If I sleep, I shall return to prison, Annabel.
Tommy Brue was not in prison, but then neither was he sleeping.
By four o’clock of the same morning, he had stolen from the marital bed and tiptoed barefoot down the stairs to the study where he kept his address book. There were six numbers listed under “Georgie.” Five were crossed out. The sixth was marked “K’s cell phone” in his own hand.
K
for Kevin, her last known address. It was three months since he’d called it, and much longer since he’d succeeded in getting past Kevin. But this time something was urgently wrong with her and he knew it.
Don’t call it premonition. Don’t call it a panic attack. Call it what it is: a father’s fear.
Using his cell phone so that no telltale pin light should appear on the bedside phone at Mitzi’s head, he touched Kevin’s number, closed his eyes and waited to hear the slack-mouthed drawl informing him that, yeah, well, sorry about that, Tommy, but Georgie doesn’t feel like speaking to you right now, she’s okay, she’s great, but she kinda gets upset. But this time he was going to
demand
to speak to her. He was going to insist on his paternal rights, not that he had any. A burst of rock music entrenched his resolve. So did the recorded voice of Kevin advising him that if you really have to leave a message, man, maybe just leave it, but since nobody picks up messages much around here, why not hang up and call another time—until that message itself was cut short by a woman’s voice.
“Georgie?”
“Who is this?”
“Is that really Georgie?”
“Of course it’s me, Dad. Don’t you recognize my voice?”
“I just didn’t know you answered the phone. I wasn’t expecting it. How are you, Georgie? Are you all right?”
“I’m just great. Is something wrong? You sound awful. How’s the new Mrs. Brue? Jesus, whatever time is it over there? Dad?”
He was holding the phone at arm’s length while he collected himself. The new Mrs. Brue, eight years new. Never
Mitzi.
“Nothing’s wrong, Georgie. I’m great too. She’s asleep. I was just desperately worried about you for some reason. But you’re fine. You’re more than fine, I can hear. I was sixty last week. Georgie?”
Don’t challenge her, the odious Viennese shrink used to say. When she enters one of her silences, wait for her to come back.
“You didn’t sound
right
just now, Dad,” she complained, as if they had been chatting every day of the week. “I thought you were Kevin calling from the supermarket, but you were you. It just threw me.”
“I had no idea you used supermarkets. What’s he buying?”
“The whole store. He’s gone mad. This is a forty-year-old man who’s been living on pine nuts for ten years and says kids are the end of life as we know it. Now all he can think of is changing mats, Baby-gros with bunny ears, a cradle with frilly sides and a buggy with a sun visor. Is this how you went when Mum got pregnant? And me telling him we’re broke and he’s got to give all the stuff back.”
“Georgie?”
“Yes?”
“That’s amazing. That’s wonderful. I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I till about five minutes ago.”
“When’s it due, for heaven’s sake? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Not for about fifty years. Can you believe it? And Kevin acting like a pregnant father already? He even wants to marry me now that his book’s been accepted.”
“Book? Nobody told me he was even writing one.”
“It’s a how-to. Brains, diet and contemplation.”
“Marvelous!”
“And happy birthday, okay? Come see us some time. I love you, Dad. It’s going to be a girl. Kevin’s decided.”
“Can I send you some money? To help you along? For the baby? For the frilly cradle and stuff?” It was on the tip of his tongue to suggest fifty thousand euros, but he restrained himself and waited for her to come back.
“Maybe later. I’ll talk to Kevin and call you. Maybe frilly cradle money’s okay. Just not money like money instead of love. Give me your number again.”
For the nineteenth or ninetieth time in the past ten years, Brue spelled out his numbers: cell phone, house, the one that rings on my desk at the bank. Had she written them down? Maybe this time she had.
He poured himself a scotch. Wonderful, incredible news. The best he could have dreamed of.
Pity Annabel couldn’t tell him she was all right too. Because actually, as he now realized, it was Annabel, not Georgie, that he had been so worried about when he woke with a jump and crept downstairs.
In short then, what you might call a case of misdirected paranoia, as the odious Viennese shrink might have said.
This staircase is an imbecility.
I should never have bought the place.
All these perilous little nooks and twists and half landings: I could break my neck.
This rucksack weighs a ton. What the hell did we put in it?
The straps are cutting into my shoulders like wire.
One more flight, I’m there.
She had slept. After two wide-awake nights in her flat staring at the ceiling, a deep, dream-free, child’s sleep.
