“I don’t know what you mean.”
He grips my upper arm. “You and your games.”
I didn’t imagine he could be like this. My eyes drop to his hand but he doesn’t let go. If anything, his grip tightens.
“Does it excite you, being violent?” I say.
He releases my arm, then swings away, one hand reaching into his hair. When he speaks again, he has his back to me. “Did you honestly think I wouldn’t notice?”
All of a sudden he has a calm authority. This must be the voice his patients hear, when they’re undergoing those costly procedures.
“Notice what?” I say.
“Don’t act so innocent. I saw you follow me.”
I had no idea that he knew — that he has known all along. He kept it cleverly concealed. Perhaps he wanted to see what my intentions were. Or perhaps he felt empowered — emboldened — by the knowledge. My deception gave him license: any advantage he took would be justified, forgivable. What to say in my defense, though? I can’t tell him that he is merely a starting point. He will hardly want to hear about his relative insignificance, his disposability.
Before I can find an answer, he whirls round again. “Did she put you up to this?”
“Who?”
“Valentina.”
“I don’t know anyone called Valentina.” I push him away but he weighs almost twice as much as I do and he doesn’t move more than a step. “Who’s Valentina? Your girlfriend?”
Something in him seems to sour or curdle and he looks at the floor.
“You told me you were single,” I say.
“I could have you right now.” His voice has thickened. “I’d be within my rights —”
I stare at him.
“And afterwards I could kill you,” he says. “Do away with you. No one would know.”
You can never guess what lies behind the face a man presents you with, but it doesn’t surprise me and I’m not frightened. This is part of what I signed up for when I bought a ticket to Berlin. I don’t dare laugh at Klaus, though I’m tempted to. I still have to extricate myself. I need to think of an explanation, one that will make sense to him. No one does things for no reason.
I slap him so hard that his whole head jars. His cheek reddens, and blood blooms on his bottom lip.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He leans over, cupping a hand below his chin, as if he expects a deluge. I leave the room, returning moments later with some kitchen roll.
“Thank you,” he says.
He’s docile, repentant. He seems to accept the fact that he was in the wrong.
“If I told you the story you wouldn’t believe it,” I say. “By this time tomorrow I’ll be gone. You won’t see me again.”
He sighs, then disappears into the kitchen, where he rinses his mouth with cold water. When he comes back, I’m sitting down.
“You don’t have to leave,” he says.
“OK, it’s true,” I tell him. “I followed you.”
“So I was right.”
“I thought you looked interesting, but I didn’t think I’d talk to you.” I consider him dispassionately, as if trying to rediscover that initial urge, the first tingle of curiosity. “I suppose I wanted to find out what kind of person you were. Sometimes you see people — in a café, or on the street — and you start wondering what they do, where they live, what their lives are like …”
“You don’t usually follow them.” His voice is gentler, and more understanding. There’s even the suggestion of a rueful smile on his face. He believes me.
I push my hair back behind my shoulder but don’t say anything. I simply let the new conciliatory mood establish itself.
“You thought I looked interesting,” he says quietly, after a long silence.
“Is that so strange?”
He gazes at me steadily and I know what’s going through his mind. And now? What about now? Do you still think I look interesting?
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Thirty-seven.” His large face lurches away from me. “Age doesn’t matter.”
My eye falls on the painting that cost him half his annual salary, and in that moment I think I understand what makes it good. Although I’m aware that the artist built the picture up slowly, layer by layer — Klaus told me as much — there isn’t a trace of effort or persistence in the finished product. It appears to have come into being in a finger snap. Glossy, smooth, and two-dimensional, its subject is the surface — the power of the superficial — but at the same time it’s an exercise in concealment, inscrutability.
/
Ostkreuz. Apartment buildings line both sides of the narrow street. Five or six stories high, their scabby grayish-brown facades are busy with graffiti. In the distance a red cross flashes on and off. APOTHEKE. I pass beneath a railway bridge. A train curves out of the east. Windows slide past, filled with brooding sky, and the stench of burnt rubber and electrics stings my nostrils. It’s hardly the kind of area where you’d expect to find a rich American.
