Prologue
The Delicate Shadow of Flight

We enter railway stations, which are almost always located in city centres, their massive façades looking out on the main boulevards, gateways to a world of timetables and destinations. We enter railway stations somewhere or other, we stand outside the Gare de l'Est in Paris, our gaze wandering over the front of the building, we rise, we pass the figures of Traffic and Modern Progress, now a hundred years old, we settle briefly on one of the masonry ledges, a vantage point from which the apparently chaotic movement of travellers coming and going assumes an ordered appearance, a logic of exchange and free flow that looks ever smoother and more natural the higher we climb, like the skeins of railway tracks that appear baffling and random when you're on their level. But now, at this moment, as we finally survey the whole of Milano Centrale station, having taken in the classical arrangement of its colossal stairways, we turn north again, marvelling as we assess the cluster of tracks before us, branching off in different directions. Never mind which set we follow, they lead away, always branching again and again, until they reach the confidently towering south-east façade of Geneva Central, the theatrical setting of Strasbourg station, Genoa's oriental phantasmagoria with its pointed little cupolas and its platforms built into the rock, looking like long, cool caves. We hover around the delicate portal of Copenhagen Central, embedded as it is in the city traffic, we see Helsinki's silent guardians, those huge granite figures holding mighty glowing globes up in the northern night, we savour the hectic atmosphere of Santa Maria Novella in Florence or note the breathtaking spaciousness of Vienna West, and finally we think of settling somewhere inside these stations and interrupting our flight. But the steel girders there, the columns, the iron balustrades arching airily in defiance of gravity, are all bristling with sharp spikes and treacherous wires that give us electric shocks. We're not tolerated, we're driven away as soon as we alight anywhere. So we move restlessly through the station halls, flying back and forth between the exits, we gather in the concourses, rising up in flocks, and sometimes we let ourselves be driven into quiet corners full of cigarette ends and garbage where we are suddenly alone, all by ourselves. A single creature. One among many. There she is.

What shall we call her? There are so many of her kind, but since we have decided to follow this one we must give her a name. What about Léonie? No, but it ought to begin with 'l', the letter 'l' has the right light touch, the name must be a light one, a name that takes off into the air. To catch the shining lightness of her existence as well as its winged volatility we must look further, the light must shine in her name itself, for it is when the afternoon sun suddenly falls slanting over the station halls and concourses that her real time begins, and as you watch her go you think, longingly, that summer will soon be here again …

Let's call her Lucia, that's a good name. Seven months before the baptism we have just given her, Lucia was born on a cross-brace of solid steel girders held together with seven bolts, between two of the sharp wires which are really placed there to repel intruders, although her mother had skilfully and cautiously made herself comfortable in order to lay Lucia. We see Lucia in the southern part of Munich Central station, near the large stairway leading down to the underground. Not sure what she really wants to do, she is exposed to the importunities of a large if rather elderly lover who has part of his left foot missing, so that as he performs certain amorous contortions he keeps falling on his beak. Lucia isn't interested. After a while he thinks better of it and joins a small flock flying south over nocturnal Bayerstrasse. Lucia stays put and struts over the paved station floor, looking around her. The lights here are interesting: snack bars! A tall man, perhaps in his late fifties, stands at one of them. A slight double chin and a certain softness of his features detract from the athletic impression he makes but cannot entirely cancel it out. His tanned bald patch and an unhealthy red in his cheeks, a flush to be attributed to the effects of alcohol, reinforce this ambiguous impression, and the same ambiguity shows in the rest of his appearance: he wears an elegant Burberry trench-coat and elegant dark brown shoes in leather matching his leather belt, just as the colour of his socks echoes the hue of his tie. In his left hand he holds a white batiste handkerchief with the monogram FvR embroidered on it in light blue, surmounted by a small five-pointed coronet. He wipes large quantities of mingled ketchup and mayonnaise from the corners of his mouth with this handkerchief: he is eating a double red and white curry-flavoured sausage-burger, obviously with a hearty appetite. He washes it down with large and rapid gulps from a bottle of Augustiner Edelstoff. Crumbs fall from the bun around the sausage to his trench-coat and the paving at his feet. As he brushes the crumbs off his coat he looks at the gold watch on his wrist, picks up his case, and strides towards a taxi waiting nearby. Her confidence shaken by the man's sudden movements, Lucia very hesitantly approaches the crumbs and then retreats again, but there - now she has snapped up a good-sized morsel, she turns away at once, and as the man's trench-coat flaps alarmingly she flies up into the hall of the Central Station. Lucia passes through the upper gateway, turns left over the tracks and platforms, flies over platforms 11 to 15, and then describes another left curve, its arc taking her far above the skeins of tracks. She comes down in a beautifully descending circle and finally lands on the outermost platform, Number 11, where she begins eating the crumb so greedily that she fails to notice the approach of the young man walking along the platform until the last moment, when she flies up in a panic. The young man stops and watches her rise in the air, rising to the glass façade of the roof structure. Although a pigeon flying up in the air on a railway station is nothing out of the ordinary, he watches her go with wistful affection. He sees her suddenly recollecting that she can't land on the steel of the roof structure. She comes down to the lower edge of the glass façade, flies out into the dark, and disappears from his view.

Then he goes on along the platform. He does not stop to think that perhaps there is no more between him and another human being - a human being whom he does not know, will never know - than the flight of a pigeon. Or perhaps that there will be nothing more: for this is a structure made up of chances and riddles. The delicate shadow of a story in flight.


Part One
The Transatlantic Illusion

Munich, stopover 7.04.1999, 20.35 hours

Silence, choking panic. Pardell walked along platform 11 of Munich Central station, treading more firmly with every metre he went. He had set off much too early so as not to risk arriving too late, and then he had paced about restlessly on the station forecourt and the passages leading off it. He had glanced in a melancholy manner at the multilingual displays on the news stands. He had watched pictures of the bombardment of a large Balkan city on the huge television screen in the station hall, and had listened to NATO generals presenting the photographs and proving how right and proper the bombardment was. Then he had spent a mark on a lottery ticket promising to return his stake hundreds and thousands of times over, he had opened the lottery ticket, and spent several minutes reading the words: "Sorry, better luck next time". Now and then he had studied one of the big yellow timetables as earnestly as any keen aspirant to the Guinness Book of Records - and with all these activities he had wasted so much time, only half aware of it, that there were now only a few minutes between him and the beginning of his first shift on duty.

A pigeon flying up in front of him occupied his mind for the last minute. He watched her go until she had disappeared under the roof of the Central Station, beneath the huge red letters saying GRUNDIG inside the façade. He looked at his watch. It said 16 hours 50, which meant that his duty shift had just begun. You went on duty in the Compagnie an hour before the train left, and the timetable said that the night train for Ostend left Munich at 21 hours 51. This night train had a standard sleeping car attached The conductor of the sleeping car was to be none other than the young man. His name was Leonard Pardell, born 1971 in Hanover. At the moment he was studying in Berlin and taking his gap semester.

His watch was a rectangular Authentic Panther Steel which his mother's lover of the time had given him ten years ago for his birthday. A plain, steel wristwatch with a price when new of just under two hundred marks, what people call a fashion watch. It was set four hours late. There was a reason for that, and some people, when asked for Pardell's local time at any given moment, would have consulted their own watches and subtracted four hours. It was particularly important for his mother to think that a week or more ago her son had taken a major step in his life and gone to Argentina for nine months, to confront the challenges of globalization.

At the moment, so his mother thought, Pardell was at an innovative partially state-supported language school in Buenos Aires, located in the romantic Palermo quarter of the city, where he was industriously and very successfully improving the basic knowledge of Spanish he had acquired years before. In five weeks' time - for the intensive course lasted six long, arduous weeks - he would be setting off by the night train from Buenos Aires for Viedma, a romantic little town in the Rio Negro delta, armed with an internationally recognized diploma and fearlessly speaking fluent Spanish. The journey of over a thousand kilometres by rail would take him there by way of Mar del Plata and Bahia Blanca, following the Atlantic coastline of Argentina with all the beauties of its landscape. Once in Viedma he would meet Felisberto Sima Martínez, manager of a mysterious business in the services sector, where Pardell was to spend an innovative six months of practical experience before confronting the challenges of globalization. Part of the deal was accommodation in a romantic chalet right on the Atlantic, with delicious healthy meals. He was also to get an allowance of 900 US dollars a month. Among his other avocations, Martínez worked with UNESCO. On 3 January 2000, therefore, having acquired yet another impressive diploma, this time testifying to his successful period of practical experience, Pardell would arrive back in Germany with excellent prospects, to tell his proud mother, her current lover and their acquaintances all about the fantastic, romantic farewell New Year's Eve party in Buenos Aires given by Felisberto Sima Martínez at the end of his stay. After that Leo was planning to spend a certain amount of time in an innovative business in the services sector in north Germany, a firm which concentrated its operations on South America. This would involve people, encounters, new experiences - flexibility, unconventional solutions for unconventional problems, an open-minded attitude, enthusiasm for the business in hand, for meeting people, for new experiences with unconventional tasks, flexibility in the solution of open-ended problems, and finally - very important, this - open-ended experience in confronting new solutions …

While his mother, who as it happened was not 11,713 but only 495 kilometres away from Leo, was nodding off over the brochure Pardell had sent her, with a cheerful Final Greetings from the Old World, her brief dreams interrupted by confusing reflections, Pardell himself, for the tenth time that evening, was checking up on local time in Munich. He followed the course of the second hand on the clock, which relentlessly forced anyone watching it into the negative attitude of being late. He went a couple of steps further, almost reaching the end of the roofed area. Case in hand, he looked gloomily down the platform. He felt the wind from the open air beyond, where the tracks and the light of the station petered out in the dark night of the points and signals.

