The Night Watch

by Julian Dinsell

  They each touched glasses and together began to eat.

  “Then let us begin with the essentials,” Jakob said between mouthfuls of noodles. “If we need to meet again, we can’t do it here. Twice is more than enough. My front door is often watched, especially when my business has been less generous than usual in its contributions to local police bonuses. Call on Lotte; she is an ancient and hugely distant relative who has a flat in the street behind mine. Look for the green door. That will be easier than remembering an address. We share a basement room. You can get to my flat from there.”

  Wolski began to realise how little he really knew Jakob.

  “Give me a name she will know you by.”

  “Kloptik,” Wolski immediately replied. Aunt Clara’s nickname for him was a reminder of a past before innocence was lost.

  “Now to more immediate questions,” Jakob said. “A journey to Hamburg; could you justify one to your masters?”

  Wolski did not reply immediately. Could he convince Golkov that there was something they needed? Analytical software, perhaps? The kind that would have to be purchased secretly from one of the shadowy figures who traded illegally in material restricted by the US government’s ban on the export of strategic goods. He had been indirectly offered such packages in the past but had always turned them down.

  “Perhaps,” he said cautiously.

  “At short notice?”

  “More difficult, but perhaps not impossible.”

  “Good; here is what I have in mind.”

  Anya and Wolski waited for him to continue, but he did not speak again until he had finished his schnitzel. He pushed the plate away and topped up his wine glass without offering any to his audience. He seemed to be addicted to the process of feeding, which was closer to refuelling than eating.

  “Anya is a traffic supervisor with LOT, our esteemed national airline, and Hamburg is one of its most important destinations, so she has reason to travel there quite often. Moreover, she has access to the computer and airline passenger lists.” Jakob delivered this last point with a sense of triumph. “There is no reason to suppose that Thornhill does not travel under his own name. He uses it openly enough, and since he travels frequently among people he knows, petty camouflage would be more likely to attract attention than avoid it. So, it is possible for Anya to know when he next arrives in Hamburg.”

  Wolski made as if to interrupt. “Is all this really necessary? Surely there must be some other way of doing this?”

  The question drew a flash of indignation from Jakob. “Is what you told me true? Are you serious about this?”

  “Yes,” Wolski said.

  “Then beware of comforting explanations.”

  “You’re talking in riddles,” Wolski replied.

  “Then I’ll speak plainly. Learn the lesson of history.”

  Sensing that some inner pain prevented Jakob from coming to the point, Wolski said nothing. Jakob leaned across the table as if to shield Anya from what he had to say.

  “We are dealing with the British. They have a history of welcoming comforting explanations. When the truth is too difficult to deal with, they seek alternative explanations that require them to do nothing. When they were first told about the camps, Auschwitz and Treblinka and all the rest, there were aerial photographs of the buildings, the gas chambers and crematoria. But they chose to devise a more comforting explanation. That’s what politicians do, they devise comforting explanations, and that’s why we have to reach someone who will believe us.”

  Wolski spoke calmly, as if to counter Jacob’s passion. “That may be a definition of the problem, but what of the answer?”

  “As I said before, we begin with the man,” Jakob replied impatiently. “Remember that everyone is an egotist. If we can flatter this man with our apparent knowledge of him personally, he will want to know more. In short, he will respect what we tell him later if we are right about him now.”

  “So what kind of confidence trick are you proposing?”

  “Not a confidence trick, that would be too ambitious; merely a piece of theatre,” Jakob said. “You will play the lead.”

  “Go on,” Wolski replied.

  “Choosing the place of the meeting is especially demanding,” Jakob said. “But we have a lucky advantage – my nephew, Roland. He is a taxi driver. For reasons I won’t go into now, he feels he owes me a great deal. He is of course correct.”

  “When does all this happen?” Wolski asked helplessly.

  “You will hear from us when everything is ready, not before.” Jakob had no more to say.

  Briskly he got up and led Anya away. The sudden end of the meeting left Wolski in a confused state of mind.

