Century Rain Part 57

"We're not giving up," Floyd said.

"Shall I try to ring through again?"

"He probably won't talk to you. But it doesn't matter-we know where he lives now."

The black Duesenberg taxi growled to a halt at one end of a leafy suburban street in the suburb of Wedding, five kilometres from the heart of the city. Long lines of cheaply built dwellings housed the many workers and bureaucrats who toiled in the nearby factories. The Borsig Locomotive Works was the largest employer in the area, but the Siemens factory was not far away and there was a string of other industrial concerns in the neighbourhood, including Kaspar Metals, they presumed.

"That's the house," Auger said. "The one on the corner. What shall I tell the driver?"

"Tell him to pull over a couple of houses beyond it."

She said something in German. The taxi purred forward, then pulled to the side of the road and slid in

between two parked cars.

"Now what?" Auger asked.

"Tell him to keep the meter running while we check out the house."

Auger had another brief exchange with the driver. "He says if we pay now he'll wait another ten

minutes."

"Then pay the man."

Auger had already changed some of her funds into Deutschmarks. She pa.s.sed a couple of notes to the

taxi driver and repeated her instruction for him to wait. The driver turned off the engine and they got out.

"I'm impressed with your German," Floyd commented as they opened the garden gate and walked up the little gravel path to the front door. "Is that what they teach all the nice young spies?"

"They thought it might come in handy," Auger said.

Floyd rang the bell. Presently, a shape loomed behind the frosted gla.s.s and the door creaked open. The

man standing in the hallway was in his fifties or sixties, dressed in s.h.i.+rt and braces, with small metal-rimmed spectacles and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was shorter and thinner than Floyd. His features were delicate, and in his very fine hands he held a duster and an item of pottery.

"Herr Altfeld?" Auger said, followed by something in German that included the word "telephone." That was as far as she got before the man closed the door.

"Shall I try again?" she asked.

"He won't open it. He doesn't want to speak to us."

Auger leaned in and rang the bell, but the man did not reappear. "That was him, though, don't you think?"

"I guess so. This is the address that goes with the number you called."

"I wonder what's got him so scared."

"I can think of a thing or two," Floyd said.

They walked back down the garden path and closed the gate behind them.

"Short of breaking in and tying him to a chair," Auger said, "how would you suggest we proceed now?"

"We wait in the taxi. If you can keep the driver copacetic, we'll just sit tight here until Altfeld makes a

move."

"You think he will?"

"Once he's sure we've left the neighbourhood, he'll want to get out of that house so he doesn't have to

put up with us ringing the doorbell or calling him on the telephone."

"This is all familiar territory to you, I guess, Wendell?"

"Yes," he said. "But usually the worst thing I have to worry about is a slug on the chin."

"And this time?"

"A slug on the chin sounds just dandy."

Auger persuaded the taxi driver to take them once around the block, so that they would appear to be leaving the scene if Altfeld happened to be watching them from behind his curtains. Once they had returned to Altfeld's road, the taxi driver parked the car in a different s.p.a.ce further up the road than before, but still within sight of the house on the corner.

"Tell the driver he may be in for a long wait," Floyd said, "but that we'll pay him more than he'd earn taking other rides."

"He still doesn't like it," Auger said, after pa.s.sing on Floyd's instructions. "He says it's his job to take fares, not play private detective."

"Feed him another note."

She opened her purse again and spoke to the driver, who shrugged and took the proffered money.

"What does he say now?" Floyd asked.

"He says he could get used to his new profession."

They waited and waited. The driver thumbed through the Berliner Morgenpost from front to back. Just when Floyd was beginning to doubt himself, the front door of Altfeld's house opened and a man emerged wearing a raincoat and carrying a small greaseproof-paper bag. Altfeld closed the garden gate behind him and set off down the street, stopping next to one of the parked cars and getting inside. The vehicle-a black nineteen-fifties Bugatti with white-wall tyres-grumbled into life and bounced away down the road.

"Tell the driver to follow that car," Floyd said, "and remind him to keep a nice distance."