He went the last few metres to the Section. You reached its large door just before the stairway to Bayerstrasse. He saw light behind the smoked glass panes, and thought he saw a shadowy shape flitting past too. He saw the emblem of the Compagnie: two golden big cats forming an oval on a blue background - he took hold of the handle, pressed it down but did not open the door, still leaving one last chink between himself and the brightness of the Section.

Pardell remembered the first time he'd been in a similar situation. Those two moments of silent panic overlapped like traced drawings, almost coinciding. He had been pushing the bike, following Dietmar, his mother's lover of the time, who was waving with the utmost cheeriness. He knew the next two weeks offered him nothing but the bike and the cheerily waving Dietmar, he knew those two would be his universe and there was nothing he could do about it - for two whole weeks, an inconceivably long period. But it was what his mother wanted. He was twelve. He saw Dietmar waving cheerily and thought about the fourteen times twenty-four hours it would take to cycle from Hanover to Baden-Baden and back. He could imagine the landscapes he would have to pass, all of them full of an ever-cheerily waving Dietmar. He had felt desperate. But then he had seen himself cycling along the street where they lived, just the same as when he came home from school. He knew the cycling tour was going to be hell, but it would come to an end. Anything to be feared from the combination of his quite attractive and very sweet mother's new lover and a surprise, anti-authoritarian cycling tour on which they were to get to know each other might happen - but it would come to an end. At his moments of greatest unhappiness he would simply think how he would cycle up the street with Dietmar behind him, how he would come home and it would all be over. And it hadn't been so bad after all, Dietmar was a nice guy really, something in the catering business. No, he'd really been very nice, although it wasn't to be long before Dietmar was replaced by Bruno, who arrived the next autumn and stayed for an unusually long time. The main thing was that all this would come to an end too. Come what may, he would walk out through this door early in the morning of 1 January 2000. And then he went in.

Munich, passing through 7.04.1999, 20.51 hours

In spite of his restlessness, Friedrich Baron von Reichhausen watched the taxi driving down Pienzenauerstrasse until the darkness had sucked up the reflection of the rear lights from the wet surface of the street. Then he closed the garden gate, avoided looking at the garage, which had not been opened for some time and contained a practically unused ruby-red Daimler, and walked through the damp garden, in which the gardener had obviously just been working. The lawn was freshly mown, the beds raked, there were newly planted flowers in many places. He had taken on the gardener when he bought the house twenty years ago. By now the gardener was in his mid-eighties and continued working for Reichhausen only because he feared that otherwise the garden would run wild - for his conversations with Reichhausen, who often invited him in for a drink, had shown him that the master of the house didn't have the faintest idea about gardening. The gardener drank seldom, and then moderately. He hated those invitations, which began with the Baron calling out to him - "Hello there, come along in! There absolutely has to be more drinking around here!" Then he would perch uncomfortably on a chair, wineglass balanced on his knees, firmly refusing to take more than the first sip for the sake of politeness, while the Baron emptied whole bottles. In his view the Baron drank too much, far too much. He knew little else about him except that Reichhausen was a lawyer specializing in inheritance cases and property management, and was regarded as the leading Munich expert in that field. He knew that a forebear of the Baron had been a famous naval airman in the First World War, nostalgically described in journals on military history as the Red Baron of the Seas. And finally he knew, or guessed, that the Baron was very rich. Not just because his villa in the Bogenhausen district of Munich could belong only to a rich man, but because it was full of valuable things too. When he had to sit in the Baron's drawing-room with him, wineglass on his knees, his gaze would wander in amazement over a huge collection of mechanical watches. Specialist journals regularly published articles on Reichhausen's collection. No one but the Baron himself knew just how large it was, but as a rule it was said to be one of the five major collections of Europe. Reichhausen's presence at auctions and exhibitions was always noted with interest. When the Baron had drunk enough he would sometimes rise to his feet, take a watch out of one of the glass cases, which were fitted with alarms, and show it to the gardener. He often made him put it on and told him all about it. Who had worn it, who had made it. And where. The gardener wanted no part of all this luxury and alcoholism. He stayed on only for the sake of the garden, which he had been tending for forty years.

This evening Reichhausen did not try inviting him in. The gardener, lurking behind the branches of a conifer, watched Reichhausen enter his house. Saw the lights in the drawing-room come on. In there he observed the mysterious Baron throwing his trench-coat down on an armchair, fetching a glass and a bottle of French cognac, pouring himself a drink, and walking up and down the room with the glass in his hand. He kept stroking his shiny, bright red bald patch with his left hand. The gardener decided to seize his chance and disappear before Reichhausen could change his mind. He put his tools away in the shed behind the house, got on his bike and cycled home as fast as he could. Reichhausen saw him crossing the lawn. He had also spotted him behind the conifer. He knew the gardener was afraid of him. All the better, he thought, then he'd never be disappointed in the man. He smiled. Something completely impossible had happened. Yesterday Reichhausen had come upon the trail of an item which he had been seeking for a long time. He had been dreaming of it for a long time too. It was the 1924 Ziffer à Grande Complication. Ever since he first heard of that watch as a little boy, it had been the object of his dreams. The beauty of the mechanism, consisting of 637 separately made parts, was the unattainable ideal behind his whole collection. The 1924 Ziffer à Grande Complication was thought to be lost. But last week Reichhausen's assistant had discovered it among the widely dispersed items of the inventory of a great inheritance - well, not so much discovered it, he had only come upon its trail. Its existence was certainly noted in certain documents, which described it in detail, but it was missing.

Great watches, like all other watches, deal with time. And conversely, time is literally dealt out by them. The more precisely they deal it out, the more unique they are. The more mysterious are their mechanisms, resting shut away in the dark of the watch-case. Those mechanisms are the sum of the distribution of the forces of their springs: they consist of the escapement, balance-wheel and escape wheel, the spirals, and finally the devices driving the interlocking cogwheels themselves. There are many genuinely great watches, but not infinite numbers of them. The 1924 Ziffer à Grande Complication is a very great watch indeed.

When Samuel Moses Ziffer made the Grande Complication and submitted it to the Geneva watchmakers' guild as his masterpiece, his contemporaries immediately sensed and understood the brilliantly provocative nature of the work - for what could be the meaning of a watch made in 1924 with a millennium display, a notable mechanical complication never before built into a wristwatch, but that its maker assumed his work would run for at least seventy-six years and a day? It meant that the maker wished to place the future owner of this watch, his grandson or more probably his great-grandson, in a position where, at midnight on 31 December 1999, he could observe the concealed operation of a switch constructed and incorporated into the watch solely for that purpose, moving 1.3 millimetres upward and setting in motion a mechanism which would engage the number 2000 to replace the display reading 1999. This was monstrous presumption, arising from such an obvious degree of speculation and self-confidence as far exceeded anything to which a member of a Swiss watchmakers' guild ought to aspire. The Ziffer à Grande Complication was the only original watch the great mechanic ever made. He was refused the title of Master Watchmaker, there were denunciations, there seemed to have been an intrigue involving some kind of erotic element. He was not persona grata in Geneva any more. Thereafter he went to various workshops in Italy, Germany and Belgium, returned to Germany again, then went to France and left a few traces of his presence in Alsace, Rouen and Paris. As far as anyone knew he was last employed in the workshops of Léon Leroy. Two years before Samuel Ziffer himself, Leroy had been one of the first to make a small series of seven automatic watches including a display of the date. He may have been an influence on Ziffer technically, although Ziffer did not use Leroy's pendulum device, a narrow oval which almost filled the entire casing. Leroy had given Ziffer's name to the Paris guild as his journeyman. Samuel Ziffer never did become a master watchmaker. All trace of him was lost in the south of France in 1942. Perhaps the unacknowledged master of the Great Complication escaped to Spain. Or perhaps not. The watch bearing his name took other paths. Before he left Geneva a dealer had acquired it at a ridiculously low price, and sold it on to a Swiss banker two months later for what was already a remarkably large sum of money. The banker gave it to his son-in-law as a wedding present. The marriage did not last. After that the watch changed hands frequently, and the number of its admirers also increased. One of the most famous of them was the Reichsjagdmeister of the Greater German Reich, and for just under two years there was at least one man who, on Göring's instructions, was trying to track down the legendary first watch ever to have a millennium display. No one knows whether he found it. At the end of the Second World War it had simply disappeared. The last expert who claimed to have seen it said that the date then read 1942.

