The Memory Trap

LUNCHTIME IN BERLIN

TWO THINGS
, the boss had told everyone to do: to act normal, but to report anything suspicious to the plain-clothes cop just inside the doors to the kitchen. But for Genghis, the new Turkish waiter, those were contradictory orders. Because, if there was one thing he had learnt never to do, both back home in the old country and in Berlin, it was to help the cops. The less a man had to do with those bastards, the better. And maybe in this case the safer too, if the kitchen-rumour about two cops-with-rifles on the roof was right. Small guns were bad enough, but long guns meant marksmen. And marksmen meant big trouble for someone. So bugger them! “Dumb Turk”, they were always saying. So he’d be dumb, then!

All the same (and strictly for safety’s sake, anyway), he kept his eyes open. And that eventually paid off in a double satisfaction: it was drugs-bust for sure, and he had two of the ring spotted; and neither of them was at one of his tables.

In the corner of the terrace was, for a guess, the supplier, who was from out of town (he looked more like a Czech or a goddamn Pole than a German), and who was scared stiff with the stuff on him, as he wouldn’t yet have been if he’d been the buyer, because carrying money wasn’t yet a crime.

But he wasn’t the scary one, anyway: the one to keep well clear of was the hatchet-faced Arab two tables away, by the steps down to the lake, who was pretending to be a Turk, reading a good Turkish newspaper, but who for bloody-sure wasn’t. You could always tell an Arab.

But he was the minder … though whether he was minding the sweating-pig Pole, or watching for the money-man, Genghis couldn’t decide. All that was certain was that he had scrutinized every new arrival on the terrace, while he hadn’t given the Pole a second glance since his arrival, and that (unlike the Pole) he wasn’t scared, but sat very still—
too
still—only lifting his eyes from this unread paper.

The head-waiter snapped his fingers. ‘Table Four—Table Five—they are still waiting. Get a move on!’

‘Yes, sir!’ Genghis bobbed his head obsequiously. ‘At once, sir!’

Table Five was the fat Berliner, and his fatter wife and fattening daughter, who had their main course to come. (One day it would be he who would snap his fingers!) And Table Four was the big handsome Englishman with the very plain Englishwoman (not his mistress … but her clothes were good and her perfume was expensive; so maybe his Mistress, rather!) : they had ordered only a snack and rot-gut wine. But none of them had business with the Pole, anyway—

He pushed through the kitchen-doors, meeting the cop’s eyes blankly.

Dumb Turk!

‘Five—three pike.’ The heat hit him. ‘Four—sandwiches, wine.’

‘Not ready—the pike.’ One of the cooks slid a tray towards him, rocking the bottle dangerously. ‘Anything happening?’

The temptation to be smart, and tell them that nothing would happen until the money-man arrived, reached the tip of Genghis’s tongue. But then he remembered the cop behind him, and shrugged stupidly.

Somebody shouted something that he missed, but everyone laughed.

Dumb Turk!

He pushed out into the sunlight again, away from the heat into the gentle warmth of the sun: it was one of those good Berlin autumn days, when the bitter winter still seemed far off. Then he saw the head-waiter bending and nodding to the fat German.

And someone else was coming in—a tall, distinguished-looking man—

The head-waiter intercepted him, bowed him to a table, and then snapped his fingers at Genghis once more.

Genghis set down the sandwiches, and took his time over opening the bottle. Then he gave the big Englishman all his attention until the rot-gut had been tasted, allowing himself additional time then to smile at the plain Englishwoman as he filled her glass, if only to annoy the head-waiter. And, anyway, apart from smelling good, she had a fine pair of boobs under that string of pearls. ‘Thank you madam—sir … ‘

The gentleman at Table Five, you idiot!’ The head-waiter hissed in his ear. ‘What are you playing at?’

‘It wasn’t ready—his order.’ He saw the distinguished-looking man look round over his menu. He would be the one—

‘Don’t bandy words with me.
Get moving.
’

Again the doors.

Again the policeman. (If he only knew!)

This time a heavily-loaded tray, with the additional beers the fat German had ordered earlier, about which he had clean forgotten: he balanced it expertly, but then waited until Otto and Dieter, who had not been far behind him, came in for their orders. Otto, he remembered, had been providing the Arab with his third cup of coffee. But, not being a dumb Turk, he wouldn’t have noticed anything, of course.

Into the sunlight again, with everything as busily normal as before, with the pigs all at their troughs, feeding their faces as though their lives depended on it (all except the Pole, who was still sweating, and the Arab, who was still not really reading his newspaper), and the sail-boats on the lake behind. And, inevitably, the head-waiter gesticulating at him.

He began to weave through the tables—

The money-man buyer was still there, studying his menu. So
he
hadn’t seen anything (but Genghis had to hand it to the cops there, the clever swine: there wasn’t a uniform inside or a suspicious car outside to be seen, they knew their business all too well, the drugs squad, evidently!)—

Then he swore under his breath as the big Englishman got up, pushing back his chair and blocking his chosen route, so that he had to swing to his left … only to find that avenue blocked by the head-waiter himself. And, of course, he wouldn’t give ground to make things easier, any more than the damned Englishman: no one ever cared for waiters.

He re-routed himself automatically, pirouetting on paper-thin leather through which he could feel the unevenness of the terrace flagstones. But now the woman was also moving, damn her—not getting up, but pushing her chair back in order to keep her eye on her partner: with a face like that perhaps she was used to him straying.

