Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

A high sky, a cold day slipping away. Anselm thought about how his father had told him that Alsterpark was only as big as it was because so many Jewish families had lived on the west side of the lake and had been dispossessed. They were gone, gone to horrible death or exile, when the Allied bombers came in the high summer of July 1944. Then people walked into the lake to escape the unbearable heat of a city set on fire by teenage boys dropping high explosive bombs, incendiary bombs, napalm and phosphorus bombs. Aunt Pauline talked about it early on the first tape.

I went to the coffee factory that day. Otto, our driver took me. We had two coffee factories. I used to do the accounts, I couldn’t bear to do nothing. I hated sitting around the house, I begged to be allowed to do something, it was difficult for women to do anything in families like ours, you understand. Marriage, children, the domestic world, that was the domain of women, my mother never questioned that for one second, she could not understand that women might want something else. I didn’t have children, of course, so I think she made an exception for me, not a full exception, she always hoped I’d marry again. I tried to tell her…what was I saying?

The bombing.

Oh. Yes. I was at the factory in Hammerbrook, in Bankstrasse. I used to work until late, after 9 p.m., it was summer, it had been terribly hot for weeks. We were driving back when we heard the sirens and then the bombs started to fall. And we stopped and got out and we ran to some trees, I don’t know why. After that, you can’t imagine. The whole world was alight. Buildings fell down. The flames went up forever, the sky was burning, it looked as if the clouds were on fire. Burning clouds, like a vision of Armageddon. The heat. There was no air to breath. The flames burnt up all the air. And the people ran out of the buildings, the screams of the children. The tar melted, people stuck in the tar. The car windows melted.Things just burst into flame. We were lying down against a wall trying to get air from the cobblestones. I was absolutely sure that I was going to die, that we were all going to die. And then the Feuersturm began, it was like animals howling, the wind, so strong it pulled me away from the wall and Otto grabbed my leg and hung onto me.

Operation Gomorrah, it was called. How did they choose the name? Whose idea was that? Gomorrah, one of the cities of the plain. The Hamburg fires burnt for nine days. Forty thousand people died, most of them women and children. Nine days of hell, the dead lying everywhere, rotting in the heat, black swarms of flies over everything, and then the rats, thousands of rats eating the bodies. Anselm remembered reading the planner of the raids’ words:

In spite of all that happened in Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method.

Air Vice-Marshall Harris.

Relatively. What was the Air Vice-Marshall thinking of? Relative to what? Auschwitz? Were there relatively humane ways of killing children? Relatively speaking, where did Bomber Harris’ raids rank on the table of twentieth-century horrors that had at its head the cold-blooded annihilation of Jews and Gipsies and homosexuals and the mentally infirm?

Not a cheerful line of inquiry, Anselm thought. Turn to other things. What would Alex want to know? What would he tell her? He didn’t want to tell her anything. This was a mistake, the product of loneliness. His life was full of lies, he could lie to her. But she was trained in lie-detection, she would know. Did that matter? Wasn’t lying the point? You were supposed to lie. The truth was revealed in your lies, by what you tried to conceal. Telling the truth ruined the whole exercise. There was nothing under truth, beyond truth. Truth was a dry well, a dead end. You couldn’t learn any more after you knew the truth.

Anselm walked down Milchstrasse, feeling dated, dowdy. Poseldorf was as smart as it got in Hamburg. The Zwischenzeiten was over now, the people were in winter gear. Shades of grey this year, grey flannel, grey checks, grey leather, soft grey shirts, grey scarves. Grey lipstick even.

Eric Constantine, wanted man, he’d bring the hire car back in a week; people would be waiting. What would happen to him?

Too late. Baader was right.

In the cafe, O’Malley was at a corner table, in a grey tweed suit, in front of him a small glass and a Chinese bowl holding cashew nuts.

‘More to your taste than Barmbek?’ he said.

It was a French sort of place, darkish, panelled, a zinc bar, dull brass fittings, freckled mirrors, paintings that impoverished artists might have traded for a few drinks, new-shabby furnishings.

‘It’s marginal,’ said Anselm. ‘It’s better than all brown. What’s that you’re drinking?’

‘Sherry. A nice little amontillado fino. Want one?’

‘Please.’ He’d only had two beers and an Apfelkorn all day. He looked around. The man behind the counter was talking on the phone. He had a cleft in his chin and highlights in his blonde hair.

Without moving his head, O’Malley caught the man’s eye. He pointed at his glass, signed for two.

‘So, what are these blokes talking about?’

‘We got an earlier conversation. With the Israeli. The katsa . Want it?’

O’Malley finished his sherry. ‘That’s extra, is it?’

‘Well, yes. Five hundred, that’s in the basement. We’ll throw in the pictures.’

‘And steak knives?’

The barman arrived with the sherries. He said to O’Malley in English, Irish in his English, ‘You must try the dry oloroso, it’s exceptional, very nutty.’

‘I have no doubt I will,’ said O’Malley. ‘Again and again. Thank you, Karl.’

When the man had gone, Anselm said, ‘You’re a stranger here, then.’

‘He’s a computer bloke, made a few quid in Ireland, now he’s realised his dream, come home, opened this little bistro.’

‘German?’

‘Certainly. From Lubeck.’

‘Ireland. Isn’t there something wrong with that story?’

O’Malley shook his head. ‘Change, John, the world’s changed. Narratives don’t run the same way any more. All the narratives are at risk.’ He drank some sherry. ‘Of course, you’re in the cyberworld most of the time, that’s not real. How are my blokes?’

‘They’re worried. This Spence who is actually Richler is threatening them. The deceased Lourens in Johannesburg apparently left something dangerous behind. Kael is agitated. May I ask what you actually want from these people?’

O’Malley looked at him for a while, rolling sherry around his mouth, his cheeks moving. He swallowed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you may not. But since you take secrets to the grave, I’ll tell you. My clients are looking for assets, thirty, forty million US Serrano and Kael handled in the early nineties. Falcontor. Did they say that name?’

‘Yes. Richler.’

O’Malley looked interested. ‘Richler?’

Anselm tried the sherry, drank half the small flute. He remembered the British embassy in Argentina when the Falklands business was beginning, his first war, standing in a high-ceilinged room in Buenos Aires, drinking sherry with the press attache. She had narrow teeth and she talked about the international brotherhood of polo. ‘It’s so unfortunate because of course we’re both polo-playing nations so there’s always been a real affinity…’

Later she made a pass at him. He took the pass. Her husband was an art dealer, that was all he remembered. That and the bites on his chest, tiny toothmarks like the attack of a crazed ferret.

‘Whose money?’ Anselm said.

O’Malley smiled, the canines showing. ‘Well, that’s an awkward one, boyo. This is money without provenance, without parentage. Conceived in sin, sent out to make its own way in the world. It doesn’t belong to Serrano, that much is certain.’