Limit (115 page)

* * *

But Jan Kees Vogelaar wasn’t asleep.

He hadn’t shut an eye all night, which was only partly to do with the headache left behind by Yoyo clouting him with a joint of meat. It was much more to do with talking to Nyela and agreeing on a plan to flee to France for the time being, where he had contacts with some retired Foreign Legionnaires. While Nyela began to pack, he organised their new identities. That evening Luc and Nadine Bombard, descended from French colonists out in Cameroon, would arrive in Paris.

At half past seven he called Leto, a friend of theirs, half Gabonese, who had come to Berlin a few years ago to help his white father fight his cancer. Nyela had met him the day before on the city’s grand avenue, Unter den Linden. Leto had been in Mamba before the company joined the newly founded African Protection Services, and had helped them open Muntu. He was the only one in Germany they could trust, even if he didn’t know all the details of why Vogelaar had had to get out of Equatorial Guinea. As far as he knew, Mayé had been toppled by Ndongo, financed by who knew which foreign powers. Vogelaar had avoided setting him right on the matter.

‘We’ll have to disappear,’ he said brusquely.

Leto had obviously just got out of bed to answer the call, but was so surprised he forgot to yawn.

‘What do you mean, disappear?’

‘Leave the country. They’re onto us.’

‘Shit!’

‘Yes, shit. Listen, can you do me a favour?’

‘Of course.’

‘When the banks open in two hours’ time I’m going to empty our accounts, and then I’ll have a few things to take care of. Meanwhile Nyela will go downstairs to Muntu and pack whatever we can take from there. It would be good if you could keep her company there. Just to be on the safe side, until I’m back.’

‘Sure.’

‘Best thing is if you meet her up in the flat.’

‘I’ll do that. When do you want to leave?’

‘Right after noon.’

Leto fell silent for a moment.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘Why don’t they just leave you in peace? Ndongo’s been back in power for a year now. You’re hardly any threat to him any longer.’

‘He’s probably still not got over me putsching him out of office back then,’ Vogelaar lied.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Leto snorted. ‘It was Mayé. You simply got paid for it. It wasn’t anything personal.’

‘All I need to know is that the goons have turned up here. Can you be with Nyela by half past eight?’

‘Of course. No problem.’

An hour and a half later Vogelaar flung himself into the stream of rush-hour traffic. The traffic lights took so long to change they seemed to be doing it out of spite. He crossed Französische Strasse, made it as far as Taubenstrasse, squeezed his Nissan into a tiny parking spot and went into the foyer of his bank. The temple of capitalism was full to the brim. There was a huge crush in front of the self-service computers and the staffed windows, as though half of Berlin had decided to flee the city together with himself and Nyela. His personal banker was dealing with a red-faced old woman who kept pounding the flat of her hand against the counter in front of the window to punctuate her harangue; Vogelaar caught his eye, and gave him a signal to let him know he’d wait next door. He hurried over to the lounge, collapsed into one of the elegant leather armchairs and fumed.

He’d wasted his time. Why hadn’t he fetched the money the afternoon before?

Then he realised that by the time Jericho and his Chinese girlfriend had left, the banks were probably closed. Which didn’t make him any less angry. Really, it was archaic that he had to hang around here like this. Banks were computerised businesses, it was only because he wanted to carry the money from his account home as cash that he needed to be physically present. Glowering, he ordered a cappuccino. He had hoped that his banker would call him in the next couple of minutes and ask him to come back to the foyer, but this hope was dashed to pieces under the red-faced woman’s avalanche of words. All the other counters had queues snaking around them as well, mostly old people, very old some of them. The greying of Berlin seemed in full swing now; even in the moneyed boulevards a tide of worry backed up like stagnant water, the worry about old age and its insecurities.

To his surprise his telephone did ring, just as he raised the coffee to his lips. He got up, balancing the cup so that he could take it across with him, glanced at the
display and saw that the call wasn’t from the bank foyer at all. It was Nyela’s number. He sat down again, picked up the call and spoke, expecting to see her face.

Instead, Leto was staring at him.

Straight away he realised that something wasn’t right. Leto seemed distraught about something. Not quite that. Rather, he looked as though he had got over whatever had upset him, and had decided to keep that look on his face to the end of his days. Then Vogelaar realised that the end had already come.

Leto was dead.

‘Nyela? What’s up? What’s happened?’