Contrary to Floyd's expectations, the taxi driver turned out to be reasonably proficient at tailing the other car, with Floyd only having to urge him to hold back once or twice. Two or three times, the driver swerved confidently down a side road and re-emerged after some twists and turns just a few cars behind the one they were following.

The pursuit took them back into town along more or less the same route they'd followed to reach Wedding. Soon they had crossed the Spree and were skirting the edge of the Tier-garten, Berlin's vast green lung. Near the western end-not far from the Hotel Am Zoo-the Bugatti slowed and veered into a parking place. The taxi cruised past, only stopping when they had turned a corner. Auger paid off the driver while Floyd walked to the corner and eyed Altfeld's car. He was just in time to observe the man emerge from the car, still carrying the paper bag. They followed him all the way to the Elephant Gate of the Zoologischer Garten, watching from a distance as he paid his entrance fee and strolled inside. Floyd knew the zoo very well. Greta and he had visited it on almost every one of their trips to Berlin, strolling around on carefree afternoons until the sky turned dark and the s.h.i.+mmering neon lights of the city beckoned.

Overhead, the sky threatened rain but never quite delivered it, like a yapping dog with no bite. Early on a Sunday afternoon, the zoo was beginning to fill up with families accompanied by fractious children who had a habit of bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. Floyd and Auger bought tickets and kept a decent distance between themselves and Altfeld. The crowds were just thick enough to provide cover, while still allowing frequent glimpses of the man in the raincoat.

They followed Altfeld to the penguin enclosure. Ringed by a spiked iron fence, it was a sunken concrete landscape of artificial rocks and shelves surrounding a shallow, squalid-looking lake. It was feeding time. A young man in shorts flung fish at the anxious, pressing mob of penguins. Altfeld stood by the railings, at the front of the small gathering of onlookers. There was no sign that he knew he was being followed. Soon the zookeeper picked up his empty bucket and moved elsewhere, and Altfeld took that as his cue to dig into his little paper bag and hurl silvery t.i.tbits to the birds.

Across the bowl of the penguin enclosure, someone caught Floyd's eye. It was Auger: she had made her way to the other side and had somehow managed to get to the front of the crowd of spectators, and was now pressed hard against the railings. Rather than paying attention to Altfeld, she was staring in obvious transfixed fascination at the bustling congregation of penguins, with their neat black morning suits, silly little flippers and expressions of utmost dignity, even as they belly-flopped into the water or fell over backwards. It was as if she had never seen penguins before.

Floyd guessed they didn't have many zoos in Dakota.

The onlookers began to disperse, leaving only a few people behind, amongst them Altfeld. As he flung the birds the last few sc.r.a.ps from his bag, he watched the penguins with the resigned detachment of a general overseeing some appalling military defeat.

Floyd and Auger approached the old man.

"Herr Altfeld?" Auger asked.

He looked around sharply, dropping the paper bag, and replied in English, "I don't know who you people are, but you should not have followed me."

"We only need you to answer a few questions," Floyd said.

"If I had anything to say, I would have already said it."

Auger stepped closer. "I'm Verity," she said. "Susan was my sister. She was murdered three weeks ago.

I know you corresponded with her about the Kaspar contract. I think her murder had something to with

whatever that contract was for."

"There is nothing I can tell you about that contract."

"But you know the contract we mean," Floyd said. "You know it was out of the ordinary."

He kept his voice low. "An artistic commission. Nothing special about that."

"You don't believe that, as comforting as it might seem," Auger said.

"All we need to know," Floyd said, "is where the objects were sent. Just one address will do."

"Even if I was prepared to tell you-which I am not-that information no longer exists."

"You don't keep your paperwork filed away somewhere for reference?" Auger asked, raising an eyebrow in surprise.

"The doc.u.mentation was...disposed of."

Floyd blocked Altfeld's view of the birds. "But you must remember something."

"I never committed those details to memory."

"Because someone told you not to?" Auger asked. "Was that what happened, Mr. Altfeld? Did someone

put pressure on you not to pay too much attention?"

"It was a complicated contract. Of course I paid attention."

"Give us something," Floyd said. "Anything. Just the approximate district in Paris to which one of the