Agents of Treachery – Spy Stories

THE HAMBURG REDEMPTION by Robert Wilson

Waking up, hitting his head on the low shelf of his hangover smacked him back into the pillow with a groan. No sooner conscious than the images flickered through the gate of his mind. He sat up with a vomital lurch and vised his head in his considerable hands. He squeezed with his eyes tight shut, and mind wide open.

“Get back,” he said to himself. “Back inside, you fuckers.”

A clock set in the headboard told him it was 4:06. A record. He hadn’t slept beyond 3:30 in months.

“Where the hell am I?” he thought, aware that he was talking to himself more and more these days because it helped to keep his mind at bay.

He got to his feet, a little dizzy. He was naked. Didn’t remember undressing. Used to finding himself fully clothed, sometimes on the bed, other times on the bathroom floor in a sweat.

He slid open the thick, weighted blind covering the window. Night greeted him. The only immediately visible light came from the blue block letters that seemed to hang unsupported in the blackness:

fleisch grossmarkt

A heave from his stomach gushed a hot liquid memento of the savagery of last night’s drinking into his throat. He couldn’t swallow enough to rid his gullet of the acid. He gasped as if drowning.

“Hamburg,” he said, his lips moving, no sound. “I’m in Hamburg.”

He’d come here because it was home, where he’d spent the first twelve years of his life before his father, a scientist, had moved to the United States in 1964, just six months after they shot JFK. His father, who had turned his back on the collective guilt of his homeland, had embraced America and had taught him to do the same. And he had. My God, had he embraced that country. He’d hugged it so close he’d become part of the apparatus that protected it against any unseen enemy. And now? He shuddered as if a train had passed beneath him and gripped the windowsill. The guilt was rocking his foundations. Not just the guilt at what he had done, but the guilt at what he was going to do. He breathed in, steadied his thoughts by concentrating on the physical.

The hotel, yes, the hotel, it came back to him because he hadn’t been too drunk when he arrived, was a converted water tower in the Sternschanzenpark. He twisted his head round a little and saw the lights of the huge TV tower off to the left. He nodded as these certainties emerged. His feet firmed up on the carpet. Strange how comforting chain hotels had become to him, although this colossal nineteenth-century cylinder, with its cavernous entrance, had a moving metal walkway up to the raw brick reception, with sound effects of dripping water, which had so unnerved him that he’d had to grip the moving rubber banister with both hands.

No headache yet, just queasiness and a vast thirst. He opened the minibar, took a bottle of water from the cube of light, and drank it down. Tears came to his eyes. His brain had started to work in unusual sequences, and instead of the usual horrific scenes he had to work at to suppress, he saw cool, still water, mountain streams, the innocence of his seven-year-old daughter in perfect, uninterrupted sleep. He knew now he would be unlikely ever to see her again. Hence the tears. Not wholly sentimental. The water was cold.

“What are you doing over there?”

The voice from the other side of the dark room went through him like a cold spear. He even tottered back the few inches to the wall. Someone else is in the room? The stupid logic resounded.

A movement.

“Don’t turn the light on,” he said quickly, an order.

“I’m just reaching for my water… OK?”

Female voice. Perfect English. Very slight German inflection. What the hell is she doing here? He sniffed the air. No smell of woman.

“You don’t remember a thing, do you?” she said.

Nothing from him.

“Hey, dark matter,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Black hole. You don’t remember a thing, do you?”

“No,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Leena,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Didn’t I give you a name?”

“A name,” she said. “You’ve got different ones for each port of call?”

Silence. An even worse start to the usual horror of consciousness.

“You did tell me your name,” she said. “But why wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying to think which one he would have used.

“Roland Schafer,” she said. “Your surname means ‘shepherd’ in Old German. Did you know that?”

He did. An image of his father flashed through his mind: shepherding him and his sister to the International School, where they were being prepared for the American educational system. He had his hands on their heads. He could even remember the pressure of his father’s touch, and rather than being comforted by it, he felt strangely ashamed.

“And what sort of a name is Leena?” he asked.

“It’s short for Marleena.”

“Like Dietrich?”

“Nearly. You’re showing your age now, Roland,” she said. “We met in a bookshop. Do you remember that?”

“No, I don’t,” he said, but he did; he just had to play things carefully for the moment.

“You did drink a lot. I mean, really a lot,” she said. “I almost had to carry you back here.”

“Where do you live?”

“Not far, but it was very cold last night, and once I got you up here and undressed and into bed I thought… what the hell?”

“What the hell what?”

“I might as well sleep here,” she said. “Can I turn on the light yet?”

“I haven’t got a towel.”

“I’ve seen it all, Roland,” she said, and clicked on the standard lamp, which cast a light onto the empty armchair next to him. He slid into it, ran his hands through his gray, wire-wool hair. Shook his face free of any tells.

Her hair was long and blonde. She was maybe just touching thirty, which was all he could tell from the darkness of her corner. She threw off the duvet. Her nudity startled him. Upturned nipples. She swung her body around, picked up something from the floor, and fiddled with it while his view was obscured by her naked back.

“I’ve got to pee,” she announced, and walked past him without the slightest self-consciousness.

She was nearly muscular with defined shoulders and her breasts in no need of a bra. Her abdominal muscles were well delineated above black panties. The mechanics of her thighs’ sinews were evident, and her buttocks had a declivity at the side. Only as she headed to the bathroom did he see a slight difference between her right and left leg.

“Were you an athlete?” he asked.

“I was,” she said, and disappeared.

His paranoia cut in sharply. Who is she? What is she doing here? Who sent her? Do they know something?

She returned, throwing him a towel, and got back into bed. This time, because he knew where to look, he saw that her right leg was a prosthetic from the knee down.

“The surgeons didn’t think I’d ever walk again,” she said. “But they always say that to make you more determined.”

“Did we cover this last night?” he asked.

“You know, you drank nearly a whole bottle of grappa single-handed.”

“Grappa?”

“It wasn’t an Italian restaurant, if that’s what’s confusing you.”

Memory wipe. Too much of that lately Pity it only wiped the present clean but not one bit of the past.

“I used to be an athlete,” she said. “Before the car accident.”

“Track and field?” he guessed.

“Not bad,” she said. “I was a pole-vaulter. You look like someone who keeps himself in good condition… or at least used to.”

“Yes,” he said. “I do weights. I used to play football.”

“You should get back on them before it’s too late,” she said.

“You’re going to have to tell me what happened from the top,” he said. “I don’t remember a goddamn thing.”

“I remember it all,” she said. “That’s my problem. Photographic memory. I even remember unconsciousness-the four days of coma I had after the car accident, although that wasn’t too bad because they were the best four days of my life. They had to wrench me out of that world and back into this one.”

“Why?” he asked, surprised to find himself interested.

“Because I was loved by a man for the first time in my life.”

“Did you know him?”

She blinked at the question because she’d always assumed it.

“Yes,” she said. “I felt I’d known him my whole life.”

“Then he must have been your father,” he said, letting the paranoia kick back in again, didn’t want to drop his defenses this early in the game.

