In the Evil Day

by Peter Temple

  Kael: Don’t tell me to calm down.

  A long silence, the sounds of the ferry, something that sounded like a series of snorts, followed by laboured breathing.

  Silence, sounds of movement, a cough.

  Kael: Paul, I’m sorry, I get a bit too excited, this is a worrying… Serrano: Okay, that’s okay, it’s a problem, we have to think. Richler wants an answer today.

  Kael: You know what they want to do, don’t you?

  Serrano: Maybe.

  Kael: They want to tidy up. And they want the assets.

  Serrano: These boats, I’m not getting… Kael: Tell him we agree but it’ll take time. Seventy-two hours at least.

  Serrano: Where does that get us?

  Kael: They’ll have this prick by then. If what he’s got is bad for us, we’re possibly in trouble. If not, we haven’t handed them our hard work on a plate.

  Serrano: You don’t actually think he’ll believe me?

  Kael: Of course he won’t. But they won’t take a chance.

  Tilders switched off. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

  ‘Good bug,’ said Anselm. ‘You’re doing good work.’

  ‘Another put and take…’ Tilders shook his head.

  ‘If you can’t, you can’t. We don’t want to spook anyone.’

  Tilders nodded. His pale eyes never left Anselm’s, spoke of nothing.

  29

  …LONDON…

  ‘THere’s money in my account I know nothing about,’ said Caroline. ‘Ten thousand pounds.’

  Colley was looking at her over the Telegraph, narrow red eyes, cigarette smoke rising. ‘Wonderful, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you noticed. Perhaps mummy popped it in.’

  ‘The bank says it’s a transfer from the Bank of Vanuatu. An electronic transfer.’

  ‘Electronic money. Floats in cyberspace, falls anywhere, at random. Like old satellites. Finders keepers. Congratulations.’

  ‘I’m declaring it to Halligan, I’m handing it over.’

  He lowered the paper. ‘Are you? Yes, well, that’s probably a sound thing to do. In theory.’

  ‘In theory?’

  ‘Well, it may be a bit late to develop principles. After you’ve played the bagwoman.’

  Caroline wasn’t sure what he was saying. She had no anger left, it had taken too long to get the bank to tell her where the money had come from. The blood drained from her face. She was no longer certain that she knew what had happened. But she had a strong feeling about what was happening now and she felt cold.

  ‘I’ve been set up,’ she said. ‘You know about this, don’t you?’

  Colley shook his head. He had an amused expression. His strange hairs had been combed with oil and his scalp had a damp pubic look.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But if you’re unhappy, that probably stems from something unconnected with the present situation. It could come from realising that you’re just a pretty vehicle, a conduit. Something people ride on. Or something stuff flows though.’

  She had no idea what he was talking about. ‘I’ve been set up.’

  ‘You’ve said that, sweetheart. Remember? Not too much nose-munchies with the public schoolboys last night? All I know is you came to me with a proposition involving paying someone for something that we could make a lot of money out of. I told you that the right thing to do was to go to Halligan. I said I wanted nothing to do with your proposal.’

  He opened a drawer, took out a flat device. ‘You’re out of your depth here. Like to hear the tape?’

  Caroline felt the skin on her face tighten, her lips draw back from her teeth of their own accord. She turned and left the room without saying anything, went down the corridor, through the newsroom. In her cubicle, door shut, she sat at the desk with her eyes closed, clenched hands in her lap.

  Out of your depth.

  Her father had said those words, those words were in her heart. The image came to her of her toes trying to find the bottom of the pool, toes outstretched, nothing there, the water in her mouth and nose, smell of chlorine. She could still smell chlorine anywhere, everywhere, smell it in the street, anywhere, any hint of it made her feel sick. Her father had used the phrase that day when she was a little girl wan from vomiting and he had repeated it every time she failed at anything.

  She shut the memory out, stayed motionless for a long time. Then she opened her eyes, pulled her chair closer to the desk, and began to write on the pad.

  Out of her depth? Go to Halligan and tell him the whole story? Who was going to be believed? Colley had a doctored tape. She had no hope.

