The first was that he had somehow been forgotten by the people who had sent him to prison, and that the days of his sentence, of which he kept obsessive track, were not even being counted by anyone other than himself. Carter had calibrated his sanity for the nine months he expected to serve, not one day longer. But what if they simply left him there to rot for the maximum three years, or even longer? Over time, it became a fixation. There was nothing he could do to pacify the voices in his head. All day, they gibbered at him from the rafters of his skull and, at night, they pursued him out onto the barren, moonlit tundra of his dreams. Now, even though he knew that he had not been forgotten after all, the fear of it still lingered in his mind.
His second obsession had been food.
He did not expect much from the prison kitchen, and he had never thought of himself as a picky eater, but the brain-coloured slurry that he scooped each day from a four-sectioned tray, perpetually greasy to the touch, was so mysterious in its composition and so consistent in its damp, sweaty smell◦– as well as the metallic tang it left in his mouth, like the taste of a penny resting on his tongue◦– that, most of the time, he did not actually know what he was eating. He was forced, in a short space of time, to recalibrate his whole idea of food. It was no longer about the enjoyment of the meal, neither was there any social aspect to the mealtimes since prisoners were not allowed to speak while they were eating. Instead the room was filled with the clatter of cutlery on trays, and men clearing their throats and the shuffle of boots on the linoleum floor.
To stop himself from going mad, Carter retreated far inside his head. There, in the treasure chamber of his memories, he relived the summers he had spent as a teenager working as a dish washer at a diner called Logan’s in Dunellen, New Jersey. Like many such diners, the building had been constructed in the shape of a railroad car, with round-topped seats like giant mushrooms for people who sat at the counter and booths by the window which looked out onto the main street. It was right across from the police station where his father worked. For years, his father had been a regular at Logan’s, with a seat reserved for him alone and apple pie served just the way he liked it, with a slice of cheddar cheese on the side. It was a personal favour to his father that Mr Logan gave Carter the job and his father had warned him what would happen if he did not live up to expectations.
‘You shame me,’ his father had told him, ‘and I will wring your neck.’ He always talked like that to his son, although he never laid a hand on him. But Carter had heard him speak to others using those same words, and had known that he meant what he said.
Carter worked from 6 a.m. until 5 p.m. and made fifty cents an hour. He was also entitled to one meal per day, although he never got to choose what it would be. The meal would be whatever got sent back by some finicky customer whose order had not been taken down exactly right by the waitress. Or, if Carter was lucky, the chef would deliberately mess up an order◦– gravy instead of grated cheese, French fries instead of mashed potatoes◦– and Carter would eat that instead.
On Sunday afternoons, in the quiet time between lunch and dinner, the chefs from several local restaurants would gather in the kitchen of Logan’s and take turns cooking for each other. Each week, a different chef would be in charge.
Carter would clean up after them, and the chefs would always make sure that there was a little left over for him. It always surprised Carter how ordinary these meals were◦– Shepherd’s Pie, Meat Loaf, Tuna Casserole◦– but they were the best of their kind that Carter had ever tasted, and one day he asked the chef about it.
The chef, a moon-bellied man with small dark eyes and a double chin, which rested on a red and white checked scarf that he kept tied around his throat as if he meant to choke himself to death by wearing it at all, replied that the simplest things were always the hardest to cook. ‘You want to know if a chef can really cook?’ he said. ‘Just get them to fry you an egg. You can eat eggs all your life and never know for sure how they can taste until a good chef cooks them up for you.’
For the most part, Carter had hated the job. Now and then, he would look up from the sink of dingy grey water and, through the open window that looked out on a vacant lot behind the restaurant, the fierce blue summer sky would flood into his eyes, and he would feel a terrible longing to just forget everything about these dreary days, to have them washed from his mind as if by some act of hypnosis.
Carter could never have imagined that, one day, he would return to those memories, selecting every moment that he could recall and holding it up to the light, turning it this way and that, like a man with a bucket full of diamonds. But each one of them brought him back to a time when food had taste and meaning and the fact that he had taken those things for granted made the resurrection of those thoughts even more precious to him in the boxed-in world of Langsdorf.
When the first course arrived◦– onions in beef broth and a piece of toasted bread with cheese on top floating in the middle◦– Carter felt a momentary twinge of guilt, knowing that even this small appetiser was more nourishment than some people out there in the streets of the city, the scavengers of coal, potato peels and the rags he had been wearing only a couple of hours ago, could expect in an entire day.
With the first sweet, salty mouthful, it was as if a part of him that had forgotten who he was during the months at Langsdorf prison suddenly remembered. The haircut and the new suit had not done that. All they had accomplished was to allow others to judge his appearance and to behave around him the way he had been used to being treated before he first put on the clothing of a convict. But that bowl of soup had brought him back to life.
As he ate, Carter kept his eye on the main door in the foyer, which he could see clearly from his table. It was a revolving door and the way the noonday light shone down into the street caused the whirling panes of glass to flicker blindingly as people came and went. Although this phenomenon obscured his view, he took comfort in the fact that anyone entering the hotel would need several seconds to accustom themselves to the darkness, time enough for him to disappear if necessary.
He had just finished the soup when Siegfried appeared through the whirling blades of the revolving door.
This man had never been a barber, nor was his name actually Siegfried. Carter had never met Siegfried. That was just an alias, agreed upon long ago, by which he could summon back to life the ghosts of his former existence.
In fact, the man’s name was Daniel Eckberg. He was in his late twenties, with pale, slightly boiled-looking skin, small eyes and a dense crop of platinum blond hair. Aside from the CIA station chief attached to the US embassy in Bonn, Eckberg was one of only two people who knew the real reason why Carter had been sent to prison. The other was Carter’s control officer, Marcus Wilby, whom Carter and Eckberg only ever referred to as ‘our mutual friend’. At the time of their first encounter, Eckberg had only just arrived in Europe, having been recruited straight out of Yale. His task was to serve as the go-between in any dealings with Carter and Wilby◦– what was known as a ‘cut-out’. That way, if Carter ever did something that caused his cover to be blown, it would be harder to trace his connections back to the CIA.
Back then, it had looked to Carter like the best chance of getting his cover blown was by Eckberg himself, who possessed a nervous, naive energy which attracted unwanted attention. But Carter said nothing about it at the time, hoping that when they met again, Eckberg would have learned the kind of tradecraft that would allow him to blend in to his surroundings.
Looking at Eckberg now, it seemed to Carter that Eckberg had learned nothing at all.