Jardine saw blue-eyed boy’s lips move and guessed it was an admonishment not to look in his direction, the coincidence of their arriving as he was departing as good a way as any to let them know of possible danger. As the car passed, it being natural for him to glance in its direction, he saw five people crowded in the rear, the daughter and youngest son sat on laps, then the suitcases strapped onto the jump seat, too many to his mind, which produced a flash of irritation which grew as he crossed the road behind it, halting at a bus stop and able to look back the way he had come and see the vehicle drive on past the doorway from which he had emerged.
That luggage rankled: it was always a problem to get people to leave things behind, items they had probably not even noticed for years suddenly taking on huge sentimental importance. Valuables he could comprehend; it would be a fair bet that Papa Ephraim had stuff on his lap and all around his feet, old master and modern art paintings in leather tubes, a case of precious objects that had to include heirlooms and, inevitably, a solid-silver seven-branch candlestick for Friday night prayers. It did not matter what he made of the car and it being overloaded — it only mattered if those on his tail, and they had to be there even if he could not see them in the gathering gloom, were made curious.
Blue-eyed boy would not stop until he was out of sight: the ship was not due to sail until first light, so a way would have to be contrived to get the family into that tunnel entrance in the dark. It was no longer his problem; he just had to keep the watchers watching him and then he had to get clear and out of Hamburg and Germany by a different route, the first stage of that to get on the approaching bus.
Jardine knew with night coming his best chance was to return to St Pauli, though not to the bar in which Lanchester had found him — the red-light district was busy in the hours of darkness and there were streets there that would make it near impossible for anyone to follow. Once in his old stamping ground, his way out he already knew, the only problem he had was of being picked up before he could get there.
Many times throughout his life Callum Jardine had been in a position of danger in which he could do nothing to alleviate it; people now saw the last campaign of the Great War as a walkover, the German army retreating and the Allies dogging their heels. It was nothing like that: in retreat the Kaiser’s army made the advancing Allies fight for every pre-prepared trench system and they had been constructed in advance and in depth.
The only way to take them, tanks rarely being available, was by infantry attack, and if the tactics had improved since the bloodbaths of Verdun and the Somme, it was still hard pounding, while to that was added the feeling, with things hopefully coming to the end, that no one wanted to be the last one to stop a bullet.
Sitting on the first bus, which took him to the Hauptbahnhof, followed by another from the main railway station to St Pauli, Jardine was aware that he was sat in well-lit seats and easily observed, a bit like a target in a shooting gallery. That feeling did not diminish when he was finally on foot and he had to remind himself of those times, the occasions when, as a soldier in battle, you come to terms with the possibility of death, allied to the knowledge it is not in your hands to avoid it. The hardest part was to keep his watchers feeling he was unaware of their presence: never spin round, don’t do that stopping-to-look-in-a-window trick so you can see if anyone else halts too — let them think they are secure and potentially you are unknowingly leading them to something significant.
The Reeperbahn was, by the time he got there, its usual Friday night self, full of locals drinking in the bars, of sailors and visitors from more straight-laced communities come to sample the liberal streets of the famous red-light district. In the many iffy places Cal Jardine had been since he left the army he had learnt that setting up a way out was of paramount importance, one of the first things to be worked out before indulging in any activity, and Hamburg was no different — it was just easier than most.
He suspected his tail knew they were in trouble when, after talking to a streetwalker, he dived into the Herbertstra?e: first they lost sight of him because of the high metal panels that shut off the street from public view. When they, too, pushed their way through the unlicensed whores who congregated at each end of the street, passing the big sign saying ‘Women Prohibited’, they entered a narrow, crowded and garishly lit alleyway, full of men either just staring, or bargaining with the scantily clad women sitting in the brightly lit windows.
The narrow alley Jardine made for had more than just a raised window beside a doorway; it was an apparent dead end, but a special one, and as he entered he spied Gretl, the woman who worked there, deep in discussion with a drunken, noisy quartet who, by their colouring and dress, looked to be seamen and Dutch. Jardine had passed several windows in which sat young and attractive women, scantily clad and available for business; this was a different kind of establishment altogether and the way Gretl was dressed underlined that.
A big lady in every respect, tall and far from young, she had on red lederhosen, a waistcoat of similar leather material which hardly managed, so tight was it laced, to contain her huge bosom, and on her head a horned helmet that barely contained her brassy fair hair. This outfit was set off with a pair of black, shiny thigh boots with spiked heels, while in her hand she held a riding whip.
Gretl had worked the Herbertstra?e for decades to become a feature of the place. Most of the window girls came for a few years and many from country towns and villages, not Hamburg. They saved up the money they made from selling their bodies, overseen and kept medically clean by the municipality, then retired back to their locality, no doubt without their neighbours being aware of their past, to set up a shop or some kind of business, or merely to become a marriageable catch with their nest egg — in some senses a more morally upright bunch than those they served.
As he approached, walking at speed, Gretl turned to look at him and he was presented with quite a sight: her eyes were picked out in thick kohl, her cheeks caked with deep make-up and her lips a bright-red slash on her lined face. She was in the midst of a stream of German invective that told those with whom she was negotiating that the price they wanted to pay for her services was very far from sufficient. When Gretl looked like that, the customers who got into her inner sanctum paid a high price for their parsimonious temerity. It would be painful, but that was before she eased their soreness with the other skills she had honed over the years.
Sighting Jardine she smiled, exposing large, yellowing teeth, then enquired in a deep guttural voice if he had finally come for a treatment, which made the Dutchmen, for in their protested responses they established that was their nationality, look and act aggrieved. All she got was a quick peck on the cheeks, leaving Jardine with the taste of pancake on his lips as he slipped past her. The last thing he heard was Gretl reassuring her putative clients that he was only passing through.
There was no way of knowing if his tail had seen him come in to Gretl’s little cul-de-sac. If they had, she would delay them and be damned ferocious with it, but all it would take to shut her up would be the production of an identity card: no one feared the police more than those who lived and worked the Reeperbahn; if a customer complained to the Polizei, they always took their side — the reputation of the district came before right and wrong. If it was the Gestapo, that was ten times worse.