The Last Temptation (18 page)

‘Tadeusz Radecki. Tadzio to his friends,’ Morgan said. ‘He’s genetically Polish, though he was born in Paris and educated in England and Germany. Currently lives in a palatial apartment in Berlin. His grandmother was some sort of countess. Plenty of blue blood, but his old man had a gambling habit and there wasn’t much dosh left by the time Tadeusz finished with university. So he decided to become an entrepreneur. On paper, he owns a very successful chain of video-rental outlets in Germany. He moved in big time after the wall came down and cashed in on all those Ossies who’d been starved of Hollywood culture.’

Carol waited. She knew there was more, much more. But she’d never seen the point in asking questions simply for the satisfaction of hearing her own voice. Morgan leaned back in his chair, locking his hands behind his head. ‘Of course, that’s not the whole story. Our man Tadzio realized early on that there was more money to be made on the wrong side of the law than on the right side. Through his family contacts, he started doing a bit of gunrunning for the warlords in the former Yugoslavia after that all fell to bits. He had the contacts in the old Soviet Union to supply the materiel, and he set himself up as a middle man. Clean hands again. It worked out very nicely for him. He made a packet and he also acquired his right-hand man, a lethal little Serb called Darko Krasic.

‘With the profits from the gunrunning, Tadzio and Darko invested in some serious protection and started shifting large amounts of drugs. They always took care to stay far enough

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away from the street-level stuff to keep their hands out of the muck while making sure their noses stayed right in the trough. In the last few years, they’ve taken the lion’s share of the hard drugs market in central Germany, as well as financing some major international deals, including shipping heroin into the UK. They’ve stayed on top mostly because Darko has a reputation for being a totally ruthless bastard. You double-cross him, you die. And not in a nice way.’

Morgan sat up straight again and indicated to Carol she should move forward in the file. The next photograph showed a railway marshalling yard. The doors of a freight container stood open, revealing half a dozen bodies sprawled in a heap. ‘Remember that?’ he asked.

Carol nodded. ‘Eight Iraqi Kurds found dead in a container at Felixstowe. Last summer, was it?’

‘That’s right. There had been a hold-up loading the ferry on the other side of the Channel, and the poor sods had basically fried alive as their air supply gave out. They were the victims of Tadeusz Radecki’s latest business venture. It’s questionable what adds more to the total of human misery, his drug running or his people smuggling. But we’re not interested in how many addicts he’s created for our German colleagues to deal with; what matters to us is putting a stop to his involvement in bringing illegals into this country in numbers we can only guess at.’

Carol started to turn to the next picture in the file. ‘Hang on,’ Morgan said. It wasn’t a tone to argue with. She dropped her hand. ‘He’s a big player, then?’ she asked.

‘One of the biggest. He had the capital to get in on the ground floor. And he already had the infrastructure set up. If you’re bribing bureaucrats to move your drugs around with impunity, it doesn’t take a lot more to get them to turn a blind eye to truckloads of human flotsam. He’s bringing them

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in from China, from the Middle East, from the Balkans, from Afghanistan. As long as they’ve got the cash or the drugs to pay their way, he’ll take them where they want to go. And where most of them want to go is here.’

‘What happens to them when they get here? Does he link in to some organized network? Or are they just dumped and left to get on with it?’

Morgan smiled. ‘Good question. We think it depends on how much money they can come up with. For a price, they get papers and some even get a job. But if they don’t have enough money to pay for that, they get dumped somewhere that’s already overloaded with asylum seekers and they just join the rest of the crowd.’

‘I suppose it would be naive to ask why the German police haven’t arrested Radecki?’

‘The usual reason. Lack of evidence. Like I said, he keeps his distance. There are firewalls between him and the business at street level. And the video shops make a great money laundry for a sizeable chunk of the proceeds. So he’s got an apparently legitimate source for living very high on the hog. The German organized crime squad have been trying to get a line on Krasic and Radecki for. a long time, but they’ve never been able to make anything stick. There’s probably only a handful of people who could actually tie Radecki to any of this, and they’re too scared to talk. Take a look at the next shot.’

