“Maybe not, but there’s something ‘off’ about her,” said Spokes.
“Tell me,” said Foley, tossing the report.
“Ali, from the Moroccan teahouse on Susannenstrasse, has a daughter who cleans the apartment building’s communal spaces and Marleena’s condo. She says there’s a private elevator to Marleena’s quarters so she knows exactly who goes up there,” said Spokes. “And Leena, as she’s known, gets frequent visits from a number of older men in their fifties and sixties. Same ones, some regular, some not so regular. All times of day and night.”
“She’s brain damaged enough to turn hooker?”
“Maybe,” said Spokes, shrugging. “She underwent three neuro ops and she’s on antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers, which is what she has in her medicine cabinet, according to the cleaner.”
“What’s Schafer getting into now?” muttered Foley.
“Ali’s daughter cleans today. Leena will text her the elevator codes, which she changes later on.”
“Someone will have to go up there with her,” said Foley. “Get the Turk to join her.”
“Arslan?” said Spokes. “Isn’t that a bit… radical?”
“He’s just going to take a look at things,” said Foley. “But if we need him to be ‘radical,’ at least he knows the place. That way we limit the number of people who know about this.”
“You think it’s going to come to that?”
“People far more senior than I am have their jobs riding on the outcome of this,” said Foley. “And I’ve just heard from London that Schafer’s English buddy, Damian Rush, gets into Hamburg at eight-forty-five.”
“Under his own name?”
“He’s only a journalist now.”
“I’d better get out to the airport.”
“Look,” said Foley, nodding out toward the park.
They sipped their coffees as Marleena Remer walked past in an ankle-length, fur-collared black coat, a black fur hat, and gloves.
“You wouldn’t know it,” said Foley into his coffee.
Schafer woke up in the armchair, his head pounding so hard he kept absolutely still while he checked the room. There was a note on the towel in his lap. Leena, an address on the Schanzenstrasse, a telephone number, and a message: “Call me. I think we can help each other.” He checked his watch. 8:30. He’d slept for more than three hours. Unheard of in his state. He was more rested than he’d been in months.
As a wise, old operative he should have been uneasy about her, but instead he felt something he couldn’t quite define: almost like first love, but without the innocence. He stood, grunting under the pummeling his brain was taking.
The window revealed a bleak dawn, fleisch grossmarkt still shone blue, but a building was taking shape beneath it as the bare branches of the trees by the railway tracks flailed in the wind. Patches of green showed through the snow. His eyes came to rest on the window ledge on which there were sharp wire spokes. On the seventh floor they weren’t there to stop people getting in.
He slurped down three Tylenol with water from the sink in the bathroom. He showered and dressed. In a sudden return of his occupational paranoia he made a meticulous search of his room and found nothing, which was as he’d expected, but it left him unnerved, too. He went down to breakfast. It was going to be a long, hard day.
A bowl of muesli. Fried bacon, blutwurst, and eggs. Ham and cheese on rye. Four sweet coffees and some pastries. He was going to need some insulation out there. Zero, with an ugly wind coming from the North. He went straight out, wearing a thick sweater under a reversible coat-blue showing, brown not. He also had a couple of hats and some spectacles-a few basic tools to disguise himself.
In this sort of weather he’d have normally taken the U-Bahn from Schlump into the Gänsemarkt, but he wanted to see what sort of resources the Company had at its disposal, so he opted for a walk in the park around the deserted Japanischer Garten. It was cold and damp, and his trousers stiffened up like cardboard before he’d even crossed the road beneath the TV tower.
Since 9/11 and the discovery of the Hamburg cell the Company had developed plenty of immigrants-Turks, Moroccans, Iranians-for basic footwork: listening in at the mosques and sniffing around the Koran schools. The Company wouldn’t want too many of them to know that they were being used to tail an ex-colleague, but it wouldn’t have to worry about loyalty from those who did.
The café in the park was closed, the chairs stacked and the umbrellas under wraps, waiting for spring, which seemed a long way off. The water features below had been drained so that they wouldn’t freeze over. The plants in huge stone half-eggs had been bagged against the frost. The park, as he’d suspected, was empty of people.
Schafer spotted his first tail at the Stephansplatz U-Bahn station ahead of him. A square-headed guy, probably from the Maghreb, who was standing at the entrance of the station, freezing cold, making a show of reading a newspaper. He led him down Dammtorstrasse to the Gänsemarkt. He used to come to this square as a kid with his mother, although it was a triangle and there had never been any geese; it had always been a big part of his family life at Christmas. The lights were on in the huge arched windows of Essen & Trinken, and there was some snow gone to ice on its green copper roof. Schafer quickly lost his tail in the station, saw him looking up and down the wrong platform as he boarded the train to Jungfernstieg.
Coming out of the underground Schafer turned his back on the gray, choppy expanse of the Binnenalster Lake and counted across the buildings from left to right. Third building. Fourth row of windows. Second along. The blind was down. Damian telling him he had company. What did he expect? He’d been arrogant to think that they could pull this off unnoticed. He went to the S-Bahn station and left a chalk mark on the inside of the right-hand steel support. Plan B.
He took a walk down the Alsterfleet canal by the side of the Rathaus. He wanted to see the Elbe but drifted onto the Altstadt square in front of the neorenaissance facade of the nineteenth-century town hall, which looked black and Gothic in the gloom. Back in 1962, at the age of ten, he’d stood here with his parents for a remembrance service to the three hundred victims of the North Sea flood. He recalled the great sadness of the adult crowd on that day, which as a child he hadn’t been able to comprehend. He felt more emotional about it now than he had then.
When he arrived at the river Elbe, which was flat as sheet iron at this point, he began to wonder what he was doing. He stared across the water, at the cranes ranked along the port quays, with eyes that had always kept the secrets they’d seen. Now he was going to blow it all open, and he realized there was something valedictory about his movements around his old town.
He got on a train at the Landungsbrücken station. First things first, he had to collect what he was supposed to pick up last night at the reading before the woman, Leena, had thrown everything into disarray. He headed back out to Schlump. Was this any sort of a job for a grown man? Endlessly going around in circles, finding different ways to check your back?
Now that he was on the train and certain that he was free of tails, he took stock. The drinking was out of control-that was clear. He tried to retrace the scene in the bookstore last night, but he still couldn’t remember meeting Leena. How could he forget that? She was the whole reason he’d left without what he’d gone in there for. But he did realize that. He had come out empty-handed… hadn’t he? His certainty wavered in his paranoid mind. Was that why he was so anxious to get to the bookstore? Why he’d searched his room? To make sure he hadn’t picked up, taken the material back to his hotel room, and let Leena walk away with it this morning? He knew it hadn’t happened like that. For a start, she wouldn’t have been there when he woke up. He’d definitely aborted the mission. But he had to work his way back through the fog, blankness, and memory obliteration of booze to get to it.