(2005) Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  He had thought, climbing the stairs, that she would gasp, then melt, then hold out her arms to grasp him, as she had always done, but the arms were across her chest and folded tight over her blouse, not the T-shirt of Guevara's face that she had worn each and every day. Past her shoulder an electric fire burned and in front of it was a rack on which a baby's clothes dried.

  He looked above the fire and saw the print of a watercolour view, popular, of the castle at Heidelberg, and the same print had been in a corridor off the entrance to the college where he had been enrolled and where she had studied to be a teacher, and which all of them had regarded with derision. Five years back, there had been in that place above the fire, a poster to com-memorate the sacrifices of the Palestinian people.

  Everything he saw, he thought was betrayal.

  There was a chest beside the fire.

  A framed photograph was on the chest.

  In the photograph she stood with her baby and a uniformed man - Caucasian white - was beside her, an arm round her shoulder.

  She said, 'We have been married for three years. He is from Krakow, but now he has citizenship. He is a good man and a good father. It was a long time ago, Sami.'

  'What does he do?' The question had an innocence.

  'He is on the Bahn-Wacht - sometimes he works at the Hauptbahnhof, sometimes on the U-Bahn, sometimes at the Dammtor. In two years he hopes to join the city's police, it is his ambition . . . It was too long ago, Sami. We change. It was the old life, we were young - everything is changed. You went, I cried for a week. I thought you would come back, I promised myself that you would come back . . . Then the planes hit the towers, and everything changed.'

  His voice was a whisper: 'Did you ever speak of it?'

  'Of who we knew? No. Whom we met? No . . . But I changed my life and hid what had been.' She looked into his face. 'Did you change, Sami, move on? Or do you still belong to the struggle? Have you left them or are you a part of them?'

  He should not have come, and he knew it. It played in his mind. The man from Krakow returned in the evening from his work shift, pulled off his tie, loosened his uniform tunic, waited for food to be set before him, had his baby sit on his knee and asked if she had had a good day. And he had ambition to be a policeman. How better to achieve ambition? She would tell him that a man, from her past, had arrived at the door without warning and who he was and who his associates had been at the college. And he would telephone to the police or the BfV - and ambition would be realized for an immigrant from Krakow . . . and he knew also that his weakness must be covered.

  The baby had begun to cry and she turned to go to it. He stepped inside the room and reached out.

  She recoiled when his fingers found her neck. He remembered the softness of the skin, where his fingers had played patterns. Then she had snuggled closer to him, had slipped undone the belt of her jeans and lifted up the T-shirt with the face of Guevara. He tightened his fingers and no scream came from her throat, just a choke. He pressed harder. When she no longer struggled, when she was limp and he

  supported her weight, he dragged her into the bedroom. He left her on the bed, beside the cot where the baby cried.

  At the door, before he quietly, carefully, closed it, as he had five years before, he paused and used the back of his hand to smear away the wetness from his face.

  He had trekked up the long hill of the Elbchaussee, had left the river behind him. Malachy came to Blankenese and by the station he found a board with a street map. Nothing written down, everything remembered. He searched for the name and found a side turning that was scarcely visible on the map. But the dusk had not yet come, and he walked in the opposite direction towards parkland, away from the side turning, sat on a bench and waited for darkness.

  Chapter Twelve

  Hours had passed. The rain had come on heavier, then eased, but the wind was fierce. The rain had penetrated the material of his heavy coat and the wind pushed the damp deeper. But in the park, where he sat on the bench and shivered and the cold caught at his bones, night had fallen. Malachy stood up, then stepped out.

  Why? That there was no clear reason for the actions he had taken, merely a higher step on the ladder, seemed of small importance to him. He had little conception of what it would mean to his life if he teetered on the top rung . . . but he did not believe he could escape it. A kaleidoscope of images sped in his mind, the faces of those who had been kind, generous to him: old Cloughie at school, Adam Barnett, war studies tutor at the military academy, Brian Arnold, his guide into Intelligence at Chicksands . . . All would now have rooted for him. Then he heard the sneers, jibes, cruelty of those who had denied him . . .

