The Devil's Breath

by Hurley, Graham

  The restaurant was small and bleak, half a dozen tables, all empty. A waiter emerged from the gloom at the back and greeted Inge by name, wiping the tiny bar with his sleeve. Inge smiled at him, pulling on a cardigan against the sudden chill, bending to greet a small black cat. The cat walked sideways towards her, mewing a welcome, sniffing at her outstretched fingers, winding itself around her legs. The cat knows her, thought Telemann, the waiter too. She’s been here before.

  They sat at a table near the bar. The waiter brought two beers and a bottle of white wine. He set a third place at the table and glanced enquiringly at the wine. Inge nodded. He uncorked the bottle and fetched a single wine glass from behind the bar, wiping it with a dishcloth and laying it carefully beside the empty place. Inge glanced at her watch, then looked up at the waiter. ‘Fünf minuten,’ she said with a smile.

  Telemann looked at her, thinking yet again of Otto Wulf, the name the girl had mentioned, the conversational grenade lobbed into their musings in the car. The details were common knowledge. The man had been a giant in Germany for at least a decade. Too young to be tainted by Nazism, too successful and too rich to be treated with anything less than respect, he’d embodied the very best of Kohl’s bustling new Republic. A chemist by training, but a businessman by instinct, he’d never accepted the permanence of the post-war settlement of Germany. As his interests in the West had prospered, he’d looked increasingly across the border, towards the East, for fresh opportunities, and he’d celebrated his fortieth birthday by endowing a million-Deutschmark fellowship at the University of Leipzig. Wulf’s contacts in the East had always been extensive, and in Washington he’d long been regarded as Moscow’s favourite German. This had cast a certain shadow on his international reputation, but by the late eighties his business interests in the DDR looked like simple foresight. He’d anticipated reunification by at least a decade and now – with the Wall down – he was reaping the profits. Germans, Telemann knew, loved him. Imposing, powerful, eternally tanned, he and his family featured regularly on the front covers of certain kinds of magazine. In middle-class circles, amongst the prosperous burghers of a resurgent Germany, Wulf was ‘jemand der’s kann’ … excellent news.

  Telemann sipped at his beer, still watching the girl. She was back at the bar, talking to the waiter. For the last hour, in the car, he’d tried to press her about Wulf, but she’d refused to elaborate, changing the subject, shrugging his questions aside. When he’d pushed her hard – Why the mistress? Why the meeting? – she’d finally turned on him, telling him not to be impatient, telling him he’d simply have to wait.

  The door opened. Telemann glanced round. A woman stepped into the restaurant. She was middle-aged, small and blonde, still beautiful, tastefully dressed, a wide, slightly Slavic face. She hung up her raincoat on a hook behind the door, immediately at home, and unknotted a red silk scarf around her neck. Seeing Inge by the bar, she waved. Inge ran across to her, the first real smile Telemann had seen. The two women embraced and Telemann stood up as they turned towards the table.

  ‘Herr Telemann … Frau Weissmann.’

  Telemann nodded a greeting and extended a hand. The woman’s touch was cold. Her smile had gone. She looked wary. They all sat down while the waiter poured a glass of wine. A large plate of black bread had appeared from the kitchen. The waiter left it in the middle of the table. Inge, immediately businesslike, explained briefly that Telemann was a friend. She should trust him. She should tell him everything.

  The older woman looked briefly doubtful, reaching for the wine. She picked for a moment or two at a crust of bread, then shrugged. Telemann, wondering whether to seed the conversation with a prompt or a question, decided against it. The two women had already talked. He could sense it. Frau Weissmann glanced at Inge for a last time, then looked down at the table. There was a long silence.

  ‘You know why I’m here?’ Telemann said finally. ‘You know why I’ve come?’

  The woman nodded. She spoke good English, barely accented. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you think you can help?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  There was another long silence. The bread lay between them on the table. The waiter had disappeared. Telemann looked at Inge again, wondering for the umpteenth time exactly how much she knew. In the cottage, talking to Klausmann, Telemann had never mentioned the threat of New York. The question had never been asked, and he’d volunteered nothing of his own. Yet the direction their conversation had taken made little sense without, at the very least, a suspicion that somebody was on the loose, with access to something chemical. That had been the sub-text. You didn’t have to say it to know it. It was simply there.

