Dying to Tell (15 page)

He shook his head, but said no more. He didn't have to, of course. The conclusion was as obvious as it was dismal. In that case ... we were wasting our time. And had been since boarding the plane to Berlin.

I didn't see it that way. During the taxi ride back to the Adlon, I reminded Hashimoto that Erich Townley had shown every sign of meaning to kill me in Viktoriapark. Why unless questions about his father posed some kind of threat to him? And what kind of a threat could that be if Erich genuinely believed his father to be dead? Hashimoto did not know any more than I did.

Which left us clean out of bright ideas about what to do next. We probably made a disconsolate pair as we plodded into the Adlon and asked for our keys. And that can only have been an encouraging sight for the visitor who was waiting for us.

Rosa Townley was sitting calm and upright in one of the plush-cushioned armchairs in the centre of the lobby. She was wearing another black outfit and was leafing through a copy of Vogue. A Galaries Lafayette carrier-bag was propped beside her chair. She didn't even pretend to be surprised to see us.

"Is your tea party over so soon?" she archly enquired as we perched ourselves on a sofa opposite her.

"How did you know we were staying here?" asked Hashimoto.

"Modern telephones," she replied with a smile. "Hilde checked the number from which you rang her. And since I was in the area this afternoon .. ." She nodded faintly towards the carrier-bag, as if to draw our attention to the fact that we were merely an add-on to a shopping expedition. "I hope Hilde told you what you wanted to know."

"She told us what you wanted us to know," I said. "May second, nineteen seventy-two. Men with knives down Mexico way. We got the message."

"Stephen is dead, Mr. Bradley. Long dead. That is the only message."

"It's the only one being sent, certainly."

"Do you still not believe it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because your son wouldn't have been willing to kill me to protect a dead man."

"Erich has told me exactly what occurred between you and him last night."

"I'm sure he has."

"If anyone should be going to the police, it is him, not you. And he may if you continue to harass us."

"I can hear the echo."

She frowned at me. "What?"

"Inside the hollow threat."

"Frau Townley," said Hashimoto with sudden decisiveness,

'you have twenty-four hours to consider your position. If, after that, you still refuse to tell us where we can find your husband .. ." He shrugged, almost apologetically. "You will leave us no choice."

"Twenty-four hours will change nothing."

"I hope it will change your mind." (Personally, I doubted twenty-four years could work that miracle, but I supposed Hashimoto's tactics were sound enough.) "I am sure none of us wishes to involve the police."

"Then do not involve them." Rosa made a strange little tossing movement of the chin, then rose from her chair, prompting us to stand in our turn like obedient nephews seeing off a respected aunt. "As I have tried to explain to you' she picked up the carrier-bag, which clearly contained nothing much heavier than a pair of gloves, and slipped her Vogue inside' it is your decision."

"An ultimatum, Kiyo," I murmured to Hashimoto as we watched Rosa's exit from the hotel a few moments later, following the fetching from the cloakroom of her superbly cut cream overcoat. "Nice move."

"The only move," he said expressionlessly.

"Do you reckon it'll work?"

"It might."

"And if it doesn't?"

He looked round at me and spread his hands helplessly. "At least we have twenty-four hours to think about it."

If thinking had to be done, I for one had no intention of starting that evening. Hashimoto had discovered that The Magic Flute was on at the Komische Oper and suggested tapping the concierge for tickets. I had to explain that several hours of German opera was the last thing I needed. Leaving Hashimoto to soothe his mind with Mozart, I took myself off to the nearest cinema showing undubbed movies. American Psycho didn't turn out to be the kind of entertainment a man in my frazzled state really needed. It took several drinks afterwards in a dire pseudo-Irish pub to restore my equilibrium. Around midnight,

no mind and body on cruise control, I made it back to the Adlon, confident I wouldn't have to think about anything until morning. I was wrong.

A letter had been slipped under the door of my room. I picked it up (nearly falling over in the process) and tossed it onto the desk, reckoning it was probably notification of a fire drill or lift repairs or some other managerial nicety I could afford to ignore. Then I noticed a red light glowing on the bedside telephone. Message waiting.