Whoever was holding Nyela’s phone stepped back, so that he could see all of Leto’s upper body. He was leaning, slumped over the bar. A thin trickle of blood ran down his neck, as though embarrassed to be there.

‘Don’t worry, Jan. We killed him quite quietly. Don’t want you getting into trouble with the neighbours.’

The man who had spoken turned the phone towards himself.

‘Kenny,’ Vogelaar whispered.

‘Happy to see me?’ Xin smirked at him. ‘You see, I was missing you. I spent a whole year wondering how the hell you managed to slip through my fingers.’

‘Where’s Nyela?’ Vogelaar heard himself ask, his voice dwindling and dropping.

‘Wait, I’ll hand you over. No, I’ll show you her.’

The picture lurched again and showed the restaurant. Nyela was sitting on a chair, a sculpture of sheer fear, her eyes open wide with terror. A pale, bald man clamped her tight to the chair, his arm stretched across her. He was holding a scalpel in his other hand. The tip of the blade hung motionless in the air, not a centimetre from Nyela’s left eye.

‘That’s how things are,’ Xin’s voice said.

Vogelaar heard himself make a choking noise. He couldn’t remember ever having made a sound like that before.

‘Don’t do anything to her,’ he gasped. ‘Leave her alone.’

‘I wouldn’t read too much into the situation,’ Xin said. ‘Mickey’s very professional, he has a steady hand. He only gets twitchy if I do.’

‘What do I have to do? Tell me what I have to do.’

‘Take me seriously.’

‘I do, I take you seriously.’

‘Of course you do.’ Xin’s voice suddenly changed, dark, hissing. ‘On the other hand, I know what you’re capable of, Jan. You can’t help yourself. Right now there are a thousand plans racing through your head, you’re thinking how you could trick me. But I don’t want you to trick me. I don’t want you even to try.’

‘I won’t try.’

‘Now that would surprise me.’

‘You have my word.’

‘No. You won’t really understand why you shouldn’t even try until you’ve grasped the basic importance of saving your wife’s sight.’

The camera zoomed in closer. Nyela’s face filled the screen, twisted with fear.

‘Jan,’ she whimpered.

‘Kenny, listen to me,’ Vogelaar whispered hoarsely. ‘I told you that you have my word! Stop all that, I—’

‘One eye is quite enough for anyone to see with.’

‘Kenny—’

‘So if you could grasp the importance of saving what
remains
of her sight, then—’

‘Kenny, no!’

‘Sorry, Jan. I’m getting twitchy.’

Nyela’s scream as the scalpel struck was a mere chirrup from the phone’s speakers. But Vogelaar’s yell split the air.

Jericho blinked.

Something had woken him up. He turned on his side and glanced at the clock display. Almost ten! He hadn’t intended to sleep this long. He leapt out of bed, heard the room’s phone ringing, and picked up.

‘I’ve got your money,’ Tu said. ‘One hundred thousand euros, just as our dog of war demands, not too many small-denomination notes, you’ll be able to get through the museum door.’

‘Good,’ said Jericho.

‘Are you coming down to breakfast?’

‘Yes, I— Think I will.’

‘Come on then. Yoyo’s making a spectacle of herself with the scrambled eggs. I’ll keep some warm for you before she eats it all.’

Yoyo.

Jericho hung up, went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror. The blond man with the three-day beard who stared back at him was a fearless crime-fighter who put his life on the line, but didn’t know how to use a razor or even a comb.
Who didn’t even, come to that, have the decency to say No loud and clear, not even when he really wanted to say Yes. He had a nagging feeling that last night he had screwed everything up again, whatever ‘everything’ meant here. Yoyo had come along to his room, drunk as a skunk but in a chatty mood, she could hardly have found her way there by accident, and she’d wanted to
talk
. The pimply kid inside him hated that idea. But what was talking, except a little ritual that might lead who knows where? It was person-to-person, it was open-ended. Anything could have happened, but he had taken umbrage and had let her scurry off, then stubbornly watched the re-make of
Kill Bill
right to the end. It had been about as abysmally bad as he deserved. This arrested adolescence was like lying on a bed of nails, but at last he had fallen comatose into a restless sleep and dreamed of missing one train after another at shadowy stations, and running through a dreary Berlin no man’s land where huge insects lurked in cavernous houses, chirruping like monstrous crickets. Antennae waved at him from every doorway and corner, chitinous limbs scuttled hastily back into the cracks in the wall in a game of halfhearted hide-and-seek.

