Sons of Cain

by Christy Kenneally

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

The year is 1953. As the Cold War divides the world, two childhood friends - now foes - carve out an existence. Karl, haunted by the past, teaches history in his home town of Hallstatt, while Max, driven by power and wealth, leads the Fratres, an extreme branch of the Catholic Church -with control of the Vatican his ultimate goal. When Karl is called to Rome to expose the corruption that has infiltrated the Church, the two men are destined to meet again. The past must be put to rest. But at what cost? From Moscow to CIA Headquarters to a Budapest prison, Sons of Cain is an epic tale of lust, power and corruption where deception is a way of life.

Release date: July 18, 2013

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 448

Sample

Chalk-dust avalanched from the blackboard and Karl Hamner tried not to sneeze. His pupils, ranged in the desks behind him, chorused a perfunctory, ‘Gesundheit.’ They could be excruciatingly polite he thought and shook his head at his own prejudice. But they were different to the boys and girls who had sat with him in this very classroom when he had been a child among children who had answered politely and dreamed quietly. It wasn’t that the present crop was disrespectful. They had survived a war – and that experience had tightened them, inside and out. Also, he concluded as he turned to face them, their eyes were different. They had seen too much of reality to dream, lost too much to be eager for connection. Was this what Simon Tauber, our schoolmaster, had seen when he’d looked at us? he wondered. No. War, for us, was something that happened outside Hallstatt. Here in the bowl of the Dachstein Mountains, the Hallstätter See had been an innocent blue. Cradled by the massif and soothed by the lake, we’d dreamed.

His recurring dream had been to inherit the chalk and the life of the schoolmaster. Elsa had dreamed of the University of Vienna and returning home to Hallstatt and … He felt the old pain seep into his chest and looked for distraction among their faces. His eyes rested on Lisl and saw Elsa. The girl had the same hair, always one brush away from tidy, the same concentrated expression, even a similar well-worn book-bag, flopped like a sleeping dog at her feet. The pain in his chest intensified and he swept his gaze among the boys, looking for a match for Max, hoping to cauterise his anguish with anger. He sighed with relief. No Max. No boy dressed better than his peers, reflecting his mother’s sense of superiority. He remembered how Max’s mother had dominated her policeman husband and seen her son as the centre of the universe. Frau Steiger was dead now. It had taken the neighbours a week to discover her body, hunched over the kitchen table, the glass she’d used to mix the poison washed and dried and winking innocently among its fellows in the dresser. His eyes swept further along the line of boys, bent over their texts. No Max, to curl his lip at Simon Tauber’s enthusiasm for learning or at his companions’ zest for play; aping his father, the policeman, who’d hid his inadequacy behind his uniform – until the Russian Front had whittled him to the bone and he’d stood on blackened feet in the snow and confessed to the terrible thing his son had done in the mine above Hallstatt. Karl could see him now, his tears freezing on his lashes as he’d wept and screamed, the truth steaming from his cracked lips as if his insides were consumed by acid. He remembered him holding out a silver cross and chain, as a votive offering for forgiveness of a son’s evil and a father’s guilt.

And what a tsunami of evil that act had unleashed on the innocent. His own father Rudi had died in a snow-hole to delay the Cossack horsemen so that Tomas, their neighbour, could carry Karl to safety. Tomas, the miner, cut down by gunfire as he’d tumbled Karl on the last plane to escape the Red Army. And Herr Steiger himself, Max’s father, sitting at the side of the road with the dull-eyed soldiers who had lost any reason to go on. That’s what had winnowed the living from the dead, during those dreadful days, he concluded – a reason to go on. He had been his father’s reason and Tomas the miner’s reason. And his mother had become his reason to come back from the hospital, in his captain’s uniform, with one hand, gnarled by frostbite, camouflaged in his father’s Wehrmacht glove.

