by Martin Suter
The fridge was full of hiding places too, above all at the back. They pulled it out from its niche in a combined effort and examined the jumble of bars, grids, radiators and wires. Nothing.
Suddenly the storm broke. The lightning and thunder were almost simultaneous, as if the grotto had been struck. The rain beat down as if from a water cannon.
They searched on, undeterred. Although there were lights and light switches in the grotto, there was no power. They were increasingly forced to rely on their sense of touch. Many of the decorative shells were fixed with their cavities upward. In many there was room for a flash drive. But none of them held one.
They had almost given up when Allmen asked, “Carlos! Where would you hide a little flash drive like that?”
Carlos thought about it. He looked around at the cave, looked at the decorations, the fridge, the barbeque, and at the flue. “If it was me, Don John, I would hide something small the way I’d hide something large. Otherwise it would be too easy.”
With that he left the grotto.
Allmen followed him. The rain had eased off slightly but was still sufficient to soak both men in seconds.
Carlos walked around the artificial outcrop that held the grotto, looked up, and climbed it nimbly like a staircase. Right at the top the chimney rose from the flue above the grill. Carlos felt around inside, found what he was looking for, pulled, and revealed a large trash bag.
53
There was no one around on the narrow streets of the villa district. The storm had died down, but it was still pouring rain.
Allmen and Carlos walked side by side in silence, heads down, hands deep in their pants pockets.
From far off they saw the brake lights of various vehicles and a crane truck close to Villa Schwarzacker. The storm had blown several heavy boughs down from the old trees, blocking three cars from going forward or backward. City workers in orange rain jackets were busy clearing the obstacles out of the way.
Allmen was worried about his greenhouse under the ancient trees. They stepped up the pace.
But they were in luck. The storm had brought down a few branches, but the gardener’s cottage hadn’t been hit.
There was another surprise waiting for them, however.
Carlos unlocked the door and let Allmen in first. He entered and switched on the light.
“Small world.” It was the voice of Bob, the man from Brookfield Klein. He was sitting on the second step of the stairs to the attic, and blinked in the sudden brightness. He was resting his forearms on his thighs. His right hand was loosely holding a pistol.
“You get wet? I made it before the rain, luckily.”
His partner came down the stairs. He nodded to them in silence and stood behind Allmen and Carlos.
“We won’t detain you long,” Bob said. “You should change into something dry in a minute.”
Allmen had composed himself. “What do you want?”
“To make sure you don’t have a copy.”
“We don’t.”
“That is what we had assumed. But after you went into Sokolov’s house tonight, we thought that might have changed. Has it?”
“You’re still sniffing around after us?”
Bob looked at his colleague and said, “Go ahead, Joey.”
Joey took a pistol out of his jacket, cocked it, stood in front of Allmen, and kept him covered. Using the other hand, with practiced ease he searched Allmen’s pockets and placed their contents on the console under the golden foyer mirror.
He found nothing.
“Before you look in his underpants, search him,” Bob ordered.
Joey obeyed, and searched Carlos. He found the flash drive in Carlos’s right sock.
“Bingo!” Bob grinned. He stood up and walked to the exit. Joey covered his back, then followed him.
“Gringos,” Carlos hissed.
54
That same evening, Carlos climbed the steep roof of the gardener’s cottage and lifted Sokolov’s laptop out of the chimney. He was determined not to give in so quickly.
He tore the new power cord from its plastic case and plugged in the computer.
He wasn’t sure what he should search for. “Hedge,” “Win,” “Brookfield,” and “Klein” all drew blanks. He restricted the search to folders and rummaged through them intuitively. He searched programs, but found so many he gave up this tack. Sokolov’s hard disk was simply too big. It had a terabyte capacity and was two thirds full. Mostly with data and programs only programmers could understand.
The sound of Allmen playing piano—attempting to calm himself—had long ceased when Carlos had an idea. He narrowed the search according to a timeframe—to the time between the transfer of the data and the arrival of the urgent message from La Route asking him to destroy all traces and hide a backup copy.
The search still produced over nine thousand results. He narrowed it down further, to folders created during this timeframe.
The search program threw up 234 folders.
One of them was called “Grotto.”
“Dios!” Carlos shouted.
It was in the recycle bin. Carlos had to drag it onto the desktop to open it. It held a single file, named “dfdutbce27bg.” Carlos opened it and the screen filled with letters and digits that made no sense.
Carlos walked downstairs.
Allmen had already withdrawn to his bedroom. Carlos knocked on the door.
“One moment!” came Allmen’s voice. Carlos heard the muffled creaking of the bed and a slight squeak from the wardrobe door, and soon Allmen was standing in front of him in his silk bathrobe.
Carlos apologized for disturbing him so late and led him up the stairs.
Since moving to the gardener’s cottage, Allmen had been in Carlos’s living room once at most, and had forgotten how tiny it was. Standing up, as there was only one chair, they stared together at the endless series of characters filling the screen as Carlos scrolled down.
“Is that it, the pink diamond?”
“No sé. No idea. But it was in a folder labeled ‘Grotto’ in the recycle bin. Sokolov had forgotten to empty it.”
