Century Rain Part 59

They went out to eat at seven, riding the S-bahn to Friedrich-stra.s.se and then walking back along the banks of the Spree until they found a cl.u.s.ter of restaurants near the newly refurbished Reichstag. They ate a good curryworst, followed by chocolate cake, and listened to an old Bavarian couple trying to remember the names of all nineteen of their great-grandchildren.

Afterwards, Floyd and Auger walked the streets until Floyd heard live music coming from the window of a bas.e.m.e.nt bar: guitar-based gypsy jazz of the kind he didn't hear enough of in Paris these days. He suggested to Auger that they spend half an hour in the bar before returning to the hotel. So down they went into the smoke and light of the music room, the sound suddenly much louder than it had been from the street. Floyd bought Auger a gla.s.s of white wine and a shot of brandy for himself. He sipped at his drink, appraising the band as fairly as he could. It was a quintet, with tenor saxophone, piano, double ba.s.s, drums and guitar. They were playing "A Night in Tunisia." The guitarist was good-an earnest young man with thick gla.s.ses and a surgeon's fingers-but the rest of them needed some work. At least they had a band, Floyd thought dolefully.

"Your sort of music?" he asked Auger.

"Not really," she said, with a shy expression.

"They're all right. Guitarist has it down, but he shouldn't stick with these guys. They're going nowhere."

"I'll take your word for it."

"So you don't like jazz, or at least not this sort of jazz. That's all right. Takes all sorts to make a world."

"Yes," Auger said, nodding as if he had said something profound. "It does, doesn't it?"

"So what do you like?"

"I have trouble with music," she said.

"All music?"

"All music," she affirmed. "I'm tone-deaf. It just doesn't do anything for me."

Floyd finished the brandy and ordered himself another. The band was now torturing "Someone to Watch Over Me." Cigarette smoke hung in the air in frozen coils, like a crazy, cloudy sunset in monochrome. "Susan White was the same," he said.

"The same as what?"

"Blanchard said he never caught her listening to music."

"It's not a crime," Auger replied. "And how did he know what she got up to in her spare time? He can't have followed her everywhere."

"She had a wireless in her room, and a phonograph," Floyd said, "but no one ever heard her listening to music on either of them."

"Don't make a big deal out of it," Auger said. "All I said was that I'm tone-deaf. I don't know everything about Susan White."

"Let's get out of here," said Floyd, slamming down his empty gla.s.s. "The smoke's making my eyes water and I wouldn't want anyone to think that the music or the company had anything to do with it."

They took the train back to the hotel and said a polite goodnight. Floyd took the couch, lying down in his s.h.i.+rt and trousers with a spare blanket for warmth. He couldn't sleep. The plumbing played a metallic symphony until three in the morning. Through a gap in the curtains he watched neon numerals flicker on and off at the base of the Everest statue and thought of Auger asleep, and how little he knew about her, and how much more he wanted to know.

TWENTY-THREE.

The car plodded along pot-holed roads, jinking across buckled railway tracks and pa.s.sing under spindly overhead structures supporting conveyor belts and pipes for chemicals.

"Ask him to slow down," Floyd said, tapping the taxi driver on the shoulder. "I think that's a sign over there."

Auger relayed the request, then peered at the tilted wooden board Floyd had indicated, which was almost lost behind a screen of tall gra.s.s. "Magnolia Stra.s.se. How appropriate."

"This is Kaspar Metal's address?"

"What's left of it should be here," she confirmed.

Beyond a broken-down wooden fence, a steam-driven demolition crane attended to the destruction of a low red-brick factory building with a wrecking ball, swinging it through the one remaining wall in a series of gentle arcs. Although there were still a few buildings standing, the s.p.a.ces between them were littered with piles of brick, shattered concrete and twisted metal.

"If there was a steelworks here," Floyd said, "then someone's doing a swell job of hiding it."

The taxi driver kept the engine ticking over while they got out and stood on the only patch of dry ground amidst an obstacle course of mud and puddles. It was bitterly cold, a persistent chemical dampness permeating the air. Auger wore black trousers and a narrow-waisted black leather coat that fell to her knees. The night before, in the hotel room, she had tried to snap the heels from her shoes, but without success.

"See if you can sweet-talk the driver into waiting for fifteen minutes," Floyd said. "We still need to check whether anybody left anything useful behind."

Auger leaned into the driver's window and opened her mouth to talk. She got her message across, but the words didn't come with the expected fluency. Where yesterday there had been a gleaming linguistic machine, spitting out elegant, syntactically rich sentences, now there was a rusting contraption that creaked and groaned with the effort of every word. This worried her: if her German was crumbling now, what was going to be next?

"He'll stay," she said, when the driver finally acquiesced.

"He took some persuading."

"My German's a bit rusty this morning. That didn't help."

They picked their way over dry, weed-infested ground to a gap in the fence. Two planks had fallen away, leaving a hole just wide enough for them to pa.s.s through. Floyd went first, holding back the high gra.s.s on the other side until Auger joined him.

"This is awful," Auger said. "There's so much damage that it's difficult to imagine a factory ever being here. The only proof we have that there was is that letter Susan White received."