When his mother had died, only his sense of duty had brought him back to the war but, this time, in Rome as a captain in the German army. There had been a brief interlude of … what? Hope? No – purpose. When he had helped to salvage a Jewish family from the SS during the razzia and, later, when he’d been entrusted with bringing that story to the Vatican. He’d crossed the line into the Vatican State, compelled by a cause greater than his duty, and branded himself a deserter. It hadn’t saved over a thousand Roman Jews – the train had still rolled from Tiburtina Station to Auschwitz – and it hadn’t saved him from Max. Max, in his madness, had dragged him into the cellars beneath Santa Maria della Concezione and, against a macabre backdrop of skeletons displayed for the edification of sinners, had offered him a share of his world. Elsa’s killing, in the mine above Hallstatt, had been nothing to Max against his dream of his new religious order, the Fratres, who would evangelise and inherit the earth. When Karl had refused that poisoned chalice, Max had bartered his own safety against the silence of Cardinal Tisserant, and the Fratres had been recognised by Pope Pius XII. Afterwards, Karl found an oasis of normality in the International Capuchin College, adopting a dead man’s name and identity to shield him from the Waffen-SS. For a brief period, there had been the sweet security of books, the measured round of lectures and study, while the city and the world beyond convulsed in the death throes of the war.

After the armistice, he’d put on his great coat, pinned his Operation Barbarossa medal to his lapel and begun the long trek home to Hallstatt. The Russians, at the checkpoints, had mocked his medal and, euphoric on victory and vodka, had shoved him on to the French, British and American checkpoints until, eventually, he’d found himself at the pier on the far side of the lake from Hallstatt, waiting for the ferry. Sitting on the warm timbers at the end of the dock, he’d looked into the lake and seen a stranger looking back. It wasn’t the beard and the shaggy hair. It was the eyes and the absence in them. He had survived when millions had not, and he felt nothing. He was as the water, mountain and sky around him were – elemental and unfeeling. Is this how Simon Tauber had felt? he wondered. Did the death of his wife and a policeman’s questions about his conversion from Judaism bleed him of the will to live until one day even the love of his students and his love for them wasn’t enough to tether him to life? Was that why he put on his suit and closed the door and walked through the sleeping streets of Hallstatt to the lake and weighed his pockets with stones and—

‘Herr Hamner!’

The voice brought him back to the tickle of chalk-dust; the peculiar tang of ink and the rows of faces. ‘Yes, El— Lisl?’

‘The question, sir, it isn’t complete.’

He turned to the blackboard and read what he had chalked there. ‘Russia was Napoleon’s …’

‘Bête noir,’ he added.

‘What does “bête noir” mean, sir?’ Jurgen asked.

‘Black beast,’ he answered. Then added, ‘A bugbear, something or someone who will not let you rest.’

His suite of rooms was on the top floor of the Schloss, as befitted the founder and Father General of the Fratres. An ornate desk was placed strategically before the floor-to-ceiling windows set in the western wall so that important guests at his morning audiences would be impressed by the mountain vista behind him. Supplicants and those due chastisement were scheduled for the evening and forced to endure the harsh glare of the dying sun. The view was pixelated, now, with a million flakes of snow, so that the window reflected the room and its sole occupant; who stood close to the glass, seemingly absorbed in the whitened world. An observer might have been struck by the simplicity of his robe or by his tall, thin frame and shock of raven-black hair. An observer might have wondered at the pallor of his face and the twin scars, furrowing from the edge of his left eye to the corner of his bloodless mouth. But no observer would ever get that close to Max Steiger unless he wished them to do so, in which case he would ensure they saw what he wanted them to see. He didn’t want anyone to observe him now and the icy anger that shook his frame. Yet another reply had come from the Vatican, another embossed and wax-sealed letter containing careful Latin phrases that translated into … nothing.

‘The Holy See wishes to acknowledge the correspondence received from Father Max Steiger. It will convey the contents to the appropriate authority.’

It was a facsimile of the reply that had come to his previous letter, and to the one before that, and to all the others he had sent. It was almost a decade since the pope had granted papal recognition of the Fratres. A qualified recognition, he remembered bitterly. Thanks to that meddlesome Cardinal Tisserant, the Fratres had to be chaperoned by Cardinal Maglione, who had been the powerful Secretary of State, and they would have to prove themselves worthy of full acceptance by the Roman Catholic Church. He placed his palms against the window and welcomed the cold sting, willing it up his arms and through his body to his brain. What more proof could he provide? He had multiplied his first band of followers with hundreds of young men and women soured by war and searching for meaning and purpose in a broken world. Priests and monks had flocked to him from the major religious orders, disaffected by their irrelevance during the war and their torpor in its wake. Who else offered them a vision of a new Europe – a Europe re-evangelised and influenced by the Church as had never been seen since Constantine recognised Christianity and unleashed it on his empire? He pushed away from the window to pace the room. The Fratres, he fumed, were already rich in resources and equipped for the campaign. He had almost twenty million dollars lodged in the Vatican Bank. There were cardinals and other high-ranking clerics in the Vatican and elsewhere who were sympathetic to their cause. An army of Fratres had already infiltrated some of the most prestigious educational institutions in Europe and stood ready to extend that influence into the sphere of politics. Europe hung within touching distance of their fingertips, and Rome …? His pacing brought him back to the desk and he crushed the letter in his frustration.