“You didn’t notice the leg last night, either,” she said, swerving away from the ugly little ditch he’d opened up in front of her, “but I was wearing trousers. You did notice other things, though.”

“What?” he asked, looking at her closely.

She threw back the duvet again, crawled to the corner of the bed nearest him, and pulled her hair away from the left side of her face.

“Remember?”

He didn’t and he would have done. She had a dent in the left side of her head, and there was scar tissue in front of her left ear around the temple. She traced a line with her finger that went across her left eye.

“It’s glass,” he said.

“They wanted to reconstruct the dent but I’d had enough of operations by then,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “Fifteen on my arms, legs, face, and brain. I said I’d wear my hair long. Have you ever had sex with an amputee?”

“I’m not operational in that department at the moment,” he said.

“You’re in the military,” she said.

“What makes you think that?”

“‘I’m not operational in that department,’” she repeated. “And you didn’t answer my question. Two classic military conversational gambits.”

“I’m off sex,” he said. “And I’ve never had a physical relationship with somebody who’s lost a limb. Was your father in the military?”

“My father?” she said, and paused as if she could categorize him in a number of ways. “My father was the chief executive officer and owner of Remer Schifffahrtsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, Hamburg.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead.”

“Do you like older men?” asked Schafer, more calculating now.

She cocked her head to one side, sized him up.

“I like them,” she said, shrugging, so that her breasts quivered. She fell backward and rolled under the duvet as if for protection. These questions about her father got under her skin.

“When did you have this car accident?” he asked.

“Four years ago. I was twenty-six, married, a successful businesswoman driving to work, and I got hit by a bus from the side. I was four days in a coma, six months in the hospital. I had to learn to walk and talk again.”

“Your English is perfect.”

“I was married to an Englishman. It was strange, because after the accident I had to work at my German.”

“And the Englishman didn’t love you?”

“You listen to people, Roland. I noticed that last night. And you say things that other people might think, but would never dream of voicing.”

“But, crucially, I don’t remember.”

“You’re right. He didn’t love me.”

“He left you?”

“After the accident.”

“That was bad.”

She shrugged.

“Who looked after you?” he asked. “Your parents?”

“My mother and her boyfriend.”

“Was your father already dead?” asked Schafer, unable to resist his instinct to pursue a weakness, and she nodded. “How long ago was that?”

“Four years.”

“So… before your accident.”

She brought her knees up defensively.

“You know, you sound like someone who has to ask a lot of questions… for your work,” she said. “But you’re not a journalist.”

“Why do you think that?”

“You don’t stroke me to get your answers,” she said. “And you’re brutal.”

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I ended up naked in a hotel room with a woman who’s as good as a stranger, with one leg, one eye, and me with no recollection of how we got here.”

“So when was the last time that happened to you?” she asked quizzically.

They nearly laughed, like people for whom humor had become an offshore island. He felt strangely calm, which he hadn’t for some time. His instinct was telling him he could relax, which was making him paradoxically more vigilant.

“When we left the restaurant, you asked me to come back to your hotel with you,” she said, “because you thought you were being followed.”

“I said that to you?”

“Yes, and amazingly, I still came back with you.”

“I’ve been a little paranoid lately.”

“You mean it isn’t true?”

“What do you think?” he said, squeezing some derision into his voice.

“I don’t know. I don’t disbelieve people just because they’re a bit weird because… I’m a bit weird myself. I know what it’s like to be disbelieved.”

“At least you’ve got a good excuse.”

“In the bookshop, we were on a sofa by the window and, when you weren’t staring into my head like my neurosurgeon, you were looking up and down the street as if your life depended on it.”

He blinked. No recollection.

“We were at a reading,” said Leena, to be helpful. “By an American writer called James Hewitt.”

“I know him. He writes spy fiction.”

“There were about twenty of us in the audience,” she said. “You drank two glasses of wine before the reading and another during it.”

“You were keeping an eye on me.”

“I like older guys,” she said. “Afterwards, I asked if you’d read James Hewitt and I bought you a glass of wine.”

“What were you doing there?”

“The owner of the bookshop rents one of my apartments. He invites me to readings, especially the ones with foreigners because of my English.”

“And after the reading?”

“Ten of us crossed the street to a restaurant where they’d laid on a late table for us. It was about ten-thirty.”

“We all sat together?”

“You were opposite me. I was next to James Hewitt. One of his friends was on your left, a musician with a long blond pony-tail. You told him you played the alto sax.”

That jerked him back in his chair. Nobody knew that. Not even his second and third wives. Nor his ex-colleagues in the Company. He hadn’t played music for more than twenty-five years.

“So you’re a woman of independent means,” he said, to cover his shock. “Did Daddy leave you a fortune?”

“You see what I mean? You listen in a way that nobody else listens and then you ask that question. You’re brutal. What do you do, Roland?”

“I’m a businessman.”

“Only if you’re what my ex-husband would have called ‘a bullshit merchant.’”

“What work did you used to do that journalists had to stroke you?”

“Don’t think I don’t know your game,” said Leena, tapping the side of her head. “I ran my own coffee import company from the age of twenty-one. I created a whole new way of packaging coffee. I was young and beautiful-an exciting combination for the media. Tell me about your military training.”

“How did your father die, Leena?”

“He shot himself.”

The wind buffeted against the building. The lamp hummed.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, softening, taking to her more now as the possibility of her being a Company recruit diminished. “A beautiful, wealthy woman in a hotel room with some sap who’s old enough to be your father.”

She stared at him with unblinking, fathomless eyes.

“I recognize damage,” she said.

The wail with a painting on it went grainy in his vision. The towel felt rough in his lap. He winced at a twinge in his side.

“Because you’ve been damaged yourself,” said Schafer uneasily. “I can see that.”

“The worst damage is never visible,” she said.

“Why did your husband leave you?” he asked, swerving away from her insight.

Tucked under the duvet, she looked at him like a small child, but with the eyes of a troubled adult.

“I wasn’t alone in the car,” she said quietly.

With that he was conscious of a terrible pain cornered in the room.

“My four-year-old son was in the backseat and he took the full force of the impact. He died instantly.”

Silence, with a heightened awareness of the two of them naked in a room in the water tower while the world obliviously churned out its future beyond the window He wanted to say something, but realized there was nothing to be said. He didn’t know what he would do with himself if his daughter died, let alone if he felt in some way responsible for it. He wasn’t sure how he was going to cope with her absence, given that by next week she would be unlikely to speak to him ever again. But at least she wouldn’t be dead.

“You’re the first person, outside the small circle of people I used to call my friends, that I’ve told that to,” she said.

“Why me?”

“Something’s ruined you in the same way that I’ve been ruined.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m an expert in guilt,” she said. “I recognize all the symptoms.”

He knew now why he was calm. Her recognition made him feel that he belonged again. His eyes were suddenly full. He blinked fast and swallowed to quell the emotion. And with that last attempt at control, a fatigue so profound it couldn’t possibly have been physical overwhelmed him, and he dropped into a lethal sleep.

