by Gary Haynes
They’re not coming for me, she thought.
‘Nice sleep?’
The voice came from behind her. She tried to turn around, but the flex-cuffs restricted her movement. She only caught a glimpse of him. He looked big, but was nothing more than a dark bulk, without definition. She turned back to face forward and noticed that the sun was shining. The windscreen was smeared, and the sun created a glare effect. She squinted.
The car was uncomfortably warm and musty, even though the heater was off, and she bent her head down to wipe the sweat from her forehead. Somebody had dressed her in a white, disposable hazmat suit. She saw drops of blood on the sleeves, on that part of the whole-body garment covering her knees. The stench of her own sweat and the smell of the sweet aftershave coming from the man behind was repugnant.
‘You’ve been a naughty girl.’
Tears flooded her eyes.
‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ she said.
‘Why do people always say that?’ he snorted. ‘You know that’s a lie. Don’t go lying to me, naughty girl.’
She still had the wits to determine a Caucasian accent. A mountain accent, with a hint of a Californian twang.
‘What do you want with me?’
‘We’re going for a walk.’
‘I don’t want to go for walk.’
She shook her head and sweat and nasal mucous flew off her skin.
‘No, you’ll walk.’
His tone didn’t have a trace of uncertainty to it.
Sweet Mary, she thought. Help me Mother. Help me Virgin Mother.
But hers was a faith based on dogma and tradition, her prayers for a form of deliverance as half-hearted and learned as a child’s.
*
He’d removed the flex-cuffs with a hunting knife and manhandled her from the car. The cuffs had been replaced with fresh ones. When she’d flopped to her knees from a mixture of disorientation, fatigue and a modicum of stubbornness, he’d dragged her up by the hair. Facing her, he’d led her down a grassy slope, preventing her from falling forward by his rough hands. The slope levelled off at the riverbank. She’d seen a scruffy heron flap its seemingly outsized wings and fly off, circling over the flyover to the thick woodland just beyond. She would have given anything, almost anything, to have sprouted wings.
The man was indeed huge, with thick, unwashed hair to his shoulders and a greying goatee. He wore stained jeans, dirty military boots, a denim vest with a black T-shirt underneath. He had tattooed blue dots for eyebrows and a black tarantula spider on each side of his thick neck. A large vein under the skin around his right temple looked like the outline of a curled-up earthworm.
He walked away from her and she saw the initials NLR tattooed on the back of his neck in between two sets of SS tattoos. A Nazi Lowrider. She’d seen him before.
Suddenly, she remembered where. He was the man that Gabriel Hall had spoken to outside Club 88 in Far Rockaway. The man he had said was named Jim Saunders. Momentarily, she felt betrayed.
He was bending over now, fixing what looked like a small digital camcorder onto a three-feet-high tripod that had been placed there when she’d been in her drug-induced sleep, she guessed. She wanted to cry out, but bit her lip instead, even as the photographs from the DVD floated through her mind, as potentially injurious to her sanity in those moments as slithers of asbestos would be to her lungs.
Through watery eyes she saw him walking back to her. She was on her knees on the grass where he’d placed her. He grabbed her by the hair again, lifted her half off the ground and pointed to the camcorder, thrusting her head towards it at the same time.
‘You just keep looking at the lens.’
She nodded, whimpering.
‘They told me to film you die. They told me to cut you. They said to tell you that you’d know how and where.’
‘I have a daughter,’ she said, green fluid dribbling from her nose.
‘You want me to get the poultry shears now? You want me to?’
‘No,’ she said, her voice a whisper.
‘You keep looking at the lens and you tell the story. You tell all of it and it’ll end right then. In that moment.’
*
Three hours later, she was sitting naked in a wet room, with off-white tiles. She’d washed herself then scrubbed her body with a nylon nail brush, such that her skin was left mottled and tender.
She hugged her knees to her breasts now, her still dripping hair shielding her face, as if she was a foundling brought in from the wilds.
