136
In the hall, behind another storeroom with two doors, this time with coats on hooks, we find more stairs. The height difference to the second floor is considerably less. We take the time to climb in silence, on our guard. On the fourth floor we come out on a landing that extends for a good fifty meters and leads to the continuation of the stairs. Harry says, with one foot on the new stairs, that it doesn’t make any damn sense. He asks if it makes sense to me. I get the strong impression, I say, that originally they didn’t plan for stairs. When they were forced to include them after all, this is what they came up with, squeezing them in left and right. I tell him I don’t know either. On the next floor up, the stairs go down again at the end of the landing. It’s unclear how many steps. Harry doesn’t trust it and hugs the wall, lowering his feet slowly as if the steps are made of rotten wood, high above a ravine.
137
We’ve counted properly and haven’t let the stairs’ antics get to us. Or is it just an unlikely coincidence? When we enter the apartment, separated from the stairwell by an elongated room tiled in the same white as the narrow hall on the ground floor, we’re standing almost next to the service elevator, another neutral environment in plain gray. Mounted on the wall opposite the elevator is an elegant brushed-aluminum plate in which a 2 and a 9 have been stamped; the indicator in the frame reads -1. I whisper that the stairs wind their way around the building and have brought us back to the elevators after all, but Harry isn’t listening to my explanations. He aims the flashlight at the wall between us and the residents’ and visitors’ elevators. He presses his ear against it; I wait, holding my breath.
No daylight in these halls. Night has fallen, we’ve been going almost four hours. These staff quarters clearly have a different layout from the ones on the first floor. There is no kitchen adjoining the living room. A table and chairs, no lounge suite. The chairs are arranged willy-nilly, as if the people left in a hurry. Harry and I sit on the floor and try to relax. The flashlight shines across the floor, casting long shadows behind crumbs and dirt and balls of fluff.
The square window with a view of the starless sky: suddenly I think of the city below us and creep over to the window with Harry lighting my way. He asks what I’m doing and follows me.
Big dark patches, businesses, department stores or housing blocks, demarcated by streetlights. I can’t see any cars driving in the streets close by. Lit windows are few; it could be five a.m. I search for TV sets, but don’t find any. I do spot a traffic light. Just the top of it, the red light, nothing of the intersection itself. When I fix my eyes on it, this is the only movement I detect in my entire field of vision: the red light flicking on and turning off again. And the varying intensity of the full moon behind the thin layer of cloud.
138
We come upon swing doors with small porthole windows and know that we needn’t look any farther. Where else would they use swing doors except between the service section and the luxury apartment? The sides of the doors are lined with silky-soft brushes. The flashlight smears a bluish-black gleam over the velvet that covers the backs of the doors from top to bottom, with the exception of one gold-colored circle, split neatly into two halves down the middle: Plexiglas for pushing the doors open. It’s dark behind the portholes.
Harry and I ball ourselves up against the wall. How are we going to do this? Without posing the question, we both search anxiously for an answer. It goes without saying that the resident will have a gun at his disposal. Even a bullet from an elegant lady’s pistol can be fatal. He’s lying in bed, unable to sleep from worry, and hears thumping in the apartment. It’s not unexpected. He’s always known that the war would one day reach his floor. Then someone calls him, and someone else, over and over again, so reticent and suspicious that he decides not to deviate from his decision. They claim to be guards. Michel and Harry from the basement. The names of the poor buggers whose throats they just cut, their last words their own Christian names. He’ll stay still, he’ll stay lying in his bed in the darkness, something no intruder who announces himself would ever suspect. He’ll take his time to aim properly and, even if he’s noticed, with his arms on the duvet folded back in front of him and thick pillows behind his back and shoulders, their astonishment will give him a good two-shot advantage.
Harry’s right though when he whispers that we can’t just burst in on him. If we don’t say anything and try to take him by surprise, it could turn out very badly. We have to avoid getting into a scuffle. We have to identify ourselves and hope that the resident keeps a cool head.
139
The wainscoting in the high-ceilinged hall behind the swing doors makes us feel like we have entered a country manor. There are no lights on anywhere. After so many hours of watchfulness, it’s a real effort to raise our voices. Harry takes the lead, announcing our presence, giving the name of the organization. As long as he’s shouting, I’m deaf to anything else and someone could come up behind me and shoot Harry straight through my head. I call out now and then too. We’re two frightened children trying to chase away the woodland spirits by making lots of noise. Everything in the apartment looks big and heavy. Bigger than usual, no doubt of that, but so oversized that even the enormous living room doesn’t bring them back to normal proportions. Perhaps because of the shadows. A serrated bar to hang a kettle off extends out of the brick fireplace. It’s hard to believe we’re in a city, twenty-nine floors up and not in the English countryside. We walk from a living room to a salon, through a book-filled library to another study. In the sleeping quarters we lower the volume of our calls. The bedrooms have thick carpets and romantic wallpaper, four-poster beds with heavy, turned woodwork. All six of them are empty. No signs of life anywhere. Harry whispers that he’s hiding from us. He warns the resident that we’ll have to search for him and explains that we’ve come to get him because it’s all become much too dangerous for him to stay here alone. I add that we can’t possibly leave without him. I notice that my tone of voice is lower, less commanding. We stand there motionless, giving our words time to sink in.
140
Far from the sleeping quarters, in a billiard room with four doors, we stop for a moment. The balls are arranged neatly on the table. On the way here, Harry and I called out loudly once more, insisting that the resident show himself, to no avail.
“I know he’s in the apartment,” Harry whispers confidently. He means, I’m quite capable of counting to forty, but that wasn’t even necessary, because only thirty-nine residents left the building. He suggests we lie low for a while with the flashlight off. The man’s trembling in a wardrobe somewhere. If we keep quiet long enough, he’ll get curious and come out of his hole and then we’ll find him soon enough.
I don’t ask why there aren’t any lights on anywhere. Has the resident been living without electricity? Did he hear us coming? Did he see us, our caps, our uniforms? Did he catch a glimpse of our emaciated, bearded faces as we waved the flashlight around and take us for two murderers from the back streets of the city?