He told her about a pyramid, where the vagrants were at the base, and about the High Fly Boys who were the next stratum up.
A manhunt fanned out across streets, parks, hotels, churches, clubs and pavement cafes to search for the owner of a brown fleck overcoat.
The target area was the city where a fortress had been built in the ninth century on the instructions of Ludwig the Pious, son of Charlemagne, at the junction of the Alster, Bille and Elbe rivers.
An army of men was mobilized, all of ethnic
Albanian origin, and had the common factor of loyalty to the fis, the clan, headed by the absolute authority of Timo Rahman. Ignorant of history, driven by obedience to Timo Rahman, men were briefed by the kryetar, the under-bosses, and were directed to smaller squares on the city map where they should seek a prey. In charge of each crew, of not more than ten men, was a chef. That morning, the codes and disciplines of distant Albanian villages settled on the streets of Hamburg. Word passed to the smallest groups that a cheap hotel on the Steindamm had yielded up the remnants of the fugitive's clothes, and a description – taken from a terrified Tunisian at his reception desk – was given them.
The Hauptbahnhof was watched and the passengers leaving on Inter City Express trains were checked. Men stood idly by the ticket machines at U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations. They were at the checkin counters of the airport, and at the terminus for long-distance buses. It was as if a foreign virus spread in the veins of a great city.
Among the hunting packs, spread out across the length and breadth of Hamburg – from Poppenbuttel in the north and to Maschen in the south, from Eidelstadt in the west and Mummelmannsberg in the east – there was desperate enthusiasm for success, to win the praise of the pate, Timo Rahman, and his gratitude.
A kryetar directed a chef to work his crew along the length of the park, the Planten und Blumen. That crew, five of them, who were all from a remote village close to the Macedonian border, made a line across the gardens, with their chef on the central path. They were house thieves, skilled pickpockets and pimps, and they made slow, careful progress from the park's St Pauli end. They knew nothing of the heritage or history of the city around them. Prosperity, wealth, opportunity made a flame that attracted moths. They were from the immigrant masses that had surged inside the city. Welcomed at first because they provided the menial labour force, they had later become detested when they changed the nature and culture of Hamburg.
Only Timo Rahman, the power and the untouch able, had the authority to stage a search of such magnitude, to cast a net of that width… None knew why a man had so crossed the pate that hundreds hunted him. The crew with their chef, all dreaming of the reward of success, moved through the park, passed the great justice building where thieves, pickpockets and pimps were sentenced, and the walls of the remand gaol where they were held before conviction – none looked at the court or the prison. As the rain poured down on them, they hunted a man.
'You are joking, Ricky? Is this some sort of wind-up?'
He swung his legs over the side and dropped down on to the pontoon.
'I tell you where I am, Ricky… I am inside a damn great harbour with a damn great sea wall protecting it, and we are still being blown half out of the bloody water. What you're saying, Ricky, it's not a starter.'
He held the mobile to his face and used his other hand to steady himself against the boat's side. The pontoon shuddered under his boots. The rest of them on the boat were inside the old wheel-house, scraping seventy-year-old wood to make it ready for the first coat of varnish. Harry Rogers, alone on the pontoon where only an idiot would be, shouted into the phone:
'I'm down in the west. There's no possibility of putting to sea because there's a depression settled in, and going to be there for a week. I'm working with mates on a restoration. There's storms forecast all week, not just down here. The North Sea's as bad, maybe worse. It's out of the question – sorry and all that.'
The wind bent in arcs the rigging his friends had already replaced on the beam trawler whose hull had been laid down in a yard across the harbour – now gone and replaced by holiday apartments – in 1931. He had not bought into the syndicate owning the boat because it was fully subscribed, and his ambition was bigger. One day he would have his own.
Across the harbour, spray burst over the sea wall.
Against the pontoon, the ropes holding the boat groaned in the swell.
