Читать онлайн «Der Fall Collini»
Автор Фердинанд фон Ширах
Ferdinand von Schirach
THE COLLINI CASE
We are probably all made for what we do.
1
Later, they would all remember it: the floor waiter, the two elderly ladies in the lift, the married couple in the fourth-floor corridor. They said the man was gigantic, and they all mentioned the smell of sweat.
Collini went up to the fourth floor. He checked the numbers. Room 400, the ‘Brandenburg Suite’. He knocked.
‘Yes?’ The man in the doorway was eighty-five years old, but he looked much younger than Collini had expected. Sweat was running down the back of Collini’s neck.
‘Good evening. Collini from the
‘Yes, glad to meet you, come along in. We might as well do the interview here. ’ The man offered Collini his hand. Collini flinched. He didn’t want to touch him. Not yet.
‘I’m sweating,’ Collini explained, and was angry with himself for saying so; it sounded odd. It’s not the sort of thing you would say normally, he thought.
‘Yes, very sultry today, it’s going to rain soon,’ said the old man amiably, although he was wrong about the sultry atmosphere. These rooms were cool; you could hardly hear the air conditioning. They went into the sitting room of the suite: beige carpet, dark wood, large windows, all of it expensive and solid. Collini could see the Brandenburg Gate from the window.
It seemed strangely close.Twenty minutes later the man was dead: four bullets in the back of his head; one had been deflected inside his brain and come out the other side, taking half his face with it. The beige carpet soaked up the blood, a dark outline slowly spreading. Collini put the pistol on the table. He got down on the floor beside the man, stared at the age spots on the backs of his hands. He turned the body over with the toe of his shoe. Suddenly he brought the heel of it down on the dead man’s face, looked at him and brought it down again. He couldn’t stop, he kept grinding his heel into that face while blood and brain matter spurted over his trouser leg, the carpet, the bedstead. Later, the forensic pathologist couldn’t reconstruct the number of times Collini’s foot had trodden down as the bones of the dead man’s cheeks, jaw, nose and skull cracked under the force of it. Collini didn’t stop until the heel of his shoe came off. He sat down on the bed. Sweat was running down his face. His pulse took some time to calm down. He waited until he was breathing regularly again, then stood up, crossed himself, left the room and took the lift down to the ground floor. He was limping, because of the missing heel; the protruding nails scraped over the marble floor. In the lobby he told the young woman at the reception desk to call the police. She asked questions, gesticulating. All Collini said was, ‘Room 400. He’s dead. ’ Beside him, the electronic panel in the lobby announced: ‘23 May 2001, 8 p. m. , the Spree Hall: Association of German Engineering Industries’.
