Advent

Kevin Wignall

Advent

First Published, December 2012 in

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Copyright 2012 © Kevin Wignall

  The train from Düsseldorf pulled into Cologne’s main station a few minutes behind schedule at a quarter to nine.  Even this late in the evening the station was busy – people with suitcases killing time waiting for night trains, beggars searching out the sympathetic or gullible, passengers jumping on and off the regional trains which buzzed in and out like worker bees.

  As the doors opened on the Düsseldorf train, forty or fifty people spilled out of it, charging along the platform at a brisk pace, none of them quite breaking into a run, but all of them eager to be where they were going.  These were not people with luggage, but regular commuters returning home after a day at work, the station so familiar it had become invisible to them.

  Karsten Groll, set against this backdrop, looked like someone walking at normal speed through a time-lapsed film.  He’d stepped out of the front carriage of the train but walked so slowly that the passengers from the other carriages caught up with him, engulfed him, left him behind.

  He hardly seemed to notice them, and anyone watching him might have wondered why he alone was in no hurry to be somewhere.  Casually scruffy, but not homeless scruffy, he was wearing jeans and a military-style jacket, a beanie hat, a small almost empty rucksack on his back.

  Only the difference in his walking speed marked him out, but that in itself would have been enough to make the same observer question if everything was well in this young man’s world.  Did he have nowhere to go?  Again, he didn’t look homeless, but perhaps he’d only just walked out on his old life.  Or was it that he didn’t want to go where he was headed, and if so, why did he not want to go there?

  That observer might have had misgivings about the young man from the Düsseldorf train, and they would have been right to be concerned.  Karsten was on his way somewhere and was determined he would get there, but it was true that he was in no hurry.

  Because Karsten Groll was walking towards his own death.  He walked towards it with the same certainty that his train had travelled towards Cologne – a few minutes early, a few minutes late, but the destination never in doubt.  He was resigned to death, too, a resignation which had developed its own steady momentum.

  So Karsten walked slowly but deliberately, and knowing this was the last night of his life, he looked upon the station as none of his fellow passengers had done.  In fact, he had chosen it – Messe would have been a little closer, but this station brought back memories of childhood visits with his mother and brother.

  He glanced up now at the glass canopy arching overhead, at the orange glow of the lights and the darkness of the city beyond.   He noticed a heritage train, the Rheingold, parked on a neighbouring platform – previously, the art student he’d been, he might have sneered at something like that, but now it looked wonderful and warm and inviting and filled him with a vague longing he couldn’t quite identify.

  He left the ordered hollow vault of the terminus with its tinny echoing announcements in German and English, and descended the steps to the more hectic retail area beneath the station.  It was mainly fast-food outlets and cafes, but a few gift shops too – perfumes, chocolates, books – and Karsten guessed it attracted a lot of people who weren’t even travelling because it was crowded with people at cross purposes, some loitering, socializing, others trying only to pass through.

  He felt a little in both camps.  He was passing through, but he came close to stopping a couple of times to look in one window or another, and finally did stop to look in the window of the chocolate shop.  The display was full of advent calendars.

  He and Stefan had always been given one apiece as children, to avoid fights over who would have the chocolate behind each window, though he couldn’t recollect ever fighting with his brother.  Perhaps he just remembered it that way now, but seeing these calendars, some shaped like Christmas trees, he wished he could call Stefan to tell him about them, to ask if he remembered how excited they would get, the daily ritual of opening each little window.

  He wished too, that some stranger would come and stand and stare at the same display, that they might strike up a conversation.  It was never about the chocolates, he wanted to say to that person, but about the anticipation of opening the window, about the rhythm and the warmth that it gave to the Christmas season.

  But no one came, and he walked on.  He doubted all those calendars would be sold in the next six days, and after that they would be redundant.  He wondered what happened to them afterwards.  Maybe they were just thrown away.  Like him, their time was almost up.

  He left the station, out into the biting cold of this November night, across the concourse, climbed the steps and crossed the overpass to the cathedral.  He was aware of it to his left, soaring above him like a gothic cliff face as he skirted around it.

