Flashback sb-2

by Ian Hocking

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked.

  His composure slipped for a moment. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re just waiting here. Standing in the rain.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jem, as she walked away, thumbs in her belt loops. ‘You know what they say about your job.’

  ‘That it is mostly legwork?’

  Still walking, she said, ‘Ooh, you’re good. You read my mind.’

  ‘It’s nothing. A cliché.’ He looked at his feet. ‘I hope you find your way, Miss Drew.’

  ~

  Jem bounced around Berlin for the remainder of the day. She told herself, with each stop, that she would hole up and work through the implications of a policeman hanging around Wolfgang’s apartment. She had certainly committed a crime by giving him a false name. Did that leave her with no option but to return to England? She rather hoped it did. There was little of her loyalty to Wolfgang left. But she did not quite hate him enough. Somehow, she had to find out where he was held, and for what. Then she had to talk to him without becoming an accessory or suspect. What did they have on him? There was the con work, yes, like the discovery of Saskia’s gambling system. Jem knew, however, that in the last month Wolfgang had begun to move in another direction altogether. He would go missing for days and return with cash in a plastic bag that he called his Turkish suitcase. He slept with a knife beneath his pillow. Who was he becoming? Who was she becoming?

  Enough.

  Jem’s stopped at Potsdamer Platz. She knew a café nearby. There she sat, and the thoughts and plans and half-predictions that filled her attention soon moved out of focus. She found herself dozing on her folded arms when a waiter tapped her shoulder with a pen.

  ‘Fräulein, hier können Sie nicht schlafen.’

  Her metal chair was cold, the table colder and the contempt of the waiter subzero. She had to fob him off. Still, no point packing her ideas into the meat grinder of her German language skills.

  In English, she said, ‘I’m waiting for a friend.’

  ‘Zwei Euro fuffzich.’

  Jem stared at him. Then she tipped the contents of her purse onto her palm and let him take whatever for the untouched coffee. Like what-ever. As his fingertips walked over the coins, she thought about springing her hand shut. Nobody expects the English humour.

  About then, the ARD Tagesschau news programme appeared on the giant screen above the counter. Germany’s hang-dog chancellor, whose name Jem could never remember, was talking from the steps of the Reichstag.

  The waiter frowned and fussed. He selected a coin.

  Jem watched a banner roll across the bottom of the screen. ‘DFU Flug Berlin-Mailand abgestürzt—keine Überlebenden’.

  Jem’s smile straightened.

  ‘Berlin-Mailand’?

  The words plugged the holes in her thoughts, suffocating her playfulness. This was the flight she had a ticket for. But why was it on the telly?

  Keine Ueberlebenden.

  ‘Excuse me, could you tell what keine Ueberlebenden means?’

  The waiter completed his work on her palm and shook his head. ‘I think you should go now, please. Sleep somewhere else.’

  Jem’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. The programme cut to grainy footage of woodland. The camera shook, tilted to mossy ground, then refocused on a blemish in the sky. It might have been a bird of prey. But, with a perceptual switch, Jem saw that it was an aeroplane in a vertical dive. The camera followed the plane until trees blotted the view.

  ‘Keine Ueberlebenden means ‘no survivors’,’ said the waiter, wiping the table around her elbows. ‘It is very sad news.’

  ~

  By midnight, at the end of a nightmarish day riding the underground and staring through everyone and everything, Jem found herself at the bottom of the steps to Saskia’s apartment building. The rain had worked its way down her collar. Her damp tights itched and a pimple had taken root in the corner of her mouth. She dallied between the desperate hope that Saskia was alive—in her apartment and cursing Jem—to the certainty that Saskia’s essence yet walked, unreflected, across its ebony floor. Jem pressed and pressed again at the button marked ‘Frau Doktor Dorfer’.

  You didn’t get on the plane. You came home. Please.

  ‘Hallo?’ said a voice, male and unfamiliar.

  ‘Um, hello. Who is this? Inspector?’

  The door buzzed. Jem pushed through to the stairwell, which was dark and echoic. She touched the light and heard its rattlesnake timer rotate. Her tired legs trembled with each step. When she reached Saskia’s door, she found it open an inch. A sound behind her reignited her fear, but it was only her rucksack, settling.