Cheadle’s apartment is on the ground floor of one of the more run-down buildings. I press the buzzer several times. At last the outer door snaps open.
“Misty?”
His voice comes from the gloom beyond the metal lift-cage. I drag my suitcase down the hall, over broken brown-and-yellow tiles. Cheadle stands in a doorway in his raincoat, like a man expecting a storm. His eyes look muddy, and he smells of beer and tobacco.
“I haven’t been to bed,” he says.
“Is it all right,” I say, “me turning up like this?”
What I like about Cheadle is the fact that there’s no longing in his eyes when he sees me. My looks are an irrelevance. He treats me as if I’m as hard-bitten and disillusioned as he is.
“I’ll give you a tour,” he says.
He shows me into a vast bare room with steel-roll doors at the far end. Rusting tools and faded girlie calendars hang on the brick walls. The lumpy armchairs and couches were probably salvaged from the street. The concrete floor is stained with oil.
“This place used to be a garage,” Cheadle tells me. “It’s great for parties.” He indicates the deep trench in the middle of the room where mechanics would once have worked on the undersides of cars. “We call it The Grave. People dance down there.”
He guides me along down a corridor lit by a single white fluorescent tube. One side is piled high with cardboard boxes. There are laptops, toasters, scanners, shredders, vacuum cleaners, kitchen blenders.
“Import-export,” I say, half to myself.
Cheadle points to a door painted to resemble camouflage. “Tanzi’s asleep in there. She works nights.”
“Tanzi?”
“My girlfriend.”
We reach two large rooms, one painted green, the other white.
“I just made coffee,” he says.
I sit at the Formica table and he pours me a cup from a battered metal pot. I help myself to sugar. He lights a thin cigar. Running along the back wall at head height is a horizontal panel of frosted glass. The weak sun that filters through turns his cigar smoke blue.
“So,” he says at last. “Had enough of the concert guy, did we?”
“He was a stepping-stone.”
Cheadle rolls the tip of his cigar against the edge of the ashtray. “And I’m not?”
I don’t know how to answer that.
“It’s all right,” he says. “I don’t give a jack.”
I sip my coffee. “This is good.”
After about half an hour, the street door buzzes. Cheadle heaves a sigh, then goes to answer it. He returns with a tall spindly man who has a zigzag of lightning tattooed below one ear. A second tattoo — the English word OUTSIDER — shows just above his T-shirt, at the base of his neck. He has a pinched face, rockabilly hair.
“Echo, this is Misty,” Cheadle says by way of introduction.
Echo grunts, then leans his shoulder blades against the kitchen wall, legs crossed at the ankles. His bl
ack leather jacket creaks. There’s dirt under his fingernails.
Cheadle opens a storage jar and takes out a packet wrapped in silver foil. Echo gives Cheadle two crumpled twenty-euro notes. Cheadle hands him the packet.
Echo glances to his right, up the corridor.
“Not here,” Cheadle says.
When Echo has gone, Cheadle leans back in his chair and tucks the money into his trouser pocket. “You disapprove?” he says.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I saw your face.”
I should be more like Klaus’s expensive painting, a smooth exterior, the truth buried layers deep.
“It’s no concern of mine,” I say. “Is there any coffee left?”
Cheadle pushes the dented pot across the table.
“Echo,” I say. “What kind of name is that?”
/
Cheadle roots in a drawer and gives me keys to the apartment. My room is the one next to the bathroom. It’s mine for as long as I want. I begin to thank him but he interrupts. Don’t thank me until you’ve seen it, he tells me. Then he says he’s going to get some sleep. If he hasn’t appeared by six, would I wake him?
