by Jorg Fauser
Blum turned to a grey-haired man in a stained waiter’s jacket standing behind the bar, adding up receipts. A long white scar adorned his simple face. A woman somewhere in her mid-fifties looked at him with suspicion. She was in full warpaint, with a large bead necklace around her neck and a Titian-red wig on her head. Her fat fingers with their brightly coloured rings, their nails filed to sharp points, were playing with a cola glass still one-third full of a liquid that looked like a mixture of eggnog and Pernod.
“Excuse me,” said Blum, “I heard this was the best show in Ostend.”
The barkeeper looked up from his receipts. He had just shaved, but had cut his upper lip and forgotten to remove the scab of encrusted blood. He looked at Blum and seemed to like what he saw, for he bared what remained of his brownish teeth, but before he could say anything the woman in the Titian wig placed her hand on his arm, and turned to Blum, speaking in a surprisingly soft and melodious voice. You could tell she was a trained singer.
“You flatter us, mister. But if a man can flatter as nicely as you do nothing good usually comes of it. May I ask who told you so?”
“A friend.”
“I see. A friend. Perhaps we know your friend?”
Blum gave a description of Hackensack. “And he always wears striking hats, and he drinks bourbon like water.”
“No, doesn’t mean anything to me. Most Americans wear peculiar clothes, you know, and they all drink spirits like water.”
“Perhaps you’ll get to meet him. We arranged to meet here this evening. Can you reserve us a table?”
She let go of the barkeeper and nudged him in the ribs. He beamed.
“Get the gentleman a drink, Joseph! What would you like? Are you an American too?”
“Do I wear peculiar clothes?”
“Well, they’re a little lightweight for this climate.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that. I’m German. I’d like a beer, please.”
“A beer, Joseph. German beer!”
“We ran out yesterday.”
“I’m happy with Belgian beer.”
“Fine. But if you reserve a table you must reserve two girls as well. Tables only come with girls.”
“Of course. And is there a show this evening too?”
“We have two shows every evening, at nine and eleven.”
“Then I’ll reserve a table for both shows.”
He put a banknote on the bar. She took it, giving Blum a rather odd look. “Not going to make any trouble, are you?”
“Madam, I don’t know the meaning of the word trouble.”
“I just had a kind of feeling when I saw you come in.”
Joseph had opened the bottle of beer, and the madam poured half a glass for Blum.
“But I don’t mind that,” she said, clinking glasses with Blum. “Trouble can be amusing too. Your health, sir!”
“And yours, ma’am.”
They drank, and then she said, “Why not take a table right away? We could be so busy later we run a bit short of girls. Or you’ll have nothing but business in mind, such things have been known. Come along, amuse yourself first, who knows what will happen later? My husband – God knows he gave me grief, but at least I have to admit he never failed to show women they came before business. Well, what about it? Would you like a table?”
Blum glanced sideways at the gloomy niches, the swathes of smoke with nowhere to disperse, the puddles of beer, the plaintive drunks. Compared to this, the Playgirl on Malta where the cockroaches screwed in the jukebox was a fun, swinging place. On the other hand he didn’t fancy walking around the town, rain was beating against the door, and at least it was warm in here.
“I’ll send a good girl over to you,” said the madam, pouring more beer into his glass, “something very special. Amuse yourself a bit – who knows when you’ll next get the chance?”
“Very well,” said Blum, “a little atmosphere can’t hurt. But let me know when the American arrives.”
He winked at her. She smiled back. No sooner had he sat down at one of the tables than a Eurasian girl appeared with another beer for him and some lemonade for herself. Looks as if the madam really does mean well, thought Blum. Mona, as the Eurasian girl was called, was half Chinese, half French, and her face, although bloated with alcohol, still showed traces of animal beauty. Her olive-coloured skin gleamed like grease. Her thick lips, which could have been a black girl’s, left Cora’s pouting mouth in the shade. She had cut her black hair very short, so that it lay on her flat skull like a bathing cap. Her plump figure was clad in a green trouser suit embroidered with red glass beads. Blum even liked the barbaric costume jewellery on her short fingers. She sat enthroned on the wooden bench, a Chinese tourist demon sipping something called a sherry cocktail and cleaning her nails with a toothpick, while Blum began to sweat. She was the Great Whore, the Angel of the Harbour. Madonna berikni u salvani. From Valletta to Ostend in fourteen days, from Helga the dentist’s wife to the imported Mona, from a case full of porn magazines to a case full of coke. But it wasn’t the cases that mattered, perhaps they were even a nuisance, perhaps a man about to be forty tomorrow should travel without any baggage at all in future. There was something bleak and ghostly about the Roxy Bar, and something in the Eurasian girl’s eyes that sent a shiver down Blum’s spine – a great void, an emptiness. He asked where she came from.
