‘Bonjour,’ said Caitlin as they passed. ‘Bon chance.’
‘Bon chance, mademoiselles,’ he nodded back, before climbing in and closing the door with a slam. Caitlin scanned the back of the van, thinking of asking for a lift, but it was crammed full with children, adults, boxes, suitcases and food.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Monique as the minibus pulled away.
Caitlin kept walking. ‘Through his uncle, Abu, Bilal came to meet other lost boys, most of them the products of failed unions between German men and migrant women. His mother stills lives in Neukцlln in the council flat where he grew up. She works for the Berlin City Council records department. She is inordinately proud of his achievements. He is one of the few young men in the neighbourhood to finish school, let alone university. He has a real job, and would have represented Germany in volleyball at the Athens Olympics.’
A few people were beginning to show up on the streets now, some of them also dressed for hiking. Another family emerged from an apartment block just across the street. The children were crying, complaining about the way their eyes stung and how it hurt to breathe. A young man rode past on a bicycle, wearing goggles and a painter’s disposable mask. He rang his bell as he passed them, fluttering his eyebrows. It drew a brief smile from Caitlin, made her feel a little better. But still she continued.
‘Bilal is tall and rangy with light olive skin and thick, wiry hair, coloured darker, almost caramel blonde. He has wide shoulders, long well-muscled arms and legs. No fat. Deep brown eyes, so brown they almost appear black from more than a few feet away. A ready smile that seems to spark off a high level of nervous energy. He rarely sits still for more than a moment and is given to little jumps and skips when he’s excited. He talks with his hands.’
Monique was staring at her now, almost walking into a pole at one point. Her eyes were wide, and anxious. As far as she knew Caitlin had never met Bilal, of course, but she had just described him perfectly.
‘Uncle Abu encouraged him to remain in school and proceed to university while many of the young men around him had simply gone onto welfare. Abu funded the boy’s education and supported his mother. As Bilal Baumer, he studied the German equivalent of sports science and became a qualified personal-fitness instructor, first working for a health insurance company, providing physiotherapy and rehab training for older clients, and later moving to a gym, where he proved very popular with the female clientele. I believe that is how you met, in fact, when he took you for a complimentary training session at a women-only gym in Berlin. When you were in the city eight months ago.’
Monique now looked physically ill, but Caitlin gave her no respite.
‘Bilal took up beach volleyball after a trip to Sardinia in 1995 and became a German regional champion with his partner Jurgen Mьller. Their run to the Olympics was cut short by Mьller’s acceptance into the Deutsche Marine.’
They had stopped walking again, and now stood on the edge of the gutter while Caitlin quickly checked up and down the street for any signs that they were being followed. It seemed clear. She spoke without emotion, simply recalling the facts from the dossier she had committed to memory as soon as her case controller had handed her the file on the al-Qaeda recruiter known as al Banna.
‘He grew up in Neukцlln, in south-east Berlin, where migrants form just under half of the total population. Three generations of Turks are mixed in with Eastern Europeans and some North Africans. Most of the Turks don’t speak German or even go to school. Unemployment is at eighty per cent and the city spends three-quarters of its budget on welfare. Baumer has German citizenship because of his father. His mother retains hers because they are not lawfully divorced. Most of the migrants in Neukцlln live in fear of immigration raids, which are hugely violent events.’
‘Stop it, please. Just stop,’ begged Monique. ‘What is the point of all this?’
‘The point, Monique, is that Bilal Baumer is not your boyfriend. Do you know why he has never agreed to move to be closer to you?’
‘His work, he…’
Caitlin smiled gently. ‘His work, or at least the job he uses as a cover, his personal training, could follow him anywhere. He’s good at his job, his cover job, and has EU citizenship. The health funds who employ him would do so anywhere. You know all this. You’ve always known.’
Caitlin stepped closer, moving into Monique’s personal space. Her voice, which she had kept flat and free of emotion while reciting from her memory of the target file, now grew softer, more understanding. ‘Like a lot of women, you don’t have perfect self-esteem. You could not believe that such a good-looking, intelligent, caring man, a good man, would be attracted to you. Part of you always believed you didn’t really deserve somebody like Billy, and you assumed, possibly without ever thinking it aloud, that he was keeping his distance until someone better came along.’
Monique’s eyes had filled with tears and she was shaking her head in jerky little spasms. ‘No.’
‘So you wore all his bullshit excuses about work and his mother and needing to stay in contact with his community. You were pathetically grateful when he travelled to see you, but you covered most of the miles in that relationship, didn’t you, honey? And you had to wonder sometimes, when he was away with a client, or travelling for work, whether there might be some other girl he was stringing along – because he was a catch and a half, wasn’t he?’
A nod this time, just the smallest movement, but a crucial acknowledgement that Caitlin wasn’t entirely wrong. She could have said something about how Monique was also drawn to Bilal because he was simultaneously dangerous and safe. A young man from a Muslim background, politically aware if not active, but fiercely secular in his outlook. Not at all like the bearded wingnuts whose medieval views on women would’ve made it impossible for an enlightened feminist like Monique Duroc to have had anything to do with them. But of course, to lay it out as brutally as that would break the tenuous connection she had established.
‘Monique, you were right,’ the American continued. ‘You were not his only one.’
A small groan escaped the throat of the distressed young woman.
Judging the time to be right, Caitlin reached into her jacket and produced the envelope she’d removed from the folder hidden under the floorboards back at the apartment. She shook out a handful of surveillance shots, good-quality hi-def colour photos of Baumer entwined with two separate women. The date stamps marked them as having been taken in the last six months.
‘He also successfully targeted a Belgian student,’ said Caitlin as Monique took the photographs with a shaking hand. ‘Anya Delvaux, a part-time canvasser for Greenpeace in Brussels, and Sofia Calderon, an activist documentary-maker from Barcelona.’