Two men sat in a coffee shop a stone’s throw away from the Sternschanzenpark. They were gray men, made grayer by the cold and the coats that they were wearing. The older man, Foley, was skimming a report that the younger one, Spokes, had just produced entitled “Marleena Remer.”

“Did she inherit?” asked Foley.

“She got his sixty percent of the shipping company, the house in the country, and his apartment in the city, plus twenty million euros.”

“So she doesn’t have to work.”

“Her head injuries were severe,” said Spokes. “There was talk of brain damage and psychological problems. Her accountant sold the coffee company for her while she was still in the hospital.”

“Have you got a tax return?”

“There’s an income from the shipping company, but most comes from property. She lives in the top two floors of an apartment building which she owns, renting out the other apartments. She has a rental income of just under a million euros and investment income of about half that.”

“That doesn’t sound so brain damaged to me.”

“Maybe not, but there’s something ‘off’ about her,” said Spokes.

“Tell me,” said Foley, tossing the report.

“Ali, from the Moroccan teahouse on Susannenstrasse, has a daughter who cleans the apartment building’s communal spaces and Marleena’s condo. She says there’s a private elevator to Marleena’s quarters so she knows exactly who goes up there,” said Spokes. “And Leena, as she’s known, gets frequent visits from a number of older men in their fifties and sixties. Same ones, some regular, some not so regular. All times of day and night.”

“She’s brain damaged enough to turn hooker?”

“Maybe,” said Spokes, shrugging. “She underwent three neuro ops and she’s on antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers, which is what she has in her medicine cabinet, according to the cleaner.”

“What’s Schafer getting into now?” muttered Foley.

“Ali’s daughter cleans today. Leena will text her the elevator codes, which she changes later on.”

“Someone will have to go up there with her,” said Foley. “Get the Turk to join her.”

“Arslan?” said Spokes. “Isn’t that a bit… radical?”

“He’s just going to take a look at things,” said Foley. “But if we need him to be ‘radical,’ at least he knows the place. That way we limit the number of people who know about this.”

“You think it’s going to come to that?”

“People far more senior than I am have their jobs riding on the outcome of this,” said Foley. “And I’ve just heard from London that Schafer’s English buddy, Damian Rush, gets into Hamburg at eight-forty-five.”

“Under his own name?”

“He’s only a journalist now.”

“I’d better get out to the airport.”

“Look,” said Foley, nodding out toward the park.

They sipped their coffees as Marleena Remer walked past in an ankle-length, fur-collared black coat, a black fur hat, and gloves.

“You wouldn’t know it,” said Foley into his coffee.

Schafer woke up in the armchair, his head pounding so hard he kept absolutely still while he checked the room. There was a note on the towel in his lap. Leena, an address on the Schanzenstrasse, a telephone number, and a message: “Call me. I think we can help each other.” He checked his watch. 8:30. He’d slept for more than three hours. Unheard of in his state. He was more rested than he’d been in months.

As a wise, old operative he should have been uneasy about her, but instead he felt something he couldn’t quite define: almost like first love, but without the innocence. He stood, grunting under the pummeling his brain was taking.

The window revealed a bleak dawn, fleisch grossmarkt still shone blue, but a building was taking shape beneath it as the bare branches of the trees by the railway tracks flailed in the wind. Patches of green showed through the snow. His eyes came to rest on the window ledge on which there were sharp wire spokes. On the seventh floor they weren’t there to stop people getting in.

He slurped down three Tylenol with water from the sink in the bathroom. He showered and dressed. In a sudden return of his occupational paranoia he made a meticulous search of his room and found nothing, which was as he’d expected, but it left him unnerved, too. He went down to breakfast. It was going to be a long, hard day.

A bowl of muesli. Fried bacon, blutwurst, and eggs. Ham and cheese on rye. Four sweet coffees and some pastries. He was going to need some insulation out there. Zero, with an ugly wind coming from the North. He went straight out, wearing a thick sweater under a reversible coat-blue showing, brown not. He also had a couple of hats and some spectacles-a few basic tools to disguise himself.

In this sort of weather he’d have normally taken the U-Bahn from Schlump into the Gänsemarkt, but he wanted to see what sort of resources the Company had at its disposal, so he opted for a walk in the park around the deserted Japanischer Garten. It was cold and damp, and his trousers stiffened up like cardboard before he’d even crossed the road beneath the TV tower.

Since 9/11 and the discovery of the Hamburg cell the Company had developed plenty of immigrants-Turks, Moroccans, Iranians-for basic footwork: listening in at the mosques and sniffing around the Koran schools. The Company wouldn’t want too many of them to know that they were being used to tail an ex-colleague, but it wouldn’t have to worry about loyalty from those who did.

The café in the park was closed, the chairs stacked and the umbrellas under wraps, waiting for spring, which seemed a long way off. The water features below had been drained so that they wouldn’t freeze over. The plants in huge stone half-eggs had been bagged against the frost. The park, as he’d suspected, was empty of people.

Schafer spotted his first tail at the Stephansplatz U-Bahn station ahead of him. A square-headed guy, probably from the Maghreb, who was standing at the entrance of the station, freezing cold, making a show of reading a newspaper. He led him down Dammtorstrasse to the Gänsemarkt. He used to come to this square as a kid with his mother, although it was a triangle and there had never been any geese; it had always been a big part of his family life at Christmas. The lights were on in the huge arched windows of Essen & Trinken, and there was some snow gone to ice on its green copper roof. Schafer quickly lost his tail in the station, saw him looking up and down the wrong platform as he boarded the train to Jungfernstieg.

Coming out of the underground Schafer turned his back on the gray, choppy expanse of the Binnenalster Lake and counted across the buildings from left to right. Third building. Fourth row of windows. Second along. The blind was down. Damian telling him he had company. What did he expect? He’d been arrogant to think that they could pull this off unnoticed. He went to the S-Bahn station and left a chalk mark on the inside of the right-hand steel support. Plan B.

He took a walk down the Alsterfleet canal by the side of the Rathaus. He wanted to see the Elbe but drifted onto the Altstadt square in front of the neorenaissance facade of the nineteenth-century town hall, which looked black and Gothic in the gloom. Back in 1962, at the age of ten, he’d stood here with his parents for a remembrance service to the three hundred victims of the North Sea flood. He recalled the great sadness of the adult crowd on that day, which as a child he hadn’t been able to comprehend. He felt more emotional about it now than he had then.

When he arrived at the river Elbe, which was flat as sheet iron at this point, he began to wonder what he was doing. He stared across the water, at the cranes ranked along the port quays, with eyes that had always kept the secrets they’d seen. Now he was going to blow it all open, and he realized there was something valedictory about his movements around his old town.

He got on a train at the Landungsbrücken station. First things first, he had to collect what he was supposed to pick up last night at the reading before the woman, Leena, had thrown everything into disarray. He headed back out to Schlump. Was this any sort of a job for a grown man? Endlessly going around in circles, finding different ways to check your back?