When Cheadle’s gone, I open the door to my room. It’s dark inside. I feel for the light switch. A white fluorescent tube on the ceiling pings, then flickers on. It hangs at a precarious angle, on two thin wires. There’s nothing in the room except for a single bed, a metal ladder, and two car tires, which are propped against the wall. The only window, which is high up, looks out onto the corridor. It feels like a toolroom or a bunker. I strip the bed and cram the dirty linen into a plastic bag, then I leave the apartment.
In a Laundromat on Warschauerstrasse I pay for a service wash, and the Turkish woman who runs the place tells me to come back at five. I cross a bridge into Kreuzberg. To the west, the last of the sun gold-plates the TV tower in Alexanderplatz. From time to time, as in the gardens at Charlottenburg, I sense I am being followed. Someone has started looking for me, or asking questions, and I’m feeling the ripples of that. I imagine a discreet cough. Miss Carlyle? When I turn round, a shifty balding man is standing on the pavement, the collar of his jacket raised. The whites of his eyes are foggy, jellied. He obviously has a problem with alcohol —
No, wait. My father wouldn’t hire an alcoholic. The detective would be an ex-policeman. Decent, innocuous. Hardworking. His suit would be off-the-peg, his shoes clean and sturdy. He would have a civil servant’s respectability.
Is there somewhere we can talk?
We sit on a bench like spies in a movie. He wants to know what my intentions are. My answers make no sense to him. But then, why would they? I can’t tell him the truth. It’s too overwhelming, and too fragile. He tries doggedly to persuade me to “come home.” Those are the words he uses, freighted as they are with so much raw emotion …
But when I glance over my shoulder no one ducks into a doorway or takes a sudden feigned interest in the contents of a shop window. No one stares down into his phone like a daredevil about to dive into a small pool from a great height. The people on the street aren’t even aware of me. They brush past me, step round me. Leave me where I am, quite motionless. This isn’t a detective story. Do I want it to be?
Under a railway viaduct is a greengrocer’s, with wooden crates of clementines on the pavement outside. I buy three and watch the shopkeeper drop them, glowing, into a plastic bag. I peel one as I walk on. The segments are so cold they hurt my teeth. So far, I have been approached by Oswald Überkopf and J. Halderman Cheadle, complete strangers who don’t know me and have never heard of me, and I’m beginning to think that’s all I should expect or hope for.
Maybe it’s even the whole point.
/
On my way back to Cheadle’s place with my clean laundry I pass a middle-aged man and a young girl. She skips along beside him, pigtails bouncing, her small hand in his. Will my father look for me? Will anyone? That feeling of being watched, or followed — those faint, urgent ripples … There are moments when I panic. I’ve been careless, I’ve left a trail of clues. What if, by some miracle, my laptop is recovered? I have heard of people who can analyze the magnetic fields or charges in files that have been overwritten. If they retrieve the file I called INTELLIGENCE, my last entry will be there for everyone to see: Klaus Frings — Walter-Benjamin-Platz — Berlin.
The chances of that happening are minimal, of course. Even so, I’m glad I left Klaus’s apartment. In moving to the no-man’s-land between Friedrichshain and Lichtenberg I’ve put myself below the radar. I’m lost to view now — surely. At one remove from the unknown.
Back in the apartment it’s quiet except for canned laughter coming through the wall. I find a broom in the kitchen and sweep my room, then I mop the floor and make the bed. At six, I knock on Cheadle’s door. There’s no response. I knock again. Still nothing. I open the door a crack. Absolute darkness and a dense musky smell. Unwashed skin and stale breath. Gradually, my eyes adjust. In the spill of gray light from the corridor I see a king-size bed and clothes dumped on the floor in jumbled heaps. Cheadle is lying on his side, with his back to me. He’s naked. Beyond him is a black woman, also naked. She’s lying facedown, one arm circling her pillow.
“Cheadle,” I whisper. “It’s six o’clock.”
But it’s the black woman who lifts her head. She stares at me blankly.
“He asked me to wake him,” I tell her.
She pushes roughly at Cheadle’s shoulder.
