Korridorium

♫ Thun­der­snow ♫

---

51/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor. I’ve never wound up inside the Vic­tory Col­umn before. Prob­a­bly just a tourist thing any­way. There are none here this time because the homi­cide squad has cor­doned off the whole place. Uwe Albo walks up to me. “I’ve never seen any­thing like this in my life. Truly nasty. I’m gonna nail that bas­tard myself, if…” He loses his train of thought. Looks rat­tled. I help him along: “The guy? Or the woman?” Albo blinks, but quickly real­izes I couldn’t pos­si­bly know more than he does yet. “No woman would do some­thing like this.” He steps aside for me. The pho­tog­ra­pher is busy work­ing. His flash illu­mi­nates a stack of loose pages topped with a bloody lump of meat. A fresh heart, it seems—most likely human, or Albo and the homi­cide squad would­n’t have shown up, and he would­n’t have called me in so fast. Well, what a great way to end the year. I look around the cor­ri­dor, but I can’t spot any­thing psy­cho­log­i­cally note­wor­thy.

Later in his office, after wait­ing for what felt like twenty paper cups of bit­ter cof­fee, Detec­tive Albo hands me the pages. The blood has left dark red stains on them. I’m pretty glad the crime lab sealed every sin­gle sheet in a plas­tic sleeve.

“There are fifty of them,” Albo says. He looks espe­cially tired today, as if the dark bags under his eyes have absorbed even more of the world’s suf­fer­ing. “Num­bered sequen­tially.” He drops into his swivel chair. “That’s all we’ve got. Sus­pect DNA, fin­ger­prints, foot­prints: zilch.” I flip through the pages. Type­writ­ten. Short texts. Sto­ries. No con­fes­sion let­ter, by the looks of it. No love let­ters, either. “The heart?” I ask.

Albo reaches for his phone as if it just vibrated. But he must have been mis­taken; he slips it away with a barely notice­able shake of his head. “The heart, yeah. The vic­tim is male, judg­ing by the blood. No sign of the rest of him.”

I stand up and wave the stack of pages: “I’ll take a closer look at these at home.” Albo stares at me like I’ve just opened my jacket to show him a sui­cide belt. “You can’t take those! Have you lost your mind? That’s cru­cial evi­dence.” I take three steps to the copier and lift the lid. The doc­u­ment feeder won’t do me any good here with the plas­tic around the pages. Albo looks like he wants to protest. A green glow sweeps beneath the glass. Can a copier light destroy foren­sic evi­dence? Albo seems to decide that’s pretty unlikely. He slumps back into his chair. He must have known right away that we’re deal­ing with a sick mind. Oth­er­wise, I would­n’t be here.

I place the sec­ond sheet on the glass. On the first page I set aside, there’s a lot of dried blood that left ugly black con­ti­nents on the copy, like inkblots in a Rorschach test. The stains pool around the text num­bered 1 on the page. It’s just a sin­gle sen­tence. It reads: “I enter the cor­ri­dor …”

♫ 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.

♫ Wim­mel­bild ♫

---

68/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor at the police sta­tion. Even from here, I can hear Albo yelling. He seems to be in a foul mood. No sur­prise there. When he sees me, he shoos the rook­ies out of the office. Even pulls up a chair for me. Never does that, the detec­tive.

“Find any­thing?” His voice is hoarse. He nods towards the copies with the blood­stain that fades down to doc­u­ment num­ber 10. “The team here says he’s a can­ni­bal and ate every­thing but the heart.”

I help myself to a cof­fee. “They must mean text num­ber 15, the ‘man-eater.’ It’s a lit­er­ary allu­sion to the Mino­taur myth. Unlikely that he iden­ti­fies with it that way.”

Albo sits on the desk and rubs his right thigh. “But there’s no body. And no miss­ing per­son report that fits. He cut the heart out with a knife that, the experts say, ‘was nei­ther par­tic­u­larly sharp nor par­tic­u­larly dull.’ Great! Got any­thing else for me?”

“It’s all pretty vague. Based on the texts, I’d guess he’s sin­gle, a loner, does­n’t like being around peo­ple.”