I slumped down at the desk and looked at the letter. My name was handwritten in capitals on the envelope MR BRADLEY with my room number in the top left corner. I didn't recognize the writing. I tore the flap open. Inside was a leaflet advertising open-top bus tours of Berlin. I'd already seen a couple of the green-and-cream vehicles pictured on the cover cruising round the streets. There was a timetable on a separate sheet of paper that slipped out of the leaflet as I opened it. It listed the fares and departure times from the Europa-Center and the Brandenburg Gate. Someone had circled the 12.15 departure from the Brandenburg Gate in red ink. Strange, I remember thinking; very strange.

I went over to the telephone, picked it up and pressed the MESSAGE button. A computerized voice told me something (in German, of course). There was a brief electronic pause. Then the message kicked in. "What you've been told is true. I have the letter. I am in Berlin. We must meet. You and me. And Hashimoto. Tomorrow. I will let you know how. Trust me."

I sat slowly down on the bed, pressed the receiver until the line was dead, then stabbed at the MESSAGE button and listened to the recording again.

There was no doubt about it. In fact, there hadn't been from the moment I heard the first word. The voice was Rupe's.

CHAPTER NINE

Berlin was locked in perfect weather. The sky was a flawless blue, the air crisp, the sunshine as warm as the shadows were cool. The 12.15 Berlin City Tour bus nudged out from its stand in Pariser Platz and crawled between the scaffolded pillars of the Brandenburg Gate as the hyperactive multilingual guide hopped around at the front of the top deck, microphone in hand, closely attended by a dozen or so tourists of varied nationality. Sitting beside Hashimoto at the back, meanwhile, I gave little thought to the lofty views of historical sites our 25 Deutschmarks had bought.

Where was Rupe? Nowhere to be seen. We were where he'd told us to be. But he wasn't. "We must meet." He was dead right there. "Tomorrow." Well, tomorrow had come. And so had we. But he hadn't. "Trust me." I was trusting him, all right. And Hashimoto was trusting him as well. But not exactly wholeheartedly.

"How can we be sure it is Rupe on the tape?" he'd fired as his first doubting salvo that morning.

"I recognized his voice, Kiyo."

"Voices can be imitated."

"I couldn't imitate yours."

"That is because you are not a trained mimic."

"For God's sake, it's him. I know it is."

"Let us agree that it probably is. How can we be sure he is not being forced to say these things?"

"Why would anyone want to force us to go on a tourist bus trip round Berlin?"

"I do not know. It does not make sense."

"Unless it really is Rupe."

"But he could meet us anywhere, Lance. Why the bus?"

Which was a good question. And the only answer I'd been able to come up with was a disturbing one. The bus was a safe and neutral venue, with witnesses on hand. And Rupe could see who was waiting for him before he got on. In other words, he didn't trust us. Or maybe he couldn't afford to. But if everything the Townleys and their tame tea-leaf reader had told us was true as Rupe had said it was why was he as nervous as he obviously was? Why the elaborate precautions?

The message had been recorded at 9.27 p.m. Hashimoto had established that in the process of laying hands on the actual tape. (The concierge had clearly thought we were both mad, but had eventually agreed to extract it from the system for us.) Some time after 9.27 p.m. a letter had been dropped off for me at reception. The receptionist had written my name and room number on the envelope. (She couldn't actually recall doing so, but recognized her own writing.) A bellboy had then delivered it (presumably). All of which told us ... very little.

But very little wasn't the same as nothing. Rupe knew we were in Berlin. How? And he knew which hotel we were staying in. How again? Maybe he was keeping the Townleys under surveillance. Or maybe Hilde Voss was supplying him with information. She was clever enough to be playing a double game. The whys crowded in after that thought, of course; the whys and far too many wherefores. If Rupe had been following us, he'd have known I wouldn't be at the Adlon to take his call. Which implied he hadn't actually wanted to speak to me. The message had been all that mattered.

But he was going to have to speak to me soon. And the bus trip gave him plenty of opportunities. No need to book, the timetable declared. Just jump on. Well, the route map showed a dozen or more stops on our hour-and-a-half tour. Rupe could be waiting at any one of them. And I had to hope he was. If he let us down ... If his nerve failed him .. . What you've been told is true'. I'd had that from his own lips. There was nowhere to go after this. My search for Rupe ended here. Even if we didn't find him. Whereas for Hashimoto .. . "I have the letter'.

