Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  Borodin checked the mirrors once more, and as he headed north toward Puteaux, an image flashed into his skull unbidden: Gotal’s big hands reaching down and scooping up the child from its pram. Had Gotal known what was expected of him even then, or had the order to kill the infant come later? Had anyone else been involved? If so, what had happened to him—or her? Had a boat been waiting to whisk them away from Venice to the mainland?

  Imponderables. And besides, the speculation was beginning to make him feel distinctly uneasy because Gotal’s actions shined a harsh and unforgiving light on his own. He told himself that none of this was of his making, that ultimately Gotal was to blame for not carrying his secret with him to the grave, and that by rights Hamilton should be dead by now—would be dead if Borodin hadn’t stepped in to alter the outcome at the restaurant.

  When that didn’t work, he told himself that he wasn’t doing it solely for himself; he also had his family’s interests at heart. The consolation didn’t last long. He saw his daughter flatly refusing to accept the money he offered her, however much she needed it, and he saw the grandson he had never met, kicking his pudgy feet in a crib.

  He also saw a stranger’s hands reaching down to carry the little chap off.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was better than being lashed to a bed, though not by much. His hands were tied behind his back and attached to a rope slung over a high beam in the barn.

  He was only just able to sit on the ground, and when walking around, his freedom was limited to a circle some fifteen feet across. This struck him as an inverted kind of justice for past misdeeds. As boys, they had begged netted plovers off the fenmen, tied fishing line to their legs, and watched them fly in circles before hauling them in and handing them back.

  The barn housed a sawmill. There were hoists and winches and a long steel rail for wheeling the tree trunks toward the giant circular blade, which lay still and menacing like a sleeping beast in its lair. The wooden racks against one wall were stacked with planks, and the scent of wood resin filled the air. Scattered around the place were any number of implements and tools that could have freed him in a moment had they only lain within his reach, but all he had to work with was the rusty nail he had found buried in the blanket of sawdust at his feet soon after he had heard the car leave.

  An hour of picking away blind at his bonds had left him with cramps in both forearms, and the nail kept slipping from his feeble fingers. He was groping around for it behind his back when the barn doors were thrown open.

  The sight of Otto and Erwin came with a splash of fear. It must have been Pippi he had heard leaving in the car earlier, which meant that the two men were free to do whatever they wished with him in her absence.

  “Where’s Pippi?” he asked.

  Otto produced a knife from his pocket and released the spring-loaded stiletto blade. “Get up.”

  Luke rose awkwardly to his feet, eyes on the knife.

  “I have some questions for you.”

  “I’ve told you all I know.”

  “We’ll see.” Otto spun him around and cut the rope running to the beam. “Outside.” He shoved him toward the doors.

  “Can I have some water?”

  Otto laughed. “How did you guess?”

  The stone trough was tucked in beside a large bush at the corner of the farmhouse. It was fed via a rusted downpipe with rainwater from the roof, and it took both men to force his head beneath the surface.

  He tried to remain calm, figuring that the best tactic was to start struggling long before his breath ran out. This worked well enough at first, but they seemed to sense he was playacting, and soon began holding him down longer, in between the bouts of questioning. “Why are you here?” … “What are you planning?” … “Where’s Borodin?” … “When is he coming?”

  Otto grew increasingly frustrated, but when Erwin, the reluctant accomplice, suddenly delivered a stinging slap across his face, Luke began to worry for his life. They weren’t just developing a taste for torture; they were working each other into a wild-eyed frenzy. There was no playacting on his part when they next dragged him from the trough. The fit of coughing was to clear the water from his nose and throat.

  “When is Borodin coming here?” Otto yelled into his blinking eyes.

  Only one thing held him back from telling them about Zurich: it would mean they’d been right all along, and in their current state there was no saying what they would do when they discovered he’d been holding out on them.

  “I don’t know,” he sputtered.

  He hadn’t been under for more than about thirty seconds when, strangely, they released him. Thinking it a ruse, he surfaced to sneak a quick breath and heard shouting. Pippi had returned, and she was screaming blue murder as she ran over from the car.

  He remained kneeling, too spent to stand, in the mud puddle that had formed in front of the trough. He managed to gather the general gist of the heated exchange, though. Pippi had been in contact with someone in Paris who confirmed Luke’s account of events. The story of the two shootings had indeed hit the Parisian papers. Luke was named and being sought by the police.

  Otto mumbled some lame excuse, which earned him a tirade of abuse. Erwin cowered under Pippi’s glare, a boy once more. She came and stood before Luke.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Better for seeing you.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think they …” She turned to Erwin. “Put him back in the barn,” she ordered.

  It was after one o’clock when Pippi looked in on him, which was why she found him kneeling on the ground, head bowed in prayer. In England, it was just past midday.

  “You don’t need to pray for your life.”

  He looked up slowly. “My friend … the one I told you about … the one who was murdered … she’s being buried right now.”

  “You didn’t say she was murdered.”

