Murder. The German police had a special department that dealt with murder cases, but Brockmann realized, to his surprise, that he had never seen one of their interrogation rooms from the inside. As always, these places were a letdown. Old furniture, much less technology than one would expect, and two cops who looked more like academy recruits than seasoned investigators.

Somewhere out there was a specialist with years of experience, an expert in the art of investigating murders. Wherever he was, he was not in the room, which was probably a good sign.

“Any of you over forty?” Brockmann asked from his side of the interrogation table.

“We are both well into our thirties, Mr. Brockmann. May we please begin?” The male Kommissar said. The woman, who certainly didn’t look like she was in her thirties, folded her arms. Noticing this, Brockmann smiled, seeing how little she had control over her own gestures.

“Sure.” He replied, putting on a forced smile that revealed this was not something he would normally do.

“We’re interrogating Alois Hermann Brockmann, born in . . .” The male policeman began to read his dates, all of them taken from some forged documents. Or were they the real ones? The worst thing about it was that Brockmann didn’t remember. He sometimes wondered if it was his age or his lifestyle that made him so unsure about the truth. Or maybe he just had things to remember that were more important than this.

“. . . Raubach and Kommissar Sabine Wegner.” He ended the protocol by naming himself and the other officer. Brockmann turned to him and looked at his Asian features.

“Raubach?” He asked. “You don’t look like a Raubach.”

The man tilted his head to the side and gave Brockmann an interested smile. “Why not?” He asked, “A guy like you should be expected to have a little bit more of an eastern name, right?” Brockmann said. He set his large hands on the desk. He usually didn’t like talking, but he was aware that this was a game of communication and he had to play it.

“A guy like me?” Raubach asked.

“Are you one of those right-wing nutjobs, Mr. Brockmann? Do you secretly celebrate the birthday of the Führer and tell people how great everything was back in the days?” Sabine Wegner leaned forward.

“Back then?” Brockmann smirked. “Everything was as shitty as it is now “back in the days”. Whenever “back in the days” was.” Brockmann leaned forward. “Am I allowed to smoke?”

“No,” Wegner said. She gave him a displeased look. Brockmann eyed her and smirked.

“Seriously? In movies, people are always allowed to smoke when they’re getting interrogated.” Brockmann leaned back, abandoning the attempt to find his cigarettes.

“So, are you?” Wegner leaned forward.

“You guys really don’t know shit about the people you interrogate, don’t you? When I was sitting where you are sitting, I had a full file with everything I needed. Political affiliation, family situation, biography. I was a member of the communist party of East Germany, honey.” He shook his head.

“Don’t call me honey again,” Sabine said, staring at him.

Brockmann stared back. Silently, he eyed her and internally laughed at their choice of roles. Really? The young woman was the bad guy? The Asian the good guy? He was an old man; a young woman being nice might do miracles in the interrogation. A good-looking sporty guy would cause jealousy and probably be blocked by someone like him. These guys were clearly not experts. Brockmann assumed that this was not a serious thing, it was probably a tip they followed. The boss had not considered this worthy of his attention so he sent the kids.

Wegner broke eye contact.

“My apologies,” Brockmann finally said.

“So what did you mean? When you said a guy like me, what did you mean?” Raubach said. Brockmann leaned forward, picking up the cup of water and taking a sip.

“Eastern Germany. You come from Eastern Germany. You might look like a chink, but I bet your Daddy moved over in the late seventies as part of the German-Vietnam exchange programs. Worked in a factory or something, met your mum, got you. Raubach is in Westphalia. As western as you can get in Germany. That is what I mean, Kommissar Raubach. For someone clearly from eastern Germany, it is strange you are named after a town in the west.” Brockmann kept his cup of water down. “So are we gonna talk about any actual crime, or did you just want to chat with an old man?”

Raubach smiled. “Do you know a man called Robert Landau?” He asked.

“Isn’t that an actor?” Brockmann asked back.

“No, I mean Robert Landau, the private banker living near the harbor.” Raubach seemed to probe Brockmann with his eyes. Brockmann knew how to hide surprise or shock. He was good at it. He was quite sure that the man didn’t see how he had gotten him cold with that comment.

“No, can’t say it rings a bell. Do you have a picture?” Brockmann put his hands on the table. Hands were usually the first to betray you.

“You actually walked past his flat several times last week, you know that? We got footage from a security camera off the office building on the opposite side of the street.” This time it was Wegner.

“I kinda walk all day, helps me with my back. I am an old man, I’ve got little to do but take walks,” Brockmann answered.

“You could browse the internet,” She smiled.

“I don’t have a computer.” He said, looking at her. Wegner only raised her brows. She seemed to have this habit of leaning forward every time she thought something was meaningful, and then leaning back every time she realized it had probably not been that brilliant.

“Are you good at climbing?” Raubach asked. Brockmann gave him a surprised look.

