Ludvik, at her shoulder, asked her remotely, 'Do you not approve?'
'Not for me to have an opinion,' she murmured. 'I just have to hope that what you're doing is effective.
Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.'
Yes, old matters of ethics and morality took a back seat in the new war. She saw a bucket lifted and the water from it was thrown so that it splashed on to the face and head of the man she knew to be a cafe owner from the east of the Old City, out by the Florenc bus station. The water ran down his cheeks and chest, and blood sluiced off the injuries inflicted on him. She thought, momentarily, that this was a return to days long gone when Stalin's purges had filled these same basement cells, and before that as Gestapo interrogators had gone to work to extract the names of the assassins of Reichs-Protector Heydrich.
'It is necessary.'
'You did not hear me say it was not,' Polly said softly.
The cells, dark little cubicles with high, barred windows of dirty glass that looked out at boot level on to the interior square of the police barracks, were where Communist and Nazi torturers had been. They could similarly have justified the pain and brutality of what they did. Now it was the turn of the democrats to use that cell and to beat, slap and kick, deprive a man of sleep, make him scream in agony, and to hide behind the wall of 'It is necessary'. As the water dripped to the floor, the man's head lifted and his bruised face focused again on the ceiling, the work resumed. Short-arm, closed-fist punches to the face, booted kicks to the kidneys and when the cafe owner's head dropped again, his grey hair was caught and held up so that the target remained accessible. There was no high horse on which Polly Wilkins could have sat and played indifference. Over the last two years men and women from the Service had trooped in and out of interrogation rooms at Bagram in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay and at holding camps in Iraq – her people, her colleagues. No bleat from the Service then about ethics and morality. Of course, her hands and their hands stayed clean because they let surrogates do it and could then claim ignorance. And others were shipped, in the name of the War on Terror, to cell blocks in Damascus or Cairo, and transcripts were sent back – with no bloodstains on them – that drove forward investigations.
'What has he said so far?'
'Nothing of importance.'
'Perhaps that's because you have hit his face so often that he cannot talk any more/ she said drily. 'Do you think he might talk better if you hit his face less often?'
'Do you want information or do you want your conscience to be comfortable?'
'Oh, for fuck's sake… ' She turned away from the screen. If her mother and father – both teachers in an insignificant country town in Wiltshire, both thrilled that their daughter worked for the Defence of the Realm – had known what their daughter watched on a TV screen they might have vomited. But, far from home, it was the reality of what she did. She looked back at the screen, then blinked and peered harder at it. If they had not held the cafe owner's grey hair, his head would have fallen on to his soaked chest, but they did, and his hands rose briefly and feebly to protect his face – fingers over his eyes and mouth – before they were ripped away and another punch landed.
'Can you zoom in?'
'No, it is a fixed lens.'
'I want to go in there.'
'Because we do not understand the skill of interrogation? Do we need another lesson from SIS?' The sarcasm hit her. 'Why?'
'Just put me in there, dear friend, because, by your own admission, you have learned nothing. Good enough?'
She was taken down a flight of stone-flagged steps and along a corridor where men lounged on hard chairs, read newspapers without interest, smoked and stripped her with their eyes. Down more stairs and into the basement. She walked boldly and with purpose, wanted only confirmation of what she had seen, in black and white, on the screen. The door was opened for her. Bright light speared from a lamp into the cafe owner's face. The men turned from their work and stared at her. The head was permitted to fall.
She went close to the chair on which he was propped, then knelt in front of him. Her body masked what she did. She took the cafe owner's hands. The man's fingers clawed at hers, as if he believed she was his salvation, his release. She was not there for kindness. She examined the hands quickly, then let them drop on to his lap, which was wet with water and urine. She stood, turned her back on him, and walked out of the cell into the corridor.
'What was that for?'
No reply from Polly Wilkins as she swept by
Ludvik. She went out into the inner square of the building where Communists and Fascists had been, and felt herself dirtied. She thought of the shower she would take, endless and soapy – and drove away.
Of the many companies owned by Timo Rahman, all doing legitimate business, one shipped furniture to Hamburg from a factory at Ostrava in the extreme east of the Czech Republic. The tables and chairs, side-boards, chests and wardrobes would be inexpensive in Germany and Timo had identified a good market for those made from beech wood. The company's offices, warehouse and showroom were in the
Hammerbrook district.
The message was brought from Hammerbrook by a young Albanian boy – a good, clean, intelligent worker – who was the son of a second cousin of Timo.
Because the boy was gjak, a blood relation, he had been entrusted with the message by the company's manager who was from the miqs, a relative by marriage. Nothing had been written down, and the message was in the boy's memory – the telex from the factory at Ostrava was now in slivers, having passed through the company's shredder.
That evening Timo was the guest at a restaurant of a Rathaus functionary who dealt with the provision of care homes for the elderly – an area he had decided was promising for expansion. The city's government, near bankrupt and bumping along on empty, needed private capital for investment in the homes to fulfil an election promise. Late in the meal, the Bear came to Timo's shoulder and whispered in his ear. Apologies were made. Timo slipped from the table, out of the restaurant and on to the pavement where the boy waited.
Timo saw the boy's nervousness and confusion. He had heard of him but had never met him – his job in the office was a reward for the cousin's loyalty. He smiled with warmth and hugged the boy to reassure him. Then the message was stammered out against the noise of passing traffic and the music that spilled from a discotheque.
'This is what I am to say, from the shipping section of Home Furnishing. "Regret cargo load 1824 has not been forwarded. Our local agent is indisposed. Also half of the cargo is damaged and cannot be sent, and the remainder, which comprises the more valued items, is missing. We await further information." That is all. The telex was signed by the director at Ostrava.
I apologize for disturbing you on such a minor matter, but that is what I was instructed to do.'
If he felt a frisson of anxiety, Timo gave no sign of it.
He asked quietly, 'Would you repeat the message?'
He was told it again.
The boy was hugged and sent away into the night.
Timo murmured to the Bear that he would need ten minutes to extract himself from the functionary's table, then they would drive.
An hour later, he stood in a car park far out to the west of the city, beyond his home at Blankenese and stared down at the quiet dark flow of the Elbe's estuary. He watched a freighter coming downriver and pondered. Whenever a difficulty obstructed him Timo came to that viewpoint, near the village of Hetlingen, and the Bear stayed in the car. It was where he scratched his mind for solutions when problems reached crisis point. It was indeed a difficulty. The coded message gave him the extent of it. The local agent – the cafe owner – was a unit leader, a kryetar, of a clan, a fis, to which Timo was allied, and