"When was the letter sent?"

"Remember the train ticket she booked but didn't use? She was just about to come here when she was murdered. The letter was sent only a month or so before that."

"Look at the ground here," Floyd said. "No weeds anywhere-they haven't had time to break through the concrete yet."

"Arson?"

"Difficult to know for sure, but I'm guessing so. The timing's too convenient otherwise."

In the middle distance, the steam-driven crane they had seen earlier was plodding over to another condemned building, its demolition ball swinging as it crunched across rubble and concrete. A pair of green bulldozers had joined it, belching acrid smoke from their diesel engines. The operators were masked and goggled, sunk down in oilskins.

Auger looked around for a place to start searching for clues. "Let's check out those buildings, see if we can find number fifteen," Auger said.

"We don't have much time," Floyd warned.

They crossed the ruins of the factory complex until they reached the remaining cl.u.s.ter of buildings. The sh.e.l.ls of the buildings looked threatening and skulllike, their roofs and upper ceilings already removed so that the iron-grey sky was visible through the gaps and cracks in the fire-damaged structures. Auger had never much enjoyed trespa.s.sing, even when such things had been part of childhood initiation rites and carried little risk of serious punishment. She enjoyed it even less now.

"Number fifteen," Floyd said, pointing to a barely readable metal plaque hanging at an angle on one wall. "Looks like the threat of the penguins did the trick. I must remember that the next time I have to put the squeeze on someone."

They found an open door nearby. Inside the building it was dark, since most of the ceiling was still in place above the ground-floor entrance.

"Watch your step, Verity."

"I'm watching it," Auger said. "Here, take this." She handed Floyd the automatic.

"If there's only one gun between us, I think you should keep it," Floyd said. "They make me nervous. I cling to the irrational idea that if I don't carry a gun, I won't find myself in a position where I need one."

"You're in that position now. Take the automatic."

"What about you?"

Auger reached into her handbag and pulled out the weapon that she had taken from the war baby in the tunnel at Cardinal Lemoine. "I have this gun," she said.

"I meant a real one," Floyd said, regarding the strange lines of the weapon dubiously. But he didn't push the point: by now he had realised that Auger wasn't playing a game.

"Be careful, Floyd. These people are willing to kill."

"That much I do know."

"And if you see a child?"

Floyd looked back at her, the whites of his eyes bright in the darkness. "You want me to start shooting children now?"

"It won't be a child."

"I'll shoot to wound. Beyond that, I'm not making any promises."

Auger looked back just before she followed Floyd inside. The demolition machines were making short

work of a nondescript brick building, taking turns to rip at its carca.s.s like hunger-crazed wolves. As the bulldozers reversed and then rolled forward again to attack, their engines raged with a dim mechanical fury. The goggled operators seemed to be holding them back rather than driving them.

"Let's make this quick, Floyd. Those things seem to be getting closer." Auger stepped further into the building and spun around to cover the entrance, but there was no sign of anyone or anything following them. Once inside, she pressed a sleeve against her mouth and nose to screen the dust from entering her lungs. It took half a minute for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. Along two main walls, and forming an aisle down the middle, were three rows of heavy equipment clearly too bulky or too damaged to be worth removing. There were lathes and drills and several dozen objects Auger didn't recognise, but which appeared to be related to the same business of metal finis.h.i.+ng.

"At least this looks like the right place," she said.

"Watch the flooring here," Floyd said. "I can see right through to the bas.e.m.e.nt."

Auger followed him, placing her feet exactly where Floyd had placed his. With each step, the floor

creaked, dislodging dust and debris. A crow flew away from a window sill in a silent flurry of black. She watched it flap away into the sky, until it looked like a piece of burnt paper blowing in the wind.

"There's nothing here," Auger said. "No papers, no doc.u.mentation. We're wasting our time."

"We've still got ten minutes. You never know what we might find." Floyd had reached the far end of the

workshop, where the rectangle of a door was just visible against the blackened plaster of the walls.

"Let's see what's through here."

"Careful, Floyd." Her hand tightened on the war baby's weapon, its child-sized grip chafing against her palm.

Floyd had already pushed open the door and stepped through. She heard him cough. "There are stairs

here," he said, "going up and down. Want to toss a coin?"

She heard the m.u.f.fled collapse of another building; the howl of racing diesel engines. The demolition equipment sounded even closer.

"Let's stay on this floor."

"I don't think we'll find much above us," Floyd speculated. "The fire damage will probably be worse the higher up we go. But something might have survived downstairs."

"We're not going downstairs."

"You got that torch?" Floyd asked.

She followed him into the adjoining room. One set of concrete stairs rose up, leading to another dark,

enclosed s.p.a.ce, while a second set descended down into even more profound darkness.

Floyd took the torch from her and shone it down into the gloom.

"This is a very bad idea," Auger said.

"That's great coming from a woman who likes to spend her time dodging trains in tunnels."

"That was an act of necessity. This isn't."

"Let's see what we find. Just a couple of minutes, all right? I didn't come all this way to turn around