by Jorg Fauser
That was clear enough.
“Well, I used to be, but in Berlin, you know, the sheer pressure, the competition, and the economy’s not improving.”
The scornful looks the officers cast him spoke volumes, a whole encyclopedia full of volumes. No one wanted Berliners now.
“So you’re not self-employed?”
“No, I travel on behalf of Träger – Träger in Charlottenburg, scouting around mainly for rugs. Last year I found a Tabriz here in Seckbach, Inspector, in a house clearance sale under a pile of rubble – it was a poem, I can tell you . . .”
His voice was gradually assuming the Berlin accent that the inhabitants of that insular city had cultivated. Blum had been to Berlin when they still had something to cultivate. The police had soon had enough of it, and were glad when his ID card came back. There was nothing to report.
“I could have told you so myself, Inspector.”
“Lock your room in future. Frankfurt isn’t Charlottenburg.”
“I hear you, Inspector,” said Blum, laying the Berlin accent on thick.
But when the door was closed it was a full minute before he was in any position to kneel down in front of the bedside table and put out his hand. The key was still there, hair and all, untouched. His heart leaped up. He had to steady his hand to light himself a cigarette, but then he was his old self again. Let them steal radios, he thought. Some never learn their trade.
28
The air was always sultry on level B, even at night, even this night in March. Blum spent half an hour taking soundings. Once you’d been in a razzia, you always expect a razzia. Under the main police station it did seem to be over, since there was no one around but a few U-Bahn travellers hurrying along the passages, past the boutiques, the pharmacists’, the toilets and the dark corners where drunks usually lay in the dirt among their bottles, watching the criminals combing their hair before showing pensioners and nursery school teachers what the underprivileged had on their minds. But today everything was empty down here, and the area with the luggage lockers lay in a ghostly calm. The one human being in sight, a young man in a ski anorak, was studying the pop concert posters outside a cultural sales booth. All was empty even outside the toilets. Blum would have liked to turn back, but he did not intend to spend the night in Frankfurt with 100 grams of coke in his blazer pocket. And he had to feed more money into the luggage locker. He had left the hotel immediately after the police.
“My plane leaves in three-quarters of an hour.”
“Your plane? At this time of night?”
“It’s a private plane. They’re allowed to fly at night.”
“Fancy that. May I ask where you’re going?”
“Vienna.”
“Ah, the beautiful blue Danube. How nice. That’ll be 345.80, Herr Blum, VAT included. We must put tonight on the bill, of course.”
“And stamp it, would you? You know what the taxman’s like.”
First he had thrown them off the scent. After a few miles by taxi towards the airport he told the driver he had to look in on his sick aunt who lived in Neu-Isenburg, next exit. The man must surely have thought he was a terrorist, but in ten minutes’ time they had reached Neu-Isenburg, and from there he took two more taxis back to the city centre. Expensive, but if you wanted to survive and get anything out of the operation it was no good penny-pinching for the wrong purposes. The man in the ski anorak pushed off. In his place, two drunks came carefully down the stairs. One was carrying the plastic bag with their bottles, the other was smoking a cheroot. A picture of peace. Blum went off to the luggage lockers.
But there were people there now. They had gathered at the back of the place, anyone who had nowhere else to go. A bottle was being passed round, a girl who couldn’t be more than twelve was painting her lips, a Turkish lad with a scarred face was playing cards with a mixed-race boy who must be well under age too. About ten of them in all. The level-B kindergarten. They were not happy about Blum. He knew they didn’t take their eyes off him. He opened the locker and turned his back to them. He was just stowing the bag of coke in the travelling bag and putting it in with the sample case when a cough made him jump. It was the girl. Her bold, cherry-red mouth was twisted into a malicious grin.
“Got a fag?”
She was beside him, peering into the locker. He put the bag inside and closed the door. Then he held out the packet of HBs. She took two.
“Looking for business?”
“What did you say?”
“You heard. I’ll do it for twenty. I’ve got a great ass.”
