“Which one are you?” Rossett asked, but Evans ignored the question.
“There is money to be made. Black markets in food, petrol, clothing, women, booze, the lot. I’ve got gangs running the docks, gangs running the city center, I’ve got gangs running pubs, clubs, brothels, and drug dens. I’m supposed to police a city with thirty-three bobbies who are mostly too scared to leave their stations.”
“Thirty-three?” Neumann shook his head.
“Thirty-three. The budget is gone, and keeping hold of the people we can afford to pay is even worse. Would you want the job?” Evans looked at Neumann and then Rossett. When neither of them replied he shrugged his shoulders. “Exactly. I’m only here because I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
He sank back into his chair. His final statement hanging in the air like a bad smell.
Rossett turned back to the window, which looked out over the street where he had parked the Jaguar. It sat glistening, speckled with drops of rain in the glow of the few streetlamps that were still working. Other than their car the area was deserted, except for the odd pile of rubbish here and there. He suddenly felt tired, and he rested a shoulder against the wall. It had been a long drive through almost constant rain from London, he was hungry, and he needed some sleep.
The room was silent behind him a minute before Neumann finally spoke.
“I still need the SS officer who was arrested.”
“Can’t we blame the resistance? I can have someone picked up so we have a body to interview and then hand over to the court in London. Between us we can say there was a mistake involving the arrest.” Evans leaned back so far in his chair, Neumann briefly thought it was going to tip backward.
“You’re asking me to not do my job?” Neumann tilted his head.
“I’m just trying to find a solution that works.”
“Just because you’ve given up doesn’t mean we have to,” Rossett said to the window, his breath misting it slightly.
Evans tried again with Neumann.
“You don’t know these people.”
“I’m the law, German law. This SS major will do as he is told.” Neumann sounded almost like he was trying to convince himself. “If we don’t deal with it in the correct manner, I’ll have the American embassy complaining, and the people who sent me here will send me to Moscow next.”
Evans looked like he was about to faint. He wiped his eyes again. The docks of Liverpool were full of American ships and cargo. What little work there was in Liverpool that paid decent money relied on those ships. The thought of it being in jeopardy made his stomach churn.
“If the Americans clear off out of the city, it’ll be finished. The only reason Liverpool is still here is because of the docks, and those docks are busy with Yank ships.” Evans now had his face buried in both hands. His voice was muffled as it pushed its way past his palms.
“So you understand the importance?”
Evans lifted his head just enough so that he could look at Neumann through his fingers.
“I already know the importance, but I have to stay here after you’ve gone. I have to live here, and I’ll not risk my life over this. You do what you have to, you speak to who you have to speak to.” He pointed a finger across the desk at Neumann. “But if you try to drag me into this, I’m off. I’ll resign and so will half of my men. Sometimes a job just stops being worth it, and this is one of those times.”
“We’ve got a suspect, we know where he is, so we need to go arrest him,” Rossett said to Neumann. “I’m tired of this.”
“You want to go to an SS garrison and arrest one of them?” Neumann twisted to look at him.
“Yes.”
“Two of us?” Neumann hooked his arm over the back of the chair. “We just walk in and stick on the cuffs?”
“It’s our job.”
Neumann considered the situation for a moment as he smoothed his finger and thumb across his mustache, then looked back at Rossett.
“We may need to plan a method of approach.”
“I’m a detective with a corpse, a suspect, and a location for the suspect.”
“So you want to do your job?”
“That’s why you gave it to me.”
Neumann nodded.
“Okay. We go get him tomorrow.”
Chapter 5
Neumann and Rossett checked into the Adelphi Hotel on Liverpool’s Brownlow Hill at 8:50 p.m. Rossett left Neumann filling in the register at the front desk and drove the Jaguar around to the secure car park at the rear of the hotel.
Three night watchmen were huddled around a battered, soot-blackened oil drum inside of which Rossett could see an insipid smoky fire burning. All three of the watchmen turned to look at him as he lowered the window.
“I need to park the car.” Rossett could smell burning rubber, and he pushed the window back up an inch to try to keep the smoke out.
One of the men, twiglike, wrapped in too-big clothes bundled with a thick leather belt, bent a little at the waist and looked like he was going to snap. He had a salt-and-pepper beard that looked orange in the reflection of the fire. It was so thick it exaggerated his chin’s movement as he squinted through the smoke at Rossett and made it look like his face was folding in half.
The old man pointed to the gloom just inside the entrance of the dark warehouse that doubled as a car park.
“Leave it there, I’ll park it for you.” The fire was lighting the watchman’s face from below, catching sooty shadows that danced around his eyes and made the beard seem to move even more.
A flame flickered and popped its head over the rim of the oil drum. Rossett saw that the light from the fire was pretty much all there was in the garage. He realized that most of the streetlamps outside weren’t working, same as outside the police station.
The place was falling apart.
“I’ll park it,” he replied to the old man.
“We’re supposed to do it.”