  Once again, he wandered thoughtfully beside the river. The uncertain sky vacillated between winter and spring, lightening and darkening every few minutes. The pattern matched his mood. Who to trust? What to do? There were no answers, and the questions seemed to fade into the grey evening mist that began to gather among the trees on the far side of the river.

  *

  In the days that followed, nobody at the Institute noticed Wolski’s retreat into isolation. By now it seemed entirely usual behaviour. He felt no emotion, not even fear, only a numbing sense of emptiness. He watched himself from a great distance, as if a spectator of his own actions, and wondered what this distant self would do next. There were moments when he felt he had come to the brink of mental collapse. Yet some deep-buried sense of purpose drove him on.

  *

  Late on a Tuesday afternoon, ten days after the meeting at Café Mozart, the call came. He recognised Anya’s voice at the first syllable.

  “Professor Wolski?” she began tentatively in German.

  “Yes.”

  “Professor Josef Wolski?”

  “Yes, yes,” he replied with feigned impatience. He realised that they had not agreed any form of code, which was an obvious and foolish mistake.

  “Forgive me, but I am unfamiliar with Polish names and I thought there might be more than one person at the Institute with yours.”

  Wolski was impressed by the tactic. Anyone listening would not immediately guess that they knew each other.

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “I’m calling on behalf of Herr Doktor Dornhugel. He will be in Hamburg and could discuss your software enquiries on Thursday or Friday.” The transliteration of Thornhill’s name into German lacked caution, but he admired her style.

  “Is it convenient to travel here tomorrow?”

  “Yes, that will be entirely convenient.”

  As he put the phone down, the dam broke. A great tidal wave of panic hit him. His knees began to shake uncontrollably and he gripped the edge of the desk in an attempt to steady himself. Yet the mental anguish came as a welcome relief from the eerie unreality that had tormented him since the last meeting at the café. Feeling fear again was like a reunion with an old friend.

  He sat still and silent, waiting for the panic to subside. When he picked up the phone, his hand was steady, though his stomach felt as if it had turned to water.

  He called Golkov’s office; his secretary answered at once. As he started to speak, his voice was uneven. He disguised it with a cough and began again.

  “Excuse me… Maria, please book me a flight to Hamburg, as early in the morning as you can, with a return on Saturday, and make me a reservation at the Europäischer Hof.” It was the only hotel he could think of. From his only other visit to the city, as a graduate student, he remembered with affection the old-fashioned barn-like building opposite the Hauptbhanhof. “Oh, and inform the administrator; Dr Golkov’s office will need to authorise the expenditure.”

  Earlier in the week, Golkov had accepted Wolski’s proposal that a software verification programme should run in parallel with the tests. Wolski had become convinced that Golkov did not want to let his backers sense any hint of trouble. He guessed that proposing this initiative would simultaneously ease Golkov’s concerns about the delay and also appe
ar to be Wolski’s final capitulation. The keenness with which the suggestion was taken up suggested that Wolski’s estimate had been correct on both counts.

  For the rest of the afternoon he made himself deal with a pile of papers on matters of routine administration. Just before six, he was surprised by a visit from Golkov. He hadn’t noticed him standing in the doorway and was startled when he spoke.

  “Off to Hamburg in the morning, I hear. A city with more money than culture, I’m told. Certainly, I know of no Rembrandts there, but then it’s never wise to confuse personal interests with business, is it, Professor?”

  Wolski was strangely glad to be reminded of the threat to the Night Watch. It helped concentrate the mind.

  *

  As the aircraft broke through the heavy Central European cloud at just over twelve thousand feet, Wolski felt a moment of exhilaration. The sunlight hit him with a force that made him sit upright in his seat. He was flying in one of LOT’s new Boeings. Even the plastics and fabrics smelt new. When he asked, the stewardess told him proudly that the aircraft had been in service less than a week. How different, he thought, from the shabby Ilyushins, with their broken cabin fittings and threadbare seats, which used to be the backbone of the fleet.

