Crime and Guilt by Ferdinand Von Schirach (translated by Carol Brown Janeway).

Title: Crime and Guilt.
Author: Ferdinand Von Schirach (translated by Carol Brown Janeway).
Genre: Fiction, short stories, crime, law.
Country: Germany.
Language: German.
Publication Date: 2009 and 2010 (this edition 2012).
Summary: A collection of 2 short stories collections and 26 short stories: Crime (2009) with 11 stories, and Guilt (2010), with 15 stories. CRIME: In Fähner, a man makes a promise to his wife on their honeymoon which effectively traps him in a horrible and abusive marriage, until decades later the pot finally boils over. In Tanata's Tea BowlI, three small-time crooks quickly and deeply regret stealing a one-of-a-kind 15th century bowl from an elderly Japanese man, when people around them begin dying horrifying deaths. In The Cello, a pair of siblings brought up in an uncaring household become incredibly close, but their bond is put through the ultimate test when the brother is seriously injured in an accident. In Hedgehog, a member of a criminal family who secretly lives a classy and sophisticated life, uses his brains to get one of his brothers off the hook when he committs a robbery. In Bliss, the security and stability of a refugee prostitute and a formerly homeless man is shattered when one of her clients dies from heart failure, and through a misunderstanding her boyfriend tries to protect her from a murder charge. In Summertime, a defense attorney has a difficult time coming up with an adequate defense for a rich man accused of killing his prostitute lover in his hotel room, until the lawyer stumbles on a genius ploy to make a defense stick. In Self-Defense, a defense attorney must defend a client who coldly and expertly murders two young men who attack him in the subway, but has no identification and refuses to say a single word. In Green, in a small farming village, a young man with schizophrenia who has been brutally murdering sheep becomes the main suspect when a young woman last seen in his company goes missing. In The Thorn, a man who works in the same museum room guarding a statue of a young man pulling a thorn out of his foot for decades, slowly develops an obsession of finding the invisible thorn, which leads him to a surprising and disturbing search for catharsis. In Love, a defense attorney has to defend a young man who cuts his girlfriend of two years because he loves her too much and experienced an overwhelming feeling of wanting to eat her. In The Ethiopian, a man commits a bank robbery and flees to Ethiopia, where he starts a prosperous and noble new life, but when he's extradited back to Germany and committs another bank robbery in a desperate attempt to get home to his family, he has to overcome insurmountable odds to return home. GUILT: In Funfair, a young inexperienced lawyer gets a break being a part of the high-profile team defending eight respectable men from a brass band, who get drunk and brutally attack and rape a young teen at a funfair. In DNA, a happy successfull couple who in their youth were addicts and had an incident that turned deadly with a john that tried to assault her, have their distant past catch up to them with the invention of DNA testing. In The Illuminati, in a boarding school where a group of boys imagine themselves to be an exclusive secret society, their bullying and hazing of an unlucky loner goes unexpectedly and terribly wrong. In Children, a man's perfect life goes completely off the rails when a girl accuses him of molestation, and many years later when he runs into her again, he gets a chance for revenge, or redemption. In Anatomy, a sick young man makes painstaking preparations and detailed plans of capturing, possessing, and murdering a woman who had rejected him in a club, but when time comes to execute his plans, fate has other plans. In The Other Man, a man who engages in wild sexual practices with his wife runs into one of the men they have had a sexual rendezvous with at his work, and is unable to control the sudden violence he feels toward him. In The Briefcase, a man from Poland is caught with a suitcase filled with xeroxes of brutally-slain corpses, which he claims have been given to him by a stranger to deliver to a random phone booth on a specific date and time. In Desire, a wealthy woman finds passion and purpose in her meaningless shell of a life when she begins to steal. In Snow, an old man who lets a drug dealer use his apartment covers for him when caught, for his pregnant girlfriend whom he doesn't want to have the baby alone, not knowing the sad parameters of their relationship. The Key is a tale of several ludicrous but brutal misadventures of two criminal partners moving a large amount of drugs, where one is a lot more intelligent than he appears. In Lonely, a teen is raped by her neighbor, and stands trial when she delivers a baby she didn't know she was pregnant with and lets it drown in the toilet. Justice is a tale of possible mistaken identity, when a man with a slightly different name than given is arrested for assaulting his neighbor with a pitbull. In Comparison, a woman who is tortured and abused by her husband for years goes on trial for killing him in his sleep for saying he's going to do the same to their 10-year-old daughter with an unprecedented defense. In Family, a millionaire who finds out about a half-brother and decides to help him with his criminal convictions, hires a defense attorney who is nonetheless unable to predict the man's thirst for violence. Secrets is a darkly humorous tale of a seemingly insane man flipping the script on the lawyer, the author.

My rating: 7/10
My review:


♥ Jim Jarmusch once said he'd rather make a movie about a man walking hid dog than about the emperor of China. I feel the same way. I write about criminal cases; I've appeared for the defense in more than seven hundred of them. But actually my subject is human beings—their failings, their guilt, and their capacity to behave magnificently.

I had an uncle who was the presiding judge over a court that heard trials by jury. These are the courts that handle capital offenses: murder and manslaughter. He told us stories form these cases that we could understand, even as children. They always began with him saying: "Most things are complicated, and guilt always presents a bit of a problem."

He was right. We chase after things, but they're faster than we are, and in the end we can never catch up. I tell the stories of people I've defended. They were murderers, drug dealers, bank robbers, and prostitutes. They all had their stories, and they weren't so different from us. All our lives we dance on a thin layer of ice; it's very cold underneath, and death is quick. The ice won't bear the weight of some people and they fall through. That's the moment that interests me. If we're lucky, it never happens to us and we keep dancing. If we're lucky.

My uncle was in the navy during the war and lost his left arm and right hand to a grenade. Despite this, he didn't give up for a long time. People say he was a good judge, humane, an upright man with a sense of justice. He loved going hunting, and had a little private blind. His gun was custom-made for him and he could use it with one hand. One day he went into the woods, put the double-barreled shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He was wearing a black roll-neck sweater; he'd hung his jacket on a branch. His head exploded. I saw the photos a long time later. He left a letter for his best friend, in which he wrote that he'd simply had enough. The letter began with the words "Most things are complicated, and guilt always presents a bit of a problem." I still miss him. Every day.

This book is about people like him, and their stories.

~~from Preface.