  This was the other reason he’d chosen to come to this station, so that he could also stroll for one last time through one of the Christmas Markets.  It was his earliest memory of Cologne but as he reached the far side of the cathedral he realized that dream would not be rekindled tonight.  The fair was spread out before him, but unlit, and the shadowy activity filling Roncalliplatz was that of stallholders making last minute preparations.

  He walked through the almost completed market anyway, and as he overheard conversations about the opening the next day he regretted that his actions would fill the newspapers with something unpleasant, possibly even marring the atmosphere for a day or two.  It was unfortunate, but he was determined he wouldn’t change his mind.

  Karsten was heading across the city, to Mohr’s bar.  Mohr would arrive there at nine, as he did every night to “check the books” – that’s what Stefan had told him.  Karsten would arrive a little later, kill Mohr and then get killed himself, not by choice but he was too much of a realist to dream up a plan that involved getting out alive.

  Besides, there wasn’t much left to stay alive for, only memories like this, tarnished forever now by loss and failure.  This and the other markets would be full of families by this time tomorrow, and it filled Karsten with wonder and bitterness that his own family had been wiped out so succinctly by bad luck and bad choices – maybe the two were the same.

  His father’s death was so firmly lodged in the past that he struggled now to think of it as something that had not been meant to happen, but he guessed his father had known how tired he was before setting off on his last car journey.  In truth, there had been nothing inevitable about it, only carelessness and perhaps a desire to be home with his family.  Karsten had only been eight at the time.

  There had been no choice in his mother’s death, of course – no one would choose cancer – and it was still too raw for him to think about even five years later.  What he did think about was the failed promise.  He’d been twenty at the time, Stefan only seventeen, and Karsten had promised her as she’d lay dying, had promised that he would look after Stefan, make sure nothing happened to him.

  He left the market behind and threaded through streets that were quieter, heading by memory and instinct towards the river and the Deutzer Brücke.  On one of the side streets there was some building work going on and he had to walk in the road.

  Stefan had made choices too, in getting together with Martina, in staying with her even when he realized she was a junkie, believing he could get her clean.  But Stefan had failed in his bid to look after Martina, just as Karsten had failed to look after his brother.

  His mind raced back, wishing Stefan hadn’t warned her pusher off, wishing the pusher had listened, wishing Stefan hadn’t gone round there and flushed his drugs and beaten him up.  Stefan had known too well what would follow, which is why he’d bought the gun.

  Even thinking of it made Karsten suddenly aware of the slight weight of it in his rucksack, a gun wrapped in a towel, lightly bouncing against his back as he walked.  He’d test-fired it once in the woods, making sure he understood it, but only once, one single round, because he hadn’t found spare ammunition and, unlike Stefan, didn’t know where to get it.  The remaining bullets in the clip were the sum of his armoury.

  In the end, Stefan had left the gun with Karsten because he’d persuaded Martina to get away somewhere, hide out with him.  That had been a choice too, and only an optimist in love could have failed to imagine that Martina would call her pusher as soon as the craving got too great.

  As far as the police had been able to tell, they’d picked Stefan up on the street, driven him out of town.  His body had been found a few days later.  They’d beaten him to death, nearly every major bone broken, his skull cracked in three places, one eye ruptured, massive internal injuries.  That’s what those simple words concealed – he’d been beaten to death.

  Karsten saw a girl huddled in a doorway, looking cold and strung out and lonely.  She mumbled something as she looked up at him but he didn’t hear her and didn’t break his stride because the world was full of people like Martina and it always would be.  Any sympathy he’d had, learned from Stefan, had long since disappeared.

  But Martina was no longer one of those people – she’d died two weeks after Stefan, an overdose.  One of her friends had claimed it was intentional, a grief-stricken suicide, and Karsten wished he could believe that but he couldn’t.  Nor could he forgive her for confirming what he’d known from the start, that Stefan’s death had been pointless.

