Old Allies

He saw the car at fourteen minutes past one, through the steam on the window, and knew it at once by the way it was parked.

It was across the square, on the far side of the tramlines, under a street lamp, by the shuttered front of a bank: a long dark grey saloon with its engine running and its lights off, standing at the kerb with its nose pointing not toward the beer hall but away from it, toward the open road that ran out of the square to the east. A car parked to watch a door faces the door. A car parked by somebody who expects, at some point in the next hour, to have to leave in a hurry after somebody faces the way out.

Kessler had taught him that. Kessler had taught him that in the spring of 2028, in the yard behind the house by the Heiliger See, with two of the household cars and a piece of chalk, at fourteen, three weeks after the funeral, in case anybody ever came for him, so that he would know what it looked like when they did.

“Do not look,” said Alexander.

Nobody at the table looked. They had all heard him say it in the S7.

He looked. He looked through the clear patch that somebody’s hand had wiped in the steam at the end of the window, across the white square, at the car. There were two shapes in the front of it. The one in the driver’s seat was large and square and did not move at all, and sat with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, as it always did, as if the car might at any moment decide to go somewhere on its own. The one in the passenger seat was small and upright and had something lit in its lap, a phone, and was looking down at it, and then up, at the beer hall, at the windows, one by one, steadily, from left to right.

On the dashboard, between them, in the light of the street lamp, there was a thermos.

“Is it them?” said his cousin, very quietly, not looking, under the green felt hat with the shaving brush.

“Yes.”

“How did they get here so fast?”

“The photograph in the train,” said Alexander. “Friedrichstraße, eleven forty-eight. Then Alexanderplatz, because the train stops at Alexanderplatz and does not go much further in the direction of anywhere a King would go. Then the square. Then the windows.” He watched the small upright shape in the passenger seat reach the end of the row of windows and begin again from the left. “She is counting them. Kessler is watching the door. They do not need to come in. They know that if they come in we will go out the back, and they do not know where the back comes out.” He paused. “Yet.”

“What do we do?”

Alexander took out the programme and unfolded it on the wet table, very quickly, and looked at it, and folded it again.

“We go out the back,” he said. “Twelve minutes early.”

---

Kessler’s rules had been five.

He had written them on the wall of the garage with the chalk, in the spring of 2028, in large plain capitals, in the yard behind the house by the lake, and made Alexander read them aloud, twice, and then rubbed them out with his sleeve, because, he said, a rule that is written down where somebody else can read it is not a rule but a gift. Alexander had remembered them anyway. He remembered everything.

One. A person who does not want to be found goes far, and is found. A person who is clever stays near.

Two. Watch how a car is parked. Not where. How.

Three. Every building has two doors. The one that is watched is the front.

Four. Never run. A running man is the only man in a street.

Five. Kessler had stopped at five, with the chalk in his hand, and looked at the fourteen-year-old Emperor of Germany standing in a garage in his school coat, and said, in the flat voice he used for everything, the voice like the end of a wardrobe: Five. If they find you anyway, it was never going to work, and you should be polite.

Alexander had thought, at fourteen, that the fifth was a joke. He had learned since that Kessler did not make jokes, and that the fifth was the most important of the five.

---

They went out through the kitchen.

The kitchen of the Hofbräu Wirtshaus was at the back of the hall, behind the stage, through a pair of swinging doors with round windows in them, and it was enormous and hot and full of steam and men in white with knives and women in dirndls with trays, and a great iron range with a dozen pork knuckles turning on spits above a fire, and a radio on a shelf playing the news, and when the five of them came through the swinging doors, in four overcoats and a cape, with the King of Hanover in front in the bandleader’s green felt hat, every person in the kitchen stopped.

A man with a cleaver stopped with the cleaver in the air. A woman with a tray of dumplings stopped with the tray. At the range, a cook with a long fork stopped turning a pork knuckle, and the pork knuckle, unturned, began very slowly to burn.

“Der Wirt,” said the woman with the dumplings.

“Der Wirt!” said the man with the cleaver, and put the cleaver down, and wiped his hands on his apron, and came forward.

