(2005) Rat Run (36 page)

Anyway we came, got our feet under the table, and have been here ever since. We're very lucky.'

She knew she was escorted by a junior member of staff because the consul-general would not want to be within spitting distance of an officer from the Service.

Her own ambassador down in Prague, if they met in a corridor, always found papers to put his head into or a window to look out of for fear of contamination.

They were at the door and the woman gave her the keys. Polly unlocked it. A darkened room, and a musty smell, confronted her, like a mausoleum. She saw a table, an armchair and a straight chair, a rack of communications equipment, and the familiar red telephone that would give secure speech contact to London, to Gaunt, and a camp-bed with blankets folded on it. There was a shower in one corner, a small partitioned unit beside it with access to a lavatory, and a small cooker over a fridge on the other side of the shower. She could make herself at home, she thought, maybe take a holiday on Harvestehuder Weg.

T hope you'll be all right. Just sing out if there's anything you need. We usually gather for sherry with the CG at about five on Fridays, in the salon, what was the ballroom - if you're still here, you'd be very welcome.'

Polly said that she had just a few 'bits and bobs' to sort out and didn't know how long that would take, whether she would be finished by Friday or not.

Alone, the door shut behind her, she rang the number of the organized-crime section of the Hamburg police, her starting point, and wondered if he was here yet, in the city, the man she was tasked to hunt for.

'It is Sami...'

He heard the silence, then a gasp, then a hiss of shock, then something clattered in his ear as if she had dropped a cup or a plate that she carried, then the silence. The first time he had rung, from the Hauptbahnhof, the phone had not been picked up. He had walked for many hours, first doing great circles round the square in front of the station, ever increasing, then taken the S-Bahn through the docks area and over the river. He had left it at the Wilhelmsburg stop.

There, he had rung again, and the coin had dropped when the phone was answered, and the crisp voice had answered, 'Yes, this is Else. Who is that?' He had given the name she would know, from five years before. He imagined her standing with the phone at her ear, eyes wide, mouth gaping.

'We should meet.'

A pause of many seconds, then a choke, then, 'I don't know i f . . . '

The voice - each cadence the same as he had known it - faded. She was, in his adolescent and adult life, the only woman he had loved. In all the years since he had been in Hamburg, he had remembered the telephone number of the apartment high in the concrete block. At first, when he had left, the memory of her had been in his mind each day and each night, but the years had tripped on and the memory had slipped to once a week, but was always there. Of course, if a recruit given to him to mould to the state of grace, readied to wear a martyr's belt, had made such a contact with old life and old love, he would have castigated him, rejected him and exorcized him from what he planned. But she was Else Borchardt, and he had come back to her city: she was his weakness.

'No - everything is possible. We should meet.'

'Where are you? I don't think...'

'I am close. I will come.'

He put down the phone. The wind thrashed around him. Cigarette packets, empty and discarded, scattered in front of its force. He thought the wind came over the flat lands from Bremerhaven and Buxtehude to the west, or from Luneburg to the south.

When it reached the blocks of Wilhelmsburg, the concrete towers, it eddied in their shelter or was funnelled between them. He had many names. His given name at birth in the Egyptian city of Alexandria was but the first. To those he served, he was Abu Khaled. On the passports he had used on his journey, each carried a different name. For the German documentation shown at the crossing between Liberec and Zgorzelec, with his place of birth listed as Colombo in Sri Lanka, he was Mahela Zoysa. In Hamburg,

eighteen months as a student, he was Sami to his lecturers, his friends and his lover. She was sharp in his mind: five years after he had slipped from her bed, gone into a dawn and left her asleep, everything of her face and body was clear to him.

It was where they had lived. He passed an arcade of shops with nameplates in Arabic or Turkish

characters, and from them they had bought their food.

He stopped to watch the football game on a dirt surface enclosed with mesh wire, where he had played and she had watched him. He walked on.