  He reached the bridge and started across its open expanse, cars tearing past, the tramlines in the middle.  There were a few people cycling and walking on both sides too, but not many.  The cold was raw and fierce out here with a wind whipping up off the river.

  Even so, halfway across he stopped and looked back at the twin towers of the cathedral, illuminated against the night sky.  He could just see, below the metal arches of the distant railway bridge, that the floating Christmas market was also being prepared for opening day.

  It occurred to him that even though the news might be upsetting when it broke, he was actually about to give the city a gift, that the Christmas markets would open tomorrow and one of the city’s biggest drug dealers would be dead.  It wouldn’t make the problem go away, of course, but it would be something.

  That had been the excuse given by the police for not finding Stefan’s killers in over two months, that the problem was bigger than Mohr.  There were two big rival drug gangs, so maybe the other had killed him because dealings between these various gangs were complex.

  He’d reminded them again that Stefan hadn’t been in a gang, that the pusher he’d beaten up was one of Mohr’s.  ‘Trust us,’ they’d said. ‘Trust us, it may not look like it, but things are happening, we’re investigating.’

  Why did they not see that Karsten had no trust left, that he had used it all up?  A week ago he’d called them one last time and had been spoken to as if he was the criminal.  No mention of the two rival gangs, of Mohr and the Turk, no mention of ongoing enquiries, just a curt reminder that they were busy, that his was not the only case, that there were many innocent victims out there.

  Innocent had been said in such a way as to differentiate it from his calls, as if Stefan had somehow been part of the underworld that had killed him.  Stefan had been able to get hold of a gun, he’d had a junkie girlfriend, but he’d been no criminal.

  A long express train crossed the rail bridge heading into the main station, an array of lit windows passing behind the metal trellis, revealing in silhouette the countless pedestrians ambling along looking at the thousands of love padlocks that adorned the bridge.

  Perhaps there were couples attaching their own padlocks as he stood there watching, an expression of their love and commitment.  And though he felt a city and a lifetime away from that other bridge, it made him smile to think that good things were happening in the world, that good things would continue to happen after he was gone.

  He walked on.  A tram passed him and he involuntarily picked up his pace, as if trying to pursue it.  The little illuminated universe of the tram grew smaller and smaller, merging with the other lights on the bridge, calling him on to his fate.

  He checked his watch and walked faster still, spurred on, fearful that if he walked too slowly Mohr might have left again.  By the time he reached the far side of the bridge, his eyes were streaming with tears from the cold wind, but he didn’t stop, just wiped them on his sleeve and kept walking.

  He turned right, cutting through side streets and his pace only slowed when he saw the bar up ahead of him.  It was open but looked quiet.  It wasn’t the kind of bar that attracted casual clientele and the regulars were mostly in Mohr’s employ or hangers on.

  He steadied himself mentally as he walked, trying to look relaxed, like this was something he did every day.  He had no fear of dying, not now, but he feared one last failure, failing to get to Mohr, being stopped before he was even close.

  He pushed the door open and stepped inside.  There was music playing, but it was nothing he recognized, some kind of rock from the 1970s.  And it was so warm that for a moment he had to stand and collect himself – he felt almost instantly sleepy after the biting cold out on the street.

  He walked into the main room then, a long bar down the left-hand side, tables and booths filling the rest of the space.  Only a couple of the tables were occupied, less than a dozen guys in total, all Mohr’s people.  One table was playing cards, the other had been listening to one of them telling a story but they fell silent when Karsten walked in.

  He kept walking and looked at the barman as he passed and said, ‘I’m here to see Herr Mohr – he knows I’m coming.’

  The barman didn’t respond at all, just stared blankly.  Karsten had almost reached the door at the far end of the room, though, when he heard a voice behind him.

  ‘Hey, kid!’

  Karsten felt his heart perform a strange sickening manoeuvre.  He stopped and turned as casually as he could manage.  The dim lighting was the only thing masking his fear and the fluttering twitch that had started below his left eye and which he couldn’t control.

