Goodbye Again (16 page)

We kept on up the hill. Safer away from roads. Half an hour later, with no sound of any pursuer, we emerged from the thick pine belt and into a glade of beech trees.

The storm had passed. The sun burst out, a bright evening sun that almost warmed us. We slackened pace, walked under the cathedral-like canopy of trees, their tall smooth white trunks like
pillars, separating great shafts of light, shining through the leaves and branches, as if from a series of high windows, making mottled patterns on the floor of leaf mould beneath our feet, dappling Ben’s face and drying his T-shirt as I turned to him.

He raised my arm, looking at our wrists. Bruised, still bleeding slightly. He licked the rivulet of blood away from my wrist and took my hand. We walked on into the dazzle of low sunlight.

The beech glade ended a little further ahead, the land began to dip, and we were in another belt of dark fir, going downhill. In chilly shadow now, the light fading.

We stopped. ‘What do we do? These trees could go on forever.’

‘Have to just sleep beneath them. Cover ourselves in leaves. Babes in the Wood.’

‘This isn’t a fairy tale.’

‘Isn’t it? This is surely the forest of the Brothers Grimm.

‘Oh for God’s sake!’

‘Okay, you tell me what we should do.’

I looked about in desperation. ‘Find somewhere, someone, give ourselves up.’

‘In this forest – who to? The old witch who lives in a house made of human bones or the big bad wolf?’

Then we heard an engine starting up, somewhere down the slope ahead of us. In another five minutes we came to the edge of the forest. Looking out from the trees, below us lay a gravelled clearing, an empty car park, picnic tables, a log hut, with a sign above the door: ‘Café and Black Forest Souvenirs’.

We waited. No sound, nothing, nobody. It was getting dark and starting to rain again.

‘Come on.’ He pulled me forward. ‘We’ll find some shelter here.’

Skirting round the clearing, we came at the log building from behind. A back door, with a porch, firewood stacked in big piles, some rubbish bins. The door was locked, of course.

‘What did you expect?’ I said. ‘A sign saying “Welcome! Come on in”?’

‘It’s a Yale-type lock. If we had a credit card we could push it in between the jamb and the lock.’

‘We haven’t got a credit card.’

‘No. So I’ll just kick it in.’

He stood back and started to kick the door repeatedly, so that at last half of it gave in with a splintering crash, and we were inside.

A storeroom, shelves everywhere, down the centre of the room, against the walls, stacked with tacky souvenirs of all sorts. Alpen-stocks, phoney spiked Prussian helmets, embroidered aprons, and wooden cuckoo clocks of every size. We could see them in the half-light: long-eaved, wooden-tiled roofs, ornately decorated and painted, small clock faces, each with its cuckoo beneath, hidden behind a little doorway, mute, but waiting its moment.

The rain started to drum on the roof. It was dark now. We were famished. We moved to the front of the shop. I looked for a telephone. There wasn’t one, but above the café counter there were soft drinks and bags of crisps, biscuits, cakes and a freezer filled with ice creams. ‘Might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb,’ Ben said, so that very soon we were gorging on a supper of crisps and dry fruit cake washed down with big dollops of peach ice cream and soda pop. Afterwards, lying on a mattress of crushed cardboard boxes and wrapped in embroidered Bavarian aprons we found in the back room, we lay down under the cuckoo clocks, dozed, then slept.

One of the cuckoo clocks woke us. Some vibration, something that released the impertinent bird from its house and set it going, cuckooing out the hours. It was pitch-black. Ben pulled me up, drugged with sleep. We stumbled about, feeling along a central shelf, found the clock, stopped it. Silence.

‘Wait! Listen. Something else.’

We listened. The faint whimpering of a hound. In the distance. Coming closer, and then at the back door, barking furiously. Torchlight coming through the splintered wood. Then the rest of the door was kicked open and there were heavy footsteps coming towards us.

In the dark we ran back towards the main shop and straight into a shelf of cuckoo clocks, pushing the whole lot over, spilling them all on the floor, where they set up an outraged cacophony of cuckooing. A man was in the storeroom now, the torch searching us out. We’d fallen on the floor, among a debris of clocks and splintered wood.

The beam came towards us, spotlighting us; the voice in German: ‘Now I have you!’

