The Elegant Lie

…

Cologne, Germany

June 1949

When the guard came to his cell, Nathan Carter was already awake and sitting on the edge of his bunk. It was 5 a.m. He had not slept all night, afraid that this was only one of many dreams he’d had, in which the day of his release from Langsdorf military prison turned out to be nothing more than a figment of his imagination.

Carter was six foot tall with dark, short-cropped hair and brown eyes in which the irises could barely be distinguished from the pupils. His chin and cheeks were scruffed with a week’s growth of beard and his normally slim build had been made considerably slimmer by the time he’d spent in prison. He had a habit of keeping his fingers tucked inside his palms, as if permanently conscious of their vulnerability. The expression on his face was thoughtful and closed, but otherwise unreadable. He looked like what he was◦– a man who kept his feelings to himself◦– but he also possessed the extraordinary ability of being able to walk into a crowded room and, with no outward sign of effort, emerge from that room with every other person having noticed he was there. Or he could step into that same space and leave again without anyone being able to recall with any certainty that they had spoken to him, or heard a single word he said, or even seen him there at all. To be remembered, or not remembered, was a skill he had turned to his advantage. It had also saved his life on more than one occasion.

The guard motioned for Carter to follow and, in the tomb-like silence of the prison before dawn, they made their way to the mess hall, which was empty at this hour except for the night duty staff, eating their breakfasts before they headed home.

Carter sat by himself at a table on the other side of the hall from the prison workers. A segmented metal tray was put in front of him, on which lay a splat of powdered eggs, half a slice of bread and a small, shrivelled apple. These were the same rations as the guards. It was the best meal he’d had in a long time. He ate everything quickly and without registering the taste of the food, gnawing the apple down to its core before eating the core as well. From a brown Bakelite cup, he drank a cup of water whose taste of dead leaves, the result of being passed through rusty pipes, was so familiar to him now that he had forgotten it could be any different.

After five minutes, the guard ordered him to his feet. What few words the guard pronounced were devoid of any feeling, as if he were speaking to some muted form of life which could not be expected to comprehend the complexities of human emotion.

Carter did not look at the guard, careful not to make eye contact or to move in anything other than a submissive, shoulder-hunched plod. To do anything else could be perceived, depending upon the mood of the guard, as a threatening gesture. The guards carried truncheons made from hard, black rubber and they always aimed for the face. One swipe across the cheek would shatter the delicate bone and either break the nose as well or else crack the skull’s nearly paper-thin orbit around the eye socket. Both scenarios guaranteed an injury from which the victim would never fully recover.

With the guard following close on his heels, Carter passed through the first of several barred gates which separated prisoners from the outside world. Only now did he dare to believe that this might not be a dream, after all.

He was taken to a room that was crowded with racks of old trousers, shoes and coats. The place reeked heavily of mothballs. There, he stripped out of his denim prison overalls while the guard picked out a set of clothes, roughly eyeing him up for size, and threw them at his feet. As he dressed in the poorly fitting garments, he smelled the sweat of other men. The shoes he had been given, their leather cracked and heels worn down, were too small, but he was afraid to ask for a different pair, so he crammed his feet into them anyway and hobbled out of the room.

The guard opened a steel door and Carter stepped out into the hazy shadows of the morning, the clean air shocking his lungs. Still following the guard, he walked along a narrow path, bordered on each side by high fences topped with barbed wire. To his left stood the prison yard, where he had been allowed to wander for one hour each day. To his right was a wide strip of earth, ploughed once a week to keep the soil soft, so that it would reveal the footsteps of anyone who had managed to escape the twin layers of prison fence, as well as the attention of the guards, looking down from the watchtowers through the telescopic sights of their rifles.

At the end of the path, Carter arrived at a guardhouse, where he signed his name in a ledger, beside the signature he had made when he arrived nine months before. He received an envelope containing a bus ticket and a food voucher, and then he was escorted through a door to the street.

There was a moment when Carter imagined that the soldier might offer some words of consolation, or even an insult perhaps, anything to break the spell of sullen hatred that had been cast between prisoner and guard. But the man said nothing. He just shut the door to the guardhouse and was gone.

Having spent so long imagining his freedom, Carter’s first thought on finding himself once more in the world was to knock on the door of the guardhouse and ask to be let back into prison. He worried that the months spent in Langsdorf had left him incapable of looking after himself, beyond the basic function of survival as a convict.

Before beginning his sentence, Carter had prepared himself, as much as he could, for the physical discomfort of prison, for the shockingly bad food and for the degradation of existing as a number. But what he had not prepared for and what, in retrospect, nobody could anticipate, was the effect of the monotony of prison life. The one thing he could not stand to contemplate◦– and thousands upon thousands of times he had batted it down into the darkness of his thoughts, only to see it rise again into the forefront of his mind, like an apple bobbing in a bucket of water◦– was the time he would never get back.

There was a saying at Langsdorf that a man only served two days in prison◦– the day he arrived and the day he left. Everything else, no matter how long the sentence, belonged in a separate world, in which the accounting of time was reckoned on a different set of clocks and calendars, which evaporated into nothingness the moment that door closed behind you.

And it was true. He could feel it◦– the terrible sameness of those days inside his cell, the brutality of wasted hours turning in upon itself, already half forgotten. But what the saying didn’t clarify was that the place in your mind where those two days joined together, your first day and your last, could not be rendered with some tidy pencil line, like the one on which you signed your name inside the Langsdorf prison ledger. Instead, it was a ragged wound, Frankenstein-stitched like the chest of an autopsied corpse. And however you might succeed in wiping from your brain the months or years you spent inside, that scar would always be there to remind you.

The road that led away from Langsdorf was named the Seltnerallee. It had once been bordered by rows of neat cottages, which provided housing for the prison staff. The prison itself had been built in the early 1900s to accommodate medium security convicts from the military district of Cologne. During the Second World War, the prison had been converted into an overflow for the barracks of the 153rd Infantry Regiment, which drew recruits from the surrounding area. At the time, there was no need for a military prison in Langsdorf, since anyone who might have served time there was either shot or transferred to penal regiments on the Eastern Front.

The Allied bombing raids that flattened most of Cologne had also severely damaged the Langsdorf complex. One wing of the horseshoe-shaped prison had to be reconstructed, but the damage to staff residences all along the Seltnerallee was so complete that they were never rebuilt. Once the rubble had been cleared away, only vacant lots remained, in which the ghostly outlines of where the cottages had stood could be seen amidst the blackened soil.

