They sat, a foursome, around a late dinner on the patio of the restaurant on Savigny Platz. Max was enjoying the slow dissipation of excitement the way a director of a theatrical production savours an opening night, and was as doting and admiring of Irina as if she were his star. She carried the glow of celebration; she seemed to be circled by candles and crystal. Rita was in the same chair she had sat in on the videotape. As she looked at Max, Irina and Arkady, she seemed concerned over a basic problem of arithmetic.
For Arkady, Max and Margarita kept fading away; all he could see was Irina. Their eyes would meet as palpably as a touch, so he kept up his part of the conversation even in silence.
The waiter set down his tray next to Max and nodded towards two men in shiny suits approaching along the park. They moved slowly, as if they were walking a dog, but there was no dog.
'Chechens. Last week, they broke up a restaurant down the block, the quietest street in Berlin. They killed a waiter with an axe in front of the customers.' He rubbed one arm. 'With an axe.'
'What happened afterwards?' Arkady asked.
'Afterwards? They came back and said they would protect the restaurant.'
'Outrageous,' Max said. 'Anyway, you're already protected, aren't you?'
'Yes,' the waiter was quick to agree.
The Chechens crossed over to the restaurant. Arkady had seen one eating with Ali at the Jump Cafe, and the other was Ali's younger brother Beno, who had the size and swagger of a jockey. 'You're Borya's friend, aren't you? We heard you had a place here.'
'Do you have a place here?' Max acted amazed.
'A whole suite.' Beno had inherited his grandfather's shrewd eyes and force of concentration, Arkady realized: this was the next Makhmud, not Ali. The way he focused on Max, Arkady doubted that he noticed anyone else at the table. 'You're having a party? Can we join?'
'You're not old enough.'
'Then we'll get together later.'
Beno led the older Chechen down the street, two world travellers at their ease.
When Rita started to sign the dinner bill Max insisted on paying for generosity's sake, and also to demonstrate that he was in control. He wasn't in control, though, Arkady thought. Nobody was.
Chapter Thirty-One
* * *
In the middle of the night he woke, aware that Irina was in the room with him. She was in a raincoat, her feet bare in the thin milk of moonlight that covered the floor. She said, 'I told Max I was leaving him.'
'Good.'
'It's not. He says he knew as soon as you came to Munich this could happen.'
Arkady sat up. 'Forget about Max.'
'Max has always treated me well.'
'We'll go somewhere else tomorrow.'
'No, you're safe here. Max wants to help. You don't know how generous he can be.'
'Her presence was overwhelming. On her shadow he could have drawn her face, eyes, mouth. He smelled her and tasted her in the air. At the same time he knew how tenuous his hold on her was. If she caught his slightest suspicion about Max, he would lose her in a moment.
'Why don't you like Max?' she asked.
'I'm jealous.'
'Max should be jealous of you. He's always been good to me. He helped with the painting.'
'How?'
'He brought the seller to Rita.'
'Do you know who the seller is?'
'No. Max knows a lot of people. He can help you if you let him.'
'Whatever you want,' Arkady said.
She stooped and kissed him. Before he could stand up, she was gone.
Orpheus had descended into the underworld to save Eurydice. According to Greek legend, he found her in Hades and led her through endless, slowly rising caverns towards the surface. The only stricture laid by the gods on Orpheus for this second chance was that he not look back until they had reached the surface. On the way, he felt her start to change from a wraith to a warm, living body.
Arkady thought about the logistical problems. Orpheus, obviously, had gone first. As they manoeuvred along the ledges of their subterranean route, had he held her hand? Tied her wrist to his as if he were stronger?
Yet when they failed the fault wasn't Eurydice's. Even as they approached the light of the mouth of the cave through which they could make their final escape, it was Orpheus who turned, and with that backward glance condemned Eurydice to death again.
Some men had to look back.
Chapter Thirty-Two
* * *
At first Arkady couldn't tell whether Irina's visit had been real, because outwardly nothing seemed changed. Max led them to breakfast at a hotel on Friedrichstrasse, praised the renovation of the restaurant, poured the coffee and laid out newspapers by importance of reviews.