Reichhausen had known of the existence of the Ziffer since the early summer of 1946. All the true hunters of the watch had their own stories of their interest in it, and could tell you precisely how they first heard of it, and when and why they had begun to dream about it. These hunters, a small band of collectors at daggers drawn with each other, shared not only their passion for the Ziffer but two other things as well: they were genuine experts, owning major and complex collections of mechanical wristwatches, and they were all correspondingly rich. They seldom talked to each other, they avoided one another, and at most it was only after large trade fairs and actions which had cost them a lot of money and nervous stress, but had satisfied their greed at least temporarily, that a couple of them would sit at the bar of a Grand Hotel to drink together, their enmity forgotten for a few hours, telling each other the old tales of the Grande Complication, as collectors of legendary postage stamps might.

The hunters of the Ziffer were considered eccentric, for most collectors simply assumed that the watch was merely a bluff, and its millennium display would have to be re-set by hand. This claim was made most frequently by those whose high opinion of themselves exceeded their financial means and their ability to pay for investigations. In fact, however, every one of them would have liked to own it, and on New Year's Eve, 1999, would have taken it away to a Scottish castle, a suite in the Waldorf Astoria, or a comfortably equipped private island in the South Seas to savour the night of the Great Complication. That night, the night of a non-existent moment between millennia, would show the truth. That was what it was all about. Afterwards, the owner would go down in history as the person who had seen the Ziffer à Grande Complication in action.

Alfred Niel had died three weeks earlier. Reichhausen was his executor. Old Niel had been one of the richest men in Germany. His property, besides consisting of a great deal of money, stocks and shares, the Niel Works making components for mainframe computers, and interests in many other businesses and in real estate, also comprised a large number of movable assets: objets d'art, paintings, jewellery and so on. Reichhausen's assistant, Dr Joachim Bechthold, had begun going through the inventories in the Luxembourg safe-deposit boxes last week. It was in the pages of these inventories that the Baron came upon the Ziffer, listed as if it had been any other item - but of the watch itself there was no trace.

The Baron had been so successful as an executor of his clients' estates because he had never been interested in mere possessions. He himself had been an heir, and to quite a considerable estate at that. But anything that ever really meant much to him he had sought out for himself. That was the source of his strength. Somehow or other, through his own ever-increasing wealth, his work, his drinking habits and his now routine success as a collector, that strength been imperceptibly eroded over the last decade. Now, on the discovery of this clue, he felt it begin to flex itself again. He felt his powers restored, he felt the return of the taut strength that used to animate him. It returned unimpaired, like a new spring.

Munich, passing through 7.04.1999, 21.00 hours

"Berlin, Fonzie, is that right? Not bad. Berlin. I've always wanted to go to Berlin, in style, though, disconnect and spend a month there, find out what's going on - I don't mean work, see what I mean, leaves me cold anyway. "Look, Fonzie, different question entirely, can you do me a favour? I'm really supposed to be going to Ostend, see? The old sod sometimes gets confused, mixes things up, see what I mean, Fonzie? Just a small business problem, that's all." Pardell might not understand the nature of this small business problem, but he saw no reason to refuse Sallinger's request. Sallinger was the first of his colleagues that he'd met. When Pardell had made his very hesitant entrance, Sallinger had immediately taken him under his wing, shown him the paperwork for the journey and the reservations list, asked his name and who he was. Where did he come from - well, he wasn't from Munich, anyone could hear that. Pardell had told him the truth. Very briefly. So briefly that the truth retired in the face of this inappropriate brevity, like a noble horse that gallops over a paddock hoping for apples, but is offered common grass instead and trots off again snorting disdainfully.

Pardell told Sallinger that he had dropped out of his studies, he was an architect, yes, just now he wanted a complete change, that's right, Berlin, he'd spent four years in Berlin. Which was enough. Sallinger looked at him, motionless, cool. Large drop-shaped tinted glasses. Black shirt with an enormous collar, a sixties design. Top four buttons undone. A small gold chain on his pale and only slightly hairy chest. He was well enough built but rather thin. His hair was very thin too. He put one leg on a chair, took out a packet of Marlboros that he carried lodged between his shirt and his shoulder, and lit a cigarette. He wore his black jeans with a stout pair of red and black cowboy boots, which came into full view with his leg up on the chair. Drawing on his Marlboro, he said he was Perry. Perry Sallinger. Got it in one, Fonzie. After Pardell had told his only too brief story of Berlin, Perry dilated upon his own ideas of the old capital of Germany, now the capital once more. Perry Sallinger, who had never been to Berlin, knew a remarkable amount about it. As he continued putting on the first uniform he had worn in his life, Pardell tried to look as attentive and interested as possible. At the same time, however, in some remote part of his mind, all jumbled up but clear in every particular, he saw just what had happened in Berlin. He felt the full force of the details of his recent past.

To get there you only had to walk down Suarezstrasse in Charlottenburg, look for number 71, then press the bell beside a nameplate saying Stritkamp which had become bleached over the years, wait until it buzzed, and then - passing through the ground floor, which smelled of cats' pee but was otherwise all right - you went upstairs to the third floor. There were three doors, with the names Stritkamp/Pardell on the middle door, which led to a three-roomed flat in the classic Old Berlin style with a large kitchen, a bathroom and a cramped lavatory. Three people lived there. Nominally it was a shared flat of the commune type, although the real tenants were a couple who needed the extra cash because otherwise they lived entirely on their vocational retraining grants. But since the couple, Holger and Hedwig Stritkamp, could be described as late examples of the radical 1968 student generation, they called their lodger a flat-sharer. There was no difference in the rent he paid, so it came to the same thing, but the arrangement had distinct social advantages. You didn't have to bother so much about a flat-sharer; after all, you were living in a commune. So Pardell was forced to witness the couple's quarrelling, marital hygiene, reconciliations and sicknesses at close quarters. He put up with it.

He lacked neither intelligence nor taste, and yet he had it stuck it out for years in an atmosphere of tasteless stupidity. He had never tried to do anything about the conduct of Holger, M. Pol. (Holgi) and Hedwig, Dip. Ed. (Hexi). If necessary he would just go out when things became intolerable, and he thought nothing of simply changing some plan he might have made to adapt it to the new situation.

For instance, he might want to shower but couldn't because the two of them were fucking in the bathroom. If they were doing it to make up a quarrel they usually fucked in the bathroom, and a compromise copulation of that kind took time. So he would decide to go swimming now instead of tomorrow and shower at the Spreewald baths, where he had a season ticket. But that would make it too late for him to go to the library and borrow the book about Piranesi he really needed for his essay. So he wouldn't go to his class next morning, he'd visit the library instead, borrow the collection of articles on Piranesi, and write a tutorial paper instead of the essay. But the tutorial paper, which Pardell calculated would take two weeks in his new plan, came up against later events. Hexi's decision to paint the kitchen a tasteful magenta. Holgi's opposition. Hexi's subsequent spontaneous tantrum. Furthermore, Holgi wanted to watch the totally commercialized sport of football, meaning the European Championship. He reacted with sexual repression and slept in the kitchen, where he continued to sleep, out of mingled grief and rage, until well into the early afternoon, so that Pardell had to leave the flat for his breakfast coffee. Hexi had dropped out of her retraining course, and Pardell had not written his tutorial paper - he had beaten a retreat when the affair of the kitchen began and changed his plans, abandoning his essay and everything else, and instead applying to conduct extra guided tours of the city, which would allow him to earn a fast buck that summer and thus write an extensive tutorial paper in preparation for next term, a paper which would serve as the basis for his diploma dissertation and even have the advantage of enabling him to conclude his studies sooner. The subject was to be The Way of Escape. Theory and Practice of a System of Building Regulations, and their Traces in the Work of Piranesi. When he introduced himself to Sallinger as an architect, Pardell still hadn't finished it. The fact was that the scattered fragments he had assembled on a quantity of sheets of paper and in Word documents, irrespective of their ultimate position in the dissertation, couldn't even be called a draft, or at least not the draft of a dissertation that would earn him a diploma … Perry Sallinger asked him a simple question: did he know the Penguin in Schöneberg? Pardell wasn't sure, but it sounded okay. Then Sallinger returned to the point. To the favour he was asking. 'That's really nice of you, Fonzie. Honest, I mean it. Will you look in at the Fat Fanny with me, then, and I'll give it to you there? Yes, bring your gear along, then you can board the train straight afterwards."