  Best foot forward, Malachy, and fast, before courage was lost.

  He left the park and walked up into the village of Blankenese. There would have been communities like this one in Surrey, Berkshire and Cheshire. He passed the dim-lit windows of shops for antique furniture, imported clothes and food, and restaurants with candles at the tables and laughter, rows of parked Mercedes and BMW high-performance cars. He went through the village, and thought that prosperity oozed from it and comfort. He reached across a low, newly painted white wicket fence and grabbed a handful of earth from a hoed bed, then bent and smeared it on his shoes. He pulled his wool hat lower on his forehead and lifted the collar of his overcoat higher. He paused at a crossroads, took bearings from the signs, then headed on. He was hungry, thirsty, chilled, but the combination made his senses keen.

  Alert, he saw the camera.

  The stanchion to hold it was on a high street-light on the main road inland from the village. Branches from a tree wove a trellis of obstructions round the post at a level lower than the camera and the light. Its position surprised him, not right for monitoring traffic in a road leading out of a village centre. A hundred metres past the light, the camera, was the side road leading off to the right. He went towards the camera, under it, and its lens would only have caught the dark mass of his coat and hat, not registered his face.

  Opposite the side road was a narrow entrance into a garden. A hedge had been clipped around the doorway, which was recessed in the beech leaves that the winter had not stripped. He was in shadow when he crouched on the step, and he tucked his dirt-stained shoes under himself; a man or woman with a dog would have been beside him before he was noticed.

  He could see up the side road, and there were distant lights behind trees and hedges, above fences and walls. He settled.

  He did not know yet which was Timo Rahman's

  home. He did not know where Timo Rahman would meet Ricky Capel. Where else to be, what else to do?

  He could not have gone to every hotel in Hamburg, stood at the reception desks and asked if Ricky Capel, importer of narcotics to the United Kingdom, stayed there. This was the only place to begin his vigil.

  Cars sped along the main road but their lights did not find him. He was protected by the hedge and the shadows. The cold racked him. He huddled.

  It happened very quickly, as his head was clouded with thoughts, all useless.

  A car coming down the main road, big headlights powering in front of it. A car coming up the road and braking hard, indicators winking for a turn to the right. The Mercedes was stationary and the approaching lights speared through its windscreen.

  He saw the face, the smooth skin that was almost juvenile. The face had been above him. The headlights of the oncoming car lit the eyes. The Mercedes swung into the side road.

  Malachy watched the track of its lights, then saw it turn in, and lost it.

  He pushed himself up - his hips and knees ached -

  then walked forward.

  The gates closed behind the car.

  Ricky looked around him. The security lights showed him the house, their beams spilling out on to lawns and beds of shrub; it was a big pad, impressive, but not a mansion, not like some of the places they had passed on the drive here. The driver had not spoken a word that Ricky had understood. At the reception des
k, the skinny bitch who had rung up to his room and called him down had led him to the swing doors, pointed to the parking area and the Mercedes and told him it had been sent to collect him. Half a day and half an evening he had been stuck in his bloody hotel room, and at the end of it there was no Timo Rahman to meet him personally, and to apologize that he had been left for nine hours to kick his heels; just a driver he couldn't understand, who had gripped his hand, shaken it and half crushed his fist.

  He was not one to hang about: first, he'd find out where the little shit-face was, where Enver, who had dumped him, had gone, and why; second, he'd get the business done, whatever; third, he'd ask for the arrangements to be made for his flight home in the morning. He waited in the car for the driver to open the door for him, and waited . . . The bastard didn't: he was at the front door, beckoning him to follow, like he was dirt. His temper was high and the blood pounded in him, as it had all through the hours in the hotel room - disrespect was shown him.

  The front door was open. He saw a short, squat little beggar, slacks and an open-necked shirt, in the hall.

