Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  He had waited for the coffee trolley to come round, because that was when people went out on to the front pavement for a smoke.

  He left the building and walked fast, didn't use the nearest public telephones. They'd break his legs if they knew that, without sanction and authorization, he was moonlighting for the spooks. Why did he do it, risk himself? Because he had entrapped Malachy Kitchen and because Ricky Capel walked top of the shit-heap and believed himself untouchable. Two reasons, each good enough.

  With a handkerchief over his mouth, giving muffled disguise, he spoke to a recording machine on the number given him and told what he knew, didn't give his name and rang off. He hoped he had done something to help one man and skewer another.

  When he came to the platform in the faint first light, he had seen the mass of scattered feathers.

  Anger churned in Oskar Netzer. He stood beside the upright poles, straightened and nailed, of the platform and in the growing brightness he saw the devastation of the killing site. The feathers were spread about an area of mud beside the pond. At the moment of the attack the ducks would have fled but now they had returned and stayed on the far side of the water. The bird had flown off, low and hugging the dunes' shallow contours, the moment he had reached the platform, and it would have carried a last scrap of the duck's breast in its talons.

  The killing bird circled high and at a distance.

  It would have been aware, with its keen eyesight, of him standing beside the posts. It wanted to feed, to take more of the flesh of its victim… Oskar saw the remaining eiders, innocent and without protection, and seemed to hear the voice of his mother as she read the letter that had been left with a lawyer by his uncle, who had driven the lorry from the camp at

  Neuengamme to the school at Bullenhuser Damm. He saw the killer struggling for stable flight in the wind and he listened as his mother read the story of the children being hoisted up for the ropes to be dropped round their necks. Was it in the blood? Did it run in Oskar Netzer's veins, as it did in the harrier's – an instinct of barbarity? The demons tugged at him. His uncle Rolf had not intervened, had sat in the cab of the lorry as the atrocity was done in the school's cellars

  … He would break a rule of the island's wilderness.

  He would turn his back on a law of Baltrum's nature park. The harrier was the cock: it fed and savaged for two; the hen would be on the nest, eggs under her warmth. Alone, a little of the madness of old times ravaged him. He strode away.

  The anger, and the demons, gripped him.

  He knew, to within ten metres, the location of the marsh harriers' nest.

  His uncle Rolf had done nothing to save the innocents. He would.

  He would find the nest in the reeds on the land side of the island, and he would ignore the screaming of the harriers over him and he would stamp his boot down on the carefully woven bowl of fronds – and see no beauty in it – and would break the eggs and see the yolks splatter out of them. He would do it to escape the demons, and to save the eiders.

  Tugged at by the wind and spat at by the rain, he was a slight, solitary figure moving among scrub and between the low trees that were crushed and stunted by the weather. He slipped into the reed bed. Beyond its expanse was the sea's inner channel, the Steinplatte, but he would not see the mainland, which was shrouded in mist and cloud. What he found was a track made by men.

  Confusion smacked his mind.

  The track was not clean, but blundered across the route he took to approach the nest.

  He stopped. Who was the greater enemy? The harriers that killed his ducks or strangers who broke the peace of paradise? He turned away from the direction of the nest where a hen bird sat upon eggs, and felt relief swamp him that rules and laws would stay inviolate. He began to follow the track of snapped-down reeds. None of the island's residents, he knew, would have walked through the reed beds and made a track that led towards the heart of the island from the land-side shore of Baltrum.

  He walked the track.

  He could recognize the prints left by rabbits, different gulls, oyster-catchers, divers and ducks, and it was not hard for Oskar Netzer to follow a trail left clumsily by two men coming in darkness. New purpose came to him, and the image of demons – of children's swinging feet – was killed. He saw the tread of a pair of boots preserved in mud and the smooth sole shapes of street shoes, and he went where they had gone. Old eyes, but sharp, identified the route two men had taken when they had come out of the reed bed and on to the sand of the lower dunes and he saw the flattened grass where they had sat, then two places where they had gone in the night into the scrub thorn. At one a handkerchief had been tugged from a pocket and hung as a marker on the scrub's barbs, and at another he spotted the fibres of a coat. He imagined them cursing, trying to force a way through, twice turning back and searching for a new way. He moved now with greater care, as if he were the harrier, and tested each footstep, as if he were the hunter. The wind sang noisily around him but Oskar's movement was silent. He froze when he heard a long, hacked cough and a man spluttering phlegm from his throat, then went closer.

