by R. J. Dillon
Nick caught Mitch’s eyes and Döbeln’s mealy little stare as he moved up, both watching him suffer in their different ways. The nylon curtain whisked away for a second time. I name this body... He stared through the plexiglass, his mouth dry. Shrouded from the neck down Oskar lay on a chipped enamel trolley. Shrivelled and crinkled his face still had a rugged dignity, one he’d seen collapse into a smile, flare into a temper or look just plain childish. In some countries Nick knew, they stitched eyes closed after they’d been emptied by bullets; but here they’d no need with so little of Oskar left. An uncanny tint covered Oskar’s peeling deflated flesh where propellers hadn’t mauled it. What’s the rest of the body like if his head’s this bad? Very nice, wonderful, someone will be able to tell his ex-wife that he looked at peace. Colours and texture of corpses, he’d had the full range since that night on the highway in Russia.
‘It’s Oskar.’
Out of her pocket the clerk took her biro and hoisted the clipboard forward for Nick to sign, as though she needed his autograph.
‘He was married, yes, had children?’ Döbeln enquired, knotting his belt for the hundredth time.
‘Split up, she threw him out,’ said Nick, remembering how Petra had to routinely fend off Oskar’s advances as he bluffed and charmed her that he’d something valuable to sell. ‘They had a couple of children, two I think.’
‘Is this her?’ Döbeln asked, taking a photograph out of his pocket. ‘Have you met her?’
Was it official procedure that they could only view one corpse, as though two would be too much? wondered Nick. He took the police photographer’s profile of the dead waitress who’d served him at his table before Sabine entered for her big scene.
‘Never seen her before,’ he said.
‘How about you?’ Döbeln asked Harney, taking the photograph from Nick and passing it on.
‘One of Oskar’s sources, I guess,’ said Mitch. ‘I met her once.’
‘How was she killed?’ asked Nick.
‘They were recovered handcuffed together,’ Döbeln disclosed.
‘Buddies for ever,’ said Mitch, his eyes dark and livid with hate. ‘Can we finish this now?’
No more hot leads for you to fabricate, Oskar, thought Nick as they made their way back to administration, a fast procession returning to the living. Nick and Mitch waited while Döbeln formally closed the proceedings, a private affair conducted in a hush, the clerk smarting from the impropriety of having two unofficial witnesses there.
‘Sign here,’ Döbeln said to Harney, his finger pointing to the first box on a thin wad of four forms.
On a metal desk under a map of the port, all Oskar’s clothes and possessions sorted into piles beside a clear evidence sack and an inventory sheet still to be completed. As Harney added his details, Nick slid a long metal key fob with the name of a rooming house stamped in red towards him.
‘You also,’ called Döbeln and as Nick added his name, the fob was already securely in his pocket.
Outside, Mitch passed him a Marlboro as the port wandered on, ignorant of one small tragedy and loss. Nick thought of Oskar and the time he claimed to have a hot Middle East contact, only it turned out to be his brother-in-law; now that was cheek, a real headache for Petra to untangle.
‘What’s that?’ Mitch asked, as Nick mumbled something to himself.
‘A farewell,’ he explained, absently. ‘For someone that I pretended to know.’
‘Sure.’
At a slipway they ran out of room to walk and the port purred on, one loud animal hidden in the snow filled air. Döbeln left the morgue in a hurry, a man coming from a restaurant, testing the night air and scanning for a taxi. He spotted them and trotted across.
‘What’s the official verdict?’ Nick asked weary and weak, tired heavy patches under each eye.
‘A stabbing, they both had stab wounds, but probably drowned. Waste metal was used in their clothes as weights, but so many vessels in the port create a whirlpool, a spa. Everything is pushed to the surface eventually.’ Döbeln said as though he didn’t entirely agree with the theory. ‘I have more details to attend to. Please excuse me,’ said Döbeln trekking off across the quay’s frozen expanses to his car.
‘We need to talk,’ said Harney, ‘away from interruptions,’ he added nodding to Balgrey in his Volkswagen, before setting off for a quiet corner of the quay followed by Nick.
‘You want to explain?’ demanded Harney over his shoulder as they moved to the quay’s tip.