'The timing was good and the show made both Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Two cautious but positive reviews, harking back to the long-standing debt that Russian art owes to German support. A bad review in Die Welt, which doesn't like modern art or Russians. A worse one in Bild, a right-wing rag that prefers news events about steroids or sex. It's a good start. Irina, you have interviews this afternoon with Art News and Stern. You do better than Rita with the press. More important, we're having dinner with some Los Angeles collectors. Americans are only the beginning; the Swiss want to speak to us next. The nice thing about the Swiss is that they don't flaunt the art they buy; they prefer it in a vault. Which reminds me, we'll pull the painting off public exhibition by the end of the week to make it more accessible for serious people.'
Irina said, 'The show was supposed to run a month so the public could see it.'
'I know. It's a matter of insurance. Rita was afraid to show the painting at all, but I told her how strongly you felt.'
'What about Arkady?'
'Arkady.' Max sighed to indicate this was a lesser subject. He wiped his mouth. 'Let's see what we can do. When does your visa run out?' he asked Arkady.
'In two days.' He was sure Max knew.
'That's a problem because Germany doesn't accept political refugees from the Soviet Union any more. There's nothing political to be afraid of.' He turned to Irina. 'I'm sorry, there really isn't. You can go back any time you want to. Even if there's a charge of treason against you, nobody cares. At the worst they won't let you in. If you were with me, there'd be no problem at all.' He returned to Arkady. 'The point is, Renko, that you can't defect, so you'll have to get an extension of your visa from the German Foreign Police. I'll take you. You'll also need a work permit and a resident's permit. This is all assuming, of course, that the Soviet consulate will cooperate.'
'They won't,' Arkady said.
'Oh, then that's a different story. What about Rodionov back in Moscow? Doesn't he want you to stay longer?'
'No.'
'Strange. Who are you after? Can you tell me that?'
'No.'
'Have you told Irina?'
'No.'
Irina said, 'Max, stop it. Someone is trying to kill Arkady. You said you were going to help.'
'It's not me,' Max said. 'It's Boris. I talked to him on the phone and he's very unhappy about you and the gallery getting involved with someone like Renko, especially when we're about to see the culmination of all our work.'
'Boris is Rita's husband,' Irina told Arkady. 'A typical German.'
'Have you ever met him?' Arkady asked.
'No.'
Max seemed pained. 'Boris is afraid that your Arkady is in trouble because he's involved with the Russian mafia. A hint of that and the show would be a disaster.'
'I have nothing to do with the gallery,' Arkady said.
Max went on. 'Boris thinks Renko is using you.'
'To do what?' Irina demanded.
She had come during the night, Arkady thought; it wasn't a dream. She watched Max for the least little misstep. New lines had been drawn and Max retreated over them as carefully as he could.
'To stay, to hide – I don't know. I'm only telling you what Boris thinks. As long as you want
Renko here, I'll do my best to keep him here. That's a promise. After all, it seems that, as long as I have him, I'll have you.'
They played at being a Western couple. Their names could have been George and Jane. Tom and Sue. They shopped, buying a sports shirt for Arkady that he wore from the shop. Wandered through the Tiergarten to the zoo, where they ignored the lions and watched the pony carts. Saw no Chechens or art collectors. Neither tried to say anything exceptional. Normalcy was a spell too easily broken.
At two, Arkady delivered her to the gallery, then went to Zoo Station and put more coins in his locker. He tried calling Peter, but there was no answer. Peter was fed up or had lost interest. Either way Arkady had lost contact.
As soon as he put the phone back on the hook it rang. Arkady stepped back. Along the pavement, Africans were selling Ossies what appeared to be French luggage. Backpackers with long hair queued sleepily at the currency exchanges. No one came forward to answer the phone. He picked it up.
Peter said, 'Renko, you'd make a terrible spy. A good spy never calls from the same place twice.'
'Where are you?'
'Look across the street. See the man in the nice leather jacket talking on the phone? That's me.'