Now that he was on the train and certain that he was free of tails, he took stock. The drinking was out of control-that was clear. He tried to retrace the scene in the bookstore last night, but he still couldn’t remember meeting Leena. How could he forget that? She was the whole reason he’d left without what he’d gone in there for. But he did realize that. He had come out empty-handed… hadn’t he? His certainty wavered in his paranoid mind. Was that why he was so anxious to get to the bookstore? Why he’d searched his room? To make sure he hadn’t picked up, taken the material back to his hotel room, and let Leena walk away with it this morning? He knew it hadn’t happened like that. For a start, she wouldn’t have been there when he woke up. He’d definitely aborted the mission. But he had to work his way back through the fog, blankness, and memory obliteration of booze to get to it.

The train clattered into St. Pauli and a minute later lunged out. He caught sight of himself in the glass of the window. It wasn’t the heavy pouches under his eyes and the depth of the lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth that disturbed him. It was more that he didn’t quite recognize himself, had to put his hand up to his face to make sure it was him. This was what losing your moral center did to you. This was what betraying your country did to you.

And with that terrifying admission he got to the point. He had not gone to the toilet in the bookstore. He’d been so disturbed by Leena coming on to him, certain that she was a honey trap, that he hadn’t dared to go in there even to relieve himself.

At Schlump he walked fast, an icy wind at his back, to the bookstore. He sat down with a cup of coffee and a German copy of James Hewitt’s latest novel. Last night’s chairs and microphones had been cleared away, and the floor area was now reoccupied by tables laden with books.

He heard the door open. The shop emptied as the two members of staff and a customer left for a smoke on the front step. Schafer went to the toilet, locked the door, lifted the seat, stood on the rim, and, using a penknife, unscrewed the extractor fan housing high up by the ceiling. His most trusted courier had left the black plastic bag that he now found inside the fan. It contained a folded sheet of paper and a memory stick, which he pocketed. He refitted the extractor fan housing, cleaned off the rim of the toilet, flushed, and, leaving the seat raised, went back to resume his reading. The staff returned. The customer flicked his cigarette and moved off.

Schafer appeared to read a couple of chapters while he was actually thinking about Leena. The note. “I think we can help each other.” With his paranoia subsiding he was sure, once again, that she was not a honey trap. Quite apart from the “come on” of the note being far too strong, she was too quirky for the average Company operative and her story too powerfully authentic to be anything other than the truth. The note made him think that maybe, given that the Company would know about her by now, she could be of some help in Plan B. He slotted the piece of paper into his book, which he paid for.

He backtracked and crossed the Sternschanzenpark to the hotel, where he knew he’d be followed again. Back in his room he entered Leena’s number into his cell phone memory. He tore her note in half, leaving only the message part as the bookmark and left it inside the novel on the bedside table. He screwed up the other half and put it in his pocket.

He took some tape from his suitcase and opened the plastic bag he’d taken from the bookshop toilet. He checked that it was the memo to private contractors that he’d stolen six weeks earlier. He wasn’t mentally up to checking the contents of the memory stick on his laptop, but he confirmed that the small mark he’d engraved on the plastic casing was still there. He put the paper and stick back in the plastic bag and sealed it with tape. He wanted to deliver the two pieces of evidence together, personally, because he was going to supply a commentary to the devastating pictures on the memory stick to Rush. Given that he was sealing his fate and that of others, including his fellows on the assignment, his Company superiors, and senior officers in the Pentagon, he should have realized they wouldn’t make it easy for him.

Using the stairs, he found that the maids were cleaning the rooms on the tenth floor. He walked past their two trolleys and saw that while one of them wore her passkey around her neck, the other preferred to keep hers tied to the trolley handle on a piece of elastic. He watched them from behind the central elevator shaft as they moved clockwise around the circular landing. When they started vacuuming, he made his move. He unthreaded the passkey and opened one of the rooms they’d already cleaned, number 1015. He slotted a coin in between the door and frame to keep it open and returned the passkey to the trolley. Fifteen minutes later the maids moved up to the eleventh floor.

Schafer let himself into the empty room, looked around. There was no need to be clever about this. He lifted the only painting in the room from the wall. The frame was deep enough to take the memory stick. He taped the plastic bag onto the back and replaced the painting. He left the room, went back down to his own, took a piece of notepaper, and wrote out a classified ad in German. This was for Plan C, in case B messed up. He checked the time: 12:30. Half an hour to get back into town for lunch.

Of the twenty people on the platform at Schlump, the Company man stood out. There was no training ground for these people. By the time he’d hit thirty-five he’d done a decade of this sort of work in Berlin.

He wanted his tail with him this time. They took the train to Jungfernstieg and walked along the front, with the wind whipping off the lake so that it was a relief to turn down Grosse Bleichen and an almost erotic experience to walk into the warmth of the Edelcurry restaurant. Three minutes early. He took a table deep in the restaurant and ordered a pilsner. The combination of last night’s alcohol and this morning’s adrenaline had put a tremble in his right hand. The beer corrected it, improved his spirits. He reminded himself to act happy.

Thomas Lüpertz was the son of Schafer’s father’s best friend. They’d done exchanges between families so that Thomas could learn English and Roland could maintain his German. The adolescent friendship had been cemented when Schafer ended up on a posting to Hamburg after his first marriage had bust up in the early 1980s. The two men hadn’t seen each other for several years. It didn’t matter. They had a great time eating currywurst and drinking beer. They laughed about life’s absurdities. He asked Lüpertz to do him a favor, gave him the classified ad he’d written, and asked him to put it in the Hamburger Abendblatt and pay for it. His old friend didn’t even question it.

Just after two o’clock Lüpertz left without taking his copy of Die Zeit, which he’d slapped on the chair next to him on his arrival. Schafer took the newspaper to the toilet with him. He had a long pee, all that beer, and spent time washing his hands. He returned to his seat and ordered a coffee. He drank two more over the next hour while reading the newspaper.

The gloom was gathering for an early winter nightfall as he came out onto the street. His tail was looking very cold. He walked down to Axel-Springer-Platz and called Leena on his cell phone.

“You said we could help each other,” he whispered.

“Who is this?” she asked, missing a beat.

“How many offers of help do you leave on drunks in hotel rooms?”

“Per week?”

He laughed. For real. It had been a long time.

“I’m the drunk from the Water Tower Hotel, room seven thirteen.”

“I’m with my accountant at the moment,” she said. “Why don’t you come to my place around seven o’clock?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I’ll text the elevator codes to this number.”

She hung up.

He caught a train to Landungsbrücken, switched to the underground, and got out at Sternschanze, leaving his tail on the train. It was dark as he walked up to the hotel, and his feet crunched on ice.

Back in his room he lay on the bed, burping currywurst. The news was full of the ongoing financial meltdown and President-elect Obama’s announcement that he would close Gitmo. Couldn’t happen sooner. He’d done his time down there. Depressed the hell out of him. He switched to Bloomberg, where all the presenters seemed too desperate for good news in a recession that had only just begun. He felt remarkably calm given that a new world order was taking shape less than seventy years after the last one, while he was getting down to the serious business of betraying his country.

