No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  He apologised again for his lateness, his appearance, the absence of the FrauBoss, then thanked her for her patience, courtesy and the schnapps. He gave her his smile, which was already famous among the investment team (Sales).

  The fresh air was bracing. He looked across the square and saw an everyday scene. He had been punched there, a girl had been kicked – and a spider had murdered a fly. For him it was about where he had been brought up, his mother, what had happened to him and to her. Walking briskly, he phoned in and said that all was well with the client. He could see into the pizzeria, where customers were drinking coffee. The man, the girl’s brother, was behind the counter. He checked on his phone for directions.

  2

  A woman behind a reinforced glass panel had told him, via a microphone and loudspeaker, where he should sit but not how long he would have to wait.

  When Jago Browne had got dressed that morning in his attic apartment, he had not considered that he would spend hours on a hard bench in a police station on Bismarckstrasse. Where he had been brought up, Canning Town in east London, the closest police station had been on the Barking road, a formidable red-brick fortress. He had never entered it, although half of the kids close to where he lived had. He supposed that, there, a waiting area existed like this one. It smelt of urine and disinfectant. When the door onto Bismarckstrasse opened, a gust of cool air dispersed it briefly.

  He was with two girls, about twenty, both probably tarts. One cried convulsively and the other comforted her. There was a fidgeting junkie, who tried to make conversation with an elderly man, who was muttering about a lost dog. A stream of men and women came to the counter, offering ID cards – they were clocking in as a bail requirement. There was graffiti on the walls – not clever or witty. Jago assumed that it was verboten to scribble on the walls but the woman behind the barricade couldn’t do much about it. It was a Rauchen Verboten area too, but there were small burn marks on the linoleum.

  Police officers hurried through the waiting area. Some came off the street and tapped a code into an inner door; others came from inside and headed for Bismarckstrasse. They had in common, entering or leaving, a reluctance to glance at the flotsam waiting on the benches. He supposed that a pistol in a holster, a truncheon and a gas canister gave the officers confidence to ignore him and those around him.

  The man who might have lost the dog was the first to break. He stood, shouted abuse at the woman beyond the glass, aimed a kick at the end of the bench and left. Jago might have followed – he nearly did. Then the woman called him forward. His spirits soared until she pushed a sheet of paper through the grille and told him to fill it in, then bring it back to her. Why had she waited forty-five minutes to do that? He had requested to see a detective following an assault and a possible instance of extortion on the square two streets away. He took the paper. He had asked Elke at the bank to tell the FrauBoss that he was running late.

  Heavy stuff from the client and he wondered if he believed any of it. It could all have been fantasy: hangings, Jews, camps, odd shoes worn by an old lady. The spider was real death. He couldn’t quite decide whether the client had been playing with him. He started on the form: name, address, work, complaint.

  He was Jago Browne. Born 1989. His mother was Carmel. Her parents were semi-lapsed Catholics from the western edge of Belfast and had left in 1972 at the height of sectarian disturbances in the hope of finding a less traumatic life. One daughter, the apple of her parents’ eyes. Just after her eighteenth birthday she’d gone to Cornwall with her two best chums for a week’s camping. Might have been the draught cider, or ignorance or an act of rebellion: a one-night stand with a deck-hand off a Penzance–Newlyn trawler. A one-night stand followed by a one-morning stand that had drifted into a one-afternoon stand. She’d thought his name was Jago, but it might have been Jack. Anyway, ‘Jago’ was Cornish and she had fastened on it once the sickness started in the mornings. Her parents had pretty much dumped her, couldn’t cope with their little jewel dropping their hopes and aspirations in the shit. That was his mother, and home was a council flat in a part of London where few wanted to be housed – Canning Town – but she was lucky to have a roof over her head. She was a fighter – and wanted love. Dave was the boyfriend who gave her a brother for Jago, and Benny had provided the sister. Neither Dave nor Benny had lasted long. She was a single mum, with three kids and a maisonette, within a bullet’s reach of the Beckton Arms. That was Jago Browne, and they didn’t need his childhood history or his education.

