He stood transfixed.
Then his phone pinged with an incoming text. He glanced down at the display for a split second.
*
Hans-Jürgen’s call disconnected abruptly again, as if he had gone into a tunnel. Why did the stupid guy always pick the places with the worst signal reception to call her from? It drove her nuts at times. Except, of course, she knew how to control her anger, so that nothing ever did truly drive her nuts any more – not like the way stuff used to.
Anger management was all part of the mental rebirth process of the International Association of FreeSpirits. The Scientologists operated the ‘Clear’, under their universal banner, THE BRIDGE TO TOTAL FREEDOM. The organization she had deserted them for offered similar mental regeneration, but through a less aggressive – and expensive – process.
Sandy was still a novice, but she was pleased, this morning, as she stepped off the end of the first stretch of the moving walkway and crossed the short distance to the next, passing a shoe-shine and a small bar, that the initial flare of temper she had felt at Hans-Jürgen’s call had been instantly extinguished, like the flame of a match in the wind.
That was one of the things her new masters were teaching her: to be a FreeSpirit was to be a flame in the wind, but not one that was attached to the wick of a candle or the top of a matchstick. Because if you needed a crutch to survive, when that crutch was gone, so were you. Extinguished.
You needed to learn to burn free. That way you could never be extinguished. Every FreeSpirit sought, one day, to become a free-floating flame in the wind.
She stared at the passing humanity on the opposite walkway. People chained to their BlackBerry emails, their iPhone keypads, their departure times, their financial worries, their guilt. Their stuff. They didn’t realize that none of it mattered. They didn’t realize that she was one of the few people on this planet who knew how to set them free.
She singled out one of the faces. A truly sad-looking man, tall and bendy, with a bad comb-over, wearing Porsche sunglasses and one of those Mandarin-collared leather jackets that were covered in motoring badges, and were designed to give off the impression that you were something important in the world of motorsport.
I could free you
, she thought.
Beyond him was a group of teenagers, with backpacks, noisily teasing each other. Then her phone rang again.
Fumbling to answer it with her gloves on, she dropped it on the floor and instantly knelt down to retrieve it.
*
When Roy Grace looked up again from the display of his phone, the woman had gone.
Did I imagine it?
he wondered. An instant ago, he was sure he had seen a woman’s hair, the same distinct, fair colour of Sandy’s hair, behind the grim-faced oldies heading rapidly towards him.
He glanced down at the display again and pressed the key to open the text message:
Yo, old-timer. At sea. Haven’t thrown up yet.
How u doing?
He composed a reply, then sent it:
Me neither.
Out of curiosity, he looked behind him. The woman with the same colour hair as Sandy had reappeared, standing behind the elderly couple, receding into the distance.
Again he felt that punch in his stomach. He turned, squeezed past a tall, irritated-looking man in a trench coat, and half walked, half ran a few steps back against the direction of the walkway. Then he wormed his way through a cabin crew group, all in uniform and towing their luggage.
Then he stopped.
Stupid.
Come on, man! Pull yourself together!
A few months ago, he might have continued to run after her, just in case…
But today he turned round and began, instead, threading a path back through the cabin crew, saying some of the few words of German he knew. ‘
Entschuldigung. T’schuldigung. Danke
!’
87
The four of them had been up all night and were cold, wet through and exhausted. On top of that, Raluca was strung out and getting increasingly agitated. She needed money, now, to go to her dealer, she told Ian Tilling.
None of the three Romanians knew what he meant when, venting his frustration, and ignoring Raluca for a moment, Tilling banged the table-top in the smoke-filled café and shouted out, ‘This is like looking for a fucking needle in a haystack!’
But they got the drift.
They were in a café, inside a corrugated-iron shack, one of a row that included a butcher’s and a mini-mart, adjoining a rubbish-strewn dirt road that was one of the main suburban arteries of Bucharest, running through Sector Four. The snow was doing a good job of tidying the street up by covering the litter.
