Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  And now that same fear was being turned upon everyday people as they went about their everyday lives. Konstantin felt curiously at home in this violent society, more so than he ever could have in a world of poets and lovers. But then he had been raised with violence into a world of violence, so it was hardly surprising.

  Konstantin was one of the few people on the street walking with a purpose. He was alert, eyes moving quickly from face to face, looking for guilt or complicity in any of the people he passed. Of course it was never going to be that easy. All he saw was shock and disbelief repeated over and over in every face. He knew what they were thinking: How could it happen here? How could it happen to us?

  If the paper trail was to be believed, he lived month to month with very little to spare. He paid his bills on time. He had borrowed a grand total of eleven books from the library since coming to Berlin, none of the titles particularly surprising given his specialism. There were no untoward comings or goings registered against his passport number with immigration control. He was the very definition of an ordinary man.

  All of that in itself interested Konstantin.

  In his world there were no ordinary men.

  Metzger maintained a small apartment in Charlottenburg, one of the more affluent boroughs of the old city. It was close to the University of the Arts, so what it cost in increased rent, it saved in convenience. The location might have been an extravagance, but it was an extravagance that was very much in keeping with the kind of man who counted out every penny and measured its worth against its cost. Charlottenburg was an oasis of calm even in the days of the divided city.

  He turned onto Schlossstrasse. It was easy to imagine the residents hidden behind those windows, safe in their ivory towers, untouched by the suffering it brought to their city. They would not be so distant today. That too was an element of the new fear-it was intimate.

  A newspaper vendor on the street corner was shouting news of the tragedy to anyone who would listen and waving the latest edition, hot off the press, under their noses. Konstantin crossed the street to avoid the man. He counted the other people on the street. There were twenty-seven. One of the busiest streets in the city at what should have been one of the busiest times, and there were only twenty-seven people out about their business. There was a painted red kiosk selling bratwurst and other sausages. A single man sat huddled up against the cold with a half-eaten brat and dried onions slathered in mustard and ketchup. He was the closest thing to normal in the street.

  How had it come to this? How had this kind of fear become so commonplace?

  Metzger lived on the third floor behind a security intercom, through a marbled foyer and up a curving granite stair. Everything about the building said Old World affluence. He ran his finger down every one of the buttons until someone buzzed him in. People were careless like that, even in the anonymity of the big cities-especially in the anonymity of the big cities. He closed the door quietly behind him and took the time to wipe the street off his shoes on the mat, scuffing each sole backward and forward three times before he opened the second inner door and walked through to the foyer.

  It was three degrees colder than it was in the street. The huge iron radiators were at least half a century old, and no doubt the boiler feeding them was just as decrepit. Brass mailboxes lined the right-hand side wall of the small antechamber. Konstantin ran his fingers over the names, stopping at G. Metzger. He didn’t have a key for the box. He didn’t need one. It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated lock. Mailboxes seldom were. The mail, it seemed, was sacrosanct. Again, that was a marked difference from his world, where the mail was monitored, censored and often used to incriminate, no matter that Stalin had been dead for the best part of sixty years. Old habits die hard.

  He took his key chain out of his pocket, sorting through them until he found a small enough bump key. Konstantin took his left shoe off and set it down on the small shelf beneath the mailboxes. The theory behind the bump key was simple: all of the grooves filed down to their lowest peak setting. He slipped it all of the way into the lock, then eased it out a single notch. He applied the slightest of pressure to the key, as though beginning to turn it, then bumped the key with the heel of his shoe. The sudden sharp impact caused the pins to jump out of the rotator, giving him the fraction of a second he needed to turn the key. It took him four seconds to open the mailbox.

  He sorted through the envelopes as he walked up the stairs. Every groove from every dragged foot was worn deep into the steps, and the wrought-iron filigree beneath the polished-smooth banister had oxidized to the richest red. There were more than twenty envelopes, and the majority of them were computer-generated mass-mailings or this month’s bills. Even with three flights of stairs to climb he hadn’t managed to read more than half of the dead man’s letter. He didn’t really need to read any more than that.

  Only one envelope was handwritten. People didn’t send letters anymore. That made a handwritten envelope something of a curiosity. He teased one of the seams open, careful not to contaminate the glued edge. There was no way of knowing if the contents of the envelope were important, but there was no sense in treating them any other way. If needs be, the old man could get the saliva used to lick the stamp and seal the envelope analyzed, its DNA lifted for comparison or identification purposes. There was so much about this new world that was every bit as frightening as anything that had ever happened in Stalinist Russia.

  He reached Metzger’s door. The brass number in the center of it had turned green. What he read caused him to check the ate stamped on the envelope. It had been posted the day before-the same day Grey Metzger had killed himself. The processing time was stamped at 16:0 °CET. The precise moment Metzger had hung up his phone and burned.

  It was a love letter, but it talked about him, not to him, as though the writer knew he would never read it but needed to get these words down, to make them exist; as though, like the little girl with her paper cranes, by setting them down God would read them and would remember her man and her love for him-which, Konstantin extrapolated the thought, meant the writer had known Metzger was going to die when she wrote it. He grunted. That meant she had mailed it out with an almost prescient precision. Was she involved? No, he shook his head. This wasn’t the confession of his killer. There was no mocking tone, no gloating. Only sadness. Her words were so intense. It wasn’t about Metzger at all, it was about his woman. The one Lethe hadn’t been able to find on the paper trail.

