Konrad Ascher stood in the central hall of Frankfurt am Main station, looking around him as he buttoned his overcoat. The big railway clock showed nearly noon. The station was busy, people hurrying to and fro across the marble floor, their paths weaving and crossing like an elaborate dance figure. Having checked that his wallet and passport were secure in his breast pocket, Ascher picked up his suitcase and turned toward the broad arch that framed the exit.
Outside, he found a grey sky and damp pavements, but the clouds were high enough that more rain seemed unlikely. A coldish wind was gusting, but Ascher welcomed the fresh air after four hours in the train. He passed the line of clean, shiny black cabs waiting at the taxi stand and turned right at the next corner. He was confident this was the street; yes, Kanzlerstrasse. In ten minutes, he was standing at the hotel reception desk. He presented a Belgian passport in the name of Coppens and gave an address in Bruges, a city he had not seen for ten years.
Ascher was regarded by his employers as a very reliable man. At their direction, he carried out confidential and delicate assignments; assignments requiring a certain professional ruthlessness, such as the job that had now brought him to Frankfurt. It suited this work that he was by nature cautious; he preferred, for example, to travel by train, surrounded by people, than alone in a car on the open road. He did not like to fly. He stayed in smaller, older-style hotels, where the breakfasts were substantial, the gloomy lobbies usually empty, and the passports he used subjected to no more than ordinary scrutiny.
Ascher’s guiding principle was anonymity, and in all things he took the course that drew least attention. He spoke as little as possible in public and avoided even minor arguments. His voice was unmemorable, and he had smoothed his boyhood Hessian accent into standard Hanover German. Always clean-shaven, he was blessed with regular features and colouring; his hair might have been described as medium brown.
His one indulgence was his clothing, although even in that he was not ostentatious. He had his suits and shirts made to measure, and bought his shoes only from Ludwig Reiter in Vienna. He had learned that being well-dressed was a most effective disguise. Far from making him stand out in people’s memories, it erased him. On the street, in railway stations, in offices and government departments, the eyes of policemen, concierges, secretaries, all quickly passed over him; the man in the neat grey suit and well-cut overcoat calmly waiting for the lift was not someone of whom note need be taken.
Ascher carried his suitcase up to the hotel’s second floor and along a creaking parquet corridor until he found his room. It was narrowly rectangular, with a single net-curtained window at the far end. He looked around the dark wood-panelled walls approvingly; there had been no attempt to modernise this place, and he felt entirely comfortable. The ceiling light, necessary even in daytime, glowed through a pearled glass shade. A tall, heavy wardrobe stood along one wall, the single bed with its green chenille bedspread along the other. The carpet underfoot was a sombre brown. On a low table stood a large cut-glass ashtray and a black telephone. The air smelled, not unpleasantly, of stale cigar-smoke and dust.
He washed his face and hands in the cream-tiled bathroom and changed his shirt and tie for a black roll-neck jumper. Returning to the foyer, he ordered a milk coffee at the bar. The waitress, a redhead with a stiff permanent wave, smiled at him experimentally; he was alone, and wore no wedding ring. Ascher asked her to change a mark into twenty-pfennig coins and went outside to find a public telephone. You never knew who might be listening on the hotel switchboard.
Over the course of fifteen minutes, propped in a new metal and glass phone booth, Ascher made three calls concerning a man named Gerstein, which concluded his preparations for tomorrow’s job. That done, he was free for the rest of the day. He decided to look around the city centre.
Frankfurt am Main was the city of Ascher’s boyhood. He had left fifteen years ago, when it was still being rebuilt after the war. Ascher was not at all sentimental, and would not have returned here unless he had been sent, but he was content to explore the place, to see what he might remember and what was new.
