Authors: Gerald Seymour
Timo Rahman's arms were folded across his chest, seemed to make him stronger, more powerful. Looming behind him was the brute of the man who had driven him to the house, who had served him at the table, who was always close, who still held the pistol. Rahman said, a gentle sing-song pitch, 'From England, Ricky, you come to my house as my guest. At my house, Ricky, you are given my hospitality. We agree?'
'Yes, I agree.'
'I say to you, Ricky, and you should believe me, that never has a thief or an intruder come to my house since my family and I moved to Blankenese. Any thief or intruder would prefer to attack the home of the police chief of Hamburg than risk my anger and retribution. You come, and my house is attacked, and this coat is left on my garden fence.'
'Never seen it before, Mr Rahman, never.'
On the coat, faint but recognizable, was the smell of petrol.
'My housekeeper had hold of his coat, but he slipped from it and went over the fence - and you have never seen it before?'
'It's what I said, Mr Rahman.'
'And the label of the coat is from Britain. I think Harris tweed is from Britain, and in the lining under a hole in the pocket, in two pieces, is a train ticket, Victoria to Folkestone, and they are in Britain. Ricky, what should I think?'
'Don't know, can't help you -1 never saw that coat before, honest.' His voice was shrill. 'That's the truth.'
'As your grandfather would have told you, Ricky, in Albania we live by a code of
besa.
It is the word of honour. No Albanian would dare to break it. It is the guarantee of honesty. Can you imagine what would happen to a man whose guarantee of honesty and truthfulness is found to fail?'
'I think I can,' Ricky said, breathy. 'Yes.'
'And you do not know who wore the coat?'
He seemed to see, from the doorway of his home in Bevin Close, the short-arm jab that dropped the man at Davey's feet, seemed to see the bundle of the man on the pavement made larger by the size and thickness of the brown overcoat. Seemed to hear Davey:
Some bloody vagrant scum, Ricky.
Seemed to feel the recoil in his shoe when he had kicked the face above the overcoat's upturned collar . . . seemed to hear, clear, Davey:
On his coat, he had the stink of petrol.
Seemed to see George Wright's place, burned, and heard what George Wright, his leg fractured, had yelled about kids on the Amersham estate and a dealer, and a line from bottom to top:
I want to be there,
watch it, when it's your turn.
He hadn't Davey at his back, and he hadn't Benji and Charlie at his shoulder
. . . Had no one to tell him what sort of crazy idiot, a mad dog, went after pushers and a dealer, a supplier and an importer, and turned up at the place of an untouchable who ran a city. If he had stood, his legs would have been weak and his knees would have shaken. Anyone knew, Ricky Capel knew, what
Albanians would do to enforce a contract. Himself, he had Merks on hire, from shit-face Enver, with baseball bats to kill a man who was late with payment, had seen them used on a man strapped to a chair.
'I swear it. I never seen that coat, not on anyone . . .
First thing, I'll do the boat, like you said. I'll get it over here.'
With their second bottle of Slovenian wine, their favourite, which they had carried off the ferry, the couple from Dusseldorf discussed their ill luck. Both had taken a week away from work to travel
to their holiday home on the island of Baltrum.
The man, a chemist, said, 'The forecast is foul. You have to book vacation days away. Of course it is chance, but you are entitled to look for breaks in weather even before Easter. I spoke to Jurgen at the shop, and he says it is only storms that we can expect.
I tell you, the day we go home, it will change.'
She, the principal of a school for infants, said, 'You can't go on the roof, clear the gutters and check the tiles in this wind. You cannot paint the window-frames and the doors, which need it, in the rain. I cannot air the bedding and the rugs. It's hopeless.'
It had been the intention of the chemist and his teacher wife to open up their home and let the fresh air waft through it after its winter closure; each spring it was necessary to add a fresh layer of paint to the outside woodwork.
She drank, then grimaced. 'Have you seen
him?'
His face, already sour from the prediction of the weather, cracked in annoyance. 'Sadly, he has survived the winter. I have not seen him, but have heard him. He came back through the rain after dark.