  Out of your depth.

  No. Death before that.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Marcia Collins. You probably don’t remember me. I’m the features editor now. Does your personal arrangement with the executive branch permit me to ask what the hell you’re doing? Am I allowed to ask that?’

  ‘No, you aren’t,’ said Caroline. ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’

  A silence.

  ‘I suppose you’ve heard they found your little Gary. Dead of an overdose. Been dead for days.’

  30

  …HAMBURG…

  When tilders had gone, Anselm went out on the balcony and smoked a cigarette, watched him drive away. He looked down at the unloved roses and thought about his first days in the family house.

  On his second morning, he had woken in fright from a drunken sleep and did not know where he was. He had been fighting the top sheet, twisting, it was tight around him. He’d lain back and felt his hair. It was wet with sweat. He got up. The pillowslip was dark. He stripped it from the pillow. It gave off a chemical smell, the smell of the pink fluid the doctor gave him to drink before he left the hospital.

  In the huge tiled bathroom, pissing into the rusty water in the toilet bowl, the same smell had risen, richer now, it sickened him.

  He showered, standing uncertainly in the huge bath. Water fell on him, a warm torrent, he was inside a rushing tube of warm water. He did not want to leave it. Ever. But eventually he went downstairs. There was bread and butter and tea, tea in bags, a box of leaf tea. He made toast and tea, that was an ordinary thing to do.

  An ordinary thing on an ordinary morning.

  Tea brewed in a china pot. In a kitchen. Toast with butter.

  He had thought it gone forever.

  He’d made two slices of toast, put them on a plate, and put the pot of tea and the toast and butter and a bowl of sugar on a tray and gone out onto the terrace. There was an old, dangerous chair to sit on and a rusty garden table. He’d gone back and forth to the kitchen and, in all, eaten seven slices of toast, toast with butter, just butter. He drank three cups of tea from the English china cup, roses on it.

  Just eating toast and drinking tea, sitting in the sunshine in the wobbly chair, massaging the two fingers on his left hand, he could not remember more peace in his life.

  Then he was sick, he could not reach the bathroom.

  He had not left the house for two weeks. There was enough food and drink for ten weeks, more. He did nothing, existed. The milk ran out, he drank black tea. He sat in the spring sun, dozed, tried to read Henry Esmond, found on his great-aunt’s bedside table, drank gin and tonic from before midday, ate something from a tin, slept in an armchair smelling faintly of long-dead dog, he had a memory of the dog, a spaniel, one eye opaque. He’d woken dry-mouthed, empty-headed, drunk water, poured wine, watched television in the study, not very much of anything, often went to sleep in the chair, woke cold in the small hours.

  His brother had rung every second day. Fine, said Anselm, I’m fine. I’m pulling myself together. He had no idea what together would look like. There were terrifying blanks in his memory of the years before the kidnap-big blanks and small blanks, with no pattern to them. They seemed to go back to his teens. It was hard to know where they began.

  He’d exhausted his clean clothes. Where was the laundry? He’d remembered a passage off the kitchen leading to a courtyard. The wa
shing machine was unused for a long time, the hose disintegrated, water everywhere. He washed his clothes with old yellow soap in the porcelain sink, found a pleasure in it, in hanging the washing in the laundry courtyard.

  And every day, he’d walked around the garden, looking at the roses, smelling them. One morning, when he woke, he’d known what he was going to do. Before noon, he left the house for the first time.

  He knew where the bookshop was. He had been there on his last visit to his great-aunt, on his way to Yugoslavia. He had bought her a book.

  He walked a long route, up Leinpfad to Benedictstrasse and down Heilwigstrasse and through Eichenpark and on to Harvesterhuder Weg and through Alsterpark. He walked all the way to the Frensche bookshop in the Landesbank building. In the crowded shop, he was assaulted by fear bordering on panic but he found the book. It was waiting for him, twelve years old, never opened, an encyclopaedia of roses. He paid and left, sweating with relief.

