Ten years later, Uli Kleist now stood in the sun on a Hamburg quayside and grinned at the slim young man who had fired those two shots over his head in the cramped airliner cabin so long ago.
“What brings you to Hamburg, Tom?”
“Let me buy you dinner, and I’ll tell you.”
They ate spicy Hungarian food at a csarda in one of the back streets of Sankt Pauli, well away from the bright lights and high prices of the Reeperbahn, and washed it down with Bull’s Blood. Rowse talked, Kleist listened.
“Ja, sounds like a good plot,” he said eventually. “I didn’t read your books yet. They are translated into German?”
“Not yet,” said Rowse. “My agent’s hoping to get a German contract. It would help—Germany’s a big market.”
“So, there is a living to be made from writing this thriller fiction?”
Rowse shrugged. “It pays the rent.”
“And this new one, the one about terrorists and arms dealers and the White House—you have a title for it?”
“Not yet.”
The German considered. “I will try and get you some information—research purposes only, yes?” He laughed and tapped his nose, as if to say, Of course, there’s more to it than that, but we all have to make a living.
“Give me twenty-four hours. I’ll talk with some friends, see if they know where you could get this sort of stuff. So, you have done well since leaving the Army. I—not so well.”
“I heard about your troubles,” said Rowse.
“Ach, two years in Hamburg jail. A piece of cake. Another two, and I could have been running the place. Anyway, it was worth it.”
Kleist, although divorced, had had a son. He had been only sixteen when someone turned him on to cocaine, then crack. The boy overdosed and died. Rage had made Uli Kleist rather unsubtle. He had found out the names of the Colombian wholesaler and the German distributor of the consignment that had killed his son, walked into a restaurant where they were dining, and blown both their heads off. When the police came, Kleist did not even resist. An old-school judge who shared his personal views about drug traffickers listened to the defense plea of provocation and gave Kleist four years. He served two, and had come out six months before. Word was, there was a contract on him. Kleist did not give a damn. Some said he was crazy.
They parted at midnight, and Rowse took a cab back to his hotel. A single man on a motorcycle followed all the way. The motorcyclist spoke twice into a hand-communicator. When Rowse paid off the taxi, McCready emerged from the shadows.
“You haven’t got a tail,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Feel like a nightcap?”
They drank beer in an all-night bar near the station, and Rowse filled him in.
“He believes your tale of researching a novel is poppycock?” McCready asked.
“He suspects it.”
“Good—let’s hope he puts it about. I doubt if you’ll get to the real bad guys in this scenario. I’m rather hoping they’ll come to you.”
Rowse made a remark about feeling like the cheese in a mousetrap and climbed off his bar stool.
“In a successful mousetrap,” remarked McCready as he followed Rowse out of the bar, “the cheese does not get touched.”
“I know it, and you know it, but tell that to the cheese,” said Rowse, and retired to bed.
Rowse met Kleist the following evening. The German shook his head.
“I have asked around,” he said, “but what you mentioned is too sophisticated for Hamburg. That kind of material is made in government-owned laboratories and arms factories. It is not on the black market. But there is a man, or so is the whisper.”
“Here in Hamburg?”
“No, Vienna. The Russian military attaché there is a certain Major Vitali Kariagin. As you no doubt know, Vienna is the main outlet for the Czech manufacturer Omnipol. The broad mass of their exports they are allowed to make on their own account, but some stuff and some buyers have to be cleared out of Moscow. The channeling agent for these permissions is Kariagin.”
“Why should he help?”
“Word is, he has a taste for the good things of life. He’s GRU, of course, but even Soviet military intelligence officers have private tastes. It appears he likes girls—expensive girls, the sort to whom you have to give expensive presents. So he himself takes presents, cash presents, in envelopes.”
Rowse thought it over. He knew that corruption was more the rule than the exception in Soviet society, but a GRU major on the take? The arms world is very bizarre; anything is possible.
“By the way,” said Kleist, “in this ... novel of yours. Would there be any IRA in it?”
“Why do you ask?” said Rowse. He had not mentioned the IRA.
Kleist shrugged. “They have a unit here. Based in a bar run by Palestinians. They do liaison with other terror groups in the international community, and arms-buying. You want to see them?”
“In God’s name, why?”
Kleist laughed, a mite too loud. “Might be fun,” he said.
“These Palestinians—they know you once blew away four of their number?” asked Rowse.
“Probably. In our world everyone knows everyone. Especially their enemies. But I still go to drink in their bar.”
“Why?”
“Fun. Pulling the tiger’s tail.”
“You really are crazy,” thought Rowse.
“I think you should go,” said McCready later that night. “You might learn something, see something. Or they might see you and wonder why you are here. If they inquire, they’ll come up with the novel-researching story. They won’t believe it, and they’ll deduce you really are out buying weapons for use in America. Word gets around. We want it to get around. Just have a few beers, and stay cool. Then distance yourself from that mad German.”
McCready did not feel it necessary to mention that he knew of the bar in question. It was called the Mausehöhle, or Mousehole, and the rumor persisted that a German undercover agent, working for the British, had been unmasked and shot in an upstairs room there a year earlier. Certainly the man had disappeared without a trace. But there was not enough for the German police to raid the place, and German counterintelligence preferred to leave the Palestinians and the Irish where they were. Smashing up their headquarters would simply mean they would reestablish somewhere else. Still, the rumors persisted.
The following evening Uli Kleist paid off their cab on the Reeperbahn. He led Rowse up the Davidstrasse, past the steel-gated entrance to Herbertstrasse, where the whores sat night and day in their windows; past the brewery gates; and down to the far end where the Elbe glittered under the moon. He turned right into Bernhard Nochtstrasse and after two hundred yards stopped at a studded timber door.
He rang the discreet bell by its side, and a small grill slid back. An eye looked at him, there was a whispered conference inside, and the door opened. The doorman and the dinner-jacketed man beside him were both Arabs.
“Evening, Mr. Abdallah,” Kleist said cheerfully in German. “I’m thirsty, and I’d like a drink.”
Abdallah glanced at Rowse.
“Oh, he’s all right, he’s a friend,” said Kleist. The Arab nodded at the doorman, who opened the door wide to let them in. Kleist was big, but the doorman was massive, shaven-headed, and not to be trifled with. Years earlier, back in the camps in Lebanon, he had been an enforcer for the PLO. In a way, he still was.
Abdallah led them both to a table, summoned a waiter with a flick of the hand, and ordered in Arabic that his guests be looked after. Two busty bar-girls, both German, left the bar and sat at their table.