When the Allies overran Cologne in the spring of 1945, they immediately took over Langsdorf, restoring the compound to its original purpose in order to accommodate the growing number of criminals within their own ranks.

After the war, when Germany was partitioned into four zones, each one under the government of a different Allied power, the Occupational Government Prison System was formed to deal with military criminals from all the western countries. The Russians, who controlled most of eastern Germany, maintained a separate prison system for their own soldiers, but French, British and American soldiers were grouped together according to the severity of their crimes. Only the most serious offenders, those guilty of rape or murder, were returned to their own countries to face long periods of imprisonment.

Soldiers guilty of the least serious offences, such as going absent without leave, petty theft or drunkenness, were usually confined to barracks or held in regimental stockades.

Those whose crimes fell somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, who had engaged in violence causing grievous bodily harm, or large-scale theft or black-marketeering, served out their time at Langsdorf, which was located in the British zone of occupation. Their sentences ranged from one month to three years. No one stayed longer than that. At the end of their incarceration at Langsdorf, the majority of soldiers were dishonourably discharged, after being issued with civilian clothes left behind by German soldiers drafted into the 153rd Regiment during the war, who never returned to collect them.

Wearing the clothes of men whose bodies lay in shallow graves from eastern Poland to the gates of Stalingrad, the former convicts would travel to the nearest airfield or train station and begin the long journey home, after which time they would be abandoned and forgotten by the military.

Nathan Carter walked ten paces down the Seltnerallee before he caught sight of his face staring back at him from a puddle in the middle of the road. The sight of his sunken eyes and gaunt cheekbones stopped Carter in his tracks. The mirrors in the prison bathroom were all made of polished metal, which afforded a reflection so vague that most men learned to shave by memory instead of sight. This was the first time in almost a year that he had actually seen himself clearly and, at first, he was so shocked to see what had become of him that he could scarcely breathe.

Carter heard a creaking sound behind him and turned to see one of the guards, who had opened the door to the guardhouse and was staring at him, his expression a mixture of impatience and hostility. Behind him, the first rays of sun glistened on dew that had coated the barbed wire coiled along the fences of the prison yard.

Hurriedly, Carter turned again and walked off down the street.

Since the Allies had ended their occupation of Germany in May 1949, only a few weeks before, the country had effectively been split in two. In the west, a new German government had established itself in the city of Bonn. In the east, another German government had been set up, although it was a government in name only, since every facet of its existence remained under Soviet control.

Marooned within the newly created West Germany, Langsdorf prison began the process of emptying its cells so that the premises could be returned as quickly as possible to their original owners. The prisoners closest to their release dates were the first to go, their sentences commuted.

By the time Carter’s discharge papers came through, only about a third of the prison population remained.

Some days, the barren street that led away from Langsdorf would be crowded with poorly dressed men, but today that street was empty except for Nathan Carter, as he shuffled out uncertainly into a country that he knew wanted only to be rid of him.

In the distance, he could just make out the twin spires of Cologne Cathedral, still standing amidst the cadaver of a city that had been all but obliterated. Even though the war had been over for almost four years, the city had only just started to rebuild. In places, huge pyramids of brick, like the ruins of Mayan temples, were all that remained of taverns, hotels and department stores, which had once been the lifeblood of Cologne’s economy. They stood as a reminder that certain things take on a kind of memory when they spend long enough in the company of flesh and bone. This city had once been like that, but the war had erased so much of its past that even the stones had forgotten. There was a smell to all this◦– a chalky, dry sweetness which caught in the throat and lingered there, and the smell of old fires long since extinguished, punctuated now and then by the reek of pickled cabbage and boiled meat from street food vendors, of carbolic soap from barrels where women washed clothes and hung them up to dry among the ruins, and the sharp, vinegary stench of poisoned rats rotting in the catacombs.

Carter began to walk towards the spires, slowly at first, in the shuffling gait of a prisoner. But then his pace quickened, and then, for the first time since his arrest, he began to run. Weighed down by his heavy clothes, he soon began to sweat, but it didn’t slow him down. In the bright, early summer morning, Carter raced along the streets, past buildings that had somehow survived intact, and others that were patched together like poorly assembled dolls’ houses. Men and women on their way to work and children heading off to school all stopped to watch him racing past.

Carter did not stop until he reached the cathedral square. Unused to the exertion, he bent double, gasping, with his hands upon the knees of his mildew-smelling trousers, and spat onto the ground.

When he finally got his breath back, he walked a little further down the street. Passing a grocery shop, he realised with a double take that the apples, plums and pears on display were actually made of wax. A little further on, in the window of a clothing store, a mannequin with plaster fingertips crumbled as if by leprosy modelled an evening gown, at the base of which was a small card that read ‘not for sale’.

Far above, the contrails of high-flying planes cat-scratched the aquarium blue sky.

A few cars rumbled by, tyres popping on the cobblestones. One of them was a high-powered Tatra sedan, which he recognised immediately because it had three headlights set in a line across the front instead of the usual two, as well as an extraordinary fin sloping down from the rear of the roof, like the dorsal of a giant shark. The Tatra slowed as it passed him and then stopped. A well-dressed man climbed out from behind the wheel. He had a wide, smooth forehead, a square jaw and yellowish-brown eyes, which looked like chips of amber hammered into the sockets of his skull. He wore a pinstripe suit with wide lapels and shoes spit-shined as only a soldier would have done. His hair, cut short at the sides and left to grow long at the top, was combed back straight upon his head. ‘Are you Carter?’ he asked. ‘Nathan Carter?’ The man was German, but he spoke decent English.

Carter straightened up. ‘I might be,’ he replied, staring uncertainly at the stranger.

The man held out one hand towards the open door of his car. ‘Please,’ he said.

‘What’s this about?’ asked Carter.

‘My employer is anxious to meet you.’

‘And who is that?’

‘Someone who will get you a decent set of clothes and a proper meal, and after that…’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Carter. ‘Do I know him? Because I’m sure I don’t know you.’

‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Anton Ritter, and all you need to know about me and my employer is that we are your friends. From the look of you, if you will forgive me saying so, I am guessing you could use a few of those. Now, please’◦– he gestured towards the car again◦– ‘I work for an impatient man.’

For a moment longer, Carter hesitated. Then he muttered, ‘What the hell,’ and climbed into the passenger seat.

