In the Evil Day

12

…HAMBURG…

‘What’s Serrano’s business in Hamburg?’ said Anselm. He was uneasy, his scalp itched. The other people in the restaurant seemed too close, he felt that they were looking at him.

They were in Blankenese, finishing lunch at a table in the window. Below them flowed the Elbe, wide, grey, unhealthy. Two container ships attended by screeching flocks of gulls were passing each other. The huge vessels-clumsy, charmless things bleeding rust at the rivets and oozing yellowish liquids from their pores-sent small waves to the banks.

‘Moving money, papers,’ said O’Malley. ‘He shifts stuff all the time. Can’t keep any computer records. No paperless office for Mr Serrano.’

‘The pages any use?’

‘The ones we can understand don’t help us. We sold them to a firm in Dublin, so we’ll get a bit of our money back. In due course. We don’t demand cash on delivery. Unlike some.’

‘Cash flow problems. The boss’s been away on honeymoon.’

‘Why does he have to marry them?’

‘Some Lutheran thing. What’s Serrano want with Kael?’

‘We’d like to know.’

‘You came over to tell me that?’

‘No. I’ve got other business here. Mention this matter to Baader?’

‘Yes. He says Kael’s a man of parts.’ Every time Anselm looked around, he thought he caught people staring at him.

O’Malley looked pensive, chewing the last of his Zanderfilet. He was big and pale, a long patrician nose between sharp cheekbones. He looked like an academic, a teacher of literature or history. But then you looked into his bleached blue eyes, and you knew he was something very different.

In the disordered and looted album of Anselm’s memories, Manila was untouched. Manila, in the Taproom at the Manila Hotel. The group came in laughing, O’Malley with a short, bald Filipino man, two elated young women who looked like Rotary exchange students from Minnesota, and dark and brooding Paul Kaskis. O’Malley was wearing a barong tagalog, the Filipino shirt worn over trousers. The Filipino was in a lightweight cream suit, and Kaskis was in chinos and a rumpled white shirt.

The Filipino ordered margaritas. Anselm heard him say to the blondes that he’d started drinking them at college in California. At Stanford. They shrieked. They shrieked at the men’s every utterance. It struck Anselm that if they were on an exchange, it was an arrangement between Rotary cathouses, an international exchange of Rotary harlots.

There was a moment when the shrieking women had gone to the powder room and the Filipino was talking softly to Kaskis and O’Malley was standing next to Anselm, paying for cigars.

‘I think I know you,’ said O’Malley. ‘You’re a journalist.’ He was Australian.

‘No and yes,’ said Anselm.

‘Don’t tell me, you’re with…’ ‘I’m a freelance, not with anyone in particular.’

O’Malley’s washed-out blue eyes, remarkable in his sallow face, flicked around the room. Then he smiled, a smile full of rue. ‘Not CIA then?’

‘No. I don’t think they’d have me.’

‘Fuck it,’ O’Malley said. ‘Met two today, I was hoping for a trifecta. Well, have a drink with us anyway.’

Anselm ended up having dinner with them. At one point, shrieking Carol, the taller and bigger of the American women, put an accomplished hand on him under the table, seemed to look to O’Malley for guidance.

Now O’Malley asked for guidance. ‘What’s Baader say about him?’

‘Arms, drugs, possibly slaves, human organs. Untouchable. He has friends.’

‘Just another Hamburg businessman then.’

‘I suppose,’ said Anselm. He had a cautious look at their fellow-lunchers, members of Hamburg’s haute bourgeoisie, serious people noted for being cold, tight-lipped and very careful with a mark. Most of them were in middle age and beyond, the men sleek-haired and hard-eyed, just on the plump side, the women lightly tanned and harder eyed but carrying no excess weight, taut surgically contoured faces many of them, bowstring tendons in the neck.

