Century Rain

TWENTY-TWO

Auger knew it was the right number as soon as the man answered the telephone. His authoritative, slightly schoolmasterly tone only confirmed her suspicions.

“Herr Altfeld.”

“Excuse the interruption, mein Herr, and excuse my very poor German, but I am trying to trace the Herr Altfeld who is an employee of Kaspar Metals—”

The call was terminated before Auger could say another word.

“What happened?” Floyd asked.

“I think I struck gold. He rang off a little too enthusiastically.”

“Try again. In my experience, people always answer the telephone sooner or later.”

She dialled through to the hotel switchboard again and waited while her call was connected. “Herr Altfeld, once again I must—”

The line crashed dead again. Auger tried once more, but this time the telephone rang and rang without being picked up. Auger imagined the sound echoing around a well-appointed hallway, where the phone rested on a little table under a print of a familiar oil painting—a Pissaro or a Manet, perhaps. She persisted, allowing the phone to keep ringing. Eventually, her patience was rewarded by the receiver being picked up.

“Herr Altfeld? Please let me speak.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“Mein Herr, I know you talked to Susan White. My name is Auger… Verity Auger. I’m Susan’s sister.”

There was a pause, during which it seemed quite likely that the man would hang up the telephone again. “Fräulein White did not have the good grace to keep her appointment,” Altfeld eventually replied.

“That’s because someone murdered her.”

“Murdered her?” he repeated, incredulously.

“That’s why you never saw her. I’m here in Berlin with a private detective.” Floyd’s advice: tell the truth wherever possible. It could open a surprising number of doors. “We think Susan was killed for a reason, and that it had something to do with the work being done at Kaspar Metals.”

“As I said, I have nothing to tell you.”

“You were good enough to offer to speak to my sister, mein Herr. Will you at least do us the same favour? We won’t take up much of your time, and then I promise you won’t hear from us again.”

“Things have changed. It was a mistake to talk to Fräulein White, and it would be an even bigger mistake to talk to you.”

“Why—is someone putting pressure on you?”

“Pressure,” the man said, laughing hollowly. “No, I have no pressure at all now. A generous retirement settlement saw to that.”

“Then you don’t work at Kaspar Metals any more?”

“Nobody works there any more. The factory burnt down.”

“Look, mein Herr, I think it would really help if we could talk. It can be anywhere of your choosing. Even if it’s just for five minutes—”

“I am sorry,” Altfeld said, and hung up again.

“Pity,” Auger said, rubbing her forehead. “I thought I was getting somewhere that time. But he really doesn’t want to talk to us.”

“We’re not giving up,” Floyd said.

“Shall I try to ring through again?”

“He probably won’t talk to you. But it doesn’t matter—we know where he lives now.”

The black Duesenberg taxi growled to a halt at one end of a leafy suburban street in the suburb of Wedding, five kilometres from the heart of the city. Long lines of cheaply built dwellings housed the many workers and bureaucrats who toiled in the nearby factories. The Borsig Locomotive Works was the largest employer in the area, but the Siemens factory was not far away and there was a string of other industrial concerns in the neighbourhood, including Kaspar Metals, they presumed.

“That’s the house,” Auger said. “The one on the corner. What shall I tell the driver?”

“Tell him to pull over a couple of houses beyond it.”

She said something in German. The taxi purred forward, then pulled to the side of the road and slid in between two parked cars.

“Now what?” Auger asked.

“Tell him to keep the meter running while we check out the house.”

Auger had another brief exchange with the driver. “He says if we pay now he’ll wait another ten minutes.”

“Then pay the man.”

Auger had already changed some of her funds into Deutschmarks. She passed a couple of notes to the taxi driver and repeated her instruction for him to wait. The driver turned off the engine and they got out.

“I’m impressed with your German,” Floyd commented as they opened the garden gate and walked up the little gravel path to the front door. “Is that what they teach all the nice young spies?”

“They thought it might come in handy,” Auger said.

Floyd rang the bell. Presently, a shape loomed behind the frosted glass and the door creaked open. The man standing in the hallway was in his fifties or sixties, dressed in shirt and braces, with small metal-rimmed spectacles and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was shorter and thinner than Floyd. His features were delicate, and in his very fine hands he held a duster and an item of pottery.

“Herr Altfeld?” Auger said, followed by something in German that included the word “telephone.” That was as far as she got before the man closed the door.

“Shall I try again?” she asked.

“He won’t open it. He doesn’t want to speak to us.”

