The Devil's Breath (18 page)

Standing in the bathroom, soaping his swollen hands, McVeigh visualized the mirror in the bedroom again, the single phrase, caked and brown. Translated, it might help. It might be something specific, another hand-hold on the climb, or it might simply be an insult, the foulest of curses embossed in raw shit by someone whose capacity for violence was probably limitless. McVeigh shuddered, glad to have missed the intruder, and bent to the shaving light over the basin. The hot metal had raised huge blisters, and the palms of both hands had blotched an angry red. The throbbing was back again, and when he tried to flex his fingers the pain made him want to gag. He reached down for the toilet seat, pulling it up, and bent towards the bowl. Then, on the point of throwing up, he saw the photo. It was small, black and white, floating face up in the lavatory. He reached down for it, retrieving it carefully, holding it up, letting the water drip from one corner, the urge to vomit quite forgotten.

The photo showed a younger Yakov, a youth in his late teens, a face newly hatched from adolescence. He was wearing an Army beret and an open-necked khaki shirt. He was grinning at the camera, his face screwed up against the sun. Beside him, smaller, was a girl. She had short black hair, a check shirt, big earrings. Her head was inclined towards him, nestling on his shoulder. In the background was a diving-board and part of a swimming-pool. Someone was standing on the end of the diving-board, contemplating the jump.

McVeigh gazed at the photo, knowing at once that the girl was Cela. Yakov had shown him another photo in London, more recent, an older face, but recognizably the same girl. The same smile. The same big eyes. The same wide mouth, one front tooth a little crooked. McVeigh turned the photo over. On the back, at last, was what he’d come to find, the blue biro still legible on the wet, a date and a name. ‘August 1975’ it read, ‘Kibbutz Shamir’. Underneath, in Hebrew, were another couple of words. McVeigh glanced at them, reaching for a sheet or two
of paper, meaning to wrap the photo and take it away. Then he stopped, one hand outstretched. The words looked familiar. He’d seen them only a minute earlier. Smeared on the mirror. Beside Cela’s bed.

*

Even inside the restaurant, Telemann could still taste the air.

Approaching Halle, early evening, the beginnings of a perfect sunset had disappeared behind a long brown smudge on the horizon. Kilometre by kilometre, the smudge had come closer, yielding its secrets, a black frieze of factories, blast-furnaces, chimney-stacks. The outskirts of the city, a uniform grey, had been blessed with a faint ochre light, the sunset diffused by the smog, the trams packed with workers returning from the day shift, old women wobbling by on ancient bicycles, kids playing football with a rusty can. Cocooned in the Mercedes, the window down, Telemann had watched the city unspooling like a film, yesterday’s Europe, embalmed by communism, tasting of sulphur and cheap petrol.

They’d parked on a triangle of wasteland near the city centre, the girl picking her way through a maze of side-streets. The wasteland was flanked by a once grand building, now abandoned. On the street, while Inge locked the car, Telemann had gazed up at the boarded windows. Over the main door, a sculpted head of Marx looked down on passers-by. Decades of pollution had rotted the porous limestone, eating away at the nose and ears. So much for Comrade Karl, thought Telemann, tasting the air again.

The restaurant was small and bleak, half a dozen tables, all empty. A waiter emerged from the gloom at the back and greeted Inge by name, wiping the tiny bar with his sleeve. Inge smiled at him, pulling on a cardigan against the sudden chill, bending to greet a small black cat. The cat walked sideways towards her, mewing a welcome, sniffing at her outstretched fingers, winding itself around her legs. The cat knows her, thought Telemann, the waiter too. She’s been here before.

They sat at a table near the bar. The waiter brought two beers and a bottle of white wine. He set a third place at the table and glanced enquiringly at the wine. Inge nodded. He uncorked the
bottle and fetched a single wine glass from behind the bar, wiping it with a dishcloth and laying it carefully beside the empty place. Inge glanced at her watch, then looked up at the waiter. ‘
Fünf minuten
,’ she said with a smile.

