Johnny Carrick was huddled in the doorway, his head on the arms that were round his legs, and his resolve leached away.
‘What do you reckon?’ Adrian asked.
‘He’s gone,’ Dennis said.
‘Can’t argue with that.’
‘Ready to chuck in the towel, because he’s — like I said — gone.’
They were at the far end of Fuggerstrasse, where it joined Motzstrasse. Dennis had led down the street and identified the doorway in which their man, November, was sitting. They were contrasting personalities, with dissimilar hobbies when not working as increments for VBX, but in matters of their trade they shared skills. Dennis claimed peripheral vision of 140 degrees, and Adrian rated his at up to 160 degrees. When they were not being used as increments, they lectured on the National Surveillance Course for recruits and there they taught the necessity of ‘third-party awareness’, which meant scanning from the corners of their eyes without shifting their heads — peripheral vision. Neither had had to twist his head to see November in the doorway.
‘You happy that he hasn’t a tail?’
‘Would have showed if he had, but it hasn’t.’
‘Well, seeing the state of him, we’ll have to call the gaffer.’
‘If he’s a goner, the whole thing’s down the tube.’
By touch, Dennis activated his mobile, which was bulky in his anorak pocket because of its built-in encryption devices, tapped the keys, waited for his call to be answered. He was in his fifty-third year, married but without children, and found relaxation in an apron in front of his cooking range where he did serious French cuisine. He would have described his colleague — standing with him on the junction of Fuggerstrasse and Motzstrasse in the damn rain — as the best partner it was possible to acquire, but he did not take their professionalism to social levels and had never cooked for Adrian. What was common with them was a mastery of surveillance, being seen without being noticed.
‘That you, Mr Lawson? … Right, sorry and all that. Bit of a problem with your November. We were kipping in the wheels by the hotel when he came out. I was doing watch, woke Adrian. He was just shambling about, walking but going nowhere. The rain’s been pissing down on him but he has no coat. He’s drenched. Right now, he’s in a doorway … Hold on.’
Adrian tugged Dennis’s sleeve, said softly, ‘Lay it on a bit thicker, give it some juice. He’s about to cop out.’
‘You should get here, Mr Lawson, and quick. From the body language of him, we’re about to lose him … Right, right. It’s the junction of Fugger and Motz … Mr Lawson, don’t hang about.’ Dennis dropped his wrist from his mouth, and his hand in his pocket closed the call. ‘How was that?’
‘Had to be said — wasn’t the time for mucking about.’
If they had been thrown together on a train or in a bar, and they had not been linked by their skills in surveillance, they would have had little in common. Their creed was to pose the question: ‘Can I be remembered, recognized or described?’ Dennis did not think so. Neither did Adrian. But, his opinion, the anticipated hard stretch was still ahead of them if the agent — November — put his act together and insinuated further into a conspiracy … got his act together and quick. Many times before Dennis had trailed in the wake of undercovers, had watched them from a remote distance, been unseen and unheard; had seen the stress on them, like they smelled of it, and had thanked his good God it wasn’t asked of him.
‘Did the gaffer say how long?’
‘Did not.’
‘Bringing the whole gang?’
Dennis grimaced. ‘Wouldn’t you, if it’s all going down the bloody drain? Without his access, we’re dead in the water.’
‘We trusted nobody,’ she had said, in her thin, whistling voice, as if she blew through a reed when she spoke. ‘To seek trust is to look for comfort where there is none.’
He lay on a Spartan, institutional, steel-framed bed. Under Reuven Weissberg the old mattress had lumps and did not protect him from the sharpness of the coiled metal springs. He had slept in that bed, on that mattress, since he was a child. It had been given him on the first night he had spent in his grandmother’s care. He had been four years old and his feet had barely reached halfway down the bed. Now his bare toes stretched beyond its end. He knew it was her belief that the bed would harden him.
She had gazed down at him as she said it, and had put on the wood slats of the chair beside the bed the chipped china mug of warm milk. The same mug had been brought him every night that he had slept under the same roof as her, and every night he would wait for the quiet to fall on her room and listen for the faint rhythm of her snoring. Then he would go to the lavatory, tip the warm milk into the bowl and flush it away. He hated its taste, and would not have dared tell her. She had voiced her doubts on the wisdom of trust, and her eyes — as they always did on this matter — had screwed and blinked as if the word was an obscenity.
‘If you trust, you make yourself weak,’ she had said.
He had spoken of Goldmann’s trust in the young soldier.
‘When you trust, you depend on another. You should trust only yourself, as we did.’
He had spoken of Goldmann’s trust in the young soldier who had saved his employer’s life without thought of himself.
‘Trust is softness, tenderness and pity. They did not exist where I was, except with the dead.’
He had spoken of Mikhail, who had been late on a reaction. His fingers had massaged the gouge in his upper arm where a bullet had hit. He had spoken of the young man he believed worthy of trust.
‘Believed? Only believed? Do nothing until you have tested him with extreme rigour. Test him to the point of breaking him. I will not have him back in my home until you have. I will not see him again.’
She had gone. He smelled the milk in the mug on the chair beside his head. The bed hurt his back and hip but he would never complain of it to her. It would have been a similar bed on which his father, Jakob, had eked out the last days and nights of his life — hacking and coughing, a victim of pleurisy — in the criminal camp north of Perm; dead and gone when his son was four. It was on similar beds that he had slept during his conscription service. Others alongside had wept, but he had not … or from the beatings of the NCOs.
He had not heard her return, but the door opened. She looked down at him. ‘You have not, Reuven, drunk your milk.’
‘I’m waiting for it to cool. I will, of course, as I always do.’
She wore a thin dark wrap and it was tight round her tiny body. She was at the end of the bed, by the iron rail. ‘Do you remember my story of trust?’
‘Every word.’
He listened, as he had so many times, and saw the trees of the Forest of the Owls and the concrete supports of the central watchtower, and the path that was the Himmelstrasse of sixty-five years before — the Road to Heaven. He saw it today and saw it then, and heard her voice.
Three hundred Jewish girls — that was the figure we heard from the rumour — were brought from Wlodawa many months after I had come to the camp. It was February 1943, and I was surprised, when I heard of their arrival, that there were still Jews left in the town. They must have been among the last.