In the Evil Day (18 page)
Tilders nodded, flicked back a piece of pale hair that fell down his forehead, separated into clean strands. ‘It appears like that.’
Anselm took the photograph of the man with the missing finger joints down the corridor, knocked. Baader swivelled from his monitor.
Anselm held out the photograph. ‘Calls himself Spence.’
Baader glanced. ‘Jesus, now you’re playing with the
katsas
?’
‘
Katsas
?’
‘His name’s Avi Richler. He’s a Mossad case officer.’
‘Thank you.’
Anselm went back to his office. Tilders put another tape in the machine, watched the digital display, pressed a button.
Serrano:
Richler wants the details. He knows about Falcontor. Bruynzeel too
Kael:
The cunts, the fucking cunts.
Serrano:
I said that to him. He says it’s about our personal safety.
Kael:
They must have holes in their fucking heads if…Jesus.
Serrano:
Well, who brought in the Jews? This boat is making me sick.
Kael:
Don’t be such a child
.
What could be in the papers?
Serrano:
Lourens said to me at the Baur au Lac in ’92 when we were meeting
the fucking Croatians, he was snorting coke, he said people who betrayed him would
have a bomb go off in their faces. He was paranoid you understand…
Kael:
In the papers? What?
Serrano:
I don’t know. I told Shawn to take anything he could find. There
could be instructions. Notes maybe, things he wrote down. There’s nothing on paper
from us. Not directly.
Kael:
What do you mean not directly?
Serrano:
Well, obviously he would have had proof of some deposits I made.
Kael:
Your name would be on them?
Serrano:
Are you mad? The names of the accounts the deposits came from.
Kael:
How secure is that?
Serrano:
As it can be.
Kael:
And this film?
Serrano:
I told you. He said he’d found a film, someone came to him with a
film, it was dynamite. He said, tell them it’s Eleven Seventy, they’ll fucking understand.
That was when he wanted us to go to the Americans to solve his problem.
Kael:
Eleven seventy? And you didn’t ask what it meant?
Serrano:
He was shouting at me, you couldn’t ask him anything. And he was
on a mobile, it kept dropping out. I couldn’t catch half of what he said.
Kael:
You set this up, you’re the fucking expert who’s left us turning in the
wind, you should fucking know better than…
Serrano:
Christ, Werner, he was your pigeon. You brought him to me. You’re
the one who said the Süd-Afs were like cows waiting to be milked, stupid cows,
you’re…
Kael:
You should shut up, you’re just a…
Serrano:
Calm down.
Kael:
Don’t tell me to calm down.
A long silence, the sounds of the ferry, something that sounded like a series of snorts, followed by laboured breathing.
Silence, sounds of movement, a cough.
Kael:
Paul, I’m sorry, I get a bit too excited, this is a worrying…
Serrano:
Okay, that’s okay, it’s a problem, we have to think. Richler wants an
answer today.
Kael:
You know what they want to do, don’t you?
Serrano:
Maybe.
Kael:
They want to tidy up. And they want the assets.
Serrano:
These boats, I’m not getting…
Kael:
Tell him we agree but it’ll take time. Seventy-two hours at least.
Serrano:
Where does that get us?
Kael:
They’ll have this prick by then. If what he’s got is bad for us, we’re
possibly in trouble. If not, we haven’t handed them our hard work on a plate.
Serrano:
You don’t actually think he’ll believe me?
Kael:
Of course he won’t. But they won’t take a chance.
Tilders switched off. ‘That’s it,’ he said.
‘Good bug,’ said Anselm. ‘You’re doing good work.’
‘Another put and take…’ Tilders shook his head.
‘If you can’t, you can’t. We don’t want to spook anyone.’
Tilders nodded. His pale eyes never left Anselm’s, spoke of nothing.
‘THERE’S MONEY in my account I know nothing about,’ said Caroline. ‘Ten thousand pounds.’
Colley was looking at her over the
Telegraph
, narrow red eyes, cigarette smoke rising. ‘Wonderful, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you noticed. Perhaps mummy popped it in.’
‘The bank says it’s a transfer from the Bank of Vanuatu. An electronic transfer.’
‘Electronic money. Floats in cyberspace, falls anywhere, at random. Like old satellites. Finders keepers. Congratulations.’
‘I’m declaring it to Halligan, I’m handing it over.’
He lowered the paper. ‘Are you? Yes, well, that’s probably a sound thing to do. In theory.’
‘In theory?’
‘Well, it may be a bit late to develop principles. After you’ve played the bagwoman.’
Caroline wasn’t sure what he was saying. She had no anger left, it had taken too long to get the bank to tell her where the money had come from. The blood drained from her face. She was no longer certain that she knew what had happened. But she had a strong feeling about what was happening now and she felt cold.
‘I’ve been set up,’ she said. ‘You know about this, don’t you?’
Colley shook his head. He had an amused expression. His strange hairs had been combed with oil and his scalp had a damp pubic look.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But if you’re unhappy, that probably stems from something unconnected with the present situation. It could come from realising that you’re just a pretty vehicle, a conduit. Something people ride on. Or something stuff flows though.’
She had no idea what he was talking about. ‘I’ve been set up.’
‘You’ve said that, sweetheart. Remember? Not too much nose-munchies with the public schoolboys last night? All I know is you came to me with a proposition involving paying someone for something that we could make a lot of money out of. I told you that the right thing to do was to go to Halligan. I said I wanted nothing to do with your proposal.’
