The predicament, p.20
The Predicament, page 20
Gabriel looked around the room in some amazement once she had slipped into the kitchen. There was a bold checked rug – yellow and green – on the parquet floor. Two leather-and-chrome armchairs faced a daybed covered in a red throw and piled multicoloured cushions. The coffee table between them was made of glass and had some low stacks of books on it and a flat black wooden bowl filled to the brim with lemons. There was a large TV set on a trolley and on a wall span of irregular shelves and storage cabinets facing the tall windows he noticed a turntable and an amplifier, wires leading to two separate speakers. Stereo, my God, he thought. On the walls were abstract prints and film posters. He felt he was in the home of some young artist or designer. Parker Baumgarten had surprised him. He thought of his own home – his shabby, chintzy, over-crowded cottage with its second-hand furniture, decorated in a style that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1920s. It was stimulating to see how Parker lived. He wondered if he could give number 3 Ruskin Studios a more modern 1960s spin. Maybe he’d ask her advice.
She offered him the choice of a bourbon on the rocks or a dry martini and he opted for the bourbon. Then she passed him a plate of small cheese squares pronged with toothpicks. The bourbon and the cheese went very well together, he said, and complimented her on her taste in interior decoration.
They ate their T-bone steaks and pommes dauphinoises in the kitchen, seated opposite each other at a perspex-and-aluminium table. They finished the bottle of Valpolicella and opened the Montepulciano. After the steaks they paused for a cigarette and then Parker produced some kind of sweet flat almond cake with cream – a Sandtorte, she said.
During the dinner she told him more about herself. Born and raised in Cincinnati – a city with a large German immigrant population, she informed him. Her father, Ernst Baumgarten, had gone there, fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, married a local girl and joined the police force, eventually becoming a detective.
‘So I always knew I wanted to be a cop,’ Parker said, with a shrug. ‘Of some sort.’ After college, she had applied to join the FBI but was headhunted and diverted to the CIA. Two years in Paris and two years – and counting – in Berlin.
‘That’s my story,’ she said. ‘What about you? You’re a writer. What’re you doing in MI6?’
‘Good question,’ he said. ‘It’s a long, complicated business – to do with my brother, my late brother, and some serious trouble he got me in. Somehow, I found myself working – part-time – for MI6. But then part-time became more and more full-time. It’s rather overtaken my old life.’ He paused, feeling sorry for himself, as usual. ‘I am writing another book, if you can believe it, but I see my old life sort of disappearing into the distance and I find myself wondering if I’ll ever get it back – or am I in too deep?’
‘Well, at least it’s in a good cause,’ Parker said, almost apologetically.
‘That’s what everybody tells me,’ Gabriel said, petulantly. ‘But this life – this spying, covert life – isn’t something I chose, unlike you. It was kind of thrust upon me.’ He paused again. ‘Or, rather, it’s like quicksand, sucking me down.’
‘What do you say to a schnapps?’ Parker asked, clearing away the plates.
‘Hello, schnapps. Yes, please.’
Gabriel lit another cigarette while she went in search of the bottle and two small glasses, almost like thimbles on squat orange stems. They moved back into the sitting area.
‘Sorry to talk shop,’ Gabriel said. ‘But what’s happening with the Vollmöller raid?’
‘There’s a delay. Day after tomorrow,’ Parker said. ‘Hempel can’t get a team together before then.’
‘Just as well,’ Gabriel said, raising his tiny glass. ‘In that case I’ll have another schnapps, if I may, Agent Baumgarten.’
She laughed and topped up their glasses. The mood was definitely mellowing, having been a little stiff and shyly formal at the start of the evening. Gabriel wondered if he was becoming a little drunk. That would be a bad idea, he realized.
They talked about themselves again. Parker confessed she had been engaged – a Frenchman she’d known in Paris – but had broken it off when she was posted to Berlin.
‘It would never have worked. Funny how you know that, instinctively.’
‘Trust your instincts.’
‘What about you, Gabriel?’
‘Well, I am in a relationship, I think. Of sorts. But it’s very complicated.’ He managed a smile, thinking fiercely – almost tearfully, all of a sudden – of Faith, recalling their days at the cottage in Claverleigh. ‘It blows hot and cold. In a maddening, compulsive way.’ He cleared his throat, exhaled. ‘She’s quite a bit older than me – not that I’m bothered about that,’ he added.
