55/398
♫ Under the Throne ♫
55/398
I enter the corridor. The neon tube flickers. Albo’s office door is slightly ajar. “Come in,” he calls, “Happy New Year!” He sits partially bathed in the pool of light from his desk lamp. The rest of the room remains in darkness. Outside, a few belated fireworks go off. It’s long past midnight.
“Happy New Year!” I reply, although the gruesome discovery from earlier today hasn’t exactly put me in a festive mood.
“So?” he asks. I know what he wants from me. Albo needs to catch a killer, and I’m supposed to help him do it. I head for the coffee machine first. Its red power light guides my way. A bad habit, but definitely better than immediately reaching for the hard liquor.
It seems Albo is ringing in the New Year with coffee, too. I notice he’s made copies of the fifty pages as well. He’s probably read them as many times as I have over the past few hours. They would’ve made decent New Year’s reading if a human heart hadn’t been sitting on top of them.
Albo’s head stays in the shadows. Maybe that’s for the best. I sit down across from him. “All typed. On a typewriter, I mean. And different typewriters, judging by the font.”
“Fifty different typewriters. I already had it checked out. There’s an eBay account, SpellingErrors68, that bought fifty old typewriters a few months ago and then deactivated the account. We reached out to eBay and the sellers—nothing useful so far, at least not what we could dig up on a holiday. Looks like he covered his tracks thoroughly.”
“SpellingError?”
“Yeah, there are tons of accounts with names like that. Why?”
“Because he doesn’t make any.”
“If you think that’s a contradiction, it’s just one of many, isn’t it?” Albo places his palm flat on the copies with spread fingers, as if laying a curse on them. “Sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes old, sometimes young, playing dumb one minute, playing smart the next…”
“Who says the killer wrote them?”
Albo pulls his hand back. “The opening. Always the same. A corridor. Remember where we found the cut-out heart? In a corridor.”
“Hardly proof,” I say. “And besides, who says it was written by a single person? Could be multiple people.”
Albo leans forward, dipping his stubbly chin into the pool of light. “Come on, man,” he says, “I need results, clues, leads, something!”
I crumple the empty paper cup and toss it toward where the trash can usually sits in daylight.
Albo gestures with his hands. “Is it a madman? An unrecognized artist? A literature teacher? Someone whose texts were stolen, seeking bloody revenge? Believing it will get him on the front page of the local tabloids? You’re the profiler, so tell me.”
“If it’s an author, and if he’s a male author – which I think is both likely – then he’s someone who likes to juggle with possibilities. And who apparently likes to play hide-and-seek.”
“What does that mean?” Albo rumbles, as he did in his prime. “That he wants us to chase him? That this guy sees murder as a game?”
I purse my lips and shake my head. Albo probably can’t see me any better than I can see him. But I need it for myself. Making clear statements here means venturing far out onto thin ice. “A game, yes. Or a kind of puzzle course through corridors. There’s mention of around four hundred texts in total: if we’re unlucky, it will continue.”
“We’ll prevent that. That’s why I need some clues!”
“What do you want to hear? That he’s educated, probably has a degree, is well-versed in the new German spelling, has a broad range of interests, including fairy tales, myth, history and science fiction possesses a dry sense of humor, seems to consider himself a poet or ‘short prose writer,’ gravitates toward word play and existential tirades, and has an obsession with corridors? That he’s forty-three years old?”
“Forty-three? Does he write that?”
“Just a hunch, because of ‘SpellingErrors68’—he might’ve used his birth year. A lot of people do.”
Albo leans forward again, this time to make sure I see him smile. “Well, that’s something. We’re narrowing it down. What about the woman he writes about at the start?”
“Could be a tragic love story. She turns up later as an anagram—I just hope the ‘chosen one‹’ hasn’t been missing her heart since yesterday.”
Albo grunts. “The victim was male.”
“Right, yeah. Maybe text number 50 gives us a lead.”
Albo rummages through the copies until he finds the right one: “The therapist?”
“Yup. That could be something: trauma, nightmares, therapy. And the bloody heart could be a manifesto. Or a cry for help.”
“So I should have all the female trauma therapists in Berlin checked to see if they’ve got someone with a corridor obsession on their couch…”
“I’d actually check the male therapists instead. Everything in these texts is twisted.”
Albo holds out one of the copies. “Who’s R. L. St.?”
I stand up and walk over to the window. Rain is falling, making the streetlights outside the station look even gloomier than usual. At least from here I can spot two shimmering reflections in the dark hole where Albo’s head must be. “Robert Louis Stevenson. Wrote Jekyll and Hyde, inspired by hallucinated little men.”
“Jekyll and Hyde. Great, this oughta be fun,” he grunts.
“I need more time, Uwe,” I say. Albo mutters something I take as grudging agreement. I leave him alone. The new year is a few hours old now, and as I step out into the night, the rain stops, as if someone had suddenly placed a hand over the city.