Flashback

Chapter Thirty-Five

The Scharmützelsee, three weeks later

The two rivers Oder and Spree define a district in Brandenburg, eastern Germany. Within this district, one can find the Scharmützelsee, which is a narrow lake ten kilometres long. On its wooded western edge, not far from an abandoned campsite, there is a road whose concrete slabs make traffic go lub-dub, lub-dub as the driver heads south, parallel to the blue expanse. The sound is pure East Germany. Poland is less than thirty-five kilometres away. It is winter and the wind today comes from Russia.

The man is driving through the tunnels of colourless trees. Through occasional breaks in the woodland he sees the lake. He is thinking too much of Saskia Brandt. His thumb guides the steering wheel. His seat is fully pushed back. The radio, though German, plays American and English music almost exclusively, and he is singing along to a recent hit, Will Young’s Leave Right Now.

His long, black coat is folded on the passenger seat. On top of it, a map.

His throat is dry. He has not slept in eighteen hours. He has been driving since Calais.

There is still light in the sky behind him as he steps from the rental car and looks at the house, which is far back from the road. He has a hold-all. He swings it across his left shoulder and crosses the broken pavement to a high, chainwire gate. There is a postbox: once white, now peeling to steel. It has a tube underneath for newspapers. A board has been knocked out of the wooden fence, leaving a hole large enough for a child, but he has seen neither children nor adults nor life on the last stretch of this road since leaving Bad Saarow, the spa town on the northern shore of the lake.

He turns. The road is dark behind. No streetlights. Is a certain fear settling upon him, light as a bird on his shoulder? He has been alone in the car for too long. He smiles to himself. Will Young’s fault.

A yellow, laminated notice has been attached to the gate with luggage ties. It reads: ‘Betreten der Baustelle verboten! Eltern haften für ihre Kinder!’ He touches it with his knuckles, thinking that the sign is old and that it must mean ‘Keep out’.

Through the gate, he sees brown, winter-dead weeds. There is no hint of the paths that must once have crossed the garden. Some of the trees are more than thirty feet high. Their bottom halves are frondless, naked stakes. The house is boxy and pinkish. The roof is flat and the last, fading blue of the lake beyond makes him see it as a Greek villa. The thought cannot but fall, stone dead, in the freezing air. The weather is the kind that his mother would call ‘too cold for snow’. He shrugs to adjust the weight of his hold-all and wonders if this is the correct house. There are no lights. Pieces are missing from the arches of the veranda.

Then he sees a shadow cross the wall. It is a woman walking towards him. Just as he sees this, the remaining daylight fails and, suddenly, it is night. The woman has shortish hair and her steps through the weeds are deliberately placed. As he watches her, the garden seems to brighten. Part of him feels that the darkness itself has condensed to form this figure.

She stops at the gate. They look at each other through the links.

‘Saskia?’

‘Hello, Danny. Did you bring the things I asked?’

‘Yes, of course. Absolutely.’

The house, Saskia explained as she gave Danny the tour, used to be the dacha of a former Stasi Lieutenant-General who died in Croatia a few months prior to reunification. It was a blank space on the administrative landscape. And it was freezing. There was no electricity and no water. They spoke of nothing in particular. Saskia had erected a tent in the hallway and they entered this small, blue dome at midnight. Danny lay down first and Saskia second, behind him. She pulled a blanket across them. Her left arm rested on his shoulder.

‘Go to sleep,’ she said.

‘You are so very weird.’

He felt the silence. Was she smiling?

Then the cold tip of her nose was against his neck and the inconstant, troubled exhalations become regular and his tiredness overcame him and he slept, the pressure behind his eyes lessening, and he dreamed about her missing hand, wondering where it was right then.

For Saskia, the shelter of his body calmed her as though he were a cave into which she had crawled. She was transported to the night she and Jem had discussed an imminent rendezvous with Wolfgang, when Saskia had pulled on her gloves and rode all the power of her certainty. Now that certainty was cracked: when tested with a knock, its note was wrong. Saskia had wanted to tell Danny to sleep in the car, but she did not—he felt too good. She knew that something fundamental had split in the roots of her relationship with Jem. Saskia thought of the chessboard floor tiles of the dacha’s foyer and pictured the Stasi Lieutenant-General welcoming his guests one summer night. Despite this, despite her unhealed injuries, there was a wetness and engorgement within her more insistent than anything she had felt with Jem. She hated that.

Danny twitched. Her arm moved and a shiver of pain passed through her, but she took it as a cost of this intimacy, whose depth would forever be this moment. No deeper, ever.

The next morning, Danny found Saskia standing in a drawing room. She was a black island among icebergs of dust-sheeted furniture.

‘First things first,’ he said. ‘A diesel generator. Some lights. Blackout curtains. And food. You haven’t eaten, have you?’

She paused long enough to show that she did not want to answer that question. Then, softly, she said, ‘Danny, I need you to go to Argentina. Not yet. But soon.’