• • •
In good weather, the drive out of the city was like a summer jaunt. They went south through the evergreens of the Grünewald, then by the waters of the Havel and hundreds of small boats, their sails catching as much sun as breeze, at a distance looking like gulls.
'There are some benefits to being German. In the middle of your first call I heard a train on your end of the line. Being efficient people, the transport organization was able to tell me at what underground and surface stations around the city trains were arriving at exactly that time. I narrowed the list to Zoo Station because, of course, you're Russian. Zoo was the one station you were sure to know. You were bound to head to familiar places.'
'You're brilliant. It's undeniable.'
Peter didn't argue the point. 'When you called yesterday from Zoo Station I was there waiting for you. I followed you around Berlin. You noticed the city has changed?'
'Yes.'
'When the Wall came down there was such an intensity of celebration. East and West Berlin back together. It was like a wild night of lovemaking. Afterwards was like waking in the morning and finding this woman you had yearned for so long was going through your pockets, your wallet, taking the keys to your car. The euphoria was gone. That's not the only change. We were ready for the Red Army. We weren't ready for the Russian mafia. I was behind you yesterday. You saw them.'
'It's like Moscow.'
'That's what I'm afraid of. Compared to your gangsters, German criminals are a Salzburg choir. German killers clean up after themselves. Russian mafias just shoot each other on the streets. Boutiques are keeping doors locked, hiring private guards, moving to Hamburg or Zurich. It's bad business.'
'You don't seem upset.'
'They haven't reached Munich yet. Life was boring until you came along.'
Arkady felt that once again Peter had taken flight, and all that he could do was see where he would land. He didn't know how long Peter had followed him, and waited to hear the names of Max Albov, Irina Asanova, Margarita Benz.
Somewhere in the woods, among the cottages and country lanes, the road crossed the former East German border and Potsdam came into view. At least the part of Potsdam that was proletariat housing and might have appeared promising in an architectural rendering, but in reality was ten storeys of anonymous balconies with fractured cement.
Old Potsdam was hidden in a canopy of beech trees. Peter parked on a leafy avenue in front of a three-storey town house. This was the kaiser's kind of mansion, with a wrought-iron gate and a portico wide and high enough for a carriage, marble stairs to double doors, classical stone facing, carved scrollwork above the windows that were high enough to show coffered ceilings, an artist's tower rising above a tiled roof. Except that so much of the facing had fallen off the bricks that a makeshift scaffolding covered the second floor. A wooden ramp ran down one side of the stairs; the other side was broken. Some windows were bricked in, some boarded up. A stunted tree and tall grass grew from the caved-in turret of the tower. The grounds had long been abandoned to rubble and weeds of opportunity. A ferrous powder compounded of rust, soot and the dust of decaying bricks covered the gate. But the building was inhabited; from head to foot, the balconies and surviving windows wore boutonnières of red geraniums, and dim lights and slow movement showed through the glass. By the gate was a sign that said MEDICAL CLINIC.
'The Schiller house,' Peter said. 'This is it. This is what my grandfather sold out for, this ruin.'
Arkady asked, 'Has he seen it?'
'Boris Benz brought him a photograph of it. Now he wants to move back in.'
On both sides, the block was lined with mansions similar in design and disrepair to the Schiller house. Some worse. One was as masked by ivy as an ancient tomb. Another was posted VERBOTEN! KEIN EINGANG!
Peter said, 'This used to be Bankers' Row. Every morning they would all go to Berlin, every evening return. These were cultured, intelligent people. They had a modest portrait of the Führer. They closed their eyes when the Meyers disappeared from this mansion over here or the Weinstein family vanished from that house over there. Later, they could get those houses for a good price. Well, you can't tell where the Jews lived today, can you? Now my grandfather wants us to trade with the devil again for this.'
A balcony door opened and a woman in a white cap and apron backed out with a wheelchair that she turned around. She put on the brake and sat down for a cigarette, mistress of all she surveyed.
'What are you going to do?' Arkady asked.
Peter pushed open the gate. 'I should take a look, don't you think?'
