The October Man Read online

  The Director says that my unique blend of creative indolence and attention to detail makes me a natural for this kind of investigation. I think she might have been being ironic—it’s hard to tell with the Director.

  “He died of a Botrytis cinerea infection,” I said, to see if that would get a reaction.

  Frau Stracker hesitated as the meaning of my words sunk in.

  “Did you say Botrytis cinerea?” she said.

  I said I had.

  “Can you die from that?”

  “It appears so,” I said.

  Frau Stracker looked aghast, but it could have been an act.

  “You produce botrytised wine here?” I asked.

  “Not here,” she said. “Not since the war. In fact we only put the old vineyards into production in the last couple of years.”

  “And before the war?” I asked.

  “It was our speciality,” she said. “We’d been making Beerenausleese since the Seven Years War.”

  And after the war the Stracker fields, which had always been hard work, lost some of their quality. This was put down to an indefinable change in the terroir—which I learnt from Vanessa later was a vinicultural term for all the factors, climate, soil and geology that determined the quality of a vineyard. The terroir could vary from one side of a field to another and often nobody could agree why.

  “Although these days some of us are more scientifically minded than our grandfathers,” said Frau Stracker. “Though the stubborn old fool never gave up.”

  The Stracker winery had continued in production until 1993 when her grandfather, Gerhard Stracker, had died. Most of the vintage was sold off for blending and the winery was going slowly bankrupt.

  “Father wanted to sell the land but Grandfather had left it to me, and it was protected under the local development plan,” said Frau Stracker. “I was in California by then and couldn’t do anything with the vineyards, so they went out of use.”

  Then one autumn evening she was standing on a hillside in the Napa Valley supervising a mechanical grape picker when the smell of the earth had filled her nostrils and she knew it was time to go home.

  “It was a mess here, but I’ve learnt some tricks and I had access to foreign investment.” Frau Stracker shrugged. “We’re already breaking even. In a couple more years we’ll be able to relaunch the label.”

  “You weren’t planning to try for a botrytised crop this year?” I asked. “Perhaps in that field down by the road? Perhaps spray that crop as an experiment?”

  Frau Stracker shook her head emphatically.

  “No,” she said. “Not this year. I know some growers used to do that but we’ve never used that technique.”

  “You just left it to chance?” asked Vanessa.

  “Grandfather said that either the grapes would be infected in a particular year or they wouldn’t,” said Frau Stracker. “He believed in a mystical connection between the farmer and the soil.”

  “And you don’t?” I asked.

  “I believe there’s a connection,” she said. “I just happen to believe it’s biochemical.”

  “What else did your grandfather believe in?” I asked.

  “A lot of things,” said Frau Stracker. “For one, he believed the family owed its good fortune to the river.”

  “Don’t you, though?” I said. “From a climatic and trade point of view?” She gave me a crooked smile.

  “Not like that,” she said. “Well, yes. Like that, too. But he meant we had a spiritual connection to the river—one that granted us good fortune. He thought we had to sacrifice to it.”

  “Oh,” I said neutrally. “What kind of sacrifice?”

  “Would you believe wine?” she said.

  I heard Vanessa give a little huff of disappointment. I don’t know what she’d been expecting—some pagan ritual involving animals, perhaps. I’ve investigated cases involving animal sacrifice, but they never have anything to do with real magic. Well, almost never.

  “Did you go out in a boat and pour it as a libation?” I asked.

  Frau Stracker looked at me suspiciously.

  “That’s a remarkably specific suggestion,” she said. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  Is there something you’re not telling me? I thought.

  “Folklore is a particular hobby of my colleague,” said Vanessa smoothly. “If you don’t satisfy his curiosity he’ll be unbearable for days.”

  “Grandfather used to put a couple of bottles, always the best of last year’s vintage, into a string bag and hang it from a tree down on the bank,” she said.

  “Any particular tree?” I asked. “Was it the same one every year?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was.”

  “Can you show us which one?”

  “No!” she said—louder, I think, than she meant to. “No, I’d rather not.”

  “Did something happen at the tree?” asked Vanessa. “Something non-folklorish? Something we should know about? Were you attacked, perhaps?”

  “God, no,” said Frau Stracker.

  “So, what happened?” I asked.

  “If I’m going to tell you then I need a drink in my hand,” she said. “Are you two allowed to join me?”

  I said yes, just as Vanessa said no.

  Frau Stracker cocked her head to one side in query.

  “She’s the driver,” I said.

  Chapter 3:

  Wine

  Sacrifice

  The winery itself was centred around a ramshackle farmhouse that looked like it had once been shelled, possibly as long ago as the Second World War, crudely patched up and then left as was for the next seventy years. This impression was helped by a pair of World War Two style corrugated iron huts that flanked the yard proper.

  The yard had obviously only been cleared of overgrowth recently and long grass, brambles and saplings pushed at the perimeter. The gravel surface was uneven and covered in puddles reflecting a low grey sky. A vintage tow trailer, its red paint bleached almost to grey, sat stranded on its rotting tyres in front of the farmhouse.

