Snowleg (43 page)

Uwe recognised the voice humming to itself and then around the curtain came that sullen face with its bulging eyes. Kresse. He had grown an uneven moustache, one side half an inch longer than the other.

“Boss! So glad to run into you. I need your help. Look.” Across the bed with his mother's wheezing body Kresse told him about the notice in the
Leipziger Volkszeitung
. “The Englishman's come back. Finally, the man's come back – and I've spoken to him. I'm seeing him this afternoon. But I need the stuff.”

“Explain yourself, Kresse,” fighting an urge to laugh. The moustache looked like something stuck on in a hurry and in slightly the wrong place.

“You remember that Marla Berking?” Kresse drew up a chair and sat down. “Remember that girl who didn't go away in the dressing-up trunk? Did you hang on to her file?”

“You know perfectly well what happened.”

“I know perfectly well what was supposed to have happened, but this is the position, boss. I've got to have the whereabouts of this girl, and I have some idea that her file is not destroyed.”

“Blackmail, is that it?”

“Yes, of course, what do you expect? But I can't recall what became of her.”

“This isn't the time, you cunt,” and his eyes flew back to the pillow where life was throbbing away.

Kresse, indifferent to the dying mother, moved closer until his elbows were resting on the blanket. A stranger coming in might have thought they were from the same family, praying.

“What's the name of her husband?” The breath reached Uwe over the still legs, gaseous and smelling of the past. His nostrils picked out mechanically the yeasty bread, the hard-boiled egg, the instant coffee with the long-life milk.

“I don't know. Maybe if you hadn't got rid of the bottles . . .” It still had the power to rankle, even after all this time, even at this moment. While Uwe was burning files, Kresse was going down to the lake and tipping Uwe's bottles into the water. All his years of smell-hunting, his samples – he had emptied the whole laboratory.

Kresse opened his mouth, and it vaguely interested Uwe to see that there was no longer a gap in those tartarous teeth. “Give me her file, boss. You can have half the reward.”

“I'm very sorry. That's all finished. It's a new world.”

“I've tested the water. He's got money. But we can get more – a lot more, I reckon.”

“How much?” His eyes returned to his mother's face, the skin around the eyes and mouth folded over itself.

“Well, he's agreed on five thousand Marks. But I wasn't going to give him the file – just show him we've got it. What do you think, boss? What's it worth? What's a doctor in West Germany make? How much liquid will he have? He can scream and yell, but he's going to have to go back to his West German city and collect it.”

“You're going to take five thousand Marks and not let him read the file?” He asked the question almost pedantically.

“That's the way of the world, boss. Wake up. Where've you been?”

Uwe had been put under pressure in his time, but he was a calm person. There was no stopping his outrage when it came. “You were always the scum of the earth. All you ever were was a nauseating little capitalist. Get out of my sight.”

“Don't give me that, boss. I need the file. It's worth a lot of money.”

“Piss off.”

Between them rose another leathery gasp. Kresse looked down and there spilled out of his eyes, as from the containers that bring minerals up out of the mine, all the impurities of which he was host. “Just as well your mother's been unplugged, boss. Or I might have done it for you.”

The curtain fell back. Gone. But their conversation had been too much for the body on the bed. Uwe held the inert wrist, knowing he squeezed it for the last time, and for some reason remembered a day on the Kulkwitzer See when he was seven, watching the sails. His mother standing on the bank – yelling to him, pulling him by his hand, ticking him off for going too near the water – and his father saying, “What makes you think he's going to listen? He's just like you.”

After he had brushed her hair, he called the nurse. He stayed to sign a couple of pieces of paper and went home.

Uwe's apartment occupied half the basement of a nineteenth-century building in Rosentalgasse. It faced west and he had chosen it because of the ancient wine cellar at the back. He had got in touch with the security firm in Munich through a work contact, and had had a reinforced door and another very good door put in. The oldest files, like fine wines, were stored in the stone racks according to their dates.

