The Elegant Lie

…

Leaving Teresa to nurse her injured head, Carter made his way down the narrow corridor to the office.

Some attempt had been made to kick the broken glass into the corner and the furniture had been dragged outside, leaving the room half empty.

Dasch was sitting at his desk. His skin looked deathly pale under the glaring bulbs, whose green glass hoods had all been smashed away.

Garlinsky stood in the middle of the room, his back towards Carter and the briefcase on the ground at his side. He turned as Carter stepped into the room. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The American.’ The gabardine wool of his overcoat shimmered softly as he moved, like the wings of an insect in the sun.

Now that Carter could see him up close, Garlinsky did not appear as dangerous as he had seemed before. But he looked very much like the kind of man who worked for people that were.

Slowly, Garlinsky turned away again.

‘You were saying,’ muttered Dasch.

‘The plane overshot the runway,’ explained Garlinsky, ‘and crashed in a thickly wooded area, possibly as far as a kilometre beyond the airstrip. Our contacts were waiting to receive it. The weather conditions were bad. There was rain and there were crosswinds. Your pilots made two aborted attempts to land and then, on the third one, they crashed.’

Slowly, Dasch subsided back into his chair. ‘So my plane has been destroyed,’ he whispered.

‘We assume so,’ said Garlinsky.

Carter walked around until he stood beside Dasch’s desk. ‘Did it burn?’ he asked.

Garlinsky shook his head. ‘It must have been almost out of fuel by the time it crashed. My contacts saw no smoke.’

‘And what about the pilots?’ asked Carter.

‘We assume that they are dead.’

‘Why do you assume?’ demanded Carter. ‘Didn’t anybody check?’

Garlinsky paused before replying. Even in those few seconds, the silence seemed to settle upon them like a layer of dust. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘was for our contacts to unload that plane in twenty minutes and be gone within thirty. The longer they remained in the area, the greater the likelihood that they might be found by the authorities, and I do not need to tell you what would happen to them if they were arrested. As soon as the plane crashed, they left the area as quickly as they could, and they have not been back.’

‘Where is this airfield?’ asked Carter.

‘As I have already explained to Mr Dasch,’ said Garlinsky, ‘it is located in Czechoslovakia, in what you once called the Sudetenland. It is near the old spa town of Carlsbad, known to the Czechs as Karlovy Vary. It was a popular resort before the war. The Czechs built the runway not far from the town as an emergency landing strip for a nearby military airbase. If there was a crash on the runway at the base, other inbound planes could divert to the emergency strip. The base was taken over by the Germans when they marched into the Sudetenland in 1938, but they never used it because the runways weren’t long enough for their heavy bombers. So, instead, they built a different airbase one hundred kilometres to the north. The emergency runway was forgotten. That is why we thought it would be safe, as long as everyone moved quickly. As of last year, Czechoslovakia is under Communist control, but people from the west still come and go and planes from western countries, military and civilian, still overfly the area on their way down to Turkey and Greece. The sight of a Canadian transport plane in the skies above Karlovy would not have aroused suspicion, and as far as we know the wreckage has not been discovered, but that situation could change at any moment.’

‘Tell your people,’ said Dasch, ‘that I will pay for the whisky they lost.’

‘It’s not the whisky I’m concerned about.’

‘Then what?’ demanded Dasch.

‘Our concern,’ explained Garlinsky, ‘is that the discovery of that plane, along with its cargo, will somehow lead the authorities back to us.’

‘We all share in that risk,’ said Dasch.

‘Perhaps,’ replied Garlinsky, ‘but the responsibility lies entirely with you. If the aircraft had exploded and everything on board had been incinerated, the equation might be different. But since this did not happen, it is safe to say that the discovery of that cargo by Communist authorities is inevitable. When that occurs, the Russians will learn of this and they will waste no time finding out where it came from, whom it belonged to and where it was going. I know the Russians, and I can assure you that this is a matter that they will pursue beyond what you and I would consider sane. They will get to the bottom of it, and that is where they will find us. In the meantime, you will have created an international incident, the type of which both the Soviet and Allied governments are painstakingly trying to avoid. Do you have any idea what will happen to you then, Mr Dasch?’

‘I can’t say that I do,’ he replied.

‘At the very least, you would spend the rest of your life in prison,’ replied Garlinsky. ‘That is if the Allies get to you first. More likely, it will be the Soviets, in which case you and everyone around you will simply be found dead. Am I making myself clear, Mr Dasch?’

‘Yes,’ answered Dasch, ‘in everything except what you would like me to do about all this!’

‘Make sure that any trace of the cargo that might lead back to us has been destroyed.’

He still hasn’t mentioned the money, thought Carter. How does he expect to keep that secret?

‘Very well,’ Dasch said. ‘I’ll send Ritter first thing in the morning.’

‘I’m afraid that will not do at all,’ said Garlinsky.

‘Why on earth not?’ demanded Dasch. ‘Ritter can get the job done.’

‘Mr Ritter is wanted by the Soviet authorities, a fact of which I’m sure you are aware. If he should fall into their hands—’

‘Enough!’ boomed Dasch, bringing his hands crashing down upon the desk.

In the seconds that followed, Garlinsky did not move. It was as if the man had turned to stone.

Finally, Dasch spoke again. ‘Are you suggesting that I go myself? The German police are watching me. I am convinced of that.’

‘Not you,’ answered Garlinsky.

‘Then who—’ Dasch began.

Garlinsky cut him off. ‘Why don’t you send Mr Carter?’ he asked.

Carter felt the breath catch in his throat.

‘Well,’ said Dasch, ‘I suppose I could do that, provided Mr Carter agrees.’

Garlinsky smiled at Carter. ‘Surely you would not want to disappoint your employer, after all he’s done for you.’

Carter said nothing. Does he know who I am? he wondered. Does he know that I have seen the money? None of that seemed possible, and yet the idea would not leave his head, rushing in circles around the inside of his skull like a fish trapped in a net.

‘Then it is settled!’ Garlinsky glanced at his watch. ‘Our time is up,’ he said.

Carter and Dasch walked him out to the gate and watched in silence as Garlinsky set off across the field, the moonlight like a cape upon his back, until at last he vanished in the mist.

‘How did he know I was an American,’ asked Carter, ‘before I even opened my mouth? Did you tell him?’

‘No,’ replied Dasch. ‘I just assumed he heard your voice before you walked into the room.’

‘Was he right?’ asked Carter. ‘Is Ritter really wanted by the Russians?’

Dasch sighed heavily. ‘Did he tell you what he did in the war?’

‘He said he was an interrogator.’

‘That is correct,’ answered Dasch. ‘And did he tell you what happened to those Russian officers after he had finished questioning them?’

‘No. He never mentioned that.’

‘They were shot.’

‘All of them?’ asked Carter.

‘They did not make exceptions.’

‘Then how do the Russians know about it, assuming the bodies were buried?’

‘Because wherever Ritter had been, they dug up those bodies by the hundreds. Or thousands. Ritter told me he lost track of their numbers. But the Russians didn’t. They remember everything. And who can blame them? The war you fought may be over, Mr Carter, but what happened between Ritter and the Russians will not come to an end until the last of them is dead, and probably not even then.’

‘And you really think he would have gone if you had told him to?’

Dasch turned and looked at Carter. ‘Ritter would do anything I ask, and that is my burden, not his.’

‘What Garlinsky’s asking for,’ said Carter, ‘it won’t be easy.’

‘Ah, but you haven’t heard my plan.’

‘Whatever it is, it better be a good one.’

‘It might just be the best I’ve ever had.’

At the end of the road leading to Dasch’s compound, a set of headlight beams cut through the darkness. It was Ritter, returning from his errand to fetch supplies to repair the broken window.

