The Elegant Lie

…

Back at the compound, Teresa was there to meet them. She did not ask where they had gone or what they had seen.

Dasch stepped inside his office to collect a briefcase full of paperwork. Ritter followed him in, leaving Carter alone with Teresa.

Teresa fidgeted awkwardly, stuffing her hands in her pockets and tapping a foot in the dirt as she kept time to some rhythm that was pounding in her head. Suddenly she turned to him and pointed out into the dark, down the long, twisting dirt road that led back towards the city. ‘Leave,’ she murmured to him. ‘Go, before it is too late.’

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ said Carter. ‘Is it personal, or do you treat everyone like this?’

She stepped closer to him.

Even in the dark, Carter could see the anger on her face.

‘All my life,’ she said, ‘I have watched people gather around my father, like hyenas around a lion when it has made a kill. They wait for the scraps he leaves behind and my father mistakes this for friendship, when the truth is that those hyenas would vanish in an instant if the food ever ran out. So the answer is no, Mr Carter. It is not personal. But I know your kind, and that is usually enough.’

‘You’re forgetting something,’ said Carter.

‘And what is that?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t come to him. He came to me.’

At that moment, Ritter and Dasch emerged from the office.

‘Climb in, Mr Carter,’ ordered Dasch.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘To your new luxury accommodation! And by luxury, I mean it has a roof that does not leak.’

‘To have any roof at all,’ said Ritter, ‘is luxury enough in this town.’

As they drove along the moonlit roads, streetlamps, neglected since the war, cast hurdles of shadow across their path.

Carter thought about Teresa’s warning to get out while there was time. It seemed to him now like less of a threat, and more of a warning by which he might still save himself. He wished he could have told Teresa it was already too late, not only for him but for her as well.

Carter’s luxury accommodation turned out to be a one-room attic apartment on Bertricherstrasse, overlooking Vorgebirgs Park. It was located above an electrical appliance repair shop which did not even seem to have a name although, judging from the number of vacuum cleaners, lamps and toasters in the front window, all of them tagged with the names of their owners and ready to be collected, the shopkeeper and his customers were already well acquainted.

‘And here is your luxury transport,’ said Ritter, pointing to a rusted bicycle with a sagging leather seat which was leaning up against the wall of the building.

As soon as they had gone, Carter made his way up to the apartment, which was reached by climbing a narrow staircase attached to the side of the building. It had two windows: one at the front, which looked out over the street, and one at the back, which had a view of a brick wall and an alleyway below. Under any normal circumstances, it was too small to be comfortable, but the prison cell in which he had spent the best part of the previous year had altered his sense of surroundings. Open spaces made him nervous now and Carter had begun to doubt if that was ever going to change. Besides, it had a roof and, more importantly, it didn’t have bars on the windows.