He opened his mouth to laugh at this, but the laughter did not come.

‘Argent-fucking-what-now?’

‘He’s there. He wants redemption.’

Suddenly Danny was angry. ‘And what do you want, Saskia?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’

At length, she left the house and walked to the shore.

Saskia tried to think of Cory instead of Danny. Over the next three days, the house grew brighter and warmer. Danny installed a generator in the basement and gas heaters in every room. Saskia scrubbed the windows and floors as hard as her strength permitted, then sat and watched Danny paint. He wore a T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. He looked so English. He noticed her watching and grinned.

‘Like what you see?’

She tried to suppress her smile. Then it was raining again and she walked to the window and saw the darkening greyness of Scharmützelsee. The slow waves looked like the saw-tooth pattern on a Japanese sword. She felt, did not see, Danny’s concern. She ignored it. She thought of Cory again and wondered whether a bullet of smart matter would ding the window and put a coin-sized hole through her heart.

‘Did you call Jem?’ she asked.

Danny returned to his painting. ‘Yes.’

‘Was there a message for me?’

‘No,’ he said, and she could hear the pity in his voice like an accent.

She remembered watching from a tree top as the police helicopter took off. And the honey light of the still-burning ambulance. Thinking: there go my friends.

But.

‘It’s not over,’ said Danny.

She wanted to go to him. Cup his cheek. Instead, she rotated her shoulder until it clicked.

‘Cold in here.’

‘You should rest,’ he said. ‘They’ll arrive in a couple of hours.’

‘Do you think they’ll come?’

‘Of course. We’ve all been through the same thing—and it’s not over.’

Jem came shortly before dark. She parried Saskia’s kiss with a cheek and did not meet her eyes. Her frostiness passed through the room like a weather front. Saskia called her ‘Cool Britannia,’ but Jem did not laugh. She donned an apron and helped prepare the food.

By the early evening, when Danny, cheerful and loud, resolved to reattach the chandelier and leapt onto the dining table like a buccaneer, Saskia had decided to talk with Jem, but her hesitant approach was interrupted by a knock at the door.

Karel stood there holding bread and salt. Saskia took these with a curtsy. He held the back of her head as he kissed each cheek. Then he kissed Jem, who had appeared at Saskia’s elbow.

‘My dear,’ said Hrafn, following Karel. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Much better. Your neck?’

Hrafn pulled on his collar. ‘I have a fantastic scar. I can’t wait to frighten my nephew. Hello, Jem.’

‘Hi, Hrafn.’

‘I brought some cheeses. I didn’t know if, well.’

‘Perfect,’ said Saskia. ‘We’ll have them after the fondue. Why don’t you help Danny solve his engineering problem?’

‘I’m freelance now,’ said Hrafn. ‘He can’t afford my rate.’

‘Like you can afford mine,’ called Danny.

The room filled with masculine noises as Karel and Hrafn directed Danny’s attempt to hook the chandelier on its chain, and amid this distraction Saskia considered her feelings for Jem. The oil lamps on the sideboard made unfamiliar contours of her face and Saskia thumbed her fringe and asked, ‘Why so quiet, Schatzi?’

‘Why not?’

‘Talk to me.’

Jem took a huge breath. Her chest shuddered. Finally, her eyes stopped on those of Saskia. ‘Danny has you in his little spell, doesn’t he?’

‘No, he does not,’ Saskia replied. She smiled to underline the ridiculousness of the notion.

‘I thought we had something different.’

‘We do.’

‘That we were special,’ said Jem, turning away.

Saskia said, ‘We are.’

Inspector Karel Duczyński had been their greatest asset in the hours following the rescue from Tolsdorf’s hut. Despite suspension from his official position, he had retained the informal currency of a police officer and his colleagues had responded well to his claims—extraordinary by any standards—that the four were victims of a stranger whose name they were never told; a stranger who had hijacked and stolen an ambulance, murdered an elderly woodsman, and, unaccountably, signalled his location to the authorities so that his hypothermic captives could be rescued.

It had proven more difficult to explain to the interrogators in Munich why all four of them had travelled to the crash site. The fictions were essentially truthful: Hrafn, as Investigator-In-Charge of the DFU team, was acting on a tip provided by Duczyński. Duczyński, in the hope of clearing his name, was following a lead provided by Danny. Danny was concerned for his sister. Jem had been overcome by a compulsion to visit the crash site, where her good friend Saskia Dorfer had died, and taken refuge in the woodland hut. A wild goose chase with a tragic climax. Who was the hijacker? Nobody knew. Who was Mr Self, the man who had called in the search-and-rescue helicopter? Nobody knew. The police investigators had been frustrated, but the trail was too cold and their stories consistent.

Of Dorfer, there had been—of course—no trace, and perhaps never would. The crushing forces of the impact were tremendous, after all.