by Robin Duval
He was contentedly reflecting on all this when Agnete’s fingers tightened urgently round his arm. He followed her eye line upwards, past the altar and the Russian doll tiers of ascending galleries; to the sun-drenched trompe l’oeil dome two hundred feet above them. There was a small balcony running around it and for a moment a man’s head bobbed into sight over the safety rail and peered down. His hand was cupped in front of his mouth as if he was speaking into a tiny microphone.
Bryn’s first instinct was to assume it was Burton, or one of his minions. But something had alarmed Agnete and she pulled him away towards the main entrance. He moved as quickly as the press of tourists permitted but soon lost her. As he stopped to search the crowd, a blunt and painful object bit into his ribs and a voice two inches from his ear rasped:
‘Steh’ still.’
He knew at once it was the silenced barrel of a pistol. The sensation of hard metal. The confident, icy authority of the man at his ear. The gun propelled him, as instantly and obediently as a trained dog, through the multitude to a small door on the north side of the church and up a flight of stone steps within the walls, goading him relentlessly upwards. He caught a single, momentary glimpse of a face, and recognised the epicene features of Udell Strange’s chauffeur. The man was fit, and as unaffected by the climb as Bryn was rapidly exhausted.
At the top was a low door which opened into a small stone chamber. Beyond a balcony rail, practically within touching distance, was the final dome of the church. A small group of men was waiting. Among them Udell Strange; and Marcus.
Agnete arrived behind him, driven up the steps by the ponytailed technician whom Bryn had seen adjusting the microphones. Her face was a picture of fury. She had the rucksack still on her back.
Bryn was now close enough to the guard rail to see the tourist crowds below, so distant and tiny they scarcely moved. There was no sign of police, security; or Burton. If this was what he had intended, he had got his timing terribly wrong. His cock-up. Someone else’s conspiracy.
‘Have you brought it with you?’
Strange was addressing Bryn.
He said nothing. Perhaps if Agnete and he could tease it out a bit longer, help might arrive. About twenty feet away, discreetly recessed within the rococo curves of the cornice, was a miniature camera, watching out – he supposed – for wouldbe suicides. He fervently hoped someone was on monitor duty and eased himself into its line of sight. The chauffeur moved with him and laid his silenced pistol delicately against his temple.
‘Is it here in Dresden?’
‘Is what here?’
Why indeed should he know what Strange was talking about?
The chauffeur smiled coldly and made a tiny clicking noise with his tongue. Or it might have been the trigger mechanism of the pistol itself. The whole tableau seemed suspended in front of him. The two dark-suited retainers on either side of the closed door; Strange standing opposite him, rimless glasses glinting, not a hair of his immaculate steel-grey helmet out of place; the ponytailed man holding Agnete; Marcus separated from the group with head inclined diffidently to the side as though detached from the proceedings and a little embarrassed by it all.
The silencer barrel bit into Bryn’s flesh.
‘Isotopen er i min taske.’
It was Agnete.
‘In her bag,’ translated Marcus, barely audibly.
Agnete compliantly opened the rucksack and lifted out the Christmas-wrapped parcel. She folded her arms around it as if reluctant to yield up her burden. With a happy smirk of recognition, Marcus started to walk towards her to accept it.
A number of things happened very quickly.
The pony-tailed man reeled back with a gasp of pain. Agnete took two strides to the balcony edge. She leaned back against the rail with the package held above her head, glanced downwards – and hurled it into the abyss. It took an eternity to reach the marble chancel floor. Agnete and Bryn alone watched the package fall. The others – Marcus, Strange, the suited men – all pressed themselves back against the stone walls, in an open-mouthed paroxysm of terror.
But when the package burst open there was no awful explosion.
No engulfing surge of vivid blue flame.
No great roar of sound.
And no sign at all of lead cladding or wooden boxing. Only burst paper and shattered glass and a light, viscous, brown liquid nonchalantly spreading towards the startled and unharmed musicians, twenty feet away beyond the communion rail.