  He walked down to the Binnenalster, bought a sausage on a roll from a street vendor, sat on a bench in the sun and opened the book. His was the hand that cracked its spine. He looked at the pictures, read the descriptions, while he ate. Then he walked all the way home, too scared to catch a bus, and, exhausted, went around the garden trying to identify the roses. It was more difficult than he had imagined. He was sure about Zephirine Drouhin at the front gate, Gruss an Aachen on the terrace, Madame Gregoire Staechelin on the wall, and three or four others.

  But that wasn’t enough. He wanted to know the name of every rose in the garden, and there were so many he couldn’t be sure of- the pictures were fuzzy, the descriptions too imprecise.

  Like his memory.

  Beate knocked on the glass. Anselm finished the cigarette and went in.

  31

  …HAMBURG…

  Baader came into Anselm’s office and slumped in a chair. He put a new case cover sheet on the desk.

  ‘I gave this to Carla,’ he said. ‘You were busy with Tilders.’

  Anselm looked at the form. The subject was someone called Con Niemand aka Eric Constantine, South African, occupation security guard, last seen London.

  ‘Lafarge Partners?’ he said.

  Baader was looking down, fingers steepled. ‘Credit check’s okay. Corporate security. How many corporate security consultants does the world need?’

  ‘Demand and supply. Ever think about what happens to these people after we find them?’

  Baader closed his eyes, shook his head. ‘John, please.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘This is a business.’ He still didn’t look up.

  Anselm went ahead, knew how stupid he was being. ‘These people, they can pay. That’s all we care?’

  Baader lifted his fox head. ‘Care? Care about what? Lafarge. Probably run by Catholics. If you like, we could ask the Pope to give them a moral clearance. On the other hand, the Pope cleared Hitler.’

  He looked away, not at anything. ‘John, either we provide this service for anyone who can pay or we don’t provide it all. You’re unhappy with that, I’ll give you a very good reference. Today if you like.’

  Silence, just the sounds from the big room, the hum of the internal fans cooling sixty or seventy electronic devices, the air-conditioning, noise from a dozen monitors, a phone ringing, another one, people laughing.

  ‘I’m really tired,’ said Baader. ‘I’ve sold the shares, the car, the apartment. I’m moving to this shitty little apartment, two rooms, all night the trains run past, eye level, ten metres away, the noise, people look at you like you’re in Hagenbeck’s fucking zoo.’

  He got up. ‘So I’m not receptive to ethical questions right now. Next year perhaps.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Anselm. He was.

  ‘Yes, well, when you’re in trouble, you too can sell your dwelling. Then you can buy your own island, buy Australia, it should get you enough to buy Australia, world’s biggest island, live happily ever after.’

  ‘My brother owns the house,’ said Anselm. Baader knew that, he just didn’t want to believe it.

  Baader was at the door, he stopped, turned his head, said, ‘War criminals from three wars, Pinochet’s number two executioner, a Russian who leaves five people to die in a meat fridge, a man who swindles widows and orphans out of sixty million dollars, a woman who drowns two children so that she can marry an Italian beachboy. And the fucking rest.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Count for something? Yes? Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anselm. ‘I’m a prick, Stefan. I’m a self-confessed prick and contrite.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Baader. ‘Anyway, it’s too late to change. We can’t. You can’t. I can’t. The fucking world can’t.’

  Anselm stared out of the window for a long time, just a sliver of lake view, a slice of trees and water and sky, endless sky, the water fractionally darker than the sky. He still had the dreams, dreams about sky, about lying on his back, he was on a hilltop looking at a huge blue heaven, birds passing high above, twittering flocks so large their shadows fell on him like the shadows of clouds, and then the real clouds came, the mountains of cloud, darkening the day, chilling the air.

  After a while, his thoughts went to Alex Koenig. It was not a good idea. She wanted something from him. A paper in a learned journal. He was a scalp. No one else had interviewed him. On the other hand…

  He started at the knock.

  Carla Klinger.

  ‘Cut your hair, I see,’ said Anselm. ‘I like it.’

