Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  “I’m tracking the killers down,” I told them in German. “I already know some of their leaders’ names.” Try as I might, I couldn’t keep the clipboard steady in my hand. “When I find them I’m going to bring them to justice.” Now I couldn’t keep my voice steady either. “I’m going to kill them. I know how to do it—I’ve been trained.”

  I let out a bark of a laugh, feeling a strange detachment from myself as if I had escaped my own body. I let go of the clipboard and handed her the leaflet. She grinned stupidly and the others were quiet behind the stall. I smiled, but they didn’t smile back. One of the young men spoke.

  “Go on now, we don’t want any loonies here.”

  I didn’t understand who he was talking to; I looked around to see who he was talking to.

  “Go on, fuck off, dopehead.” I looked around again but saw no one else at the stall.

  I walked back through the fair and left the noise and the color and the smells. I ended up back in my hotel. In my small room, I took three codeine and went to bed, despite feeling hungry. It was half past five. At six o’clock I got up and took a fourth tablet.

  Thirty-One

  I woke with a hole in my stomach; I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday. I was half-asleep still, in a post-codeine stupor. I had overslept and had no time for breakfast before my tref with Abu Leila. I taped the fraying envelope to the middle of yesterday’s Der Spiegel newspaper, puzzling, as I went through my pre-meeting shake-off routine, over my outburst at the stall yesterday, and feeling embarrassed by it. It had come from nowhere. I wasn’t going to kill anyone, so why had I said those things? Things I locked away in my safety deposit box and in my head. It was as if they had just leaked out. I put it down to tiredness and stress and concentrated on the practicalities of my tref.

  Abu Leila and I had agreed to meet in the KaDeWe department store, a huge building on the Ku’Damm. It was similar in scale to the Harrods store in London. On the top floor was a food emporium that featured many stalls, like an upscale indoor street market. Instead of Bratwurst, doners and the chips with curry sauce that you might find at any street Imbiss, they sold caviar, oysters and steak tartare. You could find hundreds of types of sausage here, a hundred varieties of beer, a hundred different breads and, more importantly, in the tobacco section, every brand of cigarette made in the world, judging by the range on offer. I found Abu Leila sitting at a Turkish-themed stall drinking coffee. He was the only person there, and was chatting in Turkish to the man behind the counter, sharing some joke. When I sat down Abu Leila nodded and the Turk, dressed in black with a full-length white apron and a red fez on his head, poured me a Turkish coffee. He raised the coffee pot high above the small cup so that it was filled with a long stream. He then disappeared to the other side of the kiosk and started to polish the spotless counter. I needed something to eat but didn’t want to ask for it now that he had gone.

  “I didn’t know you spoke Turkish,” I said to Abu Leila. He had three twelve-pack cartons of Turkish cigarettes on the counter beside his coffee; he had done his shopping. Grey bags hung under his eyes. I put Der Spiegel on the counter between us but he ignored it.

  “How are things with you?” he asked, breaking open one of the cartons and taking out a new flat packet. I told him I was fine—I did not mention my strange episode yesterday at the fair, nothing would be served by it, it was an aberration. I was glad when we started to talk business; the fake Turkish surroundings were reminding me that Helen would soon be in Turkey with Zorba. I briefed Abu Leila about the Cambridge house, told him that if I was to be responsible for security then I needed to lay down some rules. He lit up and blew out some smoke.

  “OK, tell me what you need.”

  So I told him what I needed: that no one would leave the house except with my permission, that no wives or mistresses should be contacted, or worse, brought to Cambridge.

  “One of the party is a woman,” he broke in. “I assume she would be subject to the same rules?”

  “Of course,” I said, annoyed at the interruption. I continued that coming by air from Amsterdam was possible, with a private charter.

  He interrupted again: “I’m not keen on using Schiphol; the competition has a big station in the El Al airport facility.”

  “I’m sure there are other airports one can fly from…” I trailed off. It struck me that he didn’t look that interested in what I had to say about security arrangements. I was disappointed with his attitude, as he was always telling me that PLO officials never paid enough attention to security and I had gone to a lot of effort to put the whole thing together. I decided to persevere.