“The thing about Mount Olym­pus?”

“Yeah. But also the one about the hip­pies. And he’s got a grudge against gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions and bureau­cracy. Num­ber 42, with the promised blood­bath…”

“Could just be he’s hav­ing trou­ble with his tax office. This is all garbage, man. I’ll spell it out for the dum­mies: What am I sup­posed to be search­ing for? And don’t tell me some young female clerk at the build­ing depart­ment named Cory d’Or!”

“That’s just one of many false leads, sure. Although…”

Albo shifts to get com­fort­able and knocks a pen­cil sharp­ener off the desk. He groans as he bends down. “Although what?”

“There’s a decent chance his real name actu­ally is Cory. It’s a man’s name, too.”

Albo reaches out with extended fin­ger­tips, but the sharp­ener just slides fur­ther under the desk.

“Text num­ber 8, with cav­ity, horn, and boil­ing basin, and so on,” I add.

“Yeah?” He gives up, drops back into his swivel chair, and looks at me expec­tantly.

“All pos­si­ble ety­mo­log­i­cal ori­gins of the name ‘Cory.’ And unless he hap­pens to be a linguist—which I can’t entirely rule out—only some­one with that name would know that.”

Albo rubs his stub­ble. “I’ll have it checked out. A thin lead and a slim chance, but I’ll check it. Can’t be that many Corys in Berlin and the sur­round­ing area.”

“And one more thing, Uwe.” Albo drops his hand. “I’ve been think­ing we should pub­lish some of the texts. With a note mak­ing it clear we’re look­ing for the author.”

“And you don’t think that might be exactly what he wants?”

I expected that ques­tion. “Yeah, could be. But we’ll only pub­lish excerpts, and we’ll slip in a few typos. Enough to make him see red. What do you think? Maybe some­one rec­og­nizes the texts. Or the style, or an allu­sion.”

“That’s all you’ve got? What if he feels pro­voked? I don’t want to find a liver some­where tomor­row, or a lung, excised with a knife that’s not too dull and not too sharp.”

I point to the copies. “I’ve squeezed them dry. The whole thing is a shell game designed to lead us by the nose. I can’t just point a fin­ger at some­one and say, ‘That’s him, he wrote them, you’ll find fifty type­writ­ers in his garage and the bloody knife in his kitchen cab­i­net.’ ”

Albo sways his head back and forth. We’ve known each other for so many years—every now and then he’d con­sult me, his old psy­chol­o­gist friend, on tricky mur­der cases. But despite the use­ful insights I could offer from time to time, he should know I can’t work mir­a­cles. He low­ers his voice, leav­ing no doubt that what comes next is impor­tant. “I want a writ­ten pro­file, as pre­cise as pos­si­ble, clear? One that says he isn’t a can­ni­bal, but an intel­lec­tual who enjoys cruel games. Who might be named Cory, which gave him a trauma that turned into an obses­sion with cor­ri­dors. Got it?!”

“That’s pretty much all I have, though.”

“Write it down. I need it for admin. If you hap­pen to think of any­thing use­ful while doing it, let me know. And as for pub­lish­ing the stuff—I’ll think about it.”

♫ Shiver Pol­icy ♫

---

101/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor. It reeks hor­ri­bly of a zoo enclosure—no sur­prise, con­sid­er­ing I’m in a bear pit. The two res­i­dents, Maxi and Schnute, have been locked in the other side to give the homi­cide squad access.

“The bears did­n’t touch it. They actu­ally recoiled from it, accord­ing to the keeper,” Uwe Albo greets me, wear­ing his usual ill-fit­ting suit, his face deeply lined with worry. Here, the bears can step out­side on two sides to be admired by vis­i­tors, right in the mid­dle of Berlin in a small park between the Embassy of Angola and the Ger­man Psy­chol­o­gists’ Pub­lish­ing House. The cor­ri­dor inside the small bear quar­ters, sit­u­ated between the two fenced out­door areas sur­rounded by blue-tiled moats, sits in gloom.

“Another heart,” Albo says. He sounds exhausted. “And another fifty pages.”