“Slovenly, as I said.”
The parade of characters stopped. The cursor had reached the end of the document.
Allmen and Carlos looked at each other.
“How can we find out if that’s what it is?” Allmen’s question was to both of them.
“Saber. Who knows?” Carlos murmured.
Allmen stood at the attic window and looked out into the night. The storm had risen again and was whipping the twigs of the noble old trees.
He turned from the window and stood back next to Carlos. “I think I know how. But to do that we have to vanish from here.”
55
It had stopped raining, but the gusty wind still sent occasional heavy drops pelting from the trees.
In front of the villa stood an old Opel. Its driver got out when he saw them coming, a man of similar stature to Carlos. He was probably a few years older and, like Carlos, had classic Mayan features.
Carlos introduced him as Don Gregorio. They shook hands. “Mucho gusto,” they both said.
They drove through the city, continually halted at the barriers set up by the teams clearing the streets of fallen branches, and by fire department vehicles pumping out cellars.
In the outskirts Allmen lost his orientation. Identical apartment buildings from the 1950s and 1960s lined both sides of the poorly lit streets. Industrial buildings alternated with schools, residential complexes, streetcar depots, and forlorn playgrounds. Don Gregorio drove unerringly through the labyrinthine streets before finally stopping outside one of the faceless, five-story blocks. On the tiny balconies were satellite dishes, and from the windows the blue light of televisions flickered.
Don Gregorio led them to the building’s entrance, unlocked the door, and went ahead. A range of cooking smells mingled in the hallway. Small dogs yapped from inside the apartments they passed.
On the fo
urth floor he put Allmen’s suitcases down and rang the bell in a particular rhythm.
The door opened immediately. A man, also Central American, opened the door, greeted them wordlessly, and let them in.
The apartment was small. The emulsion painted on the wallpaper had yellowed over the years. It smelled of cigarettes and food.
Don Gregorio led them down the narrow corridor. In the kitchen Allmen saw a few men sitting around a table. They were talking in subdued voices and fell silent as the newcomers passed. In the next room a Spanish-language TV program was playing. Allmen caught a glimpse of a bed four men were using as a sofa.
The next door was closed. A sign saying “Ocupado” hung on it. Their host pointed to it. “El baño,” he explained. The bathroom.
He opened the door next to it, and they entered a small room. It was furnished with a table and two chairs, a bed, a cupboard, and a bunk bed. On the walls were posters of tourist destinations in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
Don Gregorio wished them “Bienvenidos,” put the suitcases down, and excused himself.
Allmen and Carlos unpacked, then discussed their plan of action. Shortly after midnight they went to sleep.
56
Allmen hadn’t shared a bedroom with a man since his time at Charterhouse. And the dorms at Charterhouse were somewhat more generous than this room.
Given the spatial restrictions, it was clear from the start they would use the single bed as a sofa. Carlos had given him the choice of top or bottom bunk. Allmen had chosen top, as he envisaged having a more personal space up there. He had no experience of bunk beds.
For Allmen, what was worse than sharing a bedroom with one man was sharing a bathroom and toilet with eight, as it transpired. Over the coming days, this became his biggest motivation for bringing this situation to an end as quickly as possible. Normally a sound sleeper, Allmen had a bad night. He had lain awake till all was still in the apartment and he could conduct his evening ablutions in peace and quiet. But even then, for ages he couldn’t bring himself to climb down, as he couldn’t help imagining what an unfortunate sight he would be presenting Carlos, should he still be awake. And once he had finally managed it and lay back up top again, Carlos began to snore. It was less the snoring that kept him awake, more the newly acquired knowledge that his manservant snored.
By the time he fell asleep, the gray light of dawn was seeping through the broken Venetian blinds. When he woke, it was bright, and Carlos’s bed was empty.
Allmen waited a while, eventually visited the bathroom, and left it feeling refreshed. A young Nicaraguan was waiting for him with coffee. Don Carlos had asked him to have breakfast ready for Allmen.
It took Allmen a moment to realize there were people who called Carlos “Don Carlos.” He thanked the young man, who introduced himself as Gustavo, and followed him into the kitchen. There, sadly now cold, his huevo ranchero awaited him—a fried egg with tomato and chili sauce. Gustavo switched on the hotplate, on which two snow-white slices of industrial bread were lying, offered Allmen a chair at the kitchen table, and poured him an Americano—a black drip coffee from the machine. When it started to smell of burned toast, the Nicaraguan turned the slices over.
During breakfast Allmen learned more about his roommates. Don Gregorio was the only legal one. He was the tenant, had official status as an asylum seeker, and a legal job as a cleaner for a supermarket chain.
The others were all immigrants without papers or any pretense of having papers. They were all subtenants of Don Gregorio and paid him or owed him a token rent.
The only task ahead of Allmen this morning was achieved with one phone call to his trusty banking expert Roland Kerbel.
“Do you know anyone high up in the IT department at Brookfield Klein, and could you give me their email address?” he asked on the phone. Kerbel dictated him an address: [email protected].
