In the Evil Day

dialled.

‘Kennex Import. How may I help you?’

‘Michael Hollis, please,’ Niemand said in his Yorkshire accent. He had always been able to mimic accents. He heard them in his head like music, the stresses and timbres, the inflections.

‘Who may I say is calling?’

‘Tell him it’s in connection with a package.’

‘Please hold.’

Not for long.

‘Hollis.’ The faint German accent.

Niemand waited a few seconds. ‘I have a package from Johannesburg.’

‘Oh yes. The package.’

Two women came in, girls, shrieking, spiky hair, faces violated by rings, full of push and bump and finger- point.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it for less than fifty thousand, US.’

A pause. A sniff, an intake, just audible.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’

A pause, the sniff, another sound, a click-click. ‘I’m not sure we can do that. Can I call you back? Give me your number.’

‘No,’ said Niemand. ‘I’ll give you an hour to decide. Then you can say yes or no. If it’s no, the package goes somewhere else. I’ll ring.

Goodbye.’

Niemand went for a walk as far as Kensington Gardens, sat on a bench and watched the people. He had been there before, on his second visit to London. He was supposed to be on his way to Papua New Guinea to fight headhunters, that came to nothing, some political fuck-up. For ten days, he’d been stuck in a hotel near Heathrow with half a dozen other mercenaries-the stupid, the brain-dead, and the merely kill-crazy. Every day, early, he’d take the underground somewhere and run back, long routes plotted with a map. He got to know London as far away as Hampstead and Wimbledon and Bermondsey. Then they were paid off and given plane tickets home.

He always felt strange in England, hearing English everywhere. His father had hated the English, rooinekke, anyone who spoke English, Jews in particular, said it was in his blood: Niemands had fought against the British in the Boer War, been put in concentration camps, sent to Ceylon, a koelie eiland, a coolie island. But then his father had also hated Greeks and Portuguese, called them see kaffirs, sea-kaffirs. For Greeks he reserved a special loathing, having married a Greek girl and lost her because of his drinking and violence. When Niemand and his mother came back from five years on Crete, he found that his father came home drunk from the mine every day, drove the loose old Chev V8 into the dirt yard at speed, stopped in a dust cloud inches from the tacked-on verandah. One day, he braked too late, took out a pillar, half the roof fell on the Chev. He just stayed where he was, opened the bottle of cheap brandy. Niemand found him when he came home, carried him to bed, surprised at how light he was, just bones and sinew.

Niemand looked at his watch. Five minutes to go. Two young women behind three-wheeled pushchairs came from opposite directions, saw each other, cried out. Stopping abreast, they walked around and inspected each other’s cargoes beneath the plastic covers, made delighted scrunched-up faces.

He dialled.

‘Kennex Import. How may I help you?’

‘Mr Hollis. About the package.’

No further questions.

Niemand watched the mothers talking, hands moving, talking babies, faces alive with interest.

‘Ah, the package.’ Hollis. ‘Yes, I’m having trouble getting authorisation for the deal you suggest without seeing that the goods are as described.’

‘No,’ Niemand said. ‘You give me the money. In cash. I give you the package.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘I think it is. Yes or no.’

‘We have to see the goods. You can understand that.’

Niemand didn’t like the way this was going. He didn’t have contingency plans. ‘Now the price is sixty thousand,’ he said. ‘Inflation.’

‘I’m sure we can agree on price when we know what we’re getting. I’ll give you an address to bring the package to. You do that soonest, say in an hour, thereabouts, soonest. Then we look at it, we authorise payment. How’s that?’

‘Forget it. You’re not the only buyer. How’s that?’

‘That’s quite persuasive. Can you give me time to discuss this with my colleagues? I’ll recommend that we do it your way. I’m sure they’ll agree. Call me at ten tomorrow morning?’

Niemand didn’t reply for a moment. He needed to think. ‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Good. Excellent. There’s no need to look elsewhere, I assure you.’

Niemand sat for a while, not easy in his mind.

10

…HAMBURG…

Anselm took the firm’s BMW and drove to Winterhude. He found a parking space in Barmbeker Strasse, went to the Konditorei and bought a small black chocolate cake, walked to the apartment in Maria-Louisen-Steig to see Fraulein Einspenner, whose service to the Anselm family began in 1935.

She came to the door in seconds. She was just bone covered with finely lined tissue paper but her eyes were bright. She seated him in the stiff sitting room on a striped chair, took the cake to the kitchen and came back with it, sliced, on a delicate plate, on a tray with cake plates and silver cake forks.

They talked about the affairs of the day. She knew about everything, watched the news and current affairs on television, her eyes not up to reading the paper.

‘How is Lucas?’ she said.

‘Well. He’s well.’

‘When is he coming to live in his house?’

‘I don’t know. He has a house in London.’

‘Then he should give the house to you.’

‘Perhaps his son will live in it one day.’

Fraulein Einspenner thought about that for a while, nodding. Then she said, ‘Your German is very good.’

She always said that to him at some point. She had said it to him for thirty years.

Fraulein Einspenner separated a tiny piece of chocolate cake with her fork, put it to her mouth slowly. There was no perceptible chewing movement. She was ingesting it.

Anselm waited until he thought she had swallowed.

‘Moritz,’ he said. ‘Do you remember much about him?’

She was looking at her plate, making another incision in her thin slice of cake with the side of her fork.

‘Moritz?’

‘My great-uncle.’

‘I was a servant,’ she said.

‘You do remember him?’

She finished the cut, didn’t impale the fragment, didn’t look up, began another separation.

‘I saw him, yes. He came to the house.’

‘What became of him? Do you know?’

More work on the cake.