‘And what do you want with my friend?’ asked Pavel.
‘To let him know that he has been relieved of his duties with the Office of Price Administration and that, effective immediately, he is being transferred to the US Army.’
‘What about Palladino?’ asked Carter.
‘Who?’
‘My partner.’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Tate. ‘According to our records, you worked alone.’ Slowly, Captain Tate reached towards his chest and paused. ‘If I may?’ he asked the pug-faced old Russian.
Pavel made a grumbling sound in his throat, which the officer took to mean he could proceed.
Tate slid his hand beneath the double-breasted fold of his trench coat and removed a manila envelope. He stepped over to Carter, moving with the careful stride of a man setting out upon a frozen pond with no idea whether the ice was thick enough.
Carter reached out and took hold of the envelope.
Tate raised his hands again and stepped back.
At this moment, Pavel sighed and set the gun down on the counter. ‘I have decided, for the moment, not to kill you,’ he said.
‘For which I am eternally grateful,’ said the captain, lowering his hands. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of Lucky Strikes, its wartime wrapper olive green instead of peacetime white. Then he lit the cigarette with a black-painted Zippo lighter and, as the lid of the lighter flipped shut with the particular clunk-switch sound that only Zippos made, Carter noticed that the man’s fingers were trembling.
‘What does the army want with me?’ asked Carter.
‘Oh, it will be the same job, more or less.’ Tate picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. ‘We just need you to do it someplace else.’
‘Some place like where?’ he asked.
Tate pulled hard upon the cigarette until the end of it crackled and glowed. He spoke as he exhaled. ‘How do you feel about Belgium?’ he asked.
…
In his room at the Hotel Europa, Carter was woken by a heavy knocking on the door.
When he opened his eyes and glimpsed the stuccoed ceiling of his room, he could not, at first, recall where he was. For a few more seconds, his half-conscious mind attempted to refocus his eyes, sure that the wavy texture of the stucco must be some blurring of his sight and that he was, in fact, still in his cell at Langsdorf, where the ceiling was smooth and dreary, like a bone-white sky on a winter’s day.
And then he remembered.
The pounding on the door continued.
‘All right!’ shouted Carter.
He put on a bathrobe and went to the door.
It was Ritter. He was wearing the same suit he’d had on the day before. ‘Good morning, Mr Carter!’ he said. ‘Are you ready to begin?’
Fifteen minutes later, Carter was in the passenger seat of Ritter’s car, heading towards the outskirts of the city on a long, straight road called Brühlerstrasse. Sunlight flickered through the abandoned buildings of the Raderthal district. On a morning like this, even the ruins looked pretty.
As the Tatra swerved along the potholed road, Carter felt a curious, familiar sharpening of his senses, like someone who had walked into a dark space and felt, without being able to see, the presence of another in the room. These same sensations came to him every time he went undercover, as a kind of mirage took the place of the person he actually was, coiling around him like a whirlwind of smoke, spinning closer and closer as it began to harden itself, like a shell, around his body, until at last the image of this new incarnation became, on the surface, indistinguishable from the man who hid beneath it.
As Carter had learned time and again in his years as a detective, his life would soon depend upon the flawlessness of this shell. Any cracks in the mask would quickly prove fatal under the scrutiny of those whose own lives depended upon trusting him.
For Carter, this transformation had become second nature. The only way he had survived this long was by learning to live behind masks, hiding who he really was in vaults so deep he sometimes forgot they were there. Everything else was illusion, the true art of which was to change as little as possible, leaving behind as much as he could of what was authentically him. Into this fabric of reality, Carter could then weave the threads of the lies, telling them with such conviction that as he spoke the words he actually believed what he was saying. He had taught himself not only to behave like the person whom others believed him to be, but also to react without thinking, so that half-truths merged with outright fabrications until one became indistinguishable from the other. Only then could those false parts of him, which had been stitched onto his soul like the borrowed flesh of Frankenstein’s monster, take on the same life as those parts he knew to be real.
The most effective of Carter’s traits, which he had imported from his real self into the chimeras by which some people came to know him, was a certain caustic bluntness with his superiors. This simultaneously irritated some of them and had the effect of reassuring them that he lacked the subtlety ever to be a threat. Dovetailed into this bluntness was a habit of asking questions, even at times when it might have been better to keep his mouth shut. Among the longshoremen, especially those who were engaged in the theft of cargo coming off the ships, the safest course was always to wait until you were told and to keep your curiosity to yourself. But there was a balance between being curious, which was natural, and making no attempt to satisfy that curiosity, which, ultimately, was far more suspicious. The man who never asked any questions was either too stupid to be relied upon or he already knew the answers, which made him dangerous. By asking the questions that any normal person would have asked in any given situation, Carter sometimes exasperated those for whom he worked. But his allegiance had never been questioned, while others with far less to hide than Carter had been singled out, not only for suspicion but for acts of disloyalty which existed only in the minds of those who swung the iron pipes that broke the bones of men who had stayed silent out of nothing more than ignorance and fear.
Carter’s inquisitiveness became a kind of trademark of his personality, allowing him to gather information far more rapidly than he might otherwise have done and, at the same time, to ensure his survival among the people he was tasked with bringing down.
The hardest part was not the building of this parallel universe, but in finding his way back to the one he’d left behind, and in remembering who he’d been before he went away. Carter lived in quiet dread that one day he would become lost in this labyrinth of his own making. Even when he did find his way out, the journey did not come without a price. Like a piece of sea glass washed up on the beach and thrown back again and again into the waves, a little less of him returned each time he made it to shore.
Before Carter could even begin asking questions, Ritter had plenty of his own◦– some of which, at first, made very little sense.
Where did you come from? What did you do in the war? What was the name of your commanding officer? What was your serial number? What was your father’s name? What was his job? How long have your parents been married? Do you have any brothers and sisters? Are you married? Are you right handed or left handed? What is your shoe size? What was the number of your cell at Langsdorf? Before the crime for which you went to prison, had you committed any other crimes? Do you have a police record?
Ritter fired these questions at Carter with such speed and relentlessness that Carter had almost no time to think about the answers. And he knew this was exactly the point. For almost every question, he was able to answer with the truth. Only when Ritter asked about the war did Carter shave away the facts and simply say that he had served in the Ardennes. Whoever Ritter was, he had experience in shaking people down to see if they were lying, and Carter knew that the answers mattered less than the way he answered them.