  It was about leverage.

  They’d given her the chance to put it all down on paper, and they’d led her to the post office and mailed the letter out at the precise moment the man she loved burned himself alive.

  Who were these people?

  The strange tense wasn’t because she had known he was dead-she wasn’t mourning him-it was because she knew she was going to be dead when he read it. It had kept her quiet, given her something to focus on, but she would have known she was a dead woman walking. She hadn’t collapsed, she’d written the letter. That took strength. Strength meant she would almost certainly have tried to tell him what had happened to her, somehow, somewhere in the letter.

  Did they have pet words? Did she say “remember when we sat on the steps of the Berliner Dom” or “I’ve never forgotten the rain-filled day we walked hand in hand in the shadow of Checkpoint Charlie”? Something, a reference to a place, a name, anything? There had to be something buried in all of these words of love, a clue that told them who had taken her, or where, something. There had to be. She had been strong enough to write the letter; that meant she had to be smart enough to help them now, from beyond the grave.

  He stuffed it into his pocket and kicked his shoe off again. He’d finish it inside.

  It only took him nine seconds to open Metzger’s front door in exactly the same way he had bumped the lock on the mailbox.

  Konstantin closed the door behind him.The apartment was everything he would have expected from a middle-class existence. The hallway doubled
as the library, shelved floor to ceiling with the battered spines of academia and the occasional concession to pop culture. There were very few novels, he noticed, scanning the titles. The books nearest the door were almost exclusively concerned with the Byzantine period. As he moved toward the living room the time line moved with him. The majority of interest seemed to be focused on Medieval Europe, which made sense.

  The last bookcase was filled with cheap, trashy airport novels. The spines were creased, the pages dog-eared, as though each one had been read a dozen times. He took one down from the shelf and thumbed through it. On the inside he saw a price written in pencil and the stamp of a second-hand bookstore in the city. He tried three more, selected at random. They all bore the same secondhand stamp.

  There was a television, a small portable set that had to be over twenty years old. It didn’t dominate the room. Indeed, given the angle it was on, it was almost certainly never watched. There was nothing to say it even worked. Konstantin assumed that these dog-eared paperbacks had replaced the television in Grey Metzger’s life. Like Russia, the Germans protected their language obsessively, dubbing the endless reruns of American sitcoms. It would have come as something of a culture shock to an Englishman who probably thought the world revolved around his mother tongue. Konstantin shelved the book.

  The hallway opened into a high-ceilinged room. The drapes where thick, heavy green velvet, tied back with a thick gold brocade rope. The hook in the wall had an exquisitely molded lion’s head. It was a small detail, but as the KGB had drilled into him, the truth was in the details. There were dozens of tiny details, from the wainscoting on the sash window and the original ropes laid into the side of the frame to the black and white tiles that made a chessboard of the floor, or rather the three broken ones that might have been proof of a struggle. Konstantin walked slowly around the room, then sank into the faux Chesterfield sofa in the middle of the room.

  He put his feet up on the granite-topped coffee table. The room barely looked lived in. He had expected it to be strewn with journals and academic literature, with forgotten coffee cups and other signs of the absent-minded professor, but Grey Metzger was meticulously ordered and fastidiously tidy. Like a man who had been a guest here, not the owner.

  Or like a man whose life had been purged away before he could come in and look at it, he thought.

  There was a single painting on the wall. Konstantin recognized it: Sorrow. It was a print, rather than the original, but that was hardly surprising-a school teacher would not have had the wherewithal to on a painting worth upwards of fifty million dollars. It was, Konstantin thought, an ugly image to have on the wall where you did most of your living.

  There was a fish tank beneath it, but there were no fish in it.

  Konstantin was beginning to get a feel for the man he was following.

  He checked the rest of the apartment.

  There was a neatly made bed with white silk sheets in the one bedroom, and a manikin draped with the dead man’s clothes stood in the corner, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past come to haunt the room. The rug appeared to be an elk hide. There was little in the way of personality to the room, not so much as an alarm clock on the side table. He checked the drawers. They were empty. That, more than anything else, convinced him that the apartment had been cleaned by whoever had last set foot in the place. It would be pointless dusting for fingerprints.

  In the center of the bathroom was a beautiful antique porcelain bathtub set on pedestal legs. Again, like the details in the curtain hooks in the front room, the legs were molded in the likeness of lions. There were no shampoo bottles, no body washes or facial scrubs. There wasn’t a toothbrush in the cup on the sink. He ran his finger along the top of the medicine cabinet-it came away without so much as a speck of dust on it.

  The narrow galley kitchen was just as bare. He opened the cupboards one at a time, but after the first he knew it was pointless. There wasn’t a single package of junk food in any of them. No boxes of cereal. No tea bags. No dried spaghetti or noodles or any other staple of fast-food living. There should have been moldy bread, curdled milk in the refrigerator, cheese blue with bacteria and many other signs of abandonment. But there wasn’t. The purge had been absolute. There was nothing of Grey Metzger left in the place save those few clothes on the manikin and the books.

