Caught, Nearly

The Landwehr Canal was frozen from bank to bank, and there was a swan standing on it.

It was standing in the middle, on the ice, under a bridge, on one leg, with its head under its wing, perfectly still, white on white in the light of the lamps on the bridge, and the five of them stopped on the towpath and looked at it, because it was a quarter to five in the morning and there was nothing else on the canal at all, and it had evidently decided that this was where it would spend the winter and that it did not care who knew.

“Is it alive?” said Jack.

“Yes,” said Theo. “They do that. They tuck the leg up to keep it warm.” He looked at it. “We had them on the river at home. On the Milwaukee. My dad used to say they were the only things in the city that never had to be anywhere.”

The swan did not move.

“I would like to be a swan,” said Alexander.

They all looked at him.

“Not for long,” said Alexander. “A week. In January.” He watched it a moment longer. “Swans are the property of the Crown in England, I believe. All of them. They belong to the King.” He looked at his cousin. “So it would still be a kind of job.”

“Not in Prussia,” said his cousin. “Here it’d be your swan.”

“Here it would be my swan,” said Alexander, “and it would have a programme.”

They walked on along the canal.

---

He had stopped knowing where they were going in the way he had known all night, as a line on a page, and begun to know it the way other people knew things, as a direction. The hill was south and west. The canal went west. They walked along it under the bare trees with the ice on one side and the tenements on the other, past the backs of houses with their lights coming on, one window and then another, as Kreuzberg began to get up for work: a kitchen, a bathroom, a woman in a dressing gown at a stove, a man at a window in a vest looking at the weather with a cup in his hand and seeing five young men on the towpath and not caring. Somewhere a tram went over a bridge, the first of the day, lit and empty, with its bell ringing at a crossing, and Jack stopped and listened to the bell, and then walked on.

At five o’clock they left the canal and went up into the streets.

Theo had the map. His phone had eleven per cent of its battery left, which he announced every few minutes in the voice in which he had announced the time along the river, and he walked in front with it held out in his glove like a man following a dowsing rod, saying left and straight and left again, and Alexander let him. He had never been led anywhere by anybody who was not paid to do it. He found that he liked walking behind Theo very much, and watching the back of Theo’s brown coat in the lamplight, and not knowing what the next street would be called until he read it on the corner.

The streets got older and finer as they went west. The tenements here had been built for clerks and not for labourers, and had stucco on their fronts in patterns of leaves and faces and garlands, and balconies with iron railings, and big double doors at street level into the courtyards behind, carriage entrances, wide enough for a cart, each with a smaller door cut into it for people. There were trees along the pavements, planes, with their bark coming off in patches, and the snow under them was yellow in the light from the street lamps and blue in the shadows between.

“Bergmannstrasse,” said Theo, at a corner. “Then it’s three streets. Then the park.” He looked at the phone. “Nine per cent.”

They turned the corner.

And at the far end of the street, under a lamp, by the kerb, with its engine running and its lights off, there was a long dark grey saloon, parked with its nose pointing at the way out.

---

Nobody spoke.

They had stopped all at once, the five of them, at the corner, in the shadow of a plane tree, and they stood there, and Alexander looked down the street at the car, and the car, so far as he could tell, did not look back. It was perhaps two hundred yards away. There were two shapes in the front of it. The one in the driver’s seat was large and square and had its hands on the wheel. The one in the passenger seat was small and upright and was doing something with its hands in its lap, and as he watched, it held the thing up, against the windscreen, under the lamp, so that he could see it: a thermos, a tall steel one, which it shook, and listened to, and shook again.

It was empty.

He knew what an empty thermos meant to Kessler. Kessler had driven him to every engagement of his life for four years with a thermos of coffee on the dashboard, and the thermos had never once been empty, because Kessler filled it, on principle, whenever it fell below half, wherever they were, from whatever was nearest, a hotel or a station or a petrol stand or, once, at a regimental reception in Silesia, the colonel’s own kitchen, to the colonel’s astonishment. An empty thermos was not a thing Kessler permitted. An empty thermos meant that Kessler was about to get out of the car.

“Back,” said Alexander, very quietly. “Not round the corner. They will look round the corner.” He looked at the house beside them, the first house in the street, tall, stuccoed, with leaves and faces on its front. In the middle of it at street level there was a carriage entrance, a pair of great wooden doors painted dark green, and in one of them the small door for people, and the small door was not quite shut. Somebody had gone out to work and not pulled it to behind them. “In there.”

“In there?”

“Every building has two doors,” said Alexander. “That is the third rule. This one is the other one.”

---

They went in through the small door in the big door, one at a time, ducking, and Alexander came last and pulled it to behind them until it was almost shut, and left a gap the width of a finger, and put his eye to it.

They were in the carriage entrance. It was a long arched passage through the front of the house, dark, cobbled, with a smell of cold stone and bicycles, and at the far end of it, through another arch, the courtyard, with snow in it and a single tree and the backs of four more houses going up round it into the dark, and a light on in one window on the fourth floor. Along the walls of the passage there were bicycles, a great many, chained to a rail, and a pram, and a row of dustbins, and a board with the names of the tenants on it in small brass frames, and the five of them stood with their backs flat against the wall among the bicycles in the dark, and did not breathe.