Carol turned over to the next picture. It showed the corpse of a man lying on a short flight of stone steps. Most of his head was missing. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

‘That was one of the people the Germans thought might be able to put Radecki in the frame. They arrested him two days ago on the grounds that he was the supplier of a dodgy batch of smack that killed off half a dozen addicts. He got a

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bullet through the brain right on the steps of the police I station. That’s how fearless these guys are.’ f

Carol felt the strange mixture of apprehension and excitement that always came with the prospect of the chase. She had no idea what Morgan had in store for her, but whatever it was, it was clearly going to take her into the big time. ‘So where do I come in?’ H

… Morgan suddenly found the contents of his cup deeply I interesting. ‘Radecki had a lover. Katerina Easier. They’d been together four years. If he had a chink in his armour, it was Katerina.’ He met Carol’s eyes. ‘By all accounts, he was i besotted with her.’ Brf.

‘Was?’ I

‘Katerina died two months ago in a car crash. Radecki was ; devastated. Still is, we hear. After she died, he went to pieces. Shut himself away in his fancy apartment, let Krasic deal with the day-to-day running of the operation. But now he’s back. And that’s where you come in. Take a look at the next photograph/ f

Carol obediently turned the page. The skin on her arms , turned to gooseflesh as she stared down at her mirror image. ; The woman in the photograph had long hair, but, that apart, on first impressions she could have been looking at her twin. Coming face to face with her doppelganger in a police file was one of the most unsettling things that had ever happened to her. Her hands felt clammy and she realized she was holding her breath. Discreetly she exhaled, as if the release of spent air might blow the illusion away. ‘Jesus,’ she said, her tone a protest against this apparent violation of her uniqueness.

‘It’s uncanny, isn’t it?’

Carol studied the picture more intently. Now, she could see differences. Katerina’s eyes were a couple of shades darker. Their mouths were distinct in shape. Her chin was stronger

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than Katerina’s. Side by side, you could have told them apart without any difficulty. Yet that first impression of identity lingered on for Carol. ‘It’s weird to think there’s someone else out there with the same face. What a bizarre coincidence.’

‘They do sometimes happen,’ Morgan said. ‘You can imagine how gobsmacked I was when I saw your face looking up at me from an application form. That’s when we had the idea for this operation.’

Carol shook her head in wonder. ‘She could be my sister.’ Morgan’s smile reminded Carol of a lion’s yawn. ‘Let’s hope Tadzio thinks so.’

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0”f:’< telfH;

The Wilhelmina Rosen was under way, carving a passage through the murky waters. It was a stretch without locks or complex navigation, so Gunther was at the helm, leaving him free to settle down in the cabin with a stack of paperwork. Bills of lading, receipts for fuel, payroll accounts all sat waiting for his attention. But his mind kept slipping away from the task.

Heinrich Holtz’s story had opened up so many questions. His fellow crewmen might think him simple and straightforward, but there had always been much more going on behind his eyes than he’d revealed. He’d always had to live in his head, starved as he had been of the company of his contemporaries. The only thing that had kept the inner darkness at bay had been reading, though his grandfather had tried to deny him even that. As a teenager, he’d become adept at smuggling books on board, battered paperbacks bought from charity shops and market stalls. He’d read late at night in the privacy of his tiny berth in the bows, devouring violent adventure novels, biographies and true crime, dropping them overboard once he’d finished with them, lest the old man catch him in something that would at the very least be scorned as a waste of time. It had taught him to look beyond the surface to what lay beneath.

So the revelation of the secret of Schloss Hochenstein was

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the key that had unlocked the closed mansion of his past. He still had to wander down the corridors and explore the rooms before he could have any understanding of what really lay within. Some of those rooms remained obstinately dark, with no possibility of illumination. His grandmother, for example. She had been dead before he was born. He had no idea if she had borne the brunt of his grandfather’s sadism or if her love had been enough to calm his rage while she lived. There was no way of telling.