'I tell you this, Ricky, for nothing. No one's out, not even the fish. Not here, not in the Approaches, not in Irish waters, absolutely not in the North Sea. Try listening to the forecast. Don't take my word – listen to the bloody shipping forecast. Where are you? Don't you have a radio there?… Oh, you're in Germany, oh.
It'll be no different there, not on their North Sea coast
– could be bloody worse, frankly.'
The rain spattered on his face. It ran from his slicked hair and down his cheeks. Because he had been inside the wheel-house when the phone had rung, he had not had his waterproofs on – but it was Ricky on the phone and he'd come running from the earshot of the other men.
'I'm not being difficult, Ricky – never have been and won't start now. I'm telling it like it is… Steady. Of course I know what you've done for me. Steady on, Ricky. Listen, I deal in facts… Well, what you want and what's on the weather forecast just happen to be two different things… I'm not being difficult. When was I ever?'
He had blustered his protests, in the wind and in the rain, out on the pontoon that lifted and fell under him. Harry Rogers had known that in the end, push coming to shove, he would buckle. He would bend as the rigging did in the wind.
'You're not telling me what's so important? No, of course not.. . Best I can do, Ricky, is to get up there tonight, load up, sail on the night tide… You'll give me the co-ordinates on the VHF?… Have to be good enough, won't it?… I don't know how long it'll be.
No, I am not giving you shit, Ricky. You're looking at two-fifty nautical miles and there'll be waves over the top of us. We'll make what speed we can… No, I'm not saying you're shouting, Ricky… Been good to talk, as it always is… Yes, and you too, you look after yourself.'
He heard the call cut, the purr in his ear, and put the phone into his pocket. He slid back on to the old trawler's deck, went into the wheel-house and lied about 'something' having come up that required his attention at home. On the quay, as he walked into the force of the weather, he rang his son and found him in a supermarket – endured the disbelief – then called his grandson.
'If you obstruct me and refuse permission for the cameras – which you are entitled to do, citing a violation of human-rights legislation – then I make a promise to you. The affairs of your company – a travel agency, yes? – will undergo a most detailed inspection from the Revenue. It would be the type of inspection that you would find both time consuming and expensive in your accountant's fees, and it is from my experience inevitable that irregularities in your financial affairs will be exposed. Or you can choose not to obstruct me but to welcome my technicians to your home and allow them to fit cameras.'
Johan Konig sat in the back office of the travel agency's flagship premises. Back in Berlin, he had learned that the kaisers of the industrial and commercial world had a fear only of excessive attention from fiscal investigators. Nothing fazed them but the nightmare of tax people rooting in their affairs.
'I am sure you are aware that the Revenue are often clumsy in their dealings with businessmen to whom a reputation of probity is important. Carrying out computers and files when the front hall of a workplace is crowded with customers, attracting inevitable attention on the pavement, with the damage that creates, is often their way.. . I would much regret us going up that route.'
He eyed the man sitting across the desk from him and playing with a pencil. Konig would sleep that night, as he had for the previous week, in a police hostel for single men. In a month, perhaps, if time had permitted it, he would hope to find two furnished rooms in a street well
back from the lake in St Georg.
The man spiralling his pencil over the desk lived in a mansion in Blankenese, and probably banked in a week what a policeman of Konig's rank earned in a year. He despised such men.
'A warning. Ingratiating yourself with your neighbour might be tempting, but it would not be wise. If you were foolish enough to provide information to him concerning cameras and directional microphones that we put in place, then – and this is my second promise – you will face imprisonment for, probably, seven years. Seven years in Fuhlsbuttel gaol is a long time to reflect on a warning ignored. You tell your family what you care to but the responsibility for secrecy is yours – seven years.'