It was 1953 and though Maglione had been dead these seven years, he hadn’t been replaced by a Secretary of State or by a new mentor to the Fratres. Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, had absorbed the power of that office into his own august personage and had become – purposeless; circling in an ever-narrowing gyre of paranoia, seeing enemies everywhere within the Church. If Pacelli wanted to cleanse the Church of deviants and dissenters, what better than to have the Fratres as inquisitors? If he wanted to build on his wartime reputation for moral probity and spiritual leadership, the Fratres, with their special vow of obedience to the pope, were ready to proclaim him. Instead, Pacelli had become a recluse in the Vatican while the great powers had divided the world without him. Perhaps Stalin was right, Max mused, when he’d asked sarcastically at Yalta, ‘How many divisions has the pope?’ He, Max Steiger, could have answered him. ‘The pope has millions under his direct command and religious shock-troops who would willingly give their lives to a new crusade.’ But Pius had proved to be a wartime pope, who found peace too problematic, and he had retrenched rather than advanced. ‘The centre cannot hold,’ he’d muttered, quoting an Irish poet. Enthusiasm, Max knew, was a jolt of adrenaline that leached away quickly. On the cusp of the first millennium, the religious houses of Europe had been inundated with vocations, people terrified before the impending Armageddon. It hadn’t happened. When 1 January 1000 had dawned and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse failed to appear, the trickle of defections had begun. We need someone to break the log-jam, Max fumed, someone like Archimedes with a lever and a firm place to stand to move the world.

He slumped at the desk and a second letter caught his eye. The New York cardinal, Francis Spellman, had invited Father Max Steiger of the Fratres to address guests at an important function in New York City. Another time, he might have laughed at the little man’s hubris. Spellman was a cleric who had toured the front so many times during the war that a general had greeted him with, ‘We’d never know we were in a war unless you showed up.’ He’d blessed the troops and blessed the guns and advised Eisenhower to ‘go the whole hog’ after Berlin.

Max Steiger lifted the letter from the desk and read it again. The second reading didn’t improve the quality of the prose or his opinion of the bumptious Spellman, but he held it in his hand long after he’d finished reading. The world had divided into East and West. He knew from his sources that it was only a matter of time until everything east of Berlin would secede from Europe and become terra incognita, an unknown country, to the Church. Europe was already beholden to America for Marshall Aid and military protection, but the Western giant was tiring of its ‘poor relations’ and was leaning back to isolationism. ‘If you cannot change the kingdom, change the king,’ Max whispered, quoting the old Indian proverb. If the Fratres could ride the coat-tails of the American giant before it was too late, then … He snatched a pen from the desk and slid a fresh page to the blotter.

Winter leaves reluctantly this year, he thought. Snow still crusted the angles of the graves, as if the wan sunlight was a housemaid who dusted indifferently. Even the surface of the lake was as opaque as a dusty mirror. His eyes climbed the surrounding peaks, still slumbering under snow, and dropped to the village that hugged the lakeshore. People moved slowly between the houses, awkward beneath their winter clothing.

His parents’ grave was as tidy as only an Austrian grave could be; a rectangle, curbed with local stone. The headstone was understated. There was no gothic cross superimposed on the stone, like the others that crowded the cemetery. There were no cameo photographs of the dead; the kind that studded the other monuments, pictures of young men in military uniform fading behind crazed glass. There was no inscription that included ‘der Reich’ or ‘der Vaterland’. Karl placed a small bunch of blue flowers on the meagre grass and straightened. ‘Rest in peace, Mama,’ he said quietly. ‘You too, Papa,’ he added, even though his father didn’t lie there.