♥ He had a friendly face, people took him to be carefree, and things always panned out for him. You had to look more closely to detect a certain sadness, some ancient dark shadow in his expression, not so uncommon in this land between the Black Forest and the mountains of Swabia.

♥ The evening before they flew back, they were lying in their hotel room. The windows were open; it was still too hot, the air a solid mass in the little room. It was a cheap hotel, it smelled of rotten fruit, and they could hear the sounds of the street below. Despite the heat, they had made love. Fähner lay on his back, watching the rotations of the ceiling fan, as Ingrid smoked a cigarette. She turned on her side, propped her head on one hand, and looked at him. He smiled. There was a long silence.

Then she began to tell her story. She told Fähner about the men who'd come before him, about disappointments and mistakes, but most of all about the French lieutenant who had gotten her pregnant, and the abortion that had almost killed her. She wept. Shocked, he took her in his arms. He felt her heart beating against his chest and was undone. She has entrusted herself to me, he thought.

"You must swear to look after me. You can't ever leave me." Ingrid's voice trembled.

He was moved. He wanted to calm her. He said he'd already sworn to do this at the wedding ceremony in church. He was happy with her. He wanted—

She interrupted him brusquely, her voice rising and taking on its unmodulated metallic sheen. "Swear."

And suddenly he understood. This was no conversation between lovers, under the fan in Cairo, with the pyramids and the stifling heat of their hotel room—all these clichés vanished in an instant. He pushed her away a little so that he could see her eyes. Then he said it. He said it slowly, and he knew what he was saying: "I swear."

He pulled her closer once more and kissed her face. They made love. But this time it was different. She sat on top of him, took whatever she wanted. They were deadly serious, strangers to each other, and each of them was wholly alone. Afterward, he lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling. There had been a power cut and the fan had stopped revolving.

..The night before Fähner's sixtieth birthday, he lay awake. He had pulled out the faded photo from Egypt: Ingrid and himself in front of the Pyramid of Cheops, with a background of camels, scenic Bedouins, and sand. When she threw out their wedding albums, he had fished the picture back up out of the garbage. Since then, it had found a safe hiding place deep in the back of his closet.

In the course of this night, Fähner wads forced to realize that he would remain an eternal prisoner until the end of his life. He had given his word in Cairo. And now, in the bad times, was when he had to keep it; there was no such thing as giving your word for the good times only. The photo swam before his eyes. He took off his clothes and stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. He looked at himself for a long time. Then he sat on the rim of the bathtub. For the first time in his adult life, he cried.

♥ The prosecutor asked for eight years. He took his time; he described the sequence of events and went wading through the blood in the cellar. Then he said that Fähner had had other options; he could have gotten a divorce.

The prosecutor was wrong; a divorce was precisely what had not been an option for Fähner. The most recent reform of the code of criminal procedure has dismissed the oath as an obligatory component of any sworn testimony in a criminal case. We ceased believing in it a long time ago. When a witness lies, he lies—no judge seriously thinks an oath would make him do otherwise, and oaths appear to leave our contemporaries indifferent. But, and this "but" encompasses whole universes, Fähner was not what you'd consider one of our contemporaries. His promise, once given, was inviolable. Promises had bound him all his life; indeed, he was their prisoner. Fähner could not have freed himself; to do so would have amounted to betrayal. The eruption of violence represented the bursting of the pressurized container in which he had been confined his whole life by his oath once given.

♥ With regard to the practicalities of the case, there was nothing to defend. It was, rather, a problem of judicial philosophy: What is the meaning of punishment? Why do we punish? I used my summation to try to establish this. There is a whole host of theories. Punishment should be a torrent. Punishment should protect us. Punishment should make the perpetrator avoid any such act in the future. Punishment should counterbalance injustice. Our laws are a composite of these theories, but none of them fitted this case exactly. Fähner would not kill again. The injustice of his act was self-evident but difficult to measure. And who wanted to exercise revenge? It was a long summation. I told his story. I wanted people to understand that Fähner had reached the end. I spoke until I felt I had gotten through to the court. When one of the jurors nodded, I sat down again.

Fähner had the last word. At the end of a trial the court hears the defendant, and the judges have to weigh what he says in their deliberations. He bowed and his hands were clasped one inside the other. He hadn't had to learn his speech by heart; it was the encapsulation of his entire life.

"I loved my wife, and in the end I killed her. I still love her, that is what I promised her, and she is still my wife. This will be true for the rest of my life. I broke my promise. I have to live with my guilt."

~~Fähner.

♥ The judge in juvenile court sentenced Samir to two weeks' custody and obligatory participation in an antiviolence seminar. Samir tried to explain to the social workers in the juvenile detention center that the conviction was wrong. The boxer had started it; it was just that he himself had been quicker. That sort of thing wasn't a game. You could play football, but nobody played at boxing. The judge had simply failed to understand the riles.

♥ Wagner had spent his whole life struggling with his own insignificance.

♥ A garrote is a thin length of wire with little wooden handles at either end. It was developed from a medieval instrument of torture and execution—until 1974, it was the official instrument of execution in Spain—and even today it is a favored murder weapon. Its constituent part can be bought at any hardware store; it's cheap, easy to transport, and effective: The wire is passed around the neck from behind and pulled right into a noose; the victim cannot cry out, and death is swift.

♥ After a time, he went to the table, opened the casket, and lifted out the bowl. He held it at the base with one hand and turned it slowly before his eyes with the other. It was a matcha bowl, in which gleaming green tea powder is beaten with a bamboo whisk. The bowl was black, with a glaze over its dark body. Such bowls were not turned on a wheel, but shaped by hand, and none of them resembled any other. The most ancient school of pottery signed its ceramics with the character raku. A friend had once told me that ancient Japan lived on in these bowls.

~~Tanata's Tea Bowl.

♥ And while I was still deciding whether, in fact, I was going to leave the garden and go back into the salon, she began to play. She played the first three of Bach's six cello suites, and after a few bars I realized I would never be able to forget Theresa. On that warm summer evening in the grand salon of the nineteenth-century villa, with its tall mullioned glass doors opened wide onto the park that was all lit up, I experienced one of those rare moments of absolute happiness that only music can give us.

♥ The hippocampus is Poseidon's pack animal, a Greek sea monster, half horse, half worm. It gives its name to a very ancient part of the brain within the temporal lobe. It's where the work is done that transforms short-term memories into long-term ones.

