––––––––
‘It was simple. I followed you when you left Copenhagen. I was ready to go when you left. I knew you would need back-up but I also knew that you would never agree to me coming. At the station I saw Charlie pick you up. I followed him. He had no reason to suppose anyone would follow him, so he never looked.’
They hadn’t been able to talk on the train about what had happened and why. It was too busy. At Hamburg station they had found a quiet bar and sat with drinks at a table where, with lowered voices, they could talk.
‘Who was she?’
‘British Intelligence. It seems they wanted you dead.’
‘For Christ’s sake, why? I never did anything to them. Looked at properly, I never did anything to anyone. I just got caught up in the machinery.’
‘Well, I only know what Bronski told me. She was British Intelligence, with orders to terminate you.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘Yes.’
Jimmy took a drink and thought about it. How did bloody British Intelligence fit into things? The Americans and the Israelis wanted to find out what he knew about Rome and, if necessary, make sure he got permanently silenced. He didn’t like it, but he understood it. He asked Udo.
‘It was your line of work. Have you any idea?’
‘Maybe they were doing it as a favour for the Americans or Israelis. You’re the one who knows what this is really all about, not me, remember?’
Jimmy turned it over in his mind and decided Udo could be right. If British Intelligence found him, maybe killing him as a favour made sense. What the hell? The why didn’t matter any more. The woman was dead and he was alive.
‘So how did you turn Bronski round?’
‘It wasn’t difficult. If he joined me I’d take the bomber off his back.’
‘Just like that?’
‘No, not just like that. I explained and he listened. In the end he decided I was a better bet than London if he wanted to come out of the whole thing alive. To London he would be a loose end. To me, him living or dying didn’t matter. All he had to do was take Otto out of the equation, shoot her before she shot you, and there he was, home and dry. It wasn’t much to ask, seeing as how he was going to shoot her anyway.’
‘What!’
‘There was some sort of double-cross going on out of London. The woman’s control had phoned Bronski and told him to hit her, then parcel you up until he could arrange for your collection.’
‘And who was doing the collecting?’
‘Well, it had to be Mossad or the CIA. A dead Jimmy Costello is a small favour, a live Jimmy Costello could obviously command a much higher price. My guess is they’d both want you to be thoroughly interrogated before they put a bullet in the back of your head.’
Jimmy picked up his beer and then put it down again. He suddenly found he wasn’t enjoying it any more.
‘What a world. I scratch your back, you poke my eye out. I’m glad I was only ever a bent copper, all this makes me feel like it was almost honest. Your world is too rich for me.’
‘My ex-world, Jimmy. I’m a priest now.’
‘Will you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Take the bomber off his back?’
‘I’ve been too busy saving your English hide to think about it. Let’s make sure we get you sorted first.’
Suddenly Jimmy remembered something.
‘Thanks, Udo. I should have said it before but, somehow ...’
‘That’s OK, you’ve said it now, so forget it.’
‘Will you do it, when we get back? He kept his side of the deal.’
Udo thought but not for long. ‘We’ve got what we wanted. Maybe it would be best to let Yuri sort out his own problems.’
‘God, you’re a devious bastard, for a priest.’
‘With the Yuris of this life, you have to be devious or dangerous, and preferably both. The one thing you can’t afford is not to be a bastard.’ He looked at his watch. It was three fifteen. ‘Come on, we should get moving if we’re going to catch that train.’
They got up, Udo paid. They left the bar and headed off together.
‘You know, I thought the time had really come on this one. When Otto got me in the car and Bronski popped up. And in the warehouse, standing opposite that woman, I realised something.’
‘What was that?’
‘I was scared. Scared of dying.’
‘That’s natural, anyone would have been scared in that situation.’
‘I’ve told you, I thought dying wasn’t something that bothered me. But when it was about to happen I found I was wrong. It scared the shit out of me.’
They walked on in silence until they arrived back at the station and went to the platform where the Copenhagen Express was waiting. They boarded and sat down together. The carriage only had a few passengers and they sat at a table at one end away from those already in their seats. At three twenty-five, dead on time, the train slowly began to move. As it did a couple came through the door and sat at the table on the opposite side of the aisle. Jimmy looked at Udo who shrugged. It was going to be a long, quiet journey.
