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it?”
    Maximilian again has his arm up. With his other hand he is clicking on footage of the elderly fat bastard, bringing him closer. He plays him in real time, then in slow motion: a bald, burly old man with a military bearing and cavalry boots, ceremoniously proffering a polystyrene or paper beaker. Something quaintly dignified, almost priestly about his gestures. And yes, the elderly fat bastard and our boy are definitely talking back and forth.
    “Now show me his wrist.”
    “Wrist?”
    “The boy’s,” Bachmann snapped. “The boy’s right wrist, for Christ’s sake, as he takes the coffee. Show it me close.”
    A fine bracelet, gold or silver. A tiny open book dangling from it.
    “Where’s Karl? I need Karl,” Bachmann shouts, swinging round and opening his arms as if he’s been robbed. But Karl is standing right before him: Karl the onetime street kid from Dresden with three juvenile convictions and a degree in social studies. Karl of the timid, help-me smile.
    “Go down to the railway station for me, please, Karl. Maybe the chance encounter between the elderly fat bastard and our boy was not chance. Maybe our boy was getting orders or meeting his connect. Or maybe we’re looking at a sad old guy whose best thing in life is giving beakers of coffee to handsome young bums in railway stations at two o’clock in the morning. Talk to the good people who run the mission there for down-and-outs. Ask them whether they know who was it gave our boy that beaker of something in the middle of the night. Maybe he’s a regular. Don’t show them any photographs or you’ll scare them. Use your sweet tongue and steer clear of the railway police. Have a nice fairy story at your fingertips. Maybe the fat old bastard is your long-lost uncle. Maybe you owe him money. Just don’t break any porcelain. Be quiet, be invisible, the way you can. Right?”
    “Clear.”
    Bachmann is addressing all of them—Niki, her friend Laura, a couple of street watchers who had followed Karl upstairs, Maximilian, Erna Frey:
    “So here’s where we are, my friends. We’re looking for a man who has no patronymic and no relationship with normality. His record tells us he’s a militant Chechen-Russian who does violent crime and bribes his way out of Turkish jail—and what the hell was he doing there anyway?—gives the slip to the Swedish port police, buys himself back onto the boat he comes off, smuggles himself out of Copenhagen docks, charters himself a lorry to Hamburg, accepts a beaker of refreshment from an elderly fat bastard whom he engages in conversation in Christ knows whose language, and wears a gold Koran bracelet. Such a man deserves our considerable respect. Amen?”
    Upon which, he stomps back to his office, closely followed as ever by Erna Frey.
     
    Were they married?
    In every known respect, Bachmann and Erna Frey were opposites, so perhaps they were. While Bachmann loathed exercise, smoked, swore, drank too much whisky and could settle to nothing if it wasn’t work, Erna Frey was tall, fit and frugal, with cropped, sensible hair and a purposeful stride. Saddled with the Christian name of a maiden aunt, and dispatched by wealthy parents to Hamburg’s elite convent school for daughters of the eminent, she had emerged laden with the strict German virtues of chastity, industry, piety, sincerity and honor—until a mordant sense of humor and a healthy skepticism put paid to all of them. Another woman might have traded her antiquated first name for a newer model. Not Erna. At tennis tournaments she sliced and volleyed her way to victory over opponents of both sexes. On alpine excursions she outstripped men half her age. Her greatest passion, however, was lone sailing, and she was known to be storing away every penny she earned to buy herself a round-the-world yacht.
    Yet at work, this ill-matched pair were husband and wife, sharing the same room, telephones, files, computers and each other’s smells and habits. When Bachmann