Sensing him, she looked up.
‘Do you have anything to drink?’ Arno asked, giving his question a hard edge of impertinence.
She shook her head. Then suddenly she sat forward and held out her arm. ‘Feel my pulse,’ she said.
There could be trouble here, he thought. He reached forward and put his thumb against her wrist.
‘Is it fast?’ she asked.
He felt nothing at all, not even a beat. ‘You seem fine to me.’
‘I had a big coffee an hour ago.’
He moved his thumb to pick up the merest trace of life. Eventually he found a pulse. Holding onto her wrist like this felt wonderful.
‘I shouldn’t drink coffee,’ she said. ‘Now I feel dreadful. Tell me, is it racing?’
‘No. You’re fine.’
‘You think so? My head is spinning. God, I’m so hungry.’ She plunged into her purse, searching for something she didn’t find.
‘I’m hungry too,’ Arno said. ‘I haven’t eaten all day.’
She gave half a smile, as though she didn’t care one bit about his hunger.
‘Where are you going?’ Arno asked.
‘All the way to Berlin.’
‘Me too,’ he said eagerly.
‘Do you live there?’ she asked.
‘I have a room in the city.’
She nodded. Then she said, ‘How would you like to make some money?’
The question caught him sideways.
‘Well?’ Her eyes glared as if the answer should be perfectly obvious.
‘How?’
‘Do me a favour? For me and my boyfriend? If you do us a favour, we’ll pay you.’
A series of half-formed thoughts came to him, twilight thoughts, graveyard thoughts. Her use of the word boyfriend agitated him. Were they really a couple? The idea was unpleasant. Almost unbelievable.
‘What do you want me to do?’
She leaned forward and whispered, even though there was no-one else in the compartment. ‘If anyone comes through here asking, pretend we don’t know each other. That’s all. You don’t need to say anything. Just pretend we’ve never met before.’
‘Who? You and me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s easy. We never have met before.’
The woman smiled, twisting her hand in the air in exclamation. ‘Exactly!’
Sooner or later the stink-faced boyfriend returned, all puffed up and wobbling. He was eating some pungent food from a fist of newspaper. To Arno, it smelled delicious.
As he sat down, the man nodded to his girlfriend, then without further consultation, put his hand into his pocket and took out a small sheaf of notes which he slid across the tiny table fixed beneath the window.
It was all planned out, Arno thought. Great! He was an easy target. Still, the money was in front of him, so he put his palm over it and lifted it off the table.
The man lit a cigarette, still chewing on his food. The compartment filled with the smell of salty smoke. ‘Berlin?’ he said.
Arno nodded.
‘You live there?’
Arno wanted to ask him for a cigarette for himself. Or else a bite on his food. Instead he said, ‘Yes, I’m going home.’
‘Home.’ The man nodded, then handed the package of food to his girlfriend, who buried her head in the paper and took an enthusiastic mouthful. Really, a great deal of food in one go.
‘You lived there for long?’
‘Just a year or two.’
‘Good. And you’re travelling alone?’
Arno’s thoughts turned to Monika. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He wasn’t supposed to return to Berlin alone. Still, wherever she was, she wouldn’t want any part in this. She’d want him to deny her existence in this kind of situation.
‘Alone,’ Arno confirmed.
The ugly dog fixed his eyes on him. ‘Are you sober?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sure? No drink?’
‘No. I wish I had.’
‘Do you have a ticket?’
‘For the train?’
Arno had no trouble lying. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Let me see it.’
‘Why?’
‘So we can trust you.’
Arno decided he had no choice but to admit the truth. ‘Actually, I don’t have a ticket. I lost all my money.’
‘Give it to him,’ the woman said to the man. She had swallowed her food by now and was considering another dip.
‘Here.’ The man took out a leatherette wallet and from it took a slip of paper. He handed it over to Arno. It was a ticket for Berlin.
‘Now you have a ticket.’
‘Thank you,’ Arno said, a little sheepishly.
