by Jorg Fauser
Click. Blum’s heart lurched. Downwards.
“What is it?” asked Cora. “Good heavens, what’s the matter?”
He stared at her, the receiver still in his hand.
“The bastard’s called the deal off,” he said after a while.
“You really scared me just then, Blum. The way you were looking at me.”
He replaced the receiver. Hackensack, he thought. Maybe I’ll go and see him after all.
“Well, what do you expect?” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Suppose 100 grand had just slipped through your fingers?”
“How do you mean? You still have the stuff. And 100,000 wasn’t nearly enough. Listen, I’ll keep my ears open. Perhaps something will come up.”
Blum counted the last of his money. Just under DM 1,100, and the hotel bill would certainly come to more than 250. And he’d given Mr Haq 500 to no purpose. Mr Haq had made the most profit so far. He stubbed out his cigarette. His hand was trembling slightly.
“I must go out, Cora. You can keep your ears open if you like, but do be careful.”
“Are we staying together, then?”
He shrugged. She got to her feet and went over to him.
“Open your mouth, Blum.”
When he did, she pressed her lips to it. That full mouth. Those eyes. That long, ash-blonde hair. That warm, well-rounded body.
They agreed to meet that evening.
All Frankfurt seemed to be under the influence of cocaine. Everything was tense, all movements were jerky, awkward. Go, man, go. Finish him off. Even the layabouts were just bankers down on their luck, and the managers raced off to lunch on roller skates. Blum decided not to call Hackensack first. Phone calls only meant delay. He would just go to the man’s office and tackle him. Five pounds of coke, that was chemicals if you like.
On the way he went into a Tchibo coffee shop and looked through the newspapers. The dollar had recovered, excellent. So what could the tall man have meant? There it was, among the miscellaneous news items: “COFFEE AND COCAINE”. On the receipt of reliable information, officers of the Special Commission of the Bavarian CID had checked up on a 28-year-old Italian in a hotel at Munich Central station and found 1.6 kilos of cocaine in his baggage, hidden in cans of coffee. It was the largest quantity ever seized in Bavaria of the South American narcotic, which had recently attained notoriety as the fashionable drug of choice. The Italian claimed to have known nothing about the cocaine in his baggage. The police suspected, said the paper, that he was a member of an international narcotics ring which intended to get a foothold in Germany.
Blum put the paper down. A hotel at Munich Central station. 1.6 kilos. The bastard. It was hard to grasp, but this time he had actually struck lucky. Cocaine in cans. 2.4 kilos of it in jumbo cans of shaving foam, 1.6 kilos in cans of Maxwell House instant coffee. Smart, but not smart enough. The cops had 1.6 kilos; Blum had the other 2.4 kilos. International narcotics ring. How does it feel, Herr Blum, to be part of an international narcotics ring? Well, gentlemen, much as you might expect in the circumstances. As always in life, it’s best to remember that good things come in small cans and keep it that way. Then you’ll get over the withdrawal symptoms more easily if you’re left to carry the can. Stay happy on a small scale, gentlemen, because happiness is the most expensive drug of all.
21
When Blum was outside the building named on Hackensack’s card as his office address he regretted not calling first. It was an old town house in the Westend area with a chestnut tree in the front garden, five storeys, a stucco façade, and Blum wonder how it could possibly accommodate all the firms, some two dozen of them, which according to the panel of doorbells had their office premises here. None of them was a Harry W. Hackensack, Consultant. He looked at the visiting card again. The address was right. Two dozen firms in the building, all sounding equally dubious. Which of them might conceal Hackensack, and why in the world should he hide his name anyway? I’ve always fallen on my feet. Company adviser nothing. All these outfits sounded like cover organizations for international drug-running and speculation rings. On the ground floor: Dr H. Mäusing, Tax Adviser, by appointment only. Dymco International. Nord–Süd Aviation. Polska Film Co. On the first floor: General Shares Fund. Letzyg Taxation Offices. Smycholsky Telecommunications. Reality Holding. Dr Immelmann, Dr Gelb, Dr von Jakubowsky, Specialists in International Law. On the second floor: Symposion. Small Businesses Institute. Taunus & Terra Films. Wurzelmayer Detective Agency. On the third floor: well, here there were six “firms”, three of them under the mere abbreviations TWNF, ASE, ICA. If I were to advise you some day you’d get a discount. One of these must be Hackensack. Blum rang a bell. On the door hung a notice framed in brass to catch the eye and reading “no beggars or hawkers”. Blum did not yet feel he was a beggar, but he wasn’t so sure about hawking. The door opened.
