He spat.
Consolata bit her lip. His saliva was on her trainers. For a moment longer they watched her, then were gone. She could barely stand. She felt faint and the paper tickled her skin. She wore no bra, which was supposed to be a statement. What shamed her most was the fear she had felt, and the effort she had had to make to keep it from them.
She pulled out the flier, smoothed it and put it back into the bag. Massimo was at her side. Was she all right? Of course she was. She was very pale, he said. Then he suggested they take a train into Reggio and work there – he needed to reach more people. Was she sure she was all right? She realised he had seen nothing. She buttoned her blouse. They didn’t know her name, and she had achieved nothing against them. It would be easier to give out fliers on the streets in Reggio. She strode towards the station, and Massimo followed.
It was not the way of Fred Seitz to justify himself, his time and how he used it. He gave explanations of what he had done, not done or what he intended to do. He went into the hospital on Spandauer Damm and flashed his warrant card. He walked to the head of a queue. A receptionist pointed. He scribbled on a piece of paper. The English boy would stay in his wake.
Down a corridor, past a bank of lifts, up a wide flight of stairs, two at a time. He had not told the boy that he had worked hard the previous evening, on his computer. He had a car registration from CCTV, and a named owner from the licensing authority, with an address and a nationality. He had contacts, former colleagues, from the sunshine days. He had rung the GICO people in the far south of Italy and they had pushed him towards the ROS. There was a family with that name. Friends had done him a favour over the phone. There was no electronic print. To have done it formally, it would been a month before authorisation had come for that information to be released, and old spats between German and Italian law-enforcers would have surfaced. He had pushed aside work that was more pressing. He had reached home late and had packed for the weekend. That afternoon he and his wife would be heading north. He went down another corridor, past the bays of treatment cubicles, then checked a number.
It was empty, the bed crumpled. A nurse passed. Where should he look? She shrugged, offered a possibility. Down another flight of stairs. A pharmacy hatch. A plastic bag was passed across the counter. A man stood beside a girl and reached for it. They turned.
Seitz was an officer of old-school and old-fashioned methods. He thought himself hardened – he could do homicide and not throw up on the carpet. The wound on her face was almost from the ear to the mouth. Her eyes were blank, as if she were past weeping. The wound was dark, impossible to ignore. A little of him winced. He wondered how the kids who worked around him would have responded.
With a hand behind his back, he gestured for the English boy to stand aside. The girl ignored him. The man with her was a brother – his computer had thrown it up. A treasure trove loaned by parents, uncles and cousins would have gone into the rent and fittings of a pizzeria in that district, and they had moved east from Lübeck, which might have been at the extremity of ’Ndrangheta reach in Germany. They might have believed that the crime families didn’t operate in the capital. A bad mistake. She would have the scar until the day she died, and she wore no ring. The wound disfigured her.
He had his ID card in his hand, and showed it. He spoke softly and, he hoped, gently. Could he, please, interview her? Could he, please, take a statement from her? Could he, please . . . Her elbow went hard into his chest.
It would have collided with the butt of his PPK, carried in the leather shoulder-holster beneath his jacket. The weapon was a further symbol of his authority. He thought that, behind him, the English boy might have reached out to slow her. She didn’t stop. The brother swore at Fred quietly, but the word was clear enough to anyone with a knowledge of the Italian vernacular – similar to what a referee might have been called in the Stadio Olimpico or the Stadio San Paolo where the Naples tifosi had earned a reputation for quality abuse. They went past him and disappeared round a corner. A lesson learned, no surprise to him, but he doubted he would gain the thanks of his pupil, Jago Browne, who was an innocent abroad.
He thought of fear as a virus and was grateful that he was rarely exposed to it.