Telemann looked at her, thinking yet again of Otto Wulf, the name the girl had mentioned, the conversational grenade lobbed into their musings in the car. The details were common knowledge. The man had been a giant in Germany for at least a decade. Too young to be tainted by Nazism, too successful and too rich to be treated with anything less than respect, he’d embodied the very best of Kohl’s bustling new Republic. A chemist by training, but a businessman by instinct, he’d never accepted the permanence of the post-war settlement of Germany. As his interests in the West had prospered, he’d looked increasingly across the border, towards the East, for fresh opportunities, and he’d celebrated his fortieth birthday by endowing a million-Deutschmark fellowship at the University of Leipzig. Wulf’s contacts in the East had always been extensive, and in Washington he’d long been regarded as Moscow’s favourite German. This had cast a certain shadow on his international reputation, but by the late eighties his business interests in the DDR looked like simple foresight. He’d anticipated reunification by at least a decade and now – with the Wall down – he was reaping the profits. Germans, Telemann knew, loved him. Imposing, powerful, eternally tanned, he and his family featured regularly on the front covers of certain kinds of magazine. In middle-class circles, amongst the prosperous burghers of a resurgent Germany, Wulf was ‘
jemand der’s kann
’ … excellent news.

Telemann sipped at his beer, still watching the girl. She was back at the bar, talking to the waiter. For the last hour, in the car, he’d tried to press her about Wulf, but she’d refused to elaborate, changing the subject, shrugging his questions aside. When he’d pushed her hard – Why the mistress? Why the meeting? – she’d finally turned on him, telling him not to be impatient, telling him he’d simply have to wait.

The door opened. Telemann glanced round. A woman stepped into the restaurant. She was middle-aged, small and
blonde, still beautiful, tastefully dressed, a wide, slightly Slavic face. She hung up her raincoat on a hook behind the door, immediately at home, and unknotted a red silk scarf around her neck. Seeing Inge by the bar, she waved. Inge ran across to her, the first real smile Telemann had seen. The two women embraced and Telemann stood up as they turned towards the table.

‘Herr Telemann … Frau Weissmann.’

Telemann nodded a greeting and extended a hand. The woman’s touch was cold. Her smile had gone. She looked wary. They all sat down while the waiter poured a glass of wine. A large plate of black bread had appeared from the kitchen. The waiter left it in the middle of the table. Inge, immediately businesslike, explained briefly that Telemann was a friend. She should trust him. She should tell him everything.

The older woman looked briefly doubtful, reaching for the wine. She picked for a moment or two at a crust of bread, then shrugged. Telemann, wondering whether to seed the conversation with a prompt or a question, decided against it. The two women had already talked. He could sense it. Frau Weissmann glanced at Inge for a last time, then looked down at the table. There was a long silence.

‘You know why I’m here?’ Telemann said finally. ‘You know why I’ve come?’

The woman nodded. She spoke good English, barely accented. ‘Yes.’

‘And you think you can help?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

There was another long silence. The bread lay between them on the table. The waiter had disappeared. Telemann looked at Inge again, wondering for the umpteenth time exactly how much she knew. In the cottage, talking to Klausmann, Telemann had never mentioned the threat of New York. The question had never been asked, and he’d volunteered nothing of his own. Yet the direction their conversation had taken made little sense without, at the very least, a suspicion that somebody was on the loose, with access to something chemical. That had been the
sub-text. You didn’t have to say it to know it. It was simply there.

Telemann looked at Frau Weissmann again. Her fingers were back around the stem of the wine glass. She was having a lot of trouble coming to the point.

Telemann leaned forward. ‘You know Herr Wulf?’ he said.

The woman nodded. ‘I was his secretary. Here, in Halle. There were four of us. I was the most senior. I worked for him for eight years. I knew—’ she shrugged ‘—everything.’

Telemann looked at her, his voice quickening. ‘He ran a company here? In Halle?’

‘Yes.’ She looked up, nodding towards the window. ‘Littmann Chemie. He ran it in partnership with the State. Back when …’ She smiled and shrugged again, an expression of weariness.

‘… there was a State?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

‘You miss all that?’

The woman looked up at him for the first time, the trace of a smile on her lips. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘in some ways I do.’

‘Is that why you’re here? Talking to me? Now?’ He paused. ‘Or is it more personal?’