Carter helped him carry sheets of plywood from the car to the office, along with a bag of nails, a saw and some hammers. Along the way, he explained what had happened.

‘I knew he never should have bought that plane,’ said Ritter. ‘If we had just kept things small and manageable, none of this would have happened.’

‘Too late now.’

‘It was too late from the beginning,’ said Ritter, ‘but we did it anyway.’

Inside the office, they found Dasch pacing back and forth like a cat locked in a cage. ‘You can put all that aside!’ he said, when the two men entered the room. ‘We have important business to discuss.’

Ritter and Carter dumped the wood and nails and hammers on the floor.

‘You told me you had a plan,’ said Carter.

‘Not just a plan,’ replied Dasch. ‘It is a work of genius.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘It’s not what I am going to do,’ replied Dasch. ‘It’s what you’re doing. You are going on a vacation to the spa town of Karlovy Vary, where people go to sit in vats of mud and lounge around with cucumber slices on their eyes.’

‘That does not sound like something I would do,’ muttered Carter.

‘You might’◦– Dasch paused dramatically◦– ‘if you were on your honeymoon.’

‘But since I’m not—’

‘Oh, but you are!’ exclaimed Dasch. ‘You will be married to my daughter. Temporarily, of course, but you will travel together as newlyweds. If anyone asks you why you are going, that is all you’d have to tell them, and they would understand.’

‘And when we get there,’ asked Carter, ‘assuming that Teresa doesn’t murder me before we arrive?’

‘You will travel out into the countryside, perhaps to take a picnic. You will go walking in the forest where you will stumble, quite by accident it seems, upon the wreckage of that plane. And then you will see to it that nothing remains by which its cargo can be traced back to us, or to our client.’

‘It won’t work,’ Carter said flatly.

The expression froze on Dasch’s face. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because of Teresa. It will put her at risk! You have kept her away from your affairs until now◦– you know the ones I mean◦– but all of that will be for nothing if you drag her into this.’

‘Don’t you think I have considered that?’ asked Dasch, his voice rising with indignation. ‘We simply won’t tell her why she’s going. All she will know is that she is accompanying you on a trip, on which you have some business to conduct. If anyone asks her, that’s all she’d be able to tell them.’

Carter shook his head, still unconvinced. ‘That will not be enough to keep her out of danger. Let me go alone, instead. This way, she does not need to be involved.’

‘That is a fine gesture,’ said Dasch, ‘but any man travelling by himself to such a location is bound to raise suspicions, and even if you can conjure up some rationale for being there, questions would remain. But a former American soldier setting out on a honeymoon with his young German bride◦– now that makes perfect sense. Thousands of GIs have married German women since the end of the war. The purpose of your visit is so obvious that no one would think twice about it.’

‘What about a marriage certificate?’ asked Carter. ‘They might ask for that.’

With a wave of his hand, Dasch brushed the question aside. ‘The way bureaucracy works now, it can take months to process those. Even if you were getting married, you wouldn’t receive the document for months, so there’s no need to worry about that.’

‘Have you talked to your daughter about this?’

Dasch’s back stiffened. ‘I was just about to,’ he announced and, with a confident smile bolted to his face, he strode down the narrow hallway towards the dining room, where Teresa was still sitting with a wet towel pressed against her head.

A few moments later, the sound of raised voices reached Carter’s ears. He could not hear what they were saying. Their words were muffled by the walls that stood between them. Carter glanced across at Ritter.

Ritter shrugged and shook his head.

The argument continued for a few more minutes. Then Dasch appeared in the hallway. ‘Be reasonable!’ he shouted back into the dining room.

Carter heard no reply, but it seemed clear that Teresa had found some other way to answer her father, because Dasch threw up his hands and growled with frustration. Then a plate crashed into the wall beside him. Dasch flinched, then quickly turned and made his way back to where Carter and Ritter were waiting. By the time he reached them, the confident smile had returned. ‘She’ll be fine,’ he whispered to the men. ‘She just needs a moment or two to think it over.’

‘When is all this supposed to happen?’ asked Carter.

‘There is an overnight train to Vienna which leaves from here once a day. From there, you can catch another one heading into Czechoslovakia.’

Ritter looked at his watch. ‘That train has already left,’ he said.

‘Then you will leave tomorrow,’ announced Dasch. ‘Ritter will make the arrangements. Now, if it is possible.’

Ritter nodded sharply, spun on his heel and walked out. The engine of the Tatra fired up. The glare of headlights swept across the wall and then Ritter was gone, leaving Dasch and Carter alone in the room.

‘Are you sure Teresa will agree to go?’ asked Carter. Some part of him hoped that she might still refuse.

‘She will,’ Dasch assured him, ‘if not for my sake then for yours.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Carter.

‘In spite of everything she says, and all those scowling looks, Teresa has grown fond of you.’ Dasch tapped a finger against his temple. ‘I know how her mind works, you see.’ Now he held out his hand towards the corridor, at the end of which stood the dining room. ‘Will you join us for dinner?’ he asked. ‘A little company might help defuse the situation.’

Carter suddenly realised how hungry he was.

The two men walked down the hallway, stepping over shards of crockery from the thrown plate. In the dining room, they found Teresa laying out plates for their meal. She did not speak to them, or even acknowledge that they were in the room.

Dasch seemed to be expecting this. He made no attempt to coax her into conversation, which even Carter knew would only have made things worse. Instead, Dasch began to prepare the meal, as if no angry words had ever passed between them.

Carter imagined that he might at last catch sight of some of the luxury goods for which Dasch had become famous. But there was none of that. Instead, from one of the cupboards, he produced a head of garlic, rustling in its papery white skin, a bowl of eggs and a few potatoes, which even the most humble of households could have purchased in the markets of Cologne.

Next, Dasch took a knife out of the drawer and honed it with long, precise strokes against a sharpening rod.

Carter watched in quiet admiration as Dasch began chopping the garlic upon a little wooden board, the tips of his fingers only a hair’s breadth from the blade.

Dasch lit the stove and melted butter in a pan. He whisked the eggs and poured them in.

In a few minutes, he had made a large omelette, which he sectioned into three pieces and slid onto the plates.

Teresa had brought out a bottle of white Mosel wine from the Black Cat vineyard down in Zell. She poured it into the tin cups, which were the only things they had from which to drink.

They sat down at the bare wooden table.

‘You are full of surprises,’ said Carter.

Dasch grinned and picked up a fork. ‘Eat,’ he commanded, ‘before it gets cold.’

With his first mouthful, Carter thought back to what the chef at Logan’s had told him during one of his summers working as a dish washer: You want to know if a chef can really cook? 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.

And here, in this dingy little hut on a rusted enamel plate, was proof of what the chef had told him. Now Carter stared in amazement at his plate.

Teresa still wasn’t speaking, so they sat there saying nothing, the only sound the scrape of the forks on the plates and the splash in their mugs of the sharp, sweet wine. But it was not an uncomfortable silence. It seemed clear to Carter that Dasch and Teresa were used to it, perhaps that they even preferred it, and this was such a contrast to the rapid chatter Carter had come to expect from Dasch that he realised it was the first moment in which he had actually seen them as they really were.

At last, Dasch pushed his plate away and settled back into his chair. From around his neck he pulled a leather cord, from which dangled something small and glittery. He set it down upon the table before Teresa. Looped onto the cord was a gold ring fitted with a single lozenge-shaped diamond. ‘I suppose you had better wear this,’ he said.

Teresa stared at it for a while. Then finally she spoke. ‘Is that Mother’s?’ she asked.