  Frau Stracker pointed to the huts and explained that they used them for storing all the equipment. From the one on the right came a laboured mechanical whirring—Frau Stracker said it was the grapes being pre-crushed prior to the first pressing.

  “The tourists never come up here,” she said. “So we don’t have to be fancy.”

  The bits of the farmhouse that hadn’t been blown up were made of slate-grey stone while the repaired sections were a mixture of new and second-hand brick. Close up, it was much less of a ruin than it had appeared. The window and door frames were all in good repair and had recently been repainted a weird coral pink. There was a blue and white satellite dish on the roof, with a cable dangling down to vanish beneath the eaves.

  Frau Stracker led us to a heavy wooden side door that opened directly on to a staircase leading down to the cellar. If Frau Stracker noticed the way Vanessa and I subtly tensed and changed our positions as we went down into the darkness, she didn’t give any indication. The police often meet horrible things in basements, so we tend to be superstitious about visiting them.

  Frau Stracker grabbed an insulated control box that dangled from the ceiling and pressed a button. Bare fluorescent tubes mounted along a low ceiling ticked into life to reveal a long, narrow cellar lined with faded peach and white walls. Down one wall stood a row of squat stainless steel tanks and along the other a row of empty mesh-sided metal storage bins—where the wine would be stacked once it was bottled. Pipes were pinned by brackets to the ceiling with branches snaking to each tank in turn. Much later Vanessa explained that they were part of the cooling system that maintained the fermentation tanks at the correct temperature. In the shadows at the far end I saw the light glinting off the round bottoms of rows of bottles.

  Frau Stracker told us to make ourselves comfortable and strode towards the far end of the cellar.

  The area closest to the stairs had a desk and a mi
smatched set of chairs in front of a large corkboard. I took the operator’s chair and Vanessa perched on an armchair while Frau Stracker hunted out something to drink.

  I examined the corkboard, which I imagined had been hung to allow for the efficient organisation of the work rotas and equipment maintenance schedules which now peeked out from beneath a plethora of beermats, postcards, old photographs and flyers from Frankfurt nightclubs. A black and white photograph caught my eye, a jolly looking man with the sort of big bushy moustache my father would love to grow. He was standing in a pose of forced casualness in front of what I recognised as the farmhouse we were in. Minus the bomb damage.

  “That’s Grandfather,” said Frau Stracker as she returned with a dusty wine bottle and a pair of long-stemmed wine glasses. She offered Vanessa a selection of soft drinks from the hotel-style fridge under the desk. Vanessa chose a Fanta as Frau Stracker wiped off the bottle, and gave its handwritten label a quick look before scooping up a big wooden-handled corkscrew and pulling the cork with a pop. She sniffed the neck of the bottle and, satisfied, filled both glasses.

  “Try it,” she said.

  It was white wine, a delicate honey-gold shade. I sniffed it and swirled it around in a manner to make Alfred Biolek proud. It tasted nice, and that was pretty much the limit of my palate—I made a show of thinking about it before swallowing.

  “Nice,” I said, which earned me a pained expression from Frau Stracker.

  “I thought you said you weren’t producing a good vintage yet,” said Vanessa.

  “This is some of Grandfather’s,” said Frau Stracker. “He managed to produce a couple of good years in the 1970s.”

  “You can’t keep white wine that long,” I said. “Can you?”

  “Depends on the quality,” said Frau Stracker. “This needs to be drunk quite soon but he bricked some up in ’33 just in case. Said he didn’t dare unbrick it until the French left in ’49. I sold most of those vintages to raise capital to restart the winery.” She sipped the wine. “This isn’t his best, but it’s better than the stuff you buy in the supermarket.”

  I took what I hoped looked like a suitably appreciative sip and asked Frau Stracker about the incident at the wine sacrifice.

  Like many, Frau Stracker had gone through a short rebellious phase when she was fourteen.

  “To be differentiated from my long rebellious phase, which started at university,” she said.

  As part of that year’s rebellion she decided to sneak back down after the ceremony, liberate Grandfather’s “gift” from the tree, and present it to her school friends the next day as proof of her total coolness. Rebellion being all very well, but popularity being even better.

  “You go down to where they’re doing the road improvements, where the old house is,” she said. “You can get onto the island via the sluice gate at the electrical substation.”

  I had her indicate the route using Google Maps on my phone—amazingly they had Wi-Fi in the cellar.

  “It must have been a difficult walk,” said Vanessa. “Given that it was dark.”

  “There used to be a track across the island,” said Frau Stracker. “Only Grandfather went down there, so it’s probably gone now.”

  Frau Stracker had been almost to the far side of the island when it was lit up by the lights of a passing train across the river.

  “I saw a woman walking out of the river,” said Frau Stracker, and refilled her glass.

  The woman was naked, pale with a mass of blond hair curling down her back. And she was rising, as if she were walking up a ramp.

  “I could still see her, even when the train had gone,” said Frau Stracker. “It’s like she was lit by the moon. But the moon hadn’t risen…”

  As she stepped up on to dry land, the naked woman hummed to herself. But when she reached where the bottles were hanging from the tree, she stopped and turned to look directly at Frau Stracker.

