Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  They had only themselves to blame. They had vowed to turn in early, but eleven o’clock had come and gone, and by midnight so had another bottle of wine. When the maître d’ informed them that the restaurant was closing, they had abandoned the terrace for the hotel bar and a quick digestif before bed: curaçao triple sec for both of them, on Pippi’s suggestion.

  Caught up in their conversation, it had made absolute sense at the time, but they both were paying the price now. They barely exchanged one word in the elevator as they headed downstairs for breakfast.

  Throbbing heads and dry mouths accounted for much of the silence, but trepidation also played a part. Last night they had managed to stick to Pippi’s original proposal and avoid any mention of what lay in store for them today. The welcome and very pleasant interlude was now over, though; it was simply a question of who would broach the subject first.

  As soon as the waitress had delivered a pot of coffee to their table, Pippi leaped straight in.

  “I think Major Kendrick was right. I don’t think Borodin can be trusted.”

  What if Borodin had sniffed an opportunity that could be best played to his advantage by tucking Luke safely away in Germany for a time? Yes, he had jeopardized his own life by intervening in Paris, but this could have been a calculated risk—a route to a far larger prize. It was a bleak prognosis, but it stood up to scrutiny: pack Luke off to Germany with a bunch of lies to placate him, negotiate a deal for himself, then deliver the goods in Zurich. Pippi strongly believed they had to assume the worst.

  “I thought you said you liked him.”

  “I do, but I’m thinking about you.” She paused before adding gravely, “I don’t think we should go to Zurich.”

  “I have to. I need answers.”

  “You’ve lived without them for twenty-five years.”

  “Half lived.”

  “Better than being dead.”

  He weighed her stark warning. “There’s just one problem. What Borodin said to me in Paris that night, after L’Hirondelle, after he’d killed the first man and realized we were being followed by another.”

  “Remind me.”

  “If anything happened to him, I was to disappear, vanish forever, never come back. Why would he say that? He had nothing to gain from it.”

  “Maybe he did.”

  “No, you had to be there. It was a genuine warning. Someone wants me dead—God knows why—and they’re not going to stop until I am. Even if I don’t show up in Zurich, it won’t be over. It’ll never be over unless I finish it. I don’t have a choice.”

  “You can do what Borodin said: disappear, leave everything behind.”

  “Could you?”

  “I have.”

  He chided himself for the thoughtless question. Her family, friends, home, homeland—all gone for good. She had cut herself completely adrift.

  Maybe sensing his embarrassment, she mercifully came to his support. “There’s a difference. It was my choice. It wasn’t forced on me. I understand.”

  “So do I, if you don’t want to come. In fact, I don’t think you should. It’s not your battle.”

  “I made a promise to you.”

  “And now I’m releasing you from it.”

  She held his gaze. “Thank you, but no. Anyway, my plan only works with two people.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “Of course.” She smiled. “Everyone knows you have to have a plan.”

  They had traveled in separate carriages all the way from Geneva, glimpsing each other when they changed trains in Biel, but never communicating. On their arrival in Zurich, Petrovic set off through the crowd thronging the platform, secure in the knowledge that Jestin was shadowing him, and ready to spring into action if required.

  Jestin had been an excellent choice. There was something essentially inconspicuous about the man. Short, slight, and bespectacled, he was surprisingly meek-looking for a Breton. He also carried himself with a diffidence that verged on nervousness. He didn’t stride, he stepped lightly, almost daintily, as if trespassing. A stranger would have taken him for a bookkeeper or maybe a minor government official. There was certainly nothing to suggest he was one of the most notorious smugglers ever to come out of that vipers’ nest known as the Port of Brest.

  Nearing the front of the taxi queue, Petrovic permitted himself a casual glance behind him. Three people back was Jestin, adjusting the knot of his tie. Two rooms had been reserved for them at the same hotel, not because they required somewhere to stay—they would be gone before nightfall—but because they needed a place to talk in private, to ready themselves, and also to take delivery of the car and the two revolvers that Petrovic’s contact in Basel would be bringing in a little over an hour.

  As his taxi pulled away from the station, he experienced a jolt of remorse. He knew Jestin’s story—had played a part in it, luring him to Paris with the promise of big money to be made. He had even met the man’s charming wife, Christine, and it didn’t sit happily with him that he would soon be turning her into a widow. There was nothing to be done about it, though. The Karamans had spoken.

  The brothers would want the matter dealt with sooner rather than later, but it would be safer to wait until he and Jestin had disposed of Hamilton and returned to Paris. Jestin had the instincts of an alley cat. A convincing scenario would have to be constructed to put him at his ease. Petrovic pictured a staged hijacking of a lorry on a lonely road at night, the driver and his mate both armed and briefed beforehand to do the deed.

  He wondered if some faceless assassin was at this very moment entertaining the same sort of thoughts about him. Could the Karamans have already signed off on his own death? He had done everything to make himself indispensable to the brothers, but he was no fool. It was a short step from indispensable to expendable. In Borodin’s case, decades of loyal service had counted for nothing. Indeed, they had issued the order to kill him as casually as they might instruct a gardener to weed a flower bed.