He spent the afternoon strolling, taking in the many modern buildings in places where he remembered bombed ruins and vacant, weedy blocks. He ate at a café off Paulsplatz, where he perused the finance sections of the two local newspapers. Toward evening he found himself walking along the footpath beside the river Main. The wind had died away, and it felt less chilly than before. It must have rained heavily here over the last couple of days; the earthen footpaths were soft, and gluey grey mud stuck to his shoes. The trunks of the evenly spaced trees along the riverbank were all whitewashed to exactly the same height. They had been pruned for winter, the branches cut back to crowns of stubby stumps, black against the pastel sky. Reaching the end of the path, Ascher climbed the stone stairs leading up to the Eiserner Steg, the Iron Bridge.
Fifty metres along the footway, a couple, already blurred by the evening mist, walked arm in arm. Otherwise the bridge was deserted. Reaching the middle of the span, Ascher stopped to lean on the green-painted metal railing, breathing in with satisfaction the cold, dank river air.
Rivers always pleased him. Rivers were more subtle than oceans, and cities built on rivers were far more civilised than seaports. Every river had its own distinct nature, and the Main had always been a sullen, plodding workhorse. Its smell, made up of the thick local mud, the rank brown rushes lining its banks, and the exhaust from the barges that chugged up and down its length, suited it perfectly. Closing his eyes, Ascher absorbed this heavy, greenish river-smell, drawing it deep into his nostrils, into his lungs. Even after fifteen years’ absence, the Main still ran through him, still formed part of every cell in his body.
In the hungry, difficult years just after the war, this river had been the focus of the lives of all the boys in the half-destroyed city. They had swum in it in summer and fished in it in spring and autumn. In winter those with skates skated on it; those without rode sledges made from old boards down the sloping banks onto the thick ice.
Now it was 1965, and everything was different. Frankfurt had been rebuilt from a rubbleheap into a shiny modern city full of banks and stock brokerages, and the river didn’t ice over anymore. Winters in Germany now were simply not as cold as those of his boyhood. Ascher was well aware that now he had proper winter clothing, whereas then he had not, and now there was heating in shops and hotels and even bus stations, whereas then there was none. But rivers are unaffected by these niceties, and the Main no longer froze over as it had in those winters of his youth. It was like this with everything; life these days was in most aspects easier and more comfortable, but at the same time flatter and staler, than life then. That couldn’t be helped. It was the way of the world, the consequence of adulthood.
Konrad Ascher’s employers regarded him as a man entirely without imagination. His very thoroughness and reliability seemed to prove that imagination had not been granted him. But in that they were mistaken. Ascher didn’t talk about those things that pleased him, which were in any case solitary enjoyments; he had little time for people, their self-regard, their trivialities, their perpetual need for conversation. But he delighted in music, particularly Bach, and he took pleasure in the physical world around him.
He loved cities, the great – Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna – but also the lesser, Pressburg, Brno, Zagreb. Most people find one city of a given size much the same as another, differing only in the placement of its essential elements: the town hall, the cathedral church, the bar district. But Ascher knew better. If you were alive to it, each city had its own distinct personality, an essence you could sense and almost taste. That essence, a compounding of a city’s geography and its history, was discernible in its squares and churches, in its bridges, taverns and cemeteries, in its grand and its workaday buildings, and even in those spaces where a building was missing. In any city, walking the streets, sitting in a café, riding a tram, always observing, Ascher felt he was touching, with psychic fingertips, the drawn-out threads joining all the lives that had been passed in that place, the conductors along which the current of the city ran, from generation to generation.
And in fact there were really two cities in each location, the day city and the night city, the shape and aspect of their buildings, the flow of their traffic, even their population quite different by day and by night. The moments of transmutation between these day and night cities – dawn and dusk – enthralled him.
And now was such a time. He leant on the bridge railing, looking west. The sunset had spread broad washes of pink, peach and orange across the clouded sky. He watched as these bands of colour contracted, leaving pearl grey where a moment before had been a rosy blush. It was absolutely quiet. The sun, an old-gold glow smothered in haze, teetered on the rim of the world. Everything seemed to pause, waiting for the sun’s final disappearance, the alchemical transformation of day into night.
