A fear of dark water

Chapter Thirty

He had found out her name remarkably easily. Getting around the encryption had not been difficult. It had taken Roman less than half a day to decode and transfer the information.

Meliha Yazar.

The woman he had seen in the cafe had been Meliha Yazar. Roman felt a profound sadness at the idea that such a beautiful woman would now be dead. So would he be, soon.

He had stopped hating Meliha for leaving the phone for him to find. With that act — which he now felt was not as random as it had first seemed, maybe she had seen him, recognised something in him — she had given him a great gift, for now Roman knew something about himself that he had not known before. He was brave. He had always thought of himself as cowardly, but now he realised that he was not afraid of dying. They would kill him, but before they did he would make sure that the information he had, that she had entrusted to him with that simple act in the cafe, would be passed on to the policeman Fabel and others. Roman realised that sending the information by email would never work. He recognised the sophistication of their expertise and the scope of their technical resources. He genuinely admired some of their work. Truly creative.

But they were dangerous. The first thing they would do when they traced Roman would be to wipe out his email traffic and blogging presence. To silence his electronic singing.

He also knew that he could not simply rely on Fabel, because the chances were he would soon be dead too. Roman and Fabel both represented the outer radiations of a spidering spread of knowledge that had to be contained. A circle that had to be closed.

But that was in the real world. And Roman existed in more than the real world. He knew the truth and the falsity of their fantasy of a digital otherworld. It existed, but it was not somewhere you could go unless you accepted the total death of the ego. A soulless shadow of reality. He knew. He had spent so much of his young life there.

He finished decrypting the files. And there it was: he had found the secret about the Pharos Project that they could never allow to be known. They had been mad to think that they could keep something like that hidden from the world. But, there again, the Big Lie was always the most enduring, the easiest to sustain.

As soon as he had finished transferring the file to the various formats he wanted, Roman went around his apartment, opening the curtains. He struggled with a couple of the half-light windows but managed to get them open and allow some air into the apartment.

Then he went out.

It was sunny. The first really sunny day of the year. The Wilhelmsburg street was full of noise after the quiet of his apartment. He thought about the Albanians who lived below him who had not really been noisy; it had been Roman who had been intolerant simply because he had been unable to remove himself that one step further from mankind and the real world. There had, Roman realised, been people just like him throughout history. The medieval monks who chose the austerity of a monastic cell and the virtual reality of religion; the ancient philosophers who hid in caves or barrels and commented on the human condition from which they had disconnected.

It took him a long time to walk into town. But he had been determined to walk. It meant that every now and then he had to lean against a wall to catch his breath, and he sat down every time the opportunity presented itself on a municipal bench or, on one occasion, even on a lidded waste bin.

He saw the way others looked at him. But today Roman did not care. Today he had a mission to fulfil, a purpose that was, for once, not all about him. He went to the DeutschePost office first and bought five padded envelopes, dropped a memory stick and a handwritten note into each. He paused for a moment before he let the envelopes slip from his grasp and into the mail chute; in that moment, he thought of Meliha, the woman in the cafe, the woman behind the truth. He hoped that somehow, somewhere, she would be aware of what he was doing for her.

After the post office, Roman went to an ATM and withdrew five hundred euros, folded the notes neatly and placed them in a sixth envelope. On the way home he visited two more ATMs, using a different card each time; each time removing five hundred euros. By the time he reached the main door of his apartment building, Roman was wheezing and sweating profusely. He leaned against the wall and looked up at the sky. High above him, the distant glint of a passenger jet left a trail of vapour, like a needle running white thread through blue silk. There is never just one reality, he thought as he watched the jet, wondering what the passengers saw of Wilhelmsburg from that altitude. There are as many realities as there are people on the planet: reality is what lives in each person’s head. When they kill me, he thought, my reality will end, but I will have no sense of it ending. Just as I was not aware before my birth, I will not be aware after my death, so all time only exists as I perceive it. Time began with me and will end with me. I am immortal.

When he had recovered enough, he entered his apartment building and started the slow, painful climb up the stairs. His breathing was even more laboured by the time he reached the door of the apartment beneath his. When the Albanian opened the door and recognised Roman, his face darkened with dull anger; then he seemed to notice the state Roman was in and the anger was replaced by concern.

‘Are you all right? You no look so good…’

‘Jetmir…’ Roman spat the words out between rheumy wheezes. ‘That’s your name, isn’t it… Jetmir?’

The Albanian nodded and moved out to help Roman. Roman nearly laughed: Jetmir was a small, wiry, dark man whom Roman reckoned would be crushed to death if he fell on him.

‘You come in. You not well man. I get doctor, maybe.’

‘No doctor, Jetmir. I’m sorry. I’m the one who kept calling the police. You knew that anyway, but I’m telling you now, it was me and I’m sorry.’ He pushed the envelope containing the fifteen hundred euros into the Albanian’s hands. ‘Take it. I want you to have it. I know you don’t have a lot of money.’

The Albanian stared at the cash. ‘Why?’ he asked. But he made no attempt to return it.

‘Because I’ve been a bad neighbour. And because I want you to do something for me. It’s payment in advance.’ Roman paused. A pain started to shoot across his chest and down his right arm. He grabbed the Albanian’s shirt front and pulled him close. With his other hand he shoved a second envelope against his chest. ‘This is for the police,’ he said. ‘It’s very important that they get this. There are bad men coming, Jetmir. They’re coming for me.’

‘Then I get police now…’

‘No!’ Roman shouted and tightened his grip on the small Albanian. ‘No. That could be dangerous for you and your family. Listen, if anything happens to me, you’ve got to give that envelope to the police. But only to a policeman called Fabel. Jan Fabel. His name’s on the front. Have you got that? Don’t give it to anyone else.’

The Albanian nodded vigorously. ‘You wait here, I get you some water.’

It took a full fifteen minutes for the pain to ease and for Roman, sipping slowly at the water, to get something of his breath back. While they sat together on the stairs, Roman and the Albanian talked. They chatted about the most inconsequential things, about Jetmir’s home in Albania, about his children and how they sounded just like Germans. But throughout the whole conversation the earnest expression of concern never left the Albanian’s face. Roman remembered how the Albanian had tried to talk to him when the family first moved in, how they had made an effort to befriend him. He felt bad when he thought about that. They were people, after all; not just a noise, an annoyance, on the periphery of Roman’s existence.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Roman, slowly and painfully easing himself up from the stairs. ‘I’ll be fine. Just don’t forget your promise.’

‘I won’t forget. We is good neighbours now. You are my fqinj. We look after each other.’

The Albanian helped Roman up the rest of the stairs to his front door.

‘I’ll be fine now. Thanks for your help, Jetmir.’ Roman unlocked his door, smiled and waited until he heard the Albanian shut his own door one floor down. Only then did Roman step into his apartment.

Roman looked around. It really was a nice place, if only he had kept it tidier. He regretted that now. There was a lot he regretted now. He stood leaning against the door, still struggling with his breathing.

There were three of them in the flat. None of them spoke. They all wore identical grey suits and had Bluetooth earpieces jammed into their ears as if fused there. One was sitting at Roman’s computers, another held Meliha’s cellphone in his hand. The third stood directly in front of Roman, staring at him with nothing in his face.

Roman had known they would be there. Before he had left to carry out his chores he had reassembled Meliha’s phone, including the tracer, and had left it switched on. A beacon. A digital lighthouse. They were big on that kind of metaphor, he thought.

He started to laugh at the absurdity of it all just as the Consolidator closest to him stepped forward, slipped the large plastic bag he had in his gloved hands over Roman’s head and pulled the drawstring tight.