The chauffeur was the first to react. He raised his pistol to fire at Agnete; and Bryn threw himself upon him. Though he had more weight, the chauffeur was fitter and stronger and knew far better than he where to inflict pain. Every last ounce of Bryn’s strength and energy was committed to forcing the gun towards the floor, but it was a battle he already knew he could not win.
And then the door flew open and men streamed into the room. Shots were fired. A body fell heavily to the floor. Agnete cried out in alarm.
The chauffeur relaxed his hold on Bryn and the pistol slid from his fingers. Hands helped Bryn to his feet. The young man with the pony-tail was now holding a heavy automatic to the chauffeur’s head whilst his one-time colleagues were lined face to the walls, and uniformed policemen were slipping white plastic restraints over their meekly offered wrists.
Udell Strange looked a broken man. He was handcuffed to a plainclothes policeman but was hardly able to stand. His eyes were fixed on the closed-circuit camera in the cornice, as if he had noticed it for the first time.
On the floor of the chamber, blood seeping from a wound in his chest, lay Marcus. Agnete had fallen to her knees beside him and was cradling his head in her arms.
A medic came panting up the steps. Adrenalin was administered. Marcus’s shirt was stripped off and his right breast and shoulder bandaged. When it was all done, Agnete and the doctor together helped him to his feet. He took a few tentative steps and nodded weakly. He looked pale and shocked, but tranquil. Agnete gently cupped his face and kissed him. A policeman eased a handcuff around his unaffected wrist, and led him away down the stairs – almost apologetically – with Agnete following closely behind.
There had been no attempt to clear the church of tourists. A steady stream continued to flow through the doors, broadly oblivious to the drama. Even those who must have heard shots and seen policemen racing through loitered with at most mild concern. A small earthquake, apparently. No one killed. In the chancel, musicians were helping to sweep up the remains of the Christmas package. An audience was assembling for the day’s concert.
And at a stroke, Bryn had ceased to be a player in the story. He joined a small crowd outside the church watching the characters come and go. Strange’s minions were hurried away into a van. Marcus was taken to an ambulance parked up against the steps where he had a last conversation with Agnete, and a final tender embrace.
Strange himself appeared. As he descended the steps into the sunshine, uniformed policemen flanking him on either side, a cameraman jumped out (‘Look this way, Mr Strange!’) and snapped off a stream of photographs. Others quickly materialised beside him, snapping and shouting.
The adventure was over. There were a couple of things Bryn needed to do. Find a hotel for the night – there were plenty enough of those around the Neumarkt. The other probably was to look up the British consul in Dresden and see if he could regularise his position, begin the slow trek back to normality. Oh, and a third thing: say a good-bye to Agnete – should he get the chance.
The policeman in charge of the rescue squad had come rigidly to attention at the top of the church steps. A tall man in civilian clothes, with a Bismarck moustache that set off a distant lost chord in Bryn’s memory, emerged and shook his hand. And suddenly Agnete was there, and all three were smiling and chatting together.
He was about to turn away and leave them to it, when she spotted him on the edge of the crowd and waved at him vigorously. The tall man looked across and gave him a friendly salute. He had no choice
now but wait. She skipped across the cobbles and caught his arm, as brisk and vital as if nothing had ever happened.
‘Marcus will be fine,’ she said breathlessly. ‘But we have to stay in Dresden until the formalities are completed. They’re bound to want to interview you. You know you’re a real hero, don’t you?’
She smiled delightedly and led him away by the hand. Peremptory as ever.
‘Oh come on, don’t look so confused. We’re going to have a coffee. And some cake.’