  A little over three and a half hours after leaving Warsaw, Wolski was checking into the Europäischer Hof.

  Twenty minutes after that, he was doing the same thing at a rundown commercial hotel in a side street behind the station. He needed a room with a phone where he could set up base. The man at the desk was a Berliner who looked like a nightclub bouncer gone to seed. He was fat, with dark porcine eyes and greasy hair grown long to compensate for advancing baldness. He looked like a school bully who had only partly grown up. Ideal, Wolski thought; nobody is easier to bully than a bully. He needed to get the room without using his passport to register. It was essential not to give the man any feeling of power.

  He spoke as if to a janitor at the Institute. “A room, for two, perhaps three nights.”

  The man slid a registration card across the counter. Wolski had two one-hundred-euro notes concealed in the palm of his hand. He covered the card and slid it back. This was the part he was least confident about. If the amount were too small, he would lose the advantage of authority, if too large, the man would smell danger.

  “Formalities are inappropriate; I am here on private business. A young lady…” He hesitated for effect. “My niece is joining me shortly. I am sure you understand.” He lifted his hand from the counter to reveal the money.

  The man looked surprised; Wolski had almost overdone it.

  With one hand he pocketed the cash and with the other pushed a key across the counter.

  At that moment, a woman’s voice barked from a back room. “Klaus, telefon…”

  From the expression on his face, Wolski realised that he had been right. The man was used to being bullied.

  He replied meekly, “Ja … Schon da. Room seventeen, breakfast at eight.”

  “I shan’t need breakfast,” Wolski said as he began to climb the stairs.

  “You don’t get a reduction,” the man called after him.

  Wolski felt safe. It was a luxury he had not known for a long time. The room was depressing. In his experience, places had atmospheres. Some cathedrals exuded sanctity and sometimes houses reflected generations of family happiness. Here, in the smell of stale cigarette smoke, he sensed the despair of an army of salesmen down on their luck.

  He sat on the sagging bed, lifted the phone and called Anya.

  “I’ll be there in an hour, perhaps less,” she said.

  *

  Wolski lay on the bed feeling grateful, old and foolish.

  He had forgotten how striking she looked. As she stood in front of the window, the light made a halo of her fine blond hair. When they met before, there had been the powerful personality of Jakob overshadowing them both. Now, alone with her for the first time, he felt clumsy, as he often did with women, only this was worse. The difference in their ages made him feel as inept as a teenager.

  “Only you and the doorman know I am here. I’m booked in at the Europäischer Hof,” he explained, “I said you were my niece.” The absurdity of the situation struck them both at the same time.

  She sat on the bed beside him; it creaked and they both giggled like schoolchildren. For the first time since the nightmare had begun, Wolski felt happy.

  “I must tell you what is arranged,” she said.

  *

  Roland sat in his spotlessly clean Opel taxi with the engine running. He was fifty metres from the office behind the Kunsthalle where Thornhill worked. He had the flag down and the stereo turned up. He beat the steering wheel in time to Dolly Parton and hoped to convince anyone watching that he had been hired by a fare who had gone into one of the nearby shops. He enjoyed acting, and periodically would ostentatiously look at his watch and then at the meter with a satisfied shrug.

  The message from Jakob had been welcome. It was Jakob, his mother’s brother, who had kept the family together after his father died. Roland had come West when the Wall came down. The best of the memories of what he had left behind in the East all featured Jakob.

  He especially enjoyed the summer visits to Warsaw that Jakob, by some mysterious means, had been able to arrange. Jakob was full of irony, philosophy and tactics for what he saw as ‘the trench warfare of life’.

  And there were also the letters that for years arrived faithfully every week, full of humour, stern good advice and the occasional reproach for being such a poor correspondent. Roland was ashamed of being a cab driver. With his degree in Philosophy, he believed he should have done better for himself, and if times were not so difficult he might well have done so. But the truth was that after a year and a half of trying, this was the only job he had been able to get. He felt as if he had let Jakob down.