  “I should be there. I was meant to be there. Not here.”

  He hadn’t just pictured the deep ring of mourners at the graveside; he had tried to transport himself into their midst, to insert himself between his mother and his father, to clasp their hands and feel their love flowing through him as the coffin was lowered into the ground. It had come to him clearly then: he wanted to go home, and he no longer cared what it took to get him there.

  “I’ll come back later,” said Pippi.

  “I can give you Borodin,” he called after her.

  She turned back. “Oh?”

  “He’s going to be in Zurich on Tuesday.”

  “Zurich?”

  “I need your word that you’ll let me go.”

  She hesitated for a moment. “You have it.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “I could ask you the same.”

  He was in no position to negotiate, nor was he in the mood. He just wanted out.

  “I’m supposed to meet him at a bar in the old town—Café Glück.”

  “When?”

  “Four o’clock.” Pippi walked over from the doors and crouched down in front of him. “It’s true,” he said.

  “I believe you.” She reached out a hand and gently brushed away some wood shavings stuck to his forehead. “Let’s get you cleaned up; then I’ll drive you back to Konstanz.”

  Was it really that straightforward? A simple trade? His freedom in exchange for a bit of information? Not even an hour ago, her two colleagues had been drowning him in a water trough.

  He began to believe it only when she set about untying the rope at his wrists.

  Neither Otto nor Erwin shook hands with him when he appeared in the kitchen with his suitcase, but they both muttered apologies (demanded of them by Pippi, he suspected, while he was getting himself together upstairs).

  They didn’t come outside to wave him off.

  He placed his suitcase
in the boot of the car, then dropped into the passenger seat. “I won’t be recommending this hotel to my friends,” he said.

  Pippi smiled and started the engine.

  For the first five minutes, they drove along a stony road through dense woodland. They didn’t see another dwelling or another soul, and they didn’t speak.

  “Tell me about your friend Agnes,” said Pippi, soon after the trees had given way to rolling pastures, as if the sweeping view demanded that they also be more expansive in their conversation.

  “She was the first person I knew. A nun.”

  “A nun?”

  “I’m a foundling.”

  Pippi frowned, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. “I don’t know that word.”

  With high hedgerows whipping past on both sides, he told her of his abandonment and his early years at St. Theresa’s, and of Sister Agnes’ role in getting him ready for the world. Pippi didn’t have to prompt him. The story poured out of him, a steady stream that dried to a trickle only when the subject turned to Agnes’ violent death at the hands of a housebreaker.

  “I can’t help thinking she must have known him, recognized him. I mean, why else would he … could he … Sister Agnes, of all people?” He felt the pressure build suddenly in his chest. “Maybe he’d been at the orphanage himself,” he added, aware of the waver in his voice.

  “Maybe,” said Pippi. “When did this happen?”

  “A week ago.”

  There was something ominous in her brooding silence, but then she turned to him and asked brightly, “Are you hungry?”

  It was a small country inn set in an orchard of ancient apple trees near a remote crossroads. Pippi knew the owner, Uta, a stout woman with a mad mop of silver hair. She looked Luke over with the wary eyes of a protective parent before showing them to a table on the terrace out back. Two tall cold beers arrived promptly. Luke savored a sip.

  “Good?” Pippi asked.

  “Better than rainwater.”

  He offered her a cigarette, lighting it for her, and then his own.

  “Stay,” she said.

  Had he heard her right? “Excuse me?”

  “You’re free to go, but I’m asking you to stay.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want Borodin. I want the man who really betrayed us.” She allowed him a moment to take in her words. “It’s why he sent you, and the money. It was a message, a warning, his way of telling me he didn’t do it. It was someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Otto or Erwin. Maybe both, but I don’t think so.” She paused. “If you help me, you can have the money back and I’ll deliver you to Zurich.”

  He smiled at the expression. “Like a letter?”

  “Didn’t Borodin say? It’s what we do.”

  “Deliver people to Switzerland?”

  “Not just people.”

  “You’re smugglers?”

  She looked affronted by his use of the word. “We help people get out of Germany with as much as they can take.”

  “Jews?”

  “Yes. Not always.”

  His mind turned to Fernando and the rumors about him doing a brisk business selling immigration visas to the Dominican Republic. “Is the money good?”

  Her green eyes hardened. “Everyone needs to live. And you’ve seen how we live. We don’t do it for the money. Johan was Jewish.”

  They had met at Freiburg University, where she was studying languages and he medicine. When the Nuremberg Laws were passed a couple of years ago, stripping Jews of German citizenship and banning “cross-racial” marriages, they both gave up their studies in protest. It was Johan’s idea that they begin assisting Jews and other opponents of the Nazis to leave the country while they could.

  “This is only the beginning,” she said. “There is worse to come.”

  “You think?”

  She cast a wary glance around her. It was late, and the only other diners on the terrace were a young family of four, tricked out in traditional dress—dirndls for the mother and daughter, lederhosen for the father and son—like something off a picture postcard. Pippi still lowered her voice, though.