“For heaven’s sake, child, get out before I—”
“Before you what? Before you get out your ID. You’re a cop, right?”
Finally he had the 1.50 marks ready and fed them into the slot. Then he turned the key and took it out of the lock. The girl followed his movements, hungry-eyed.
“Push off, sparrow.”
“Push off yourself, asshole.”
Now the boys were surrounding him too. The mixed-race kid put out his hand.
“Give me a mark.”
For the church, mister. But this bunch looked a good deal more dangerous.
“Me too.”
“Me too.”
“And me.”
The Turkish boy summed up. “Give us ten marks and it’ll be okay.”
“Why should I give you ten marks? You must be out of your minds.”
“He said he’d fuck me in the ass,” said the red-lipped decoy.
“You better give us twenty, then,” said the mixed-race boy.
For a moment Blum thought he had lost his reason. Too much coke. He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them. He was still standing in front of the lockers, with the children crowding close.
“Hey, old man, you not well?”
“Looks like he’d fall over any minute.”
“I guess he had too much Omo in the stuff.”
“Now let me tell you—”
“Talks like a cop, but he ain’t.”
“Hand over the bread, Grandpa, or something nasty might happen.”
The drunks were standing silent by a pillar, watching the scene. Blum shook himself. He had dealt with the others. If only this haziness would clear from his brain . . . He tackled the Turk.
“What does your Dad think of you hanging around here, Mustafa?”
The Turk cast him a scornful glance. Then the mixed-race kid joined in, tugging Blum’s sleeve.
“Don’t try that on, old man. We know what you’re doing here.”
Blum slapped him down, hard. The others caught the mixed-race kid, and then the Turkish boy had a knife in his hand. Blum hit out, and it fell to the ground with a clatter.
“You’ve got a hell of a lot to learn before you know anything,” he said, but he didn’t hang around to teach them. A retreat to familiar territory. You didn’t mix it with a horde of precocious teenagers if you had a luggage locker full of coke. The drunks stood where they were, open-mouthed, and forgot their thirst for a moment. Blum waved to them, but they didn’t wave back. They had to stick it out even longer on level B. It was cold and rainy up above. Germany was only for those who knew their way around. Blum considered himself one of them, but these young toughs had almost got the better of him. In any place like Calcutta you’d have shown them, he thought, but once they start speaking German you’re finished. He went into the nearest snack bar, ordered coffee and a bitters, and took a pinch of coke in the Gents. This was a fine start to the night.
He would have liked to plunge into the commotion of the big city, but Frankfurt was more of a boggy pond; all the flowers grew from the same plant, all the dragonflies danced above the same water. He didn’t fancy spending his money on a whorehouse. He needed a place for the night, somewhere to stay during the hours when everything was still in the balance. And since the others knew that too it might be better just to let himself drift. He began drifting.
In the next bar they greeted him as if he belonged there, and
a man in dungarees asked if he had another two grams.
“Two grams of what?” asked Blum, frowning, pokerfaced.
“What do you think, man? Coke, of course.”
“Coke? You mean fuel for your stove?”
“Hey, don’t you remember me? I’m Detlev.”
“Oh, the anti-nuclear protester. I get it now. Coke instead of nuclear power. Coke power: nuclear coke. Do you build your own nucleus – biologically or with cellophane? I recommend shaving foam. Guaranteed sterile.”
Detlev looked at him in horror and retreated. “Wow, man, that’s terrible stuff. I’d noticed.”
“Really? I was going to change to brown coal anyway.”