  The timer for the stairwell light stopped.

  The darkness closed down.

  ‘Hello?’

  With a click, light erupted from the opening doorway. An old gentleman stood there. His eyes were rheumy and his eyebrows stately ticks of white. His thin hair was rusty at the temples. He wore a pullover with shoulder patches and rested both hands on a short, ivory cane. Despite his age, there was something of Saskia about him. The apartment staircase rose, behind him, to darkness.

  ‘You must be one of Saskia’s friends.’ His accent was American.

  Jem wanted to reply that, no, she was Saskia’s girlfriend, but the word would not do.

  ‘Saskia…’

  He cupped her elbow.

  ‘My poor girl, come inside.’

  ~

  She slipped from her coat, which was heavy with rain, and dumped her rucksack in the space where Saskia stored her umbrellas and black, flat shoes. She followed the stranger up the apartment stairs. His shoes were wet too. At the top landing, he turned and tapped his left shin with the cane. ‘Excuse my slowness. It is sensitive to the weather.’

  ‘The hallway light is on the left at the top.’

  ‘I know it. Here.’

  He pressed it, and Saskia’s spirit returned with a flash: the antique phone; the ‘wooden man’ kung fu dummy with Jem’s special-occasion knickers hanging from an arm; a poster from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, the yucca, the curtained door, the sideboard with weight training gloves crossed on top, the ebony floor. The smell of toast made that morning and the perfume mixed for Saskia in the south of France.

  The man turned. He, too, had been contemplating the hallway. ‘Dick Cory. But everyone calls me Cory.’

  ‘I’m Jem.’

  At last, they shook hands. His palm had a rough knot of skin and, on instinct, Jem turned it over.

  ‘An old burn,’ said Cory. He made a fist but Jem had already seen the reversed letters.

  ‘‘Pyrene’?’

  ‘They make fire extinguishers.’ He smiled. ‘Ironically.’

  ‘I came to see if Saskia…’

  ‘Let me fix you a drink.’

  ‘She keeps a whisky bottle on the right of the dishwasher.’

  Cory searched her face. ‘I know.’

  Chapter Eight

  Jem took the white leather sofa and Cory the reclining chair. They faced each other, stranger to stranger. The balcony doors were open. The net curtains sagged and bloomed. Rain was loud on the tiles. She rocked her glass: a tick to send the ice away, a tock to bring it back.

  ‘I am Saskia’s father.’

  ‘Her father?’

  ‘She came to us late in life. I retired when Germany was still in pieces. Don’t let the cane fool you. I can still click my heels.’

  Jem smiled. His words were at odds with the artificiality of their situation. She suspected that he was used to keeping his head when all about him were losing theirs. It made her playful. She said, ‘Saskia never mentioned her father.’

  ‘I never mention Saskia.’

  ‘You’re not German. American?’

  ‘I was born in Atlanta, but took advantage of economic opportunities in Germany following the war. Dortmund, mostly. That’s where I met Saskia’s mother. Yourself?’

&nbs
p; ‘I’m from South West England.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been to Plymouth.’

  ‘My sympathies.’

  He blinked to acknowledge the remark, but his lips only curled with the application of his glass. He held the whisky in his mouth before swallowing.

  ‘So were you coming or going?’ she asked.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘When I arrived, the lights were out upstairs.’

  He sipped his drink again. ‘Going.’

  As his eyes moved away from her, Jem considered his story. She believed that a man like him could father a woman like Saskia. The details, though, were too pat. The remark about Atlanta was redolent of rehearsal, smooth as Saskia thumbing bullets from her gun. Jem could imagine Cory as old guard CIA, a high-up bureaucrat who had long since abandoned the physicality of spying but not the comfort of tradecraft.

  ‘Jem, I’m afraid I have to tell you something about Saskia.’

  Spoken, the name unlocked a door inside her. ‘I ran away at the airport.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  But she did not hear him. She gripped her chair and felt the shifting forces of the dive as the passengers held on and prayed that the pilots could solve the riddle of their instruments. Hands groping for other hands. Comfort in the last of moments. Business deals incomplete. Journeys truncated and lives unfinished. Jem shuddered. Something touched her hand and she focused her eyes on Cory’s palm, which he had placed again on hers. She felt his scar. Pyrene.

