In the Evil Day

by Peter Temple

  ‘Debt collection?’

  ‘Say the Ukrainian government owes you five million dollars, they won’t pay, you’re desperate. You go to Bowden. They offer ten, twenty cents in the dollar for the debt, it depends. For you, that’s better than nothing, cut your losses. Now Bowden’s the creditor.’

  ‘That impresses the Ukrainians, does it?’

  ‘Bowdens wait until they find a Ukrainian government asset to target somewhere, maybe a Ukrainian Airways plane in Oslo, something like that. Something valuable. They bring up the legal artillery, get a court order impounding the asset. Now the Ukrainians have to fight a legal action in a foreign country to get their plane back. That or pay up the million. Bowden’s bet is that they’ll want to talk a settlement. Say sixty cents in the dollar. And they usually do.’

  ‘I see. What a sheltered life I’ve lived.’

  ‘All that is changing.’

  Anselm went back to reviewing the logbooks. Every file had one, all checks, results, speculations, actions, all recorded in writing. As behoved parasites who lived off other people’s computer systems, professional prowlers of the cyber world, W amp;K kept no electronic records of their own, worked only through proxy computers, and otherwise sought tirelessly to erase the traces of their electronic trespasses. If W amp;K was interested in you, the safest thing was to ensure that your name or names and the names of anyone near you, did not appear on the electronic record: no bank accounts, no vehicle registrations, no passport or visa applications, no customs records, no credit-card transactions, no plane tickets, no car hire, no hotel bookings, no bills from public utilities or department stores, no electronic commerce, no emails, no accidents, no hospital admissions, no court appearances, no nothing.

  It was safe only to have your death recorded.

  W amp;K was not the only company providing this kind of service.

  What set W amp;K apart was that, when their own efforts bogged down, Baader could ring some faceless secret servant in Munich or Moscow or Madrid or Montevideo. Then there was a chance they would get moving again. That came from fourteen years with German intelligence, the BND, the Bundesnachtrichtendienst-ten years in Department One, Operations, and four in Department Three, Evaluation.

  Most of W amp;K’s work was commercial, companies spying on each other, on themselves, trying to find out where executives went, who they saw, who visited companies, what people said, what they wrote. But the firm took on missing persons, anything it could handle.

  Just before ten, Carla Klinger knocked and came in. She used a rubber-tipped aluminium stick to walk. She was in her late thirties, thin and angular, a scar on her nose where it had been broken. The BND had sacked her because she was found to have had an affair with another female, possibly once a STASI person, Baader had been vague about the details. Then she had a car accident, broke one side of her body, arm, ribs, hip, leg. Someone told Baader about an expensively trained talent going to waste and he offered Carla a job.

  ‘Serrano,’ she said, taking the logbook out from under her left arm and offering it. ‘He rang this man and they’re meeting tomorrow. At the Alsterarkaden.’ She always spoke to Anselm in English.

  Anselm looked at the log. The man’s name was Werner Kael. He lived nearby, off Sierichstrasse, in the millionaire belt, a wide belt.

  ‘What shows on him?’ said Anselm. Carla wasn’t much for volunteering information, a trait she shared with Baader. Possibly something nurtured in the BND.

  ‘Calls himself an investment consultant, holiday house in France, four weeks in the Virgin Islands in winter. He used to travel a lot, short trips. Not for a few years. Four tax investigations in the past twelve years, no action taken.’

  ‘Tell O’Malley,’ said Anselm. ‘It may have meaning for him.’

  She nodded, put the logbook under her arm and left.

  Anselm waited, then he went down the passage. Baader was staring at his big monitor, figures.

  ‘Werner Kael,’ said Anselm from the doorway.

  Baader didn’t look at him. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Arranged to meet O’Malley’s man, the money man.’

  Baader touched his chin with a long index finger. ‘Arms, drugs, slaves, body parts. Israel, Palestinians, Iranians, Iraqis, Sud-Afs, Tamil Tigers, everyone. Sold the IRA half a container of Semtex. Then there’s a fucking shipload of ethyl ether to Colombia out of Hamburg. Five thousand per cent profit.’

  ‘What’s his secret?’