But of course he couldn’t go on clowning all night. Maybe the tragic approach was better. He sat in a bar for an hour, staring at his glass. Then the barmaid asked if anything was getting up his nose, and he left. It was raining. He thought he saw Cora in another bar – same hair, same figure, but she was wearing a long dress – except that when he looked at the woman from in front the effect wasn’t so much Bardot as, at the most, Anita Ekberg. Seen too many movies, he thought, and paid. It was still raining. The steel scaffolding on the Opera House gleamed. It was being rebuilt in honour of “Truth, Beauty, Virtue”. All very well and good, thought Blum, given a million I’d be with you. Perhaps Cora is right, he thought, and it’s no kind of life to be thinking in figures all the time, travelling about in a state of distrust, turning paranoid and insisting on cash. It somehow makes everything dirty . . . right, baby, but what’s clean is there to be made dirty, isn’t that so? Anyway I’m too old to begin all over again, and if I could I’d probably do the same as before. There’s really no point in it, I don’t believe in love but I’ve always paid for it, and when I have my bar on that island some day it will say above the door: All Currencies Accepted. That’s a kind of faith too, thought Blum. It had stopped raining. Now it was snowing.
At three in the morning Blum was outside a bar that was just closing, rubbing the snow off his sunglasses with his scarf. A patrol car glided past. The man in the passenger seat looked at Blum. Now he’ll report back to the officer leading the manhunt that I’m still out and about, thought Blum. He’ll go through my data again, send for the files. Something odd about this customer, he’ll think. Look at this, Tomaczek, the man spent a year abroad, we must latch on to that. Telling us he buys up old rugs. One of those fake Berliners, Tomaczek, making out they were there in the fifties. Aha, here we have it! So he was in Tangiers. I can smell narcotics 100 yards away against the wind. Call through to Interpol and connect me up, and you bring in that dealer, Tomaczek, squeeze him till the pips squeak, then bring me what’s left and don’t forget to wipe the floor clean. With Vim.
A taxi stopped. Two men in long raincoats tumbled out, and they too discovered that the bar had closed. The taxi drove off. They whispered to each other. Blum realized that one was looking sideways at him. In the wan light they both had pale faces. Snowflakes were melting on their dark, uncombed hair. Blum wanted to move away, but he felt rooted to the spot. Finally the two men came over to him. Junkies, thought Blum. That’s all I needed.
“I guess you have something to sell,” said the taller man.
“Me? What makes you think that?”
“It’s kind of in the blood,” said the shorter man nonchalantly.
Yes, they were junkies.
He went back to their apartment with them. Crazy, he thought, but it was all the same to him now. He had the little tube of coke with him. Somehow nothing mattered any more. You had to let things take their course. Take it as it came, go with the flow. It might sound corny but there could be something in it, and drugs had to do with magic. The apartment was large and gloomy, in an old building with a view of the street, trees in front of it. A dirty kitchen, the rest of the place the same as everywhere, the same pointless lumber. Junkies were junkies, that was the only difference. He gave them a pinch, and they mixed the cocaine with heroin and injected it in their veins, right in front of him, brazen as Asian street beggars and with the cold objectivity of surgeons.
“Don’t you want to try it too?”
“No thanks, I don’t like needles.”
“You’re missing out on the very best there is.”
He shook his head and explored the apartment. The door of one room opened, creaking, and a girl with frizzy red hair stood there blinking in the light of the corridor, clutching an old dressing gown together over her breasts. She struck him as familiar, but he couldn’t place her.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“A ghost,” he said.
“I’ve seen you before,” she remarked, lighting a cigarette. Her fingernails were very long, and blood-red.
“I feel the same,” he said.
“I know where. On the Iron Bridge. You’re the guy who had the cocaine.”
“And you were driving the tall man.”
“Still got any of that stuff?”
They went and sat down with the junkies. The redhaired girl sniffed some coke. Blum asked her why the tall man had called the deal off.
“Oh, him,” she said dismissively. “He just talks big. Acts like the Emperor of China, but there’s nothing behind it.”
Blum nodded. A tram rattled along in the distance. One of the junkies put a record on: reggae.
“So as sure as the sun will shine
I’m gonna get my share, what is mine
And the harder they come
The harder they fall . . .”
