shoulders.
He thought she had waited with patience for the story to run its course. Malachy ploughed on to its end. 'I didn't have petrol. Didn't have a weapon – didn't have a plan. I was just driven forward. I went right up to the house…'
The yawn split her face. .. and they were talking about a shipment. Drugs, I suppose.'
She stifled it, but the yawn's last heave muffled her voice. 'I think I'm there… I'm sorry, Malachy, for what happened to you but it's not my corner to stand in.' 'Drugs movements, they don't interest you?'
'I don't do drugs – half a hundred agencies do, but it's not why I'm here.'
'They're going to ship them out from an island – it's called Baltrum, don't know where it is. I'll find a map.
They've a boat coming.'
'You go careful.'
'It's the finish of the road for me. I reckon there I can screw the man – the importer – and then I'm about through with it.'
'Will you have gone far enough along the road?'
'Don't know, to be honest with you, don't know whether it is.' He said weakly, 'I think it's all I have.'
'Well, I'll be getting along,' she said brusquely, and she stood and looked down at him. 'If you reckon that buggering up one shipment of heroin or cocaine is the dog's bollocks I'll not argue with you. What does that add up to? A tenth of one per cent of the capital's supply for a month? About that? You tell yourself that you've made a difference and get back to the real world, Malachy. Good luck.'
She walked away.
He watched her as she slipped to the path and the heaviness of her sodden coat seemed to bow her. She walked on the carpet of fallen blossom and through the puddles, and the wind threw back her hair. He thought the roughness of her last words was a veneer: she, too, was fragile. He sensed that, at the last, frustration had spilled through her. She had given him most of a day, had brought him out of a police cell, had snatched him away from the home of Timo
Rahman, and her reward had been a mumbled location for a transfer of drugs. Peering after her, on his feet, he saw her as a diminishing figure under the prison wall at the boundary of the gardens. Yes, as vulnerable as him – and he felt her tongue and the warmth of her. I don't do drugs. Her time with him had been wasted, and before he finally lost sight of her, her stride had lengthened – and then she was gone.
He went to find a map that would tell him where the island was.
Chapter Fifteen
He walked and could have dropped. Without the strength and tread of his shoes, he would long ago have stopped and sunk down to a bench beside a pavement. He had a sandwich in him, sausage and chilli, and the bulk of a map bulged his hip pocket. He had gone east from the city.
Behind him were the proud places of the city, and its shamed corners – the outer and inner Alster lakes, the Rathaus, the New City and the Old City, the warehouse quarter and the former docks where cranes now lifted building materials for apartment blocks, over bridges and alongside canals, and through satellite communities housed in high towers, under autobahn routes using threatening pedestrian tunnels.
But at Kirchsteinbek, with the map unfolded and his finger tracing the route, he turned south – and he thought the danger of the city receded. Ahead of him now were scattered villages, small towns and fields, drainage channels excavated geometrically across them. The map guided him.
Bare poplar trees, tops bent in the wind, made aisles for him along straight roads. He passed a modern gaol wall, set back on his left, and the light had gone down enough for the arc-lights to shine out brilliantly. The map told him that soon he would swing his course to the west. There was a memorial stone set in the grass short of the prison perimeter but his eyes were too exhausted and his attention too dulled for him to read its inscription. In the growing darkness, beyond the gaol, a track led to low buildings, and beside the road, set among the poplars, was the sign: KZ -
Gedenkstatte Neuengamme, and below it was a second sign directing visitors to a museum and exhibition centre. Before the prison there had been traffic on the straight, endless road, but none after it.
The buildings, what remained of a concentration camp, seemed isolated. Malachy went faster, struggled to lengthen his step, and his shoes stamped out on the road's Tarmac. He wondered who came here, and why. Were there still lessons for learning?
Hallucinations delved in his mind. Did men in vertical striped pyjama suits, which hung on fleshless bodies, watch the tramp of a lone figure on the road?
Did he smell the smoke that curled from a high brick chimney? Did he hear the trap of a gallows sprung, and the rattle of shots? If he could have run he would have. He did not have it in his limbs to hurry and the sights and sounds of the fantasy played in him till he was far beyond the shadows of the place.
Malachy Kitchen lived. Ghosts had died there – starved and died, fallen from exhaustion at a work site and died, had been dragged to a noose and had died, or had been forced down to kneel in a grave pit and had died. He saw no self-pity and heard no cry for mercy.
He lived.
Far away, behind his back, was the evening glow of a city with orange light bouncing off low clouds, where men searched for him.
At the end of the road was the Elbe river and a bridge. Across it was a bus shelter where two elderly ladies waited. They eyed him with acute suspicion.
The stubble was on his face, his clothes hung wet on his body, his breath came in pants and he sagged down on to a seat beside them. They shifted from him as far as was possible and held their handbags tight in their gloved fists. He thought of the young woman who, to save him, had kissed his mouth, and he thought of the last young woman he had tried to kiss: she had turned away from him, flinched from him.
He asked them where the bus went. They were in their best as if they had visited family or friends. The bus went to Seevetal.
Was there a railway station at Seevetal? They showed no willingness to engage in conversation with the vagrant who shared their shelter. There was a railway station there.
Where did the trains go to from Seevetal? They sniffed in unison, as if he disgusted them – to Hamburg, Rotenburg and Bremen.
Malachy's head dropped. The tiredness came in waves across him. He thought of two young women.
One had turned her face from him, one had kissed him and he dreamed… The sharp jab of a bony elbow woke him, and he walked behind them to board the bus. In his mind was only pain and the sight of the one young woman, his wife.
25 January 2004
'For God's sake, don't you understand anything? No way was I going to traipse down to Brize Norton. What did you think I was going to do? Hold up a bloody banner on the apron, 'Welcome Home to My Hero'? Don't you know what you've done to me?'
The doorbell rang.
He might at least have shown some fight, but he played what they called him, 'a gutless bastard', and denied nothing. Just said, each and every time, that he didn't know what had happened. In denial: that was what her father had said on the phone when Roz had called him an hour ago, denying it because he couldn't face what he'd done – and her father had said he was right behind his girl for not meeting the aircraft in from Basra.
The doorbell rang again, as if this time a finger was on the button and staying there… It was now eight days, on the corps's calendar in the kitchen, since 'it' had happened, whatever it was, and six days since the gossip mill in Alamein Drive had produced the whisper. He'd come home the afternoon before, like a rat running, with a train