  Telemann looked at Frau Weissmann again. Her fingers were back around the stem of the wine glass. She was having a lot of trouble coming to the point.

  Telemann leaned forward. ‘You know Herr Wulf?’ he said.

  The woman nodded. ‘I was his secretary. Here, in Halle. There were four of us. I was the most senior. I worked for him for eight years. I knew—’ she shrugged ‘—everything.’

  Telemann looked at her, his voice quickening. ‘He ran a company here? In Halle?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked up, nodding towards the window. ‘Littmann Chemie. He ran it in partnership with the State. Back when …’ She smiled and shrugged again, an expression of weariness.

  ‘… there was a State?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly.’

  ‘You miss all that?’

  The woman looked up at him for the first time, the trace of a smile on her lips. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘in some ways I do.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here? Talking to me? Now?’ He paused. ‘Or is it more personal?’

  The woman looked at him for a moment longer, refusing to answer, then she turned to Inge and began to speak to her in German. Her voice was very low yet vehement, her hands clasping and unclasping, the anger evident in her face. As hard as he tried, Telemann could make little sense of what she was saying. It was an intensely private language, gestures as well as words. Finally, the woman stopped, her finger on the table, her last point made. Inge nodded and glanced up. She looked startled, like a child after a surprise scolding. ‘Frau Weissmann is happy to talk to you about Herr Wulf and about Littmann Chemie. But nothing else. You understand?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Nothing personal.’

  ‘Fine by me.’ Telemann nodded, his hands upturned on the table, a gesture of apology. ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was another silence, then the older woman leaned forward again, the hesitation quite gone. She spoke for perhaps half an hour, without interruption. She explained that her relationship with Otto Wulf had been close and that he’d trusted her with a number of sensitive files. Certain of these files related to customers with whom Littmann would not normally have done business. Some of them, she’d come to suspect, were cover names for Middle East terror organizations.

  On a number of occasions, she’d accompanied Wulf on three-day trips to the Baltic island of Rugen. There, as well as top names in the State nomenklatura, she’d met dozens of young terrorists, Palestinians mostly. They trained for periods of three or six months. They learned about field-craft, explosives, small-arms, surveillance. They were schooled in the ways of the West. They were taught how to lie low in big cities, how to fade into the urban background. These skills they picked up from the DDR’s finest, and they then returned to their sponsors to put the theory into practice.

  Talking about these eager young recruits, their spirit, their trust, their enthusiasm, Telemann got the impression that she’d rather liked them. The word she twice used was ‘Kinder’. Children. Evidently, Wulf had liked them too. Though for different reasons. At this point in the monologue, Telemann had wanted to interrupt her, scenting more detail, but the expression on her face froze the question on his lips, and he smiled, apologetic again, and gestured for her to carry on.

  The story returned to Halle. Amongst other che
micals, Littmann produced dimethylamine. With odium cyanide and phosphoryl chloride, you could make a variety of nerve gases. It was, she said dismissively, a simple process. The company had been doing it for years, supplying thousands of gallons for the armies of the Warsaw Pact. She spoke of Littmann’s track-record with some pride. In this particular field, she said, their product was the best. Worldwide, it had an unrivalled reputation. It was very stable, very effective, the kind of stuff you could trust. Telemann listened to her without expression, thinking of the bodies he’d seen in the Bellevue morgue and the grainy shots of mothers and children lying in the dust in Halabja. She might have been talking about lager.

  Sitting in the empty restaurant, her body bent towards the table, her fingers endlessly circling the wine glass, she warmed to her theme. Littmann had always been scrupulous about end-users, the customers to whom various gases had been sold. Recently, though, she’d begun to suspect that the rules had been broken. For whatever reason, in an increasingly complicated life, Otto Wulf had decided to supply small quantities of what he termed ‘Jaegermeister’ to a new outlet. Six months ago, 10 gallons of ‘Jaegermeister’ had left the factory gates, together with some primitive dispensers. The consignment had been coded as ‘industrial detergent’ and, to her knowledge, only two men shared the secret of what was really inside the two 5-gallon drums. One of them worked directly for Wulf in West Germany, and the other had been killed in a recent auto accident. At this point, the wine bottle three-quarters empty, she stopped.

