Powder and Feathers: Chapter Fifty-Two
Flight. Jean-Pierre and Colm make their way to Berlin.
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Table of Contents
JEAN-PIERRE
“Are you alright?” Jean-Pierre asked as they strode through the airport together, glancing sideways at Colm. His brother looked like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, his hair sticking up in all directions and grey bags showing under his eyes, a shadow of stubble on his cheeks.
“Mm,” grunted Colm, staring forward, and Jean-Pierre sighed, but chose not to further engage on the subject.
The passport inspector was not a mundie, and judging by their face when Jean-Pierre’s passport was placed in their hands, they were a student of history or art or something similar, because they blanched, glanced up at him, and very hurriedly passed it back to him.
Colm was too distracted to mention it, at least, and they caught the train into the city centre before getting the next one out to Oranienburg.
Gunther Klein and his wife, Frances, lived in a heavily forested district some ways out of the centre, so Gunther came to pick them up from the station. He was a square man, pudgy but made up of somewhat severe angles, and he had the dark, curling hair that Jean-Pierre recognised from photos of Heidemarie.
He’d never let himself get too into researching Heidemarie’s family, her various children, her various grandchildren — there was too much risk that Colm would find traces of his surveillance, and even with the practical concerns ignored and set aside, he’d never enjoyed how it made him felt on the occasions he’d looked into it. It was one thing to stalk or spy on someone for his own purposes, and another still to do so in the course of work or politics.
In cases of family, it was always more complex — in cases of Colm’s family, whom Jean-Pierre could look upon but was not to approach or engage with, it was more complex still.
