RAT RUN GERALD SEYMOUR

by Gerald Seymour

  He crawled across the floor towards the half-open window. It was slow going and the pain came in rivers. It was a big effort for him to crawl, and a bigger one for him to locate the grenade's pin and work his finger into it. He gasped, dragged out the pin, then propped himself up on an elbow and tossed it through the window. For a moment it seemed to bounce on the sill and he wondered if it would roll back and drop down beside him, but it did not. Far below he heard it bounce, men's yells, panic, and the explosion.

  Muhammad Iyad bought time. Not much time left to him, but time for the man he protected.

  The door was barricaded with the cooker and the refrigerator, and with the mattresses from the beds, all wedged between the door and the wall opposite by the table, chairs and the wardrobe from the bedroom.

  If they came close on the landing above the staircase, he fired sprays of bullets on automatic above the barricade, then slithered back to a corner where the answering shots could not find him. He was down now to his last grenade and to his last three magazines of bullets.

  He lay in a pool of his own blood. It was smeared across the carpet from each time he had manoeuvred himself to the firing position. It came from a chest wound and from his shattered knee. To kill the pain, he had only his faith in God and the image of his wife, and the thought that the man would use well the time given him. It was an hour, more than an hour, since they had last approached the door when he had expended a whole magazine from the machine pistol, and a handful of minutes since he had thrown a fourth grenade through the slit of the open window. Of course he would die in the little room on the top floor in a city far from his home and the family he loved. He had no fear of death. The only uncertainty in the mind of Muhammad Iyad was that he had not given the man the time that was needed.

  Before they had come - in the night - before he had heaved the barricade into place, he had cleaned the apartment. With water and soap, he had scrubbed down every surface where the man's fingers might have rested, plates he had eaten off and cups or glasses he had drunk from. The bedding in which he had slept, the clothes from the man's bag, his toothbrush, razor, and spare trainer shoes were piled in a loose heap in the room's centre. They were there because Muhammad Iyad was one of the few in

  the Organization who understood the power of the enemy. The skill of their fingerprint experts and the quality of their ability to examine for microscopic particles of DNA were known to him. No trace of his man was to remain when the ability to fight - not the will for it - had seeped from Muhammad Iyad's body.

  There were new sounds beyond the barricade -

  scraping noises, as rats might make, and he thought they chipped away stones from the dividing wall under the roof tiles and sought to come at him from above.

  He knew about the grenades with the thunder noise that deafened and the flash that blinded, and about the gas that choked. Too long - if he waited for them to come, waited too long, and he was unable to light the fire . . . but every second he delayed, each minute, every hour he bought, gave the man more time. They were closer, more urgent in their work.

  Muhammad Iyad hoped that prayers would be said for him. He trusted that in his village, in the far-away mountains of Yemen, men would speak well of him.

  There was a story of the dying moments of the great prince Saladin, who had defeated the Crusaders on the hill of Kurn-Hattin. He had been told the story, as a child, by the imam of the village: when Saladin lay dying he called for his standard-bearer and ordered him to ride round the limits of the city of Damascus with a torn-off rag from Saladin's shroud on the tip of the standard-bearer's spear, and to shout out that Saladin had gone with no more of his possessions to his grave than his shroud. It was fitting to be so humble, and Muhammad Iyad hoped to ape the great prince. Nothing would go to his unmarked grave, the body buried in the dead of night, but his faith in God, his love for his family and his sense of duty to his brothers and friends. He fired an angled burst into the ceiling, towards where the scraping had been, and heard the rats squirm back. An oath was muffled by the stonework and the ceiling's plaster cascaded down to whiten him and make a film over the blood in which he lay, like the snow of the Afghan mountains. He reloaded, tossed away the empty magazine and called instructions, as if he was ordering another man where to be and when to fire.

  He felt the weakness growing - knew that God and Paradise beckoned. If he delayed, if the weakness overwhelmed him, the DNA would not be destroyed.

