Her hand faltered, and the handset sank; she almost dropped it, then I thought she was going to throw it down. She looked at it, and her face twisted. ‘Fuck you, then,’ she said, and put it down softly. She stood up, and I saw, almost more clearly than her nakedness, the reddened and blackening blotches of her bruises. She looked as if she’d been through a mincer. But I thought of my ravished privacy, riffled files, my girlfriends checked up on, the baffled venom in that voice as it twisted and tortured the truth to suit its own suspicions. My conscience shut its mouth, folded its arms, and enjoyed the view.
She considered her drink, put it down and walked with stiff dignity, like a sort of robotic ballerina, towards the bathroom. After a moment I heard the toilet flush, and the shower come on. Not a bad idea; I could use the same myself. I flicked the cams free, gathered my strength and kicked out hard, out, away and into the open air with a rush, then back round the arête to the face of the hotel. This time I didn’t need to cling; I hit, bounced, clamped on an ascender and began to haul myself up at speed with creaking arms, passing the rope under my battered buttocks to keep it away from windows. I had relief to fuel me, now that I knew what all this had been about.
A Strasbourg number, and Goran Bernheimer, deputy trade commissioner for the European Community. So Joan of Arc here was an EC trade investigator; nice job for a paranoid. But by the sound of that little lot, she’d be off my back soon enough: Bernheimer was no fool. The relief lasted all the way back to my room – almost.
I was on the window-sill when the cold feeling crept over me. Okay, she was just an overzealous cop with a fixation, the type that tends to end up planting the evidence. Let her try that now! But a cop of sorts she was, and not just
some muckraker. That gave more weight to the other things she’d said, a lot more. Okay, she was wrong about me – but the main reason she suspected me seemed to be the company I kept. I’d assumed she was just as wrong about them – but was she? About them she sounded absolutely sure; and as if the absent Georges did too. And surest of all about Lutz.
I slid back in, wincing at my injuries, and headed for that haunt of philosophers, the bathroom. I needed to get clean all over again how. There was a television tilted over the broad bath, but it gave me little comfort as I let my aches soak away into the steaming water. The news was full of riots, both here and in Warsaw, Polish skinheads battling it out with neo-Communist thugs, both equally horrible; the ringleaders in particular looked practically interchangeable with each other – or with those here, for that matter. Europe was beginning to wear a common face, and it wasn’t one I liked. Grudgingly I hauled myself out of the water and phoned down to the valet service for my evening
frac
, and the garage for my car. I was going to look in at Lutz’s party after all.
I’d rented a top-line BMW sport, and this late the roads were clearing; I made good time out of town and onto the byroads. They led me a curling way out to the little village that was the only material remainder of the once-vast Amerningen estates, squatting dourly beneath the shadow of their baroquely decorated gates. The men at the gates were in tuxedos, too, but there was no mistaking them for either guests or waiters, impeccably polite as they were; they were uniformly huge, great square-headed Prussian grenadier types. You thought they’d clump, but they moved with easy athletic grace. One of them chatted lightly in good English while the others gave me and my invitation the unobtrusive once-over, checking me against some invisible list; then they threw open the gates with enough ceremony to make anyone overlook the delay. Soft glows awoke among the shrubbery as I drove by, then dimmed again behind me to leave the long drive in shadow.
You might have expected a Bavarian baron’s family home to be a Gothic extravaganza of towers and battlements, or a beamy old rustic
Schloss
full of stags’ heads and open fires. Instead I pulled up under the porte-cochère of
a wide, sleek stately home which must have been the latest fashion for an eighteenth-century gentleman of leisure, glazed dome in the roof and all. Evidently Lutz’s ancestors were smoothies, too. If there was an old castle anywhere around, it was probably an artistic ruin in the gardens. This place suggested sips of Cointreau more than steins of beer, though by the din that rolled out as the tall front door opened, there was some pretty active sipping going on right now. A tide of flunkeys spilled out, headed by a fifty-fiveish Juno who must have been quite something in her youth and, despite the severe business suit, was still well worth a look. She greeted me like a favourite nephew, introduced herself, with a conspiratorial smirk, as Inga-Lise, the Herr Baron’s major-domo; and assuring me that the Herr Baron was expecting the Herr Ratspräsident, meaning me, she whisked me gracefully off into the depths of the house.