‘Meaning?’
‘Oskar,’ spat Harney. ‘Pretty convenient how he and his source were neatly terminated after you show up.’
‘Coincidence,’ retorted Nick.
‘My ass,’ said Harney turning, his rugged face thrust forward at Nick. ‘No one told me that this was an exclusive CO8 operation, you guys think you’re some sort of goddamn elite.’
‘But we didn’t get Oskar killed,’ yelled Nick pushing Harney out of his face. ‘You were so desperate for a piece of the action you scraped the barrel dry with Oskar.’
‘We’re invited to the ball whether you want it or not, okay?’ Harney snarled, shoving Nick hard in the chest.
A silence divided them and took them apart as the wash from a pilot boat patted the pier below their feet. Harney wheeled round. ‘We’ve lost eight agents in the last year. Now I want some of the goddamned action. Jesus, not think I’m owed even that?’
‘Join the queue and you’re owed jackshit.’
‘The deal’s already agreed, we’re in whether you like it or not,’ Harney snapped, closing his shoulders on Nick, striding off.
‘Good to see you two getting along, old son,’ Balgrey shouted as he brought up his car.
‘Go to hell, Jack,’ said Nick, lighting a cigarette.
‘Lift into town?’
‘Go to hell.’
‘See you there,’ laughed Balgrey, driving off.
A motor scooter with its throttle jammed madly back, came too fast across a chained bridge separating docking basins. Flicking his cigarette into breaking waves, Nick looked around. From the shore a dusky tint deepened shoals of snow, and a thousand different noises bubbled around his head; cars, trucks and generators, thrashing engines joined as one. Minibuses in shipping line colours discharged solemn faces for the voyage out and sped off. And how far will I have to go to find Lubov’s gold? Nick wondered, watching a police launch churning through the Elbe, riding propeller surf from tankers and cargo ships coming into the hafens of Steinwerder with the tide. He felt in his pocket, his fingers closing round the metal key fob and made his way off the quay in the falling snow.
A couple of metres up the road he took a taxi from a rank of Mercedes used by seamen with the same frequency as liberty boats. Drained yet alert with a sense of urgency, he rode silently into Hamburg; swept up along the Kohlbrand Bridge, then plunged under the river on the E45 autobahn. Nick with another dead face to remember and Hamburg didn’t even care, a city of traffic and human pleasure too busy to even slow down for the loss of a minor player named Oskar.
• • •
From his obsessive, and as it turned out to be, deadly fascination with all things espionage, Oskar had taken to practising the tradecraft of real and fictional spies he’d studied on film or read about, and had turned into a recluse. To keep clear water between him and his imaginary opposition he stayed for a couple of months in small hotels, paying up front, conscious of every footfall outside his door. Though his real reason for this elaborate subterfuge was that his wife had given him no option when she discovered he was having a string of affairs with women he’d duped into believing he was a secret agent. A woman of strong Lutheran conviction, his wife cast out his clothes onto the street rapidly followed by Oskar. Since then he’d been hiding from her lawyers and the last address he’d taken was on the key fob in Nick’s hand; a rooming house on Molingstraße, its number faint after years of frost and sun.
A caretaker was hunched over a portable televisio
n in his foyer booth when Nick strolled past, lifting his eyes only for a second, a seasoned veteran of knowing who to challenge, who to admit; he concentrated wisely on his programme.
Locking himself in to Oskar’s final sanctuary, Nick surveyed the wreckage. Across the carpet a deep earthy brown strain similar to blood, though once on his hands and knees Nick discounted it as human and thought it more probably wine, and confirmed it when he rolled out the bottle from under Oskar’s bed. As he straightened, brushing fluff off his knees, long quick steps clumped towards the room. He checked his breath not moving, his back against the wall. A key scraped in a lock opposite followed by a racking cough and a door slamming with a decadent bang.
He followed a path already set away from the wardrobe; a pair of jeans outstretched on the floor, one leg bent ready to sprint; socks, boxer shorts and a Press Club tie scattered in an uneven line. Eliminating the items as evidence of an unprofessional search, Nick went over to the washbasin and medicine cabinet screwed off-centre onto the wall. Razor, soap and toothbrush were dumped around a sliced open tube of dental paste. There was a power lead for a laptop but Nick couldn’t find it and knew it would be gone.
