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  Standing at the rear of the crowd, Buchboden looked at his watch. Gebhart was still ranting, waving his arms, even if his words weren’t carrying far. Buchboden moved away from the crowd. He gazed up at the helicopter that hovered now directly over the Brandenburg Gate before it swung toward the Tiergarten and came back again, droning.

  Buchboden stopped near a parked police car occupied by two grim-faced uniformed cops. Across the back seat lay assault rifles, riot visors, bullet-proof shields.

  Nobody knew who fired the first bullet. Nobody knew from which direction it came. It struck Gebhart in the neck and he fell back from the small platform, still clutching his loudspeaker. The automatic gunfire that followed was short and intense and appeared to originate from a place beyond the Brandenburg Gate, perhaps from the edges of the Tiergarten.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ A young cop jumped out of the car and grabbed his rifle. With less speed his overweight partner, who was chewing gum, also got out. Buchboden watched the demonstrators spread in sudden chaos, throwing themselves to the ground, covering their heads with their hands. Police, pouring from their cars all over the place, had their passage toward the source of gunfire blocked by the mob.

  Screaming, confusion, bewilderment; it was impossible to know how many had been struck by bullets, how many were dead. The gunfire stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The police who managed to make their way beyond the Gate were too late to apprehend the gunmen, who had vanished into darkness. The officers in the helicopter, scouring the sky over the Tiergarten, later reported that they’d seen nothing.

  Karl-Heinz Buchboden walked away. He’d parked his car earlier in a street behind the Russian Embassy. He unlocked it, got in and drove in the direction of Kreuzberg, a district inhabited by Turkish immigrants where the air smelled of Eastern spices and the windows of small kebab restaurants were lit long into the night.

  He listened to police bulletins as he drove. The coded messages were urgent, panicky. Every patrol car within a three-mile radius was being despatched to the Brandenburg Gate.

  He tuned the radio to a local news station. Already there were reports of the night’s events, most of them garbled, exaggerated, poorly informed. Broadcasters liked that heightened sense of reality, they enjoyed tragic immediacy, the speedy communication of unexpected occurrences. Reporters, cameramen, the whole jabbering squadron of media would be rushing toward the Brandenburg Gate.

  He parked in a sidestreet off the Oranienstrasse, beyond Moritzplatz. He locked the car, then began to walk. He went inside a small Turkish café, drank two cups of sweet thick coffee, smoked a couple of cigarettes. He studied the waitress for a while, a girl whose mix of Turkish and Nordic appealed to him. She wore her dark hair plaited, and she bustled around the place, cleaning tables, emptying ashtrays. Buchboden looked at the clock on the wall. It was more than an hour since Gebhart had been shot. In another fifteen minutes he’d get up, leave the café and stroll slowly in the direction of the Kotbusser Tor.

  From the kitchen somebody spoke in Turkish. The girl vanished for a while inside the kitchen. When she came back she propped her elbows on the counter of the bar and looked at Buchboden. ‘Have you heard?’

  ‘Heard?’ he asked.

  ‘They say twenty-five people are dead at the Brandenburg Gate. There was gunfire. Nobody knows who did it. Nobody knows why.’

  Buchboden shook his head. ‘I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘They were marchers. Some kind of demonstration. I don’t know. Then they started shooting. This city …’ She shrugged, turned from the counter, poured herself a glass of orange juice.

  Buchboden said, ‘What is the world coming to.’

  He got up, left some coins on the table, said good night. He stepped into the street. He walked toward the Kotbusser Tor. This was an exotic, uneasy vicinity, filled with kebab vendors, nightclubs that had a certain seedy quality, gay bars, Yugoslavian restaurants, a few Greek joints. Buchboden had always been intrigued by this part of Kreuzberg because it had a nefarious quality, an air of criminality: you knew that drug deals were going down behind closed doors.

  Clothing stores were open late, funky little places selling cut-price jeans, Doc Martens, punk gear. A scent of spices and roasting lamb floated from doorways. In spite of the bitter night the streets were thronged, people window-gazing, studying menus, hurrying to assignations. Buchboden enjoyed all this hustle, the life of the place, the swarm. He looked at his watch. He was all at once tense.