The television annoyed him. He turned it off and stared at the receding ceiling, letting fragmented thoughts of his third wife come to him. She was slipping away. Their separation and his drinking had brought them to a state of alienation he couldn’t bear. All that was left was the little girl. They’d called her Femi, the Egyptian for “love.” But that wasn’t going to be enough to keep them together. It had been the one thing that had pushed them apart. His wife had quit work, and he’d had to come out of retirement to fund it, but he hadn’t wanted to go back into the Company because he’d heard it had all gone bad in the 1990s.

The stress rose in his chest. He rolled off the bed to the mini-bar and sucked down a miniature of vodka and a scotch. He went back to the bedside table, opened James Hewitt’s novel, and shook his head in dismay. They couldn’t even put the bookmark back in the right page.

His cell phone vibrated, Leena sending him the elevator codes.

They were sitting in the front of the Moroccan tea shop on Susannenstrasse; it was five in the afternoon. Any view of them from the street was obscured by the ranks of hookahs piled up in the window. Foley wasn’t impressed by the report that Spokes had just given him. He sensed the situation was getting out of control, could feel the weight of a heavy decision gathering on his shoulders.

“Damian Rush checked into the Park Hyatt,” said Spokes. “He’s been out at the port most of the day, seems to be doing an article on the collapse of the German manufacturing miracle.”

Foley said nothing in reply, drummed his fingers on the table.

“Lüpertz is in his office, and Ms. Remer is back in her condo,” said Spokes.

“I’m going to tell you this so you know what’s happening here and perhaps that will help you understand what we’re going to have to do? All right?” said Foley. “Schafer and Rush were together in Rabat.”

He now had Spokes’s full attention.

“After the July bombings in London, MI5 was desperate for intelligence and MI6 sent Rush to ask some questions for them. He and Schafer worked together on some of the interrogations.”

“Right. I didn’t think it was a coincidence that they were here together in Hamburg.”

“And that Rush left MI6 over a year ago and is now a journalist.”

Spokes fell silent.

“When Schafer’s contract was terminated along with the others’, I went to Rabat to close down the ‘black site’ just after the November election,” said Foley. “That was when I discovered that the private contractors’ memo was missing. And six weeks’ work later, by process of elimination of the other two members of Schafer’s Rabat squad, here we are in Hamburg with Schafer and Rush.”

Spokes could sense Foley hardening with each of these revelations.

“They still have to meet,” said Spokes.

“I know that. And physical meetings and material exchanges are the most dangerous moments for operatives,” said Foley, quoting to Spokes from the manual. “And what do you think Schafer is doing about that, with all his field experience from the days of the Berlin Wall?”

“He’s trying to confuse us.”

“He’s not trying. He is,” said Foley. “We lost him last night and we lost him again this morning. He knows we can’t ask the Germans for help and we’ve got limited reliable resources at our disposal. So he’s spreading us thin on the ground. We’re already watching three corners: Rush, Lüpertz, and the wild card, Marleena Remer.”

Spokes had suspected it would come to this. It was the nature of cover-ups. Once containment looked hopeless there was only one other course of action.

“What did the Turk find this afternoon?” asked Foley.

“The elevator opens out into her apartment on the top floor,” said Spokes, on automatic. “There are two bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, a walk-in closet for her clothes and shoes, a kitchen, dining room, a huge L-shaped living room, where he left the listening device, and an office. On the other half of that floor there’s an art gallery with around twenty works in it. More interesting is what’s below. That just consists of a room within a room.”

“And?”

“It was locked. Arslan said the door looked serious and the walls were made out of brick.”

“Has the cleaner ever been in there?”

“No, and she only does the six-foot walkway around the room when Marleena tells her to.”

“Anything else in her apartment?”

“No safe,” said Spokes. “Arslan mentioned that she had two spare legs of slightly different colors in the walk-in closet. That’s it.”

“Are those elevator codes still operational?”

“We intercepted an SMS from Leena to Schafer giving new codes.”

“Tell the Turk to come and see me.”

The elevator to the Park Hyatt hotel dropped into an upmarket shopping mall, which meant that the Turk did not have to wait outside in subzero for the Englishman to make an appearance at six o’clock that evening.

Rush embarked on a circuitous route to the Hauptbahnhof before doubling back past the St. Jacobi and St. Petri churches and ended up going down into the Jungfernstieg station. The Turk didn’t want there to be any chance of Rush seeing him in such a well-lit place. He hovered for a minute before the Englishman came back up with a copy of the Hamburger Abendblatt under his arm. Arslan watched Rush from the station as he headed up the Ballindamm on the side of the road where the buildings were. Arslan tracked him from across the street under the trees next to the Binnenalster Lake. Rush went into the Café Wien, took a table, stripped off his coat and woolen hat, went to light a cigarette, remembered just in time, and put it back in the packet.

The Turk paced the walkway beneath the trees, nervous and trying to keep warm. This was going to be his only opportunity. It was very dark under there, and the branches clacked overhead. The intense cold meant that there was no one around. Even the traffic, in the early evening on a day of business, was light. He watched as Rush ordered a coffee and read the newspaper in the well-lit café. The Englishman seemed to be studying columns of figures, something like the stock market numbers.

Rush took out his cell phone, looked around him, decided against it. Too many people. He paid the waiter for the coffee, put his coat and hat back on. He still had his cell in his hand.

The wind was cutting, and the Englishman winced as he came out of the Café Wien. He looked back up the street and then across the bridge between the two lakes. Arslan willed him to cross the street which, when the lights changed, he did. Rush walked between the trees before moving out to the railing above the steepish bank down to the water’s edge. He lit a cigarette under the lapel of his coat and made his phone call. Arslan moved quickly, using the trees for cover. Just as Rush closed down his cell, the Turk was on him, hit him with a savage blow across the side of the neck that tipped the Englishman over the rail and down the bank. Arslan vaulted the rail and scrambled down to the water’s edge, where Rush had come to rest. He heaved him into the icy water and held him under. There was a brief struggle, and it was all over. He kicked him out into the lake, picked up Rush’s cell phone, and threw it in after him.

It was a short walk from the hotel to Leena’s condo on Schanzenstrasse. Schafer was excited at the prospect of seeing her again. It had been dark for nearly two and a half hours by the time he set off, just before seven o’clock. He picked up a tail waiting for him under the bridge. It didn’t bother him.

He entered the elevator codes and went up to her apartment. The doors opened onto a wooden floor and Leena in a black miniskirt, boots over the knee, black tights, a long-sleeved black top, and a necklace of stainless steel lozenges. Her blonde hair was piled high, and makeup disguised the scar tissue on the side of her face.