He coughed politely, and began to squeeze past. But as he did so the Englishman came into sight again—

What! He was heading for the Pole
—
? And
—

He saw the Arab get up. And, simultaneously, the Englishwoman began to move, pushing him—almost unbalancing him—
what
!

Suddenly the Englishwoman went mad—and his ankle caught on something, so that the tray began to escape from his control: he had only a fraction of a second to catch up with it, or else—
what
!

Nothing mattered but the tray—
the Englishwoman was either mad or drunk, what she was doing, and glass and crockery was crashing, and the Englishman tripping up, and someone was shouting
—

But it was the tray that mattered!

No one saw Genghis’s amazing recovery: his gravity-defying swoop, down and up, and the triumph of speed over impetus which caught up with and corrected the unbalance of his burden so triumphantly against all the odds, above Table Five. Or, if anyone did, the next moment obliterated the image, as the
Verfassungsschutz
marksman opened fire. Because then Genghis did finally drop the tray.

A WALK IN THE SUN

THEY WERE
waiting for him at Heathrow: they took him off the plane ahead of everyone else, like a king or a criminal.

‘Dr Audley? Would you come this way please, sir.’

‘Mmmm.’ He hated being stared at like this. But there was no help for it. All he could do was to come quietly. The uniformed man even took his hand luggage from him. And then the civilian took it from the uniformed man.

It had been obvious, of course, ever since the
Return Immediately
message had been delivered so apologetically by his CIA guard-dog/guide dog, that the shit was in the fan back home; that they had held the flight for ten minutes just so that he could be on it merely confirmed the obvious. But after that the old drug had worked on him as it always did, as it always had done over so many years, so that now he was neither flattered nor apprehensive, but only impatient.

‘Oops!’ The man in the suit had stopped suddenly, so that he had almost cannoned into him. ‘What—?’

‘Hold on a moment, sir.’ The man didn’t need to explain further, since the reason for their halt was blocking the passage ahead. ‘Could I have your identification, please?’

‘Mmm.’ Audley watched as the young soldier, green-beretted, camouflage-jacketed and armed-to-the-teeth, scrutinized his passport.

The civilian handed the passport back to him, unsmiling. ‘Nothing to worry about, Dr Audley. There’s an airport security exercise in progress, that’s all. And we’re in a restricted zone here.’

‘Yes?’ He hadn’t the faintest idea where he was, actually. But within all major airports there were gim-crack labyrinths like this. In fact, the Devil himself had probably re-designed Hell in the light of the information he had gained from observing airport layouts.

‘We’re almost there.’ Misreading Audley’s expression of distaste as transatlantic weariness, the man nodded reassuringly. ‘Not far now.’

He winced within himself. Those were almost the exact words he had been accustomed to feed Cathy on long car-journeys. Which reminded him that, however stimulating, this wasn’t the homecoming he’d planned for next week, just in time for her birthday. And he hadn’t even got her a present now.

Damn!

‘Your bag, sir.’

The civilian was offering him his hand luggage while standing outside an anonymous door on which the uniformed man was about to knock.

‘Thank you.’ On the other hand, depending on the nature of this emergency, it might get him home earlier. And, however important his Washington job was supposed to have been, it had also been ineffably boring most of the time. So all this might yet be a time-bonus. ‘And my other luggage?’

‘That’s being transferred directly to your onwards flight, sir.’

The words took a second to register. ‘My onwards flight—‘ He just managed to clip the humiliating question mark off the end.

‘Don’t worry, sir. I shall attend to it myself.’ The man was wearily accustomed to querulous questions from VIPs. ‘And I shall be returning here to collect you—‘ He looked at his wrist-watch. ‘—in exactly thirty minutes from now, sir.’

If this was Hell, then he wasn’t even properly in it, thought Audley irritably: he was in the limbo of transit to somewhere else. And wherever it was, he already didn’t want to go there.

Then he realized that the uniformed man was opening the door for him—he hadn’t heard either a knock or any reply to it, but the thunderous VIP scowl he had fixed on the poor fellow had rendered the man expressionless.

‘Yes—thirty minutes. Thank you.’ He heard himself reply to them both as he strode into the room like the wrath of God. ‘What the devil—‘

‘Hullo, David,’ said Sir Jack Butler.

Audley felt the wrath of God deflate, collapsing him to his true size in an instant. ‘Hullo, Jack.’

‘Close the door, there’s a good chap.’

‘Yes, Jack.’ He had expected an underling, he realized. Or an equal, anyway. But, equal or underling—or civil servant of any variety and seniority, bearing whatever instructions and orders, and whatever material to be quickly studied, and then signed for or returned—or even the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, with the Thirty-Nine Articles—it would have been all the same. But it was Jack Butler. So he closed the door.

‘David, I’m sorry to pull you off a job like this—in this way.’

‘That’s all right, Jack.’ What he hated about Jack Butler apologies was their sincerity. Anyone else’s apologies he could treat with the disdain they deserved. But when Jack said he was sorry, then that was what he was.

‘I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t necessary.’ Butler regarded him steadily.

‘No? I mean—
no
—
‘ From having been suddenly embarrassed, Audley became even more suddenly apprehensive: that Jack himself should come to brief him was not in itself too worrying, because knighthood and promotion hadn’t changed him one bit; but this elaboration of his apology
was
out of character ‘—no, of course not, I mean.’