Auger leaned in and rang the bell, but the man did not reappear. “That was him, though, don’t you think?”

“I guess so. This is the address that goes with the number you called.”

“I wonder what’s got him so scared.”

“I can think of a thing or two,” Floyd said.

They walked back down the garden path and closed the gate behind them.

“Short of breaking in and tying him to a chair,” Auger said, “how would you suggest we proceed now?”

“We wait in the taxi. If you can keep the driver copacetic, we’ll just sit tight here until Altfeld makes a move.”

“You think he will?”

“Once he’s sure we’ve left the neighbourhood, he’ll want to get out of that house so he doesn’t have to put up with us ringing the doorbell or calling him on the telephone.”

“This is all familiar territory to you, I guess, Wendell?”

“Yes,” he said. “But usually the worst thing I have to worry about is a slug on the chin.”

“And this time?”

“A slug on the chin sounds just dandy.”

Auger persuaded the taxi driver to take them once around the block, so that they would appear to be leaving the scene if Altfeld happened to be watching them from behind his curtains. Once they had returned to Altfeld’s road, the taxi driver parked the car in a different space further up the road than before, but still within sight of the house on the corner.

“Tell the driver he may be in for a long wait,” Floyd said, “but that we’ll pay him more than he’d earn taking other rides.”

“He still doesn’t like it,” Auger said, after passing on Floyd’s instructions. “He says it’s his job to take fares, not play private detective.”

“Feed him another note.”

She opened her purse again and spoke to the driver, who shrugged and took the proffered money.

“What does he say now?” Floyd asked.

“He says he could get used to his new profession.”

They waited and waited. The driver thumbed through the Berliner Morgenpost from front to back. Just when Floyd was beginning to doubt himself, the front door of Altfeld’s house opened and a man emerged wearing a raincoat and carrying a small greaseproof-paper bag. Altfeld closed the garden gate behind him and set off down the street, stopping next to one of the parked cars and getting inside. The vehicle—a black nineteen-fifties Bugatti with white-wall tyres—grumbled into life and bounced away down the road.

“Tell the driver to follow that car,” Floyd said, “and remind him to keep a nice distance.”

Contrary to Floyd’s expectations, the taxi driver turned out to be reasonably proficient at tailing the other car, with Floyd only having to urge him to hold back once or twice. Two or three times, the driver swerved confidently down a side road and re-emerged after some twists and turns just a few cars behind the one they were following.

The pursuit took them back into town along more or less the same route they’d followed to reach Wedding. Soon they had crossed the Spree and were skirting the edge of the Tier-garten, Berlin’s vast green lung. Near the western end—not far from the Hotel Am Zoo—the Bugatti slowed and veered into a parking place. The taxi cruised past, only stopping when they had turned a corner. Auger paid off the driver while Floyd walked to the corner and eyed Altfeld’s car. He was just in time to observe the man emerge from the car, still carrying the paper bag. They followed him all the way to the Elephant Gate of the Zoologischer Garten, watching from a distance as he paid his entrance fee and strolled inside. Floyd knew the zoo very well. Greta and he had visited it on almost every one of their trips to Berlin, strolling around on carefree afternoons until the sky turned dark and the shimmering neon lights of the city beckoned.

Overhead, the sky threatened rain but never quite delivered it, like a yapping dog with no bite. Early on a Sunday afternoon, the zoo was beginning to fill up with families accompanied by fractious children who had a habit of bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. Floyd and Auger bought tickets and kept a decent distance between themselves and Altfeld. The crowds were just thick enough to provide cover, while still allowing frequent glimpses of the man in the raincoat.

They followed Altfeld to the penguin enclosure. Ringed by a spiked iron fence, it was a sunken concrete landscape of artificial rocks and shelves surrounding a shallow, squalid-looking lake. It was feeding time. A young man in shorts flung fish at the anxious, pressing mob of penguins. Altfeld stood by the railings, at the front of the small gathering of onlookers. There was no sign that he knew he was being followed. Soon the zookeeper picked up his empty bucket and moved elsewhere, and Altfeld took that as his cue to dig into his little paper bag and hurl silvery titbits to the birds.

Across the bowl of the penguin enclosure, someone caught Floyd’s eye. It was Auger: she had made her way to the other side and had somehow managed to get to the front of the crowd of spectators, and was now pressed hard against the railings. Rather than paying attention to Altfeld, she was staring in obvious transfixed fascination at the bustling congregation of penguins, with their neat black morning suits, silly little flippers and expressions of utmost dignity, even as they belly-flopped into the water or fell over backwards. It was as if she had never seen penguins before.