Another one of the watchmen wiped the back of a fingerless glove across his face, smearing a little soot like war paint across the bridge of his nose.
Rossett didn’t reply.
“Throw it in the far corner.” The first man went back to staring into the fire.
There was no point in arguing.
The Jaguar’s headlamps cut through the gloom, sharp, straight edges of white pushing back the night as Rossett entered the garage. It was almost empty except for a few cars covered in thick layers of dirt. Most looked like they hadn’t been moved for years.
Rossett parked the Jaguar next to an old Rover saloon in the farthest corner of the warehouse. He got out of the car and noticed that rain was dripping through a hole in the roof and slapping onto the concrete floor. He looked up at the sky through the hole for a moment, then locked the Jaguar.
Rossett strolled the hundred yards back to the hotel slowly, through a rain so fine it was almost mist. It was as if a cloud had descended to take a look around Liverpool’s empty streets, and then stayed the night.
A tram clattered past. Rossett watched as sparks bounced off its roof. It swung around a street corner, then headed away from the hotel. There was a pub on the far side of the road. The lights were off, and the only movement was the slow swing of the sign hanging above the door.
The city was dead.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps that led up to the entrance of the hotel, sparked up a cigarette, then watched the streets. Always the copper, first one way, then the next, eyes everywhere, taking it in, the lay of the land. A shop front was illumined, way off to his left. The light from the window display dashed the wet pavement with a watery yellow of mattes and glosses.
Rossett saw movement. There and then gone. He stepped back into the shadows and watched as another tram clattered past. He didn’t move an inch as the tram whined away into the night and the street fell silent again.
More movement, a shadow at first, then a figure. All Rossett could make out was a bundle of rags tied in the middle. It wa
s a kid, the first person he’d seen since he’d left the garage, sifting through a rubbish bin, picking out random items and dropping them on the ground, then moving on to the next one, coming closer.
A girl, nothing more than a child. She almost looked Victorian. Like she’d fallen through a time tunnel and landed in the twentieth century. The night made her black and white. She stopped, staring at the orange tip of Rossett’s cigarette as it glowed in the shadows.
Rossett realized she was scared and took a step forward so that she could see him under the light outside the hotel.
She didn’t move.
He raised a hand.
She watched.
He lowered his hand, then took another drag on the cigarette.
She weighed him up. He watched her; she reminded him of a fawn in a forest, peeking through the trees, always on edge, unable to relax as its nose twitched the air sniffing for danger.
She took a chance and lifted her hand.
Rossett nodded.
She approached but stopped short, maybe fifteen feet away. Her eyes looked too big for her face, and a thin slit of a mouth became thinner as she tried to size him up.
“Got any spare change?” Her voice had a touch of phlegm about it.
“What are you doing out so late?” Rossett wafted the cigarette at the sky in case she hadn’t noticed how dark it was.
“Out?”
“Yes.”
“I live out.” The old coat she was wearing was so big, Rossett only got a hint of the shrug that had just happened underneath it.
“You’ve no home?”
“No.”
“No parents?”
She looked up the street, then back at hm. “Me mam’s dead, it was the Germans. Me dad . . . I dunno.”
“You don’t have anyone to look after you?”
“No.” She pulled at her sleeve, then wiped her nose with the heel of her hand. “I don’t need no one.”
“Everyone needs someone.”
“I don’t.” She pulled her sleeve down.
Rossett was in danger of agreeing with her, but instead he flicked the cigarette away and buried his hands in his coat pockets. “Where do you sleep?”
“Why?”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Why?”
“You’re a kid.”
“I’m not gonna let you touch me.”
Rossett bridled. “I don’t want to touch you.”
“I know what you perverts are like.”
“I’m not a pervert.”
“Talkin’ to kids outside hotels? You’re not touchin’ me.”
Rossett pulled his warrant card. “I’m a policeman.”
The girl squinted at the card, then gave the shrug Rossett was becoming all too familiar with. “Policemen is worse.”
“Worse?”
“Policemen took me mam.”
“What?” Rossett pocketed the card.
“Policemen took me mam. The Germans said they wanted her, so the police come round and took her to them.”
“When?” Rossett said quietly.
“Last year.”
“Did they say why they wanted her?”
“No.”
“They must have had a reason?” He realized he sounded defensive and felt embarrassed about it.
“They were loadin’ the wagon.”
“They have a wagon?”
“The Germans tell them to fill it up.”
Rossett stared at the kid. Her big eyes blinked at him as she jutted out her chin and hooked a thumb through the piece of string that was tying her coat.
“You’ve been on your own since then?”
The shrug again.
“There’s other kids.” She looked off into the distance as she wiped her nose again.
Rossett followed her gaze, then looked at the ground. “I’m sorry,” he said finally, and he meant it.
She looked at him. “Got any change?”
“Isn’t there anywhere you can go?”
“The church, but they make you go to school.”
“You should go to school.”
“Why?”
“For your future.”
She snorted, wiped her nose again, then held out the wiping hand toward Rossett. “Got any change?”