‘Now hand it back.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The ticket. Give it back to me.’
Confused, Arno passed the ticket back to the man, who stood up, unzipped a side-pocket on one of his bags, and slipped the ticket inside. It was the last in a row of five or six bags they had in their possession, the one directly above Arno’s head.
‘You’ll stay with us in this compartment. With your ticket. Got it?’
Arno nodded obediently.
‘And this bag’ – the man used his cigarette to point to the bag with the ticket inside – ‘is yours, right?’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s yours. Whilst we’re travelling together. Understand?’
Arno nodded.
‘It’s your bag. With your ticket inside. Yes?’
‘Yes, it’s my bag.’
‘With your ticket.’
‘With my ticket.’
‘Good.’
Arno glanced behind him and upwards. The bag was a brown holdall with gold fasteners snaking around its corners. It had bulges along its side, solid ugly lumps as if a stack of bricks had been pushed inside. Books? Shoes? Weapons? He didn’t want to know. Even so, he found himself saying, ‘So what’s inside?’
The man smiled, the first time Arno had seen his teeth, which were remarkably white and perfectly aligned. When he smiled, some of his ugliness lifted and he took on a more elegant bearing. Maybe that’s what the girl liked about him. His surprise smile.
‘Children’s toys,’ he said, turning to his girlfriend and smirking at her. She smirked back. Something in those shared smirks seemed to explain a lot about the couple.
Bastards, Arno thought. He’d been caught in a trap. Whatever was in that bag, it had to be bad news.
‘One last thing: if you get into trouble,’ the man said, ‘say this word. Vendetta. Just say that and we’ll help you.’
‘Vendetta,’ Arno repeated, watching the man, not trusting him an inch.
‘Say it again,’ the man said.
‘Vendetta,’ Arno repeated.
Presently, the train was pulling into a station that was lit up like a cinema screen. There was dried seafood and salami strung up in shop windows. People on the platform stood with bags and suitcases ready to board. Arno thought it could be an important station, maybe a border somewhere. Geography was not his strong point. He began to expect a guard to come aboard, and the thought of it made him feel worked up.
The train moved on, taking its passengers deeper into the night. Finally, a refreshments trolley came through. Using his new money, Arno bought a sandwich and a large brown bottle of beer. There was no guard, no uniformed bureaucrat, no petty-official. He sat back and gorged on his food and drink, feeling suddenly merry at the way things were turning out.
The beer went down quickly. He thought about getting up and finding the same drinks trolley and buying a second bottle. But leaving the compartment seemed forbidden. So he turned over and tried to sleep.
An hour passed. The man opposite started to snore, purring loudly like an enormous cat. He pushed out his legs – two imperialistic feet that easily displaced Arno’s thin legs.
Eventually, Arno managed to sleep, so it seemed – he couldn’t tell for how long –
before waking again at some unsayable hour. Everything was murky. His mouth ached and his eyes were dry. He looked out of the window and could see a dark blue mist climbing. It was the very first minutes of morning.
He looked at the couple opposite. They were both asleep now but he still felt trapped. The man’s mouth was slung open like a sagging hammock. The woman was more in-between, her head lolling on her neck as if her eyes could snap open at any moment and catch him watching. He thought about moving to another compartment. Or locking himself in the toilet. He might have done, but his ticket was in their bag and their money was in his pocket. And he liked the feel of it there. He supposed he owed them a favour in the end.
He stood up and pushed his head into the corridor. He noticed some of the overnight passengers had been replaced by morning commuters into the city. They had combed hair and smelled of tooth-powder and perfume. The morning sun was low and white, flashing into the carriage like a lunatic lighthouse. The atmosphere had changed now into something more familiar: the brisker logic of daytime.
Then, at the far end of the next corridor, through the adjoining doors, he could see two guards working their way towards him. He returned to his seat. It was time to behave himself, to play the part assigned to him.