Through the gap the width of a finger, Alexander watched the car.

The doors of the car opened. Both of them. Kessler got out of the driver’s side, slowly, as he got out of everything, unfolding, a large square man in a dark coat, and stood up in the street and looked at the street, all of it, in one long slow movement of his head, from the far end to the near, the way he had been taught to look at a street thirty years ago and had looked at every street since. Kimura got out of the other side, small and upright in her black coat, with the empty thermos in one hand, and shut the door, and came round the back of the car, and stood beside him.

They did not look at the carriage entrance. They did not look at anything in particular. They looked at the whole street at once, as two people do who have been looking at streets together all night and have stopped needing to say which part each of them is taking.

Then they began to walk.

They walked up the street toward the corner. Toward the house with the faces on it. Toward the carriage entrance with the gap the width of a finger in its small door. They walked side by side on the pavement under the plane trees, not fast, not slow, at the pace of two people going to get a coffee at a quarter past five in the morning, and their footsteps came up the street toward the green doors, Kessler’s heavy and even, Kimura’s light and quick, two to his one; and Alexander took his eye away from the gap and stood with his back against the cold stone among the bicycles, and felt, on either side of him in the dark, his cousin and Theo and Jack and Lukas, quite still, and the cactus in the crook of his own arm, and listened.

The footsteps came nearer.

There was, he remembered, standing there, a bakery on the corner. He had seen it as they turned in: a shop on the ground floor of the house on the far side of the corner, with its light on and its blind half up and a smell of bread coming out of the vent in the wall over the door, which had just opened, at a quarter past five, as bakeries in Berlin opened, for the people who had to be somewhere at six. Kessler had seen it too. Kessler had seen it from the car. Kessler was not walking toward the carriage entrance. Kessler was walking toward the bakery, to fill the thermos, because it had fallen below half.

The footsteps came level with the green doors.

And Kimura’s voice, in English, quite ordinary, not raised and not lowered, the voice of a woman talking to a colleague on a pavement at a quarter past five in the morning, said, just the other side of the wood:

“He’ll want to see the sun come up.”

And Kessler’s voice, the flat voice, the voice like the end of a wardrobe, in his English, which was correct and had no music in it at all:

“Then he will go up something.”

The footsteps went on past the doors.

“There’s nothing to go up in this city,” said Kimura’s voice, going away. “It’s flat as a griddle.”

“There is one hill,” said Kessler’s voice.

A pause. The footsteps, going away, toward the corner.

“It has a cross on top,” said Kessler.

“Of course it does,” said Kimura, and then the bell of the bakery door, and the two voices were gone, inside, into the smell of bread.

---

In the dark of the carriage entrance, nobody moved for some time.

Then Jack let out his breath, very slowly, through his teeth, in a long thin whistle that he stopped halfway, and Theo said, in a whisper so faint that Alexander felt it more than heard it, “Did they know?”

“I do not know,” said Alexander.

He did not. That was the thing he would remember afterwards, standing among the bicycles in a stranger’s carriage entrance in Kreuzberg at sixteen minutes past five in the morning with a cactus in his arm: that he had known exactly how Kessler thought for four years, and had moved the programme twelve minutes on the strength of it, and had told Theo on an iron bridge what Kessler would say in a yard among barrels and been right, and now, with Kessler six feet away on the other side of a green wooden door, he did not know whether Kessler knew that he was there.

He thought about it honestly.

He thought that Kessler had parked at the end of a street off the Bergmannstrasse, three streets from the only hill in Kreuzberg, at five in the morning, for no reason that Alexander could see except that it was on the way to the hill from everywhere they might have been. He thought that Kessler had let the thermos fall below half. He thought that Kessler had walked past the only open door in the street at the pace of a man going for coffee, and that Kimura had said what she had said at exactly the volume at which a person speaks when she wants to be heard through an inch of wood and wants to be able to say afterwards that she was not speaking to anybody.

He thought that it was possible to know a man for four years and still be taught something by him.

“Wait,” he said, in a whisper. “They will come back.”

“Back?”

“They have gone for coffee. The car is that way.” He put his eye to the gap again. The street was empty. Snow, lamps, the plane trees, the grey car at the far end with its engine running and nobody in it. “They will come back past the doors. And then we will know.”

---

They waited six minutes.

They were the longest six minutes of the night, longer than the eleven at the steel door, because at the steel door they had not known there was anything to know. Here they did. They stood against the wall in the dark with the bicycles, five young men in four overcoats and a cape, holding their breath and then not holding it, because nobody can hold his breath for six minutes, and Alexander counted, against his pulse, as he had counted on the dais and at the guard and at the door, and found that his pulse was going much faster than usual and that the counting came out wrong, and stopped.