He wasn’t sure of the etiquette of the moment. Their strange earlier intimacy and mutual nudity called for more than a handshake. Leena kissed him on the cheek. Her lips made light contact with the corner of his mouth with electric effect. She led him by the arm to the huge window at the back of the apartment, which overlooked the old city toward the lake. The TV tower loomed to the left. They stared at the glittering city. He enjoyed the pressure of her hand on his bicep. He had an odd feeling that she was about to make him an outlandish offer, like: “All this for your soul.” She sat him on the sofa, offered him a drink. He took a scotch on the rocks. She joined him with what looked like a glass of water.

“You’re looking better than you did this morning,” she said.

“It’s been a while since I’ve slept like that,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me.”

“I don’t need to know.”

“I meant about being able to help each other.”

“I told you my expertise,” she said. “I think you’re an expert, too.”

“I don’t feel like an expert in anything.”

“You ask questions and you listen.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Nobody listens these days, unless you’re talking about them, and even then they’re selective about what they hear,” she said. “I thought, at first, you might be a policeman. A detective, you know, used to asking questions and listening… and thinking all the time. Conservative and ordered, hierarchical, but also seeing horrifying things and dealing with evil people.”

“I’m not a cop,” he said. “I’m a bullshit merchant, remember?”

“That’s part of your job,” she said. “Just to keep people from knowing who you really are.”

His face did not betray a single emotion. He sipped his scotch slowly.

“You’ve had three wives?” she said.

“The middle one only lasted a few months.”

“And you’re away a lot.”

“How would you know?”

“You’re not as American as most Americans,” she said. “You’ve assimilated the cultures you’ve been involved with. You speak German and other languages.”

“Russian and Arabic,” he said, nodding.

“And you’re fifty-… six years old?”

“Fifty-seven.”

“There’s something of the old warrior about you, Roland.”

“Did you say, ‘cold warrior’?”

“I recognize you, I mean your type.”

“Was your father in the military?”

“Before he went into business,” said Leena, “he was in intelligence. It was one of the reasons he was so successful and it was also why my mother left him.”

“And why was that?”

“She never quite knew who she was with.”

“Did she remarry?”

“A plumber,” said Leena. “And she knows exactly where she stands with him.”

“Yes,” said Schafer, “plumbers are safer than spies and more useful around the house. Did your father shoot himself because your mother left him?”

Leena shook her head slowly, as if her father’s suicide had something to do with Schafer.

“What was it?”

“I don’t know for certain,” said Leena. “And my mother couldn’t tell me anything. But two weeks after his funeral I had a visit from a woman who told me that her husband and my father had worked together in Berlin in 1979. Her husband had never come back. She implied that my father had something to do with it. It was complicated by the fact that she wanted money. She might have seen me as someone easy to exploit. That’s certainly what my ex-husband thought.”

“Did you see her again?”

“A year ago. I’d done a bit of research among my father’s ‘friends’ by then, and I’d found that there was some doubt as to his loyalty. Nothing that could be proved, but there were questions about where the capital came from to start up his shipping company,” she said. “I gave the woman some money.”

“Was he ever politically motivated?”

“Never,” she said. “You’re not a spy anymore though, are you?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Last night. It wasn’t an act. I don’t think a spy would risk getting that drunk. My father used to drink himself senseless, but only on his own.”

“I don’t work for anybody anymore,” said Schafer. “I used to be a spy some years ago, and then the Wall came down and I retrained.”

“As what?”

“An interrogator.”

“And the Arabic, was that all about the war on terror?”

“No, my third wife’s Egyptian,” said Schafer. “She speaks English, but I thought it would be fun to learn her language. We use Arabic in the house.”

“Children?”

“One daughter. Unexpected. My wife had been told she couldn’t conceive and at thirty-eight she suddenly became pregnant. She quit her job. I came out of retirement.”

“As an ex-interrogator who speaks fluent Arabic,” said Leena. “When was that?”

“2002.”

“Perfect timing.”

“I didn’t want to go back into the Company, so I joined a private security outfit. They paid more. I could get triple-time if I went to Afghanistan or, later, Iraq.”

“Abu Ghraib?”

“I was there, but not down in the cells with the 372nd Military Police Company,” said Schafer defensively. “The idea was to earn as much as I could as quickly as possible and get back to my retirement.”

“So they didn’t include a course on how money works on the human brain?” said Leena.

“How’s that?”

“The more you make, the more you need, the more you want.”

Schafer sipped his drink, shrugged. He felt something like the discomfort of incipient piles.

“So,” she said, “your spying days are over. Your interrogating days are finished. You don’t work for anybody anymore. You should be back in your retirement. So what are you doing in Hamburg, Roland?”

Silence. Not even traffic noise penetrated the density of the glazing. An invisible clock ticked somewhere. Maybe it was in his head. He didn’t know precisely why, something to do with their earlier intimacy and his strange, retrospective day, but he decided to do something uncharacteristic: to reveal himself.

“I’m atoning for my sins,” he said.

“That’s a strange thing to be doing here,” said Leena. “You’d be better off in Westphalia with Our Lady of Aachen for that kind of thing.”

“I was born in Hamburg,” said Schafer. “My parents moved to the States when I was twelve years old. Then I worked here in the eighties. It seemed like the perfect place to come to remember who I used to be.”

“And what are these sins?”

Schafer was surprised to find himself in exactly the mode he tried to engender in his interrogees: confessional. And he knew how she’d got him there. Because he wanted it.

“The company I was working for offered me a special assignment. It was a lot of money,” said Schafer. “You’ve heard of ‘extraordinary rendition’?”

Leena nodded.

“I operated in a number of ‘black sites’ in Eastern Europe.”

“What are they?”

“Places where terror suspects who’d been ‘extracted’ on the ‘extraordinary rendition’ program could be interrogated, using an ‘alternative set of procedures,’” said Schafer, the sweat coming up on his palms. “It had been decided that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to prisoners in the war on terror.”

“You don’t have to use military speak in here,” she said. “I was brought up on collateral damage.”

“After the London bombings in July 2007 I was offered another assignment that was so secret it was only referred to by its code name: Wordpainter. There were three of us. We were referred to as the Truth Squad. We were all outside contractors and we were given a special memo.”

His heart had gone into overdrive, and he was suddenly finding it difficult to get enough air. He sucked on the whiskey.

“The memo broadened the ‘alternative set of procedures,’ allowing us to use ‘extremely harsh techniques’ to extract vital information from ‘high-value detainees.’”

“What does that actually mean?” she asked. “The Bush administration had a talent for euphemism.”

“Electric shocks, heat, fire, bastinado, strappado, extreme humiliation… anything that pushed the limits of human tolerance. You know,” said Schafer, after a long, ruminative drink, “once you’ve decided that torture is okay it’s inevitable that boundaries get pushed.”

“Presumably you were paid extra to do all that?” she said.

“Seventy thousand dollars a month.”

He breathed in heavily, as if he had a weight on his chest. The phone rang. An answering machine cut in after seven rings. No message. The phone rang again. Still no message. It rang once more.

“I’m going to have to take that,” said Leena. “It’s one of my clients.”

She took the call in her office, closed the door. She came back out to explain that she was going to be a while and that he would have to entertain himself. She pointed him to the art gallery, poured him more whiskey

“Client?” he said. “Are you an analyst or something?”

