The Isis Covenant

XXVIII

A shaven-headed teenager dressed in a dark bomber jacket and black jeans met them at the top of the stairs.

‘Friends,’ Teddy assured him.

‘Sure,’ the boy grunted. ‘But friends still gotta be given the once-over. Orders.’

Teddy shrugged and ushered Jamie forward. The hands that ran over his body were surprisingly gentle, but thorough — whoever taught the boy knew what they were doing.

‘Tell him if he tries that with me I’ll tear his freekin’ head off.’ Danny stood with her arms folded.

Jamie translated. The boy shrugged and produced his best high-school English.

‘You don’t get searched, you don’t come in. Suit yourself.’

‘You can wait outside,’ Jamie suggested.

‘Sure, when hell freezes over. You put one hand in the wrong place, mister, and your girlfriend will be the one who’s crying.’ She submitted to the search with a glare that would have lowered the temperature considerably in Satan’s realm, and they were ushered through the metal-studded wooden door.

Inside, a short bar dominated one corner; worn leather benches lined the walls, providing seating for a few scattered tables, at one of which three old men in shirtsleeves sat playing cards and muttering while a fourth watched. The cards were slapped down in quick succession followed by a triumphant cackle from the victor as he picked up the winning hand.

Teddy nodded to a door at the rear of the club. Jamie and Danny exchanged glances. They’d already decided that Jamie would do the talking and that they had no option but to trust their hosts. Jamie followed Teddy while Danny went to sit in the corner near the card players.

Behind the door, an office. Bare, nicotine-stained walls with flaking paint, three olive-green filing cabinets, a large ornate safe that might have been looted from a Hungarian bank, and a wide desk with a scarred red-leather top and a desk lamp that gave the room its only illumination. In an ashtray beside the lamp a cigar smouldered, the smoke spiralling in uninhibited tendrils through the rays of the lightbulb. At the desk, a silver-haired patrician — in another setting, Jamie thought, he would have been a count or a prince — sat mountainous and solid, despite his obvious great age. Even now it was possible to see the ghost of the laughing eyes and matinee-idol looks that must have had the girls chasing after him in the grey uniform with the silver lightning flashes on the collar. The man looked up and sent a message with his eyes. Teddy turned to go.

‘Wait,’ Jamie said. ‘A girl was killed on the way here. She was stabbed. He had a knife.’

Again the slightest flicker and Teddy was at the old man’s side, whispering into his ear, then sliding past Jamie to stand behind him. Not a threat, exactly, but …

‘He says he knows nothing about the girl. You were being followed. Two men. Maybe they were there to protect you — from us?’

Jamie shook his head. ‘No. You said to come alone. We came alone.’ At the same time an image of David’s face appeared. Who knew how the Israelis worked? It was possible, but if it had been Mossad, Jamie doubted even streetwise Teddy would have spotted them.

‘You lost them when you came through the bar, but he went back to check. Found only one. That’s when he came to you. The first time he saw the girl she was already dead. Then he brought you here. Does that satisfy you?’

It didn’t seem to matter whether it did or not. He knew it was all he was going to get. He nodded and there was a slight click as Teddy closed the door behind him. Once they were alone, the other man allowed the silence to lengthen and Jamie felt the ice-blue eyes searching his soul.

‘Where do you think you are?’ It seemed an unlikely question, but appeared to demand an answer.

‘I’m in a gentlemen’s drinking club in Hamburg.’

The leonine head shook slowly.

‘No, you misunderstand your situation.’ He picked up the cigar and pointed it at the door. ‘You and your lady friend are one step from the tomb. You think you can just walk into our world and walk out again? That’s not how it works. If I believe what you say, maybe you do. I don’t believe what you say: two bodies are floating in the docks. A blow to Hamburg’s tourist trade, but what the hell, there are plenty more tourists.’ He smiled at his joke, but it was an undertaker’s smile. ‘Who killed Micky Janelis?’

The room seemed to grow twenty degrees colder and Jamie was surprised he was able to keep his voice steady. ‘Micky killed himself.’

‘And how would you know that?’

‘Because I was there when he did it.’

The head came up. ‘Why would Micky do a thing like that? Micky was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Everybody liked Micky.’

Jamie hesitated. With some people you could get away with a lie or a diversion, but not with this man. ‘Maybe he thought someone was going to tell the world the truth about his past.’

‘You?’

He nodded.

‘You’d have done that to Micky?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Micky was my friend.’

‘Maybe Micky should have chosen his friends more carefully?’

‘Maybe.’ It took all Jamie’s nerve to hold the blue eyes. ‘But sometimes there comes a point when you even have to sacrifice your friends. I thought a man who’s done what you’ve done would understand that?’