Ahead was the statue. Made from weather-darkened bronze, the figure showed a diving 'keeper - what he did on the dirt surface behind the wire - horizontal but with a groping arm and a ball that hugged the fingertips. Nothing had changed in Wilhelmsburg in the five years since he had gone. She would not have changed.

He came to the doorway.

The blocks were where the city put immigrants and students and those without work, far from its wealth, distanced from its prosperity by the Elbe river. She had said, 'I don't know i f . . . ' on the phone, and had said, 'I don't think . . . ' He could not believe that Else Borchardt's love for him was lost, but he hesitated in front of the bank of names and bells, and he scanned the list but did not find her name. Within, perhaps, two minutes, a child elbowed past him and rang a bell and there was the click of the closed door being unlatched. He followed the child inside. She was on the twelfth floor of fourteen. He took the stairs. At each landing, as the breath spurted in his lungs, the certainty that had brought him to Wilhelmsburg diminished, a fraction of confidence at each flight, but he pressed on. When he came to the door on the twelfth floor, when his finger hovered over the bell button, he saw that the name typed on paper in the slot beside it was not Borchardt. It was five years since he had closed that door on his back, quietly so that she should not wake. He killed the doubts, pressed the button, kept his finger on it and heard the bell ring out.

She stood in front of him.

He saw no welcome, but fear.

She was heavier than the image of her he had carried in his mind, thicker at the hips, and her waist sagged on the belt of her jeans. There were lines at her mouth and eyes where there had been none, and she wore lipstick that before she had despised. Her hair hung loose and was not kept tight against her scalp by the scarlet bandanna of protest she had always worn.

He had thought, climbing the stairs, that she would gasp, then melt, then hold out her arms to grasp him, as she had always done, but the arms were across her chest and folded tight over her blouse, not the T-shirt of Guevara's face that she had worn each and every day. Past her shoulder an electric fire burned and in front of it was a rack on which a baby's clothes dried.

He looked above the fire and saw the print of a watercolour view, popular, of the castle at Heidelberg, and the same print had been in a corridor off the entrance to the college where he had been enrolled and where she had studied to be a teacher, and which all of them had regarded with derision. Five years back, there had been in that place above the fire, a poster to com-memorate the sacrifices of the Palestinian people.

Everything he saw, he thought was betrayal.

There was a chest beside the fire.

A framed photograph was on the chest.

In the photograph she stood with her baby and a uniformed man - Caucasian white - was beside her, an arm round her shoulder.

She said, 'We have been married for three years. He is from Krakow, but now he has citizenship. He is a good man and a good father. It was a long time ago, Sami.'

'What does he do?' The question had an innocence.

'He is on the Bahn-Wacht - sometimes he works at the Hauptbahnhof, sometimes on the U-Bahn, sometimes at the Dammtor. In two years he hopes to join the city's police, it is his ambition . . . It was too long ago, Sami. We change. It was the old life, we were young - everything is changed. You went, I cried for a week. I thought you would come back, I promised myself that you would come back . . . Then the planes hit the towers, and everything changed.'

His voice was a whisper: 'Did you ever speak of it?'

'Of who we knew? No. Whom we met? No . . . But I changed my life and hid what had been.' She looked into his face. 'Did you change, Sami, move on? Or do you still belong to the struggle? Have you left them or are you a part of them?'

He should not have come, and he knew it. It played in his mind. The man from Krakow returned in the evening from his work shift, pulled off his tie, loosened his uniform tunic, waited for food to be set before him, had his baby sit on his knee and asked if she had had a good day. And he had ambition to be a policeman. How better to achieve ambition? She would tell him that a man, from her past, had arrived at the door without warning and who he was and who his associates had been at the college. And he would telephone to the police or the BfV - and ambition would be realized for an immigrant from Krakow . . . and he knew also that his weakness must be covered.

The baby had begun to cry and she turned to go to it. He stepped inside the room and reached out.