Tilling munched hungrily on a massive, dry bread roll that had some kind of meat in the centre – he had no idea what it was. It was dead and had the consistency of leather, but it was protein. He was wired from caffeine. Ileana, Andreea and Raluca, all barely awake, were smoking. Their task was almost impossible. In a city of two million people, as many as ten thousand lived outside of society. Thousands, mostly young people, whose common currency was silence and suspicion.
For the past fourteen hours, they had scoured the sector’s shanties along the steam pipe network and they’d crawled down so many holes in the road they had lost count. But so far, nothing. No one knew Simona. Or, if they did, they were not saying.
He yawned, his tiredness bringing back memories. He’d forgotten the sheer exhaustion that came, at times, with the territory of being a police officer. The days – and nights – when you had to keep going, running on adrenalin, fuelled by the scent of progress.
It was one of the best feelings in the world.
‘Please, Mr Ian, I must go now,’ Raluca said.
‘How much do you need?’ Tilling asked her, pulling out his battered wallet.
Rubbing her thumbs anxiously together, rocking backwards and forwards on her chair and eyeing the wallet intently, as if scared it might disappear if she stopped looking at it, she said, ‘One hundred and forty lei.’ Then she picked her cigarette from the ashtray and drew hard on it.
Ian was constantly staggered at the amount of money heroin addicts needed for their fixes. This was more than she could earn in a week in a menial job. Little surprise she was a hooker. Apart from stealing or fraud, there wasn’t any other way she could earn that kind of money.
Almost beyond hope – but not beyond caring – as he riffled through the banknotes, Tilling called the proprietor over. He was an elderly, bearded man, wearing a grimy apron over brown overalls, who had lived through and survived Ceauşescu, and who seemed to have found a level of contentment with his lot, somewhere behind the resigned sadness of his expression. The former British police officer asked him whether he knew of any street kids living close by.
He knew plenty, he replied, who didn’t? Some of them came in, late afternoon, just before he closed, to scrounge any leftovers, or stale bread he was about to throw away.
‘Do you ever see a young girl and a young man together?’ Tilling asked. ‘He’s about sixteen, she’s about thirteen, but they probably look older.’ Those who lived on the streets aged fast.
There was a faint glimmer in the man’s eyes, which they all picked up on.
‘The girl is called Simona,’ Raluca said. ‘And the boy, Romeo.’
‘Romeo?’ He frowned.
Raluca, animated by the sight of the money, suddenly said, ‘You would recognize him. He has a withered left hand, short black hair, big eyes.’
The proprietor’s recognition seemed to deepen. ‘This girl with him, she has long hair? Long brown hair? Wears a multicoloured tracksuit thing – always the same?’
Raluca nodded.
‘They have a dog? Sometimes, they bring the dog in here. I find bones for him.’
‘A dog!’ Raluca became even more animated. ‘A dog! Yes, they have a dog!’
‘Some days they come here.’
‘Always when you are closing?’ Tilling asked.
‘Depends.’ He shrugged. ‘Different times, some days. Other days I don’t see them. I prefer customers!’ He laughed at his own joke. Then he said, ‘Crazy me, I’m forgetting. The girl, she was in here this morning. She asked me for a bone, for a special bone. She said she was going away and she wanted to give a bone to the dog as a goodbye present.’
‘Did she say where she was going?’ Tilling asked, panic rising inside him.
‘Yeah, I think on a cruise around the Caribbean,’ he said. Then he smiled again. ‘I ask, she didn’t tell me. Just, she said, “Away”.’
‘Do you have any idea where they live?’
He opened his arms in a shrug. ‘Close. Somewhere near to here, I think. On the street, under the street, I don’t know.’
Tilling looked at his watch. It was just gone midday. Raluca wasn’t going to be functioning well soon, without her fix, and he needed her to identify Simona and, equally importantly, to talk to her. Simona and Romeo were more likely to believe a friend than himself. But if he gave Raluca the cash, she might disappear, get her day’s supply and then crash out somewhere.
‘Raluca, I’ll drive you to your dealer. OK? Then we come back and search.’
Raluca looked hesitant. Then she glanced out of the window, at the increasingly bleak snowscape, and nodded.
