by Mark Mills
Even after the Hamiltons took him into their lives, he had continued, a little guiltily, to plug the yawning hole in his past with fanciful speculations, and to build a future brimming with madcap possibilities. Lorna and Ramsay had sensed the dreamer in him, yet had done nothing to curb this tendency—quite the reverse, in fact. Ramsay had filled his eager young ears with the stories of Aeneas and Odysseus; of Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps and Marco Polo’s epic journey to the palace of Kublai Khan; of Columbus, Magellan, Cook, Drake, and Raleigh; of Vasco da Gama, Cortés, and Pizarro. And then there were the ones who never quite made it into the history books: men like Nikolaus Federmann, Anthony Knivet, John Chilton, and Samuel White.
Never one to let the truth stand in the way of a good yarn, Ramsay had spiced his tales with pirates and buccaneers and mythical creatures and monsters of the deep and cannibal tribes and half a hundred other ways to die.
Luke couldn’t say exactly when it happened—somewhere around the age of ten, perhaps—but he had found himself turning his eyes to the high skies of the flat Cambridgeshire Fens that were now his home.
Flight.
It was all around him, in the flocks of geese and ducks that winged in from foreign parts every year when the rivers jumped their banks, brightening the low pastures. And when it came time for them to move on, to head south, he always felt a stab of sadness that he couldn’t be going with them, because south, he had learned by then, was where people who looked like him came from.
He saw now that the seeds had been sown in him long ago, quietly putting down roots with the passage of the years. It was almost inevitable that he would sign up for the University Air Squadron. Flight. Just the one time, he had told himself, to see what it’s like. Well, maybe once more. Okay, this really is the last time.
The addiction was immediate. To finally soar way above the world and survey it like a map was the most exhilarating sensation, alien yet oddly familiar, not so different from being on the ground, on the outside looking in, never quite belonging. Maybe that was why he had excelled and found himself being courted by the RAF.
Professor Soames, his history tutor at Trinity, had been dismayed when Luke announced he was going to forgo a doctorate in favor of flying airplanes.
“What makes you think for a moment that there’s a future in those infernal contraptions?”
His parents, as in all things, had supported his decision, but only once they established that he was not looking to fill the boots of their dead son by taking up a career in the armed forces. They were less happy when Luke had found himself posted almost immediately to the North-West Frontier with his squadron.
They needn’t have worried. Engine failure was the only real danger one faced when bombing villages and strafing tribesmen. That was where the dream had died, in the jagged foothills of the Hindu Kush, in a miasma of self-disgust and insubordination. When the drink no longer dulled the pain, he had reached for a stronger opiate: Alice, sleek and self-possessed, all that fire so cleverly concealed beneath ice. The discovery of their affair had done for him, and almost for her marriage. He was lucky not to have been drummed out of the RAF there and then. The only reason he hadn’t been was because her brute of a husband was an army officer and, therefore, an enemy as well as an ally in the eyes of Luke’s superiors. He suspected that Squadron Commander Braithwaite had rather enjoyed the whole sordid debacle for the opportunity it presented to get one over “the other half,” as he referred to the army regiments garrisoned alongside them at Risalpur.
The desk job in Paris was Luke’s penance, and for the first few months it hadn’t seemed too high a price to pay. The city’s many charms had carried him through. When it came down to it, though, his wings had been clipped, and only the looming threat of war offered any prospect that he might once more find himself in a cockpit, soaring with the birds.
This was no reason to wish for another conflict so soon after the last. He knew that, just as he knew that the perilous predicament in which he now found himself appealed to something deep inside him, some stratum of his soul laid down long ago.
The invitation came out of the blue as the train was pulling into Konstanz: dinner at the American’s hotel, a grand lakeside establishment that had just passed by outside the window when the offer was made.
Cordell Oaks seemed slightly shocked by his own impulsiveness. “Your friend is welcome, too, of course.”
The “friend” was a fictitious acquaintance of Luke’s from university days, now an English teacher at a school in Konstanz.
“I think he might already have made plans for us tonight.”
“Well, if he hasn’t, the offer stands. I promise not to mention milk, in any of its countless forms.”
Luke struggled to suppress a smile. Cordell Oaks looked bashful.
“My wife and children keep me in check, so when they’re not around I do tend to go on a bit.”
They parted company with a handshake in front of the station building, the American then folding his bulky frame into the back of a taxi. Luke waved goodbye and strolled to the small port tucked beside the station. He lit a cigarette, enjoying the caress of the sun on his tired face, taking stock of his reduced circumstances: a foreign town, a name and an address, a suitcase, and a pistol tucked into the back of his waistband.
An attractive young woman with a wavy blond bob passed by in front of him pushing a stroller, making for one of the white ferryboats docked at the long jetty, and it seemed for a moment that she had been sent by some higher power to taunt him with the certitude of her carefree existence. He finished his cigarette, picked up his suitcase, and made his way back across the train tracks.
