Pavel & I (48 page)

And so they went inside. Woke up the caretaker in the ground-floor flat with a rap on his window, bade him unlock the front door, and vanished inside. Karpov sent the other Russian in after, to keep guard at the bottom of the stairs, then positioned himself near the door, always keeping his eye on us, the hostages. A working-class neighbourhood, two blocks north of the Tiergarten; a horse butcher's on the corner next to a derelict beer cellar with no glass in the windows. Nobody spoke. Sonia sat stone-faced, her hands drawn back into ample sleeves; shoulders squared, feet planted, fast, shallow breaths through a half-open mouth. To her left sat Anders. He kept glowering at me, mistaking me for young Salomon's killer, then cocked his head to listen for internal seepage. Pavel's talk about internal bleeding must have got to him: a twelve-year-old boy, face to face with his own mortality. His hands searched his belly, to test it for swelling, defiant eyes turning to fear. As for myself, I kept my eye on the General, six foot tall and sleek in his greatcoat. He took a gamble when he sent Pavel up to act as his mouthpiece, a strategy aimed at defusing those first few seconds of shock in which a man might do something foolish, before the realities hit home and accommodation replaced rebellion as the motive force of action. It wasn't much of a gamble – Lev's gun made sure of that – but a gamble nonetheless. I thought I knew its origin. Karpov
liked
Pavel. The way they had stood together, sharing a smoke, their faces lighting up with every puff. While Lev paced and awaited orders, they shared a moment's peace: time enough to discuss procedure, and to comment on a woman's beauty. We in the car witnessed it all with stoic resignation; slaughterhouse cattle on the threshold of the knacker's barn. All we could do was watch and wait. I remember that, despite the cold, sweat kept gathering on the inside of my eye-patch until I was forced to mop it up with a corner of my handkerchief.

The caretaker held the door open for them, then quickly disappeared back into his apartment; he had long since learned to display no curiosity. Pavel mounted the stairs, reading the nameplates off doors whenever they got to a new landing. Lev was right behind him, his eyes transparent in the staircase light. Here and there he would stop to spit tobacco from one corner of the mouth. They stopped on the fourth floor, in front of a door marked ‘Braun'. A sliver of light bled from under its wood.

‘He's pretending he's Braun?' Lev asked.

‘No. He's hiding with the Brauns. Now, not another word. I do the talking.'

Pavel reached out a hand and twice rapped the door. A shadow moved inside the apartment's hallway, then the silence of indecision.

‘Who is it?' sounded through the door.

‘Herr Braun? We need to talk to you. Open up, please.' His German gentle and educated; a doctor making a house call. The door opened a crack.

‘Who are you?'

‘Please,' said Pavel. ‘Don't do anything stupid. All we want is to talk to the Professor.'

The man started to say something, a denial of knowledge, and close the door on them. Then he saw Lev's gun. It wasn't pointed at anything in particular but he got the point.

‘Russians?' he asked.

‘I'm American. Please. We just want to talk.'

The man hung his head and let them in. Chez Braun: a room, a kitchen, and the toilet out on the landing. In the living room the marital bed stood squeezed right next to the sofa. A cracked mirror adorned the wall. The place smelled of cauliflower and burned wood varnish. One kitchen cupboard lay dismantled to serve as firewood. Braun's wife turned at the cooker, wearing her coat indoors against the cold. She saw the gun and started crossing
herself. Pavel nodded to her in greeting, then put a finger to his lips.

‘Where is he?' he asked, the voice reassuring even in whisper.

By way of an answer Braun pushed to one side the sagging sofa. It slid with ease, the floor long worn smooth by the motion. The backboard hid a half-sized door, visible only by its wooden knob and hinges. Pavel bent to open it, but Lev shouldered him aside. He took a deep breath, flaring his nostrils, then tore the door open and leapt inside.

Behind the door lay a closet big enough for a cot and a writing desk, minus the chair; one would have to work from bed. On the cot sat the Professor: an elderly man wearing a dressing gown over his sweater and slacks; the eyes overlarge behind thick slabs of glass; Prussian whiskers and an unkempt air of genius. There was no window from which he could have thrown himself, but even so Lev took no chances. He jumped on the old man and pushed him into the wall; tied his wrists with a length of wire, then stuck two fingers inside his mouth to search his gums for cyanide. It was a well-executed, methodical arrest. He even confiscated the man's glasses for purposes of disorientation. Pavel watched it all through the open door. He only stepped through once Lev had straightened up, pleased with his handiwork. There was a bloom of colour on the Georgian's cheek, from the exercise. The Professor, by contrast, was deathly pale.