Tilling paid and they left. The temperature seemed to have dropped further in the brief time they had been inside. You could not survive in this kind of weather on the street. If Simona and Romeo were close by, as the man suggested, they would almost certainly be underground, near a section of the heating pipe.
But there were hundreds of holes in the streets leading down into subterranean dwellings for the homeless. And already, they had only a few hours of daylight left.
88
Somewhere in the centre of every major city he had visited, there was always one street that stood out from the rest. The kind of street where Roy Grace knew, without looking through the windows at the price tags – if indeed the items even had price tags – that he could not afford to shop.
He was entering such a street now.
‘Maximilianstrasse,’ Marcel Kullen informed him, as they bumped over tramlines, turning into a grand, wide avenue that was lined on both sides with handsome, formal, neo-Gothic buildings. Some had colonnaded fronts, others had marble pillars, and most, at street level, had gleaming shop windows beneath elegant canopies. Grace clocked some of the names: Prada,
Todd
, Gucci.
Even the German detective’s elderly but immaculate grey BMW felt a little out of place here, amid the kerbside parade of chauffeured limousines, Porsches, Ferraris, Bentleys and greenly fashionable little Minis, Fiat Cinquecentos and Smarts, most of them gleaming despite the filthy grey, ankle-deep slush.
Seated on the front passenger seat, Grace clutched the pile of phone records that the Kriminalhauptkommissar, true to his word, had promised him. Although anxious to get stuck into them, he had politely maintained conversation with Kullen during the thirty-minute drive in from the airport.
The tall, good-looking German filled him in on how his wife and kids were doing, and despite Grace’s protestations that he was no longer interested in looking for Sandy, Kullen gave him an update on all the efforts made by his bureau at the Landeskriminalamt to find any trace of her – to no avail.
They passed on their right the imposing front of the Four Seasons hotel, then Kullen made a U-turn and pulled over, outside a posh café with an enticing window display of cakes, and a clientele that seemed to consist exclusively of women in long fur coats. Some were seated outside in the colonnade, smoking.
The German detective pointed at a brass doorbell panel on a marble pillar and the door next to it.
‘There is the company,’ he said. ‘Good luck. I will wait for us.’
‘You don’t need to do that. I can take a cab back to the airport.’
‘You were very kind when I was in England. Now I am – how you say – at your service?’
Grace grinned and patted him on the arm.
‘Thank you. I appreciate it.’
‘And perhaps afterwards, we have time for a little lunch – and I think maybe there will be things we need to talk about.’
‘I hope so.’
As he climbed out of the car into the bitterly cold air, a fleck of sleet tickled Grace’s cheek. He took his briefcase from the back seat, then walked up to the entrance door and looked at the names on the panel:
Diederichs Buchs GmbH. Lars Schafft Krimi
and then, the third one down,
Transplantation-Zentrale
.
His nerves seemed to have settled since leaving the airport, and he was feeling quite relaxed as he pressed the bell, if a little tired from his early start. Immediately a bright light shone in his face from a small lens above the panel. A female German voice asked his name, then told him to come to the third floor.
Moments later the door release clicked. He pushed it and stepped into a narrow hall, plushly carpeted in red, with a burly security guard behind a desk, who requested Grace to sign his name in a register. He wrote
Roger Taylor
and faked a signature beneath. Then the guard pointed him to the old-fashioned cage lift. He rode it up to the third floor and stepped out into a large, sumptuously appointed reception area, carpeted in white. A number of scented white candles were burning, filling the air with a pleasant aroma of vanilla.
A young woman, chicly dressed with short black hair, sat behind an ornate, antique desk.
‘
Guten Morgen
, Herr Taylor,’ she said, with a cheery smile. ‘Frau Hartmann will see you shortly. Please take a seat. May I get you something to drink?’
‘Coffee would be great.’
Grace sat on a hard white sofa. On a glass table in front of him was a stack of the company’s brochures. On the walls were framed photographs of happy-looking people. They ranged in age from a small child playing on a swing to an elderly, smiling man in a hospital bed. No captions were needed. They were all clearly satisfied customers of Transplantation-Zentrale.