  He had never met Timo Rahman but instinctively knew him. All the deals with the Hamburg end for the shipment of packages had been handled by Enver, the nephew. All the loads of immigrants brought in on the lorries he'd brokered had been dealt with by Enver. He felt uncertain, rare for him, and alone -

  awkward because he wore a suit and a tie. The man in the hall, Timo Rahman, flexed his hands in front of his groin, then slid them behind his back. Ricky had the message, and didn't like it. He chucked the car door open, climbed out, slammed it shut, stamped across the gravel and came to the step. He looked into Timo Rahman's eyes - Ricky wasn't tall, but he was taller than the man. Ricky backed off from no one. But he saw the eyes. The hall lights shone in them. Ricky wiped from his mind what he was going to say about the shit-face, Enver.

  His shoulders were grasped, he smelt the lotion, he was kissed on each cheek and the lips - cold as bloody death - brushed his skin.

  In accented English. 'You are welcome, Ricky Capel.'

  'Good to be here, Mr Rahman.'

  'And your journey was satisfactory?'

  'No problems, Mr Rahman.'

  'I am grateful you were able to find time in your busy life to visit me.'

  'A pleasure, Mr Rahman.'

  The eyes never left Ricky's. Years back, when he was a kid and when Mikey wasn't away, they had gone as a family, with the girls, to the zoo up in London, and they'd taken in the reptile house, and there had been snakes, most of them curled up and asleep, but a cobra had had its head up, had hissed and shown its fangs at the glass, and its eyes had watched them. He couldn't hold Timo Rahman's gaze and he was looking down at the carpet and saw that his feet shuffled, like he had nerves. His arm was gripped at the elbow.

  'I want to show you something that is precious to me, Ricky.'

  'Anything, Mr Rahman.'

  He was led across the hall and up a wide staircase.

  At the landing he heard TVs playing behind two closed doors. A door into a bedroom was opened for him.

  On through the bedroom, into a dressing room where a wall was lined with a wardrobe. He didn't understand.

  'Look, Ricky Capel.'

  The pudgy finger pointed.

  It was the picture his grandfather had. Black-and-white, the same. Different frame, plastic and cheap, but the same handwriting scrawled across it. A mountain background, a cave with a narrow entrance, five men tooled up and standing in a line. A fire with a cooking tin on it, and three men sitting cross-legged with the smoke blowing against them. There was his grandfather, and the tall guy whose funeral his grandfather had trekked north to attend, and the one that his grandfather called Mehmet.

  'We got that,' he said.

  'My father, your grandfather and Major Anstruther, comrades.'

  'He's dead, Anstruther is. Grandfather went to his funeral. We got that same picture.'

  'Comrades, Ricky Capel. They fought together, fought for each other. Each of them would have died that the others would live. Joined by blood, all men of value. Heroes, fighters, brothers. So, Ricky Capel, your family and mine are bound together in loyalty to them.'

  'We do business, yes.'

  'In the mountains, in the snow of winter, they lay together to give warmth that one of them should not freeze. In combat they gave covering fire that one of them should not be a target. Your grandfather and my father, they bound our families in loyalty. It is more than business - their blood ran together, as does ours.'

  It was a quiet, gentle voice and Ricky had to strain to hear it. He looked, mesmerized, at the photograph.

  Sharon, his mum, said the picture spooked her. Mikey, his dad, dismissed it as sad, but said old men needed a memory to hang on to. Percy, his grandfather, never talked about the war and what he'd done, lost up there in those bloody mountains.

  'I suppose so, yes.'

  'They were men of honour. Whatever the one asked, the other would give. They lived together, they killed together.'

  'I see what you mean, Mr Rahman.'

  'Do you have, Ricky Capel, your grandfather's loyalty?'

  'I hope so. I . . . ' He checked himself. 'Of course I do.'

  He was led from the dressing room, from the bedroom and down the stairs into a dining room of heavy, gloomy furniture - wouldn't have entertained any of it - where two places were laid. Wasn't offered a drink, was told they would eat and then work at their business.

