If a flight was delayed long enough, then by the end of the wait, he felt he could write the biography of almost everyone on the aeroplane.
As the group rose to board, the American in the open-necked shirt walked past where he was sitting. Their glances met again but they did not exchange a word, or even a nod. In that instant, Harper, new to his line of work, felt that although he was a man excluded from civilian life, with no real nationality or home, he was part of something else: a kind of brotherhood, an understanding that would only be acknowledged in the briefest of looks. There was a community of shadow men out there, around the world, in airports and railway stations — on the streets, hidden in hotel rooms, disguised as ordinary people and indistinguishable to everyone but others of their kind, all ghosts, all invisible, all playing the same game. He had been inducted.
Lots of training, lots of games, lots of sex: that was how he remembered those years in Amsterdam leading up to ’65. He was a young man in his twenties and apart from a multiply-divorced mother who drank so much she didn’t know who he was sometimes, he had no ties, no obligations. He didn’t look like the people around him but he didn’t look definitively like anyone else either. Part-something.
The trick to being unusual was learning how to milk it. He liked to use the geography of his birth to wrong-foot people, especially women he was trying to bed. He liked to choose exactly the right moment to reveal a little about himself — after a few drinks together, when their gazes had locked once or twice. Maybe there had been a light touch or two, a brushing of a sleeve, a hand resting briefly on a knee, although that would have been quite forward in those days. In the early sixties, as he remembered, a woman’s favourite way of inviting physical contact was to pick a bit of fluff off your suit jacket, often with a brusque, maternal swipe of the hand. After a certain amount of this, a certain amount of her batting him around like a small boy, came the point when he could start taking the initiative. These small physical gestures were only indicators, though. The real movement forward came when the talking started, when they began exchanging stories. That was when he knew he was home and dry.
One of his favourite gambits was to ask her where she was born: always so much more tactful than asking a woman how old she was. You could get tripped up that way if you weren’t carefuclass="underline" they had a tendency to ask you to guess, a question which was surprisingly hard to answer to your own advantage. If you stuck to where rather than when, it was a neat and simple way into intimacy. You couldn’t say to a woman, ‘Tell me your unhappiest childhood memory,’ straight off, but when they told you where they were born, the conversation automatically became more intimate. The tragic detail from her childhood would be lying in wait at the end of that simple, factual answer. Sometimes there wasn’t one, of course — sometimes the story of her birthplace was routine, told with a self-deprecating laugh in acknowledgement of its ordinariness. And then, because she was a nice woman — he only went for nice women — she would ask back.
The pause. The downward look. The soft voice that indicated this was not something that he usually confided in a person he had only just met.
‘I was born in a concentration camp.’
The best bit was the steady gaze he received, tinged with confusion, as the woman he was talking to recalibrated what little she knew of him, this tall young man with brown but not-dark skin and thick but straight black hair, who looked definitively un-Dutch but not definitively anything else.
Once, but only once, one of them said it out loud, sceptically, ‘You don’t look Jewish.’
Was it Alida who had said that? No, Alida came later. Alida came after ’65. Alida was the one who looked for the scars on his back: the scars that weren’t there.
Once, in a bar on Gravenstraat, a pale freckled woman with large breasts but unfortunate teeth came up to him while he was sitting on a high stool and stood next to him, waiting to be served. He wasn’t really out for the night, just having a beer after work, making the same one last until he was ready to go: Frankenmuth, brewed for modern American tastes. She stood a little closer than was necessary, considering the bar wasn’t all that crowded, she staggered a little — she was quite drunk, he thought — and put her hand on his thigh to steady herself, before saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ and then snatching the hand away, as if his thigh was hot.
The bartender came up to them and rested his wrists on the bar, looking at them expectantly, and the woman said, ‘Oh, it’s me now, thank you darling. Can you do a Pink Squirrel? Two of them.’ She held her fingers up in a V-for-victory sign.
The bartender looked at them with such disdain that Harper wanted to say, please, the second one isn’t for me.
‘Oh, okay,’ she said then. ‘Two Old-fashioneds.’ She looked at Harper. ‘My friend’s in the corner there. She’s really nice.’
They made small talk while the bartender mixed the drinks. Behind the rows of bottles on the wooden shelves, there was a mirrored surface that reflected the jewelled golds and browns and oranges of the various liquors. When he moved his head, he could glimpse different shards of their reflections; her hairline, an eye or ear, his nose. She turned her back to the bar, placing both elbows on it, and surveyed the room as if they were spies, before talking from the side of her mouth.
‘I’ve never met a neger before,’ she said. ‘Me and my friend are going to a party later, want to come along, meet my friends? They’re really nice people, they’d be interested to meet you.’
Up until that point, he had been giving it some serious thought. ‘Thanks,’ he said, picking up the change he had left on the bar and pocketing it. ‘But I’ve already met more than enough white people.’
*
‘Choose an Anglo name,’ his trainer at the Institute had told him, as they sat with clipboards in the meeting room and worked their way through the details of his new identity for travel purposes. ‘Something that’s easy for anyone to understand, something nice and neutral. Not Smith, for heaven’s sake. Barnhardt actually chose Smith.’
Nicolaas Den Herder, born on the island of Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies, to a white Dutch mother and an Indo officer in the Dutch Colonial Army, had already changed his surname to Luther, then to Aaltink, then back to Den Herder.
He thought about it.
‘Favourite film star? Childhood pet?’ the trainer said helpfully.
‘My mind’s gone blank.’ How was it possible to name yourself?
The trainer sighed, lifted a sheet of paper on his clipboard, looked down and said, ‘Walton, Fullerton, Jamieson, Johnson, Harper, Headley. .’