For a moment, as he adjusted the beam, I saw the man’s face. It was the burly Fritz, in his tattered Bavarian outfit, rifle slung over his shoulder, torch in one hand, a snarling Alsatian on a lead in the other.

We were on our feet, Ben pulling me round behind another shelf of clocks and curios. A great cracking sound, Fritz smashing through the shelves in front us, the wood splintering, throwing out another load of souvenirs and clocks, releasing a further flock of outraged cuckoos. The room was loud with sound from the wretched birds and the barking dog.

Fritz blundered forward through the splintered remains of the shelves, big boots crunching over the souvenirs, the cuckoo clocks and the Prussian helmets with their sharp plastic spikes lying all over the floor. He was moving towards us. But then he stumbled, falling heavily, the torch flying from his hand. The dog snarled and the cuckoos continued their uproar, but there was no movement, no sound from Fritz. Ben pulled me to the torch, picked it up, turned with the beam.

Fritz was lying motionless among the souvenirs, the Alsatian still leashed to his hand, snarling. And then he saw the Prussian
helmet and its sharp spike driven in somewhere below his neck. Blood was starting to seep over the floor – and Ben was pulling me then, over Fritz’s body and out the back door. And now, torch in hand, he was dragging me across the dark picnic area and into the woods again. The torch barely showed our way and we stumbled and fell into drains of storm water, brambles and the spiky branches of fir trees. After twenty minutes I was bruised and breathless. I dragged Ben to a halt.

‘Ben, this is crazy! If Fritz is dead, it’ll be perfectly clear that we didn’t kill him, that he fell on that spike. We should go back to the shop and wait for someone …’

‘No. They’ll find out who Fritz is – he’s certainly mixed up with these drug-running, art thieving neo-Nazis – and the police will arrest us as their accomplices.’

‘But they handcuffed us. Why do that if we were with them?’

‘Because we double-crossed them!’

‘But we didn’t! And we can prove that – take the police back to the barge, tell them the whole story.’

‘They won’t believe it, and we’ll be held here for months.’

He dragged me on, and then we fell over the edge of something, and tumbled down a steep slope, where I felt a bad jag of pain in my ankle when I reached the bottom. I couldn’t move, my ankle twisted, with Ben almost on top of me.

‘Christ!’ I shouted. ‘My ankle – you bloody fool, if only we’d stayed in that shop. For God’s sake! Get off me!’

He moved. I managed to bend down, trying to reach my foot. Then, the blood going to my head, I was suddenly dizzy. I fainted.

I came to – ten minutes later I suppose. It was almost light, sunbeams glinting faintly through the trees, a dozen feet above us, both of us lying at the bottom of a leafy pit in the forest.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said, looking down at me with real concern.

In frustration he jangled the chain that held us and we sat there,
our backs against the steep slope, saying nothing, as the sun rose above us. Then after a few minutes, he suddenly started shouting. ‘Help! Help!’

‘You’re not in England,’ I told him. ‘You better shout in German.’

‘They’ll get the message.’ And he carried on shouting, every few minutes, in English. They didn’t get the message. Nobody came. I would have cried if I hadn’t been so exhausted. Ben, too. He gave up shouting. We both lay back, dozed, slept.

When we woke the sun was above us, illuminating a man standing at the lip of the slope, looking down, holding a rifle. Young, a short beard, green forester’s cap and green serge jacket, jodhpurs, hunting boots. My ankle jabbed with pain. I shouted up at him, in German.

‘Please help us. My ankle – help us.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said easily, as if finding two handcuffed people in the middle of the forest was a regular occurrence. He took out a walkie-talkie and spoke into it; I couldn’t catch his words. When he’d finished, he just stood there, looking down on us.

‘Did you call the police?’ I asked the man, speaking quickly in German, before Ben could make any more nonsense about our not contacting the authorities. ‘You see, we fell into this hole last night and –’

Ben interrupted. ‘You said “police” just now. We don’t want them.’

‘Oh yes we do. That’s where I’m going, and you too, since we’re chained together.’

Ben said nothing, resigned to common sense at last.

The man spoke again. ‘Yes, you will need to go to the police. I’ve called my friend. He has transport, not far, just at the end of the track.’

‘Are you hunting here?’ I asked.

‘No. We are park wardens, here to see that others are not hunting. This part of the forest is a nature reserve. Hunting is forbidden.’