On a table used as a desk Nick went through Oskar’s homework in the form of magazines, maps and printed documents from a dozen security websites. Spilling from a laminate wardrobe, pairs of shoes ripped from their soles, collars and shirts torn clean to the seam. Sifting through other bits and pieces, part of his mind searched and another part listened for the return of those who’d made a mess of Oskar and his room; rung to be warned by the caretaker that he had a stranger nosing around, not a resident but someone he hadn’t seen before. Come quick and you’ll catch him.
And they might be on their way round right now for all Nick knew. He moved faster his hands picking up pace. By a broad window he stopped. The view didn’t interest him much, a plain standard paved square a few floors below didn’t exactly take his breath away, but the red window box drew his attention. The room’s light had picked something out in the compacted soil and clumps of weed. He wrenched back the clasp easing up the window and took a closer look. Of course it could be anything; foil, sliver of glass, anything bright would glint in this light. He scraped back the soil and lifted out a biscuit tin; oblong and new, not buried for very long. Carrying it over to the bed, he noted how its price tag was blistered and so too was its enamel.
Placing it on his knees Nick eased off its top, emptied strips of paper, and folded squares of newsprint until he found a dead pigeon that stank to high heaven. Tipping the pigeon out there was another bed of paper; beneath it a sealed postal packet inside a plastic bag. Thumbing open the stuck down flap he shook out a DVD. And Nick sat there holding what Sabine had died for and Sally Wynn was fatally prevented from retrieving. And poor Oskar for once had something that could really have made him into a legend, turned him into a genuine living and breathing secret agent as Harry Bransk’s contact; Oskar and his latest girlfriend from the Brazillia never realising how badly they’d get burnt.
From the way the room was searched and how Oskar and his friend were dealt with, Nick knew it wasn’t Moscow’s style, but Blümhof. At Oskar’s table Nick found Sellotape and a thick black marker pen. Resealing the postal packet, he wrote FEO – For Eyes Only – adding Rossan’s name in capitals below; before quickly checking the room for anything else he might have missed. As he pulled Oskar’s door closed after him, a racking cough followed him down the corridor, the postal packet snug in his pocket.
Eighteen
Twisting Jack’s Arm
Hamburg, December
From the rooming house Nick took a taxi to the Neederdorf Grill on Deichstraße, delivered by a chubby round driver with nailbrush hair who pulled up with a suicidal lurch for the kerb. He found Jack Balgrey at a corner table and joined him without an invitation. Keeping her distance at a banquette by the door, Erika didn’t even raise so much as an eyebrow in Nick’s direction as he walked by.
‘Drowning your sorrows, Jack? Been a pretty rough day back at the old import and export business has it?’ Nick asked.
‘Piss off, old son, can’t you see I’m busy.’
Jack had ordered his second bottle of house red and Nick helped himself to a glass, his first long sip ran sleepily through his body.
‘That’s not the way to treat an old friend. I thought we could have a few drinks together, our way of saying goodbye to Oskar.’
‘Really,’ grunted Balgrey, topping up his glass.
Stranded on a small stage in a corner a comedian finished off his routine, and a pianist took the spotlight, running through a standard repertoire of cocktail songs. Polite laughter and candle smoke, a happy melee as office parties unwound preparing for the festive season and compulsory family reunions.
‘Your tradecraft is slipping Jack,’ offered Nick. ‘Seems to have gone a little rusty,’ Nick added. ‘I heard a rumour that Hawick was in town, that you and him had a tête-à-tête.’
‘Someone’s pulling your chain, load of old guff,’ blustered Balgrey. ‘The Deputy Chief wanting to meet with me, pure cobblers old son, one hundred per cent cobblers.’
‘Yesterday, St. Pauli Landungsbrücken,’ said Nick, pushing a photograph captured by Erika and Freja across the table. One clear black and white image from a series taken in front of a ticket office offering harbour tours; framed against the impressive backdrop of the free ancient Hanseatic port, Jack and Hawick neatly caught cold.