  Telemann looked at her. Even the remains of his jet-lag couldn’t hide his excitement. Otto Wulf. Bonn’s favourite businessman. Peddling nerve gas to the rag-heads.

  ‘Three questions,’ he said softly. ‘Then I go.’

  The woman looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. ‘OK.’

  ‘One. Do you have any paperwork? A file, maybe? Something I can look at?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘No. I no longer work for Herr Wulf.’

  ‘OK.’ Telemann paused. ‘Then I need the name of the guy who works for Wulf. The one you mentioned just now.’

  The woman nodded, but said nothing. Telemann hesitated for a moment, then leaned forward again. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Number three. I need to know what Jaegermeister is.’ He glanced up. ‘Jaegermeister,’ he repeated. ‘What is it?’

  The woman looked across at Inge and smiled. Then she nodded at the bar, over her shoulder, a private joke. ‘It’s a drink,’ she said finally. ‘Curls your toes.’

  ‘I know. But …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘What is it really?’

  The woman reached for the last of her wine and raised her glass, a toast. ‘It’s Tabun,’ she said. ‘Tabun GA.’

  An hour later, back in the car. Telemann settled back into the firm, cool leather. The woman had left the restaurant without waiting for a meal. She and Inge had embraced at the door, an exchange of kisses, a word or two of German, and then she’d gone. Behind her, on the table, she’d left a single sheet of paper with a name and an address. Mahmood Assali. 4/121 Friedrichstrasse, Bad Godesberg. Below it, in large capitals, she’d written the word ‘Wannsee’. ‘Wannsee’, she’d said, was the name they’d used for the file. Mention the word to Mahmood, and he’d know at once what it meant.

  Now, in the car, Telemann glanced across at Inge. The meal had been better than he’d expected, and a small celebratory glass of schnapps had mellowed a little of his impatience. What he needed now was access to a secure phone, and that meant returning to Hamburg. He’d go to the US Consulate. He’d talk to Emery, get the story cross-checked and plot the next moves. In the meantime, though, there was still the question of motive. That, in some curious way, still bothered him.

  ‘This relationship Wulf had. With his mistress. What happened?’

  Inge looked across at him in the darkness. She didn’t reply. Telemann pressed the point. ‘He did have a mistress?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  Inge shrugged. ‘He had an affair with her. He took what he wanted. He made all the usual promises. And then—’ she shrugged again ‘—he left her.’

  ‘How long? How long did this take?’

  ‘Five years.’

  ‘Five years? And he was serious?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘In love? Bells? Whistles? All that stuff?’

  ‘He said so.’

  ‘Any complications?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Ah …’ She smiled, white teeth in the darkness. ‘Is that what you call them? Complications?’

  ‘Well?’

  There was a long silence. Then she nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘One. A little boy. Nikki.’

  Telemann looked at her for a moment or two, remembering Frau Weissmann in the restaurant, her hands clasped tight, the private life she’d refused to share. At her age, a child would have been a small miracle, all the more cause for the bitterness and the rage.

  ‘Is that why she told me about Wulf? Because of Nikki? Her child?’

  There was another silence. Across the road, two dogs were fighting over a parcel of bones. Inge was watching them, her head turned away.

  Telemann leaned forward. ‘Well?’ he said.

  A car swept past and the dogs slunk away. Inge looked at him. She was laughing.

  Telemann frowned. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

  ‘You think Frau Weissmann was Wulf’s mistress?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Truly?’ She savoured the word. ‘Truly?’

  ‘Yes.’ Telemann stared at her. ‘She’s not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who is she?’

  ‘She’s my mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Ja. Meine mutti.’

  ‘So who was the mistress?’

  Inge looked at him for a moment longer, the laughter quite gone. Then she reached for the ignition keys.

