Carrick dropped his shoulder, and nudged him clear of them in one brutal, sharp action. The man crumpled. Carrick glanced down and saw a grimy face that pleaded. He knew the man was harmless, that he had reacted beyond a level that was necessary. He had thrown aside a beggar or a derelict, and the door was held open for him.
He saw hostility on the doorman’s face, and there was a jumble of words, German.
‘I don’t speak German,’ Carrick said, and walked towards the lift at the far side of the lobby.
The doorman called after him, in angry English, ‘He scavenges from the kitchen, is harmless, sir. For what he is, sir, we give him some respect.’
Carrick ignored him. He did the role-play well. He saw his Bossman and Viktor into the lift, stepped in with them and pressed the button. It was a glass-sided lift and he saw the doorman stalk away. He had known his ground or would not have spoken out so forcefully to the bodyguard of a guest, Carrick reckoned. The doorman went out now through the swing doors, on to the pavement, bent and lifted the man off the pavement, then seemed to slip something — money? — into his hand. Beside him, Viktor was impassive, but he thought Josef Goldmann’s mood had lightened, calmed by the display of force. They came to the reception floor.
A girl behind a desk said, ‘You are very welcome, gentlemen. It is three rooms now, not two, and one is a superior suite, yes? The reservations are for two nights — it is for departure on the thirteenth of April, correct? Just your signatures, please.’
His Bossman’s scrawl was unrecognizable. Carrick just did his initials.
They were given key cards. Carrick led back to the lift and they went up six more floors. Along a silent corridor. He stood aside as his Bossman worked the lock and opened a door.
Viktor said to Carrick. ‘I work out the rosters, which you will accept. Now get the bags.’
He was dismissed, as if he was low-life.
He went back down. Had to make peace, of a sort, with the doorman because he needed him to organize the parking of the prebooked hire car, arranged by a Berlin contact — but Carrick hadn’t been told a name — in the basement under the hotel. A good-size euro note was passed, not acknowledged as it was pocketed. The doorman, now, had that aloof look, and Carrick reckoned it was to show his contempt for the hirelings of a Russian Jew mobster who needed the swagger of protection. He took the three bags out of the boot. He didn’t know where they were moving on to — It is for departure on the thirteenth of April, correct? — whether they had enough clothes or would buy more. The man who had come to the narrowboat, who had invaded the Summer Queen, had said that the risk against him, in Berlin, increased to the level of … dead, so there are no misunderstandings. Dead. He hitched a bag on to each shoulder and picked up the third. Across the road he saw, in a doorway, the hunched shape of the derelict he had thrown on to the pavement. A stream of lorries passed on the street and in a gap between them he noted that two men still lingered on the far side.
He took the bags through the swing doors. He thought his life depended on how well he played the role. And, here, Carrick understood nothing.
He brought the bags to the rooms, was told what hours were his to rest, and what hours were for duty stretches.
In his room, stretched out, he slept.
They waited till a uniformed porter took away the hire car.
‘What did you think?’ Reuven Weissberg asked.
‘I thought it peculiar. The little boy held his father’s hand as if it were dark and he was frightened.’
‘And scum was pushed away.’
‘Harmless scum.’
Reuven Weissberg turned away from the place where they had watched the front entrance of the hotel on the Joachimstaler, and began to walk towards the U-bahn. There was a question he did not ask Mikhail. In fact, many questions were in his mind and he asked none. Did the man, shown on the reservation as Carrick, demonstrate his qualities as a professional bodyguard when pushing scum aside? Was the man merely professional or was he also loyal? The questions floated with him as he walked. Was a bodyguard ever loyal? How far would a bodyguard risk his own skin in defence of his paymaster? Was any bodyguard to be trusted? Should Carrick, on the word of the launderer, be trusted? Had his own Mikhail earned trust? That last question, never answered, was like a stone in the shoe of Reuven Weissberg. When guarded by Mikhail he had himself been shot.
They walked to the Uhlandstrasse station and went down the steps. He had been shot in Moscow. In the hectic days when he had battered his way into territory where other groups had believed themselves supreme, when he had snatched clients and given them new roofs, when he had recruited from State Security and Special Forces to enforce the roofs, he had made enemies of stature. In Moscow he had not used restaurants because that was where men such as himself were most vulnerable — and where he chose to attack rivals.
He had lived with the fever of the bunker, had surrounded the villa where his grandmother cooked and cared for him with high walls, electronic alarms and guards. He did not display himself at the wheel of a high-grade Mercedes, but drove old cars that could disappear on the streets and stay unrecognized. But he had been shot on the steps of a bank after depositing money. He could count few mistakes in his life, but it had been a mistake to visit that bank on three consecutive Fridays. He had come out into the sunlight, had paused because the snow had not been cleared adequately off the steps, and looked for a sure footing. Mikhail had been behind him — not in front — and the pistol had come from a pocket. He had seen the recoil and had dived to his left. There he would have made a good secondary target had the impetus of his fall on to the icy step not caused him to slide two steps lower. The second shot had missed him. Then Mikhail had reacted.
One shot into the chest and two into the head Mikhail had identified the getaway driver, whose panic had caused the wheels to spin, and shot him, a bullet in the head. They had fled. They had slithered away to their car. Mikhail had made it plain he thought himself a hero. He, Reuven, had congratulated him, had found the words as the pain reached beyond the numbness in his arm. They had not gone to hospital. At the villa, his grandmother had cleaned the wound, then had boiled water and used the scissors from her needlework box, tweezers and a knife to take out the debris of his coat that the bullet had forced into the cavity. She had not stitched the holes. He knew it was long ago, during times in the Forest of the Owls, that she had learned to treat wounds. He had never cried out when she had probed for debris, would not have dared to. Within the next week, six more men had died from weapons fired by Mikhail and Viktor, and a new business roof was successfully taken under his control. It had been his first step into the multi-billion-rouble death industry, and the killings made his control of an entrepreneur’s roof absolute.
Of Mikhail, his grandmother had said to him, ‘Why was he behind you, not in front? Why did he only shoot when two shots had been fired at you? What did he risk? Trust only yourself. Never put your life into the hands of another. Guard your own body.’
He stood on the platform and waited for a train, Mikhail a pace behind him. He thought of the man, Carrick, whom he had seen barge aside scum, and the trust written large on the face of Josef Goldmann as he held the man’s arm.
The train came, clattered alongside the platform.
His grandmother had told him that survival was in his own hands, as it had been in hers, in her stories that he knew by heart.
How much did I want to live? How often did I wish I was dead?