They sat in the open air, with Martin Luther’s bronze statue between them and the great church. The American photographer who had shouted at Strange was sitting at the next table, a Blackberry to his ear. Bryn could hear fragments of his conversation and guessed he was talking to his editor, probably in the States. He was hyperactively excited.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he kept saying. ‘I tell you it’s The Man. Oh yeah, pure as the driven snow; but not any more, buddy. He’s here in Dresden and up to his ears. This’ll stuff him and General Jim Scott and the whole friggin’ F-O-R good ’n proper. These morons have been playing footsie with terrorists for Chrissake.’
As he spoke, a black limousine came round the church from the other side of the square. Udell Strange was in the back between two plainclothes policemen. A posse of photographers flocked around the car, like chickens after grain, frenetically snapping. Strange made no attempt to cover his face but sat bolt upright, a simulacrum of misery. In the front passenger seat was the man with the Bismarck moustache, wearing the contented smile of one who had just pulled off the coup of his career.
Bryn looked up at the building. Blackened elements from the original shell – bones from the past – had been embedded in the new sandstone as a reminder of the reality belied by that sweet interior. It soared above him in a perfect compound of power, economy and emotion like a great German symphony, and if possible more moving.
The English morris dancers were packing their bells and costumes into suitcases. Shorn of their eccentric gear they looked surprisingly normal – office workers even. A young man amongst them nodded at Bryn; he was beginning to feel as if everybody knew him. Two BMWs drew up beneath the Luther monument and the morris dancers climbed in. A balding figure in a neat three-piece suit came down the steps of the church and signalled to them to move on. It was David Burton.
He stood a few moments more at the foot of the steps, looked up at the sun, unfolded a panama hat and placed it elegantly upon his head. He raised a hand in regal acknowledgement and Agnete waved back at him. He strolled away across the square and disappeared into the lobby of the Hilton Dresden Hotel.
‘Do you think he’s disappointed?’ said Bryn.
‘I think he’s relieved. It would have been a poisoned chalice. All kinds of problems.’
‘You dropped it in the Skaggerak, didn’t you?’
She laughed.
‘It was such a charade. In the end I couldn’t let any of them have it. I did it that morning before you came up and found me. Box, lead cladding, flask and all. We were passing over the Norwegian Trench, the Kraken’s Lair, the deepest water in Europe, and – well, sometimes – the simplest solution is the best. It’s burrowing its way through the glacial sands towards Australia, never to be heard of again. I kept the wrapping paper.’
‘And the bottle? The one in the Frauenkirche?’
‘You remember we stopped for petrol. There was a systembolaget – a sort of Swedish state off-licence – and I bought it while you were filling up. I looked for a similar shape to the flask. Such a waste. Five year old rum, lovely amber colour. I told Burton I disposed of the smithium somewhere between England and Sweden. That’s six or seven hundred miles of North Sea to trawl. I don’t think he’ll bother.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because you’re so unbearable when you’re right. And because… ’
A snatch of Lady Gaga erupted from her rucksack. It took them a time to realise that it was Agnete’s iPhone, forgotten since Scotland. She delved into the bag and hooked it out. The caller on the display screen was Marcus.
While she was talking to him, her free hand descended on one of Bryn’s and held it tightly. It was an odd sensation. The word troilistic crept disquietingly into his mind; no doubt there’d be a more normalising term in Danish. She seemed very happy. Marcus’s injuries were superficial and he would not have to stay long in hospital. Bryn could hear his voice at the other end, energetic and cheerful and boastful.
She switched the phone off.
‘He sends you his love and hopes you’ll forgive him.’
‘What’s happening to him?’
‘Oh he’ll have to face the music. But he’ll do a deal. Marcus always has a few cards up his sleeve. You know that.’
He did not respond. She looked at him curiously.
It was the moment.
‘You love him, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Of course.’
She took her hand away. A breeze had picked up in the Neumarkt, tossing the tourist litter across the cobbles. A street cleaner with a motorised refuse buggy started to hoover up the drifts caught at the base of Martin Luther’s statue.
‘You have nothing to fear from Marcus.’
‘Oh really.’
‘You are an idiot.’