  First he saw the shoes.

  They were shoes for a city's pavements. They were sodden wet and mud-stained and had been hung on scrub branches above a small grassed hollow that was sheltered from most of the driven rain. He thought it a futile gesture to try to dry them because the wind did not come into the hollow.

  A man slept there. He was on his side, his back to Oskar, hunched, knees drawn up. He thought the man had coughed in his sleep. Beside him was a plastic bag and its neck guttered in the light wind in the hollow.

  He saw the firearm, a loaded machine pistol, and a metal box… On his way home, he had stopped at the cemetery at the edge of Ostdorf, and he had sat by the grave. He had told Gertrud of the young woman who had helped him rebuild the viewing platform, of her kindness, her interest in him and her sweetness – so different from the many who abused and sneered. He saw one of two strangers, and a machine pistol, and his eyes showed him the path taken by the second man, who had the heavy tread of strong boots.

  He lost the sense of time.

  He would not have known, or cared, whether he followed the boots' tread for an hour or for two hours.

  He had seen the weapon and moved with considered caution. It did not cross his mind that he should turn on his heel, tramp back to Westdorf and go to the little brick building where the island's policeman lived. He did not have a friend in authority on the island, did not have a friend in the world – except Gertrud. He crossed the dunes, a wraith, and every few paces he would stop, listen, then go forward with his head low and his eyes searching for the tread marks.

  If he had not, for a short moment, been upright, Oskar would not have seen him.

  The man was briefly visible at the top of the dunes; below him would have been the soft sand that fell away to the beach and the sea. The man bent again, as if to satisfy himself a last time, then – abruptly – began to retrace his steps. On his stomach, Oskar Netzer, nine days short of his seventieth birthday, ducked and crawled into the last of the scrub. A dozen metres from him, seen through a tangle of branches, the man stopped, took a cloth from his pocket, ripped a strip from it, and tied the strip to a branch, as if for a marker. Then he was gone. Oskar saw his face as he passed, sallow and stubble-covered: the face of a stranger who threatened paradise.

  When he came out from the cover and gazed back, he saw a second cloth marker knotted to a scrub bush.

  He went forward, where the man had been.

  At the top of the dune, where it looked over the sand, the beach and the sea, a triangular support had been made from a length of driftwood and two dead but solid branches. The pieces of wood had been driven into the ground and lashed together with string to form a cradle. In it was as large a flashlight as Oskar had ever seen, facing the beach and the surf. He believed he had found a light that would be used after darkness to signal to the sea. He believed that the two men would come in the black
of the night, using markers left to guide them, unencumbered by the weight of the light. Why? He had no idea, no interest.

  With clinical ferocity, he tore apart the string that held the light in place, kicked in the glass face and the bulb, then used his hands to scoop out a hole in the sand. He dug and dug, then he buried the broken light, and the glass shards, and felt some small pleasure at having safeguarded paradise.

  After they had gone, the professor went out on to the veranda and dropped heavily, exhausted from the emotion of the encounter, into his favourite chair of woven rushes. He had been shown the photographs, magnified almost to life-size, of his son, and had been told they were taken from illegal travel documents.

  He had been asked if he could identify them. He believed that, in their search for information, the political police had visited many scores of homes – any family where a son had shown an early trace of opposition to the regime, then disappeared. He had not been able to hide his recognition and he had seen the boredom of many denials flee the two men's faces; his nostrils had scented their excitement. He had dumbly nodded his agreement. Any father would know a photograph of his son, even when he had not seen or heard of him for a decade. Was he alive? He had not been told. Where was he? A second refusal.

