Guilt (7 page)

A new trial was granted, the girlfriend admitted what the two of them had done back then, and Holbrecht was exonerated at the new hearing. It wasn’t easy for the young women to testify. They apologized to Holbrecht in open court. He didn’t care. We managed to keep the press out of it. He was awarded damages for the time he’d spent in prison as an innocent man. They amounted to a bit more than thirty thousand euros.

Holbrecht bought a little café in Charlottenburg; it sells homemade chocolates and good coffee. He lives with an Italian woman who loves him. Sometimes I drink an espresso there. We never discuss the affair.

He sat in the car. He had fallen asleep briefly, not a deep sleep, just a dreamless nodding-off for a few seconds. He waited and drank from the bottle of schnapps he’d bought in the supermarket. The wind blew sand against the car. The sand was everywhere here, a few centimeters under the grass. He was familiar with it all; he’d grown up here. At some point she would come out of the house and walk to the bus stop. Maybe she’d be wearing a dress again, a thin one, preferably the one with yellow and green flowers on it.

He thought about how he’d spoken to her. About her face, her skin under her dress, about how tall she was and how beautiful. She had barely looked at him. He had asked if she would like something to drink. He wasn’t sure if she’d understood. She’d laughed at him. “You’re not my type,” she’d yelled, because the music was too loud. “I’m sorry,” she added. He’d shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. And grinned. What else was he supposed to do? Then he’d gone back to his table.

She wasn’t going to make fun of him today. She would do what he wanted. He would possess her. He imagined her fear. The animals he’d killed had felt fear as well. He’d been
able to see it. They smelled different just before they died. The larger they were, the more fear they felt. Birds were boring. Cats and dogs were better; they knew when death was coming. But animals couldn’t talk. She would talk. It would be crucial to do it slowly so as to get the most out of it. That was the problem. Things mustn’t move too fast. If he was too excited, it would go wrong. The way it did with the very first cat. He’d lost control right after he’d amputated the ears, and he’d stabbed it convulsively much too soon.

The set of dissecting instruments had been expensive, but it was complete, including bone shears, a Stryker saw to split open the skull, the knife for cutting through cartilage, and the knife for severing the head. He’d ordered it on the Internet. He knew the anatomical atlas almost by heart. He’d written everything down in his diary, from the first meeting in the nightclub until today. He’d taken photos of her secretly and glued her head onto pornographic pictures. He’d drawn in the line where he wanted to cut, with black dashes, like in the anatomical atlas.

She came out of the front door, and he got ready. As she shut the garden door behind her, he climbed out of the car. This would be the hardest part. He had to compel her to come with him, but she mustn’t cry out. He had written down all the possible variants. Later the police found the notes, the pictures of the young woman, the slaughtered animals, and hundreds of splatter films in his parents’ cellar. The officers had searched the house when they found his diary and the dissecting tools in his car. He also had a small chemistry
lab in the cellar—his attempts to make chloroform had been unsuccessful.

The right side of the Mercedes hit him as he got out of his car. He flew over the hood, slammed his head onto the windshield, and landed on the ground on the left side of the car. He died on the way to the hospital. He was twenty-one.

I defended the driver of the Mercedes. He got an eighteen-month suspended sentence for negligent homicide.

Paulsberg stood next to his car. As he did every evening, he had turned off on the way home and driven up the little hill to his old ash tree. He had often sat here as a child in the shadow of the branches, carving figures out of wood and playing hooky. He lowered the window; the days were already getting shorter again and the air was cooler. It was quiet. For the only moment in the day. His cell phone was switched off. From here he could see his house, the house where he had grown up, built by his grandfather. It shone brightly, the trees in the garden lit by the sun; he could see the cars parked by the road. He would be there in a few minutes, his guests would already be waiting, and he would have to talk about all the idiocies that go to make up social life.

Paulsberg was forty-eight now. He owned seventeen major retail businesses in Germany and Austria that sold expensive men’s clothing. His great-grandfather had established the knitwear factory back there in the valley; Paulsberg had already learned everything about fabric and cut when he was a child. He had sold the factory.

He thought about his wife. Slim, elegant, enchanting, she would make conversation with everyone. She was thirty-six, a lawyer in an international firm, black suit, hair loose.
He had met her in the airport in Zurich. They had both been waiting for their delayed flight in the coffee bar and he’d made her laugh. They made a date. Two years later they got married. That was eight years ago. Things could have gone well.

