Britta takes her time getting off the train and then stands unmoving on the platform. When the train has departed again and the arriving passengers have scattered, she looks around, mentally divides her surroundings into grid squares, and scans them with her eyes. Leipzig’s central railway station, with its impressively vaulted glass roof, is always worth taking in, but Britta’s interest is trash bins. On each platform, there are about ten such bins, set far apart, big stainless-steel containers with deposit holes for glass, plastic, paper, and miscellaneous other garbage. As long as no train is pulling in, she has an unobstructed view of four platforms on either side, and she’d be able to spot anyone hanging around one of the bins. Nevertheless, the platforms are too long for her to see all the way to the end, so she’ll have to do a good deal of walking on each one in order to check all the bins, and since there are twenty-one tracks, she’s in for a real workout. Furthermore, there are garbage cans both on the concourse and on the two basement levels, where the usual retail shops and food stalls can be found, so there’s no guarantee she’ll find G. Flossen this way; the station’s big enough for them to miss each other all day long.
Britta sighs and tells herself that despite the odds, this method has always worked in the past. Flossen possesses neither a cell phone nor an e-mail address, and if he’s got a mailing address, she doesn’t know what it is. At any rate, with this bad weather, it’s fairly likely that he’s somewhere in her vicinity.
Just as she’s about to set out on her quest, two men in uniform start moving in her direction. The security staff has her in their sights, and it’s too late to elude them.
“Can we help you?” The men have stopped directly in front of her. Each rests one hand on his pistol and the other on his truncheon.
“With what?” Britta asks back.
“It’s not clear what you’re doing here,” says the second man. “The next departure from this track isn’t until forty-three minutes from now.”
“I’m looking at the roof,” says Britta. “Aren’t these reinforced concrete arches incredible? Not to mention the glass. More than a hundred and seventy thousand square feet of glass.”
“We have to ask you please to leave now. This is a transit area.”
Through controlled breathing, Britta subdues her rage. She tells herself that the security guys want nothing from her, it’s not personal, they have no idea who she is and what she does, they’re just doing their job. Besides, it’s her own fault. It should have occurred to her that the recent attack would put everyone on edge.
She manages a smile and a no-problem gesture, to which the cops respond with a we’re-keeping-an-eye-on-you look. In any case, this level of security makes it a pretty sure thing that G. Flossen isn’t loitering on any train platform.
It’s still raining. It’s raining not like weather, but like apocalypse. Although it’s unequivocally daytime, it’s dusk in the streets. The streetlights have come on, tinting the deluge orange. Cars are cleaving forks in the flooded thoroughfares; the sewers don’t stand a chance. Leipzig has disappeared behind a curtain, from which people emerge and run crouching toward the station entrances. Inside stand the indecisive, not yet daring to dash out and wondering whether they can wait out the rain, even though it’s plain to all that it could go on like this for hours.
Britta has no choice. Normally, she’d walk—Rosental Park is barely ten minutes away. But in weather like this, every second counts. She pulls her hood over her head, opens her umbrella, and presses her shoulder bag against her body. In the lee of the station wall, she runs to the cabstand on the west side. When she climbs into the taxi, her pant legs are wet to the knees.
Very soon after the taxi drops her off at the park, Britta realizes she’s going to get a lot wetter. Instead of running over the open lawns, she opts for a path on the edge of the woods, where the rain isn’t falling quite so heavily. But the ground is soft; within minutes she’s got water inside her soaked shoes, and even her jacket proves to be less waterproof than she thought. Already the first drops are running down her back. But the worst part isn’t the cold and wet; it’s the gnawing question of whether what she’s doing here makes any sense. G. Flossen is a nutcase. But is he nuts enough to stay outside on such a day? Be that as it may, Britta remembers that she has no choice but to go on. A second trip to Leipzig in the near future is impossible. If she wants to talk to Flossen, this is her only chance. She throws an inner switch, chucks her useless umbrella into the bushes, and marches on. She wants to circle the Rosental once and then to check two more parks before yielding to the worst possible outcome and going home with her purpose unfulfilled.
