Last thing, as he'd gone for cover, she'd yelled,
'When I'm back, I'll have you stripped as bare as the day you were born, believe it. I'll be getting more than your blood group, religion and your damn number.
Try me.'
Chapter Fourteen
'It's quite a read, your life, isn't it?' She gazed at him, her mouth set. The eyes behind the spectacles were big and seemed to bore into him. Malachy looked away from her.
'And that's only the digest that I've been sent. I suppose when the whole lot of it spews up it gets worse.'
'I don't look for sympathy/ he muttered.
'Wouldn't have thought, where you're coming from, there were too many barrowloads of pity. Can you talk about it? I'm not a shrink, don't know about couch therapy.'
She'd found him in a squared-off sunken area on the edge of the Japanese garden. A feeble fountain trilled a spray down into a stone-banked pool and its drops mingled with the rain. The blossom snow covered his shoulders and the cobbles round his feet, and had begun to form a covering on her hair. They were together on a bench and the wind was in the trees, but they were protected from it by the high shrubs that encircled them. He felt a sharp spasm of anger.
'I don't go scavenging for a shoulder to cry on. For a simple reason, I don't give explanations for what happened, for what I did. I don't know what happened.'
'That's a good enough line. In your boots I'd stick with it.'
'Hear me again… I don't know what happened – everybody else does, but not me.'
'They called you a coward.' She seemed to roll the word on her tongue, as if it were strange to her, not a word she had used before. Beyond her experience.
But she said it with a boldness, coward, like it was of no importance to her if he were hurt by the word. 'My boss has dug it up. Seems there were other descriptions of you, but all end up in the same locker, "coward". Were they correct in their assessment?'
'I don't know. That's not just soap and water to wash it out. It's what I'm tagged with… but I don't know. Why, Miss Wilkins, do you not just go and find something else to do?'
Her face, which had been cold, chilled further. Her voice had edge: 'I am trying to make a decision that involves you. Do I spend time with you? Do I dump you and walk away? My work is on a short fuse of opportunity and I am loath to waste the few opportunities available to me in semantic bloody sparring with you. I work at VBX and-'
Malachy said, 'I know what's at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, haven't been there but people from the place came to us.'
She flared, 'Learn, please, not to damn well interrupt me. I am wet through, tired and hungry and… I am tasked, for reasons that have sod-all to do with you, to investigate Timo Rahman, godfather, brothel-owner and people-trafficker. What do I find? I find, on hour one, a guy in dosser's gear hanging on Rahman's security fence with the dogs of hell trying to pull him off it, and the dosser is a former Brit officer whom I then learn has enough disgrace on his back to bury him. This guy is now a fox, no cover to run to, with the hounds baying and bloody horns tooting
… What's extraordinary about the fox, he's put his head over the wall and gone into the hounds' kennelyard. That is either death-wish stupidity or courage based on purpose. Are you going to help me make my decision?'
'If it were easy… '
'Don't wriggle, get honest. For God's sake, look at me.' Her arm snaked out, her wet hand snatched at his chin, her fingers caught the flesh and her nails pressed on his jawbone. She twisted his face towards hers. He blinked, but did not try to break her grip.
'Are you worth any of my time or not? Two sorts of bravery that I can think of. Physical – blokes jumping out of aeroplanes, running across open ground chucking hand grenades at pill-boxes, doing boys' games stuff. Don't know, but I'd reckon that's the easy bit.
Try the next one. Moral, standing against the flow, not crossing to the other side of the road to avoid involvement, being your own person. Going into Timo Rahman's garden is bravery, but I don't know which.
Do I stay or do I dump you? I give you my word, you'll get no sympathy from me. Tell it like it was, not all the crap about Iraq and what you were called and how far you fell, but what brought you here. Tell it straight.'
He felt the grip on his chin and jawbone slacken.
Her spectacles had misted and the blossom flakes obscured her penetrating gaze. Malachy began haltingly, as if a great shyness enveloped him, to tell a story of an old lady – widow of a London Transport bus driver – who had gone to bingo alone. 'But it was not for her, it was for me. It was to be able to stand and not back away, confront and not flinch. I'm not proud.'
'Just get on with it,' she said.
He told her about a pyramid, where the vagrants were at the base, and about the High Fly Boys who were the next stratum up.
A manhunt fanned out across streets, parks, hotels, churches, clubs and pavement cafes to search for the owner of a brown fleck overcoat.
The target area was the city where a fortress had been built in the ninth century on the instructions of Ludwig the Pious, son of Charlemagne, at the junction of the Alster, Bille and Elbe rivers.
An army of men was mobilized, all of ethnic
Albanian origin, and had the common factor of loyalty to the fis, the clan, headed by the absolute authority of Timo Rahman. Ignorant of history, driven by obedience to Timo Rahman, men were briefed by the kryetar, the under-bosses, and were directed to smaller squares on the city map where they should seek a prey. In charge of each crew, of not more than ten men, was a chef. That morning, the codes and disciplines of distant Albanian villages settled on the streets of Hamburg. Word passed to the smallest groups that a cheap hotel on the Steindamm had yielded up the remnants of the fugitive's clothes, and a description – taken from a terrified Tunisian at his reception desk – was given them.
The Hauptbahnhof was watched and the passengers leaving on Inter City Express trains were checked. Men stood idly by the ticket machines at U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations. They were at the checkin counters of the airport, and at the terminus for long-distance buses. It was as if a foreign virus spread in the veins of a great city.
Among the hunting packs, spread out across the length and breadth of Hamburg – from Poppenbuttel in the north and to Maschen in the south, from Eidelstadt in the west and Mummelmannsberg in the east – there was desperate enthusiasm for success, to win the praise of the pate, Timo Rahman, and his gratitude.
A kryetar directed a chef to work his crew along the length of the park, the Planten und Blumen. That crew, five of them, who were all from a remote village close to the Macedonian border, made a line across the gardens, with their chef on the central path. They were house thieves, skilled pickpockets and pimps, and they made slow, careful progress from the park's St Pauli end. They knew nothing of the heritage or history of the city around them. Prosperity, wealth, opportunity made a flame that attracted moths. They were from the immigrant masses that had surged inside the city. Welcomed at first because they provided the menial labour force, they had later become detested when they changed the nature and culture of Hamburg.
Only Timo Rahman, the power and the untouch able, had the authority to stage a search of such magnitude, to cast a net of that width… None knew why a man had so crossed the pate that hundreds hunted him. The crew with their chef, all dreaming of the reward of success, moved through the park, passed the great justice building where thieves, pickpockets and pimps were sentenced, and the walls of the remand gaol where they were held before conviction – none looked at the court or the prison. As the rain poured down on them, they hunted a man.