A cigarette smouldered in the ashtray. It was American tobacco, not the perfumy, cigar-like stuff the Germans liked to smoke.

Carter was staring at the cigarette.

The man followed his gaze. ‘Of course!’ he exclaimed, the cigarette wagging between his lips. ‘How rude of me.’ Reaching into his chest pocket, he produced a silver cigarette case, which he opened, revealing a neat row of smokes, like the ivories of a piano keyboard.

Carter took one and the stranger lit it for him with a gold Dunhill lighter.

As the leathery smoke swirled around him, Carter retreated into silence.

Ritter left him in peace.

The car pulled out into the flow of traffic heading east along the Bischofsgarten road towards the Rhine. After only a few minutes, they arrived at the Bleihof club, a famous landmark in post-war Cologne. Only a stone’s throw from where the river swirled past, grey and cold, the Bleihof was a tall, spindly and haunted-looking place, with red and white shuttered windows and a second storey which leaned out over the ground floor, making it seem as if the entire structure might, at any moment, stagger forward like a drunken man and pitch headlong into the river.

The hotel had once been the family home of a man who made his fortune selling bars of lead to barges moving up and down the river. The lead was used as ballast for empty ships and could be sold to other ships when the riverboats picked up their cargos downriver.

By the end of 1945, it had been transformed into the haunt of Allied soldiers, and the sad and beautiful women who kept them company in their long silk dresses and lips smeared red as arterial blood, laughing hollow-eyed at jokes they did not understand. Now that Germany had reclaimed its territory, the days of the Bleihof club were numbered. Each night, the drinking and the dancing took on a frenzied finality, as if the world itself were coming to an end.

Parked out in the street were British staff cars, as well as olive green US Army Packard sedans, Willys jeeps and Harley WLA motorcycles. Only a few of the vehicles were civilian and, unlike the military cars, these ones were all guarded by men like the stranger who had picked Carter up off the street, in their wide-lapel suits and shiny shoes with Mauser pistols tucked into the specially made leather-lined pockets in their trousers.

Ritter pulled up in front of the club and cut the engine. ‘Come, Mr Carter!’ he said. ‘My employer must not be kept waiting.’

Carter emerged from the car, dazed and squinting in the brassy sunlight.

The doorman of the Bleihof, in a long blue coat which came down to his ankles, immediately sized up Carter’s ill-fitting clothes, the hack-job prison haircut and the grey, half-starved complexion. Then he glanced at Ritter, as if to ask whether he really expected such a downtrodden wreck of a man to be allowed inside.

Ritter ignored this, if he even noticed it at all. The two men swept past the front entrance and made their way around to the back of the club to a small red door in between two curtained windows. From inside came the sound of a band playing ‘When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano’.

Ritter knocked on the door and then stepped back. He nodded and smiled at Carter. ‘My employer knows how to throw a party. You wait and see!’

‘Who’s the party for?’ asked Carter.

Ritter laughed. ‘Why, Mr Carter! It’s for you!’

The door opened and a man stuck his head out.

‘Come on!’ shouted Ritter. ‘Let us in!’

The man swung the door wide.

Ritter put one arm on Carter’s shoulder and guided him into the room.

The blare of the music struck Carter as if a ghost had shoved him in the chest. The darkened room was filled with smoke and voices. From the state some people were in, it looked as if the party had been going on all night.

Ritter steered him through the crowd, snatching up a champagne glass from a tray being carried past by a white-jacketed waiter. He drained the glass and handed it to the next man he came to.

Overwhelmed by the crush of bodies and the unfamiliar sound of women laughing, Carter stumbled along behind Ritter, who acted as a kind of battering ram through the maze of people in their way.

The low ceiling creaked and, in those moments when the music paused, he could hear different music playing upstairs, and the shuffling footsteps of people dancing in the room above.

At last, Ritter showed him into a second room, where a long table was crowded with plates of food. ‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ he said to Carter.

At the far end of the room, lounging in a leather wing-backed chair, sat a tall man with thinning hair and a round, boyish face.

On one side of him sat a much younger woman with deep cloudy blue eyes, like those of a newborn baby, which Carter had often seen in Rhineland girls. Her hair was black and very shiny and pulled back in a ponytail, which showed more practicality than any attention to fashion, since most of the women wore their hair steam-curled into waves and held back from their faces with a mass of bobby pins. Neither was she wearing the same scanty, sequined clothing as the women in the outer room. Instead, she had on trousers and a navy blue turtleneck sweater, and her fingertips were stained with ink, as if she had just emerged from writing an exam.

‘Mr Carter!’ exclaimed the boy-faced man, leaping to his feet and vigorously shaking Carter’s hand. ‘It is an honour to meet you. My name is Hanno Dasch, and I am a great admirer of your country.’

‘Including what they did to this city?’ asked the girl with the ink-stained hands.

Dasch shot her a glance. ‘That is in the past,’ he snapped, ‘and the fact is we should never have been enemies in the first place. As far as I’m concerned, everything you see outside we brought upon ourselves.’

‘Why pick me to tell all this?’ asked Carter. ‘I’m not the only American in Cologne.’

‘But none have resumes like yours,’ said Dasch, ‘or better prospects for the future.’

‘From the look on your new friend’s face,’ said the girl, ‘you might want to explain to him why a man in a second-hand suit who, I am guessing, cannot afford to shine his shoes, has suddenly found himself the guest of honour at a party thrown for him by someone he has never set eyes upon until today.’

‘I do have a meal ticket,’ said Carter.

The girl crumpled her lips in a vague, sarcastic smile.

‘May I introduce my daughter, Teresa,’ Dasch said with an exasperated sigh.

His daughter, thought Carter, as that piece of the puzzle fitted neatly into place.

‘The reason I have thrown this party in your honour,’ explained Dasch, resting his hand upon Carter’s shoulder as if they had known each other for years, ‘is that I am not only an admirer of your country, I am also a great admirer of your work, in particular.’

‘My work?’

‘Don’t be modest! Explain to Teresa how you managed to complete one of the most successful robberies in the history of the US Army.’

Carter shifted uneasily. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I wouldn’t call it that.’