  “There is another thing,” I said. “It would be good for me to have help with this—when people arrive, I mean. I can’t cover all the angles on my own. I need someone at the station, at the house. I need a car and a driver—”

  Abu Leila raised his hand. “No way can all that happen, Michel. This needs to stay small. I can’t trust anyone else with this. You’ll have to do the best you can do.” That, as Jack would say, took the wind out of my sails. To make things worse he asked me to write down the address of the house, which I did, and he put the piece of paper in his wallet without reading it.

  “Tell me about Ramzi, and”—patting the newspaper with the envelope in it—“the story of this.” The kiosk man came over and gave Abu Leila a refill, fawning over him as if he was a regular. I asked him for a not very Turkish pretzel. When he’d gone, Abu Leila turned to me expectantly. I briefed him as best I could, recalling word for word my conversation with Ramzi, as I would have put it in my report had I been able to complete it. When I was finished, Abu Leila looked at me, then took off his glasses to clean them with the napkin that was under his coffee cup. I nibbled at my pretzel.

  “You have given a good account as always, Michel.” He put his glasses back on.

  “Doesn’t this change the Cambridge meeting in any way?” I asked.

  Abu Leila shrugged. “I’m not sure. It depends. Tell me about the driver.”

  “The driver?”

  “You said Ramzi told you a new driver brought them from Ramallah to the crossing. Did he describe him?” I put my pretzel down and described him as Ramzi had: a thin, balding Palestinian with a small scar that prevented hair growth on his chin. When I was done, Abu Leila looked into his cup and I had no clue as to whether I’d portrayed someone he knew or not. Then he drained his coffee and left money on the counter before picking up the newspaper. He stared at me in a way I had not experienced before. It felt uncomfortable, like I was being studied under a microscope. I had the sensation that he looked like someone different, someone I didn’t know, like when I caught glimpses of Helen looking much older.

  “Did you open the envelope?” That took me aback; it was the second time he’d asked this question. But he continued to stare at me, not changing his expression.

  “Of course not,” I said, blushing and looking away, knowing it was a weakness even as I did so. “I would never do such a thing.”

  His face regained its usual smile and he stood up, clapping me on the back. “Of course you wouldn’t. Let us walk down the Ku’Damm and look at the women in their summer dresses.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked. We never walked together down the street; our meetings were all in safe houses, restaurants, cafés and museums, and we always left separately.

  “If your time is up, Michel, your time is up, it is God’s will.” I was confounded at his unlikely fatalism, it was a negation of everything I had been taught. I was going to argue but then he said, “We’ll just walk up to the Kranzler. We need to talk about your future, Michel, and I want to do it in a real café,” waving at the Turkish stall, “not a fake.”

  Thirty-Two

  Once outside the KaDeWe we wandered up the Ku’Damm in the direction of the Europa Centre and the Kranzler Café. It was hot after the artificially cooled air of the department store. Abu Leila was smiling to himself. He held up his pur
chase of Turkish cigarettes, as if to explain his delight. I desperately wanted to stop and do some counter-surveillance, to pop into a shop with a big window and check out the people on the street to see whether I recognized anyone from the KaDeWe. Two German boys, ten or eleven years old, ran past us shrieking and shouting. We heard their parents call after them from behind us. The boys were whining for ice cream. Abu Leila laughed, saying, “A spell in Gaza would do them good, Michel. To appreciate what they have, yes?” He said something else but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of tourists and traffic. A motorcycle was revving nearby. I had to ask him to repeat himself and leaned in to him so I could hear his answer.

  “I said that I think I will have to move from the GDR soon. Their ideology is built on absolutes, and absolutes can’t bend when the wind of change blows, they just snap.”

  “Where would you go then?” I asked.

  He shrugged, as if the question hadn’t occurred to him.

