sweat. He got up. The pillowslip was dark. He stripped it from the pillow. It gave off a chemical smell, the smell of the pink fluid the doctor gave him to drink before he left the hospital.
In the huge tiled bathroom, pissing into the rusty water in the toilet bowl, the same smell had risen, richer now, it sickened him.
He showered, standing uncertainly in the huge bath. Water fell on him, a warm torrent, he was inside a rushing tube of warm water. He did not want to leave it. Ever. But eventually he went downstairs. There was bread and butter and tea, tea in bags, a box of leaf tea. He made toast and tea, that was an ordinary thing to do.
An ordinary thing on an ordinary morning.
Tea brewed in a china pot. In a kitchen. Toast with butter.
He had thought it gone forever.
He’d made two slices of toast, put them on a plate, and put the pot of tea and the toast and butter and a bowl of sugar on a tray and gone out onto the terrace. There was an old, dangerous chair to sit on and a rusty garden table. He’d gone back and forth to the kitchen and, in all, eaten seven slices of toast, toast with butter, just butter. He drank three cups of tea from the English china cup, roses on it.
Just eating toast and drinking tea, sitting in the sunshine in the wobbly chair, massaging the two fingers on his left hand, he could not remember more peace in his life.
Then he was sick, he could not reach the bathroom.
He had not left the house for two weeks. There was enough food and drink for ten weeks, more. He did nothing, existed. The milk ran out, he drank black tea. He sat in the spring sun, dozed, tried to read
His brother had rung every second day. Fine, said Anselm, I’m fine. I’m pulling myself together. He had no idea what together would look like. There were terrifying blanks in his memory of the years before the kidnap-big blanks and small blanks, with no pattern to them. They seemed to go back to his teens. It was hard to know where they began.
He’d exhausted his clean clothes. Where was the laundry? He’d remembered a passage off the kitchen leading to a courtyard. The washing machine was unused for a long time, the hose disintegrated, water everywhere. He washed his clothes with old yellow soap in the porcelain sink, found a pleasure in it, in hanging the washing in the laundry courtyard.
And every day, he’d walked around the garden, looking at the roses, smelling them. One morning, when he woke, he’d known what he was going to do. Before noon, he left the house for the first time.
He knew where the bookshop was. He had been there on his last visit to his great-aunt, on his way to Yugoslavia. He had bought her a book.
He walked a long route, up Leinpfad to Benedictstrasse and down Heilwigstrasse and through Eichenpark and on to Harvesterhuder Weg and through Alsterpark. He walked all the way to the Frensche bookshop in the Landesbank building. In the crowded shop, he was assaulted by fear bordering on panic but he found the book. It was waiting for him, twelve years old, never opened, an encyclopaedia of roses. He paid and left, sweating with relief.
He walked down to the Binnenalster, bought a sausage on a roll from a street vendor, sat on a bench in the sun and opened the book. His was the hand that cracked its spine. He looked at the pictures, read the descriptions, while he ate. Then he walked all the way home, too scared to catch a bus, and, exhausted, went around the garden trying to identify the roses. It was more difficult than he had imagined. He was sure about Zephirine Drouhin at the front gate,
But that wasn’t enough. He wanted to know the name of every rose in the garden, and there were so many he couldn’t be sure of- the pictures were fuzzy, the descriptions too imprecise.
Like his memory.
Beate knocked on the glass. Anselm finished the cigarette and went in.
31
…HAMBURG…
Baader came into Anselm’s office and slumped in a chair. He put a new case cover sheet on the desk.
‘I gave this to Carla,’ he said. ‘You were busy with Tilders.’
Anselm looked at the form. The subject was someone called Con Niemand aka Eric Constantine, South African, occupation security guard, last seen London.
‘Lafarge Partners?’ he said.
Baader was looking down, fingers steepled. ‘Credit check’s okay. Corporate security. How many corporate security consultants does the world need?’
‘Demand and supply. Ever think about what happens to these people after we find them?’
Baader closed his eyes, shook his head. ‘John, please.’
‘Do you?’
‘This is a business.’ He still didn’t look up.
Anselm went ahead, knew how stupid he was being. ‘These people, they can pay. That’s all we care?’
Baader lifted his fox head. ‘Care? Care about what? Lafarge. Probably run by Catholics. If you like, we could ask the Pope to give them a moral clearance. On the other hand, the Pope cleared Hitler.’
He looked away, not at anything. ‘John, either we provide this service for anyone who can pay or we don’t provide it all. You’re unhappy with that, I’ll give you a very good reference. Today if you like.’
Silence, just the sounds from the big room, the hum of the internal fans cooling sixty or seventy electronic devices, the air-conditioning, noise from a dozen monitors, a phone ringing, another one, people laughing.
‘I’m really tired,’ said Baader. ‘I’ve sold the shares, the car, the apartment. I’m moving to this shitty little apartment, two rooms, all night the trains run past, eye level, ten metres away, the noise, people look at you like you’re in Hagenbeck’s fucking zoo.’
He got up. ‘So I’m not receptive to ethical questions right now. Next year perhaps.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anselm. He was.
‘Yes, well, when you’re in trouble, you too can sell your dwelling. Then you can buy your own island, buy Australia, it should get you enough to buy Australia, world’s biggest island, live happily ever after.’
‘My brother owns the house,’ said Anselm. Baader knew that, he just didn’t want to believe it.
Baader was at the door, he stopped, turned his head, said, ‘War criminals from three wars, Pinochet’s number two executioner, a Russian who leaves five people to die in a meat fridge, a man who swindles widows and orphans out of sixty million dollars, a woman who drowns two children so that she can marry an Italian beachboy. And the fucking rest.’
They looked at each other.
‘Count for something? Yes? Yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Anselm. ‘I’m a prick, Stefan. I’m a self-confessed prick and contrite.’
‘Yes,’ said Baader. ‘Anyway, it’s too late to change. We can’t. You can’t. I can’t. The fucking world can’t.’
Anselm stared out of the window for a long time, just a sliver of lake view, a slice of trees and water and sky, endless sky, the water fractionally darker than the sky. He still had the dreams, dreams about sky, about lying on his back, he was on a hilltop looking at a huge blue heaven, birds passing high above, twittering flocks so large their shadows fell on him like the shadows of clouds, and then the real clouds came, the mountains of cloud, darkening the day, chilling the air.
After a while, his thoughts went to Alex Koenig. It was not a good idea. She wanted something from him. A paper in a learned journal. He was a scalp. No one else had interviewed him. On the other hand…