~~The Cello.

♥ The next morning, she went to the lake again. She thought it would be easy to drown herself, but she couldn't do it. When she rose back up to the surface, she jerked open her mouth and her lungs filled with oxygen. She stood in the water naked; there was nothing but the trees on the bank, the reeds, and the sky. She screamed. She screamed until her strength left her; she screamed against death and loneliness and pain. She knew she would survive, but she also knew that this was no longer her homeland.

♥ Over the next months, she got to know other men and women from her homeland. They explained Berlin to her, its authorities and its laws. Irina needed money. She couldn't work legally; she wasn't even allowed to be in Germany. The women helped her in the first few weeks. She stood on the Kurfürstenstraße, and she learned the price of oral and vaginal sex. Her body had become a stranger to her; she used it like a tool. She wanted to survive, even if she didn't know for what. She didn't feel herself anymore.

~~Bliss.

♥ Of course she knew nothing about his drug business. In the mornings, Abbas left love letters for her attached to the refrigerator. He told his friends that when she drank, he could see the water running down inside her throat. She became his homeland; he had nothing else.

♥ He thought about his father, who had slapped him merely because he had stolen an apple from the fruit stand. He'd been seven years old at the time. "There are no criminals in our family," his father had said. He had gone with him to the fruit seller and paid for the apple. Abbas would have liked to become an auto mechanic, or a painter, or a carpenter—or anything. But he became a drug dealer. And now he was no longer even that.

♥ Defendants and defense lawyers have a curious relationship. A lawyer doesn't always want to know what actually happened. This also has its roots in our code of criminal procedure: If defense counsel knows that his client has killed someone in Berlin, he may not ask for "defense witnesses" to take the stand who would say that the man had been in Munich that day. It's a tightrope walk. In other cases, the lawyer absolutely has to know the truth. Knowledge of the actual circumstances may be the tiny advantage that can protect his client from a guilty verdict. Whether the lawyer thinks his client is innocent is irrelevant. His task is to defend the accused, no more, no less.

♥ He had never really believed Boheim to be the perpetrator. Percy Boheim gave no appearance of being a raving madman who would crush the head of a student with a rain of blows. But, Schmied was also thinking, who knows his fellow human being? Which was why, for him, motive was very seldom the deciding factor.

♥ Police work proceeds on the assumption that there is no such thing as chance. Investigations consist of 95 percent office work, checking out factual details, writing summaries, getting statements from witnesses. In detective novels, the person who did it confesses when he or she is screamed at; in real life, it's not that simple. And when a man with a bloody knife in his hand is bent over a corpse, hat means he's the murderer. No reasonable policeman would believe he had only walked past by chance and tried to help by pulling the knife out of the body. The detective superintendent's observation that a particular solution is too simple is a screenwriter's conceit. The opposite is true. What is obvious is what is plausible. And most often, it's also what's right.

♥ Boheim was masterful. The discomfort of everyone involved in the trial was evident. It was a strange situation. No one wanted to suspect him of murder—it was just that it couldn't have been anyone else.

♥ Famously, the most important rule for a defense attorney when examining a witness is never to ask a question to which you do not already know the answer. Surprises are not always happy ones, and you do not play with the fate of your client.

~~Summertime.

♥ Lenzberger had only four convictions on his sheet, but he had a new metal baseball bat. In Berlin, they sell fifteen times more baseball bats than balls.

♥ Lenzberger didn't know whether to fight or flee, and because the man still looked like a bookkeeper, he made the wrong decision. He swung the baseball bat high in the air. The man hit him only once, a brief chop to Lenzberger's neck that happened so fast the CCTV camera couldn't capture it on the individual frames. Then he sat down again without casting another glance at his opponent.

The blow was precise, hitting the carotid sinus, which is a brief surface dilation of the internal carotid artery. This tiny location contains a whole bundle of nerve endings, which registered the blow as an extreme increase in blood pressure and sent signals to Lenzberger sank to his knees; the baseball bat landed on the ground behind him, bounced a couple of times, rolled across the platform, and fell onto the train tracks. The blow had been so hard that it had torn the delicate wall of the carotid sinus. Blood rushed in and overstimulated the nerves. They were now transmitting a constant signal to inhibit the heartbeat. Lenzberger collapsed face-down on the platform; a little blood trickled into the rigid tiles and pooled against a cigarette pack. Lenzberger died: His heart had simply stopped beating.

Beck remained standing for another two seconds. Then he, too, fell; his head banged against the bench and left a smear of red. He lay there, eyes open, seeming to be looking at the man's shoes. The man straightened his glasses, crossed his legs, lit a cigarette, and waited to be arrested.

♥ I drove to the Homicide Division in the Keithstrasse. It makes no difference whether police stations are in modern high-rises built of glass and steel or in two-hundred-year-old guardhouses—they're all alike. There is gray-green linoleum in the corridors, the air smells of detergents, and there are oversize posters of cats in all the interrogation rooms, along with postcards that colleagues have sent from their vacations. Clippings with jokes are stuck to computer screens and cupboard doors. There is lukewarm filtered coffee from orange-yellow coffee machines with scorched warming plates. On the desks there are heavy I LOVE HERTHA mugs, green plastic pencil holders, and occasional photos of sunsets on the walls in glass holders without frames, taken by some clerk. The decor is practical and light gray, the rooms are too cramped, the chairs are too ergonomic, and on the windowsills are plastic-looking plants in self-irrigating pebble trays.

♥ Dalger avoided interrogations right after an arrest, when everything was still fresh and he didn't know very much. He was the man for confessions. He didn't use tricks, he didn't use blackmail, and he didn't use humiliation. Dalger was glad to leave the first interrogation to his juniors; he didn't want to start asking questions until he felt he knew everything there was to know about the case. He had a brilliant memory for details. He didn't rely on instinct, even though that instinct had never let him down in the past. Dalger knew that the most absurd stories can be true and the most believable stories false. "Interrogations," he told his juniors, "are hard work." And he never forgot to finish by saying, "Follow the money or follow the sperm. Every murder comes down to one or the other."

♥ He was fifty-two years old, and he wanted clarity; things had to be orderly and he didn't want to take any demons home with him from the office.