  His flat was built into the roof of an apartment block in the Kreuzberg district, between the Landwehrkanal and Leipzigerstrasse, with an entry on Stresemannstrasse along which the old Berlin Wall had run. His workplace was a bank – the section dealing with private wealth management and advising on investments – in the old east sector, out beyond Alexanderplatz and the great tower. The boy from a sink estate in Canning Town had made it into the stellar world of international banking via a school that believed in merit, a university in the north-west, where he’d worked his brain raw, a merchant bank in the Bishopsgate area of the City of London, and on to Berlin. How had he done it? People liked him. Those who had stumbled across his path thought him ‘worth a punt’ or had felt good after giving him ‘a helping hand’. He would have said that he’d been in the ‘right place at the right time’ so he was on a two-year exchange with the bank in Berlin, and a German youngster was coping with life in Bishopsgate. He added the bank’s name to the form he was completing.

  Under ‘complaint’, he put, ‘To report extortion and criminal violence’. It was almost eleven o’clock. It would take him the best part of an hour to get across the city and its former dividing line, beyond Karl-Marx-Allee and to the top of Greifswalder Strasse. By the time he got there the whole morning would have gone. In the section, they all worked like beavers at the direction of the FrauBoss, and Elke had been back on his mobile to ask when they should expect him – as if he had a criminal’s tag on his ankle. He pushed the sheet of paper through the grille. A uniformed woman took the girls to a side room.

  Jago continued to wait. Earlier it had seemed a good idea but the excitement had palled. In Canning Town no one made witness statements. His act of defiance was to get out a cigarette, not light it but roll it between his lips. He’d give it five more minutes.

  On an upper floor of the station, in a pinched office, a picture on the wall faced his desk. Each time he looked up it was straight ahead, there for him to feast on. The sun was at its height. The sea was pure blue. The beach was golden, and not many of the pebble banks showed. Bikini-clad girls lay on multi-coloured towels, stood on the sand, or among the slight waves. He had taken the photo himself. He gloried in it, bathed in its warmth. It made the greyest, coldest day in Berlin a little more acceptable.

  He was an investigator, had passed the ‘detective’ course run by the national police college, was in the KriminalPolizei, but would never allow himself to be promoted to sergeant. If he looked away from his screen and ignored the picture, he had the window to look out of. There was a courtyard and a glimpse of the sky – it had clouded over, wasn’t raining yet but soon would be. The picture was his joy . . . He sighed, then allowed himself a brief smile. Manfred Seitz, investigator of the KrimPol based at the station on Bismarckstrasse, smiled infrequently when others might see him do so. Sometimes in the presence of his wife, not often . . . He was given the shit by those who ran the KrimPol section that dealt with organised crime in that part of Berlin. He was a dinosaur. Most of them were young enough to be his kids but they had the status of ‘sergeant’ or ‘lieutenant’ and could instruct him on his duties, which events he should follow-up. He fielded the rubbish and was kept at a distance from any work that might offer a step up the promotion ladder. He didn’t complain . . . There was a bank worker in Reception, with a scarred face, a foreigner reporting ‘extortion’. No one was dead, and there had been no hospital admission. It was for him to handle.

  Fred – every
one used the abbreviation – sipped the coffee he had brought to work in his Thermos. He did not patronise the canteen, thought it tiresome. He brought his own sandwiches, which Hilde made for him while he showered each morning – he went to the station before she left for the infant school – so he could avoid the gossip and back-biting at the lunch tables. He had been Fred to his parents and at school in the Baltic city of Rostock, and when he had joined the police. . . . His children used it – the daughter in Zürich and the son at college in Dresden. He thought it suited him, that it matched his appearance.

  It was a quiet morning. The ‘kids’ had made arrests the previous day, Kurdish pickpockets, and were still celebrating. Fred Seitz was at that stage of his career – within three years of retirement – when he was too junior to appear before the cameras or brief the press, and too old to appear in court as a witness on whom a conviction that could lead to advancement might depend. He was in a rut. A last glance at the sea, the beach and the bikini girls. His screen showed a new report from a Nature Conservancy group handling the parkland to the east of Lübeck, across the estuary. His pipe was on the table with sweet-smelling ash in the cold bowl. He killed the screen, hitched his jacket onto his shoulder and closed his door. The kids were around a central table in the work area but did not want him in their midst so he had been awarded the partitioned small room as an office, space that should have gone to a team leader.

  He took the staircase down two floors.