*
After work at a federal police office in Berlin, Finkel had driven to Brussels via Düsseldorf to meet with Robert Dubois in a downtown bar that was famous for its live jazz. It hadn’t been a social visit. Dubois had told him, with a look of bewildered bleakness, that Carla Romero had gone into hiding. He hadn’t seemed to know all the details, or if he had, he hadn’t divulged them. He’d said simply that she’d rung him on his private smartphone.
Travelling home to Berlin, Finkel had experienced the beginnings of a tension in his shoulders that he hadn’t put down to the long journey, and a nervy feeling which had jarred with his usual professional equanimity.
But upon his return to the capital, he’d gone immediately to a somewhat nefarious pensioner he’d come across in his time in GSG 9, a wizened-looking man with extravagant eyebrows who lived in a near dilapidated cottage in Potsdam. The man had worked for the former East German Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, and Finkel had procured for himself an object once used to pass secrets from the French to the Soviet sector of Berlin in the days before the wall had been demolished by popular demand.
That purchase had not fully abated his nervousness, nor had it cured the tension, but it had eased them, although in a manner that a civilian would have found morbid, defeatist even.
88
California, the next day.
The main house had a red-tiled roof, a tasteful colonnade and a cream façade. It was a five acre site, with three guest houses, two swimming pools, a tennis court, and well-tended gardens. The residential estate was surrounded by a wall that was fifteen feet high, the entrance an electronically controlled, wrought-iron gate.
Gabriel had asked Sam Cartwright to locate the whereabouts of the woman that Berne had read about online, named Helma. By now she would be a septuagenarian, if she was still alive. He’d given Sam the details of her legal parents, Peter and Mary Honey. Sam had located her relatively quickly, and commented that it was the easiest assignment he’d had in weeks, so he wouldn’t be sending an invoice. Instead, Gabriel could buy him a couple of beers the next time they saw each other. Gabriel had felt it would be impolite to argue.
Sam had said that Helma’s parents had changed her given name, that she was now named Barbara. She’d been married to a Wall Street banker and was seriously rich. Old money and new. The banker’s name was Walt Murray He’d died of a heart attack on a golf course three years ago, and Mrs Barbara Murray now lived in the Coachella Valley area of California, near Palm Springs.
Feeling the sweat against his baseball cap, the visor shielding his eyes from the intense sunlight, Gabriel walked up the drive of sandstone paving slabs towards the gate, noticing the tips of Chilean mesquites and willow acacia.
As he rang the gate’s intercom, a blood-red open-top sports car passed by, the waft of air welcomed.
‘State your business,’ a male voice said.
‘My name is Gabriel Hall. I’m a New York attorney. I’m here to see Mrs Barbara Murray.’
Following a pause, the voice said, ‘You’re not on our list of appointments.’
‘It’s very important,’ he said.
‘Ring and make an appointment and take your hat off.’
Gabriel removed his baseball cap.
‘Tell Mrs Murray it’s about her father.’
There was silence for a few seconds.
‘Wait there.’
Gabriel wondered why the security was as hot as the weather, des
pite Barbara Murray’s wealth.
A couple of minutes later, Gabriel watched a slim young woman stroll down the drive towards him. She wore a canary yellow T-shirt and shorts. Her blonde hair was cut in a messy bob.
When she reached the other side of the gate, he said, ‘You don’t look like security.’
‘No. I’m Mrs Murray’s assistant. I’m also her accountant.’
He noticed her gleaming white teeth, a hint of make-up. She had a laminated identity badge hanging between her breasts. Her name was Candy Shinwell.
Smiling, he handed her his business card.
‘People can buy these for the price of a coffee,’ she said.
‘That’s true. But I’m not a fake.’
‘Really? You look like a smartass conman to me.’
Gabriel forced a smile. ‘Ouch.’
Grinning cynically, she said, ‘I’m going to call security unless you’re out of here real quick.’
‘Why didn’t they come down?’
‘They watch screens. They have low IQs. They can’t tell the difference between a lawyer and someone who wants to sell my employer a shitty insurance policy.’