Then, in the middle of this moment of stillness and silence, the great bell of Saint Bartholomew’s cathedral struck sonorously. Again, and once again it rang out, deep and slow and resonant. Then, taking the cue, the bells of the other churches around the main square, and then those across the river, began to toll. Another and another began, until the soft air was entirely filled with the sound of bells, melding together in a continuous clangour which blended with the pale orange-grey light.
A long twisting skein of ducks appeared overhead, streaming away toward the just-departed sun. The birds’ flight seemed somehow sad, a vain pursuit of something already lost. Down below, the surface of the water was painted a deep, vivid pink. Somewhere indeterminate, far along, the pink river and the pink sky merged.
The light, brassy bell of the small parish church on the south bank ceased ringing, leaving the carillon lopsided. Then another stopped, and another, until only the great bell of the cathedral was left, sounding three more deliberate, slow, heavy peals before it too stopped. In its place, rather than silence, Ascher heard lapping water, car horns, a train passing, crickets.
The bells were the hinge on which the day had folded over into night. The last trailing ducks vanished into the western sky, which was now lead grey with a streak of mauve at its base. The river under the bridge was greeny-black, and smelled oilier now. Ascher was entirely content. He had been witness to magic.
He straightened his back and looked around. While he had been immersed in the sunset, lights had sprung up on the banks of the river. People were hurrying to and fro across the Eiserner Steg, muffled in coats in the gathering gloom. He stood closer to the rail so as not to impede anyone passing.
Down on the black water below him, the bow-lamp of a barge, flanked with ruby and green sidelights, was approaching. Its deck was in darkness, and Ascher could not determine whether the roundish shadows near the low wheelhouse were men or shrouded crates of cargo. Then a pinpoint of orange glowed briefly; the steersman was smoking. Ascher imagined him wrapped in a pea-jacket, a woollen cap damp from river-mist on his head, his pipe between his teeth.
Ascher envied the steersman. A straightforward life; you got on your vessel at such-and-such a place and you pushed upriver for fifty or a hundred kilometres, stopping at locks when you needed. The decisions you had to make were all within a narrow compass, the distance between passing vessels, the speed and angle of approach to wharves and bridges. You didn’t have to decide whether people were telling you the truth or not, and steer a course amongst these truths and lies, and you didn’t have the responsibility of deciding whether a man should be allowed to keep his life or not.
Ascher believed in fairness. In his business, a strict code operated. The stakes were the very highest, and loyalty and trust were essential for everyone’s safety. If someone betrayed that trust, their life was forfeit; that was understood. Everyone knew the rules, and if everything was done according to those rules, the results were necessarily always fair.
And Ascher had always believed that his employers, who had access to information he did not have, were honourable, and that what they told him was true. It made his work easy, as he had no obligation to decide guilt or innocence for himself. Even more, it meant his actions were always entirely justified. His work was merely giving effect to a correct and necessary judgment.
But while he did not talk a great deal, Ascher listened, and perhaps because he was so very reliable, his employers had become careless in what they allowed him to learn. And Ascher possessed a mathematical mind, and understood the intricacies of the stock market.
So to this man tomorrow, Gerstein. Ascher’s instructions were to dispose of him, and he had come prepared to do exactly that. He had planned the job thoroughly, and knew he would carry it out without a hitch, undetected, and that he would be in another Germany, across a well-guarded frontier, when it was discovered Gerstein had disappeared. And even if anyone did connect his disappearance with a Belgian named Coppens, descriptions of whom were imprecise, what of it? Herr Coppens would not be found, because he did not exist.
All very well. But Ascher had now ascertained, from all the different pieces of information which had come his way, that Gerstein had broken no code, had done nothing wrong at all, except to be in the way of a certain development from which people associated with Ascher’s employers would obtain significant financial and political advantage. The last elements of this puzzle had been provided by the afternoon newspapers.