  When Fred stood behind the woman at Reception he could see, distorted by the stains on the glass, the bank worker. A nice-looking boy, good build and features. He asked the woman and was told he had been there close to an hour. The ‘kids’ would have held it up: smart-arse idiots. She told him which interview room was empty.

  He went through the security door.

  He said briskly, ‘I am sorry you have been kept waiting so long. Follow me, please . . .’

  ‘Do sit down.’ He gave a suspicion of a smile, an empty pleasantry. ‘Now, how can I help you? Excuse me, you are English? Do you speak German?’

  Jago said, ‘I have adequate German. You could have helped me a while ago by coming to find out why I was here. So, sometimes your language, sometimes mine.’

  ‘A good compromise . . . and I apologise. Communications in the building are not always satisfactory . . . How can I help?’

  ‘Are you always so cavalier with the time of people who bother to report a crime? Or is that bad for the clear-up figures?’

  ‘I’ve already apologised . . .’

  ‘There’s a phrase in England that all those public utility companies – or the police – use when they keep you hanging on a phone and have likely failed you. ‘We take your complaint very seriously.’ But I’m a member of the public and, although I’m a foreigner, I’m registered here as a taxpayer. So I pay your salary – or a fraction of it.’

  The smile widened, might even have been touched by genuine humour. In the corridor, before getting to the interview room, they had introduced themselves. The investigator, Fred Seitz, was tall and thin, the skin sagging below his cheekbones. His throat was scrawny and his jacket hung loose from angular shoulders. His scalp was discoloured and his hair cut short. Jago estimated him to be in his mid-fifties.

  He told his story.

  ‘Is that all you saw?’

  ‘I’ve told it as I saw it.’

  ‘And described accurately the injuries to you and the girl?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  The investigator had produced a notepad and pencil but had written only a line at the top of the page, then closed it. Now it had gone back into his pocket, with the pencil. He produced a pipe, which whistled as he sucked the stem. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

  ‘As a police officer, I expect you to investigate the assault, interview the girl concerned, follow that up, identify our assailant, then arrest and charge him.’

  ‘Are you widely travelled, Mr Browne?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘But you are aware of the Italian diaspora – of course you are.’

  Jago said sharply, ‘I know many Italians live here. I have eyes in my head.’

  ‘You have not visited Italy?’

  ‘No. Does that make me an inferior witness to criminal acts?’

  ‘I understand, Mr Browne, your irritation with my questions. I assure you they are relevant.’

  ‘I’ve given you chapter and verse on a crime.’

  ‘You want me to be honest?’

  ‘Does honesty mean evasion, denial, what we call “sweeping under the carpet”, too unimportant for you to—’

  ‘Allow me to be honest. It’s always good to speak the truth, even when it’s unpalatable.’

  The smile had broadened. The investigator had pushed back his chair and stood up. His police pistol, in a grubby holster, was against his hip, his shirt was not clean, he wore no tie and his trousers were crumpled. At the Plaistow police station, where they handled Canning Town, they would have been red-faced at his rudeness. He thought the man didn’t give a damn.

  ‘Mr Browne, in Germany we are a colony of Italy. Not of the Italian state but of the various arms of the Italian Mafia. They bring their customs, behaviour and daily habits inside our frontiers. Although they live in Germany they don’t change their culture. It’s a ghetto life. They exploit the lax legislation concerning criminal association and they do well – extremely well. In Germany, the principal representatives of the generic Mafia are the ’Ndrangheta. Have you heard of ’Ndrangheta, Mr Browne? It would help your understanding if you have.’

  ‘I know nothing about them. Why should I?’

  ‘Because you are a banker. It says here, above your signature, that you work in a bank. You can recite big numbers, understand spreadsheets and statistics . . .’

  ‘I’ve reported what happened to me and a young woman. Have I wasted your time?’

  If Fred Seitz was about to lose his cool he hid it well. ‘They bring into our country billions of euros. Billions. They buy up hotels and apartment blocks, businesses and restaurants. A man who has no visible sign of income suddenly purchases a four-star hotel and pays ten million euros. We are swamped by them. It is the proceeds of cocaine money. Right at the bottom of the scale, their protection rackets are perpetrated on legitimate business – not for billions or millions or even hundreds of thousands. They’re Italians, and that is how they live. What am I supposed to do? Nothing – so I cannot justify spending much more of my time on it. Sorry, but that’s the truth.”

