The car was already gone, but the minibus waited for him. He climbed in.
He spoke, silent and without lip movement: ‘Just as you said it would be, old boy … Pity me, Clipper, with all these damn Thomases for company.’
Stone-faced, Viktor drove.
Josef Goldmann had a hand on Carrick’s shoulder, leaned forward and spoke in his ear: ‘How did you know, Johnny?’ Play dumb and play ignorant. ‘Know what, sir?’
‘How did you know that Mikhail was with Reuven Weissberg at the shooting and did not react until the shot had been fired, and it was only Reuven’s good fortune that the shot took the flesh of the arm and not the chest or skull? How did you know that?’
‘I didn’t know it, sir. I guessed it. I wouldn’t have a kneecap if I hadn’t guessed something.’
Laughter behind him, but hollow.
‘Mikhail was not fucking a tart when Reuven was shot, and he was not masturbating a young boy. He was there, Johnny, but he was slow with his reaction. You were not slow when I was attacked. It was a good guess.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Chapter 11
He was numbed and quiet. Carrick sat in the apartment’s kitchen. The grandmother moved around him, but it was as if he weren’t there. A coffee mug had been placed on the table near to his elbow, and he had nodded but was not acknowledged. The grandmother spent her time washing dishes and saucepans in the sink, then drying them and putting them in cupboards. Afterwards she prepared a meal, peeled vegetables and stripped cold meat off a bone. He believed her to be wary of him, but felt her suspicion was ingrained, not personal.
When she had made his coffee, she had taken a tray — four mugs and a steaming pot — out of the kitchen and had been gone two or three minutes. Carrick had not moved from his chair at the table. Reuven and Mikhail, his Bossman and Viktor were in another room, If a door was opened he could hear their faint voices, but the language used was beyond him. Mikhail had brought the tray back.
He had carried it into the kitchen and put it on the draining-board. Carrick would have expected some brief expression of thanks — obvious, whatever the language used — and then for Mikhail to go back to the meeting. He did not. Carrick watched him. Mikhail rinsed the coffee dregs from the mugs and sluiced the pot, then took a cloth and dried them, did it with care, and placed the mugs on a shelf in a cupboard. Carrick saw this as a slight but unmistakable sign of servitude.
What thoughts were in his mind revolved on the racing, spinning tip of the drill. Carrick could not have said how close he had been to confession — shouting, screaming, anything to get the hand holding the drill to move back and away from his kneecap. If he had made that confession he would have gained himself a minute, a few minutes, a half-hour, of life, but by now he would be dead. Too right. Dumped. A ditch, a shallow grave. So, the closeness of it had numbed him, left him quiet.
They taught in SCD10 that an undercover, when pressured by suspicion, should not try to twist his way out but should turn and confront. ‘Change the direction,’ one instructor had preached, ‘throw it bloody back at them, deflect their attack, make them answer some bloody questions.’
‘Be outraged at the very thought of their accusation being true,’ another instructor had said.
Everyone worth listening to on the courses reckoned that an undercover, working with level-three criminality, would find his legend threatened and must hit back.
His kneecap would have been pierced, no doubt about it. Adrenaline had exploded in his mouth — the pure instinct of survival, not planned but made on the hoof — and then the soft response, in words he hadn’t understood, of Reuven Weissberg.
He could still feel the grip of Reuven Weissberg’s fist on his coat, and had known that he would have stumbled, might have fallen, crossing the wasteground from the warehouse to the car. Mikhail stood in front of him, and seemed to eye Carrick.
Carrick stared back. If the grandmother had not been there, Carrick reckoned Mikhail might have spat in his face. Wouldn’t have dared to, not in her presence. On-the-hoof decisions were accepted by a cover officer and a control in SCD10. There was acceptance that no damn manual could legislate for the unexpected crisis, and a crisis was having a cordless drill with a hand on the trigger, the tip spinning a few inches from a kneecap. If he hadn’t seen the puckered wound of a bullet’s entry, when Reuven Weissberg had discarded his coat, if … But he had. The accusation had not been thought through, and it had saved him. Now, the adrenaline was long drained out, and the numbness had taken hold.
Carrick could recall the words, the sounds, that he had not understood, Enough and Free him, and he had seen Mikhail’s eyes in that dance of disbelief, had heard Josef Goldmann’s weeping, but it was Reuven Weissberg who had stood, come to the chair and waved Mikhail back. Then Viktor had loosed the straps and lifted him from it.
He thought Reuven Weissberg had saved him from the pain of the drill and then had saved his life. He sat in the chair at the table and gazed down at the dregs in the bottom of the mug. He would not have survived but for the intervention of Reuven Weissberg. He had felt the strength of the man through the leather jacket’s sleeve, had seen the strength of the eyes, had heard the soft command of the voice — and owed his life to that man.
Mikhail said, ‘I am to tell you that we move on in the evening.’
Carrick shrugged, acknowledged, but did not speak. Did not press for explanation — where, when, why? He thought Mikhail believed nothing of his denial, and that an enemy had been made. Carrick presumed that the outside of the block was watched. They had found him in the night, which meant that a surveillance team was in place, and he presumed, also, that they had been outside the warehouse. They had not intervened. He had been a second, two seconds, from having a drill pierce his kneecap. But for the quiet words spoken by Reuven Weissberg, he was meat, beaten and bloodless.
Carrick had lost count of how many times he had studied the last undissolved grains of coffee in the mug. He lifted his eyes and found the picture. He searched among the depths and darkness of the trees but could not find no meaning there. The only meaning he knew was that Reuven Weissberg, not those who had sent him, was his protector.
She packed his bag, always did. ‘Do you want him as a trifle, a bauble, because he belongs to someone else?’
He stood beside the bed. She folded two shirts, underclothes, a pair of jeans, and already in his bag were the heavy socks he would wear with boots. Reuven said, ‘When did I ever want anything as a toy?’
‘Because he belongs to Josef Goldmann. Do you want him for that reason?’
‘No.’
‘He’s not of your blood or your faith.’
‘Blood isn’t important to me and I have no faith.’
She sighed, long and slowly. ‘You’re ignorant of him.’