The Road Between Us (11 page)

‘I’m sorry, Han.’

Hannah puts out her arms and lowers herself on to the floor. She crawls forward and prostrates herself at her father’s feet, circling her hands around his ankles as she had done as a child, a game in which he dragged her around as she clung on.

‘Hannah! What are you doing?’

‘Don’t go again.’ She doesn’t look up as she says this. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

His hand hovers over her hair. ‘Get up off the floor.’

Hannah doesn’t move for half a minute, and then when she slowly rises to her knees, she holds his appalled gaze. She is at the height she had been on the day he left for Afghanistan.

He cups her face in his hands and brushes her wet cheeks with his thumbs. ‘I have to go,’ he says.

Hannah sniffs. ‘Why?’

Edward hesitates before he speaks. ‘You remind me too much of her.’

VI

WITH A WATCH ON EACH WRIST, MIKE BARKER COULD BE MISTAKEN
for a trader in derivatives or equities, especially as the one on his right is set to the Eastern Standard Time of Wall Street, the one on the left the British Summer Time of the Square Mile. That he is also sitting behind one of the finest German engines money can buy – on hand-stitched nubuck leather that still smells of the showroom – adds depth to this illusion. But the dragon tattoos creeping out from under the watchstraps give him away, these and his thick moustache, the sort only a six-foot-two-inch ex-paratrooper with gym-hardened muscles can carry off without looking ridiculous. No one ever laughs at Mike Barker’s moustache.

He checks the left watch now and presses in the ignition key. He has been enjoying listening to the dawn chorus, as he always does at this time of day, and the discreet hum of the V-12 engine does not bring it to an end. The car, a four-wheel-drive Mercedes, is a turbocharged model, so thoroughly black, from the bodywork to the dashboard, it seems to absorb light, giving the impression that it is all part of the same fluid surface.

It has armour-plated doors, run-flat tyres and black-tinted bulletproof windows that do not open. It also has a separate oxygen supply and an emergency medical unit built into the boot space, including blood plasma and morphine. For a six-seater that has been customized to four, it handles well, despite its extra weight.
Indeed, as Mike has discovered when he has taken it to a racetrack to practise his high-speed turns and reverse getaways, it is so well balanced it would take a side impact from a juggernaut to roll it over. Inside there is an electric glass panel dividing the front from the back and, behind the driver’s seat, twin Bloomberg screens showing the FTSE and Dow Jones in red and green zigzags, the only colours permitted in the interior.

Mike puts in the earpiece linked by a transparent coil that disappears behind his collar to a radio receiver attached to his belt. This pack, which is connected to a monitor at Scotland Yard, is to be turned on only in emergencies, but he likes to wear it anyway, feeling it gives his boss some added value. He checks the rear-view mirror, takes in the white-stuccoed house with its bulletproof windows and turns the screens on in readiness. The front door is opening and Friedrich Walser is stepping out into Belgrave Square, a briefcase in one hand, a Nike sports bag in the other.

A sinewy and laconic 56-year-old with a German accent, manicured nails, all-year skiing tan and silver hair that hangs down below his collar, Walser looks more like a Milanese art dealer than a master of the universe. As is his custom, when he reaches the car he gets to his knees as if in Muslim prayer. It is to check for explosives under the 4x4. He knows Mike will already have checked with his mirror device, but for Walser the double check has, as he once explained, become a superstition. Mike doesn’t take it personally. He understands. If anything, it makes him admire his boss even more.

Walser opens the door, acknowledges Mike with a nod, says nothing.

He is known for his silence. According to a profile Mike has read about him in the
Financial Times
, he wears it defensively, like a layer of body armour, but he can also use it offensively, crushing his opponents under its weight, or obliging them to fill it with one-way chatter that puts them at a psychological disadvantage. From what Mike can determine, Walser has been married three times but is single now. And he has few friends at work. While his more
clubbable colleagues in the banking world will cultivate a certain urbanity and wit as tools of their trade, Walser won’t even start a phone conversation with ‘hello’. And he will always be the first through a door that is being held open for two people.