Pardell followed Sallinger, who had already stepped out of the Munich Section door. He propped it open with his shoulder, took out a Marlboro and his original Zippo lighter. Pardell heard the lighter snap. Sallinger made a kind of hissing sound. 'Did you hurt yourself?' asked Pardell. 'Nope, it's okay, Fonzie. Hell, come on, we better step on it,' said the hillbilly gloomily. They went down the steps to Bayerstrasse, crossed the road near the tramline stop, and turned into a side street frequented by hesitant visitors to garishly lit porn cinemas, and by the guests staying in dubious boarding-houses and hotels. The street also contained a number of snack bars and import-export businesses, their display windows stacked with cartons as if they were the back areas of stock-rooms. Without so much as glancing at Pardell, Sallinger crossed to the right-hand side of the road. Presumably he thought Pardell knew what and where the Fat Fanny was. A first distant foreboding of the incursion into his life of new rhythms and new demands prompted him not to clear up this misunderstanding but simply to follow Sallinger, whose cowboy boots clinked on the asphalt. The midnight blue polyester uniform had changed Pardell. And he was treated accordingly, as an insider. The uniform had been worn immediately before him by a South Tyrolean who, having paid off the debts of his disastrous failure of an Italian restaurant in Rosenheim by working as a conductor, had gone to Padua to open a German restaurant there. The South Tyrolean's predecessor in the uniform had been a biochemistry student working as an auxiliary conductor until the unexpected death of his bachelor uncle. Before that it had been worn by a BMW shift-worker taking early retirement who suffered from insomnia, and was cured of it by the necessity of staying awake at all costs while on duty in the sleeping car. And there had been others before him too, an endless series of men with just one thing in common - they were all about one metre eighty tall, relatively slim, and all things considered well-proportioned. The leg length had been right for some of them, the sleeves too long or too short for others, the jacket might have been too tight over the shoulders or the wearer a little too stout for the trousers - but everything fitted Pardell perfectly. You could have said that although the uniform had, as it were, visited the Fat Fanny many times in the past, it had never before cut such a good figure. Pardell had followed Sallinger as if he had visited the bar countless times before, and as if he had found a place at the damp counter countless times too. Sallinger ordered two beers, told Pardell to wait just a minute, and went to the back of the bar where some other conductors were sitting, most of them in their shirt-sleeves, wearing dark blue ties. Sallinger leaned over the table and jerked his head in Pardell's direction, explaining something. The explanation took some time, three or four minutes, and finally one of the conductors, a man with curly red hair, gave Sallinger an envelope. Sallinger came back. 'Hey, Fonzie, listen - here, let's have a drink first - right, see this, here's this envelope, I was supposed to give it to someone in Ostend. It's his birthday tomorrow, see, this is a birthday card, very private, understand? When you get there go to the company's Ostend Section, just ask the way, you'll find it, no problem, and give my friend the envelope, Luk Pepping, that's his name. I don't fancy posting it, see? Great, Fonzie, I'll just go back over there a minute, have a good journey, cheers!'

Pardell stood there with a beer glass pointlessly raised in his left hand and the envelope in his right. By himself. Sallinger and the other conductors had left through the back of the bar and were nowhere to be seen. Resigned, he put the envelope into the inside pocket of his jacket and tried to drink the beer as fast as possible. He was surrounded by orange-clad railway porters and gloomy, elderly Federal Rail conductors, who could serve only on regional and commuter trains and thought regretfully of their power in the glory days when passengers weren't customers but meekly did as they were told. He saw the newspaper sellers, the cheerful postal employees, the dark-skinned cleaners … all the people to be found in the fluorescent lighting of large stations, the people that ordinary passengers hardly notice at all.

Unfortunately the waitress, a dark-haired woman younger than Pardell, with a Slav accent and pretty strands of hair falling unintentionally over her slightly perspiring brow, insisted that he must pay for both beers. No, credit wasn't given here. Who did he say? Perry Sallinger? Never heard of him. Pardell blushed and handed her one of the last large notes he had left, a fifty. He gave her a tip of two marks twenty and saw a surprised and relatively charming smile. He smiled back. Then he left the Fat Fanny in a hurry, casting a brief glance at the doorway of a porn cinema diagonally opposite. The dark wall of the station lay at the far end of the street.

***

Pardell had decided to leave Berlin late in the autumn of 1998. A number of coincidental factors had led him to make this decision. A phase of intense strife between Hexi and Holgi. Profound doubts of the absolute importance of his own studies. Distress at the commonplace ending of a relationship, commonplace mainly because both Pardell and his girl-friend Sarah had of course dreamed of something that would not be commonplace, and parted more or less out of sympathetic boredom, with a view to feeling some lively emotion about each other again. The final and most important factor was an amateur video on the small television set his boss had in her office. The video, made on 27 August, showed the interior of a Beilbinder Berlin Tours sight-seeing coach containing a number of horrified Japanese, Americans and New Zealanders going frantic. You could see fists hammering against the pitiless glass, limbs thrashing about - and amidst this inferno you could see, if only for a few seconds, the highly amused face of Leonard Pardell. He had been the tourists' guide, and after this incident Frau Beilbinder did not require his services any more. He had looked at ads in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, and finally found one inserted by an innovative organization offering international practical work together with first-class language courses and computer training. Various different combinations were on offer: you could study English in Calcutta, French in Rwanda, Russian in Russia, Spanish in Argentina. He knew which one he wanted, and started making arrangements next morning. The woman on the phone had an incredibly beautiful voice. He applied for two gap semesters, transferred the 5,730 marks he was required to pay as course fees, inclusive of the flight from Madrid to Buenos Aires, and booked a suitable flight from Munich to Madrid in good time. He began counting the days. He got his papers ready, doing his homework on this escape route. He gave away his few pieces of furniture, left his books with acquaintances in Potsdam, bought two high-quality hard anthracite-grey suitcases, and finally, in the middle of March, travelled by train to Munich, met a former girl-friend in the station restaurant, went by suburban train to Franz Josef Strauss Airport, checked in his luggage, took off around ten a.m. in a Lufthansa plane for Madrid, arrived at twelve-thirty, and was in no hurry to find the departures gate, since the plane for Buenos Aires wasn't taking off for another three hours. He sat happily reading a Spanish grammar for beginners, rose to his feet an hour before the flight was due to leave, went to Desk 23 to check in and handed the smiling lady there his ticket. It said on the ticket that it was for a special charter flight with Air Iberia. The beautiful Air Iberia lady smiled, greeted him in English (with a husky accent), took his ticket, then smiled less widely, made a phone call in Spanish and turned to him with an expression of concern. He was the tenth today, she said, all of them from Germany and Austria. There was no such flight. Even the charter company didn't exist, no, no phone numbers, she really was so sorry. Pardell called Frankfurt to clear up the misunderstanding, only to discover that the number he had dialled no longer existed, sat down on the orange seat, stunned, and very soon realized the full extent of the catastrophe. He decided to do something about his luggage at once. It turned out to have been sent straight on by Lufthansa and was now somewhere between Lisbon and Miami, Florida. He was lucky to be able to change his reservation back to Munich at a very low surcharge, took off at about nineteen hours, and arrived at Munich main station by the suburban train around twenty-three hours - after informing the airport of the scam and going to Customs and the Lufthansa lost luggage office. He had just 800 marks in cash, and about 500 marks more in his savings account. He took a room in a boarding-house in Bayerstrasse, and sat down on the bed. There was no shower. He didn't undress, but sat wondering what he was going to do. He had no idea.

Munich to Starnberg 7.4.1999, 21.20 hours

"Throw anything else out of that window and I'm radioing the motorway police on the spot." "Arsehole. If you don't watch out I'll smash the next bottle through the fucking windscreen." "One more word from you and you get out at the next parking place. You needn't think I'm lowering myself to call you names," said the taxi driver, glancing in the rear-view mirror, where he saw his repulsive fare passing a hand over his bald patch with a look of amusement. But surprisingly, he did keep quiet.

Reichhausen was in a hurry. In other circumstances he would have gone on bandying words with the taxi driver, and might even have got out, just for the fun of it. But he had to make sure he reached Starnberg as quickly as possible. He had left the house twenty minutes earlier, taking a cab at the nearby taxi rank and forgetting to bring anything to drink with him. As soon as he was in the taxi he had regretted it. He told the cabby to stop at a filling station and bought five miniatures of vodka, which he drank one after another, throwing the empties out of the window. The cold airflow and the sound of the bottles trundling away pleased him.

William Fischbein, director of Munich Private Security, the insurers of all old Niel's property, lived in Starnberg. Fischbein had to be informed before the absence of the Ziffer went on record. Reichhausen would simply inform him of the material value of the watch and the consequences of its loss, theft or misappropriation. For only a collector could appreciate the true value of the Ziffer, and of all collectors perhaps no one better than himself. He was extremely agitated, also exhausted and drunk, and his mind dwelt with loving greed on the Grande Complication.

