“And the next damn thing we knew, there were a couple of Lebanese bombs on our German railway system that, if they’d gone off, would have made London and Madrid look like a rehearsal for the real thing. After that, even our own politicians accepted there was a price to be paid for giving the finger to the Americans in public and kissing their arses in private. German cities were victims-in-waiting. And that’s how they are tonight.”
He scanned the room, studying their faces one by one. Maximilian’s hand had gone up, registering an objection. So had Niki’s next to him. Others followed. This pleased him, and he smiled broadly.
“Okay. Don’t bother to say it. You’re telling me that those Lebanese guys who planted the bombs didn’t even
know
about the latest wreck of Lebanon when they started their plotting, is that right?”
The hands went down. It was right.
“They were pissed off by a couple of very bad Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that some German newspapers reprinted because they thought they were being brave and setting us free, okay?”
Okay.
“So am I wrong? No, I am
not
wrong! What pulled their triggers doesn’t matter a fuck. What
does
matter is, the threat we are dealing with doesn’t see the difference between personal and collective guilt. It doesn’t say: ‘
You’re
good and
I’m
good, and Erna here is no good at all.’ It says: ‘You’re all a bunch of no-good apostates and blasphemers and murderers and fornicators and God-haters, so fuck the lot of us.’ For those guys, and all the guys we’d like to meet who share their perceptions, it’s the western hemisphere versus Islam, and no stops between.”
And then he went to the heart of it.
“The sources that we newly assembled pariahs here in Hamburg will be looking for have to be conjured into life. They don’t know they exist till we tell them. They won’t come to us. We find them. We stay small. We stay on the street. We do detail, not grand vision. We have no preconceived target to direct them at. We find a man, we develop him, we see what he’s got, and we take him as far as he’ll go. Or woman. We work the people nobody else reaches. The baggy little guys from the mosques who speak three words of German. We befriend them and befriend their friends. We watch for the quiet incomer, the invisible nomad on his way to somewhere who is passed from house to house and mosque to mosque.
“We comb the undead files of Herr Arni Mohr and his fellow protectors across the courtyard, we revisit old cases that started with a flourish and fizzled out when the prospect took fright or resettled in another town where the local outstation was so fucking dumb it didn’t know how to handle him and didn’t want to. We ignore the protests of our hosts, and we track these former prospects down. We take their temperature again. We make the weather.”
He had one last word of caution, though it too was typically anarchic.
“And remember, please, that we are illegal. How illegal, not being a fine lawyer like so many of our august colleagues, I don’t truthfully know. But from all they tell me, we can’t so much as wipe our arses without prior consent in writing from a board of high judges, the Holy See, Joint Steering in Berlin and our beloved Federal Police, who don’t know spying from shit, but have all the powers that the intelligence services are rightly deprived of so that we don’t become the Gestapo by mistake. Now let’s do some real work. I need a drink.”
The all-night bar was called Hampelmanns and it was situated in a cobbled side street close by the station concourse. A wrought-iron dancing man in a pointed hat dangled over the ill-lit porch, and tonight, as on most other nights apparently, it was host to the gentleman known initially to Günther Bachmann’s team as the elderly fat bastard.
The gentleman’s unspectacular surname, as they now knew, was Müller but to his fellow habitués at Hampelmanns he was known exclusively as the Admiral. He was a returnee from ten years of Soviet captivity as a reward for his career as a submariner in Hitler’s Northern Fleet. Karl the reformed street kid from Dresden had tracked him down and, having phoned through his name and whereabouts, kept a silent watch on him from an adjoining table. Maximilian the stammering computer genius had magicked up his date of birth, personal history and police record, all within a matter of minutes. And now Bachmann himself was negotiating the smoky brick staircase that descended to the cellar bar. As he did so, Karl the street kid slipped past him into the night. The time was 3
A.M.