At the third minute a light came on in the stairwell of the house behind them, the timed light, which somebody on an upper floor had pressed, and they heard a door open somewhere far above and footsteps begin to come down the stair, slowly, one flight, two, and they all looked at each other in the sudden yellow light, five pale faces among the bicycles, and the footsteps came down three flights and then stopped, and a voice said, very clearly, in Berlinerisch, wo ist denn der verdammte Schlüssel, where is the damned key, and went back up again, and the light went off.

At the fourth minute Jack said, in a whisper, “My nose is going to run.”

“Do not let it,” said Alexander.

“How do I not let it?”

“Discipline,” said Lukas, from the end, in the dark.

At the fifth minute the bell of the bakery door rang.

Alexander put his eye to the gap.

They were coming back. Kessler had the thermos, full, Alexander could tell by the way he carried it, by the bottom, like something with weight in it, and Kimura had a paper bag, which was steaming a little at the top in the cold, and they came along the pavement under the plane trees toward the green doors at exactly the pace at which they had gone, side by side, not talking.

They came level with the doors.

And they stopped.

Alexander, with his eye to the gap the width of a finger, saw them stop, the two of them, on the pavement, perhaps six feet away, with their backs half to the doors. He saw Kimura open the paper bag and look into it and take out something, a roll, and break it in half and give half to Kessler, and he saw Kessler take it in the hand that was not holding the thermos, and the two of them stand on the pavement in the snow eating a bread roll at twenty past five in the morning, outside a carriage entrance in Kreuzberg, in no hurry at all.

“Mine’ll tell them at sunrise,” said Kimura, with her mouth full. “Whatever it is. I’ve known for a week he’d decided. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

“Mine wrote it down,” said Kessler.

“Of course he did.”

“He wrote down the sun,” said Kessler. “To the minute.”

“Mine climbed a mountain for it, last time.” Kimura brushed crumbs off her coat. “In the dark. With a phone and no water. I nearly had a heart attack on that trail.”

“Then they are the same,” said Kessler.

“Don’t tell either of them that.”

“I tell them nothing,” said Kessler. “That is my function.”

Kimura laughed, a short dry laugh, the first sound Alexander had ever heard her make that was not a sentence. And the two of them turned, and began to walk on, down the street toward the car, side by side, Kessler with the thermos and Kimura with the bag; and as they passed the edge of the green doors, without turning his head, without changing his pace, at the ordinary volume of a man remarking on the weather, Kessler said, in German, two words.

“Die Stiefel, Majestät.”

The boots, Majesty.

And walked on.

---

Alexander looked down.

The small door in the big green door was open the width of a finger. Through the gap, at the bottom, where it met the step, in the light from the street lamp, there showed the toe of a boot of the First Foot Guards, black and wet, sticking out an inch on to the snow of the pavement in Kreuzberg like the tongue of a child who has been told to hide.

He drew it back in.

Down the street, the doors of the grey car opened and shut, one and then the other. The engine, which had been running all the time, changed its note. And the car pulled out from the kerb, slowly, nose first, in the direction its nose had been pointing all along, the way out, and went away along the street to the end, and turned south, toward the park, with its lights off, and was gone.

Nobody in the carriage entrance said anything for perhaps half a minute.

Then his cousin, beside him in the dark among the bicycles, began very quietly to shake. Alexander felt it through the wall. Then Theo. Then Jack, whose nose had run after all and who was wiping it on the cape and shaking at the same time. And Alexander stood with his back to the cold stone and the cactus in his arm and his boot drawn in and found that he was shaking too, and that it was not the cold.

“They knew,” said Theo, when he could. “They knew the whole time. They stood there and ate a roll.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“Since when?”

“Since the boots,” said Alexander. “Since the bridge, I think. Perhaps since the Communs.” He thought about it. “Perhaps since the tenth of December, when Lukas bought five day tickets from a machine at Potsdam station and the machine has a camera.” He looked at Lukas in the dark. Lukas looked back, with his grey eyes, and did not say anything, and did not look in the least sorry. “Kessler sees the footage from every camera in every station in Brandenburg. It is his job.”

“Then why didn’t they do anything?”

“Because of the fifth rule,” said Alexander.

His cousin had stopped shaking. He was looking at Alexander in the dark of the carriage entrance, in the grey light that came in through the gap in the door.

“You said the fifth rule was, if they find you anyway, be polite.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “That is the fifth rule for me. Kessler wrote it on the wall of the garage, and I read it aloud, twice, and he rubbed it out.” He put his hand on the small door, and opened it, and the cold came in, and the light, and the street, empty, with the snow and the plane trees and a gap at the kerb at the far end where a car had been. “But I have just understood that it has a second half, which he did not write on the wall, because it was not a rule for me. It was a rule for him.”

“What’s the second half?”

Alexander stepped out of the carriage entrance on to the pavement in Kreuzberg, into the light, in his boots, and looked down the street toward the park, where, over the roofs at the end of it, against a sky still black and full of stars, there was a darker shape that was the hill.

“If you find them anyway,” he said, “and there is no need, you should be polite.”