The Other Side of Silence

For a moment or two I felt light-headed. I was back up on the roof of the Villa Mauresque, eavesdropping on the two spymasters. The next I was falling backward down the chimney with all sense of self-awareness left behind alongside the gene-deep certainty that life was actually worth the struggle. It wasn’t. That much was obvious. The light at the end of the tunnel that was the sun framed by the chimney grew smaller by the second until it was no bigger than a dim and distant star in some remote galaxy. I’d gone missing and it was likely that I was going to be missing for quite a while, perhaps permanently. Back in Berlin, even before the Nazis, looking for missing persons used to cost the city millions of marks a year. Did any of it ever matter? Perhaps it was even possible that I would never be found, as those before me had not been found. When the darkness of the chimney closed around me I had the strong sense that life was over as surely as if I’d sat in my car once again and tried to asphyxiate myself with carbon monoxide. I took a deep breath of my present oblivion and hoped my useless, tired mind was no longer required. I didn’t want to know anything anymore. What difference did it make anyway? There was no need to hold on to life so tightly. So I let go. I let go. The Englishman had done me a favor. I welcomed the darkness as a child welcomes Christmas morning.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I stared at the yellow lightbulb on the dark green ceiling for a long time. It never went out. The yellow wasn’t just yellow but orange and sometimes green and perhaps more than just a simple lightbulb. It looked like the evil eyeball of some almost invisible Cyclops that was trying to stare into my soul in order to decide if I was worth devouring. Once or twice I tried to stand, thinking to smash it, but the ceiling must have been at least twelve feet from the bare wooden floor on which I lay. The room was as big as a ballroom, but stiflingly hot and oppressive with the smell of vomit-my own-and the sound of flies now enjoying this unexpected repast. I was covered in sweat and my salt-stained shirt stuck to my back like a butter wrapper. If I’d been wearing any shoes I would have thrown one at the bulb because I couldn’t see a light switch anywhere. Louvered shutters as big as the garden gates at the Villa Mauresque were closed, and even without opening them I knew the windows were barred and that I was a prisoner. Not that I had energy for doing anything as strenuous as throwing a shoe or opening a window. Besides, my hands were tied painfully behind my back. My jaw ached as if I’d tried to chew my way out through the skirting boards below the blood-red walls. Even the hair on my scalp seemed painful. Most of all I was desperately thirsty. I shouted for water but no one came.

There was an old French clock on the dusty marble mantelpiece and, as time passed, I realized it was permanently stuck at ten past twelve, like my life, it seemed. I guessed I was in some disused or vacant villa close to Villefranche-sur-Mer. I could hear the sound of the ocean, which helped to calm me, and I imagined all of the places I would go if I’d been given a ship and my freedom. Scotland? Norway? Kaliningrad? The Cape of Good Hope? Good hope was something in very short supply, and so that felt like a good place to go. Beyond the louvered shutters it seemed to be dark, but with the pain behind my eyes I couldn’t be entirely sure. I’d stared at the bulb for so long most of my vision was just a negative afterimage. Something negative, anyway. Like everything else. At ten past twelve I heard a key in the lock on the doors and the two Englishmen from Portsmouth walked heavily in and hauled me to my feet.

“Pissed himself,” said one, his nose wrinkling with disgust.

“Saves us taking him to the bathroom. What are you complaining about?”

“The boss won’t like it.”

They dragged me to another room, almost as large, and sat me on a dining chair in front of a long table. There was a glass chandelier immediately above my head but the shutters were closed and most of the light came from some standard lamps in the corners and an Anglepoise on the desk.

The pale-faced man behind it was wearing a seersucker suit and thick glasses and seemed more interested in the contents of his cherrywood pipe than in me. His hair was thin and so were his nose and mouth and, to my way of thinking, his blood, too. At the far end of the room the door was open, and while I could not see who was in there I was certain from the clouds of tobacco smoke that the room was occupied by more than one person. Perhaps the two spymasters from London.

“Did you bring some clothes from his flat?” the pale-faced man asked the other two.

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded. I’d never seen him before, but he was English and very still and deliberate, like a monk from a nearly silent order.

“He smells. Wash him, give him something to eat and drink, and then bring him back here wearing a change of clothes.”