by Peter Temple
‘We could ask for help. Ask Carrick. They’ll find him.’
‘Find him, they find the fucking film. The bike, that’s what we need. Find the bike, we nail the cunt. Ring of steel, now that would have helped.’
‘Just around the City, no use. Although…’
‘What? What?’
‘I read they were trying out cameras in other parts for when Bush was here…’ ‘Who would know? Who would know?’
‘I don’t know, how would I…’
‘Ask the fucking Germans, ring the fucking Krauts, they’re supposed to know everything.’
‘How much can you tell them?’
‘Just tell them everything we know. Okay? We’re hanging out here. Time, the bike, the place, two people, the fucking direction, anything you can think of. Now. Please?’
38
…LONDON…
Niemand woke, an instant of bewilderment. Then he knew where he was. It was night, there was light coming from downstairs.
He needed to piss, urgently. He sat up, put his feet on the floor. His shoulder felt stiff but there was little pain.
He stood up, went to the bathroom naked. There was a mirror above the toilet and his face looked pale. He went back to the bed, wrapped the sheet around his waist and went to the top of the staircase. Looking down made him feel dizzy. Below was a big room with a long trestle table at one end under a row of windows. On the table stood several models of buildings and what looked like a model of a town, a village with a church in a square.
She was not in view. He didn’t know her name.
Niemand started down the steep stairs. The woman appeared, a knife in her hand.
‘Not you too,’ said Niemand.
She frowned, then she realised. ‘I’m cooking,’ she said. ‘I’m chopping vegetables.’
‘How long has it been?’
She looked at her wristwatch, a man’s watch. ‘Nearly twenty-four hours.’
There was no point in hurrying. They’d have found him before this if they could.
‘My clothes,’ Niemand said. ‘I have to go.’
‘You can’t wear what you came in. Except for the jacket, that’s okay.’ She pointed to her right. ‘In there, there’s a cupboard. You might find something to fit you.’
He was at the bedroom door, when she said, ‘Or you could just carry on wearing that sheet. Won’t raise an eyebrow around here.’
He liked the way she spoke. It was a musical sound, it had tones. In the bedroom, a wall of cupboards was full of men’s clothes, one man’s clothes, jackets, suits, shirts, shoes. He found underpants, a pair of jeans, they looked a bit short in the leg for him, too big in the waist. They would do. He took a grey T-shirt, too big, that didn’t matter, found socks.
He went back upstairs and showered in the big cubicle, wetting the bandage. When he went to soap his side, he felt a sharp pain at the collarbone, in his back.
The clothes didn’t look too bad. His shoes were under the bed. He put them on and went to his bag on the dressing table. The money was in bundles held with rubber bands. He opened one, saw the fakes immediately, only the top notes looked real.
‘Bastards,’ he said without venom. It didn’t surprise him. It had been nothing but betrayals since the beginning. Plus he had been stupid.
He examined all the bundles. Probably five hundred pounds in real notes. His jacket and his nylon holster were hanging over the back of a chair. Blood had dried on the jacket lining. He put the real money in the holster, took the bag and went downstairs.
The kitchen was a counter along one wall. She had her back to him, doing something with a pot.
‘Did I say thank you?’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
She turned, not surprised, she had heard him on the stairs. She was a good-looking woman, a strong face, dark eyes.
‘Quite all right,’ she said. ‘I often pick up wounded men. It’s a service I provide to the community. Are you hungry?’
Niemand thought for a moment. He should leave. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘It’s a kind of stir fry. Chicken. Sit down.’
She put out two plates, cutlery, napkins, two wine glasses, a bottle of red wine, not full. She poured wine without asking.
The food was good. She wasn’t bad to eat with either. No noises, she kept her mouth closed when she was chewing, she didn’t talk with food in her mouth.
‘Your name’s Con,’ she said. ‘I’m Jess.’
He waited until he’d swallowed. ‘Jess. Where are we?’
