The Carnival Master

8.

The restaurant to which Scholz took Fabel was in Dagobertstrasse, in the Altstadt area of Cologne. It was housed in the ground floor of an elegant gable-ended building.

‘What do you recommend?’ asked Fabel.

‘This place has quite a reputation. A new chef came in a year or so ago and has worked wonders. And they’re starting their Karneval menu… but I suppose you’ll want fish,’ said Benni, frowning as he searched the menu. ‘We’re big on meat dishes here…’

‘Believe it or not,’ said Fabel, with a smile, ‘we do eat things other than fish in the North.’

‘And we eat fish here. Did you know that Cologne used to be the biggest fish market in Germany? Because of the Rhine running through it like a sort of medieval motorway. It was a distribution centre for the whole of central Germany. Okay, then, how about the ragout of lamb with figs? It’s very good here. And what do you fancy – a nice Rhine wine or an even nicer Kolsch beer?’

They agreed on a bottle of Assmannshausen Spatburgunder red and placed their order.

‘It’s nice here,’ said Fabel. The restaurant lay beneath a white plastered vaulted ceiling and arched double doors looked out onto the street. He could see that it had started to snow a little more earnestly.

‘Yeah…’ Scholz surveyed the restaurant appreciatively. ‘Yeah… it’s not bad. Cologne is packed with cool places to eat. Almost any type of cuisine in the world. Even vegetarian. We’re a big conference and convention city now and we get all kinds of rich business types. I like this place, but sometimes I like to go somewhere a bit more… well, basic, I suppose you’d say. I like my food well cooked, not well designed if you know what I mean. You said you were going to tell me all about cannibalism,’ said Scholz. ‘Sounds like something you know a thing or two about.’

The waiter came with the wine and Scholz asked Fabel to taste it. He obviously expected Fabel’s knowledge of wine to be greater.

‘That’s very nice,’ said Fabel and the waiter filled both glasses. ‘To be honest, I did a bit of boning up on it before I came down,’ said Fabel.

Scholz shook his head. ‘I still can’t wrap my mind around it. Why would someone get off on eating someone else?’

‘Human sexuality is a very complex thing, Benni. I’m sure you’ve dealt with enough weird cases to know that. There are perversions that revolve around fantasies about eating a sexual partner or being eaten by one. Our mouths are secondary sexual organs. You could almost say that oral sex is a type of cannibalistic behaviour.’

‘We obviously date different types of women…’ Scholz grinned.

‘Anyway, there are several forms of cannibalism. Motives for it, if you like. But anthropologists and psychologists break it down into two main groups: ritual and nutritional cannibalism. In nutritional cannibalism you have straightforward epicurean cannibalism – people who eat human flesh simply for the taste of it or for the experience… but without getting a sexual kick out of it. By far the most common form of nutritional cannibalism is for survival, when there’s no other food source available. For example, I was reading about the Holodomor before I came down here: the forced starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviets in the nineteen-thirties. Food became so scarce that cannibalism became relatively common.’

‘So what’s this endocannibalism and exocannibalism I’ve heard about?’ asked Scholz.

‘Exocannibalism is when you eat a stranger, endocannibalism is when you eat someone from your own tribe or culture.’

‘So endocannibalism is having granny for dinner…’ said Scholz. ‘But all this is very rare, isn’t it?’

‘Not as rare as you’d think. We’ve all done it, every culture, at some point in our history. Ritual mortuary endocannibalism was a European thing in the Stone Age.’

‘And what’s that in plain German?’

‘When a relative died, for example, there would be a sort of funeral feast, except it was the dear departed, specifically their brain, that was the main course. Archaeologically it was a significant discovery. It shows that as early as the Stone Age we had the idea that the mind, or the spirit, was seated in the brain. Close family members would eat parts of the brain to absorb something of the spirit of their ancestor. It makes sense, I suppose, in a sort of pre-scientific way. And if, in plain German, you want evidence of people eating people, you only need to go a hundred or so kilometres from where we’re sitting. The caves near Balve on the Honne River. Archaeologists found evidence of it there.’

‘So what motivates our guy to cut out such a precise amount?’

Fabel was about to answer when the food arrived. ‘This looks good,’ he said. The lamb ragout with its fig-and-vegetable dressing had been arranged on the plate like a work of art. He took a mouthful. ‘Mmmm… tastes good too. Good choice, Benni.’ The lamb melted on his tongue. After a moment, Fabel continued. ‘Anyway, to answer your question… the Karneval Killer takes a precise amount of flesh because that’s the portion he wants. Just as we go into a butcher shop and order a kilo of mince. The other thing is that our killer doesn’t have an abstract connection with food.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Take this meal,’ explained Fabel. ‘You and I are sitting here eating lamb ragout… but the word “lamb” in this context conjures up only the idea of a type of food. We don’t think about a young sheep, or particularly about it being killed, skinned and gutted. Even in a butcher’s shop, we see a cut of meat and don’t really visualise it as an animal’s body part. Similarly, when you see a cow or a lamb in a field, or a duck in a pond, you don’t start salivating and thinking, oh, I’ll have some of that.’

‘I’m sorry, said Scholz, his mouth full. ‘I don’t see your point.’