Labrecht was a guest lecturer in trial law at the high school, and because of the real-life examples he used, his lectures had become legendary. He told the students it was a mistake to believe that judges enjoyed convicting people. "They do it when it is their duty, but they don't do it when they have doubts." The real meaning of judicial independence was that judges, too, wanted to be able to sleep at night. That was the point at which the students always laughed. Nonetheless, it was the truth; he had come across almost no exceptions.

The job of examining magistrate is perhaps the most interesting in the criminal justice system. You get a brief look into everything, you don't have to put up with boring, long trials, and you aren't obliged to listen to anyone else. But that is only one side of it. The other is the loneliness. The examining magistrate reaches his decisions alone. Everything depends on him: He sends a man to prison or sets him free. There are simpler ways of earning a living.

Labrecht wasn't exactly thrilled by defense attorneys. But then he wasn't exactly thrilled by prosecutors, either. What interested him was the case, and he reached decisions that were hard to predict in advance. Most people complained about him; his massively oversized glasses and his pale lips gave him a strange look, but he commanded universal respect. At the celebration for his twentieth year on the job, he received a certificate from the president of the district court. The president asked him if he still enjoyed what he did after so many years. Lambrecht's response was that he'd never enjoyed it. He was an independent man.

♥ The prosecutor's office was therefore going for a charge of so-called excessive self-defense. When you are attacked, you have the right to defend yourself, and there is no limit to your choice of means. You may respond to a fist with a cudgel, and to a knife with a gun; you are under no obligation to choose the mildest form of counterattack. But equally, you may not overreact: If you've already rendered your attacker helpless with a pistol shot, you may not cut off his head for good measure. The law does not tolerate such excesses.

♥ The seventy-two-hour rule states that the chances of solving a murder or manslaughter start to decline rapidly after seventy-two hours.

♥ Every year, around 2,400 fatal crimes are recorded in Germany, approximately 140 of them in Berlin. That's more than in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Cologne combined, but even with an annual success rate of 95 percent, that leaves seven cases a year in which the perpetrator is never caught.

~~Self-Defense.

♥ Most custody hearings are a grim business. The law requres that there be an investigation of whether there is a compelling reason to believe that the person being held in custody has committed a crime. This sounds clear and unambiguous, but is hard to grapple with in reality. At this point, the interviews of witnesses have barely begin, the legal proceedings are just starting, and there is no general overview. The judge may not make things simple for himself; he has to decide about the incarceration of someone who may not be guilty at all. Custody hearings are much less formal than trials; the public is not admitted; judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys don't wear robes; and in practice it's a serious conversation about the questions surrounding the prolonging of detention.

♥ Suddenly, out of nowhere, he said what he hadn't wanted to say to the psychiatrist: "I see people and animals as numbers."

"How do you mean?"

"When I see an animal, it has a number. For example, the cow over there is a thirty-six. The gull's a twenty-two. The judge was a fifty-one, and the prosecutor a twenty-three."

"Do you think about this?"

"No, I see it. I see it right away. The same way other people see faces. I don't ever think about it; it's just there."

"And do I have a number?"

"Yes, five. A good number." We both had to laugh. It was the first time since he'd been arrested. We walked on silently side by side.

"Philipp, what is it with eighteen?"

He looked at me, startled. "Why eighteen?"

"You said it to the policewoman, and you killed the sheep with eighteen stab wounds."

"No, that's not right. I killed them first and then I stabbed them six times in each side and then six times in the back. I had to take the eyes, too. It was hard; the first few times they came apart." Philipp began to tremble. Then he blurted out, "I'm afraid of Eighteen. It's the devil. Three times six. Eighteen. Do you get it?"

I glanced at him questioningly.

"The apocalypse. The Antichrist. It's the number of the beast and the number of the devil." He was almost screaming.

The number 666 is indeed in the Bible; it appears in the Revelation of Saint John: "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred three-score and six." It was a popular belief that with these words the Evangelist was alluding to the devil.

"If I don't kill the sheep, the eyes will consume the land with fire. The apples of the eye are sin itself; they are the apples form the tree of knowledge, and they will destroy everything." Philipp began to cry with a child's lack of all restraint, shaking from head to foot.

"Philipp, please listen to me. You're afraid of the sheep and their terrible eyes. I can understand that. But the whole thing with the Revelation of Saint John is absolutely cuckoo. John didn't mean the devil when he used the number six sixty-six; it was hidden play on the name of Nero, the Roman Caesar."

"What?"

"If you add up the numbers in the Hebrew spelling of Caesar Nero, you get six sixty-six. That's all. Saint John couldn't write that out; he had to say it in numbers. It has nothing to do with the Antichrist."

♥ He, too, even at long distance, had agreed that everything pointed to a case of paranoid schizophrenia. It is not an infrequent disorder; the evidence suggests that approximately 1 percent of the population will be afflicted with it once in their lives. It often manifests itself in phases that lead to the disruption of thought processes and perceptions, distorting both their form and their content. Most patients hear voices; many believe they're being pursued, that they're responsible for catastrophe of nature, or they're tortured, like Philipp, by mad ideas. The treatment involves both drugs and extensive psychotherapy. Patients need to be able to trust, and to open themselves up. The odds of a full recovery are around 30 percent.

At the end of the tour, Philipp came with me to the main door. He was just a lonely, sad, anxious boy. He said, "You never asked what number I am."

"That's true. And what number are you?"

"Green," he said, and he turned on his heel and went back into the clinic.

~~Green.

♥ One of the policemen went in search of the bathroom. He opened the bedroom door by mistake, stepped into the dark room, and groped for a light switch. And this was when he saw it: the walls and ceiling were papered with thousands of photos, stuck one over the other; there wasn't an empty inch of space. They were even lying on the floor and the night table. Every one of them features the same thing; only the location changed. Men, women, and children sat on steps, on chairs, on sofas, and on window seats; they sat in swimming pools, shoe shops, meadows, and on the banks of lakes. And all of them were pulling a yellow thumbtack out of one foot.

~~The Thorn.

♥ "Patrick, what can I do for you?" I asked after a while.

"It's hard," he said.

"It's always hard," I said, and waited.

"I haven't ever told anyone."

"Take your time; it's quite comfortable here." In fact, it was cold and it was uncomfortable.

"I love Nicole the way I've never loved anyone, ever. She doesn't call; I've tried everything. I even wrote her a letter, but she never answered. Her cell phone is switched off. Her best friend hung up when I called. ..Yes, you're right," he said; "it really wasn't an accident. I don't know if I can tell you what really happened."

