Had there been a waitress who hovered at a table further out in the restaurant and who was blessed with sharp hearing, she would have eavesdropped on the quiet voice of the man called the Friend, who said, ‘I’m more inclined towards the optimist than the pessimist, the glass half full rather than half empty. I think we’ll have him tomorrow morning. We go, gentlemen, and stake out. We’re old men but a bad evening in Lubeck is a good enough opportunity for old skills to be dusted off. I’m confident we’ll locate him and then the opportunity will present itself for the strike. The morning, tomorrow, would be best. I would like to say that it’s been a real pleasure to be a colleague of both of you. If we travel tomorrow, early, there will be no chance of farewells. I do it now, gentlemen.’
They went out into a bitter night: one to go to Roeckstrasse, one to the medical school on the university campus, and one to meet the ferry from Telleborg to greet a man considered expert at his work.
They came to Lubeck. It had been a slow train with stops, and the carriage had been crowded. For part of the journey he had stood and she had sat. For the first twenty-five minutes out of Hamburg she had been sandwiched between a black-skinned girl, who ate pastries, scattering crumbs, and managed to talk continuously on a mobile phone, and a youth with orange-dyed hair in a standing strip over the crown of his head, the sides shaven, metal rings in his ears and eyelids. When they’d left the carriage, the girl had brushed the remainder of the crumbs off her lap, but the boy had said something politely that she did not understand as he had stepped over her feet.
She was exhausted. He had looked for a lift to take her from the platform to the concourse, but there was none, and it had been a laborious effort for her to climb the steps.
The Engineer had sufficient English to ask for the hotel, at an information kiosk. He said that the hotel into which he was booked with his wife was on Lindenstrasse. The woman had been filing her nails and looked at him as if he were an interruption; she had pointed out where they should go, and passed him a small map with the street heavily underlined.
His wife asked if they could take a taxi, and he said it was, on the map, only a hundred metres or so… They should have used a taxi. She leaned more heavily now on his arm and the case squealed on its wheels. There was sleet in the air and a thin film had settled on her shoulders and in her hair. They passed a bench where a bearded old man sat with an opened bottle beside him, then statues to Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck. He did not know who they were or why they were commemorated. He looked again at the map and realised he had gone too far along the street and must turn to the right. She sighed heavily, blamed him.
They had to cross a major road but went with other pedestrians, and then they were in Lindenstrasse. The hotel was an old, white-painted building. He had expected something modern, glass and steel. He helped her up the steps and bounced the case after him.
They were at Reception. A girl was there, young and blonde. She wore a low-cut blouse and leaned towards him across her desk. He sensed Naghmeh’s recoil. She queried his business there and he answered that he had a reservation. She asked, of course, in what name. In what name? He turned away from her. He felt a fool. He had to reach inside his jacket pocket, produce the Czech passports, flick one open and look at the name. He should have memorised it on the first flight, the second or third, or on the train. He grinned, played the idiot, and displayed the page of the passport that carried a name and his photograph. Both were taken, photocopied, handed back. Registration forms were given to them. He said, in his difficult English, that his wife was not well. He made a meaningless scribble on his form in the signature box, and asked for the key. It was given him, with a sealed envelope.
They took the lift, went along a corridor and heard TVs. He unlocked the door. It was an ordinary room, with a double bed and a wardrobe, a small desk and a television on the wall. A door led to a bathroom with a walk-in shower.
She looked around her and sagged. In the hotel in Tehran there had been a bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers because of who they were. Not here. He opened the envelope as she sat heavily on the bed. It was handwritten, not signed, on the hotel’s paper, and said at what time they would be collected. He checked his watch. They had an hour and ten minutes to pass. Was she hungry? She shook her head.
She lay down, eyes closed. Pain seemed to cramp her. He had created her exhaustion, her loss of dignity, because he could not face life without her. Her breathing was ragged.
The Engineer found a magazine and read about Lubeck, what an old Hanseatic trading city offered the visitor and where marzipan could be bought.
How long could he hold out? Two more cigarettes had been lit but he had seen at least another six in the packet. He might hold his silence for the next and perhaps the one after that. Foxy didn’t know how long his body would allow further resistance. Pain travelled from the burn points, the cuts, the bruising, the splits and the wrecked gums to his brain.
The goon, Foxy realised, was not trained. He had no experience of the dark interrogation arts. He understood only physical force and the infliction of pain. But men would come, elbow him out. They would have the same skills as the interrogators from the Joint Forward Intelligence Team in Basra, whom he had sat alongside and done ‘terp’ work for. All the basics were used by the Brit interrogators: sleep deprivation, stress postures, hours under the hood that was a thick hessian sack made for sandbags, slaps, kicks and shrieking in the ears. Big, proud men were broken by them, as he would be. Foxy would be broken, lose the resolve… so what had all the pain been for? Might he not at the start have coughed who he was, his name and mission… He had bought time.
He didn’t know how much more he could buy. The man across the room from him, exhausted, breathed heavily. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. His fingers trembled and the wood shivered in his hand. Frustration, obvious, built in the goon’s head. The next spate of violence would be uncontrolled aggression and Foxy would suffer… knew it. But didn’t know how long it mattered that his silence held. When he had been the interpreter for the JFIT people in Basra, he had never seen one of them show anger, lose their cool. He knew the routine: questions, silence, beating and kicking, silence, burning – knew it and waited for it. How long did they need? More than an hour? More than one more beating and two cigarettes? Foxy couldn’t remember what the gaunt little American, with the hook for a hand, had said or what was called a ‘code of conduct’ with a prisoner.
He lay on the cell floor, trussed, roped to the wall and knew it was coming soon: a bad beating and kicking, and a burning.
A decision that only Mansoor could make: to give up on him and wait for the senior officers to come, or to try one more time.
He had been exhausted and had spent time leaning against the table – not sitting. He had been brought a glass of juice by one of the Basij peasants; the guard had had no stomach for what he had seen, the prisoner on the concrete floor, and had vomited his last meal. He had drunk the juice, which had refreshed him, given clarity to his thoughts. The two guards inside the cell, minding the door, had not spoken during the long hours. He thought they were terrified by what they had seen. He knew they looked away when he used a cigarette to burn. They did not interrupt the growing understanding he had.