“I am sixty and my back hurts. The only thing I do climb is out of my bed. Are you serious? Did someone climb into the guy’s flat and steal something? And you suspect me? What about the gangs who hang out there?”

“There are no gangs,” Raubach said.

“Gatherings of young people listening to loud music and smoking pot? I call that a gang!” He threw his hands up in what was probably an unconvincing gesture of being annoyed. Truth was, he was tense. They didn’t reveal how they had the idea that he had anything to do with it.

“We took that into consideration. But we chose you for a very specific reason. We looked at your financials and saw that you receive a pension from the state. Nice pension, nothing big, but something one can live on. So, I dug a little deeper . . .” She leaned forward again. Brockmann raised his brows. They had dug into his finances? He was a suspect, then. Not a person-of-interest you checked after a crime, but a real suspect. How did this happen? What had he overlooked?

“And?” He asked. Wegner now eyed him with a curiosity that gave her move away; a little too early.

“Well, you said you were a member of the East German Communist Party. But, I could not find out who or what ministry you worked for, which makes me think you might have been with the Ministry of State Security, or STASI as it was called. Is that right?” She tilted her head to the side. Brockmann looked at the two and then gave out a loud and robust laugh.

“You know how many people worked for State Security? Do you have any idea how few ever did anything but read a lot of stuff? Controlling the thoughts of everybody means you gotta be informed really, really well. Anyway, no I was not STASI. I lacked the brains for it. I was border.” Brockmann looked at them. “So if I do something, I do it from a safe distance and not by climbing up anywhere. Should I get a lawyer?” He raised a brow.

“You had the chance before the interview began,” Raubach said.

“Yes, but then I still had the feeling I was here to help, now I feel like you wanna tag something on me. Seriously, I get along with my pension, I am old, my back is not okay and my mind isn’t what it used to be. I don’t do any breaking and entering, believe me.” He looked at both and they looked at each other.

“What is wrong with your back?” Raubach asked.

“Hurts,” Brockmann said as Wegner leaned back, again admitting defeat through the gesture.

“Why?” Raubach asked.

“No idea. Went to a bunch of doctors, all still wet behind the ears. Did all kinds of tests on me. There was nothing found. It just hurts.” He took out his tablets as if to underline the issue and popped another painkiller.

“What do you think it is?” Raubach asked.

“A worm, probably. Died in there and never left. Its body does not decompose and that is why it hurts.” Brockmann looked up to Raubach and the policeman nodded with raised brows.

“Alright,” Raubach said. He turned to Wegner.

“Do you have a gun?” She asked. Brockmann nodded.

“Yes, I do.” He said, knowing they already knew he had a license for one. These things were rare in Germany, so it would show up in his file.

“We will need to see it,” Wegner said. Brockmann looked at her.

“I think you need a court order for that,” he said. Now he had the feeling that whatever had given them the ability to have him taken in for questioning was not solid, not something they could use to get a court order to check his gun.

“You got something to hide?” Raubach asked.

“From two cops who wanna pin something on me? No, why would I?” He said, and looked at Raubach.

He knew they were through. They had no proof, only information. Information from whom, he wondered.

****

The good thing about being an old man is that you become invisible. A good-looking guy in a suit with sunglasses is watched by everyone. An old guy in a worn-out suit? Nobody remembers him. Nobody pays him any attention. He's a complete ghost.

That had made following Robert Landau very easy.

His day usually began with a run, which Brockmann could not keep up with, so he scouted section by section of his morning route. Never had the man recognized the familiar face in the park or on the street when he had passed him. It took Brockmann a week to be sure. Then he knew why Landau was so careless. He was not considering himself the hunted, but the hunter.

After the run, he usually took a shower and had breakfast, before taking the S1 subway line downtown where he worked in an old private bank, mainly managing the accounts of the old Hanseatic families. Hamburg had a lot of those. Ancient family lines whose wealth dated back to medieval times. He was a classic 9 to 5 worker, who would leave the office on point at ten past five, take a train to get some food, sometimes even meet someone. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. In the evening, he mostly took online cooking courses. Smokers and BBQ were his special interest. Sauces he specialized in and Indian food seemed to be an occasional guilty pleasure. Brockmann stood in the rain on the opposite roof and watched him with a pair of old binoculars while the rain and wind whipped against him.

It was during weekends that things got interesting. Robert took long walks in the woods. There were not many forests in Northern Germany, so he often had to drive an hour or two. He never took the train because he had this large yellow trash-bag with him. He had gone to the hardware store and gotten a spade, one of those that could be taken apart. Swedish metal, carbon fiber grip. Expensive. He had that one in his backpack together with a cold beer.

Following him into the woods was easier and at the same time harder than in the city. Landau was not trained and had to stay focused when he ventured into the forest, especially once he left the ordinary path. In the woods, any human presence would have alarmed him. So Brockmann had to become truly invisible. The rain helped him the second time they made the trip, as the hood from the raincoat limited Landau’s view. It became much easier to stay out of sight.