He had left his father lying in a snow-hole during the retreat from Moscow. Death had already marked Rudi Hamner’s hands and face with frostbite and he’d chosen to make a stand against the pursuing Cossacks to buy time, so that his son could return to Hallstatt. Karl had dreamed of that return almost every night on the long march with the Fourth Army. While his comrades had talked of Moscow and glory and had plodded along with purpose, his thoughts and dreams had been strong counter-currents, tugging his heart towards home. When the great wave of Hitler’s army had broken within sight of the Russian capital and retreated, those who’d survived had retraced their steps across the white wilderness.

Who could have thought that hell would be so cold? he mused and, instinctively, put his left hand in his coat pocket. His hand throbbed even in the warmth of the much-mended Wehrmacht glove. ‘Summer issue,’ he muttered and felt the old bitterness rise like bile in his throat. He turned abruptly and walked towards the gates of the cemetery, his thoughts punctuated by the crunch of gravel under his boots. They had worn summer uniforms, gloves and shoes because the generals had insisted that it would all be over in a few weeks. Even when the rain had come and mud had sucked the Panzers to a standstill. Even when the snow had come and frozen the oil in the lorries and the carbines and the big guns, and had frozen the coffee soldiers carried in their canteens. Even when men had become disoriented in the white wilderness and frozen to death or huddled forty to a hut to share a little warmth and a plague of lice. Even— He stopped on the path and took a deep, ragged breath. Almost a decade has passed, he reminded himself. The war is over. The boundaries of Europe have been redrawn. Many cities and towns have been rebuilt; even the land itself has healed over with a new skin of fields. He wondered if the pain he felt would last forever. Other men from Hallstatt had fought on various fronts. Many of those who had survived seemed to adjust to post-war life with gusto, as if they’d woken up from some horrific dream, taken a deep breath of relief and gone on with a normal life. Some told war stories in Gert’s bar or compared wounds and souvenirs. Some even laughed and slapped each other on the shoulder in recognition of their camaraderie. But Karl Hamner could not remember the last time he’d laughed.

‘The zucchetto! Where is the abominable thing? I had it in my hand a—’

‘It’s on my head, Emil.’

‘Oh!’

Emil Dupont, secretary to Cardinal Tisserant, dusted the prelate’s shoulders with his palm.

‘Ribbons for my beard?’ Tisserant suggested slyly.

‘No, you look suitably Mosaic, very Old Testament. Now remember, Eugène, no shouting.’

‘I do not sh—’

‘I rest my case. Let me look at you. Très bon. This is the first meeting Pius has called in – oh, I can’t remember how long.’

He centred the pectoral cross on the prelate’s chest.

‘For God’s sake, E—’

‘Silence?’

‘Wha—’

‘Allow a silence before you speak. It focuses the attention of the others and adds gravitas to what you say.’

‘Gravitas,’ Tisserant grumbled. ‘A Latin word meaning heavy, an apt description of the Vatican since the war. It’s like wading through mud.’

‘Sarcastic!’

‘I was simply say—’

‘No, no. At the meeting, don’t be sarcastic. Sarcasm is the sign of a small mind, Eugène. It will only make you enemies.’

Cardinal Tisserant stared until Emil stopped his fussing and caught his eye.

‘Have it your own way,’ the secretary smiled, ‘more enemies.’

The snow had stopped falling and the white peaks flared behind him as he read and re-read his letter of acceptance to Cardinal Spellman’s invitation.

The style and content of the prelate’s letter smacked of someone accustomed to communicating with Vatican departments. The opening paragraph groaned under the weight of flowery greetings and fraternal good wishes. The actual request was nestled in the second paragraph, sandwiched between praise for ‘your immense contribution to Mother Church’ and apologies for ‘adding the weight of our humble request to Father General’s already onerous workload’.

The ‘sweetener’, as Max Steiger identified it, beckoned from the third paragraph. ‘The function will be attended by illustrious Catholic laymen from the highest echelons of commerce and politics.’ ‘Money and power,’ he murmured.

The final paragraph was a literary version of a Great Amen sung by the Sistine Choir. A single sentiment, swooping and looping through slightly different versions of itself until it built to a crescendo ‘In Christ Jesus, Our Lord’ and collapsed into a sprawling signature.

He put the letter aside and blew out a pent-up breath. Perhaps Churchill was wrong when he wrote that Britain and the United States were divided by a common language, Max thought. That may be true of the language of the ‘governed’ but Spellman’s letter was a template of the lingua franca used by the powerful, it could be read and interpreted with ease by the denizens of the Court of Saint James and the White House.