‘It is,’ Dasch confirmed, ‘but it will not be enough to convince anyone that the two of you are married.’

‘Why not?’ asked Teresa.

‘Because first you must master the art of looking at him’◦– he waved his fork at Carter◦– ‘as if the only thought in your head is not to shoot him and leave him for dead.’

She glanced at Carter and then back to her father. ‘You ask a lot,’ she said.

Ritter returned just as their meal was ending, bringing a file decorated with the logo of the Josef Schmieder travel bureau. ‘I know a man who works for them,’ he said. ‘I had to wake him up. But it’s all here. They are booked in for one night in the presidential suite at the Orlovsky hotel. Full meal plan. Unlimited access to the spas.’

Dasch took the file from Ritter’s hand and opened it. He made approving grunts as he inspected the tickets. Then he lifted out the itinerary and squinted at the print. A frown appeared on his face, the creases to his forehead deepening as he read to the bottom of the page. Then he looked up suddenly and glared at Ritter. ‘This is what it costs for a single night!’ he shouted. ‘Are you trying to bankrupt me, Ritter?’

‘You told me to make the arrangements,’ answered Ritter, ‘and that is precisely what I did. They are on their honeymoon. It is the most magical time of their lives! Why would you settle for anything less?’

‘Because it’s not true!’ wailed Dasch.

‘And you would want people to know that?’

‘Of course not,’ spluttered Dasch.

Ritter leaned over the table and set one finger on the travel agent’s file, as if to stop it from blowing away in an imaginary breeze. ‘Then this is exactly as it should be.’ He straightened up, indignant, but as he turned to leave he caught Carter’s gaze. For a fraction of a second, Ritter arched one eyebrow and then, before anyone else could notice, his face returned to its usual stony self.

After the meal, Carter cycled back towards his apartment, the dynamo headlight casting a weak, wavering glow upon the dirt road. Arriving, he parked his bicycle next to the old staircase, but did not climb the stairs. Instead, he stepped back to where the alleyway connected with the street. For a while, he just stood there in the shadows, looking up and down the road. It was deserted. Clouds slipped past the gibbous moon, filling the street with a steely blue light and then snatching it away again. The cafe across the road, where he was due to meet with Eckberg, was dark and empty. He wondered if Eckberg was even going to make the rendezvous. Carter felt sick to his stomach at the thought of going behind Wilby’s back, but the man had given him no choice.

Carter dashed across the street and into the alley that ran behind the cafe. He came around the corner, next to a row of garbage cans set out behind the building, and almost collided with Eckberg. It took Carter a moment to realise that Eckberg was holding a gun.

‘Right on time,’ said Eckberg, tucking the pistol back into his jacket.

‘Are you sure about this place?’ asked Carter.

Eckberg dangled a key on the end of his finger. ‘I guess we’ll find out.’ He opened the back door, which was plated with iron, and the two men stepped inside.

The air was still and greasy-smelling. The chairs had been stacked on the tables. Carter could see out into the street, where the cobblestones were outlined with moonlight.

Eckberg showed him to a small table at which the employees could take their breaks. The only light came from the pilot on the grill used for cooking the sausages. It was enough to cast a pale, orangey glow across the faces of the men.

‘So somebody got hurt,’ said Eckberg.

‘Before I tell you anything,’ replied Carter, ‘I need to know that the station chief has approved my talking to you.’

‘I told you he did.’

‘And he knows you’re talking to me now?’

‘You want to call him?’ asked Eckberg. ‘There’s a payphone down the street. How much time have you got?’

‘Not enough,’ admitted Carter. ‘I was just making sure. I don’t know what this is going to do to Wilby.’

Eckberg breathed out sharply. ‘Look, Carter, you need to stop thinking about him and start worrying about yourself. Whatever happens to Wilby he has brought upon himself by withholding information from people he’s supposed to be working with. Not just me. I’m the low man on the totem pole. He can cut me out of the loop if he wants. But the station chief◦– that’s another matter altogether. Nobody’s faulting you for anything.’

‘When Wilby finds out, he will.’

‘But he isn’t going to,’ insisted Eckberg. ‘In fact, it’s very important that you don’t mention any of this to him. That’s for your own security. He’s still running this operation. If he finds out that we suspect him, either of not sharing information or, even worse, of leaking it, that could jeopardise the whole station. So until you hear otherwise, the station chief’s orders are for you to carry on as if everything is fine between the two of you.’

‘It’s never been fine. You know that.’

‘Well, as normal as it’s ever been◦– you understand?’

‘All right. So how much do you need to know?’

‘I’ll take whatever you’ve got,’ replied Eckberg, ‘starting with the reason you called me.’

Carter sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers lightly on the table. ‘How much do you know about Galton?’ he asked.

‘Who?’ Eckberg narrowed his eyes.

‘Sergeant Galton, the guy Wilby set me up with for the purchase of black market goods.’

Eckberg shook his head. ‘I guess you’d better start from the beginning.’

So Carter told him everything◦– about Galton, about the plane with its cargo of whisky and counterfeit currency, and then about the meeting with Garlinsky.

While he listened, Eckberg cupped his hands over his mouth and nose, struggling to take in all that he was hearing.

As Carter spoke, he heard the muffled rustling of Eckberg’s breath, like a deep-sea diver sucking in air through a tube.

‘The thing is,’ said Carter, ‘I think Garlinsky knows I am aware of the counterfeit currency.’

Eckberg lowered his hands to the table. ‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.

‘He specifically asked for me to be the one who travelled to Karlovy Vary.’

‘Did he give a reason for that?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Carter. ‘Something about Ritter being wanted for war crimes by the Russians, and Dasch himself is convinced that the German police are monitoring his movements. Or at least that they are trying to.’

‘He’s probably right,’ said Eckberg. ‘So that makes you the obvious choice.’

‘I guess. I don’t know. It didn’t seem that way to me.’

‘You’re starting to sound as paranoid as Wilby, for Christ’s sake.’

‘What if Wilby leaked the information?’

‘Well, that’s why you’re talking to me now, isn’t it?’ said Eckberg. ‘When do you leave for Karlovy?’

‘We leave tomorrow,’ said Carter.

‘Who is “we”?’ he asked.

‘I’m travelling with his daughter, Teresa. Dasch has made it up to look like we are newlyweds.’

‘And when you get there?’

‘I find the wreckage and make sure no trace remains of the money. Teresa doesn’t even know why she’s going, only that it is important, and she is smart enough to know what questions not to ask.’

‘You know where the plane is?’ asked Eckberg. ‘Where exactly, I mean? Otherwise you could be out there for weeks trying to locate it.’

‘There’s an old runway from before the war, somewhere east of the town. I have a map which shows where it’s supposed to be. Garlinsky said the plane overshot and crashed into the woods just beyond it.’

‘Does Wilby know about this?’

‘Not yet. I was going to set up a meeting for tomorrow.’

Eckberg looked at his watch. Then he sighed. ‘You’d better get going,’ he said. ‘The last dead drop check is at midnight. That gives you a little over an hour. Do you think you can get there in time?’

‘If the wheels don’t fall off my bike, I should be fine.’

They made their way back into the alley and Eckberg locked the door behind them.

‘You did the right thing, coming to me,’ said Eckberg.

‘I wish it felt that way.’

Eckberg took hold of Carter’s arm and shook him gently. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You know as well as I do that nothing ever goes according to plan. It’s how you react to things going wrong that determines whether you succeed or fail. And I’m telling you, whether it feels right to you or not, you’re part of the solution now.’

‘Did they teach you how to give that kind of pep talk,’ asked Carter, ‘or is that something you picked up on your own?’

‘That’s not something you can teach.’ Eckberg smiled reassuringly. ‘We all have to learn it the hard way.’