Floyd guessed they didn’t have many zoos in Dakota.

The onlookers began to disperse, leaving only a few people behind, amongst them Altfeld. As he flung the birds the last few scraps from his bag, he watched the penguins with the resigned detachment of a general overseeing some appalling military defeat.

Floyd and Auger approached the old man.

“Herr Altfeld?” Auger asked.

He looked around sharply, dropping the paper bag, and replied in English, “I don’t know who you people are, but you should not have followed me.”

“We only need you to answer a few questions,” Floyd said.

“If I had anything to say, I would have already said it.”

Auger stepped closer. “I’m Verity,” she said. “Susan was my sister. She was murdered three weeks ago. I know you corresponded with her about the Kaspar contract. I think her murder had something to with whatever that contract was for.”

“There is nothing I can tell you about that contract.”

“But you know the contract we mean,” Floyd said. “You know it was out of the ordinary.”

He kept his voice low. “An artistic commission. Nothing special about that.”

“You don’t believe that, as comforting as it might seem,” Auger said.

“All we need to know,” Floyd said, “is where the objects were sent. Just one address will do.”

“Even if I was prepared to tell you—which I am not—that information no longer exists.”

“You don’t keep your paperwork filed away somewhere for reference?” Auger asked, raising an eyebrow in surprise.

“The documentation was… disposed of.”

Floyd blocked Altfeld’s view of the birds. “But you must remember something.”

“I never committed those details to memory.”

“Because someone told you not to?” Auger asked. “Was that what happened, Mr. Altfeld? Did someone put pressure on you not to pay too much attention?”

“It was a complicated contract. Of course I paid attention.”

“Give us something,” Floyd said. “Anything. Just the approximate district in Paris to which one of the spheres was shipped would be better than nothing.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Was the function of the spheres ever discussed?” Floyd persisted.

“As I said, it was an artistic commission.” Altfeld’s voice had become tense, and his composure seemed ready to snap at any moment. “Kaspar Metals was engaged in many other metallurgical contracts during the same period. Provided the specifications were followed, there was no need for us to question the subsequent use to which the items would be put.”

“But you must have been curious,” Floyd said.

“No. I had no curiosity whatsoever.”

“We think the spheres might be part of a weapon,” Auger said. “At the very least, components of something with a military application. The same thought must have occurred to you. Didn’t that give you pause for thought?”

“The purpose of the objects was a matter for the export bureau, not me.”

“Nice get-out,” Floyd said.

Altfeld looked up at him. “If questions had been raised, export of the objects would have been blocked. They were delivered, so the matter is closed.”

“And that lets you off the hook, does it?” Floyd asked.

“My conscience is clear. If this troubles you, I apologise. May I be permitted to watch the penguins in peace now?”

“That contract was part of something evil,” Auger said. “You can’t wash your hands of it that easily.”

“What I do with my hands,” Altfeld said, “is entirely my business.”

“Tell us what you know,” Floyd insisted.

“What I know is that you should stop asking questions and leave this matter alone. Leave Berlin now and return to wherever it is you came from.” He regarded Auger. “I can’t place your accent. I am normally very good, even with English speakers.”

“She’s from Dakota,” Floyd said, “but you don’t need to worry about that. What you do need to worry about is telling me who has put the fear of God into you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

By now, they were the only people anywhere near the penguin enclosure. Floyd saw his moment, knowing he’d regret his actions immediately, but also well aware that there was no other means of getting anything useful out of Altfeld. He lunged and grabbed Altfeld by the collar of his raincoat and shoved him hard against the railings with his back to the enclosure, knocking the wind out of him.

“Now listen sehr gut,” Floyd said. “I’m not an impatient man. I’m not a man who normally does this kind of thing. Matter of fact, I’m usually an easy-going sort of fellow.” Altfeld wriggled, trying ineffectually to escape Floyd’s grasp. “But the problem is that a friend of mine is in a lot of trouble.”

“I know nothing about any friend of yours,” Altfeld wheezed.

“I never said you did. But this little contract of yours—the one you don’t want to talk about—is connected to the trouble my friend is in. It’s also connected to the murder of Miss Auger’s sister. That makes two of us who’d like to get closer to the truth, and only one of you standing in our way.”

“Let go of me,” Altfeld said. “Then perhaps we can have a reasonable conversation.”

“Don’t hurt him, Wendell,” Auger said.