..Finally, he said, "I wanted to eat her."

"Your girlfriend?"

"Yes."

"Why did you want to do that?"

"You don't know her; you'd have to have seen her back. He shoulder blades come together in points; her skin is firm and clear. My skin is full of pores, almost like holes, but hers is dense and smooth, and it has these tiny little blond hairs on it."

I tried to recall the picture of her back that was in the file. "Was it the first time you wanted to?" I asked.

"Yes. Well, only once before, but it wasn't so strong that time. We were on vacation in Thailand; it was when we were lying on the beach. I bit her a little too hard."

"How did you want to do it this time?"

"I don't know. I think I just wanted to cut out a little slice."

"Have you ever wanted to eat anyone else?"

"No, of course not. It's all about her, only her." He dragged on his cigarette. "Am I crazy? I'm not some Hannibal Lecter. Or am I?" he was afraid of himself.

"No, you're not. I'm not a doctor, but I think you've gotten too caught up in your love for her. You know that, too, Patrick; you say so yourself. I think you're quite ill. You need to let people help you. And you need to do it soon."

There are different kinds of cannibalism. People eat people out of hunger, out of obedience to some ritual, or out of severe personality disorders that often take a sexual form. Patrick thought Hollywood had invented Hannibal Lecter, but he's always existed. In Styria in the eighteenth century, Paul Reisiger ate "the beating hearts of six virgins"—he believed that if he ate nine, he could become invisible. Peter Kürten drank the blood of his victims; in the 1970s, Joachim Kroll ate at least eight people he'd killed; and in 1948, Bernhard Oehme consumed his own sister.

Legal history abounds with the unimaginable. When Karl Denke was captured in 1924, his kitchen was full of human remains of all kinds: pieces of flesh preserved in vinegar, a tubful of bones, pots of rendered fat, and a sack with hundreds of human teeth. He wore suspenders cut from strips of human skin on which nipples were still identifiable. The number of victims remains unknown to this day.

"Patrick, have you ever heard about the Japanese man Issei Sagawa?"

"No, who is he?"

"Sagawa is a restaurant critic in Tokyo right now."

"So?"

"In 1981 he ate his girlfriend in Paris. He said he loved her too much."

"Did he eat all of her?"

"At least several pieces."

"And"—Patrick's voice shook—"did he say how it was?"

"I don't remember exactly. I think he said she tasted of tuna."

"Ah..."

"The doctors back then diagnosed a severe psychotic disturbance."

~~Love.

♥ His life began the way lives begin in a terrible fairy tale. He was abandoned.

♥ He handled human stock, livestock, and hop-root stock with equal respect and equal strictness. He got angry with his wife when she was too soft with the child. "You're spoiling him for me," he said, thinking of shepherds, who never stroke their dogs.

♥ He had found his life. Ayana and he loved each other; Tiru was growing and was healthy. Michalka couldn't grasp his good fortune. Only sometimes, but less and less often, did the nightmares return. When that happened, Ayana would wake up and stoke him. She said her language had no word for the past. The years with her made Michalka soft-tempered and calm.

♥ In a trial, it is the district attorney who presents his closing argument first. Unlike in the United States or England, the prosecutor takes no position; he or she is neutral. The DA's office is neutral; it also establishes exonerating circumstances, and this it neither wins nor loses—the only passion in the DA's office is for the law. The law is all it serves—that, and justice. That at least is the theory. And during preliminary proceedings, it is the rule. But circumstances often change in the heat of a trial, and objectivity begins to suffer in the process. That is only human, because a good prosecutor is always a prosecutor, and it is more than hard both to prosecute and to remain neutral. Perhaps it is a flaw woven into the very fabric of our criminal justice system; perhaps the law simply demands too much.

..Of course it cannot all turn on whether a defendant's statements are believed. In court, what is at issue is proof. The accused thus has an advantage: He doesn't have to prove anything, neither his innocence nor the accuracy of his statement. But there are different rules for the district attorney's office and the court: They may not state anything that they cannot prove. This sounds much simpler than it is. No one is so objective as to be able always to distinguish conjecture from proof. We believe we know something for sure, we get carried away, and it's often far from simple to find our way back.

Final arguments are no longer decisive in trials these days. The DA's office and the defense are not speaking to sworn witnesses, but to judges and juries. Every false tone, every bit of hair tearing, and every pretentious turn of phrase is unendurable. The great closing arguments belong to earlier centuries. The Germans no longer tolerate pathos; there's been too much of that already.

But sometimes one can allow oneself a little dramatic production, an unanticipated final request.

..Our system of criminal law is based on the requirement of personal guilt. We punish according to someone's guilt; we ask to what extent we can make him responsible for his actions. It's complicated. In the Middle Ages, things were simpler: Punishment was only commensurate with the act itself. A thief had his hand chopped off. It was all the same, no matter whether he'd stolen out of greed or because he would otherwise have starved. Punishment in those days was a form of mathematics; every act carried a precisely established weight of retribution. Our contemporary criminal law is more intelligent, it is more just as regards life, but it is also more difficult. A bank robbery really isn't always just a bank robbery. What could we accuse Michalka of? Had he not done what all of us are capable of? Would we have behaved differently if we had found ourselves in his place? Is it not everyone's deepest desire to return to those they love?

~~The Ethiopian.

♥ They were respectable men with respectable jobs: insurance salesman, car dealer, skilled carpenter. You would have no cause to find fault with them. Almost all of them were married, they had children, they paid their taxes, their credit was good, and they watched the news on television every evening. They were perfectly normal men, and nobody would have believed that something like this could happen.

♥ "Defense is war, a war for the rights of the accused." The sentence appeared in the little book with the red plastic cover that I always carried around with me back then. It was the Defense Attorney's Pocket Reference. I had just sat my second set of exams and been admitted to the bar a few weeks earlier. I believed in that sentence. I thought I knew what it meant.

♥ The judge called us into his room one by one. I wore a robe, because I didn't know you don't wear robes to such meetings. When the review of the remand in custody began, I talked too much, the way you talk when you're young and you think anything's better than saying nothing. The judge only looked at my client; I didn't think he even listened to me. But something else was standing between the judge and the man, something much older than our code of legal procedure, an accusation that had nothing to do with the laws as written. And when I had finished, the judge asked once again if the man wished to remain silent. He asked quietly, with no inflection in his voice, while he folded up his reading glasses and waited. The judge knew the answer, but he asked the question. And all of us in the cool air of the courtroom knew that the legal proceedings would end here and that guilt was another matter entirely.

