told such stories. She said it wasn’t nice to fib, and I told her indignantly that I hadn’t been fibbing. Didn’t she remember the fawn? I could, clearly. My mother shook her head — Linda and her stories — and told me we’d seen a fawn like that in a film the other day. And then it all came back to me. Of course, a film!

Imagination is a wonderful thing, so wonderful that I make a great deal of money out of it. Everything I’ve written so far has been as far removed as possible from myself and the reality I know. It is odd to let other people into my life now. I console myself with the thought that these aren’t really scenes from my life but a displaced reality in which I immerse myself. A lot of the details are different, partly because I make a conscious decision to change them and partly because, after all this time, I can’t be certain of every single detail. Only one chapter — the one everything revolves around — will be authentic: a night in high summer, Anna’s flat, deafening music, blood and vacant eyes. .

The book ought really to begin with that chapter, but I haven’t yet been able to face going back to that place. Yesterday I promised myself I’d write the chapter today, and today I’ve put it off until tomorrow.

Writing is strenuous, but in a good way. It’s my daily training. It does me good to have a real goal.

No one except me notices any difference. Everything’s the same: Linda sits in her big, lonely house and tells her agent and her publisher that she’s working on a new book. Linda does that once a year; it’s nothing special. Business as usual for my agent, Pia, who’s already been informed that a new manuscript is on its way and who is naturally delighted. (Although it does, of course, surprise her that I should suddenly want to change genre and write a thriller.) Business as usual for Charlotte, who at most notices how I’m spending less time reading and watching TV, and more time in my study. Business as usual for Ferdi, the man who tends my garden and may only notice that he’s come across me in my pajamas less in the middle of the day. Everything is the same. Only the observant Bukowski knows that I’m plotting something and gives me conspiratorial glances. Yesterday I caught him looking at me with concern in his big, knowing eyes, and I felt touched.