The woman looked at him for a moment longer, refusing to answer, then she turned to Inge and began to speak to her in German. Her voice was very low yet vehement, her hands clasping and unclasping, the anger evident in her face. As hard as he tried, Telemann could make little sense of what she was saying. It was an intensely private language, gestures as well as words. Finally, the woman stopped, her finger on the table, her last point made. Inge nodded and glanced up. She looked startled, like a child after a surprise scolding. ‘Frau Weissmann is happy to talk to you about Herr Wulf and about Littmann Chemie. But nothing else. You understand?’

‘Sure.’

‘Nothing personal.’

‘Fine by me.’ Telemann nodded, his hands upturned on the table, a gesture of apology. ‘I’m sorry.’

There was another silence, then the older woman leaned
forward again, the hesitation quite gone. She spoke for perhaps half an hour, without interruption. She explained that her relationship with Otto Wulf had been close and that he’d trusted her with a number of sensitive files. Certain of these files related to customers with whom Littmann would not normally have done business. Some of them, she’d come to suspect, were cover names for Middle East terror organizations.

On a number of occasions, she’d accompanied Wulf on three-day trips to the Baltic island of Rugen. There, as well as top names in the State
nomenklatura
, she’d met dozens of young terrorists, Palestinians mostly. They trained for periods of three or six months. They learned about field-craft, explosives, small-arms, surveillance. They were schooled in the ways of the West. They were taught how to lie low in big cities, how to fade into the urban background. These skills they picked up from the DDR’s finest, and they then returned to their sponsors to put the theory into practice.

Talking about these eager young recruits, their spirit, their trust, their enthusiasm, Telemann got the impression that she’d rather liked them. The word she twice used was ‘
Kinder
’. Children. Evidently, Wulf had liked them too. Though for different reasons. At this point in the monologue, Telemann had wanted to interrupt her, scenting more detail, but the expression on her face froze the question on his lips, and he smiled, apologetic again, and gestured for her to carry on.

The story returned to Halle. Amongst other chemicals, Littmann produced dimethylamine. With odium cyanide and phosphoryl chloride, you could make a variety of nerve gases. It was, she said dismissively, a simple process. The company had been doing it for years, supplying thousands of gallons for the armies of the Warsaw Pact. She spoke of Littmann’s track-record with some pride. In this particular field, she said, their product was the best. Worldwide, it had an unrivalled reputation. It was very stable, very effective, the kind of stuff you could trust. Telemann listened to her without expression, thinking of the bodies he’d seen in the Bellevue morgue and the grainy shots of mothers and children lying in the dust in Halabja. She might have been talking about lager.

Sitting in the empty restaurant, her body bent towards the table, her fingers endlessly circling the wine glass, she warmed to her theme. Littmann had always been scrupulous about end-users, the customers to whom various gases had been sold. Recently, though, she’d begun to suspect that the rules had been broken. For whatever reason, in an increasingly complicated life, Otto Wulf had decided to supply small quantities of what he termed ‘Jaegermeister’ to a new outlet. Six months ago, 10 gallons of ‘Jaegermeister’ had left the factory gates, together with some primitive dispensers. The consignment had been coded as ‘industrial detergent’ and, to her knowledge, only two men shared the secret of what was really inside the two 5-gallon drums. One of them worked directly for Wulf in West Germany, and the other had been killed in a recent auto accident. At this point, the wine bottle three-quarters empty, she stopped.

Telemann looked at her. Even the remains of his jet-lag couldn’t hide his excitement. Otto Wulf. Bonn’s favourite businessman. Peddling nerve gas to the rag-heads.

‘Three questions,’ he said softly. ‘Then I go.’

The woman looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. ‘OK.’

‘One. Do you have any paperwork? A file, maybe? Something I can look at?’

The woman shook her head. ‘No. I no longer work for Herr Wulf.’

‘OK.’ Telemann paused. ‘Then I need the name of the guy who works for Wulf. The one you mentioned just now.’

The woman nodded, but said nothing. Telemann hesitated for a moment, then leaned forward again. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Number three. I need to know what Jaegermeister is.’ He glanced up. ‘Jaegermeister,’ he repeated. ‘What is it?’

The woman looked across at Inge and smiled. Then she nodded at the bar, over her shoulder, a private joke. ‘It’s a drink,’ she said finally. ‘Curls your toes.’

‘I know. But …’

‘But what?’

‘What is it really?’