Khalil trusts nothing the first time,Joseph had said. But Joseph was dead and buried long ago, a discarded prophet from her adolescence. She was Michel's widow and Tayeh's soldier and she had come to enlist in the army of her dead lover's brother.
A Swiss soldier was eyeing her, an older man carrying a Heckler & Koch machine pistol. Charlie turned a page. Hecklers were her favourite. At her last weapon-training session she had put eighty-four shots out of a hundred into the storm-trooper target. It was the top score, men or women. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he was still looking at her. An angry idea struck her. I'll do to you what Bubi once did in Venezuela, she thought. Bubi had been ordered to shoot a certain Fascist policeman as he came out of his house in the morning, a very favourable hour. Bubi hid in a doorway and waited. His target carried a gun under his arm, but he was also a family man, forever romping with his kids. As he stepped into the road,Bubi took a ball from his pocket and sent it bouncing down the street towards him. A kid's rubber ball--what family man would not instinctively bend down to catch it? As soon as he did, Bubi stepped out of his doorway and shot him dead. For who can fire a weapon while he is catching a rubber ball?
Someone was trying to pick her up. Pipe smoker, pigskin shoes, grey flannels. She felt him hover, and advance.
"I say, do excuse me, but do you speak English?"
Standard issue, middle-class English rapist, fair-haired, fifty, and tubby. Falsely apologetic. No, I don't, she wanted to reply to him; /just look at the pictures. She hated his type so much she was nearly sick on the spot. She glowered at him, but he was a stayer, like all his kind.
"It's simply that this place is so awfully desolate," he explained. "I wondered if you'd care to have a drink with me? No strings. Do you good."
She said no thank you, she nearly said, "Daddy says I mustn't speak to strangers," and after a while he strode away indignantly, looking for a policeman to report her to. She returned to her study of the common edelweiss, listening to the place fill up, one pair of feet at a time. Past her to the cheese shop. Past her to the bar. Towards her. And stop.
"Imogen? You remember me. Sabine!"
Look up. Pause for recognition.
A jolly Swiss headscarf to hide the bobbed hair dyed a vague brown. No spectacles, but if Sabine were to put on a pair like mine, any bad photographer could make twins of us. A large carrier bag by Franz Carl Weber of Zürich dangled from her hand, which was the second sign.
"Gosh. Sabine. It's you."
Get up. Formal peck on cheek. How amazing. Where are you going?
Alas, Sabine's flight is just leaving. What a pity we can't have a girlish talk, but that's life, isn't it?Sabine dumps carrier bag at Charlie's feet. Keep an eye for me, darling. Sure, Sabs, no problem. Sabine vanishes into Ladies. Nosing inside bag, boldly, as if it were her own, Charlie draws out gaily covered envelope with ribbon round it, detects outline of a passport and air ticket within. Smoothly replaces it with own Irish passport, air ticket, and transit card. Sabine returns, grabs bag--must dash, exit right. Charlie counts twenty and returns to loo, roosts. Baastrup Imogen, South African, she reads. Born Johannesburg three years and one month later than me. Destination Stuttgart in one hour and twenty minutes' time. Goodbye Irish colleen, welcome to our tight-arsed little Christian racist from the outback, claiming her white-girl's heritage.
Coming out of the Ladies, she found the soldier once more looking at her. He saw it all. He's on the verge of arresting me. He thinks I've got the runs, and doesn't know how right he nearly is. She stared at him until he walked away. He just wanted something to look at, she thought as she once more dug out her book on Alpine flowers.
The flight seemed to take five minutes. An out-of-date Christmas tree stood in Stuttgart's arrivals hall and there was an air of family bustle and everybody going home. Queuing with her South African passport, Charlie studied the photographs of wanted women terrorists and had a premonition that she was about to see her own. She passed through immigration without a blink; she passed through green. Approaching the exit, she saw Rose, her fellow South African, lounging on a rucksack, half asleep, but Rose was as dead as Joseph or anyone else for her and as invisible as Rachel. The electric doors opened, a swirl of snow hit her face. Pulling up her coat collar, she hurried across the broad pavement towards the car park. Fourth floor, Tayeh had said; far left corner and look for a foxtail on the radio aerial. She had pictured an extended aerial with a bold red fox's brush waving from the top of it. But this foxtail was a scruffy nylon imitation on a ring, and it lay dead as a mouse on the little Volkswagen bonnet.
"I'm Saul. What's your name, honey?" said a man's voice close to her, in soft American. For a dreadful moment she thought Arthur J. Halloran alias Abdul had come back to haunt her, so that when she peered round the pillar she was relieved to find a fairly normal-looking boy propped against the wall. Long hair, Bean boots, and a fresh, lazy smile. And a "Save the Whale" badge like hers pinned to his windcheater.
"Imogen," she replied, because Saul was the name Tayeh had told her to expect.
"Lift the hood, Imogen. Put your suitcase right inside. Now look around, see who you see. Anybody bothering you?"
She gave the parking hall a leisurely inspection. In the cab of a Bedford van plastered with crazy daisies, Raoul and a girl she could not see properly were halfway to consummation.
Nobody, she said.
Saul opened the passenger door for her.
"And fix your seat belt, honey," he said as he got in beside her. "They got laws in this country, okay? Where you been, Imogen? Where'd you get your suntan?"
But little widows bent on murder do not engage strangers in small talk. With a shrug, Saul switched on the radio and listened to the news in German.
The snow made everything beautiful, and the traffic cautious. They drove down the helter-skelter and joined a ribbon-built dual carriageway. Fat flakes raced into their headlights. The news ended and a woman announced a concert.
"Care for this, Imogen? It's classical."
He let it play anyway. Mozart from Salzburg, where Charlie had been too tired to make love to Michel on the night before he died.
They skirted the high glow of the city, and the snowflakes wandered into it like black ash. They mounted a clover-leaf and below them, in an enclosed playground, children in red anoraks were playing snowballs by arc-light. She remembered her kids' group back in England, ten million miles ago. I'm doing it for them, she thought. Somehow · Michel had believed that. Somehow we all do. All of us except Halloran, who had ceased to see the point. Why was he so much on her mind? she wondered. Because he doubted, and doubt was what she had learned to fear the most. To doubt is to betray, Tayeh had warned her.
Joseph had said much the same.
They had entered another country and their road became a black river through canyons of white field and laden forest. Her sense of time slipped, then her sense of scale. She saw dream castles and train-set villages in silhouette against the pale sky. The toy churches with their onion domes made her want to pray, but she was too grown-up for them, and besides religion was for weaklings. She saw shivering ponies cropping bales of hay, and remembered the ponies of her childhood one by one.