  What had he done? Their backs to him, they had headed for the door. Now he sat in his chair and thought of his son, Anwar, who was betrayed by his own father. He had heard their car speed away, and knew they would be going fast to the police headquarters in Alexandria on Sharia Yousef. He wept and thought that his own flesh and blood had destroyed him.

  As he shrugged out of his overcoat and hitched his umbrella handle on the hook, Gloria gave him the signal received, via the Cairo station, from Alexandria. He read the name, then said it out loud as if that reinforced its weight: 'Anwar Maghroub…

  Well, Mr Maghroub, I think I hear the clink of handcuffs on you/

  Gaunt listened and she played him the tape from the answer-machine, then passed him the transcript she had typed.

  'All tightening nicely. Please, what's in my diary this afternoon?'

  'You are seeing the nurse, the annual health review, blood pressure, et cetera – I did tell you.'

  'Be so kind, cancel it.'

  She mimicked horror. 'The AHR is set in granite, about as compulsory as anything gets.'

  He grinned, acted sheepish. 'Cancel it, thank you, with abject apologies, and plead an appointment with God,'

  He began to smack his console's keys furiously. For fifteen minutes, in a document he entitled 'Rat Run', which was littered with typographical errors, he wrote the report, some material sourced from provenance and some not. He spilled down through the paragraphs: what had been told him by a pensioner widow; the story of an unpaid debt; the heresies of an expert in Islamic studies; the nightmares of a Thames House colleague at Belmarsh magistrates' court; the detail given by a harbourmaster; where Polly Wilkins was, and the hired hand she had recruited…

  After he had finished, Gloria tidied and printed it.

  Carrying his report, Gaunt went to heaven by the elevator, briefed the assistant deputy director, and requested that a meeting should be called for early afternoon.

  Back in his room, he lowered his blind and shut out that perfect, privileged view of the river. He loosed his laces, kicked off his shoes, swung his heels on to his desk, tilted back his chair – and reflected that a chaotic, confused investigation was now close to satisfaction, cursed himself for presumption – then cat-napped.

  'Come on, what have you seen?' She knew he held back but could not fathom why.

  She was cold, chilled to her bones by the wind, and the old man kept a distance from her. She had been up on the platform when he had come back. He had not joined her but had squatted down against the pole she had helped to strengthen. She had come down the rickety ladder and had sat beside him, but then he had stood and moved away from her. She had closed the distance between them, and again he had moved.

  Had he walked the shoreline? He had nodded, non-committal.

  Had he seen anything of interest? He had pointed down to the little patch of spread feathers, then pointed up and away into the distance, and she had identified the harrier above a reed bed.

  Had he watched people out in the wilderness? He had shrugged, as if the movement of people was of no matter to him. Had he noted the presence of strangers on this part of the island? He had snorted, then looked away.

  She shivered, and the motion made the words in her throat croak.

  'I think, Oskar, that tonight my business in your paradise will be finished. After it is finished, I will never return… I am here to find strangers who have come to Baltrum… Oskar, I need your help in finding them.' She spoke softly, tried to find gentleness.

  'Please, if you have seen strangers, where was it?'

  But he showed her his back and gazed down on the ducks. She had heard of, but never met before this week, men who lived their lives as hermits, cocooned in isolation. They found a refuge beyond the need of others. She reflected. This man, living with the stink of old sweat and old dirt and old damp, ran from reality – as did Malachy Kitchen. God save her – two recluses, the one trapped on this nowhere island, and the other trapped on an inner-city sink estate. Just her bloody luck to get two of them, and need them, in a single week. She sought to honey her voice.

  'Oskar, you are running. You can tell me – what from?'

  He faced her, and smiled at her, as if he believed himself sane and her an idiot, and he said, 'I run from the sight of the dancing bare feet of children.'

  As he walked away, he took a piece of bread from his pocket and she saw the green of mould on it. He gestured with his hand that she should not follow him and he went down the slope below the viewing platform. He was breaking the bread and throwing it forward towards the cluster of ducks. Bloody mad – or worse? The dancing, bare feet of children… What did that add up to? A paedophile? The dancing, bare feet of children. A man who hung around playgrounds in a city, with a bag of sweets in a pocket? She saw, damn right, a reason for running, as great a reason as hiding in a sink estate from cowardice.