‘You always so spiky, Ms Shinwell?’
‘I worked in Washington for three years. I saw your kind every hour of every day. Good day, Mr Hall, assuming that’s your real name.’
She turned on her heels and began to walk up the slight incline of the drive that was flanked at the top by chitalpa, with their lush pink blooms.
‘Hey, gatekeeper,’ Gabriel called out.
She looked back, her face scrunched up. ‘What’s with you?’
‘Give this to Mrs Murray,’ he said, thrusting a white envelope through the bars. ‘She’ll want to read it. You’ll know that the twenty-third amendment doesn’t grant the residents of the District of Columbia representation in Congress,’ he said, hoping to prove his credentials as a lawyer. ‘Did that bother you?’
‘You’re persistent. I’ll give you that.’
‘Give it to her. And don’t read it on the way,’ he said.
She walked back, snatched the envelope from him and glanced at it. ‘If you’re some kind of nut, I’ll call the police.’
‘Just give it to her.’
Three minutes later the gate opened.
89
Ms Shinwell led Gabriel into a naturally well-lit room that he took for a study, then left without speaking. There were silver-framed photographs on what looked like an antique desk of French design, photographs of smiling family faces. There was one that he guessed was Mrs Murray in an haute couture evening dress of emerald-green silk, with her tanned husband sporting a tailored white dinner jacket.
His eyes shifted to the wall-to-ceiling glass doors and the terrace beyond, which was festooned with climbing vines and clematis. A couple of marble cherubs stood on plinths beside an ornamental pond. Mrs Murray was living in rare splendour, he thought.
A few seconds later, the woman in the photograph opened the door. She had dyed auburn hair and her skin was clear and unlined. She wore a beige trouser suit that hugged her trim body. Gabriel figured she’d kept a plastic surgeon busy for years. She sat on a pearl-white couch.
‘Please sit down,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
He settled himself into a doughnut-shaped rattan wicker chair with massive cushions.
‘My assistant says it’s about money. Is it about money, Mr Hall?’ she said, glancing at his business card in her hand.
‘Money?’
‘I’ve read the note. Are you going to blackmail me?’ she said, her eyes fixed on him.
‘Of course not, Mrs Murray.’
Her head moved slightly to one side.
‘So, how did you find me?’
‘A private investigator I use professionally. He doesn’t know anything, in case you’re worried.’
He saw her body shift nervously.
‘I talked with a Jewish man who told me that his Polish brother was sent to a Soviet forced labour camp after the war. A uranium mine. Part of the Gulag. A lingering death sentence.’
‘That’s tragic, I’m sure. But what does it have to do with me?’
Her eyes betrayed her unease.
‘The man responsible was a lieutenant in the NKVD. Your biological father. Joseph Kazapov.’
She blinked, twice. He saw her clench her right hand.
They talked for half an hour. She had the type of intelligence that was born of experience rather than an expensive education. But there was an undeniable vulnerability there too, Gabriel thought. He told her as much of his own story as he could, and had felt good for doing so. He told her about the online edition of Der Spiegel. She’d looked at first sympathetic, then ashamed. She’d opened up to him, and after she’d done so, he understood why the security was so tight.
She got up and walked over to a walnut cabinet. She unlocked a drawer with a brass key, took out a large envelope and handed it to him.
‘A copy of my birth mother’s one-page affidavit. Brigitte Bayer. A black and white photograph of him in his NKVD uniform. I don’t know why I’ve kept them so long. Perhaps you are the reason, Mr Hall.’ She looked out to the terrace. ‘I don’t know what he calls himself now, or where he lives. I have no desire to see him, of course. Quite the contrary, in fact. I hope and pray you find him. When you get to my age, you don’t care about scandal anymore. It doesn’t frighten you. But he still does.’
‘So, he’s definitely still alive?’
She nodded. ‘Up until about eight months ago, yes.’
‘But you haven’t seen him since 1954 in Berlin?’