‘What he did,’ said Dasch, picking up the story, ‘was to send four trucks to the US Army’s warehouse on the outskirts of Wiesbaden, in the American occupation zone, with bills of lading for more than three million American cigarettes which had just arrived there and which were due to be distributed to commissaries at every Allied base on the continent of Europe. The guards at the warehouse had been told to expect the trucks at a certain hour of the morning and they arrived exactly on time. The bills of lading were checked and the cigarettes were loaded on board. The whole thing took less than one hour. Then the trucks departed and, half an hour later, four different trucks arrived with identical bills of lading for the three million cigarettes. Of course, they were immediately arrested. By the time it was determined that these men were, in fact, carrying the legitimate bills of lading and that those in the first trucks were fakes, the cigarettes had disappeared, along with the men who had been impersonating American military personnel. The trucks were found about an hour away from the city, all neatly parked and with the keys still in the ignition, but the cigarettes and the men who stole them were never found. This was a success beyond the wildest dreams of anyone who’s ever dared to contemplate such things.’

‘Except for the fact that he ended up in prison,’ muttered the girl.

‘Ah!’ Dasch raised one finger and sliced it back and forth through the air, as if he were extinguishing a match. ‘But, Teresa, do you know why?’

‘I imagine you are about to tell me,’ she replied.

‘He was betrayed,’ said Dasch, and suddenly he was no longer smiling, ‘by someone he thought he could trust. Is that not right, Mr Carter?’

‘That’s what the papers said.’

‘So they did,’ Dasch agreed, ‘and there was something else they said, as well.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Teresa.

‘That Mr Carter never divulged his contacts, or the names of the people he had worked with. Even though he himself had been a victim of deceit, Mr Carter remained a man who could be trusted.’

‘Bravo, Mr Carter,’ said Teresa, without a trace of sincerity in her voice.

‘Bravo, indeed,’ said Dasch, turning to Carter and looking him straight in the eye. ‘Such loyalty deserves to be rewarded.’

Teresa rose to her feet. ‘Enjoy your party,’ she said to Carter. ‘I am going home.’ Then she walked out of the room.

‘Please forgive her,’ said Dasch. ‘She is singularly lacking in diplomacy.’

‘At least she’s honest about it,’ said Carter.

‘A little too much so, I’m afraid.’

Carter noticed that the music upstairs had stopped now, and the floor no longer creaked with dancing.

‘The party is getting old,’ said Dasch, apparently forgetting that Carter had only just arrived. ‘Why don’t we go out and get some air?’

As they left the little room with the wing-backed chairs, he saw that the band had finished for the night and were now packing away their instruments into battered, velvet-lined cases. The lights had been turned on and most of the guests had departed. A few sat unconscious on couches which, under the punishing glare of dusty light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, revealed stains of wine and the charred holes of cigarette burns.

Outside, almost all the cars had gone, leaving the street littered with cigarette butts, which the doorman was gathering one by one and stashing in the pocket of his long blue coat. It was a common habit for civilians to follow in the path of Allied soldiers, picking up the ends of cigarettes, which they would then take apart and reassemble into cigarettes of their own.

Ritter was standing by the door, hands folded across his chest and one leg tucked behind him so that the foot was resting flat against the wall.

Teresa had already vanished, and Carter wondered if he would ever see her again. It caught him by surprise that he would even wonder such a thing but, after the relentless sameness of prison life, almost everything he’d seen and every thought to cross his mind since he’d walked out of Langsdorf had been a cause for amazement.

‘Walk with me, Mr Carter,’ said Dasch. ‘We have some business to discuss.’

With Ritter following behind, the two men strolled across the street.

Dasch led them down a pathway that had been cleared between two large grey piles of masonry, like heaps of dinosaur bones. Beyond the rubble lay the shell of a house. Pigeons swooped and fluttered out of holes punched through the slate roof tiles.

Dasch stepped into the hollowed remnants of the building.

Carter followed him in and then stopped and looked around. Above them, perched upon a fan of splintered floorboards, stood a bathtub that had somehow survived completely intact. A staircase led up to nothing. Shards of glass, powdered with soot, fanged the frames of broken windows.

‘Breathe in, Mr Carter!’ Dasch commanded, raising his hands like a preacher. ‘Do you smell it?’

Carter vaguely caught the scent of fires that had been extinguished long ago. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ he said.

‘In places like this,’ explained Dasch, ‘you can still smell the war. It is a very particular odour. Some people have told me that it comes from the ionisation of the air after an explosion. Others say it is the smell of bones that have been burned to dust. And some say it is purely my imagination, my own daughter included. I am often tempted to believe her, but when I walk among the ruins, I know for a fact it is real.’

Carter had thought he was joking, but now it seemed to him that maybe there was some kind of smell◦– different from the sweaty odours of the street that had flooded his senses when he first walked out of prison. This was sharp and piercing, like burned electrical wiring, like the reek of flint when it is struck against itself.

In that moment, Carter suddenly realised that he had made a terrible mistake following Dasch into the confines of this place. But there was no way out of it now. ‘What are we doing here?’ he asked.

‘I just have one question for you,’ said Dasch.

Carter sensed some nameless menace, hideous and lethal, lying just beneath the courteous formality of Dasch’s words.

‘I studied your technique,’ continued Dasch. ‘There is scarcely a detail of that robbery with which I am unfamiliar, and yet there is still one thing I do not understand.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Carter. The moisture had gone from his throat and his lips felt like blades of dry grass rustling together as he spoke.

‘What I don’t understand is why.’

‘Why what?’

‘Why you did it. Why you would suddenly go from being a functioning, law-abiding member of society to carrying out such an audacious theft.’

Carter was silent.

‘And I would like it very much,’ said Dasch, ‘if you could satisfy my curiosity on that small point.’ And now he pinched the air between his thumb and index finger, as if to show what a tiny, insignificant matter it was.

‘I did it,’ said Carter, ‘because I realised that I could.’

Dasch stared at him intently for a moment. Then his face split into a grin, revealing strong, white, perfect teeth. He tilted his head to one side and nodded.

It struck Carter as a strange movement, this tilting of the head, until he realised that Dasch had been nodding to Ritter, who stood directly behind him.

Carter felt dread sifting through his blood, like a slow silty explosion of black ink diffusing in water. Slowly, he turned around.

Ritter was only an arm’s length away, a small automatic pistol aimed directly at Carter’s face, but now he lowered the weapon and tucked it away beneath the folds of his coat.

Carter turned back to face Dasch. ‘What the hell was that?’ he demanded.

‘That,’ replied Dasch, ‘was your job interview, which all depended on your answer to my question.’

