He was led to the car. He had thought, if this moment ever came – hands gripping his arms and handcuffs biting at his wrists – that the chief man among them, whom he had thought to be only a tax investigator, would wear on his face a mask of gloating satisfaction. .. but there was only impassive coldness. A hand wrenched down his head so that his scalp would not hit the top of the car door, and he was pushed inside. If the man had shown triumph, a little of Timo Rahman's dignity would have survived. He sat low in the back seat and humiliation swam over him.
The consul general took the call. 'What can I do for you, Dr Konig?… I'm sorry, that name again, please
… Miss Polly Wilkins? I don't believe I know her…
She was here? Well, I never saw her and I've never heard of her. There is, and I can emphatically state it, no one of that name at my consulate… I see, I see.
Well, Dr Konig, I suggest you contact our embassy in Berlin… I can't imagine where the confusion arose but I regret, sincerely, that I am unable to be of assistance… Miss Wilkins is not on my staff, is not here, and I have no idea who or where she is… If she were to arrive on my doorstep, is there a message for her?… Timo Rahman is under arrest, is that it? If I ever meet her, I will assuredly tell her. Good day, Dr Konig.'
He rang off. He gazed bleakly through the window and out over the lake. The thought in his mind was of betrayal, promises broken, contacts thrown to the winds. He detested the presence on his premises of what he referred to as 'the shadows people'. He thanked his God that she had gone, good riddance, from the upstairs and permanently locked room to which he had no access, and wondered where she was
… He was buzzed and warned his next appointment had arrived – and he erased her, and her business, from his mind.
He was drawn back, as if a rope pulled him.
Oskar circled them.
He had been at the platform through the afternoon, had cleared away the eider's carcass and had watched the birds' renewal of confidence. With death gone, they had fed and preened – but he had known that he would go back. Late, as the sun's shafts dipped and fell on the birds, and made a brilliance of their plumage, he had moved. He had thought it, as he had approached them and heard one dripping voice, a small matter that he had done already. The destruction of the light, he had felt, was of minimal importance. He had looked for a larger gesture, an act that would mitigate the shame on his family and the poison in his blood.
He saw the weapon, and the steel case, which was open and showed him the dials below an extended antenna.
Moving on his stomach, so slowly, through the scrub and never pulling when a thorn caught him, Oskar was undecided as to whether to steal the radio or the firearm from the strangers who violated his paradise. He did not know which was more vital to them, the weapon or the radio. Their backs were to him.
To take either, he must crawl from the scrub's cover.
If he had either the radio or the weapon, he would go in the dusk, the darkness, to the home of the island's policeman, who thought him a malcontent, a trouble-maker – who would be confounded and would offer fulsome gratitude. He had to expose at least his arms, head and shoulders if he were to stretch far enough to snatch away the weapon or the radio.
One talked – not a tongue that Oskar Netzer knew – and the other, taller, lay close to him and was on his side, seemed not to respond and might have slept. The blackness of the evening was fast coming.
He did not feel the brittle twig blown away long before by a storm that was dry from the cover of the scrub. Oskar did not feel it against his stomach and through the thickness of his outer coat. He wriggled to go closer. He knew that from exertion his old lungs croaked for breath that rattled in his throat, and he tried to suppress the wheeze. His fingers were, perhaps, ten centimetres from the weapon, but more than twenty from the radio. With what he believed to be the greatest caution he brought a knee forward, and felt a creaking pain in his joint, then squirmed forward. He saw the gap, his fingers to the weapon, shorten. He heard the twig snap.
He was going back.
Thorns caught him.
He struggled to plunge deeper into the cover.
The crescendo of gunfire burst over him, and he felt numbing shock in his arm, his shoulder, his hip.
He went deep into the thorn thicket. He heard shouting. Men blundered in the scrub but had only the small beam of a torch to guide them.
The wetness of his blood was in his hand.
He lay as if dead.
Malachy had jerked upright.
The sound had come on the wind. Three single shots, not on automatic.
When he started to move – into darkness – towards where three shots had been fired, she clung to his coat.
'It is nothing to do with us,' she hissed. 'We do not intervene.'
With both hands she held his coat, fists buried in it.
He listened, heard the surf break and the whine of the wind.
Chapter Nineteen
He no longer pulled against her grip. He could have struck out, could have broken free. Malachy did not struggle and he could feel her fingers clenched in the sleeve of his coat. If he had thought it necessary, but he did not, he could have swiped at her face with his other hand.
He allowed her to hold him and controlled his breathing. He thought she would believe that he had given up on the struggle, unequal, against her. It was three, four minutes since they had heard three shots fired. She would not have known it but all of his studied concentration was on the memory of where the gunfire had come from. One shot would have been hard for him to make the equations of the direction but three were sufficient. In his mind, as he relaxed his arm and let it sag for her, a line was drawn to his right. He estimated that the shots had been fired at a little more than a quarter of a mile from him, and perhaps three hundred yards back from where the soft sand marked the end of the dunes and the scrub, the start of tire drop to the beach. He reckoned that he lulled her.
'I'm not blaming you,' she said, a small voice against the wind. 'You have to see, Malachy, the big picture. It's beyond you now. Don't think, after what you've done and where you've been, that I'm not sympathizing. But – and I've told you – you have to let it go. The big picture is supreme.'
He knew it. There was a slackening in her fingers' grip. He thought that what she had said – no blame, her sympathy – was utterly and clearly genuine. The darkness seemed to Malachy to have come fast, sun sunk, clouds heavier, and he could see only the outline of her face, but he had felt on his skin little sharp pants of breath as she had spoken of the big picture's supremacy.
'You have to bottle it down, swallow it. Hear me…
You've done more than anyone could have asked of you. I only know the bones of your history, Malachy, but I am telling you that no one could have done more to get back what you've lost. If you say that you don't know what happened in that shit place, in Iraq, I am believing you. Already you have the right to walk tall – God, that sounds crap. Now, forget what's personal and see the wider scape… You're not a fool, Malachy, you're not a selfish man.'
One of her hands now rested on his sleeve. The fingers had straightened out and were no longer deep in the material. It would have hurt him to hit her. He could make out the upper point of the dune crest behind him but the gully beside it was lost. Locked in his memory, he had the imagined line that would take him to a point – where a weapon had fired three single shots – where Ricky Capel was. He had no doubt of it: Ricky Capel was at the extremity of the line in his mind. She lifted his arm, and he let her, and her lips brushed the skin at the wrist, then she lowered his arm. He made no resistance.
She said with gentleness, 'I'm out of Prague. There was a guy but it's long ago. Do you think you could get
