Rhinoceros

'The shower's for me, too. I'm not very hungry.'

'You will be if you don't eat – hungry in the middle of the night.'

'He's gone!'

She had stolen a glance up the street and it was deserted. Tweed looked, grunted, took her arm, guided her across to the pavement on the other side of the street. A whole line of vehicles, many of them large trucks, were parked for the night.

'He's gone into one of the arcades we passed on our way to see Harry,' Tweed explained. 'Walking up this side of the street we're almost invisible behind these trucks if he reappears…'

They reached the main street running past the platform and landing stage. Tweed was about to turn left when Paula tugged at his arm. She nodded to her right.

A short distance away a tall man in a straw hat was operating a video camera. Mark Wendover. As they watched, with his back to them he swivelled the camera to take pictures of the Alster, of a ferry coming in. Then he quickly swivelled it into a different direction, aiming the lens at a building – the entrance, the ground floor windows, higher up to the first floor. The imposing building was the Zurcher Kredit Bank.

'He's at it again,' Paula protested. 'Doing his own thing. Mavericking.'

'Well, if that's the way he works…'

'Something I've been meaning to tell you,' Paula said as they approached the hotel entrance. 'Kept slipping what passes for my mind. Before we left Park Crescent – you were out of the room – Monica told me that when that awful screaming started on the Internet the phone went dead.'

'It did?' replied Tweed dismissively. 'I thought she was calling various contacts to see if their systems were all right.'

'That was later,' Paula said emphatically. 'She reckons the phone was dead during the whole awful experience. Afterwards, too. For a couple of minutes.'

'A glitch…'

'Listen, do! The Internet is linked to the phone system.'

'Intriguing.'

Annoyed, Paula gave up. When she reached her room she dived into the bathroom to take the shower she would have welcomed hours earlier.

In his room Tweed postponed the shower while he called Cord Dillon at his private number in his apartment.

'What is it, Tweed?' a sleepy voice enquired. 'It's morning here – and I'm not an early riser unless I have to be.'

'Mark Wendover. What kind of a detective agency does he run in New York?'

'Corporate work. Embezzlement. Someone dipping their hand into the till. In a big way. How is Mark?'

'Thriving.'

'Is that all? Good. Thank God

Tweed took out his doodle pad, scribbled Zurcher Kredit, put a large loop round it, joined Rondel's loop to it, then Mark's. He stared at the pad for a few minutes, the non-working end of his pen in his mouth. He grunted, then went into the bathroom for his shower.

Earlier that evening, after shouting her head off at Tweed, Lisa had stormed back to her room. When she opened the door she saw an envelope had been slipped under it into the room. She took it out of the envelope, saw it was a hotel record of a phone message.

Call me urgently. Go to the main railway station to make the call. Rocco.

She left her room immediately. Leaving the hotel, she walked. Every now and again she paused, fiddled with one of her sandals as though it had picked up a stone. This gave her the chance to glance back, to check she wasn't being followed.

The station wasn't crowded when she arrived. It was Germanic, vast and with a very high roof. She went into an empty phone cubicle, called the number. A familiar voice answered.

'Lisa, would you like to make a hundred thousand marks?'

'What did you say?'

'I think you heard me. I want you to gain all the information you can from Tweed from now on. How many in his team? Where is he going? In Hamburg. Outside Hamburg? And the only person you report this information to is me…'

'Just a minute,' she said. 'Someone is trying to get in here.'

She turned round. A man she had never seen was holding a white envelope. He thrust it into her hand, said it was for her, then departed.

'You've got the envelope,' the voice on the phone commented. 'Now count the contents. I'll wait.'

She opened it. A thick sheaf of 1,000 DM banknotes. She checked. 10,000 DM. She checked again. No, 100,000 DM. In English money, roughly?30,000. She slipped the envelope inside her handbag.

'Remember, you report only to me…'

She had never had so much money in her life.

CHAPTER 17

Tweed and Paula were having dinner in the Grill Room. They had the only table occupied on the balcony, which gave them a good view down into the restaurant below. There were just a few guests, even though they were on the edge of July.

'Not so many people as I'd have expected,' Paula commented. 'I think it must be the heat – it has even penetrated up here.'

She was eating scrambled eggs – not on the menu but she'd explained to the waiter she wasn't very hungry owing to the heat.

'Most unusual, Madame, for Hamburg,' the waiter replied. 'A heatwave is something we rarely experience.'

'I see Newman is sitting at a table over by the wall and has Mark with him,' Tweed remarked. 'As we came in I heard Mark asking if he could join him, as he hated eating alone.'

'Keeping up the pretence they don't know each other,' Paula observed.

'And Marler is having sandwiches and a drink in the lounge by himself. From that position he can observe anyone who comes in here. Doesn't miss a trick, our Marler. Don't look now, but you'll never guess in a hundred years who has just sat down at a table by himself. By the wall,' said Tweed.

'Tell me – or I'll have to look.'

'The Brig. Bernard, Lord Barford. Wearing a white dinner jacket.'

'On a sweltering night like this?' Paula exclaimed.

'Oh, typical of him. You dress for dinner whatever the temperature. He'll have done that hundreds of times in the mess when he was in the Army.'

'Heavens.' Tweed's observation had just sunk in on Paula. 'He's the last man on earth I'd have expected to turn up here. What's going on?'

'I haven't any idea.'

'You don't believe in coincidences. And Hamburg wasn't one of the places Aubrey, his drunken son, included when he told me over lunch at Martino's where the Brig often flies to. I wonder why he keeps Hamburg so secret?' Paula said.

'I simply couldn't even guess.'

Tweed was making short work of his Dover sole. He was famished. Both of them had avoided alcohol, were drinking water to ward off dehydration.

'Has he spotted us?' Paula enquired as she finished off the last of her scrambled eggs.

'No. He didn't look up here as he came in. Now he's concentrating on reading some documents.'

'He probably will see us when we leave, go down the steps from this balcony.'

'We'll try and choose a moment when he's surrounded by waiters serving him. They do have plenty of waiters.' Tweed put down his knife and fork, checked his watch below the table cloth.

'What's our next objective – after we've visited Dr Kefler?'

'To locate and identify Rhinoceros. Coffee? Dessert?'

'Not for me,' Paula decided.

'Then now might be a good moment to leave.'

As they descended the stairs into the main restaurant, Paula had a good look at the unexpected arrival. A covey of waiters hovered round him as they served a steak. She thought he looked very alert, his hand movements agile, very much in command of himself, sitting erect as a ramrod.

'He didn't see us,' Paula said as they walked into the lounge.

'Don't kid yourself. He's a spry bird. Doesn't miss much.'

Marler was seated by himself, shielded from other guests by a palm tree. Tweed walked slowly, dropped a crumpled piece of paper into his lap, continued walking.

'What was the note about?' Paula wondered.