In the Evil Day

by Peter Temple

  Anselm went back to his office. Talked to anyone? What was there to say? How did you talk about fear, about cringing like a whipped child, about pissing in your pants, other things, sobbing uncontrollably, other things?

  Carla Klinger knocked. ‘The new file,’ she said. ‘The chemist. He flew to London. Now I’ve got him on a flight to Los Angeles from Glasgow, took off an hour ago.’

  It was a second before he placed the chemist. Yes. The chemist’s company in Munich thought he was planning to defect to the competition. Five years he’d been on a research project, they were close.

  ‘That’s good work, Carla. Tell the client.’

  She smiled her cursory smile, nodded, turned on the stick.

  Good work? Thieves, contract thieves, spying, stealing to order, stealing anything for anyone. Anselm thought about the woman they’d found in Barcelona, Lisa Campo. He remembered his reply to Inskip’s question.

  What do you think? Charlie gets his money back, they fall in love again, go on a second honeymoon. Eat pizza.

  For all they knew, Charlie Campo wanted to find his wife so that he could torture her and kill her. For all they cared. Just a job with a success bonus. Good work? He’d enjoyed it at the start, four of them using Baader’s purloined software, learning how to search the waters for a single rare fish, the net ever expanding, dropping deeper. Sitting in a quiet room, in the gloom, watching the radar, waiting for the blip, waiting for the coelecanth. He’d felt removed from himself, a relief from the running introspection, the endless, pointless internal dialogue. Just the quiet lulling of the electronic turbines, the hard drives spinning, spinning, spinning. But now…

  Anselm went down the passage to Beate’s office. She wasn’t there. He was grateful not to have to endure her remarks about health as he went onto the balcony to smoke.

  A cold day but dry, patches of blue coming and going in the high, wispy cloud. In line with Poseldorf, a ferry with a ragged tail of gulls was cutting through the chop. Kael and Serrano would be off their ferry by now.

  Alex Koenig.

  He could ring her to say he would talk to her about what had happened to him. Within limits. He could set limits, things he wouldn’t talk about, the parameters of their talk.

  What was the point of that? How could he set limits? What would they be?

  Beate tapped on the glass. Anselm flicked his cigarette end into the garden below-not a garden, just balding lawn and unpruned leaf-spotted roses, no one cared.

  This would be Tilders. He went inside. Beate smiled her beatific smile.

  ‘I’d have brought the phone but I saw you were almost finished with that vile thing.’

  ‘You’re never finished with vile things,’ said Anselm.

  24

  …LONDON…

  The store was warm and fragrant, like a palace in a dream. As Niemand wandered around, the expensive scents of the women shoppers brushed his face, clung to him. On an escalator, he stood behind three youngish Japanese women in grey, sleek as pigeons, eyes rounded by the knife. They appeared to be crying.

  When he’d finished looking, riding the escalators, he left by a back exit and walked around the block. He found a spot to watch the front doors and dialled. Caroline Wishart answered on the third ring.

  He told her where he was, where to go.

  He didn’t see her go into the store, there were two entrances, the pavement was crowded. After a while, he crossed the street, went into the store through the right-hand doors, turned right and climbed the stairs to the third floor. He went through jewellery and handbags, around four Asian women talking in undertones, rings on their fingers flashing like lights. At the escalator, he dialled again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I got bored,’ he said. ‘I’m on the fourth floor looking at the toys. Come up the escalator next to the stationery, in the corner, know where that…’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  He waited, saw her pass. Waited, watched the people, dialled her again.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to come down again. To the second floor.’

  ‘Don’t mess me around,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a spy film.’

  He looked at his watch, stepped onto the up escalator.

  Caroline Wishart didn’t see him until the last second, when he was offering the package. She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, held out the bag with one hand, took the package in the other.

  Niemand took the bag.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

  He walked up the escalator, three people ahead of him, bag in his left hand, three steps at a time, glanced back. She was off the escalator, half hidden by a man in a dark suit. Another man was in front of her, facing her, close.