♥ The men were released. They left by a rear exit and went back to their wives and children and their lives. They paid their taxes and kept their credit good, they sent their children to school, and none of them spoke of the matter again. But the brass band was dissolved. There was never a formal trial.

~~Funfair.

♥ The Order of the Illuminati wads founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, an instructor in canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. Only the students of the Jesuits had access to the libraries, and Weishaupt wanted to change this. The professor had no organizational talent; perhaps at the age of twenty-eight he was simply too young. Adolph von Knigge, a Freemason, took over the leadership of the secret society in 1780. Knigge knew what he was doing; the Order grew until it began to pose a threat to the Crown because of its sympathy for the ideas of the Enlightenment, and this finally led to both him and it being banned as enemies of the state. After that, theories abounded. Because Adam Weishaupt looked a little like George Washington, it was claimed that the Illuminati had murdered the president and replaced him with Weishaupt—for Weishaupt means whitehead and the national symbol of the United States, the white-headed or bald eagle, was proof of this. And because people loved conspiracy theories even back then, suddenly everyone became a member of the Illuminati: Galileo, the Babylonian goddess Lilith, Lucifer, and eventually even the Jesuits themselves.

In reality, Weishaupt died in 1830 in Gotha; the history of the Order ended with its ban by the government in 1784, and all that remains is a small memorial tablet in the pedestrian precinct in Ingolstadt.

For some people, that's not enough.

♥ When Henry was six he was sent to school and things began to go wrong. The goody cone he was given to celebrate his first day was made of red felt with stars stuck on it and a magician with a pointy beard. It was a heavy cone, it has a green paper cover, he'd carried it all by himself since they'd left the house. Then the cone got caught on the door handle of the classroom and that made a dent in it. He sat on his chair and stared at his cone and everyone else's cones, and when the teacher asked his name. He didn't know what he was supposed to say and he began to cry. He was crying because of the dent, because of the strange people, because of the teacher, who was wearing a red dress, and because he'd pictured everything differently. The boy next to him stood up and went in search of a new neighbor. Until that moment Henry had thought the world had been created for him; sometimes he had turned around quickly, hoping to catch objects as they changed places. Now he would never do that again. He remembered nothing about the rest of the lesson, but later he believed his life had been knocked out of balance that day in a way that could never be righted again.

♥ At some point his father said it was late already and they still had the long return drive ahead of them. As they headed down the allée, Henry saw his mother turning back towards him one more time and waving. He saw her face through the window and he saw her saying something to his father; her red mouth moved silently, it would move forever, and he suddenly grasped that it wasn't moving for him any more. He kept his hands in his pockets. The car got smaller and smaller until he could no longer distinguish it from the shadows in the allée.

He was twelve years old now and he knew that all this was premature and much too serious.

♥ The boarding school was a world unto itself, more constricted, more intensive, devoid of compromise. There were the athletes, the intellectuals, the showoffs, and the winners. And there were the ones who were ignored, who were mere wallpaper. No one made his own decision as to who he was, it was the others who judged and their judgment was almost always final. Girls could have provided the corrective, but the school didn't admit them, so their voices were missing.

♥ He wanted to touch her breasts but he didn't dare to. Then he got a cramp in his calf, and as he came, because he had to say something he said, "I love you." She jumped to her feet and turned away; his stomach was sticky with sperm. Bending over, she pulled her bikini back on hastily, then opened the door and turned back towards him as she stood in the doorway. He could see her eyes now. They held sympathy and disgust and something else he didn't yet recognize. Then she said "Sorry" softly and slammed the door, running to join the others out of sight. He sat in the dark for a long time. When they met next day, she was standing along her friends. She said loudly, for everyone to hear, that he shouldn't stare at her so idiotically; she'd lost a bet, that was all, and "that thing yesterday" had been the stake. Because he was young and vulnerable, the imbalance grew even more severe.

♥ Then she held Henry's sheet of paper in her hands. It was a drawing, just a few pencil strokes, of his mother collecting him at the station. She hadn't so much as noticed the boy in class, but now her hand began to tremble. She understood his drawing, it was all evident to her. She saw the struggles, the wounds, and the fear, and suddenly she saw the boy himself. That evening, her entry in her diary consisted of two sentences: "Henry P is the greatest talent I have ever seen. He is the greatest gift of my life."

♥ He groped for the piece of paper in his pocket. "Hodie to illuminatum inauguramus," it said. "Today we will consecrate you as one of the Illuminati." He had waited for it, the piece of paper meant everything to him, he'd found it this morning on his night table. Under the Latin text it said, "8 pm. Old Slaughterhouse."

"...and forgive us our trespasses..."

"Yes," he thought, "today my trespasses will be forgiven. He was breathing so loudly that a couple of the boys turned round to look at him. They were already in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, the liturgy would end at any moment. "My trespasses will be forgiven," he said half out loud, and closed his eyes.

Henry was naked and was made to put the noose around his neck himself. The others were wearing black hoods that they had found in a forgotten cupboard in the attic, rough monk's robes and penitent's shirts made of goat hair which hadn't been worn in modern times. They had placed candles around, and the flames were reflected in the grimy film on the windows. Henry could no longer recognize the boys' faces, but he saw all the details: the fabric of the hoods, the thread the buttons were sewn on with, the red bricks of the window frames, the forced lock in the door, the dust on the steps, the rust on the banisters.

They bound his hands behind his back. Using watercolors form art class, one of the boys painted a red pentagram on Henry's chest to ward off evil; they'd seen it in some engraving. They took the rope around his neck and pulled it up to a hook in the ceiling using the old winch; Henry's toes could barely touch the floor. One of the boys read out the great exorcism, the Rituale Romanum, the papal instructions written in Latin in 1614. His words rang out in the room; nobody understood them. The boy's voice cracked: he was being carried away by himself. They really believed they were purifying Henry of his sins.

Henry didn't freeze. This time, this one time, he'd done everything right; they could no longer reject him. One of the boys swung at him with a whip he'd made himself, with knots in the leather. It wasn't a hard blow, but Henry lost his balance. The rope was made of hemp; it cut into his throat and blocked his air passages, he tripped, his toes could no longer find the floor. And then Henry got an erection.