Smiling does not come easily to him either – and when people approach his desk he will wave them away. He protects his privacy fiercely and has for the most part managed to avoid giving interviews to the financial press, despite being the most senior executive in the London division of Rheinisch-Westfälische, the provincial German investment bank he has, over the past four years – and almost single-handedly – turned into a bulge-bracket, mainly through a series of mergers and hostile takeovers. Walser weathered the financial crisis of 2008–9 better than most.

Into the vacuum of Walser’s silence has been sucked a blizzard of rumours, as blinding as it is white. In the 1970s he had been a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, that is one. He has had death threats, hence his obsession with security, that’s another. The most persistent is that his father had been in the SS – the commandant of a concentration camp, no less. Mike has checked the records but hasn’t been able to find any SS members with the surname Walser. Then again, the commandant of a concentration camp would have changed his name after the war, presumably, perhaps when escaping to Argentina with the likes of Mengele and Eichmann.

When the infamous ‘
Arbeit Macht Frei
’ sign disappeared from above the gates of Auschwitz in 2009 there was a rumour that it had been stolen to order, for a collection – Walser’s order, Walser’s collection. Mike has no idea whether that was the truth, but he does know that his boss collects Nazi memorabilia. The usual items: SS ceremonial daggers, Iron Crosses, documents signed by Hitler. Mike has seen them. But he also knows that rumours of this sort are not uncommon about German bankers of a certain age, especially in recent years after it emerged that German banks had loaned the money for the building of the concentration camps. Deutsche Bank had funded Auschwitz-Birkenau; Rheinisch-Westfälische, Bergen-Belsen.

Another rumour doing the rounds at RWB is that Walser’s driver is also a bodyguard, one who is licensed to carry a handgun.

When he started, Mike was approached by one of Walser’s colleagues and asked about this alleged gun. He had merely said that his working arrangements were private; Walser, not the bank, employed him. The colleague said that Walser had a strange habit, that twice a day he would close and lock his office door for five minutes or so. His blinds were always shut anyway. The man had speculated that Walser was having a ‘power nap’ in there – either that or a ‘power wank’. Mike said nothing but took satisfaction from knowing that the man would never have dared say that to Walser’s face. Besides, Mike knows what his boss is doing when his door is locked, and there is another odd habit only he knows about, something Walser does at the same time every day. Mike isn’t about to share that with anyone either, because he respects Walser. More than that, he feels a keen loyalty to him, something approaching devotion.

At 6.30, the car begins its glide towards the City, taking, as usual, a slightly different route from the one taken the day before. Mike turns on Radio 4 so that Walser can hear the news headlines. More phone hacking, more crises for the euro, more about the disruption to flights being caused by the eruption of Norway’s Beerenberg volcano. When the sports news comes on, Mike turns the radio off so that his boss can read the
Financial Times
. He knows his routines. It is one of the reasons Mike likes working for him. Another is the uniform: he is not required to wear one. An open-neck shirt and jacket is fine. The jacket is needed anyway, to cover the shoulder holster in which he keeps his Browning 9mm pistol, the one with the clip filed down and the safety on.

After dropping Walser off at the main entrance of RWB, Mike drives round the side of the building and parks in the underground car park there. He then sips black coffee as he waits in the bank’s refectory, located in the corner of a second-floor atrium. He likes it in here because he can watch the stressed-looking bankers come and go, trying to imagine what it is they do exactly, apart from worry.

He also likes to use the time to catch up on some military history. Today he is reading a critically acclaimed new hardback about the atrocities committed by the Red Army in the final months of the Second World War.

He is so engrossed in the book he forgets the time and when, six hours after sitting down, a text comes through from Walser’s secretary, he feels momentarily disorientated. Can he be ready with the car in five minutes? Walser wants to go to the Imperial War Museum. Mike has driven him there before.

They cross town in their customary silence and, after he has dropped Walser off at the entrance gate to the museum, Mike goes to the Library Street car park, an eight-minute walk away. There, he removes his jacket, unstraps his holster and locks his handgun away in the glove compartment. He had been searched last time they went to the museum and, even though he had been able to produce his small-arms licence and show his security ID card, the police had been called, the gun had been confiscated and the red tape involved in getting it back had been irritating.

