(2005) Rat Run (48 page)

It seared in Gaunt's mind. He recalled the long signal sent him by Polly Wilkins that detailed hours spent in the Planten und Blumen garden and what a man had told her. It fell into place. A man had tried to claw back his life by climbing a pyramid. He offered no sign of it, and stood.

'Very helpful you've been, Tony. A last chore for you. Please, see if there's anything in the Capel file that might equate with a rat run - you know, a round-the-houses short-cut as an importation route

- any trace to a b o a t . . . Oh, if I ever wanted to go to that estate - probably very close to where I work - and meet a pensioner who was mugged for her purse, who would I go to see, and where?'

A slip of paper was taken from the chief's desk notepad, and the accompanying silver-coated pencil, inscribed 'To a Valued Colleague From the Police Academy, Toronto', scribbled something. Gaunt pocketed it without reading what had been written.

He never showed enthusiasm for information given.

Going down in the lift and out into the evening, he realized that he had spent an hour with a policeman who was so embittered by defeat that he had pulled the marionette strings of a broken man and given the poor beggar purpose - quite bizarre, but life was ever thus. He reflected: a man with purpose in his step could always be found useful work.

He lay full length on a platform bench.

Police had come to him a half-hour before and towered over him. They'd had pistols, handcuffs, gas and batons on their belts, but he had shown them his passport and his onward train ticket. The man had grimaced contempt, the woman had sniffed, and they had left him. A train came through, pulling half a hundred, Malachy's best guess, wagons of chemicals.

He was awake, had been since the police had checked him. When the wagons had rumbled away into the night, a silence fell round him and the station's life died. He had reached Rotenburg. He must wait, chilled and damp, another hour for a night service that would take him - via Bremen, Oldenburg and Emden - to the coast.

Off the coast was an island, but he did not know what he would find there, or if he would find anything.

He sat on his bed and a blanket shrouded his shoulders.

The nightmare had worked in the mind of Oskar Netzer. If he lay on his bed, he would sleep because of his age and his tiredness. If he slept he dreamed, and the nightmares chased relentlessly after him. He saw men loosen the noose round a frail neck, take down a child's corpse and put the noose on another.

The blanket gave him sparse warmth. Always at the last, the picture in his mind was of his uncle Rolf, who had helped to drive the children, their carers and guards, their doctor and the ropes to the cellar where hooks were set in the ceiling. Because that blood ran in him, he was part of the evil. He had come to the island of Baltrum, with his wife, to find peace but it escaped him. The blood in his veins was contaminated. He threw off the blanket and stood up heavily. The joints of his legs - as if he was cursed -

ached at the movement, and he went to his living room. Respite, if it were to be found, would be in the bundles of planning applications that littered his table, and the drawings of a proposed new sewage works.

Only by fighting each change that came to the paradise, Baltrum, could Oskar Netzer exorcize the guilt that ran in his blood. He pored over applications and the proposal... Anything and any person who was new to the island and threatened it must be fought root and branch - as Lutherans had said three centuries before - without compromise. The light, from a low-wattage bulb with no shade, beamed down on him as he scanned typescripts and drawings, and was saved from sleep.

He had many names, discarded, and in the morning he would have a new one. In the morning he would be given the passport and documents for Social Security.

He had the name given him at birth - Anwar.

He had the names, for a week or a month, on the travel papers with which he criss-crossed international boundaries.

He had the name Sami, student of mechanical

engineering and lover of Else Borchardt.

He had the name Mahela Zoysa, on whose

Sinhalese identity he had come into Germany and which, in the morning, he would give up.

He had the name, in the Organization, of Abu Khaled but he was far from the company of

colleagues. For Abu Khaled, a man had died in the top-floor rooms of an apartment - that sacrifice had been made for him.

He preferred to sit on the linoleum, with his back against a wall and a calendar above him that showed a faded picture of the fortress of Gjirokastra in Albania. He shunned comfort, preferred the floor to a chair or a mattress . . . Alone, unwatched and delving into memories he would choose the floor to rest on.