The door slammed. That is how I know he is there.'
They tried hard, both of them, to ignore their neighbour, who was one of the few twelve-months-a-year residents on the island. It was four years since they had bought the perfect home to escape from the pressure-cooker life of the city. The first summer there they had brought with them their grandchildren, two small, lively kids, who had kicked a football on their little patch of grass at the back and each time the ball had crossed the wire fence dividing their property from their neighbour's garden there had been increasing rudeness when the chemist had asked permission to retrieve it. The children had been reduced to tears and had not come during another summer.
He said, 'I wonder what he does all those months when we are not here, who he insults.'
She said, 'I think we are a recreation for him.'
'He is a man of misery, he takes happiness from it.'
'Death, when it finds him, will be a blessed relief -
for us.'
They laughed grimly, chiming a cackle together.
The second summer they had left a note on Oskar Netzer's door inviting him to join them for a drink that evening. He had come, had filled their bijou furnished living room with the odour of a body long unwashed, and they had shown him the architect's plans drawn up in Dusseldorf for an extension of a garden room topped by a third bedroom and a shower cubicle. He had refused the drink, then had refused to endorse the plan - they had thought it commensurate with every environmental and aesthetic consideration. He had rubbished the architect's drawings.
Through the rest of that summer, the following winter and into the third summer, their neighbour had fought the plan in Baltrum's
Rathaus
committees: its size, its materials, its concept. Last summer they had consigned the plan to the rubbish bin, had given up on the project. Last year when they had been at their house, if he came out into his garden they went inside.
They had nothing to say to him, and he made no secret of his opinion that they were intruders and unwelcome - but his death would come, and their liberation.
He said, 'I cannot imagine a life so detached from reality. They say that even when his wife was alive he was no different.'
She said, 'That woman, she must have suffered. It is not possible she could have been the same.'
'You never see newspapers outside the house for the rubbish, you never hear a radio. There is no television. He must know nothing of the world he inhabits.'
'Would not know about the economy, its down-
turn? The unemployment...'
'Would not care, isolated here.'
'Would not know about the war, in Iraq? Not know about the terrorists . . . '
'Ignorance - stubborn, obstinate, hate-filled ignorance. So pathetic, to be at the autumn of life and to realize, deep in your heart, that you will do nothing in your last days that is valuable, nothing that is respected.'
A memory for both of them, when they had packed up the house at the end of the last summer and loaded the trolley to wheel it to the ferry, had been the lowering and gloom-laden face of Oskar Netzer behind a grimy window. At home in Duisseldorf, each time they spoke of their neighbour, anger grew, and they had to stifle it or accept that he hurt their love of the island and their small home.
He poured the last of the wine from the second bottle into his wife's glass. 'You are right, my love. He would reject any action that made him loved, respected.'
She drank, then cackled in laughter and the drink spurted from her lips. 'Sorry, sorry . . . His ducks will love him. The bloody ducks will mourn him when he's dead, no one else.'
The wind hit their windows and the rain ran
on them, and the curtains fluttered, and next door to them - unloved - their neighbour slept.
'You can take him. Please, get him out of here.'
'Don't know that I want him.'
'Remove him, Miss Wilkins.'
'If you say so.'
She had sent her signal, encrypted on the laptop.
Coffee had kept her awake while she'd typed. She followed Johan Konig out of the side room and back into his office.
'Squeeze it from him, why he was at the Rahman house.'
'Without your help?'
'If I hold him I have to charge him and put him before a court. It is not a road I wish to follow.'
'Understood.'
He passed her the plastic bag, then turned his back on her. For a moment she looked around the bare room, which, she had decided, displayed a man's aloneness and a life without emotion. She fastened on the one item that showed humanity - a photograph of a hippopotamus in a muddied river with a white bird on its back. In her imagination, she delved into Konig's past. Perhaps a holiday in east Africa with a wife or a partner, and that was a favourite picture.