  So far had he cast his mind back into the past that he almost missed Thornhill. The fuzzy picture of him with Jakob and the Bach viola players that had arrived the week before was not ideal. But he picked him out nonetheless.

  Roland slammed the transmission into drive and the cab surged forward.

  He pushed the flag up as Thornhill came to the kerb, but his initial slowness had let another cab into the stream of traffic ahead of him. Thornhill hailed it and got in. Roland hit the dashboard with his fist and a haze of dust settled over the car’s instruments. He waited at the kerb to allow the delivery van behind to overtake and fill the space between the Opel and Thornhill’s cab.

  Again, he almost left it too late. An elegantly dressed woman laden with parcels reached out and opened the passenger door. He sped away with the door swinging open. In the rear-view mirror he saw the woman shouting, but her outrage was constrained by the need to hang onto her new possessions. Roland nearly collided with a beer truck as he leant over the back seat and struggled to close the door.

  Trailing another vehicle clandestinely was a new experience for Roland and he began to enjoy the tingle of excitement. Carefully he kept at least one vehicle between himself and Thornhill’s cab. Only once did he have to act decisively, jumping a set of lights as they changed to red. They entered the St Pauli district. The shabby streets around the Reeperbahn, Europe’s most notorious red light district, looked as if they had a hangover from the night before.

  Thornhill’s cab stopped outside a building that, like many others, had steel doors and sheet steel bolted over the windows. The whole exterior was painted matt black – the background for a vast illuminated sign that proclaimed Blau Paradis. Roland had delivered passengers to this part of the city hundreds of times before, but only at night. It was not a place where daylight was welcome.

  There was a drab strangeness to it all. The steel-shuttered buildings, without the cover of darkness and with their gaudy illuminations switched off, looked like nuclear bunkers. It was as if the outer edges of human fantasy had to be contained, like some toxin destructive to life.

  Thornhill was expect
ed. The door of the Blau Paradis opened as he approached. Roland wondered what to do next. He knew Wolski would be waiting and looked for a phone. There was a kiosk on the other side of the street. Using a handful of coins from a bag between the front seats, he dialled the number Anya had given him. Wolski answered at once and listened to Roland’s news without interruption.

  “Take this number down.”

  Roland reached into his jacket but found nothing to write with. Angry at his own thoughtlessness, he fumbled through his pockets.

  “Eine moment…”

  Eventually, he found a pair of nail clippers and carved the number on the cover of the directory, which, even in this part of town, Germanic civic pride had kept unvandalised. He tore off the cover and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. Perhaps to drown the embarrassment of having forgotten something as simple as anything to write with, the philosopher in him went to work on the surrounding landscape. What kind of place was it that kept telephone booths intact and vandalised people?

  *

  Wolski put the phone down and looked at the map again. The day before, Anya had carefully noted the numbers of all the public call boxes on the roads out of St Pauli. Wolski had read about how easy it was to trace mobile phones and he distrusted them.

  Calls between public phones would be much harder to trace. The number he had given Roland was at the Bismarck Memorial, a little garden with a clear view down the incline that led to St Pauli. It was a good place to wait.

  Anya sat in a hired Toyota parked by a meter at the other end of the garden. With little warning, it began to rain. Immediately Wolski saw the flaw in his plan. An elderly man sitting in a public garden reading a newspaper, close to a phone booth, would normally go unnoticed. In the rain he would be an object of curiosity. Reluctantly he decided to join Anya in the car.

  As he got in, she started the engine.

  “Which way?” she said.

  “Not yet. Do you have an umbrella?”

  The rain brought Roland many would-be customers and he waved them away. He remained parked in sight of the Blau Paradis and was disguising his surveillance as a meal break with Brocwurst and a can of lager from the delicatessen across the street. The rain coursed over the windscreen, making it difficult to see. He wound down the driver’s window a couple of inches and quickly began to get wet; it didn’t matter. This time he was determined not to miss his man.