(2005) Rat Run by Gerald Seymour

Author:Gerald Seymour [Seymour, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-30T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

In the city of Dresden, on their first visit to Germany, an elderly American couple waited for one of a line of public telephones in the square to come free.

That afternoon they had toured the opera house and the Kreuzkirche, then crossed the Augustus-brucke to trawl the galleries of old masters' works in the Zwinger houses. Next they would visit the Hofkirche in the Theaterplatz. They needed a telephone to ring their hotel to confirm a booking for the morning, car and driver, to travel out of the city to the Pillnitz Palace and take them later to Meissen where they would buy porcelain for shipment to Chicago.

They stood, Dwight and Janet, behind a young man. He had dialled, and now he waited for an answer. Always the difficulty at such a time, which phone to target. Which caller would take the least time? They had chosen to stand behind this young man, slight and with bowed shoulders. He spoke.

They could not hear him. But even if he had raised his voice they would have been too polite to listen

- and, anyway, their knowledge of German was scant.

She had her thumb to keep the guidebook open at the page for the Hofkirche and together they matched the view of its towering spire across the Theaterplatz with the photograph.

In front of them, the man hooked the phone back, turned, smiled politely and gestured that the booth was now available. Such a charming-looking young man . . . Her husband would not have done it -

Dwight had the shyness that age brought - but Janet was bolder. Would he, please, show them how to operate the payphone? She gave him their hotel-room card with the number they needed, and coins. He did it for them, waited until the call was connected with Reception, then passed the receiver to her. And he was gone.

It made them both feel good, as they crossed the Theaterplatz, to have met a young man so

considerate.

'Where do you think, Dwight, that guy was

from?'

'Couldn't say, could have been from anywhere.'

The office worker was brought by the Bear to Timo Rahman.

In the life of the pate no deals were too small, none was unworthy of his attention. He had come from the yard where he owned the fleet of haulage lorries that carried loads across Europe, legal and contraband, and had arrived at a site on the Elbe side of St Pauli where the old building had been flattened. Bulldozers worked there and shifted aside the mess of concrete, wire and rubble. He had a share, thirty-three and a third per cent, in the hotel to be built on what was now a hole. Dust swirled round him and he wore an orange hard hat jauntily. He would move on from there to the fruit, vegetable and flower market at the Hauptbahnhof where money was paid him for

the right to set up a stall. The haulage business brought him tens of thousands of euros a year; the hotel would earn him millions on completion; the stalls were only worth hundreds.

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