The memories danced for him, changed step as if a beat altered, seemed to him to be on a loop and always returned to him as the boy, Anwar - a child of the city of Alexandria.

He had been born in 1972: that year, as he knew now, was when Palestinians had assaulted the festival of the Munich games - and had not been prepared: the planning had been inadequate. A year later, 1973, a month after his first birthday, as he knew now, Egyptian troops had stormed the Zionist defences on the Canal, but had lost and been humiliated. He was Anwar, named in deference to the president whom his father supported. He had been nine when patriots, rich with faith, had killed the Great Pharaoh, Anwar al-Sadat, and later, as a teenager and out on the breakwater beyond the yacht club and alone, he had learned to be shamed by his name. He should have enrolled at the university in 1991, but he had gone from his home in the night with a small bag, and had left no note. He had never, since the night he had gone from his father's house, sought to make contact.

His father, if not dead, would now be in his seventy-sixth year. His mother, if not dead, would be in her seventy-third. He did not know if they lived, if they knew of the life of their youngest child. Nor did he know of the careers taken by his two brothers and his sister, of their aspirations and ambitions. He did not know if the family still occupied the house with the veranda at the front and the wide balcony beyond the bedrooms at the back, whether there was still a yacht club for them to visit and the Semiramis Hotel for them to eat at . . . Did they still buy books at the Al-Ahram shop? Did they, any of them, have love for him? Did they curse him? Was his name ever

mentioned in that house?

It was, he accepted it, weakness to hold memories.

In the morning he would take a new name, and the next night or the night after he would travel on. Then he would find the young men and women, whose names, addresses and coded greetings were locked in his mind.

He waited and had never challenged the promise made to him that a man would come.

He worked in a shop selling sportswear and shoes.

Each day, from his home in the Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe, he travelled on three buses to get to the Trafford Park retail complex. He was twenty-two and his parents were from the old military city of Peshawar, in the North West Frontier province of Pakistan, but they were now anglicized and his father worked in a local education authority office as a clerk, his mother part-time on the counter of the local library. Both had expressed surprise when at the age of seventeen, he had begun to attend Friday prayers at a mosque close to the city centre, but they had not prevented him. A year and a half later, abruptly, he had abandoned the religious training; then his parents had shown relief. What gave them the greatest pleasure was that their one child had a job with corporate training and a smart outfit to wear at work. It was where he had been told he should find employment, and he had accepted dirt wages and long hours. He had seen, last Christmas and last Easter, the masses pour into Trafford Park to saturation point - more people than had been in the Twin Towers that the martyrs had flown against. A man would come, one day, into the shop or would sit beside him on one of the three buses and say, 'And let not the hatred of others make you avoid justice.' He would answer the man: 'Be just: that is nearer to piety.' The words from the Book, 5:8, were clear in his mind and always with him.

He waited for the man to come and served in the sports shop during the day, and prayed each night in his room that he would be worthy of the trust placed in him.

Malachy felt the train slow, and as the rattle of the wheels died he heard the scream of sea birds. He reached up, unhitched the window blind, let it fly clear, and rubbed condensation off the glass.

He did not know whether he had reached, almost, the end of a journey or the start of one. Could not have said if this was where, almost, an old life ended and for him a new day started. Would not have been able to tell himself if this was the place, almost, that disgrace was finished and where he would now find the searched-for quality of respect.

His face was pressed against the cleared window.

Under the platform lights passengers, dazed from the night journey, coughed, spat and hacked their throats clear, then lugged down suitcases, parcels and rucksacks. The station was Norden. He could smell, distantly, sea air, but by the time the train jolted away and picked up speed, the rain falling from the darkness obscured the glass. When he stretched up and looked down the length of the carriage he saw only emptiness. He was alone. Through the mist now settled on the window, he saw occasional front-porch lights, an illuminated forecourt to a petrol station, a car showroom. Some of the roads were lit like daylight and some were dark - and the gulls cried louder, as if greeting him.

