Estocada

by Graham Hurley

  Sol had left to fetch another chair for the table. Dieter asked Marta about the parrot. The question drew a sorrowful shake of the head.

  ‘Ask my crazy husband.’ She settled at the table and resumed eating. ‘The real one was called Moshe.’

  ‘The real one? You mean this one? Before he died?’

  ‘No. Another one. Ask him. Ask Sol.’

  Sol was back with the chair. Dieter sat down while Sol disappeared again to the kitchen, returning with a bowl brimming with silky goulash.

  ‘Eat,’ he said.

  Dieter reached for a chunk of bread. The goulash was delicious, the paprika not too fierce, the meat dissolving on his tongue. He wanted to know about Moshe the parrot. Moshe meant Moses.

  Sol shot his wife a reproving look. Maybe I’ve happened on a family secret, Dieter thought. Maybe I’m intruding still deeper into this cosy little ménage. Sol took a mouthful of goulash, then another. Finally he nodded at the perch.

  ‘We had a real parrot last year. It belonged to a friend from the Institute. He was leaving Germany and the parrot couldn’t go with him and so he gave it to us.’

  ‘This is Moshe?’

  ‘Sure. Moshe was a character. He was very Yiddish, very bright, very outspoken. He also had lots to say. My friend was very patient with him. He’d taught him well.’

  Marta interrupted. She’d never wanted the damn bird in the flat, having to clean up all the time, feed it, listen to it, but it was close to Sol’s birthday so in the end she’d said yes.

  ‘And?’

  ‘It talked all the time. Talked and talked. Wouldn’t stop. Night and day. On and on. Maybe it was missing its owner. I don’t know. I told Sol we’d be in trouble with this parrot but Sol never listens, which is fine if you’re away all day, but not if you’re me, stuck here with nowhere to hide and that bird watching me all the time.’

  ‘Next door,’ Sol murmured. ‘Tell our young friend about next door.’

  ‘Next door live older people, even older than us. Party people. The walls here are thin. They listen to the radio all the time, all the rubbish they put out.’

  ‘And Moshe…?’ Another prompt from Sol.

  ‘Ja. The damn bird is clever, very clever, but mainly he says just one thing, God help us.’ She was looking at her husband, as if to seek permission for whatever came next in the story. Light from the window shone on her glasses, masking her eyes.

  ‘Heil Moshe!’ Sol was smiling. ‘A real squawk, again and again. Heil Moshe! He could do it soft. He could do it loud. Heil Moshe! God knows how my friend managed it. Maybe he got the parrot to listen to the radio, just to get the accent right. It sounded perfect. Proper Austrian. Be in the next room and you’d think Hitler had moved in.’

  ‘Ja.’ Marta again. ‘You think I want to share my whole life with that man? You think there’s not enough of him in the papers? Out on the street?’

  The people next door, she said, had complained to the block warden. They said their neighbours, Jewish neighbours, were daring to take the Führer’s name in vain. The block warden came round to check on the parrot. Sol was out at work. She had to waste some of her precious coffee on the block warden while Moshe did his party piece and afterwards, before he left, he told Marta she had until that night to get rid of the parrot. Otherwise she and her husband were in real trouble.

  ‘So what did you do?’ Dieter’s spoon hovered over the remains of the goulash.

  ‘I opened the window and threw it out.’

  ‘It flew away?’

  ‘Yes. And then it flew back again. Maybe it was hungry. Maybe it was in love with us. I don’t know. But it sat on that windowsill and still pretended to be Hitler. Heil Moshe! When Sol came back from work he was still there and the neighbours were banging on the wall and soon the block warden would be round again. In this city they send you to the camps for less.’

  She shook her head, visibly distressed, and Sol leaned across the table and put a hand on her thin arm.

  ‘Moshe’s gone,’ he said. ‘We solved it, didn’t we?’

  Dieter was looking at the stuffed parrot. He wanted to know how.