“Issa’s going to be very pleased with you, dear,” Erna Frey had assured her, waking her with a cup of coffee and then sitting on her bed. “You’ll be bringing him
just
the news he’s hoping for.
And
a lovely breakfast.”
She had said it again into the driving mirror, while Annabel crouched in the back with her bicycle, waiting to be launched down the hill to the harbor front. “Just remember there’s nothing in the least deceptive or dishonorable about what you’re doing, dear. You’re his bringer of hope and he trusts you. I put the yogurt in last. Your key’s in the right-hand pocket of your anorak. All set? Off you go, then.”
The new padlock sprang open, the iron door took both hands to push, soft music was playing over the radio, she thought Brahms. She stood in the doorway, filled with fear and shame and a sickening, hopeless sadness for what she was about to do. He lay prone beneath the arched window, on the bit of floor where he had his bed, his long body wrapped head to toe in a brown blanket with the top of his skullcap peeping out one end, and Karsten’s designer socks the other. Neatly arranged beside him lay everything he needed to accompany him to his next prison: the camel-skin bag, the black coat folded small, Karsten’s loafers and designer jeans. Was he naked apart from the socks and hat? She closed the door behind her but remained there, leaving the length of the loft between them.
“We shall depart for the clinic immediately, please, Annabel,” Issa announced from under the blanket. “Has Mr. Brue provided an armed guard and a malodorous gray bus with barred windows?”
“No bus, no armed guard, I’m afraid,” she called back cheerfully. “And no clinic either. You’re not going anywhere after all”—sidestepping towards the kitchen—“I’ve brought us an exotic breakfast to celebrate. Do you want to join me in here when you’ve got up? Maybe you want to pray.”
Silence. Shuffle of stockinged feet. She crouched to the fridge, opened the door, set the rucksack beside it.
“No clinic, Annabel?”
“No clinic,” she repeated, not hearing his footsteps anymore.
“Yesterday you tell me I must go to a clinic, Annabel. Now I must not go. Why?”
Where was he? She was too frightened to turn round. “It just wasn’t such a good move as we thought,” she said loudly. “Too much
bureaucracy.
Too many
forms
to fill in, awkward
questions
to answer”—Erna Frey’s suggestion—“we decided you were better off where you are.”
“We?”
“Mr. Brue. Me.”
Keep Brue between you, Bachmann had advised. If Issa sees him as a higher being, keep him that way.
“I do not understand your motivation, Annabel.”
“We changed our minds, that’s all. I’m your lawyer, he’s your banker. We looked at the options and decided you were best off here in my apartment, where you want to be.”
She found her courage and looked round. He was standing in the doorway, filling it, swathed in the brown blanket, a monk with coal dark eyes, watching her unpack the rucksack that had everything in it she’d told Erna Frey he liked: a six-pack of fruit yogurts, poppy-seed rolls oven-warm, Greek honey, sour cream, Emmental cheese.
“Was Mr. Brue depressed by the knowledge that he must pay a lot of money to the clinic, Annabel? Is this the reason why he changed his mind?”
“I told you the reason. Your own safety.”
“You are lying to me, Annabel.”
She stood up abruptly and swung round to face him. There was only a meter between them. At any other time she would have respected the invisible exclusion zone that kept them apart, but this time she held her ground.
“I am
not
lying to you, Issa. I am telling you that, for your own good, there has been a change of plan.”
“Your eyes are bloodshot, Annabel. Have you been drinking alcohol?”
“No, of course I haven’t.”
“Why
of course,
Annabel?”
“Because I don’t drink alcohol.”
“Do you know him very well, this Mr. Tommy Brue, please?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Have you been drinking alcohol with Mr. Brue, Annabel?”
“Issa, stop this!”
“Do you have a relationship with Mr. Tommy Brue which is comparable with the relationship you had with the unsatisfactory man in your previous apartment?”
“Issa, I told you,
stop
!”
“Is Mr. Tommy Brue the successor to this unsatisfactory man? Does Mr. Brue exercise a disproportionate power over you? I watched how he regarded you lustfully at Leyla’s house. Do you succumb to Mr. Brue’s base desires because he is materially rich? Does Mr. Brue believe that by keeping me here in your house, he is subjugating you to his will and also ensuring that he will not be obliged to pay big sums to the KGB clinic?”
She had regained control of herself. We don’t want you compliant, Bachmann had said. We want you creative. We want your ice-cold head and your larcenous legal mind, not a lot of callow emotional shit that can’t go anywhere.
“Look, Issa,” she said coaxingly, turning back to the rucksack. “Mr. Brue doesn’t just want to feed your body. Look what he’s sent you.”
