Flashback

Chapter Twelve

The Fernsehturm, Berlin’s TV and radio tower, rose from Alexanderplatz to a height that seemed unsupportable given its thin spire. The pavilion at the base always reminded Jem of those jagged bubbles in comics that appear when the hero punches the baddie. Pow! Up goes the tower. Almost at the top was a glittering mirror ball. Very disco. Inside the ball was an observation deck and restaurant. Above it was a thick ring of antennas and, higher still, a long shaft coloured red and white like a barber’s pole. Long ago, Danny had told her what the colours meant; what barbers had once done to people.

For a while, she waited on Gontardstrasse beneath one of the huge trees and watched people entering and leaving Alexanderplatz Station. It was cold. She had bought a scarf on the way and its edges flicked now and then as if shooing something off her shoulder. Jem shrugged inside her duffle coat. There were too many people, trams, and taxis. If someone was following her—someone like Cory—she might never know.

She approached the tower and entered the glass-walled pavilion. She added herself to the tourists queueing for the lifts. The atrium was uninspiring. It felt like a departure lounge to nowhere. That, and the connecting thought to aeroplanes, put more wood on the fire of her anxiety. Jem hugged herself. The truth of it was that Danny scared her more than Cory, more than the police, more than the half-heard revs-up, revs-down of failing jet engines on an aeroplane going down, down, down. There were so many words between her and her twin brother that needed to be unsaid. Jem needed a reversal, the mother of all undo buttons.

‘You see, there’s an anxiety in the background.’

The therapist has smelled something. Her blood is up.

‘Yes?’

The blood going down. The TV tower. Danny, what did the barbers do once upon a time?

‘It’s like the hiss of a TV tuned to a dead channel.’

Oh, how analogue. (TVs don’t do that anymore. No tuning. No snow. Those snows are gone.)

The therapist leans forward. Her MiniDisc recorder spins, swallowing their words byte by byte.

‘This hiss actually comes from the music box, doesn’t it?’

Jem looks at her. The therapist thinks she has made a discovery. There, in her eye: the mote of triumph. The self-congratulation and validation. I am a good therapist. Breathe. I am a good therapist.

Jem will hear that sentence one more time—I am a good therapist—when she confronts the woman on her doorstep, months after this conversation. ‘Is this real? Did I misremember what we said?’

‘How did you know about the music box?’

The therapist smiles. Her baggy, friendly face is close to Jem’s. Anything that Jem says will now be added to that growing edifice of certainty.

The MiniDisc recorder spins. The blood spirals down.

‘You mentioned the music box yesterday, when you were under. Do you remember the tune?’

The tune.

Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ.

Danny was waiting for her on the observation deck of the tower, unmistakable against the ashy sky. He was taller and broader than most—rowing, rugby—and dressed as if he was new money, which he was. His eyes were narrowed by habit and darkened by his pronounced brow. His blonde hair was thinning. He kept it short. As he noticed Jem and moved towards her, his long coat billowed. She felt a flush of privilege and fear as though he were a hawk coming to her arm. His swoop ended in an embrace. She pressed her cheek to his chest. He was squeezing too hard, but no less than she deserved.

‘Did you think I’d died in the crash?’ she asked.

‘I never would have believed it,’ he said. He took her chin and guided her face to his. There were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m here to rescue you, of course.’

‘How very you.’

She stepped back but kept a grip on his coat. She looked left and right. Danny followed her eyes each time. He smiled with half of his mouth.

‘If it’s legal trouble, I’m your lawyer.’

‘Family discount?’

‘Nice try.’

Jem walked alone to the edge of the deck. It was rotating perceptibly. A rail protected the slanted glass panels. She looked for St Mary’s Church and the Warenhaus. Traffic leaked between buildings. At her elbow, an English boy in a Manchester United T-shirt listened to his father tell the story of a wall that once cut Berlin in two.

‘Here,’ said her brother. ‘Without milk.’

Jem took the coffee. She imagined the cup falling through the glass and down the tower.

‘How many sugars did you put in this?’

‘Two. Looks cold down there.’

She sipped. ‘The wind comes from Russia today. It was on the radio.’

‘So you learned German.’

‘Don’t ask me to translate Nietzsche, but I’m a black belt in fruit and vegetables.’

‘Black belt, she says.’