A person being slowly hanged suffocates. In the first phase the rope cuts into the skin, the veins and arteries in the neck are closed off, and the face turns violet-blue. The brain is no longer supplied with blood, consciousness is lost after about ten seconds; only if the windpipe is not totally blocked does it take longer. In the next phase, which lasts approximately one minute, the breathing muscles contract, the tongue protrudes from the mouth, and the hyoid bone and the larynx are damaged. This is followed by powerful, uncontrollable cramps; the legs and arms thrash eight to ten times, and the neck muscles often tear. Then suddenly the hanged man seems peaceful, he's no longer breathing, and after one or two minutes the last phase begins. Death is now almost inevitable. The mouth opens, the body gasps for air, but only in individual panting spasms, no more than ten in sixty seconds. Blood may issue from the mouth, nose, and ears, the face is now congested, the right ventricle of the heart is distended. Death comes after approximately ten minutes. Erections during a hanging are not uncommon: in the fifteenth century people believed the mandrake, a solanaceous herb, grew from the sperm of hanged men.

But the young men knew nothing about the human body. They didn't understand that Henry was dying; they thought the blows were arousing him. The boy with the whip became furious, he struck harder and roared something that Henry didn't understand. He felt no pain. He remembered finding a deer on a country toad as a child that had been hit by a car. It was lying there in its own blood in the snow, and when he tried to touch it, it jerked its head round and stared at him. Now he was one of them. His trespasses had been wiped away, he would never be alone again, he was purified, and finally he was free.

♥ I saw the dog too late. I braked and the car skidded on the gravel road. The dog was huge and black; it took its time crossing the road and didn't even look at me. In the Middle Ages such dogs were supposed to pull mandrake roots out of the ground; people believed the plants would scream when dug up and the scream would kill people. The dog obviously didn't mind. I waited until it disappeared between the trees.

~~The Illuminati.

♥ Driving back from meetings, he listened to jazz in the car, and his world was complete.

♥ She had walked by him and his sandwich board on the Kurfürstendamm every Saturday. He took the weekend off and waited. When she came he followed her; he waited in front of shops and cafés and restaurants. Nobody noticed him. On the fourth Saturday she bought movie tickets. He found a seat directly behind her. His plan was going to work. She had put her hand on her boyfriend's thigh. Holbrecht sat down. He smelled her perfume and heard her whispering. Pulling the kitchen knife out of the waistband of his pants, he clutched it under his jacket. She had pinned her hair up; he saw the blond fuzz on the back of her slender neck. He could almost count the individual tiny hairs.

He thought he had every right.

~~Children.

♥ He thought about his wife. Slim, elegant, enchanting, she would make conversation with everyone. She was thirty-six, a lawyer in an international firm, black suit, hair loose. He had met her in the airport in Zurich. They had both been waiting for their delayed flight in the coffee bar and he'd made her laugh. They made a date. Two years later they got married. That was eight years ago. Things could have gone well.

But then the thing in the hotel sauna happened, and it changed everything.

♥ The hotel was much cited for its "wellness environment." There were steam baths and Finnish saunas, indoor and outdoor pools, massages and mud packs. The garage was full of Mercedeses, BMWs, and Porsches. Everyone belonged.

♥ Sometimes in the night, when the house was still and Paulsberg was asleep and she couldn't stand the bright green numbers on her alarm clock, she got dressed and went out into the garden. She would lie down on one of the lounge chairs by the pool and look up at the sky, waiting for the feeling that she'd known ever since her father died. She could hardly bear it. There were billions of solar systems in the Milky Way and billions of Milky Ways. And in between, nothing but cold and the void. She had lost control.

♥ Of course judges do not have to know the motives of a defendant in order to be able to sentence him. But they want to know why people do what they do. And only when they understand can they punish the defendant in a way that is commensurate with his guilt. If that understanding is lacking, the sentence will almost always be longer.

♥ The prosecutor had made yet another mistake. Our criminal law is over 130 years old. It is an intelligent law. Sometimes things don't go the way the perpetrator wants. His revolver is loaded. He has five bullets. He approaches a woman, he shoots, he wants to kill her. He misses four times, only a single shot grazes her arm. Then he's standing right in front of her. He pushes the barrel of the revolver against her stomach, he cocks it, he sees the blood running down her arm, and he sees her fear. Perhaps he has second thoughts. A bad law would sentence the man for attempted murder; an intelligent law wants to save the woman. Our criminal code says that he can step back from his attempt to murder without incurring punishment. Which is to say: if he stops now, if he doesn't kill her, his only punishment will be for endangering her by inflicting bodily injury—not for attempted murder. So it's up to him: the law will be friendly to him if he does the right thing at this point and lets his victim live. Professors call this "the golden bridge." I never liked this expression. The things that go on inside people at such moments are too complicated, and a golden bridge belongs more in a Chinese garden. But the idea behind the law is right.

~~The Other Man.

♥ They were well. She did everything the way she'd always done it: conversations with her husband about work, shopping in the supermarket, tennis lessons for the children, Christmas with her parents or parents-in-law. She uttered the same sentences she always uttered; she wore the same clothes she always wore. She went to buy shoes with her girlfriends, and went to the movies once a month if she could get a babysitter. She kept up-to-date with exhibitions and plays. She watched the news, read the political section of the paper, paid attention to the children, attended parent-teacher days at school. She didn't do any sports, but she hadn't put on weight.

Her husband suited her; she's always believed that. But it wasn't his fault. It was nobody's fault. It had just happened. She hadn't been able to do anything about it. She could remember every detail of the evening when it all became clear.

..Much later, when they were lying in bed, she'd suddenly been unable to breathe. She'd lain awake until morning, rigid with anxiety and guilt, her thighs cramping. She didn't want it that way, but it had stayed that way. And while making breakfast for the children next day and checking their schoolbags, she'd known she'd never feel any different again: she was totally empty inside. She would have to keep living with that.

..Gradually everything disappeared, until she was a mere shell. The world became alien to her; she no longer belonged to it. The children laughed, her husband got excited, their friends argued—but nothing touched her. She was serious, she laughed, she cried, she comforted—it was all the way it usually was and all on cue. But when things were quiet and she looked at other people in cafés or on the streetcar, she felt none of it had anything to do with her any more.