  ‘There’s a shop in Pankow that sells stuffed animals. They do fish and birds too. Another friend of mine had a carp stuffed once, a huge thing. So I went to the shop and bought the parrot. Cost me a fortune but it did the trick because Moshe thought some other parrot had moved in and after that we never saw him again.’

  ‘And the neighbours?’

  ‘They were disappointed. They wanted us gone.’

  ‘The block warden?’

  ‘He was OK. You want the proof?’ He gestured round at the living room. ‘We’re still here.’

  Dieter finished the goulash. Then he fumbled in his jacket pocket and produced the sprigs of heather. He gave one to Marta, another to Sol, kept the third for himself.

  ‘For Moshe,’ he said. ‘To bring him good luck.’

  Marta left the heather beside her bowl. For some reason she didn’t want to touch it. Sol thanked Dieter and tucked the little sprig into the breast pocket of his shirt. When Dieter said he’d come to apologise for the incident at the wedding, Sol told him it didn’t matter. It was Ribbentrop’s fault, not Dieter’s, but it was foolish to expect anything else. Like so many others in his position, the man had lost touch with what really mattered. If he felt anything about Herr Ribbentrop, he felt pity.

  ‘For him?’

  ‘For his wife. For his children.’ He paused. ‘Beata tells me you have a Japanese friend.’

  ‘I do. Her name’s Keiko.’

  ‘And she attends to Ribbentrop?’

  ‘She tries to help him. You know about reiki?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a way of curing people. A way of changing them.’

  ‘Good. I hope she has a lot of patience.’ He studied Dieter for a moment or two. ‘Do you play chess at all?’

  Without waiting for an answer, he fetched a board and a box of pieces and cleared a space on the table to set up the game. From the kitchen, he fetched a bottle of schnapps and poured two glasses. When Marta announced she was taking the dog next door to the bedroom he gave her a hug and said he’d be along later. Watching his eagerness to get back to the table, Dieter wondered how often this couple had visitors to their flat.

  Sol gave Dieter first move. From the outset, Sol played the game with an intuitive brilliance that Dieter had never encountered before. He also played at breakneck speed, seeming to read Dieter’s mind the moment he deployed a particular piece, blocking here, countering there, making life tougher and tougher while all the time preparing a final set of moves of such murderous elegance that Dieter was obliged to surrender his king with a muttered apology for his own naivety. Marta, thankfully, had closed the bedroom door.

  ‘You play often?’ Sol enquired after Dieter’s third straight annihilation.

  ‘I played a lot in Spain. It kept us out of the bars. Now it’s harder to find the time.’

  ‘Your lady doesn’t play?’

  ‘My lady plays a different kind of chess. She doesn’t need a board.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘She lives up here.’ Dieter tapped his head. ‘She’s very Japanese. She gives nothing away.’

  ‘And you can live with that?’

  ‘I depend on that. All my life I’ve been looking for someone… ’ He frowned, hunting for the right word.

  ‘Someone what?’

  ‘… someone who doesn’t give all of themselves away. I fall in love too easily. I fall in love and the girl is all over me and months later, sometimes only weeks later, I’m bored to death because I know every inch of them. Then it happens all over again, another girl and another girl and pretty soon I’m knocking on Georg’s door and begging him to come out and get drunk with me because I can’t face the prospect of going home to whoever it might be. It gets to be like a book you’ve read before. Some people say there are only a dozen stories in the world. Maybe that’s true.
’

  ‘And Keiko?’

  ‘I still don’t know her story. And that’s exciting.’

  ‘Will you ever know?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘So will it ever end?’

  ‘Ask Georg. He’s much wiser than me.’

  Sol smiled. Then he nodded at the board and suggested another game. Dieter shook his head. He enjoyed this man’s company immensely. Sol had the gift of listening, of asking the right questions, of getting in close and unlocking secrets you’d rarely shared with anyone. In a dogfight, Dieter suspected he’d be close to unbeatable. He’d manoeuvre the way he talked, the way he played chess, taking advantage of the smallest opportunity, the merest glimpse of weakness, but just now, on the chessboard, Dieter had lost his taste for humiliation.

