by Jorg Fauser
“Do me a favour and don’t let Fred crack up,” said the sales rep, looking at Blum with his blue eyes. “He’s the only person I have left.”
“I won’t,” said Blum. Then Fred came back with the spirits, and they all had a drink, and Fred had another, and then they left the sales rep’s hut.
The sky had clouded over, and a cold wind had risen. The delivery van bore faded lettering: F. KOWALSKI – BEST EGGS, FRESH CHICKENS – BISLICH, LOWER RHINE. They squeezed themselves into the driver’s seat, Fred behind the wheel, the sales rep next to him, Blum by the door with his case between his knees. During the drive a loose piece of metal somewhere kept clanging, Fred had difficulty changing gear, and the heating wasn’t working. So they juddered on, sticking close to the Rhine, under the sulphurous sky that never allowed complete darkness to fall, making for Holland. No one said anything. Blum was sorry he hadn’t taken a pinch of coke. He felt unutterably weary and dispirited. At this crucial moment, he thought, of all times. He could deal with these two colleagues, but if the Italian was waiting for him again in the first Dutch town he reached he’d probably have to give up. He took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. No, he was not about to give up. Federal Germany had almost done for him, its damaged, hopelessly corrupt citizens like Cora. That was all behind him now. See it through, he thought. See it through. Even if he landed up in Neheim-Hüsten in the end, he might still see Freeport first, maybe even the Punjab Club in Lahore, with Mr Haq . . .
“Wake up, friend,” said the sales rep beside him. “We’re there.”
“At the border?”
“We have to go a little way on foot now.”
Blum clambered out of the truck. Fred was standing behind a hedge relieving himself. The truck was parked at the far end of a little wood with a gravel path running past it. The sky was already pale on the horizon, and birds were beginning to stir. The sales rep stood close to Blum.
“Watch out for Fred,” he whispered. “He’s got his eye on your case.”
Blum nodded. He looked at the time. Nearly four. The bastard’s been driving us around for three hours, he thought. Fred waved. They walked along beside the wood, first Fred, then Blum, then the sales rep. After quarter of an hour they came to a stream. Fred and the sales rep, who were wearing gumboots, simply waded through the water. Blum took a run and jumped. He made it across the stream without losing his case. They went on, zigzagging through a little wood, across fields and meadows, and finally reached a footpath leading straight into the mist.
“Go along there and you’ll come to another stream,” said Fred. “Then you’re in Holland. Follow the stream and it leads to a canal on the left, then you come to the road and you can catch a bus.”
It was beginning to get light. Blum looked hard at Fred, the case in his left hand, his right on the handle of the knife in his jacket pocket.
“And suppose someone spots me? There must be border guards patrolling around here.”
He saw Fred smile. The sales rep was now standing on his colleague’s left.
“Nonsense,” said Fred. “And if they are – I thought they couldn’t touch you?” His gaze wandered to the case, his left hand to his coat pocket. “I’d love to know what you’ve got in there, friend.”
“You’re welcome,” said Blum, ramming the case into Fred’s stomach, while the sales rep seized his left arm and held it tight. Fred groaned and swore, but not very loud.
“Good thing you noticed he’s left-handed,” whispered the sales rep.
“I didn’t,” whispered Blum back. He did not shake hands with the sales rep but waved to him after he had gone twenty yards. The sales rep was still hanging on to Fred’s arm.
“Do you want to know what’s in it?” called Blum softly.
“What?”
“Dynamite,” called Blum. Then he walked quickly away down the path without looking round again.
32
Blum lay on the bed, staring through the window at the roof of the building next door. Two seagulls were perched on the chimney. It looked as if they were staring back. He heard the hurdy-gurdy from over at the Damrak Hotel playing the same tune all day. The sky was a dirty grey.
He picked up the phone, waited for reception to answer, and said he’d like to try the Frankfurt number again. He read it out once more from the card that Hackensack had given him, although he knew it by heart. The card was dirty too now. And once again he heard the ringing tone and imagined the phone in an empty room – cleared, abandoned everyone gone, only the yellow crocus still shining on the wall. Suddenly there was a crackle on the line. At first Blum thought the connection had been broken, but then a voice actually spoke, a male voice.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Mr Hackensack. Blum here. You remember me – Blum –”
He stopped. Hackensack would have reacted by this time.