Then they just sat around, and the red-haired girl wanted to go to bed with Blum, but he didn’t want any junk or any sex either. All Blum wanted was the money, 200 marks for a gram, junkie money with blood on it, blood money, ashes for snow. The red-haired girl began painting her toenails, and Blum lay down on a sofa and listened to the junkies – one had been constipated for six days, the other was talking about some dirty deal or other, and they both seemed to be discussing the same thing, interchangeable symptoms of the same condition, the same incurable illness. He saw the day slowly dawning behind the trees, the city coming to life, going on again, Frankfurt am Main in the Federal Republic of Germany.
29
The sky in Wiesbaden was bright blue. Blum took a taxi drive through the town twice, to Biebrich and to Dotzheim, until he decided that there was no one tailing him, and yet when he got out at Central Station he had that sense of being watched again. And 100 marks were gone too.
The rollneck pullover he’d bought that morning cost DM 129. A cappuccino cost 3.50. A steak and salad was 17.80. A ticket to Amsterdam cost 104.30. You had to struggle to make ends meet in this country. But that was no reason to double-cross him the way Cora had. He wasn’t mixing baby powder with the coke to stretch five pounds to ten. No, you could keep clean even if you were wading through filth, but to understand that you had to be sure of yourself.
There wasn’t a word in the newspapers about the big police raid. However, the asylum seekers were making headlines again. Mr Haq had not, of course, been seeking asylum, but a discussion of business and the qualities of modern life. That’s no reason to deport someone straight away. My dear Mr Haq, you didn’t tell me the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so we’re equal but not quits. Tell the barman in the Punjab Club to crush that ice.
The Intercity train to Cologne was announced. Blum stayed on the platform until the last minute, watching the people getting in, but what use was that? Anybody could be one of them.
Blum found a seat next to the corridor. He didn’t need to watch the landscape going past. It all looked the same anyway. It was the people who were important. Dangerously important. The well-preserved lady in her seventies with waved white hair who kept her gloves on even when eating chocolate; the bespectacled man with the bush of grey hair accompanying the man with shaky hands who consumed half a bottle of vodka; the thin man in the striped green suit going through a whole pile of model railway magazines with the gloomy expression of someone in
his last semester of teacher training – they were the sights worth seeing, the Binger Loch of this journey, the Loreley rock. So he couldn’t take his eyes off the corridor for a moment, or put his sample case in the baggage compartment.
The bespectacled man disappeared at Bingen. Before they reached Koblenz he came back without the vodka-drinking man, but with a strong smell of alcohol about him, and as elated as if he’d thumbed his nose at the whole world. The attendant with the drinks trolley came along. Blum bought a coffee. The thin man was hungry, and spent his time over the next thirty miles taking a plastic knife out of a cellophane bag and using it to spread cellophane-packed plastic sausage on a cellophane-wrapped slice of plastic bread. Blum leafed through the Bahamas handbook and informed himself about offshore banking. A pleasing subject, but it wouldn’t do to start dreaming about it. The bespectacled man and the thin man would have been a good choice for a syndicate’s commando squad. They were definitely filmable. And just because the lady was over seventy didn’t mean she was necessarily retired.
Nothing happened in the corridor. The passengers pored over their files, looked out of the window looking bored, allowed the leading articles in the newspapers to lull them to sleep. Blum gradually relaxed. The old lady struck up a conversation about the Bahamas with him. Blum recommended her to invest in Freeport. When he explained the Hawksbill Creek Agreement which had set up the free trade zone of Grand Bahama, the two men suddenly left the compartment. So much for syndicates
“It’s too late for me, of course,” said the lady at last, “but why don’t you risk something on it, young man? Everything here is going to the dogs.”
“Madam, it’s never too late,” replied Blum.
Shortly before they came into Cologne Central Station, the train stopped for several minutes. Blum stood in the corridor staring into a dirty back yard. The soot of a hundred years lay on the walls. A blouse fluttered from a window. Cartons of empty beer bottles stood on the garbage bins. A woman’s hand drew a curtain aside, opened the window and brought the blouse in.