  “It is your future I am more worried about, Michel.” We slowed down for an elderly woman in a red top walking in front of us, and I started to ask Abu Leila what he meant when the woman stumbled onto her knees. I instinctively bent forward to help her up, but then she fell forward again, her face hitting the pavement with a nauseous slap. She was lying motionless on the ground. Her underskirts were showing. I got down beside her and pulled her dress down over her legs. Then, while on my knees, I saw dark blood spreading on the pavement from under her body. I looked back up at Abu Leila, who was mouthing something that I couldn’t hear over the sound of an idling motorbike that had stopped nearby. He was holding out the copy of Der Spiegel to me. I saw someone in black leathers and a motorcycle helmet with a tinted visor step up behind him and point something at the back of his head. People were scattering in wordless panic. I reached up to warn him or to pull him down or something, but Abu Leila jerked and looked surprised then dropped to his knees. The newspaper fell and the cartons of cigarettes scattered onto the pavement, the open one spilling its contents. I worried that the packets would fall into the blood pooling on the pavement. The man in leathers took another step towards us and pointed again and Abu Leila nodded at me. His right eye exploded in a red mess onto the inside of his glasses. I tried to hold him up as he collapsed across the woman on the ground. The man in leathers was now properly visible to me: he was holding an automatic with a silencer. I tried to identify the model. A small wisp of blue smoke eased out of its long muzzle. Behind him another man, again in black leathers, sat astride a black 750cc Honda, its engine throbbing as it waited by the side of the road. The driver’s head was turned to us, but, like his companion, no face was visible beneath the dark visor of his helmet. The man with the pistol looked at me, at least I think he did, it was impossible to see what he was looking at, he may have been checking Abu Leila for life or looking at the things on the pavement. He stepped forward and shot again. I flinched and Abu Leila twitched in my arms. Someone screamed. The rider shouted, “Yalla!,” sounded his horn and revved the engine. The killer put the weapon inside his leather jacket, then turned and ran back to the bike, swinging himself onto the back and wrapping his arms around the driver’s midriff. The engine screamed horribly as the bike accelerated violently into the traffic, its front wheel leaving the ground momentarily. You could hear the bike for a long time in the distance.

  A crowd had started to gather. I looked down to see the back of Abu Leila’s head, or what was left of it, and I was frozen, unable to function. He was growing heavy in my arms. A logical, KGB-trained part of my brain was telling me to get out of there. A fifteen-year-old part of me was making me stay put, to get underneath him and hold my breath, to play dead. The crowd grew bigger but kept a safe distance. I let Abu Leila sink down on top of the old woman. Still on my knees, I started to pick up the packets of Turkish cigarettes, then remembered the copy of Der Spiegel. I found it, still folded, a couple of meters away. No one came forward to help, I heard no “Let me through, I’m a doctor.” But a man called hysterically for the police and an ambulance, both at this stage redundant. Then a woman screamed, and I couldn’t understand the point of it, but it helped me to get up, helped me walk away from the man who had been my mentor and surrogate father. A father superior in many ways to my own poor uneducated dead father, also shot in the head.

  Out-of-focus people were muttering and pointing and I could hear the sound of a siren because the Germans lose no time in ringing the authorities about the smallest thing. But this was not a small thing, and I pushed through half-hearted attempts to stop me leaving and broke into a run until I reached the entrance of Kurfürstendamm U-Bahn station, where I took the stairs three at a time and boarded the first northbound train.

  I stood near the doors, ready to jump off at every stop if necessary. Everyone who got on looked at me and took a step backwards. It was as if I carried the violence of what had happened with me. Was I being paranoid? It was only when the train was going through a tunnel that I saw, in my reflection in the glass of the door, dark stains on my face. I put a hand up and transferred blood to my fingers. Was it my own? I felt my head and body for possible holes or nicks, but concluded that the blood was Abu Leila’s and wiped it off with tissues with a trembling hand. Stupidly, I hadn’t gone through his pockets to remove anything incriminating. But at least I’d had the presence of mind to pick up the copy of Der Spiegel with the envelope inside. I started thinking that I should be going to my hotel to get my bag—I had my passport on me—but I wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea or not. I weighed up leaving the trail of an unpaid hotel bill, a plane ticket and an overnight bag (including a packet of codeine) against going back to pick them up, thereby remaining longer than necessary in West Berlin. It was a matter of hours, if not minutes, I reasoned, before the police had a description of me from the many witnesses, and it would soon be circulated to every official at every exit from West Berlin.