The sleek express slid out of the vaulted engine shed into the daylight and Hamburg began to pass by. Jimmy watched it while his brain tried to run back over what had happened and what Udo had told him. A question, as unexpected as it was unbidden, popped into his head. One he could talk about.
‘Do you believe, Udo?’
‘Believe what?’
‘Religion, the Catholic Church. What we’re supposed to believe.’
Put like that, Udo had to think. Straight out with no frills, it was a hard question. And Jimmy wasn’t a lecturer in the seminary. It wasn’t an academic question where you put certain words together for the right answer, the acceptable answer. Jimmy waited.
‘No, I don’t think so. I want to believe and I try to go through the motions with sincerity so that maybe, one day, belief will come. But now, at this minute, no.’
Udo waited. This was Jimmy’s conversation; Udo the priest let him do it his own way. He could guess how hard it was.
‘If there’s nothing, then Bernie wasted her life, wasted it on me and for me. And if there’s a God and a Heaven, well, I’m not the sort who goes there. If it’s there at all, it has to be fair. The Bernies get to go there, the ones who’ve done some good in their lives. It’s not for the Jimmy Costellos of this world. If I could get into Heaven then it wouldn’t be fair so it wouldn’t be Heaven, which means it’s all just wishful thinking. I want there to be a Heaven for Bernie’s sake. But I also don’t want there to be one for my sake.’
‘Because it’s not just about Heaven, is it? If you have Heaven, then you have to have Hell.’
Jimmy nodded.
‘But I can’t let myself believe in nothing or, like I said, it means Bernie’s life was wasted. There’s only one thing I can really believe in. Standing in that warehouse made me see it. Me. I believe in me, me being alive and me staying alive.’
Udo waited but nothing more came.
‘You know what you are, Jimmy?’
‘A bad Catholic?’
‘No, just a half-Catholic.’
‘A half-Catholic, what the hell is a half-Catholic?’
‘It’s what most Catholics are, at least most of the ones I’ve known.’
Udo paused to see if Jimmy wanted the talk to go on.
‘Well, go on then, explain.’
‘It’s not easy. Maybe onion-Catholics is better. You’re layers and layers of things, Catholic things, like going to Mass, saying prayers, the Pope, bishops, the whole set-up. But if you strip away those things, the layers, what is there at the heart of it for you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘What is there at the heart of an onion?’
Jimmy thought about it.
‘Nothing, an onion is just an onion.’
‘Like you, layers and layers of acquired Catholic stuff. Stuff you’ve been told to do so you do it. Stuff you’ve been told to believe, so you try to believe it. When you put aside all the layers and ask the question “what am I?”, you’re nothing, just another guy, just another life. If you allow yourself to think about it, to really think about it, there’s nothing to think about.’
Jimmy looked out of the window and tried thinking about it. But what was there to think about? When you came right down to it there was life. And that’s all there was, until death took even that away.
‘So what can an onion-Catholic do about it?’
Udo shrugged.
‘Live. What else is there? Find a way to live and then get on with it.’
‘Is that what you’ve done?’
‘Yes.’
‘You became a priest.’
‘It works all right for me. I wouldn’t recommend it, though.’
‘You don’t have to, I tried it. I can see now that it wouldn’t work for me. I couldn’t change, I still can’t.’
‘Why change? What’s changing got to do with it?’
Jimmy was puzzled. ‘You have to change don’t you? Isn’t that what it’s all about?’
Udo smiled. ‘Nobody changes. Once you’re who you are, what you’ve chosen to be, or what life has made you, that’s it. That’s the one you stay.’
‘And you think that’s how it is for everybody?’
‘Oh, there’ll be exceptions. There’ll always be saints and monsters. But for ordinary people in the middle, people like you and me, I think it’s pretty much true. You won’t change.’
Jimmy believed him. Udo wasn’t the first to point it out, but this time Jimmy knew it was true. The conversation didn’t pick up again so Udo left it. The train travelled on. After a minute he leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
Jimmy sat and looked at him. Udo was right. It was true and he would have to live with it. At least he had found out one thing. He didn’t want to die. In fact, he was shit-scared of dying; he wanted to live. The problem was, would he live? Had all this Bronski thing put the word out on him? Somehow, talking with Udo, he felt he was finally getting close to something important, something about himself, about living. He was finally getting close to making a sort of sense of things. But it would be typical of God to let him lift the curtain a little on what his life was all about only to have someone turn up and bring down the curtain once and for all. In primary school, the teachers used to say God was a mystery, that we weren’t meant to understand. He had grown up thinking that was just a cop-out. A way of avoiding the difficult questions with impossible answers. Maybe he had been wrong. But it wasn’t God that was the mystery. It was his bloody sense of humour.