  He took the last grenade from the black bag and the last magazines, and a box of matches. He laid the grenade on the whitened floor, put the magazines on top of the heap of bedding and clothes, then made a little burrowed space at their base. He tore up scraps of paper from the bag, the coded instructions for each move forward in the journey. He struck the first match, and the paper lit.

  Then he struck a second match, lit the paper better, and a third, and blew lightly on the fire; blood from the chest wound was at his lips.

  When he saw the flames climb and spread,

  Muhammad Iyad pulled the pin from the grenade and slid it under his stomach, his gut held down the lever.

  If he moved, or was moved, the lever would fly free and seven seconds later the grenade would detonate.

  The smoke gathered in the room and the wind from the open window fanned the fire.

  When the bedding and clothing under the

  magazine caught and the heat reached furnace point, the bullets would explode and career round the room and into the walls and the ceiling, which would win more minutes; if he shifted away from the fire the grenade would explode.

  He did not think he could have done more to win the man time to get clear and resume the journey to the north German coastline.

  He had something that day to tell his wife.

  The wind came in low off the sea and caught the wires that divided the gardens of the properties in Westdorf. The homes, the few that were occupied all year and the many that were opened and aired only when the tourist season started, were now packed close together. When Oskar and Gertrud had come to the island of Baltrum, in their flight from his family's past, it had been a perfect refuge. Now every handkerchief of open ground in Westdorf, and in the twin community of Ostdorf, was packed solid with buildings. He, the complainant each time there was a whisper of new foundations going in, was now overlooked each summer and swamped by visitors; he hated them. If Oskar had not been so old, and the arthritis in his knees had been less acute, he told himself he would have moved to the neighbouring island of Langeoog, or even to the more deserted Spiekeroog, but it was a fantasy. Gertrud was at Ostdorf, and he would never leave her.

  Oskar Netzer lived in an old house in the heart of Westdorf. Homes on the island did not have names but were identified by numbers. The lower the number, the older the house. A hundred years before, his would have been the home of a fisherman. Its number was 23A, but around him and prying into his life were 248, 212,179 and 336. All were empty, locked and shuttered, and would stay that way till Easter week; he loathed Easter, when the hordes returned.

  No one visited Oskar at house number 23A. No guests were invited in. Anyone who called could state their business at the door even if the rain lashed on them. In the years since Gertrud's death, not a single person had seen the inside of his living room or gone up the stairs and witnessed the state of the bedroom or been led into the kitchen for a welcoming mug of coffee. The house was enveloped with grime. His living room was littered, table, chairs and floor, with planning applications for development. He rotated the sheets on his bed every three or four weeks, and hung out the dirty ones in summer or winter to be washed by the rain; the winds took away their smell.

  In the kitchen, pots, plates and pans were encrusted with fat. It was - and his neighbours were loud in their complaints when they arrived for their summer vacations, from Bremen or Hamburg, Cologne or Dusseldorf - a pig-sty. Their opinions did not concern him, and the filth of his home had little effect on his health. The resident doctor on th
e island had opined that Oskar Netzer was not mentally unstable, merely eccentric. The secret of his past, the shame he carried through blood, was known only to him and had been shared only with Gertrud, who was dead now.

  In a month, there would be a mass of wild flowers that he could pick from his overgrown garden lawn, which was never mown, and take to the cemetery.

  That day there were daffodils for cutting. The wind snatched at his overalls and heavy coat, ripped at his old Frislander's cap and rifled against his face.

  He left his front door flapping open.

  A councillor came out of the supermarket. Oskar had opposed the building of the second supermarket, had succeeded in delaying it for two years before permission was given. Behind the supermarket were the high floodlights of the public tennis courts. Oskar had fought them, and their building had been postponed for twenty-eight months, until his objections were overruled. To the mainland side of the tennis courts was the monstrosity of the Fitness Studio, his greatest defeat. But for every failure there had been successes: a block of holiday apartments, permission reluctantly refused by the council, an all-weather football pitch and eight new homes - and now the extension to the pasta and pizza outlet.

  The councillor with his trolley was in front of him.