The last stop of the train's route - from Munich, on to Cologne, then to Rotenburg, Bremen, Oldenburg and Emden - was the harbour at Norddeich. It was flat there, exposed, and the wind ripped at flags and came in battering gusts on to the side of the carriage. The isolation, he thought, was precious to him and gave him strength. He stepped down from the carriage.

Ahead of him, tied up, was a ferry. To his left a marina of yachts nestled behind a sea wall, and to his right, crowded close, a fishing fleet. He saw the wind, the rain, hit the ferry's superstructure and rock the masts of the pleasure-craft and the small trawlers.

He walked towards the ferry and the elements almost keeled him over. He braced himself to advance. He found a man in a precariously rocking hut, who smoked an old pipe and had a coffee mug cupped in his hands as if for warmth.

Was this the boat, the ferry, for the island of Baltrum?

The man, bored and cold, shook his head.

Where was the ferry that went to the island?

The man growled, indistinct, 'Nessmersiel/ then sucked at his pipe and billowed smoke.

How could he reach Nessmersiel for the ferry?

He should go by bus.

When and where did the bus go from?

First the man shrugged. Then he took his pipe from his mouth, sipped from his mug and waved back in the direction the train had come.

Malachy thanked the man for his kindness and wished him a good day. In another world, the old one, he would have felt a spurt of anger at the slowness of the extraction of answers . . . but the former life of Malachy Kitchen had ebbed. He smiled. He went out through the door where a length of string, holding it open, strained to breaking-point. Where he had been, what had happened to him, had slowed his anger, deadened it.

The wind scurried against his back as he walked past the deserted train, away from the tethered fishing fleet and the rattle of rigging on the yachts in the marina. Rain bit at his shoulders and hips and at the back of his legs. He walked well and the pains, aches and itches were behind him. He was alone, as he would have wanted to be, and his journey was nearly done, or was nearly started.

The bus parked beside the gangplank.

The dawn had come, and the rain had eased but not the gale.

The bus for which he had waited nearly two hours had brought Malachy, and three others, along a straight road behind the sea-defence dyke. Then, at the village of Nessmersiel, the bus had swung to the north, and the last stretch of the route had been on a road flanked by neat, darkened homes. The driver had broken clear of the village and brought them to the harbour where a squat ferry waited.

She stood a little step aside from the gangway, and had a packed rucksack high on her shoulders. She had two small stubs, tickets, in her hand and held them out. 'We get two for the price of one,' she said.

'I didn't ask you to come,' he said flatly.

'Our people always like it when field people go cheapskate. I didn't say you asked me. Next week, getting ready for the season, the full fare starts.'

'I don't want you with me.'

'Don't sulk - you look grim enough without that.'

'And I don't want your concern.'

Her eyes sparked. 'Well, I'm here, and you should get used to it.'

Malachy took a ticket from her and went up the gangway. He heard her heavy shoes tramp up after him. The other passengers from the bus, on boarding, bolted from the open deck and went inside a doorway that advertised a cafeteria service. Exhausted obstinacy led him to a part of the open deck where the rain slanted in hard, and the wind. He slumped down on a plastic-coated bench that puddled water. She followed him and tried to wriggle the rucksack off her back. He made no move to help her but then she gasped in frustration and he reached to take the weight of it.

'That's better. Well done. Join the human race.'

'I was fine on my own,' he said.

The rain made a film on her hair but when she twisted her head to face him and dumped the rucksack down, the wind caught and tousled it, broke the film and droplets sparkled. She sat beside him. She wore strong lace-up shoes and a long waxed coat that she hitched round her knees but, out on the deck, her ankles took the rain.

She snatched off her spectacles, blinked, then rummaged in a pocket for a handkerchief and wiped furiously at the lenses. She grinned. 'You display, Malachy, a quite staggering degree of self-importance.

I'd like to give that a kick. I'm not with you to watch your back. Get yourself thumped and see if I care.