Jem laughed, but felt the next throwaway remark die inside her. This conversation was a tipping point. Here was Danny. She only had to push and the baggage of memory would totter over this cliff and drop away, forever out of mind. Danny was here because he did not want to lose her again. So be it. She could fuse her half with his. Return to England in disgrace.

‘Jem, I brought you a pressie.’

‘Let me say something first.’

‘Wait. This is important.’ He took a doll from one of the deep pockets in his coat. It was six inches tall and wooden. It wore a Tyrollean hat. Jem remembered deciding, as a twelve-year-old girl, that all Germans wore hats like that. Tucked into its crimson band was a feather whose highlights had been brushed on by an old doll-maker in Bremen. ‘Hänsel,’ her father had said. ‘To rhyme with ‘pencil’.’ The doll still had its ambiguous expression.

‘Poor Hänsel. What happened to Gretel?’

‘They were separated, I suppose. I found Hänsel on eBay. He’s a collector’s item.’

In her little sister voice, she said, ‘But is he our Hänsel?’

Danny lay the doll across her palm. She inspected the elbows, the knees, and the head. Hänsel’s cheeks were expertly freckled. His eyes, however, were dead.

‘I know what you’re looking for,’ Danny said.

‘There are no holes.’

‘There were never any holes,’ he said. ‘There were never any strings.’

The half-remembered notes of a music box picked through the tower. The turning tower.

Ich ruf zu Dir.

I call to thee.

‘Danny, how can you even look at me?’

She had never told her brother, face to face, that she loved him. Not once. But, at this realisation, her eyes stopped on something that reset her thoughts.

A man stood at the vanishing point of the curving deck. He wore a black leather jacket, buttoned, and an English flat cap, reversed. His hips were slanted and his eyes easy. His grin was too broad; it underscored his awkwardness. Even at this distance, Jem could see the bruise beneath his right eye, and it reminded her of the steady right hand of Saskia Brandt. What was he doing here? She had last seen him half-senseless against a pew in the Trinity Church. A man propped up by his desperation. He began to walk towards them.

She whispered, ‘It’s Wolfgang.’

‘Your friend from uni?’

Wolfgang no longer seemed like the player who could cut coke with any number of household chemicals when the con work dried up. His eyes were bloodshot. On top of everything, thought Jem, he was probably going cold turkey. The three of them made a strange triangle. The twins kept their backs to the panorama while Wolfgang, his face cooled by the light, smiled with a patience that bordered on British.

‘This is Danny,’ she said.

Wolfgang shook his hand. ‘Jem talks about you all the time. Big Danny.’

‘Hello, Wolfgang. Guyliner? You shouldn’t have.’

The German chuckled, touching a hand to his bruise and said nothing more. The expectation shifted to Jem, but she could not voice her questions for Wolfgang without presenting a version of herself that she wanted to withhold from her brother. She sipped her coffee and tried to read Wolfgang’s demanding eyes. The silence was interrupted by her vibrating phone, number withheld. She mumbled an apology and took the call.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Jem,’ said Ego. ‘The person who has just joined you is wearing a device that transmits your conversation by radio.’

She blinked.

‘What?’

‘The man is wearing a ‘wire’. He is ‘bugged’.’

‘OK, OK.’

‘Say ‘who’.’

Jem switched ears and looked at the horizon. ‘Who?’

‘I would advise you and your brother to leave immediately. Now say, ‘Sorry, wrong number’.’

‘Sorry. Wrong number.’

Ego hung up. There was no dialling tone. Just emptiness. She kept the phone to her ear and tried to assemble a plan, but she was panicking. Wolfgang must have been arrested in the Trinity Church. And here he was, wearing different clothes. So the police had let him go back to the apartment to change. Had that been why she’d found the police officer waiting outside the apartment? It had to be one of those plea-bargain things. But what had Wolfgang offered the police? Saskia? Jem?

She looked at Danny. If she tried to leave the tower with him, he would be incriminated. She didn’t know what to do. She said, ‘He’s wearing a wire.’

‘A wire?’ Danny raised his eyebrows and turned to look, down, on Wolfgang.

The hustler gunned his charm. He laughed. ‘Clever girl. I told him it wouldn’t work. You’re as smooth as your friend Saskia, aren’t you?’

‘Who?’

‘Tease,’ he shot back. His apparent good humour only emphasised his malice. ‘The police talked to you outside my apartment yesterday. They know about Saskia, the meeting at the church, and the officer she assaulted. They know that she tried to frame me. There’s nothing they don’t know. She bought your ticket to Milan, for Christ’s sake.’

