Free The British Lion by Tony Schumacher Page B

know.”
    “You call me if you need me, understand?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Take care.”
    King put down the receiver, pushed the door of the call box open, and stepped out. The city was silent, muffled by the snow.
    He looked up and down the street. Nobody moved. It felt like he was the only person in the world, and for a moment he wondered what it would be like to just walk away, be on his own.
    Start again? He had his passport in his apartment, money for a ticket; he could be out of this shithole of a country in ten hours and en route to the U.S., far away from dirty tricks and political games.
    How important could this Jew be?
    He let the door swing shut behind him and looked up at the falling snow.
    No time for dreaming; Dulles would have him killed.
    He knew it; he knew it because he’d done the killing for Dulles before.
    He trudged across the pavement to the narrow door at the side of the shop, shouldered it open, then kicked it closed behind him. He clumped up the wooden stairs and noticed some fat dried drops of blood on the timber.
    He pushed open the bedroom door and nodded his head at Cook, who was sitting on a low chair opposite the mattress where Anja lay under a thin brown blanket. King looked at Anja, face to the wall, trying to ignore them, and then at the floor. He noticed that his breath was misting in the chill of the room.
    “What do we do?” Cook leaned forward like a nervous schoolboy desperate for information.
    “We get rid of the body.” King looked at Anja again.
    “Now?” Cook said.
    “Later. We’ll take her to the river. The snow is due to keep coming and going all night. We can use the storm to cover us.”
    “Was he upset?”
    “About what?”
    “The woman and the tailor?”
    “What do you think?” King turned to look at Cook, who stared back, face pasty white, worry draining it of color.
    Cook shook his head.
    “How was I to know she had a gun? Did you blame me?”
    King tilted his head. “It doesn’t matter who is to blame, Eric, okay? None of that matters. What matters is that there are no more mistakes. We’re already out on a limb here; if anything else goes wrong we will get dropped and left to get out of this ourselves. You need to remember that: there will be nobody coming to help us. Do you understand me?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay, try to get some sleep. This is going to be a long night.”
     

CHAPTER 9
    D EATH HAD A habit of being dramatic.
    Police Generalmajor Erhard Neumann had seen enough murders in his career to know this.
    He was on speaking terms with death; he knew its tricks, its sleights of hand, its clever way of pulling you one way and then spinning you the other.
    He knew that death favored a flourish of wide strokes. A strong palette of reds, blacks, and ghostly whites splashed and dashed onto the canvas. Death favored shadows. It skulked in corners surrounded by gloom, bodies scattered around like leaves on the ground after a strong wind had dislodged them from the tree of life.
    Like an art critic he looked at the background and the foreground, he looked at scenery, he looked at the frame, he looked where fingers pointed and heads were turned.
    He looked at the past, the present, and the future.
    And then, when he knew it inside out, he decided who’d painted it.
    He lived murder, he lived death.
    He looked up and down a darkened Regent Street and then back at the tailor’s shop to which he’d been called.
    The telephone call had said “robbery gone wrong,” but Erhard Neumann wasn’t ready to agree until he’d seen the body himself.
    He felt Lieutenant March shift in the snow next to him. The younger man was rocking backward and forward, impatient to get into the shop to show his boss what he had found. Neumann looked left and right again. He could see German soldiers and English policemen fanned out, blocking the road in either direction.
    “Maintaining the scene,” March had said when Neumann had arrived, causing to him frown and feel