Floyd looked around: no other spectators just yet. He kept the man pinned against the railings. “This is as reasonable as it gets. Now why don’t you tell me about the people who wanted these spheres made?”

“I will tell you nothing except that you are better off having as little to do with them as possible.”

“Ah,” Floyd said. “Progress—of a sort.” He rewarded Altfeld with a slight reduction of pressure, allowing him to stand fully on his feet again. “The question is—if they’re so bad, why did you deal with them in the first place? Surely Kaspar Metals didn’t need the work that badly?”

Altfeld looked around, doubtless hoping for assistance to wander by. “Work was always welcome. We were not in the business of turning contracts away.”

“Not even contracts as technically demanding as this one?” Auger asked.

He glared at her, as if she should be ashamed to have an opinion on the matter. “There was nothing unusual about it at first. The contract appeared relatively simple, as these things go. We were happy to take it on. But as the work progressed, so did the demands for the quality of the finished product. The specification became tighter, the tolerances smaller. The copper-aluminium alloy was difficult to cast and machine. At first we didn’t even have measuring instruments capable of calibrating the objects’ shape to the necessary degree of accuracy. And then there was the whole business of the cryogenic suspension—”

“Cryogenic what?” Auger interjected, alarm bells ringing in her head.

“I’ve said too much.”

Floyd took a renewed grip on Altfeld’s raincoat and lifted him higher, until the back of his collar snagged on the spiked points of the iron railings. Floyd let him dangle. “You’ve only just whetted my appetite.”

Altfeld’s breath caught in his throat. “Late in the contract, the client revealed that the spheres would have to withstand immersion in liquid helium, at a temperature only a whisker above absolute zero. This in turn created numerous difficulties. Now leave me alone!”

“It sounds as if you were being asked to do the impossible,” Floyd said. “Why didn’t you just back out of the contract, if the details kept changing?”

“We tried,” Altfeld said. “And that is when I learned of our clients’ capacity for ruthlessness. There was to be no backing out, they said.”

“I take it you called their bluff.”

“Yes. And then one of my senior managers—the man who had conducted the last round of negotiations with my clients—was found dead in his home.”

“Murdered?” Floyd asked.

“He had been bludgeoned to death in his conservatory. Yet this had happened on a sunny afternoon, when his home was in full view of many witnesses. No one was seen to come and go. At least, no one who could possibly have committed the crime.”

“Except maybe a child,” Floyd said.

Altfeld nodded gravely, and suddenly all the fight drained out of him, as if he had just been told something he desperately wished not to be true. Floyd sensed the change in his mood, as if on some level Altfeld was glad to be able to talk to someone at last, no matter how fearful the consequences.

“During the final stages of the contract, when the spheres were being evaluated and shipped, I saw children all over the place. They followed me wherever I went. They were always around, visible just out of the corner of my eye. I haven’t seen any since the factory burnt down. I hope I go to my grave still able to say that.”

“They frightened you?” Auger asked.

“Once, I was close enough to one to look it in the face. It is an experience I hope never to repeat.”

Auger leaned closer to him. “I can understand you being afraid of those children, Mister Altfeld. You were right to be afraid. They are very dangerous and they will kill to protect their interests. But we’re not working with them. In fact, we’re doing all in our power to stop them.”

“Then you are even more foolish than I suspected. If you had any sense you would leave this matter well alone.”

“We just need an address,” Floyd said. “A lead. That’s all we’re asking for. Then you won’t hear from us again.”

“But I will hear from them.”

“If you help us, then maybe we can stop them before they reach you,” Auger said.

Altfeld let out a small, henlike clucking sound, as if this was the least convincing reassurance he’d ever heard.

“At least tell us where the production took place,” Floyd said.

“I will tell you nothing. If you have found your way to me, I am sure you are capable of continuing your investigation without my assistance.”

Floyd found some strength he didn’t know he had and hauled Altfeld even higher, lifting his collar free of the railing. He moved his grip down the buttons of his raincoat until he had the man by the waist and then levered him higher, until his head and upper body were leaning back over the railings and the sheer drop into the enclosure.

Altfeld let out a gasp of fright as his centre of gravity began to shift backwards.

“Tell me,” Floyd hissed, “tell me or I’ll push you over.”

Auger tried to pull Floyd away from Altfeld, but Floyd had had enough of lies and evasions. He didn’t care how scared this man was; how innocent a part he had played in some larger conspiracy. All he cared about was Custine and whatever it was that had made Auger wake up screaming.

“Give me an address, you bastard. Give me an address or I’ll feed you to the birds.”

