Flashback

Chapter Seven

Berlin, two hours after the crash

Viewed from the S-Bahn carriage, the low, violet sky above Berlin took Jem back to mornings camping on Dartmoor when she was a teenager—when she was a good girl, outdoorsy and bookish rolled into one. She smelled grass instead of the snug carriage air. She felt the dull, scratched handle of a pot instead of the metal frame of the seat in front of her. I’m looking at your future, Good Girl, she thought, trying to project her thoughts backwards, and it features rain, umbrellas and a metric assload of rye bread.

Jem took her prepaid mobile phone from her rucksack. She dialled Wolfgang’s number.

‘Pick up, you lazy git.’

He did not answer.

‘This is what’s happened,’ she said to his answer machine. Her vernacular was back, and it was a dish she would serve cold for Wolfgang. ‘I’m still in Berlin. Yeah, deal with it. I got as far as the airport, but I had to cut and run. I couldn’t go through with it. I don’t want to play any more. I’ll explain. I’m on my way back to yours.’ She looked at the information board at the front of the carriage. Orange letters slid by, as if on their own business. ‘I’ll take my time. Sleep. I’ll bring croissants.’

There was no need to think of Saskia. That story had ended. Curiosity: satisfied.

She twisted her fist around the metal handle of the seat in front. Revved it. Instead of the carriage seat, Jem saw one in the double-decker bus that had taken her to St Maynard’s School. She had once put her teeth on the metal rail just to feel the bus through her skull. The metal had been cold and oddly electric. Jem: hanging onto the bus by her teeth. Her hands in their fingerless gloves. Neeeeow. Her friends laughing.

And now this.

At her changeovers, she loitered on the platforms. She crossed Berlin in long, thoughtful strokes. Zigging one way, zagging the other. She was brittle but cheerful as she turned into Wolfgang’s road. It was raining and paper ribbons fluttered from the low branches of the tree near the launderette. Cars planed through the water. Jem was happy in the puddles. She could handle a doobie-doob-doob around a lamppost and a no-nonsense look from a German policeman. All the while, she worked on the speech she would give Wolfgang. It would make her intentions to leave him clear as crystal. She would fly east. She would watch the Urals pass beneath her aeroplane and move on to her Plan B.

She stopped in the drizzle.

There was a man outside the apartment building. He was leaning against the barrier that admitted cars to the rear of the block. His gloves were the colour of midnight arrest and his expensive suit did nothing for the dull impression he made: police from sensible shoes to flat-top military hairdo.

‘Well, doobie-doob-doob,’ she whispered.

He turned to her.

‘Wer bist du? Was willst du hier?’

Jem hesitated. There was a wide pavement between them. She felt the urge to run but knew it would be disastrous.

‘Nichts. Ich bin verloren.’

The man withdrew a pair of glasses and put them on. They were NHS retro, black like his gloves. ‘Are you English?’

Jem said nothing. She stared. It was natural, she told herself, to distrust him, no matter how guilty she felt.

‘Don’t be worried,’ he said, smiling. His age slipped from forty to thirty. ‘I apologise for my manner. It is cold and wet. I am a policeman. My name is Inspector Karel Duczyński. I am employed by the Bundeskriminalamt. I could show you some identification if you come closer.’

Jem bit the inside of her cheek. The steady voice inside her, the compass by which she had always steered, whispered escape.

‘Madam, I must ask if you are here to see Wolfgang Klenze.’

‘I’m not here at all.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m just passing by.’

‘Please. Let us talk briefly and I then can, so to say, exclude you from my query.’

I wonder, she thought, if this has anything to do with the plans for homemade explosives in Wolfgang’s back pocket. Jesus, Saskia.

‘Inquiry. It’s ‘inquiry’.’

‘Inquiry. Thank you. Your name?’

‘Nancy Drew.’

The inspector tilted his head. ‘Do you live in this building, Miss Drew?’

‘Nancy Drew just passing through.’

‘But your voice sounds familiar.’

‘We English must sound alike.’

‘Earlier, a young English woman left a message on Wolfgang’s answer machine.’ He shook his head, as though dismissing any inference she might have made. ‘The woman called herself Jem, not Nancy. But if you are to see her, please tell her that I would like to have a conversation. She is not for any trouble.’

Jem glanced at the pavement, toed a broken slab, and looked up.

‘What’s your name again?’ she asked.

‘Yes, it is difficult to remember.’ He produced a white deck of cards. He dealt one to himself and raised it like a cigarette. ‘Please?’

When it was clear the inspector would not move, Jem walked to him and took the card. Her fingers trembled. She put it in the pocket of her coat. His expression suggested that he had complete knowledge of her, but Jem reassured herself that the look was standard issue, like his handcuffs.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked.

His composure slipped for a moment. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You’re just waiting here. Standing in the rain.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Well,’ said Jem, as she walked away, thumbs in her belt loops. ‘You know what they say about your job.’

‘That it is mostly legwork?’

Still walking, she said, ‘Ooh, you’re good. You read my mind.’

‘It’s nothing. A cliché.’ He looked at his feet. ‘I hope you find your way, Miss Drew.’