His cousin stood just inside the swinging doors in the green hat, with Alexander at his shoulder, and looked at the kitchen of a Bavarian beer hall looking at him, and Alexander saw him decide, in about a second and a half, that there was nothing to be done about it, and that he might as well.

“Hinten raus?” said his cousin, in his grandmother’s German, which he had last used in earnest behind the bar of the Zum Schwarzen Bären in Hanover in October 2031, and pointed past them all, through the steam, toward the back of the kitchen. Out the back?

The kitchen looked at him for a moment longer. Then the man with the cleaver laughed, enormously, from the stomach, and said something in a Bavarian so thick that Alexander understood only the word Polizei, and the word Hintertür, and the word Majestät; and the whole kitchen began to move at once. The woman with the dumplings put down her tray and went to the back of the kitchen and opened a door. The cook with the long fork went in front of them, through the steam, past the range, past the burning pork knuckle, waving the fork, and a girl at the sink with her arms in suds to the elbow turned round and held up both hands, soapy, and clapped them, and a man in a white hat at a cold table full of sausages took a sausage, cooked, and wrapped it in a napkin, and as Jack went past him in the cape pressed it into Jack’s hand without a word, as one landlady’s son to another.

And they went out through the back door of the Hofbräu Wirtshaus into a yard full of empty barrels and frost, with the whole kitchen standing in the lit doorway behind them in the steam, waving, as though they were seeing off a ship.

Nobody in the kitchen had looked at Alexander. He had walked through the middle of them in the navy coat with the red collar showing at the throat, and they had parted for the man in the green hat, and closed behind him, and Alexander had been, to every one of them, the man behind the man.

He thought, crossing the yard among the barrels, that this was the second of Kessler’s rules working, and the third, and that the fourth was next.

“Do not run,” he said.

---

They did not run.

They went out of the yard by a gate into a lane, and down the lane under the railway, where the arches of the S-Bahn crossed the city on their high brick legs, each arch with something inside it, a bar or a shop or a workshop with its shutter down, and the trains going over them in the dark with a long hollow roar like surf, and out on the far side on to the bank of the river.

The Spree was frozen at the edges and black in the middle, and it went away to the west in a long curve between stone walls, with the lamps on the bridges reflected in the black water in long trembling lines, and on the far bank the great dark shapes of the museums on their island, and the dome of the Cathedral, very big and very black, against a sky that had a little orange in it from the city. It was very cold. It was a quarter past one in the morning on the nineteenth of January and the thermometer, if there had been one, would have said fourteen degrees below, and their breath went up in front of them in five white clouds.

They walked along the river. They walked at the pace Kessler had taught him, which was the pace of five young men going home after a holiday, not slow and not fast, with their hands in their pockets, talking, and Jack eating the sausage.

“Will they follow us?” said Theo.

“Not yet,” said Alexander. “They will go into the hall first. Kessler will go in the front, because he must be seen to have gone in the front, and Kimura will go round the side to the kitchen, because she will have seen the steam coming out of the vent and known where the kitchen is. The kitchen will tell her nothing. The kitchen will tell her that the landlord went out the back with four friends and a sausage.” He walked on. “Then they will come to the back door, and stand in the yard, and look at the lane, and know that it goes under the railway, and that under the railway there are five directions. And they will stand in the yard among the barrels for a minute and think about it, and then Kessler will say something.”

“What will he say?”

Alexander considered it honestly.

“I think he will say, Hackescher Markt,” he said. “Because it is the nearest place along the river where there are bars that are open at this hour, and he will think that we want bars. And she will say, no. And he will ask her why. And she will say, because he would have thought of that.” He walked on along the river under the railway. “She knows me less well than he does. But she knows my cousin better. And she has spent all year watching my cousin go to the second-nearest place.”

“Where’s the second-nearest place?” said Theo.

“Auguststrasse,” said Alexander. “Clärchens.”

“Is that on the programme?”

“It is the next line on the programme.”

