The ICE train was pulling into a town that looked like it had been lifted straight from the fairy tale world of Grimms’ fables.
The driver announced the next station. It wasn’t Koblenz. He closed his eyes again. This time he did not allow himself to sleep. He was hungry, he realized. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. He walked along to the restaurant car and ordered a too-hot cup of black coffee and a microwaved pizza slice in a silver-lined box along with a cinnamon bun dripping white icing, and a candy bar. It was all sugar food. Fast energy junk. But he didn’t feel like a sit-down silver-service dinner, which was the only alternative, so it would have to do.
He worked his way back through the train, rolling with the motion of the car as it leaned into the long curves in the track, until he was back in his seat. He sipped at the coffee. He ate the pizza in six bites, barely taking the time to chew before he swallowed, he was so hungry. He licked the stringy cheese from his fingers.
If he thought like a Russian, it made sense that the Disciples of Judas would want the Church’s “papa” dead. It was a bold move. It was a strike right at the heart of their false messiah. It obeyed the Moscow Ru come hard, come fast and leave them frightened. It was just like breaking down the door at four a.m. and dragging a man out of bed, naked, kicking, screaming and, most important of all, helpless. But more than that, with the eyes of the world watching, it turned the murder of one man into a spectacle.
The driver announced Koblenz Hauptbahnhof.
Konstantin wrapped the bun in the napkin it came with and crammed it and the candy bar into his pocket and moved toward the door.
He stepped off the train straight onto the set of a macabre morality tale straight from the Grimms’ repertoire. It was fitting, given the gingerbread quality of the houses and the quaint narrowness of the cobbled streets. There were police waiting at the end of the platform. Instinctively Konstantin reached for his pocket for his papers. The fear was ingrained in him. It took him a moment to remember this wasn’t Moscow and these men weren’t looking for traitors to the Soviet cause. They didn’t care if he was a defector, but it was hard for him to forget that he was exactly that. He walked toward the station house. Not too quickly, not too slowly. The policeman nodded slightly as he past. Konstantin inclined his head a fraction.
The station house had that unique railway station smell, a combination of flowers, fast-food grease, diesel engines and the desperation of a place where people were forever saying goodbye.
There were ten uniformed officers that he could see spread out across the platforms and the main entrance. In the few minutes it took him to walk across to the coffee stand beside the ticket office, buy a piping hot Americano that came served in a paper cup thin enough to burn the fingers, sit down on a bench and drink it, they didn’t challenge a single traveler. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but they obviously didn’t see it in the faces of the bald businessmen, the skinhead in the torn Clash tee-shirt that said London was calling, or the woman in the high heels and A-line skirt whose powerful calf muscles turned all the heads as she walked by. They didn’t see it in the bearded man in his college professor jacket with worn-out elbows, or the lanky student with his sunglasses and dyed-black hair that hung down past his shoulders.
He took the crushed bun from his pocket and unwrapped the napkin. The icing stuck to the tissue, the tissue stuck to the bun and then both stuck to his fingers as he tried to tease them apart. Konstantin took his time, savoring the bun. A tramp came and sat down on the bench beside him. He smelled as though he hadn’t bathed in a month; it was that sour stench that reached down his throat and made him want to gag. Konstantin took the candy bar from him pocket and offered it to the man, who took it, peeled it out of its wrapper and ate it hungrily. Pigeons gathered around their feet. One hopped up onto the bench beside the tramp. A woman came and sat on the other end of the bench and started to read a newspaper. The tramp spread his arms out, trying to shoo the birds away, but that only brought more. Together they looked like a curious reworking of the Last Supper: Jesus, Mary, Judas and the birds.
Konstantin finished his coffee and threw the sticky napkin in the bin.
The police guarding the station watched him walk toward them. The timetables and maps were on the wall beside them.
They didn’t stop him.
He took his phone from his pocket. At less than two inches squared the route map was almost useless, but it was enough for him to check up against the street map beside the timetables and ICE, Inter City and regional rail schematic maps. He studied the two for a few minutes, committing them to memory. “Do you need any help?” the nearest of the uniformed officers asked, seeing him staring at the street map.