He knew almost nothing of his mother. His grandfather had only ever referred to her as a whore, or a bitch who had fouled her own doorstep. There wasn’t even a photograph of her among the old man’s personal effects. He might have passed her a hundred times on the street and he would never have known. He liked to think that the electric current of his hatred would alert him to the bitch’s presence, but he knew that was wishful thinking.

From his birth certificate, he had gleaned a few facts. She was called Inge. She had been nineteen at the time of his birth, her occupation listed as a secretary. Where his father’s name should have been, there was a blank. Either she hadn’t known who he was, or she had had her own reasons for keeping silent. Perhaps he was a married man. Perhaps he was a callow fool she didn’t want to be tied to for the rest of her life. Perhaps she was trying to protect him from the wrath of her own father. All these options were equally possible, given that he knew nothing of the kind of person she had been, or whether she had been as brutally oppressed by the old man as he had. It didn’t stop him despising her for leaving him to face the fate she had escaped.

After the old man’s funeral, he had asked the crew what they knew of his mother. They’d never have dared open their mouths while the old man was alive, but with him safely

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despatched, Gunther had told what little he knew.

Inge had been brought up very strictly. Her mother had kept her close, forcing her into the mould of proper German womanhood. But when she had died, Inge had seized her chance. Whenever the old man came home, she was demure as ever, putting his meals on the table, making sure the apartment was clean and neat, dressing modestly and speaking only when she was spoken to. While the Wilhelmina Rosen was out of port, however, it was a different story.

Gunther had heard from other boatmen that Inge was regularly seen in the dockside bars, drinking with sailors until the early hours. Naturally, there were boyfriends, enough to earn her the reputation of a good-time girl, if not quite a slut.

She must have known she was dancing with the devil, he thought. Watermen have a strong sense of community and a confined world; word of her indiscretions was bound to make its way back to her father’s ears. But before that could happen, she’d fallen pregnant. What surprised him, now he came to think about it, was that she hadn’t got rid of him. It wasn’t that hard to come by an abortion in Hamburg in the mid19708. She must have wanted to keep him very badly if she was prepared to withstand the wrath of her father.

According to Gunther, she managed to hide the pregnancy for the first five or six months, swaddled in baggy sweaters. When her father had found out, he had been enraged almost beyond speech. Life on board had been hell for a few weeks, the old man in the foulest of tempers and the crew unable to do right for doing wrong. He could imagine only too well what it must have been like, and felt grateful to have missed it.

There followed an ominous silence for a couple of months. Then one morning, after a three-day lie-over in Hamburg,

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the old man had arrived at the quayside in a laden car. The crew had watched openmouthed as he had calmly unloaded a crib with two full sets of bedding, several carrier bags of baby clothes and a box containing bottles, formula and sterilizing tablets. Finally, the old man had wheeled a pram up the gangplank. It contained a baby. f ^ j n

No one had the nerve to ask the old man what had become of Inge, and they’d sailed before rumours could reach them. But when they’d next hit their home port, Gunther had made a beeline for the bars to garner what gossip he could. As he’d suspected, the old man had come home to find Inge ensconced with the baby. He’d thrown her bodily out of the apartment, tossing her clothes down the stairs after her. He’d changed the locks and set about bringing up baby himself.

Inge, it was reported, had left town. One of her ex boyfriends worked on a cruise ship and he’d found her a job on board, waitressing. When the ship came back to Hamburg, Inge was gone. She’d handed in her notice in Bergen and walked off into the Norwegian night without a forwarding address. That was the last anyone in Hamburg had heard of her, as far as he could tell.

He wondered what had become of her, but in a remote, unemotional way. Even as a child, he had never entertained fantasies of rescue. It had never occurred to him to dream that his mother would sweep on board, wrapped in mink and dripping with diamonds, to take him away from his personal hell and envelop him in the lap of luxury.

These days, when he thought of her, he imagined she had probably ended up selling herself in one way or another, either formally as a prostitute or informally as the wife of someone she could see as a protector. It was, he thought, a damn sight more than she deserved.