Fabel looked at Scholz’s half-empty plate and realised that he was going to have to talk less and eat more to catch up. ‘We used to have a more immediate relationship with our food. But now we live in an age when a particular type of exotic bean or berry or herb is flown halfway around the world just so that it can be a garnish on a dish. It’s difficult to imagine that for most of our history simply having enough food to survive has been our main preoccupation. That also includes our history of cannibalism. Like I said, we’ve all done it – every culture in the world has had some experience of eating human flesh. Yet it remains the greatest social and cultural taboo.’

Scholz lifted his fork and contemplated the chunk of lamb impaled on it. ‘I wonder what it tastes like… human flesh, I mean.’ He shrugged and popped the lamb into his mouth.

‘It’s similar to the taste of veal, I believe. Or pork,’ said Fabel. ‘Anyway, our killer doesn’t have the same lack of connection with his food source. The links in his food chain are all too solid. He sees these women, assesses their shape and selects them. He can taste them just by looking at them.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Scholz spoke through a mouthful of lamb. ‘That he eats them for the taste?’

‘No… or not just for that. I think he gets off sexually. But there’s a lot of other stuff mixed in. With military cannibalism, you kill a formidable foe on the battlefield and you eat him to absorb some of his strength. With ritual cannibalism, you eat part of the sacrificial victim to become connected to the divinity or the spirit of the victim… that symbolism is still there in Christian communion, a hangover from pagan beliefs. And, like I said, funerary cannibalism involves eating part of a deceased loved one so that they would live on through you.’

‘Or in you…’ said Scholz.

‘I think our killer has abstracted his sexual perversion and believes that he is enjoying a relationship with his victims far more intimate than he would by just having sex with them.’

‘By eating a slice of the victim’s arse he absorbs their spirit and becomes their soulmate?’ Scholz’s expression was earnest. Fabel laughed.

‘Something like that. But he had to start off somewhere. There is a chance that to begin with our guy was simply a sex offender… committing rapes, that kind of thing. Through time he might have added the cannibal element. Remember the Joachim Kroll case? In Duisburg in the late seventies?’

Scholz nodded.

‘Kroll was a rapist-murderer and he had an undetected career going back two decades. Then, at some point along the way, he decided to try some of his victims’ flesh. Interestingly, he took flesh from exactly the same part of his victims’ bodies – the buttocks and upper thighs.’

‘Do you think we have a copycat?’

‘No. Kroll wasn’t exactly an inspirational figure. He had a near-idiot IQ and was a pathetic loser type. He died in ’ninety or ’ninety-one. The similarities are coincidental. But I do think there’s a chance the Karneval Killer started off small. Assaults on women. Particularly involving biting.’

‘Yeah…’ Scholz poked his lamb thoughtfully with his fork. ‘You could be right. One of my officers, Tansu Bakrac, has a theory about that.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’ll let her explain tomorrow. Basically she’s put a question mark over a couple of cases in the past. One in particular. I’m not so sure, though.’

There was a pause and the two men concentrated on their meals.

‘I was surprised when you turned up, Jan,’ said Scholz at last. ‘I was told you were packing the job in.’

‘That’s the idea,’ Fabel said. Suddenly he felt like talking about it. There was something about Scholz’s open, honest demeanour that invited confidence. A good thing to have if you were a policeman. ‘Officially I’m working out my notice. But I really don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. It all seemed so straightforward. Now I’m not so sure.’ He told Scholz about his experience on the way down: eating the salami roll while examining the photographs of Sabine Jordanski’s disfigured body and it not even crossing his mind that it wasn’t normal behaviour.

‘I get that all the time,’ laughed Scholz. ‘I put it down to being accustomed to it all. I say I benefit from professional objective detachment. Everyone else says it’s because I’m a pig.’

‘But that’s exactly what bothers me,’ said Fabel. ‘I’ve become too accustomed to it all. Too detached.’

‘But it’s what you do…’ said Scholz. ‘Think about what it’s like to be a doctor, or a nurse. It’s supposed to be all about saving lives, but the truth is that medicine is all about death. Every day a doctor will deal with a patient who is on their way out of this world. Some of them suffering terribly. But it’s their job. If they got emotionally involved with every patient, or spent their free time thinking about the inevitability of the same thing happening to them, they’d go mad. But they don’t. It’s their stock in trade. You can’t beat yourself up because you’ve become used to murder.’

‘That,’ said Fabel, with a grin, ‘would have been a very well-put point, if it weren’t for the fact that, as we both know, the medical professional comes right at the top of serial-killer occupations. Statistically, anyway. Also alcoholism… suicide…’

‘Okay…’ said Scholz. ‘Maybe not a good example. But you know what I mean. You’re a professional policeman. That’s what you are. And the reason you’re here is because you are considered the best in Germany for cracking this kind of case. Maybe it’s a mistake to deny that.’

‘Maybe…’ said Fabel. He sipped his wine and looked out of the window at the lamplit street, now decked with snow. Out there was a city he didn’t know. And in that city Vitrenko conducted his violent trade in human flesh. Maria was out there too. Alone. ‘Maybe you’re right.’