  He heard them before he saw them, the sound of chanting, of boots clattering on concrete, the noise of glass being smashed, of baseball bats struck against walls and cars. He slipped into a narrow sidestreet. He heard angry voices raised, more chanting.

  They came seemingly out of nowhere, three, maybe four hundred of them, as if brought together by a command only they could hear. They wore the insignia of their prejudices, swastika armbands on their leather jackets, swastika headbands across their brows. There were skinheads, tattoo freaks, black-booted, chain-carrying, knife-flashing, and they were compelled by rage beyond reason. They strutted down the street, breaking shop windows, tearing down signs, chanting as they moved.

  Then somebody threw a Molotov cocktail into a kebab joint, which seemed to be the signal for the mob to step up their activities. More fiery bottles were thrown into restaurants, bars, through the windows of apartments or cars. Whenever they encountered resistance from store owners, who had armed themselves during the years of ethnic tensions, they responded with knives, chains, sharpened steel combs, spiked leather belts, baseball bats. Shotguns, revolvers, semi-automatic weapons. Buchboden, concealed in darkness, held his breath. He watched them work through the neighbourhood in their apocalyptic fashion, leaving behind a maze of flame and death. They worked thoroughly, too, as if whatever urge drove them was of no random nature. A few buildings began to burn in the night, rafters collapsing in flame, cars exploding; the neighbourhood might have been kindling. The air was rich with the stench of burning rubber, blackened meat, cinders. The whole business took maybe five or six minutes.

  And then, as if in response to an order from an unknown source, the mob dispersed, some disappearing in the direction of the Görlitzer Bahnhof Station, others hurrying toward the Reichenberger Strasse or vanishing along sidestreets off the Oranienstrasse. They split into small groups, discarding their swastika accoutrements as they went.

  Buchboden stepped out of the alley. All around him in the reflections of fire people lay on the pavements, women clutched each other and wept, a child went screaming past, clothes aflame. The scene was chaotic, insane: all sense of order had disintegrated for a few frenzied minutes, as if some mass craziness had possessed those young men and women briefly, a collective hallucination of savage brevity. Buchboden wandered across the street, avoiding a burning car, seeing three men gathered around a woman who was clearly dead, hearing cries, angry curses, noticing firelight glisten from broken shards of plate glass. He gazed at sparks rising from the roof of a building, a swift orange lick of flame whipping up into the wintry sky.

  They had done their job well.

  Buchboden walked to a corner, stepping past the injured, the dead. A Greek woman lay against a wall, the side of her face bloodied, her skull battered. A man, presumably her husband, hovered around her in panicky concern and helplessness. He looked at Buchboden imploringly. Help me, do something, help me. Buchboden continued to move. He couldn’t help. He couldn’t do anything. He made a gesture of sympathy – what more was expected of him? He heard sirens, ambulances, fire engines. The night was filled with noise. The sounds of law and order and sanity: too late. Too late again.

  Buchboden saw a patrol car draw up a few yards away. Three uniformed cops came out, armed with rifles. Buchboden stepped toward them. He recognized none of them. He showed them his ID and they were immediately deferential.

  ‘Skinheads,’ Buchboden said. ‘Our young Nazi friends. They scattered all over the place. You’ll probably round up a few if you ca
n get through this mess,’ and he gestured along the street, where another car suddenly exploded, blowing out the window of a bookshop. Somebody screamed.

  The cops hurried away on foot even as more patrol cars arrived. A fire engine rumbled along the street, men unravelling hoses hurriedly. Two ambulances appeared, medics emerged, stretchers ready. Nurses and doctors wandered along the pavements, wondering where to start. Buchboden lit a cigarette in his gloved hand. Madness on a cold night; an asylum might have released its incurable in this part of the city. Fires raged. The street was an inferno.

  There had to be twenty cop cars on the scene now. Another fire engine appeared, more ambulances. Somebody strolled toward Buchboden. It was Grunwald, who worked out of the same office as Buchboden at the Platz der Luftbrücke. Grunwald was young, naïve, one of life’s optimists.