‘Battersea.’
He knew where it was. He pointed at the trestle table to his left. ‘Is that your hobby?’
‘I’m a model maker. I do it for a living. A very bad living.’
‘Make models?’ It had never occurred to him that there could be such an occupation.
‘For architects. Usually. The village there, that’s a development in Ireland. A typical Irish village for millionaires. Americans.’
They carried on eating. Then she said, direct gaze, ‘Who shot you?’
Niemand finished chewing, swallowed, wiped his mouth with the napkin. He drank wine. He liked red wine, it was the only alcohol he liked. ‘A man dressed as a woman,’ he said.
Jess drank. ‘I’ll put that again. Why did you get shot?’
She had probably saved his life. She had a right to ask.
‘I was stupid,’ he said. ‘I was selling something to people I didn’t know.’
‘Drugs?’
‘No.’
‘They shot a dealer around the corner the other day. In his car. Two men. One from each side.’
‘I’m not a drug dealer.’ He didn’t have strong feelings about dealers in drugs, the whole world was built on addictions, but he didn’t want her to think he was one. ‘I’m not a drug dealer,’ he said again.
‘Point made.’ She finished her wine and stood up. ‘I have to go out,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back around ten, ten-thirty.’
He stood up too. ‘I’ll be gone. Thanks. I’ll wash up.’
There was a moment of awkwardness.
‘You should stay quiet for a few days, the doctor said,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t really have a bedside manner, your doctor.’
He heard the sound upstairs. Pivoted.
Christ, no, not again.
‘It’s the cat,’ she said. ‘Climbs up the pipes, gets into the bathroom. Always knocks something over. Deliberately. It’s not even my cat, thinks it owns the place.’
‘Just the night,’ said Con. ‘Would that be okay?’
There was a pad and pen beside the phone. She wrote.
‘My cellphone number. Ring if you come over weak.’
He nodded. ‘What floor are we on?’
‘Third. There’s another one. It’s empty.’
‘How’d you get me up here?’
‘In the lift. This was a factory. The fire-escape door’s in the corner over there. They made radio parts, valves and condensers, stuff like that.’
‘How do you know about old radios?’
‘My dad,’ she said. ‘He wanted a boy, so he taught me how to fish and shoot and change a fuse and hotwire a car.’
Niemand sat down. ‘I wish I’d met you earlier in my life,’ he said.
39
…HAMBURG…
They ran on the river path, saw the backs of the houses across the water, here and there a rowboat pulled onto the bank, fowls strutting and pecking, a man hanging washing. There were few runners, many people on bicycles. The sun came and went, gave no heat.
Anselm had not run with anyone since college, since his runs with his room-mate Sinclair Hollway, who went on to become a Wall Street legend for putting twenty-six million dollars on a nickel play. The unauthorised money lost, Sinclair was found dead in his house on Cape Cod a week later.
‘Anselms have been in Hamburg for a long time,’ she said.
He looked at her. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing anti-glare glasses, the kind t
arget shooters wore, yellow. She looked different.
‘What do you know about Anselms?’
‘I looked them up. I suppose you know all the family history.’
‘Some.’
‘Pioneers of the Hanseatic trade with America, it said.’
‘That’s quite possible. How old are you?’
The yellow eyes. ‘Thirty-seven next month. Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘You simply wanted to know?’
‘Yes. Simply wanted to know. Innocent inquiry. Or isn’t it?’
‘I have no opinion.’
‘No innocent inquiries. Is that it? Nothing is innocent.’
‘A question about age, that could certainly be innocent, yes.’
‘But you don’t think this is?’
‘I didn’t think you had any curiosity about me. This is really a conversational cul-de-sac. What kind of books do you enjoy? Do you read novels?’
‘I read novels.’