  ‘You’ll turn your back on it and walk away?’ Jago felt the tiredness crushing him. He stood up and picked up his briefcase.

  ‘Do you want my advice?’

  He said he did.

  ‘Does your employer know you’re here?’

  He shook his head.

  The investigator said, ‘I admire what you did. You intervened when many didn’t. Pin a medal on yourself, but do it in private. You will note that I took no statement from you. As far as the legalities of this incident go, you played no part in it. What is it to do with you? Get a life – look the other way. The Italians and their gangster habits are not your priority. Do you smoke, Mr Browne? Would you like a cigarette?’

  He did. Jago felt the need of one. The investigator must have liked him because Rauchen Verboten took a back seat. A window was opened on one side of a central pillar, then a second. Both had been locked but the other man used a straightened paper clip to unfasten them. He led and Jago followed. A leg out and over the window ledge and they could almost have kicked the heads of pedestrians on the Bismarckstrasse pavement. There was a cloud of smoke as the pipe was lit, then acrid fumes. Jago dragged on his cigarette. He thought it the work of an expert because there was a smoke detector in the centre of the interview-room ceiling. He was told that if you sat under a desk in the office and smoked close to the floor, the alarm would sound because it was well made, German manufactured. A flicker of a grin. When he had finish
ed his cigarette he threw it onto the pavement while the investigator hammered the pipe bowl on the outer wall. Jago saw many marks on that stretch of wall where the paintwork was dented. It would have been a familiar routine. He brought his leg back inside.

  ‘Will you follow this up?’

  ‘I am away tomorrow evening for a few days’ vacation with my wife. I will look at it when I return, perhaps. No promises. Thank you, Mr Browne, for coming. A last word. Forget it. No one will thank you if you do otherwise.’

  The investigator showed him to the door.

  He’d wasted his time. Jago Browne walked towards the S-bahn to go east and back to work.

  ‘Get a life,’ the man had said. ‘Look the other way.’

  Marcantonio paid cash. The two shirts, a hundred euros each, were wrapped by the sales assistant, and the girl slid glances at him. The shop was on the Ku’damm, small, smart and exclusive. He dressed well, though the knuckles of one fist were scratched and his right shoe was scuffed at the toecap. He never used a card, and the two hundred euros were from a wad of more than two thousand he carried in his hip pocket. The girl would have noticed the money. Most days he went to the shops on the Ku’damm. He preferred the range there to those on Potsdamer Platz or Friedrich-strasse. He shopped, sometimes with his minder and sometimes with the woman at the edge of his life, because on most days he had little else to do.

  He had learned a little of what might be useful to him in his future life, if not as much as his grandfather would have wished. He found the company poor and the preoccupation with business contacts and investment opportunities tedious. Also, in Berlin he had no special status. He was not recognised, as he would have been in the village. It was as if, here, he was a probationer, having to prove himself worthy of respect, which was about the margins of percentages, buying and selling prices, what could be bought in property, square metres for how many euros . . . It bored him.

  It was more interesting to shop, buy shirts and jeans. They would go into a cupboard at his apartment – when the door was opened there was often an avalanche of clothing, still in its cellophane wrapping. Marcantonio did not, of course, give out his mobile number: difficult to do it because the device changed so often and he used a new number most weeks. If he wanted the girl, he would drive past at near to closing time, park on the kerb and hoot. She would come running. Many did, and the banknotes in his hip pocket were an encouragement. Sometimes he tipped lavishly with the absurd profits made from the sale of cocaine, or firearms, or immigrants without papers, or from the rents raised by apartment blocks and the profits from restaurants and hotels, and . . . So much money. It cascaded through his hands on a level not possible in Calabria. There, it was likely to be noticed and draw attention. Here, no eyebrow was raised. The girl’s lashes fluttered, her blouse bulged, and her fingers were smooth over the wrapper, but he did not reward her. First, Marcantonio had no time to screw her as tomorrow his half-year of imprisonment in Berlin would be over and a little freedom beckoned. It was as if he was out ‘on licence’ – which his father and uncle would never know. He was going home to the village, and he would no longer need to change into a clean shirt halfway through each day. The second reason that Marcantonio did not tip the girl was that a nagging frustration diverted him.