‘Yes, Kenny,’ Vogelaar said calmly. ‘They warned me.’
‘And you’re betraying them?’
Vogelaar was silent.
‘You try to find fault with my morals, you reproach me with some promise I’ve supposedly made, and then you rat out the people who came to save your life.’ Xin nodded as though he had just learned a valuable lesson. ‘Look at that, just look at that. Unredeemed man. What did you tell the two of them about our adventure in Africa?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’d like to be,’ Vogelaar snarled. ‘In fact I offered them a deal. The dossier, for money. We were just about to make the exchange.’
‘That’s priceless,’ chuckled Xin.
‘And? What now?’
‘Sorry, old friend.’ Xin wiped a tear of laughter from the corner of his eye. ‘Life doesn’t offer all that many surprises, but this – and do you know what’s the best thing about it? I even considered that they might come and find you! Just as you consider the possibility that perhaps next week you’ll be hit by a meteorite, that perhaps there’s a God. I fly off to Berlin in a tearing hurry to prevent something that I never really – never! – thought would actually happen, but life – Jan, my dear Jan! Life is just too wonderful. Too wonderful!’
‘Get to the point, Kenny.’
Xin threw his hands in the air in a gesture that said, let’s all have a drink. A baron among his minions.
‘Good!’ he guffawed. ‘Why the hell not!’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s a promise. It means you have my promise! If everything runs on rails, no hiccups, no tricks from you, not even thinking about tricks, not even a wrinkle in the skin – then the two of you can live.’ He came closer and narrowed his eyes. His voice took on that hissing note again. ‘But if, contrary to my expectations, anything from that dossier becomes public, then I promise that Nyela will die by inches, you can’t even begin to imagine how! And you’ll be allowed to watch. You’ll see how I pull her teeth out one by one, see me cut off her fingers and toes, gouge out her eyes, I’ll flay the skin from her back in strips, and all that while Mickey here rapes her over and over again until there’s nothing left for him to fuck but a whimpering lump of bloody meat, and by then she’s still a long way from dead, Jan, a long way, I promise you that, and I’ll keep every one of these promises.’
Vogelaar felt Xin’s breath on his face, looked into those cold eyes, dark as night, felt Nyela tremble in his arms, heard his heartbeat in the sudden silence. He believed every word that Xin said.
With a dry crack, the faulty neon tube gave up the ghost.
‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘It’s a deal.’
Museum Island
In satellite images of Berlin, the Museum Island in the river Spree stuck out like a wedge, a kilometre and a half long, driven slapdash into the neatly laid parquetry of the city’s boulevards. An ensemble of imposing buildings, linked by broad paths and walkways, housing exhibits from over six thousand years of world history. Visitors could pass from huge halls the size of cathedrals, through quiet cloisters, to great courtyards flooded with light, could get lost in the megalomaniac grandeur of ancient architecture or lose track of time in silent galleries full of more human-scale artworks. At the northern end of the island, the Bode Museum towered above the water like some baroque ocean liner, its columned prow crowned with a great dome, while at the southern end of the whole complex a Classicist façade churned out crowds of visitors in its wake. Most imposing of all was the Pergamon Museum, a vast building like something glimpsed in a dream – if a bewhiskered German patriot of the nineteenth century had nodded off dreaming over a book of Greek myth. A huge, glowering central hall was flanked by two identical wings to either side, colossal rows of pillars marching off to end in Doric temple façades. The ground plan had originally been a U-shape, but in 2015 a fourth wing had been added, glassed-in, that made the building into a square. Here, as in no other museum on Earth, visitors could walk through millennia of human history, Egyptian, Islamic, Near Eastern and Roman.
Jericho had often crossed the island during trips to Berlin, taking one of the many bridges that moored it to the city, without ever having set foot in one of the museums. There had never been time. Now, as he hurried along the banks of the Spree, the thought that the time had finally come was not a cheering one. His jackets bulged with all the packets of money which made up Vogelaar’s payment. His Glock was in its holster, invisible to all. He looked like any other tourist, but he felt like the proverbial goose, off to meet the fox for dinner. As long as Vogelaar actually had the dossier, the two of them would make the exchange quite quietly and calmly, cash for information, and be on their way. If he didn’t, there would be trouble in store. The mercenary would want the money by hook or by crook, and he would certainly not rely on a smile and a kind word to get it.
Jericho felt his ear and slowed his pace.
The Pergamon Museum’s temple façade seemed to stare at him, each window a watchful eye. In the fourth wing, crowds of culture vultures jostled along the glass hallway, among the last surviving traces of lost empires. He walked on, glancing at his watch. Quarter past eleven. They had agreed on twelve o’clock, but Jericho wanted to get to know the location first. On his right, a long, modern building abutted the rest, its lower storey modelled after the older architecture while the top was a tall, airy colonnade: the James Simon Gallery, entrance to the museum island’s web of walkways. Visitors bustled across to the island in a chattering, sweating throng. Jericho joined the crowd crossing this arm of the Spree and was carried along up a grandiose stairway to the top floor of the gallery. He bought his ticket in a spacious hall lined with terraces and cafés, and followed the signs for the Pergamon Museum.
His first impression as he entered the southern wing of the museum was that he had walked into nirvana. The only feature in the room which tied it to earthly time and space was the Romanesque arched window towards the river. The exhibits were lifted clean out of any historical context, displayed in a space so huge it could almost be hyperspace, and looked splendid yet lonely at one and the same time, a chilly, hypothetical view of history. Jericho turned right and walked along a kind of street, with walls on either side, its frieze and battlements glowing with rich colour, reading the explanatory captions as he went. The animals in the frieze represented the Babylonian gods, with stately lions for Ishtar, goddess of love and protector of armies, serpentine dragons for Marduk, god of fertility and eternal life, patron of the city of Babylon, and wild bulls for Adad, lord of storms. Nebuchadnezzar II had ordered an inscription for the walls, reading ‘May ye walk in joy upon this Processional Way, oh ye gods.’ He could never have dreamed that the moment would come when groups of Japanese and Korean tourists would mill about in confusion here, losing their bearings amidst the grandeur of the past, hurrying to catch up with the wrong tour guide, confused by identical tabards. There was a model of Babylon in a glass cube, with a truncated pyramid in the middle soaring heavenwards; this was the ziggurat, the temple of Marduk. So that was where the God of the Old Testament had poured out his wrath, onto this surprisingly low tower, where he had confounded their language. Right then. This street had originally led to the ziggurat from the Ishtar Gate, which dominated the next hall, blue and yellow, glorious, shining like the sun, covered like the walls of the Way with the gods’ totem animals. The mass of visitors crowding the Way gave some idea of what it must have been like here at the time of the great processions.