‘And how did you know what I would say?’ asked Carter.

‘I didn’t,’ admitted Dasch, ‘but your answer was entirely to my satisfaction.’

‘What if it hadn’t been?’ asked Carter.

Once more, Dasch’s hand came to rest upon Carter’s shoulder, like a bird that had been trained to settle there. ‘There’s no need to talk about that,’ he whispered.

Carter and Dasch crossed the street to where the Tatra was parked, with Ritter drifting along behind them, like his master’s second shadow.

The Bleihof club was closed now, its windows hidden behind shutters whose red paint still showed the dappled blistering of heat from the nearby buildings that had burned in the air raids years before.

‘Climb in,’ said Dasch.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Someplace where you can relax while you consider my offer.’

‘And what is your offer?’ asked Carter.

Dasch did not immediately reply to Carter’s question. Instead he turned to Ritter and exclaimed, ‘You see? This is what I like! This directness. This fearlessness.’ He chopped the knife edge of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Cutting through the fog of ambiguity!’ Only now did he respond to Carter. ‘We may have our country back now, part of it anyway, but we have very little else. The lack of simple things we once took for granted, as you yourself did before you started living in a prison cell, has only increased our desire to possess them. The people who have these simple things◦– the cigarettes and chocolate and soap, which used to be such ordinary pleasures◦– are not the British or the French, and certainly not the Russians. They are the Americans, especially the soldiers over here. And I need somebody who can deal with them, preferably one of their own. But I can’t just wander out onto the dance floor of the Bleihof club and hire the first American I see, even if he were amenable to my offer. I need a person with proven experience in the complicated business of separating these luxuries from those who have enough and delivering them to those who do not. That person is you, Mr Carter. I knew it from the moment I first read about your story in the paper. And since then I have been waiting for the day when you were free again, just as you yourself have waited for so long.’

After travelling along Aachenerstrasse, the car entered the Rudolfplatz and pulled up beside the Hotel Europa, which had been one of many grand hotels in Cologne before the war and was now, having somehow managed to escape annihilation during the war, the only grand hotel. ‘Here we are,’ said Dasch. ‘Your home until tomorrow.’

‘I can’t afford to stay here,’ Carter protested.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Dasch told him. ‘Just tell them your name. Everything is taken care of. And here…’ He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a roll of money as thick as his fist. After peeling off a dozen bills, he handed them to Carter. ‘This will get you some new clothes, and a visit to the barber, as well.’

‘And what then?’ asked Carter.

‘I want you to make up your mind,’ said Dasch. ‘Either go home and try to make a life for yourself, ashamed of your past and hoping that no one learns about the things you’ve done. Or take that shame and turn it into something else. You can understand the actions which first drew you to my attention, and for which you have been punished, as evidence of the skills you have been granted in this life. I am offering you a chance to make use of those skills, among people who will respect you and welcome you, not turn their backs when they see you coming, or throw you once again into a concrete cell if given half the chance. I’ll send Ritter by in the morning. If you’re still here, you can begin your work immediately. If not,’ he shrugged, ‘then I will have misjudged your potential.’

Carter climbed out of the car and shut the door.

The Tatra sped away down the street, turned onto Hohenzollernring and was gone.

For a moment, Carter just stood there, staring up at the magnificent hotel with its revolving front door, lace curtains in the windows and flowers growing in window boxes on the balconies. But Carter did not enter the hotel right away. Instead, he waited until the car was out of sight, then he turned south and walked several blocks to the Zülpicherplatz, until he came to a little barber shop on the corner. A small, black and white enamel sign bolted above the door read ‘Militärrasierstube’, indicating that it was a place for soldiers to get their hair cut.

As Carter arrived, two British soldiers passed him on their way out of the shop. Buttoning their short, yellowy-brown wool overcoats, the men fitted their side caps carefully onto their freshly cropped heads and continued down the street. As they passed by Carter, the men barely seemed to notice he was there. To them, he was just another downtrodden survivor of a beaten army, struggling to forget the last five years of his life.

Carter smelled the aftershave that the barber had splashed on their necks. At the same time, he caught a breath of his own unwashed body, and the old sweat of a stranger steeped into the worn-out clothes that hung like scarecrow rags upon his undernourished frame.

Inside, a man in a white tunic was sweeping up the hair that had fallen around the barber’s chair. Facing the chair was a large mirror, its backing flaked around the edges so that the reflection appeared as if seen through a pair of cataracted eyes. Along the counter were jars of different coloured liquids, red and blue, containing combs and scissors and a straight edge razor.

The man glanced up at Carter. He did not smile. ‘The cost is three marks,’ he said, ‘and that is in advance.’

Carter pulled a twenty-mark note from his pocket. ‘Do you have change for this?’

The barber’s eyes widened at the sight of the large bill. Then he set his broom against the wall and spun the chair around for Carter to take a seat.

Carter removed his coat and hung it on a peg upon the wall, which was lightning-bolted with cracks, still unrepaired, from the seismic shock of a 10,000kg bomb known as a Grand Slam, which had been dropped by a Royal Air Force Lancaster on the night of 31st May 1942. The bomb had fallen six blocks away and where it landed, nothing remained in a two thousand foot radius but a crater, thirty foot deep in the middle, which had since filled with water, forming a pond in which old people, since there were only old people left in that part of town, sometimes went swimming. They floated peacefully, small islands of pale, sagging flesh, and stared down through the surprisingly clear water at the mosaic of broken stones, which were all that remained of the buildings they had once called home.

As Carter settled back into the chair, the barber folded down the collar of Carter’s shirt and gently wrapped around his neck a thin strip of papery fabric. Then, with a movement like a magician wafting his cape, the barber covered Carter’s upper body with a clean white cloth.

‘How should it be?’ he asked.

‘Short on the sides,’ said Carter, ‘and leave it long on top.’

The barber fished out a pair of needle-nosed scissors and a comb and began to snip away at Carter’s unkempt mass of hair.

At Langsdorf, prisoners received mandatory haircuts once every three months. The cuts were done by untrained soldiers using electric clippers and the hair was cut down to the scalp, frequently leaving gouges in the skin. It was possible to bribe the prison barbers with cigarettes or money, but all that got a person was a slower haircut; a little less painful, but just as ugly as everyone else’s.

As Carter closed his eyes and listened to the metallic swish of the scissors, the muscles in his back relaxed for the first time in so long he had mistaken them for bone. Suddenly, and catching him completely by surprise, tears spilled out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks.

