Katherine Carlyle Read Online Free PDF Page A

above mine. She says she can’t give out that kind of information.
    I nod. “It’s important to be —” But I can’t remember the German for
discreet
, so I say, “It’s important not to tell everything.”
    She stares at me.
    “No, really,” I say. “I mean it.”
    I walk round to the back of the hotel. The bulb in the streetlamp outside my room is broken, and glass fragments glitter on the cobbles. The window above mine is closed. Hot-pink blinds are lowered almost to the sill.
    /
    My first full day disappoints me with sunlight and clear skies, but at least I know it can’t go on. Berlin is one of the coldest cities in Europe. Last winter was severe, with heavy snowfalls as late as March. The papers talked of “Arctic air systems” and temperatures that were “Siberian.” Out on the street there’s something brisk and combative in people’s gestures and expressions, even in the language they use. How lazy Rome seems by comparison! A city of lotus-eaters.
    It takes forty minutes to reach Walter-Benjamin-Platz. Open at both ends, with tall utilitarian arcades running along its northern and southern sides and a paved area in between, the square feels like a civic monument, built to commemorate a loss or a catastrophe. Since I don’t have Klaus Frings’s exact address I start at the southeast corner of the square and move slowly westwards, checking the nameplates on every door. When I reach Leibnitzstrasse without having found him I cross to the northwest corner and work my way east. Halfway along I begin to panic. What if he has moved? Approaching the penultimate door, I scan the names on the upright rectangle of tarnished metal:
Nowaczyk, Lutz König, Dr. Popp, Hauff-Buschmann, Wimpary, Frau C Alvarez, Frings
—
    Frings!
    Once again I admire the clipped, almost porcelain ring of that single, simple monosyllable. I touch the buzzer next to his name. Round and satisfyingly concave, it seems to have been constructed with my fingertip in mind. I step back. Now what? Should I make contact with him? If so, how? I feel ahead of myself, out of sync, like a detective trying to solve a crime that has yet to be committed. The name Klaus Frings is all I have, but what is it exactly that I want? I need to think.
    I turn away.
    Built into an arch in the corner of nearby Savignyplatz is a café with dark wood tables and red chairs. As I walk in, the radio is playing a Dinah Washington song. My father has always had a thing about Dinah Washington. He used to sing along sometimes when we were in the car. “What a Difference a Day Makes” or “September in the Rain.” His voice wasn’t bad, but my mother would grin at me and shake her head despairingly, blond hair covering oneeye. An S-Bahn train thunders overhead, blotting out the music. The whole café shudders, but the man behind the bar doesn’t react. His thinning hair is the color of mahogany. I order a hot chocolate, then sit by the window.
    When he brings my drink I say,
“Mille grazie.”
    “You’re Italian?”
    “Sorry. I forgot where I was.”
    I’m English, I tell him, though I’ve lived in Rome since I was nine. He’s from the north, he says. A small town near Brescia. But he has been in Berlin for fifteen years. The door opens and a woman enters. He excuses himself.
    I look around. Standing at the counter is a man in his fifties, dressed in a black suit and a black polo-neck. Another, younger man is sitting at a table, silver headphones over his ears. A third man is reading a magazine, a bag of cat litter at his feet. Is one of them Klaus Frings? It’s possible. Anything’s possible. Another train rumbles past, the reflected carriages flowing right to left across the upstairs windows of the building opposite and crumpling as they cross the glass. I sit there for an hour. When I finally go up to the bar to pay, the owner says he hopes to see me again before I fly back to Italy. I nod and smile and say I hope so too.
    For the rest of the day I