Nicholas Searle - The Good Liar

of a spotlight pierced the darkness in the compartment.

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‘What time is it?’ asked Hans more loudly than he had intended.

‘Three forty,’ his father replied. ‘We’re at Aachen. We have to disembark for passport checks.’

The train conductor walked down the corridor, rapping each

compartment window as he passed.

‘Everyone out,’ he shouted. ‘Quickly.’

The occupants of the compartment stood awkwardly, apologiz-

ing, jockeying politely for space. Hans’s father reached for his

suitcase.

‘No need to take that,’ said one of the men. ‘This is just papers.

They’re not interested in contraband. Just people. You’ll be back

soon enough.’

Konrad nodded and left the case on the rack.

They filed out of the compartment and off the train, the blonde

woman going first, and joined the orderly queue that snaked into

the customs hall. It was bitterly cold as they exited the carriage

and not much warmer on the station concourse. As he crossed

the platform Hans looked down the length of the train. They

were detaching the German locomotive and on the neighbour-

ing platform its French replacement snorted steam as if waiting

impatiently.

Once they were inside he could smell her perfume drifting

sweetly towards him. He looked down her elegant back and saw the

straight black seams of her stockings, and thought again of that

shiny, softly creased fabric and what it concealed. She smoked a cigarette in an ivory holder and he inhaled its aroma greedily, wanting everything of her.

His father was nervous, feeling inside his pockets for his papers.

The woman turned and said, ‘It’s such an inconvenience, isn’t it,

getting off the train and back on again? They only introduced these measures recently.’ She flashed a patronizing smile and inhaled on

her cigarette.

‘Yes,’ replied Konrad, flustered. ‘You travel to Paris often?’

‘Oh yes. I’m a fashion designer. I work with several studios.

And you?’

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‘Journalist. Preparing an article on Monsieur Cocteau. My first

trip to Paris for several years.’

‘And is this your personal assistant?’

‘Ah no. This is my son, Hans. I thought it was time he saw

Paris.’

‘I see,’ she said, turning to him. ‘A young man of his age. So much to see in Paris.’

Hans looked directly at her and held her eyes for a moment. He

thought he noticed a conspiratorial grin on her face that he found

delicious but at that instant the queue began to move.

Hans looked sideways. She was smirking at him, not apparently

making fun of him but amused at his excitement. He longed to

reach out to touch her, to feel the flesh under her skirt, or on her arm, just to know that she existed and that he did too. But the queue was speeding up and she had to regain her place.

Four trestle tables were set up, two on each side of the passengers as they processed through the dimly lit hall. It was easy to work out the routine. At each table were two uniformed men in field- grey

uniforms with SS flashes on the lapels. One sat and asked questions, while the other stood and looked sceptically at the subject, as if

with the intention to intimidate. In the shadows at the side of the hall stood four further men, overseeing everything.

Each person was called forward and processed moderately

quickly. It seemed that people were selected almost at random for

deeper questioning. Even that appeared desultory. But for most

people the ordeal consisted solely of a close examination of their

papers and a cursory, uninterested few questions.

They were getting closer. Konrad watched intently as the guards

went about their business, as if he could divine some answer to the problem of negotiating the next few minutes safely. Hans whispered

to him to stop behaving so nervously.

The woman in front of them was called. As she stepped confi-

dently forward she half turned to Hans and his father and smiled

again. His father, distracted, did not see her.

Hans watched as she strode to the table. She was doing this with

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panache, he thought. She smiled brightly at the two men in turn

and placed her papers neatly and decisively before them. They reciprocated with thin bureaucratic smiles. She joked, but Hans could

not hear what was said. It was possible, he thought, that she was

alerting them to his father’s agitation.

The seated man laughed and glanced at his partner, who picked

up one of the documents on the table, while the other leafed

through her passport. Hans attempted to feign a casual lack of interest as he focused intently on what was happening.

Hans and his father were now at the head of the queue but were

not, for the moment, called forward. All activity at the other tables had ceased and the only person being processed was the blonde

woman, apparently oblivious to the stillness, speaking animatedly

with the officials and smiling broadly. Of course. She was a marker.

That was why she had spoken to them. She was there to pick

them out.

Alternatively, thought Hans, she would be back on the train shortly and would ask herself what had become of that good- looking but

highly strung journalist and his handsome son. He wondered what

would happen to their luggage: whether some minor functionary

would be deputed to the train to find the bags of the traitors and

take them back for examination. He glanced around, expecting at

any moment the grip of a gloved hand on his arm.

He saw one of the officials make a discreet hand signal, unnoticed, it seemed, by the woman, and three of the men in the shadows

began to move. This, then, was it. Hans braced himself. But it was

not his arm that was grasped. The men moved towards their col-

leagues at the table. In a well- practised motion they took hold of the woman under her arms and ushered her swiftly and efficiently

towards a door at the back of the hall. She said nothing: it must have been the sheer shock, Hans thought. The commotion, such as it

was, was over in a matter of seconds. The man seated at the desk

made a neat pile of her papers, stood and walked through the door

with his colleague.

‘ Mein Herr! Bitte schön .’

Hans and his father heard the irritated tone of the man’s voice

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shouting at them and started in unison. They were being called for-

ward to one of the tables. The examination was brief and

peremptory. There was a railway timetable to be adhered to. There

was a delay to be made up. The officials were down a quarter of

their strength.

In less than two minutes they were walking back to the train in

silence.

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1

It was, he thinks as he tries with difficulty to guide the link through the first buttonhole of his right cuff, the first time he fully realized the potential of intrigue and surreptitious interventions. Until then he had not understood that convenient secret arrangements could

be arrived at between individuals just as between hostile states. He had come with this little enterprise to comprehend the power and

facility he held to nudge the planets into a constellation that coincided with his interests.