  ‘Party donor. Learned the trade from one of Goebbels’ cocksuckers. Dieter Kuhn. Dieter only died last year, the year before, about ninety, the old cunt. Fascism is good for health. Hitler would still be alive. Plus Kael’s got American friends, a big help in life.’

  Baader swivelled. ‘O’Malley’s chasing money?’

  ‘As far as I can tell,’ said Anselm.

  ‘Well, there’s no knowing. Kael’s got to put his dirty money somewhere, could be this man does it for him, what’s…?’

  ‘Serrano. You don’t know the name?’

  ‘No. Tell O’Malley that as far as I know Kael doesn’t talk to his clients. He’s got cut-outs for that. So Serrano isn’t buying or selling. Which probably means he’s doing something for Kael.’

  Anselm went back to his office, tried to concentrate on the task, focus on the logbook. He had to work at concentration. His mind wandered, wanted to go back to dark places, drawn as a dog was to old buried bones, rotten things, just a layer of earth on them.

  The mobile on the desk rang. It was said to be secure. But nothing was secure or W amp;K wouldn’t have a business.

  9

  …LONDON…

  Niemand had a long wait at Heathrow customs. When his turn came, the dark pockmarked man looked at him for a time and said, ‘Central African Republic. Don’t see a lot of these. No. Quite unusual. What’s the population?’

  ‘Going down all the time,’ Niemand said. ‘Volcanic eruptions, human sacrifice, cannibal feasts.’

  The official didn’t smile, kept looking at him while he photocopied the passport page. Then he said, ‘Enjoy your stay in the United Kingdom, sir. Mind the motorised vehicles now.’

  Niemand changed a thousand dollars into sterling, rang a hotel, bought a pre-paid mobile phone, and took the underground to Earls Court. He didn’t trust taxis, the drivers cheated you and then things became unpleasant.

  It wasn’t until he came up from the tube station that he felt he was in England: a cold late-autumn day, soiled sky, an icy wind probing his collar, chasing litter down filthy Trebovir Road. The hotel was close by. He had stayed there before, on his way back from his uncle’s deathbed in Greece. That was a long time ago and they wouldn’t remember him. Besides, he had a different name now.

  The woman at the desk was somewhere out beyond sixty, crimson lips drawn on her face, high Chinese collar hiding chins, slackness.

  ‘I rang,’ he said. ‘Martin Powell.’

  ‘Did you? Just the night, dear?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Forty pounds twenty a night,’ she said. ‘In advance.’

  ‘I’ll pay cash.’

  She smiled. ‘Always happy to accept real money.’

  He waited, looking at her, not producing it. He didn’t care about the money but he liked to see how people behaved when off-the-record money was offered. ‘What does that come to then?’

  ‘One hundred pounds exactly,’ she said. ‘Dear.’

  Niemand registered and carried his pilot’s flight bag up the stairs covered with balding carpet. In his room on the third floor, he went through his no-weights exercise routine, twenty minutes. Then he showered in a scratched fibreglass cubicle. The water never went above warm, gurgled, died, spat into life again.

  Towelling himself, he thought: A gun, do I need a gun?

  He considered it as he dressed, put on clean black jeans, a black T-shirt, the weightless nylon harness that carried his valuables, a black poloneck sweater, his loose-fitting leather jacket. He didn’t
know who he’d be dealing with. Guns were for showing. Guns were like offering cash. People understood, you didn’t have to spell it out.

  Downstairs, unconsciously hugging the inside wall like a blind man, around the corner to a pub, a mock-old place with fake timbers, hungover staff, just a dozen or so customers, one sad man with a pencil moustache drinking a pink liquid, possibly a Pimms, the last Pimms drinker. At a corner table, he ate a slice of pizza, tasteless, just fodder, rubber fodder, he was hungry, couldn’t eat much on planes, someone sitting so close to him he could hear their teeth crush the food, the drain sound of swallowing. When he was finished, he moved his plate to an empty table. He couldn’t bear smeared plates, dirty cutlery, mouth prints on glasses, the cold, congealing bits of leftover food.

  From under his sweater he brought out his nylon wallet and found the number. He looked around, dialled.

  ‘Kennex Import. How may I help you?’

