‘Did you think I’d died in the crash?’ she asked.
‘I never would have believed it,’ he said. He took her chin and guided her face to his. There were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m here to rescue you, of course.’
‘How very you.’
She stepped back but kept a grip on his coat. She looked left and right. Danny followed her eyes each time. He smiled with half of his mouth.
‘If it’s legal trouble, I’m your lawyer.’
‘Family discount?’
‘Nice try.’
Jem walked alone to the edge of the deck. It was rotating perceptibly. A rail protected the slanted glass panels. She looked for St Mary’s Church and the Warenhaus. Traffic leaked between buildings. At her elbow, an English boy in a Manchester United T-shirt listened to his father tell the story of a wall that once cut Berlin in two.
‘Here,’ said her brother. ‘Without milk.’
Jem took the coffee. She imagined the cup falling through the glass and down the tower.
‘How many sugars did you put in this?’
‘Two. Looks cold down there.’
She sipped. ‘The wind comes from Russia today. It was on the radio.’
‘So you learned German.’
‘Don’t ask me to translate Nietzsche, but I’m a black belt in fruit and vegetables.’
‘Black belt, she says.’
Jem laughed, but felt the next throwaway remark die inside her. This conversation was a tipping point. Here was Danny. She only had to push and the baggage of memory would totter over this cliff and drop away, forever out of mind. Danny was here because he did not want to lose her again. So be it. She could fuse her half with his. Return to England in disgrace.
‘Jem, I brought you a pressie.’
‘Let me say something first.’
‘Wait. This is important.’ He took a doll from one of the deep pockets in his coat. It was six inches tall and wooden. It wore a Tyrollean hat. Jem remembered deciding, as a twelve-year-old girl, that all Germans wore hats like that. Tucked into its crimson band was a feather whose highlights had been brushed on by an old doll-maker in Bremen. ‘Hänsel,’ her father had said. ‘To rhyme with ‘pencil’.’ The doll still had its ambiguous expression.
‘Poor Hänsel. What happened to Gretel?’
‘They were separated, I suppose. I found Hänsel on eBay. He’s a collector’s item.’
In her little sister voice, she said, ‘But is he our Hänsel?’
Danny lay the doll across her palm. She inspected the elbows, the knees, and the head. Hänsel’s cheeks were expertly freckled. His eyes, however, were dead.
‘I know what you’re looking for,’ Danny said.
‘There are no holes.’
‘There were never any holes,’ he said. ‘There were never any strings.’
The half-remembered notes of a music box picked through the tower. The turning tower.
Ich ruf zu Dir.
I call to thee.
‘Danny, how can you even look at me?’
She had never told her brother, face to face, that she loved him. Not once. But, at this realisation, her eyes stopped on something that reset her thoughts.
A man stood at the vanishing point of the curving deck. He wore a black leather jacket, buttoned, and an English flat cap, reversed. His hips were slanted and his eyes easy. His grin was too broad; it underscored his awkwardness. Even at this distance, Jem could see the bruise beneath his right eye, and it reminded her of the steady right hand of Saskia Brandt. What was he doing here? She had last seen him half-senseless against a pew in the Trinity Church. A man propped up by his desperation. He began to walk towards them.
She whispered, ‘It’s Wolfgang.’
‘Your friend from uni?’
Wolfgang no longer seemed like the player who could cut coke with any number of household chemicals when the con work dried up. His eyes were bloodshot. On top of everything, thought Jem, he was probably going cold turkey. The three of them made a strange triangle. The twins kept their backs to the panorama while Wolfgang, his face cooled by the light, smiled with a patience that bordered on British.
‘This is Danny,’ she said.
Wolfgang shook his hand. ‘Jem talks about you all the time. Big Danny.’
‘Hello, Wolfgang. Guyliner? You shouldn’t have.’
The German chuckled, touching a hand to his bruise and said nothing more. The expectation shifted to Jem, but she could not voice her questions for Wolfgang without presenting a version of herself that she wanted to withhold from her brother. She sipped her coffee and tried to read Wolfgang’s demanding eyes. The silence was interrupted by her vibrating phone, number withheld. She mumbled an apology and took the call.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego. ‘The person who has just joined you is wearing a device that transmits your conversation by radio.’
She blinked.
‘What?’
‘The man is wearing a ‘wire’. He is ‘bugged’.’
‘OK, OK.’
‘Say ‘who’.’
Jem switched ears and looked at the horizon. ‘Who?’
‘I would advise you and your brother to leave immediately. Now say, ‘Sorry, wrong number’.’
‘Sorry. Wrong number.’
Ego hung up. There was no dialling tone. Just emptiness. She kept the phone to her ear and tried to assemble a plan, but she was panicking. Wolfgang must have been arrested in the Trinity Church. And here he was, wearing different clothes. So the police had let him go back to the apartment to change. Had that been why she’d found the police officer waiting outside the apartment? It had to be one of those plea-bargain things. But what had Wolfgang offered the police? Saskia? Jem?
She looked at Danny. If she tried to leave the tower with him, he would be incriminated. She didn’t know what to do. She said, ‘He’s wearing a wire.’
‘A wire?’ Danny raised his eyebrows and turned to look, down, on Wolfgang.
The hustler gunned his charm. He laughed. ‘Clever girl. I told him it wouldn’t work. You’re as smooth as your friend Saskia, aren’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Tease,’ he shot back. His apparent good humour only emphasised his malice. ‘The police talked to you outside my apartment yesterday. They know about Saskia, the meeting at the church, and the officer she assaulted. They know that she tried to frame me. There’s nothing they don’t know. She bought your ticket to Milan, for Christ’s sake.’
Danny put two fingers on Wolfgang’s collarbone. ‘Step back from my sister.’
‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Jem.
Wolfgang looked beyond them. ‘Scheisse,’ he hissed. He frowned into the turning crowd. Jem followed his eye until she saw the smartly-dressed police officer who had stood in the rain outside Wolfgang’s apartment. He had one arm around a telescope, and it flopped skyward as he forged towards them, craning around the children and prams, skirting the hooked teenage couples, apologising to the adults.
Jem’s phone vibrated. It was a text message from Ego.
We’ve been found. I’m under attack. Leave immediately.
Before Jem could sort her thoughts—found by whom? The police? How could Ego be under attack when he was in her purse?—the officer gripped her upper arm. She yelped and the phone tumbled to the floor. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are under–’
Danny had put his hip into the punch. It landed between the policeman’s jaw and his ear. He fell against Jem. In the bubble of interest that spread from the punch to the crowd, she remembered Saskia turning in the night wind, reaching for her.