  It was the guy who’d been telling a story and he looked at Karsten now as if he was in the mood for sport.  The others were all looking at the guy and smiling, and Karsten guessed this was one of the big men in the organization, maybe even the one who’d arranged Stefan’s murder.  It made Karsten wish that he had more bullets, that he could kill this man too, kill all of them.

  ‘You’re not Turkish, are you?’

  The others all burst out laughing.  Karsten looked anything but Turkish.  It was a double joke too, because the Turk wasn’t even Turkish, but an Albanian.

  Karsten couldn’t speak for a moment and responded by pulling his beanie hat off and putting it in his jacket pocket.  He was too hot anyway, so hot he felt he might pass out.

  The guy nodded in mock approval and said, ‘Now that is a fine German boy.’  He smiled at Karsten and said, ‘Don’t look so worried, I’m just having some fun, but if you had been a Turk…’  That seemed to be a punch-line in itself because his friends fell about laughing again, maybe even laughing too hard, and so did the guys playing cards.

  Karsten nodded and turned and walked through the door.  There was a short corridor in front of him and then stairs to the upper floor.  Even as he reached the bottom of the stairs he could see Mohr’s bodyguard standing on the small landing at the top.

  He tried a smile and stopped when he was halfway up the stairs and said, ‘I’m here to see Herr Mohr.’

  The bodyguard was heavily built, his head shaved, wearing a leather jacket.

  ‘He’s busy.’

  ‘He knew I might be coming tonight.’  As Karsten talked he eased the rucksack from his back and opened it.  He clearly didn’t look threatening because the guard looked unimpressed rather than suspicious.  ‘I’ve brought him the payment… the money I owed.’  He was reaching into the rucksack now, and was pleased that it looked as if he was searching for the money instead of ensuring the towel was wrapped around the end of the gun, that his hand was firmly on the grip.  ‘Three thousand, five hundred…’

  Karsten held the outside of the rucksack with his other hand, pointing up at the bodyguard.  He fired and his hand kicked backwards.  The towel muffled the noise but the shot was still much louder than he’d expected.  He’d been aiming at the bodyguard’s chest but the bullet hit him in the side of the neck and blood sprayed out of it.  The guy fell to his knees as he reached up, his hand blindly trying to address the fountain of blood which pumped deep and sleek around his fingers.

  Karsten wasn’t sure if he heard someone shout behind him – the music seemed louder now and he couldn’t distinguish the sounds.  They had to have heard something, surely.  Either way, he wouldn’t have long and knew he needed to move quickly.

  The bodyguard toppled forward, a confused expression locked into his face.  His body slid down four or five stairs before becoming wedged and crumpling awkwardly.

  Karsten flew up the remaining stairs, jumping over the body.  He could smell burning and pulled the gun out of the rucksack.  He pushed the door open and stepped into the office.  He dropped the smouldering rucksack onto the floor, pointing the gun forward as he kicked the door shut behind him.

  Mohr was sitting there just ten feet away behind the desk.  He had a shock of dyed hair, was overweight, wearing a shirt and pale grey suit – he looked like a car salesman.  And amazingly to Karsten, he was actually going through the books in that there was some kind of ledger on the desk in front of him.  There were no bundles of money or drugs, but then he guessed that was only in the movies.

  Mohr almost instantly went to reach into his jacket but Karsten waved the gun at him and said, ‘Hands on the table or I’ll kill you right now.’

  Mohr complied and Karsten reached behind and fumbled for the lock, turning it.  He couldn’t hear anyone coming yet, so maybe they hadn’t heard the first shot.  They would hear the others, but it wouldn’t matter then.  The rucksack was still smouldering and Karsten stamped on it a couple of times as he moved forward, never letting the gun stray from Mohr’s body.

  ‘You look familiar,’ said Mohr.  ‘But you don’t work for the Turk.  Have we met before?’

  Karsten shook his head.

  ‘I saw you once, from a distance, but we’ve never met.’

  Mohr shrugged and looked ready to speak, but Karsten only had a limited amount of time and this wasn’t a conversation.