Carter wondered what he meant by that, but there was no time to ask.

Eckberg slipped away into the dark.

Carter climbed onto his bicycle and started riding.

It was almost midnight by the time he reached the alleyway behind Maximinenstrasse, just outside the Cologne central station. The local trains had ceased operating for the night, but there were still passengers on the platforms waiting for the overnight express trains that would take them to Paris, Brussels or Rome. The place for the dead drop had been well chosen, since there were always people coming and going in the area around the station and the alleyway was lit by a single streetlamp jutting from the wall of a brick building that formed one side of it.

Carter climbed off his bicycle and pushed it through the alley, since there was a couple approaching from the other side and not enough room for him to cycle past them.

The couple were laughing and speaking in hushed voices. From the sway in the man’s walk, Carter judged him to be drunk. There were many bars around the station, some of them little more than collections of tables and chairs under half-collapsed roofs, but even these had their charm and also loyal customers. During his time in this country, one thing Carter had always marvelled at was the fact that, even when almost nothing else was available, you could always get a decent glass of beer.

He knew he would have to pass the couple and then double back to the dead drop. He had already written the note, and it would only take him a couple of seconds to stash it behind the brick. What occupied his thoughts was the possibility that no one would get to the drop before it was time for him to leave. If that happened, Wilby would not be there for the meeting, which Carter had scheduled for 11 a.m. the following morning. They had never discussed what to do under such circumstances. Without Wilby’s permission, Carter didn’t know if he was supposed to follow through with Dasch’s plan or to abandon it completely and disappear. Carter knew that if he did not guess correctly, he would find himself in a world of trouble◦– with Dasch, with Wilby or with both of them.

The couple were passing by, heads lowered, muttering to each other in voices too low for Carter to hear.

Carter was already looking past them, trying to spot the loose brick in the wall somewhere up ahead.

At that moment, the man weaved towards him, and Carter had to turn the front wheel of his bike to avoid crashing into the couple. The man moved suddenly, as if to right himself, and then Carter felt a deep, wrenching pain in the side of his head. Blackness flooded through his eyes and he stumbled back, still trying to keep hold of the bicycle. He hit the wall and tried to stay on his feet, but only slid down onto his haunches, finally letting go of the bike, which crashed to the ground.

Suddenly, the man and the woman were standing over him. They hauled him upright and, with one on either side of him, began to drag him down the alleyway in the direction from which they had come.

Dimly, Carter grasped what was happening, but he was so dazed that he could not find the strength to fight back. His nose was bleeding.

A car pulled up at the end of the alleyway, its engine revving loudly.

Carter tried to wrench himself free but the man hit him again, this time on the top of the head, and from the sound it made, Carter could tell that the man was wearing a set of iron knuckles. The streetlamp’s orange-yellow blurred and spread across his vision, as if his eyes were filled with oil. He knew that he was passing out. The light began to tunnel, closing to a single point of clarity and, just as that was about to disappear, the couple dropped him on his face.

At first, Carter wondered if he had been dumped in the trunk of the car, but then he realised he was still in the alley. Someone fell to the ground just beside him. Blearily, he saw the face of the woman. Her front teeth had been smashed out and her upper lip was split all the way to her nostril. She rolled onto her back and groaned, pale hands reaching to her face. Someone stepped on Carter, a heel digging into his back, and then he heard a soft and heavy thump and the harsh, barking sound of a man getting the wind knocked from his lungs.

Once more, Carter was lifted to his feet by a man he now recognised as Wilby, and who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

The driver climbed out of the car and started coming down the alley towards them, moving cautiously since his view was obscured by the streetlamp that stood between him and the others.

Wilby pulled a gun from his shoulder holster. He aimed it at the man.

The driver stopped.

Wilby set his thumb on the hammer and cocked it.

The man’s arms moved slowly outwards from his sides. He backed up, then got into the car and drove away.

Carter looked down and saw the couple. The man had been rammed head first into the wall. He lay face down and unconscious. The woman was spluttering with a mouthful of blood and broken teeth. She had rolled onto her stomach and was trying to get up. She had got as far as her hands and knees before Wilby kicked her underneath the jaw, swinging his leg like a football player making a field goal. The blow lifted the woman up and she came to rest in a sitting position with her back against the wall, her head lolling so grotesquely sideways that Carter thought her neck must be broken.

Leaving the bicycle where it lay, Wilby wrapped Carter’s arm around his shoulder and ran with him down to the far end of the alley. Carter tried to run along, but mostly his toes just dragged along the ground. They kept moving for some time, past the cathedral to Bechergasse and from there down side streets to Frankenwerft, which ran along the west bank of the Rhine. There, Wilby helped Carter into the ruins of a building and they both collapsed in the dirt, exhausted.

‘Can you hear me?’ gasped Wilby.

‘Yes.’

‘How badly are you hurt? Can you tell?’

‘Nothing’s broken. I think I’ll be all right. Who were those people?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Wilby, ‘but whoever they are, they weren’t just mugging you for your wallet. They were planning on taking you with them. They might have guessed you were an American and figured they could hold you for ransom. That’s happened before in this town. The only other possibility is that your cover has been blown. Do you have any reason to suspect that?’

‘No,’ said Carter. ‘There’s nothing I’ve seen to make me think so.’

A car drove past out on the road, and both men held their breaths in case it stopped. But the car kept going.

‘I spotted you when you went into the alley,’ said Wilby, ‘and I was going to wait until you’d left before I checked the drop. But then I saw what happened and came running. Lucky for you.’

Carter told him about the meeting with Garlinsky, as well as Dasch’s plan to send him and Teresa into Czechoslovakia.

‘I hate to say it,’ said Wilby, ‘but I think Garlinsky is right. If the Russians find that money before you have a chance to destroy it, and if they figure out that he’s the one who made it, they’ll come after him and whoever he works for with everything they’ve got.’

‘Then shouldn’t you just let the Russians find it?’ asked Carter.

‘The problem,’ said Wilby, ‘is that they aren’t just going to blame Garlinsky. That money went down in a military plane. They’re going to convince themselves we are involved. And when that happens, they’re not going to sit back and do nothing. This kind of thing will be answered, and the Russians can be very heavy handed when it comes to that. We’re already in a war. It’s just a question of what kind of war we’re fighting. So far, we have managed to avoid firing artillery at each other, but this kind of thing could change that. You never quite know what straw is going to break the camel’s back.’

‘So what do you want me to do?’ asked Carter.

‘I want you to do exactly what Garlinsky said. Find the plane. Destroy it. Make sure there’s nothing left behind that could lead the Russians back to Dasch or Garlinsky, but not before you’ve gathered enough evidence to make sure we can track down Garlinsky ourselves.’

‘Shouldn’t you send in a team of experts for this?’

‘Of course, and if I had a month to set it up, or even a week, I might be able to do that, but we have less than twenty-four hours. Besides, if I pull you out now, it won’t take more than a few minutes for Dasch and Garlinsky to figure out you’re either on your way to the authorities or already working for them, and they’ll shut everything down and vanish in the wind and we’ll never find them again. It will be as if they had never existed, and everything you have suffered through to get this far will have been for nothing◦– less than nothing because of how close you got us to the truth. But if you follow through with what they’re asking, if you accomplish the task and make them think they’re in the clear again, you will have done for them what they could not do for themselves. And they will reward you for that.’

‘How?’

‘By opening doors you never knew existed and behind which you will see the true face of our enemy. An opportunity like this will never come again, and we cannot walk away from it.’

‘All right,’ said Carter, and he started to rise to his feet.

‘Not so fast,’ Wilby told him. ‘We’re not done here yet.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Carter, as he settled back into the dirt.