Complications excited the Strangler. Even an ordinary watch had to achieve a great deal: accuracy, the simplicity and harmony of the dial, the precision of the primary mechanism, reliability, durability, and as long a running time as possible. Adding complications was the most difficult part of the work in every respect, for the watchmaker had not only to master them but build them into the watch, using the exquisite delicacy of the basic mechanism. The master must be more than merely capable, or the watch would remain journeyman work, if of a high standard. Ideally, the complication arose from the nature of the basic mechanism itself - a true masterpiece developed out of the design of the bottom train plate, the mixture of materials, the construction of the balance wheel and escapement, in a logical system perfected by the complication. It must be possible to understand the inner meaning of the mechanism with its aid. The workings of a complication must be so perfect yet so plain to understand that it would be self-explanatory even to the enthusiastic layman - one must be able to read the mechanism of great timepieces in any direction. That was what made the 1924 Ziffer à Grande Complication a true masterpiece - if, for instance, you followed the separate, complicated clockwork of the millennium display through the interior of the watch, tracing the paths of the driving mechanism and the escapement, you were led easily to the escape wheel, the spindle wheel, and so to the spring and its fixing - right to the source of power. The complication and the basic mechanism were curiously interrelated. The whole thing amounted to beauty, simplicity and complexity in the smallest possible space, a tiny mechanical universe that would remain complete in itself in the darkness of its case, from which nothing emerged but the click of the escapement, the whirring of the balance spring, all the polyphonic music of the mechanism. It represented the controlled, harmonious distribution of power over a precisely determined period of time.

***

"There's no name and no number on the house, is this the one you wanted? Hello?" shouted the cabby. Ten minutes ago his athletic, red-faced fare had nodded off during the drive, with a small dribble of saliva running from the left corner of his mouth. At the driver's last call he woke up with a snort. Looking in the rear-view mirror, the cabby saw him wake with a start and wipe the film of sweat off his bald patch with his left hand, seeming to be alarmingly wide awake again at once. He grunted agreement, picked up his briefcase of pale brown and wonderfully supple leather, gave the taxi driver two large notes and got out without waiting for his change. Starnberg was cooler than Munich. It had been raining here too, and everything smelled of delicious air freshened by the nearby lake. He enjoyed the crunching of the gravel on the drive, took a deep breath, got out his handkerchief and wiped his face once again. Reichhausen could see no light except in the upper storey of the house, where Fischbein's bedroom would be. As he folded up the handkerchief with the five-pointed coronet above his monogram and put it back in his pocket, he glanced at the window. He'd probably catch Fischbein in his pyjamas. Too bad. Looking at the lighted window, he heard a faint breeze in the fir trees to his left. A car drove by in the next street, splashing through a puddle. He was out of doors, with all the world around him. For a moment his body was at rest, sensing the position of his strongly beating heart within it. Then he felt impelled to go in.

Munich to Ostend 7.4.1999, 21.30 hours

Light had filtered through the doors of the Wagons-Lits Munich Section, you could hear a clanking, buzzing sound; the storeman was bringing round the electric truck with two seats in front which pulled a double-sized trailer. Pardell took the stairs as fast as he could, and sat down hesitantly beside the storeman. "What's the matter with you conductors, then? A lazy bunch, the lot of you. Lounging around in the Fat Fanny, oh yes! But there's work to do, don't you forget!" The storeman started up the electric truck, which jolted and made a grinding sound; the trailer was resisting. The Ostend train was leaving from Platform 17, so they drove down Platform 11 and back into the main hall of the station. The storeman told Pardell that the sleeping car needed to be almost entirely re-stocked, practically everything had been sold. He was groaning, suffering from a hangover, could scarcely stay upright in his seat and drove in wavering lines, hooting at passengers, who scattered before the electric truck and its rake-thin driver like poultry before the slaughterer. Coming into the straight on his way to Platform 17 he almost ran over a small dog's left paw. All the time he kept grumbling to Pardell, who had the sense not to take it personally. The storeman hated all conductors in general. Because they dispersed his things all over Europe, because they were careless and easy-going, because they'd rather throw china out of the window just outside Venice, Port Bou or Amsterdam than wash it up. Because they were fucking sods. On his training trip Pardell had heard the conductor Hoppmann, who was showing him the ropes, say the storeman lived in the stockroom and spent his nights adding up figures, looking for mistakes, going through all the records ten times over to see if the conductor had made a mistake somewhere. Perhaps, Pardell was now thinking, that hadn't been entirely an exaggeration. Cursing, the storeman heaved the wooden crates of drinks up on the roof of Sleeping Car 287, which stood at the end of the train, only just sheltered by the platform roof. He took the bags of dirty linen, handed him the bags of clean linen. Pardell knew he had to enter all items properly in his records and put them away in the drawers and on the shelves. He also had to check that the storeman had counted properly, and make sure that the conductor before him, who had arrived with the sleeping car this morning, had not made any mistakes - and see whether, through an oversight on the part of anyone involved, the sleeping car was either over-supplied or under-supplied. He was going to have a lot of counting to do. Finally the storeman handed him the wooden crate, took a large gulp of Asbach and drove back to the Section with the dirty washing and the empty beer, water and wine glasses, muttering crossly. Back on the platform, Pardell watched the storeman drive away in his erraticmanner, first racing first towards a group of business travellers and just missing them, then grazing and slightly denting a garbage bin. What a pretty picture. Good to see the back of him. Pardell realized that he would be working alone. At this thought he sighed, and smiled. At least he would be alone.

He felt the pull of his destination, Ostend, and the 708 kilometres (as the crow flies) that divided him from it, all the things he must count and enter in his records: Sheets, blue; sheets, large; pillowcases blue/small; bath towels; Perrier, small; Apollinaris, small; knives; pastry forks … He felt the force of the columns of figures waiting in sleeping cars, on duty records, reservations and all those other documents, waiting for him to write them down and transfer them; he saw the printed boxes and narrow columns in which he must place and verify all these items. Hoppmann had shown him just how to do it. And Pardell had quickly realized that a system of constant checking-up on each other was operated by the conductors, stores staff and management. All those papers, documents, times of arrival, series of figures, stock-rooms of provision and delivery notes, all those laundry lists and pre-printed records forms added up to a great building. He had its layout in his head to some extent, but no one had explained who or what awaited him inside the building. He sensed the distance and the night into which the platform would lead him. He sensed the places ahead of him and the voices animating them. Was he apprehensive? Yes, he was.

Fifteen minutes to departure. He looked at the reservations list. There was one reservation in Munich, a Gents, Double. Gents, Three, Tourist would be boarding the train in Cologne. So he could spend the time between Munich and Cologne counting. He calmed down a little. At the other end of the platform he saw passengers getting on the train and noticed their different rhythms of movement. He noticed the agitated passengers, and the tired evening commuters to whom the train was just an extension of the suburban line. The reservation for the Gents, Double arrived five minutes before the train left, very relaxed, taking his papers casually out of the inside pocket of his trench-coat - a mild and friendly glance, a nod, and he got into the sleeping car. Pardell followed him down the corridor; he had already opened up Compartment 22, which awaited its occupant with the lights on. The passenger ordered coffee for next morning. "Sono solo. I'm on my own," were his last words, spoken in a friendly tone. He had added a twenty-mark note to his travel papers, inside his Italian passport - just in case another male passenger wanted to occupy a Double during the journey. Pardell took the note without hesitation, looked at it with pleasure, but did not actually pocket it until he was in the office. It was an advance tip, meaning that he still had to deliver the goods. Indeed, it was a bribe. According to regulations, if a compartment had already been opened, the conductor always had to fill it with passengers of the appropriate class before opening another. For instance, suppose that when the train reached Aachen in five hours' time a well-heeled merrymaker were to feel an urge to eat his breakfast with a view of the ever-misty ocean off Ostend, and suppose, swaying and smelling of liquor, he approached Pardell and asked for a Double, a berth in a compartment for two, then Pardell was expected to put him in with the Italian, who would have been asleep for some time. If you couldn't afford a Single you just booked a Double and tried to bribe the conductor. It was a better deal for the conductor than for the Compagnie, which was why it was strictly forbidden. Pardell had quickly made up his mind to take the note anyway. This decision boosted his confidence. He entered the passenger in the sleeping car records, just as Hoppmann had shown him ("Right, see this, here's the reservation. Now, where's that number, oh yes, here we are, so then I write the number down here, look, yes, right here in this box. You'll soon get the hang of it, it seems much worse now than it really is, honest …") By now the train was on its way to Augsburg. Indecision about what to do first on the one hand, exhaustion as his nerves grew calmer on the other, and a desire to sit down and open a bottle of staff beer all vied with one another. The Federal Rail conductress came hurrying past. Pardell handed that resolute young woman the Italian's ticket, which she stamped before disappearing again. Pardell took a bottle out of its crate, glanced at the many others he would have to count and put in the fridge. Later. A little later. Once again he thought back to the evening when his transatlantic illusion had burst like a bubble. Sitting down on the bed in his room in the boarding-house, he had noticed the vertigo from which the outside world was suffering. The objects around him, the mirror, the chest of drawers, the window looking out on the night in the walled back yard, the events of the immediate past, his flight back to Munich, as well as the things and the people he had originally wanted to leave, were all whirling around him in different orbits, the fragments, scattered near and far, of a collision between unevenly balanced heavenly bodies. To his own surprise, he managed to hold back the tears. He had an idea, a vague feeling somewhere in his mind, that apart from Juliane, whom he could still call if absolutely necessary, there was someone else he knew in Munich … someone who was still living in Munich … oh yes, Salat, that was it. Rudolph Salat. Salat had been living in Munich for quite some time. He picked up the phone. Directory Enquiries had never heard of him. So next morning, after a terrible night, he called Salat's mother in Celle.