Silence. It was getting hot. Birds twittered in the thick foliage far above us. I lay back on the mossy bank and closed my eyes.
‘
Danke schön,’
I said. I was happy to speak German again.

Five minutes later, the sound of an engine, stopping somewhere below us, beyond the dell. Another green-clad man arrived. They came down into the dell and pulled us up carefully. Then, one of the men carrying me, they took us down the slope to a forest track and levered us gently into the back seats of a four-wheel drive.

We set off along the track, beneath the trees, sunlight dappling through the leaves, a smell of fresh pine after the night’s rain, warm summer air blowing in my face from the open window. God, I was happy to be doing something safe and sensible at last.

‘Where’s the nearest police station?’ I asked.

The first man turned. ‘You will need to see the chief at police headquarters in the town of Ulm, not far, less than an hour’s drive.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ My ankle was feeling better already. Ben said nothing. I turned to him. ‘It’s the only thing to do,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I suppose so.’

THIRTEEN

Ben’s Story

‘So …’ The chief superintendent had been speaking English easily, but now he shifted uneasily in his chair after hearing our story. He was wary, with the air of someone who wanted to keep out of this particular trouble. One of his men had released us from our handcuffs and now we sat in his office, in a meticulously reconstructed medieval building, high up on the ramparts overlooking the Danube at Ulm, a town to the east of the Black Forest.

‘This talk of looted art, Herr Contini, of Nazis and neo-Nazis and drug traffickers – and of your being handcuffed and held by these people in the Black Forest, in a hunting lodge on stilts which collapsed in a flood from the river – it sounds like a fairy story, no?’

‘Superintendent, do you think we handcuffed ourselves?’

‘You told me you were handcuffed on a canal in France. That’s outside our control.’

‘Yes, by that woman in the headscarf. She was one of the group who took us from the barge to the hunting lodge. It’s all true, Superintendent, and if you get out to the remains of that lodge, wherever it is, and the souvenir shop where that guy Fritz tried to get us, you’ll see.’

‘Yes, we had a report – a man was found wounded in a Black Forest souvenir shop this morning. We are investigating, but he was not called “Fritz”. He was called Bruckner. Hans Bruckner. He was simply a robber who broke in and got himself injured somehow in the back of the shop. Not an art thief or a neo-Nazi.’

‘No? He was the caretaker in that hunting lodge for the other men. The man with the thin red hair and his thuggish friends, and the woman in the headscarf: the place must have been a hideout for these neo-Nazis.’

‘Herr Contini …’

‘The fact is they are all crooks, Superintendent. Drug traffickers, neo-Nazis, art looters, whatever. On that barge we took across France, in that hunting lodge, all in it together. Drug trafficking and looking for this hoard of looted art to pay for their new Nazi schemes.’

‘Indeed.’ He smiled. ‘And where is this hoard of looted art?’

‘I don’t know. Are we being charged with something?’

‘No, Herr Contini. We are simply making our enquiries.’

‘Are you? If you were, you should get out to that ruined hunting lodge straight away and look among the debris. The man with the red hair and the briefcase, he was the boss of this group. You’ll find plenty of neo-Nazi evidence in the ruins of that lodge.’

‘We have had no reports of any hunting lodge collapsing in the Black Forest, but we will look into it.’ He closed a notebook, in which he had written nothing. He wanted no formal record of our meeting. ‘So, you have made your statements, both of you. You must return home now.’

‘Yes, except that we’ve nothing to get home with. No clothes, passports, money, nothing. All in the ruins of that hunting lodge. Maybe we could all go back there?’

‘That will not be necessary, Herr Contini. You will go to your consuls in Munich for new passports. I will arrange money for you both, to get to Munich and then on home. Now, in fact. There is a train in an hour.’

He wanted to get rid of us. Old Nazis? Neo-Nazis? Looted art? All far too hot to handle, in front of us, at least. He picked up a phone, spoke for some minutes, then turned. ‘You will have an advance of fifteen hundred marks. That will cover your hotel in Munich, food, new clothes and enough to get home with. You will repay us when you get home. One of my officers will accompany you on the train and see that you get to a hotel and your consuls, that you get temporary passports and that you leave Germany. Safely,’ he added politely.

Every service, I thought, in the cause of putting all this unpleasantness under the carpet. A can of worms he wanted to reseal. But I wasn’t going to let him, if I could help it. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’re not making this up. It’s all true.’