‘Enter,’ he called, in response to an almost imperceptible knock.

His secretary eased inside the door and closed it noiselessly behind him. He bowed to Father General and then seemed to just hang there. Max Steiger remembered that Brother Cyprian had joined the Fratres from one of those pallid little religious communities one sometimes encountered in Switzerland. They seemed content to keep bees and minister to a largely contented congregation of villagers and alpine farmers. He wondered if they’d noticed Brother Cyprian’s defection from their ranks, the man was so self-effacing as to be almost invisible. He might have refused his services except that Brother Cyprian had also been a confidant to the lady of the local Schloss, a widowed and extremely wealthy dowager who had been influenced by Brother Cyprian to bequeath the Schloss to the Fratres. He understood she had another outside Bern and one near Lausanne. Before she is called to her eternal reward, she might decide to thwart her heirs in favour of the Fratres. He was careful to allow Brother Cyprian the opportunity to minister to the good lady. The monk was also the perfect secretary, devoted to detail and singularly without ideas or opinions. Max Steiger peeled his reply to Spellman from the blotter and floated it into the out tray. Slowly, he took another document from the pile and began to read. He liked to keep people waiting, it could be instructive. His father – stepfather – had been a policeman in the Austrian village of Hallstatt. He remembered him boasting of how he’d make an appointment to interview some local suspect and then turn up three hours late. ‘Imagine the tension,’ his stepfather would enthuse. ‘By the time I show up he’s admitting everything and shopping everyone else.’

His previous secretary had confessed to a minor infringement of the rules after just ten minutes of silence; which was why he was the ‘previous secretary’. He suspected Cyprian had more of the glacier in him and could outwait God.

‘Yes?’ he asked, without looking up from his work.

‘A Sister Rosa is waiting to see you again, Father General.’

Max signed a document and capped his pen with an audible click, just to see if the Brother would blink. He didn’t.

He swivelled his chair so that the secretary wouldn’t see his face as he parsed that message. ‘A Sister Rosa’ is so deliciously Swiss, he mused, so wonderfully detached. ‘Again’ was something to consider. Did it suggest impatience or annoyance on the part of his secretary? No, he concluded, it was simply Cyprian at his informational best. A person has been here before and is here again.

‘And you said?’

‘You are busy.’

‘And she said?’

‘She will wait.’

And she would wait, he had no doubt about that. The girl was too naïve to see things for what they were. It had been no more than a sudden urge that needed to be satisfied. He didn’t regard their coupling as a ‘liaison’ or an ‘encounter’ – both words implied a relationship of sorts, and there’d been none and never would be. She had been a remedium concupiscentiae, a ‘remedy for lust’, as a former professor of his had defined marriage. He had not forced her, although he could have done and had done with others. She had been obviously infatuated and, although initially resisting him, had responded with passion. And that was an emotion he could never tolerate in any sexual encounter. Rejection, submission, even defiance were all acceptable – but not passion. Passion implied intimacy and that was what was bringing her back when she hadn’t been sent for.

‘You will inform the Mistress of Novices that I do not wish to see this novice again and I rely on her to ensure it.’

‘Yes, Father General.’

‘See that this letter goes in the evening post. I will be travelling to New York in the United States on the twenty-second of this month. Make the necessary travel arrangements. Brother Cyprian—’ He looked away and counted to twenty before turning back to his secretary, ‘that will be all.’

For a moment, he thought he’d caught a spark of defiance in his secretary’s eyes and it cheered him.

Cardinal Eugène Tisserant bustled along in the latticed shadows of the great columns that curved from the basilica to embrace St Peter’s Square. He remembered the fascist trucks that had hovered like ravens on the Via della Conciliazione, just beyond the white line that marked the Vatican State. As the war had moved to its close, they’d been replaced by grey troop-carriers, ugly with swastikas. ‘Fascist or Nazi, they never crossed the line,’ he muttered with satisfaction. Except, he reminded himself, Captain Karl Hamner who came to tell me of the razzia. Even now, the memory of that terrible night when the Waffen-SS had trucked over a thousand Jews from their quarter in Trastevere via the Collegio Militare to the railway station at Tiburtina and to Auschwitz. He stood, head bowed, and placed his palm against a pillar for support. Whoever said that time heals all wounds was a fool, he thought bitterly. Some wounds should never be allowed to heal so that we will be reminded of our failures forever.

