“And that’s delightful. But what do you plan on doing when they put you in front of a camera and you can’t act?”

“This is Hollywood! People will see the picture because I’m in it, not because of what I’m doing.”

“It’s not that I’m averse to you destroying a career, if it comes to it, but sooner or later people will talk, people are talking, and I will not be responsible for creating the single noisiest scandal that has ever affected our kind. If Marilyn Monroe loses a week of her memory, that’s OK. That’s practically par for the course in this town. If she loses six months, or a year, or five years, and wakes up at the end of that in some B-movie with her knickers on her head because that’s all you were capable of pulling, then we have a problem and I will not go down as the estate agent who brokered that. So I’m telling you now–get out. Find a different body.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” Aurangzeb had worked hard on that pout. “I’m here now. I’m doing it. I can make this work.”

I stood back a pace. “That your final answer?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

Her lips parted in surprise, then opened in a shriek of laughter. “That it? That all you gotta say to me?”

“That’s it,” I replied. “I’m going to find the waiter I walked in here in–he had nice hands–and get out. Might go somewhere chilly. Canada, perhaps. Alaska. See the Northern Lights.”

“Jesus, you are the lamest thing ever!”

“Sure. I’m lame. I’ve had the loud life and now I like the quiet. I’ve also spiked your champagne.”

The laughter forming on her breath froze, diminished, shrank. Her face twisted through a kaleidoscope of emotion, none pleasant. “You’re lying,” she blurted. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Sure I would. I came in here as a waiter. If there’s one thing we’re good at–one thing we ought to excel at, you and I–it is blending with the crowd. Enjoy the stomach pump.”

I turned. I walked away.

“Hey!” she called after me. Then, “Hey… you!”

A void where my name should have been. If she’d paid more attention to the file I’d compiled for her, she could have found my picture right there, neatly annotated for her attention, but Aurangzeb was lazy, hadn’t bothered to do her homework. “Hey!” she shrieked, loud enough for people to turn. I smiled serenely, walked over to where my bewildered waiter was trying to gather his thoughts and, laying my hand on his arm, I murmured, “You all right, son?” and jumped.

Playing the violin, speaking French, an intimate knowledge of the Dodgers.

If all these fail, and you really, really want to know if your target is a ghost in hiding, gastro-enteritis is another great way to go.

Chapter 44

Sleeper trains never pull into their final destination at a reasonable hour.

6.27 a.m. is not a good time to start the day.

No shops are open, no coffee is to be found except cheap brown sludge for the earliest of the early-morning commuters who are too harried or hung over to care. You can’t check in at a hotel, but must sit on what luggage you have in whatever café will take you and wonder why you didn’t fly.

The weather was notably colder. Over the last five days the skies had darkened with the soil, and as I shuffled blearily on to the glass-and-steel concourse of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, my breath condensed in the air.

I like Berlin.

I liked it before it was levelled, and I like the way it was rebuilt. The architects of the new Berlin didn’t fall into the trap of believing that all that went before must be perfectly resurrected, nor that the past as a whole should be buried. Rather they fused the best that had been with the best innovation had to offer, rejecting the concrete-tower-block solution adopted by so many 1950s town planners and instead embracing apartment living, broad streets and the planting of as many trees as their budget could buy. In West Berlin this created a wealth of greenery, grown up over the years into balmy groves lining genteel streets, and great parks where children could hide between the gnarled roots, sounds of the city lost through the undergrowth. In East Berlin the development had been less idyllic, and only now were the trees planted beginning to grow into their full leaf beneath the functional towers and sensible estates of the industrial planners in a hurry to get grinding.

I like the vegetables you can buy in Berlin, fatter and sweeter than the usual supermarket stuff; I appreciate how easy it is to be a cyclist in the city, with ways through the parks, pedestrianised roads and traffic that yields at every green light to the mob of two-wheeled commuters that has saturated the street before it. I like the schnitzel, the creamy potatoes, the beer, the noise where it should be noisy, the calm where it should be quiet. I have no time for boiled sausages, or boiled vegetables of any nature really, and cannot for the life of me comprehend why anyone would still insist on serving dishes whose whole cooking process consisted of exposure to water, to freely invited guests.

The fact that Alice Mair, partner of Nathan Coyle and a woman who would probably, if the company she kept was anything to go by, be quite content to kill me on sight, lived in this same well-ordered city only mildly dampened my spirits.

First task–a place to stash Coyle.

I bought the least bad coffee I could find and went in search of an internet café.

Estate agents have always existed for my kind, in one way or another. They are a useful tool when you are in a difficult situation: an expert in whoever you need them to be, they can salvage a body gone wrong, help you find your path to a body that will go right.

The estate agent in Berlin went by the name Hecuba.

I tried phoning her office, and the number was disconnected.

I tried emailing her from a dummy account, and the message pinged back immediately: not recognised, no one home.

I deleted the email account with which I had attempted contact and moved cafés before continuing my search.

I sent out a few emails to a few contacts–Fyffe, Hera, Kuanyin, Janus. Only Hera replied and no, she hadn’t heard from Hecuba for years.

I even tried Johannes Schwarb, who replied immediately that no, that site had been taken down, and hey, you in Berlin, you wanna hang out?

Thanks, Spunkmaster13, I replied. I’ll let you know.

Hecuba was nowhere to be found.

Irritated, I tried a few more mundane sources. The process was slower, and the euros ebbed away as I trawled through vague memories of half-heard names and faces, until I stumbled on one which was familiar. She’d got herself a haircut, a brand new suit and some fifteen years of experience, but Ute Sauer was still my skin.

I called her up from a payphone.

I don’t do that any more, she replied.

Wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Willing to beg, I said.

She was silent a long while on the end of the line. Then, “Zehlendorf,” she said. “I’ll pick you up. Who do you look like today?”

Zehlendorf is twee.

From its still-standing buildings of old Germany through to its semi-detached houses framed with grass and running water, Zehlendorf is the place to buy hemp handbags, straw sunhats and a sense of organic, universal belonging. In summer it is the Berlin countryside without the inconvenience of leaving the city. In winter the sounds of happy children’s choirs are inflicted on innocent shoppers as they shuffle through snow-crusted streets. Ute picked me up from the U-Bahn. She drove a silver hybrid, and as she pushed the passenger door open with one hand, with the other she swept a pile of CDs on to the back seat, Mozart quintets and Little Songs For Happy Children. I ducked in beside her, and as we pulled away her car wheedled at me, demanding seat-belts be worn.