The barber stopped his cutting, produced a clean handkerchief and dabbed away the tears. He made no comment, nor did he pause in his work for more than a couple of seconds. In a moment, he was back to snipping away tiny strands of hair raised up along the black, medicinal-smelling tines of the comb.

For the remainder of the haircut, Carter puzzled over why the tears had come. It was something about the peculiar anonymous gentleness with which the barber performed his task, set against the dull, uncaring brutality that surrounded almost every memory he had of prison life.

When the haircut was finished, the barber held up a small mirror for Carter to see the back of his head.

For the first time in a long time, Carter recognised himself.

Then the barber produced a hot towel from a pot simmering on a heater in the corner. He squeezed out the water and then coiled the towel into a ring, laying it over Carter’s face so that only his nose peeked out from the hole in the middle. Then Carter heard the dry shuffle of the straight edge razor blade against the leather strop. The warmth of the towel radiated across his face and down his neck.

A minute later, the barber removed the towel and painted Carter’s face with soap, using a badger hair brush. Then he positioned the razor in his hand, tilted Carter’s head very slightly to the side and slowly drew the blade down Carter’s cheek, the straight edge rustling faintly as it cut through the bristles.

When the barber had finished his work, he closed the razor and wiped the white slick of shaving cream on a towel that hung across his sleeve. Then he used the clean side of the towel to clear away the last flecks of soap from beneath Carter’s ears. Finally, he splashed rubbing alcohol onto his palms and, with practised movements, neither sensual nor complicated, he swiped his hands across Carter’s face and neck. Carter gasped at the almost electric jolt of the alcohol upon his skin.

The cloth was removed, once more with a flourish, and Carter reached into his pocket for the money. ‘There used to be another barber here,’ he said, as he handed over the twenty-mark note. ‘It was a while ago. I haven’t been around much lately.’

‘Do you recall his name?’ asked the man, narrowing his eyes.

‘Siegfried,’ answered Carter.

The barber’s face froze. His arm remained extended, fingers still clasping the money. ‘Are you sure that was his name?’ he asked.

‘Positive,’ said Carter.

The barber’s face had turned very pale, like the belly of a fish floating upside down in a pond. ‘I would be happy,’ he began, his words sounding strangely rehearsed, ‘to tell him we have spoken, and where he might find you, if you would care to let me know.’

‘I’ll be in the dining room of the Hotel Europa today at noon. Say that Carter wants to see him.’

The barber seemed to remember suddenly that he was still holding the twenty-mark note in his hand. He went over to a drawer in the counter, opened it and began rummaging about amongst a pile of coins and crumpled bills.

‘Keep the change,’ said Carter.

The barber turned and stared. ‘What? All of it?’

‘You earned it,’ said Carter. Then he turned to leave.

‘Mr Carter!’ the barber called to him.

Carter stopped at the door but did not turn around. ‘Yes?’

‘Welcome back,’ he said.

By the time Carter sat down at his table in the ornate dining room of the Europa, a large room located just off the main foyer of the hotel, he was wearing a new navy blue double-breasted suit, new shoes, new shirt, new tie. In fact, new everything. Every scrap of clothing he had been wearing when he walked into the little haberdashery on Bügeleisenstrasse had been rolled into a bundle by the quietly appalled sales clerk and tossed into the alleyway behind the shop, where it lay in a puddle for less than a minute before someone dashed out of a doorway to claim it.

Carter had chosen a small table in the corner, facing the entrance to the dining room and right next to the kitchen door, through which he might escape if necessary. He never sat anywhere except with his back to the wall and never more than three running paces from an exit. He had picked up a copy of the newspaper on his way in and glanced down at the headlines while he waited. The front page was taken up by an article about a woman whose body had been found washed up in bulrushes on the banks of the Rhine. As yet, she was still unidentified, but the police had ruled it as a suicide. It mentioned that, during the war, the suicide rate in Germany had been more than ten thousand people a year and, although the number had dropped considerably since the armistice of 1945, it was high enough to be a matter of national concern. Carter was not surprised to read this. As remarkable as the progress of rebuilding this country had been, it still had a long way to go. And it would be much longer still before the psychological damage of the war began to heal. If it ever healed. If it was ever meant to heal.

From what Carter had seen, not only would these mental scars remain, for as long as those who had lived through the war continued to draw breath, but the trauma itself would outlive them. It would be passed on from generation to generation, until it had altered the very substance of German identity. One thing was for certain◦– there could be no going back to the way things had been before, and yet that was exactly what Hitler had promised; a return to the greatness of some imagined moment in the past. By the time people realised that they had been tricked by one of the biggest con men in history, there was no choice except to link arms and march forward into a nightmare. The Germans even had a word for it: ‘Ausharren’. It meant to proceed down a path that you knew was the wrong one to take, but to take it anyway because you had no other choice except to die. Carter wondered if the woman had thought about that as she slipped into the murky water of the Rhine.

Carter heard someone clearing their throat and looked up to see the waiter in his close-fitting tuxedo jacket. Before the war, this man had been a professor of physics at the university of Cologne, but considered himself lucky to have any job at all now, even as a waiter in a restaurant where he had previously been a regular customer. He was tall and thin, with a strangely blunted nose and the tops of his ears chipped away as if they had been carved from rotten stone◦– all the result of frostbite, which he had received near the town of Tula Oblast while sleeping in the ruins of what had once been the house of Leo Tolstoy, in the winter of 1941. Beneath his collarbone, barely visible under the flimsy fabric of his shirt, was a large, X-shaped scar, where he had been stabbed with the cruciform blade of a Mosin-Nagant bayonet when a group of Siberians appeared out of a blizzard on the outskirts of Novgorod, and overran the snow-covered bunkers where the professor and his men had been waiting out the storm. There was also a mottled scar across his neck, like the drag of a long fingernail, where he had been grazed by a bullet from a Tokarev pistol, fired by a commissar in the seconds before he lost consciousness as the waiter choked him to death, waist deep in tar black water in the marshes of Pripet. Stories lost to all but him, and only half remembered now. ‘Will you be having company, sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Carter.

‘Then would you like to wait before you order?’

‘No,’ said Carter. ‘I believe I will get started right away.’

‘Would you like to hear the special, sir?’ asked the man.

‘Whatever it is, I will have it.’