  “Do you know what is really happening here? Two weeks ago, I was in the bakery. There was a woman in the queue, a widow, Frau Pfeiffer. She said something about our dear Führer getting too big for his Austrian boots. No one has seen her since. I heard the other day that she has been taken away for ‘reeducation.’ Think about that. When people start denouncing each other, it is all over. Opposition is dead. He has even stolen the minds of our children.” A glance at the perfect German family. “I have a niece the same age as that girl. How old is she? Six? Seven?”

  Luke looked over. “Something like that.”

  “Lisl talks about Rasse—race. They learn it at school. I asked her if she even knew what a race was. ‘Arisch oder nicht,’ she said—Aryan or not. Six years old. She cried when I told her my boyfriend was Jewish.”

  Luke watched her run the tip of her forefinger down the beaded sweat of her beer glass.

  “Johan used to say that every person we help is a life saved. I believe him now.”

  “What happened to Johan?”

  Pippi was about to reply when their food arrived: grilled cutlets of lamb fanned out on a wooden platter, along with fried potatoes and a green salad. She waited for Uta to retire with the tray before answering.

  They had dealt with Borodin before and had no reason to believe the exchange wouldn’t go off as smoothly as the previous ones, especially since no people were to be trafficked this time, just some paintings. These they planned to spirit across the lake into Switzerland in the dead of night. Borodin sometimes used an intermediary, but on this occasion he made the delivery in person. The rendezvous was a remote fishing community near Friedrichshafen, a hamlet of houses set on a small cove. They had used it before, and as before, the handover took place away from the dwellings, on a wooded promontory nearby.

  The paintings were precious enough to be packed individually in wooden crates, and once they’d been unloaded from the back of Borodin’s van, Johan checked and pocketed their fee for the transport. Borodin then disappeared into the night. Ten minutes later, while they were still loading the paintings into the boat, four men materialized from nowhere with flashlights and machine pistols.

  They were forced at gunpoint to lug the paintings back through the trees to a couple of waiting cars. Even Johan, hot-headed by nature, understood that there was nothing to be done—they were outgunned—but when the leader of the gang also demanded that they hand over the money they’d just been paid, he resisted and was clubbed to the ground with the butt of a gun. As he struggled to his feet, the leader kicked him hard in the head, and kept kicking.

  Johan never regained consciousness. His breathing had weakened almost to nothing by the time they got him back to Konstanz, and he died a few hours later in the hospital.

  Pippi hung her head at the memory, poking at her food.

  “They were dressed like civilians, but I think they were military. The leader gave orders like an officer.”

  “Wehrmacht?”

  “Or Abwehr.” The feared German secret service.

  “It doesn’t make sense. They would have arrested you.”

  “Not if they were in it for themselves. They had what they wanted. It was enough.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe Borodin was behind it.”

  “Then why did he not hand the paintings straight over to them?”

  It was a good point. “You didn’t ask yourself that at the time?”

  “Of course.” She had assumed Borodin was just going through the motions to distance himself from the deceit. Besides, the idea that Otto or Erwin was behind the betrayal had been unthinkable at the time. “I’m glad, in a way, it wasn’t him. I have always liked
him.”

  “I’m not sure I’d trust him any further than I could throw him.”

  “I need your help,” said Pippi. There was nothing imploring in her gaze, just a steady certainty that he would do the right thing by her.

  “What you need is to get out of this game before it’s too late.”

  “Soon,” she said. “Just one more job.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Munich.”

  “Go home, Pippi. That’s what I plan to do.”

  “You can’t go home.”

  “It’s a misunderstanding, a mistake. I’ll lie low, sit it out.”

  “Listen to me,” she said forcefully. “The people Borodin works for don’t make mistakes.” They were, she explained, a Croatian crime outfit with a presence throughout Europe. The situation in Germany was just another lucrative opportunity for them to exploit. Vast sums of money were up for grabs as the systematic dispossession of the Jewish population gathered pace, but they had fingers in all kinds of other pies, from extortion to assassination and espionage.

  Luke laid his knife and fork on his plate. “I’m telling you, they’ve got the wrong man. I’ve done nothing.”

  “Don’t you see? It’s not what you’ve done, it’s who you are.”

  “Who I am?”

  “Were. Before you became Luke Hamilton.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he scoffed.

  “Is it?” Pippi planted her elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “Your friend Sister Agnes is killed, and a few days later someone tries to kill you. Coincidence? You think? Because I don’t.”

  Could she possibly be right? Had she teased out the connection he had failed to find? What if Agnes had simply been a stepping-stone toward him? What if the attempt on his life had not, in fact, been a case of mistaken identity? A part of him wanted to reject her theory out of hand, although he couldn’t say why exactly.

  “And you’ve worked this all out in the last, what, twenty minutes?” he said, heavy on the skepticism.