  When he turned his head, looked up, he saw a woman at the top of the escalator, back to him, a young woman in black, dark hair on her shoulders, talking on a cellphone held in her right hand, her head back.

  Niemand thought: Who do these people phone? Who phones them? What do they have to say to each other? He looked down, watched the metal belt slide beneath the shiny steel plate, he’d always felt some unease at the moment; in his life he had been on escalators no more than a few dozen times.

  He was taking the step to solid ground, to safety, when the woman on the cellphone raised her left hand, fingers spread, her hand moving, her fingers speaking.

  She had hair on her knuckles, dark hair.

  She turned, less than two metres from him, smiling, a nice smile, big mouth, dark lipstick, brought the cellphone away from her head, looking at it, chest-high.

  Niemand took a pace and dived at the man in drag.

  He was in the air when he saw the two short black barrels protruding from the top of the phone.

  He heard nothing. Saw only a lick of flame.

  The blow was high in his chest, no great pain.

  Fuck, he thought, why didn’t I expect this?

  Then he had his left hand on the weapon, brought his right hand down the man’s face, clawed his face, nails just long enough to gouge flesh from forehead, eyebrows, eyelids, cheekbones. He made a screeching noise, then Niemand had his fingers hooked behind the man’s lower lip, nails beneath the teeth, wrenching.

  The man in drag was not prepared for this kind of attack, this kind of ferocity, this kind of pain. Blood running into his eyes, blind, he let Niemand drag him to his knees. Niemand got the weapon away from him, no resistance, let go the jaw, kneed him in the head twice, three times, the man fell sideways, head hit the carpet, the wig was half off, near-shaven skull revealed, pale, shocking.

  Niemand jumped on his head, kicked it, looked around, grabbed the sports bag, suddenly aware of the people, shouting.

  Go down, said his instincts.

  He went up, ran up the escalator, hurting a little in the chest now, not much, people getting out of his way on the moving steel ramp. On the next floor, he told himself, Walk, be calm, no one here saw anything, no one heard anything. Seconds, it lasted seconds.

  Walk, just walk.

  He walked through games and dolls, toys, saw a stairway, no, not that one, a section full of plump women, maternity wear, shoes, children’s shoes, children standing around looking bored, rich children buying school uniforms, veer right, through a doorway, stairs. Yes.

  He went down, as fast as he could go without causing people to look, not many people coming up the stairs, he was bleeding a lot, he could feel the warmth of his own blood on his skin now, but the pain was bearable.

  Bearable, he said to himself, you’re not dying, this is not a terminal wound, not a lung shot. No, definitely not a lung shot. He’d seen enough lung shots, he knew lung shots. The sound, the strange bubbling sound. Nothing like that. He was breathing fine, just pain and blood, that was nothing.

  Sonny, you die when I fucken tell you to and not a fucken second before.

  They were the words mad Sergeant Toll shouted at him when he lay in an erosion gully, bruised all over, arm broken, at the School of Infantry
obstacle course. Niemand used the same words to the curly-haired boy, Jacobs, whose blood was lying like red mercury on the ancient dust of Angola. But Jacobs hadn’t obeyed. He’d coughed blood and he’d died.

  Floors, he’d lost track of floors, surely this was the ground floor. No, one to go, shit no, more than one. He wasn’t feeling well. Not a good idea this, he should have left Mr Fucking Shawn’s cassette where he found it.

  More stairs. Another floor? No, he remembered this section, the smell, perfume, somehow not women’s perfume, too much lemon and bay, this was the ground floor, carry on down, he’d be in the basement.

  An exit, right there, to his right, he hadn’t noticed it. He walked towards the doors. Upright, don’t hunch, the tendency was to hunch when hurt, why was that? It didn’t help, didn’t take away any pain.

  He looked around, not feeling alert. Where were they? They hadn’t sent one man to kill him. One man in a dress and a wig. They’d sent two men to the hotel, that hadn’t worked. Second try, this place would be crawling with killers, a full fucking platoon of them.

