Ian Hocking - Flashback

Jem bit the inside of her cheek. The steady voice inside her, the compass by which she had always steered, whispered escape .

‘Madam, I must ask if you are here to see Wolfgang Klenze.’

‘I’m not here at all.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m just passing by.’

‘Please. Let us talk briefly and I then can, so to say, exclude you from my query.’

I wonder , she thought, if this has anything to do with the plans for homemade explosives in Wolfgang’s back pocket. Jesus, Saskia.

‘Inquiry. It’s ‘inquiry’.’

‘Inquiry. Thank you. Your name?’

‘Nancy Drew.’

The inspector tilted his head. ‘Do you live in this building, Miss Drew?’

‘Nancy Drew just passing through.’

‘But your voice sounds familiar.’

‘We English must sound alike.’

‘Earlier, a young English woman left a message on Wolfgang’s answer machine.’ He shook his head, as though dismissing any inference she might have made. ‘The woman called herself Jem, not Nancy. But if you are to see her, please tell her that I would like to have a conversation. She is not for any trouble.’

Jem glanced at the pavement, toed a broken slab, and looked up.

‘What’s your name again?’ she asked.

‘Yes, it is difficult to remember.’ He produced a white deck of cards. He dealt one to himself and raised it like a cigarette. ‘Please?’

When it was clear the inspector would not move, Jem walked to him and took the card. Her fingers trembled. She put it in the pocket of her coat. His expression suggested that he had complete knowledge of her, but Jem reassured herself that the look was standard issue, like his handcuffs.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked.

His composure slipped for a moment. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You’re just waiting here. Standing in the rain.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Well,’ said Jem, as she walked away, thumbs in her belt loops. ‘You know what they say about your job.’

‘That it is mostly legwork?’

Still walking, she said, ‘Ooh, you’re good. You read my mind.’

‘It’s nothing. A cliché.’ He looked at his feet. ‘I hope you find your way, Miss Drew.’

Jem bounced around Berlin for the remainder of the day. She told herself, with each stop, that she would hole up and work through the implications of a policeman hanging around Wolfgang’s apartment. She had certainly committed a crime by giving him a false name. Did that leave her with no option but to return to England? She rather hoped it did. There was little of her loyalty to Wolfgang left. But she did not quite hate him enough. Somehow, she had to find out where he was held, and for what. Then she had to talk to him without becoming an accessory or suspect. What did they have on him? There was the con work, yes, like the discovery of Saskia’s gambling system. Jem knew, however, that in the last month Wolfgang had begun to move in another direction altogether. He would go missing for days and return with cash in a plastic bag that he called his Turkish suitcase. He slept with a knife beneath his pillow. Who was he becoming? Who was she becoming?

Enough.

Jem’s stopped at Potsdamer Platz. She knew a café nearby. There she sat, and the thoughts and plans and half-predictions that filled her attention soon moved out of focus. She found herself dozing on her folded arms when a waiter tapped her shoulder with a pen.

‘ Fräulein, hier können Sie nicht schlafen .’

Her metal chair was cold, the table colder and the contempt of the waiter subzero. She had to fob him off. Still, no point packing her ideas into the meat grinder of her German language skills.

In English, she said, ‘I’m waiting for a friend.’

‘ Zwei Euro fuffzich .’

Jem stared at him. Then she tipped the contents of her purse onto her palm and let him take whatever for the untouched coffee. Like what- ever . As his fingertips walked over the coins, she thought about springing her hand shut. Nobody expects the English humour.

About then, the ARD Tagesschau news programme appeared on the giant screen above the counter. Germany’s hang-dog chancellor, whose name Jem could never remember, was talking from the steps of the Reichstag.

The waiter frowned and fussed. He selected a coin.

Jem watched a banner roll across the bottom of the screen. ‘DFU Flug Berlin-Mailand abgestürzt—keine Überlebenden’ .

Jem’s smile straightened.

‘Berlin-Mailand’ ?

The words plugged the holes in her thoughts, suffocating her playfulness. This was the flight she had a ticket for. But why was it on the telly?

Keine Ueberlebenden .

‘Excuse me, could you tell what keine Ueberlebenden means?’

The waiter completed his work on her palm and shook his head. ‘I think you should go now, please. Sleep somewhere else.’

Jem’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. The programme cut to grainy footage of woodland. The camera shook, tilted to mossy ground, then refocused on a blemish in the sky. It might have been a bird of prey. But, with a perceptual switch, Jem saw that it was an aeroplane in a vertical dive. The camera followed the plane until trees blotted the view.

‘ Keine Ueberlebenden means ‘no survivors’,’ said the waiter, wiping the table around her elbows. ‘It is very sad news.’

By midnight, at the end of a nightmarish day riding the underground and staring through everyone and everything, Jem found herself at the bottom of the steps to Saskia’s apartment building. The rain had worked its way down her collar. Her damp tights itched and a pimple had taken root in the corner of her mouth. She dallied between the desperate hope that Saskia was alive—in her apartment and cursing Jem—to the certainty that Saskia’s essence yet walked, unreflected, across its ebony floor. Jem pressed and pressed again at the button marked ‘Frau Doktor Dorfer’.

You didn’t get on the plane. You came home. Please.

‘ Hallo? ’ said a voice, male and unfamiliar.

‘Um, hello. Who is this? Inspector?’

The door buzzed. Jem pushed through to the stairwell, which was dark and echoic. She touched the light and heard its rattlesnake timer rotate. Her tired legs trembled with each step. When she reached Saskia’s door, she found it open an inch. A sound behind her reignited her fear, but it was only her rucksack, settling.

The timer for the stairwell light stopped.

The darkness closed down.

‘Hello?’

With a click, light erupted from the opening doorway. An old gentleman stood there. His eyes were rheumy and his eyebrows stately ticks of white. His thin hair was rusty at the temples. He wore a pullover with shoulder patches and rested both hands on a short, ivory cane. Despite his age, there was something of Saskia about him. The apartment staircase rose, behind him, to darkness.

‘You must be one of Saskia’s friends.’ His accent was American.

Jem wanted to reply that, no, she was Saskia’s girlfriend, but the word would not do.

‘Saskia…’

He cupped her elbow.

‘My poor girl, come inside.’

She slipped from her coat, which was heavy with rain, and dumped her rucksack in the space where Saskia stored her umbrellas and black, flat shoes. She followed the stranger up the apartment stairs. His shoes were wet too. At the top landing, he turned and tapped his left shin with the cane. ‘Excuse my slowness. It is sensitive to the weather.’

‘The hallway light is on the left at the top.’

‘I know it. Here.’

He pressed it, and Saskia’s spirit returned with a flash: the antique phone; the ‘wooden man’ kung fu dummy with Jem’s special-occasion knickers hanging from an arm; a poster from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, the yucca, the curtained door, the sideboard with weight training gloves crossed on top, the ebony floor. The smell of toast made that morning and the perfume mixed for Saskia in the south of France.