She glared at Weber, who had no idea what was going on.
‘You bastard, you absolute fucking bastard.’
Weber disclaimed all knowledge, but being drunk and cantankerous, he wasn’t believed.
‘So the question, Dr Weber, is how you gained access to plant it. You have a key to these premises?’
‘For God’s sake, man, if I had a key, why would I hammer on the door? I’d use it to let myself in!’
‘So you borrowed the neighbour’s key?’
‘No way. That interfering old bastard wouldn’t give me the time of day.’
Cooper had an explanation for that. ‘Smelled your breath once too often.’
It was obvious to the officers that if Weber hadn’t planted the device himself, someone had done it for him.
‘Frau Cooper, has anyone other than yourself been here in recent weeks? Cast your mind back.’
‘No. Yes.’
The officers exchanged glances; these academics, they swam in a sea of contradictions.
‘So which is it?’
She had suddenly remembered that just over two months ago, she’d retained the services of a cat sitter while she visited her mother in England.
‘Ah.’
‘What do you mean, Ah?’
‘Well, it must be obvious that a cat sitter, by nature of the job, will have access to apartments all over the city.’
‘If not the entire Federal Republic,’ Weber said in a sneering tone.
‘And the name of this person?’
‘Trudi. Trudi Kirsch. But honestly, she’s one of the most conscientious people I’ve ever met. There’s no way she would do a thing like that.’
‘Trudi Kirsch,’ Weber said, ‘never heard of the woman!’
‘I don’t understand it,’ Cooper said, looking through to the hall, ‘that door’s like a safe; it locks in three places when you turn the key.’
‘It is indeed very strong,’ one of the officers agreed, ‘but the same cannot be said of the frame.’
‘And there you have modern life in a nutshell,’ Weber suggested, to raised eyebrows all round.
‘We live in a world where covering one angle well is no longer enough. In times like these we must learn to cover them all.’
The drink was talking again and as usual had nothing of interest to say.
When the officers left, taking her father with them, Herr Bangert offered her refuge in his apartment for the night. Schnucki was welcome too, though he didn’t like the idea and took some rounding up.
‘Where to put his litter tray,’ Herr Bangert wondered, ‘oh well, we’ll find a place. Oh, and by the way,’ he added, sliding it into a corner of his bathroom, ‘I really can’t see why your father would bug you. In my experience, he always wants to be right there. In your face, as you young people say.’
*
Later that night, stretched out on Bangert’s spare bed, this question started to bother her. Yes, the old man was right; bugging her apartment wasn’t her father’s style at all, which raised the find from irritating to ominous.
She didn’t believe for a moment that Trudi Kirsch was involved, but to set her mind at rest fired off an email asking if a stranger claiming to be her father had talked his way into her apartment. Trudi replied within the hour. The only person she had allowed into the apartment was the person she’d mentioned in one of her daily reports, a man from Ökostrom checking the power supply.
Looking back through her messages, Cooper found it; according to Kirsch, the employee had identified himself as H Fischer. Armed with a name and date, she called the company. Unfortunately, Fischer was a common surname and she couldn’t provide a first name to go with it. And Ökostrom, mindful of their duty with respect to data protection, would only go so far as to confirm that while they employed an H Fischer, she was a woman. Things got even more interesting when they disclaimed all knowledge of a power surge in Heinrich-Roller-Straße on the day in question.
‘In any case, Frau Cooper,’ they pointed out, ‘even if there had been, sending someone round would have served no useful purpose.’
37
Saito was first to arrive. Even though the door had been repaired, she noticed signs of damage at once. A painter was due, Cooper said, though Herr Bangert had pointed out that she might have a long wait. Tenant security was one thing, but cosmetic considerations such as damaged paintwork were lower down the list.
‘I have green tea.’
‘I’m happy with that.’
Parking her suitcase in the hall, Saito sat on “the opposite sofa”. Until now they hadn’t met face-to-face and if first impressions counted, no one had told Cooper. Clad in baggy trousers and an even baggier sweater, she was close to shapeless. Her hair, though well looked after, hadn’t a hint of style. Saito also noted a complete absence of makeup. Which could simply have been because Cooper hadn’t been planning to leave the house, but she doubted that.
Cooper no longer cared much how she looked. As for Saito, what struck Cooper most was how neat she was, right down to the way she perched with her cup on the edge of the sofa. She had to hope that her outward appearance reflected a habit of mind. Her attention to detail might yet protect them all.
‘So,’ she said, when Cooper had laid it all out, ‘we have the unacceptable behaviour of your father to thank for this discovery.’
‘We do. About the only thing I have to thank him for.’
Saito mimed a writing movement.
‘Really?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
Provided by her host with a used envelope and a pen, Saito started writing.
Are you sure there was only one?
An alarming question which hadn’t occurred to Cooper. She shook her head.
Saito wrote again. Keep talking but not about this. Don’t address me by name.
‘So how was your flight?’
