The Wind and the Rain

by Martin O'Brien

  “Take a walk along Rue des Roses then you can continue around the parallel street and meet me back here. If I hear a shot I will depart back to Savoy. Hopefully I will see you both there,”

  Janko nods to Gunari and then gestures to me to head upstairs.

  I head up the stairs and Janko follows. Rue des Roses is a narrow one-way street which has the now-typical Monegasque narrow pavements on either side. Four-storey apartment blocks line our path on either side. Janko walks in middle of the road while I stick to the tiny pavement on the left. Occasional cars drive towards us so Janko keeps moving to the side and then back to the centre of the road.

  I am surreptitiously holding a photo of Tremmick taken by Gunari in Argentina along with the copy I took from Jacob at Auschwitz. Will I recognise Tremmick if I see him? What a nightmare it would be if he simply walks right on past and I don’t realise until I’m bed tonight.

  We cross a junction and arrive outside number thirteen. It is a splendid apartment block in comparison to the indistinguishable buildings at the start of the street. Ornate decoration surrounds the door. The road is only wide enough for one line of traffic although there are about twenty mopeds parked up in a bay opposite.

  “Keep walking,” Janko whispers to me as I prepare to inspect the front door. I’m not sure what has triggered him to say it in this manner but I know to listen to him.

  We carry on striding down the street and pass a man in his twenties. He is wearing a light coat and dark jeans. He stares at me as I walk past. I hold his gaze until we pass. A scooter whizzes by and the driver honks the horn which makes me jump.

  A busy crossroads awaits us and Janko guides us right onto Avenue Sainte-Cécile and almost immediately we turn right again on to Rue des Lauriers. Bang in front of me is a huge tower, I nearly trip over gawping at it. It must be thirty storeys high.

  “What’s that?” I say to Janko.

  “The tallest building in Monaco, the Millefiori apartments. It’s a bit two-dimensional for my tastes. It’s like it was designed by a child,”

  We continue walking down the road in the shadow of the tower. It is nice not to be burning up in the full glare of the sun. I wish this nauseous feeling would pass, the cramps are only making it worse. The last thing I want to do is call in sick on such an important day.

  “Why didn’t we stop at the apartment?” I ask.

  “I didn’t trust the guy on the street. I think he was carrying a weapon,” Janko says, his face ghostly white.

  “Maybe,” I say, unsure of Janko’s thinking. This heat is probably making him paranoid.

  “We have to be careful. If Tremmick knows we are onto him he may have enlisted help. They will be dangerous people if that is true.”

  So we have to kill another man in addition to Tremmick? This plan doesn’t look like it is going to work. We are supposed to be silent shadows not creating a bloodbath. Something inside tells me that I may not be leaving Monaco any time soon.

  A minute later we arrive back at our starting spot. I see Gunari standing against a wall in the shade and smoking a cigarette.

  “We saw the entrance to the apartment and possibly an armed accomplice,” Janko says. Gunari whistles softly and takes a drag of the cigarette before scowling and throwing it on the floor.

  “There may be other guards too that we don’t know about, especially in his apartment,”

  We stand around and I feel utterly useless. What am I doing here? I don’t feel like I am contributing anything and in all honesty I’m not sure the other two are offering anything practical too. Perhaps Tremmick will never be caught, too well-defended for us to strike.

  I glance up at the top of the steps and I can’t speak. I try to nudge Janko and end up nearly knocking him over. I point up towards Rue des Roses.

  Janko stares up and sees what I see - the man we saw in the street is walking past accompanied by a silver-haired man.

  “It’s the guard,” Janko says what I couldn’t say, “with a man who could be Tremmick,”

  “Let’s go and take them out,” I say. I’m ready for action and start to move off towards the stairs.

  “No, no,” Gunari says holding back my arm, “The guard has seen you. I will follow them at a distance. You two follow me.”