‘Herr Contini, stop creating trouble for yourself.’ His tone was suddenly hard. ‘Go home. Forget it all. All your fantasies, all this Nazi nonsense. It never happened.’

‘That’s what they all like to say, don’t they? It never happened.’ The superintendent said nothing.

A clerk arrived with an envelope. The superintendent opened it and handed me a wad of cash. Fifteen hundred marks, which I signed for. A plain-clothes policeman arrived later to take us to the station. We stopped on the way to buy some new clothes, then onto a fast train to Munich. The cop, a youngish, lively man, sat on the seat opposite. I knew he was listening to us. I’d managed to talk to Elsa briefly alone before we got on the train, telling her to say
nothing to me of any of our previous troubles or plans. The man would report back anything we said, I was sure.

On the train we spoke of easier things – cooking, dishes we liked. I told her how, on the trip to Italy I’d made with Katie two years before, to the marble town of Carrara up in the Apuan Alps, where I’d taught painting and sculpture at the local Academia delle Arte for a week – how I’d cooked us both Irish stew one evening. With barley, onions, carrots, and diced hunks of lamb, cooked it slowly for hours, so that it was nearly solid and you could cut it almost like a cake.

‘Sounds dire.’

‘No. It’s the old way in Ireland – how you’re supposed to do it.’

‘I see.’

‘All right, cook us something better when we get home.’

‘I’ll try.’

The cop took us to a small hotel off the Königsplatz. He met another plain-clothes cop here – young, polite and eager – who took over from him, escorting us to our room. A double, but with twin beds.

‘It’s okay,’ I said to Elsa when he’d gone. ‘Don’t worry – twin beds and no handcuffs.’ Then I went over to her and whispered. ‘Don’t speak of anything in here.’ I pointed up to the ceiling, the lamps over the beds. ‘Could well be bugged.’

Elsa’s ankle wasn’t badly twisted, just bruised and blue. I said we’d get some ointment for it and she had a bath, and I took a beer from the minibar, and sat looking out the window, which gave onto a restaurant terrace, coloured lights and an empty barbecue pit. No customers. I wouldn’t have wanted to eat there anyway. I wanted to be out and about in the ordinary world again. I was hungry and we had money in our pockets.

When we reached the lobby half an hour later, the cop was still
there, chatting up the blonde girl at reception. Clearly the place
had connections with the Munich police.

‘Look,’ I said to him, ‘we’re going out to eat. But don’t worry about us, we’re not going to run away – no passports.’

He feigned surprise. ‘Worry? Of course not, Herr Contini. I am only here to see that all goes well for you and that you both get home safely.’

‘Good. We’ll be back in an hour or so.’

‘Try the Bierkeller in the next street along. Excellent Bavarian food, Herr Contini.’

He saw us out the door.

‘I bet we’re being followed,’ I said, taking her arm.

‘Christ, you’re being paranoid again.’

We didn’t go to the Bavarian Bierkeller – last sort of place or food I wanted, and probably another cop haunt as well.

We walked on and found an Italian trattoria off the Amalien-strasse, the Luna Caprese. We went through the restaurant to an open terrace behind and were given a table by a wall at the far end, where drifts of potted red geraniums cascaded down beside us.

At once I remembered – the same tumble of red geraniums falling down from the balcony of our apartment overlooking the Piazza Gramsci in Carrara with Katie, two years before. And now a woman sitting in front of me who looked just like Katie, so that the real Katie, and that view over the piazza with its lion-mouthed fountains and heroic statuary, flashed before my eyes.

The Luna Caprese was an old-fashioned trattoria – check tablecloths, candles in Chianti bottles, an Italian crooner, with a guitar, on a small stage to one side. Very Italian, and the past begun to run in my veins, that week with Katie in Carrara, the wine, and the water of those fountains.

We ordered a bottle of chilled Frascati. A warm August night, rumours of pomodoro and garlic, the romantic chatter and the sentimental singer. I raised my glass.

‘To the real world at last!’

She was slow in raising hers. She was fretful. ‘Yes, the real New York for me. And you?’

‘There’s the Modi still on the barge on the Rhine, and Katie’s journal with it. And the cats. I’ll have to get the picture back at least.’