Initially, he had taken the files for his freedom. But they were also his security, to protect him from people like Morneweg and Kresse. And maybe the time would come when he could do someone a favour. Those people who had been, for whatever reason, unreasonably arrested or tortured outrageously. Because that was not what it had been about, not what he had worked for at all.

He turned into his street and his hopes, his aspirations before he met Morneweg surged back to him. For an ardent moment he was twenty-four again. At night he would go rowing on bad-smelling canals, but in his imagination he was pulling towards the university in Dessau where he would teach the natural sciences. And then his father died. He remembered the curious old man at the funeral – the brown suit and the low cough, the card with the name on it, the glass of sweetish white wine in the Bodega. He had never been a Party animal, but he found it surprisingly easy to be loyal to a man like Morneweg who treated him in a paternal fashion, who allowed him to go on believing in the State with an only child's conviction. He had a sense – even in his grief – of being welcomed.

“We need scientists,” Morneweg had said, taking off his glasses to reveal his owl's face and breathing on one lens and then the other. “Your doctorate, I'm told, is on the smelling senses.”

The door to the street opened to Uwe's touch. Down the passage he could see his own front door ajar, and he wondered gloomily if his neighbour, who had a key, might have come in to borrow his new vacuum cleaner. He looked with unease into what should have been a neat entrance hall – the paddle against the wall, the boar's head supporting on one tusk an orange life jacket, the brush mat. His visitor had not paused to clean his feet. Across the carpet towards the bedroom door led a set of prints outlined in mud and melting grey ice.

His whole body alert, his eyes raced over the footprints into what had been a tidy room. Through the door, drawers upturned on the floor and papers everywhere. Kresse hadn't had to go far: Uwe stored the newest and less important documents in the filing cabinet beneath his desk.

Kresse sat on the bed, scowling into the telephone. A file in his hand. He wouldn't have had time to read it, just a postcard or two. “At the zoo. The giraffe compound,” in his whining, bitter, disgusting voice. Then: “I have reddish hair, but anyway I'll recognise you.”

Uwe retreated. The sound of the receiver being replaced and more drawers opening and Kresse humming “How will you ever forgive me?”

“Herr Uwe!”

His neighbour stood behind him, a burly ex-fruiterer with pink cheeks and teddy-bear eyes. “I heard a hideous noise. I thought maybe I should come in, but it sounds like a friend.”

In the bedroom the humming had stopped.

Next to the door was a shelf. He found his service revolver behind a row of books. “I think I know who it is, Herr Hölderlin. I'll deal with it,” and swiftly reached up and retrieved the silencer from the boar's throat.

The footprints petered out in a pair of black ankle boots white with salt. Kresse stood against the far wall, his gun levelled at Uwe's chest. “Where's this to, boss?” and jerked his thumb at the door behind him, anonymous and reinforced with steel.

“I've been thinking, Kresse. We'll cut a deal.”

“I'm not that stupid, boss.” He watched Uwe closely with his poisonous eyes. “Unlock it.”

“Fifty-fifty – if you do the work.”

“Unlock it, boss.”

Their two guns pointed at each other. It seemed incredible they could have been colleagues. Swords and shields in the same battle.

“I'll need a key,” decided Uwe.

“Then, get it,” twitched the uneven, pantomime moustache. A Groucho Marx nose wouldn't have looked odd on him, but for the gun.

Still covering Kresse, Uwe dug his left hand into his pocket. “How are we going to do this?” He felt like giggling. “I know,” and without raising his voice: “Herr Hölderlin?”

An intense silence was broken by the sound of feet dragging themselves into the room. “Herr Uwe?”

Uwe sensed his neighbour's eyes rolling between them, back and forth, like balls of brown wool trailing fear between two paws.

Kresse's gaze fell on the whisperer, who contracted away, and flicked back to Uwe, jetting venom. “Who the fuck are you?”

Uwe, his gun trained on Kresse's chest, held out the key. “Could you kindly open that door, Herr Hölderlin?”

The key was plucked from his hand. He was conscious of the burly figure going round the back of him and edging to the door and the grating of metal on metal. And so he waited, one arm out, watching the other man, the barrel of each gun mimicking their stare like the dark unclosing eyeball of a fish.

“It's open,” came the tremulous voice and the teddy-bear face swivelled as if it had never seen two men pointing guns at each other in a basement room with socks and papers and muddy footprints all around.

Suddenly, Uwe threw his revolver onto the bed. “I mean it, Kresse. Fifty-fifty, as long as you do the work.”

Kresse grinned vindictively. “Get in there. You too, whatever your name is.” And went on grinning at the wall, the stone racks, the files stacked there. “Where is it?” looking about.

“What?”

“One of these is mine.”

Uwe went over and took a file out. He went further along the wall and took out another. But Kresse still stood there, making his calculations. “All these files, boss . . .” his voice tinkling, his gaze no longer insulting.

Then in a move so unhurried and effortless that Kresse didn't comprehend until too late, Uwe put his hand to the wall and like someone tugging the night behind him he pulled across a shuttered metal door and locked it.

They could hardly hear the banging and crashing in the hallway. “I don't think it will last long,” handing Hölderlin the revolver. “But perhaps you might wait until I get back.”

“It will be my pleasure to do this, Herr Uwe. As always.”

Alone in the precious cellar, Kresse could scream until he was blue in the face.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“M
Y COLLEAGUE – WHAT HE
was planning, it was insufferable.” Uwe turned his tired eyes to the giraffes. The female took the calf's tail between her lips and licked it and rested her head on its rump and butted gently with her horns. “It went over the limit. Really, it went over the limit.”

Peter waited for him to say more, not drawing breath. But he seemed far away, on the scorched savannah, the sun fizzing through the thorn trees.

“Not too near the rail!” A mother calling to her child brought Uwe prowling back.

“Look,” removing the magazine from his coat pocket and unrolling it. Tucked between advertisements for harness straps and depth sounders, a postcard. “This was in your file.”

A giraffe photographed in Hamburg zoo. And Peter, as soon as he saw it, understood the reason. He turned the postcard over. Postmarked April 7, 1983. Addressed to “Snjólaug” at the department of psychiatry, KarlMarx University.

Peter stared at the two crimson stamps, his handwriting legible but changed beyond recognition. “Dearest Snowleg, How will you ever forgive me? I must see you again. I love you, Peter. PS This reminds me of you.”

“How come you have this?”

“I was one of her case officers.”

In the year his wife absconded to the West, Morneweg had recruited Uwe. Where once he worked for the “prevention, disclosure and combating of underground political activity”, today Uwe sold bread-machines. In 1982, Morneweg empowered him to set up a unit whose task was to gather smell-samples of those critical of the regime. Over the following months he was sensible of a deepening in the old man's regard for his work. He was promoted and, because of his excellent English, Morneweg used him on occasion to check the accuracy of certain transcripts. In March 1983, Morneweg asked Uwe to sit in on his interrogation of a young woman suspected of plotting an escape to the West with an Englishman.

“I can keep this?”

“Of course. It's yours.”

Peter tucked it into his pocket. Who was this man? Was he going to lead him up the garden path? Uwe had given him a postcard, but was he now going to say, “I don't want money myself – however, for another five thousand Marks I can introduce you to someone who may have seen her four years ago”?

“Tell me – what did you do to her? What did you actually do? Did you hurt her?”

“Did I hurt her?” The question took Uwe by surprise. “No, I didn't hurt her.”

Peter saw the surprise and having expected to be shaken down he felt a wave of relief. A memory of Malory on the shelf next to
L.A. Woman
and a fox-cheeked girl stirred in his memory. “Listen, you're very kind to have come here, to bring the file . . .” A wooden stall, water boiling in a mug, and beyond the tangerine curtain the names being called – “Leadley, Liptrot, Hithersay, Tweed . . .” He wanted to go as far as he could. “You see,” expelling the words in the way he used to say
Sum
, “I did something really terrible and it's been haunting me.”