  'What a charming sight - the dutiful widower with flowers, a devoted man for whom a stranger might feel sympathy.'

  'Your way, the island would be concreted from north to south,' Oskar growled. 'From east to west.'

  'But the stranger would be ignorant. The stranger would not have known of the poison an old fool can spurt.'

  'I do what's right for Baltrum.'

  'Flatulent arrogance. Can't keep your nose out, can you? Have to interfere. The island survives on the money it makes in the season - and only a senile idiot fails to see that fact.'

  'Step aside.'

  'When I've finished/ the councillor spat back. 'All of us, in a competitive world, strive for the future of the island. Each year thousands of euros, which could be better spent on our community, are wasted by the required legal investigations to your objections. You, one man, bleed us dry. Prying and interfering, Herr Netzer, is all you are good for . . . I say this, and I am not proud of it, she is better where she is than listening to the drivel you manufacture.'

  'Would you have made money from the extension to the pasta and pizza place?'

  'I offer you the future. One day you will interfere once too often, pry into a hole, find a wasps' nest and be stung. Who then will help you?'

  'I go my own way. I know what is right.'

  The trolley was pushed out of his path. The wind fluttered the councillor's hair. The short spat had no effect on Oskar. He thought that the price he paid for his vigilance was the rudeness of those who did not comprehend his concern for the island of Baltrum. He would not change, he would fight until death took him - as it had taken Gertrud. He strode away and his fist was tight on the stems of the daffodils. To his right was the grass strip for light aircraft to land; he had opposed it and said that the noise of the planes would disturb the island's wildlife. Further to his right was the little lake that was fed only by rainwater and the field converted to a children's play area; he had opposed that and said it was too adjacent to the Westheller, the marshland, a summer haven for wading birds. Before he reached Ostdorf, the smaller of the two villages at the western end of the island, a horse-drawn cart had veered by him because he would not give way. All building work was done in autumn, winter and spring, and the materials were brought in by the ferry, then loaded on to horse-drawn carts to be taken to the site. This one was to change a two-bedroom house into a five-bedroom eyesore, the extra rooms for visitors - and that fight, too, after a year of conflict, he had lost.

  He came to the cemetery at the limit of Ostdorf's development. The flowerbeds in the garden of house number 23A, which she had tended, were overgrown and beyond recognition, but the daffodils she had planted still flourished for him to pick. The garden in front of her grave was meticulously tended. Not a weed in the sandy soil. He bent awkwardly, lowered himself to kneel and laid the flowers in front of the stone. They had a cleanness and purity about them, which should have been the island's virtues.

  On Baltrum, Gertrud - dead five years - had been the only soul who knew of his past, and the torture it had brought him. She had sat beside him, and his mother, in the Hamburg lawyer's office when his uncle's will was read and when the letter of confession - with a dying man's shake in the handwriting

  - had been produced. First the letter had been read in the lawyer's clipped tone; its second reading had been in his mother's halting, shocked voice. The confession had driven him from his work as a construction fore-man in the Blohm & Voss shipyard: he had resigned the day after the visit to the lawyer's room in the humid summer of 1975. He had sold their property, a three-room apartment in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort, cheaply for speed. They had gone to Baltrum, bought the house and he had believed himself safe from the intrusion of the outside world.

  As a child, Oskar Netzer had come through the Feuersturm bombing in August 1943. As an adult he should have been stronger when confronted with the letter of confession; he had not. It had made of him the self-centred recluse kneeling in front of the weathered stone. He was alone with her, the only company - other than the beloved eider ducks - that he sought.

  'I showed them, my sweetheart, that they could not ignore me. They loathe me but I do not care. I thought they would burst blood vessels. Now, coming here, I am accosted by a councillor - you will remember him, Schulz, with the face of a goat. He accuses me of interference, prying, putting my nose where it has no business. The idiot thinks he offends me. I am proud of his description. More important, my sweetheart, is that the eider are back .. .'