The man who owned a prosperous travel agency nodded pathetic acquiescence. He was told that a delivery van would bring the equipment and a time later in the day was fixed for it. The business was done. Konig left the premises. He could not, quite, identify the mistake made by Timo Rahman, but he believed it existed. When it had been identified it could be manipulated. Later, back at Headquarters, a surveillance request would be drafted and would go to a magistrate, and the necessary paragraph of justification would describe activities of a flasher, a potential molester of women, in a residential side-street in Blankenese, and it would go through on the nod. It surprised him, when he reached his office, that there was no message for him reporting the progress of the British intelligence officer in unravelling the fugitive's story – what he did hear, in fulsome detail, was that every crew of Albanian foot-soldiers scoured the city's streets for a quarry.
She did not interrupt. She sat close to him, no longer smelt his clothes or his body.
'I left him there. He was all trussed up on the lamp post and there was no chance of him breaking the knots, and he'd the tape – half a dozen times – round his face. He couldn't shout. I put the toy gun back into my pocket, picked up what was left of the rope and the tape, and went home. I didn't feel good.
Felt sort of flat, sort of empty… In my mind I'd this picture of a ladder, and I was two rungs up it, and that was still nothing. Didn't feel I'd done anything. Knew it wasn't enough. There was this guy – don't even think about it, because I'm not telling you and you won't learn about him from me. He knew the way the pyramid was built. Above the pushers is the dealer, up higher than the dealer is the supplier. The dealer didn't give me what I needed – thought I needed.'
She could watch the main path through the garden.
From the bench, in the sunken area, through a gap in the surrounding bushes and through the light cloud of falling blossom, she saw them.
'I was told who supplied the estate's dealer. I went after him, went with a canister of petrol. I suppose, in terms of conscience, I could square it, but not easily. I didn't think I was an avenging angel – couldn't have said that what I did was the redemption road. The supplier was a target, and I needed a bigger and better target than a dealer.'
An older man, swarthy and short, was on the path and another walked on a thinly seeded space of grass to his right, but the older man made gestures to his left as if he directed more men who were under his command. Two joggers went past the older man but he seemed not to notice them. Swarthy, as if they were tanned from old exposure to the Mediterranean sun, and slight – the same complexions and the same build as the men who had carried clothes from the hotel doorway on Steindamm. She had told Malachy
Kitchen that a price was on his head.
'The supplier had this house out in the country.
Would have been worth near a million. I'm not ashamed of what I did, but I took no pleasure from it.
The family weren't there. I broke a window and spilled petrol inside… '
She saw the older man use his arm and fingers to point into the shrub bed above the small cobbled garden with the pond, where they were, where they sat on the bench, and she heard an answering cry but did not know the language.
'I slopped the carpet and curtains with the stuff, then I threw a match on to… '
Polly Wilkins, officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, a well-brought-up girl whose mother had lectured her as a teenager never 'to be easy', reached up – two hands – took his face in them, felt the roughness of unshaven cheeks and gulped. 'Kiss me.'
'… the petrol. God, it caught, half burned my face and… '
'Do it, you bloody fool,' she hissed. 'Kiss me.'
She could have laughed. On his face was shock, then bewilderment, then a sort of naked terror. He had no idea why… She pulled him closer, her lips on his face but he screwed his mouth away.
'Not for fun, idiot. Do it like you mean it.'
He softened. Maybe he had heard, now, a heavy breath spurt behind his shoulder, maybe he had heard the snap of a dead twig under a shoe. She did it like she meant it, lips on lips. She had her eyes almost closed, as if passion gripped her, and she saw a younger man hovering in the bushes and gazing down on her. She thought he was coming closer. She screwed her tongue between the teeth.
She growled at him, 'Use your bloody hands.'
He did. Like she was precious, might break, his hands came up and caught her shoulders and he pulled her nearer him. Two rainsodden bodies entwined and his mouth was opened wider and her tongue could roam more fully. God, and the taste of his mouth was foul. And his clothes stank… Polly Wilkins had not tongue-kissed a man since that pathetic creep, Dominic, had flown to Buenos Aires – had near forgotten how to. The man standing above her, with the bushes waist high around him, watched, and then there was a shout from where the main path would have been, and the rustle of his feet as he moved away. He might look back. She kept her tongue in place and let the hands hold her shoulders.