  Gunari pulls out his Glock 17 from the inside of his jacket, cocks it, and places it in the outside right pocket of his coat. He jogs up the stairs with his hands in his pockets to follow the duo. Janko and I stare at each other for a few seconds then slowly make our way up the stairs in ambling pursuit of Gunari.

  I reach the top and wait for Janko who is struggling with the steps. He looks out of breath which is worrying me.

  “Can you continue, Janko?” I’m seriously concerned about him.

  “I’ll be fine. Come on, Ana - Gunari is nearly out of view,” Janko grimaces and sets off at a strong pace. I speed up to catch him and I can see Gunari about thirty metres away. He takes a left turn and disappears from view.

  We increase our stride and as we turn left I see Gunari ahead taking a right. We reach the street where he turned and I check the street-sign which informs me it is Rue Bellevue. In the far distance I see the two men we are hunting walking along the narrow street. Apartments are on our left and a high stone wall covered in climbing plants commands the right side.

  The two targets head left down a staircase, Gunari follows them and eventually me and Janko reach the steps and go down as well. I reach the bottom, look around and see Janko is still with me. At the last moment I see Gunari vanishing down steps about twenty metres to my left. I motion to Janko telling him where they went.

  The bottom of this set of steps brings us back to the street near the station. Gunari turned right, so we follow him. I can’t see the two men anymore but I presume Gunari can. Outside the train station Gunari walks through the entrance. As Janko and I are about to follow him into the station Janko tells me to stop.

  “We can wait here,” Janko says.

  “He might need our help,”

  “Maybe so, but he needs to handle this himself. A public area like this, all three of us can’t become involved,”

  I pace outside the station, a sweaty mess. The heat and the sickness is driving me insane. I pull out my bottle of water from my bag, take a swig and within a second I throw up against a wall. I notice a few strangers watching me, I turn to Janko and he seems embarrassed.

  I heave again but barely anything except a trail of saliva comes out. I sit on the concrete and drink some more of the warm bottled water. I await the sound of a gunshot.

  Instead I hear Gunari calling to us:

  “Hey! Quick, I have an idea,”

  I stand up and have to fend off a dizzy moment. Once it passes, I join Janko in entering the station.

  “Where are they?” I say.

  “They have left via the other exit,” Gunari says.

  “Why aren’t you chasing them?”

  “He bought a train ticket from the woman over there, it’s definitely Tremmick,” Gunari has a manic look in his eyes, “He’s here in Monaco,”

  “I think I know what your idea is. Very clever, Gunari,” Janko says. He grabs my hand and walks with me over to the ticket window where a middle-aged woman sits ready to serve us. Her craggy face is heavily made up and heavily bored too. Janko puts on his most friendly manner.

  “Good afternoon Miss, I hope you are well today?” Janko says. The woman doesn’t respond, “I hope you can do me a favour. My brother has bought a ticket from you a few minutes ago. I am meant to be driving him to the station but he has forgotten what time his train departs. Could you be a darling and confirm what time the train leaves?”

  The woman couldn’t be more bored of Janko’s tale:

  “Your brother bought a ticket for the 0610 train from Monte Carlo.”

  “Oh my, what a helpful response. He is so forgetful these days, he can’t drive anymore as he forgets where he is living.”

  The woman sits back in her chair
impressively dismissive of Janko’s sugary chat. Janko turns away then stops, holds a finger up and spins back round to the woman:

  “Just one more thing, I should check he bought the right ticket. Which destination did he book for? I hope he didn’t choose Moscow again,” Janko laughs softly.

  “He bought a ticket to Barcelona. You can tell him there are no refunds if he has purchased it for the wrong destination,” the woman replies. Janko smiles at her and then turns back to join me and we walk out of the station to see Gunari.

  “Do you know Columbo?” Janko asks me. He is grinning like a madman.

  “No, is he friends with Bavarian Boris?” I reply and Janko shakes his head and chuckles.

  Dislocation

  Saturday, 10 May 1986

  “What happened to Nuri?”