  ‘Tell me about the Institute,’ he said. ‘Is what you do secret?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s complicated, too. We try and reduce matter to its essence. Do atoms and molecules mean anything to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s as it should be. Leave this stuff to us. Think of one of those spiral mazes. Get closer and closer to the middle and in the end you might be looking at a very big bang.’

  ‘Literally? Some kind of explosion?’

  ‘We hope so. That’s what the science tells us. Split the atom in a certain way and you might blow up half the world.’

  ‘And that’s a good thing?’

  ‘It might be. As long as you lived on the other half.’

  Split the atom. Dieter hadn’t a clue what this meant. Did you need a special atom? Or would any do?

  ‘Uranium. That’s where it begins and ends. Uranium’s radioactive. It has special properties. Dig it out of the ground and it can do you harm. Enrich this stuff, make it really pure, and who knows what might be possible?’

  ‘You’ve got lots of it?’

  ‘Enough for our purposes. It’s hard to lay hands on. Much rarer than gold.’

  ‘We mine it here? In Germany?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘Czechoslovakia. Africa, too. There’s lots in the Congo.’

  Sol began to pack the chess pieces away, returning them carefully to their box. Dieter watched him for a moment or two. His next question, he knew, was only too obvious.

  ‘And you think you may succeed one day?’

  ‘Succeed in what?’

  ‘Being able to blow up half the world.’

  Sol put the lid on the box and stored it under the dresser. Then he turned round again.

  ‘Are you religious? A man of God?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But just sometimes? When things are really tough?’

  ‘Then yes. Maybe I am.’

  ‘Good. Then the answer is yes. One day someone will split the atom.’ He reached out and cupped Dieter’s face in his hands. ‘Just pray it doesn’t happen here.’

  19

  BERLIN, 30 AUGUST 1938

  Next day, Tam Moncrieff awaited word from Wilhelm Schultz. Nothing happened. This, thought Tam, was odd. These people have taken a look at me. I appear to have been signed up for some role in what they plan to do next. Yet the detail – what they expect me to do – is as vague as ever.

  At lunchtime he telephoned Bella. She was busy but said she could spare twenty minutes at her office in the embassy. He found her surrounded by a mountain of paperwork and a half-eaten orange. Twenty minutes had just become ten. He had to be quick. He gave her a name. Thomas Kreisky.

  ‘Have you ever heard of him?’

  She put the orange to one side, then nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I’d like to meet him.’

  ‘Is this something private? Personal?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘I only ask because the man’s a banker. He’s an American, as you probably know, and I understand he’s brilliant at what he does. He represents a number of interests in New York. I have it on very good authority that the regime loves him. Apparently he does them all kinds of favours.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Money, mainly. He puts together funding syndicates. There are also occasions when he can keep Germany’s name off the table. In this city that can be a very big help. You’re telling me you want to do business with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just as well. The man’s a shark.’ She glanced at her watch. Then she rummaged in a drawer for a file and extracted an address. ‘The regime keeps an eye on Kreisky, as you might imagine, and so do we.’ She gave Tam the address and then found a card and handed it over. ‘He goes to this place a lot, early evenings. It’s a club, the Kasbah. It’s near where he lives. It seems the man has some fearsome appetites. If you really want to meet him, you might start there.’

  Tam was looking at the address. He glanced up.

  ‘What kind of club are we talking about?’

  ‘Homosexuals, mainly. Kreisky is a man who likes risk. The regime frowns on his sort but he’s useful enough to be left alone. The club is discreet. Friends in high places keep it open. They say Kreisky will fuck anything. And not just in business.’

  *

  Tam returned to his hotel to find still no word from Schultz. Several hours later, after another lengthy wait, he took a tram out to the suburb where Kreisky lived.

  Workmen were hanging brand new swastika banners the length of Wilhelmstrasse and, sitting in the tram, Moncrieff wondered whether another of the interminable military parades that featured on the British newsreels might be in the offing. Hitler, as he now knew, had a habit of raising the nation’s blood pressure ahead of the next military adventure, and now might be just the time to march a division or two through the city to impress the locals. Poor bloody Czechs, he thought.

