‘It’s a damned good story,’ Fiedler said, having allowed Stanton to take him to a local bar and order drinks. The man lodged in the Wedding district of the city, an area associated with working people and radical politics. ‘But the cops wouldn’t let me run with it even before they closed the paper. What’s wrong with them? It’s crazy. It’s like they think anybody who isn’t actually a Prussian general is a revolutionary. The Tageblatt was about as radical as sausage and potatoes, but they’re acting like we were putting the Communist Manifesto on the front page.’
Stanton steered Fiedler back to the topic in hand.
‘The story,’ he asked, ‘what was so damned good about it?’
‘I’ll tell you what was so damned good,’ he said, leaning in a little closer, wiping the beer foam from his mouth then depositing it in the lock of greasy hair that hung across his forehead. ‘The woman’s a witch, that’s what’s so good. I saw her in her cell before the police had got round to shutting everything down. Almost bald, her head covered in stubble and you could see a number tattooed on it. More tattoos down her arms and legs too. Horrible amateur scribbles, probably done with a knife and ink. Must have hurt like hell. Still, perhaps she likes a bit of pain. I’ve got an informant in the central lock-up who says she’s got scars all over her body. And plenty more tattoos too – on her mushi, for God’s sake. A woman. A white woman with a tattoo on her cunt. Pretty shocking, eh?’
Stanton did find it shocking, although not for the reasons Fiedler imagined. He had known many tattooed women; most of the tougher girls in the army had acquired some ink but they weren’t covered in it. And amateur tatts? Knife and ink jobs? And scars? It seemed to Stanton that those other Companions of Chronos had made a peculiar choice of agent if they were hoping to find someone who could blend easily into the world of 1914.
It made him wonder even more just what sort of world this woman had come from.
Fiedler ordered another beer and filled his shot glass from the bottle that Stanton had put in front of him. His greasy fingertips left prints on the glass. Stanton noted that his shirt collar was quite soiled. This was a man who only a few weeks before had had his own by-line in a major daily and rented a telephone. Now he was clearly skimping on hot water for both his person and his laundry. These were cruel times. Stanton reckoned that Fiedler was about a month away from destitution. He was certainly drinking as if he was.
‘Apparently the woman’s a foreigner of some sort,’ Fiedler went on, anxious to maintain access to the bottle. ‘Probably English, although she spoke German as well. A strange shorthand sort of German, my man told me, with quite a few Russian words in it. All most peculiar.’
‘Do you know where they’re keeping her?’ Stanton enquired.
‘Well, not at the lock-up any more. She was wounded, remember. And I know that she got sick, blood-poisoning I imagine. So often it’s not the actual bullet that does the killing … I suppose I could ask around. But fieldwork is expensive.’
‘The sooner you find out,’ Stanton said, ‘the better I’ll pay. In fact, if you tell me now I’ll give you another hundred marks on the spot.’
Stanton had guessed that Fiedler was holding out on him, trying to drag out another pay day. He’d clearly already pursued the story as far as he could.
Fiedler smiled. ‘You’re a good reader of men, Kapitan Drechsler, you should be a journalist.’
‘Sadly it seems to be a shrinking market.’
‘Yes,’ Fiedler agreed grimly. ‘Pretty soon the only information left in this city will come direct from the Wilhelmstrasse. Anyway, the police have put her in a hospital, hoping she’ll pull through and they might get something more out of her. She’s guarded, though. They won’t let her talk to you.’
Fiedler wrote the address down on a beer mat.
The Berliner Buch. Stanton’s own place of recuperation. Good, he knew it a little already and it was the last place the police would ever expect the Kaiser’s assassin to return to.
Stanton left Fiedler with his money and the bottle and went looking for a cab. If this woman was wounded and still in hospital, then it was almost certain that her wounds were infected. He needed to hurry. She might quite easily already be dead.
44
STANTON WAS PRETTY sure he could spring the woman, if she were still alive. Hospitals were never secure, no matter what efforts were made to make them so. Too many people coming and going, too many gowns and facemasks, too many emergency cases scurrying about. Hospitals hadn’t been secure in the twenty-first century and Stanton was confident that they would be considerably less so a hundred and eleven years earlier.
But getting her out was just the first problem. Next, she would have to be concealed while she recovered. Hiding a sick, possibly unconscious woman who had been sprung from protective custody while also providing her with the care she’d need would require preparation.
He’d known from the start that if he could find his target at all they would probably be very sick, which was why he had secured a double-room suite at the hotel, just as he had been forced to do for McCluskey on their first night in Constantinople. He hadn’t realized, of course, that this new charge would also be a woman. A fact which would require an explanation if he didn’t want to arouse the interest of the hotel detective. He imagined she’d be too young to pass for his mother, as McCluskey had done. A sibling was called for.
‘My sister will be joining me from Dar-es-Salaam,’ he announced at reception, having returned to his hotel after questioning the journalist Fiedler. ‘Her health is delicate and she has been ill, a hunting wound sustained in the bush. We have come home to the Fatherland for her hospital treatment and now she must convalesce. She is to occupy the second room in my suite. I trust your hotel can offer every comfort in such a situation?’
The hotel manager (to whom Stanton had insisted on speaking) assured him that they could, and to Stanton’s relief did not ask for a second set of papers. The sister of a German officer wasn’t required to submit any. Stanton’s ID would cover them both.
Next Stanton hired an automobile, a beautiful maroon-coloured Mercedes Benz four-cylinder town car. He absolutely loved it. Squatting down in front of the radiator grille and turning the crank handle to start the engine, he forgot the intensity and emotional turmoil of his situation and allowed himself a moment of sheer joy. No electric starting motor for this baby. If a man wanted to start it he had to pump the crank.
As the great machine shuddered into life, throbbing violently, he climbed in behind the wheel and sat back on the hard-sprung leather seat. Running his hands over the polished mahogany instrument panel, he could scarcely believe that this was the first time he’d been behind the wheel of a car since leaving the twenty-first century. In happier circumstances, classic wheels would have been the first thing he’d have treated himself to. To drive a vintage car when it wasn’t vintage at all but cutting-edge technology was about as good as it got for Stanton. And to drive it on near empty roads, with motor roaring, leather, brass, rubber and steel rattling. A huge primitive Neanderthal machine with its own unique personality. And difficult to drive. No power anything, no synchromesh, just man against metal.
Experimenting with the gears and clutch as he guided the car out into traffic, Stanton swore that if ever he got off the time-warp roller-coaster he was on he’d buy half a dozen. Never mind women, he’d have cars! And bikes too. British bikes. He’d tour the country on a state-of-the-art 1914 Enfield. He’d take a Norton to the Isle of Man and win the next TT Race.