  The two tired-looking men eyeball each other and then back to me in amusing synchronicity.

  “She took matters into her own hands. She stopped working as part of a team,” Gunari says.

  “Like Icarus, our Nuri flew too close to the sun,” Janko adds, “If you don’t work together, your chances of success greatly diminish,”.

  The three of us are eating a very late lunch at a restaurant in Nice. Janko has already called it the last supper much to Gunari’s annoyance. Our food has arrived but we are mainly pushing it around the plate, even me. My stomach cramps are affecting my appetite which makes me very sad as my pasta Provençal smells delicious.

  “She found out that Tremmick was living in East Berlin. By the time we found out what she had discovered it was too late,” Janko’s face is hard, the past has painted a harsh lesson.

  “Why didn’t she tell you what she had found out?”

  “I think she underestimated us,” Janko replies. “She was blinded by righteousness. She was impatient, always demanding action straight away.”

  “Unfortunately, she underestimated Albert Tremmick too,” Gunari says, accompanied by a frustrated snort. Janko motions to the waiter to bring another bottle of wine to our table.

  “I honestly never thought we would be provided with an opportunity to take out Tremmick again,” Janko says, taking a big gulp of his wine, “After the Argentinian fiasco I thought that would be it. Even now, I assumed he would have vanished already after what happened in Berlin,”

  The waiter returns and places a bottle of Château Cos d'Estournel down on the table. I wish we had sat in the shade. I can feel my head start to burn even though it’s about four in the afternoon.

  “What did Nuri find out about him?” I ask. No one responds for a minute or two, both men sip their wine and look almost guilty.

  “Oh Nuri, if only you had told us what you had found out,” Janko says, I see tears falling down his face. Gunari notices too and he stops looking and stares at the table, “We could have ended his existence there and then and also stop that dreadful underground lab from being set up,”

  Janko wipes the tears away and laughs uncomfortably. I place my hand on his and give it a little squeeze, his hand is soft and puffy.

  “When she joined us, she was immediately a voracious reader. She read everything in my library within a year or two. She would read newspapers from around the world every single day. It was where she occasionally found anti-Roma discrimination that we would take action against.

  “One day in January eighty-one she disappeared. She told us that she was researching something and that she may be gone for a while,”

  “It wasn’t out of the ordinary, she had done it a few times previously. She would come back in a few days, a week at most, and everything would be back to normal.” Gunari says.

  “Only this time she was gone for two weeks with no letters or telephone calls.” Janko says, ”That was when we started researching the scant notes she had left behind. All we could see were some newspaper cuttings about a child with a rare abnormality. The child had been born with two brains,”

  “What?” I say, I’ve never heard such nonsense. Gunari throws a withering look at Janko and intercedes:

  “The child was a conjoined twin. In the womb something strange happened and the other one died and part of its brain fused with the one who survived, the child was being taken from Bulgaria to East Berlin for treatment.”

  “I’m sure that’s pretty much what I said,” Janko says, “the child was only six months old. Funding had been found from a South African private medical clinic to treat the child.”

  “Nuri had looked in to the company,” Gunari continues, “She discovered that one of the suppliers to this South African company was an Argentinian firm. The director of the firm was Federico Hernández. The same Federico Hernández who was in business with Tremmick and whose brother I had put to sleep in Buenos Aires,”

  “The work she had put in to find this out was staggering,” Janko says, “I went in to her room and found directories of businesses in dozens of different countries. She was looking for a needle in a haystack and she was lucky enough to stab her finger with the needle.

  “We presumed she had headed to East Berlin and we made plans to follow her there. But the newspaper cuttings were from three months prior. There was nothing else there except a cutting from two weeks before she left. It stated that the child had passed away during treatment,”

  “Oh, the poor little guy,” I say, although it may have been a blessing for him if he was very ill.

  “Yes, indeed,” Janko says, “Gunari said let’s go there and see what we can find. That evening we made some calls, managed to sort out our papers and then headed to Zurich to fly to Berlin Schönefeld.