  “What if there are more than three of them?”

  Wilke took his eyes off the road just long enough to glance at his elder brother, seated beside him. “It’s quite possible the girl won’t even be there.”

  “But what if she is? What if there are others, too?”

  “Friedrich, we still have the element of surprise on our side. Just follow my lead.”

  It pained him to see Friedrich in such a state. His face, usually so animated, was a hollow-eyed mask. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep after motoring through the night from Düsseldorf to Konstanz. Even his jacket seemed to hang differently from his broad-shouldered frame, as though a part of him had withered away beneath.

  “There is something I need to ask of you, Friedrich. A favor.”

  “What?”

  Wilke dropped a gear to negotiate the tight bend in the country road. “Stefan was your son, but he was in my charge when it happened.”

  “I’ve already told you, Markus, I don’t hold you to blame.”

  “But I do. And I would like to be the one to kill the Englishman.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “You think I’m not up to it?”

  “It’s not that,” said Wilke. “It’s not about you.” This wasn’t entirely true. Friedrich, a successful lawyer, was also a man of faith, and although it could hardly be described as a deep religious conviction, there was a chance he would waver at the vital moment. That could prove disastrous in a public place, where speed and timing were everything.

  “It’s about me,” Wilke went on. “I was there. I watched it happen.” He paused to pick the correct words. “I would find it easier to live with that memory if you allow me the honor of avenging Stefan’s murder.”

  Friedrich turned his flat, dead gaze on the quilted slopes with their orderly scattering of farmsteads. “I have always disliked Switzerland,” he sa
id. “It’s so unspeakably neat.”

  “Even the cows look bored,” Wilke observed.

  A smile twitched at the corners of Friedrich’s mouth. “It’s true, they do.” He turned back. “Let me think about it, Markus. You’ll have your answer by the time we get to Zurich.”

  Wilke let the subject lie. Friedrich had always had a contrary streak in him, even as a boy. The harder you pushed, the more he was likely to resist. With any luck, he would come around. It mattered to Wilke that he did, and not just for Stefan. For his own sake, too. He was consumed by a deep and urgent need to kill the man who had effectively destroyed his career.

  For two years he had toiled away in and around the Bodensee, biding his time, filling his pockets and, more importantly, those of Major Goeritz, his immediate superior in Berlin. He had done everything expected of him. He had even groomed Stefan to take over from him, by way of assuring Goeritz that the stream of money would not dry up when Wilke moved to Berlin. That had always been their tacit arrangement: hard grind in the provinces followed by promotion to a post at Abwehr headquarters in the capital. The prize had lain within his reach. The arrest of a leading scientist as he was about to defect to the British would have secured it.

  All gone now. He had tried and failed several times to get Goeritz on the phone—a sure sign that his superior was already distancing himself from the bloody debacle.

  No, Friedrich would have to forgo the pleasure. Hamilton had to die by Wilke’s hand. It was just unfortunate that circumstances would not allow him to take his time.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  As Borodin approached the restaurant at the bottom of Rämistrasse, he knew he was being watched. What worried him most, though, was knowing that if Petrovic had any sense, he would make his move now, intercepting him and bundling him into a car.

  The steel tip of his walking stick tapped lightly against the pavement; his right hand remained in his jacket pocket, closed around the grip of the revolver; and his ears strained for the sound of a car approaching at speed, or footsteps closing rapidly from behind.

  Nothing.

  Once inside the restaurant, he didn’t drop his guard, but Petrovic had missed his moment. He bestowed a warm smile on the hat-check girl sitting attentively in her booth as he passed down the corridor.

  The Kronenhalle had changed little since his last visit. Its somber grandeur, reinforced by the impeccable table settings and the formal wear of the staff, was still offset by the vivid splashes of color adorning its wood-paneled walls. Gottlieb and Hulda had always had a penchant for modern art, some of it provided by the artists in exchange for free meals, and he noted that they’d grown their collection over the intervening years. As the maître d’ led him to the corner table he had reserved while in Paris, the only diner to show any interest in him was a skeletal woman of middle years, eating alone, picking forlornly at her salad. She seemed an improbable plant, but he didn’t dismiss the possibility. Petrovic had sent a woman to kill him in Paris, had he not?

  He ordered a gin fizz from the maître d’ to help pass the time. Petrovic would wait a while in the hope that Hamilton might show up and the matter could be settled out on the street, without his having to hand over the remaining tranche of cash.

  Lighting a cigarette, he sat back and looked around him. He recalled with unexpected fondness the many fine hours he had passed with friends and strangers in this room. Thanks to its neutrality, Zurich had always attracted a rich mix of displaced, stateless (and often degenerate) personalities. They had certainly been thick on the ground in the years immediately after the war, and the Kronenhalle had been one of their favored watering holes.

  It was no bad thing, he reflected, that his life had briefly folded back on itself to a place filled with shimmerings of past happiness, because from today it would strike out on an altogether different course. There could be no returning to the places he had once known. His future lay before him, a road snaking off through an unfamiliar landscape.

