Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

Yes. Let’s talk about something else.

She talked about her childhood, about rowing on the Alster, birthdays, grand parties, dinners.

We always went to the New Year’s Eve ball at the Atlantic. So glamorous.Everyone was there. They had kangaroo tail soup on the menu on New Year’s Eve in 1940. That was the first time I went after Stuart’s death. Also the last year we went. I went with Frans Erdmann, he was a doctor. Much younger than I was.He died at Stalingrad.

After eight, he left for work, closed the massive front door behind him. The temple of memory, he said to himself. The only memory missing is mine.

…HAMBURG…

ANSELM WALKED along the misty lake shore carrying his running gear in a sports bag. His knees were getting worse and his right hip hurt, but he ran home on most days. The long route on good ones, the slightly shorter one on others. The number of others was increasing.

Today, Baader was coming from the opposite direction, every inch a member of the Hanseaten : perfect hair, navy-blue suit, white shirt, grey silk tie, black shoes with toecaps. They all dressed like that, the commercial and professional elite of the Hansastadt. They met at the gates to the old mansion on Schone Aussicht.

‘Christ,’ said Baader, ‘I was hoping that thing was an aberration.’

Anselm looked down at his windbreaker, a nylon garment, padded, quilted, red. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s football hooligan wear, that’s what’s wrong with it,’ said Baader.

‘I aspire to be a football hooligan,’ said Anselm. ‘Engage in acts of senseless violence.’

‘Join the police,’ said Baader. ‘That way you get a uniform and they pay you.’

They walked up the driveway.

‘What’s this walking?’ said Anselm. Baader drove a Porsche, a new one every year, sometimes more often.

‘Being serviced.’

‘I didn’t know you did that. I thought you bought a new one when the oil got dirty.’

‘Lease,’ said Baader. He had a long thin face, long nose, and a near-continuous eyebrow, just a thinning in the middle. ‘Lease, not buy. Deductible business expense.’

‘A joke, Stefan,’ said Anselm. ‘A very old joke. But on the subject, Brinkman’s in a state of panic. He says the kitty’s empty.’

Baader stopped, eyed Anselm. ‘Brinkman is an old woman,’ he said. ‘An old woman and a bean counter.’

‘Well, he says there aren’t many beans to count and some of your expenses aren’t deductible. He’s worried about illegality. He doesn’t want to go to jail.’

Baader shook his head, started walking again. Anselm thought that he knew what was going through the man’s mind: I gave this sad, drunken, amnesiac, neurotic prick a job when he was unemployable, too fucked-up even to commit suicide properly. I’ve put up with behaviour no sane employer would countenance. Now he’s the voice of conscience.

‘How was the honeymoon?’ said Anselm. He should have asked earlier.

‘I’ve had better.’

At the front door, finger on the button, not looking at Anselm, Baader said, ‘When there were just three people and I did the books, I made money. Now we have to have fucking super-computers that cost as much as blocks of apartments. Maybe I should go back to three.’

‘It’s worth a try,’ said Anselm. ‘Of course, you had fewer ex-wives then and it was pre-Porsches and apartments in Gstadt.’

Baader pressed the button, waved at the camera. From his cubicle, Wolfgang, the day security, unlocked the door.

They went upstairs to the big rooms on the second floor of the grand old building that housed the firm of Weidermann amp; Kloster. There was no Weidermann, no Kloster and the firm was no longer the publishing house the two men founded after World War Two. Now W amp;K’s business was looking for people, checking on people.

The biggest room was lit by a dim blue light. It held six computer workstations clustered around a bank of servers, a 1000-CPU supercomputer, state-of-the-art equipment. Two tired, stale-mouthed, gritty-eyed end-of-shift people were in residence.

Anselm’s office led off the room. On the way to it, he passed a shaven-headed man in black sitting on his spine, his head back, eyes closed. He was chewing in a bovine, cud-shifting way.

‘You’re eating in your sleep, Inskip,’ Anselm said. ‘Wake up and go home.’

‘Home,’ said Inskip, not opening his eyes, ‘is where they have to take you in. That is not the situation at my lodgings.’

Inskip was new in the job, six months, but he was suited to it, not a normal person. He’d been recommended to Baader by someone who knew his father, once a lieutenant in the Army of the Rhine, now something in the British Foreign Office, probably an MI6 employee. Inskip’s mother was a German doctor’s daughter and he’d learned German at her knee.

Inskip had a degree in mathematics from Cambridge and his only real job had been six months as a junior lecturer at an English provincial university.

‘Kicked out for GMT,’ Inskip had told Anselm one night. They were standing on the balcony, smoking, snowflakes dancing in the cold light from the windows.

‘GMT?’

‘Gross moral turpitude. I committed an unspeakable act.’

‘What was it?’

‘Search me. No one would speak of it. I was off my face, drink and drugs, so I had no recollection. Anyway, I couldn’t be bothered to ask, told them to fuck off. Loathed the place, all ghastly grey concrete, stuck out in these fields, students thick as sheep.’

Now Inskip opened his eyes. ‘The Indonesian’s on the radar. Two minutes ago.’

‘Where?’

The man’s name was Sudrajad. He had not been sighted in Europe since stealing four million dollars from a French construction company trying to swing a contract in Indonesia. The French wouldn’t have felt so bitter if they’d got it, but it went to Americans who made a member of the Soeharto family a partner in their firm.

‘Swissair 207 into Zurich from New York, 11.20.’

A list of names, dates and numbers appeared on his computer screen. Inskip began to scroll it.

‘What name?’

‘Hamid. The Malaysian passport.’

‘Told them?’

‘I’m looking for a hotel…here it is. Schweitzerhof. One night. There’s a limo booked.’

‘Tell them. He may go somewhere of interest on his way to the hotel.’

The clients chasing the Indonesian were a Paris firm of commercial investigators, good clients.

Anselm went into his office and read the night reports. The Serrano watchers said the woman appeared to be paid off at the station. Serrano and the bodyguard went to the Hansa Bank, where the case went into a safe-deposit box. The bodyguard left and Serrano took a cab to the Hotel Abtei in Harvesthude and had not left the premises. This information had been passed on to O’Malley in London.

In the tray was a long complaint about payment from Gerda Broeksma, the firm’s representative in Amsterdam. They couldn’t afford to lose her. If Anselm understood the figures, she had brought in almost 5 per cent of the firm’s turnover in the past year. Holland was good for business. The Dutch were a suspicious lot. They knew that people who left their sitting room curtains open at night were not necessarily without anything to hide.

Anselm went down the short passage to Baader’s office. The door was open. He was on the phone, beckoned, pointed to the Marcel Breuer chairs at the window. Anselm sat down. Baader stopped grunting into the phone and came over.

‘What?’

‘Gerda. She says we’re three months behind. She wants to quit.’

Baader put his chin on his hands, closed his eyes. He had long lashes. ‘Why does everyone go to you? The caring fucking ear. You running a complaints booth?’