Trains. What heavy-handed symbolism. How could he be having such ploddingly obvious dreams? He looked the blond man in the eyes, and imagined him simply turning away and walking off into the mirror, leaving him alone there in the bathroom, sick and tired of his inadequacies, the inadequacies of that pimply kid.

He had to get rid of the kid somehow. Anyhow. Enough was enough!

His shout burst through the lounge like a nuclear blast, tearing to shreds all conversation, all thought. Sleepy jazz muzak tinkled away in the sudden silence. On the low glass table in front of him, an abstract composition in coffee and foamed milk surrounded a jagged heap of shattered porcelain.

He stared at the display.

‘Do you understand me?’ Xin asked.

His knees gave way. Nyela’s muffled sobs sounded in his ear as he sank back into the leather chair. Nothing had happened. The scalpel had not plunged into her eye, had not sliced through pupil and iris. It had simply twitched, and then stopped dead still once more.

‘Yes,’ Vogelaar whispered. ‘I understand.’

‘Good. If you play by my rules, nothing will happen to her. As for what will happen to
you
though—’

‘I understand.’ Vogelaar coughed. ‘Why all the extra effort?’

‘Extra?’

‘You could have killed me by now. As I left the building, on my drive across town, even here in the bank—’

The picture vanished, and then he saw Xin again.

‘Quite simple,’ he said, back to his chatty old self. ‘Because you’ve never worked without a safety net and an escape hatch. You believe in life after death, or at least you believe in lawyers opening deposit boxes and releasing their contents to the press. You’ve made arrangements in case you die suddenly.’

‘Do you need help?’

Vogelaar looked up. One of the lounge staff, with a startled look on his face, a hint of disapproval. No screaming and shouting in banks. At most, they were places were you could contemplate a dignified suicide. Vogelaar shook his head.

‘No, I – it’s just that I’ve had some bad news.’

‘If there’s anything that we can do—’

‘It’s a private matter.’

The man smiled with relief. It wasn’t about money. Someone had died, or had an accident.

‘As I say, if—’

‘Thank you.’

The staffer left. Vogelaar watched him go, then got up and left the lounge hurriedly.

‘Go on,’ he said into the phone.

‘Your sort of insurance rather depends on the idea that if anyone’s out to cause you harm, they’ll go after
you
,’ Xin continued. ‘So you can warn them to keep their hands off. If I don’t turn up to take afternoon tea tomorrow at such and such a time and place, with all my bits and pieces intact, the bomb goes off somewhere. It’s a lone wolf strategy, because for most of your life you were a lone wolf. But you’re not any longer. Perhaps you should have changed your plans.’

‘I have.’

‘You haven’t. That bomb will only be detonated if it’s your life at stake.’

‘My life, and my wife’s.’

‘Not exactly. You’ve changed your mind but you haven’t changed your habits. Earlier you’d have said, get the hell back on the next plane out, Kenny, there’s nothing you can do. Or, kill me and see what happens. But now you’re telling me, leave Nyela alone or I’ll make things hot for you.’

‘You can be sure of that!’

‘Meaning that you could still set off the bomb.’ Xin paused. ‘But then what would we do with your poor innocent wife? Or to put it another way, how long would we do it to her for?’

Vogelaar had crossed the foyer, and went out into the crowds on Friedrichstrasse.

‘That’s enough, Kenny. I see what you mean.’

‘Really? Back when Vogelaar only cared about Vogelaar, life was hard for people like me. Back then you’d have said, go on, kill the woman, torture her to death, see where it gets you. We’d have played a little poker, and in the end you’d have won.’

‘I’m warning you. If you harm even a hair on Nyela’s head—’

‘Would you die for her?’

‘Just come out with it and tell me what you want.’

‘I want an answer.’

Vogelaar felt his mind soar, saw his whole life spread out beneath his wings. What he saw was a bug, biting, pinching, stinging, playing dead or scuttling lightning-fast into a crack. A drone, a programmed thing, but one whose armour had been corroded these past few years by regular doses of empathy. His instincts had been ruined once he realised that there was in fact a purpose to life, that there could even be a purpose to dying so that others might live. Xin was right. His plans were out of date. This bug was sick and tired of creeping into cracks, but right now the future held nothing else.