The doors on the third floor left belonged to the Trans-World Nature Fund, the Evangelical Mission to Asia and South America (Brothers of the Last Days), and the International Consulting Agency. Oh well. Blum pressed one of the three doorbells. A buzzer sounded. He opened the door and entered a musty corridor dimly lit by a 40-watt bulb. The coats on the coat-stand belonged to elderly ladies who did not care about looking chic. Some of the elderly ladies were in a large office. Blum glanced into it. They were seated tapping away at old-fashioned office typewriters, or standing in front of stacks of printed papers putting them into envelopes. There was a smell of carbon paper and dust. One of the ladies raised her head and saw Blum. Her face was as expressionless as the back of an unlicked stamp.
“What do you want?”
“I’m looking for Herr Hackensack,” said Blum. “Herr Hackensack the company adviser . . .”
“Third door on the right,” she said. “This is the Brothers of the Last Days Mission.”
“Yes,” said Blum, retreating, “so I see. Thank you very much.”
The linoleum squealed. There was a small notice tacked to the third door on the right, with the information “ICA – Frankfurt” typed on it. Not very promising, thought Blum, but he knocked. He heard wooden flooring creak, and then the door was cautiously opened.
“Yes?”
A lady with a grey pageboy bob and a brown tweed suit. Hooked nose, narrow, colourless lips, probing eyes behind glasses on a chain that hung around her neck.
“Are you the driver? You can give me the packages.”
Blum assumed his professional smile.
“My name is Blum,” he said. “I’m a business partner of Mr Hackensack . . . this is Mr Hackensack’s office, isn’t it?”
“This is the branch office of the International Consulting Agency,” said the lady, in not unfriendly tones. Under her cool gaze, Blum began to feel less sure of himself. “Mr Hackensack isn’t here at the moment.”
“But can I reach him here? Maybe I could leave a message?”
The lady looked hard at Blum, at the same time inspecting his trousers. The creases in them could be made out only if you looked closely. All the same, Blum seemed to have passed muster, for she told him to come in.
The ICA office was as modest as the firm’s name was grand – a scratched desk with sliding locks, a filing cabinet, an old SEL telex machine, a coat-stand with an outmoded hat and a telescopic umbrella hanging on it, hard-backed chairs, a visitor’s armchair that must have come from the flea market, and on the wall, the only splash of colour, one of those tear-off calendars that pharmacists and drugstores hand out to their regular customers at Christmas. The picture for the month of March showed a bright yellow crocus. There was a door labelled “private” in the back wall. Just enough light fell through a little window to enable you to make out, with a fair degree of certainty, whether you were reaching for the telephone receiver or the coat-stand. The window was barred. Blum wondered what there could be to steal here. Time seemed to have stood still in the ICA ever since the jazz cellar had opened and Blum had finally discovered that everything in life has its price. The
tweed-clad lady sat down at the desk, but did not offer Blum a chair.
“May I ask how long you have been Mr Hackensack’s business partner?”
From the way in which she said the words “business partner”, Blum realized that he was on shaky ground.
“Oh, well, only since last week really. We met on Malta, and Harry – I mean Mr Hackensack – asked me to look in on him in Frankfurt. He was going to give me some business advice.”
“Can you tell me what kind of business you are doing here, Mr . . .?”
“Blum. Like a flower in bloom. Well, I’m afraid that’s something I’d like to discuss with Mr Hackensack personally.”
“Does Mr Hackensack know?”
“Yes, of course. I just said so.”