  ‘It’s hard to grasp,’ he said. He shook his head slowly. It was the gesture of a man whose basic nature was generous, an incorruptible man. ‘I just don’t see any point to this …’ He gazed the length of the street. ‘When did you get here?’

  ‘I just arrived,’ Buchboden said.

  ‘You heard about the other business with the Ossis?’

  Buchboden said he hadn’t.

  ‘Twenty-three dead at the Brandenburg Gate. For what? For what?’ Grunwald looked bewildered, as if he’d just seen a rampaging beast that defied any zoological category.

  ‘That’s a mystery a little too profound for me to unravel,’ Buchboden answered. ‘The human savage.’

  ‘The human savage,’ said Grunwald, whose clean-shaven face was illuminated by flame and looked glossy. ‘It’s fucking satanic.’

  Buchboden pondered this description a moment. Satanic: no, it wasn’t quite right. He laid a hand on Grunwald’s sleeve. Grunwald looked despairingly at him. ‘First the killings at the Brandenburg Gate. And now this. I’d call that satanic,’ he said.

  Buchboden said, ‘I don’t believe in supernatural agencies, Gerhardt. Only human ones.’

  Grunwald seemed not to have heard. He said, ‘What’s going on? What the fuck is going on?’

  Buchboden shrugged. He could already see the next day’s newspapers, the analyses of events. Columnists, editorial writers, would be speculating on whether the second demonstration of the night had been planned in advance or if it had spawned itself out of the violence around the Brandenburg Gate. They would contemplate the possibility of a connection between the two outrages and wonder if it were some mad coincidence of rage and destruction. There would be laments, the beating of breasts, deep concerns expressed over the state of the German nation: since the Second World War, Germans had become accustomed to analysing their collective psyche in print. Buchboden could see it all. He wouldn’t even have to read the goddam papers. A nation at war with itself. The primitive animal rises again. The spectre over the land. All that and more.

  His attention was drawn by the appearance of two uniformed policemen who were dragging a young man along the pavement. The kid, maybe eighteen, wore a black leather jacket, the customary boots, and on the back of his hand was a gothic tattoo, perhaps a bat, Buchboden couldn’t tell. The kid had blood running from a wound on his forehead. He blinked at Buchboden. He had a glazed, druggy expression.

  ‘We caught him in an alley,’ one of the uniforms said. ‘Trying to hide. The fucker.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with this,’ the kid said. He was all defiance and hardness. ‘Go ahead. Got any eyewitnesses?’

  Buchboden pushed the kid against the wall. ‘How come you’re bleeding?’

  ‘I don’t know. Somebody hit me. I was minding my own fucking business. Walking along. That’s all.’

  ‘Sing me another song,’ Buchboden said. He turned to one of the uniforms. ‘Take him to my office. I’ll talk to him there. And anybody else you might round up. Bring them along. It might be quite a party.’

  Buchboden released the kid, who raised a hand to his wound. ‘I wasn’t involved in any of this,’ he said.

  Buchboden turned away. He knew there would be a long night ahead of him, interrogations, taciturn kids with nothing much to say, nothing much to offer by way of explanation. They’d regard the incident as some kind of happening, as if that were justification enough. Part of the Szene, nothing else. Beyond that, they’d be sullen and indifferent. Even Karl-Heinz Buchboden, notorious for his interrogative expertise, wouldn’t get anything out of them. As Nightshade, he wouldn’t be trying too hard in any event.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  LONDON

  IN HIS OFFICE PAGAN FOUND A MEMO FROM NIMMO. FURTHER TO MY meeting with the American Ambassador, I demand that in future any aspect of the investigation that involves the American Embassy or its personnel must be cleared by me, personally, in advance. Under no circumstances will you disregard this. In addition, I await your progress report.

  Pagan pushed the sheet aside.

  He imagined Nimmo and the Home Secretary having a little chat with Caan. He thought of the undercurrents of such a conversation, the Ambassador talking in his most cordial manner, the Home Secretary listening with his customary doped expression, Nimmo into his appeasement mode.