“Déjà vu,” I say. My stom­ach turns. This was sup­posed to be a relax­ing long week­end.

Later, the detec­tive paces his office diag­o­nally in sup­pressed rage, back and forth, from the door to the cof­fee machine, from the cof­fee machine to the door. And back again. Tomor­row, Car­ni­val Mon­day parades will wind through Ger­man cities. But the Berlin homi­cide squad won’t have any rea­son to cel­e­brate or throw candy. “Now we’ve got two vic­tims. And a ser­ial killer we know noth­ing about, except that he’s sent us a hun­dred damn mes­sages we can’t make heads or tails of.”

That’s directed at me. I’ve only been able to skim through the new texts so far. To have some­thing to say, I respond with a counter-ques­tion – an old psy­chol­o­gist’s trick: “Why first the Siegessäule and then the Bären­zwinger? Berlin land­marks. He’s try­ing to sig­nal some­thing.”

Albo grabs the open door frame. “You tell me.” He gets inter­rupted, step­ping out of the room to talk to an offi­cer. Some­how, I already have a hunch what the news will be.

And sure enough: “No usable evi­dence. The guy prob­a­bly just climbed into the enclo­sure at night. Must have a death wish. Or he knows his way around bears. And the pages: another fifty type­writ­ers. The exact same fifty type­writ­ers. In the exact same order.”

I pic­ture a simul­ta­ne­ous chess player step­ping from table to table, mak­ing one move on each. Fifty tables, fifty chess­boards, fifty games. Advanc­ing one move at a time. I don’t men­tion any of this to Albo. Bad tim­ing. He’s tired and angry—a wounded bear that does­n’t know why every­one is hound­ing him or where to take cover.

Work is wait­ing for me. Read­ing. Think­ing. Fol­low­ing leads. Con­nect­ing the dots. I fig­ure it’s time to make myself scarce.

♫ Insom­nia ob omnia ♫

---

105/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor. It’s sus­pi­ciously quiet behind the door to the detec­tive’s office. I knock—something I never do. A kind of groan is my answer: Albo grunts as he pushes him­self up from his swivel chair, look­ing dis­ori­ented. “What time is it?”

“Too early, by the looks of it. Uwe, did you crash here?” Albo mas­sages one of his legs, which seems to have fallen asleep, too. “I need to hit the wash­room for a sec­ond.” He limps out of the room.

While he’s gone, I take another look at the copies of the mes­sages left by the killer. I’ve already spent the whole night por­ing over them. Albo usu­ally sits in his office at the crack of dawn, so I thought it’d be a good chance to see if the cops have any­thing new.

Albo comes back, hair wet and water splat­tered across his shirt. Does­n’t look like he keeps a razor here at the sta­tion.

“Num­ber 73″ he says, aim­lessly flip­ping through his copies with­out find­ing the one he’s look­ing for, “is a joke, right?”

The cof­fee tastes even more bit­ter than usual in the early morn­ing. I set the paper cup on Albo’s desk. He looks like he needs it. “The one about ‘joy every­where’? He’s mak­ing fun of us. But I think we can pin him down this time.”

“Out with it,” Albo prompts as he drops into his chair, which almost rolls right out from under his ass.

“I had the impres­sion from the start that this guy suf­fers from obses­sive-com­pul­sive dis­or­der. Text num­ber 95 speaks vol­umes. Plus we’ve got a child­hood trauma, a schizoid story with death threats, and the dead-end sit­u­a­tion.”

“Num­ber 54, you mean? That one’s too old. He worked his way past that a long time ago. Don’t for­get, he used the exact same type­writ­ers in the exact same order.” Albo takes a sip from the cup I put in front of him and coughs.

“He could’ve used them back­ward or scram­bled them up. But you’re right, Uwe, he won’t be stopped that eas­ily.”

“Schizo, you say? The one with the mir­ror-self.”

“That’s where he plants a bomb.”

“His Islamist sui­cide bomber wants to blow every­thing sky-high, too. So why does the guy kill with a knife him­self…?” Albo’s voice trails off. His thoughts are already some­where else—or maybe it’s just the sleep depri­va­tion catch­ing up to him.