  ‘Me,’ she said softly. ‘I was his mistress.’

  7

  The old man, Abu Yussuf, sat beside the water-cooler in the semi-darkness, listening to the machine they called the Regulator. Every hour, throughout the night, it buzzed. The buzz was high-pitched and insistent, impossible to ignore. It lasted for exactly a minute, and it meant that the old man must find his plastic card, and get to the machine, and insert the brown strip of oxide into the slot at the side, a single pass, in and out, less than a second. Then the buzzer would stop, and at the end of his shift, with dawn purpling the sky over Queens, the machine would speak to him again, a long white tongue of paper, proof that he’d stayed all night, the ever-faithful janitor. The paper, his attendance log, he’d leave in a wire tray on a desk in the reception area, ready for collection by the duty secretary. That way, they knew he wasn’t cheating them. That way, he kept his job.

  Sighing, the old man got up and crossed the corridor. The machine was in a small utility room, beside a drinks dispenser. The old man felt in his dungarees for the card and fed it into the machine. The buzzing stopped. Retrieving the card, he fumbled in his pocket for small change and exchanged a quarter and two dimes for a can of Pepsi. Opening the Pepsi, he crossed the corridor again, a different office this time, one he’d yet to clean. Opening the office with his master key, he reached for the light switch, blinking in the sudden glare of the overhead neon, as awed as ever by the huge expanse of carpet and the crescent of padded leather sofa, and the way that Mr Aramoun had positioned his desk, back to the window, dominating the room.

  The old man inched forward, the can of Pepsi still in his hand, his eyes never leaving the desk. There were two phones on the desk, and one of them, he was sure, would carry him through to Ramallah. He glanced at his watch. It was two minutes past three, the middle of a hot New York night. The offices along the corridor were empty. He knew that because he’d cleaned them all. No one would return until the first secr
etaries at seven, and even then they had to ring the security phone and wait until he shuffled along to the lobby and let them in. No, if he was to do it, if he was to still the voices in his head, then it had to be now, in the dead of night.

  The old man put his can carefully on the edge of Aramoun’s desk, and crossed to the big picture windows. Outside, Manhattan twinkled in the darkness, block after block. He gazed at the view for a moment, still amazed at the scale of the place, this huge city at his feet. Then he reached for the pull on the venetian blinds. The blinds came clattering down, shielding him from the world outside. Now, he thought. Now is the time.

  Beginning to sweat a little, he searched in his pocket for the slip of paper. He’d spent the latter half of the afternoon in the public library over in Newark. The girl at the information desk, Turkish or maybe Armenian, had been very kind. She’d found the international directory for him. She’d written down the number he had to dial. First the numbers for Israel. Then the number for Ramallah. Then, last of all, the numbers for Amer Tahoul. Amer Tahoul worked in the Treasurer’s Department in the Municipality Buildings in Ramallah. Amer Tahoul was his wife’s brother. He’d know what had happened. He’d know why the letters had suddenly stopped.

  The old man found the slip of paper and flattened it on the desk. He reached for the Pepsi and took a sip, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. His hand, he noticed, was shaking. He looked at the phone for a moment, weighing the odds again, wondering whether they kept some kind of check on the calls, a strip of paper like the Regulator, something they’d confront him with, something that would bring this strange new life of his to an abrupt end.

  So far, he knew, he’d done well. Even the boy, in his own way, had been surprised by the job he’d done on the car, the drum installed in the trunk, not a drop of liquid spilled, not a single trace of leakage around the connections to the pressure-hose. The boy had watched him at work in the garage, bent over the trunk, wrestling the heavy drum into place with spanners and a big hammer. Once, just once, he’d looked up, asking for help, an extra pair of hands, surprised to see the youth standing beside him, staring down at the drum, his face invisible behind a huge rubber gas mask. The old man had laughed at him, a small act of revenge for the weeks of scorn and insult, mocking the boy’s caution, his timidity. Not even women took such precautions against the Israeli gas, he’d said, watching the boy’s eyes, unsmiling, behind the thick discs of ground glass.