There was moisture at his eyes, and Percy Capel prodded a finger behind the lenses of his spectacles and wiped them. He was asked, the gentleman's voice silken and gentle, whether he had ever talked of this.
'What? Down the Legion? Not likely. Been part of a war crime, sir, would you? I never told my Winifred – dead and buried, bless her – nor my boy, nor…
What's extraordinary, my grandson has met up with the Rahman family. He's in-' He stopped, but he had already launched so he groped for an explanation. 'In import and export. Buys and sells. He met up, just by chance, with Mehmet Rahman's grand-nephew, and that put him in contact – business, you know – with Mehmet Rahman's son, and they'd heard of our family name. Small world… My grandson asked me what I knew of Mehmet Rahman. Did I say he was a murdering swine, a bloody animal? I did not. There's truth, some of the truth, a little of the truth – that's what I chose, a little of it. I said that my family and his were joined by blood, that my life was saved by Mehmet Rahman. It's a debt, right? You can't pay off that sort of debt. It's with you all your time on earth, and with your family.'
The gentleman's face showed the vivid expression of not understanding. Percy Capel felt the obligation to explain. 'A debt like that, it owns you. Do you see that? It owns me, and my son, and my grandson. It's as much my grandson's debt as mine. They do business, my grandson and Mehmet Rahman's son, and I suppose that's like paying off the debt – but I doubt my grandson sees it that way… Anyway, you don't want to know that.'
The frown on the gentleman's forehead had gone, as if he now understood, and Percy was nudged towards further anecdotal memories.
He talked of more demolition and more sabotage, and of a Lysander that had landed to pick up the major and himself and fly them out, and then the tape was stopped. He was told how valuable his record of events would be to historians at the Imperial War Museum.
The chauffeur drove him back to Bevin Close, and he was almost home before he realized that he had never been told the gentleman's name. He wondered then if he should have talked of Timo Rahman and Ricky, and an unpaid debt.
'Worth it?' the curator asked.
As he pocketed the tape, Frederick Gaunt smiled with warmth. 'I've never done it myself, but I can imagine it. You prise open the two sides of an encrusted oyster shell, and you find inside it a perfectly formed and lustrous pearl. Very much worth it.'
A man from Krakow who hoped to be a policeman had told detectives that his wife, strangled to death, had kept at the start of their relationship a chain of Arabic worry-beads in a drawer in their bedroom, and she had sworn to him that they were the gift of a friend, a student of mechanical engineering at Harburg – the only friend in her life before the Bahn-Wacht officer.
A lecturer at the university had recalled the name of Else Borchardt's boyfriend as Sami, but not his family name.
A child, in the Turkish language and through the help of an interpreter, had told detectives of a man who had hustled into the block after the child had pressed the bell at the outer door and his mother had activated the lock.
A clerk at the warehouse, where past student records were kept, had ferreted that previous evening and found the papers – with the photograph – of that student from seven years before.
A lecturer at the university, called by detectives from his mid-evening dinner-table, had confirmed that the photograph shown him was that of Else Borchardt's student boyfriend.
A child, roused from sleep, was shown four photographs of male students and had chosen with no hesitation the picture of Else Borchardt's boyfriend and had said that that was the man who had pushed by him when his mother had let him into the block.
A subeditor, with the front page of his newspaper about to close, had taken a call on the news desk of the Hamburger Abendblatt and had been alerted to receive, from Homicide, the photograph of a suspect.
A journalist had worked at his computer to key in a full-face photograph… and the smaller picture of a victim.
A technician had pressed the button that started the print run of the newspaper's altered front page.
A driver had brought the new editions, bound with wire for delivery to wholesale distributors, from the presses of the Hamburger Abendblatt, with the suspect's photograph spread across three columns of the front page, and the victim's photograph across one.
By morning, the suspect's photograph blared out at readers from Flensburg in the north, to Bremen in the south, from Lubeck in the east to Emden in the west.
Above it 'Wanted for Murder' was printed in bold type, and under it was a picture of a pretty girl who had been strangled in the sight of her baby.
Carrying a plastic bag with four sealed coffee beakers, four cling-wrapped rounds of sausage sandwiches, the nut-flavoured milk-chocolate bar that was Timo Rahman's favourite and a folded newspaper, the Bear left the shop.
He sauntered towards the Mercedes, and opened the newspaper's front page.
It hit him.
He saw the photograph and the headline, and under them was the picture of a girl who had deep eyes and a smile.
It blasted him. But it was one of the Bear's skills that he could hide the Shockwave caused by confusion, danger. No flicker of apprehension crossed his face, no twitch of anxiety. He could see them: Timo Rahman in the front passenger seat, and the Arab immediately behind him alongside the mouseboy. The newspaper was ripped by the wind and he rolled it quickly. There was a signal, long agreed, between his master and himself. In one hand he held the newspaper and the plastic bag, and he let the fist of the other drop – apparently casually – to the seam of his trousers, below the pocket. His thumb seemed, idly, to flick his first two fingers. It was the signal that risk was around them. Only a man as cautioned in risk as Timo Rahman would have watched his driver so closely that he noticed the gesture of the thumb brushing against two fingers. The front passenger door opened.
The appearance of the Bear, huge shoulders, shambling walk and a perpetual frown of confusion, was that of a man whose body was an adult's but whose brain was that of a child. The appearance deceived. He saw Timo Rahman duck his head and make some excuse to those in the back seats, then come towards him. He was trusted with every secret of his master's life – not so the accountants, lawyers and investment brokers who surrounded Timo
Rahman. Alone, the Bear had the trust.
He had been, at the end of the Hoxha regime nineteen years before, an officer of the Sigurimi, the political police of the Albanian state. Earlier than any he had worked with, he had had the intelligence to comprehend that the death of the old president would mark the start of a changed world. The morning after that death he had slipped away from his office in the town of Shkodra, had taken a bus high into the mountains and gone to the village of the Rahman fis and, with humility, had pledged his loyalty. For two years he had been tested as the fis had expanded its power in the vacuum left by Hoxha's death – by robbery, tax-collection and enforcement, the Bear had proved his worth. He had gone with Timo Rahman to Hamburg and had fought beside him as the empire was created.
They walked together, master and driver, to the back of the shop.
Out of sight of the men on the back seat of the car, he showed Timo Rahman the front page of the newspaper.
Timo Rahman scoured the page – the headline, the photograph, the picture, the report.
The Bear would not speak unless he was asked to, would not advise unless the request were made. He would have said that it was not wise for Timo Rahman, whatever the rewards, to associate with militants, but he had not been asked. He would not have agreed that Alicia, the wife of Timo Rahman, had met a lover in the garden's summer-house – but he had not been asked. He held his silence and waited, and then the paper was crushed in Timo Rahman's hands. He was told where he should drive to, and they walked back to the car. The face of Timo Rahman showed no mark of the crisis.