Victor O'Reilly - Games of The Hangman

The youth leaned forward. He smelled terrible and looked worse, but there was something, some quality, curiously appealing about him. "There is a man upstairs, a Dutchman – his name is Jan van der Grijn – and he is creating trouble. If you go up, because you are an outsider, he will stop."

"Why's he doing this?"

The youth shrugged. He looked at the ground. "He stayed here a little while ago," he said, "and after he left he was missing some stuff. He has come back to find it. He says one of us robbed him, and he's threatening everyone who was there that night."

"Why don't you go to the police?"

The youth shook his head. "We don't want the police in here," he said. "We have enough trouble with them."

The marijuana smoke diffused through the corridor. "I can't imagine why," said Fitzduane dryly. He was thinking it might be an excellent idea to leave.

The youth tugged him by the arm. "Come on," he insisted. "Afterward I will tell you about Klaus."

Reluctantly Fitzduane followed the youth up the stairs. "What's your name?" he called up after him.

"Ivo," answered the youth. He opened a door off the second-floor landing and stood aside. Muffled shouts came from inside, but Fitzduane went in anyway. An extremely bad decision. The door slammed shut behind him.

He could smell Ivo by his side. "The Dutchman has two friends with him," Ivo said. "They are the ones in the leather jackets."

"Good information," said Fitzduane, "but lousy timing." Before he knew what was happening, he felt an armlock around his neck and something sharp being pressed against his kidneys. Someone with foul breath spoke into his right ear. He didn't understand a word.

A big man in a leather jacket stopped punching a blond youth, who was held by an equally large companion, and came forward. He hit Fitzduane once very hard in the stomach. Fitzduane sagged to his knees. He felt sick, and he was getting quite angry.

Detective Kurt Siemann of the Bern Kriminalpolizei, not one of the Chief Kripo's favorites, hence his rank – or rather lack of it at the mature age of forty-seven – was of two minds about whether to follow Fitzduane into the Youth House.

His brief was terse: "Keep an eye on him, note his movements, keep him out of trouble, but don't hassle him," which seemed to Siemann to incorporate certain self-canceling elements. Following Fitzduane into the Youth House could well be construed as ‘hassling.’ On the other hand, since the Bern police were not yet equipped to see through stone walls, the instruction ‘keep an eye on him’ was currently being obeyed only in the figurative sense at best. Another complication was that it was current police policy to steer clear of the Youth House as much as possible. It was a policy with which Detective Siemann did not agree; he was all in favor of donning riot gear and cracking a few heads.

Detective Siemann decided that on balance he was probably better off staying outside, staring at the tulips and counting the flies. He thought it wouldn't do any harm if he sat down on the grass and rested for a few minutes. He lay down and put his hands behind his head – it wasn't all bad being a policeman in the spring. It might not be fair to say that he fell fast asleep, but even Detective Siemann himself would admit that he dozed.

The Bear tried to maintain an orderly wallet with everything in its place, but somehow it didn't seem to work out that way. Cash, credit cards, notes, receipts, police bulletins, bills, letters, and other impedimenta of debatable origin all seemed to gravitate of their own volition in no logical order to an apparently endless series of pockets that he had discovered disgorged their contents only on whim. It was infuriating. He worried that he would be unable to find his police identity card at some crucial moment, but so far, at least, that piece of documentation seemed to be a bit less independently mobile than the others.

The Bear hadn’t found a way to solve his problem, but he had discovered over the years that he could keep anarchy marginally in check by a deliberate daily ritual – weekly more like it – of emptying out his pockets on his office desk and doing a sort.

He swore violently in Berndeutsch, and then in Romansh for good measure, when he discovered in the debris the photograph of the motorcyclist the Irishman had asked him to check. He reached for the phone.

The answer from the vehicle registration computer came through almost immediately. The motorcycle was registered to Felix Krane with an address in Lenk. He checked with the Operations Room and discovered that Fitzduane's tail had reported in by personal radio some eight minutes earlier. The Irishman was in the Youth House.

The Bear decided it might be a good idea to make up for his absentmindedness by delivering his information immediately. He looked at the chaos on his desk, swore again, extracted the minimum necessary for survival, and swept the balance into a drawer.

He headed toward the Youth House, which was only a few minutes away on foot. Most places were, in Bern.

Fitzduane felt a hand cup his chin, and his head was jerked painfully backward.

Van der Grijn stared down at him for a few seconds and then withdrew his hand with a grunt. "No, I don't think so."

He spoke a quick command in Dutch, and Fitzduane felt himself hauled to his feet and quickly but thoroughly frisked. The shoulder bag containing his camera equipment and the tripod case lay on the floor, ignored in the confusion.

Out of the corner of his eyes Fitzduane could see Ivo on his right but slightly behind him. Fitzduane had the strong feeling that Ivo knew more than he was saying. Still, comparing the slight figure of Ivo with the three burly Dutchmen, he began to appreciate the youth's courage. He'd known what he was up against, and he could have gotten away. Instead, he had deliberately put himself in danger to try to do something about the situation.

Van der Grijn stepped back a couple of paces and stood to one side so that he could keep Fitzduane in full view while the Dutchman who had been doing the frisking came around in front of Fitzduane and started going through his pockets. He was carrying a Bundeswehrmesser, the standard West German Army fighting knife. He held it in his right hand as he emptied Fitzduane's pockets with his left. At all times he kept the point of the blade, which bore the signs of many loving encounters with a sharpening stone and glistened under a light film of oil, either under Fitzduane's neck or angled slightly upward for an easy thrust into his heart or stomach.

Fitzduane kept quite still. His wallet was removed from his inside pocket and handed to van der Grijn. The searcher stepped back and then returned to his position behind Fitzduane, by the door. Fitzduane mentally christened him Knife. He thought that Knife was about two meters behind him. He was beginning to have some potential room to maneuver.

Van der Grijn flipped open Fitzduane's wallet. He pocketed cash and credit cards and examined Fitzduane's press card and other credentials. The short pause gave Fitzduane time to get his bearings. The rectangular room was spacious but furnished only with a large, plain wooden table, two stuffed armchairs not in the prime of life, and two straight-back chairs. Every square millimeter of wall space was covered with drawings, slogans, and other graffiti. Light came from one large and two small windows at one end of the room.

There were roughly a dozen people of both sexes lined up in two irregular groups on either side of the room. They were mostly in their late teens and early twenties, but several were older. All of the smaller group – four in number – had been badly beaten. One lay on the floor, his bloody hand over his eyes and a pool of blood leaching from his head.