A Russian one-volume softback edition of Turgenev’s
Torrents of Spring
and
First Love.
The Tales of Chekhov,
also in Russian.
A miniature disc player to improve on her old tape recorder, classical discs of Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, and—because Erna thinks of everything—spare batteries.
“Mr. Brue likes and respects us both,” she said. “He is not my lover. That’s in your imagination, nowhere else. We don’t want to keep you here a day longer than is necessary. We would do anything on earth to set you free. You have to believe that.”
The yellow van stood where it had dropped her. The same boy was at the wheel. Erna Frey was still sitting in the passenger seat. She had the car radio on and was listening to Tchaikovsky. Annabel slung her bike in the back and the rucksack after it, jumped in and slammed the doors shut behind her.
“That’s the filthiest thing I ever had to do in my life,” she remarked, staring out of the windscreen. “Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.”
“Nonsense, dear. You did it beautifully,” said Erna Frey. “He’s happy. Listen.”
The Tchaikovsky was still playing over the radio, but the reception seemed strangely ragged, until Annabel recognized the sound of Issa clumping round the loft in Karsten’s moccasins, singing discordant tenor at the top of his voice.
“So I did that too,” she said. “Perfect.”
Wisteria overhung the timbered porch. The tiny but immaculate garden was groomed in the Romantic manner, with a rose shrubbery and a lily pond fed by ornamental frogs. The house itself was small but very pretty, a Snow White house with rustic pink roof tiles and whimsical chimneys, set beside one of Hamburg’s most desirable canals. The time was precisely seven o’clock in the evening. Bachmann knew the importance of punctuality. He was dressed in his best bureaucratic suit and carrying an official briefcase. He had polished his black shoes and, with the help of Erna Frey’s spray, flattened his rebellious mop of hair into temporary submission.
“Schneider,” he murmured into the entry phone and the front door opened at once only to be swiftly closed after him by Frau Ellenberger.
In the eighteen or so hours since Erna Frey had marched Annabel off to bed, Bachmann with Maximilian’s help had laid siege to the Service’s central computer for all the Karpovs known to man, phoned a contact in the Austrian Security Service and obliged him to unearth the unhappy history of Brue Frères of Vienna in its declining years, buttonholed Arni Mohr’s prickly head of street surveillance concerning the perceived lifestyle of the bank’s surviving principal, dispatched a researcher to storm the archives of Hamburg’s finance office and—by midafternoon—assailed Michael Axelrod of Joint for a full hour on the encrypted line to Berlin before calling up all files on a highly respected Muslim scholar living in north Germany and known for his moderate views and pleasing television manners.
For some of the files, Bachmann was obliged to seek special clearance from Joint’s money-laundering section. To Erna Frey there had been something almost demented about him as he shambled back and forth between the researchers’ den and their own, puffed at innumerable cigarettes, plunged into the files strewn across his desk or demanded sight of some memo he had sent her, forgotten about, and which now lay buried in the bowels of her computer.
“Why the bloody Brits of all people?” he had demanded to know. “What makes a Russian crook go to a Brit bank in an Austrian city? All right, Karpov senior admires their hypocrisy. He respects their gentlemanly lies. But how the fuck did he
find
them? Who
sent
him to them?”
And at three o’clock this afternoon:
Eureka!
He had it in his hand, a flimsy brown file plucked from the catacombs of the public prosecutor’s office. It was marked for destruction but by a miracle had escaped the flames. Bachmann had once more made the weather.
They sat in flowered armchairs, facing each other in the window bay of her spotless drawing room that was a piece of England, drinking Earl Grey tea from the finest Minton bone china. On the walls, prints of Old London and Constable landscapes. In a Sheraton bookcase, editions of Jane Austen, Trollope, Hardy, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. In the bay, fluffy spring buds in Wedgwood pots.
For a long while neither spoke. Bachmann smiled kindly, mostly to himself. Frau Ellemberger gazed at the lace-curtained window.
“You object to a tape recorder, Frau Ellenberger?” he inquired.
“Emphatically, Herr Schneider.”
“Then let there be no tape recorder,” Bachmann announced decisively, dropping one instrument back into his briefcase while leaving the other running.
“But I may make notes,” he suggested, setting a notepad on his lap, and keeping his pen poised.
“I shall require a copy of whatever you propose to place on file,” she said. “If you had allowed me more notice, my brother would be here to represent me. Unfortunately he has business elsewhere tonight.”
“Your brother is welcome to inspect our files at any time.”