When the voices were distant, low, she broke away and gasped.
'Don't get any bloody ideas.'
The colour flooded his skin under the bristle growth on his cheeks. 'No.'
'They'd have had you,' she said, with emphasis, as if the explanation was important. She rattled on, 'Did you know how badly you stink? No, you wouldn't…
Right, where were we?'
'I fired the supplier's home, perhaps a million pounds of it.'
'You said, "but I took no pleasure from it". Right?'
'Right.'
The laughter burst in Polly. 'Didn't seem to me you took much pleasure from what's just happened.'
'I'm grateful to you.'
'Don't, please, bloody thank me. That I cannot take.'
She stiffened, touched her hair, smoothed her skirt and eased away from him. 'Where were we? Yes, we were into assault, probably grievous bodily harm, and we've just hit arson. What's next, Malachy?'
She could have bitten the tongue that had been far into his mouth. He winced. She thought she had wounded a man already hurt and down. Damage done. She did not apologize. What she knew of Malachy Kitchen had come in a terse one-page signal from Gaunt that was bald and without humanity. It would have been easier for her to sit as judge and jury on him if he had made a callow admission of guilt or had writhed behind a catalogue of mitigation. He had said: 'I don't know what happened – everybody else does, but not me.' She'd thought he spoke the truth.
She had tapped into vulnerability and she felt ashamed of her laughter.
Polly said quietly, 'You burned down the home of a supplier, but you were still short of satisfaction. What had happened to you, everything, conspired to goad you forward – as if, Malachy, you're on a treadmill.
But they always go faster, don't they, treadmills? So, who is above the supplier?'
'I had a name given me. Ricky Capel of Bevin Close, that's south-east London. He was the importer.'
'Going there, that's climbing higher,' she said bleakly. 'Higher than most would have.'
'Going there got me a kicking.'
She saw, for the first time, a smile – rueful, uncertain
– crack his cheeks, and she listened and believed she could comprehend the burden of shame that had driven him. She thought it past the time for laughter, and for goa
ding him. He told the story of it with detachment, as if another man had been kicked in the face – and she could taste the stale scent of his mouth.
'I really appreciate this, Mr Rahman/ Ricky Capel babbled. 'I gave my word to my grandfather, to old Percy, that I'd come here. He's never been himself, but it was important to him that I came. They were his friends – could have been him if they hadn't shipped him out the squadron and sent him to Egypt. I'm grateful you've taken the time.'
There was a shrug and a wallet was produced.
Money was passed to him, and Ricky ducked his head in thanks. He chose, from the flower-seller at the gates, two bunches of red roses, each with a half-dozen blooms. In the car he sat in the back seat and water ran from the roses' stems on to his trouser leg.
He looked around him and saw the high mature trees of the cemetery and the banks of rhododendrons.
Couldn't say when it had last happened to him, and it was not a mood he liked, but he felt moved by the great quiet of the place. He had not been to a cemetery since his grandmother, Winifred, had been buried, and it had pissed with rain and his best suit had never been right afterwards – and he hadn't cared about her death because the old woman had loathed him. He thought this place lovely. The Bear stopped the car. Ricky climbed out, but Rahman waved for him to leave the flowers on the seat – which confused him, but he followed Rahman.
They walked to a wide space among the trees, where long grass made a cross, with a square, high-walled building at its heart. There were no markers here of individual graves, not like he'd seen on TV.
Each of the grassed lengths, he reckoned, was at least a hundred yards long.
'What's this, then?'
Rahman said, sarcastic, 'It is what the friends of your grandfather did, Ricky. It is where German people are. They died from the bombs when the RAF made the firestorm. The air burned. Prisoners from a concentration camp dug the pits and there are more than forty thousand souls buried here. In one week, more than forty thousand.'
'Well – Nazis, weren't they?'
'I expect some, Ricky, were children.'
Rat Run Page 33