As they searched the apartment, Saito explained how boring it had been, how she’d passed over Home Alone 2, not to mention City Slickers 3, and how relieved she was when her plane finally touched down at Tegel. It had actually landed at Schoenfeld but already Saito was covering her tracks.
When they found nothing in the bedroom, they headed for the bathroom.
‘Surely not here. Is nothing sacred!’
Saito held a finger to her lips. ‘Probably not.’
A thorough search of the hall, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom came up with nothing but cobwebs, crumbs and a few pellets of dry cat food “for the middle-aged cat”, so they returned to the sofa, where they were unexpectedly joined by the animal in question. He sidled up to Saito as if he’d known her all his life.
‘You’re honoured. He usually hides from strangers.’
Then she noticed that Saito, while pretending to stroke him, was actually checking his collar for bugs. She couldn’t believe it.
‘You must be joking.’
‘I don’t joke.’
This was becoming clearer to Cooper by the minute. They sat in silence for a while, Saito deep in thought. Then she started writing again.
We haven’t searched this room.
Cooper grabbed the envelope and wrote back. The police already did that.
Maybe they missed something.
Saito found the second device under Schnucki’s sofa and wrote some more.
We have to leave this apartment. We have to talk.
Cooper put her coat on and led Saito to the park across the road from her apartment, the Leise Park. Saito was particularly taken with the remains of the old cemetery, lingering at several gravestones. Apart from the dates, she couldn’t make sense of the inscriptions. She stood for a while before a stone to the memory of Wolfgang Ritter, deeply loved and painfully missed.
‘He was their only son,’ Cooper explained, ‘they would no doubt have expected
to die before he did.’
Saito intended to cause the deaths of many more sons and daughters, but this was an ambition held in the abstract without reference to specific individuals with names and dates and now, looking at these gravestones, she felt strangely sad. When millions died, where would be the room for their headstones then? Come to that, how many truckloads of coins would be required to equip each of the dead with the six they needed to traverse the River of Three Crossings to the fabled life beyond?
They carried on along the narrow arc of the path till they came to a bench. Cooper considered it an ideal spot for private conversation; it was hardly likely that the security services had bugged the trees when they couldn’t have known they were coming. She’d just said as much to Saito when Cindy Horváth called.
‘We’ll be arriving soon.’
We? What did she mean, we? The rendezvous concerned security. No one not invited should have known it was taking place, yet here was Horváth coming with her latest boyfriend in tow.
‘Perhaps,’ Saito suggested, ‘we could have been clearer on the nature of this meeting. It is not a lovers’ outing.’
By “we”, she really meant Cooper but was too polite to say it.
‘So, Cindy, who is this person? Exactly?’
‘József Báthory. He’s fabulous.’
‘Right. And what does he do, this man?’
What he did was set her body on fire, but Horváth felt that news of that sort could wait. And what did it matter anyway? The fabulous József was meeting friends in town; he wouldn’t be attending. When Cooper ended the call, Saito, normally impassive, looked anxious.
‘We have twenty minutes before she arrives; we have to get things clear.’
Cooper’s apartment had been bugged. Since she didn’t know who had done it, they had to assume the worst. Shaken by the thought that every move she made was being watched, her first instinct was to call the whole thing off. The odds, never good, were stacked against them now. Surely Saito could see that? In any case, she wasn’t cut out for life on the edge, every waking moment consumed by anxiety, every night’s sleep troubled by recurrent intimations of disaster.
‘You want to give up.’
‘I don’t want to; I just don’t see what other choice we have now. Rationally speaking.’
Listening to this, Saito was worried too, less by the evidence of surveillance than Cooper’s lack of resolve.
‘I had always understood,’ she said, looking her in the eye, ‘that our species was vertebrate.’
When Cooper caught up with this, she realised that Saito was accusing her of lack of backbone and didn’t like it.
‘Fine, but what do you suggest?’
According to Saito, there were two ways to play it. They could remove the second device, thus alerting the authorities to the fact that it had been discovered or, and she preferred this idea, they could leave it where it was and use it to misinform, thus keeping one step ahead. This last suggestion appealed to Cooper too, perversely attracted to deviousness because it didn’t come naturally to her.
‘You’re saying we can use it to our advantage.’
‘Provided we’re methodical.’
Saito wanted to know what the bugs had heard up till now, which forced her friend to think back in time, something she wasn’t good at. Who had visited her apartment lately?’
‘Cindy, Magnus. And Herr Bangert, of course, but he doesn’t count.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘That’s it.’
To Cooper’s surprise, Saito produced her mobile phone and raised a document.
‘So,’ she said, ‘Cindy and Magnus arrived on the same day, Sunday the eleventh of December.’
Cooper was astonished. ‘I couldn’t have told you that myself!’
Saito didn’t doubt it for a moment. ‘And they left the following day?’
‘Yes, but while they were here, they kept banging on about nuclear explosions, dirty bombs and other Magnus-like things. Very damaging.’
‘But Catherine, that was before Christmas. We already know the bugs were planted after you’d left to visit your mother. Based on Trudi’s daily report, that would be January the second.’