  Pagan wasn’t sure how to respond to the memo. He could report his conversation with Burr, but he reckoned that Nimmo would consider it the gossip of an old man who was either resentful or demented. Willie Caan involved in skulduggery? Unthinkable, out of the question. Caan was beyond reach, unassailable. He was a Good Guy, he took HIV-positive kids from the decrepit inner cities of England to Disneyland. He did Good Deeds. Besides, he represented a country from which, in ways too complex to unravel, the United Kingdom had come to expect patronage and support.

  A shadow had been nagging Pagan ever since the meeting with Burr. If The Undertakers existed, and Caan knew about them, then the Ambassador was involved – however remotely – with the death of Bryce Harcourt; which meant there had to be some link, even at many very careful removes, between the Ambassador and Carlotta. And if Caan was being kept abreast of the investigation by Nimmo or the Home Secretary, what did that imply? Everything Pagan passed to George Nimmo would go ultimately to Grosvenor Square. Nothing was secret. Confidentiality was a joke.

  And Caan had an inside track, a fast track.

  Pagan wandered the room, worrying over this consideration. He could hardly go to George and tell him to give Caan absolutely nothing. Nimmo wouldn’t entertain such a notion. The alternative was simple. He’d be very selective about what he reported to Nimmo. And if George felt he was being ignored or sidetracked, screw it. It was no time to show George Nimmo, yo, a whole deck of cards.

  Billy Ewing entered Pagan’s office. ‘This just came in.’ He laid a fax on Pagan’s desk. The message was from the Sûreté in Paris and had been signed by Claude Quistrebert. It was addressed to Pagan and stated that somebody using the name Karen Lamb had rented a car from Hertz in Paris. She’d given her destination as Marseille. The car had been found, seemingly abandoned, in the town of Chartres. Karen Lamb had apparently disappeared.

  End of message, end of trail, Pagan thought.

  ‘She’s playing games,’ Ewing said. ‘Rents a car, informs the Hertz people where she’s going, then dumps it. At which point she either gets picked up by somebody else, probably by prearrangement, or she finds another means of transport out of Chartres. She’s making a maze, Frank. But it doesn’t tell us where the hell she is, does it?’

  Pagan sat back in his chair. He thought about Carlotta and wondered if she’d changed her appearance. She might be unrecognizable. Plastic surgery. Disguises. Even if he were to issue a photograph of her to the Press, what good could come of it? There would be the usual series of false sightings and reports from cranks and crackpots. He didn’t need that clamour.

  Pagan closed his eyes. He was thinking of the photograph that had been taken of Carlotta in Rio, the shadowy male figure in the background, that little stroke of familiarity he’d felt. But it led nowhere. It faded out in the dim recesses of memor
y. Who was the guy?

  He looked at Ewing. ‘Is Foxie around?’

  ‘Told me to tell you he’d gone out hunting for somebody called McLaren. Said you’d know.’

  Pagan massaged his eyelids in a weary way. ‘If he needs me, he can call me at home.’

  He went back to Holland Park and sat for a time listening to the silences of the apartment. Familiar sounds – the buzz of the refrigerator, the click of the thermostat in the water-heater – struck him as strange for some reason. Perhaps he’d been gone too long; perhaps he needed a change in his life. He pondered the alleged existence of The Undertakers, considered the complicity of Ambassador Caan, thought about Jake Streik. He was restless, pacing the apartment. In the kitchen he unwrapped a ham sandwich he’d bought at the deli down the street. Bland. Brennan Carberry would probably have suggested mustard, Dijon or an exotic brand he’d never heard of. He chewed as he wandered through the rooms. He put the half-eaten sandwich down on the bedside table. He wasn’t in the mood for fodder. His head was buzzing. He was juggling names, possibilities, connections; gridlock in his skull.

  The apartment was confining. He had to get out. He changed his clothes, put on a clean overcoat, and went downstairs. He got into the Camaro, and drove without any sense of direction, without conscious purpose. But he knew in his heart where he was headed. Why deny it? He passed the black windshaken expanse of Hyde Park, and then he was in Park Lane. He stopped the car outside the Hilton. He went into the lobby, approached the desk and asked for Brennan Carberry. He was directed to the house telephone. He dialled her room number. She picked up and said, ‘Hello, Frank.’