The driveway had once been laid in cobblestones and led to a reception arch of pillars. Now two ruts cut through the weeds, and one of the pillars had long since suffered a collision and been replaced by a standing sewer pipe. The front door had a red cross and a RUHIG! sign for quiet, but it was open and the sound of radios and the smell of antiseptic drifted out. There was no reception desk. Peter's inspection tour took them down a hall of dark mahogany to a ballroom turned into a mess hall and an enormous kitchen divided by breeze blocks into a small kitchen with steaming vats and a second area of tiled baths and toilet cubicles.
Peter tried the soup. 'Not bad. They have good yellow potatoes in East Germany. I was in Potsdam last night, but I didn't get here.'
'Where were you?'
'In the archives of the Potsdam City Hall, looking for Boris Benz.' He let the ladle drop and moved on. 'There's not enough of him,' he said. 'I tap into the federal computer and I see his driver's licence, Munich residence, marriage licence. I see his registered ownership of a private company called "Fantasy Tours", with work, insurance and medical records in order, because his employees are examined for venereal disease once a month by law. What does not show up is his local education or work history.'
'You told me that Benz was born here in Potsdam and that many East German records weren't transferred yet.'
Peter bounded up the stairs. 'That's why I came here. But there are no records at all here for Boris Benz. It's one thing to plug a name into a computer file; you're only adding one more blip to the screen. It's more difficult to insert a name on an old, meticulously written school roll. As for work or military records, they don't matter if you're not looking for work or a loan from the bank. It only proves that Boris Benz has more money than personal history. Ah, this must have been the master bedroom.'
They looked into a ward with five beds on one side. Some of the beds were occupied by patients attached to IVs. Family photographs and crayon drawings were taped to the walls. The sheets looked clean and the parquet floor was mopped to a shine. Four elderly women in housecoats were playing cards. One of them looked up. 'Wir haben Besucher!' Visitors!
Peter nodded approvingly at each resident.
'Sehr gut, meine Damen. Schönen Foto. Danke.' They beamed as he waved and backed away.
The other bedrooms had been turned into wards and more zinc-lined baths. Cigarette smoke travelled out of the open fanlight of an office. They climbed to the third floor. In the ceiling of the stairwell where a chandelier had once hung was a fluorescent ring.
Peter said, 'I asked myself, if Benz didn't grow up here, how would he know about my grandfather or what he did in the war? Only the SS and the Russians knew. So there are two possible answers: he's Russian or German.'
'Which do you think it is?' Arkady asked.
'German,' Peter said. 'East German. To be more precise, the Staatssicherheit. Stasi. Their KGB. For forty years Stasi created identities for spies. Do you know how many people worked for them? Two million informers. More than eighty-five thousand officers. Stasi owned office buildings, apartment houses, resorts, bank accounts in the millions. Where did all the agents go? Where did the money disappear to? In the last weeks before the Wall came down, the agents at Stasi were furiously creating new identities for themselves. When people stormed its offices, they were empty and the master files had evaporated. One week later Boris Benz rented his flat in Munich. That's when he was born.'
The third floor was servants' quarters turned into medicine cupboards and nurses' rooms. Panties were drying on a line that ran from corner to corner.
Peter said, 'Where could the Stasi go? If they were important, they were going to be put in jail. If they were unimportant, with "Stasi" on their papers no one would hire them. They couldn't all rush to Brazil like a second wave of Nazis. Russia doesn't want thousands of German agents. What's this?'
A narrow stairway was blocked by buckets. Peter moved them aside, climbed the stairs and tried the knob of a door built into the ceiling. A sash snapped and dust cascaded down the steps as he pushed the door open.
They pulled themselves up into the tower. The casement windows were buckled, parts of the roof had fallen in, and from one corner grew a stunted lime tree, a lifelong prisoner of the tower. The view was wonderful: lakes and rolling hills reaching to Berlin, green country in every other direction. Two storeys below was the balcony with the nurse in the wheelchair. She had pushed off her sandals and rolled down her stockings to her calves. She raised the leg rests and angled the chair for more direct exposure to the sun, then lolled back like Cleopatra, the cigarette in her mouth an exclamation mark to total ease.
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