"Yes, do call him, maybe you can persuade Rudi," were her last words at the end of a twenty-minute conversation to which Pardell had contributed almost nothing except for the first few remarks. What Rudi's mother thought he ought to be persuaded of she did not reveal to Pardell. In his imagination, the presence of his school friend in the strange city of Munich seemed like a promise. A number you could call, with the certainty of knowing the voice of the person who picked up the phone, was an invisible anchor amidst all that was unpleasant and unknown. A sequence of figures bringing hope and confidence.

Pardell told Salat, who had picked up the phone at his first attempt to call, that he was in Munich and in great difficulties, he was looking for somewhere to stay, a room, it was urgent. Salat thought for a moment, then became quite animated and said this was an extraordinary coincidence - entirely by chance his flat-sharer had just moved out and the room was free, Pardell could move in at once if he liked, he, Salat, for one would be very pleased if he did. Yes, of course, the room was fully furnished. Salat sounded really enthusiastic. With great relief Pardell picked up his hand luggage, paid for the room and an astonishing telephone bill, called the lost luggage office once again from a public phone, but in vain, and set off to see his old - well, friend wasn't the right word, nor was acquaintance. Set off to see Salat.

The flat was in an old building near the Columbusplatz, opposite the railway line running south from Munich. Most of it was at the back of the building, but the little kitchen window faced the front. It could be opened only a crack, and the majestic sound of passing trains was muted as it came through the window. The flat was tiny, but had a very long thin corridor crammed with shelves fifteen centimetres deep, from which the stuff stored on them - shoes, old keep-fit machines, camping gear and magazines - protruded unattractively. It smelled of the rotting piles of leaves of eternal autumns, of the fantastic soups of Eurasia, of the dried entrails of unknown species of domestic animals, and of mysterious herbs. In some places it felt creepy, in others the unhealthy warmth of irregularly installed piping systems of gigantic extent and obviously working overtime predominated. Towards the end of the corridor, these more general smells gave way to the clearly private variety; here you passed imaginary laundry baskets full of cotton clothing worn by people who went in for sweaty activities.

Who was Rudolph Salat? After staying down a class twice, Rudolph Salat was close enough to Pardell's year for them to be school friends. Grasping the situation with the speed of light, he lost no opportunity of having a good time there and then. Pardell had been hiking and camping with him a couple of times on expeditions to provincial towns in Lower Saxony such as Brunswick, Uelzen and Fallingbostel, expeditions that would begin in the afternoon only to end in adverse circumstances two days later, and that involved magic lifts, cadging cigarettes, and casting around for generous strangers. Salat had been living in Munich for two years, studying something or other. He was quite good-looking, with slightly reddish-blond hair, although he was on the way to a certain flabbiness, especially his cheeks, which now bulged on each side of the finely shaped furrows of his nose. He had always worn suits, shirts and ties, but now there was a certain depravity, a touch of seriously intended decadence about him. Pardell had entered the flat at the southern end of the corridor, shaking hands with Salat by the dim light of an electric bulb. Salat immediately asked if he had a cigarette, he'd just that moment run out, and he lit it while they were still in the corridor. Then they looked at the room in question, the fully furnished room, Pardell agreed to take it, and put his hand luggage down in its sourish atmosphere with incredible relief. Then he gave the grinning Salat, who was "clean out of cash just now" a fifty-mark note, and a little later Salat came back with seven packets of Gauloises Blondes and three bottles of terrifying red wine. They talked about nothing in particular. Pardell didn't want to tell anyone about his recent experiences and his failure. Around nine in the evening Pardell gave Salat another fifty marks, "for supplies", during Salat's absence struggled with nausea, nodded off in the tunnel-like lavatory, woke three hours later, dragged himself through the empty flat to his room, went to sleep in his clothes, and didn't notice the totally intoxicated Salat come back at about seven in the morning, take ruthless possession of a large part of the quilt, and make himself comfortable in Pardell's warmth.

Next day Pardell woke up shivering, and smiled at the conduct of his new flat-mate Salat, who had obviously been so drunk that he had come to the wrong room. It was no use trying to wake him, so Pardell went quietly into the kitchen, where he failed to find anything that would make a proper breakfast. There was only a stale crust of bread. He ate it.

As soon as Pardell had given Salat, who woke up early in the afternoon, four hundred marks for the rent of the room inclusive of heating, Salat's attitude towards his new flat-sharer changed. He looked at Pardell more sceptically, with a vague kind of suspicion, as if Leo were a passing acquaintance who had originally dropped in for morning coffee and then, off his own bat, decided to stay to supper. Since Salat believed implicitly in the validity of his own feelings, his hostility to Pardell increased. For instance, Salat began secretly holding him responsible for the many overflowing ashtrays and the uncleaned lavatory. On the second morning Salat looked with disgust at the resinous urine tidemark in the washbasin, although it was Salat himself who had been happily piddling in the basin for years and never cleaned it with any suitable products.

On the third day Pardell came home from an aimless walk to find Salat snoring distressingly in his bed, tried with silent disgust to grab the lion's share of the quilt in his own turn, failed, and lay down, shivering, beside the narcoticized, strong-smelling sleeper. He could not get to sleep. He thought. No doubt about it, he hated Salat, that was all he knew for certain. He had hated him before, and if it hadn't been an emergency he would never have called him. He hated him all the more because he couldn't understand why Salat was bothering him by occupying his room, since after all he could have given him, Pardell, the other room instead. What did it mean?

After a few moments the question of the other room and what the matter with it was had made Pardell get up and go down the long corridor. The door to the other room was in the middle of the west side of the corridor. Since the electric light was so dim, he was in deep twilight, but he found to his surprise that the place was a tiny, musty little cubby-hole, a lumber-room created when the corridor was partitioned off from the flat next door. Instead of reaching into empty air, Pardell's cautiously groping hand had touched the handle of a mop, which fell out into the corridor. There were several buckets with dust already beginning to solidify in them, there were cigarette ends, and finally there were a few bold cockroaches who, confronted for the first time in generations with the existence of intelligent life in the form of Pardell, scurried off incredulously into cracks and crevices. Pardell closed the door of the cubby-hole. Went back to the room where the disgusting Salat was sleeping and lay down beside him. Suddenly enlightened as to the nature of his accommodation, he felt an irresistible longing to get away from it.

***

The passengers going by on their way to sit in ordinary non-sleeping cars, stopping to ask him if it was far to carriage number so-and-so, didn't realize that he knew as little about it as they did. Being an honest soul, the first few times he had said only something suitably vague, explaining that he didn't know for sure himself, he was still new to the job, this was his first trip, can't really say, I only work in this car, not the others … Soon the endless explanations of his own uncertainty began getting him down. For instance, he had to count a gree enter railway stations, which are almost always located in city centres, their massive façades looking out on the main boulevards, gateways to a world of timetables and destinations. We enter railway stations somewhere or other, we stand outside the Gare de l'Est in Paris, our gaze wandering over the front of the building, we rise, we pass the figures of Traffic and Modern Progress, now a hundred years old, we settl

When a friendly woman in a mud-brown coat with a practical shoulder-bag slung around her asked whether it was much further, etc., he said briefly, still counting, "Yes, quite a way. Keep going."

Shortly before Cologne, he understood two related things: he saw that in general there was not much to be said for the charm of an auxiliary conductor who can do nothing but explain that he is new and works only in this car. But he also saw what wearing a uniform meant - it meant being competent whether you really were or not. It meant that you had become an established part of a whole complex of regulations, timetables and rolling stock, even though of course you didn't have the slightest thing to do with any of them. All the same, so far as everyone outside the system was concerned you had moved to the other side. It also worked the other way around, for he did in fact feel that the few passengers he had met so far were the representatives of an outside world where people were looking for seats, while it was his urgent business to count little 0.3 litre bottles of South Tyrolean red wine and put them away in the cupboard, to join other little 0.3 litre bottles of South Tyrolean red wine already counted and put away by one of his colleagues. The bad-tempered store-man who would check his records had also counted all the little bottles at some point. That was what it was all about here.