‘Very good, sir,’ replied the professor, bowing slightly and making a conscious attempt not to click his heels together, which had become a habit during the war.

In the stillness while Carter waited for the food, he found himself struggling to maintain an outward appearance of normality and calm while, inwardly, his heart felt clogged with a fluttering anxiety which, at first, he could not trace back to its source. As the minutes passed, the answer began to appear, dimly, like a man walking out of the fog, until finally it stood there in front of him and he recognised the demon that had dogged his path from the moment he set foot in prison.

During his time in Langsdorf, two things had obsessed Carter to the point where he could feel his sanity slipping away and madness scuttling towards him on its brittle, crabbing legs.

The first was that he had somehow been forgotten by the people who had sent him to prison, and that the days of his sentence, of which he kept obsessive track, were not even being counted by anyone other than himself. Carter had calibrated his sanity for the nine months he expected to serve, not one day longer. But what if they simply left him there to rot for the maximum three years, or even longer? Over time, it became a fixation. There was nothing he could do to pacify the voices in his head. All day, they gibbered at him from the rafters of his skull and, at night, they pursued him out onto the barren, moonlit tundra of his dreams. Now, even though he knew that he had not been forgotten after all, the fear of it still lingered in his mind.

His second obsession had been food.

He did not expect much from the prison kitchen, and he had never thought of himself as a picky eater, but the brain-coloured slurry that he scooped each day from a four-sectioned tray, perpetually greasy to the touch, was so mysterious in its composition and so consistent in its damp, sweaty smell◦– as well as the metallic tang it left in his mouth, like the taste of a penny resting on his tongue◦– that, most of the time, he did not actually know what he was eating. He was forced, in a short space of time, to recalibrate his whole idea of food. It was no longer about the enjoyment of the meal, neither was there any social aspect to the mealtimes since prisoners were not allowed to speak while they were eating. Instead the room was filled with the clatter of cutlery on trays, and men clearing their throats and the shuffle of boots on the linoleum floor.

To stop himself from going mad, Carter retreated far inside his head. There, in the treasure chamber of his memories, he relived the summers he had spent as a teenager working as a dish washer at a diner called Logan’s in Dunellen, New Jersey. Like many such diners, the building had been constructed in the shape of a railroad car, with round-topped seats like giant mushrooms for people who sat at the counter and booths by the window which looked out onto the main street. It was right across from the police station where his father worked. For years, his father had been a regular at Logan’s, with a seat reserved for him alone and apple pie served just the way he liked it, with a slice of cheddar cheese on the side. It was a personal favour to his father that Mr Logan gave Carter the job and his father had warned him what would happen if he did not live up to expectations.

‘You shame me,’ his father had told him, ‘and I will wring your neck.’ He always talked like that to his son, although he never laid a hand on him. But Carter had heard him speak to others using those same words, and had known that he meant what he said.

Carter worked from 6 a.m. until 5 p.m. and made fifty cents an hour. He was also entitled to one meal per day, although he never got to choose what it would be. The meal would be whatever got sent back by some finicky customer whose order had not been taken down exactly right by the waitress. Or, if Carter was lucky, the chef would deliberately mess up an order◦– gravy instead of grated cheese, French fries instead of mashed potatoes◦– and Carter would eat that instead.

On Sunday afternoons, in the quiet time between lunch and dinner, the chefs from several local restaurants would gather in the kitchen of Logan’s and take turns cooking for each other. Each week, a different chef would be in charge.

Carter would clean up after them, and the chefs would always make sure that there was a little left over for him. It always surprised Carter how ordinary these meals were◦– Shepherd’s Pie, Meat Loaf, Tuna Casserole◦– but they were the best of their kind that Carter had ever tasted, and one day he asked the chef about it.

The chef, a moon-bellied man with small dark eyes and a double chin, which rested on a red and white checked scarf that he kept tied around his throat as if he meant to choke himself to death by wearing it at all, replied that the simplest things were always the hardest to cook. ‘You want to know if a chef can really cook?’ he said. ‘Just get them to fry you an egg. You can eat eggs all your life and never know for sure how they can taste until a good chef cooks them up for you.’

For the most part, Carter had hated the job. Now and then, he would look up from the sink of dingy grey water and, through the open window that looked out on a vacant lot behind the restaurant, the fierce blue summer sky would flood into his eyes, and he would feel a terrible longing to just forget everything about these dreary days, to have them washed from his mind as if by some act of hypnosis.

Carter could never have imagined that, one day, he would return to those memories, selecting every moment that he could recall and holding it up to the light, turning it this way and that, like a man with a bucket full of diamonds. But each one of them brought him back to a time when food had taste and meaning and the fact that he had taken those things for granted made the resurrection of those thoughts even more precious to him in the boxed-in world of Langsdorf.

When the first course arrived◦– onions in beef broth and a piece of toasted bread with cheese on top floating in the middle◦– Carter felt a momentary twinge of guilt, knowing that even this small appetiser was more nourishment than some people out there in the streets of the city, the scavengers of coal, potato peels and the rags he had been wearing only a couple of hours ago, could expect in an entire day.

With the first sweet, salty mouthful, it was as if a part of him that had forgotten who he was during the months at Langsdorf prison suddenly remembered. The haircut and the new suit had not done that. All they had accomplished was to allow others to judge his appearance and to behave around him the way he had been used to being treated before he first put on the clothing of a convict. But that bowl of soup had brought him back to life.

As he ate, Carter kept his eye on the main door in the foyer, which he could see clearly from his table. It was a revolving door and the way the noonday light shone down into the street caused the whirling panes of glass to flicker blindingly as people came and went. Although this phenomenon obscured his view, he took comfort in the fact that anyone entering the hotel would need several seconds to accustom themselves to the darkness, time enough for him to disappear if necessary.

He had just finished the soup when Siegfried appeared through the whirling blades of the revolving door.

This man had never been a barber, nor was his name actually Siegfried. Carter had never met Siegfried. That was just an alias, agreed upon long ago, by which he could summon back to life the ghosts of his former existence.

In fact, the man’s name was Daniel Eckberg. He was in his late twenties, with pale, slightly boiled-looking skin, small eyes and a dense crop of platinum blond hair. Aside from the CIA station chief attached to the US embassy in Bonn, Eckberg was one of only two people who knew the real reason why Carter had been sent to prison. The other was Carter’s control officer, Marcus Wilby, whom Carter and Eckberg only ever referred to as ‘our mutual friend’. At the time of their first encounter, Eckberg had only just arrived in Europe, having been recruited straight out of Yale. His task was to serve as the go-between in any dealings with Carter and Wilby◦– what was known as a ‘cut-out’. That way, if Carter ever did something that caused his cover to be blown, it would be harder to trace his connections back to the CIA.