‘I can’t help you there, Ben.’ She was terse. ‘You’ll have to do that on your own.’

‘Not certain I can even help myself. You see, besides Briefcase and his pals at the hunting lodge – and some of them may have survived – there must be others in that gang of crooks. They’ll have known how we were taken from the barge to the hunting lodge and escaped. So if I go back to the barge they could be waiting for me to turn up, so they can put the screws on me about where the rest of the looted art is hidden.’

‘Okay, Ben, so it’s perfectly clear – don’t go back to the barge. You’ve lost the picture, and that damn journal. Leave it at that, for God’s sake. We’ve had enough. You’ve got us out of everything, and you’ve been great, but I’m not taking any more risks.’

‘You’re right. Except …’

‘Except what?’

‘Carrara – I’d like to go there and see if the stuff is really hidden somewhere up in those hills.’

‘Crazy.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Why don’t you stop “maybeing” and “excepting” and just stop this art hunt, which is really only an excuse for not going back to your real work?’

‘You’ve said that before. Just like Harry. That’s what everyone says, when there’s something unpleasant lurking up the other path in their life.’

‘Right, you play the hero – go on looking for something nasty up the other path. The truth hunter.’

‘You were that once, on the boat out of Killiney. Saying how you had to be truthful.’

‘Yes, I was so bloody conscientious about my principles. That’s probably why I lost Martha: I tyrannized her with them.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I don’t have any principles now. They kill you, or what you have with someone you love. I just want to go home.’ She wouldn’t look at me as she spoke. Then at last she turned to me, vehement. ‘I’d prefer to be happy now, not truthful.’

Maybe she was right. I wondered if my heart was really in it anymore. What did it matter? Maybe all this high-principled crusading of mine was just a way of avoiding my painting again, back in the empty Cotswold barn, without Katie. In the balmy scented evening, the chilled Frascati on my lips, I wanted Katie then, and it was easy to forget principles.

I said, looking at her over my glass, ‘I’d throw away my principles, too, if I had the flesh-and-blood thing with someone again.’

She said nothing, a vague nod, but it was clear enough – I wasn’t going to have these things with her. We ordered the food: a big plate of antipasti, then kidneys and parsley cooked in white wine. The crooner sang an old Italian song I remembered, ‘Volare’, and I ordered another bottle of Frascati.

Italy was really moving in my veins now, whether I wanted it or not. And suddenly I wanted it. Wanted to fly there – to Carrara, to that apartment on the Via Plebiscito looking over the Piazza Gramsci, the chestnut trees, bandstand and heroic statuary where I stayed that week with Katie, with the white-marble quarries scarred into the mountains high above us, like snow. The summer art school, leaning over the shoulders of a dozen happy amateurs, lavish with their colours, or working away at small blocks of Carrara Cremo, dreaming of Bernini and Michelangelo.

I could stop playing the hero and let that looted art rot up in
the marble hills, if that’s where it was – along with whatever secrets I might find there about my father, or Elsa’s. I could lose the Modi nude and Katie’s journal. I’d loved the woman in the painting, and I’d loved Katie, but I wasn’t going to die for either of them by returning to the barge. All I had left was that last time with Katie in Carrara.

A whole unencumbered week, eating in the evenings on the apartment terrace beneath the geraniums, high over the piazza gardens. The town band playing
La Traviata,
our lemony fingers tickling the
frittura mista,
little fish and clams doused in batter, flamed in oil, with the local white wine. Later, in the pool of light from the white-globed lamp above us, the blue flames from our coffee-beaned sambuca, smoke from my rolled tobacco keeping the midges from our golden halo.

I looked again at Elsa, but the face I was pursuing now was the original picture – Katie’s face, vivid in the soft light from the lantern above our balcony in Carrara. And her face next morning, still as marble, in the gauzy Tuscan dawn from the bedroom window, when I turned and saw her, deep in peace, asleep on the crumpled pillow.

Just remember this, I thought – Katie in the flesh, our bed, her lies, whatever. The lies didn’t matter, and nor did the marble quarries at Carrara or the sins of my father. All that mattered was the memory of Katie.

All right, maybe it was crazy, thinking to resuscitate the love of a dead woman among the fountains and heroic statuary of those baroque gardens. But why not? I raised my glass to Elsa. ‘To us,’ I said, remembering Katie.