But then the thing in the hotel sauna happened, and it changed everything.

Every year since their marriage, they had spent a few days in a mountain hotel in Upper Bavaria. They liked this way of unwinding, sleeping, walking, eating. The hotel was much cited for its “wellness environment.” There were steam baths and Finnish saunas, indoor and outdoor pools, massages and mud packs. The garage was full of Mercedeses, BMWs, and Porsches. Everyone belonged.

Like most men of his age, Paulsberg had a paunch. His wife had kept herself in better shape. He was proud of her. As they sat in the sauna he observed the young man staring at her. A southerner, black hair, Italian perhaps, good-looking, smooth skin, tanned, around twenty-five. The stranger was looking at his wife as if she were some beautiful animal. It irritated her. He smiled at her; she looked away. Then he stood up with his penis half-erect, walked towards the exit, and stopped in front of her, turning so that his member was right in her face. Paulsberg was about to intervene when the young man wrapped a towel around his hips and nodded to him.

Later, when they were back in their room, they made jokes about it. They saw the stranger at dinner; Paulsberg’s wife smiled at him and blushed. They talked about him for the rest of the evening, and during the night they imagined what it would be like with him. They had sex for the first time in a long time. They were afraid, and they were turned on.

Next day at the same time they went back to the sauna, and the stranger was already waiting there. She opened her towel while she was still at the door, and walked slowly past him, naked, knowing exactly what she was doing and wanting him to know too. He got to his feet and stood in front of her again. She sat on the bench, and looked first at him, then at Paulsberg. Paulsberg nodded and said “Yes” in a loud voice. She took the stranger’s penis in her hand. Paulsberg saw the rhythmic motions of her arm through the steam in the sauna, he saw the young man’s back in front of his wife, olive-skinned and shining wet. Nobody spoke; he heard the stranger panting; the movements of his wife’s arm became slower. Then she turned to Paulsberg and showed him the stranger’s sperm on her face and body. The stranger picked up his towel and left the sauna without saying a word. They stayed behind in the heat.

First they experimented in public saunas, then in swinger clubs, and finally they advertised on the Internet. They established rules: no violence, no love, no encounters at home. They would stop it all if either of them started to feel
uncomfortable. They never stopped once. At the beginning he was the one who wrote the copy, then she took over; they posted masked photos on websites. After four years they had it down to a science. They’d found a discreet country hotel. There they would meet men on weekends who’d answered their ads. He said he was making his wife available. They thought it was a game, but after so many encounters it wasn’t a game any more, it had become a part of them. His wife was still a lawyer, she was still radiant and unapproachable, but on weekends she became an object used by other people. That was how they wanted it. It had simply presented itself; there was no explanation.

The name in the e-mail had meant nothing to him, nor could he connect the photo with anyone; he had stopped looking at the photos the men sent a long time ago. His wife had written back to the man and now he was standing in front of them in the hotel reception area. Paulsberg knew him fleetingly from school thirty-five years before. They had had nothing to do with each other there. He was in the parallel class. They sat on the barstools in the lobby and told each other the things people who’ve been at school together always tell each other; they talked about former teachers, the friends they’d both known, and tried to ignore the situation. But it didn’t get any better. The other man ordered whiskey instead of beer and spoke too loudly. Paulsberg knew the firm he worked for; he was in the same business. The three of them ate dinner together, and the other man drank too much. He flirted with Paulsberg’s wife, saying she
was young and beautiful and Paulsberg was to be envied, and he kept on drinking. Paulsberg wanted to leave. She began to talk about sex and about the men who sent her pictures and whom they met. At a certain point she laid her hand on the other man’s hand, and they went to the room they always booked.

While the other man was having sex with his wife, Paulsberg sat on the sofa. He looked at the picture that hung over the bed: a young woman standing on the seashore. The artist had painted her from behind, in a blue-and-white bathing suit of the kind worn back in the twenties. She must be beautiful, he thought. At some point she would turn around, smile at the artist, and they would go home together. Paulsberg thought about the fact that they had been married for eight years now.

Later, when they were alone in the car, neither of them said a word. She stared out of the passenger window into the darkness until they reached home. During the night he went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water, and when he came back he saw the display on her phone light up.