Back then, it had looked to Carter like the best chance of getting his cover blown was by Eckberg himself, who possessed a nervous, naive energy which attracted unwanted attention. But Carter said nothing about it at the time, hoping that when they met again, Eckberg would have learned the kind of tradecraft that would allow him to blend in to his surroundings.

Looking at Eckberg now, it seemed to Carter that Eckberg had learned nothing at all.

Eckberg approached the tall, frostbitten waiter and spoke to him.

The waiter pointed at Carter and Eckberg made his way across the room. ‘It’s good to see you, Nathan,’ he said, taking a seat at the table.

It irritated Carter that Eckberg called him by his first name, not because he should have used a different one but because it spoke of a familiarity between them that did not actually exist.

‘I ordered whatever you’re having,’ Eckberg announced, unravelling his napkin with a flick of the wrist and tucking it into his collar.

Carter glanced around the room to see if anyone was watching. That gesture might have fitted in if they’d been sitting in a diner in New Jersey, but it didn’t look right here. There was no doubt in Carter’s mind that the other diners had noticed, but they were too tactful to show it. They remained hunched over their food, locked in quiet conversations, studiously oblivious.

Eckberg set his elbows on the white tablecloth and knitted his fingers together. ‘So how’s it feel to be a free man?’

‘I think it’s going to take a while before I know.’

‘That looks like a new suit to me.’

‘New everything,’ replied Carter, ‘except the man who’s wearing it.’

The waiter arrived with the soup and put it down before Eckberg. As soon as the waiter had left, Eckberg pushed the bowl to one side. ‘You almost gave the barber a heart attack. He wasn’t expecting to hear from you for at least a couple of weeks, maybe even months. Frankly, neither were we.’

‘If you’re not going to have that,’ said Carter.

‘Be my guest.’

Carter reached across and pulled Eckberg’s bowl over to his side.

‘So why are we hearing from you now?’ asked Eckberg. ‘Did you already find who you were looking for?’

‘I didn’t have to,’ said Carter. ‘He came to find me. He sent a car with a chauffeur.’

The expression froze on Eckberg’s face. It was a moment before he could speak. ‘That is unexpected,’ he said at last.

‘Unexpected? That’s the word you’re going to use? How the hell did he even know that I was getting out today? How did he even know where I was?’

‘I’ll look into it,’ said Eckberg.

‘It’s a little late for that. This guy is obviously better connected than you thought. You need to let me know where things stand.’

Eckberg scratched at his eyebrow. ‘Listen, about that. About me letting you know. Our friend has decided to pull me from the operation. He sent me this time because I’m the one you were expecting to see and he didn’t want to spook you. But I’m not the one you will be meeting from now on.’

‘Why is he pulling you?’ asked Carter.

Eckberg shrugged, but he looked more like a man in pain than one who was ambivalent. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he has his reasons.’

Although Carter said nothing about it, he was relieved that Wilby had made the decision to remove Eckberg from field operations. It wasn’t just Eckberg’s mannerisms that made Carter nervous to be meeting him in such a confined space, when he knew others might be watching. It was also the way he looked, so obviously American in his low-heeled shoes, cuffed trousers and wide-brimmed fedora hat.

There was an art to blending in. You didn’t have to look like you belonged. You just had to avoid standing out.

The most reliable way to achieve this was to find yourself a cafe in the neighbourhood where you would be working, sit at a table by the window and spend an hour watching people go by, particularly those who were about the same age as you, taking careful note of the way they dressed, the kind of things they carried and the way they wore their hair. After a while, you would get a sense of what passed for normal. Then you made your way to a second-hand clothing store or some kind of a charity shop where used clothing was sold. You picked out a set of clothes that came closest to the things you had seen◦– not what you liked or what you thought fitted best, but what people were actually wearing. You had to buy everything◦– socks, undershirts, belt, shoes◦– and to make sure that all of it was used. New clothing would be noticed, no matter how local it was. And how did people carry their belongings in the street? Did they use briefcases, or canvas satchels or paper shopping bags? The final important detail was to get a haircut from a local barber, after making clear that you didn’t really care what kind of cut you received. This would guarantee a disappointingly average hairstyle, which was exactly what you needed. There were many other tricks, adding layer upon layer of camouflage until a person could achieve a perfect anonymity.

Even if Eckberg had followed these strange rituals, which he clearly hadn’t, something about his expression◦– an unmistakable and yet almost impossible to define sense of optimism which radiated out of his well-fed, rounded face◦– was markedly different from the ashen complexions of those Europeans of his age who had been poisoned by the bad food, smoke and horror of the war.

Ironically, it was this same lack of guile, which caused Eckberg to stand out so glaringly in these surroundings, that reassured Carter of his trustworthiness. But being trustworthy and being effective were two different things, and one did not outweigh the other, especially since Dasch had already proved himself to be more capable than anyone had expected. ‘Who’s going to replace you?’ he asked.

‘Nobody,’ answered Eckberg. ‘Our friend will come to the meetings himself.’

The news caught Carter by surprise. ‘No cut-out?’ he asked. ‘I thought that was a basic protocol.’

‘It was. I mean, it is,’ he said, unable to conceal his frustration. ‘It should be, anyway, if you ask me.’

‘Then why isn’t it?’ Carter leaned forward across the table. ‘What the hell is going on?’

‘You’ll have to ask our friend about that and, given what you’ve just told me, he’s going to want to meet you right away.’

‘I’m upstairs, room 201, but only until tomorrow morning, so tell him to hurry. I need some answers from you people or I’m getting the hell out of here.’

‘Understood.’ Eckberg rose from his chair and looked around. ‘You know, this is the most expensive place in town. I can’t afford to eat here. So how are you paying for it?’

‘I’m not,’ Carter told him. ‘It’s a gift from my new employer.’

Eckberg rapped his knuckles softly on the table. ‘Good luck to you, Carter,’ he said.

As Eckberg walked out of the room, people sitting at their tables raised their heads to watch him go, their eyes filled with a mixture of curiosity and the coldness reserved for all strangers.