  ‘Michael Hollis, please,’ Niemand said in his Yorkshire accent. He had always been able to mimic accents. He heard them in his head like music, the stresses and timbres, the inflections.

  ‘Who may I say is calling?’

  ‘Tell him it’s in connection with a package.’

  ‘Please hold.’

  Not for long.

  ‘Hollis.’ The faint German accent.

  Niemand waited a few seconds. ‘I have a package from Johannesburg.’

  ‘Oh yes. The package.’

  Two women came in, girls, shrieking, spiky hair, faces violated by rings, full of push and bump and finger-point.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it for less than fifty thousand, US.’

  A pause. A sniff, an intake, just audible.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’

  A pause, the sniff, another sound, a click-click. ‘I’m not sure we can do that. Can I call you back? Give me your number.’

  ‘No,’ said Niemand. ‘I’ll give you an hour to decide. Then you can say yes or no. If it’s no, the package goes somewhere else. I’ll ring.

  Goodbye.’

  Niemand went for a walk as far as Kensington Gardens, sat on a bench and watched the people. He had been there before, on his second visit to London. He was supposed to be on his way to Papua New Guinea to fight headhunters, that came to nothing, some political fuck-up. For ten days, he’d been stuck in a hotel near Heathrow with half a dozen other mercenaries-the stupid, the brain-dead, and the merely kill-crazy. Every day, early, he’d take the underground somewhere and run back, long routes plotted with a map. He got to know London as far away as Hampstead and Wimbledon and Bermondsey. Then they were paid off and given plane tickets home.

  He always felt strange in England, hearing English everywhere. His father had hated the English, rooinekke, anyone who spoke English, Jews in particular, said it was in his blood: Niemands had fought against the British in the Boer War, been put in concentration camps, sent to Ceylon, a koelie eiland, a coolie island. But then his father had also hated Greeks and Portuguese, called them see kaffirs, sea-kaffirs. For Greeks he reserved a special loathing, having married a Greek girl and lost her because of his drinking and violence. When Niemand and his mother came back from five years on Crete, he found that his father came home drunk from the mine every day, drove the loose old Chev V8 into the dirt yard at speed, stopped in a dust cloud inches from the tacked-on verandah. One day, he braked too late, took out a pillar, half the roof fell on the Chev. He just stayed where he was, opened the bottle of cheap brandy. Niemand found him when he came home, carried him to bed, surprised at how light he was, just bones and sinew.

  Niemand looked at his watch. Five minutes to go. Two young women behind three-wheeled pushchairs came from opposite directions, saw each other, cried out. Stopping abreast, they walked around and inspected each other’s cargoes beneath the plastic covers, made delighted scrunched-up faces.

  He dialled.

  ‘Kennex Import. How may I help you?’

  ‘Mr Hollis. About the package.’

  No further questions.

  Niemand watched the mothers talking, hands moving, talking babies, faces alive with interest.

  ‘Ah, the package.’ Hollis. ‘Yes, I’m having trouble getting authorisation for the deal you suggest without seeing that the goods are as described.’

  ‘No,’ Niemand said. ‘You give me the money. In cash. I give you the package.’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘I think it is. Yes or no.’

  ‘We have to see the goods. You can understand that.’

  Niemand didn’t like the way this was going. He didn’t have contingency plans. ‘Now the price is sixty thousand,’ he said. ‘Inflation.’

  ‘I’m sure we can agree on price when we know what we’re getting. I’ll give you an address to bring the package to. You do that soonest, say in an hour, thereabouts, soonest. Then we look at it, we authorise payment. How’s that?’

  ‘Forget it. You’re not the only buyer. How’s that?’

  ‘That’s quite persuasive. Can you give me time to discuss this with my colleagues? I’ll recommend that we do it your way. I’m sure they’ll agree. Call me at ten tomorrow morning?’

  Niemand didn’t reply for a moment. He needed to think. ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Excellent. There’s no need to look elsewhere, I assure you.’

  Niemand sat for a while, not easy in his mind.

  10

  …HAMBURG…

  Anselm took the firm’s BMW and drove to Winterhude. He found a parking space in Barmbeker Strasse, went to the Konditorei and bought a small black chocolate cake, walked to the apartment in Maria-Louisen-Steig to see Fraulein Einspenner, whose service to the Anselm family began in 1935.