“You should go home and hit the sack, Uwe. You look ter­ri­ble.”

“Thanks, same to you,” he retorts. “And don’t show your face back here until you’ve got some­thing use­ful.” His phone rings. With a sharp, shoo­ing wave of his hand, he kicks me out. Before I leave, I study the walls. We should put up one of those huge cork­boards some­where, like in Amer­i­can movies where they pin up all their evi­dence and con­nec­tions. We’d leave the mid­dle blank, and grad­u­ally, the image of the sus­pect would take shape right there. What was it again? Cory means “cav­ity”?

I decide to take my own advice, can­cel all my morn­ing appoint­ments, and crawl back into bed.

♫ Don’t Wake the Fer­ry­man ♫

---

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.”

♫ Before the Rit­ual ♫

---

148/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor. A uni­formed offi­cer I’ve never seen around here before steps up to me. “I’m here to see Albo,” I say, and fol­low him down the hall­way until he knocks on a door.

Inside, the detec­tive sits in front of sev­eral mon­i­tors show­ing the inter­ro­ga­tion room. Sit­ting alone at a plain wooden table in there is a man. He’s wear­ing hand­cuffs with his hands flat on the table.

“We got him,” Albo says, look­ing up at me. “And I def­i­nitely want you in that room with me for the inter­ro­ga­tion.”

Maybe it would’ve been nice to hear an apol­ogy first for drag­ging me out to precinct head­quar­ters in the mid­dle of the night. But that’s just not Albo’s style. His call yanked me out of a dead sleep, and I still feel sea­sick, like the world is wrapped in cot­ton wool.

“He tried to break into the Alex. The TV tower,” he adds unnec­es­sar­ily.

“Was he try­ing to… put another heart in a cor­ri­dor up there?”

It’s a young guy with messy blonde hair. I can see dried blue paint on his hands and cov­er­alls.

Albo scratches his eye­brow and shakes his head. “He dis­guised him­self as a painter, com­plete with over­alls and a paint bucket, but he got busted when he tried to head up the emer­gency stairs.”

“So, no heart,” I say with relief. “What about texts?”

“Zip,” Albo says. “That would’ve been too early any­way. He just wanted to scout out the next cor­ri­dor. I’ve had my guys step up patrols around the city’s major land­marks the last night or two.”

“Did he say any­thing? Con­fess?” I try to size up the guy on the mon­i­tor. His eyes seem to be star­ing into noth­ing­ness, though the cam­era feed might be deceiv­ing. He’s young. Way too young, really. Wet behind the ears.

“Can’t get a word out of him,” Albo says, though he still looks a lit­tle proud and relieved. He gives me a jovial punch on the thigh. “I’m hop­ing you can crack him for me. Before I have to resort to my own meth­ods.”

“And what if he’s not the guy?” I ask.

Albo shifts rest­lessly on his stool. “What else would he be doing at the Alex?”

“Sui­cide,” I say. “A bet with his bud­dies, a grand ges­ture for his girl­friend…”

Albo dis­misses it with a wave of his hand.

I don’t drop it. “I seri­ously doubt the guy knows what the Many-Worlds Inter­pre­ta­tion is.”

“Many-Worlds Inter­pre­ta­tion?” Albo asks.

“Text num­ber 63″ I say. “And I doubt he knows how to spell ‘Mega­lithic cul­tures,’ num­ber 97, or…”

Albo stands up. “How about you fig­ure out how we get a con­fes­sion out of him instead!”

“Uwe, man, face facts: this isn’t the guy we’re look­ing for. But if your team finds fifty type­writ­ers in his apart­ment, call me—even in the mid­dle of the night—and I’ll crawl back here on my knees and apol­o­gize to you.” Some­times you have to wave a fence post in Albo’s face—or bet­ter yet, hit him over the head with it—for him to real­ize he’s barked up the wrong tree.

He vis­i­bly deflates. “I was so sure.”

“You’re over­worked. If I can give you a piece of friendly advice: take a few days off, head out to the cot­tage by the lake, sit in the sun, and stare holes into thin air.”

