Free Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson Page B

cross the Gendarmenmarkt. Turning right, then left, we emerge into another spacious paved area, bordered on the east side by the Staatsoper. According to the American, the opera house is closed for renovation work. In front of us, fifty meters away, a ghostly fan of light rises from the ground, reminding me of the photo booth in Hauptbahnhof Zoo. Portraits of me with my eyes closed, as if asleep or dead.
    “That’s where we’re going,” he says.
    Set in the middle of the square and flush with the paving stones is a thick glass pane. I stop at the edge. Beneath the pane is abrightly lit white room, its walls lined with shelves that are pristine, empty.
    “This marks the place where the Nazis burned the books,” the man tells me. “One of the places, anyway. Forty thousand people gathered here to watch.”
    The crackle of a fire. Pages lift, then shrivel.
    The man looks away into the sky again. “In those days, the square was called Opernplatz, after the opera house. Now it’s named after August Bebel, one of the writers whose work was thrown into the flames.”
    I stare down into the empty room. “If you keep looking you start to see a library.”
    He nods. “Maybe that’s the whole idea.”
    As he walks me back to the Gendarmenmarkt I ask what line of work he’s in.
    “Import-export,” he says.
    “I don’t know what that means.”
    “I thought you knew everything.”
    I give him a look. We’re acting as if we know each other, as if we’ve known each other for years, but he only walked out of the darkness half an hour ago.
    “It’s an umbrella term,” he says. “Right now, I’m working with a bunch of Russians.” Outside the Konzerthaus, he turns to face me. “The city’s full of Russians.”
    I sense a stirring inside me as if my body is a room with all its windows open and a breeze has just blown in. At that moment people come spilling down the steps. The concert is over. The man stands his ground, forcing the crowd to flow round him. Klaus appears, his mobile pressed to his ear.
    “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he says.
    “Did you think I’d gone?”
    He puts his phone away. “No. I don’t know.”
    “I came outside. I needed air.”
    “You didn’t get cold?”
    “No.”
    The man gives Klaus a look that is challenging and oddly resolute, but Klaus doesn’t notice. Either that or he chooses to ignore it. Somehow it doesn’t feel right to introduce the two men to each other. I hardly know them myself.
    “I called a taxi,” Klaus says.
    As he turns away to scan the street, the man in the raincoat hands me a small white card. Putting his thumb to his ear and his forefinger to his cheek, he signals that I should call him, then he winks at me and walks away.
    “Who was that man?” Klaus asks later, as we pass the Hotel Adlon.
    I tilt the card so the streetlights play over it. “J. Halderman Cheadle,” I say, “apparently.”
    “You met him tonight?”
    I nod. “He’s some kind of messenger, I think.”
    “Messenger?”
    “He’s got something to tell me. That’s why he was there.” I look out of the window as the taxi accelerates past the Gedächtniskirche and on into the Ku’damm. “The weird thing was, he seemed to know it. They don’t usually know.”
    “The way you talk.” Klaus gives a little exasperated waggle of his head. “You sound like a spy.”
    I lean back, green and yellow neon streaming through the inside of the car. “So how was the Tchaikovsky?”
    /
    I meet Oswald on Tuesday evening, as planned, under the sign with the frankfurters and the flames. He tells me it’s a famous
Treffpunkt
— a meeting place — especially after hours. If you come at three in the morning you see millionaires, porn stars, criminals. He indicates the menu on the back wall. That should give me some idea, he says. Though the place functions as a fast-food outlet, offering the usual
Currywurst
and
pommes-frites
, I notice that Russian vodka is available, and Scotch,