He looked at Parker and smiled at her. She was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, he had calculated. This was the sort of person who should be commanding, driving his emotional expectations, not Faith Green. Parker was attractive, lively, clever, accomplished – and lived in some style, a style that reflected her interesting, unique personality. He felt a weight descend on him, sensing that parallel life flash by him, feeling the sharp, poignant stab of missed opportunities, the wrong road taken. What was that word? Anomie? Was that right? Taedium vitae? There should be a word for that feeling – a deep soulful ruefulness that your life has not gone according to plan. There was probably a precise German compound noun for that state of being: heart-aching-ruefulness. Herzschmerzreue … Would that work?
‘Are you OK, Gabriel?’
‘Yes, yes. I was just thinking about something.’ He clenched his fists. ‘My sad, stupid brother and the unwanted legacy he left me. I should probably go,’ he said abruptly and stood up.
He thanked Parker for the delicious meal – the best steak he’d ever eaten – her excellent company, a wonderful few hours, just what he’d needed.
She walked him to the door and Gabriel knew there would be a farewell kiss, after so much shared over the evening, such honesty. And there would be, he knew, the unspoken option of more.
He leant forward to kiss her farewell, taking the initiative, thanking her once again, and angled his head so she couldn’t kiss his lips. She got close, kissing the corner of his mouth, and Gabriel, noting the extra impress of her lips, received the implicit message. He stepped back quickly, seeing her momentary quizzical look, as she wondered how she had somehow misinterpreted the signals, the moment. She smiled brightly. All forgotten. No matter.
Gabriel walked through Westend for a while, heading for the bright lights of the Kurfürstendamm, knowing there would be plenty of taxis there to carry him back to his hotel. The night had cooled and the cloudy sky reflected West Berlin’s raucous neon glow – like a burnished yellow sodium shield above his head – a nightly visual rebuke to the cowed brethren in the dark East. He felt disquieted. Perhaps he and Parker should have kissed, fully – and, granted, maybe not have slept together that first night, but initiated the possibility of an affair – a proper, passionate, adult relationship kindled. Maybe he was being a fool. Too late now, fool. What could be more agreeable than to kiss a young woman like Parker and hold her slim, tall body in his arms? He kicked angrily at a pebble and it flew into the side of a parked car with a sharp ping. Shit. What did she make of him? he wondered. Perhaps she would be grateful, as she readied herself for bed, thinking back, that nothing more sensual had ensued. Dodged a bullet, as the saying went. Who wanted to be in a relationship with a tormented, unhappy, fucked-up writer? Conceivably, he had done her a favour.
9.
The Raid
It was still dark at 5 a.m. Still night, effectively, though there was the faintest glimmering of light creeping onwards, infusing the dark – not illuminating, exactly, Gabriel thought, but just about allowing you to see more clearly: buildings, cars, people, taking on their shapes.
He was standing behind an unmarked police van about fifty yards down the street from Vollmöller’s apartment block. There were six uniformed police officers and the detective, Ödön Hempel. He and Parker were talking quietly to each other in German.
Gabriel reached inside his jacket and touched his shoulder holster. It was odd being armed, he felt, but Parker had insisted he be issued with the weapon. He had signed a chit for the holster, the gun and its several clips of ammunition. They were both carrying the same handgun – a High Standard HDM, as it was called. It was a .22 ten-round pistol with a fixed silencer, or ‘suppressor’. Quite a heavy weapon with a long barrel but incredibly quiet, so Parker had told him. The noise of its firing was no louder than clicking your fingers, she said. He eased his shoulders, feeling the belt and braces of the holster tight around his body. He wondered what his editor, Inigo Marcher, would think of his author: armed, standing with police in a Berlin street before dawn, about to raid the flat of a suspect? He realized he had to stop this persistent rail, this plaint. These rhetorical questions he kept asking himself were beginning to drive him a little insane.
He glanced over at Parker. She was in a one-piece navy overall with a blue windcheater with ‘CIA’ on the back. Gabriel was wearing a long brown tweed deer-stalking jacket in a red check and with big flap pockets. The collar was lined with leather and there were leather patches on the elbows. He had never been deer-stalking in his life but this jacket had travelled the world with him. And here it was having an outing in Berlin.