Albo gives a sour smile.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and I can tell the words are prac­ti­cally being dragged out of him, “for drag­ging you out of bed. I was a bit quick on the trig­ger, I guess. Cof­fee?”

I shake my head. “Come on then,” he says, “I’ll drive you home.” I know how that goes. Scream­ing through red lights with the siren blar­ing. Never again. I’d rather call a cab.

The cab takes its time get­ting here, so I pop into the painter’s room after all.

“Hey,” I say, not wait­ing for an answer. “Maybe I can get you a per­mit for a graf­fiti piece on the TV tower. You just gotta know the right peo­ple. Is it a good quote?”

He stares at me like he’s see­ing a ghost. Finally, his mouth opens and moves a few times like a fish gasp­ing for air before he answers: “It was sup­posed to be our logo.”

“Ah,” I say. “A com­pany logo?”

“No, no: ours, mine and my girlfriend’s.” Wrong order, pal, I think. You two aren’t gonna last. I’m about to ask him what kind of logo it is, but the offi­cer who brought me to Albo steps in and whis­pers in my ear: “Your cab’s here.”

“Well, have fun,” I say, rais­ing my hand. The guy actu­ally raises his hand back, like we’re bud­dies. Ah, sweet inno­cence! This gen­er­a­tion prob­a­bly can’t think two cents’ worth because pfen­nigs were abol­ished. Everything’s going down the drain.

The taxi dri­ver wants to chat about some soc­cer games. Albo would say, “Shut up and drive.” I give it a try myself—and look at that, it works like a charm.

♫ Silencer ♫

---

151/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor lead­ing to the “Room of Silence” inside the Bran­den­burg Gate. Before Uwe Albo called me, I had no idea a place like this even existed. “Silence” is writ­ten on the wall in var­i­ous lan­guages. A pretty fit­ting place for Easter, really, but I already have a bad feel­ing about what’s wait­ing for me here.

Every­thing is cor­doned off. Albo’s col­leagues rec­og­nize me and wave me through. The detec­tive him­self stands in the small, unadorned med­i­ta­tion room like a lum­ber­jack in a per­fume shop. My gaze imme­di­ately drops to the floor, and sure enough, right on cue: in the mid­dle of the room lies a stack of paper, topped with a bloody lump of meat.

“Another heart,” Albo says when he sees me. “Num­ber three.”

A sharp wave of his hand scat­ters the young offi­cers. We’re alone. “This room is locked at night. Yet this morn­ing, the heart was sit­ting right here.” Albo grabs my arm. I can clearly see the whites of his eyes. “That bas­tard scares me, you know? He writes a story every day on one of his type­writ­ers, and when­ever he fin­ishes his run of fifty type­writ­ers, he calmly drops another one of his hearts some­where in Berlin—without us get­ting an inch closer to catch­ing him!”

I can smell Albo’s breath; he’s stand­ing that close. Is this a cry for help? Is he crack­ing? Is he at the end of his rope? But Albo relaxes his grip, lets go, and clenches both fists. His eyes nar­row to slits as he says, men­ac­ingly low, “I’m gonna nail him with these bare hands, and once I’ve got him, he can play all the hide-and-seek he wants in the cell where he’ll spend the rest of his life.”

He looks at me, as if look­ing for backup. I give him a stern nod. That seems to sat­isfy him. “Come on, let’s move. Foren­sics can han­dle the rest.”

Later in Albo’s office, we study copies of the new texts. Famil­iar themes, new twists—the play­ful, com­pul­sive streak shines through again and again.

“I paid the Inte­gral­ists a visit,” I say. Albo looks up, intrigued, hav­ing clearly for­got­ten he asked me to infil­trate Berlin’s Inte­gral scene in the first place. “Decent peo­ple across the board who think they’ve found the Philoso­pher’s Stone—a kind of cut crys­tal with a whole range of facets that all need to be accounted for when look­ing at human­ity and the world.”

“Facets?” Albo asks, frown­ing.

“Yeah, just like the killer’s texts. Every­thing can be viewed from dif­fer­ent angles and per­spec­tives…”

“Which I can then con­ve­niently pick and choose from.”