Shortly before arriving at a station where reservations were expected he had to open the relevant compartment or compartments and put on the light ("Right, watch this, yes, that one there, that's it, open it up, so now where's the light? Look, here's the light switch, right, yes, put the light on now, good, yes, you'll soon learn, 'course you will …" such had been Chief Conductor Hoppmann's explanation). He opened Compartment 11, the first in the car, put on the light, checked the three Tourist class berths and waited in the corridor, ready to step out of the car when the train stopped. They were already approaching the bridge over the Rhine, he could see the cathedral in the distance bathed in yellowish-green light, he heard the metallic clatter of his sleeping car going over the steel of the bridge. Here we are. He sensed the aura of the sleeping city of Cologne, thought quietly of the sound of a night train passing slowly, heard from afar as you try to get to sleep …

***

When Pardell had woken up after the night when he discovered the truth about Salat's flat and the extent of Salat's fraudulent conduct, he made four more discoveries. First, immediately after waking up, he discovered that the wretched Salat had already gone out, and that he had obviously been through Pardell's jacket before leaving and taken the last three notes from Pardell's wallet. Then, out in the dark corridor, he discovered that Munich Electricity had evidently decided to respond to Salat's poor moral sense in the matter of payment by cutting off the electricity, for neither the dim light bulb in the hall nor its fellows in the kitchen and bathroom reacted at all to being switched on, nor did the encrusted stove warm up when he tried to make himself an espresso. Then he found that there was nothing to eat in the dark and already defrosting fridge. The only remaining item of food was half a bottle of Getzlaff Curry Ketchup, all dried up and staring at Pardell. And finally he saw a couple of open packets of cleansing tissues lying on the kitchen table. They bore a blue and gold emblem on a white background, two golden, athletic big cats with their paws stretched out to form a graceful oval with cursive lettering around it: Wagon-Lits, read Pardell. In smaller lettering below the frame made by the outstretched limbs of the heraldic animals, another Wagon-Lits was complemented by the words Compagnie International des. Which meant International Sleeping Cars Company.

Sleeping cars. Railways. Pardell sought his memory for railway stations, in his mind walked past the dark rows of trains in which he had travelled, and tried to slot the Wagons-Lits, their emblem and the activities of their company into place. At first he came up with nothing, but then he remembered an Interrail journey with a school friend many years ago. At one point on this trip they had been travelling on a crowded night train, along with several hundred other young people who were squatting, complaining, in the corridors and luggage areas, or lying in their sleeping bags like the dead. Like all the others, they had boarded the train somewhere with the hope of the innocent, and without thinking it over properly. As it moved out of Basle station they exchanged amused glances, only to find themselves not ten minutes later struggling, with increasing desperation, through crowds of other people also making their way forward with increasing desperation, treading accidentally on the feet of Finnish girls, feeling the ruthless elbows of panic-stricken young Italians, losing sight of each other, fearing they might be robbed, standing still for minutes on end because someone had collapsed hysterically seven or eight places ahead of them - ending up, at some point, outside a locked wooden door with a small glass window through which they could see a dim, empty, well-tended place, with soft lighting from yellow lamps suggesting such warmth and comfort that they wanted nothing more than to be let in and allowed to stay there. They rattled and knocked at the door, just as many other young people before them had rattled it and knocked at it, until an angry-looking man with a blue uniform and a dark, bushy moustache came up and called through the door, with a strong Swiss accent, "Got reservations, have you?" They hadn't even known you could make reservations, and honestly said no, whereupon the Swiss disappeared again behind that fine door, muttering crossly. There was an emblem on the middle of the door: two big cats forming an oval on which the words Wagons-Lits were inscribed in gold in small, cursive lettering.

***

Sleeping cars are almost always in exposed positions on trains - usually at the front or the back, depending on the direction from which they have arrived at a station and on whether it is a terminus or not. Cologne is a through station. Pardell's sleeping car was a long way down the platform. Reservations list in hand, blue-clad, attentive and admirably watchful, he waited for his Gents, Three, Tourist. It was drizzling slightly, and you could hear the soft sound of cars in the streets raising spray as they drove through puddles. Another two minutes at this stop. Just then someone - no, two people, one older and one younger man who might be father and son - reached the platform, speeded up, asked a Federal Rail porter something, the porter pointed a long way back, indicating the distant Pardell, whereupon they started running, travel documents in one hand, hauling suitcases along with the other. Pardell remained composed, even more, he felt his composure increasing with every frantic step the two covered - just because he wasn't going to Ostend of his own free will, because he had no control over the form of his journey, he could move freely, hesitant and still unsure of himself, but more freely with every breath he drew of the fresh, damp air of Cologne. Back in his office, drinking a shot of Edelstoff, he remembered how he had come to be on the other side of the sleeping-car door. He thought of all the time between that "Got reservations, have you?" and his own friendly greeting to the two passengers as they arrived, panting: "Come on, quick, I'll give you a hand, yes, don't worry. Evening, gentlemen! Come this way, here's your compartment, shall I put your cases up on the rack for you?"

2 April 1999, five days ago, 13.12 p.m. Pardell had now reached the end of the roofed part of Platform 11 and was standing in the weak, still wintry mid-day sun. He had been told to go right down to the far end of the platform, then turn left, he would see a small side exit, and the entrance to the Wagons-Lits Munich Section was on the left of that. There was a shabby wooden double door painted grey in the side wall of the main station, with a rectangular, dark blue board measuring about twenty centimetres fastened to it. It showed two golden, athletic big cats with their limbs forming an oval.

