Cautiously, he stepped through the open doorway of the office. His boots crunched on broken glass. It was dark in there, and it took him a moment to realise there was someone else in the room.
A figure sat at a desk in the corner, head in his hands, hunched over like a bear. ‘I said get out!’ roared the man.
In that moment, Carter realised it was Dasch. Without a word, he turned to leave.
‘Carter, is that you?’ Dasch’s voice sounded strained and unfamiliar.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but I’ll leave you alone.’
‘Nonsense!’ With a sweep of one hand, Dasch beckoned to Carter. With the other, he clicked on the desk light, which had somehow remained unbroken. ‘Come in,’ he said, ‘and marvel at my handiwork.’
In amazement, Carter looked around. The large map of Europe had been torn down and kicked into a corner of the room. A filing cabinet had been tipped over and lay like a coffin on the floor. A smell of old cigarettes from an overloaded ashtray, whose contents had been hurled against the wall, mixed with the blossom-scented air sifting in through the broken window.
‘This must look like the result of a brawl in one of your Wild West saloons,’ said Dasch. ‘I just sent Ritter out to get some wood to make repairs. God knows where he’ll find what he needs at this time of day, but he always manages somehow.’
‘Was there a fight?’ asked Carter.
‘Only me against the world.’ As Dasch spoke, he began arranging things that had been scattered around the desk◦– pencils, a ledger, a stapler◦– as if somehow to atone for the damage he had done to the room. ‘One day, it will sink into my skull that this is a struggle that I cannot win.’
‘And how did it beat you this time?’
‘By crashing my plane.’
It took a moment for Dasch’s words to sink in. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Carter said at last.
‘Garlinsky called with the news,’ explained Dasch. ‘He’s on his way over here now. God help me.’
‘Why are you so afraid of Garlinsky?’ asked Carter. ‘What power does this man have over you that a million others don’t?’
Dasch was silent for a while before he replied, and then he answered with a question of his own. ‘What are we, Mr Carter? What kind of men would you say that we are?’
‘That all depends on who you ask.’
‘I’m asking you.’
The wind whistled in through the fangs of broken glass still clinging to the window frame.
‘We are men who work outside of the law,’ said Carter. ‘That is the thing which defines us, to the world and to ourselves.’
‘Very good.’ Dasch raised a finger and wagged it at the ceiling. ‘No matter which side of the law we choose to stand on, one thing remains a constant◦– what we do is who we are. Although the world imagines that there are many of us on our side of the line, wallowing in our riches, the actual number of those who truly prosper is very small indeed. In this little universe, we come to know each other, by reputation if not by association. Do you follow me, Mr Carter?’
‘So far, I guess,’ he said.
‘So when a man appears out of nowhere, the way Garlinsky did about a month ago, not only with a plan to expand my business beyond what even I had thought was possible, but with enough money in his briefcase to actually make the plan work, it is natural enough that I would make enquiries as to who this man might be.’
‘Sure,’ said Carter, ‘that makes sense. And did you?’
‘Of course.’
‘What did you learn?’
Dasch leaned across his desk. ‘Nothing,’ he hissed. ‘He is a ghost, Mr Carter, and even here among the ruins of the Reich, where almost everybody must keep secrets from the past, no one has the skill to make them disappear completely the way this Garlinsky has done. No one but the devil, anyway.’
At that moment, the guard appeared in the doorway, his rifle slung across his back. The silhouette of the gun barrel jutted from his shoulder, as if an arrow had been plunged into his neck. ‘Somebody’s coming,’ he said. ‘I think it is Mr Garlinsky.’
Dasch rose to his feet. ‘I didn’t hear a car.’
‘There is no car,’ replied the guard.
‘What?’ asked Dasch. ‘Is he on a bicycle?’
‘No, sir. He is on foot.’
‘But it’s an hour’s walk back to the city, and nobody lives out here!’
‘Nevertheless, sir,’ said the guard, ‘somebody is coming.’
‘Well,’ Dasch said exasperatedly, ‘when he gets to the end of the road, open the gate and see what the hell he wants.’
‘Sir,’ said the guard, ‘he is not walking on the road.’
There was something about the way the guard spoke that sent a shudder down the length of Carter’s spine. Leaving the carnage of Dasch’s office, the two men followed the guard across the compound until they came to the fence. Beyond it, shuddering blue in the moonlight, lay a wide, open tract of land, stretching featurelessly out towards the Rhine. A shallow mist had settled on the ground, weaving in amongst the nodding stalks of milkweed.
Across this space came a figure in a long trench coat, carrying a briefcase whose polished leather sides caught a glint of moonlight now and then. His face was hidden in shadow. He did not move quickly, but his pace never slackened and the trench coat billowed about his legs, stirring the mist as he walked.
‘It’s him,’ whispered Dasch.
Only now, as Carter mutely watched the man’s approach across the wasteland, did he understand the fear that Dasch had spoken of, and he thought back to the last time a stranger had walked into his life.
…
The year was 1948.
By then, he had been working as a civilian contractor with the US Army for over three years, moving from base to base wherever he was needed. He had begun in England. From there, he had shifted to France and, once the war ended, into Germany, where bases were quickly established in the American zone of occupation.
Carter’s job as a contractor guaranteed him a decent wage, as well as healthcare, two weeks’ vacation a year and time off for all major holidays. In spite of the good working conditions, Carter had lost count of the number of men who had taken civilian jobs at the base and then left soon afterwards, returning to the States. After the war, there had been an initial slump in the job market as returning veterans competed for employment, and many of those who returned to Europe immediately after being demobilised had done so because they’d had no choice. By 1947, as the big American manufacturers in the car, aircraft and construction industries had completed their transition from wartime to peacetime operations, most of those men who had come over decided to return stateside. For most of them, whether they had fought there or not, Europe was still haunted by the carnage that had swept across it. It would take years, if not decades, to restore the cities that had been bombed and, beyond those cities, in the forests and the fields, the dead could still be found huddled in the foxholes where they had perished. Liberation had come at such a terrible price that the word itself was seldom used, except sarcastically, by those who had been liberated. For those who had been left to clean away the wreckage, it was not the outcome of the war that tormented them. It was simply the cost.
For the soldiers of the occupation, the lack of choice about whether or not to remain there was its own solution to the problem. But for men like Carter, the choice was real and present. It gnawed at them constantly as they weighed steady work and steady pay against the dream of going home. For most, the dream won out. Only a few, like Carter, became regulars in the seemingly endless shift from base to base, never staying long enough to feel like they belonged and never knowing when they would be asked to leave again. The majority were veterans, but few of them talked about their war experiences and, since it was considered rude to enquire about such matters, it was always left at that. These men, and women too, learned to live among the gaps in what they knew about each other. Their pasts became blurred and redundant. Carter found, to his surprise, that this existence suited him, at least for now. Most days he could convince himself that he had made his peace with it, but there were moments, when certain sounds and smells would jolt him back into the life he’d once taken for granted, that he realised how fragile this peace really was and that he could not endure this forever. But as to how and when he might move on, that stayed a mystery to him until the day Marcus Wilby appeared.