‘Manfred! Wilma!' he called out past the two men who filled his closet. ‘Who is this? Are they Russians?'

‘The dark one says he is American. He speaks German, though.'

A glimmer of hope woke in the Professor's myopic eye. Lev yanked him up by the crook of his arm, then dropped him back on the cot when he saw Pavel moving to intervene. The gun rose and perched itself in the soft of Pavel's neck.

‘Easy now.'

‘I just wanted to ask him to collect his papers.'

He gestured to the stacks layered upon desk and floor; page upon page of equations and notes, all in the same fastidious hand. ‘Karpov will want them.'

Lev considered this. ‘You do it. Haldemann can give you instructions.'

Pavel bent to follow the command, but there was hardly enough space to move. Grudgingly, Lev backed out of the doorway in order to make space. He sat crouching in the exit, his eyes alert to each of their movements. The Brauns stood behind him, holding hands. Bent low, picking up papers, all Pavel could see of them were their legs and those hands, folded in companionship. To his side, still lying on his cot, the Professor quietly began to weep.

‘You need to tell me which of the papers are the most important, Professor. We can't take them all.' Pavel located a leather satchel and opened it up. ‘How about this folder here? Will you need this?'

‘What will you do to me?'

‘You are a famous man, Professor. These people' – he pointed to Lev – ‘they just want to talk.'

‘He's a Russian?'

‘Yes, he is.'

‘Oh God.'

Haldemann lost control of himself then: broke into sobs that shook his whole body, until Pavel laid a hand on his cheek and shushed him like a little girl. Abruptly, in between sobs, the man told him about his modest little dream. It was as though he had rehearsed it. All he'd ever wanted, he told Pavel, was a cottage by the sea. The Ostsee, if he had any choice, though any sea would do, he loved the smell of it, the brine and the sand; it reminded him of childhood. And in this cottage he would devote himself to the breeding of snails. Pavel thought he had misunderstood at first; mixed up the word, or simply misheard. Then it dawned on him.

‘For eating, you mean?' he asked him, still busy stroking Haldemann's hand.

‘
Ja, ja,
' the man nodded. ‘For eating.' He mimed the act of sinking his fork in a shell and eating its contents, his cheeks dry now, though still salty with tears.

‘Professor,' Pavel told him politely, ‘you need to tell me which papers to pack.'

Behind them, in the doorway, Lev barked at them to hurry the fuck up.

There may have been time, in that closet, to smuggle a question past Lev's vigilance. A moment was all Pavel needed. Surely he will have wanted to know how much Karpov's prize was really worth. I know that I have lost sleep over it for a good twenty years. He must have asked him, then. Surely he will have asked. About the German bomb. How close they had got, Haldemann and his colleagues, down in their underground lab. Perhaps it hadn't been so much a question as an exchange of glances while he tended to the Professor's tears: a touch, a gesture, a twitch of the mouth. Enough to constitute a question and an answer, and perhaps just a little bit more: an agreement about their mutual future.

I know it must have happened, back in the Brauns' closet, in that half moment when Lev patted his pockets for a fresh twist of tobacco, or when the
Hausfrau
distracted him with her confused offer of a cup of
Ersatzkaffee.
It eludes me, however, the precise nature of their secret communication. Try as I might, I have never been able to put it down on paper. It is a hole at the centre of the story. It isn't the only one.

His dream divulged, Haldemann calmed down sufficiently to assist in the selection of his papers. Pavel filled up the satchel, then helped
the old man step through the half-sized doorway and into Lev's custody. The wire cuffs were biting into the Professor's wrists and cutting off the circulation; his hands looked grey and lifeless. He may never have felt Pavel's furtive squeeze designed to wish him good fortitude. Without another look at the Brauns, Lev marched them out into the corridor, Haldemann walking first, and the Russian last, his gun in Pavel's back. Short-sighted and unable to support himself against the banister, the Professor moved very slowly, probing for the stairs with his feet before every step. He stopped to catch his breath on the third-floor landing, Lev skittish and snarling at him to keep moving.

‘I really thought you would try something,' he said to Pavel as they resumed their descent. ‘Karpov said you'd be the kind of man to try something. He said he read it in your file.'

Pavel just shook his head.

‘That mysterious file,' he complained. ‘I don't know where you got it from, but someone's been telling you stories.'

Lev grinned and spat tobacco on the floor.

On the second-floor landing, Pavel missed a step and stumbled forward. He fell into Haldemann's back, then reached out with his arms, to catch him lest he fall. His pale, fine-fingered hands missed the old man's shoulder and grabbed his neck and chin instead.