Parker wandered over.
‘We’ll go in five minutes,’ she said, with a smile. ‘This is thanks to you, Gabriel.’
‘I just feel a bit odd, that’s all. What with this gun, et cetera.’
‘Vollmöller has a gun. So should we.’
‘True.’
‘I assume you’ve had weapons training,’ she said.
‘Yes. Sort of. A while ago,’ Gabriel replied, thinking back to the brief target practice he’d had at the former chicken farm in Leyton. At least he wasn’t lying.
He was relieved that there had been no perceptible fallout from the supper they had shared together. Parker’s attitude to him seemed unchanged. Perhaps it was only he who was aware of the supposed undercurrents flowing, he wondered. Over-analysing, over-sensitive, second-guessing, as per usual.
The detective, Ödön Hempel, approached. He and Gabriel had been introduced earlier. Hempel was a stocky, blonde-haired young man, with an eager, infectious manner. He was a CIA agent in the Berlin police force, earning two salaries. He spoke good English and was clearly curious about Gabriel.
‘You come in last, Mr Dax. Agreed? We all go first.’
‘I won’t argue with that. Please call me Gabriel.’
‘I am Ödön.’
‘You just tell me where to stand, Ödön. I’ll happily leave everything up to you and Parker here.’
Hempel looked at his watch.
‘OK. Let’s go.’ He issued instructions to the policemen and they set off at a slow jog up the street towards the apartment block. Two of the men, Gabriel noticed, were carrying sledgehammers. Another man had a three-foot-long jemmy. They all had holstered automatics and truncheons at their belts. Gabriel strode after them.
The front door caved in after three sledgehammer blows and the team raced inside, heading up to the second floor where Vollmöller had his room. There were agitated shouts from the other tenants as they realized something untoward was going on in their building. A man appeared in his nightshirt on the stairs and was shoved brusquely aside by a policeman. He began to yell imprecations. Gabriel stepped carefully around him and followed the others up the stairs. He arrived as the policeman with the jemmy wrenched open the door of Vollmöller’s room, 210, with one swift, wood-splintering heave. The police thundered in, guns drawn, shouting. And then quickly stopped shouting. Gabriel peered over their shoulders. No Vollmöller.
Gabriel and Parker stood in Vollmöller’s rank room, looking around. Down below, Ödön Hempel and his team were remonstrating loudly with the inhabitants of the building. A faint smoke-grey light crept in through the window. Dawn was upon them.
There had been a quick search but there was no sign of the Mauser pistol. Gabriel noted that some aspects of Vollmöller’s lair met the clichéd expectations. The bed was filthy, the sheets a greasy saffron, sebaciously shiny from the weeks and months of contact with Vollmöller’s unwashed naked torso. A small Primus stove on a rickety table, a blackened saucepan and opened tin cans were testimony to his limited short-term culinary needs. No nude pin-up pictures, however. Taped images of German footballers filled half a wall – Borussia Dortmund seemed the favoured club.
It was the smell – or, rather, the smells – that Gabriel noticed more than anything. The lingering whiff of fatty-spicy cooking, underlaid by cigarette smoke, underlaid by sour body odour, underlaid by human effluvia. The sickle-edge of a chamber pot poked out from beneath the bed. The universal smell of poverty, Gabriel recognized, observing that Parker had covered her nose with a handkerchief. It triggered something in his memory. Where had he smelt that same fetid pungency before? He remembered: in Lucian Applegate’s filthy cottage, thinking that tense visit now seemed a lifetime ago.
They stepped out on to the landing where the air was clearer. Things seemed calmer downstairs – the residents retreating to their rooms.
‘Can you believe this loser wants to assassinate the President of the United States? Has the gall? The presumption?’ Parker asked. She seemed genuinely offended.
‘Loser’ in this context was not a familiar term to Gabriel, though, having seen Vollmöller’s desperate pit of a room, he understood the implications of the word immediately.
‘Aren’t they always “losers”, in that sense?’ Gabriel said. ‘Starting with John Wilkes Booth.’
Parker lit a Kool, thinking.
‘I just don’t get it,’ Parker said. ‘Where the heck is he? How did we miss him?’