‘Baader says Kael doesn’t talk directly to his own clients,’ said Anselm, ‘so he may be a client of Serrano’s. Kael’s money’s all dirty and Serrano may be helping him with it.’

‘This meeting tomorrow,’ said O’Malley. ‘Can that be covered?’

‘Outdoors, it’s a put-and-pluck on Serrano,’ Anselm said. ‘With possibilities of disaster. Want to wear that?’

‘I’ll have to.’ O’Malley ran a hand over his tightly curled greying black hair, touched the collar of his lightweight tweed suit, the knot of the red silk tie. ‘The world used to be a much simpler place, didn’t it? There were things you could do, things you couldn’t. Now you can do anything if you can pay for it.’

‘Nostalgia,’ Anselm said. ‘I was thinking the other night. I’ve never asked. What happened to Angelica?’

‘She doesn’t work anymore. She paints. She married an Englishman and now there’s an American.’

‘People you know?’

‘The Pom, yes. I liked him. Eton and kicked out of the Guards. Rooting the CO’s batman probably, much worse than rooting the CO’s wife, he doesn’t fuck his wife. The American’s rich, inherited. I had dinner with them in Paris, in their apartment, the Marais can you believe? They have a cook, a chef. But there’s hope, she’s really distant with the hubby. Not surprising, he’s an Egyptologist, the place’s like a tomb and he could bore Mormons stiff.’

O’Malley drank the last of his wine. ‘Still interested?’

‘Just curious.’

‘I could bring you together. Accidental meeting.’

‘We only actually kissed once. While very drunk.’

‘I remember. The Angel didn’t kiss casually, though. Not a serial kisser.’

‘I may be too late for accidental meetings. I may have had my ration of accidental meetings.’

‘No, there’s always one left.’

A youth in white had appeared to take away the plates. Close behind him came another young man, dark, Italianate, long-fingered. He fawned over O’Malley, suggesting the dessert trolley or something from the kitchen, anything, any whim. O’Malley ordered cognacs. He had the accent identified with Cologne, somehow frivolous in the intonation. North Germans found it annoying.

The waiter gone, O’Malley sighed. ‘Well, a business lunch. What’s a put-and-pluck cost?’

‘As an estimate, plenty.’

O’Malley was looking away, watching three sailors on a Japanese container ship taking photographs of the shore. He said nothing for a while, drank some riesling, nodded in answer to some inner question. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I thought it would be in that vicinity.’

They sat in silence until the cognacs came, more fawning. O’Malley rotated his fat-bellied glass and sniffed the small collar. ‘If angels peed,’ he said, and sipped.

Anselm felt the unease returning, wanted to be out of the place, away from people. He saw O’Malley’s mouth rolling the liquid, his upward gaze, the calibrating.

‘Nice lunch,’ said Anselm. ‘Thank you.’

O’Malley landed his glass on the heavy white linen. ‘My pleasure. You eat quickly, not so much a diner as an eater.’

‘I usually eat in the street,’ Anselm said. ‘Vendor food. You get into habits like that.’ The unease was growing. He steadied himself. ‘I have to go.’

On their way out, O’Malley stopped and bent over a handsome woman in dark business clothes, alone. ‘Are you stalking me, Lucy?’ he said. ‘How did you know I’d be here?’

Anselm kept going, he wanted to be outside. A flunky was waiting to open the door. He went out onto the pavement, closed his eyes, breathed deeply, said his mantra.

In the taxi, O’Malley said, ‘That woman, she’s English, a very smart maritime lawyer based here. Froze a Polish ship for us in Rotterdam. I hope she’s going to do the trick again.’

‘I’m sure the courts look kindly upon her.’

‘She’s persuasive. They say she blew a judge when she was starting out in England. That’s the gossip. Judgment overturned on appeal.

Black mark for a judge.’

‘At least he’s got his memories,’ Anselm said. ‘Keep her wig on?’

O’Malley shook his head. ‘How can you be so ignorant of legal decorum?’