“Is that you, Mr Hackensack?”
“No, this isn’t Hackensack.” But the speaker was American too, that was obvious. “Who are you?”
“I’m a – a business partner of Mr Hackensack’s. I was at your office last week. I spoke to a lady there.”
“Where was this?”
Blum named the street, the number of the building, the floor, the name of the firm, and described the mummified Prussian secretary.
“Ah, well, that lady isn’t with us any more,” said the man at the other end of the line. “We never heard about your visit. What was it you wanted to discuss with Mr Hackensack?”
“He was going to advise me on an investment. Meantime I’ve already made one, but there are certain problems with further developments, if you follow me.”
A pause, then: “Maybe.”
“Can I speak to Mr Hackensack personally, please?”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible just now. Mr Hackensack isn’t here. We’re having some difficulties with our reorganization.”
“I see. But perhaps you can give him a message?”
There was a rushing sound on the line, and Blum thought the man had hung up, but then he heard him again. Quite close this time.
“That can be done. What did you want to say to him?”
“Tell him I’m in Amsterdam and I’d like to get in touch with him. Tell him it’s about chemicals . . .”
“Chemicals?”
“Yes, he’ll know what I mean. Chemicals and information. I’m at the Hotel Roder Leeuw.”
“And what was your name again?”
Blum spelled his name.
“I hope you don’t mind waiting a little longer, Mr Blum.”
“Listen . . .”
But the man really had hung up now.
Blum took a packet of cigarettes off the wash-stand. Fishy smells wafted out of the kitchen of the hotel restaurant into the inner courtyard, and fat pigeons were waddling along the gutter. The bells of the Nieuwe Kerk were playing the “Ode to Joy” again. Beethoven on the half-hour, some Protestant hymn or other every hour, Blum suspected. There were multilingual warnings about hotel fires in the Roder Leeuw too. Do not panic. Keep calm. Easier said than done, thought Blum. It was raining now, and the raindrops too were natives of a country where the cooking was good; they were fat and smeared the window. He lay down with his cigarette.
The room was smaller than anywhere he had stayed since Barcelona, furnished only with the bare necessities, the mustard-coloured fitted carpeting in the man-made fabric supplied to all hotels of this category, and a coloured print on the wall showing a canal in Amsterdam at a time when you could still bathe or catch fish there without dying of poisoning. The water dripped from the shower-head in the shower cubicle. The wardrobe door wouldn’t close properly, and although he had turned up the heating he was freezing, even in his rollneck pullover. After an endless, nerve-racking day he had reached Amsterdam utterly exhausted, taken a room in the first hotel he found and slept for a full day, and when he had woken up it was another day before he could bring himself to go out and eat. He felt like a limp sack of flesh
with its muscles on strike and its brain sending out no more signals. Perhaps the nocturnal sessions with the voice broadcasting those coded instructions into the ether had taken over his unconscious mind, and now, here in Holland without a radio, cut off from the secret frequencies, he was like a missing agent slowly dying in the cold.
They’re keeping me on ice, he thought as he stared up at the dirty sky by day, and when he woke from dreams of terror by night, drenched in sweat, and heard the “Ode to Joy” again as he gulped down a glass of water; trembling, he thought: now they’re going to grill me. And when he heard the telephone ringing and ringing in Frankfurt, he saw Hackensack, fat Mr Hackensack, Consultant, sitting in a similarly shabby hotel room in a similarly dilapidated town, trying to tune radios that were no longer broadcasting, speaking into phones on a dead line. Then Blum said, out loud, “You just need the right attitude, Mr Hackensack,” and he laughed and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and turned to the wall, lapsing into the new but ever-familiar nightmare that always began on white beaches and always ended in flight, in ruined cities under dark moons, among frogs with killer eyes and blondes with blood-red lips.
