The exterior of the block of flats was promising. Art deco, a yellow he knew must have a specific name, but he could not recall it. Patent-yellow? Or was patent a shade of green?
The interior broke the promise. Crummy was precise. Any hint of Art Deco had vanished long ago in a postwar refit. The official embassy flat was a classic example of the East German style of design and décor. Not designed to make you feel at home, but to make you feel there was no such place as home. Trendy Scandinavia—all that Swedish component shelving and chairs like dog baskets—hadn’t got a look in. Every chair sat you bolt upright as though to slouch were a sin. In contrast, the mattress was soft enough to give you lumbar agony. And every possible surface was finished in a deckled-cream, wipe-down plastic. The dining table looked less likely to be the scene of a convivial meal than an autopsy.
The block of flats bore the inept name of Paradise Apartments—insult added to injury. He’d keep it. What did it matter? He’d be long gone before winter.
All his life he’d resisted sentimentality. He’d had no love for either parent—a drunken mum and a psychopathic dad—and the only reason his dad had got as far as committing suicide was that Wilderness had not got around to killing him. All his affection as a teenager had centred on his maternal grandfather, Abner, and the old man’s mistress, Merle. With them gone there’d been no discernible affection in him until Nell, and with Nell gone—walked out never to return—there’d been none till Judy. But Judy had wooed him. Never one to be passive, Judy had taken all the initiative and unleashed the flattery of a slow seduction on him. She’d taken a couple of years to do this … Wilderness resisting only inwardly, wondering what her father would think … until the day he’d gone round to the house in Holland Park and asked for her hand in marriage.
Now, alone in this sterile outpost of Stalinallee, he found he missed Judy and the girls more than ever before. The switch that so readily changed him from husband and father to field agent didn’t seem to be clicking in. Sitting for a few minutes on the rock-hard couch, looking out across the street, through a dirty, blackened window, at a towering, redbrick, faux-gothic monstrosity—something that had failed the audition to be St. Pancras Station in London and been plonked down here instead—he felt a seeping sentimentality … and what good is a sentimental agent? All the same, he counted his blessings once more and came up with a total of three.
He shook himself. The dog who came in from the rain. Muttered a quick “fukkit” and went in search of his car.