‘Do you want me to sign an affidavit too, Mr Hall?’
He looked down at the parquet flooring momentarily.
‘No. That won’t be necessary. But can you think of any reason why he’s doing what he’s doing, assuming he’s responsible?’ he said.
He had to remind himself that he still had no evidence at all, and part of him found his own question a little obscene because of it.
She looked morose, her head bowed.
‘You’ve read the article,’ she said. ‘What else is there to know? I believe he’s insane.’
Gabriel thanked her and left, thinking that was too simple an explanation, even if he did manage to prove Kazapov’s guilt. But the fact that there was no doubt now that he’d killed Brigitte Bayer, and that he was alive was something, at least.
*
Gabriel was sitting in the back of a cab, travelling to Palm Springs International Airport, two miles east of the desert resort city, to board one of a meagre number of scheduled flights at that time of year to JFK. The turquoise sky was flecked by a few high, translucent clouds, the air conditioning evaporating the film of sweat that had covered his body within a minute of exposure to the heat. He studied the folds of skin on the middle-aged driver’s neck, that reminded him of a slab of pork belly.
He’d read the affidavit, which had been translated into English. He’d studied the old photograph. Joseph Kazapov just looked like a skinny young man. It offered no clue as to what he would look like now, or how he might be identified, unless the man was standing naked in front of him — the document referred to a long scar on his shoulder.
The mobile phone Carla had given him rang and he fetched it out from the pocket of his black trousers.
‘Gabriel Hall?’
It was a man’s voice. One he didn’t recognize. A gruff French accent, he believed. He didn’t know how to react, so he kept silent.
‘Where did she give you the phone?’
Gabriel didn’t answer.
‘Tell me, please.’
Gabriel felt trapped. If he said where, he could be putting Carla in danger. If he said nothing, he could be missing an opportunity and putting her in danger. Thinking of Sangmu, he made up his mind.
‘In southwest Connecticut. A few miles from Yale.’
‘Thank you. My name is Robert Dubois. I’m in Brussels. There’s been a
breakthrough. I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation on the phone, even one that is likely clean.’
Gabriel felt numb, but he remembered Carla mentioning the Belgian federal police officer. He knew most Belgians spoke French as a first language. But why wasn’t she ringing him? As if reading his thoughts, Dubois clarified the position.
‘Carla is in hiding. She was threatened by Jim Saunders, the man the late Johnny Hockey asked you to give a message to at Club 88 in Far Rockaway. Don’t worry. She’s in an FBI safe house. She is well protected. She gave me this number and asked me to inform you of these things.’
Confused and more than a little nervous, Gabriel put his free hand to his forehead and began to massage it with his palm.
‘Will you come to Brussels? I will meet with you.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘I can’t discuss it, as I said. But I have contacts with the German federal police, as you would expect. In Berlin, to be precise.’
Gabriel exhaled deeply and felt his hand trembling. The sweat reappeared.
‘Can you just tell me if…if someone’s died. I need to know,’ he said.
‘No one has died, Mr Hall.’
‘Thank God.’
‘If there if a God, Mr Hall, He played no part in this, unless He is a diabolical entity. Will you come? I’ll let you know the details.’
‘Of course I will.’
‘One more thing, Mr Hall. Carla told me to tell you that the FSB informed her boss that Joseph Kazapov died in a town called Oranienburg in Brandenburg in 1945, just after the formal surrender of Berlin.’
90
Berlin, the same day.
It was Sunday, and Finkel had just watched a subtitled Chinese martial arts film at a theatre off Oranienburger Strasse that still had metal ashtrays screwed to the backs of the wine-coloured seats. He’d had a fizzy drink and popcorn.
He left the shabby art nouveau building, cleared his throat and inhaled the warm afternoon air. He walked along the uncluttered pavement to an outdoor parking lot a short distance away, replaying the balletic fight scenes and lavish imagery in his mind. He’d loved martial arts films since his teenage years. Then it had been an ideal. Now it was escapism.