  I got off at the end of the line and took a taxi straight to Tegel Airport, driven by a mercifully unsociable German who took the Autobahn agonizingly slowly. A motorcycle passed us, and I sank into my seat, feeling stupid for being a slow-moving target on an open road. I cleaned myself up some more, picking small bits of dried bloody matter from my clothes, one of which was a hair attached to a tiny piece of skin.

  An hour later, after vomiting and cleaning up in the airport bathroom, I sat in a rumbling British Airways plane as it taxied onto the runway that would lead it into the sky towards London.

  It was the first time I had looked forward to take-off.

  Thirty-Three

  I made my way to King’s Cross without much thought for anything except getting to my room. I took the escalator from the underground two moving steps at a time. From the main-line train station I walked onto the street and stepped straight onto an open bus without even having to break my stride. It was getting dark when I got off the bus near Tufnell Park tube station, something I never did—usually getting out earlier at Kentish Town and walking. Inside the front door I stood for a moment, breathing hard in the darkening hall, listening to the sounds of the house. Helen would not be home as she was going to Turkey the next day and had planned to stay at her mother’s flat because it was nearer the airport, and besides, I was meant to be away. I got to my floor without seeing anyone, listened at her door but heard nothing, and listened at my own before opening it.

  In my room I sat on the bed with the sodium glow of a street light coming in through the window and tried to filter the torrent of thoughts I’d suffered since leaving Abu Leila lying on the Ku’Damm in West Berlin, not four hours before. I couldn’t get a purchase on my thoughts; they were like black slippery eels in a tank. I dealt with them one by one. I put myself in the shoes of the West German police: I had left my bag in a Berlin hotel, and had left Berlin within an hour of Abu Leila’s death, buying a ticket with cash at the British Airways desk at Tegel. My bag, now sitting for the second night in a room booked only for one, had a British Airways return
ticket for tonight in the name of Michel Anton. Records at Tegel would show that Michel Anton had actually left earlier in the day, soon after Abu Leila had been shot. Checks would soon show the frequency of my visits to West Berlin, and a routine inquiry with the Swiss would expose the fact that Michel Anton no longer existed but had died aged two. All this meant that Michel Anton from Geneva could be no more. Because they would connect the forged passport with a murdered Middle Eastern–looking man they would refer the matter to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the federal intelligence service, who would no doubt make contact with their UK counterparts, since that is where I had gone. The bag in the hotel also contained an open pack of codeine tablets, which had a batch number on it. They would try to track these to a prescription at a pharmacy but would soon realize that they had been stolen. It was unlikely that my dealer could be tracked down, although he could provide no information about me even if he was; he knew me as Roberto, not Michel.

  I went through these and other matters: like that yalla shouted by the bike rider. An Arabic urge to “come on,” “move it,” “let’s go.” Who were they? I tried to make sense of these threads, but I grew weary and took just two codeine from a new pack, bolting the door and lying down with my jacket and shoes still on. One of the slippery eels in my head kept reappearing as I disposed of the others one by one, although this became more difficult as the codeine took effect. It was a big one though, this eel, one that was uglier and more difficult to get hold of than any of the others. Even as more of the codeine metabolized into morphine I couldn’t expel it. I would have taken more codeine, but a corner of my brain nagged at me to remain in control. An hour later I was rocking my head, so I got up quickly and for the first time put on the lights. I made coffee and drank it, but the caffeine fought for head space with the morphine, and I veered between a calm and an anxious place. Stupidly I’d left the curtains open and went to close them; I was getting sloppy, and sloppy was dangerous.