‘Your father sent me here to see if you were doing all right.’
‘You can tell him I’m fine,’ she replied.
Carter pointed at the dish towel. ‘Do you need some more ice for that thing?’
She lifted the bundle of cloth, revealing that the side that had been pressed against her head was soaked with blood.
Carter gasped. ‘What the hell happened?’ he asked. ‘Did your father do this to you?’
‘It was an accident,’ she told him.
Instinctively, he stepped towards her. ‘Let me take a look.’
‘Leave me alone!’ she snapped. ‘It’s just a little cut.’
Carter halted in his tracks. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I think you might need stitches.’
Her face turned suddenly ashen. ‘Is it really that bad?’ she asked.
‘Just let me take a look,’ he pleaded with her.
This time, she did not protest.
Gently, Carter moved aside some strands of hair that had become tangled in the clotted blood.
She breathed in sharply with the pain.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
The cut was about an inch long, not deep but cleanly done, as if it had been made with a knife.
Carter went over to the sink, pulled open one of the drawers and removed a clean dish towel. Then he turned on the tap, soaked the cloth, squeezed out some of the water and gave it to Teresa. ‘Give me that,’ he said, holding out his hand for the cloth that had been soaked in blood.
‘Will it need stitches?’ she asked.
‘I think you might be OK,’ he replied.
‘Good.’ She pressed the clean cloth to her head. ‘I don’t want to see any doctors.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want to have to explain to them what happened.’
‘Then explain it to me, at least.’
‘I was walking past the window of the office when my father threw the chair through the window.’
‘And it hit you?’
‘No! Only a little piece of glass. He didn’t mean to do it. People don’t understand.’
‘You make it sound like this has happened before.’
‘It is an occupational hazard of working with my father.’
‘What is?’ asked Carter.
‘Sooner or later, everyone gets hurt.’
‘And what about him?’
‘He has already been hurt enough,’ she muttered.
There it is again, thought Carter, this past no one will speak about. Now would have been the time to press her about where she had come from and what she had lived through to make her the person she was, the time to push past all of her sarcastic answers until he arrived at the truth. But Carter couldn’t bring himself to do it. Neither could he hide from himself that the reason for his hesitation lay in the fact that he would probably have succeeded, but only by exploiting the pain that she was in. None of that should have mattered. He had been taught never to feel sympathy, never to forget what he was there to do.
But one single fact had overwhelmed the brutal logic of his trade. Carter could no longer deny feeling drawn to her in ways that were both irresistible and frightening to him, because he could not control where his emotions were leading him. From the moment Carter had first laid eyes on Teresa, he had sensed the presence of the barricades this woman had built to keep the world at bay, even if he still didn’t know why. He had grasped at once this fragile illusion of strength, because it was no different from his own. To hunt her down inside that labyrinth of secrets, destroying what held her world together, would have been the greatest act of cruelty in a career which had been filled with cruelties.
So Carter let the moment pass, trusting that the opportunity might come again. But the true meaning of what had just happened did not escape him. From now on, Carter realised, he would not only be lying to everyone around him. He would also be lying to himself.
‘Why is it so quiet out there?’ asked Teresa.
‘Garlinsky is here,’ replied Carter.
‘Since when?’
‘He just arrived.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘You mean you haven’t seen him?’
‘Nobody has seen him,’ said Teresa. ‘Not even my father. All he has heard is a voice on the phone. That’s why my father is so frightened of Garlinsky. He wasn’t even sure the man was real.’
‘He is flesh and blood all right,’ said Carter, ‘and that is one more reason to be scared.’
‘You’d better see what’s going on,’ said Teresa, ‘before my father smashes anything he might have missed the first time.’
‘Are you going to be all right?’ he asked.
‘Go!’ She waved him away.
Carter turned to leave.
‘And I’m sorry,’ she muttered, so quietly that Carter almost missed what she had said.
Carter looked back over his shoulder. ‘Sorry for what?’ he asked.
‘For thinking you were like the others.’
Carter stared at her, afraid that she could tell what he was thinking. It would have been better, he wanted to say, if you had just kept hating me.
…
The day after his staged arrest at the Dornheim military base, Carter boarded a plane bound for America. Two days later, after an overnight stay in Lisbon, where he had slept on the metal floor of the aeroplane with a life jacket for a pillow, Carter stepped out onto the tarmac at Fort Dix in central New Jersey. It was a hot summer day and he could feel the humid air like butter between his fingertips. Huge cauliflower clouds, which the pilot of his transport plane had jockeyed past on his way down, now passed by majestically above them.
There to meet him was Captain Tate, the officer who had walked into Pavel’s cafe all those years ago.
Tate was not in uniform this time. He wore an unpressed pair of chinos, boondocker boots and a white T-shirt. ‘It’s Jersey camouflage,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to stand out, after all.’
‘You mean you’re coming with me?’ asked Carter.
‘I guess you’re too valuable for us to let you out of our sight.’
‘You don’t trust me on my own?’
‘I trust you just fine. It’s the people we work for who don’t. Say, are you really flying out of here tonight?’
That was the deal he had struck with Wilby. Two hours with his father. That was all. Wilby dared not risk any more. ‘They drive a hard bargain,’ Carter said.
The tarmac shimmered with heat haze as they made their way to the parking lot, where Tate climbed behind the wheel of a Packard Super Eight sedan with purplish-black paint like the skin of a ripe eggplant, white wall tyres and a fat chrome bumper that looked as if it could push down trees.
It startled Carter to see such a beautiful, clean and new machine. Most of the vehicles he encountered back in Germany either belonged to the military and were painted olive drab or else were civilian cars which somehow survived the war and had been resurrected by their owners. In many ways, the technology had gone backwards in Europe, not forwards, as people turned to the only working machinery they could find, which had remained intact simply because it had been obsolete by the time the war began.
‘And this won’t draw attention?’ asked Carter.
‘This isn’t so fancy.’ Tate looked at him and grinned. ‘You’ve really been away a while, haven’t you?’
Just outside the base, Carter asked Tate to pull over at the same gas station where he had telephoned his father to say goodbye. ‘I need to make a call,’ he said.
Tate pulled off the road and the bell clanged as he rolled over the air tube laid out in front of the pumps. He tanked up his car while Carter went over to the phone booth.
‘All set?’ asked Tate, when Carter returned.
‘All set.’
‘Any chance you’d care to tell me who you called?’ asked Tate.