Jem bounced around Berlin for the remainder of the day. She told herself, with each stop, that she would hole up and work through the implications of a policeman hanging around Wolfgang’s apartment. She had certainly committed a crime by giving him a false name. Did that leave her with no option but to return to England? She rather hoped it did. There was little of her loyalty to Wolfgang left. But she did not quite hate him enough. Somehow, she had to find out where he was held, and for what. Then she had to talk to him without becoming an accessory or suspect. What did they have on him? There was the con work, yes, like the discovery of Saskia’s gambling system. Jem knew, however, that in the last month Wolfgang had begun to move in another direction altogether. He would go missing for days and return with cash in a plastic bag that he called his Turkish suitcase. He slept with a knife beneath his pillow. Who was he becoming? Who was she becoming?

Enough.

Jem’s stopped at Potsdamer Platz. She knew a café nearby. There she sat, and the thoughts and plans and half-predictions that filled her attention soon moved out of focus. She found herself dozing on her folded arms when a waiter tapped her shoulder with a pen.

‘Fräulein, hier können Sie nicht schlafen.’

Her metal chair was cold, the table colder and the contempt of the waiter subzero. She had to fob him off. Still, no point packing her ideas into the meat grinder of her German language skills.

In English, she said, ‘I’m waiting for a friend.’

‘Zwei Euro fuffzich.’

Jem stared at him. Then she tipped the contents of her purse onto her palm and let him take whatever for the untouched coffee. Like what-ever. As his fingertips walked over the coins, she thought about springing her hand shut. Nobody expects the English humour.

About then, the ARD Tagesschau news programme appeared on the giant screen above the counter. Germany’s hang-dog chancellor, whose name Jem could never remember, was talking from the steps of the Reichstag.

The waiter frowned and fussed. He selected a coin.

Jem watched a banner roll across the bottom of the screen. ‘DFU Flug Berlin-Mailand abgestürzt—keine Überlebenden’.

Jem’s smile straightened.

‘Berlin-Mailand’?

The words plugged the holes in her thoughts, suffocating her playfulness. This was the flight she had a ticket for. But why was it on the telly?

Keine Ueberlebenden.

‘Excuse me, could you tell what keine Ueberlebenden means?’

The waiter completed his work on her palm and shook his head. ‘I think you should go now, please. Sleep somewhere else.’

Jem’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. The programme cut to grainy footage of woodland. The camera shook, tilted to mossy ground, then refocused on a blemish in the sky. It might have been a bird of prey. But, with a perceptual switch, Jem saw that it was an aeroplane in a vertical dive. The camera followed the plane until trees blotted the view.

‘Keine Ueberlebenden means ‘no survivors’,’ said the waiter, wiping the table around her elbows. ‘It is very sad news.’

By midnight, at the end of a nightmarish day riding the underground and staring through everyone and everything, Jem found herself at the bottom of the steps to Saskia’s apartment building. The rain had worked its way down her collar. Her damp tights itched and a pimple had taken root in the corner of her mouth. She dallied between the desperate hope that Saskia was alive—in her apartment and cursing Jem—to the certainty that Saskia’s essence yet walked, unreflected, across its ebony floor. Jem pressed and pressed again at the button marked ‘Frau Doktor Dorfer’.

You didn’t get on the plane. You came home. Please.

‘Hallo?’ said a voice, male and unfamiliar.

‘Um, hello. Who is this? Inspector?’

The door buzzed. Jem pushed through to the stairwell, which was dark and echoic. She touched the light and heard its rattlesnake timer rotate. Her tired legs trembled with each step. When she reached Saskia’s door, she found it open an inch. A sound behind her reignited her fear, but it was only her rucksack, settling.

The timer for the stairwell light stopped.

The darkness closed down.

‘Hello?’

With a click, light erupted from the opening doorway. An old gentleman stood there. His eyes were rheumy and his eyebrows stately ticks of white. His thin hair was rusty at the temples. He wore a pullover with shoulder patches and rested both hands on a short, ivory cane. Despite his age, there was something of Saskia about him. The apartment staircase rose, behind him, to darkness.

‘You must be one of Saskia’s friends.’ His accent was American.

Jem wanted to reply that, no, she was Saskia’s girlfriend, but the word would not do.

‘Saskia…’

He cupped her elbow.

‘My poor girl, come inside.’

She slipped from her coat, which was heavy with rain, and dumped her rucksack in the space where Saskia stored her umbrellas and black, flat shoes. She followed the stranger up the apartment stairs. His shoes were wet too. At the top landing, he turned and tapped his left shin with the cane. ‘Excuse my slowness. It is sensitive to the weather.’

‘The hallway light is on the left at the top.’

‘I know it. Here.’

He pressed it, and Saskia’s spirit returned with a flash: the antique phone; the ‘wooden man’ kung fu dummy with Jem’s special-occasion knickers hanging from an arm; a poster from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, the yucca, the curtained door, the sideboard with weight training gloves crossed on top, the ebony floor. The smell of toast made that morning and the perfume mixed for Saskia in the south of France.

The man turned. He, too, had been contemplating the hallway. ‘Dick Cory. But everyone calls me Cory.’

‘I’m Jem.’

At last, they shook hands. His palm had a rough knot of skin and, on instinct, Jem turned it over.

‘An old burn,’ said Cory. He made a fist but Jem had already seen the reversed letters.

‘‘Pyrene’?’

‘They make fire extinguishers.’ He smiled. ‘Ironically.’

‘I came to see if Saskia…’

‘Let me fix you a drink.’

‘She keeps a whisky bottle on the right of the dishwasher.’

Cory searched her face. ‘I know.’