At first, Bachmann could see only the people sitting closest to the shafts of light from the stairwell. Then he made out an electric candle on each table and gradually the faces round them. Two gaunt men in black ties and suits were playing chess. At the bar, a lone woman invited him to buy her a drink. “Another time, thank you, dear,” Bachmann replied. In an alcove four boys, naked to the waist, were enjoying a game of billiards, watched by two dead-eyed girls. A second alcove was given over to stuffed foxes, silver shields and faded miniature flags with crossed rifles. And in a third, surrounded by model warships in dusty glass cases, ships’ knots, tattered hatbands and mottled photographs of submariners in their prime, sat three very old men at a round table that would have seated twelve. Two were thin and frail, which should have given authority to the third, whose glossy bald pate, barrel chest and belly made him the equal of his two companions put together. But authority, at first glance, was not what the Admiral was about. His huge motionless hands, cupped before him on the table, seemed unable to grasp the memories that haunted him. The small eyes, which had long retreated into his creaseless head, appeared to be turned inward.
With a nod to encompass all three men, Bachmann quietly sat himself at the Admiral’s side and from his back pocket drew a black wallet displaying his photograph and the address of a quasi-official missing persons agency based in Kiel that did not exist. It was one of several workaday identities that he liked to carry with him for contingencies.
“We’re looking for that poor young Russian kid you bumped into at the railway station the other night,” he explained. “Young and tall and hungry. Dignified fellow. Wore a skullcap. Remember him?”
The Admiral woke sufficiently from his reveries to turn his huge head and examine Bachmann while the rest of his body remained rock-still.
“Who’s
we
?” he inquired at last, after he had taken in Bachmann’s humble leather jacket, shirt and tie, and his air of decent concern that—almost legitimately—was his stock-in-trade.
“The boy’s not well,” Bachmann explained. “We’re afraid he’s going to harm himself. Or other people. The health workers in my office are really worried about him. They want to get to him before anything bad happens. He’s young but he’s had a hard life. Like you,” he added.
The Admiral appeared not to hear him.
“You a pimp?” he asked.
Bachmann shook his head.
“Cop?”
“If I can get to him before the cops do, I’ll be doing him a favor,” he said, while the Admiral continued to stare at him. “I’ll do
you
a favor too,” he continued. “One hundred euros cash for everything you remember about him. No comebacks, I guarantee.”
The Admiral lifted a large hand and, having wiped it speculatively across his mouth, rose to his full height and, without a glance for his silent companions, moved to the next alcove, which was empty and in near darkness.
The Admiral ate decorously, using a lot of paper napkins to preserve the cleanliness of his fingers, and adding liberal doses of Tabasco that he kept in his jacket pocket. Bachmann had ordered a bottle of vodka. The Admiral had added bread, gherkins, sausage, salt herrings and a plate of Tilsit cheese to the order.
“They came to me,” he said at last.
“Who did?”
“The mission people. They all know the Admiral.”
“Where were you?”
“In the mission house. Where else?”
“Sleeping?”
The Admiral pulled a wry smile as if sleep was something other people did. “I’m a Russian speaker. A harbor rat from Hamburg docks, but I speak better Russian than German. How did that happen?”
“Siberia,” Bachmann suggested, and the vast head rocked in silent agreement.
“The mission doesn’t speak Russian. But the Admiral does.” He gave himself a huge pull of vodka. “Wants to become a doctor.”
“The boy?”
“Here in Hamburg. Wants to save mankind. Who from? Mankind, of course. A Tartar. So he said. A
Mussulman.
Been commanded by Allah to come to Hamburg and study so that he can save mankind.”
“Any reason why Allah picked him out?”
“Make up for all the poor devils his father slaughtered.”
“Did he say who the poor devils were?”
“Russians kill everybody, my friend. Priests, children, women, the whole fucking universe.”
“Were they fellow Muslims that his father killed?”
“He did not specify the victims.”
“Did he say what his father’s profession was? How he managed to kill so many poor devils in the first place?”
The Admiral took another swallow of vodka. Then another. Then replenished his glass. “He was curious to know where the rich bankers of Hamburg have their offices.”
To Bachmann the practiced interrogator, no piece of information, however outrageous, must ever appear surprising. “What did you tell him?”
“I laughed. I can do that. ‘What do you want a banker for? Do you need to cash a check? Maybe I can help you.’”