  “It was like she was shining a light straight into me,” said Frau Stracker. “She said, ‘Tell your grandfather thank you for the wine. But the compact was broken the day they killed my mother. It is a new age and the old ways have gone.’”

  Then she took the bottles of wine and walked back into the river.

  “Did you pass on the message?” I asked.

  “Did I, fuck,” said Frau Stracker. “I ran all the way home and never spoke of it again.”

  “Why speak of it now?” asked Vanessa.

  “Something has changed,” said Frau Stracker. “Don’t ask me to say what.”

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Frau Stracker, and finished her second glass. “I think it might have been a long, slow gradual change—it might have been decades. I think I only noticed it because I’d been away so long.”

  In California, learning to grow wine in the manner of the New World.

  “Who do you think the woman was?” I asked.

  “I think she was the Goddess of the River,” said Frau Stracker matter-of-factly. “Or alternatively I hallucinated the whole thing—which, on balance, I think is more likely.”

  I asked if she’d ever met the goddess again. Or even, perhaps, left out a wine sacrifice herself.

  “Those days are past,” she said. “That’s what the goddess said. And viniculture has progressed. Apart from anything else, global warming has extended the growing season so we don’t need to rely on noble rot to produce a decent vintage.”

  She talked a bit about soil management and microclimates, which Vanessa at least seemed to understand. I let her ramble—you can’t push people who’ve had genuine encounters with the supernatural. The BKA did a tonne of psychiatric assessments in the 1960s which the Director metaphorically waves at me when she thinks I’m being too casual.

  I personally think we should call up Tagesschau and let Astrid Vits announce the existence of magic on live TV. But apparently there are “agreements” prohibiting that approach—and international “agreements” at that.

  When we’d finished the wine I asked if I could buy a couple of bottles of Grandfather’s 1970s vintage for myself. Frau Stracker seemed a bit startled, but she was too much her grandfather’s granddaughter to pass up the chance of a sale.

  “With a sizeable discount, I noticed. She must have liked you,” said Vanessa afterwards when we were walking back to the car. “Are we going to have cheese with this?”

  “This is not for us,” I said, digging around in the back of my car for the old Aldi bag I knew was in there. “Tomorrow we’re going to leave a little present for the river.”

  “For the river?”

  “You’d be amazed,” I said.

  As soon as we were safely out of sight of Frau Stracker Vanessa checked her messages. Amongst a string of texts was one saying the dossier the Director had sent me had arrived and was awaiting pickup in Vanessa’s office.

  It had clouded over while we were in the basement and in the darkness it took us a couple of attempts to find my car.

  “Should you be driving?” asked Vanessa.

  “I only had half a glass,” I said. “Frau Stracker drank the rest.”

  “You had a full glass,” said Vanessa.

  “I tipped half of it out while you weren’t looking.”

  Vanessa was outraged.

  “That was a twenty euro bottle of wine,” she said as we climbed into the VW. “How could you throw it away?”

  “I’m not an aficionado like you,” I said.

  The twenty-four-hour business end of policing operated out of a different building, closer to the river, than the Kriminaldirektion where Vanessa had her office. In the Polizeipräsidium was the dispatch room, juvenile detention area, medical assessment room, cells and all the other things I’d joined the BKA to avoid. In contrast, the Kripo offices were dark, mostly deserted and, apparently, in the middle of being rebuilt. Vanessa’s office was on the second floor just off the main stairwell. She complained that she had to share with a colleague but I noticed
her desk was still much nicer than mine. On the wall was a large topographical map of the Mosel valley with curling yellow Post-it Notes stuck all over it. And on a table against the wall was the dossier.

  “You people don’t mess about,” said Vanessa when she saw it.

  KDA dossiers are transported in a bulletproof, steel-lined briefcase, which as well as being heavy has really sharp corners hidden under a thin layer of grey fabric. These can be murder on your legs if you have to lug them about for any length of time. There’s a six-digit mechanical combination lock and there used to be, or so says the Director, a thermite anti-tamper charge that was only discontinued in 1995.

  “What’s in it?” asked Vanessa as I strained to pick it up.

  “Would you believe homework?” I said.

  Since we were here, Vanessa logged into a terminal to see if there were any case-relevant emails. There must have been something, because she gave me a sharp look after reading one and then covered her reaction by asking me what hotel I was in.

  “The Ibis Flyer,” I said. “Do you know it?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Nice place?”

  “I’ve never been in there.”

  Vanessa was still distracted when she accompanied me back to my car and gave me directions to my hotel. Finally she gathered enough courage to say what was on her mind.

  “Tobias?”

  I shoved the dossier case in the back with the Geiger counter and closed the back.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “There’s no easy way to ask this,” she said. “Only a colleague has emailed me… And according to them… You can do magic.”

  “That’s right.”

  I was going to have to find out who this “colleague” was and where they were getting their information from.

  “Magic?”

  “I thought we’d already had this conversation.”