A moment later, he stepped out of the ruined building and joined the flow of people. A number were still looking out across the river and, when he followed their gaze, Carter could see a plume of black smoke rising from among the buildings on the other side of the Deutzer bridge.
‘What happened?’ Carter asked a man who was shielding his eyes from the sun with a newspaper so that he could get a better view.
The man turned to Carter. ‘Keine Ahnung,’ he replied. No idea.
‘It was a crash,’ said a woman. ‘Somebody told me there was an accident between a streetcar and a bus.’
‘That was bound to happen,’ said the man, ‘the way those streetcars race around.’
‘Could you tell me the time?’ asked Carter.
The man reached into his vest pocket and hauled out a pocket watch on a chain. ‘Twenty minutes past nine,’ he said.
Carter swore quietly, realising that he was already late for the meeting. He thanked the man and crossed the road, making his way as quickly as he could towards the bridge, where tramcars rushed by in both directions, punching the air as they swept past. The pedestrian walkway was jammed with people pushing bicycles and others who, still seeming half asleep, plodded unhurriedly towards their jobs.
Carter weaved among them, trying to make up for lost time. As soon as he was across the bridge, he veered off onto Constantinstrasse and from there onto Grembergerstrasse.
The smoke from the crash was still in the sky and Carter heard the clang of fire truck bells coming from the same direction. Carter imagined how it must have looked after the air raids during the war, with smoke rising not just from one fire but from hundreds scattered across the city.
Turning off Grembergerstrasse, Carter realised that the crash had taken place on Nassaustrasse, the same street where the meeting was taking place. Several fire trucks were blocking the road and hoses were being unravelled by men in black helmets with large, silver comb-shaped fittings on the top, which reminded Carter of the helmets worn by French soldiers in the First World War. Blue lights jutted from the roofs of the green fire trucks, flashing a quick, pulsing rhythm, as if sending out messages in code.
As Carter walked towards the fire trucks, peering into doorways for the house numbers as he searched for 106, he realised that the crash had caused one of the buildings up the street to catch fire and it was this that the firemen were battling now. But the closer he came, the less sense the picture made to him. He could not see the streetcar anywhere, or the bus with which it was supposed to have collided. He was only a hundred paces from the first of the fire trucks before he finally realised that there was no streetcar and no bus, either. The woman had been mistaken. Only the house had been damaged. The whole front of it had collapsed.
The air was thick with oily smelling smoke and feathers of ash rained down upon the heads and shoulders of the spectators. The police had cordoned off the area and a small crowd had gathered to watch. With bronze-tipped hoses, firemen sprayed jets of water at the smouldering wreckage.
‘It was a bomb, they think,’ said a woman next to Carter. She wore a housedress and an apron and her hair was bundled in a cotton headscarf.
‘A bomb?’ asked Carter.
‘From the war,’ she explained. ‘A bomb that didn’t go off. There are hundreds of them all over the city. They went right into the ground◦– deep, deep, some of them◦– and there they lie until something comes along to wake them up. It might have been a streetcar going overhead. It might have been anything. But there’◦– she held out a hand towards the burning house◦– ‘is what has come of it.’
‘I don’t think that’s what it was,’ said another woman. She was holding a child in one arm. His fat little legs dangled down around her waist. The child made no sound, content simply to stare at the spectacle of the trucks and the firemen and the gushing arcs of water. ‘I saw the explosion from my house across the street,’ the woman continued, ‘and it came out of the second floor. If it was a bomb from the war, it would have come up from below the road.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the woman in the headscarf. ‘Anyway, the whole place is gone now, so I guess it doesn’t matter how it happened.’
‘What number house is it?’ asked Carter.
‘That’s 106,’ replied the woman, ‘and thank God the owners are never around. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen them.’
Before the shock could settle in his bones, Carter watched as a body was carried out of the wreckage on a stretcher. It had been partially concealed with a blanket. The fact that the head was covered left Carter in no doubt that the person was dead. The two firemen who carried the stretcher were pasted with whitish-grey dust. As they moved towards a waiting ambulance, the blanket slipped away.
As they glimpsed the corpse, a kind of groaning sigh went up from the onlookers.
Carter could see at once that it was Wilby. The front of his head, from the eyebrows upwards, had been completely crushed. Blood from his ears and his mouth had mingled with the dust, forming a frothy crust upon his face.
One of the firemen paused and made as if to put down his end of the stretcher in order to replace the blanket, but his companion put a stop to that with one short, sharp command, and they carried on to the ambulance, which was only another few paces. They slid the stretcher inside and the double doors at the back of the ambulance were immediately slammed shut. The ambulance departed, its bell clanging, towards the Hohenzollern bridge, which would take it, eventually, to the Lindenburg hospital on the other side of the river.
‘Was there no one else?’ Carter asked a policeman, who stood with shoulders squared, holding back the crowd by force of will alone.
‘Who knows?’ replied the policeman. ‘It will take them a week to dig through that mess.’
With bile rising in his throat, Carter turned and stumbled away down the street, until he came to the Kalk train station on Gottfriedhagenstrasse. There, he found a phone booth cubicle and shut himself inside. He put in a call to Bonn station.
A woman answered. ‘Embassy,’ she said.
‘I need to speak to Eckberg.’
‘Who is calling, please?’ she asked.
‘You can tell him it’s Carter. Please hurry. It’s important.’
There was a pause. ‘I’m afraid the person you are asking to speak with isn’t here right now. If you would like to come to the embassy, I’m sure we can find someone who will help.’
Carter hung up the phone. He breathed in the smell of stale cigarette smoke that had sunk into the cramped walls of the booth, and stared without seeing at the calling cards of prostitutes, jammed between the wall and the metal coin receiver of the phone. Carter wondered if Eckberg was dead. Maybe the station chief, too. Both of them could have gone to that meeting at the safe house. Until he found out otherwise, it only made sense to assume that they were gone.
Only one thing seemed perfectly clear◦– that the explosion was no accident. Whoever set the charge must have known about the meeting, and also who would be there. That information must have come from somewhere inside Bonn station, after Wilby broke with his own protocol to keep everyone else in the dark. So Wilby had been right all along. The station had been compromised, which also explained what had happened in the alleyway the night before. Only someone with access to the inner working of the station could have known the location of the dead drop.