In the Evil Day (19 page)
Like his memory.
Beate knocked on the glass. Anselm finished the cigarette and went in.
BAADER CAME into Anselm’s office and slumped in a chair. He put a new case cover sheet on the desk.
‘I gave this to Carla,’ he said. ‘You were busy with Tilders.’
Anselm looked at the form. The subject was someone called Con Niemand aka Eric Constantine, South African, occupation security guard, last seen London.
‘Lafarge Partners?’ he said.
Baader was looking down, fingers steepled. ‘Credit check’s okay. Corporate security. How many corporate security consultants does the world need?’
‘Demand and supply. Ever think about what happens to these people after we find them?’
Baader closed his eyes, shook his head. ‘John, please.’
‘Do you?’
‘This is a business.’ He still didn’t look up.
Anselm went ahead, knew how stupid he was being. ‘These people, they can pay. That’s all we care?’
Baader lifted his fox head. ‘Care? Care about what? Lafarge. Probably run by Catholics. If you like, we could ask the Pope to give them a moral clearance. On the other hand, the Pope cleared Hitler.’
He looked away, not at anything. ‘John, either we provide this service for anyone who can pay or we don’t provide it all. You’re unhappy with that, I’ll give you a very good reference. Today if you like.’
Silence, just the sounds from the big room, the hum of the internal fans cooling sixty or seventy electronic devices, the air-conditioning, noise from a dozen monitors, a phone ringing, another one, people laughing.
‘I’m really tired,’ said Baader. ‘I’ve sold the shares, the car, the apartment. I’m moving to this shitty little apartment, two rooms, all night the trains run past, eye level, ten metres away, the noise, people look at you like you’re in Hagenbeck’s fucking zoo.’
He got up. ‘So I’m not receptive to ethical questions right now. Next year perhaps.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anselm. He was.
‘Yes, well, when you’re in trouble, you too can sell your dwelling. Then you can buy your own island, buy Australia, it should get you enough to buy Australia, world’s biggest island, live happily ever after.’
‘My brother owns the house,’ said Anselm. Baader knew that, he just didn’t want to believe it.
Baader was at the door, he stopped, turned his head, said, ‘War criminals from three wars, Pinochet’s number two executioner, a Russian who leaves five people to die in a meat fridge, a man who swindles widows and orphans out of sixty million dollars, a woman who drowns two children so that she can marry an Italian beachboy. And the fucking rest.’
They looked at each other.
‘Count for something? Yes? Yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Anselm. ‘I’m a prick, Stefan. I’m a self-confessed prick and contrite.’
‘Yes,’ said Baader. ‘Anyway, it’s too late to change. We can’t. You can’t. I can’t. The fucking world can’t.’
Anselm stared out of the window for a long time, just a sliver of lake view, a slice of trees and water and sky, endless sky, the water fractionally darker than the sky. He still had the dreams, dreams about sky, about lying on his back, he was on a hilltop looking at a huge blue heaven, birds passing high above, twittering flocks so large their shadows fell on him like the shadows of clouds, and then the real clouds came, the mountains of cloud, darkening the day, chilling the air.
After a while, his thoughts went to Alex Koenig. It was not a good idea. She wanted something from him. A paper in a learned journal. He was a scalp. No one else had interviewed him. On the other hand…
He started at the knock.
Carla Klinger.
‘Cut your hair, I see,’ said Anselm. ‘I like it.’
She blinked twice, moved her mouth. ‘Two weeks since then but thank you. The new British file, Eric Constantine, Seychelles passport, he hired a car from a Centurion Hire in London.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. Seven days hire. Paid cash. To be returned to the place of hire.’
‘Centurion Hire? How big are they?’
‘One site.’
‘And they’re online?’
‘No. I looked at the big hire companies, nothing, so I thought about what all the small car-hire businesses would have to do. One thing is insure, they have to insure the cars, and I asked an insurance person. In the UK, three insurance companies get most of the hire car insurance. They don’t just insure all of a company’s vehicles, blanket cover. Every hire, they want a record of who the hirer is. Inskip and I opened them up and we found the name.’
She licked her lower lip. ‘Not a great problem,’ she said.
Anselm shook his head. ‘Not for you maybe. For people like me, a great problem. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? Can we run all the British currents through it, see what happens?’
‘Inskip’s doing that now. Then we’ll see what we can do in the States. I don’t know the insurance position there.’
‘You should be in charge here.’
‘Then who would do my work?’
She left. Walking with a stick didn’t make her any less attractive from behind. From any angle.
He went back to looking out of the window. He had said it. He wasn’t necessary. Carla could do her job without him and probably do Inskip’s too.
Baader could save a lot of money by showing him the door. It would cross the mind of someone who’d had to sell his shares, his Blankenese apartment, the Porsche, now lie awake in a two-room postwar walk-up listening to the trains’ electric screech vibrate his window.
Baader could have got rid of him a long time ago.
Baader was his friend, that’s why he hadn’t done it.
It was thirty minutes before his meeting with O’Malley. Anselm got up and put on his good overcoat.
A FERRY was on its way to the Fährdamm landing. Anselm paced himself to get there to meet it. The lake was choppy, north wind raising whitecaps. He got off at the Fährhaus landing and walked back along the shore towards Pöseldorf, along the gravel path through Alsterpark, not many people around, some old people and women with prams, two junkies on a bench, workers sucking up leaves, the devices held at the groin, big yellow whining demanding organs.
A high sky, a cold day slipping away. Anselm thought about how his father had told him that Alsterpark was only as big as it was because so many Jewish families had lived on the west side of the lake and had been dispossessed. They were gone, gone to horrible death or exile, when the Allied bombers came in the high summer of July 1944. Then people walked into the lake to escape the unbearable heat of a city set on fire by teenage boys dropping high explosive bombs, incendiary bombs, napalm and phosphorus bombs. Aunt Pauline talked about it early on the first tape.