He did not welcome this realization. But having come to it, he could not ignore it. He was not one of those able to tell himself, shrugging, ‘orders are orders.’ He had seen his parents killed, and Germany itself half destroyed, as a result of men hiding behind that doctrine, all the time knowing the orders to be wrong. And now he knew his orders to be wrong.
He had put the problem out of his mind during his walk from the city center. But now, standing on the Eiserner Steg, looking out over the river, he had to face it. Disposing of Gerstein was wrong, completely unjust. But what else was he to do? In a film, he might let him go: ‘I’m giving you a chance. Drop everything, money, family, just vanish.’ And then the bags of cement off the back of the barge and into the river without Gerstein’s body.
But no. That kind of altruism was only for films. In real life, vanishing couldn’t be managed on the spur of the moment. And even if the necessary preparations had somehow been made, people are unreliable. This Gerstein, if he did let him go, would slip up one way or another; Ascher’s employers would find out; then Ascher himself would become the pursued, and soon enough lose his own life. No, the job had to be done.
And that knowledge threw Ascher completely off balance, without a footing, as if he were falling through unexpectedly thin ice into a freezing river. Once he had carried out this job, knowing it to be unfair, his life would be irreversibly changed. He would no longer be the dispassionate agent of a righteous justice, but a mercenary, a thug, harming others for pay. And that would deprive him of everything he valued in life. How could he watch a sunrise, how dare he listen to Bach, once he had reduced himself to a swine? He would never be able to look squarely at himself again. A highly moral man, thought Ascher, faced with this situation, might simply dispose of himself. But the fact was, he was just as reluctant to die as anybody else.
For a moment Ascher railed at himself. Why did he have to go chasing after the truth? What was the point of the truth, anyway? It upset everything. What was wrong with him, that he couldn’t just accept what he was told, and live comfortably and happily? He shook his head. He couldn’t, that was all. Not that he was a saint, but he had only one self, and he had to live in it.
He had met men who spoke of erecting a barrier between one part of their minds and another, to protect themselves from what they saw or heard or did; lawyers, policemen, soldiers. But Ascher didn’t believe them. What got inside you got inside you, and if it was corrosive, it corroded you, even if you pretended it wasn’t there. Anyway, Ascher could see no way of dividing himself in two. His strength had always been the strength of singlemindedness, and his mind would not permit itself to be compartmentalized, split.
He felt a heavy grey weight in his stomach. He understood now why people were so anxious to sleep-walk through their lives, avoiding even a glimpse of the truth; they were scared of looking at life too closely. Because once you did, it was clear that life had no purpose and no meaning, it was just a filthy dunghill to crawl around in until you died. He’d allowed himself to believe that his life, at least, was clean, was justified, but it turned out he’d been deluding himself. He was an insect on a dunghill, like everyone else.
So far, of course, he had done nothing unworthy; that was for tomorrow. How his life would proceed after tomorrow Ascher couldn’t see exactly, but the path could only be downward. More and more base acts, knowing them to be base; further and further from cleanliness, deeper and deeper into the dunghill. The prospect of the future filled him with disgust. The weight in his stomach felt even heavier, as if it were going to drag him, not Gerstein, down under the green water to the slimy riverbed.
A cold drizzle had begun to fall, feathery in the lamplight. It was time to return to his hotel, to sleep for the last time as an honorable man. Ascher walked to the end of the Iron Bridge. His footsteps on the concrete pavement seemed to ring unusually loudly. He paused for a moment under a lamppost to adjust his scarf, then stepped out of the pool of light into the shadows.
Peter Newall was born in Sydney, Australia, where he worked variously in a naval dockyard, as a musician and as a lawyer. He has also lived in Germany, Japan and in Odesa, Ukraine. His work has been published in England, Europe, the USA, Hong Kong and Australia.