Déjà Vu

Chapter Thirty-One

Cologne: Three Weeks Earlier

The tusk-like arches of the main railway station emerged on her left. Opposite was a department store. She stepped between them a wounded figure. Her eyes, hidden under sunglasses, fixed on the sign for Oppenheim Street. She found a bench. It was late summer and the sun was low.

Ute removed a camera from her shoulder bag and retied her long hair into a neat ponytail. She pretended to photograph the passers-by, but she was taking pictures of an office block. Its ground floor housed a perfumery. Above that, the windows were soaped. Ute moved away. She found an alley that led around the back of the building. More photographs. There was a fire escape. Beyond was Father Rhine, steady as the sea.

She returned to the main street. On the same bench, she ate ice cream by twilight.

She paused on the way home to buy a padlock and a tube of superglue. The shop assistant asked her out for dinner, his gaze flickering upward to her green eyes. She stared at him until he apologised. She hurried from the shop and vomited into a drain.

The day grew old. She avoided eyes and hugged herself against the chill air while others relaxed in cafés and commented on Germany’s Indian summer. Ute heard them and seethed. It was not summer; it was autumn. If not that, then winter.

She was a student. She was writing a thesis on the use of traditional myths in Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Six nights ago, she had returned to the Kabana Klub. Her friend, Brigitte, had accompanied her, and together they had scanned the crowd. They had not found him. Brigitte had said, ‘Why would he come back? He might expect it.’

‘He would not.’

‘What are you going to do if you see him?’

‘First, I need to see him.’

Brigitte had accompanied her the next night too, and the one after that. Then she had stopped. Ute did not blame her. The music was too loud for conversation and, as Brigitte persisted with her questions, Ute persisted with her silence.

On the third night, alone, Ute saw him: a short, moustached man. He stood in the same corner wearing the same clothes. He chatted to two women just as he had chatted to her. He lit their cigarettes with a Zippo lighter whose flame he conjured with a dash across his thigh. But her fate and theirs took different paths; they smiled indulgently at his broken German and walked away, giggling. Ute watched them leave. She wondered whether she should confront the man. She decided not to.

He left two hours later, on foot. He walked for almost a kilometre. He meandered and doubled back on himself. Ute matched him. She had lived in the city her whole life and he had not. She stopped on corners and into shadows. She reversed her coat. There were few places for him to lose her.

They took the underground at Ottoplatz and emerged at Reichenspergerplatz. They came to the office block. This must be the place. She found a phone booth and dialled Holtz’s office at the police station. There was no answer.

The night was cold. She walked back to her apartment via the river. The route was dangerous and she did not care. Fear was nothing next to her anger. She had a stun gun in her bag and a five-inch flick-knife under the sleeve of her right arm. She dared every shadow to attack.

Back at her apartment, she considered calling Brigitte. But Brigitte should not be involved. So Ute did not call the woman who had visited her in hospital on the first night when she was still curled, catatonic, bleeding from her vagina and holding keepsake scrapes of her attackers’ flesh beneath her fingernails.

She did not call Detective Holtz again. She removed her clothes and dropped to her exercise mat. She did press-ups to muscle failure, crunches until her abdomen burned, squats with a barbell, and then repeated the routine until she felt nauseated and dizzy.

There was a poster of von Bingen, Germany’s top triathlete, on the living room wall. She looked at it for a long minute.

Then she tugged the poster away. She reached for a pen, and, on the blank reverse, drew a plan.

On the afternoon before the attack, she had been reading a book. Now she took it to the sofa. She sat there, jacket on, door wide, and opened the book at its marker. The page showed three old women sitting around a spinning wheel. The caption read:

She knew she was stronger than Brigitte. Her friend would have been damaged for life. Not Ute. She had no fragile belief in right or wrong, or natural order, or her own invulnerability. She had no creator to blame.

She had nothing.