"What's in the letter, Kiyo?" I'd asked him earlier, as we waited for the bus. "You may as well tell me now. Rupe will, soon enough."

"As you say. Soon enough."

"Come on. What's the point in holding out on me?"

"What is the point of a promise?" he'd countered.

"That you keep it, I suppose you mean."

"No. The point is that it is freely given."

"You're not going to go all Zen on me, are you?"

He'd frowned at me as if genuinely puzzled. "My friend," he said with deliberate emphasis, "I have never been anything else."

Presumably, then, it was some Zen mind-control technique that enabled Hashimoto to remain so much calmer than me as the bus cruised round to the Reichstag, where a giant snake of tourists were queuing to visit the dome, but nobody at all was waiting for the bus. It started to get distinctly chilly as we pressed on through Tiergarten, but our guide was only just warming up, regaling us with tired anecdotes about the places of interest we were passing in which I took no interest whatsoever, but which Hashimoto apparently greeted with rapt attention.

"We're not out here to see the sights," I grumbled as the bus slowly circled some draughty triumphal column. "Keep your eyes peeled for Rupe."

"He will come to us or not, Lance," said Hashimoto. "Looking will not force him into view."

This was true, of course, but hellishly if not Zen-ishly -unhelpful. I kept my eyes peeled. (When they weren't blinking away tears brought on by the cold. Hashimoto, of course, somehow managed to look warm and snug compared with me.) I didn't see Rupe.

Once we were out of Tiergarten and back on city-centre streets, the wind dropped and our pace slowed in the lunchtime traffic. We stopped to take on some people at the Zoo, but Rupe wasn't among them. The guide wittered on about the new church and campanile at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche and analysed the revolutionary architecture of the Berlin Stock Exchange. Then we started tracking back east along Kurfurstendamm, past the Cafe Kranzler, where we'd met Hilde Voss, the sunlight flashing at us from the large gold letters of its sign. It was pushing towards one o'clock now and the Berliners were out in force, shopping and lunching and bustling about their business. It would be easy, I knew, for one man to lose himself in the crowd, to watch us drift by on the bus, squinting against the sun. This, I supposed, was how Rupe had planned it: for us to show ourselves before he had to decide whether to show himself.

We passed Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche again, this time on the southern side, and drew up at a stop a short distance further along Tauentzienstrasse opposite the Europa-Center, the big shopping complex that was the other time tabled departure point for tours. "There'll be a break here of twenty minutes," the guide announced. "If you want to leave the bus to stretch your legs, be sure to be back by one-fifteen, or you'll have to wait for the next bus, at two-thirty."

Everybody else on the top deck but Hashimoto and me got off. The guide went down for a fag and a chat with the driver. The tourists wandered off for some window-shopping. "This could be it," I said, less convinced than I hoped I sounded. "Twenty minutes for Rupe to clock us and come aboard."

"And lots of people to obscure his approach," said Hashimoto, glancing across at the crowded pavement on the other side of the road. "You are right. It is the likeliest place. At the moment ... we have the bus to ourselves."

There were benches spaced along the grassed and flower-bedded central reservation of Tauentzienstrasse, most of them occupied by workers snatching a take away lunch. I craned over the rail and studied each bench in turn. There was no sign of Rupe.

"It would also be a strangely appropriate choice," Hashimoto went on. "You see the sculpture?"

"You mean the pipes?" Halfway along the central reservation, four twisted and interwoven metal tubes several feet in diameter reared from the ground in what I took to be an artistic statement. (One I couldn't remember being there in '84 and of what I couldn't imagine.)

"The pipes. Yes. Nicknamed "Dancing Spaghetti". Symbols of the divided city, according to my guidebook."

"How does it make that out?"

The pipes are intended to represent the severed links of a chain, planted in the earth."

"Oh yeh?"

"A family is rather like a chain, I think. Something to cling to in times of trouble. But at other times ... it chafes. Friendship is the same, is it not?"

"I suppose it is."