  ‘I look like my brother, that’s why you think I’m familiar. Stefan Groll, who you murdered.’

  He was expecting a denial, but Mohr nodded and said, ‘You know, in America they have something called suicide by cop, when a person wants to die and behaves in such a way that a policeman shoots him.’

  ‘Stefan didn’t want to die – he wanted his girlfriend to live, that was all.’

  Mohr looked threatening as he said, ‘Did he honestly believe I would let him wreck my business? You call that wanting to live?’  His voice got louder, and Karsten wondered if he was hoping his shouts might be heard from downstairs.  ‘What did he think, that I would see the error of my ways and leave the drugs business behind? He left me no choice!’

  Karsten couldn’t hear anything, but he suddenly sensed as if by instinct alone that something was happening in the bar below, that there was some movement.  He had no more time and realized anyway that he wasn’t hear for an admission of guilt, which was just as well, but for something much simpler.

  He braced his arm and fired.  The noise was deafening now.  It hit Mohr in the chest and knocked him back in his chair.  But there was no explosion of blood this time and Mohr looked damaged, winded, but no less threatening.  His hands flailed about, and Karsten saw he was reaching for his gun in its shoulder holster.

  At the same time Karsten realized Mohr wasn’t as overweight as he looked, that he was wearing body armour.  He aimed the gun a little higher, directly at Mohr’s face.  He squeezed the trigger, closing his eyes at the crucial moment, hearing a single word from Mohr, ‘No!’, small and desperate and then the deafening bang and another and another until the trigger clicked beneath the pressure of his finger and nothing happened.

  He opened his eyes.  Mohr had slumped sideways, not quite falling out of his plush leather office chair.  He was dead, his face barely recognizable.  Karsten’s ears were ringing with the gunshots, but he heard the rush of bangs and clattering and shouts as his own death came panicked towards him.

  Then he heard a gunshot, but it was from the bar below.  He walked to the office door, unlocked and opened it to look down the stairs.  There were more gunshots.  The door into the bar opened, the 70s rock pounding out, then a voice shouting, ‘Miki! The Turk!’  A percussive thud followed, the sound of that same person having the air pummelled out of his lungs by the impact of a bullet.  Karsten couldn’t see him, but he guessed he’d slumped in the doorway, wedging the door open, because the noise level stayed the same and the gunfire became more insistent.

  Karsten stepped back inside, locked the door again.  He could see another door in the corner behind the desk.  He picked up his rucksack and ran through it, into a long narrow corridor which had boxes of spirits lined up along one wall.

  There was a window at the end of the corridor and he opened it and looked down.  It was a yard below, with a couple of cars parked there.  It was quiet too, though he could still hear the noise carrying up from the bar and perhaps a siren in the distance.

  The window was narrow and he doubted any of the other people in Mohr’s bar would have got through it.  Karsten slipped the gun into the rucksack and threw it down, then pulled himself through the window, slinking his hips sideways to get out.  There was a Mercedes parked almost below and he jumped, landing on the roof with a denting thud, and immediately to the ground from there.  The car wasn’t alarmed.

  He picked up the rucksack, took the gun out again and slipped it into his jacket pocket.  He walked along the side of Mohr’s bar and out into the street.  When he saw other people nearby looking on with concern, he adopted the same expression himself.

  There were a couple of cars parked erratically outside the bar, and still the sound of gunfire, as if there was some kind of stand-off.  There were more sirens now, too, and even as Karsten walked casually from the scene a couple of police cars came tearing past.

  He dropped the rucksack into a litter bin a little way before the Deutzer Brücke, making sure he pushed it in all the way.  And halfway across the bridge he stopped as he had before and looked at the cathedral and the trains passing on the railway bridge.  He took the gun from his pocket and dropped it into the dark water below.

  He stood for a moment longer, waiting for yet another police car to go hurtling over the bridge behind him.  But he had no thoughts for the city now, nor for his family and his memories.  He could think of nothing clearly because he was not meant to be alive.