  It headed south, that much he knew. He had spent too long in the north. He wanted clear skies, warm seas, short winters, and the company of well- and roof-water drinkers. Naples, maybe. The offer was there, and unless Rosaria was a consummate actress, he had no reason to believe she hadn’t made it in earnest. Sweet, gentle Rosaria, whose body he had bought on his last night in Paris, and who had wept the next morning when he offered to buy her a railway ticket home: tears of frustration rather than joy, because her French husband had confiscated her passport to prevent her fleeing the country.

  “I’ll get it for you, and anything else you want. All I need is an address.”

  “He’s a dangerous man.”

  “What can I say? I’ve met a lot of dangerous men in my life and I’m still here.”

  An hour and a half later, when he had met Rosaria at the Gare de Lyon, she had wept again—with relief this time, upon seeing her passport and the small traveling case containing the clothes and other items she had requested.

  He had sent her home to Naples in style, with a first-class ticket that included her own compartment as far as Rome. “You don’t have to worry,” he had told her, “Xavier won’t come looking for you.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Trust me.”

  “You didn’t …?”

  “Kill him? No, just scared him a little.”

  The weasely little Frenchman had bawled like a baby through his broken teeth when Borodin pulled down his trousers and held the stiletto blade to his contracting testicles. He knew the type: cheap hustler, all bark and no bite, good only for preying on the weak.

  Sensing that Rosaria wasn’t entirely convinced, he had handed her some American dollars so she could set herself up elsewhere if it would make her feel safer. In return, he had received the name of the bar in Ravello that belonged to her uncle Gualtiero. He would know where she was should Borodin ever find himself in those parts.

  Her last words to him had come from the open window of her compartment as the train pulled away.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I like you, Rosaria. Because I can.”

  It was more than that, though, and at some level he had known it even then. Now, sitting here in the Kronenhalle with a gin fizz in one hand and a cigarette in the other, it was more apparent to him than ever. It had been a test of sorts. He had wished to perform a good deed and see how it sat with him. Rather well, was the answer. One act of kindness could never atone for the many and various sins he had committed over the years. But the mere fact that he was even thinking in such terms suggested that deep inside him some shift had occurred, the first tremors of which he had felt while speaking to Hamilton in the Spanish pavilion.

  Those reverberations had caused him to falter and had cost him dearly. He had lost almost everything short of his life. He had been stripped back to a man sitting in a Swiss restaurant with a passport in one pocket, a revolver in the other, and a sizable sum of cash stitched into his jacket lining. However matters played out later, he would not be returning to Andrej’s apartment to collect his suitcase. All that he had, he carried with him. Like a tortoise, he thought, with a bare wisp of a smile.

  It vanished when he saw Petrovic enter the restaurant and address himself to the maître d’. He was wearing a fawn summer jacket and gray flannel trousers. Borodin hadn’t remarked on it before, but the peasant boy from Brgud had acquired a sense of style during his time in Paris.

  They greeted each other in French, switching to their own tongue once the waiter had taken their drink order and retired.

  “He’s not joining us?” asked Petrovic, noting that the table was laid for two.

  “Not here. Later, maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “It depends what’s in the case.”

  Petrovic placed the attaché case on the buttoned leather seat between them and slipped the catc
hes. Borodin fished for a bundle of notes buried beneath others and discreetly flicked through it with his thumb. “If it’s not all there, I’ll come looking for the rest.”

  “I know,” said Petrovic, “which is why it’s all there.” He closed the case and tucked it away at his feet.

  Borodin could play this any number of ways, and he had lost valuable sleep last night toying with his options. Confronted with Petrovic in the flesh, he instinctively opted for honesty. It would be good, as well as educational, to turn the heat up under him, watch him sweat a bit.

  “It’s only fair you know: I’ve had no communication with Hamilton since he left Paris.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I told him where to be, and when. There’s a possibility he won’t show.”

  “That’s unacceptable.”

  Borodin gave a nonchalant shrug. “It was the best I could come up with under the circumstances. You were trying to kill us both at the time, remember?”

  “We had a deal,” hissed Petrovic.

  “Which I intend to honor. I need that money as much as you need Hamilton—well, maybe not quite as much.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Surely you can’t be that naive,” said Borodin, warming to his plain-talking theme. “You’re as good as dead if you don’t deliver Hamilton. You may even be as good as dead already for failing to finish the job in Paris. Have you thought about that? Of course you have.”

  The waiter returned with the bottle of white wine they had ordered. Borodin tasted it and waited till it was poured before continuing.

  “You’ll get what you want, but maybe not today. I need you to know that, so you don’t do anything rash. It would be bad for me but worse for you, because you’ll never find him without me.”

  Petrovic didn’t reply immediately. “I understand the situation.”

  “That’s good, because I’m not sure I do.” Borodin took a sip of wine. “Look at us, Tibor: two colleagues who’ve rubbed along happily enough for years, not quite friends but almost, forced by the Karamans to turn against each other. Can you make sense of that?”