  Kreisky’s apartment block was a five-minute walk from the tram stop. It was built in the Bauhaus style, emphatically modern, but a line of linden trees at the kerbside softened the harsher angles. A bench across the road offered a perfect view of the plate-glass doors at the building’s entrance and Tam settled down in the sunshine to keep watch.

  Over the next couple of hours, men and the occasional woman hurried down the street and disappeared into the apartment block across the road. None of them looked remotely like Kreisky. As far as he could judge, entry meant getting past the concierge on the door, a smartly uniformed figure whose watchful courtesies suggested a wealthy clientele, but what Tam had in mind for the American banker depended on Tam himself keeping a low profile. Kreisky might, or might not, make an appearance. But either way, Tam knew he had no choice but to wait.

  Kreisky appeared towards eight o’clock in the evening, delivered to the apartment block by a taxi. He seemed shorter than Tam remembered from the surveillance photo he’d seen but there was no mistaking the face, especially the little goatee beard. He greeted the concierge with a nod and a passing touch on the arm and disappeared into the building. Barely minutes later he was out on the street again. Tam gave the portly figure a fifty-metre start and crossed the road to follow him.

  Kreisky was walking slowly, pausing to light what looked like a small cigar. Tam caught a glimpse of his face as the match sparked and moments later, on the move again, he could smell the cigar. A park lay off to the left. Dusk was falling and Kreisky had stopped once more, this time beside a telephone box. Tam paused, watching him picking up the receiver and waiting to be connected. Twice Kreisky checked his watch, then he talked for no more than thirty seconds, replaced the receiver and walked on. Beyond the park, he stopped to check the traffic and then crossed the road. Tam followed, still comfortably behind.

  Ahead, beyond what looked like a school, were a series of side streets. Kreisky had disappeared. Tam quickened his step, trying to remember the address of the club. A couple of hundred metres later he recognised the street name. He turned the corner. It looked residential. He stopped, confused. Then came a voice, very close, very soft, an American accent.
/>   ‘You’re looking for the Kasbah?’

  Tam could feel the presence of the man behind him. He turned round. Kreisky.

  ‘I am.’ Tam smiled down at him. ‘Is this the right street?’

  ‘It is. You’ll need a word or two at the door to get in. I don’t recall your face.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. I’m a visitor. Passing through.’

  Kreisky was wearing just a hint of perfume. His eyes were blue in the paleness of his face and his smile revealed a set of stained teeth, two of them capped in gold.

  ‘You’re Scots?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have business in the city? Friends maybe? Someone who told you about our little fuck palace?’

  Tam didn’t answer. He’d sparked Kreisky’s interest. He could see it in the smile that played around the fleshiness of his lips. This lanky stranger was a prospect. He might merit a little investment. Maybe a drink or two. By which time it would be dark.

  ‘You really know the place?’ Tam looked him in the eye. ‘Or am I wasting my time?’

  *

  The club was busy, couples everywhere, all men. Two young boys were at the door to hand out masks. There was a choice of a mask on a hand stick or a mask with a loop of elastic to keep it in place. Tam chose the elastic. His mask belonged on a woman: a flourish of eyebrows, wildly dramatic cheekbones and a mouth rimmed in scarlet lipstick. He modelled it for Kreisky, who extended a hand.

  ‘Come meet some friends of mine. What do I call you?’

  ‘Rory. You?’

  ‘Seymour.’ Kreisky gave his hand a squeeze. ‘Be frank with me, Rory. How much time do we have?’

  ‘Three hours. I have to be elsewhere by midnight.’

  ‘Perfect. This is young Hans. Behind the mask he has the sweetest, softest mouth. Say hi to my new friend, Hans.’

  Hans was shirtless below the mask. He’d oiled his upper body and it gleamed in the candlelight. He put his arms around both Kreisky and Tam. He smelled of recent sex.