“I’ll take your word for it.”
“So you don’t like jazz, or at least not this sort of jazz. That’s all right. Takes all sorts to make a world.”
“Yes,” Auger said, nodding as if he had said something profound. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“So what do you like?”
“I have trouble with music,” she said.
“All music?”
“All music,” she affirmed. “I’m tone-deaf. It just doesn’t do anything for me.”
Floyd finished the brandy and ordered himself another. The band was now torturing “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Cigarette smoke hung in the air in frozen coils, like a crazy, cloudy sunset in monochrome. “Susan White was the same,” he said.
“The same as what?”
“Blanchard said he never caught her listening to music.”
“It’s not a crime,” Auger replied. “And how did he know what she got up to in her spare time? He can’t have followed her everywhere.”
“She had a wireless in her room, and a phonograph,” Floyd said, “but no one ever heard her listening to music on either of them.”
“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” Auger said. “All I said was that I’m tone-deaf. I don’t know everything about Susan White.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Floyd, slamming down his empty glass. “The smoke’s making my eyes water and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the music or the company had anything to do with it.”
They took the train back to the hotel and said a polite goodnight. Floyd took the couch, lying down in his shirt and trousers with a spare blanket for warmth. He couldn’t sleep. The plumbing played a metallic symphony until three in the morning. Through a gap in the curtains he watched neon numerals flicker on and off at the base of the Everest statue and thought of Auger asleep, and how little he knew about her, and how much more he wanted to know.
TWENTY-THREE
The car plodded along pot-holed roads, jinking across buckled railway tracks and passing under spindly overhead structures supporting conveyor belts and pipes for chemicals.
“Ask him to slow down,” Floyd said, tapping the taxi driver on the shoulder. “I think that’s a sign over there.”
Auger relayed the request, then peered at the tilted wooden board Floyd had indicated, which was almost lost behind a screen of tall grass. “Magnolia Strasse. How appropriate.”
“This is Kaspar Metal’s address?”
“What’s left of it should be here,” she confirmed.
Beyond a broken-down wooden fence, a steam-driven demolition crane attended to the destruction of a low red-brick factory building with a wrecking ball, swinging it through the one remaining wall in a series of gentle arcs. Although there were still a few buildings standing, the spaces between them were littered with piles of brick, shattered concrete and twisted metal.
“If there was a steelworks here,” Floyd said, “then someone’s doing a swell job of hiding it.”
The taxi driver kept the engine ticking over while they got out and stood on the only patch of dry ground amidst an obstacle course of mud and puddles. It was bitterly cold, a persistent chemical dampness permeating the air. Auger wore black trousers and a narrow-waisted black leather coat that fell to her knees. The night before, in the hotel room, she had tried to snap the heels from her shoes, but without success.
“See if you can sweet-talk the driver into waiting for fifteen minutes,” Floyd said. “We still need to check whether anybody left anything useful behind.”
Auger leaned into the driver’s window and opened her mouth to talk. She got her message across, but the words didn’t come with the expected fluency. Where yesterday there had been a gleaming linguistic machine, spitting out elegant, syntactically rich sentences, now there was a rusting contraption that creaked and groaned with the effort of every word. This worried her: if her German was crumbling now, what was going to be next?
“He’ll stay,” she said, when the driver finally acquiesced.
“He took some persuading.”
“My German’s a bit rusty this morning. That didn’t help.”
They picked their way over dry, weed-infested ground to a gap in the fence. Two planks had fallen away, leaving a hole just wide enough for them to pass through. Floyd went first, holding back the high grass on the other side until Auger joined him.
“This is awful,” Auger said. “There’s so much damage that it’s difficult to imagine a factory ever being here. The only proof we have that there was is that letter Susan White received.”
“When was the letter sent?”
“Remember the train ticket she booked but didn’t use? She was just about to come here when she was murdered. The letter was sent only a month or so before that.”
“Look at the ground here,” Floyd said. “No weeds anywhere—they haven’t had time to break through the concrete yet.”
“Arson?”
“Difficult to know for sure, but I’m guessing so. The timing’s too convenient otherwise.”
In the middle distance, the steam-driven crane they had seen earlier was plodding over to another condemned building, its demolition ball swinging as it crunched across rubble and concrete. A pair of green bulldozers had joined it, belching acrid smoke from their diesel engines. The operators were masked and goggled, sunk down in oilskins.
Auger looked around for a place to start searching for clues. “Let’s check out those buildings, see if we can find number fifteen,” Auger said.
“We don’t have much time,” Floyd warned.
They crossed the ruins of the factory complex until they reached the remaining cluster of buildings. The shells of the buildings looked threatening and skulllike, their roofs and upper ceilings already removed so that the iron-grey sky was visible through the gaps and cracks in the fire-damaged structures. Auger had never much enjoyed trespassing, even when such things had been part of childhood initiation rites and carried little risk of serious punishment. She enjoyed it even less now.
“Number fifteen,” Floyd said, pointing to a barely readable metal plaque hanging at an angle on one wall. “Looks like the threat of the penguins did the trick. I must remember that the next time I have to put the squeeze on someone.”
They found an open door nearby. Inside the building it was dark, since most of the ceiling was still in place above the ground-floor entrance.
“Watch your step, Verity.”
“I’m watching it,” Auger said. “Here, take this.” She handed Floyd the automatic.
“If there’s only one gun between us, I think you should keep it,” Floyd said. “They make me nervous. I cling to the irrational idea that if I don’t carry a gun, I won’t find myself in a position where I need one.”
“You’re in that position now. Take the automatic.”
“What about you?”
Auger reached into her handbag and pulled out the weapon that she had taken from the war baby in the tunnel at Cardinal Lemoine. “I have this gun,” she said.
“I meant a real one,” Floyd said, regarding the strange lines of the weapon dubiously. But he didn’t push the point: by now he had realised that Auger wasn’t playing a game.
“Be careful, Floyd. These people are willing to kill.”
“That much I do know.”
“And if you see a child?”
Floyd looked back at her, the whites of his eyes bright in the darkness. “You want me to start shooting children now?”
“It won’t be a child.”
“I’ll shoot to wound. Beyond that, I’m not making any promises.”
Auger looked back just before she followed Floyd inside. The demolition machines were making short work of a nondescript brick building, taking turns to rip at its carcass like hunger-crazed wolves. As the bulldozers reversed and then rolled forward again to attack, their engines raged with a dim mechanical fury. The goggled operators seemed to be holding them back rather than driving them.