I went to the coffee factory that day. Otto, our driver took me. We had two
coffee factories. I used to do the accounts, I couldn’t bear to do nothing. I hated
sitting around the house, I begged to be allowed to do something, it was difficult for
women to do anything in families like ours, you understand. Marriage, children, the
domestic world, that was the domain of women, my mother never questioned that
for one second, she could not understand that women might want something else. I
didn’t have children, of course, so I think she made an exception for me, not a full
exception, she always hoped I’d marry again. I tried to tell her…what was I
saying?
The bombing.
Oh. Yes. I was at the factory in Hammerbrook, in Bankstrasse. I used to work
until late, after 9 p.m., it was summer, it had been terribly hot for weeks. We were
driving back when we heard the sirens and then the bombs started to fall. And we
stopped and got out and we ran to some trees, I don’t know why. After that, you
can’t imagine. The whole world was alight. Buildings fell down. The flames went
up forever, the sky was burning, it looked as if the clouds were on fire. Burning
clouds, like a vision of Armageddon. The heat. There was no air to breath. The
flames burnt up all the air. And the people ran out of the buildings, the screams of
the children. The tar melted, people stuck in the tar. The car windows melted.
Things just burst into flame. We were lying down against a wall trying to get air
from the cobblestones. I was absolutely sure that I was going to die, that we were
all going to die. And then the
Feuersturm
began, it was like animals howling, the
wind, so strong it pulled me away from the wall and Otto grabbed my leg and
hung onto me.
Operation Gomorrah, it was called. How did they choose the name? Whose idea was that? Gomorrah, one of the cities of the plain. The Hamburg fires burnt for nine days. Forty thousand people died, most of them women and children. Nine days of hell, the dead lying everywhere, rotting in the heat, black swarms of flies over everything, and then the rats, thousands of rats eating the bodies. Anselm remembered reading the planner of the raids’ words:
In spite of all that happened in Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane
method.
Air Vice-Marshall Harris.
Relatively. What was the Air Vice-Marshall thinking of ? Relative to what? Auschwitz? Were there relatively humane ways of killing children? Relatively speaking, where did Bomber Harris’ raids rank on the table of twentieth-century horrors that had at its head the cold-blooded annihilation of Jews and Gipsies and homosexuals and the mentally infirm?
Not a cheerful line of inquiry, Anselm thought. Turn to other things. What would Alex want to know? What would he tell her? He didn’t want to tell her anything. This was a mistake, the product of loneliness. His life was full of lies, he could lie to her. But she was trained in lie-detection, she would know. Did that matter? Wasn’t lying the point? You were supposed to lie. The truth was revealed in your lies, by what you tried to conceal. Telling the truth ruined the whole exercise. There was nothing under truth, beyond truth. Truth was a dry well, a dead end. You couldn’t learn any more after you knew the truth.
Anselm walked down Milchstrasse, feeling dated, dowdy. Pöseldorf was as smart as it got in Hamburg. The
Zwischenzeiten
was over now, the people were in winter gear. Shades of grey this year, grey flannel, grey checks, grey leather, soft grey shirts, grey scarves. Grey lipstick even.
Eric Constantine, wanted man, he’d bring the hire car back in a week; people would be waiting. What would happen to him?
Too late. Baader was right.
In the café, O’Malley was at a corner table, in a grey tweed suit, in front of him a small glass and a Chinese bowl holding cashew nuts.
‘More to your taste than Barmbek?’ he said.
It was a French sort of place, darkish, panelled, a zinc bar, dull brass fittings, freckled mirrors, paintings that impoverished artists might have traded for a few drinks, new-shabby furnishings.
‘It’s marginal,’ said Anselm. ‘It’s better than all brown. What’s that you’re drinking?’
‘Sherry. A nice little amontillado fino. Want one?’
‘Please.’ He’d only had two beers and an
Apfelkorn
all day. He looked around. The man behind the counter was talking on the phone. He had a cleft in his chin and highlights in his blonde hair.
Without moving his head, O’Malley caught the man’s eye. He pointed at his glass, signed for two.
‘So, what are these blokes talking about?’
‘We got an earlier conversation. With the Israeli. The
katsa
. Want it?’
O’Malley finished his sherry. ‘That’s extra, is it?’
‘Well, yes. Five hundred, that’s in the basement. We’ll throw in the pictures.’
‘And steak knives?’
The barman arrived with the sherries. He said to O’Malley in English, Irish in his English, ‘You must try the dry oloroso, it’s exceptional, very nutty.’
‘I have no doubt I will,’ said O’Malley. ‘Again and again. Thank you, Karl.’
When the man had gone, Anselm said, ‘You’re a stranger here, then.’
‘He’s a computer bloke, made a few quid in Ireland, now he’s realised his dream, come home, opened this little bistro.’
‘German?’
‘Certainly. From Lübeck.’
‘Ireland. Isn’t there something wrong with that story?’
O’Malley shook his head. ‘Change, John, the world’s changed. Narratives don’t run the same way any more. All the narratives are at risk.’ He drank some sherry. ‘Of course, you’re in the cyberworld most of the time, that’s not real. How are my blokes?’
‘They’re worried. This Spence who is actually Richler is threatening them. The deceased Lourens in Johannesburg apparently left something dangerous behind. Kael is agitated. May I ask what you actually want from these people?’
O’Malley looked at him for a while, rolling sherry around his mouth, his cheeks moving. He swallowed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you may not. But since you take secrets to the grave, I’ll tell you. My clients are looking for assets, thirty, forty million US Serrano and Kael handled in the early nineties. Falcontor. Did they say that name?’
