The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [80]
‘You want a coffee?’ asked an incredulous Meisner. ‘At this time of night?’
Gaddis explained that it had been a long day – ‘I was up at five’ – and turned his attention to the menu. The café offered the sort of food he loathed: right-on stews, bean soups, tofu salads sprinkled with snow peas and pine nuts. He would have killed for a rib-eye steak.
‘What the hell’s a bio-bratwurst?’ he asked, but the doctor merely stared at him blankly through his tortoiseshell glasses. He had the distracted look of a man coming to terms with the indiscretions of his past. Gaddis scanned the food on the neighbouring tables. Surely there was something worth eating? Beside him, two undernourished Scandinavians were picking gingerly at a rocket salad. A string of lights was suspended over their table, hung between two chestnut trees. In the other direction, a young couple – British, by the look of their clothes – were holding hands and finishing off two large bowls of onion soup.
Gaddis froze.
He had seen the woman before: that afternoon, on the southern edge of the Holocaust Memorial, leaning on a bicycle and staring past him in the direction of the Reichstag. He had noticed her because she had been wearing a yellow overcoat identical to one that Holly had worn on a date to the cinema. He looked at the woman’s chair. Sure enough, the same coat was draped around the back of her seat.
Was he under surveillance? Gaddis’s coffee arrived and he was grateful for the distraction because it meant that he could fix his attention on the waitress. There was a small macaroon resting on the saucer and he swallowed it in an attempt to keep his behaviour natural.
‘Damn,’ Meisner said.
‘What?’
‘I forget my cigarettes.’ The doctor was checking his pockets, patting the inside of his jacket. ‘Would you mind waiting here while I go back to my apartment? It is just around the corner, just a few minutes away.’
Was this part of the surveillance operation, part of some pre-arranged plan? Was Meisner working in tandem with the British? Gaddis was about to offer him one of his own cigarettes when he realized that Meisner’s suggestion had presented him with the opportunity to leave the café.
‘Can I be honest?’ he said.
Meisner frowned. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Would you mind if we ate dinner somewhere else?’
‘Are you cold or something? They have blankets inside.’
‘No. It’s not the cold. I’d just rather we finished our drinks, fetched your cigarettes and went somewhere else to eat.’
Meisner suddenly saw what Gaddis was driving at. His face seemed to draw back on to its bones. When he lowered his voice, it was tight with nerves.
‘You think there is a possibility that—’
Gaddis interrupted him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think there is that distinct possibility.’
They stood up immediately. Gaddis drained his coffee in a single gulp, secured a ten-euro note under a sugar bowl and led Meisner off the terrace. They were fifty metres up Liegnitzer when he turned and saw the man who had been sitting with the woman in the yellow overcoat crossing the street behind them. He was speaking into a mobile phone.
‘I think POLARBEAR just made us,’ Ralph was telling Tanya. He was embarrassed, spitting with rage. ‘Fuck it. He’s coming towards you. Looks like they’re heading to Meisner’s apartment.’
‘We will go into my home and think what to do,’ Meisner was muttering. Gaddis was concerned by how quickly his companion’s mood had deteriorated into outright panic. ‘Why did you bring these people to me? Everything was fine in Berlin until Doctor Sam Gaddis shows up.’
Gaddis turned again but could not see anybody following them. A part of him wanted to walk back to the café and to confront the couple at their table. Who were they?