Bachmann shared the joke. “So how did he take that one?”
“‘Check? What is check?’ Then he asked me whether they lived in their offices or had private houses as well.”
“And you said?”
“‘Look,’ I told him. ‘You’re a polite fellow, and Allah has told you to become a doctor. So stop asking a lot of stupid questions about bankers. Come and relax in our fleabitten hostel, sleep on a real bed and meet some of the other fine gentlemen who want to save mankind.’”
“And did he?”
“Shoved fifty dollars into my hand. A crazy starving Tartar kid gives an old campnik a brand-new fifty-dollar bill for a beaker of lousy soup.”
Having taken Bachmann’s money also, and stuffed his pockets with whatever was left on the table, ending with the vodka bottle, the Admiral returned to his seamates in the adjoining wardroom.
For several days after this encounter Bachmann lapsed into one of his cherished silences from which Erna Frey made no attempt to retrieve him. Even the news that the Danes had arrested the driver of the lorry on charges of people-smuggling failed at first hearing to spark him.
“His chauffeur?” he repeated. “The lorry driver who dropped him at Hamburg railway station?
That
chauffeur?”
“Yes,
that
chauffeur,” Erna Frey retorted. “As of two hours ago. I sent it through to you, but you were too busy. Copenhagen to Joint in Berlin, Joint to us. It’s rather informative.”
“A Danish national?”
“Correct.”
“Of Danish origin?”
“Correct.”
“But a Muslim convert?”
“Nothing of the kind. Look at your e-mails for once. He’s a Lutheran and the son of one. His only sin is to have a brother in organized crime.”
Now she had him.
“The bad brother telephoned the good brother two weeks ago and told him there was a rich young man who’d lost his passport and was about to arrive in Copenhagen as a passenger in a certain cargo ship from Istanbul.”
“Rich?” Bachmann leapt in. “Rich
how
?”
“The fee would be five thousand dollars up front for getting him out of the docks, and another five on safe delivery to Hamburg.”
“Payable who by?”
“The young man.”
“Himself, on safe delivery? Out of his own pocket? Five thousand?”
“It would seem so. The good brother was broke so he was a fool and took the job. He never knew his passenger’s name and he doesn’t speak Russian.”
“Where’s the bad brother?”
“In jail too. Naturally. They’re keeping them apart.”
“What does he say?”
“He’s frightened stiff and he’d rather stay in prison than have the Russian mafia take a week to kill him.”
“This mafia boss: Is he a plain Russian or a Muslim Russian?”
“The bad brother’s Moscow connect—according to the bad brother—is a respectable, thoroughbred, high-rolling Russian gangster, engaged in the best class of organized crime. He has no time for Muslims of any sort, and would prefer to see the whole lot of them drowned in the Volga. His contract with our driver’s brother was a favor for a friend. Who the said friend is, or was, is not for a humble Danish crook to inquire.”
She sat back and with lowered eyelids waited for Bachmann to come to heel.
“What does Joint say about it?” he asked.
“Joint burbles. Joint is fixated on a high-stepping imam, currently living in Moscow, who filters money to dubious Islamic charities. The Russians know he does it. He knows they know he does it. Why they let him do it is beyond the wit of man. Joint is determined to believe that the imam is the mafia boss’s missing friend. This despite the fact that, so far as anyone knows, he has no record of funding escape lines for runaway Russian-Chechen vagrants on their way to study medicine in Hamburg. Oh, and he gave him his coat.”
“Who did?”
“The good brother who drove our boy to Hamburg took pity on him and feared he would catch his death of cold in the chilly north. So he gave him his overcoat to keep him warm. A long black one. I have another gem for you.”
“Which is?”
“Herr Igor across the courtyard has an ultrasecret source buried inside the Russian Orthodox community in Cologne.”
“And?”
“According to Igor’s intrepid source, reclusive Orthodox nuns in a town not far from Hamburg recently gave shelter to a young Russian Muslim male who was starving and a little crazy.”
“Rich?”
“His wealth has not been established.”
“But polite?”
“Very. Igor is meeting his source tonight under conditions of extreme secrecy to discuss payment for the rest of the story.”