Altfeld wheezed, as if suffering some kind of seizure. Between ragged breaths he gasped out, “Fifteen… building fifteen.”

Floyd lowered him to the ground, leaving him sagging against the railings.

“That’s a good start.”

By the time they returned to the hotel, it was too late to consider driving out to the industrial district where Kaspar Metals had been located. “We’ll take a cab out there first thing tomorrow,” Floyd said. “Even if we don’t find anyone around to talk to, there might be something left behind after the fire that we can use.”

“Altfeld was keeping something back,” Auger said. “What, I don’t know, but he wasn’t telling us the whole story.”

“Do you think he knew anything about Silver Rain?”

“No, I’m pretty sure he didn’t. Like I said, there simply isn’t the manufacturing base available here to put it together. The metal spheres are part of something different.”

“But probably related,” Floyd said. “Maybe we should pay Altfeld another visit, see if we can squeeze something else out of him.”

“We should leave him alone,” Auger said. “He just seemed like a scared old man.”

“They always do.”

“Perhaps there’s nothing else of use he could have told us,” she said, hoping to steer Floyd away from the idea of tormenting Altfeld further.

“Maybe there isn’t, but someone has to know more. Altfeld might have handled the contracts, but whoever was doing the actual machining—the factory-floor work—must have had a better idea of what those spheres were for, if they were ever going to calibrate them correctly.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“We’ll go to the site of the factory first thing tomorrow and see what we can find out. If that opens up new lines of enquiry, we’ll follow them. You said there was enough money to keep us in this hotel for a while?”

“Yes,” she said, “but we can’t stay here for ever. Or at least I can’t. I need to be back in Paris by Tuesday. That means catching the overnight train tomorrow evening.”

“Why the hurry? We only arrived here this morning.”

“I just need to be back in Paris. Can we leave it at that?”

They went out to eat at seven, riding the S-bahn to Friedrich-strasse and then walking back along the banks of the Spree until they found a cluster of restaurants near the newly refurbished Reichstag. They ate a good curryworst, followed by chocolate cake, and listened to an old Bavarian couple trying to remember the names of all nineteen of their great-grandchildren.

Afterwards, Floyd and Auger walked the streets until Floyd heard live music coming from the window of a basement bar: guitar-based gypsy jazz of the kind he didn’t hear enough of in Paris these days. He suggested to Auger that they spend half an hour in the bar before returning to the hotel. So down they went into the smoke and light of the music room, the sound suddenly much louder than it had been from the street. Floyd bought Auger a glass of white wine and a shot of brandy for himself. He sipped at his drink, appraising the band as fairly as he could. It was a quintet, with tenor saxophone, piano, double bass, drums and guitar. They were playing “A Night in Tunisia.” The guitarist was good—an earnest young man with thick glasses and a surgeon’s fingers—but the rest of them needed some work. At least they had a band, Floyd thought dolefully.

“Your sort of music?” he asked Auger.

“Not really,” she said, with a shy expression.

“They’re all right. Guitarist has it down, but he shouldn’t stick with these guys. They’re going nowhere.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“So you don’t like jazz, or at least not this sort of jazz. That’s all right. Takes all sorts to make a world.”

“Yes,” Auger said, nodding as if he had said something profound. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“So what do you like?”

“I have trouble with music,” she said.

“All music?”

“All music,” she affirmed. “I’m tone-deaf. It just doesn’t do anything for me.”

Floyd finished the brandy and ordered himself another. The band was now torturing “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Cigarette smoke hung in the air in frozen coils, like a crazy, cloudy sunset in monochrome. “Susan White was the same,” he said.

“The same as what?”

“Blanchard said he never caught her listening to music.”

“It’s not a crime,” Auger replied. “And how did he know what she got up to in her spare time? He can’t have followed her everywhere.”

“She had a wireless in her room, and a phonograph,” Floyd said, “but no one ever heard her listening to music on either of them.”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” Auger said. “All I said was that I’m tone-deaf. I don’t know everything about Susan White.”

“Let’s get out of here,” said Floyd, slamming down his empty glass. “The smoke’s making my eyes water and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the music or the company had anything to do with it.”

They took the train back to the hotel and said a polite goodnight. Floyd took the couch, lying down in his shirt and trousers with a spare blanket for warmth. He couldn’t sleep. The plumbing played a metallic symphony until three in the morning. Through a gap in the curtains he watched neon numerals flicker on and off at the base of the Everest statue and thought of Auger asleep, and how little he knew about her, and how much more he wanted to know.