I
'You walk to Nessmersiel, you take a small boat to the island – you wait to be collected. It is what you do.'
The mouseboy's face quivered. 'You dumping us – me? Oh, that's bloody good.'
'You go on from here together.'
The mouseboy, Ricky Capel, came out of the car and stood his full height. His chest was up against the Bear's master. 'What's this about?'
'It is about a fool. The fool is 'Wanted for Murder'.
I do not do business with fools.'
The Bear watched and his fists were clenched. He was ready to thrust his own body between the mouseboy's and his master. The newspaper was unfolded, the photograph was shown. He saw the man, who had no name, lean forward and look past Ricky Capel and study his own photograph. His expression was of sadness, not of surprise.
The mouseboy said, 'Then we're fucked. I don't want no part of that.'
'You should know, Ricky, that it is stupid to make enemies of those more powerful than yourself. The Americans are in love with the expression 'You can run but you cannot hide'. Take him, or you will make bad enemies. Do not make a bad enemy of me, or of his friends – because I will find you and they will.'
At the back of the Mercedes, Timo Rahman opened the boot. The argument, brief, was finished.
He lifted out the gear that had been checked at the warehouse in Hamburg. He laid on the grass at the side of the road, under the signpost, the case that held the short-wave radio, the heavy, weatherproofed flashlight, two sets of leggings and two heavy coats.
Last, he raised the boot's flooring and extracted from it a short-barrelled machine pistol, a magazine and a small plastic pouch of loose ammunition. He gave those to the man with no name, the fool who was hunted. From his inside pocket he took a passport and a bulging envelope. The passport was offered to the man, the envelope to the mouseboy. Because he had collected it from the people who had printed it, the Bear knew that the passport was Slovenian and in the name of Milan Draskic – and knew that the envelope, because he had counted the notes, held seventy-five thousand American dollars. Then he went back to the front, took out the plastic bag, pocketed the chocolate, and left them with coffee and the sandwiches.
The mouseboy shook in fury. 'Not that arsehole who's the fool, it's me. I'm the bloody idiot for ever coming near you.'
'You can run, Ricky, but you cannot hide.
Remember it.'
The Bear went back to the car and when Timo
Rahman had settled into his seat, he reversed into the turning for Nessmersiel, and drove away, back where they had come from. For a long time, he could see in his mirror the two men they had abandoned by the road… If he had been asked, he would not have left them there because of the danger it might bring, but he had not been asked. At the last, before they were too small for him to recognize their movements, he saw them carry what they had been given into the cover of the plantation.
'Look at him. He's the sort of man we need.'
'We don't need any man – I don't need anyone.'
'That is pig-headed, Malachy, and boring.'
They had walked the length of the island's seashore. They had come off the ferry at the harbour on the extreme west point of Baltrum and had gone by the groynes and the packed stonework that made a barrier against the waves' surges. They had passed the knots of homes above the barrier, then struck out along the beach. With the tide far out they had been in a desert of gold-white sand, and grains of it swept across them in stinging clouds.
Polly had wondered if he would play Samaritan and offer to take the rucksack, but he had not. He had kept two paces in front of her and when she had tried to close the distance and be beside him he had lengthened his stride; she thought if she had run then so would he. Far to their left she had heard the rumble of the surf breaking, and to their right she saw the low dunes where the coarse grass was flattened by the wind's blast. The beach sand stretched to the surf and it reached as a thinning finger towards the far length of the island. Out to sea, she had not seen a single ship's silhouette against the horizon where clouds seemed to chase away the clear skies. And there had not been another living soul for distant company. At the tip of the finger, facing another island across a channel, he had turned inland. High on the beach, where the sand was softest, she had struggled under the weight of the rucksack but had kept pace with him. Polly Wilkins had pride and his rejection of her presence wounded her. He had led her on to a path among the dunes and there, in gullies, they had found protection. The wind eased against the rucksack, which seemed lighter on her shoulders.
'I'll do very well without a lecture.'
'That sort of man, he's all eyes and ears.'
In the dunes, her mobile had rung. She had rummaged in pockets for it, found it, held it clamped to her ear. Gaunt. How was she? Where was she? She had shrieked against the wind that she was fine, on Baltrum, and had been told she was lucky to get the best damn holiday-place postings – and that it was about debt. About what? she had howled, louder than a crying seagull that balanced on the wind above her.
Half of the call was lost on a fade-out, but she caught enough to hear that Timo Rahman had called in Ricky Capel's debt. The call was cut. They had walked on through the dunes, along a scuffed path, and each few paces she had seen his head swing right, then left, as if he soaked up an understanding of the place and memorized it.
They had dropped down into a dip, then the path bent sharply, and they had seen him – the first life since the harbour and the homes close to the sea defences. An old man was huddled against the wind, and did not have the strength to fight it, but tried to straighten the supports for a viewing platform above a shallow, weedy, stagnant pond. Maybe, she thought, the old man in combat with the wind had the same awkwardness as herself, the same bloody-minded obstinacy as Malachy Kitchen. Without help, she realized, he would fail and the platform would collapse.
'Everyone needs help. I do, you do – he does.'
'It's wrong, involving others. Involve people and they're likely to get hurt.'
'Total rubbish. If you've finished your quest for the Grail then bugger off. I haven't, and I need help.'
She saw the savagery, and heard it. 'And you won't be around after you've involved a man, and he's hurt, won't be around to pick up the pieces.'
'What do you think I've done with you, if it's not involve you?'
'I'll pick up my own pieces.'
The ethos of the Service, which they taught recruits, what was practised in field operations was the supremacy of officers over informants – milk and dump, exploit and quit. But Malachy Kitchen had told her that he was trained in intelligence-gathering, would know first hand what she had been taught and practised. The old man had his shoulder wedged against the right forward support of the pillar… Of course she would milk and exploit, dump and quit.
'I'm not out on a stroll, looking to get back my self-respect. My work is life and death and-' She regretted the pomposity.
He said quietly, 'Maybe there's a shop in the village up the other end and you can buy yourself a medal.'
If she had not had the rucksack on her shoulders, Polly Wilkins would have flounced away, but she hadn't that spring in her. She trudged towards the man on a tramped-down track that skirted the pond.
There were ducks – heavy white ducks, who didn't seem to know it was about life and death. Her father was enthralled by birds, and her mother made sandwiches for them to take to the Chew and Blagdon reservoirs where they'd sit and watch waterfowl. As a child Polly had been dragged along too and had squinted through her father's telescope. For her sixteenth birthday they had given her a pair of pocket binoculars. There were big military- strength ones in the rucksack but she would not show them.