Despite her fears, she seems to be in luck. On the other side of the vast lawn, not far from the Zooschaufenster, the “window to the zoo”—from which today there is certainly no animal to be seen—Britta spots a slowly moving blue tent. At once, she steps off the path and heads directly for the tent. Soon she starts to run, even though the tent makes no move to flee; on the contrary, it has stopped altogether, and now it’s looking at her.
Up until the last second, she’s not sure whether it’s really Flossen. Only when she’s standing directly in front of him does she recognize the bearded face with the slightly confused eyes under the hood of his huge poncho. Under the poncho there’s also a bicycle, on the sides of which, as Britta knows, big saddlebags filled with plastic bottles are hanging.
“Hey,” says Flossen. “There you are.”
“Did you wait for me?”
“I thought you were coming and so I hung around inside the station, but that sort of thing’s rather difficult now.”
“So I noticed.”
“Have you got something for me?”
As a matter of fact, she does: two empty soda bottles with especially high deposits. When she pulls the bottles out of her shoulder bag, Flossen’s whole face lights up. He takes the bottles from her, lifts his poncho, and stashes the booty in his saddlebags. She has never asked him why he spends his days rummaging through the city’s garbage bins in search of bottles with refundable deposits. She’s come to believe that he simply lives off them. Maybe, she speculates, G. Flossen hates society so much he can’t in good conscience perform a job that’s of any use to other people.
“But you haven’t come here just to hand over a couple of empties. Ask your question.”
“Okay,” says Britta. “Was it you?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
Flossen sighs. Then they fall silent for a while, each of them dwelling on what this double no means. Neither doubts that the other is telling the truth. Britta doesn’t find Flossen very congenial and is glad she doesn’t have to like him. He’s got arrogant nostrils and a voice better suited to a carping woman than to a man in his seventies. In an earlier life, he studied social sciences and then made himself an important figure at a Berlin university for decades, before something happened that threw him off course, something to do with a wife and a child and a stretch in prison. Since then, he’s devoted himself body and soul to eco-activism. Green Power’s antiwhaling campaign receives the most notice, but G. Flossen’s specialty is blocking infrastructure development. In the past, with the collaboration of Britta’s candidates, he’s succeeded in blowing up the main piers of a bridge that was under construction over the Elbe River, the borehole for a city tunnel, and several half-finished wind-power farms. Personal reservations aside, Britta does enjoy their professional collaboration; something ingenuous in his character elicits her trust.
“You have no idea what’s going on?” he asks.
Britta shakes her head.
“No doubt you’ve already asked the Muslims?”
“They say it wasn’t them.”
“I didn’t think so. Why would they target a freight terminal? We’d be more likely to go after something like that—a hub for meat transport, that sort of thing.”
“Have you got any ideas?”
She’s never stopped addressing him with the formal Sie, even though when he talks to her, he obstinately uses the informal Du. Now he looks at her thoughtfully, perhaps even a little worriedly.
“Not really,” he says. “But there’s something brewing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Britta harshly.
“I have no clue. Just a feeling, that’s all.”
Britta can’t stand vague hints, but she has to admit that she herself made a similar remark to Babak: No idea, but I’ve got a bad feeling. Something’s up.
“You dominate the market,” says Flossen. “Any competitor would have to offer more than this airport crap.”
“People are often amazingly irrational.”
He laughs, blowing air through his nostrils. “Nevertheless. The thing smells bad.”
Britta feels a sudden, strong desire to go home. Under her jacket, she’s shivering with cold.
“Maybe somebody’s trying to draw you out,” says Flossen. “Maybe they’ve got their eye on you somehow.”
“Who’s they? What’s somehow?” The anger in her voice is impossible to ignore. Flossen shakes his head.
“Look, my child. The world’s big and complicated. Just be on your guard.”
His poncho rustles and sends little waterfalls in all directions while he slips under the polythene sheet, climbs onto his bike, and prepares to pedal away. “Thanks for the bottles,” he says, and off he goes, heading not in the direction of the city, but over there, where the woods begin.