Beyond the hall double doors opened on to a massive ballroom. Once its colonnades might have echoed gentle waltzes and quadrilles; now it was a swirling blur of decorations and coloured lights, strewn with couches and cushions and sprawling, giggling bodies. The air was thick and smoky, aromatic tobacco tinged with pot and an unholy mixture of expensive perfume and wealthy sweat. It glowed and flickered in the path of an occasional laser, overspill from the disco in the promenade outside, flaring and coruscating on swinging earrings and iridescent gowns, tracing a hot insubstantial finger over bare shoulder blades and into cleavages. As we picked our way down the side of the hall, over bodies recumbent or entwined, a side-door crashed open amid shrieks and shouts. Bare feet pattered on the marble floor, and we were momentarily enveloped in a warm crush of half-clad bodies, the girls looking hastily dressed, most of them, though one or two were in their knickers, the men in shirts, shorts, socks, rumpled and hot and glassy-eyed. Someone thrust a hand under my nose and cracked a little pod; I smelt the sweetish tang of amyl nitrate and jerked away, among shrieks of laughter. Inga-Lise smiled at me approvingly. Then they were gone, piling down some steps that evidently led to an indoor pool, judging by the splashes and shrieks. One or two thought better of it, and vanished, giggling, through another door ahead; with a look of guileless naughtiness Inga-Lise let it swing back a crack to shed a little light on the goings-on within. The two of us exchanged glances and chuckled.
‘Quite a show. I hope they’re not going to overdo those poppers, or you might be sweeping out the odd corpse
in the morning.’
She gave me that half-teasing, approving look again. ‘The Herr Ratspräsident doesn’t indulge so?’
‘Oh, I can be pretty indulgent. But I go for different highs, real ones. I think they’ll keep me younger in the long run.’
She smiled, and handed me a tulip glass of champagne from a passing servant’s tray. ‘The Herr Ratspräsident looks younger than I was led to expect, for one who achieves so much. That is a good thing in a man.’
‘So does the Herr Baron. You must look after him really well.’ She dimpled, but seriously. ‘Alas, he is too good at looking after himself.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’ I grinned. But I wondered whether that expression was just her unwieldy English, or whether she really was giving me a gentle warning to watch my back. Nice of her, but I didn’t need it. Right from our early dealings with the Baron von Amerningen I’d decided that for all the Pan-European guff he spouted, the interests he was most devoted to were his own, a man of powerful survival instincts. My good friend Dave had simply commented that it took one to know one. I hoped he was right.
I was looking out for Lutz right now, but there was no sign of him among his guests, and Inga-Lise seemed to be leading me somewhere specific. We moved through the great house, tripping over minor orgies here and there, and towards what must be the back stairs. They led us up and overhead, two floors up, to where even that deafening disco was just a minor thudding in our feet. There were other doors ahead, not as large as the ballroom’s but heavy and businesslike. Servants lounging on tilted chairs before them sprang up as we approached – no, not servants exactly. More of the types that manned the gates, but where they had been fairly personable, these were plug-uglies, quite extraordinarily so, all bulbous noses and cauliflower ears, and a malevolent gleam in their piggy little eyes. Inga-Lise handed me over to them with a faintly apologetic smile, saying, ‘I go no further,’ and taking her leave with that impish smile again, a little forced. I heard her footsteps hurrying away down the corridor, and it struck me that it was almost as if she wanted to be back at the stairs before those doors opened.
When they did, though, it was almost an
anticlimax. After the glitz and groping among the
beau monde
downstairs this inner sanctum looked absurdly peaceful, a sedate gathering radiating nothing more than the buzz of quiet conversation. At second glance, though, it seemed a little stranger than that, because though the talk was quiet, the talkers weren’t. As the doors closed behind me and one of the servants exchanged my champagne glass, I found myself eye to eye with a pair of wild-eyed rock musician types, middle-aged unisex Goths in two-tone hair, black PVC and laces straining with midriff bulge. What was probably the woman rolled black-rimmed eyes at me and demanded, ‘All aboard for the Brock, eh?’ in strident middle-class Cockney. I gave a meaningless smile and drifted aside, only to see somebody tall and camel-like gazing vaguely around and wiping thumb and forefinger over his dangling little moustache. That had to be Lino Mortera, one of our Italian board members and about my least favourite; and there was fat little Pontoise, for whom I had a lot more time, gesticulating furiously to a couple of hefty harridans who would have had a promising career as Russian trawler skippers or Belsen guards. I didn’t want to meet either man right now, so I steered hastily for the far side of the room. I rubbed elbows with other business types I vaguely recognized from the fair, hard, intense women with the gloss of TV producers or executives and slightly less glossy ones who might be their academic counterparts. A tall rangy woman who looked like a successful German executive was standing by herself, so I breezed in on her with a borrowed conversational gambit. ‘Well, it’s all aboard for the Brock, isn’t it?’