Rossett dug in his pocket, thumbed through some coins, and then handed them over. “Here.”
The girl didn’t need asking twice. She was so quick Rossett barely felt the brush of her fingers in his palm. It was like a sparrow had landed and then left, and when he looked down he saw that the money had gone.
She smiled.
He smiled back. “I can get you a room here, for the night, maybe two?”
“I’m not going to touch you.” That the kid should have to be so defensive against such an innocent offer made him scared to think about what she had been through.
“I can help you.”
“I don’t want help. Not from no copper, anyway.” She started backing away. “You lot killed me mam.”
She headed off the way she had come, and Rossett watched her go without trying to stop her.
Like she had said, his lot had killed her mam.
Rossett’s room was small, dark, and damp.
The window was open a few inches. Rossett tried to close it, but the swollen frame was jammed against old paint and refused to budge. He stepped back and looked at the curtains. He doubted they would meet in the middle when they were pulled across.
He sighed.
He took off his overcoat and threw it onto the wooden chair in the corner of the room.
The lamp by his bed, which was the only source of light, flickered as the coat landed. Rossett stared at it for a moment, then stamped his foot on the floor. The light flickered again, this time for longer, before finally settling down again.
He crossed back to the window and saw that the girl was digging in another bin, this one a little farther down the road. Another lonely tram rattled past, this time going in the opposite direction. On the top deck there were two people sitting behind condensation-covered windows in the yellow light of the cabin. They seemed to ripple as they passed.
Rossett sat down on the corner of the bed. He ran his hand across the top sheet. It felt gritty, dusty, and he lifted his palm to check for dirt.
He had one arm back in his overcoat when there was a knock at the door. He opened it and found Neumann, staring off down the corridor, hands in his pockets.
“Do you want to get something to eat?” The German looked tired; his eyes were red, as if he had just been rubbing them. “If I stay in that room all night there is a good chance I’ll kill myself.”
“I was just going to the garage to get a rope,” Rossett replied flatly.
“Shall we go the bar instead?”
“I’m guessing it’ll be as depressing as this room, but yeah, let’s go to the bar.”
The bar was in the hotel basement, and Rossett had been correct.
It was as depressing as his room.
Neumann went to the counter as Rossett took a seat in one of the threadbare red velvet booths. The booths ran around three sides of a small, dusty, disused dance floor. Above the dance floor was a large crystal chandelier. Most of the bulbs had blown and Rossett could see cobwebs and dots of dead flies like they were trapped in time.
The velvet he was sitting on felt damp through his trousers, so he shifted and tested it with the palm of his hand. He couldn’t decide if it was just cold or if the seat was actually wet, so he gave up trying and sat back down. The booths had once been ornate, their woodwork surrounds gilded. Now they were chipped and faded, and black and brown bruises could be seen poking through from underneath the old paint.
Neumann put two pints of beer and two glasses of watery Scotch on the table, then slid in next to Rossett.
Rossett had to resist the urge to huddle for warmth. Instead, he nodded thanks and picked up the whiskey.
“Cheers.”
Neumann pi
cked up his own glass.
“Cheers.”
Both of them pulled the same face as they sipped at the whiskey.
“What is that?” Rossett managed to say after a few seconds.
Neumann didn’t answer; he was too busy rubbing his chest with the heel of his hand. Rossett caught the eye of the barman and pointed at Neumann, then at the Scotch.
The barman gestured apologetically at the empty shelves behind him.
Take it or leave it.
Rossett shook his head and took a sip of the beer. It wasn’t much better. He looked at Neumann, who was still wheezing.
The German took a deep breath. “Is that a secret way of killing Germans?”
Rossett picked up his own glass and sniffed it, then shook his head at the barman again.
“If it was, we would have won the war.”
“If we’d known you had that, we wouldn’t have started it.” Neumann picked up his beer with one hand and slid the remaining Scotch as far away as he could manage. “You might want to brush your teeth before you light up one of those cigarettes of yours.”
Neumann looked around the bar and its scattering of customers, who were spread almost as thin as the cheap carpet.
“This is the worst part of the job,” said Neumann.
“Bad alcohol?”
“Bad hotels.” Neumann took a drink, paused, and added, “And bad alcohol.”
“It’s better than what I used to do with Koehler.”
“Working with the Jews?”
Rossett ignored the question and scanned the bar. There were eight other people in there, seven customers and the barman, all men. Nobody seemed to be enjoying the experience, least of all the barman. He was wearing an overcoat, sitting on a stool, reading a newspaper so thin he was having trouble holding it up in the draft from under the door.
“I hate Liverpool.” Rossett said it so softly, he was almost surprised when Neumann replied.
“You’ve been here before?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
Rossett let out a long sigh and stared at his beer. “My wife.” He took a sip, then wiped his top lip clear of suds. “She was from here.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Why would you?”
“Is it a problem for you? Being here?”
An Army of One: A John Rossett Novel Page 6
