Something in him seems to sour or curdle and he looks at the floor.
“You told me you were single,” I say.
“I could have you right now.” His voice has thickened. “I’d be within my rights —”
I stare at him.
“And afterwards I could kill you,” he says. “Do away with you. No one would know.”
You can never guess what lies behind the face a man presents you with, but it doesn’t surprise me and I’m not frightened. This is part of what I signed up for when I bought a ticket to Berlin. I don’t dare laugh at Klaus, though I’m tempted to. I still have to extricate myself. I need to think of an explanation, one that will make sense to him. No one does things for no reason.
I slap him so hard that his whole head jars. His cheek reddens, and blood blooms on his bottom lip.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He leans over, cupping a hand below his chin, as if he expects a deluge. I leave the room, returning moments later with some kitchen roll.
“Thank you,” he says.
He’s docile, repentant. He seems to accept the fact that he was in the wrong.
“If I told you the story you wouldn’t believe it,” I say. “By this time tomorrow I’ll be gone. You won’t see me again.”
He sighs, then disappears into the kitchen, where he rinses his mouth with cold water. When he comes back, I’m sitting down.
“You don’t have to leave,” he says.
“OK, it’s true,” I tell him. “I followed you.”
“So I was right.”
“I thought you looked interesting, but I didn’t think I’d talk to you.” I consider him dispassionately, as if trying to rediscover that initial urge, the first tingle of curiosity. “I suppose I wanted to find out what kind of person you were. Sometimes you see people — in a café, or on the street — and you start wondering what they do, where they live, what their lives are like …”
“You don’t usually follow them.” His voice is gentler, and more understanding. There’s even the suggestion of a rueful smile on his face. He believes me.
I push my hair back behind my shoulder but don’t say anything. I simply let the new conciliatory mood establish itself.
“You thought I looked interesting,” he says quietly, after a long silence.
“Is that so strange?”
He gazes at me steadily and I know what’s going through his mind. And now? What about now? Do you still think I look interesting?
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Thirty-seven.” His large face lurches away from me. “Age doesn’t matter.”
My eye falls on the painting that cost him half his annual salary, and in that moment I think I understand what makes it good. Although I’m aware that the artist built the picture up slowly, layer by layer — Klaus told me as much — there isn’t a trace of effort or persistence in the finished product. It appears to have come into being in a finger snap. Glossy, smooth, and two-dimensional, its subject is the surface — the power of the superficial — but at the same time it’s an exercise in concealment, inscrutability.
/
Ostkreuz. Apartment buildings line both sides of the narrow street. Five or six stories high, their scabby grayish-brown facades are busy with graffiti. In the distance a red cross flashes on and off. APOTHEKE. I pass beneath a railway bridge. A train curves out of the east. Windows slide past, filled with brooding sky, and the stench of burnt rubber and electrics stings my nostrils. It’s hardly the kind of area where you’d expect to find a rich American.
Cheadle’s apartment is on the ground floor of one of the more run-down buildings. I press the buzzer several times. At last the outer door snaps open.
“Misty?”
His voice comes from the gloom beyond the metal lift-cage. I drag my suitcase down the hall, over broken brown-and-yellow tiles. Cheadle stands in a doorway in his raincoat, like a man expecting a storm. His eyes look muddy, and he smells of beer and tobacco.
“I haven’t been to bed,” he says.
“Is it all right,” I say, “me turning up like this?”
What I like about Cheadle is the fact that there’s no longing in his eyes when he sees me. My looks are an irrelevance. He treats me as if I’m as hard-bitten and disillusioned as he is.
“I’ll give you a tour,” he says.
He shows me into a vast bare room with steel-roll doors at the far end. Rusting tools and faded girlie calendars hang on the brick walls. The lumpy armchairs and couches were probably salvaged from the street. The concrete floor is stained with oil.
“This place used to be a garage,” Cheadle tells me. “It’s great for parties.” He indicates the deep trench in the middle of the room where mechanics would once have worked on the undersides of cars. “We call it The Grave. People dance down there.”
He guides me along down a corridor lit by a single white fluorescent tube. One side is piled high with cardboard boxes. There are laptops, toasters, scanners, shredders, vacuum cleaners, kitchen blenders.
“Import-export,” I say, half to myself.
Cheadle points to a door painted to resemble camouflage. “Tanzi’s asleep in there. She works nights.”
“Tanzi?”
“My girlfriend.”
We reach two large rooms, one painted green, the other white.
“I just made coffee,” he says.
I sit at the Formica table and he pours me a cup from a battered metal pot. I help myself to sugar. He lights a thin cigar. Running along the back wall at head height is a horizontal panel of frosted glass. The weak sun that filters through turns his cigar smoke blue.
“So,” he says at last. “Had enough of the concert guy, did we?”
“He was a stepping-stone.”
Cheadle rolls the tip of his cigar against the edge of the ashtray. “And I’m not?”
I don’t know how to answer that.
“It’s all right,” he says. “I don’t give a jack.”
I sip my coffee. “This is good.”
After about half an hour, the street door buzzes. Cheadle heaves a sigh, then goes to answer it. He returns with a tall spindly man who has a zigzag of lightning tattooed below one ear. A second tattoo — the English word OUTSIDER — shows just above his T-shirt, at the base of his neck. He has a pinched face, rockabilly hair.
“Echo, this is Misty,” Cheadle says by way of introduction.
Echo grunts, then leans his shoulder blades against the kitchen wall, legs crossed at the ankles. His black leather jacket creaks. There’s dirt under his fingernails.
Cheadle opens a storage jar and takes out a packet wrapped in silver foil. Echo gives Cheadle two crumpled twenty-euro notes. Cheadle hands him the packet.
Echo glances to his right, up the corridor.
“Not here,” Cheadle says.
When Echo has gone, Cheadle leans back in his chair and tucks the money into his trouser pocket. “You disapprove?” he says.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I saw your face.”
I should be more like Klaus’s expensive painting, a smooth exterior, the truth buried layers deep.
“It’s no concern of mine,” I say. “Is there any coffee left?”
Cheadle pushes the dented pot across the table.
“Echo,” I say. “What kind of name is that?”
/
Cheadle roots in a drawer and gives me keys to the apartment. My room is the one next to the bathroom. It’s mine for as long as I want. I begin to thank him but he interrupts. Don’t thank me until you’ve seen it, he tells me. Then he says he’s going to get some sleep. If he hasn’t appeared by six, would I wake him?
When Cheadle’s gone, I open the door to my room. It’s dark inside. I feel for the light switch. A white fluorescent tube on the ceiling pings, then flickers on. It hangs at a precarious angle, on two thin wires. There’s nothing in the room except for a single bed, a metal ladder, and two car tires, which are propped against the wall. The only window, which is high up, looks out onto the corridor. It feels like a toolroom or a bunker. I strip the bed and cram the dirty linen into a plastic bag, then I leave the apartment.