  The night had closed on him and the storm had grown. Oskar Netzer reckoned it now at force eight, and worsening. He had laboured into the dusk. Only when the drill bit had nicked the finger steadying the screw, and drawn blood, had he decided he could no longer continue strengthening the viewing platform.

  It was not for visitors that he sought to repair it but for himself. A part of paradise for this old and troubled man was to be on its deck and gaze down at the small waterscape, and see the eiders. It would be bad that night, but the forecasts for the next week that were pinned up by the harbour told of worse to come. As he blundered back along the sand path through the dunes and the scrub, he prided himself that he knew every step of the way from the viewing platform to the cemetery at Ostdorf where the nearest street-lights were.

  When he reached them he stood in their pool, leaned on the closed gate and told Gertrud what he had been doing, and how he had let the drill's bit cut into his finger. He thought he heard her voice: 'You are an old fool, Oskar, nothing but an old fool.' Then he went on home, and the wind sang in the wires, and he thought of what he would eat for his meal, and of his book that he would read afterwards . . . But the meal and the book soon slipped because he worried more about the fierceness of the storm gathering out in the North Sea. The worst of the gales were always in the days and nights before Easter.

  He passed the harbour, brightly lit, and saw the Baltrum ferry moored, and every boat the islanders owned seemed to be corralled in the shelter of the groyne, finding safety from the sea - and a new worry surged: would the wind take tiles off his roof? So much to worry about, so little peace.

  'You people are wrong, Freddie, about as mistaken as it is possible to be.'

  He was not the first and most certainly would not be the last. Gaunt had taken the train north to this provincial university to hear heresies and listen to unpalatable opinions.

  'Osama has been made, by you and the Agency, into an icon - it was a grievous error at your doors to have done so,'

  The man across the Formica-topped table from him was of around his age but that was the only similarity between them. Gaunt was groomed, wore his three-piece suit with a quiet tie and had a polka-dot handkerchief sprouting from the breast pocket. His shoes were highly polished and he'd burnished them in the last minutes of the journey with the cloth from his briefcase. The professor wore scratched sandals over loud socks, shapeless cord trousers held up by sagging braces, a check shirt frayed at wrists and collar, topped with a stained self-knotted bow-tie,
his white hair sprang from the sides of his scalp and made a halo round his head.

  'First you set him on a pedestal and gave him an undeserved value, then you compounded the fault by failing to topple him. You lifted Osama to a position where he became the equal to the heads of government of your coalition. I have told your colleagues, so many times, of that error, and their response has been to wring their hands and whine that it is the demand of their masters. You should have stood up, been counted, refused to travel on that road.'

  As chair of Islamic studies at the university, the professor had a rightful place of merit in academic circles, but to the Service he was more valuable. Living, working outside the bubble of the Service at Vauxhall Bridge Cross and the Whitehall ministries across the river, he offered opinions that grated with the normal well-oiled meshings of government's gears. At a time of crisis, it was predictable that Frederick Gaunt would have used up precious hours and gone north.

  'So, you believe a man is coming, perhaps with a destination of the United Kingdom. You show me a photograph. He looks pleasant enough. You have gauged his importance by the fact that another was prepared to give his life and meet death in agonizing circumstances; a life sacrificed that a more valued person, whom you believe to be of the rank of co-ordinator, should have time to make good his escape.

  You ask me to penetrate the co-ordinator's mind.

  First, forget Osama bin Laden, who - I venture - is irrelevant now, other than as a carved, painted totem.'

  They sat in the far corner of the canteen in the students' union building. They ate. Gaunt picked at a stale salad of tomato, chives and lettuce, and had a bottle of gassy water. The professor had had a mountain of chips with wrinkled sausages floating on a brown sauce lake, and drank from a can of

  Chardonnay. A few minutes before, when a pair of girls had come close with their trays, Gaunt had imperiously waved them away.