‘I can’t let you go without the approval of the station chief.’

It surprised Carter to hear Wilby say this. ‘I thought you were keeping this whole thing under wraps.’

‘I was,’ Wilby admitted. ‘Parts of it, anyway. And I told you why, as well. I don’t believe the station is secure.’

‘So what’s changed?’ asked Carter.

‘This isn’t the same mission we began. It’s too big to keep in the dark. So even if there’s a risk involved, it’s one I’ve got to take. That we have to take.’

I wonder if Eckberg was wrong about you, thought Carter. I wonder if I was, as well. And suddenly he wished he’d never doubted the man who crouched beside him in the dark. ‘So get the approval,’ he said.

‘It’s not that simple,’ replied Wilby. ‘The station chief is going to have questions, not all of which I can answer, and we don’t have time for me to act as go-between, relaying messages back and forth. That could take days, or even weeks.’

‘That train pulls out tomorrow evening.’

‘I’ll set up an emergency meeting for tomorrow morning at the safe house on Nassaustrasse. Do you remember the house number?’

‘One hundred and six.’

‘That’s it,’ said Wilby. ‘I’ll call the meeting for nine. In the meantime, don’t go back to your apartment. It’s not safe. Do you think you can bed down here for the night?’

Carter looked around. He could see stars through gaps in the roof. ‘It’s not exactly the Hotel Europa,’ he said.

‘I told you to enjoy that while you could.’ Wilby slapped him on the shoulder, then stood and headed for the gap in the wall.

‘Thank you,’ said Carter.

Those words stopped Wilby cold. He turned around. ‘That’s not something I expected to hear out of you.’

Carter shrugged. ‘It kind of surprised me as well.’

‘Don’t get all sentimental on me now,’ said Wilby. Then he slipped out into the street.

Carter glanced at his watch, but the crystal had been broken in the fight and it was no longer working. He took it off and put it in his pocket. It couldn’t be long until dawn. He felt the cold now, seeping in through the neck of his shirt and slithering down his back. A dusty, metallic odour filled Carter’s lungs, the same as in the house where Ritter had almost blown his brains out on the first day they met. What had Dasch called it? The smell of the war? Something like that. And he had been right. Once you smelled it, you never forgot what it was. And from then on it would always be there, lurking in your blood.

Carter woke to the sound of somebody slamming a door.

He opened his eyes.

It took him a moment to remember where he was.

The morning sun was shining on his face, streaming down in bolts through the lopsided mosaic of slate tiles which were all that remained of the roof in the ruined building where he’d spent the night.

Out in the street, people passed by on their way to work. Beyond them, he saw a barge making its way down the Rhine. Some of the people had stopped and were looking across the river at something.

Carter lifted himself up on one elbow. His joints felt stiff and the side of his body that had rested on the ground was numb with cold. He staggered to his feet and wandered about in the ruins until he came to a puddle of water. There, Carter tidied himself up as best he could, crouching down on his haunches and washing the dried blood from his face where the man in the alley had hit him. Then he wetted his hair and smoothed it back, combing it through with his fingers. He slapped the dirt off his clothes and made sure his buttons were fastened. There wasn’t much else he could do.

A moment later, he stepped out of the ruined building and joined the flow of people. A number were still looking out across the river and, when he followed their gaze, Carter could see a plume of black smoke rising from among the buildings on the other side of the Deutzer bridge.

‘What happened?’ Carter asked a man who was shielding his eyes from the sun with a newspaper so that he could get a better view.

The man turned to Carter. ‘Keine Ahnung,’ he replied. No idea.

‘It was a crash,’ said a woman. ‘Somebody told me there was an accident between a streetcar and a bus.’

‘That was bound to happen,’ said the man, ‘the way those streetcars race around.’

‘Could you tell me the time?’ asked Carter.

The man reached into his vest pocket and hauled out a pocket watch on a chain. ‘Twenty minutes past nine,’ he said.

Carter swore quietly, realising that he was already late for the meeting. He thanked the man and crossed the road, making his way as quickly as he could towards the bridge, where tramcars rushed by in both directions, punching the air as they swept past. The pedestrian walkway was jammed with people pushing bicycles and others who, still seeming half asleep, plodded unhurriedly towards their jobs.

Carter weaved among them, trying to make up for lost time. As soon as he was across the bridge, he veered off onto Constantinstrasse and from there onto Grembergerstrasse.

The smoke from the crash was still in the sky and Carter heard the clang of fire truck bells coming from the same direction. Carter imagined how it must have looked after the air raids during the war, with smoke rising not just from one fire but from hundreds scattered across the city.

Turning off Grembergerstrasse, Carter realised that the crash had taken place on Nassaustrasse, the same street where the meeting was taking place. Several fire trucks were blocking the road and hoses were being unravelled by men in black helmets with large, silver comb-shaped fittings on the top, which reminded Carter of the helmets worn by French soldiers in the First World War. Blue lights jutted from the roofs of the green fire trucks, flashing a quick, pulsing rhythm, as if sending out messages in code.

As Carter walked towards the fire trucks, peering into doorways for the house numbers as he searched for 106, he realised that the crash had caused one of the buildings up the street to catch fire and it was this that the firemen were battling now. But the closer he came, the less sense the picture made to him. He could not see the streetcar anywhere, or the bus with which it was supposed to have collided. He was only a hundred paces from the first of the fire trucks before he finally realised that there was no streetcar and no bus, either. The woman had been mistaken. Only the house had been damaged. The whole front of it had collapsed.

The air was thick with oily smelling smoke and feathers of ash rained down upon the heads and shoulders of the spectators. The police had cordoned off the area and a small crowd had gathered to watch. With bronze-tipped hoses, firemen sprayed jets of water at the smouldering wreckage.

‘It was a bomb, they think,’ said a woman next to Carter. She wore a housedress and an apron and her hair was bundled in a cotton headscarf.

‘A bomb?’ asked Carter.

‘From the war,’ she explained. ‘A bomb that didn’t go off. There are hundreds of them all over the city. They went right into the ground◦– deep, deep, some of them◦– and there they lie until something comes along to wake them up. It might have been a streetcar going overhead. It might have been anything. But there’◦– she held out a hand towards the burning house◦– ‘is what has come of it.’

‘I don’t think that’s what it was,’ said another woman. She was holding a child in one arm. His fat little legs dangled down around her waist. The child made no sound, content simply to stare at the spectacle of the trucks and the firemen and the gushing arcs of water. ‘I saw the explosion from my house across the street,’ the woman continued, ‘and it came out of the second floor. If it was a bomb from the war, it would have come up from below the road.’

‘I don’t know,’ said the woman in the headscarf. ‘Anyway, the whole place is gone now, so I guess it doesn’t matter how it happened.’

‘What number house is it?’ asked Carter.

‘That’s 106,’ replied the woman, ‘and thank God the owners are never around. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen them.’

Before the shock could settle in his bones, Carter watched as a body was carried out of the wreckage on a stretcher. It had been partially concealed with a blanket. The fact that the head was covered left Carter in no doubt that the person was dead. The two firemen who carried the stretcher were pasted with whitish-grey dust. As they moved towards a waiting ambulance, the blanket slipped away.

As they glimpsed the corpse, a kind of groaning sigh went up from the onlookers.

Carter could see at once that it was Wilby. The front of his head, from the eyebrows upwards, had been completely crushed. Blood from his ears and his mouth had mingled with the dust, forming a frothy crust upon his face.