He opened a drawer, took out a flat device. ‘You’re out of your depth here. Like to hear the tape?’
Caroline felt the skin on her face tighten, her lips draw back from her teeth of their own accord. She turned and left the room without saying anything, went down the corridor, through the newsroom. In her cubicle, door shut, she sat at the desk with her eyes closed, clenched hands in her lap.
Out of your depth.
Her father had said those words, those words were in her heart. The image came to her of her toes trying to find the bottom of the pool, toes outstretched, nothing there, the water in her mouth and nose, smell of chlorine. She could still smell chlorine anywhere, everywhere, smell it in the street, anywhere, any hint of it made her feel sick. Her father had used the phrase that day when she was a little girl wan from vomiting and he had repeated it every time she failed at anything.
She shut the memory out, stayed motionless for a long time. Then she opened her eyes, pulled her chair closer to the desk, and began to write on the pad.
Out of her depth? Go to Halligan and tell him the whole story? Who was going to be believed? Colley had a doctored tape. She had no hope.
Out of your depth.
No. Death before that.
The phone rang.
‘Marcia Collins. You probably don’t remember me. I’m the features editor now. Does your personal arrangement with the executive branch permit me to ask what the hell you’re doing? Am I allowed to ask that?’
‘No, you aren’t,’ said Caroline. ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’
A silence.
‘I suppose you’ve heard they found your little Gary. Dead of an overdose. Been dead for days.’
WHEN TILDERS had gone, Anselm went out on the balcony and smoked a cigarette, watched him drive away. He looked down at the unloved roses and thought about his first days in the family house.
On his second morning, he had woken in fright from a drunken sleep and did not know where he was. He had been fighting the top sheet, twisting, it was tight around him. He’d lain back and felt his hair. It was wet with sweat. He got up. The pillowslip was dark. He stripped it from the pillow. It gave off a chemical smell, the smell of the pink fluid the doctor gave him to drink before he left the hospital.
In the huge tiled bathroom, pissing into the rusty water in the toilet bowl, the same smell had risen, richer now, it sickened him.
He showered, standing uncertainly in the huge bath. Water fell on him, a warm torrent, he was inside a rushing tube of warm water. He did not want to leave it. Ever. But eventually he went downstairs. There was bread and butter and tea, tea in bags, a box of leaf tea. He made toast and tea, that was an ordinary thing to do.
An ordinary thing on an ordinary morning.
Tea brewed in a china pot. In a kitchen. Toast with butter.
He had thought it gone forever.
He’d made two slices of toast, put them on a plate, and put the pot of tea and the toast and butter and a bowl of sugar on a tray and gone out onto the terrace. There was an old, dangerous chair to sit on and a rusty garden table. He’d gone back and forth to the kitchen and, in all, eaten seven slices of toast, toast with butter, just butter. He drank three cups of tea from the English china cup, roses on it.
Just eating toast and drinking tea, sitting in the sunshine in the wobbly chair, massaging the two fingers on his left hand, he could not remember more peace in his life.
Then he was sick, he could not reach the bathroom.
He had not left the house for two weeks. There was enough food and drink for ten weeks, more. He did nothing, existed. The milk ran out, he drank black tea. He sat in the spring sun, dozed, tried to read
Henry Esmond
, found on his great-aunt’s bedside table, drank gin and tonic from before midday, ate something from a tin, slept in an armchair smelling faintly of long-dead dog, he had a memory of the dog, a spaniel, one eye opaque. He’d woken dry-mouthed, empty-headed, drunk water, poured wine, watched television in the study, not very much of anything, often went to sleep in the chair, woke cold in the small hours.
His brother had rung every second day. Fine, said Anselm, I’m fine. I’m pulling myself together. He had no idea what together would look like. There were terrifying blanks in his memory of the years before the kidnap—big blanks and small blanks, with no pattern to them. They seemed to go back to his teens. It was hard to know where they began.
He’d exhausted his clean clothes. Where was the laundry? He’d remembered a passage off the kitchen leading to a courtyard. The washing machine was unused for a long time, the hose disintegrated, water everywhere. He washed his clothes with old yellow soap in the porcelain sink, found a pleasure in it, in hanging the washing in the laundry courtyard.
And every day, he’d walked around the garden, looking at the roses, smelling them. One morning, when he woke, he’d known what he was going to do. Before noon, he left the house for the first time.
He knew where the bookshop was. He had been there on his last visit to his great-aunt, on his way to Yugoslavia. He had bought her a book.
He walked a long route, up Leinpfad to Benedictstrasse and down Heilwigstrasse and through Eichenpark and on to Harvesterhuder Weg and through Alsterpark. He walked all the way to the Frensche bookshop in the Landesbank building. In the crowded shop, he was assaulted by fear bordering on panic but he found the book. It was waiting for him, twelve years old, never opened, an encyclopaedia of roses. He paid and left, sweating with relief.
He walked down to the Binnenalster, bought a sausage on a roll from a street vendor, sat on a bench in the sun and opened the book. His was the hand that cracked its spine. He looked at the pictures, read the descriptions, while he ate. Then he walked all the way home, too scared to catch a bus, and, exhausted, went around the garden trying to identify the roses. It was more difficult than he had imagined. He was sure about Zephirine Drouhin at the front gate,
Gruss an Aachen
on the terrace, Madame Gregoire Staechelin on the wall, and three or four others.
But that wasn’t enough. He wanted to know the name of every rose in the garden, and there were so many he couldn’t be sure of— the pictures were fuzzy, the descriptions too imprecise.
