in the liberation of the city after nearly a year of Iraqi occupation. He had been told they could rejoice in martyrs’ deaths. He struggled to remember them, to picture their faces and hear their voices. His father had told him once that there was never a good or bad time for confession. It had involved him taking a handful of piastres from his mother’s purse to buy sweets from another kid at school. His father had told him that confession was a fine purging agent. He had gone to his mother, interrupted her work on medical case histories and seen her brow furrow with annoyance. He had said he had taken some money and bought sweets. She had shrugged and returned to her work.
Now he said, ‘There was no headache.’
‘What, in God’s name, were you up to?’
‘I did not want to be there.’
‘That is pathetic. It was important – we talked about it.’
Something of his pain would have been in his face. He was wrapped in a bathrobe, had come to their bedroom to find clothing for the day: he wore a suit, shirt, tie and polished shoes when he saw patients; he dressed down only for days with his students. He sat on the side of the bed. He took a deep breath – he was not Steffen but Soheil. He was not from Lubeck and German, but from Tehran and Iranian. He spoke the truth, bared himself.
He spoke of a phone call from Berlin, a meeting with an Iranian, who might have been an intelligence officer of the VEVAK. He said he had cleared facilities for a patient to come for consultation, and had been rude to his staff who had queried why he had agreed to see a nameless patient with no medical history. He said he was trapped, that his past and origins had claimed him.
The sheet dropped. Her hands reached out and gripped his shoulders. ‘You are German! You do not have to-’
‘Wrong.’
‘You are German. You are Steffen Weber.’
‘I was, but am not now. I am Soheil – I am my father and mother’s child.’
‘You do not know who you are treating? You do not know who their secret police are bringing?’
‘I do not.’
Her back arched, and he saw the upper curve of her chest, which had been on show at the Rathaus. It would have been covered only with a loose wrap on the ride home.
She shook him. ‘Call the police or the security people. This is not a banana country. You cannot allow thugs to manipulate you.’
‘I-’
She flared, ‘Are you married to me? Yes. Are you their servant?’
He could not answer her. He pushed himself up from the bed and went to the wardrobe. He took out a suit and a folded shirt, fresh socks and laundered underwear, a quiet tie and shoes that glinted with the polish the maid had applied. He closed the wardrobe, turned and knew what he would see.
His wife, Lili, held the sheet high, covering herself. He thought that a woman would always cover her body if confronted by a stranger. He went to dress. He faced a long day in Hamburg before he returned to the medical school at Lubeck for his evening appointment with a patient whose name he had not been told. He did not think, then, that her marriage to a stranger could be saved.
He reached the door and said. ‘They would hunt me, track me, find me if I refused. They will have chosen me because of my birthright. I assume that the patient is someone of military importance or in intelligence gathering. If you wish, Lili, to condemn me, you could lift the telephone and speak to the police or the security apparatus. I ask you not to… They have a long arm and a long reach, and I would spend the rest of my life searching the shadows at my back.’
He closed the door after him.
Sarah knew.
The telephone on the desk had rung. He had been sitting on his desk, feet dangling, when it had screamed for his attention. He had picked it up.
She knew the story.
His face had seemed to contort as he’d listened. A greyness came to his skin, followed by pallor, and Gibbons’s tongue had flipped over his lips. She understood that a location had been given. Then Gibbons shook, as if throwing off an unwanted skin, a burden, and his back straightened. His only question: which airport were they going out from, City, Heathrow or military? It was as if, by the time he hung up, he had regained control.
She was in the outer office and it was not her place to pressure him for the information so she’d kept her head down.
He called to her that the town named as the target’s destination was Lubeck. She asked if the transport was taken care of, and he nodded, but without excitement. Well, perhaps anticipation of ‘excitement’ was unrealistic, she thought, as she looked through the open door at Len Gibbons, whose office – and professional life – she ran. She knew why the name of Lubeck had stopped him dead in his tracks. She knew the story.
The story held in the Towers’ archive was titled The Schlutup Fuck-up, and not many knew it, but she did.
When Sarah had gone to work for Gibbons her friend, Jennifer, had quietly let her know about the Schlutup Fuck-up and its effect on his career, the struggle the man had put in to shift it off his shoulders. A veteran in the archive and able to ferret in restricted areas, Jennifer had unearthed the story. To Sarah’s knowledge, Len Gibbons had never been back to that northern corner of Germany, up by the Baltic coast and close to the Trave river. Small wonder the poor wretch had blanched. The pain of the Fuck-up would have been acid-etched in his mind.
She disguised her privileged knowledge with apparent indifference: ‘Will you be wanting me to come with you, Mr Gibbons?’
‘I don’t think so, Sarah, but thank you. A pretty ordinary place, Lubeck, and unlikely to present problems. Not a place to be mob-handed on the ground.’
She wondered how he would be – in a modern world of supposed integrity – when he was there, in Lubeck, and deniability might be hard to rustle up. And she wondered, all those years ago, how much tittering there had been behind hands in the previous home of the Service, and how much a Fuck-up of dynamic proportions would harden a man – a man such as Len Gibbons. He had not mentioned the men in Iraq, not expressed praise or admiration for their work, nor sympathised with the conditions they would have operated under, nor referred to the back-up team. She could do jargon with the best of them: Sarah considered the lack of praise, admiration, of any acknowledgement for what others had achieved to be part of the ‘collateral’ of the Schlutup Fuck-up and the scars it had left.
‘Whatever you say. I asked…’
‘Good of you. Pretty straightforward stuff, and an experienced team around me.’
It was a cold morning in the city but the early sun gave beauty to the skies. The blue was cut by the exhaust fumes spewed from the engines of a Boeing 737, bound for the Swedish ferry-port city of Malmo. Gabbi did not query whether the most effective route had been chosen for him, or the quickest, or the one that would provide greatest security. He would land by noon, would be met and driven to the departure point. Layers of people worked on the problems and came up with answers that he would not second-guess. It gave Gabbi satisfaction to reflect that so many laboured behind him. He was launched, and had no thought for those who had gained the information that had set him on his way.
The car had taken them.
There had been a further delay when Mansoor had looked down at the nearside rear tyre of the Mercedes and thought it too smooth, barely within legal limits, not fit for carrying passengers of such status. He had queried the tyre’s safety. He had almost accused the driver of taking a good tyre to the market in Ahvaz, selling it and replacing it with an inferior one, then pocketing money. They had argued, until the Engineer had clapped his hands and demanded that he and his wife left.
The dust cloud thrown up behind the car had thinned, and the children had left cheerfully enough with their grandmother for school.
The bird had stayed. He had as good a view of it as he could have hoped for. He did not tire of watching it. His father would not have understood, or his wife or his mother. Himself, until he had been allocated to the security of the Engineer, he would not have believed that a man could watch a bird that sat across a hundred and fifty metres of water from him, and pray that the moment would not pass. The focus of the glasses was on the feathers