And all the time the sample case of cocaine stood unlocked under the wash-stand, and once, when Blum had just opened it and was looking at the jumbo cans, the Indonesian chambermaid came in with clean towels, and he took a can, showed it to her, sprayed a quantity of foam on his cheek, and the chambermaid laughed, she had beautiful eyes, and for a moment even that was possible again, but then she put the towels down on the wash-stand, he picked up his shaver, she went out of the room, and the hurdy-gurdy played its tune for the seventy-seventh time that day.
33
Blum went out for a Chinese meal. He found a decent-looking restaurant, quite empty, in a street on the outskirts of the Old Town. An old man with four long white hairs wafting over his polished bald pate like strands of candyfloss brought him sharkfin soup, mushrooms, fried shrimp and rice wine. Alone in this large restaurant, under all these lamps, among Buddhas and gilded dragons, attentively observed by a company of silent, smiling waiters, Blum felt for a wonderful moment like a traveller who is the first to set foot in an undiscovered country, and is treated by the natives with that exquisite courtesy which leaves the stranger unsure whether he will be accepted as a friend or chopped up at night and fed to the pigs. This moment, unfortunately, did not last very long, for another customer entered the restaurant.
The young man – Blum judged him to be in his late twenties – was greeted by the Chinese respectfully but with obvious familiarity, and sat down a few tables away, his face towards Blum. He did not so much as look at the menu, but listened to what the old Chinese waiter was whispering to him and then nodded. He wore an old tweed jacket and jeans, his fair hair fell untidily to his narrow shoulders, and there was reddish stubble on his thin face with its watchful eyes. But even the way he lit his cigarette spoke volumes to Blum – the young man had exactly the provocatively casual manner that he himself had done his best to cultivate all his life.
Blum turned his attention to his meal again. All the same, he could see that the young man had only a bowl of soup and then ordered coffee. As he pushed his plate away and was wondering whether to have a coffee too, he saw the young man take out a small snuffbox, sprinkle some of its contents on the back of his hand and sniff it up with enjoyment. Then he grinned at Blum as if to say: well, friend, what do you think that was – Pöschl’s Brazil or Peruvian flake? Blum immediately took his little tube out of his trouser pocket and imitated him: left – right. And then again, left – right. The Chinese waiters acted as if they had seen nothing.
“Good stuff?” asked the young man, stirring sugar into his coffee. He spoke with a Hamburg accent.
“We could swap – you let me sniff yours and I’ll let you sniff mine.”
The man from Hamburg stood up and took his coffee cup over to Blum’s table. His face looked a little older at close quarters. A few wrinkles already, and rings under his eyes.
“So the old man actually brought you something to eat,” he said, sitting down and crossing his long legs.
“Why not? This is a restaurant, isn’t it? Our slant-eyed friends make a living by serving food.”
“Haven’t you noticed how crowded this place is?”
Blum lit an HB. If this man wanted to tell him something then he needn’t bother with an answer. It was superfluous anyway, and the Peruvian flake was just taking effect and rocking his head. The man from Hamburg was staring at the wall where a picture hung.
“Sensible of him to hang a picture of the Boxer Rising over it, don’t you think?”
“Over what?”
“Over the blood that sprayed on the wall.”
“Blood? What blood?”
“Blood and some brains too. Three weeks ago the Israeli Mafia drove up here one evening and stopped the whole Chinese heroin trade at a blow. But not quite the way the Narcotics Department imagined. Still, it looks perfectly civilized again here, don’t you think?”
“Very civilized. And the cooking is excellent.”
“Yes, Mr Lee served the best Cantonese food in Amsterdam.”
“Served? Was he at the table too?”
“The police fished him out of the Amstel next day with his big toe in his mouth. But the restaurant was shut for only three days. And the day it opened again three Israelis were found in the garbage bins of the Hilton with their throats cut. All with their pricks in their mouths. Amsterdam is an interesting spot for anthropologists. Too bad for the Chinese that one of the Israelis was a member of Shin Bet, their secret service. Since then it’s been very quiet in this restaurant.”
The fair man snapped his fingers, and one of the younger waiters brought him another coffee. Blum finished his rice wine, but it wasn’t strong enough for him any more.