  “I was freezing to my bones when we stepped out of the airport. You know how fresh it is by the lake in Savoy in winter? It feels lovely on your skin. But in Berlin, the wind whips you while the drizzle soaks you. I couldn’t shake the ominous feeling inside. A deep sadness in my soul that told me this was not going to work out how any of us hoped.

  “Everywhere we seemed to go the police asked us questions. Two shady men in East Berlin looking lost. We used the classic Jewish refugee story which they would invariably believe. East and West Berlin, the police were both sensitive of offending Jews. If we had mentioned we were Roma they would probably have deported us immediately.

  “We were staying in a seedy hotel on Alexanderplatz. Not a curved line in sight there. Blocks of concrete rectangles everywhere, a palette of greys. We went straight to bed that night and I felt more hopeless than at any point in my life.

  “I woke up and the despair hadn’t abated. I hate going anywhere without a plan or even any idea on what to do next. The only clue we had was the East Berlin office of the South African company. We headed there.” Janko waves his hand but I’m not sure what the gesture is meant to convey. Gunari take over the story as Janko’s hope appears to have deserted him once more.

  “Outside of our hotel we saw the TV Tower, do you remember seeing it?” Gunari asks, I nod my head in agreement, “It’s a huge tower halfway to heaven with a giant ball at the top that contains a viewing platform and restaurant. It’s the tallest building in either part of Germany. I really don’t know how Janko missed seeing that the night before but like he said, we were out of our depth.

  “It’s not often we would admit that,” Janko says, “Perhaps Nuri was right and we were the ones who had become complacent. But, not telling us what she was up to and where she went. She failed us, all of us.

  “The office was on a street two blocks from Unter den Linden. We saw the Brandenburg Gate with the wall behind it and East German guards in front of it preventing people walking up to it. The symbol of the city reduced to an embarrassing afterthought. Berlin really is a strange place.”

  “The office was in a grand old building,” Gunari says, “According to the sign outside they were on the second floor. We weren’t sure on what to do. Janko decided to go up and claim to be a salesman.”

  “I walked up the stairs,” Janko says, “Hope had not yet returned. Desolation was in my heart, my brain emp
ty of ideas. I reached the top of the stairs. An open door welcomed me in. I saw a bored young girl on reception, the rest of the office was empty. I could see rooms that looked like they had been vacated quickly, documents lying on the floor.

  “My mind snapped to action and I told the receptionist that I worked for the company that owned the building and I was performing a check before their lease expired. She barely looked up when I said I was going to take a look around. I could have told her I was attaching explosives to the walls and she probably would have carried on painting her nails.

  “I went through each room methodically. I was back in my element investigating. I found what I was searching for. Alas, in retrospect, I missed the bigger picture. I found documents that linked the South American supplier with another firm who were participating in the reconstruction of the Deutscher Dom on Gendarmenmarkt.

  “If she had told us what she knew we could have helped a lot of those people in that clinic,” Janko says, “Everything is now beginning to fall into place. The company was responsible for building some of the underground infrastructure around the church,”

  Janko stops speaking and I don’t really understand what he’s on about. Gunari too, looks intrigued.

  “We were there, at the church, you must remember Gunari?”

  “Yes, I remember us looking around below the church that night,” Gunari says, “Creepiest night of my life,”

  “It was rather ghostly,” Janko emits a chuckle, “It was deserted but there was odd noises coming from everywhere. Things clanging on the floor, rattling pipes. I thought Gunari was going to run out of there at one point,”

  “I didn’t take you for Scooby Doo, Gunari,” I say.

  “It was a very odd experience,” Gunari concedes, “And not one I would like to repeat,”

  “But after what I’ve seen this week there might be a more sinister explanation,” Janko opens his hands out, “Ana, can you guess which U-bahn station is nearest to Gendarmenmarkt?”

  Now I see what he is saying, I nod at Janko. I turn to Gunari who is now smiling bitterly.