The couple opposite were beginning to wake. The woman, who in the natural light seemed fractionally less glamorous than the night before, set her glazed eyes on the passing countryside through the window. The gorilla next to her bore all the marks of a shabby night’s sleep: puffy eyes and slack cheeks, twitching with some sort of bad temper.
A minute later, one of the guards stepped into the compartment.
Arno looked up and smiled. His heart was beating hard.
The guard looked back and forth. ‘Together?’ he said, waving his finger between Arno and the couple opposite. The guard had blond hair and a gold tooth winking from between his lips. In his waistband was a pistol and a small black baton.
‘No,’ Arno said emphatically. ‘We don’t know each other.’
‘Okay.’ The guard put out his hand to the couple, ‘Tickets.’
The man slipped his hand inside his jacket. He brought out a slip of yellow paper, which to Arno‘s eyes was neither a ticket nor a passport. The officer took some time to examine it, then as if prompted by something he’d read and consequently understood, looked up to the row of baggage in the nets above their heads.
‘Yours?’ he said to the couple, pointing to one row of bags.
‘Yes.’
With the flat of his hand he felt along the broadside of each bag. He was more perfunctory than really searching for something, as if he was just going through the motions.
Then he turned to the bags above Arno’s head. He reached the brown holdall and began fondling the misshapen leather, pressing and clasping at every swelling.
The woman said quickly, pointing at Arno, ‘That’s his.’
‘Yours?’ the guard said.
Arno nodded.
‘Okay. Ticket.’
Arno got to his feet and lifted the bag down onto the bench seat. He was groggy with tiredness and hot with adrenalin. He didn’t remember which pocket the man had put his ticket into, so he began trying several. The fastener stuck at first, so he had to wrench it back and forth until it split open. He didn’t know what would spill out, but he expected something rotten, like a stack of Soviet bank notes or a live snake or something else terrible. Instead – he glanced only quickly – there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of little purple and blue books. Passports. They were bundled into stacks of maybe ten or twenty in a batch, bound up with rubber bands.
He drew the sides of the bag together quickly. He knew it was wrong, but how wrong? His crumpled up ticket was not there, so he turned the bag on its side and tried several other pockets. Eventually, opening the flap at the end, his ticket sprung out like a Jack-in-the-box. He eagerly handed it to the officer, who wrote something on the rear-side and then passed it back.
‘Now. Show me what’s in the bag.’
‘Inside?’
‘Open it please.’
Arno returned his fingers to the main pocket of the holdall. Reluctantly, desperately hoping something unexpected would come along and interrupt, he loosened the mouth of the bag. The guard stepped closer and opened it wider, peering into the gaping hole. The passports were in plain sight now.
At this, Arno glanced to the couple opposite. They pretended not to see him.
‘What are these?’ the guard said.
Arno said nothing. He looked at the couple once again. Were they going to help him?
The guard had his hand inside the bag now. ‘What are these?’ he asked again.
Arno had no answer. Finally he said, ‘Vendetta.’
‘Excuse me?’ the guard replied.
Louder this time. ‘Vendetta.’
Arno’s eyes darted to the couple, the ugly brute and his girlfriend. They were ignoring him altogether. Their eyes were on the guard. How could they? Dare he say the word again? They must have heard him say it. Rotten bastards. Perhaps he should scream it into their faces.
‘Vendetta,’ he said one last time. He said it now with such a slow, deliberate cadence that no one could possibly mistake it.
At this, the guard’s expression changed. His face seemed to turn pale by a shade and his mouth began to sag a little. His gold tooth hung in the morning air. He closed up the bag and gently, almost caressingly, fastened up the pocket. Then he lifted the bag back into the netting where it came from and stepped back by a pace, and as if to apologise for something that Arno couldn’t possibly begin to understand. The guard bowed his head, gave the thinnest of smiles, then silently left the compartment.
Arno was stunned. A cool thrill passed through him, a tight, swirling blend of relief and victory. He sat back on the bench and let himself flop backwards. He had won.
At once, the couple opposite got to their feet. ‘You did perfectly,’ the man said. His voice was more brisk than before, as if he’d just woken up and was his real-self again.