Cooper was relieved. ‘None of it was picked up?’
‘Not a word. So unless you’ve talked to someone else…’
She was clear on that point; she had talked to nobody else. But much can hang on a definition. It didn’t occur to Saito to ask if Cooper talked to her cat any more than it crossed Cooper’s mind to tell her.
They heard some children playing in the distance, no harm in that while they still had the life in them to do it. Saito leant forward and whispered in Cooper’s ear, noticing as she did that despite the absence of earrings, the lobe had been pierced.
‘You realise your apartment may be under observation. Someone may even be watching us here.’
Neither of these possibilities had occurred to Cooper, who assumed that coming to the park would be enough to ensure privacy. She checked the nearest bushes, trees and gravestones, but as far as she could see, no one was lurking behind any of them.
‘We must assume,’ Saito continued, ‘that we are under suspicion and so we give them nothing to go on, nothing at all, while reassuring them by way of the second device.’
‘And how do we do that?’
To Saito that was obvious: by referring from time to time to the stated objectives of Future World, which, helpfully, were the opposite of their true intentions.
‘’But in doing this, we must not hit them over the head with a hammer. It must be done in a light, glancing way, and not so often as to seem deliberate. You may wish to practise this.’
Cooper didn’t think so. ‘In front of a mirror, I suppose.’
Her sarcasm was lost on Saito. ‘That will not be necessary.’
Trailing behind her a bright pink suitcase on wheels, the glamorous Cindy arrived in a fragrant cloud of counterfeit Joy ten minutes later than advised. Since she seemed to have forgotten the purpose of the meeting, Saito told her of the latest security breach in Cooper’s apartment.
‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Well, maybe my friend József can help with that.’
Saito and Cooper exchanged glances; they didn’t like the sound of this at all.
‘And how might that be, Cindy? What would qualify this József of yours to help?’
Horváth looked suitably vague; the question was as irrelevant as it was unexpected.
‘Didn’t I say? I thought I had. He’s with the Hungarian security service. But that isn’t a problem, really. As you can see, I didn’t bring him with me. In any case, he didn’t want to come; he had other fish to fry.’
Cooper was furious. Horváth had praised this man’s prowess between the sheets so he must already have had ample opportunity to plant a bug in her clothing, her bag or one of her many shoes. Now they would have to avoid serious issues until these angles had been covered.
Horváth was happy to play along but she had news of her own. Magnus had messaged her the day before; the boy was in hospital following an accident with a forklift truck which, according to him, had been entirely the other guy’s fault. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it!
‘So I would say it’s entirely down to the girls now. Agreed?’
At which point Cindy Horváth, seductive star of her own YouTube channel, sitting with her friends on a park bench in Berlin, took her cell phone from her coat pocket, switched on its illuminated case and checked her makeup in the light of its many LEDs.
38
Rafael Munoz shared an apartment with a research student who paid his bills on time. That he did this out of fear of falling into a deep hole of debt from which he would never escape was fine by Munoz who, from his childhood years in León, knew a thing or two about poverty. On the downside, and though to outward appearanc
es a man, Aleksander Nekrasov was an ardent feminist; perhaps to be expected, Munoz thought, in one whose discipline was social science, a field of study neither disciplined nor scientific. So when the package arrived and Nekrasov signed for it, Munoz had a problem.
He’d known it was coming. Saito had given him several hints, but its arrival one day ahead of the tracker’s projected arrival date took him by surprise. From which he concluded that efficiency had its disadvantages, and efforts to achieve it were themselves inefficient. This in turn gave him the rationale he required to lie in bed longer than he should of a morning, and to consume more food and drink than his body required, though as a result, its volume was increasing by the month and might yet reflect his consumption. But the problem he had right now was that Nekrasov, having taken delivery of a large parcel marked FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE, wanted to know what was in it, and Munoz had no wish to tell a feminist of either gender that it contained a silicone sex doll. That, and a covering note from Gina Saito.
Finally secure in his room, Nekrasov boring himself solid in a library somewhere, and serve him right, Munoz read Saito’s note, which assured him that now he could have it whenever he wanted. She hadn’t thought too deeply about what “it” might be, as if even thinking about it might require the application of disinfectant. But it was instantly clear to Munoz that he could have his way with Ai whenever the mood took him. And Ai would be more compliant than Saito, which wouldn’t be difficult.
He was beginning to consider the various positions he could adopt with this beauty from the box when he came across the manual. Having waded through more than his fair share of user guides, he always believed that if such things couldn’t be understood intuitively, as real women never could be, then they were useless. So he was disconcerted to find thirty-five pages of instructions. Consumed with desire, he raced through several sections, with helpful diagrams for the verbally challenged, outlining the maximum permitted angle of Ai’s joints. Then he reached the instructions regarding her eyes – which he had wrongly assumed would gaze on him with adoration the moment he removed her from the box and incoming photons, reflected from his manly features, made it through to her artificial retinae.
The Ears of a Cat Page 17