Suddenly he was sorry he hadn’t snorted another line of coke before going out. The telephone rang. The lady picked it up, but said nothing. She just listened, made a note of something, and hung up.
“Well, Mr Blum, so far as I know Mr Hackensack won’t be in until Monday. I’ll tell him you were here, and if he thinks it’s important he’ll get in touch with you. Perhaps you’d leave me your card, or write down here where he can reach you . . .”
Blum lit a cigarette and blew the smoke across the desk. The lady didn’t bat an eyelid. She was used to the old fellow’s cigars. Typical, really, thought Blum, typical of the man to have a dump like this as his office. Carries on about power and chemicals, and now there’s just the crocus on the wall and the umbrella on the coat-stand. And a mummified Prussian female at the desk to scare away people like me. But I’m old enough not to be scared, mister.
“I can’t be reached,” he said, just a little too loud. “Just tell Mr Hackensack I was extremely sorry he wasn’t able to show me Frankfurt. Frankfurt by night, of course. That’s what he promised me back on Malta. Come to think of it, you can leave out the ‘extremely’. Just ‘sorry’ will do. I’ll call if I can. Goodbye.”
He turned and left the office without closing the door behind him. There was a graffito carved with a knife in the lift: “Lise doesn’t screw”, and he thought: If I ever see him again, I must ask him the first name of the ICA’s secretary.
Outside he suddenly wasn’t sure why he had reacted so violently. What had he expected? A whole floor of a skyscraper gleaming with neon lights, where Hackensack and 123 employees – assisted by the latest IBM computers – laboured day and night to help people like Blum in their struggle for existence? He’d flared up like a fool. Perhaps a visit to Mr Haq was indicated. Perhaps the Pakistani had more experience in this field than he had so far admitted.
Blum took the tram, but got off again at the next stop. He hadn’t been in a tram for fifteen years, and it was unnerving to be crammed among all these people and exposed to their glances. He absolutely had to have a car, but not a hire car. He mustn’t sign anything. And the taxi he took cost a small fortune. That was life – talking big about investments in Freeport two hours ago, and now he had to count every coin.
This was getting to be not just hard but unfair too.
When he entered the stairway of the boarding house a ground-floor door opened, and a woman who could have been the ICA secretary’s aunt stared suspiciously at him and said, “No vacancies, young man.”
It sounded like a threat.
“I’ve come to visit one of your lodgers, ma’am.”
“There’s no one in the house.”
“Mr Haq – Mr Haq from Lahore, on the third floor, he’s expecting me. On business.”
“On business? What kind of business, young man?”
Blum took out one of his visiting cards (Siegfried Blum – business representative – Berlin – Barcelona – Tangiers). She snatched the card from his hand, glanced at it and gave it back with a scornful grin.
“No one here to represent now. They’re all gone, the whole lot of them.”
“May I ask where?”
“Taken away, of course. What do you think? I always told my sister she shouldn’t allow such riffraff into our place.”
In the ground-floor apartment, from which a sour smell of boiled cabbage and brawn wafted, an ancient voice called: “Emmi, is that the police again? They’re not to come into this house! I won’t have it!”
Blum wrinkled his brow and took a step back.
“The police were here?”
“Are you hard of hearing, young man? The police, that’s right, the police. I’m not letting rooms to any more Turks.”
“Mr Haq is from Pakistan.”
She looked at him as if he were a Pakistani himself, and a particularly unpleasant specimen. “They cooked too, that lot did, they cooked in the rooms even though I told them a hundred times not to. How am I ever to get the stink out of the furniture?”
The ancient voice called again. “No more police, Emmi, I won’t have any more police here! Father would never have stood for it.”
“So when were the police here?”
“They were all taken away yesterday evening, every last one of them. So what exactly were you representing for them?”
Perhaps Mr Haq had not made the most profit after all. He was certainly a clever man, and it could be that he had made off just in time. But if not . . .
Blum made his own getaway.