  He went past the doorman, who stared at him, then onto the pavement, lots of people, they were hard to avoid, all carrying bags. He bumped into a woman, said sorry. Daylight fading. Cold day, cold on his face, he felt warm inside, that was a good sign, they always talked about feeling cold when you were hit badly. The old hands. He was an old hand now. But he’d never taken a bad hit. Just the piece out of his side, the flesh wound in the bum and the grenade slivers in his arm and his chest.

  He knew where he was. The underground was just around the corner. Catch the tube as planned.

  The pain was in his jaw now, why was that?

  He crossed the side street, walked to the corner, turned into the busy street. No, he shouldn’t catch the tube, he’d be trapped down there. He walked past the station entrance, halfway down the block. Cross, better to cross, he thought. Crossing the street, traffic stalled, walking between the cars. This was a silly thing to have done, you didn’t want to die for this kind of shit.

  Too late to think about that. Anyway you didn’t want to die protecting parasites in Joburg, that would be a really seriously stupid way to go.

  ‘You all right?’

  Someone was speaking to him. Someone on a motorbike, sitting in the traffic, a yellow helmet, waiting for the lights ‘Need a lift,’ said Niemand. ‘I’m hurt.’

  ‘Get on,’ said yellow helmet.

  Niemand got on, bag on his lap, held the sides of the rider’s leather jacket. He looked back. Two men in dark suits were on the corner outside the store, looking around.

  Then, through the cars, he saw another man in a dark suit coming, running around cars.

  Coming to get him. Make sure this time.

  He couldn’t move, couldn’t get off the bike.

  What was the point? He couldn’t run.

  The man was fifteen metres away, a pale face, dark hair, coming quickly.

  Fuck, he thought. Stupid.

  With a roar, the bike pulled away, went between a car and delivery vehicle. Niemand’s head went back and when it came forward he couldn’t stop it, it came to rest between the rider’s shoulder blades, wanted to stay there.

  This wasn’t good. How much blood had he lost? He took a hand off the rider’s jacket and felt his shirt. It was wet, soaked.

  Too much blood.

  25

  …LONDON…

  ‘You tell me what’s going on,’ said Caroline Wishart. ‘Two bastards sandwich me, take the package. Stolen goods, the one says. Then someone attacks Mackie.’

  ‘Close the door, will you?’

  Colley was holding a plain cigarette in long ochre fingers, tapping it on his desktop, tapping one end, turning it over, tapping the other. ‘I’m buggered,’ he said. ‘Who knows how many people he’s swindled.’

  ‘Where’d you get the money?’

  ‘The money?’

  ‘Yes, the money.’

  He lit the cigarette with an old gas lighter, many clicks before the flame and the deep draw, belched smoke, did some coughing. ‘Chalk this one up to character building,’ he said. ‘Some you win, some are fuck-ups. That’s life.’

  ‘Who’d you tell?’

  ‘Tell? Who’d you tell?’ He put on a high-pitched and squeaky voice, his idea of an upper-class girl’s voice.

  Caroline wanted to strangle Colley, go over to him and slap his face and put her hands around his mottled neck.

  ‘Leaving aside the pathetic quality of your imitations,’ she said, ‘where’d the money come from?’

  He smiled, a pleased expression. ‘It wasn’t actually real money.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The top and the bottom ones, yes. The middle ones…shall we say Middle Eastern?’

  It was dawning on Caroline that she was missing something. ‘Well, shall “we” tell me what the fuck’s going on here?’

  Colley formed his lips into an anus and blew tiny, perfect smoke rings. She saw the pale, vile tip of his tongue. The grey circles met the thermal from the ground-level heating duct, rose, dissolved.

  ‘You came to me for help, remember,’ Colley said. ‘You could’ve gone to Halligan, but no, you thought he’d pinch your story, make you sorry you screwed him with your non-negotiable demands.’

  She could not contain herself. ‘Well, not doing that, that was probably a big mistake.’

