The man, a chemist, said, 'The forecast is foul. You have to book vacation days away. Of course it is chance, but you are entitled to look for breaks in weather even before Easter. I spoke to Jurgen at the shop, and he says it is only storms that we can expect.
I tell you, the day we go home, it will change.'
She, the principal of a school for infants, said, 'You can't go on the roof, clear the gutters and check the tiles in this wind. You cannot paint the window-frames and the doors, which need it, in the rain. I cannot air the bedding and the rugs. It's hopeless.'
It had been the intention of the chemist and his teacher wife to open up their home and let the fresh air waft through it after its winter closure; each spring it was necessary to add a fresh layer of paint to the outside woodwork.
She drank, then grimaced. 'Have you seen him?'
His face, already sour from the prediction of the weather, cracked in annoyance. 'Sadly, he has survived the winter. I have not seen him, but have heard him. He came back through the rain after dark.
The door slammed. That is how I know he is there.'
They tried hard, both of them, to ignore their neighbour, who was one of the few twelve-months-a-year residents on the island. It was four years since they had bought the perfect home to escape from the pressure-cooker life of the city. The first summer there they had brought with them their grandchildren, two small, lively kids, who had kicked a football on their little patch of grass at the back and each time the ball had crossed the wire fence dividing their property from their neighbour's garden there had been increasing rudeness when the chemist had asked permission to retrieve it. The children had been reduced to tears and had not come during another summer.
He said, 'I wonder what he does all those months when we are not here, who he insults.'
She said, 'I think we are a recreation for him.'
'He is a man of misery, he takes happiness from it.'
'Death, when it finds him, will be a blessed relief – for us.'
They laughed grimly, chiming a cackle together.
The second summer they had left a note on Oskar Netzer's door inviting him to join them for a drink that evening. He had come, had filled their bijou furnished living room with the odour of a body long unwashed, and they had shown him the architect's plans drawn up in Dusseldorf for an extension of a garden room topped by a third bedroom and a shower cubicle. He had refused the drink, then had refused to endorse the plan – they had thought it commensurate with every environmental and aesthetic consideration. He had rubbished the architect's drawings.
Through the rest of that summer, the following winter and into the third summer, their neighbour had fought the plan in Baltrum's Rathaus committees: its size, its materials, its concept. Last summer they had consigned the plan to the rubbish bin, had given up on the project. Last year when they had been at their house, if he came out into his garden they went inside.
They had nothing to say to him, and he made no secret of his opinion that they were intruders and unwelcome – but his death would come, and their liberation.
He said, 'I cannot imagine a life so detached from reality. They say that even when his wife was alive he was no different.'
She said, 'That woman, she must have suffered. It is not possible she could have been the same.'
'You never see newspapers outside the house for the rubbish, you never hear a radio. There is no television. He must know nothing of the world he inhabits.'
'Would not know about the economy, its down turn? The unemployment…'
'Would not care, isolated here.'
'Would not know about the war, in Iraq? Not know about the terrorists… '
'Ignorance – stubborn, obstinate, hate-filled ignorance. So pathetic, to be at the autumn of life and to realize, deep in your heart, that you will do nothing in your last days that is valuable, nothing that is respected.'
A memory for both of them, when they had packed up the house at the end of the last summer and loaded the trolley to wheel it to the ferry, had been the lowering and gloom-laden face of Oskar Netzer behind a grimy window. At home in Duisseldorf, each time they spoke of their neighbour, anger grew, and they had to stifle it or accept that he hurt their love of the island and their small home.
He poured the last of the wine from the second bottle into his wife's glass. 'You are right, my love. He would reject any action that made him loved, respected.'
She drank, then cackled in laughter and the drink spurted from her lips. 'Sorry, sorry… His ducks will love him. The bloody ducks will mourn him when he's dead, no one else.'
The wind hit their windows and the rain ran on them, and the curtains fluttered, and next door to them – unloved – their neighbour slept.
'You can take him. Please, get him out of here.'
'Don't know that I want him.'
'Remove him, Miss Wilkins.'
'If you say so.'
She had sent her signal, encrypted on the laptop.
Coffee had kept her awake while she'd typed. She followed Johan Konig out of the side room and back into his office.
'Squeeze it from him, why he was at the Rahman house.'
'Without your help?'
'If I hold him I have to charge him and put him before a court. It is not a road I wish to follow.'
'Understood.'
He passed her the plastic bag, then turned his back on her. For a moment she looked around the bare room, which, she had decided, displayed a man's aloneness and a life without emotion. She fastened on the one item that showed humanity – a photograph of a hippopotamus in a muddied river with a white bird on its back. In her imagination, she delved into Konig's past. Perhaps a holiday in east Africa with a wife or a partner, and that was a favourite picture.
Maybe the wife or partner had now left him or had died. She reckoned it involved a sadness. She betrayed herself, her eyes lingered too long on it.
'It is the better to understand them,' Konig said.
'What do you mean?'
'The better to understand them in Berlin, now in Hamburg.'
She said quietly, 'I assumed it was something personal.'
'God, no… The better to understand the men who control organized crime, to understand Rahman. The hippopotamus is the society in which we live, and the bird is the godfather. The egret, the bird, is not the enemy of the hippopotamus. Instead it fulfils a need of that great creature by picking off its back the parasites that will damage its skin. It is a symbiotic relationship – the hippopotamus provides sustenance for the bird, the bird returns gratitude by cleaning the hippopotamus's back. They need each other. Society wants drugs, prostitutes and sex shows, and the godfather gives it. He does not leech the blood of society, he merely provides a service that is demanded. That is why the picture is there, to remind me of reality.'
'What is the relationship between the bird, the godfather and terror cells?'
He pressed a small button on the leg of his desk.
'Again, symbiosis. The bird goes wherever there are parasites. Parasites are money. The terror cells have money, safe-houses and conduits for weapons. If there is benefit from co-operation you will find the egret there. Do not imagine, Miss Wilkins, that Timo Rahman steps back on the dictates of conscience or morality when there are parasites to feed off. The picture tells me much.'
She grimaced. 'I suppose so.'
'Take him.'
She held the plastic bag. 'Yes, I will.'
A man stood in the outer door, blinking in the bright light and she recognized him as the one who had brought the relays of coffee since they had emerged from the basement cell block.
'May I offer you advice? The power of Timo
Rahman in this city stretches far, wide. He has a network of clan leaders, who control the foot-soldiers. All of them will, by now, be out searching for an Englishman who dared to violate "sacred" territory, Rahman's home. Keep him safe, Miss Wilkins, or he will be hurt, severely, and so will you, if you are with him. I warn you, and you should listen to me.'