Mike doesn’t mind the trips to the museum. Quite enjoys them, in fact. He is obsessed with the Second World War himself and will sometimes plan his whole evening’s viewing around the Führer. The Hitler Channel, as he calls the History Channel, usually has back-to-back Nazi porn, even if, as a fig leaf, they will sometimes squeeze in a documentary about Mary Queen of Scots, or the invention of the steam engine.

Mike takes the stairs rather than waiting for the lift to the Holocaust Exhibition on the third floor. At the top he takes in the sign warning visitors to turn off their mobile phones, as if they are entering a church. In a way they are – a shrine to human suffering.

As he reaches the dimly lit room showing photographs of living skeletons staring mutely into the camera from behind barbed wire, Mike feels the usual gravity descend upon him, a stealthy saturation. He studies an image of a man in civilian clothes kneeling on the lip of a mass grave, an SS soldier holding a gun to his
head. How had they allowed these photographs to be taken? For their records, no doubt – that Germanic craving for bureaucracy always damned them. Another image shows a pyramid of naked female bodies in a mass grave. The caption reveals it is the work of the Einsatzgruppe C, the SS paramilitary death squads in the Ukraine. Mike wonders what it is with the Nazis and nudity. There was something fetishistic about this need to strip people before they killed them. But there was probably a practical reason. Flesh decomposes more quickly than fabric.

Mike sees Walser across the room contemplating a painting. He is folding his arms and putting his hand to his chin. He then takes a couple of steps back and cocks his head. It is an oil painting about three feet by five which shows an SS officer on a black horse. The officer is wearing a black leather jacket, the tails of which are spread out over the back of his saddle. His boots, jodhpurs, gloves and cap are also black. Were it not for the stillness of the painting, its lack of emotion and movement, this SS man might have been one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As it is, he is looking at the gallows to his left, as if contemplating his own fate. The signature and date appear to have been painted over, but a caption on the frame reads: ‘An SS officer believed to be the commandant of a concentration camp, painted during the war by a prisoner.’

Mike gives Walser a sidelong glance and wonders if this is his father. Probably. It would make sense. But he knows better than to ask. Don’t mention the war. He is sure Walser has loaned this painting. Mike hasn’t seen it in his private collection, but a week earlier he had delivered a painting to the museum that was about this size, handing it over to the curator in a packing crate.

He doesn’t know whether it is true or not about Walser’s father being in the SS but even if it is, Mike feels that the sins of the father should not be visited upon the son. He reckons he isn’t a bad judge of character. He finds his boss to be a decent and sensitive man. Those who are suspicious of him do not know how his eyes have a wet film on them whenever he listens to Bach.

As they drive back to the City, Mike puts on a CD of the
Brandenburg concertos, without needing to be asked. After dropping Walser at the bank, he goes for some lunch and then reads his book again, this time in the car. He will not be needed now until after the markets close.

At 5pm he is waiting in the bank’s underground car park. This is the strangest part of his daily routine – the ‘odd habit’ Walser’s colleagues would love to know about. He will drive his boss a couple of miles and then drop him off at Mile End tube. What Walser does then, Mike knows, is none of his business. He will wait there for him, outside the station, and Walser will return in an hour, get in the car and clip on his seat belt without saying a word.

The Nike bag suggests he is going to the gym, but Mike suspects it is something to do with a charity, his boss doing an hour’s voluntary work in a homeless shelter, perhaps. Because that is something else people don’t know about Walser. He makes substantial charitable donations, always anonymously. Mike usually acts as the go-between.

Walser’s latest act of unsung generosity has been to offer Edward Northcote and his daughter, either together, separately or with friends, the use of his château in Alsace, for as long as they like, any time they feel in need of a holiday. Mike had driven round to their house in Parsons Green to deliver the letter personally, and as it wasn’t sealed he had taken the liberty of reading it. Walser explained in it that he had heard about their story in the news and had been moved by it. Northcote’s daughter had opened the door. Mike had liked the way she smiled when she read the invitation; the way dimples had appeared in the corners of her mouth. He left her his card.