Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

The man said, ‘ Tschus .’

The cheerful chirping goodbye.

Anselm swung his bag at the man. It knocked the knife hand back, the full weight of the whisky bottle caught him in the face. He went backwards, his knees bending.

Anselm hit him with the bag again, heard the bottle meet bone, felt it, turned, saw at the edge his vision something in the smaller man’s right hand-a pistol, a pistol with a silencer.

Awkwardly, off balance, Anselm swung the bag at him.

Missed.

The man had stepped back, out of range.

He raised the pistol.

Anselm heard nothing but he felt an impact against his chest.

The smell of something.

Whisky.

He had raised the bag without thinking and a bullet had hit the bottle of whisky.

‘Leg den Beutel fallen ,’ said the man. He had both hands on the pistol now, but not sighting, holding it at his chest. Unhurried, confident.

Anselm threw the bag at him, it missed, went into the dark.

‘ Stupide ,’ said the man.

‘Shit,’ said Anselm and it came into his mind that it wasn’t an awful thing to die here, in the open, beside the lake. He could have died in a stinking hole in Beirut.

‘Nochmals Tschus, ’ said the man.

He raised the pistol, sighted.

Nothing to do, thought Anselm.

The man grunted and pitched forward, came towards Anselm, falling, the pistol pointing down, someone behind him.

Alex. She’d hit the man with her left shoulder, run into him at full stride.

As the man fell, met the ground, Anselm, the calm still upon him, stamped on the hand holding the pistol. He wished he wasn’t wearing running shoes.

The pistol came free.

Anselm picked it up and pointed it at the man’s head. ‘ Bewegen Sie sich nicht ,’ he said.

Alex was standing behind the man, winded, bent at the waist, holding her shoulder, looking up at Anselm.

‘ O mein Gott, ’ she said.

Anselm held the gun on the smaller man and walked backwards to the knife man, bent to look at him. He was breathing. There were blood bubbles at his nostrils, foamy blood bubbles.

‘ Was is los ?’ said Alex.

Anselm said to the gunman: ‘ Steh auf. Zieh die Hose aus.

’ ‘ Was ?’

‘Ziehen sie Sich aus oder ich tote sie .’

The man had to take off his shoes to remove his trousers. He stood awkwardly, pale legs ending in short black socks.

‘ Machen Sie schon ,’ said Anselm, showing him the direction with the pistol. ‘ Bewegen Sie sich .’

The man took off at a half-run.

‘Come,’ he said to Alex.

‘What about him?’ she said, pointing at the man on the ground.

‘His friend will be back for him,’ said Anselm. He took the pistol by the barrel and threw it into the lake.

They walked back towards the office. Anselm put his hand to his chest and it came away black with blood.

He was beginning to feel nausea rise.

She took his arm and they walked back along the lake shore towards the cheerful lights.

‘Where’d you learn to knock someone like that?’ he said.

‘Gridiron. I played in the States.’

‘We didn’t pass in the dark,’ he said.

She leaned towards him and touched the side of his face with her lips.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But it was close.’

…LONDON…

Caroline found the note on her desk:

See me soonest. Halligan.

End of the road. Goodbye Fleet Street, hello Leeds.

Family, McClatchie once said, you always start with the family. But Jess Thomas didn’t have any family.

The architect in Singapore had said something.

She goes back a long way with Natalie, with the family, I think.

Natalie Zampatti had a family.

She rang Sandra Fox at Craig, Zampatti.

‘Nat’s got a sister somewhere, a doctor,’ said Fox. ‘Hang on I’ll ask the secretary from whom no secrets are hidden.’

Caroline waited. The longest possible shot. The most fucking impossible shot.

‘There? Try St Martin’s Hospital. Apparently sister and husband are both doctors. Her sister’s name’s Virginia.’

It took a long time and she couldn’t get hold of Virginia but she got the name of her mother. Finally she was speaking to Mrs Amanda Zampatti in Cardiff, a thin voice, uncertain.

Caroline gave her the Detective Sergeant Moody of Battersea Police line.

‘Oh my God, she’s all right is she? Poor girl, she’s got no one, you know.’

‘We’d like to be sure. There’s no actual cause for alarm at the moment. But we thought she might have gone somewhere to get away from everything.’

‘Well, Virginia and David have a place, a farm sort of place. She’s been there, I know that, Ginnie told me on the phone.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘To tell you truth, I don’t know. They wanted to take me but really I can’t be…’

‘No idea where it is?’

‘Well, Wales, but that’s not much use is it? Up north, I think. She said it was away from anything, no phone or telly or anything. I can’t think why you’d want to have a place…’

‘Thank you, Mrs Zampatti. I’ll get back to you if we find out anything.’

Caroline slumped again. There was no quick way to do this.

…HAMBURG…

Baader’s doctor was in Mittelweg, a small, bald man, impassive. He looked at the wound under Anselm’s pectorals and made clucking noises.

‘ Das ist nicht ubel, ’ he said. ‘ Da konnen Sie von Gluck reden.

’ Light-headed, Anselm watched as he cleaned the long cut, sprayed it with anaesthetic and stitched it up with the quick movements of a tailor. He wound a bandage around Anselm’s body.

‘Don’t get it wet for forty-eight hours,’ he said. ‘Then change the bandage ever day. Any sign of infection, come and see me straight away. Otherwise, in a week. Tell the receptionist you are Herr Baader’s associate.’

He went to a cupboard and came back with two packets of tablets. ‘This one twice a day. That’s important. The others are for pain. If you have pain.’

Baader was waiting, sitting in an uncomfortable chair reading a fashion magazine. They walked to the car, drove in silence for a while.

‘This is deep shit,’ said Baader. ‘Dieter says we’ve been opened. He doesn’t know for how long.’

Anselm tried to focus on the meaning of this. ‘What can they know?’ he said.

‘Where we go, what we want. Everything. Everything we know.’

‘Won’t make much sense.’

Baader turned into Schone Aussicht. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘everything makes sense if you’ve got enough of it.’

Not life, thought Anselm, not life. ‘Who would they be?’ he said For a second, the sad wolf face looked at him. ‘People who are offended,’ Baader said. ‘People who don’t mind blowing up a ferry full of people to kill two men. The people who want to kill you.’

Baader turned into the driveway, parked outside the annexe. He put his head back against the rest, looked at the roof, said, ‘I think you should go away for a while. Tonight. Just go. Fat Otto will get you out of here, we can switch transport a few times. Do a few things like that. Go to Italy. Rome. I’ll give you an address, you can collect cash there.’

Anselm didn’t argue. He felt sick, weak, tingling in his veins, the taste in his mouth he remembered from Beirut.

He was part of someone’s problem now. Whatever the problem was and whoever the people who had it were. He had joined Lourens and his ex-employee, joined Serrano and Kael and Bruynzeel. Yes. And Kaskis and Diab and all the dead soldiers from Special Deployment. They had been a problem for someone and they had been killed for it. Tilders, he had been collateral damage. They hadn’t cared whether they killed him or not.