Maybe the wife or partner had now left him or had died. She reckoned it involved a sadness. She betrayed herself, her eyes lingered too long on it.
'It is the better to understand them,' Konig said.
'What do you mean?'
'The better to understand them in Berlin, now in Hamburg.'
She said quietly, 'I assumed it was something personal.'
'God, no . . . The better to understand the men who control organized crime, to understand Rahman. The hippopotamus is the society in which we live, and the bird is the godfather. The egret, the bird, is not the enemy of the hippopotamus. Instead it fulfils a need of that great creature by picking off its back the parasites that will damage its skin. It is a symbiotic relationship - the hippopotamus provides sustenance for the bird, the bird returns gratitude by cleaning the hippopotamus's back. They need each other. Society wants drugs, prostitutes and sex shows, and the godfather gives it. He does not leech the blood of society, he merely provides a service that is demanded. That is why the picture is there, to remind me of reality.'
'What is the relationship between the bird, the godfather and terror cells?'
He pressed a small button on the leg of his desk.
'Again, symbiosis. The bird goes wherever there are parasites. Parasites are money. The terror cells have money, safe-houses and conduits for weapons. If there is benefit from co-operation you will find the egret there. Do not imagine, Miss Wilkins, that Timo Rahman steps back on the dictates of conscience or morality when there are parasites to feed off. The picture tells me much.'
She grimaced. 'I suppose so.'
'Take him.'
She held the plastic bag. 'Yes, I will.'
A man stood in the outer door, blinking in the bright light and she recognized him as the one who had brought the relays of coffee since they had emerged from the basement cell block.
'May I offer you advice? The power of Timo
Rahman in this city stretches far, wide. He has a network of clan leaders, who control the foot-soldiers. All of them will, by now, be out searching for an Englishman who dared to violate "sacred" territory, Rahman's home. Keep him safe, Miss Wilkins, or he will be hurt, severely, and so will you, if you are with him. I warn you, and you should listen to me.'
'That's a cheerful message to start the day.'
The night-duty man led her away along the
corridor. They went down three floors in an elevator.
Down more flights of stairs. She realized then that none of the big battalions marched with her.
She had no weapon and no back-up to call on. The cell door was unlocked. He lay on the bed.
She threw the plastic bag at his head and it cannoned into his face. His eyes burst open.
'Come on/ she snapped. 'My options were shifting you out or learning more about the hygiene habits of hippopotami -1 chose you. Move yourself.'
He looked up at her, eyes glazed with bewilderment, and shook himself.
From the bag, he took the belt and slotted it into his trousers. He laced his shoes, put the watch on his wrist and hung the tags at his throat. Then she took him out into the last of the night's darkness.
His train had been delayed, a points failure on the track south of Lincoln, and the taxi queue at the station had been endless. By the time he returned to his office, the bells behind Big Ben's clock face were chiming midnight. Gaunt found the signal. Because it rambled and was strewn with typescript errors, he thought his precious Polly suffered acute exhaustion.
Most of the others of her age who had desks scattered through the building popularly known as Ceausescu Towers - but not Wilco - would have gone to their beds and then, after toast and coffee, have composed a report without errors of syntax, punctuation, spelling. She had responded, and he blessed her, to her understanding of urgency.
The signal, and he had read it four times before he unfolded the camp-bed and shook out the blankets, was a masterclass in confusion - yet there was clarity.
A clear enough link, he believed, now existed between a fugitive escaping from Prague, a co-ordinator, and a considerable player in Hamburg's community of organized crime, a high-value target.
The lights switched off, his jacket and waistcoat, shirt, tie and suit trousers over the hanger on the back of the door, his shoes neatly laid at its foot, he stretched himself out on the bed, and spread a blanket over him. God, was this not business that should be consigned to the young? Work tossed in his mind, and in his hand - gripped tight - was the sheet of paper that described a man rescued from the security fence around that HVT's property. A name, a date of birth, a six-digit service number, a blood group, an occupation of government service, a tongue that stayed silent and a British-issued passport.