Danny put two fingers on Wolfgang’s collarbone. ‘Step back from my sister.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Jem.

Wolfgang looked beyond them. ‘Scheisse,’ he hissed. He frowned into the turning crowd. Jem followed his eye until she saw the smartly-dressed police officer who had stood in the rain outside Wolfgang’s apartment. He had one arm around a telescope, and it flopped skyward as he forged towards them, craning around the children and prams, skirting the hooked teenage couples, apologising to the adults.

Jem’s phone vibrated. It was a text message from Ego.

We’ve been found. I’m under attack. Leave immediately.

Before Jem could sort her thoughts—found by whom? The police? How could Ego be under attack when he was in her purse?—the officer gripped her upper arm. She yelped and the phone tumbled to the floor. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are under–’

Danny had put his hip into the punch. It landed between the policeman’s jaw and his ear. He fell against Jem. In the bubble of interest that spread from the punch to the crowd, she remembered Saskia turning in the night wind, reaching for her.

‘Take my hand.’

The policeman struggled upright. He did not release his grip on her and, for a moment, the two stood like dancers on the brink of a tango. His glasses were designer, she noted. He was furious.

‘You’re not called Nancy Drew.’

‘And?’

‘Both of you are under arrest.’

‘Good luck with that,’ said Danny. ‘You tried to attack my sister.’

‘I am an officer of the police.’

‘How the fuck should we know?’

The man twisted his neck. The cartilage clicked. He withdrew a wallet and flapped it open. ‘Karel Duczyński, Inspector, Bundeskriminalamt – the Federal Criminal Police Office.’

‘Your mother must be very proud. I’m Danny. This is Jem.’

Jem’s phone rang again. She looked at the inspector, who nodded.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Hello, Jem.’ It was Cory. ‘Good location for a meeting. Plenty of radio interference, and people.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I see you’ve met the inspector.’

Jem cupped the handset and said to Duczyński, ‘He can see us. The man you should really arrest.’

‘Who?’ He looked at her with suspicion, but there was clearly something truthful in her expression—fear, perhaps—and she was relieved when he opened the holster of his sidearm.

She turned back to the phone and said, ‘What now?’

‘I don’t know where you found an Ego-class computer, but I want you to put it on the observation deck and leave. It will have the information I want. Forget about me and Saskia. Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly.’

As she cut the call, the three men looked at her with expectant expressions, but she ignored them, looking vainly for Cory in the crowd.

‘Well?’ asked Danny.

Jem’s phone buzzed again. She looked down at it. Another text message from Ego.

I’ve thought of something.

Abruptly, a siren split the air and sprinklers opened, dropping icy water on all. Some people hunched and swore. Others shouted urgent questions about fire exits at the barman, who shouted back and waved his arms towards the stairwells. Two waiters hurried down from the restaurant and directed people into lines. Meanwhile, the water continued to fall from the sprinklers with such energy that it seemed to reflect from the floor.

Jem shaded her eyes and tried to take a breath without swallowing water. Her focus remained on the faces in the crowd. Which one was Cory? Was he even here? Intuitively, she was certain that he had been on the observation deck when he made the phone call.

‘We should go,’ shouted the inspector.

‘Agreed,’ Danny called back.

Someone took Jem by the arm, but she was not sure who. All her attention was on the left archway. Cory was standing there, easy on his cane, wearing a light-grey suit and expression whose subtleties, at this distance, Jem could not make out.

‘What are you waiting for, Jem?’ said Danny. ‘Move.’

‘It’s him.’

‘What?’ said the inspector, leaning toward her.

Jem said her next words quietly: ‘I think he’s going to kill us.’ There was no panic in her tone; she had moved beyond it. Perhaps it was this sobriety that truly spoke to the inspector. He raised his gun—left hand cupping the butt, right hand gripping the handle—and his words

‘Polizei!’

barked out

‘Keine Bewegung!’

while the slow, bulky shape of Danny moved towards her—swooping like the hawk coming to her arm. And equal slowness characterised Cory’s face as he frowned.

Screaming.

Screaming from those people in the path of the inspector’s gun. Bodies twisted aside. Fathers cuffed their sons away and reached out for pushchairs. Children looked on with open mouths. Arms were flung protectively over heads. Crouching.