  ‘Hush.’ He touched away one of her tears. ‘As Saskia’s father, I am her next of kin. I should take care of her affairs. Do you understand?’

  Jem nodded and let the water spill from her eyes. A drop found her lip and she remembered Saskia gathering fistfuls of her blue Schlumpf hair.

  ‘Jem? Does she have a computer? Is it behind the curtained door?’

  ‘Mr Cory, I’m tired.’

  ‘The door has a wirelessly-operated lock. Did you see her use the release? It could be anywhere. A TV remote control. An unused light switch.’

  A fairy tale.

  Jem shook her head to clear it. She noticed, again, that Cory was holding her hand, but now it felt wrong.

  ‘Are you really Saskia’s father?’

  For a moment, anger collected in his eyes, and Jem wondered what he might do. But he resumed his chair. The lamp behind his head made an eclipse of his face. From the darkness, he said, ‘I should be down in Munich to identify the body. I guess I’m not brave enough.’

  Neither spoke for a minute.

  ‘What do you think,’ she said, ‘about the idea that Saskia didn’t die? That, if there are survivors, she of all people…’

  The severity of his expression stopped her.

  ‘It was a vertical impact, Jem.’ Cory’s eyes burned low like evening stars. ‘Do you want to watch the television? There might be developments.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Did you hear about the pilot’s last message? A code-word. ‘STENDEC’. They were talking about it on the radio.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘You want me to tell you what they said?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Cory waited a moment. Then he began, ‘In 1946, the Brits set up a South American airline under an old war hero, Donald Bennett. Many of his planes crashed. One, Star Dust, took off in August of 1947, on the last leg of its journey from London to Santiago, and was never seen again.’

  ‘Santiago is in Chile, right?’

  ‘In Chile. The flight involved a journey across the Andes.’

  Jem let her imagination drift with Cory to the past. There was a comfort there. The past had already been; it was fixed and known. One could stand above the past. It contained a solace that, given years, Saskia’s death would be so distant that its hurt could dim.

  ‘That last flight, Star Dust, left Buenos Aires carrying mailbags, movie reels, and several examples of the rich and privileged. ‘Fly with the stars’. That was the motto of British South American Airways, written beneath an Art Deco star man. Each aircraft was given a name beginning with ‘star’.’ Another pause passed between them. It came cold, like an Andean wind. ‘Nobody knows what happened on board the flight prior to the crash. Some minutes before its wheels were due to hit the runway in Santiago, the radio operator on board Star Dust sent the message ‘STENDEC’.’

  ‘‘STENDEC’.’

  ‘Star Dust repeated the message once and was never heard from again. In the weeks following the disappearance, the Chilean army scoured the Andes together with hundreds of amateur aviators and mountaineers. But Star Dust could not be found. Donald Bennett, the war hero, personally joined the search and continued it, in one way or another, until the end of his life. It was the last crash that the British government was to tolerate. Bennett was pressured to resign. He did, and returned to England under a cloud.’

  Jem puzzled through the letters. ‘What do you think ‘STENDEC’ means?’

  ‘There are many possibilities,’ he said, smiling, ‘from the stupid to the plausible. An anagram of ‘descent’, for instance. Or ‘Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash-Landing.’ Or perhaps Star Dust had already crashed, and the signal was sent by a third party to sow confusion.’

  ‘Why would somebody do that?’

  ‘There was a King’s Messenger on board. Perhaps someone didn’t want his secret documents to reach the British ambassador in Santiago. And there was a Palestinian businessman with a diamond stitched into the lining of his jacket. Perhaps somebody wanted that.’

  ‘How do you think it relates to Saskia’s flight?’

  ‘It’s late, Jem.’

  She nodded. She did not trust this man. He had vast capability that his age only intensified. The net curtains bloomed like a cape and let in the sound of rain on the balcony. Minute upon minute passed and she fell asleep. When she awoke, Cory’s seat was empty, and in its place was the idea that he had never existed beyond a dream. Saskia was in the shower, surely, and any moment now she would return to Jem and the two would make up.

  No, I ran away from her.

  There was a sound from the kitchen. A glass being placed just so.

  I didn’t escape her after all. I ran away.