  Carefully, Colley rested his cigarette in a saucer, finger-shaped nicotine stains around the edges, looked up at her. ‘Listen, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘your big scoop, it happened to you, you didn’t happen to it. Now you’ve got to produce another one. And you gels, you can’t actually do that, you can’t actually do anything, and once you stop giving the working-class old farts cockstands, once the next little upper-class tart comes along, well then you’re back to writing your lifestyle crap.’

  He was telling her something but she couldn’t quite grasp what it was.

  ‘Still,’ said Colley, ‘you can always get daddy to set you up as an interior decorator, can’t you?’

  ‘So what do I do?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing. Move on, this never got off the ground, no harm done, we just forget it. We don’t put it in the CV and we don’t entertain the pub with the story.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  Colley took off his glasses, looked for something to clean them with, found a crumpled tissue and breathed on the filthy lenses. ‘Well,’ he said, not looking at her, rubbing glass, ‘some good can come out of a cockup. You never know.’

  She waited. He didn’t look up, started on the other smeared lens. He wasn’t going to say any more, she was dismissed.

  She left, feeling the tightness in her chest, the sick feeling.

  One day she would kill Colley. Tie him to a tree in a forest, torture him and kill him. No, torture him and bury him alive, shovel damp soil alive with worms onto his head, into his mouth, watch his eyes.

  But she knew that what she hated most was not Colley.

  No, she hated herself for being so stupid as to go to him, to trust him.

  26

  …HAMBURG…

  He found her on the university website.

  Dr Alexandra Koenig, Dr. med., Dr. phil., Dipl.-Psych. Clinical psychologist.Research: Empirical validation of psychoanalytical concepts; psychophysiology; post-traumatic stress disorder.

  A homepage carried a photograph, properly severe. He went to her curriculum vitae. It listed at least two dozen articles. She had been a visiting fellow at the Harvard Medical School. She was on the editorial board of The Journal for Trauma Studies.

  There was an email address. Anselm stared at the screen for a while, then he opened the mailer, typed in her address. Under Subject, he put: Rudeness, contrition.

  In the message box, he typed: We could meet, for a walk perhaps. John Anselm.

  He felt relieved after sending the message and went back to the logbooks. The phone rang.

  ‘It’s done,’ said Til
ders. ‘Some luck too. Two for the price of one.’

  ‘Not a concept known to this firm,’ said Anselm. He didn’t know what Tilders was talking about. They must have got the bug on Serrano earlier than expected.

  His email warning was blinking. He clicked. Alex Koenig.

  The message was: A walk would be nice. Does today suit you? I am free from 3 p.m.

  Anselm felt flushed. He couldn’t think of anywhere to meet her, and then he thought of his childhood walks with Fraulein Einspenner in Stadtpark. He hadn’t been there in thirty years.

  She was waiting in front of the planetarium, formally dressed again, wearing her rimless glasses. There weren’t many people around, a few mothers with prams or pushers, lovers, older people walking briskly.

  She saw him from a distance, didn’t look away, watched him approach.

  ‘Herr Anselm,’ she said, long and serious face. She held out her right hand. ‘Perhaps we start again?’

  ‘John,’ said Anselm.

  ‘Alex.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Shall we walk?’ she said.

  They walked on the grass, away from the building. There wasn’t much left in the day. A wind had come up, serrated edge of winter, hunting brown and grey and russet leaves across a lawn worn shabby by the summer crowds.

  ‘Well,’ she said, not at ease. ‘You know what I do for my living. You are not still a journalist.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m in the information business.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We gather it and sell it.’ That was true, that was what they did. He didn’t want to tell this woman the sordid truth but he didn’t want to lie to her, he’d told a lot of lies, most of them to women.

  They were at the road. She stopped and turned. He turned too and they looked back at the planetarium: it was big, solid, domed, towering over the parkland, a faintly sinister presence, alien in its setting.

  ‘That’s an Albert Speer kind of building,’ Alex said. ‘Hitler must have liked it. It says, look at me, I’m huge.’