I shake my head. “No, no—the whole point of the inte­gral approach is that it’s holis­tic. You don’t just limit your­self to sin­gle aspects.”

“In other words: you felt right at home with them.”

“Point is, it’s a phi­los­o­phy that val­ues life in all its forms. It does­n’t breed killers, if that’s what you’re ask­ing.”

Albo scratches his stub­ble. “So where do we find him then?” I rap my knuck­les against my stack of copies. Our only lead.

A uni­formed offi­cer with a goa­tee and pony­tail knocks on the open door to grab our atten­tion. Albo steps over to him. I immerse myself in the pages in front of me. There’s men­tion of a twin. Inter­est­ing. A lead to the vic­tims, the first two of whom were appar­ently iden­ti­cal twins? “Then get back to work!” I hear Albo bark.

Snort­ing, he comes back into the office, wav­ing a thin folder. “The heart’s got the same DNA as the other two.”

“A third iden­ti­cal twin?” I ask, sur­prised. “Is that even a thing? Iden­ti­cal triplets?”

Albo slams the file onto his desk with a loud bang. “They’re so rare that every sin­gle one of them is reg­is­tered. But none of this makes sense, quite apart from the fact that no pair of triplets has been reported miss­ing.”

I let his “pair of triplets” slide. “Then they must be unreg­is­tered triplets. Or the lab made a mis­take…”

Albo nods, look­ing sud­denly exhausted. “Told them the same thing. They need to recheck every­thing, step by step.”

“—Or,” I con­tinue, “they’re clones.”

Albo stares at me. “Those were three hearts from adult human beings,” he says hoarsely. I nod.

Albo leans heav­ily on his desk and looks me dead in the eye, worn out. “Offi­cially, human clones don’t exist—and cer­tainly not adults.”

I nod again. “Offi­cially,” I say.

“Man,” Albo groans, slump­ing into his office chair. “Hous­ton, we have a prob­lem.”

♫ Sloe Sea­son ♫

---

153/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor at the sta­tion, clutch­ing the stack of copies con­tain­ing the writ­ings of the triple murderer—texts lit­er­ally stained with blood. The blood of ille­gal clones?

Albo is engrossed in his files. I skip the pleas­antries: “Is there such a thing as iden­ti­cal quadru­plets?”

Albo looks up. “Just had some in Leipzig recently. Damn rare, but not impos­si­ble.”

I grab a cof­fee. No sugar left.

Albo keeps his eyes on me. “Why do you ask?”

“Because then it might finally be over.”

Albo laughs bit­terly. “Over? I have to catch a killer, regard­less of what hap­pens in fifty days!”

“—Forty-eight,” I cor­rect him. Albo gives me a look that would­n’t pass day­time TV cen­sor­ship.

“Ray Brad­bury,” he says then. I look at him, slightly con­fused. “Amer­i­can author,” I say.

Albo nods. “Any Friend of Nicholas Nick­le­by’s Is a Friend of Mine.”

I shrug. Albo tosses me a thin, worn paper­back: Ray Brad­bury’s I Sing the Body Elec­tric! “Any Friend of Nicholas Nick­le­by’s…” is one of the sto­ries listed in the table of con­tents.

“You read stuff like this?” I ask, sur­prised.

Albo shakes his head. “One of our foren­sic guys put me onto it. There’s a guy in there who thinks he’s Charles Dick­ens but can’t put any­thing worth­while on paper. He buys six dozen type­writ­ers and writes like a mad­man…” With that, he stands up, walks over, and takes the slim vol­ume back from my hand. He flips it open, finds the spot, and quotes: “The poem. The essay. The play trag­ique. The farce. The short story. And it was all bad.”

“What are you try­ing to tell me, Albo?”

“That’s him, don’t you see? The type­writ­ers, the dif­fer­ent texts. And then he sits…” Albo taps the book­let. “…at the back of a train and throws all the pages out one by one, and they flut­ter away. Thou­sands of them.”

“But that’s just a story, Albo. We have three dead bod­ies and a ser­ial killer.”