“You know your way around,” he said. “Been here long?”
“Oh, for ever. Of course Amsterdam is always interesting for certain trades as well as for anthropologists.”
“So long as you can get along with the Israelis.”
“And the Chinese. And the Moluccans. And the Turks. And the anarchists.”
“Anarchists? What do they have to do with it?”
“Oh, the anarchists have made up the leeway pretty well. They could flatten half the city, but they’d rather rake in the subsidies first. In a few years’ time, if all goes well here, you won’t be able to move except in a helicopter, preferably a Vietnam-tested American Huey with a troop of rangers firing at anything that moves – first a canister of teargas over the rooftops, then gas-masks on and into the office with an escort and a barrage of firing . . . a little scuffle before every deal will raise the most sluggish blood pressure . . . no, seriously, when it gets hot here you can forget everything you ever heard about street fighting. Once the lid comes off the pan you’ll be able to smell it all the way to the Bahamas. Another little pinch?”
Blum shook his head. He had a feeling that the lid was coming off his own pan. “You don’t by any chance know a blonde called Cora?”
The young man smiled, pleased. “Oh yes. And you must be Blum, right?”
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“Pure chance.”
“Oh, really.”
“My name’s Ted.” He beckoned to the old Chinese standing by a screen with a toothpick in his mouth and staring at the Boxer Rising.
“And I always thought there were no coincidences in this line of business.”
Ted paid the bill. “I assume you’ll come back with me for a drink. We’d almost given up hope of finding you.”
“We?”
“My partner and I.”
As they left the restaurant, the Chinese stood in a row like a reception line, and the lights were switched off. No sooner were they outside than the iron shutters came down. On the corner Blum noticed a car with two radio aerials outside a cigar shop. Two men were sitting in its dark interior watching the Chinese resta
urant, and Blum caught himself feeling something almost like relief. Other people had their problems too.
Ted drove an old Volvo. They did not talk much on the way. They left the car beside a small canal and jumped aboard a houseboat. The water smelled of decay. A yellow cone of light fell out of the cabin.
Ted knocked on the door, giving a signal, and it was opened from inside. The first person Blum saw was Cora, sitting on a floor cushion and looking expectantly up at him.
“Hello, baby,” said Blum, and he went in.
34
Blum would have furnished a houseboat in just the same way – top quality Oriental rugs, comfortable seating in the corners, a stereo system, a bar. All that struck him as strange were the three cuckoo clocks hanging on the wall above a number of Far Eastern knickknacks. They were part of the business, explained Ted’s partner, a youngish, dark-haired character called Tim.
“Our warehouse is elsewhere, of course – since yesterday, in fact, we have two warehouses. Decentralization sometimes makes sense – but the cuckoo clocks do a fantastic job in discussion with customers. I mean, some people practically faint away with delight hearing those cuckoos every quarter of an hour, three times running, timed to exactly a ten-second interval between each other. The Japanese flip their lids.”
“You sell cuckoo clocks to Japanese?”
“I told you these two were something special,” said Cora. Blum looked darkly at her.
“We just brought the cuckoo clocks back with us,” said Ted. “They’re made in Kuala Lumpur. We often do business there. Malaysia is practically our hinterland.”
The pair of them seemed to deal in anything eccentric – cuckoo clocks, walrus harpoons, opium pipes, electroplated staples from Taiwan, military tags from Singapore, translations of the Koran into Burmese, remaindered stocks of lace underwear from bankrupt Italian fashion houses, dry batteries from Uzbekistan. They also obviously smoked an Afghan hookah pipe and drank Bloody Marys by the pint. And then the little doors in the cuckoo clocks opened up and the cuckoos started calling. At ten-second intervals. Cora lounged decoratively between a burning candle and a sleeping cat, pretending to be drawing. Even more silver had flaked off her cowboy boots, but she was now wearing an expensive and exotic silk blouse, no doubt from Ted’s stock. She seemed to be on very intimate terms with the two dealers. A dealer groupie. Blum was ignoring her, which made her nervous. The conversation was now revolving around cocaine – Peruvian flake, 96 per cent.