~~Desire.

♥ He tried to smile. She nodded in a friendly way. They sat at the table for twenty minutes and didn't utter another word. The officer was familiar with this; it often happened that prisoner and visitor had nothing to say to each other. When the officer said that visiting time was over she stood up, leaned forward quickly again, and whispered in the old man's ear, "Hassan is the father of my child." He smelled her perfume, and felt her hair on his old face. She blushed. That was all. Then she left and he was taken back to his cell. He sat on his bed and stared at his hands with their age spots and scars, he thought about Jana and the baby in her stomach, he thought about how warm and safe it was in there, and he knew what he had to do.

When Jana got home, Hassan was asleep. She undressed, lay down beside him and felt his breath on the back of her neck. She loved this man whom she couldn't make sense of. He was different from the boys in her village in Poland, he was grown-up, and his skin seemed to be made of velvet.

Later, when he woke up for a moment, she told him the old man wouldn't testify against him; he could stop worrying. But he had to do something for him, buy him new teeth, she'd already spoken to a social worker who could take care of it. No one would find out. She was all worked up and talking too fast. Hassan stroked her stomach till she fell asleep.

~~Snow.

♥ There have always been repressed pregnancies. Every year in Germany alone, 1,500 women recognize too late that they're pregnant. And year after year, almost 300 women only realize it when they give birth. They misinterpret all the signs: menstruation has ceased because of stress, the stomach is distended because of overeating, the breasts are enlarging as a result of some hormonal disturbance. These women are either very young or over the age of forty. Many have already had children. People can repress things, though nobody knows how the mechanism works. Sometimes it's totally successful: even doctors are deceived and refrain from further physical exams.

~~Lonely.

♥ The criminal court is in the Moabit district of Berlin. That part of the city is gray; no one knows where the name came from; it sounds a little like the Slavic word for a Moor. It is the largest criminal court in Europe. The building has twelve courtyards and seventeen staircases. Fifteen hundred people work here, including 270 judges and 350 prosecutors. Approximately 300 hearings take place every day, 1,300 prisoners from 80 nations are incarcerated here awaiting trial, and more than 1,000 visitors, witnesses, and trial personnel pass through. Every year roughly 60,000 criminal proceedings are handled here. These are the statistics.

~~Justice.

♥ Alexandra was pretty: a blonde with brown eyes. In older photographs she wears a hair band. She grew up in the country near Oldenburg, where her parents were livestock farmers: cows, pigs, hens. She didn't like having freckles, she read historical novels, and all she wanted was to go and live in the city. After middle school, her father got her an apprenticeship in a respectable bakery and her mother helped her look for an apartment. At first she felt homesick and went home on weekends. Then she got to know people in her city. She loved life.

..Alexandra had no worries; everything was going to work out well with this man. It was all the way she'd wished it for herself. He was loving, and she thought she knew him.

The first time he hit her was long before the baby was born.

♥ The problem was simple. Manslaughter does not distinguish itself form murder by degree of "intent" the way you see it in crime dramas on TV. Every murder is a manslaughter. But it's also more. There has to be some additional element that makes it a murder. These defining elements are not arbitrary: they are laid out in the law. The perpetrator kills "to satisfy sexual urges," out of "greed" or out of other "base motives." There are also words to define how he kills, for example "heinously" or "brutally." If the judge believes such a defining element is present, he has no choice: he must give the perpetrator a life sentence. If it's manslaughter, he has a choice; he can sentence the perpetrator to anywhere between five and fifteen years.

♥ The trial began three months later. The presiding judge would be retiring shortly. Gaunt face, crew cut, gray hair, rimless glasses—he didn't look as if he belonged in the new courtroom. An architect had designed it in contemporary style with bright green plastic molded chairs and white Formica tables. It was supposed somehow to represent democratic justice, but it didn't have any effect on the sentences being handed down.

♥ I was familiar with the decision. The Federal Supreme Court had ruled that the sentence in cases of murder is not absolute. Even a life sentence can be commuted in certain exceptional cases. That was the argument I used in my summing up; I didn't have any other ideas.

The court set Alexandra free. The presiding judge said she had acted in self-defense. It's a difficult rule. In order to be allowed to defend yourself, an attack must be either in progress or imminent. You cannot be punished for defending yourself. The only problem was that a sleeping man cannot instigate an attack. And no court had ever accepted that an attack is imminent when the attacker is asleep. The presiding judge said it was a unique decision, an exception; it was valid only in this one instance. Alexandra had not been obliged to wait until he woke up. She had wanted to protect her daughter, and she was permitted to do so. She herself had been in fear of her life. The court lifted the order of arrest and released her from detention. Later the judge persuaded the DA not to appeal.

..It suddenly occurred to me that we hadn't heard from any fingerprint experts. I checked the files in my laptop: no traces had been found on the statue. The perpetrator must have worn gloves. The statue weighed ninety pounds, Alexandra barely weighed that herself. The bed was almost two feet off the ground. I read her statement once again. She said that after she'd done it, she'd sat in the nursery until first light, then she'd called the police. She hadn't showered and she hadn't changed her clothes. Roughly one hundred pages further on in the file were the photos of her clothes: she had been wearing a white blouse. There was no trace of blood on it anywhere. The presiding judge was experienced. There was no way he could have overlooked it. I closed the screen. It was late summer, the very last days, and the wind was still warm.

I saw her coming out of the courthouse. Felix was waiting for her in a taxi. She got into the backseat with him. He took her hand. She was going to go with him to her parents', take Saskia in her arms, and it would all be over. They would have to be very careful with each other. Only when she felt the warmth in her stomach would she reciprocate, squeezing the hand that was squeezing hers and had killed her husband.

~~Comparison.

♥ Besides Waller, four of his father's workmates attended the funeral. Waller wore his father's only suit, which fit him perfectly. He had his father's square face and his thin lips. Only his eyes were different. And everything else.

♥ I tried a sensible defense lawyer. Meinering was sentenced to two years. After that he was sent home for trial in Germany. Because a year of prison in Brazil, given the catastrophic conditions, is calculated as the equivalent of three years of jail time in Germany, his trial was called off and he was released.

~~Family.

♥ The man came to our offices every morning for two weeks. He always sat in the same place in the big conference room. Mostly he held his left eye shut. His name was Fabian Kalkmann, and he was mad.

~~Secrets.