Cheadle rolls over. “Fuck.”
I shut the door.
Later that night he opens a liter bottle of red wine and we sit at the kitchen table drinking out of jam jars. They had some people over, he explains. The glasses all got broken.
I ask when I can meet his Russian friends.
“It’s all you ever talk about.” He lights the stub of a cigar. “You’re using me.”
I smile but keep quiet.
“What is it with you and Russians?” he says.
I’m about to answer — or avoid answering — when the toilet flushes and the woman from Cheadle’s bedroom appears in a purple halter neck and pink hot pants.
“Well, this is cozy.” She reaches for Cheadle’s jar and swallows half his wine.
Cheadle introduces us.
“He found me on the street,” Tanzi says.
“Me too,” I say.
“Not sleeping with you as well, is he?”
I shake my head. “Too old.”
Tanzi lets out a raucous laugh. “Damn. You’ve got a tongue on you, girl.”
We’re talking about Cheadle as if he isn’t there and he seems to be enjoying it. Cigar between his teeth, he’s leaning back in his chair with a grin on his face, his fingers interlocked behind his head.
Tanzi is curious about my age.
I tell her.
“Nineteen,” she says dreamily, like you might say “diamonds” or “caviar.”
Cheadle stubs out his cigar. “The thing is, when you’re young, you’re always adding to yourself. Accumulating. Even negative experiences contribute to the sum of who you are. When you’re older, it’s different.”
“What happens then?” I ask.
“You’re like a battery that’s going flat. You’ve got less energy, and you can’t be recharged as easily. The day will come when you can’t be recharged at all. You just go dead. In the meantime there’s a dwindling. Everything’s trying to get away from you.”
“You’re not flat yet, right?” Tanzi gives him a cheeky look, then finishes his wine.
Old people often think they know more than young people, simply because they’ve been around for longer, but it’s not necessarily the case. They can be as wrong about things as anybody else. Once in a while, though, Cheadle comes out with a line that switches a light on in my head, and whenever that happens I know without a shadow of a doubt that I’m in the right place.
Even negative experiences contribute to the sum of who you are.
/
>
If I’m really staying, Cheadle says — if, as he puts it, I’m going to become “one of the family” — I will be expected to do chores, and given that he hasn’t asked for any rent, that seems reasonable enough. On my second morning, as I’m heating milk for his coffee, he places a BlackBerry on the work surface in front of me.
“A gift,” he says.
I tell him I don’t need it. I tell him what I did with my last phone.
“But that was your old life,” he says.
He has a point.
I accept the BlackBerry as a symbol of all the changes I have made. I have a new number — a Berlin number! — and only one contact: J. Halderman Cheadle.
That afternoon I add two more: Klaus Frings and Oswald Überkopf.
A couple of days later I’m in my room, looking at recent entries in my notebook — the quote from Farewell to an Idea, my drawing of Pavlo’s icon — when my phone rings for the first time. Cheadle’s name appears on the screen. He tells me he has organized a dinner with his Russian friends for nine o’clock that night. The restaurant is on Schlüterstrasse. I fall silent. It’s only a week since Klaus took me to a restaurant on Schlüterstrasse, which is just round the corner from his apartment. What if he walks in while we’re there?
“Misty?”
“Yes?”
“Happy now?”
When I arrive that evening Cheadle is sitting at the back of the restaurant with a drink in front of him. He’s alone. I take a seat beside him, facing out into the room. The walls are the color of wet sand, and a vase filled with red gerberas stands on the bar. It’s not the restaurant Klaus took me to.
Cheadle glances at his phone. “They’re on their way.”
“What,” I say, “like last time?”
He grins, then swirls the whiskey in his glass. “Drink?”
I order sparkling water. I want to stay sharp.
My eyes swerve towards the door every time it opens. My left leg is jiggling under the table. To distract myself, I go to the Ladies. As I walk back across the restaurant, Cheadle looks past me.
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