My cover is a bouncer's licence with a name I've practised until it answers to itself. I am Daniel, thirty-eight, eleven years with the State Criminal Police, and I have been standing outside a Frankfurt club called Ruths for three nights, checking coats and faces and the black cars that arrive after two. The money moves through here. I know it the way you know a draught in a house.
On the fourth night she comes out to me herself.
Ruth is somewhere in her forties, in a black dress that says nothing and a coat she doesn't need at this temperature, and she stands beside me on the step and lights a cigarette without offering one. We watch the street together for a full minute.
“You hold your left shoulder like a man who's worn a holster for years,” she says. “You check the mirrors on the parked cars. You've never once looked at the girls.” She exhales. “You're police, Daniel.”
My real name. My stomach goes cold and my face, I hope, does nothing.
“Whatever gave you that idea.”
“Relax. Your handler's sloppy, not you.” She drops the cigarette and grinds it out with a heel that costs more than my car. “Here's what happens next. You keep the door. I pay you cash like everyone else. You see what you see.” She looks at me then, properly, and her eyes are amused and completely without fear. “I'm not going to ask why. I'm going to ask whether you're any good at it.”
Behind her the bass thuds through the wall. Somewhere inside is a ledger my department has wanted for two years, and standing in front of me is the woman who keeps it, offering me the keys to the building and telling me she knows exactly who I am. It is the worst possible position for an undercover officer. It is also, I realise, the first time in a year that anyone has looked at me as if I were interesting.