Konstanz was not much more than a name to him, a town set near the head of the Bodensee, the vast lake whose shores were shared by Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. But you sensed immediately the air of easy and ancient prosperity about the place. The buildings were tall, some five or six stories, with stone-trimmed windows and doorways. Their stuccoed facades were painted a medley of colors, everything from soft ochers to pale greens and blues: a gentle palette that stood in marked contrast to the harsh red, white, and black of the Nazi flags littering the main square. Most buildings seemed to have one draped from a window or hanging from a wall-mounted flagstaff.
It was almost one o’clock, and the tables in front of the restaurants and cafés on Markstatte were crowded with diners. It was also Friday, so the smell of grilled fish carried on the light breeze—an aching reminder that he hadn’t had a square meal in over twenty-four hours. He was tempted to wrestle himself a table in the shade and enjoy a lazy lunch while watching the world pass by, but his appetite lost out to nerves when a group of uniformed young men, handsome and hard-eyed, sauntered into the square. They wore jackboots and khaki shirts and swastika armbands, and they moved with the lolling superiority of prefects policing a school playground.
Fautrier had told him that Pippi Keller lived near the cathedral, and he pushed on, guided by the tip of the spire poking above the tiled rooftops. The cathedral was set on a rise at the heart of the old town. Constructed of the same gray stone as the station building, it was an austere temple to Protestantism, its clean, hard lines stripped of all frivolous detailing. A leafy square abutted its southern side, and it was from here that Hohenhausgasse dropped away.
Number Twenty-Three presented a haggard face to the cobbled street. Its faded yellow stucco had crumbled away in patches to reveal the brickwork beneath, and the large wooden doors closing off the stone archway were cracked and dried like driftwood. In them was set a smaller door. It had no handle, just a keyhole, so he reached for the bellpull.
The distant tinkle was followed by a creaking sound above his head. He looked up in time to see the window being pulled shut again. He waited, knowing that his presence had been registered, and before long he heard footsteps, followed by the rasp of a heavy steel bolt. The door swung ope
n to reveal a woman. She was near enough his own age, midtwenties, tall and strikingly attractive, with auburn hair worn modishly long.
“Yes?” she asked. Not exactly cold, but close.
His German, like his French, was halting but competent. “I’m looking for Pippi Keller.”
“Pippi Keller? She doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Can you tell me where I can find her?”
“Who wants to know?”
“My name is Luke Hamilton. I’m a friend of a friend of hers.”
“Oh? Who?”
“Bernard Fautrier. He’s French.”
It was almost nothing, just a faint flicker in her large green eyes. “Wait here. I’ll see if my aunt knows anything.” She closed the door in his face.
He thought about lighting a cigarette, decided against it, then went ahead anyway. It was half smoked by the time the door finally swung open again.
“Come in,” said the woman.
Beyond the deep archway lay a cobbled yard with an old, dusty sedan parked in it. A door was set in the wall to the right.
“Follow me.”
A wooden staircase climbed steeply to a narrow landing. Reaching for a door handle, she turned and delivered a disarmingly warm smile.
“I should warn you, she’s a bit deaf.”
She led the way into the room. Luke just had time to register a table laid for three—a meal abandoned—when the frozen tableau shattered into a kaleidoscope of colors and then went black.
Chapter Nine
He knew he was coming to, because he heard a female voice say in German, “He’s waking up.”
His chin seemed glued to his chest, and the searing pain burned a path from the back of his skull to the tips of toes. He was seated in a chair. No, not just seated, bound to it by the ankles and wrists. It took a superhuman effort to raise his head and force open his eyelids. It took him a little while longer to focus.
The woman was regarding him impassively from a chair opposite his. A tall, rangy man stood at her shoulder, smoking a cigarette. He had lank hair the color of straw, and the lazy, heavy-lidded eyes of a born cynic.
Luke retched suddenly, violently. Almost nothing came up, just a bit of bile that he was able to keep back. It was a good job he had skipped lunch.
“Who are you?” asked the woman.
“I told you: Luke Hamilton.”
She held up his passport. “This means nothing. I have three of these. And you don’t look British.” She tossed the passport onto a side table, where the cash that Fautrier had given him was neatly piled next to the pistol and the camera he had bought in Strasbourg. She picked up the Browning and turned it in her hands.
“Did you come here to steal or to kill? Or both?”
“Neither.”
Only when he received a stinging slap on the cheek did he realize someone was standing behind him. “Answer her!” snapped a male voice.
“Neither.”
Another slap, the other cheek this time, followed by a weary reprimand from the woman: “Erwin, that’s enough.”
“Pippi, he’s lying.”
So, Pippi Keller was a consummate actress, the deaf aunt no more than a convenient fiction to put him at ease as she lured him into the trap.
“Why did Fautrier send you here?”
“He said you could help me.”
“Help you? What does he look like?”
Luke described Fautrier as best he could.
“It’s definitely him,” came the voice at Luke’s shoulder.
“His real name is Borodin,” said Pippi. “He’s not French. He’s Croatian. And he’s no friend of ours.”
