Korridorium

♫ Don’t Wake the Ferryman ♫

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120/398

I enter the corridor, and judging by the smell, one of the officers tracked in dog shit. Or is that me? I check my soles: not exactly clean, but visibly nothing that could stink this atrociously.

In Albo’s office, it smells like coffee as usual.

“They were twins,” Albo says the moment he sees me. Without me being able to stop it, a movie starts playing in my head. I see the Kessler Twins standing before me, each gripping a butcher knife. Ellen says, We want your heart. And Alice says, It’s for the sake of poetry, sorry.

“The deceased,” Albo adds, “share the exact same DNA. Unless it was the same heart twice, they were identical twins.”

Ah, not the killers! The victims! The scene shifts in a flash. Ellen says, I didn’t want to die at all. And Alice: It had to be done. Both have holes in their chests.

I have to sit down.

Why would that bastard cut the hearts out of a pair of twins? And fifty days apart to the day? What the hell is waiting for us when another fifty days run out?

“Well? You got something for me, too?” Albo looks like he just spent a sunny afternoon in the garden of his country cottage. Or like he actually got a full night’s sleep for once. Does he know something? Has he been holding out on me?

“What about the twins? Are you gonna find them?” Albo lets out his signature dry laugh: “There are way too many out there. And they don’t even have to be local. The hearts had been removed twelve to sixteen hours before they were found each time. If he kept them cold, he could’ve stretched that by a few more hours.”

“So why the good mood, Uwe?” I ask. Why waste time guessing when I can press him on the sore spot?

“Because you’re about to tell me who the hell I should be looking for.”

Bad start. I’ve never handled high expectations well. Back in school, it used to make me stutter. Let’s see if I’ve learned anything since then. “Maybe the simulation angle gets us somewhere.”

“The thing with the simulated patients? Yeah, they really exist. Over a hundred of them. But nobody with that exact set of symptoms. Besides, we’re looking for a man.”

“The killer could be one of the med students. Or one of the professors.”

Albo purses his lips and offers a subtle shake of his head. Leave that to the pros, he’s telling me. But I’m not giving up that easily. “If he’s simulating being a standardized patient—maybe the murders are simulated, too. Maybe the whole thing is just one big simulation to him.”

“Simulation of what? And what the hell is a simulated murder?”

“One that only looks like a murder. Nothing in those texts is real, either.”

Albo grunts in disgust. “Except the hearts. Those are real. He carved them out of some twins, and that’s where the simulation ends, doesn’t it? No matter what he writes in those pages. Murder is murder—he can’t write that off his conscience.”

He’s getting worked up. Best not to push that angle any further. Luckily, I’ve got something else—something he definitely hasn’t figured out yet. “The Trickster.”

“Mm-hmm. Number 85 with the go-go dancers. I knew there was more to that one.”

“Those velvet pillows they’re serving things on.” Albo leans forward, intrigued. “I figured out what the colors mean. There’s a specific sequence.”

Albo rummages through his copies: “A rainbow?”

“Hardly. It’s a sequence of developmental stages from a specific sociological theory. It spans all of human history from its inception to the present day. And right on into the future. A kind of open-ended Richter scale for human evolution.”

Albo furrows his brow. That’s probably not what he was hoping to hear.

“Tribal societies, kingdoms, democracies,” I lecture. “And it keeps going. Don’t you get it? He thinks he’s superior to you and me. He thinks he’s evolved beyond all of it: bureaucracy, the social contract, morality…”

I let that sink in. I can see the wheels turning in Albo’s head. Then: “And he wants to prove that to us? That the laws of civilization don’t apply to him?” Albo can’t stay seated anymore. He springs up and walks over to the window, staring out, thinking it through. “How does that help us, though?”

I was waiting for that. “This stage-and-color theory is pretty en vogue among a very specific crowd. Free spirits who think their philosophy is going to save the world. There’s a scene—the ‘integral scene.’ Small, but tight-knit. Centered right here in Berlin.”

Albo turns back toward me. “Berlin intellectuals. Right. And one of them went off the deep end. Thinks he’s…” He can’t find the right word. Before I can chime in, Albo already has the phone receiver in his hand. “I’ll have it checked out. ‘Integral scene,’ you say?” And when he sees me nod: “Infiltrate them. Can’t hurt. Ask around, see if anyone’s noticed a megalomaniac nutcase in their ranks.”

I start to protest, but Albo shuts me down before I can resist. “You used to want to save the world as a free spirit yourself. And what’s the saying? Takes a philosopher to catch a philosopher.”

Spiral Dynamics:

Integral theory: