The Devil's Breath (37 page)

Telemann nodded, remembering the incident, the headlines worldwide, Israeli politicians vowing revenge.

‘You were there?’ he said.

‘Within an hour.’ She nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Working?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you stayed with it. The investigation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Still?’

She looked at him for a moment, unsmiling, then she nodded at the television. ‘No,’ she said. ‘The case is over. The man is dead.’

She left the room, returning to the kitchen, and Telemann heard her singing, an old James Brown number, word-perfect.
To his surprise, the last couple of hours in bed had been hugely successful, and now she was putting it into words for him. ‘
I feel good
…’ she sang. ‘
I feel good
…’

Telemann shook his head, his attention returning to the television. The news magazine had stayed with events in the Middle East. There were shots of masked youths on the West Bank hurling stones at a line of Israeli soldiers. The shots were barely two hours old, and Telemann watched them, fascinated. The soldiers began returning fire, canisters of CS gas, clouds of the stuff drifting down the street. An armoured vehicle appeared. More troops jumped out of the back, running towards the stone-throwing youths. The soldiers were wearing gas masks and carried riot shields and heavy white batons. Most of the youths turned and fled, but the soldiers caught one, clubbing him to the ground, kicking his head and body, then dragging him back towards the armoured vehicle. Telemann turned away, sickened by the endless spiral of violence, the death of some woman in a military prison provoking yet more bloodshed, yet more pain. Where does it end, he thought, hearing Inge in the kitchen, a new song, a different language, lyrics he didn’t recognize, couldn’t understand.

*

The scene inside the hospital was chaotic. McVeigh followed Cela, pushing through the crowd of women inside the big glass doors. Some of the women had come in from the surrounding villages, weathered brown faces, long flowing cotton
thoubs
, spilling out of the ancient buses, fearing the worst. Now they milled aimlessly around, surrounding first a doctor, then a nurse, anyone in a uniform, anyone who might be able to put a name to the rumours. Who had been injured? Who had been killed? How many had the Israelis taken away?

Cela side-stepped a male nurse guarding a pair of swing-doors and gestured for McVeigh to follow. They plunged down a corridor, ignoring the shouts of the nurse. The corridor was wide. On either side, curtained bays held victims of the riot, broken limbs, bloodied faces, bandaged heads. Several youths were still unconscious, lying on stretchers, their faces turned carefully away from the light. Relatives sat beside them, heads
bowed, bodies rocking back and forth, a constant low incantation, hauling them back to consciousness.

In an office at the end of the corridor Cela found Amer. He was standing by the window, arguing with a youth of perhaps nineteen. The youth was half-sitting on the edge of a desk. There was blood on his stone-washed jeans and he was obviously in pain, yet the pain served only to fuel his rage. His face was pale with shock, but his eyes were wild and his voice rose with each fresh outburst. Amer was trying to calm him, his hands flat before him, like a conductor or a priest. He looked exhausted, his suit rumpled, his face shadowed by a day’s growth of beard.

The youth saw Cela by the door. He tried to get off the desk, shrieking her name, pushing Amer away as he tried to restrain him. Cela didn’t hesitate, crossing the room, putting her arms around him, holding his head to her chest. The youth sobbed briefly, then began to shake, a spasm of his whole body, his rage returning, redoubled. McVeigh caught Cela’s eye and went to her side, feeling the youth beginning to collapse, lifting him bodily on to the desk. The youth was still looking at Cela, gabbling in Arabic, his eyes huge in his face, and McVeigh stayed beside him, a target for his flailing limbs, waiting for the worst of the violence to subside. At length the larval flow of Arabic slowed and the youth closed his eyes, his breath coming in shallow gasps, his body beginning to slump on the desk. McVeigh held him for a moment longer, then Cela gestured for him to step away, and he did so, letting a nurse and a doctor in a white coat slip between them. The doctor was carrying a small syringe and a pair of scissors with which he cut quickly up the inside seam of the jeans. The denim parted, peeling back like a banana skin. Above the left knee, where the bloodstains were heaviest, the flesh had been pulped. McVeigh could see bone through the torn sheets of muscle. The doctor examined the wound quickly, calling for something in Arabic, and then injected the syringe into the youth’s thigh. The youth screamed, but the fight had left his body, and when the trolley appeared from the corridor, the rubber mattress still wet with
someone else’s blood, it was a simple job for McVeigh to transfer him.

The trolley disappeared into the corridor and there was a moment’s silence before the phone began to ring. The doctor reached for the phone. He was looking at the nurse, signalling for her to clear the office. Cela understood at once, shepherding McVeigh towards the door. Amer joined them in the corridor. Outside, rising and falling, McVeigh could hear the wail of more sirens.

Amer looked at Cela. Some of the women from the hospital entrance had managed to fight their way into the casualty area. They were stumbling from bay to bay, looking for reassurance, sons, husbands, brothers still alive. McVeigh watched them. The noise was deafening. Then Cela touched him on the arm, told him to follow again, herself and Amer, out through another set of swing-doors, leaving the chaos behind them. They turned a corner, then another, Amer in the lead. At a pair of tall double doors, he paused for a moment, looking at Cela. Then he shrugged, and pushed inside.

McVeigh followed, at once recognizing the smell, sweetish, pungent, a mix of bleach and body fluids. He looked around, letting the double doors swing shut behind him. A bank of tall white fridges lined one wall. There were four dissecting slabs, stainless-steel, and a line of basins with the usual instruments laid out ready for use. On the wall behind was a blackboard, with a box of chalks beside it. The room was empty, two big extractor fans revolving slowly overhead.

McVeigh looked at Cela. ‘Why here?’ he said. ‘Why the morgue?’

‘It’s quiet. We need to talk.’

‘We?’

‘You and me.’ She paused. ‘And Amer.’

McVeigh nodded, waiting. Amer had buttoned his jacket, an automatic gesture of respect. He was looking at his feet, shaking his head. McVeigh shivered. The place felt cold.

‘Who was the boy in the office?’

Amer looked up. ‘His name’s Said. He’s my nephew. He’s
one of the sons of my wife’s sister. The woman I told you about last night. The woman who died in prison. That’s why—’ he nodded at the door ‘—we have so much trouble.’

‘The riot? The gas? Because of your sister-in-law?’

‘Yes. I was hoping the news …’ He shrugged, not finishing the sentence, glancing at Cela.

Cela nodded. ‘We didn’t need this,’ she said. ‘Not all this.’

‘All what?’

‘The violence. The gas. The people from the television.’

‘Why not?’ McVeigh frowned, remembering the conversation in the restaurant. ‘I thought that was the whole point of it. The kids, the
Intifada
. Getting the world to watch.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘But what?’ McVeigh gazed at her, thinking quite suddenly of Yakov sprawled across a Kensington pavement, most of his head blown away. He must have come here, to a place like this, his long body on one of those slabs, ringed by saws, drills, forceps, a pathologist in a white coat. His life would have ended up on a blackboard, a sentence or two of curt anatomical detail, body-weight, vital dimensions, cause of death. McVeigh blinked. Whoever you were, wherever you died, the procedures were just the same.

‘Tell me,’ he said quietly, ‘tell me why he died.’

‘Who?’

‘Yakov.’

Cela looked at him for a long moment, saying nothing. Then she glanced at Amer. He knows, thought McVeigh. He knows, too. Amer shrugged. He looked uncomfortable.

‘We have a problem,’ he said at last. ‘You must help us.’

‘How?’

‘You have to go to America.’

‘
America?
’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow. Perhaps tonight.’ He looked up. ‘Please.’

‘Why?’

Amer glanced across at Cela. She was studying a row of handsaws. Her face was quite expressionless. Then she began to
talk, her voice very low. ‘The woman who died was called Hala. Her husband is called Abu Yussuf. Two months ago he went away from this place, from Ramallah. They took him to America. And they gave him gas.’

‘What kind of gas?’

‘Nerve gas. Tabun gas.’

McVeigh nodded, frowning, trying to follow it. Nerve gas, America, the story ballooning. ‘Where is he now?’ he said. ‘This man?’

Cela looked up for the first time, checking with Amer. Amer nodded. ‘This morning,’ he said quietly, ‘he phoned again this morning. I know where he is.’

McVeigh blinked, then looked at Cela again. ‘And he has the gas? This man?’

‘Yes. We think so.’

‘What will he do with it?’

‘We’re not sure.’ She paused. ‘But he’s a Palestinian. And we know what the world will think if he uses it.’

‘But who sent him? Who gave him the gas?’

Amer was looking at his shoes again. Cela was running a finger slowly along the blade of the nearest saw.

‘We did,’ she said at last. ‘Yakov did.’

*

They were 10 kilometres short of Bremen, late afternoon, before Telemann finally chose the photos he’d use.

He sat in the front of the Mercedes, the wooden box on his lap, flicking through them. Inge, driving, glanced down from time to time, smiling at a particular shot. She’d brought a handful of cassettes with her, British groups mostly, Simple Minds, U2, and she sang along to some of the lyrics, a light, playful voice, her long fingers tap-tapping on the steering-wheel. She’d been singing all day, visibly more relaxed, and when he thought about it properly, Telemann realized what it was. The woman was on vacation. Her work was done.

He extracted a shot of Wulf and propped it on the dashboard. Wulf was sitting on the bed, his back to the wall, his legs stretched out, his belly masking the remains of an erection. His face was shiny with sweat, and his eyes were half-closed, and he
was favouring Inge with a benign leer. He looked like a man replete, the gourmet diner at peace with his appetite. It was a photograph that did him no favours. It was neither athletic, nor inventive, nor physically flattering. It demonstrated nothing but greed. Telemann, beginning to despise the man, loved it.

He glanced at Inge. They’d at last established a relationship of sorts, Telemann gruff, Inge taunting, and from time to time he thought he’d detected glimpses of the real Inge, an altogether more complex proposition, almost certainly Israeli by birth, almost certainly German in origin, very definitely known by a different name back home. Once, standing in the bathroom in the Hamburg apartment, he’d tried to guess it, calling out the names he could remember from his days in Tel Aviv, but she’d appeared in the hall, shaking her head at every one, saying only that she’d grown up by the sea and had shared her childhood with her elder sister. Her sister had been her best friend. They’d both been mad about sailing. And they’d both had a passion for animals. Listening, Telemann had laughed, making the obvious joke about Wulf, but when he’d checked in the mirror, scraping away the last of the lather, he’d been surprised to see the expression on her face, angered and hurt.

Now he nodded at the photo. ‘You sure you want to go through with this?’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Taking me to Dusseldorf?’ He paused. ‘There must be simpler ways.’

She shook her head, reaching for the controls on the radio, turning down the music.

‘You’d be stopped,’ she said. ‘It’s in the papers, too.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Oh?’

‘No.’ Telemann shook his head. ‘Whatever you’ve got on Wulf, whatever he’s done, I’m sure there’s paperwork. Evidence. Proof. Just give me that. Then we call it quits and I go home.’

Inge frowned. ‘But you want names,’ she said. ‘You want to know what he’s done with the chemical. Where it’s gone.’ She looked across at him. ‘Isn’t that what you want?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then you must talk to him. He’s the only one who knows. I don’t.’

‘And you think he’ll tell me?’

She smiled and said nothing for a moment. Then she looked across at him again, an expression he’d seen once or twice before, cool, curious.

‘He has an alarm system in the apartment,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s a series of buttons. One of them’s under the table in the main lounge. There’s another in the bedroom, beneath the top surface of the cabinet, his side of the bed, the side by the window. The disconnect is in the fuse box at the bottom of the closet in the hall. Once you’ve tripped it—’ she shrugged ‘—I don’t think you’ll have a problem.’

Telemann nodded, thoughtful, looking at the photo on the dashboard. ‘Thanks,’ he said drily.

‘Pleasure.’ She glanced across at him again. ‘One other thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Pain doesn’t bother him. On the contrary, he quite likes it.’

‘Ah—’ Telemann nodded, still eyeing the photo ‘—so what does hurt him?’

She smiled for a second time, checking her lipstick in the mirror, then trod hard on the accelerator to pass a long line of trucks.

‘Humiliation,’ she said.

They reached Dusseldorf at half-past seven, a livid, smoky twilight, the access roads to the autobahn still busy with traffic. Inge drove into the business area, block after block of glass-walled towers and glittering store-fronts. Within sight of the central railway station, she parked by the side of the road. A tram hummed past, a line of heads buried in newspapers. She turned off the engine and nodded down the street. At the corner of the block was a large square building clad in black glass. On the front, five storeys up, in huge red gothic letters, the single word, WULF. Telemann looked at it, not saying anything. The belly, he thought. The appetite. The beast uncaged.