“I told you, I’m an expert on the nature of guilt,” she said from the doorway to her office. “I know how to relieve its symptoms and what the consequences are if it’s ignored.”

He stayed on the sofa for a while, as if pinned by that statement and exhausted by his own revelations. Then his edginess got to him, and he socked down the scotch and went for another. He grabbed a handful of ice and poured a measure to the brim. He walked the length of the window, asking himself whether this had been a big mistake. Had his vulnerability this morning made him read too much into how he’d felt about her? He stared out of the huge panel of glass at a vast dark patch within the heart of the city. What did he feel about her? He wasn’t attracted to her, not sexually. Did he think she had some answers? Could she help him understand?

He drifted away from the window, let himself into the art gallery It was pitch black, with no visible cityscape. He flicked the switch. Only lights illuminating paintings came on. The windows were blacked out. He drifted through the maze of works. He wasn’t much interested in modern art. Too conservative. Didn’t get it. These were bleak landscapes. Large, white, unframed canvases with something gray and indistinct happening, or rather not happening, in various quarters. The only portrait was at the far end of the gallery. An old man in a business suit was sitting in a chair within some kind of cage. He was holding on to the arms and screaming. It made him shiver.

At the end of the gallery was a door, which gave him notions of escape. It opened onto stairs going up to the roof and down to the floor below. He went down, drink in hand, the ice tinkling against the glass. Another door opened onto a wide, wooden-floored corridor with a view of the city visible at the end. The lighting was utilitarian neon. He walked down the corridor, checked around the corner, realized there was a room set within the entire floor of the condo. Maybe, given her superb physical shape, it was her gym.

His palms were sweating again as he reached for the door handle, opened it. The air inside was cold and smelled of damp and something unpleasant like effluent. The surface of the floor was different; it had the grittiness of rough concrete. As he felt for a switch, the door clicked shut.

The strobe of fierce neon thrashed four images onto his retina. Ropes and pulleys over a large puddle. A metal frame in front of a cinder block wall. A bed with straps hanging from it. An uncoiled hose. Even before the neon had settled he fell to the floor unconscious.

Someone was stroking his face with a wet washcloth and running a hand through his hair. It was so lulling it put him in mind of being pushed in a pram under trees. He came to, stripped to the waist, broken glass on the floor. The concrete bit into his back. His vision was blurred, but he could make out a face above him. His vision slowly cleared. Leena rested his head on the floor and took a seat on a stool at his feet. She was wearing an orange boilersuit, of the sort prisoners wore in Gitmo.

“What is this, Leena?” he asked, seeing blood on his chest.

“You fainted, dropped your glass of whiskey, cut your head and hand as you went down, and bled all over your shirt,” she said. “You must be familiar with this sort of room.”

“What is this?” he asked, turning his head to take in his surroundings.

“I call it a return to equilibrium,” said Leena.

“It’s a treatment room for your clients?”

“I help people, mainly men, who feel that they have such a disproportionate amount of power to control the lives of others that they experience overwhelming sensations of guilt. By reducing them to a state of powerlessness, through the infliction of pain and humiliation, I return balance to their minds. This reduces their suicidal tendencies and, in some cases, reinvigorates their sense of belonging within the human race.”

“And who are your clients?”

“Mainly captains of industry, politicians, military men, policemen, and the odd prison governor, but no interrogators,” she said. “Or is that being too euphemistic? The idea is to face up to things, after all. I’ve never had any paid torturers among my clients.”

“I told you I’m atoning for my sins,” said Schafer. “I’m dealing with my guilt in my own way. I’m going to reveal myself to the world for the man that I am, for the work that I’ve done in the name of my government. I’m condemning myself by media. Do you think my wife will have me back? Do you think she’d want me anywhere near our daughter?”

“You’re not coping with it very well,” said Leena. “I don’t think last night was the first time you’d drunk yourself into oblivion. Everybody in the restaurant was concerned for me… not you. They could see that you’d given up on some essential human qualities. Then you walk in here and faint.”

“So what are you proposing?”

“That you have some of the experience of the victim,” said Leena. “I can’t simulate everything. I can’t keep you for days in a locked room with little food and in poor or extreme conditions with no sleep. I can’t reduce your humanity to the level of livestock and have you brought up to the light, immobilized into a state of total helplessness, and then, possibly the worst thing, have another human being do terrible things to you for hours and days, over which you have no control, not even if you tell the truth. I wouldn’t want to. It would reduce me, too.”

“So what do you do?”

“I can make you feel helpless and humiliated and deliver a certain level of pain,” said Leena. “There are psychological benefits.”

“It sounds like I have to trust you.”

“That’s not a common link between torturer and victim, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, but that’s part of it.”

“And what do you get out of it?”

Silence apart from the drip of water. They looked at each other for some moments.

“There’s not a minute of every day that I don’t think about what happened in the accident,” she said. “I went through a red light. I wasn’t thinking straight. My head was so full of what my father had done, killing himself, that I was in a state of distraction almost all the time. I was a careful woman driver, not a crazy kid, and my brain suddenly didn’t understand the difference between red and green anymore.”

“You’re punishing your father.”

“It’s the only way I can keep going,” she said. “Otherwise I have nothing. All the money, all the comfort, all the male interest in me, all the possibilities that life has to offer are meaningless.”

He stripped. She fastened his wrists and ankles into the four corners of a metal frame lying on the floor. They were silent and complicit. She stepped away from him, reached for a remote that hung from the ceiling, and pressed one of the buttons. One end of the steel frame started rising within some metal runners until it was vertical and Schafer hung spread-eagled within it. The pain in his shoulder joints was immediately excruciating. It was a technique he knew bore results.

Leena pressed another button on the remote, and the metal frame revolved through 180 degrees, so that Schafer was upside down and facing away from her. His hips felt as if they were about to dislocate. Leena selected a two-meter length of rattan cane and swiped the cold air, backward and forward.

Foley had given the Turk the all clear once he’d heard that both Leena and Schafer were in the lower apartment and they’d lost sound contact. Arslan entered the elevator codes and went up to the top floor wearing a pair of latex gloves. He had a 9mm Glock 19 with a titanium suppressor, which he did not intend to use. In his pocket he had a twisted leather garrote.

The elevator doors opened onto the apartment. He went through the master bedroom to the en suite bathroom and put together a cocktail of Leena’s medications in one of her pill canisters. He picked up a bottle of scotch from the drinks tray and tucked it under his arm. He strode through the art gallery, down the stairs and into the apartment below. He walked silently on treadless sneakers, took out his Glock, and opened the door. The soundproofing of the room meant that he’d heard nothing of what was going on inside. He was momentarily stunned by the sight before him.

“That was the rattan cane,” said Leena, slightly breathless. “This is a sjambok. It’s made out of rolled rhinoceros hide. You’ll notice the difference.”

Nothing from Schafer, just gasping. Blood ran from the open welts across his back, buttocks, and hamstrings. It ran in tickling trickles down his body and over his face and forehead and dripped onto the concrete.

