It was a morning almost like any other in the recent times of Jago Browne. From force of habit, although he was off sick, he wore his office suit, the one that went, dirty or spotless, to the dry cleaner round a corner from his attic apartment every Friday evening and was collected on Saturday. His shoes were polished and he wore a clean shirt with a nondescript tie. He had not brought his briefcase or laptop. The weather had closed in a little and cloud built to the east, over Spandau and Tegel. He had a formal raincoat – nothing as casual as an anorak – folded over his knees. Jago had no weapon. He didn’t own one.
The lady was opposite him. She had been there when he had arrived, then had gone to the same bench and taken the same place on it as the previous day. She might have noticed that the young man facing her was dressed similarly to when she had first seen him and looked as if he was killing time before a business meeting. She might have caught little nuances of change. No checking of his watch and his eyes hovered mostly to his right. Perhaps she understood. That day she had brought her own cigarettes and a lighter with mother-of-pearl sides. She had already smoked two, but had not offered him one. She might have thought he was too preoccupied to engage in the chatter that would accompany the gift of a cigarette. She was well dressed again, and her shoes, almost new, still didn’t match. Jago thought that each pair would have set her back a hundred and fifty euros.
He had a clear view of the pavement in front of the pizzeria. He could see the doors, and shadows moving inside. He hadn’t yet seen the girl. Why was he there?
Difficult to summon up an answer. He didn’t know yet the extent of his involvement. His mother had known where she was going and why on a darkening February evening eleven years before. Jago had been left in the kitchen. His mother’s orders had been staccato, sharp, and he would have been an idiot to challenge them. He was to start his maths homework. He was to make Billy’s tea. He was to help Georgina with her reading and get her something to eat. He had told his mother what the kids had been wearing, in which direction they had sauntered off. She already knew, of course, the make and style of his phone: she had saved hard to get him a decent model. The door had slammed after her. His mother was five foot two. She weighed under eight stone. She had no flesh on her, neither muscle nor fat – but she could summon up the temper of her Irish ancestry.
Among the few who knew and the fewer who cared in Canning Town, a little of a legend had been born. Various stories were peddled. One had it that Carmel had fastened the group’s leader with her gaze, requested the return of the phone and been given it. Unlikely. Other versions roved over her finding the leader, slapping him a bit, standing on tiptoe, then kneeing him in the groin, head-butting him and taking the phone from his pocket. The most popular had her marching into the kid’s home, pushing aside a shaken mother, going upstairs and bearding the bastard in his room, not needing to touch him because he cringed from her, then taking the phone from the bedside table and leaving. She had come home. She had checked that the phone worked, then put it down beside his maths book.
Which legend was fact and which fiction, Jago didn’t know: it was never spoken of again. When he had closed his books, she had chucked a coat at him and taken him out. There was a sports club on Caxton Street. She had signed him up. No questions were asked: he was a teenager doing what his mother demanded. He had hated the humiliation and her for inflicting it, and had hated his brother for going to his rescue when he had been whimpering on the ground.
He could have trotted out all of that, if a shrink had been sharing the bench with him, to explain why he was there.
The door of the pizzeria stayed closed and no car had edged up to the kerb close to it. He saw the girl more clearly when she came to the window and wiped it vigorously. At the bank, Jago was under what they called ‘360-degree reporting’. He was subjected to a form of close surveillance, monitored. They wanted to know if he had the skills to sell the bank’s product. It might be ‘cold calling’. It might be spotting a business in a road back from Unter den Linden, or a main drag through the Turkish quarter of Kreuzberg, pushing in through the door and doing the talk. There was a story the FrauBoss liked to tell – a sandwich bar on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse that always had a queue outside: she’d passed it often enough, and thought the owner looked sick. She had reckoned he was due to sell up and had gone in with the sales spiel. The investment was more than six million. Anyone could score if their eyes were open, and their brain was clear.
He looked away from the pizzeria to the woman with odd shoes, and wondered what his chat-up line might be, how to attract her and her wealth to the bank’s stewardship. He should have known why he was there and what he hoped to achieve, what might be the consequence of failure or success. The woman breathed an aura of money. Something about a challenge, and something about a gesture.
She came down the stairs.