  Konstantin reached into his pocket for the letter. Could they have been so thorough and so careless at the same time? He went back through to the living room, but instead of sitting on the leather sofa he perched on the windowsill so that he could look out over the People’s Park as he read it again.

  He read the letter through, start to finish, three times. The first thing he noticed this time was that she had called him Graham, his full name, not Grey, not the short, affectionate version a lover might be expected to use. That seemed odd given that Grey used the shortened version of his name on almost every official document Lethe had uncovered. The second thing that stuck out was that she hadn’t signed it with her name, rather she’d called herself Sorrow’s Bride. That was hardly the goodbye a lover would want to remembered by.

  The rest of the letter was the usual string of sentimental stuff and nonsense that had his eyes glazing over after thirty seconds. He forced himself to concentrate, going over each sentence slowly, looking for an out-of-place word, looking at how the letters themselves rested on the lines in case she’d elevated the occasional letter to spell out some second message within the message-a way of talking to them from beyond the grave. There was nothing that he could see.

  He sat there for an hour, the midday sun streaming in through the windows in bright unbroken beams. The heat through the glass prickled his skin. Konstantin looked up from the letter and saw Van Gogh’s Sorrow, with her sagging breasts, weeping into her hands, and he was again struck by how ugly the painting really was, especially for the only piece of art in the place. He put the letter back in the envelope and the envelope back inside his pocket and went over to the painting. He reached up and ran his fingers over it, feeling for any imperfections on the canvas. He worked his fingers from the top edge of the frame down, slowly. He chewed on his lower lip, not realizing he was doing it. There was nothing. The frame was perfectly smooth. He ran his hand up and down the sides of the frame again, refusing to believe he was wrong. Second time was no more revealing. He hadn’t really expected the cryptic epigraph to mean anything, but it had been worth a try.

  He grunted.

  It had been too easy to think she’d simply point him to the hidden treasure, X marks the spot.

  For the sake of thoroughness, he lifted down the picture. There wasn’t a safe hidden away conveniently behind the picture, of course. The sun-shadow outline of the picture was stained deeply enough to suggest the picture had hung there for years, not a few days.

  Konstantin hoisted it up, tilting the frame to re-hang it when something fell out from the back and clattered on the tiled floor. He put Sorrow back down and picked up the white gold wedding band that had fallen out from the back of the picture. There was an engraving on the inside of the ring: a series of digits, probably the date of the wedding, he thought. Only, according to the paper trail, Grey Metzger had never been married. Sorrow’s Bride indeed.

  He pocketed the ring and flipped the painting over. The USB thumb drive taped to the inside of the frame was so small he had almost missed it. He peeled away the tiny strip of tape and pocketed the stick along with the letter and the ring.

  “Who were you?” he asked, rubbing at his chin as he looked down at the painting on the floor. His skin was rough with stubble. It had been forty-eight hours since he had shaved. He knew from experience that that was enough to transform him from human into some atavistic throw-back that could be used to scare the living daylights out of young children-and grown men at four a.m. for that matter.

  Who was this woman who called herself the Bride of Sorrow? Everything about her presence of mind in the face of death screamed CIA, MI6, KGB, Mossad, an
y one of them but absolutely one of them. He might not know who she was, but he was pretty damned sure she wasn’t a school teacher.

  The answer to that question, and possibly so many others, was almost certainly on the flash drive. He wanted to get a look at it before he turned it over to Lethe. That meant finding a computer.

  Konstantin re-hung the picture and left the apartment, knowing he’d found all there was to find in the dead man’s home.

  9

  The Secrets of Fatima

  Dominico Neri was a sour-faced little man with the weight of the world on his slouched shoulders. He was cut from the typical Italian male cloth-interesting features rather than outright handsome, dark-skinned and narrow, his torso an inverted equilateral triangle of jutting ribs beneath a wrinkled cotton shirt. He sat across the table from Noah, sipping at a double-shot espresso in a stupidly small cup.

  He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. That disheveled look and the half-awake eyes no doubt made him painfully popular with the fairer sex, Noah thought. Neri looked like the kind of man who didn’t so much love them and leave them as he did the kind of man who skipped the whole love thing and went straight for the checkbook to pay the alimony. He stared at Noah. The scrutiny was almost uncomfortable.

  That was hardly surprising, Neri was Carabinieri.

  Rome was burdened by half a dozen levels of police, from traffic cops to jail cops and forestry police all the way to the normal beat cops. The Carabinieri were set aside from all of them. They were military police.

  Only Neri’s eyes looked the part, Noah thought, studying the man back openly. If he’d been pushed to guess a career, he would have said journalist. The gun worn casually at his hip killed that career path, though.

  “So,” Neri said, setting the espresso cup down on the cheap white saucer. The coffee left a near-black stain around the inside of the cup. Noah could only imagine what it was busy doing to the detective’s stomach lining. “You think this is all somehow linked to the suicide in Piazza San Pietro two days ago?”