Once he had read two or three a week, on planes, while eating, waiting for something, someone, somewhere. He never went anywhere without at least two, usually three, buying five or six at a time and leaving them where he finished them. He had donated books to planes, airports, trains, railway stations, left them in parks and bars and hotels and coffee shops, government offices and embassies, taxis and buses and hire cars. Once he left a book in a brothel, the woman had seen it in his coat pocket, asked for it.
They ran. He looked down and saw how shabby his running shoes were, bits were peeling. No German would run in such shoes.
A family on bicycles was coming at them, two abreast. He dropped behind Alex. The plump mother said thank you, three children each said thank you, the father said another thank you.
Running behind her, he admired her backside. He also admired her action. No show to it, no big knee lift or arm action. She just ran, everything straight. When he went up to join her, they touched, just a brush of upper arms, a sibilant friction.
‘DeLillo,’ she said. ‘Do you like him?’
‘I read the earlier books, the Oswald book, that was the last one I read.’
‘You liked that?’
‘I don’t know. I must have, I finished it.’
‘You give up on books easily?’
‘Yes. It’s an American thing. Gratify me or be gone.’
‘You don’t want to live in America again?’
In the beginning, in the early days in the old house on the canal, he had sometimes thought about going back to America. But the idea disturbed him, made him weepy. Go back where? He had no home, the people he had loved were gone, father, mother gone, he was alone. Lucas was all he had, if he had Lucas, they could not even touch properly and Lucas lived in London, he was English now. Go home to the place he left to go to Beirut? To Kaskis’ tiny apartment on the hill? It would belong to Kaskis’ family since Beirut. And later he came to think that Hamburg suited the way he felt, his condition. He was of it and not of it. He belonged and he didn’t. The Germans had partial memory loss and so did he. They had chosen what pieces to forget, but then perhaps so had he.
‘America overwhelms me,’ he said. ‘There’s too much of too little. Why would you think I don’t have any curiosity about you?’
The yellow eyes looked at him, away. ‘I should not have said that. A silly thing to say. What else do you read?’
‘Mostly, I get drunk and go to sleep in front of the television with the cable news on.’
It was true. He sat with a book in his lap, a glass in his hand and on the television an endless loop of death, destruction, pain, fear, famine and misery. Often he came back and watched again when he woke far out on the wrong side of the night, wet with sweat from his dreams.
They ran.
‘I also listen to music while I’m getting drunk watching the news,’ he said. ‘A multi-media experience.’
They ran. Anselm’s knee was beginning to hurt, the pain that started as dull, like a memory of a pain, gradually turned to fire in the joint.
‘You’re not interested in the music I listen to?’ he said.
They ran. He thought that this would probably be the only run they would ever take together and he did not know how to prevent that from being so.
‘People like you probably listen to Wagner,’ she said. She did not turn her head.
‘Wagner?’
He had no idea what she meant, he had no view on Wagner, his father had hated Wagner, the Wagners as a whole. But he also disliked her tone, it send a current of annoyance through him and, for an instant, he wanted to bump her into the canal-it would be easy, hip and shoulder. Splash. There would be no coming back from that and it would be over. He would go home. Resume his life without shrinks. She could crawl home, wet, have her own post-traumatic stress.
‘People like me?’
She said nothing, didn’t look at him.
They ran and he kept looking at her. ‘What kind of person am I?’
She still didn’t look at him. ‘You’re an adrenalin addict,’ she said.
‘You like percussion. You’re a seeker after percussion.’
‘I was a hostage, that’s all you know about me. Where do you get all these other opinions from?’
‘Just intuition. Professional intuition. You say you were often scared but you never stopped looking for chances to be scared.’
Anselm heard bicycles coming up behind them. He fell back to let them pass, thin androgynous people in latex outfits, helmets, thin dark glasses. Alex slowed for him.
‘That’s not a terribly clever thing to say,’ he said. ‘That was my job. That was what I did. I didn’t go to these places on holiday.’
‘Did you take holidays?’