‘Chance encounter, old son, one in a million,’ suggested Balgrey, sliding the photograph back.
‘Don’t get me angry Jack.’
Through the grill’s full windows a row of pretty merchants’ houses gleamed in the night. They offered ample distraction to pull away Jack’s thoughts from having to explain, though by now he realised there could be no more evasion, and Jack’s wayward stare as good as saying he knew he’d no options remaining.
‘Putting pressure on me wasn’t he,’ Balgrey stated pouring more wine, in desperate need of an anaesthetic. ‘Hawick was implying that my pension would be well and truly up the Swanee if I didn’t comply with London’s wishes.’
From Jack’s grim expression, Nick read a sense of hopelessness, a severance of another bond with his past.
‘What do London really want?’ asked Nick.
Glass cubes held small round candles and Jack’s heavy face was covered in licks of dancing light. ‘Your every move, who you met with, what you planned, even probably what you had for breakfast knowing Hawick.’
‘And how did they expect you to do that?’
‘I have my ways,’ said Balgrey with a seasoned drinker’s sly wink.
‘Would that include our mutual friend Harry?’
To what extent Harry Bransk featured in Jack’s equation seemed to require a further stimulant, and another bottle of wine was duly ordered. He made the wine his focus, a quarter of the bottle gone on Jack’s lamentations of his career shortcomings, his fragile marriage and uncertain future. They had the corner to themselves by an open fire, the flames reflected on oak panels as dark as ebony.
‘Harry’s been on the payroll since day one,’ said Jack, sullen, not bothering or caring to lift his eyes from his glass, turning it round and round on the tablecloth. ‘He’s another one to add to your list of certified double dealers, old son. And you can thank London for the intrusion,’ he said, a sneer flung in no definite direction.
‘Who authorised all this? Who’s running the show, Jack?’ Nick asked, politely.
‘Comes under the eagle eye of a Special Operations Directorate they’ve had running for a while,’ Balgrey moaned. ‘His Hawickness with Blackmore and Stratton all peering over my shoulder.’
‘London has put you in an impossible position,’ said Nick.
‘Strung up by my balls,’ growled Jack. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’
‘But you don’t have to take it lying down, Jack.’
‘Really, and how do I do that, old son?�
� Balgrey flared, glass in hand. ‘Got a solution for your uncle Jack have you?’
‘As a matter of fact I have,’ said Nick, sharing out more wine. ‘From now on you’re working exclusively for me.’
‘For you?’ Balgrey laughed, his heavy shoulders rocking. ‘I thought I was doing that already, old son. Giving you a lead on Oskar and Harney. What was that, a dream?’
‘That was you doing as your man from Cologne suggested. Working for me might just keep you alive long enough to collect your pension,’ said Nick, looking over his glass at Jack. ‘You can start by arranging a meeting with Harry, your usual routine, nothing to alarm him.’
‘What if I don’t want to be part of your team?’
‘That’s not an option you should even consider,’ said Nick
For the first time since he arrived Nick smiled, but it wasn’t what Jack regarded as friendly. ‘I want this to go priority to London, tonight, for Paul Rossan only,’ Nick advised him, sliding the postal packet from Oskar’s across to Balgrey as he rose to leave.
• • •
Mid-morning in Hamburg and Harry Bransk stoically waited for Jack Balgrey, kicking his toes against the polished floor in the Kunsthalle on Glockengießerwall. Harry displaying total concentration, affecting knowledge that he didn’t have. His hands rammed up to his wrists in his pockets, his head tilted at an angle pointed at Friedrich’s Wanderer. He hardly shifted his gaze as Nick came softly to his side.
‘You haven’t been straight with me, Harry.’
Faster than Nick anticipated Harry darted off, only for his exit to be blocked by a guided party entering from another gallery. Without ceremony or a word Nick took Harry’s arm and walked him quietly away, setting out on their own exclusive tour.
‘On my honour, Nick, I don’t know what you’re talking about, okay,’ Harry complained in a whisper, arms outstretched to emphasise his case. Nick sighed. He could smell Harry’s potent aftershave clinging to the purified filtered air around them; Finnish, aromatic, tossed on with liberal goodwill.