“No,” growled the man at her side.
“So what are you really doing here?”
“It’s a long story.”
“We have time,” she replied. “Say it in English if you want.”
“You speak English?”
She ignored the question, her eyes flicking to the man standing behind him. “Get him a glass of water.” And then, more forcefully: “Just do it, Erwin.”
Erwin was younger than the other two, though not by much—closer to twenty than to twenty-five. He filled a glass from the jug on the table and roughly forced the rim between Luke’s lips, banging it against his teeth.
“You should know that Borodin was responsible for the death of a friend of ours,” said Pippi.
“A good friend,” added the tall man.
A shadow of something in Pippi’s eyes, and a hardening in her voice. “So be careful what you say.”
“I can only tell you what I know.”
“In English if you want.”
He started at the beginning, with Fautrier’s approach at the Spanish pavilion, but as he continued with his account of the past twenty-four hours, he grew increasingly uneasy. Hearing it from his own lips made him realize how utterly far-fetched it all sounded. It didn’t help that every so often, Pippi would silence him so that she could bring the other two up to speed in German. Their skepticism was palpable, in both their faces and their comments. “Oh, really?” … “That’s ridiculous!” … “Does he take us for complete idiots?”
He quickly figured out that he had only one thing going for him: anyone looking to do them harm would have to be a fool of the first order to come calling with such a preposterous story. It was scant solace. There was no avoiding the fact that Fautrier—who wasn’t Fautrier at all, it now seemed, but a Croatian named Borodin—had knowingly delivered Luke into the hands of his enemies.
When he had finished his account, Pippi rose to her feet and told the others to follow her. They filed into the kitchen, like jurors retiring to consider their verdict, leaving the accused to stew in the dock.
Outside, the cathedral bell tolled three o’clock. Had he really been dead to the world for almost two hours? Probably. He could tell that the blood on the back of his neck had dried to a crusted track. He glanced at his suitcase lying open and empty on the floor, the new clothes he had bought this morning scattered all around.
Voices filtered in from behind the kitchen door: male voices, muffled but insistent; then Pippi’s, firm and assertive, bringing the men to order. If he hadn’t been sure of it before, there was little doubt now who ran the show, whatever that was. Something not entirely aboveboard, not if they’d had dealings with Borodin, during the course of which someone had lost their life.
The heated debate taking place in the kitchen reached a new pitch. Voices rose in anger. Pippi had the last word before entering the room alone. She pulled the door closed behind her and drifted to the window, peering outside.
“If Borodin were sitting there, I would shoot him.”
They were the first English words she had spoken, and her accent held almost no hint of the guttural undertones one would expect of a German.
“I sympathize,” said Luke.
She turned to face him. “You said he saved your life.”
“Twice. But look at me now.”
“Out of the frying pan, into the fire,” she replied absently. “Isn’t that what you say in English?”
“It is.”
She came and stood before him. “We don’t believe you.”
“It’s the truth, I swear it. You must know someone in Paris. Call them. If it’s not in the papers by now, it will be tomorrow. A shooting at the restaurant—L’Hirondelle—and another near the Luxembourg Gardens. I’m probably named.”
She weighed his words. “He was told to kill you, then changed his mind? I know Borodin, and that’s not him.”
“I’m not saying I understand. I’m as confused as you are.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“Then listen,” she said. “Borodin kills two men in Paris to protect you. Even if it’s
true, is it going to stop there? No. This is the beginning of something bad. You think we want to be part of it?”
It was a fair point. “So let me go. You’ll never see me again.”
“Too late for that.”
“You have my word.”
“It was too late the moment you rang the bell.” Raising her voice, she called: “Otto.”
The rangy man with the lazy gaze appeared from the kitchen, exchanged a complicit nod with her, then made for the dresser against the wall behind Luke.
“I’m sorry,” said Pippi. “It’s the only way.”
Luke tried desperately to see what was going on behind his back, but all he got was the barest glimpse of Otto busying himself at the dresser.
“Don’t worry,” said Pippi. “He knows what he’s doing. He’s a medical student.”
Luke’s head snapped back to her. “I had nothing to do with your friend’s death. I swear to God I didn’t even know Borodin before yesterday. Please, you’re making a big mistake.”
“It’s just a precaution. We’re not going to kill you.”
Otto had closed in silently from behind. “Not yet,” he said into Luke’s ear. “Not here.” He seized Luke’s hair and yanked his head back.
Luke’s first thought was of a knife being dragged across his windpipe. The second, as a rag was clamped over his mouth and nose, was of a straightforward smothering. No mess, no noise, just the silent snuffing-out of a life.
He struggled, fighting for breath, which came in small sips, sweet and acrid. He felt himself falling … the darkness drawing tight around him, swaddling him in its black cloak.
Chapter Ten
Luke stood squinting at the edge of the airfield, watching as the caravan drew closer through the white heat and the wind-whipped dust. They crept toward him like a column of ants—men, women, children, camels—making for the hills and the homes they had left behind many weeks before.