“I’m fine, thank you,” Konstantin told him without looking away from the map. The parade route followed the line of the Rhine for two of its three miles before turning in toward the Old Town. There were several landmarks, including, of course, the massive Ehrenbrietstein citadel on the opposite bank of the river. Then there was the aluminum factory and the automotive brakes manufacturing plant. Both had a lot to offer in terms of isolation, but without seeing them he had no way of knowing whether they presented a genuine shot. Office buildings, hotels, boarding houses-those were the kind of places he was most interested in. Places offering a view, which meant they had to be a few stories above ground level. That almost certainly discounted a lot of the older buildings of the Old Town, meaning the shooter would probably favor the new town with its wider streets and higher buildings. But again, he wouldn’t know for sure without walking the parade route.
Beyond the main portico of the station a curious glass roof rippled out into the center of the main square. The road curved around a paved area. To the right of the entrance a bright yellow DHL van was collecting the day’s deliveries. To the left was the short-term parking lot. It was filled with almost identical “people carriers” and family cars. Bicycles were chained up against every post that supported the glass roof. Even through the glass, the sky above was like some crystal blue mountain stream. Across the street was one of those chain-store cafes that had turned the simple pleasure of drinking a coffee into visiting an emporium. On the far side of the square he saw a building almost entirely constructed of glass. It might have been a design school or a fancy office block, he couldn’t tell. It was at odds with almost every other building around it.
There were signs pointing every which way. He followed the pedestrian route down to the Rhine. The path divided into two, half for cyclists, half for walkers. There was no one for three hundred yards ahead of him. Konstantin took his time walking, looking left and right like a tourist drinking in the medieval architecture. A small cafe spilled out into the street. The eight wooden tables were empty, but two of them had dirty espresso cups on them and the corner of a napkin that fluttered in the wind. Next door, buckets of tulips, sunflowers, velvet-headed roses and other colorful bunches of flowers had been arranged around the doorway. There was a white handwritten sign in the door saying “Closed,” but a striking middle-aged woman stood in the window, fixing the display. Seeing him, she smiled. Konstantin smiled back. The windows of the first floor were dark, as there were no skylights. He turned to follow the angle of trajectory from the first floor as best he could, but it was far from ideal. In the shooter’s place he wouldn’t have used it. That was enough for him to dismiss it.
Down at a waterfront kiosk he bought a packet of unfiltered cigarettes. The man took his money. They exchanged pleasantries. Konstantin mentioned the barriers and the shopkeeper burst out laughing. “Where have you been for the last month, my friend? The Pope’s coming to cleanse us of all of our sins,” he said, still grinning. “In a few hours you won’t be able to walk here for people. It’ll be crazy.” He didn’t smoke, so he didn’t have a lighter to light the cigarette he put in his mouth. The barriers ran all the way along the riverside. A few people had already taken their places at the front as though they were queuing for pop royalty at a sellout concert. They had their picnic baskets and neat little tripod stools. He liked the way a father took a chocolate bar and broke it into squares, giving one each to his wife and the two children.
“Any trouble?”
The shopkeeper kept on smiling. “Here? Trust me, the only reason kids hang around on street corners is because they’re waiting for the lights to change.”
Konstantin smiled at that. Most people believed the towns they lived in were safe, at least averagely so, but looking around him he knew he could probably take the shopkeeper at his word. There was some industry, so that meant there was probably some friction, and given the tight economic climate all across Europe, that friction probably escalated into the odd fist fight on a Friday night. Fairy tale twin town didn’t look like it had a high instance of breaking and entering, car thefts or other antisocial crimes. There was very little in the way of graffiti that he had seen, even on the tunnel walls or along the wall that kept pedestrians back from the water’s edge. Of course that could have been due to clean-up crews for the papal visit.
And as idyllic as it looked on the surface, plenty of nastiness could be happening behind those cookie-cutter