He could hear music in the distance. The little baroque orchestra in the Frauenkirche starting its concert at last. Playing the flute Badinerie from one of Bach’s suites, with unusual energy.
‘Do you not realise he’s my father?’
Another person would have seen this coming from a mile away. Weeks ago. But not Bryn. To Bryn, it was a bolt from the blue.
‘I thought your father – ’
‘Min Far? No. Unfortunately my darling Papa omitted to be present when I was conceived. I am the result of a brief and very happy fling that my mother had with your cousin. Thirty years ago when he was at the British Consulate in Geneva and Papa was Danish ambassador in Bern. Papa always knew. People know how to look after secrets in the Diplomatic Service. And you are, Bryn, the first person for a very long time to share mine.’
It all took a while to digest.
‘So we’re cousins.’
‘I think once removed.’
‘Right.’
‘Or possibly not.’
She sighed. Her hand had returned to his.
‘I’m afraid Marcus isn’t the only candidate, just the most willing. My mother is what you might call a free woman. She is on her fourth marriage now and my father on his third. They’re still the best of friends, and good friends with all their previous partners. I don’t suppose you find that easy to understand, but for me it’s perfectly civilised and realistic.’
‘Mamma mia.’
He couldn’t help it.
She laughed.
‘In any case, my mother and I are completely different. My limit is a single lover at a time. Are you happy now?’
‘It’s very complicated.’
‘If you’re English. Marcus was always an absent father. Years could pass without me seeing him. Not because my parents didn’t want me to, but because that’s the way he is. Someone who turns up unexpectedly. When it suits him. But in answer to your question: of course I love him, though obviously not as much as Papa, and in a different way. Who would not?’
Gradually, over successive cups of coffee and slices of Erdbeerkuchen mit Sahne, the story unrolled. How – early in the year, when she was at a loose end – Marcus had suddenly invited her to be his unpaid assistant. It had been an exciting ride. Being with Marcus was exciting. As a consequence, she’d been slow to suspect that something might be seriously wrong.
In the meantime, she had fallen in love with Bryn. She was not yet prepared to admit quite when this had happened, though he suspected he had passed an awful lot of time in unnecessary uncertainty.
She’d found herself painfully torn between him and her commitment to Marcus. The dilemma was still unresolved when she had co
me to him that evening in Ealing. It was all the more difficult because she did not know even whether she could trust him, whether indeed he might be working for another side. The folded paper with Burton’s number for example. It was not until Scotland, when she realised he would be a dead man if she did not intervene, that she made her choice. Since then it had been the two of them.
They hung around in the square all day, eating, talking; embracing a lot. Late in the afternoon, a newspaper gusted across the square and wrapped itself round Bryn’s leg. It was the outside double page of the morning’s Die Welt. He picked it up: there was a photograph of an erupting volcano below the title banner, and a quantity of German text below. Agnete took it from him and translated.
Much had happened since they’d left London. Lassen Peak had – quite literally – blown its top. Like Mount St Helens thirty or forty years before, the summit had been entirely destroyed. The mountain had collapsed upon itself, sealing in for millennia the magna and everything that remained of its upper flanks. The earlier dust cloud was already dispersing over Alaska and Western Canada. On the east coast, the airways were beginning to return to normal.
On the inside front page, another picture caught their eye. Two men: a uniformed one in the foreground, waving; and beyond him in the shadows an older person, with rimless glasses and steel grey hair, turning away as if to avoid the photographer. It was easy enough to recognise General James Scott but Agnete had to help Bryn with the figure in the background.
‘It’s in the headline,’ she said patiently. ‘Die seltsame Königsmacher.’
‘Kingmaker I can work out,’ he said. ‘But what’s the other word mean?’
A gust of wind ripped the loose page from his fingers and bore it off across the square. The street cleaner caught the cartwheeling paper on the end of his stick and dropped it into the maw of his machine.
‘Here’s my iPhone,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you just look it up on Google?’