‘Well done,’ confirmed the woman. Was she being condescending?
‘What do you mean?’ Arno said.
‘We got what we wanted,’ she replied.
‘We knew this train line was a route for smugglers into the city. Now we’ve just proved it.’
The couple were lifting their bags from the racks, preparing to leave the train. Outside the compartment glass, along the train corridor, another man appeared, someone they knew, a colleague, who now began to assist them with their luggage.
‘Who are you?’ Arno said.
‘Prussian Police,’ the woman replied.
‘What?’
‘Well done,’ she said again. ‘We’re sorry if that was a little frightening for you.’
Arno shrugged. He was stunned. He didn’t know what to think.
After what seemed like just a few minutes, the train began to slow. The next moment, the windows were filled with the smoke and blather of Berlin’s Anhalter station. All through the carriage, people were gathering up their belongings and shuffling towards the carriage steps, elbowing each other, impatient to get off.
In the spin, Arno slipped away from his compartment and out into the station. A surreal feeling took hold as he made his way through the morning crowds. He was back in Berlin and it was a wonderful feeling. He half-expected to be confronted by more officials on his way out of the station – police? guards? soldiers? – or whoever that couple on the train were supposed to be. But nobody stopped him.
Prussian police? They had it planned out all night through. He’d been their stooge. And the corrupt guard on the train? He’d be for it now.
Still, Arno thought, things had turned out well in the end. He was free and had money in his pocket humming to be spent. That’s how it often went for him: one day he’d be down, the next day up. He was like a tightrope walker at the circus, always balancing himself as he made his way along the wire. And he’d never once come to
any real harm. Not yet anyway.
He couldn’t wait to see Monika now, to tell her about his overnight journey and to share his windfall with her. Surely she would forgive him for losing their money, now he had more than replaced it. He went into the great city, sure she had returned, sure he would find her safe and well.
4
It was a fine feeling to be back in the city. Berlin! He stepped out into the plaza where the train station opened up to the city. The sky was smoky blue and the sun was climbing steadily, and all at once he felt refreshed and alive. He took in the morning air, the smell of motorcar fumes and frying oil and horse dung, and the sight of all the people walking in every direction, the men in their bowler hats and the women in their close-fitting dresses, smelling of flowers in bloom.
Now, after nine hours on a train, he wanted to stretch his legs, to feel energy circulate through his blood again. He left the station and found a local bar that served breakfast. He ordered a plate of fried eggs with cold meats and jam, along with a large mug of coffee. Twenty-five minutes later, with the coffee making his head spin, he began his way home. Yet, when he turned, he ran straight into the police couple from the train.
His spirits sank. He wanted to be free of them, to take his money and disappear. What did they want?
Out in the open, the woman’s beauty had been revived, as if the sunlight revealed a more fundamental truth about her good-looks. The man, on the other hand, looked a great deal worse, like his face had been pressed against a brick wall for an hour. It was red and creased and slanting to one side. The couple were standing beside a luggage trolley laden with all their bags from the train. Right on top was the lumpy satchel once assigned to Arno.
The couple paused for a moment. They seemed to assess him with vague looks, as if he was a stranger to them or perhaps someone they recognised without being able to place. In this moment of silence, Arno turned and walked in the other direction. Without looking back, he took a tram to Hallesches Tor, south of Mehringplatz. Standing on the tram, balancing against the sway of the carriage, he forgot all about the police and concentrated his mind on Monika. At Hallesches, he walked across the square where the trams criss-crossed each other and cars circled round in great bending loops. It was only a five-minute walk to his attic room from there. He desperately hoped Monika would be waiting for him. She didn’t have her own key, but she knew where he kept his: in the electricity meter-box in the front hall, inside the loose wooden casing that covered a set of wires. He always kept it there. He’d certainly lose it otherwise.
Vanished in Berlin: Kidnap suspense mystery set in 1930s Berlin (Berlin Tales Book 2) Page 2