Albo slams the book onto his desk. “Just a story, you say? But these are all sto­ries, too! The typewriters—don’t you get it? He knows the Brad­bury story and iden­ti­fies with it!”

“Take it down a notch, Albo. He iden­ti­fies with every­thing and noth­ing. That’s pre­cisely our prob­lem. He’s a shape-shifter, and we can’t get a grip on him. One minute he’s ‘inte­gral,’ the next he’s sur­re­al­ist. We don’t grasp him, get it? You can’t just pick out one facet and call it a day. Not here. Not with him. And six dozen type­writ­ers aren’t fifty.”

Albo looks like he’s on the verge of blow­ing a fuse. He must have latched onto this Brad­bury thing out of sheer des­per­a­tion. I don’t give him room to breathe: “Num­ber 122 is another one of those. Incom­pre­hen­si­ble gibberish…”—I pull the sheet from my copies—”…until you find the orig­i­nal.”

“Which orig­i­nal?” Albo asks, frown­ing at the page.

“A Braulio Are­nas is men­tioned, right? Chilean poet. Just so hap­pens he wrote a poem titled ‘Errata’ that lists a bunch of print­ing errors found in an unnamed text. A sur­re­al­ist poem.”

“And?”

“Num­ber 122 is that text. It con­tains every sin­gle error listed. For exam­ple, in the poem, it says, ‘Instead of mak­ing two hits with one shot it should be mak­ing two lips with one mouth.’ Sound famil­iar? Or ‘Instead of the youth the beauty the mill it should be the mill the beauty the youth.’ Ulti­mately, it was the miss­ing com­mas that tipped me off that his text was built on that poem.”

Albo looks at his copy, rubs his stub­ble, and thinks it over. Finally, he asks: “Does it make any sense?”

“None,” I say. “It’s just—and I quote—‘a grotesque par­ody of some­thing that is already absurd.’ ”

“Uh-huh,” Albo says.

I tap his copy. “There’s one error miss­ing, by the way.”

Albo’s brow fur­rows.

“One line reads: ‘Instead of I love you it should be I love you.’ ”

“Where’s the error?”

“That’s the whole point of Sur­re­al­ism. And the same goes for the killer. He’s no more Braulio Are­nas than he is Charles Dick­ens!”

Albo nods with­out look­ing up. “So how do we nail him?”

“Let’s talk about some­one who decided to stretch his bizarre mind games so far into real­ity that the homi­cide squad has to deal with them,” I say, hold­ing up the copies. “Let’s talk about incom­pat­i­ble claims and col­laps­ing belief sys­tems.”

Albo looks up. “Always a good idea,” he says. Do I spot a wry smile tug­ging at the cor­ners of his mouth? Maybe it feels to him, too, a bit like thirty or forty years ago, when we used to sit up all night debat­ing life, God, and the universe—and all the insan­ity we humans inject into it.

♫ Hunt­ing Spree ♫

---

158/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor of the precinct and close the door to the john behind me. Every now and then a good idea hits me while sit­ting on the throne, but this time, my mind is a blank slate. I’ve been holed up with Albo for way too many hours, going through the killer’s hun­dred and fifty texts with him like we’re piec­ing together a puz­zle. Some­where in there, a clue has to be hid­den about who he is and why he carves the hearts out of inno­cent triplets.

Albo is on the phone when I get back. This late at night? It seems true that the homi­cide squad never sleeps. Albo hangs up and stares at me with blood­shot eyes. “The con­verted dou­ble-decker bus that tours through the back­wa­ters at night…” I resist the urge to grab another cof­fee and sit down instead. “With chill-out music and philo­soph­i­cal self-dis­cov­ery.” Albo holds up the page in ques­tion. “Made it up. Does­n’t exist in real­ity. I had my guys check.”

Fig­ured as much. It started with the fifty type­writ­ers. The guy who sup­pos­edly bought them one by one, sec­ond­hand, only exists as a for­mer eBay han­dle, “SpellingError68,” with a Berlin address and a Pay­Pal account. He’s since deleted all the accounts, and no one’s lived at that address for years. Every trace has been metic­u­lously erased; all inquiries lead to dead ends, just like in the texts: as far as we know, hotel chef Pas­cal is just as fic­tional as house­boat dweller Norbu or some Cory d’Or, male or female.