Theo stopped on the riverbank. He stood there, in the brown coat, with his phone in his hand, and looked at Alexander with an expression of slowly dawning horror.

“So they’ll be there,” said Theo. “When we get there. If she’s right about him going to the second-nearest place. And you’re going to the second-nearest place. Because it’s on the programme.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “Possibly.”

“Then why are we going?”

Alexander did not answer at once. They had come to a bridge, an old iron bridge over the black water, with lamps along it, and he stopped at the foot of it and looked up the river at the lights, and at the dark shape of the Cathedral, where he had knelt at fourteen with a crown coming down on his head, and at the orange sky.

“Because of the fifth rule,” he said.

---

Theo’s phone buzzed at twenty-two minutes past one.

They were on the bridge, halfway across, and it buzzed in his hand, and he looked at it, and stopped, in the middle of the bridge, under a lamp, and went pale, and then red, the way his ears went red, from the top.

“It’s Kimura,” he said.

They all stopped.

“She has your number?” said Alexander.

“She’s had my number since I was fifteen,” said Theo. “Everybody’s had my number since I was fifteen. I’m the one they ring when they can’t ring him.” He held the phone out, so that they could see it, under the lamp, in the cold, with the river going under them black.

It was one line. There was no greeting and no name, because there never was with Kimura, and it said:

Tell him the boots are showing.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Alexander looked down at his feet, at the boots of the First Foot Guards, black, to the knee, polished that morning by a man who had polished the boots of three Emperors, showing below the hem of the navy overcoat on an iron bridge over the Spree at twenty past one in the morning like the feet of a costume.

He looked at them for some time.

“She has been in the kitchen,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because nobody in the kitchen looked at me,” said Alexander. “But somebody in the kitchen looked at my boots. The girl at the sink, with her arms in the suds. She turned round and clapped. She was looking down. I saw her look down.” He was quiet for a moment. “Kimura asked them what the others were wearing. And the girl at the sink said, one of them had boots like a soldier in a band.”

“In a band,” said Lukas, very quietly, from the rail of the bridge.

That was four. Alexander did not count it out loud. He thought that, on this night, the rule about Lukas had been suspended by both parties, and that it would be ungracious to keep the score.

“Is she angry?” said his cousin.

Alexander looked at the message again on Theo’s phone. Tell him the boots are showing. No name, no greeting, no question, no order. Not where are you. Not come back. Not you are in breach of every regulation the protection department has. A piece of information, given, with nothing asked in return, about a thing he could fix.

“No,” he said. “She is telling us that she knows. And that she is not going to hurry.” He looked up from the phone, along the river, at the city. “That is what old allies do. They tell you that they know where you are, so that you know they are not going to pretend they do not. And then they give you the night.”

“Will they find us?”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “At the top of something. At sunrise. Kessler with his hands on the wheel and Kimura with the thermos.” He took the phone gently out of Theo’s hand and looked at it for a moment longer, at the single line, and then gave it back. “That was always going to be on the programme. I simply did not write it down.”

---

He fixed the boots on the far side of the bridge.

He could not hide them. There was nothing to hide them with. But on the far bank, at the end of the bridge, there was a bench, under a lamp, with the snow on it, and he sat on the bench and took the programme out of his coat and tore off a strip from the bottom, the bottom inch, below 08.10, Sonnenaufgang, Kreuzberg, where there was nothing written, very carefully, along the fold; and he took the pencil, and on the strip, in the same square hand, he wrote two words, and folded it, and gave it to Theo.

“Send her this,” he said.

Theo unfolded it and read it, under the lamp, and looked at Alexander, and then typed it into the phone, letter by letter, with his thumb, and sent it, and they all heard it go, the small soft sound of a message leaving, into the cold, over the river, toward a dark grey car with its engine running and a thermos on the dashboard.

It said: Danke. Später.

Thank you. Later.

“That’s it?” said Jack.

“That is everything,” said Alexander, and stood up from the bench, and buttoned the navy coat to the neck over the red collar, and walked on toward the Auguststrasse at the pace of a young man going home after a holiday, in the boots of the First Foot Guards, with the boots showing.