One of the firemen paused and made as if to put down his end of the stretcher in order to replace the blanket, but his companion put a stop to that with one short, sharp command, and they carried on to the ambulance, which was only another few paces. They slid the stretcher inside and the double doors at the back of the ambulance were immediately slammed shut. The ambulance departed, its bell clanging, towards the Hohenzollern bridge, which would take it, eventually, to the Lindenburg hospital on the other side of the river.

‘Was there no one else?’ Carter asked a policeman, who stood with shoulders squared, holding back the crowd by force of will alone.

‘Who knows?’ replied the policeman. ‘It will take them a week to dig through that mess.’

With bile rising in his throat, Carter turned and stumbled away down the street, until he came to the Kalk train station on Gottfriedhagenstrasse. There, he found a phone booth cubicle and shut himself inside. He put in a call to Bonn station.

A woman answered. ‘Embassy,’ she said.

‘I need to speak to Eckberg.’

‘Who is calling, please?’ she asked.

‘You can tell him it’s Carter. Please hurry. It’s important.’

There was a pause. ‘I’m afraid the person you are asking to speak with isn’t here right now. If you would like to come to the embassy, I’m sure we can find someone who will help.’

Carter hung up the phone. He breathed in the smell of stale cigarette smoke that had sunk into the cramped walls of the booth, and stared without seeing at the calling cards of prostitutes, jammed between the wall and the metal coin receiver of the phone. Carter wondered if Eckberg was dead. Maybe the station chief, too. Both of them could have gone to that meeting at the safe house. Until he found out otherwise, it only made sense to assume that they were gone.

Only one thing seemed perfectly clear◦– that the explosion was no accident. Whoever set the charge must have known about the meeting, and also who would be there. That information must have come from somewhere inside Bonn station, after Wilby broke with his own protocol to keep everyone else in the dark. So Wilby had been right all along. The station had been compromised, which also explained what had happened in the alleyway the night before. Only someone with access to the inner working of the station could have known the location of the dead drop.

Without any idea of where he was going, only that he needed to put some distance between himself and the ruins of the safe house, Carter wandered down Am Grauen Stein road until he came to the Deutzer cemetery, its wide expanse bristling with tombstones and the occasional stone angel, arms held out as if waiting for raindrops to fall into their palms. Carter turned into the cemetery and walked among the graves until he found a bench, shaded by the serrated green leaves of a horse chestnut tree. He sat down and tried to think straight.

Carter realised that there was nowhere for him to go where he knew he could be safe. There had been no plan for this eventuality. None of the escape routes, which had been put in place in case anything went wrong, could be trusted anymore. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the cover under which he had been living, as an ex-soldier working on the black market, was not a mask at all but his actual identity. He had no documents or contacts he could trust which might prove otherwise. For that, he had relied entirely on Wilby. The station chief might have been able to vouch for him, and maybe Eckberg, too, but both of those men were probably dead now, which left Carter out in the cold.

The tornado of these fears whirled in Carter’s mind, so vast and deafening that he pressed his hands to the side of his head, as if to stop the debris of his panic crashing like shrapnel through the walls of his skull.

Eventually, Carter managed to force aside his confusion long enough to remember what Wilby had said to him the night before◦– that everything he had suffered through would be for nothing if he bailed out now. If he ran, he knew he’d be running for the rest of his life, which probably wouldn’t last long, since the way things stood right now he didn’t even know who he was running from. The only people he could trust now were the ones he’d been sent to betray.

That night, Carter and Teresa boarded the overnight train to Vienna.

Cologne central station was busy, with porters wheeling trunks of luggage towards the baggage car and people milling around with tickets in their hands, looking for which wagon to board. The lights were yellowy and glaring and the sweaty smell of steam from the locomotives mixed with a haze of cigarette smoke. Conductors prowled the platforms, whistles clamped between their teeth and flag batons gripped in their fists. Policemen, armed with submachine guns held against their chests, strolled about in pairs.

Carter carried a suitcase full of new clothes. It was all that he owned in the world.

Teresa wore a dress and high-heeled shoes, and a long coat tied with a belt. Her dark hair was shining in the station platform lights.

Carter looked at her. It was the first time he had seen her in a dress. ‘Shut up,’ she told him.

‘I didn’t say anything!’

‘That was for what you were thinking,’ she replied.

Dasch had come to see them off. Unapologetically, he stared.

Finally Teresa turned to him. ‘What is it?’ she demanded.

‘Well, I…’ Dasch began. ‘I was just going to say…’

‘Yes?’

‘That you are a beautiful couple.’

She stared at him incredulously.

Dasch ignored the glance. He put one hand on each of their shoulders. ‘When you arrive in Carlsbad,’ he said, ‘if it is possible, and without forgetting what you’re going there to do, or how much I am paying for all this, try to find a moment when the weight of the world isn’t resting on your shoulders.’ Without another word, he turned and walked away.

Both Carter and Teresa became suddenly aware that they were alone now.

Whistles blew along the platform.

A conductor leaned out of a carriage doorway and shouted, ‘Alle einsteigen!’

‘I guess maybe we should get on board,’ said Carter. His words came out faint and hollow, like a voice almost lost in the static of a poorly tuned radio.

‘Where is that cocky American confidence now?’ she asked.

‘Same place you left your trousers,’ Carter replied. Then before she could say anything else he held out his hand, and to his surprise she took it without sarcasm or reluctance and they climbed on board the train.

A barrel-chested porter, wearing a dark blue uniform with silver buttons, picked up their bags and escorted them to their private compartment in one of the first class carriages. There, he accepted the bills Carter awkwardly stuffed into his hand, and delivered the bags to the first class steward, a slightly built man with a small potbelly and a narrow face, who moved effortlessly in the cramped space of the train.

Carter, meanwhile, seemed to be banging his elbows into everything he passed and felt the narrow space of the corridor close in as if it were shrinking around him with every step he took.

The steward swung open the door to their compartment, revealing a small room with a window at one end, a table, whose surface was taken up mostly by a lamp with a red shade, and a couch that spanned the length of one wall. The other wall was panelled with mahogany veneer and had a gold-framed mirror in the centre.

Realising that this couch would fold down into their bed, Carter immediately broke out in a sweat. He had imagined that there might be some kind of bunk arrangement, since that was the only type of bedding he had ever seen on trains before, but he had never travelled first class.

Their bags were placed upon a railing that ran along the length of the opposite wall and was fitted with a net in which the suitcases could rest without sliding around.

‘Dinner will be served in half an hour,’ said the steward.

Carter reached for his wallet, ready to tip the man just as he had tipped the one before.

With one sharp, commanding movement, the steward held up one hand, keeping it close to his body. ‘It is not necessary,’ he said quietly.

Carter felt the sweat run down his face.

The steward left, closing the door behind him.

For the first time since they had entered the compartment, Carter looked at Teresa.

She was smiling at him.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘You seem uncomfortable.’

‘I am!’ he almost shouted. He wanted to tell her that he had spent the previous night in a bombed-out building and that he had slept well, so well that it had saved his life, because a part of him knew he belonged there, on the ragged edges of humanity. But this rolling cell, with its cushions and delicately crenellated lampshade, was almost more than he could bear.

Whistles blew out on the platform again. They heard the sound of running footsteps. The train jolted as it began to move.

Teresa gave a short cry and tipped backwards onto the couch.

The lights of the station flickered past. A moment later, they slid into a sheath of darkness, fractured by the lights of houses that overlooked the tracks. Carter glanced around the compartment in case there was a chair somewhere that he might have missed. But there was no place to sit except beside her. Slowly, he lowered himself down, careful not to put himself too far away and also not too close.

Minutes passed.

Neither of them spoke.

Carter got up and opened the window to let in some air, but it was loud and cold and rain came in, so he closed it up again and took his seat once more.

‘I suppose there is no point in my asking why we’re on this honeymoon,’ said Teresa.