He entered by the bronze door and began to climb the Scala Regia, puffing with exertion. And where is Captain Karl Hamner now? he wondered, and then prayed that Karl had found some peace. At the first landing, he stopped and raised his skull cap to wipe the top of his head. They’re adding steps to this damn stairs. By the time he reached the top landing, he was wheezing. The Swiss Guard on duty at a small table moved to help him. ‘Eminence?’ the guard enquired anxiously. God, he’s so young, Tisserant thought as he fought to control his breathing. Finally, he managed to straighten, square his shoulders and fix the guard with an imperious eye.

‘It’s the Visigoths,’ he informed the startled guard. ‘Hold them off until I return.’

He had a visitor. The little house looked exactly as he had left it but—

War teaches men to differentiate between what seems and what is. Or maybe it reverses evolution and we rely on more feral instincts. And there is someone in the world who does not wish me well.

‘It’s me. Johann,’ a voice yelled from inside and Karl replaced the cord of timber in the neat pile. ‘Saw you coming from the window,’ Johann added as Karl pushed through the door. ‘If you’re expecting trouble,’ he said, fingering two glasses from the shelf, ‘you should prepare for it.’

Karl sat on the other side of the table and accepted a glass of his own schnapps. They toasted and drank. Johann bobbed and weaved on the stool as if he was still riding the lake. Karl wondered if the one-armed ferryman ever got used to the stability of dry land. He waited. Something in the other man’s expression suggested this wasn’t a courtesy call. Silence had never been one of Johann’s strengths.

‘If you ask me, I’ll tell you,’ he blurted.

‘Ask you what?’

‘If you’re stupid enough to ask that question then you’re too stupid to understand the answer.’

Karl felt a throbbing in his temples and massaged them with his fingertips. Schnapps at midday was never a good idea – in retrospect. He’d have to do it the hard way.

‘I’m asking.’

Given his opening, Johann seemed uncertain how to begin. Karl saw him measure his empty glass against the bottle and shake his head. He steeled himself.

‘Look, boy,’ Johann said, gruffly, ‘no one comes back from a war – well, not the same anyway.’

‘Someone told me that a long time ago.’

‘You should have listened to him.’

‘Her.’

‘Then you should have listened bloody harder. Women know about that kind of thing.’

Johann nodded at his own insight before continuing.

‘Marta set me straight, after the first war. “You say you left your arm in Verdun,” she says to me one evening. “That’s right,” I says, wondering where the hell this was going. “Go back for it,” she says. “You know I can’t do that, Marta,” I says. “I know that, Johann,” she says, “but do you? You act like you lost yourself over there. It was just an arm, Johann,” she says, and she’s crying. “I – we need the rest of you.” “How do I do that, Marta,” I ask her? And I mean it. She blows her nose and I know she has it all worked out. “I can look after the girls,” she says, “but you’ve got a son that needs a father. Erich is how God made him,” she says, “and maybe God hadn’t much to work with. I don’t understand things like that. But Erich rows that ferry boat better than any man in Hallstatt – better than you did when you had two arms.” It’s the truth. I was a carpenter before Verdun, better in the boat now with one arm than I ever was with two. Not better than Erich, mind. “Go in the boat with him,” she says. “I’ll be no damned good to him with one arm,” I says. “Erich doesn’t need a one-armed man to spell him at the oars,” she says, “he needs to have his father in the boat.”

So, I went in the boat. Wasn’t easy, oh no. Sometimes, I can get a bit het up – get a bit short with Erich, sometimes. Doesn’t bother Erich. He just smiles and rows. And when we beach her in the evening, he takes my hand, like a little boy, and we walk home together.’

His voice had been creaking for a while and now strengthened suddenly as he leaned across the table. ‘I never told that to nobody,’ he said.

‘Why are you telling me, Johann?’

‘Because – because you’re Rudi’s boy, dammit. Rudi didn’t come back but you did, Karl. You came back with a piece of you missing and you’ll lose what’s left of you if you don’t get into some damn boat.’

He took a deep breath and looked longingly at the bottle. Karl took pity on his irascible neighbour and poured a generous measure for both of them.

‘I’ve seen them,’ Johann said quietly, ‘and you’ve seen them. Men like you and me. Men who came back and never left where they’d been. At the start it’s all “welcome home” and hugs and kiss