At eleven Carlos returned. He had been locating Internet cafés far enough away but easily accessible by public transportation. They wanted to send each message from a different address.
He copied the beginning and end of the sequence of letters and digits from the file and pasted it into an email, flagged at the highest level of importance, and addressed to [email protected].
The message was simple: “Contact within 24 hrs, pls.”
Beneath the sequence of characters was a link to the site rosadiamant.com, a website Carlos had set up at an Internet café. It displayed the beginning and end of the sequence and the words “To be completed by September 12.”
Carlos copied the message onto a flash drive and left the apartment.
The waiting began.
57
During the afternoon Carlos visited two different Internet cafés. Both times in vain. The man from Brookfield Klein had not responded.
Allmen read a book. Then paced back and forth in the tiny room. Then gazed out of the window. The next building was the same as the one he was in. In between the two were twenty yards of concrete slabs with clotheslines stretched above them.
At one point he saw a woman walking around among the laundry. She felt to see which items were still damp, and took the dry ones down, putting them over her arm. A small boy was riding close by on his tricycle. Every so often one of the little wheels got caught in a crevice between slabs. The boy patiently dismounted, made his tricycle roadworthy again, and rode on.
That evening Carlos prepared a Guatemalan dinner for ten. Guacamole, ground beef patties with spicy tomato sauce, fried plantains, black beans, corn tortillas, and chili sauce.
Allmen kept him company.
He watched as Carlos made the avocados into a paste with a fork, mixed them with diced onions, chopped coriander and salt, returning one of the avocado stones to the mixture, then placed his guacamole in the fridge.
“Why do you leave the stone in, Carlos?”
“So the avocado doesn’t go black.”
“How does that stop it going black?”
“It thinks it’s still whole.”
Carlos peeled the plantains out of their skins, now almost black.
“The plátanos have gone bad, Carlos.”
“Plátanos are only ripe once their skin is black.”
He cut the plantains into thumb-length pieces and placed them on a plate ready to fry.
Allmen bombarded him with further questions. But it didn’t help calm his nerves.
Carlos’s dinner was a high point in the otherwise monotonous life of the undocumented workers. They forced him to watch the Honduras-El Salvador match from the Central American Cup with them. He sat on the edge of one of the beds in the cramped bedroom/living room and tried to behave like a soccer fan.
Allmen watched politely from the door for a while, then used the excitement surrounding the Honduras go-ahead goal to withdraw to the bathroom and from there to his bedroom. He lay in bed and tried to read by the poor light of the standard lamp, the only light source in the room.
He waited impatiently for Carlos, continually hoping the cheers and shouts from the TV room signified the end of the game. When Carlos finally slipped quietly into the room, he asked, “What time is it, Carlos?”
“Eleven thirty, Don John.”
“Five thirty in New York.”
“The Internet cafés will be closed, Don John. We have to wait till tomorrow morning.”
Eventually Allmen fell into a restless sleep. When he woke, Carlos’s bed was empty.
By the time he’d finished in the bathroom, Carlos was sitting at the table in front of the laptop. He had inserted the little flash drive and opened a document containing the text of an email. It was from [email protected] and consisted of just two words and a punctuation character: “Your conditions?”
Allmen and Carlos had already agreed upon the conditions among themselves. Their reply contained simply the international bank account number for Allmen International Inquiries.
And the figure 2.5 million Swiss francs.
> 58
Allmen knew all too well what it was like to have no money. Nevertheless he had always lived as if he had lots. Being forced to live as if he had none, and all that while waiting for millions, was a new experience for him.
The men he was living with had no money at all and lived that way too. They had nothing else either. No papers, no work, no future.
He would have loved to give them a few tips on how to cheat the world, and yourself, into thinking you have money. But he soon realized these people couldn’t act as if they had money. They didn’t know what it was like to have any.
Allmen decided that as soon as the millions had come in, he must give his roommates some money. To practice with.
Twice he succumbed to cabin fever and left the apartment, without informing Carlos. The first time he went to a nearby Indian restaurant, which looked elegant from the outside but shabby on the inside. He ordered a tasting menu. All the curries had the same flavor, all cooked a long time in advance and quickly reheated. Yet he still enjoyed the change of scenery and the feeling of being a real person.
The second time he ended up in a local tearoom. Apart from him there were just waitresses in training and elderly women. He ordered a latte and a croissant and missed his Café Viennois.
Carlos made no comment when Allmen returned from his outings. But he let his patrón sense what he thought about this lack of discipline.
The days in the overcrowded apartment were long. And the way they both stared at the laptop, like a kettle that refused to boil, made them longer.
At one point Carlos asked, “How can they be sure we won’t keep a copy?”
“They can’t be sure. But they’ll have to take the risk.”
“Por qué?” Why?
“It’s the safest bet.”
“Ojalá.” Let’s hope so.
On the third day, the penultimate day before the deadline, an email arrived. “Procedure?” it asked. And “Guarantees?”
They replied, “Procedure: delivery of the flash drive via DHL on receipt of the bank transfer. Guarantees: word of honor from Johann Friedrich von Allmen.”