“It is to be hoped, Herr Schneider,” said Frau Ellenberger.
When she had opened the front door to him, she had blushed. She was now spectral pale, and beautiful. With her wide, vulnerable eyes, swept-back hair, long neck and young girl’s profile, she was to Bachmann one of those beautiful women who pass unnoticed into middle age, and disappear.
“I may begin?” Bachmann inquired.
“Please.”
“Seven years ago you made a voluntary sworn statement to my predecessor and colleague, Herr Brenner, regarding certain concerns you had regarding the activities of your employer at that time.”
“I have not changed my employer, Herr Schneider.”
“A fact of which we are aware, and shall respect,” Bachmann replied reverentially, making an ostentatious note to himself by way of reassuring her.
“It is to be hoped, Herr Schneider,” Frau Ellenberger said again, to the lace curtains, while she gripped the arms of her chair.
“May I say I admire you for your courage?”
He might, he might not, for she gave no sign of having heard him.
“Probity too, of course. But courage foremost. May I ask you what moved you to make it?”
“And may I ask
you,
what you are doing here?”
“Karpov,” Bachmann replied promptly. “Grigori Borisovich Karpov. Valued former client of Brue Frères Bank, Vienna, now of Hamburg. Holder of a Lipizzaner account.”
While he spoke, her head swung round to him, partly—as it seemed to Bachmann—in disgust, but partly also in spirited if guilty pleasure.
“Don’t tell me he’s still up to his old tricks,” she exclaimed.
“Karpov himself, I do not regret to inform you, is no longer with us, Frau Ellenberger. But his works live after him. As do those of his criminal associates. Which, without breaching official secrecy, is why I am here tonight. History doesn’t pause for breath, they say. The deeper we dig, the deeper we seem to go back in time. Allow me to ask you: Is
Anatoly
a name to you at all? Anatoly, consigliere to the late Karpov?”
“Distantly. As a name. He was the fixer.”
“But you never met him.”
“There were no intermediaries.” She corrected herself. “Apart from Anatoly, of course. Karpov’s fixer extraordinaire, Mr. Edward called him. But Anatoly wasn’t just a
fixer,
mind. He was more like a
straightener.
Always picking up Karpov’s crooked bits and making them look straight.”
Bachmann stored this egregious comment but did not pursue it.
“And
Ivan
? Ivan Grigorevich?”
“I know of no Ivan, Herr Schneider.”
“Karpov’s natural son? Later to call himself
Issa
?”
“I know of no issue of Colonel Karpov, natural or otherwise, although I have no doubt there were many. Mr. Brue Junior asked me the same question only the other day.”
“He did?”
“Yes. He did.”
And again Bachmann let the observation pass. A halfway-decent interrogator, he liked to preach, on the rare occasions when he was let loose on new entrants to the Service, doesn’t smash the front door down. He rings the front doorbell, then goes in at the back entrance. But this was not the reason he held off, as he later confessed to Erna Frey. It was
the other music
that he was hearing: the feeling that, while she was telling him one story, he was listening to a different one, and so was she.
“So may I ask you, Frau Ellenberger—going back in time again, if I may—what prompted you, seven years ago, to make that very courageous statement in the first place?”
It took awhile for her to hear him.
“I’m German, don’t you see,” she replied irritably, just when he was about to repeat his question.
“Yes, indeed.”
“I was returning to Germany. My homeland.”
“From Vienna.”
“Frères was about to open a
branch
in Germany. My Germany. I wished—yes, well, I
wished,
” she said angrily, and frowned through the net curtains and all the way into the garden, as if the fault lay there.
“You wished to draw a line, perhaps? A line under the past?” Bachmann suggested.
“I wished to reenter my own country in a
pure state,
” she retorted, with sudden animation. “Untainted. Don’t you understand?”
“Not quite yet, but I’m getting there, I’m sure.”
“I wished to make a clean beginning.
With
the bank.
With
my life. Is that not human nature? To wish a new beginning? Perhaps you don’t think so. Men are different.”
“It was also the case, I believe, that your distinguished employer of many years had passed away, and Brue Junior”—using her own term for him—“had recently taken over the bank,” Bachmann suggested, lowering his voice in submission to her didactic tone.
“That is the case, Herr Schneider. You have done your homework, I am pleased to note. So few do their homework these days. I was
extremely
young,” she reported, in a tone of unsparing self-diagnosis. “Younger than my years by
far,
remember. If I compare myself with modern youth, I was a total
infant.
I came of a poor family, and had no experience of the larger world
whatever.