“A rid­dle wrapped in a mys­tery inside an enigma,” I’d mut­tered ear­lier in the evening.

“Hape Ker­kel­ing,” Albo had offered with a nod, but I shook my head. “Win­ston Churchill.” Albo smirked crookedly. “Either way, all clues lead nowhere.” Which holds true for me, too, as a psy­chol­o­gist and—as Albo likes to ele­vate me—a pro­filer. Even the “KISTe,” the Fed­eral Crim­i­nal Police Office’s text analy­sis data­base used to eval­u­ate writ­ten state­ments by criminals—confession let­ters and ran­som notes—couldn’t get us any fur­ther.

We’d last been debat­ing the alien. “I would have so liked to speak with him about God. Then it must be done this way,” it reads in Num­ber 106, right as the alien kills the human astro­naut with whom com­mu­ni­ca­tion seems impos­si­ble. Crazy story. Who comes up with this stuff? A reli­gious fanatic?

I step over to the win­dow. The city is silent. Even if Berlin never truly sleeps, around 3:30 in the morn­ing it at least drifts into a brief half-slum­ber. “Maybe he thinks he’s doing some­thing good,” I say. “There’s a movie where a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor fakes a mur­der that turns out to be a sui­cide at the last second—but as a cri­tique of the death penalty and the Amer­i­can jus­tice sys­tem, he waives his appeal and goes to the exe­cu­tion cham­ber as the alleged killer.”

Albo stretches his back with a groan. “How do you pic­ture that? The triplets were in cahoots with him? He bred clones of him­self, breath­ing husks with­out feel­ing, and he’s cut­ting them open to cri­tique the moral­ity of our sci­en­tists?”

I tug at the win­dow, try­ing to pop it open. It’s been stick­ing for years. “I’ll get it fixed,” Albo says, and for a sec­ond I feel like I’m trapped in a time loop, hav­ing heard him say that at least a dozen times. “I say that every time, don’t I?” Albo asks, clearly hav­ing the exact same thought.

“If he were a psy­chopath, he could­n’t put him­self in other peo­ple’s shoes the way he con­stantly does in these texts.” I real­ize I’m start­ing to lec­ture as I pace back and forth. “Of course, we’re still not sure if the texts even came from the killer. Maybe they came from the triplets. But assum­ing the mur­derer wrote them: then the texts point to the murders—and the mur­ders, in turn, point to the texts.”

“We’ve cov­ered that ground. We’re going in cir­cles, pal,” Albo grunts sul­lenly.

“No,” I say, “because your flash of bril­liance about a cri­tique of the sci­en­tific estab­lish­ment is the best idea we’ve had so far. Mur­ders that aren’t really murders—meant to raise ques­tions and shake peo­ple up.”

“Switch­ing sides now? Plan­ning to cozy up to him, grab a drink, be his buddy?”

I stop pac­ing. Albo’s sore. No wonder—the case is tak­ing a nasty bite out of his pro­fes­sional pride.

“I wouldn’t be sur­prised,” I say, “if it was his own heart. Sym­bol­i­cally, I mean—that he’s tear­ing it out as the author of these texts because some­thing in them cuts him to the quick, because one of these texts is gen­uinely real and he’s reveal­ing him­self to us. Maybe with what­ever he’s stor­ing behind the black door? Or the busi­ness with the shat­ter­ing world­views?”

Albo looks at me, tired but with a slight provoca­tive edge. “In a case like that, you look at the sus­pects and cross off every­thing until only the most likely ones are left, right? So go home, man, and do your home­work.”

Dawn is already break­ing when I step out of the precinct. The crisp air feels good. The Life of David Gale sud­denly pops into my head—with Kevin Spacey. That was the title of the movie about the phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor. But how did Cory d’Or man­age to tear their own heart out three times and plant it at three dif­fer­ent Berlin land­marks? My thoughts haven’t made sense for a long time. High time to get some sleep.