She turned a very strange look on me. ‘
Verzeih’n – ah. Dem Brocken. Ja, dauert’s nicht lang
.’ She sounded heavy, depressed; yet even as she said the word her eyes narrowed and her tongue traced her lips slightly. She looked as if she was going to shiver.
The Brocken. Yes, it will not be long.
Brocken! So that was what they were talking about! I knew what it was, all right; I’d been there. A mountain in the Harz range, the highest if I remembered rightly, along what had been the old East German frontier, a long way from here. But I seemed to remember the name from somewhere else as well, somewhere that set the shadows gathering in my mind.
‘Listen,’ I said urgently, ‘about the Br—’
Abruptly she turned away, pressed her forehead to the wall, and brushed me away when I tried to
intervene. I slid away in case she attracted attention, past a couple of German longhairs arguing about performance art, plastic form and
Guernica.
I took refuge among a knot of relatively normal types, mostly overdone jetsetters like burnt-out graduates from the set downstairs, sweating copiously into their collars and discussing the shortcomings of their brokers and their own idiotic ideas of what the markets were doing. I was injecting a little basic economics when two women converged on me, lean, fortyish types with bright nervy eyes, wearing fantastically expensive-looking polyester jumpsuits and puffing at one bloated joint. One leaned over and said, ‘I know
you
,’ in breathy accented English. ‘You are the capitalist,
nicht wahr?
You know, Putzerl? From the article, the man who makes parcels think.’
They weighed me up with bright sardonic eyes, and giggled. ‘What have you come to peddle, Herr Kapitalist?’ enquired the other.
‘Your ass?’ suggested the first, and they shrieked.
‘No,’ I countered coolly. ‘Yours.’ The listening men cheered.
‘
S’ist’s nicht z’verkaufn!
Is not for sale!’ protested the second. ‘I buy it all up since years ago!’
‘Show her yours,’ whooped the other. ‘She’s always buying, the dirty slut!’
‘What’s point? I see it later, anyhow! I watch out for you, Herr Peddler! I like you!’
‘As long as you are not Jewboy!’ the other put in. ‘Putzerl doesn’t like nasty snip-snippety
Juden
, does she, mmh?’
‘I see that too!’ squealed Putzerl, and they doubled up, coughing great clouds of pot. It smelt like expensive stuff, but it left a bitter taste on my tongue – hellish bitter.
One of the men wrapped a meaty arm around my shoulder. ‘You watch those two, they breaks your balls for you! Break them,’ he persisted, ‘
crr-acck
!’ in case I hadn’t got the point. ‘Like my wife does to me. Like my goddamn kids. You wait till later.
He
tames ’em! Tcherno, he tames those two, I’ve seen them crawl, just crawl. You know what I’ve seen?’ He shook his head, slick with sweat, and I looked down into his eyes, bloodshot and dark, very dark. It was like looking down into pools of pure terror. ‘You know what I’ve seen?’ he repeated. ‘
Liebe Gott
, you know …’
His arm slumped, and he sagged and turned
away, shaking his head. The men around him were talking louder as he lurched through them, heading for a side-door. They were sweating, too, though it wasn’t unduly hot here and they didn’t seem to be drinking much; there were only a couple of waiters, elderly types, and their trays were seldom touched. There was a lot of pot in the air, though, and I began to feel a bit lightheaded myself. The tensions I’d sensed in that last exchange – or was it just the pot, just that wrongness that can infect a party, leaping from one head to another like lightning and warping the whole ambience? Had that happened here? But there was another kind of agitation, too, an uneasy, unhealthy thing that was almost excitement – the emotion of a group of people about to do something that’s illicit and irresistible in equal proportions. I remembered the college climbing club as we prepared to make a highly illegal bungee jump from a local bridge, all bravado and Buck’s Fizz while the perspiration trickled down our spines into our shorts. That kind of feeling. The difference was that these people were hardly bothering to conceal it from each other, as if they’d been through it all before, and had little to hide, except perhaps from themselves. I found myself wondering if I’d strayed into some sort of
really
peculiar perversion ring – but there was that accusation of neo-Nazism, and that mention of the Brocken. It was a well-known place, it had been like the Brandenburg Gate, a point of German partition. Could the name have been borrowed for some sort of neo-Nazi
Bund?
Only too likely; or it might mean nothing. Except that I had heard it somewhere else, all right, in a voice I didn’t care to remember.