The word ‘honeymoon’ rang like a gong in Carter’s ears. He had already given up the struggle to conceal how he felt about Teresa. In spite of what Dasch had told him, it seemed an affection so entirely one-sided that any revelation of his feelings would only cause the walls to close on him completely, smothering him to death between the first class cushions, first class lamp and first class mahogany veneer. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There would be no point in that.’

‘Is it going to be dangerous?’ she asked.

For the past few minutes Carter had been staring at his shoes, but now he looked up and the first thing he saw was her reflection in the mirror. ‘It might,’ he said to the reflection, ‘but the fewer questions you ask now, the safer you will be.’

There was a sudden sharp, clattering sound, which made both of them jump. It was a moment before they realised that the steward was knocking on the door. ‘Dinner is served,’ he announced, his voice muffled through the polished wood. Then they heard him knocking on the next door down the corridor, and the one after that, telling them dinner was ready.

Carter and Teresa stood. It was really too small a place for them both to be standing at the same time and they had to shuffle past each other to get to the door. For a brief moment, as she stood directly in front of him, as close as partners in a waltz, he had to stop himself from looking her in the eye, convinced that she would know each thought that trampled through his mind.

The dining car had actual chairs, upholstered in red cloth with yellow piping, the same colour scheme as the exterior paint on the carriages. The tables had been set with white cloths and lamps that were the same as the ones in the compartment. Curtains gathered with silk bell ropes had been drawn back from the windows, even though there was almost nothing to see outside except the occasional cube of light from some window out there in the night.

They were shown to their table by a waiter in a short, white tunic who spoke only one word◦– champagne◦– in a way that seemed less like a question and more like a guarantee.

The dining car quickly filled up, mostly with couples, most of them older, and all of them, it seemed to Carter, well accustomed to the wealth of their surroundings. But they seemed happy and intent only on themselves and, for the first time since they had boarded the train, Carter felt the muscles in his shoulders begin to relax. He glanced up at Teresa.

There was a softness in her face and in her eyes which he had never seen before. ‘You look very pretty,’ he said, and he wondered where the hell those words had just come from.

‘I’m glad you think so,’ she told him. ‘We are married, after all.’

‘I didn’t say it because of that,’ he muttered hoarsely, as if his lungs were filled with smoke. ‘I actually meant it.’

‘Well, I’m still glad,’ she replied.

He picked up the heavy silver cutlery and weighed it in his hands. ‘I don’t know if I could ever get used to this.’

‘And you think I could?’ she asked.

‘Yes, actually, with all the caviar your father must have heaped upon your plate.’

She shrugged and shook her head. ‘I never saw it. He made sure of that. He never much cared for it himself. His tastes were always simpler than those of the people with whom he was dealing.’

‘Well, for a man with simple tastes,’ said Carter, ‘he can cook one hell of an omelette.’

‘He would be pleased to hear you say so.’

‘Where did he learn to do that?’ asked Carter.

‘He was a chef,’ she replied, ‘and the people for whom he cooked had tastes even simpler than his.’

‘How does a man go from that place to where he is now?’

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

‘He isn’t here.’

‘There’s no short answer.’

‘We have plenty of time.’

‘We do not speak of this,’ she told him, her voice almost lost amidst the clatter of wheels on the tracks.

‘I know.’

‘So why are you asking me now?’

‘Because if I don’t ask now, the time will never come again, and then we will always be strangers.’

‘And that matters to you?’ she asked.

‘I wish it didn’t,’ he said, ‘but I can’t help that now.’

She sighed and took up her purse, which was lying on the table beside her. It was black, rectangular and closed with two gold prongs that locked together with a twist. She opened the purse and removed a small, creased photograph, about two inches square, but she kept it hidden in her palm. ‘Did it ever occur to you,’ she asked, ‘that afterwards you might wish you’d never known?’

‘All the time.’

‘And still you ask me.’

‘Yes.’

She handed him the photograph. ‘When you figure out that it’s too late to undo what’s been done, just remember I gave you the chance.’

Carter took the crumpled piece of paper and laid it on the table. It showed two men standing side by side on some kind of stone balcony, with snow-capped mountains in the distance. In front of them stood a girl in a dark skirt and white shirt with a thin scarf hanging down her chest. She was holding a bouquet of flowers. He recognised both men immediately. One of them was Dasch. He wore a white apron and what looked like grey checked trousers. In his hands, he clutched the tall white hat of a chef. He was smiling, but he looked afraid. The other man was Adolf Hitler, in a double-breasted jacket and black trousers. His face looked calm and serious. One hand rested on the shoulder of the girl. It took Carter another moment to grasp that this was Teresa. She looked so young, he barely recognised her. He looked up and caught Teresa’s eye. ‘When was this taken?’ he asked.

‘About 1936,’ she replied. ‘I must have been about twelve years old. My father cooked for Hitler and for those with whom he dined. That was his job. His only job. Hitler had a very specific and unusual diet. For breakfast, only milk and toast or little cakes. For lunch, only vegetables. For dinner, vegetables and rice or pasta. No alcohol. No tobacco. No coffee. Of course, even when these things became scarce, he could have had whatever he wanted. He also ate at odd hours. Breakfast at 1 a.m. Lunch at 4 p.m. Dinner whenever it pleased him. From the day he was hired in 1935, my father travelled with him everywhere. And in January 1945, when Hitler went down into his bunker in Berlin, my father went with him, while my mother and I lived in a house nearby. A few months later, Hitler died in that bunker but, long before then, my father had reached the conclusion that anyone who remained with him would end up dead as well.

‘By the beginning of April, the Russians had begun shelling the city with their long-range artillery and air raids struck night and day. One morning, just after the all-clear sirens had sounded, my father showed up at the door of our house. He was wearing clothes I’d never seen before. He told my mother she had fifteen minutes to pack a bag and then we would be leaving. When she asked him where they would be going, he told her, “Anywhere but here.” She asked where his clothes had come from and he told her he had pulled them off a dead man who had been caught outside in the air raid of the previous night. He had dressed the man in his own clothes and thrown him into a house that was on fire. Because he was a part of Hitler’s private staff, my father had a special pass that allowed him to travel anywhere he wanted and by whatever means were available. By the end of that day, we were already far to the west. We were somewhere near Hanover when our train was attacked from the air. Royal Air Force planes fired rockets into the locomotive and shot bullets along the length of the carriages. The rear of the train exploded. It must have been carrying munitions. The whole train left the tracks and fell on its side. I remember seeing the ground rise up to meet us and the windows shattering. The next thing I knew, I was lying out in a field with my father standing over me. His jacket was smouldering. My hair had been burned. I could smell it. When I sat up, I could see that the whole train was on fire. A few people were walking around in the field, some of them terribly injured. My mother never made it out of the train.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Carter.

‘People always say that,’ replied Teresa, ‘and what they really mean is that they’re sorry they asked. So are you sorry you asked, Mr Carter?’

‘No,’ he told her. ‘Keep going.’

‘When the fire died down,’ she continued, ‘my father went back into the wreckage of the train, found her body and carried her out, wrapped in a blanket. We buried her in the field. Until yesterday, I’d never known he took the ring from her finger. At the end of that day, trucks from a passing army convoy stopped and told us we could climb aboard. By then, my father had stolen the identity cards of a man who had died of his wounds. His name was Hanno Dasch. My own passbook had already been lost, but nobody cared as long as he had his.’

‘So what is his real name? And yours?’

‘None of that matters,’ she said. ‘Those people are dead now, and we should let them stay that way.’

‘And who else knows about this?’ asked Carter.

‘No one,’ she said. ‘Aside from my father, only you.’