Udo had slept for over an hour and now woken up. The people sitting at the table across the aisle had just got up and were going through the door. Probably going to the Bordbistro to get something to eat or drink. Jimmy had been thinking while Udo slept and now he wanted to talk. Jimmy leant forward and put his elbows on the table to ask his question.
‘You’re going to leave the bomber in place, aren’t you?’
Udo leant forward to answer it. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on, Udo, I haven’t known you long but I know you well enough. If you turned Bronski it was because he really believed you could take the bomber off his back. If you can do that it means you’re on the inside of whatever it is. You could have stopped it at any time, but you didn’t. I also know you well enough to know you take being a priest seriously. So how come you’re letting someone kill Bronski?’
Udo gave a tired smile.
‘There’s no way round you, is there, Jimmy?’
‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘OK, why not? Yuri Kemedov, now Charlie Bronski, operated in East and West Germany and the Baltic States. He ran some agents and did counter-intelligence work but he also operated against internal anti-state elements. He arranged for the infiltration of any group or organisation the government thought might be trying to subvert the revolution or be sympathetic to the West. Religious groups, liberal-minded academics, artists and writers who didn’t toe the Party line. The way things were, he was never short of work. But he wasn’t happy just to operate against legitimate targets. He was busy getting a name for himself and moving up. He started to set up groups, groups that weren’t anti-state but weren’t officially approved, that were in a sort of grey area. He did everything from faith healing to reading groups. He’d sucker people into them, groom a few who looked like he could fit them up as the leaders, then rig it to look like they were involved in subversive activities. When he was ready he’d roll up the whole thing and take the credit.’
‘How come he could do that? People must have known.’
‘We all knew, but we were the ones doing the work for him and he was back at head office with the full confidence of the high-ups. What would you have done? Blown the whistle or kept your mouth shut and obeyed orders?’
‘Yeah, I can see how shopping him wouldn’t really be an option.’
‘And it wasn’t anything that was big-deal. It was lots of small-time stuff. The high-ups were glad he was doing it but they never really took a close look into any of it.’
‘Did you actually work for him?’
‘Yes, I was on quite a few of his operations, legitimate ones and set-ups. I acted as an enforcer, a sharp-end man. I saw him a few times and knew all about him but he never noticed me.’
Jimmy understood but he was still surprised. It was payback time, revenge. Seeing the bad guy get what he deserves. But he still couldn’t see Udo as the bomber, not unless he’d been more wrong than he’d ever been before.
‘What happened? You came to Copenhagen as a priest and there he was, a happily married Catholic writer living with his wife in Nyborg?’
‘Yes. I recognised him straight away. It didn’t take a great brain to see how he had got there. He had wormed his way up the ladder and then, when he was worth something, sold out to the Americans or the British. Someone had given him a new life, a nice one at that.’
‘And you decided, what?’
‘To end the bastard’s cosy little retirement.’ Christ, thought Jimmy. It wasn’t the answer he had expected. Udo went on, as much to himself as to Jimmy. ‘We once did a job for him in Tallinn. He had arranged for an unofficial reading group to be set up amongst some university students. He got them books from the West, titles you couldn’t get in the East. At first it was nothing much, bestsellers the state wouldn’t let people read, harmless. But slowly he began to get them stuff that wasn’t so harmless. Things that had political implications. Subversive. When he was ready he sent us in to roll it up.’
‘Why use the Stasi?’
‘Because he couldn’t trust the local police. They would spot what was going on and most of them weren’t, how shall I put it, unconditionally committed to the Russian revolution. They might see to it that the job got bungled, let the leaders slip through their fingers. He didn’t want that because this time it wasn’t a small-change thing. He had a big fish in play. One of the students he’d groomed as a leader was the daughter of a prominent Estonian politician thought to be in favour of independence. To smear him through his daughter would be a big feather in Kemedov’s cap and move him quite a few rungs up the ladder. We did the job, she and a few others got swept up, there was a secret trial and she and two others got bullets in the back of their heads.’
‘Christ, Udo, that was dirty work by any standards.’