For the first time he noticed there was a clock somewhere in the room. He could hear a laboured ticking somewhere in the background. Eventually, the other man reached below the desk and opened a drawer. Jamie held his breath for what came next. And what came next was a bottle filled with a clear liquid and two glasses which he filled to the rim. He pushed one towards Jamie and raised the other in salute.

‘To Micky.’

‘To Micky,’ Jamie poured the rough liquor down his throat, blinking as it exploded in his stomach and set his body on fire.

From somewhere a picture magically appeared on the desk as the glasses were refilled. ‘Me and Micky, Kharhov, ’forty-three, when his kompany was seconded from the Leningrad front. I was eighteen when that was taken, and with the Leibstandarte.’ He grinned. ‘Hitler’s bodyguard. The best. Let me tell you about Micky. Micky hated the Reds more than any man on this earth. Sure, we sometimes killed prisoners. They sometimes killed prisoners. So what? It was war. They’ll tell you that the Eastern Front was a nightmare. Hell on earth. No. The Eastern Front was a soldier’s paradise. Every man knew that if he was captured, he was dead. So you fought until your last bullet; and when that was gone, you fought with your entrenching tool, then your knife and finally with your teeth and your bare hands.’ He lifted his hands so Jamie could see them. Strong workman’s hands that looked as if they should still bear the bloodstains of half a century earlier. ‘We were the walking dead, and that made us the gods of the battlefield. Micky wasn’t real SS, not Waffen SS anyway, but I liked Micky. Problem was, he enjoyed killing prisoners. One day after we recaptured Kharkov I saw him pop twenty in a row and he never stopped smiling. Maybe they were commissars, maybe they weren’t. Twenty men and women kneeling in front of him. Pop. Pop. Pop.’ He pointed a finger and pulled the imaginary trigger in imitation of a hand gun. Jamie tried to square the image of Micky’s perpetual grin with the penitent Micky had claimed to be, praying for the souls of his victims, and failed. ‘I heard the Latvian Legion was wiped out in Courland, so I never expected to see Micky again. Then one day in the fifties he turns up in Hamburg. I’d got lucky; shrapnel in the leg fighting with the Hitler Jugend at Caen. Fortunately, the Canucks didn’t shoot the wounded, although they shot just about everybody else. By the time Micky knocks on my door, I’m in business for myself and working with HIAG helping out the old kameraden who weren’t so lucky. He needs help, he says, he’s back fighting the Reds, but this time with the CIA. I laughed, because the CIA was a big joke back then, but he was serious. They wanted to run agents into Latvia from Hamburg; Micky had convinced them he could put together the organization to make it happen. We have the people, we have the expertise — everybody in Hamburg knows someone who has a boat. So for about three years the SS is working with the Americans against the Soviets, and getting well paid for it. In maybe ’fifty-four, Micky’s star is fading and the Yanks work out that everybody they’re sending into Latvia is being snapped up soon as their feet hit the beach. The work dries up, but Micky is still smiling. He’s always been interested in art, he says one night when we’re having a drink at the Ferry House to wind up the operation. “I’m going to start an art gallery; would you know anyone who has any art to sell?” Now, Micky, he knows what happened in the war, in France and Italy and the Netherlands, when everybody was putting away their nest egg for the future. You were a trooper, you stuck a gold candlestick down your boot. You were a general, you filled a convoy of trucks with everything you could lay your hands on: paintings, sculptures, gold and silver bullion. Some of it was destroyed, some recovered by the Allies, but a lot of it was still around in attics and bank vaults and nobody had any idea what to do with it. “Give me a little at a time,” Micky says, “just the small stuff, no Old Masters, I’ll sell it for you at best price and take a commission.” So that’s how Micky started in business, and we’ve been in business ever since. I miss Micky.’

He dipped into the drawer again and came out with a pistol that Jamie recognized as a Walther P-38, oiled and gleaming and dangerous. He laid it on the desk in front of him and spun it until it came to rest with the barrel pointing directly at Jamie.

‘Why did you come here?’

Jamie pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and laid it on the desk beside the gun.

‘I’m trying to find out what happened to this man. It could save his life.’

The other man read it, sucking his teeth, and shaking his head. Eventually, he shrugged.

‘Maybe I can do something, maybe I can’t. It was a long time ago. Plenty of people disappeared because they wanted to and for good reason.’ He laid the paper back beside the gun. ‘Come back in two days and I’ll have an answer for you.’

He poured himself another drink and Jamie left him staring at the picture; an old man forever imprisoned by his youth.

Back in the club, Danny was dealing cards to the old soldiers. One of them looked up with a grin.

‘For God’s sake take her away. She’s raping us.’