  She came to the door in seconds. She was just bone covered with finely lined tissue paper but her eyes were bright. She seated him in the stiff sitting room on a striped chair, took the cake to the kitchen and came back with it, sliced, on a delicate plate, on a tray with cake plates and silver cake forks.

  They talked about the affairs of the day. She knew about everything, watched the news and current affairs on television, her eyes not up to reading the paper.

  ‘How is Lucas?’ she said.

  ‘Well. He’s well.’

  ‘When is he coming to live in his house?’

  ‘I don’t know. He has a house in London.’

  ‘Then he should give the house to you.’

  ‘Perhaps his son will live in it one day.’

  Fraulein Einspenner thought about that for a while, nodding. Then she said, ‘Your German is very good.’

  She always said that to him at some point. She had said it to him for thirty years.

  Fraulein Einspenner separated a tiny piece of chocolate cake with her fork, put it to her mouth slowly. There was no perceptible chewing movement. She was ingesting it.

  Anselm waited until he thought she had swallowed.

  ‘Moritz,’ he said. ‘Do you remember much about him?’

  She was looking at her plate, making another incision in her thin slice of cake with the side of her fork.

  ‘Moritz?’

  ‘My great-uncle.’

  ‘I was a servant,’ she said.

  ‘You do remember him?’

  She finished the cut, didn’t impale the fragment, didn’t look up, began another separation.

  ‘I saw him, yes. He came to the house.’

  ‘What became of him? Do you know?’

  More work on the cake.

  ‘Became of him?’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  She rested the fork on the plate.

  ‘The war,’ she said, looking up.

  ‘He was killed in the war?’

  ‘A lovely cake. When will you come again? I so look forward to seeing you. I see your father and your grandfather when I look at you.’

  This meant she was tired. She walked to the front door of the building with Anselm, holding his hand, two fi
ngers of his hand, and there he stooped to kiss her papyrus cheek.

  She smelled as she had thirty years before, when she had stooped to hug him, kiss his cheek.

  ‘Remember when we used to go to Stadtpark together?’ she said.

  ‘The birds. You loved them so much.’

  He walked back to the car, stopped to buy cigarettes, drove down Dorotheen Strasse and into choked Hofweg. Turning down to Schone Aussicht, he saw the last light of day on the silver lake. Three small boats were tacking towards the Poseldorf shore, on their sails a colour the palest rose.

  In the building, Baader was gone, returned to his child bride, and the shifts had changed. Inskip was back.

  ‘There may be life outside this place,’ he said in his languid English voice, not looking at Anselm. ‘Have you considered that?’

  ‘Movement, yes,’ Anselm said. ‘Life is another matter.’

  ‘I’ll settle for movement,’ said Inskip. ‘Up and down. You may or may not be pleased by some initiative I’ve shown. A Ms Christina Owens came up on the Continental database. The Campo woman checked in as C. Owens at a hotel in Vancouver six years ago. Someone in Canada found that out for the client.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Christina Owens is staying at a hotel in Barcelona. The security man’s given me some pictures.’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  Inskip tapped, they waited, the screen began running a jerky hotel lobby surveillance film, four cameras: entrance, reception desk, seating area, lifts.

  A couple came in the door, a woman with shoulder-length hair and a man walking just behind her. They saw him at the desk collecting a key. At the lifts, waiting, she turned her head to him, a younger man, said something, curt, impatient. He shrugged, raised a hand. The lift doors opened and they entered.

  ‘Again.’

  The couple came into view walking through the doors from the street.

  Anselm raised a finger.

  Inskip froze the film. She was head-on to the camera.

  Anselm made the enlarge sign.

  It was a taut-skinned face, perky nose, eyebrows pencilled in, full lower lip.

  ‘Save it.’

  The box file was at Inskip’s elbow. Anselm opened it, took out the top photograph: a woman, mid-twenties perhaps, hair pulled back, long nose, glasses. She had the face to play a librarian in a Hollywood film and she bore no resemblance to the woman in the Barcelona hotel surveillance video.