There were two apartments across from each other on the bottom floor. Frederich approached the left one first. It was dead quiet inside. Maybe. He went over to the opposite apartment, which had a shoe rack at the front with only women’s shoes on it. Drexler could have been hiding out with a girlfriend, he thought. He moved away from the door and climbed the elaborate, curved staircase to the top floor, where there were two more apartments. The smell of cooking hung in the air. The sounds of children screaming excitedly at each other came from the right, and the left apartment had its front door open. A vacuum cleaner turned on, causing loud whirring to invade the hallway, while the head of the vacuum cleaner protruded outside to clean the welcome mat. Frederich turned around and went back downstairs. He stood undecided in the light in the middle of the lobby. The silence of the first apartment made it strangely alluring, and Frederich found himself slowly creeping toward it, taking gentle, careful steps while listening for any intervening clues inside.
Scratching noises came from the front of the building. Frederich turned his head quickly, seeing a shadow beneath the crack of the door, and he rushed to a position behind the stairs. The outside door flung open, bringing the street noise in with it. It remained suspended, held open by the foot of the tattooed man from earlier. The man took the keys out of the hole and picked up two duffel bags, the strain of their weight showing on his arms. He then skewed left and dropped the bags onto the floor in front of the silent apartment. Upon unlocking and pushing the door open, he picked up his bags and disappeared inside before the apartment door slammed shut, and Frederich was left alone again inside a lifeless lobby.
He remained thinking in his spot. He was now almost sure that Drexler was in that apartment. Whatever the man was carrying in those bags, it was not business documents or groceries. The guy had some serious hardware in there. Despite that, Frederich wanted to be positive. He opened the back door and went into the yard; a tiny, fenced-off area with an entrance to the underground cellar beside a set of garbage and recycling bins. Each of the apartments had windows looking out into the yard, and Frederich checked them carefully before crawling in beside the bins and training his eyes on the first apartment. It had four windows; one from the kitchen, a small bathroom window, and the rest likely the living and bedrooms. Frederich waited and watched as the first hour ticked by, then the second, before eventually darkness set in and the lights inside the apartment went on. All the curtains were drawn, but Frederich could see the occasional shadow moving between the gaps. At one point the back door to the building broke open, and a heavy-set older woman came out holding a full garbage bag. Frederich shrunk deeper into the corner, and the woman thrust the bag into the bin and slammed the lid shut before walking back, mumbling something to herself in Polish.
Frederich sat patiently in the dark like a fox, alert but barely moving, sensing himself merging into the night as the time passed by and his anticipation slowly grew. From his position in the corner, he got the break he was looking for. If he had lost his focus for even a few seconds, he might have missed it. Without warning, one of the curtains was dragged open and someone appeared with a lit cigarette in his mouth. Frederich skipped a breath. That red, round face stood out like a match head. Drexler rolled the window open slightly with the crank handle, and as soon as he had appeared he was gone. Midnight approached, and the lights went out.
Frederich lingered in the shadows until 3:30 am with unbridled, festering thoughts, unable to stop his mind going back to the day of the bombing. The screams, the carnage; Ida and the innocent civilians, overwhelmed with suffering. Frederich’s rage resonated in his fingers, his legs grew restless. The pressure in his chest sucked the air out of him. That son of a bitch — the cause of it all — was inside that apartment, sleeping soundly. What was Frederich waiting for? ‘Make it messy,’ Scheffler had said. My pleasure, thought Frederich.
He rose out of the corner and marched out. First, he pushed the lobby door open and lodged it on the clip. Now the front door of Drexler’s apartment would remain in view. Frederich walked back into the yard and took out his pistol and a tear gas grenade. He fired a bullet at the living room window, the loud snap of the suppressor shattering the peaceful, morning silence. Shards of glass came crashing to the ground as he walked across and fired another bullet into the bedroom window. Using his pistol hand, he removed the pin from the tear gas grenade, shifted the curtain to the side and tossed in the grenade. Then he walked back across and followed it up by tossing another grenade into the living room. The tear gas rose up and gradually began filling the apartment. He took ten steps backwards and pointed his pistol into the white cloud while keeping the front door to the apartment in his sights.
Two distinct yells came from inside as smoke poured out of the window. Frederich focussed ahead, ready to snatch the life out of anybody moving inside. A shadow appeared, then disappeared, then flashed again at the left side before the front door burst open. It was the tattooed man with the cornrows who Frederich had seen earlier. The man bent