  The rain came on harder, soaking his shoulders and the back of the coat, and dribbling on his face; it crushed the blooms of the daffodils and ran on to the stone.

  In truth, not much more than interference, prying and putting his nose into other persons' business remained in the life of Oskar Netzer. It was his spine.

  The Bear drove Timo Rahman away from the house in Blankenese. As they approached the electrically operated gates, Timo lowered the window, extended his arm and waved. He looked back and for a moment glimpsed the wan face of Alicia in an upstairs window, but she did not wave to him. They pulled out into a quiet street, and he had the window up again.

  To neighbours, there was little remarkable about the Albanian who had come to live among them in Blankenese, a speckgurtel district of Hamburg.

  Blankenese was one of the affluent 'bacon-belt' areas of the city, where the well-fed had their homes. Those neighbours knew little of the man who kept himself to himself, whose wife they rarely saw, whose children were taken by car to school and driven home. His name was not in the newspapers, he did not entertain locally, and offers of drinks or summer barbecues were always politely refused - 'We are already committed on that evening/ weekend / lunchtime, and so are unable to accept your kind invitation.' It was the way of the pate that the least should be known about him.

  He had come far in his life from the village north of Shkodra in the Albanian mountains close to the border with Montenegro.

  A VW Passat had been parked on the main road, backed into a driveway so that its occupants could see up the dead-end street and respond easily to whichever way his car turned on the main road: north towards the Blankenese station for the S-Bahn line, or south and the Elbchaussee. Timo leaned across the Bear's shoulder and peered into the mirror. A woman was driving the Passat with a man as her front-seat passenger. Sometimes the surveillance on him was covert, and needed his instinct - and the Bear's - to spot. Sometimes the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat section put a car on his tail in the full knowledge that it would be instantly identified.

  It was a gesture, covert or obvious, and one to be ignored. Lesser men than Timo Rahman were in the maximum-security wing of the gaol at Fuhlsbuttel.

  Other
than to visit a blood relation eleven years back he had never been there, and such visits were now inappropriate and beneath his stature.

  He did not remark on the Passat, two cars back in the traffic behind them, neither did the Bear.

  It was the assumption of Timo Rahman that every remark he made - in his bedroom, his kitchen, his car, at a business meeting - was overheard by audio devices. He had been told that the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat boasted to favoured politicians that the equipment available to them was the best in Europe. Nothing that incriminated him ever passed his lips and those he dealt with were schooled at the same desk. He discussed with the Bear, as the VW Passat followed them, the weather forecast for that day in northern Germany, as any of his neighbours would have.

  Inside the speed limit, the Bear drove down

  Elbchaussee. Set back from the wide road, which wound down from the high ground above the river, were the great mansions where the elite of the city's commerce and banking had made their homes, with views across the estuary to the Airbus factory. He could have lived there, could have moved Alicia and the girls into an Elbchaussee home, but it would have drawn attention to him. Timo lived in Blankenese, without the views, among the chief executives and principal department heads, and did not draw comment. But his financial empire, always moving on a steady path to greater legitimacy, based on stocks and bonds, property holdings and aircraft leasings, could have bought him the best.

  Fewer than a dozen men - and the woman whose face had been at the upper window of his home

  - could have brought down the empire of the pate, could have consigned Timo Rahman to the

  Fuhlsbuttel gaol by their testimony He had no fear of them. Alicia, watched by her aunt in all her waking hours at the villa, was incapable of action. The Bear could have sent him to the prison they called 'Santa-Fu', but the idea was ludicrous. The net of loyalty around Timo - of which the Bear was part - was the same in Hamburg as it was in the mountains of Albania. It was based on the centuries-old diktats laid out in the Canun of Lek Dukagjen, was based on the besa, which was a man's word of honour - and violation created an inevitable hakmarrje, the blood feud. As his father had in Albania, Timo Rahman sat at the head of a clan, a fis, in Hamburg. He had brought with him the disciplines of the Canun from the village north of Shkodra to the richest of German cities, and with his baggage had been the im-penetrable strength of the fis.