22
The restaurant had once been an ordinary corner café, and the low ceiling was black with smoke. You perched on uncomfortable coffee-house chairs at tiny marble-topped tables, surrounded by palm fronds, plaster statues and rubber plants, you were snubbed by waiters who had all graduated in communication aesthetics and looked like fencers or ballet dancers, and you paid twice as much for your salade niçoise or your café orange as you would anywhere else, because there was an extra attraction in the form of Art. Artistic performances were given on a platform in glaring neon lighting, by ladies who were mainly rather stout and who made silly but supposedly lascivious remarks in a voice like a carter’s labourer. Blum thought, nostalgically, of Barcelona and Tangiers, of the curry nights at the Phoenicia. But of course nostalgia was out of place here. Cora was standing in the aisle on the way to the toilets, in front of the art nouveau posters, speaking to anyone who crossed her path. Her mouth had a rosy sheen, and she had plaited her hair into little braids. Braids, of all things. Doesn’t look much like BB any more, thought Blum, but maybe that’s just as well. Let’s not get sentimental. When I was seventeen I wanted to be a theologian, but God couldn’t care less. Now she was whispering to a repulsive character with a reddish beard who wore the dungarees that went with it. He sported the yellow badge of the anti-nuclear protesters. Badges twenty years ago had more zing to them, thought Blum.
“The way I see it, fiction’s a harder drug than anything you can shoot up,” said the man sitting beside Blum. He was tall and thin and good-looking in an unobtrusive way. Cora had introduced them, but Blum couldn’t remember names. However, the man was a writer.
“Have you been shooting up already?” asked Blum, sipping his whisky.
“I meant purely metaphorically,” said the man. “Your whisky there, addiction to the opposite sex, just about anything that gives us hope of realizing our true selves – they’re artificial paradises. But fiction, now, that’s the area where we can tread in the certainty of being bowled over by what we shall never be.”
“An interesting idea,” said Blum, suppressing a yawn. Cora had disappeared.
“Look at our Utopias,” began the writer again, apparently inspired by having found an audience at last. “With drugs, you see, we want to experience ourselves. Sounds cheap, but it isn’t. However, of course it leaves us just where we were before. But experiencing other people, and according to Sartre hell is other people – ah, that would be worth any mutilation.”
“And I always thought writers led a quiet life,” said Blum after a pause that threatened to go on rather too long. “Do you make a good living from your books? Are you successful?”
“As Greene said, writers are never successful.�
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Maybe I ought stock up on a little anthology of quotations, thought Blum. If the cops get me after all I could say: Do you know something, gentlemen? Fiction is a harder drug than anything you’re about to fit me up for.
“Yes,” he said finally, “that’s life – hard but fair.”
A large woman in a cloche and a feather boa minced over from the bar to the aisle. A kiss here, a greeting there. The star of the evening.
“Have you known Cora long?” asked the writer.
“Depends what you mean by long.”
She had reappeared now and was talking to the star. I hope this isn’t going to turn into another artists’ party, thought Blum.
“And what do you think of cocaine?” he asked the writer.
“A dangerous drug,” the man pontificated, drawing on his pipe. He smoked a tobacco that smelled like sheep dung. “A cynical, vain, paranoid lady, our Peruvian Lady. Remember, Hitler took pervitin daily during those last years, and you could call pervitin the number one wake-up drug.”
“Really? I only know Wakey Wakey that we took during our final school exams. So carry on about cocaine.”
“Maybe cocaine is the poule de luxe ultimately behind everything. Cherchez la femme.”
“Ah. And did you ever . . .?”
The writer was evasive. “Words are my drugs – the opium of nouns, the heroin of adjectives, the chemical compounds of verbs.” Then, rather disdainfully: “But the authentic drugs are only useless palliatives, methods of withdrawal from fiction, like giving methadone to an addict.”
Cora waved to Blum in full view of everyone. The star diseuse inspected him through a lorgnette hanging around her fat neck. Blum was annoyed. The writer leaned back and thoughtfully inspected him through the smoke.
“I had a thing with Cora once,” he said at last, “but it didn’t work out. Writers don’t need nude models, and it got to be rather a nuisance explaining why she doesn’t feature in my books.” He knocked out his pipe. “Writers ought to live alone.”