  What would he do now?  He had no plans because he had imagined no future for himself beyond tonight.  He was to return home, he supposed, but then what?  Resume his studies, start again?  He thought of an old Samuel Beckett quote he’d once heard – he couldn’t remember all of it, only the end, Fail again. Fail better.

  He walked on and, feeling the cold as his senses came back to him, he reached for his beanie hat and put it on again.  Had he failed tonight?  He had failed to die but that had never been part of his plan, just a consequence of it.  He had killed Mohr and one other, deaths which sat remarkably lightly on his conscience, so in that at least he’d succeeded.

  Perhaps, as it turned out, Mohr would have died tonight anyway, but Karsten had killed him, in a stand against Stefan’s death, and against all the bad luck and bad choices that had beset their family and dragged it down.  He had succeeded, for the first time in years, and it didn’t matter that he didn’t know how he’d succeeded, because nor had he ever understood the flowering of his failures.

  He walked on, back the way he’d come, back to the market, and there for a few paces he walked alongside a middle-aged man carrying three cardboard boxes, an awkward load.  Karsten was about to turn when he heard the man mutter something as the boxes slipped.

  Karsten turned on his heel, grabbing the box that was in danger of toppling to the ground.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said the man, and was about to say something else when one of the other boxes slipped.  Between them they managed to stop it falling to the floor but the top burst open and Karsten saw that it was full of wooden toys.

  Once it was safely lowered to the floor Karsten smiled and said, ‘I loved these when I was a kid.’

  The guy smiled too as he stacked the open box on top of the other and picked them both up.

  ‘I still do,’ said the man, then looked at the box in Karsten’s arms as if at a complex puzzle.

  ‘I’ll carry this one for you.’

  ‘Thanks, it’s only just over here.’

  They walked a short distance to his stall, the man talking briefly about the market and how long he’d been coming here.  There were two people already at the stall, the guy’s son and daughter he guessed, maybe a few years younger than Karsten.

  He said hello to them and was thanked again for helping out.

  ‘I was just there,’ said Karsten, and they shook hands and he said,  ‘Well, good luck with the fair.’  He turned and headed towards the cathedral.

  The man smiled and watched him walk off, but then for some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, he became full of misgivings for the young man who’d just helped him.  He wasn’t sure why, but he felt in some way that it was important not to let him walk away.

  He glanced at his son and daughter who looked back at him almost as if they knew what he was about to do.  It was the way he was, he supposed, and they were long used to it by now.

  ‘Hey, son!’  He followed after him and as Karsten turned around he said, ‘I didn’t even catch your name.

  Karsten came back a couple of paces.

  ‘Karsten Groll.’

  ‘This may be a strange question, Karsten, but do you have job right now?’

  Karsten shook his head and said, ‘I’m an art student, but I’m taking some time out.’

  ‘Art?’

  He nodded and said, ‘Sculpture mainly. Some painting, but mainly sculpture.’  Over the past twelve months Karsten had almost forgotten art but suddenly felt the urge to go back to it, as if his old life was seeping back into him.  He’d lost the will to create but could finally see that it would come back if he gave it time.

  ‘Well look, my other son’s travelling around the world, so we’re one short this year. I can’t pay you much, but it could be a good experience for an artist.’

  ‘You want me to work on your stall?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Karsten looked across at the son and daughter who were smiling expectantly, and he said, ‘I’m not sure what my plans are.’

  ‘It’s only four weeks – Advent, that’s all.’

  Karsten nodded and said, ‘I used to come here when I was a kid.’  He walked back as the man introduced himself and his family and talked about the opening tomorrow and what they might expect over the coming month.

  Within twenty minutes it felt as if he had always been a part of this, or at least, as if nothing had come before.  It was as if he had turned around on the Deutzer Brücke and not gone on and killed Mohr and his bodyguard.

  Because this kindly man and his family had taken him in on a moment’s trust, killer that he was.  His future had been a blank, but now it seemed to him that the world had been made new again, and tomorrow night he would still be here after all, when the lights filled the darkness.