”
“But you were a raw recruit, first time in the field, allow me!” Bachmann protested, matching her indignation. “The orders came down from
above
and you obeyed them. You were young and innocent, and in a position of trust. Aren’t you being a little
hard
on yourself, Frau Ellenberger?”
Did she hear him? And if she did, why then was she smiling? Her voice was changing. It was younger. As she started speaking again, a brighter cadence entered it, a softer, fresher, more Viennese lilt, that put a forgiving gloss on even her severest observations. And to the younger voice, a younger figure: still prim, still respectfully upright, but more active and flirtatious in its gestures. Stranger still was the fact that her very style of speech seemed chosen to please the ear of someone superior to her in both age and station, whereas Bachmann was neither; and that, by an unconscious act of retrospective ventriloquism, she was evoking not merely the voice of her vanished youth, but the voice in which the relationship with the person she was describing had been conducted.
“There
were
those around me who were
forward,
Herr Schneider,” she remembered, fondly nonetheless. “
Very
forward, provided it secured them the attention of
Mr. Edward
.” A name to prize and own. A name to savor. “But that wasn’t my style
at all,
oh no. It was my reticence, not my forwardness, that commended
me
to him. He told me so himself. ‘Elli, when you’re scouting for a Girl Friday, better to pick the one from the back of the crowd.’ That was the
rough
side of him speaking,” she added dreamily. “It took me by surprise at first, the
rough
side. It took getting used to. You didn’t expect it of a gentleman of Mr. Edward’s refinement. Then it was all right. It was
real,
” she said proudly, and fell silent again.
“And you were a mere—
what
at that time?” Bachmann inquired at length, but very delicately, determined not on any account to break the spell.
“Twenty-two years old, and with the
highest
secretarial grades. My father had died when I was young, you see. A cloud hangs over the manner of his death, I don’t mind telling you. Hanged himself, I
heard,
but never officially. We’re Catholics. My mother’s brother was a priest in Passau and kind enough to take us in. What else could you be in Passau? Unfortunately, with the years, my uncle became overaffectionate towards me, and I felt it prudent, at the risk of upsetting my mother, to remove myself to secretarial college in Vienna. Yes. Well. There we were. He violated me, if you want to know. I hardly realized at the time. You don’t, not if you’re innocent.”
And again she fell silent.
“And Brue Frères was your first appointment,” Bachmann suggested.
“I can only tell you,” Frau Ellenberger resumed, in answer to a question he hadn’t put, “that Mr. Edward treated me with
exemplary
consideration.”
“I would have no doubt of that.”
“Mr. Edward was a model of propriety.”
“My office does not dispute that. We feel he was led astray.”
“He was English in the best sense. When Mr. Edward confided in me, I felt flattered. When he invited me to accompany him socially, for example, to just a little dinner”—she was using the English words—“after a long day’s work before he went home to relax with his family, I felt proud to be selected.”
“Who wouldn’t? Nobody.”
“That he was not merely old enough to be my uncle, but practically my grandfather, did not arouse my undue concern,” she resumed sternly, as if for the record. “Having already become accustomed to the attentions of an older man, I accepted them as normal for one in my position. The difference was, Mr. Edward had zest. He was
not
my uncle. When I told my mother what had occurred, she did not view my situation as unfortunate, but to the contrary advised me not to endanger it by petty considerations. Mr. Edward, having only one son to remember, would surely not forget a pretty young girl who had shown him loving friendship in his declining years.”
“And he didn’t forget, did he?” Bachmann prompted, casting an appreciative eye round the room, but he had lost her again—and almost, it seemed to him, she had lost herself.
“So at what point, exactly, would you say, Frau Ellenberger,” he resumed brightly, making a fresh start, “did the intrusion of
Colonel Karpov
cast a blight over your shared happiness, if I may put it thus?”
Had she really not heard him?
Still?
She raised her eyebrows to their fullest extent. She tilted her head attentively to one side. Then she launched on another statement for the file.
“The arrival of Grigori Borisovich Karpov as a major Frères client coincided with the full, improbable flowering of my relationship with Mr. Edward. I could not then, nor can I now, determine which event preceded the other. Mr. Edward had entered what I can but describe as his second or third youth. He was positive in his attentions to me, and in spirit a great deal more adventurous than many of the younger men of the Viennese banking community.” She mused for a while, started to say something, shook her head and gave a roguish smile of reminiscence. “
Very
positive, if you want to know.” The moment vanished. “You asked
when,
I believe.
When
he appeared on the scene, I suppose you mean. Karpov. Yes?”