‘Not even Ritter? I wouldn’t think he’d object to what your father used to do.’

‘It’s not the job he’d mind. It’s the fact that my father deserted. A man like Ritter sees the world in black and white. Each German soldier took an oath of loyalty, and for Ritter such things become a part of you, as real as the bones beneath your skin. It cannot be removed. It cannot be undone.’

‘Not even at the end of the war?’

She shook her head. ‘This might be hard for you to understand, but it has nothing to do with the war, or even the fact that Hitler is finally gone. An oath is a sacred thing. It is a line you have drawn in the sand. Break it, and the world dissolves into a pack of lies.’

Her words felt like needles jabbed into his flesh. This whole idea of loyalty, which men like Ritter thought of as their greatest strength, could be transformed by men like Carter into their greatest weakness without them even knowing what had changed. Carter thought of all the times that he had pierced through the armour of such people, just as he was doing now, and how he had learned to accept the collateral damage to those whose lives had been caught up in the crime rings he’d helped to break apart.

This time, it was different. Teresa was the only person he had ever met who had lived so long with her secrets that, like the oaths of Ritter’s comrades, whose bones lay strewn across the Russian steppe, they had become a part of her. It seemed so unfair to Carter that the thing they had most in common he would never be able to reveal. He did not know the precise moment when he had begun to care about the woman who sat before him. If he had known, perhaps he might have been able to prevent it, and to strangle those emotions before they ever reached the surface of his mind. But it was too late now.

‘On the day the war ended,’ continued Teresa, ‘we had passed through the Allied lines as refugees. We finally reached Cologne, and that was where my father began to reinvent himself as the man he has become.’

‘But why did you pick Cologne?’ asked Carter. ‘The place was in ruins, after all.’

She smiled at him. ‘Because that’s where the treasure had been buried.’

‘What treasure?’

‘Everything he has been selling since the war ended. The champagne. The wine. The cigars.’

‘He buried it?’

She laughed. ‘No. Hitler did. He had ordered the construction of various fortresses scattered around the Reich. Some, like the one at Rastenburg he called the Wolf’s Lair, were completed. Others, like one in the Alps he called the Giant, were never used, even though kilometres of tunnel had already been dug into the sides of the mountains. And some, like the underground complex Hitler had ordered to be constructed beneath the city of Cologne, were destroyed before they could ever be completed. My father never even knew of it until one evening late in the war, after Hitler had gone down into the bunker, bringing his entourage with him. My father was expected to cook for them, but he had trouble finding any ingredients. When my father apologised for the quality of the meal, Hitler remarked that if they had been in Cologne instead of Berlin, they could have had anything they wanted. He explained that the construction of a bunker complex beneath Cologne, similar to that in Berlin, had been permanently derailed by a single bomb which had fallen on the Eisengasse, causing all four levels of the complex to collapse.’

Carter thought of the crater where Galton had been shot, and he tried to imagine the tunnels and the rooms below, one crashing down into another as the Eisengasse was cremated above it.

‘By the time the fires had burned out,’ said Teresa, ‘the builders of the Cologne complex decided that the damage was so severe it made no sense to re-start the excavation. Instead, they began work on a different fortress in Belgium and the Cologne project was forgotten. Or almost forgotten. Hitler told my father that night that an underground storage facility, which had been created to supply the Cologne bunker, had actually survived the bombing. He unrolled a great blueprint, which showed where the complex was located and how it would have looked if it had ever been completed. The entrance to the storage area had been blocked by rubble, but Hitler’s engineers had confirmed that the contents had almost certainly remained intact. The plan was that at some point in the future it would all be retrieved, but for now it was safe and Hitler had other things on his mind. In the end, Hitler’s engineers never reopened the storage facility. But my father did.

‘It took him a month to locate the entrance and another month to dig his way down through the rubble, but finally he found his way inside. Until that moment, he wasn’t even sure if Hitler had been right about the contents of the facility. He gambled everything on the chance that it might have been true, and it turned out he was right. He woke me in the middle of the night to tell me the good news. Until then, we had been living in an abandoned rail car in a siding not far from the field where the Eisengasse had once stood. We were starving. He led me out across the field and down into a tunnel, lighting the way with a candle in a jar. We came to a set of huge iron doors, one of which had been bent almost in half by the weight of stone that had come down upon it in the cave-in caused by the bomb. We stepped through into a huge room, and there I saw row after row of wine crates, food crates◦– tobacco, chocolate, canned fruit, canned vegetables. Anything you could have wanted was there. We sat down on the dusty floor, and my father opened up a tin of cherries and we ate them with our fingers. The next day, my father began selling small amounts of what he had found. Not too much, you understand. A bottle of wine. A box of cigars. The sort of thing any scavenger might turn up if he was lucky. Within a few weeks, he had bought a truck for moving things around the city. We rented a house. He bribed city officials to give him contracts transporting construction materials around. He bought more trucks. Within a year, he had become the most successful dealer in black market goods that this part of the country had ever seen.’

‘But how did he do it?’ asked Carter. ‘The police raided the compound. They searched the trucks dozens of times. Your father told me so himself, and they always went home empty-handed.’

‘Because they were looking in the wrong place,’ explained Teresa. ‘He never used the trucks to move black market merchandise.’

‘Then how?’

‘The trains,’ she said. ‘On the far side of the Eisengasse, trains were constantly moving wagons through those sidings. That’s how he did it, and they never thought to look.’

‘Then why did he need me?’ asked Carter. ‘If he had it all worked out, why take the risk of bringing someone new on board?’

‘He had to,’ explained Teresa. ‘The storage area was almost empty◦– at least the part that he could reach.’

‘You mean there was more?’

‘Yes,’ said Teresa. ‘Sometime after he first entered the storage area, my father discovered that there was actually a second adjoining area, connected by a steel door, behind which the ceiling had collapsed. The door frame had buckled and he couldn’t open it, but he was convinced that more provisions had been stored there or perhaps even something more valuable. He had all sorts of theories◦– a temperature-controlled room for artworks, a cellar for the finest of the wines, a vault for precious gems. Or maybe nothing, an empty concrete space just filled with tons of dirt. It used to keep him awake at night. He once told me that if even half of what he had imagined lay behind that door was actually there, he could retire off the proceeds. But it might as well have been on the moon, because he couldn’t get to it and the fact was he needed a new source of products. As far as he was concerned, there was only one solution to that◦– the Americans. He knew they were unlikely to deal with him directly, so he needed a middleman, someone who understood how their minds worked and who could speak their language. And that’s why my father picked you. He always said he had an instinct for knowing who to trust.’

Back in the sleeping car the bed had already been pulled down, and a flask of cocoa was set upon the little table, flanked by two cups upturned in their saucers, rattling faintly with the movement of the train.

‘I’ll sleep on the floor,’ said Carter.

‘No,’ she told him, ‘you won’t.’

They sat down, side by side.

‘I ask so many questions,’ said Carter, ‘but you ask almost none of me.’

‘And you wonder why?’ she replied.

‘Of course.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it is because I am afraid you’d tell the truth, and that I could not bear to hear it.’

Hearing those words, Carter leaned forward, resting his elbows upon his knees and pressing his hands to his face, as if to stop his mask from crumbling to dust. Her hand rested softly on his shoulder. She was so close now. He could feel her presence like static in the air. ‘I wish we weren’t pretending,’ he told her.

‘We’re not,’ she whispered.

He looked up.

She kissed him before he could speak.

And the barricades that he had built to withstand any siege and splintering of bone began to slip and fall, dissolving back into the particles from which they’d been created, like the castles he had built as a child out of the gritty sand at Belmar, when they were swept away by the incoming tide.