“Put that down,” said Arslan from the door, the Glock in his outstretched hand.

Leena spun around, her face livid from effort.

“What are you doing in here?” she said, like a teacher whose space had been invaded by a pupil. “Is he something to do with you, Roland?”

“Drop the whip and come to me,” said the Turk.

This was better than he could possibly have imagined. His mind opened up to possibilities for a clean finish. It could be a sex session gone tragically wrong.

“He needs this,” said Leena.

“He might,” conceded Arslan.

“One stroke,” she said, and before Arslan could protest she laid the sjambok across Schafer s back. It landed with a dull smack and was accompanied by a stunned silence followed by a gagging scream. Arslan slammed the door shut. Leena threw the whip to the ground.

“Let him down from there,” said Arslan.

Leena used the remote to turn Schafer upright and let him down. As his back made contact with the concrete an exquisite agony concentrated itself in Schafer s body. He gritted his teeth.

“Release his feet,” he said. “You got handcuffs?”

Leena pointed to the wall behind with its assortment of cuffs and shackles. Arslan threw her a set.

“Cuff his hands behind his back. Leave him on his front.”

Arslan looked around while Leena worked on Schafer. He put the bottle of scotch on the table, swung a pulley and rope into position over the two of them, moved the stool underneath. He took out the leather garrote and told her to connect it to the rope.

She knew her work, used a metal caliper to make sure the join wouldn’t slip, looped it over Schafer s head. Arslan pulled on the rope. Schafer’s head came up and he scrabbled to his knees.

“Sit on the stool,” said Arslan.

Schafer sat facing away from him, hands behind his back. His chest expanded slowly and shallowly, as if each breath was agony. Arslan told Leena to tie the rope off to a ring in the floor. He motioned Leena with his Glock toward the table, took the pills out of his pocket.

“You’re going to drink these down,” said Arslan. “It’s either that or… violence. I’m easy either way.”

The one thing Leena knew from her endless replaying of the car accident was that, while she could stand pain, she could not bear impact. She knew the consequences of impact, and just the idea of it induced a profound sense of dread in her. She looked at the pillbox, contemplated it for some long seconds. She opened the canister and poured out a handful.

Arslan unscrewed the top from the scotch.

“These,” she said, holding up a round white pill, “are to make me go to sleep. One is normally enough for an adult to sleep a full night. If I take three of them I might get four hours.”

She took six and swallowed them with the scotch.

“These,” she said, holding up a half-red, half-gray capsule, “are antidepressants. The red part is the ‘anti’ and the gray part the ‘depressant.’ They’re supposed to make me happy, but all they do is turn dark black to overcast gray.”

She swallowed another handful; the whiskey seeped out of the corners of her mouth.

“Now these are the babies,” she said, holding up a rounded blue lozenge. “I take these all the time. They really work. Oxy-Contin 160 mg. Active ingredient oxycodone. Known in America as Hillbilly Heroin. These wrap you in cotton wool and tuck you away from life in a little drawer. They cure all known hurt except… the pain of loss.”

She socked back eight, poured whiskey after them. She took another assorted handful and worked her way through those. She became unintelligible, her legs went, and Arslan lowered her to the floor, where her eyes rolled back and she passed out.

The Turk went to the pulley rope, yanked it tight so that Schafer came to his feet. He pulled tighter and got him up onto the stool and then on tiptoe. The blood thumped in Schafer’s carotids. His calf muscles strained and cracked. He felt himself tottering. His mind had achieved great clarity since he’d been returned to upright. The extraordinary pain from the beating he’d sustained had contributed to this. He began to understand something of the nature of religious flagellation. The greater the awareness of his mortal sack through extreme vulnerability, the more he seemed able to concentrate on what was pure and untouchable. He’d never been a believer in God. He’d had no time for the soul or any of that spiritual claptrap. He’d stopped going to church as soon as he was out of his parents’ orbit. But now he found himself on the edge of a revelation. The possibility of it excited him.

A man of Middle Eastern appearance came before him. He couldn’t imagine how he must look to this foreigner. His face craquelured with blood, like Christ bleeding from his crown of thorns, but then the man was probably a Muslim, what would he know? There was nothing readable in his black, shining eyes.

“You know what I’m here for,” said the Turk. “You can make this short or long and drawn out.”

“Go fuck yourself,” said Schafer.

The Turk disappeared, and Schafer felt the rope tremble, and then his feet lost contact with the stool. He struggled to get back to it as the garrote cut into his neck. Darkness crowded his vision. And just as things started to rush away, he crashed to his knees. The world came back up to him. His vision cleared. The rope tugged him back up until he was once again standing on the stool. Arslan walked into frame with ajar of reddish powder.

“This is a mixture of chili and salt,” he said. “Don’t make me do this to you, Schafer.”

Schafer licked his lips, a terrible dryness in his mouth. He had so little to lose that he decided he might as well see what it was that lay beyond the limit of his endurance.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said hoarsely.

The powder tickled as it cascaded down the backs of his legs. Then a burning sensation started and grew until he was convinced that a blowtorch was involved. He swayed on the stool. His body no longer seemed to be his, or was it that the pain was no longer at an endurable level? A strange notion occurred to him: Was this the nature of purgatorial fire? And in that instant, when he thought that he’d ceased to be corporeal but had not yet become nothing, he felt himself suffused with a clean light and an overwhelming sense of gratitude for something that had been conferred on him. And with that thrilling in his chest, he shouted out and leaped from the stool, kicking it away.

The Turk watched, shaking his head. He waited until Schafer’s legs stopped kicking. He crossed the floor to where Leena lay, rolled up her boilersuit, and removed her prosthetic leg. He left the light on, shut the door. Minutes later he left the building.

It was a fifteen-minute walk in subzero temperatures to the Bar Heftier on Beim Schlump. Arslan walked past the red leather-topped bar stools and found Foley in a corner with Spokes opposite him in comfortable armchairs. The room was warm and glowed with an amber luminescence, as if viewed through a glass of whiskey.

Foley offered Arslan a seat and a drink. He refused both.

“I’m not staying,” he said. “I’ve got a flight to Istanbul. I’m just delivering this.”

He handed Spokes the prosthetic leg. Spokes smuggled it rapidly to the floor by the table.

“What’s that about?” said Foley coldly.

“The last thing he shouted out before he died was that what you wanted was in her leg,” said Arslan, then hesitated, looking up into his head. “At least that’s what I think he said.”

The Turk shrugged, turned, and left the bar.

Forty-Eight hours later, as instructed in Rush’s phone call, a British journalist from the Guardian newspaper arrived in Hamburg on the 20:30 flight from Heathrow. He took a cab to the Water Tower Hotel in the Sternschanzenpark. He’d made sure that he was going to be given room 1015 when he’d made his reservation. Once there he dropped his bags and immediately lifted the painting from the wall. He stripped out the plastic bag and put it in the bottom of his case without looking at the contents. He opened the curtain and saw the blue block letters in the blackness of the freezing night.

fleisch grossmarkt