She recoiled when his fingers found her neck. He remembered the softness of the skin, where his fingers had played patterns. Then she had snuggled closer to him, had slipped undone the belt of her jeans and lifted up the T-shirt with the face of Guevara. He tightened his fingers and no scream came from her throat, just a choke. He pressed harder. When she no longer struggled, when she was limp and he

supported her weight, he dragged her into the bedroom. He left her on the bed, beside the cot where the baby cried.

At the door, before he quietly, carefully, closed it, as he had five years before, he paused and used the back of his hand to smear away the wetness from his face.

He had trekked up the long hill of the Elbchaussee, had left the river behind him. Malachy came to Blankenese and by the station he found a board with a street map. Nothing written down, everything remembered. He searched for the name and found a side turning that was scarcely visible on the map. But the dusk had not yet come, and he walked in the opposite direction towards parkland, away from the side turning, sat on a bench and waited for darkness.

Hours had passed. The rain had come on heavier, then eased, but the wind was fierce. The rain had penetrated the material of his heavy coat and the wind pushed the damp deeper. But in the park, where he sat on the bench and shivered and the cold caught at his bones, night had fallen. Malachy stood up, then stepped out.

Why? That there was no clear reason for the actions he had taken, merely a higher step on the ladder, seemed of small importance to him. He had little conception of what it would mean to his life if he teetered on the top rung . . . but he did not believe he could escape it. A kaleidoscope of images sped in his mind, the faces of those who had been kind, generous to him: old Cloughie at school, Adam Barnett, war studies tutor at the military academy, Brian Arnold, his guide into Intelligence at Chicksands . . . All would now have rooted for him. Then he heard the sneers, jibes, cruelty of those who had denied him . . .

Best foot forward, Malachy, and fast, before courage was lost.

He left the park and walked up into the village of Blankenese. There would have been communities like this one in Surrey, Berkshire and Cheshire. He passed the dim-lit windows of shops for antique furniture, imported clothes and food, and restaurants with candles at the tables and laughter, rows of parked Mercedes and BMW high-performance cars. He went through the village, and thought that prosperity oozed from it and comfort. He reached across a low, newly painted white wicket fence and grabbed a handful of earth from a hoed bed, then bent and smeared it on his shoes. He pulled his wool hat lower on his forehead and lifted the collar of his overcoat higher. He paused at a crossroads, took bearings from the signs, then headed on. He was hungry, thirsty, chilled, but the combination made his senses keen.

Alert, he saw the camera.

The stanchion to hold it was on a high street-light on the main road inland from the village. Branches from a tree wove a trellis of obstructions round the post at a level lower than the camera and the light. Its position surprised him, not right for monitoring traffic in a road leading out of a village centre. A hundred metres past the light, the camera, was the side road leading off to the right. He went towards the camera, under it, and its lens would only have caught the dark mass of his coat and hat, not registered his face.

Opposite the side road was a narrow entrance into a garden. A hedge had been clipped around the doorway, which was recessed in the beech leaves that the winter had not stripped. He was in shadow when he crouched on the step, and he tucked his dirt-stained shoes under himself; a man or woman with a dog would have been beside him before he was noticed.

He could see up the side road, and there were distant lights behind trees and hedges, above fences and walls. He settled.

He did not know yet which was Timo Rahman's

home. He did not know where Timo Rahman would meet Ricky Capel. Where else to be, what else to do?

He could not have gone to every hotel in Hamburg, stood at the reception desks and asked if Ricky Capel, importer of narcotics to the United Kingdom, stayed there. This was the only place to begin his vigil.

Cars sped along the main road but their lights did not find him. He was protected by the hedge and the shadows. The cold racked him. He huddled.

It happened very quickly, as his head was clouded with thoughts, all useless.

A car coming down the main road, big headlights powering in front of it. A car coming up the road and braking hard, indicators winking for a turn to the right. The Mercedes was stationary and the approaching lights speared through its windscreen.

He saw the face, the smooth skin that was almost juvenile. The face had been above him. The headlights of the oncoming car lit the eyes. The Mercedes swung into the side road.