The first time he had lost him, but the second time Brockmann had followed him as he made it halfway through the forest on the path and then had taken a sharp turn into the underwood to his left. He had stumbled more than he walked, but nevertheless, he had travelled a mile almost before he stopped. He looked around and Brockmann took cover behind a large tree. Then Landau got the spade out of his backpack and assembled it. Frustrated and obviously not accustomed to this sort of physical work, he put on protective clothing, something that looked like overalls, and finally began digging. Once he was deep enough and out of breath, he threw the yellow bag in and covered it with dirt.

Brockmann had remained in the forest after the man had left, and once he was far away enough, he had dug up the yellow bag. He had not brought any tools, so he cursed as he had to do it with his bare hands. It took him almost an hour to grab hold of the yellow plastic and drag it out of the ground. Inside, he found just what he had expected.

Bones. Cleaned of any organic tissue, they looked almost polished and too white. He was not a trained medic, but he was pretty sure they were human. One looked like it was part of a leg. Smaller ones looked like hand bones. He now knew for sure who had been killing all of the homeless who had vanished in the last weeks, but what he didn’t know was if the man was what he suspected him to be.

A serial killer was only of minor interest to him. He might tip off the police about it. But humans were monsters. All humans were monsters, but that was not his concern. What he was after was a little less mundane than just a serial killer. He held the bone of some poor bastard’s upper leg in his hand as he sat down in the hole he had just dug and felt the first drops of rain falling on his shoulders.

What a perfect day, he thought sarcastically.

****

Well, he had chosen this path. Two weeks before, he had happily been living on his pension and had drunk too much at Gitte’s Eck, and had kept himself busy hating the world and keeping to himself. He had been walking down the harbor just because he liked watching the ships pass by. A girl had left a newspaper lying on a bench that had a huge headline about vanishing homeless on the cover. A stabbing. Potential murder. He had wanted to ignore it, but a murder in his neighborhood at least interested him mildly. Newspapers had once been full of lies, now they were full of half-truths. When there was no great secret to keep from the general public anymore, the reason for lies changed and the methods became less clear. Truth was still a luxury one had to afford.

Death was death, though, and that’s what had come to his neighborhood. A man had been stabbed in an alley. He had been homeless, but Brockmann thought the face looked familiar. The alley was splitting from one of the busier streets of the Reeperbahn district, the tourist-attracting red-light district of Hamburg. That was busy and close to people, so it interested the police. They asked for any possible lead to identify the man who had attempted to murder him and had put out a 5.000 Euro bounty. To make things easier they had printed pictures of the victim, the street, etc.

Brockmann blinked twice before he was sure he saw right. On the wall behind the potential victim was a sign, a line with two crossing waves. He knew what that was.

He kept on staring at the sign for about five minutes wondering what he should do. The easiest thing he could do was to put the newspaper down and forget it. Nobody would ever know. Nobody would probably even recognize the sign. He sat there at the harbor, watching giant cruisers for old overweight tourists being dragged into the wharves of Hamburg to be refurbished. He would never go on one of those. Actually, he would never do a lot of things that old people did. That was not in his nature. So, what he did instead was focus on the strange sign sprayed on the wall. He knew that there was almost no chance of its appearance at the site of a stabbing being a coincidence.

He became uncertain of how long he had been sitting there brooding, how many circles his head had made. Finally, he got up and walked to the next gas station. He bought a map there, though the wisecracking young man working there recommended using something called “Google Maps”, which got him an angry grunt from Brockmann.

****

He found the street referred to in the newspaper, which was the Kleine Königstraße, the small Kingstreet, a street which was a historical street right next to the larger Königstraße, mostly unused nowadays. It was a typical place for someone to sleep if they had no flat. The man had slept in an entrance to a house which was barely a five-minute walk from where Brockmann now was. He sighed and took the walk, passing the dirty streets of the red-light district, where empty bottles and trash were piling up to remind everyone of the escapades of the night before. Pornography cinemas began to open up early, to get the perverts who preferred the broad daylight for their trip into the seedy underbelly of this world.

Brockmann had seen worse. This was what he saw every day. His disgust in human nature had grown into a general state of mind right here. Of course, a few minutes down the river, the street suddenly turned into a much more civilized living quarters. Here he found the Old Kingstreet, and, as it was fairly short, he easily found the place where the homeless man had been stabbed. There it was. The sign was no taller than thirty centimeters, not comparable to the large, sprayed signatures the other self-proclaimed artists left here. In fact, this was not sprayed on at all. A closer look showed that someone had used a broad tinsel to put it there.

“Are you looking for something?” An elderly woman said. Brockmann looked at her.

“Yes and I don’t want to be disturbed while doing it, hag.” He hissed. Immediately, the elderly woman used her two sticks to get away from him. He smirked and looked at the sign.

He knew he had to report this.