‘He knew we were coming for him,’ Gabriel said. ‘So somebody must have tipped him off.’
‘That’s not possible.’
Gabriel looked at her and shrugged.
‘It’s the only explanation.’
10.
The Itinerary
The next morning, Gabriel was in his hotel bathroom, shaving, when he heard the telephone ring. He quickly wiped his face and picked up the phone.
‘Morning, Gabriel, it’s Parker. I’m downstairs.’
‘Give me five minutes,’ Gabriel said.
He found her waiting for him in the lounge. She looked a bit abashed.
‘I still can’t get over the Vollmöller fiasco,’ she said. ‘Furlan’s gone, his brother is gone – and now Vollmöller’s disappeared. Do you think this is an abort of some kind?’
‘It looks like it,’ Gabriel said. ‘But my hunch would be that’s exactly what they want it to look like.’
‘Interesting point. Yeah.’
They ordered some coffee.
‘There was a meeting yesterday,’ Parker went on. ‘A debrief after the Vollmöller raid. There was a top-brass CIA man there, Frank Sartorius, over from the States – he said he knew you.’
‘Yes, we met in Guatemala,’ Gabriel said, trying to look unperturbed.
‘And someone from MI6, British, called Faith Green. She said she knew you as well.’
Gabriel took a sip of his coffee. So Faith was in Berlin. He felt the usual sudden agitation – a little depth charge of emotion detonating inside him – and told himself to calm down.
‘Yes, I do know her, also,’ he said, in as throwaway a manner as possible.
‘Kennedy will be in the British sector for a while, at the Brandenburg Gate, hence MI6, I guess.’
‘Makes sense,’ Gabriel said, though his mind was active. Faith would make contact if she wanted, he realized. There was nothing for him to do. Just wait.
‘So, the upshot of this meeting we had,’ Parker continued, ‘was that we should form a sort of Vollmöller cadre, within the general security operation around the President. You, me, Hempel – and Hempel’s police team – overseen by Frank Sartorius, focusing on the Vollmöller threat.’
‘Let me know what you want me to do,’ he said.
Parker handed him a document.
‘That’s JFK’s itinerary,’ she said. ‘It all starts on Sunday twenty-third, when he flies into Cologne.’
Gabriel studied the schedule, and was immediately impressed at how demanding it was. Sunday in Cologne, then everybody moves to Bonn. Speeches, receptions, a meeting with Chancellor Adenauer, a dinner, more meetings. Monday picks up again in Bonn. Lunch and a brief address. Adenauer once again. Then another press conference, then a meeting with the Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, the day concluding with a dinner at the American embassy.
Tuesday 25 June, it all kicks off anew, he saw, no respite. Meetings, then a helicopter to Hanau. Speech to the US 3rd Army division. Lunch, then by car to Frankfurt.
Gabriel looked at Parker.
‘I’m already exhausted and this is only the third day.’
‘It’s insane, I know. But it’s what they do.’
Frankfurt – another speech. Then helicopter to Wiesbaden. Another meeting, another reception.
‘Cologne, Bonn, Hanau, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden. Then Berlin,’ Gabriel said. ‘On Wednesday. Just here for the day.’
‘And what a day.’
‘My God.’
‘Yes. Air Force One should arrive just before ten a.m.’
Gabriel looked at the Berlin itinerary.
‘Wow. Crowded,’ he said.
‘Sartorius would like to meet you. Monday morning, eleven a.m.’
‘Of course. Where?’
‘We’ll let you know in good time.’
They chatted on for a while, then Parker left. Gabriel felt unsettled, not only because he knew that Faith was now in Berlin but because Frank Sartorius was back in his life as well, a re-encounter imminent. He thought back to Guatemala and the comings and goings in the Alcázar-Plaza. What, if any, was the connection between Sartorius and Furlan? Furlan had only said he knew ‘of’ Frank Sartorius and that might well be true, Gabriel supposed. They had been together in the same hotel but he had no evidence of any other significant contact between them, apart from seeing them chatting briefly in the lobby, just the once. Maybe that was unsurprising, maybe not. Guatemala City was not Berlin. It was a much smaller metropolis and the forces that ran the place, the country, were fairly obvious, clearly defined. And then Furlan had come to Berlin – and had now left, apparently. But now Sartorius was in town.
