Сэм Истлэнд - The Elegant Lie

‘What he did,’ said Dasch, picking up the story, ‘was to send four trucks to the US Army’s warehouse on the outskirts of Wiesbaden, in the American occupation zone, with bills of lading for more than three million American cigarettes which had just arrived there and which were due to be distributed to commissaries at every Allied base on the continent of Europe. The guards at the warehouse had been told to expect the trucks at a certain hour of the morning and they arrived exactly on time. The bills of lading were checked and the cigarettes were loaded on board. The whole thing took less than one hour. Then the trucks departed and, half an hour later, four different trucks arrived with identical bills of lading for the three million cigarettes. Of course, they were immediately arrested. By the time it was determined that these men were, in fact, carrying the legitimate bills of lading and that those in the first trucks were fakes, the cigarettes had disappeared, along with the men who had been impersonating American military personnel. The trucks were found about an hour away from the city, all neatly parked and with the keys still in the ignition, but the cigarettes and the men who stole them were never found. This was a success beyond the wildest dreams of anyone who’s ever dared to contemplate such things.’

‘Except for the fact that he ended up in prison,’ muttered the girl.

‘Ah!’ Dasch raised one finger and sliced it back and forth through the air, as if he were extinguishing a match. ‘But, Teresa, do you know why?’

‘I imagine you are about to tell me,’ she replied.

‘He was betrayed,’ said Dasch, and suddenly he was no longer smiling, ‘by someone he thought he could trust. Is that not right, Mr Carter?’

‘That’s what the papers said.’

‘So they did,’ Dasch agreed, ‘and there was something else they said, as well.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Teresa.

‘That Mr Carter never divulged his contacts, or the names of the people he had worked with. Even though he himself had been a victim of deceit, Mr Carter remained a man who could be trusted.’

‘Bravo, Mr Carter,’ said Teresa, without a trace of sincerity in her voice.

‘Bravo, indeed,’ said Dasch, turning to Carter and looking him straight in the eye. ‘Such loyalty deserves to be rewarded.’

Teresa rose to her feet. ‘Enjoy your party,’ she said to Carter. ‘I am going home.’ Then she walked out of the room.

‘Please forgive her,’ said Dasch. ‘She is singularly lacking in diplomacy.’

‘At least she’s honest about it,’ said Carter.

‘A little too much so, I’m afraid.’

Carter noticed that the music upstairs had stopped now, and the floor no longer creaked with dancing.

‘The party is getting old,’ said Dasch, apparently forgetting that Carter had only just arrived. ‘Why don’t we go out and get some air?’

As they left the little room with the wing-backed chairs, he saw that the band had finished for the night and were now packing away their instruments into battered, velvet-lined cases. The lights had been turned on and most of the guests had departed. A few sat unconscious on couches which, under the punishing glare of dusty light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, revealed stains of wine and the charred holes of cigarette burns.

Outside, almost all the cars had gone, leaving the street littered with cigarette butts, which the doorman was gathering one by one and stashing in the pocket of his long blue coat. It was a common habit for civilians to follow in the path of Allied soldiers, picking up the ends of cigarettes, which they would then take apart and reassemble into cigarettes of their own.

Ritter was standing by the door, hands folded across his chest and one leg tucked behind him so that the foot was resting flat against the wall.

Teresa had already vanished, and Carter wondered if he would ever see her again. It caught him by surprise that he would even wonder such a thing but, after the relentless sameness of prison life, almost everything he’d seen and every thought to cross his mind since he’d walked out of Langsdorf had been a cause for amazement.

‘Walk with me, Mr Carter,’ said Dasch. ‘We have some business to discuss.’

With Ritter following behind, the two men strolled across the street.

Dasch led them down a pathway that had been cleared between two large grey piles of masonry, like heaps of dinosaur bones. Beyond the rubble lay the shell of a house. Pigeons swooped and fluttered out of holes punched through the slate roof tiles.

Dasch stepped into the hollowed remnants of the building.

Carter followed him in and then stopped and looked around. Above them, perched upon a fan of splintered floorboards, stood a bathtub that had somehow survived completely intact. A staircase led up to nothing. Shards of glass, powdered with soot, fanged the frames of broken windows.

‘Breathe in, Mr Carter!’ Dasch commanded, raising his hands like a preacher. ‘Do you smell it?’

Carter vaguely caught the scent of fires that had been extinguished long ago. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ he said.

‘In places like this,’ explained Dasch, ‘you can still smell the war. It is a very particular odour. Some people have told me that it comes from the ionisation of the air after an explosion. Others say it is the smell of bones that have been burned to dust. And some say it is purely my imagination, my own daughter included. I am often tempted to believe her, but when I walk among the ruins, I know for a fact it is real.’

Carter had thought he was joking, but now it seemed to him that maybe there was some kind of smell◦– different from the sweaty odours of the street that had flooded his senses when he first walked out of prison. This was sharp and piercing, like burned electrical wiring, like the reek of flint when it is struck against itself.

In that moment, Carter suddenly realised that he had made a terrible mistake following Dasch into the confines of this place. But there was no way out of it now. ‘What are we doing here?’ he asked.

‘I just have one question for you,’ said Dasch.

Carter sensed some nameless menace, hideous and lethal, lying just beneath the courteous formality of Dasch’s words.

‘I studied your technique,’ continued Dasch. ‘There is scarcely a detail of that robbery with which I am unfamiliar, and yet there is still one thing I do not understand.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Carter. The moisture had gone from his throat and his lips felt like blades of dry grass rustling together as he spoke.

‘What I don’t understand is why.’

‘Why what?’

‘Why you did it. Why you would suddenly go from being a functioning, law-abiding member of society to carrying out such an audacious theft.’

Carter was silent.

‘And I would like it very much,’ said Dasch, ‘if you could satisfy my curiosity on that small point.’ And now he pinched the air between his thumb and index finger, as if to show what a tiny, insignificant matter it was.

‘I did it,’ said Carter, ‘because I realised that I could.’

Dasch stared at him intently for a moment. Then his face split into a grin, revealing strong, white, perfect teeth. He tilted his head to one side and nodded.

It struck Carter as a strange movement, this tilting of the head, until he realised that Dasch had been nodding to Ritter, who stood directly behind him.

Carter felt dread sifting through his blood, like a slow silty explosion of black ink diffusing in water. Slowly, he turned around.

Ritter was only an arm’s length away, a small automatic pistol aimed directly at Carter’s face, but now he lowered the weapon and tucked it away beneath the folds of his coat.