The sun went. His knee was getting worse, soon he would be showing it, favouring it, he would be pathetic. This was why you didn’t run with other people.
‘Time to turn,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to be at work in an hour.’
They turned. He tried to slow the pace but she wouldn’t be slowed. She wanted to push him, he felt that.
‘Holidays,’ she said. ‘Did you take holidays?’
He didn’t want to answer. He couldn’t remember. He remembered the artist who hit him, that was all. It was possible that he hadn’t taken other holidays. Then he remembered sailing with Kaskis in the Bahamas. That wasn’t really a holiday. Kaskis was doing something there, some story on money laundering and corruption. He rang, said come over and we’ll have a sail, I’ll hire a boat. They took the boat out the morning Anselm arrived. There was a strong wind to begin with. It got a lot stronger and it changed direction. His experience was on smaller boats and this one was a pig. They should have expected that, it was a cruising boat, not meant for heavy conditions. Kaskis didn’t want to make for harbour. He also didn’t want to take down the mainsail. He agreed only after they dug in and, for a few seconds, it seemed as if they would pitchpole. Taking down the mainsail, Anselm was almost knocked overboard, cut his head. Under power with just the jib up, the boat threatened to breach in the troughs. Getting home took a long time. Kaskis loved it, he lit up with pleasure. You could see how he’d made Special Forces in the army.
‘I took some holidays,’ said Anselm.
The knee was not good. It was sending signals up and down. He looked at her. She was looking at him.
‘What kind of holidays do you shrinks take?’ he said. ‘Or do you just stay at home and introspect? Keep in touch with your inner selves. Do some mental scoping.’
‘Scoping?’
‘You could scope your anima. Do an animascope. An animoscopy. That’s got a nice medical sound to it.’
‘So you didn’t take holidays?’
‘What is this about holidays? Since when were holidays the measure of people? Did Marie Curie take a lot of holidays?’
‘I don’t know. Do you?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Your memory loss. Has that been permanent?’
‘How
did we get on to that? What’s permanent? Permanent is a retrospective term. I’m still alive. Just.’
More cyclists, no leanness or androgyny here, a group of overweight women, bikes wobbling, breasts alive, jostling inside tracksuits.
‘Precision,’ said Alex. ‘It is important. Do you still experience the loss of memory? Correction. The absence of some memory.’
‘Some. Yes. I’ve lost all the good bits, the holidays. I’m left with the crap.’
Both knees were hurting now. He would have to stop, walk the rest of the way. He did not want to do that.
They ran for another hundred metres.
‘I’m tiring,’ she said. ‘Can we slow?’
He felt relief, he’d outlasted her, he didn’t have to be humiliated. ‘It’s just a kilometre,’ he said. ‘I was thinking we should pick it up.’
The yellow glance, a shrug. ‘If you like.’
She went away from him without effort, no sign whatsoever of fatigue. He watched her backside and could make no effort to go after her. The path turned and she was gone.
Anselm stopped, walked. She had tried to be kind to him, to spare him embarrassment. She had pretended to a weakness she didn’t have.
His response, wired into his brain, was to go for her throat.
She was waiting at her car, grey tracksuit on, yellow glasses off, breathing normally.
‘I found a reserve of energy,’ she said.
‘I noticed.’
They didn’t speak until she stopped outside the office gates. She didn’t look at him.
‘Perhaps that is not a thing we should do together,’ she said. ‘It might not bring out our best natures.’
Anselm took his bag from the back seat. ‘I don’t have a best nature,’ he said. ‘Least worst, that’s my best.’
40
…LONDON…
The request from Lafarge to find a motorcycle was on his desk. He was tired, not just his knees hurt now, his left hip sent splinters of pain up and down. He summoned Inskip and explained.
‘It’s Mission Hopeless,’ he said, ‘but they’re paying. Carry on, Number Two. Or is that Number One? No, I would be Number One, surely?’