  She blinked twice, moved her mouth. ‘Two weeks since then but thank you. The new British file, Eric Constantine, Seychelles passport, he hired a car from a Centurion Hire in London.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday. Seven days hire. Paid cash. To be returned to the place of hire.’

  ‘Centurion Hire? How big are they?’

  ‘One site.’

  ‘And they’re online?’

  ‘No. I looked at the big hire companies, nothing, so I thought about what all the small car-hire businesses would have to do. One thing is insure, they have to insure the cars, and I asked an insurance person. In the UK, three insurance companies get most of the hire car insurance. They don’t just insure all of a company’s vehicles, blanket cover. Every hire, they want a record of who the hirer is. Inskip and I opened them up and we found the name.’

  She licked her lower lip. ‘Not a great problem,’ she said.

  Anselm shook his head. ‘Not for you maybe. For people like me, a great problem. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? Can we run all the British currents through it, see what happens?’

  ‘Inskip’s doing that now. Then we’ll see what we can do in the States. I don’t know the insurance position there.’

  ‘You should be in charge here.’

  ‘Then who would do my work?’

  She left. Walking with a stick didn’t make her any less attractive from behind. From any angle.

  He went back to looking out of the window. He had said it. He wasn’t necessary. Carla could do her job without him and probably do Inskip’s too.

  Baader could save a lot of money by showing him the door. It would cross the mind of someone who’d had to sell his shares, his Blankenese apartment, the Porsche, now lie awake in a two-room postwar walk-up listening to the trains’ electric screech vibrate his window.

  Baader could have got rid of him a long time ago.

  Baader was his friend, that’s why he hadn’t done it.

  It was thirty minutes before his meeting with O’Malley. Anselm got up and put on his good overcoat.

  32

  …HAMBURG…

  A ferry was on its way to the Fahrdamm landing. Anselm paced himself to get there to meet it. The lake was choppy, north wind raising whitecaps. He got off at the Fahrhaus landing and walked back along the shore towards Poseldorf, along the gravel path through Alsterpark, not many people around, some old people and women with prams, two junkies on a bench, workers sucking up leav
es, the devices held at the groin, big yellow whining demanding organs.

  A high sky, a cold day slipping away. Anselm thought about how his father had told him that Alsterpark was only as big as it was because so many Jewish families had lived on the west side of the lake and had been dispossessed. They were gone, gone to horrible death or exile, when the Allied bombers came in the high summer of July 1944. Then people walked into the lake to escape the unbearable heat of a city set on fire by teenage boys dropping high explosive bombs, incendiary bombs, napalm and phosphorus bombs. Aunt Pauline talked about it early on the first tape.

  I went to the coffee factory that day. Otto, our driver took me. We had two coffee factories. I used to do the accounts, I couldn’t bear to do nothing. I hated sitting around the house, I begged to be allowed to do something, it was difficult for women to do anything in families like ours, you understand. Marriage, children, the domestic world, that was the domain of women, my mother never questioned that for one second, she could not understand that women might want something else. I didn’t have children, of course, so I think she made an exception for me, not a full exception, she always hoped I’d marry again. I tried to tell her…what was I saying?

  The bombing.

  Oh. Yes. I was at the factory in Hammerbrook, in Bankstrasse. I used to work until late, after 9 p.m., it was summer, it had been terribly hot for weeks. We were driving back when we heard the sirens and then the bombs started to fall. And we stopped and got out and we ran to some trees, I don’t know why. After that, you can’t imagine. The whole world was alight. Buildings fell down. The flames went up forever, the sky was burning, it looked as if the clouds were on fire. Burning clouds, like a vision of Armageddon. The heat. There was no air to breath. The flames burnt up all the air. And the people ran out of the buildings, the screams of the children. The tar melted, people stuck in the tar. The car windows melted.Things just burst into flame. We were lying down against a wall trying to get air from the cobblestones. I was absolutely sure that I was going to die, that we were all going to die. And then the Feuersturm began, it was like animals howling, the wind, so strong it pulled me away from the wall and Otto grabbed my leg and hung onto me.