He worked on the old east side of Berlin and here he was on the old west side. He lived miles from here and might not need to come back. The chance of the FrauBoss allowing this client to drift from her orbit was slight. He smiled, as if he was about to leave, but she persisted. He felt her intensity through the grip of her fingers.
‘There was a theologian, Martin Niem?ller. He was imprisoned for many years but survived in a camp while many around him were hanged. He was ashamed that he had lived when so many brave men and women had been murdered. He wrote about those who, like himself, did not stand up to evil. When they had arrested the socialists, he didn’t speak out because he wasn’t a socialist. When it was the trade unionists, he did nothing because he was not a trade-union supporter. When it was the turn of the Jews he was silent because he wasn’t a Jew. He wrote, ‘And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.’ That was the big evil, the mature oak. The little evil is the acorn, thriving unnoticed – crime on the streets. Did you see a woman sitting in the little park, as old as myself?’
‘Yes.’
‘And she wore odd shoes? Expensive but not matching?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she see what happened?’
‘Saw the start, then slipped away.’
‘Her father was hanged in the last days of the war, at the Flossenburg camp. Eighteen days later the Americans arrived. The evil consumed her. She says her father would have been better to close his mouth, do nothing, look away, and live to bring her to adulthood. I hope, Mr Browne, that you will find time to visit the KrimPol detectives. The girl won’t. Her elder brother is the manager of the pizzeria. He won’t either. They are Italian and would say they know better.’
He apologised again for his lateness, his appearance, the absence of the FrauBoss, then thanked her for her patience, courtesy and the schnapps. He gave her his smile, which was already famous among the investment team (Sales).
The fresh air was bracing. He looked across the square and saw an everyday scene. He had been punched there, a girl had been kicked – and a spider had murdered a fly. For him it was about where he had been brought up, his mother, what had happened to him and to her. Walking briskly, he phoned in and said that all was well with the client. He could see into the pizzeria, where customers were drinking coffee. The man, the girl’s brother, was behind the counter. He checked on his phone for directions.
2
A woman behind a reinforced glass panel had told him, via a microphone and loudspeaker, where he should sit but not how long he would have to wait.
When Jago Browne had got dressed that morning in his attic apartment, he had not considered that he would spend hours on a hard bench in a police station on Bismarckstrasse. Where he had been brought up, Canning Town in east London, the closest police station had been on the Barking road, a formidable red-brick fortress. He had never entered it, although half of the kids close to where he lived had. He supposed that, there, a waiting area existed like this one. It smelt of urine and disinfectant. When the door onto Bismarckstrasse opened, a gust of cool air dispersed it briefly.
He was with two girls, about twenty, both probably tarts. One cried convulsively and the other comforted her. There was a fidgeting junkie, who tried to make conversation with an elderly man, who was muttering about a lost dog. A stream of men and women came to the counter, offering ID cards – they were clocking in as a bail requirement. There was graffiti on the walls – not clever or witty. Jago assumed that it was verboten to scribble on the walls but the woman behind the barricade couldn’t do much about it. It was a Rauchen Verboten area too, but there were small burn marks on the linoleum.
Police officers hurried through the waiting area. Some came off the street and tapped a code into an inner door; others came from inside and headed for Bismarckstrasse. They had in common, entering or leaving, a reluctance to glance at the flotsam waiting on the benches. He supposed that a pistol in a holster, a truncheon and a gas canister gave the officers confidence to ignore him and those around him.
The man who might have lost the dog was the first to break. He stood, shouted abuse at the woman beyond the glass, aimed a kick at the end of the bench and left. Jago might have followed – he nearly did. Then the woman called him forward. His spirits soared until she pushed a sheet of paper through the grille and told him to fill it in, then bring it back to her. Why had she waited forty-five minutes to do that? He had requested to see a detective following an assault and a possible instance of extortion on the square two streets away. He took the paper. He had asked Elke at the bank to tell the FrauBoss that he was running late.