"You want Lost Luggage?" Pardell almost said yes: the contours of his two anthracite-grey suitcases appeared to him in a storm of memory involving a dark, sparkling blue sky above the North Atlantic and a motionless plane fighting not to go down. "No, I wanted the Compagnie Intern … the Wagons-Lits," replied Pardell. "You haven't lost anything? Do you have a complaint? Anything wrong on your journey?" "No, I was looking for a job." "Saw the ad in the Abendzeitung, did you?" Pardell hesitated, and looked fleetingly at the whitewashed wall opposite. A large, round railway clock with a second hand steadily advancing. To its left, and yellowing at the edges, an old map of Europe (with boundaries as they had been in the Iron Curtain period), a blue enamel plate with faded yellow lettering on it, and a little lower the black and white photograph of two youngish men in front of a station that Pardell did not know. The man opposite Pardell was a little shorter than he was, rather stocky, and certainly thirty years older. He wore a nondescript brown suit and a subdued tie. His sparse hair was white and cut short, which gave his face an undeniably intelligent expression. When he saw Pardell come in he stopped in mid-movement. This made him look remarkably skilful, like the shadow-play figure of a tightrope walker, but with a touch of absurdity about him in what at first glance was a shabby office in the most remote corner of a large railway station. "You never know if anything will come of those ads," said the tightrope walker thoughtfully, and then went on, winking, "The Abendzeitung, you said? Wasn't that last week? We don't usually advertise. Last year we put in an ad and hired a man who was arrested right there on the platform three weeks later," he said, smiling and looking into Pardell's eyes, inquiringly but with a very friendly expression. "What had he done?" "Oh, I don't know exactly. I heard something about a surgeon from Karlsruhe who had to spend some time in hospital, but not to operate there …" Smoothly continuing the movement he had just halted, the white-haired man went over to a wooden partition with two large, high windows in it, and a wooden door left ajar. Still talking, he asked Pardell to follow him. "Well, let's hope I can keep you a little longer than that. Only joking. So you saw the ad - when can you start? Are you …?" "I'm a student. I've taken two gap semesters because …" "Ideal. We always have a few students. I'll need your university registration certificate, your inland revenue card, a certificate of health. Have you ever had, how can I put it, much experience of dealing with people?" "I worked part-time as a city guide in Berlin for quite a while …" "Oh, excellent, professional expertise too! When could we begin your training?" "Training?" "Nothing special, I'll send you out on a trip with an old hand, an experienced man. Providing he has no objection, you could start directly after that. Don't have any infectious diseases, do you? No, don't bother to say, I don't want to know, only joking!" He paused, his eyes travelling across the desk piled high with papers, tables, circular scales and lists in small handwriting at the far end of the room, and on to a window with a view of Bayerstrasse. Behind him, on the wall, was another map of Europe and another but smaller clock. The map had little red, black and green flags covered with numbers stuck in it. Its proportions seemed curiously distorted - a distortion that Pardell had noticed at his first fleeting glance, without being able to decide for certain what caused that impression. "May I ask how old you are?" "Twenty-eight." "Fancy that, I was twenty-seven myself when I joined the Compagnie! And I've never regretted it! I expected to stay for six months, and I've been here for, let's see, yes, I've been here for … thirty-six years, two months and eleven days! My name's Eichhorn, I'm in charge of the Munich Section, and also, but you'll have gathered that for yourself, head of the Variables." "Pleased to meet you, my name's Pardell," said Pardell, who had not the faintest idea what Eichhorn was talking about. "Swiss, are you?" "No, German." "Ah. Pity about that. All the same, you've made something of yourself. Good-looking. Polite. Only joking! No, really, I like the look of you … Well, I ought to tell you what to expect. You don't believe that story about the Abendzeitung yourself, do you? We never put in any ad at all. Only joking just now! We don't put ads in!" Eichhorn laughed, moved slightly, swivelled in his chair, took cognac glasses and a bottle of Rémy Martin three quarters full out of the desk. "Just a small one to wish you benvenuto!" Pardell nodded, smiled, liking Herr Eichhorn very much. For one thing, because he felt that his qualities were in natural demand here. Were going down well. His intelligent and malleable predilection for saying yes rather than no. His hitherto ridiculously unexploited gift for languages; he could hear their different rhythms. Most of all, however, he liked Eichhorn himself - his amusing way of talking while not moving a millimetre! His pleasant face, intelligent in an old-fashioned way. Head of the Variables? "Now, pay attention. What we call Variables in the jargon, entre nous, you know what I mean, well, extras." "Extras like actors in a play?" "Heavens, no. Where do you think we are? Well, perhaps you're right." Eichhorn thought about it. "No, it's not really that. Some time ago, during and after the war, our Variables included a lot of people who did casual work going from job to job in the big hotels and restaurants. Who therefore, for one reason or another, weren't in full-time employment. It's obvious; a conductor has to be a waiter and cook too, must have good manners and so on, must be used to working nights, which isn't to everyone's taste. I couldn't do it myself any more. Ah well. Heh, heh!" He took a small sip. "An extra would be asked, for instance, if he could go on a five-day trip, let's say Zurich to Vienna, Vienna to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Basle. When regular employees weren't available at the various Sections." "An extra is someone who works only now and then?" "That's how it used to be. We can't do that any more. You'll be busy full-time, my dear boy! But you'll have to chop and change, obviously. Going about day and night, night and day! Like the wind! Whooo!" He smiled again, and looked attentively at Pardell's face, Before Eichhorn continued, a keenly intellectual expression which did not fit at all with his flow of conversation flashed into his eyes. Eichhorn explained the "broad outlines" of the system, and the tasks of the auxiliaries. "Only the broad outlines, you understand. The niceties, the details - you'll pick them up as you go along, I can't very easily explain them to you just like that. Everyone has his own style …" There were over fifty Sections, four of them in Germany, based in Dortmund, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich. Each Section ran certain services - for instance, Munich ran the sleeping car to Naples, although there was a Section in Naples too. Whereas the Neapolitans ran the sleeping car to Stuttgart. There were regular cars, and additional cars depending on the season and the number of reservations. And there were extra trains, both now in spring and again in summer. It was a very complex network. "Now, how shall I put it, one Section can't employ as many permanent conductors as would be needed to have one in every car all the time. The labour laws come into it, you see, statutory rest periods, that kind of thing. Sometimes a man can't do a trip because he's already worked too many hours, or had too many beers. Only joking! Another cognac? Yes, of course, naturally, do. Well, when that happens we need extras. The extras don't work exclusively out of one Section, they work all over Europe. It's always been like that. I said so before. So you might go from Munich to Paris, for example, stop over there for a day's break, then go on a car to Madrid, from there to Barcelona - then you have two days' break. Then you go to Marseille, off duty, where you take over the car for Brussels; you make a short trip to Ostend and then home to Munich on the night train. Sometimes you have short trips, sometimes long ones …" Eichhorn smiled dreamily. For the first time he let his head sink slightly. "You'll be working on your own, getting your instructions in the Sections of whatever cities are concerned. It functions well. You get an auxiliary's pass and a travel book. That's elementary. You use the travel book to make yourself out tickets to wherever you're going on duty. Naturally the idea of using it for various private trips will cross your mind! But watch out!" Eichhorn was grinning broadly now, and raised his forefinger. "That's strictly forbidden. And you won't have any time for it anyway." "Oh, I don't care about that. In fact I'm glad to hear it!" "Glad to hear it, are you? Well, well, I won't ask any questions. You get sixteen marks an hour, plus 11 per cent of the turnover on the food and drink you sell - but the man who trains you will tell you that anyway. Can you come along this evening? If so I'd send you with Herr Hoppmann, an experienced old colleague - I think he's going to Ostend … " He looked on the desk, found nothing, and went into the outer office where a large duty roster covered with tiny writing hung on the wall. "Yes, like I said, Ostend! That's a relatively long trip, give you time to familiarize you with the job. I don't think you learn the rest until you're working on your own. Well, how about it? I could do with someone in a couple of days' time, in fact I was beginning to wonder whether - heh, heh - whether I ought to go out again myself, see what I mean?" Pardell did not hesitate for a moment to agree, perhaps a little too quickly not to make it perfectly clear to Eichhorn that he was in urgent need of this job. He said yes, fervently. "Best of luck for the tour d'instruction," said the remarkable Eichhorn as they parted. "Twenty hours fifty. Don't be late." Pardell left in a state of euphoria, although during the day that euphoria naturally turned to uneasiness the closer he came to his training trip with Chief Conductor Hoppmann. It was to be a dreadful experience. In every remark that Pardell diffidently made, however minor and insignificant, Hoppmann found small, innocent words that he could twist in order to demonstrate his wit, intelligence, sense of humour and fine feelings. He particularly liked distorting proper names. "So what did you say your name was? Paddle? That's not a name, a paddle's what you need when you're up the creek. What? Pudel, as in poodle? Woof woof! Ha ha ha, that's a good one, tell you what, I think humour is very important, I like a man who can take a joke, you bet, now let's see what we have here …" said Hoppmann in his strong Bavarian accent, by way of welcoming him to the Section. Pardell found himself addressed during the trip as Puttl, Pattel and Petall, and when Hoppmann had decided to use his first name as Lo, Lovis, Luis and Lukas. Also as Polni, a displeasing mixture of "Leonard" and "Pardell" which made Hoppmann grin, so that he frequently used it, calling "Polni" from a distance, addressing him by that name at close quarters, or muttering the name "Polni, Polni" to himself like a senile old man. For instance, "Come along Polni, little Polni," as he inspected the glinting splashes of beer on the black plastic floor of the office. "Hey, Polni, be a good fellow and wipe that up, it gets everywhere. Come on, look back there, there's a little room next to the shower with cleaning stuff in it. Keep everything nice and clean, Polni!"

***

The third man who should have been in the Tourist compartment was ill. Or had been delayed. Or had changed his mind. Pardell completed the paperwork, finished counting, prepared the sachet of instant coffee and the cup for the passenger in Number 22, lay down on the conductor's berth and dozed. He got out the old ten-mark alarm clock Hoppmann had kindly given him after the training trip ("Hey, Pallti, you look a little sleepy, I can see that, yes, you look terrible, tired, not half, see here, here's this nice alarm clock, nothing the matter with it, right, you can give it back to me when you finish with us, no sleeping on the job, see? Give it back to me when you leave us and no sleeping on the job, get it? Talk about a funny one …"). He set the alarm for 4.20 a.m., leaving plenty of time before they reached Louvain, where he was to wake the passenger in the Double. All was peaceful, just the cataract of the rails going by and the quiet hum of the electricity. No sleeping on the job! That Bavarian idiot Hoppmann! Who does he remind me of. Let's think. Was that someone coming along the corridor? No, someone going to the lavatory at the end of the car … this berth was cramped! Pretty, she was, that woman in the Fat Fanny, the waitress, the way she wiped the sweat from her brow with her wrist, there was something about it that …

Meanwhile the train was passing through the countryside south-east of Verviers. Despite the early hour, a group of people were standing close to the railway embankment near the little village of St Witz. They were searching the area, and scarcely registered the passing of the D222 night express, in which Pardell was dozing off at that very moment. Early yesterday morning, a pensioner's German Shepherd dog had retrieved an unusual item for his master, an item which the pensioner had not thrown for him. It was a man's left hand, cut off about ten centimetres above the wrist, and the cut had been a clean one, executed with unusual force, which made the police from Verviers suspect at first that the owner of the hand could have had his arm trapped under a train by accident. But forensic examination made that seem improbable. For the hand not only lacked a body, it lacked something else of its own: its middle finger. The pathologist had decided that the finger had been severed some hours after the death of the hand, and even then the hand had still been attached to the body. The police suspected that this was a classic case of the amputation of a finger for the sake of a valuable ring sunk into the flesh of its former owner. Another striking feature was that the hand was in the course of thawing out, so for some reason or other it had been frozen. Furthermore, this solitary left hand suggested that it had belonged to a man of forty to fifty. The upper part of the stump, on the left, bore the small but distinctively curved scar of what had once been a deep wound, perhaps made by a hook or a corkscrew. It was a revolting and alarming case - which did not, however, make headlines outside the regional papers and a short report in Le Monde du Belge. The newspapers described it as if it were a "wanted" notice, along the lines of "Have You Seen This Hand?" No one responded, for at the time the Belgian public was chiefly concerned with a large group of paedophiles who had been doing unspeakable things to a large number of children. Since no corpse with a missing hand had turned up either, no one was bothering much more about it when a few officers of the Verviers police, led by a hungry and bad-tempered inspector, went searching the fields, damp with drizzling rain, on both sides of the tracks with their torches and their dogs.