  Chapter Nine

  August, 1947, a hotel in Buenos Aires

  He had been told the city was wintering, but Cory lay in his hotel room cursing the heat. Through the shuttered window came birdsong, bicycle bells, and the occasional drill of an automobile. The hotel itself was quiet. Its owner, an old Spanish prostitute, strictly observed siesta between one o’clock and four. It was now 3:16 p.m., and, in the stillness, Cory was at the edge of panic. He fiddled with the long key around his neck. Each touch made him think of the tomb it would open.

  At 3:39 p.m., a knock.

  Cory rolled from the bed, tensed as its old coils pinged, and looked at his cane.

  To me.

  The factor did not obey his thought. His intention lacked clarity.

  ‘To me,’ he growled.

  Still, the cane did not move.

  Another knock.

  Finally, he took the cane. Icons appeared beneath his thumb. He selected the symbol that represented projectile response and the factor transformed in his grip until he was holding a pearl-grey gun. He put the barrel to the centre of the door and stood against the wall, beyond the doorframe.

  He struggled to get in character: Simon Wilberforce, English, a local agent for the Shell Oil Company. Rather. What.

  ‘Um… duermo,’ he said in his British accent. ‘Salga por favor.’

  ‘Lisandro, Señor Wilberforce.’

  Cory relaxed. He returned his gun to its cane form and opened the door on the grinning boy. As usual, Lisandro wore a mismatched ensemble of his older brothers’ clothes. ‘¿Qué desea usted, Lisandro?’

  ‘Hay una camisa roja en la ventana, como me dijiste. Me llevó un buen rato llegar hasta allí..’ He offe
red his palm.

  Cory gave him a peso but kept his finger on the coin. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Will-for.’

  ‘Wil-ber-force.’

  ‘Wil-ber-force.’

  ‘Good lad.’ Cory released the coin. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll start on some verbs.’

  Nice touch, he thought. Wilberforce had worked at Rutherford Boys’ School during the war.

  Cory untied the string that passed through his hanging jacket—he had stayed in too many of these hotels to expect a wardrobe—and brushed the cockroaches from its armpits.

  ‘Tomorrow more hungry than today, Mr Wilberforce.’

  Dirt cracked around Lisandro’s mouth as he smiled. Cory had sufficient anxiety to loose a curt remark, to remind him that Mr Wilberforce was an elder, not a friend, but the boy’s charm had flanked him. Cory tried on his new Dorfzaun panama hat. He pinched the brim. ‘What do you think? Too Mark Twain?’

  ‘Usted esta enojado, Señor Wilberforce. You pretty.’

  ‘Handsome, Lisandro. Not pretty.’ He smiled. The moment grew long, and he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘About the verbs. In all honesty, I won’t be coming back tomorrow. I’ll be gone. Debo irme. Lo siento.. Understand?’

  Lisandro pouted.

  Cory took a thousand peso clip from his belt buckle, tugged out a note, and placed it over the one peso coin. Lisandro stared at it with wonder.

  ‘Please pay the señora. You can keep the rest. Buy something for your mother.’

  ‘I buy her house!’

  Cory left the room and strolled along the gloomy corridor. His semi-brogue shoes—white bodies, tan heels and toes—made hollow clonks on the floor. He swung about the balustrade, ready to take the stairs two at a time, when Lisandro called, ‘Cheerio, Mr Wilberforce!’

  ‘Cheerio, Lisandro!’

  He raised his hat and clattered down the stairs. Siesta be damned.

  ~

  Tierra Argentina, land of silver, and this jewel on her eastern hip: Cory loved both. He strode through the San Telmo district, where, on his first visit, he had lingered hours over the bright collision of architectures: Spanish colonial style with Italian flourish and a nod to French Classicism. The Dutch painter, Mondrian was three years dead in 1947, but Buenos Aires held a colourful requiem. Even the streets were geometrically arranged. He skirted a pair of strutting porteños and their bandoneón accompanist. At points, the eyes of fellow European travellers marked his as though they were Geoffroy’s cats making remote acquaintance through the grasses of the pampas. He savoured the boutiques, smiled at prostitutes and declined the split coconuts with twisted straws. He moved, imperially slim, through the tea-like odour of chewed coca leaves and the fall scent of cigars. The vigour of the city awed him, yet this was siesta, the quiet time.