Cory was raising his white cane. Slowly. Slowly.

‘Get her out of here!’ shouted the inspector.

Danny collided with her and–

(But it was not a cane. It was a gun. A gun the colour of old marble.)

–Danny and Jem tumbled down, down.

Something puffed from the nozzle of Cory’s gun and at the same time the air above her head split with a sharp, hot flash. The inspector had fired.

Her nightmarishly slowed perception ended as Jem struck the floor and Danny rolled across her. Suddenly, she was winded, alive, and deafened. Jem saw the queues break apart as people surged into the stairwells. Some were crushed. Still the water came down and Jem brushed her slick hair aside to see what had happened to Cory. Before she could stand, she was lifted bodily towards the open lift.

‘Danny, let go of me!’

Lifts were not meant to work during a fire—this she knew—but when Danny punched the panel, the doors closed on her and she dropped, alone, filling the silence with calls for her brother.

A few metres from the ground, her phone rang.

‘Ego? Ego?’

‘Turn right when you leave the lift, Jem, and don’t look back. Hurry now.’

Inspector Duczyński could not move anything other than his eyes, which slid around uselessly, failing to focus in the falling water. His shoulder burned with the most terrific pain he could remember. Did I get him? I think I got him. He pressed down on thoughts of failure and bad luck. He redrew his next decision draft upon draft. Reach for his radio. No, turn his head. No, stanch the bleeding.

I think I got him.

God, my shoulder.

Maybe I killed him.

He spat out the water that had collected in his mouth.

Move, Duczyński. Now.

Someone seized his chest.

‘Come on.’

It was Jem’s brother, Danny.

‘Danny?’

‘Move.’

The ceiling passed through his vision as though he were flying. Fountains of water chilled him. ‘Ist er tot?’

‘Shut up. I think you got him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Habe… habe ich unseren Mann erschossen?’

The floor slid beneath his back, tugging on his belt.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. For fuck’s sake hold on. We’re almost at the lift.’

A second man began to shout—an official?—but was cut off by Danny.

‘Get out of my way. I’m serious. He’s injured and we’re using the lift. No question.’

Duczyński thought about the thousands who could see the TV tower from their apartment, café, or aeroplane. He considered their indifference. The rain battered his knuckles and warped his vision through his glasses.

‘Notarzt zum Fernsehturm!’ he shouted, sure that his police radio was at his mouth, and this was his last chance. ‘Zwei Männer wurden angeschossen!’

‘Easy, tiger. You’ll get a medal. Think how proud your mother will be.’

Blackness, marked by red numbers counting down.

To the Ghost, the four words were written in fire across the darkness:

Emergency neurotransmitter augmentation successful.

He was immobilised. No breath passed his lips. The message disappeared. Then:

I-Core has been forced to restart in safe mode. Full restart in one minute.

No, thought the Ghost. Restart basic…

He died.

Then sensation grew again from his fingertips: the factor had slid home to his hand, adding enough resources to raise him above the threshold of consciousness.

Restart now and establish basic life support, he thought.

Words only he could see scored his vision.

Welcome to Intelligent Core (I-Core™) BIOS v7.01

Water assaulted his face. There would be time to think over the failures that had led to the hot metal in his lung. Where in hell had that police officer come from? His overclocked nerves had passed notice of the bullet before it had met his flesh, but not soon enough for him to twist aside. A lucky shot. Or a good shot.

Warning: Brachiocephalic artery has lost integrity.

Warning: Systolic pressure critical.

Warning: Sinus rhythm and QRS complexes abnormal.

Warning: Lactic acidosis detected.

I-Core has begun the repair of Cory, R. 6457-1112-1111 and will remain in autonomous mode until the repair is complete. Nanochondrical base functions will not be affected. Stand by, please.

Cory’s fight to stay conscious brought back memories of swimming at his grandfather’s fishery, not far from Atlanta. He had visited the lake with his wife Catherine not two months after their wedding. At noon, they had dived down, holding hands, competing to reach the lake bed. It surprised neither of them that Cory, the soldier, had reached it first. He put a full palm to the gravel then he kicked himself upwards, twisting to see the naked silhouette of Catherine already halfway to the surface, having abandoned the attempt. Cory remembered rising towards her. The chilly strata were topped by warmer draughts; all the while a sleepy panic marked the time before he could take a life-saving breath.