‘For Yuri it was routine. Kemedov was an apparatchik.’ Jimmy’s face asked the question. ‘It was a term, a name for the bureaucrats who had no convictions, no loyalties except to the system. Kemedov didn’t believe in any ideology, not communism, not anything, except succeeding. And that meant serving the system he found himself in. So long as it served him well, he’d be a good servant. Until he got far enough to get a better deal elsewhere.’
‘So when you saw him at Mass in Nyborg you decided he deserved some more appropriate reward for his years of service to the State?’
‘Yes. The girl’s father had shot himself just ahead of being arrested but she had a big brother. He was in the army at the time, a captain, serving in Afghanistan. When the Soviet Union fell apart and Estonia got independence he joined their new army and got to be a colonel before he retired. I passed on the information I had about Kemedov through old contacts. I didn’t hurry, there was no need. Kemedov wasn’t going anywhere. I waited until there would be no way he would suspect me. Unfortunately you turned up at the wrong moment, he added two and two, got five, and the rest you know.’
Jimmy was relieved in one way. Udo wasn’t the actual bomber. But it wasn’t far off the mark. He’d brought the bomber in and set up the target. Bomber, fixer? If you were talking right and wrong there wasn’t much to choose between them, was there?
‘So, will your colonel kill him?’
‘I suppose so. That’s what he came for. He lost a sister and a father because of him. It’s what Kemedov deserves.’
‘What about forgiveness, mercy?’
‘What about justice?’
‘Oh well, it’s your game not mine. I’m just an innocent bystander.’
It was still another hour and a half to Copenhagen. There was nothing to do but think and talk.
‘Tell me, Udo, what are the chances that all this will get to the others who might be interested in me?’
‘How should I know?’
‘It was your world once, it was never mine. However poor your guess is it would be better than any I might make.’
‘I think they’ll probably know where you are, if not now, then soon. Too many people got involved and it was messy.’
‘So you think they’ll come?’
‘If it’s important to them. But only you know how important it is so the question is, do you think they’ll come?’ Udo stood up. ‘Come on, I’m hungry.’
Jimmy realised that he was hungry too so they went down the train into the Bordbistro. They ordered beer and sandwiches and sat in one of the semi-circular booths. The Bordbistro was almost empty, passengers who’d wanted to eat had mostly already done so. The couple who had been opposite them were drinking coffee and talking at a table at the far end. The other two booths next to theirs were empty.
‘If they come is there anything I can do?’
Udo slowly shook his head.
‘Not that I can see. If it’s the Americans they’ll fit you up for something then put in for your extradition. If it’s the Israelis it will be a snatch. They’re both good at what they do, they’ve had plenty of practice. That’s about all I can tell you, except that if they’re coming they won’t waste any time.’
‘Should I run?’
‘You tried running from Bronski and where did it get you? You got out OK because you had me as back-up. The people who come after you this time will be better than Bronski, better equipped and there won’t be just two of them and I’ll be no good to you. If you run, where will you go and what will you use for papers? If they’ve got a definite fix on you they’ll get you. Sorry, that’s how it is.’
Jimmy felt like a rabbit who had just escaped from a fox by running across the road only to see the headlights about to hit him. Now you’re safe, now you’re not.
‘Have you anything to suggest?’
‘Nothing that will help. Make a will. Say your goodbyes and say some prayers. Get drunk and stay drunk.’
‘Thanks. I’ll try and remember.’
They both sat in silence. Jimmy turned to one side and looked out of the window. He had never liked travelling, these days it seemed he did nothing else. Not that he was actually going anywhere. Maybe soon it would be over and he would settle down somewhere. Permanently.
Strangely enough, all he felt was tired. Not weary, not frightened, just tired. He was close to knowing something important, something about himself. It was all building up to something. He couldn’t change who he was and he wouldn’t try any more. He had finally realised that he didn’t truly believe in anything except himself and staying alive. He wasn’t even a bad Catholic, only an onion-Catholic. None of it made any sense, not yet. But he was close.
‘Please, God, let me get there before it all ends.’
Udo surfaced from his own thoughts. ‘Sorry, I missed that. I wasn’t listening.’
‘It was nothing, just me talking to someone with a funny sense of humour who isn’t there and wouldn’t do anything even if he were.’
‘I see, a prayer. Well, why not? I hope it gets answered.’
‘So do I, Udo. So do I.’