  Her temper snapped. She had played gentle and it had taken her to bloody nowhere.

  In her fluent and best German, she barked against the wind: 'You hide, then, see if it matters to me – or bloody keep running and see if I'm bothered. Not that it would interest you, with your problem, but I am attempting to save lives. That's the lives of ordinary, totally innocent people, but you wouldn't care, would you? So bloody absorbed in your own foul little world, voyeuring kids… Watching the dancing, bare feet of children and, no doubt, imagining what's under their skirts and shorts. You make me, with your selfishness, sick. Hear me? Sick… '

  He did not turn. At her attack, his shoulders seemed to crumple.

  His voice was frail, uncertain: 'My uncle drove a lorry from the KZ at Neuengamme that took children to a school's cellar. Medical experiments had been performed on them and they were killed so they could not testify against the doctors. The feet that danced were those of the children who were hanged in the cellar of the school… Leave me alone. Go away.'

  She rocked, reeled.

  She had nothing to say.

  The cold engulfed her. She went, dismissed, and shame blistered her.

  He had heard the sluicing of the water and the screams.

  Now Timo Rahman heard the whimpers of his wife and the stamp down the stairs of Alicia's aunt. It could not have been otherwise.

  The last night he had slept in the guest room, which was never used because no guests were invited to stay at their home. The Bear had driven the girls to school and they had gone, sullen and frightened, aware of but not understanding the crisis afflicting their parents. They would never challenge their father and neither had dared to ask why their mother was locked, a prisoner, in her bedroom.

  He sat in the living room, his head and body statue still, the coat with the Harris tweed label clutched in his fists
on his lap, and he waited for her aunt to come off the stairs and cross the hall, which he could see.

  The Bear, who loved Alicia to the point of devotion, was in the garden and away from sight through the window. He raked leaves and perhaps wept – but it could not have been otherwise.

  In the village, in the mountains where Timo

  Rahman had been raised, she would have been beaten to death at his own hand, then buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, and would never again have been spoken of.

  Her aunt passed the door. She did not stop to show her long arms and the skin on them wet from the bath, soiled with blood. She did not hold up the brush of steel bristles that had last been used by the Bear to scrape rust from an old bucket. She went by the door, but he had seen the blood and the brush.

  He knew that his wife had met a man in the summer-house of their garden – knew it because Ricky Capel would not have dared to lie to him and had denied the man was at the house because of him

  – and knew that, for her betrayal of him, she was now cleaned.

  He could hear each sound she made through the bedroom's locked door and down the stairs and across the hall and into the living room – and knew her body was now cleaned by a brush of steel bristles, the dirt scoured away so that the skin bled, It could not have been otherwise.

  The man, Dean – or whatever he was supposed to call him – cleaned the gun.

  Ricky said, 'I'm alive… Why am I alive?…

  Because I lied. I lied to Timo Rahman. If I hadn't lied, I'd be dead. He'd have strangled me or broken my head open with a hammer, if I hadn't lied. For giving him the truth, he wouldn't have shot me because that would be too quick and he'd have wanted to hurt me.'

  His body shook in spasms and he watched as each part of the weapon was laid out on a coat and meticulously wiped. He rambled.

  'A man came after me where I live – I don't know who he is and I don't know what his problem is. A guy I do business with, his home was burned down with petrol. This man came to where I live and his coat stunk of petrol – the coat was distinctive, sort you see once and not again, but you don't forget it from the once… and I'm at Rahman's. All bloody hell breaks out, alarms and things, and there's a man legging it over the fence at the back of the garden, but his coat catches on the wire, and they'd have had him if he hadn't slipped off the coat. The coat came in the house, brought in by that bloody gorilla, and it was the same coat and it had the same stink, petrol. He asked me straight, Rahman, did I know the coat?