“Saigon,” she said, giving him a provocative look. “But my father, he great general in China, he go back to Shanghai to save fatherland, they take him prisoner, he still in prison. When I have much money I free him.”
“Perhaps I can help you,” said Blum.
“You? Why you?”
“Well, perhaps I’d be glad if someone got me out of prison too.”
“Why you in prison?”
He grinned, wiped the sweat from his face, drank his beer. “We’re all on a knife-edge.”
“Yes?”
“I mean, we can all tread in the shit any moment. Bang, and they lock you up for ten years. I don’t think I’d mind if there was someone wanting to get me out.”
“But my father general, he in prison for China.”
“Surely it doesn’t make any difference after thirty years.”
To Mona, however, it did make a difference. By comparison with her father the general, anyone else who had to go to prison cut a poor figure. Blum tried to imagine Hermes being shown in a good light by his daughter – if she really was his daughter – telling her customers about him in twenty years’ time in Hamburg or Marseilles. She couldn’t very well say he was in prison for Germany. Anyway, men like Hermes very seldom ended up in jail. They had not just their numbered accounts, they had their escape routes too.
“What you think of, Bloomin?”
“Blum. Like a flower in bloom.”
“Bloomin.”
“This’ll make you laugh, I’m thinking of money.”
“Why? You can’t pay?”
“Of course I can pay, Mona.”
“For sherry cocktail?”
“Would you like another?”
“No. For me can you pay?”
Of course he could pay for Mona too, said Blum, but wouldn’t that spoil their friendship? No, he could pay her all the same, said Mona. After all, she didn’t need the money for herself, she could live on bread and water, she could live on air if she had to, no, she needed it for her father the general who had been all alone in prison for thirty years, forgotten by everyone but his daughter because the prison was so secret, nobody knew where it was, somewhere at the other end of the world, but once he had smuggled a letter out, a letter that had reached her a year later. And he had written that all was not lost, he had built a sundial in the prison yard, and he had taught birds to speak, and the rats brought him food. Could Blum do that? Yes, said Blum, if he had a daughter like Mona he could do it too, and he’d have found out that all was not lost in Istanbul at the latest. And Mona smiled, or at least two small lines appeared one on each side of her mouth,
but it was still a smile. If you had nothing else, that was happiness.
“Now we go to private room,” she said.
The “private room” was a surprise. In the part of the Roxy Bar where clients made love it was a good olf-fashioned bordello with well-heated rooms and pink wallpaper, lavishly supplied with pot plants and velvet-covered doors, Turkish ottomans and French beds, candelabras and gilt-framed trick mirrors. Perhaps Blum had underestimated Hackensack’s taste, but the dust lying everywhere showed that the fashions of the nineteenth century had few followers today in Ostend, as elsewhere.
If no expense had been spared on the furnishings, Mona spared none either. She kept enticing new desires and new banknotes out of Blum, and she herself even had moments of pleasure and made strange sounds, like the twittering of birds, so that Blum wondered what kind of man that father of hers must be, and what birds he had taught to speak. Finally, bathed in sweat, he laid his head between her thighs, on her wet pussy, and in his thoughts he was far away in China when a cold draught of air from somewhere swept through the room. He opened his eyes. A man in a white suit stood in the doorway. Somehow the man seemed familiar. Then a second man made his way into the room through a door in the wallpaper. He wore a leather jacket and seemed less familiar. At the same moment Mona pushed him away from her and disappeared through the door in the wallpaper. Blum sat up and rubbed his eyes. He had almost forgotten about this character.
“I take it you’ve finished,” said Rossi, closing the door behind him.
40
“You’re making a mistake, Rossi,” said Blum.
“Is that all you have to say to me?”
“I don’t have the cocaine.”
“Why are you lying, Blum? We’ve been watching you ever since Amsterdam. The case is in a left-luggage locker, and the locker receipt is in your wallet.”
They’d been watching him since Amsterdam. Not since Malta, then, not since Munich, not since Frankfurt.
“And how did you know I was in Amsterdam?”
“Amsterdam is a small city, Blum. A thing like that gets around.”
“But the frog-eyed character in Frankfurt wasn’t your man?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Can I get dressed?”
“Please do.”
The Italian leaned on the wall beside the door and watched as Blum dressed. His partner, looking bored, was leafing through a comic book. Blum’s movements were rather slow. It took him a whole minute to put on a sock.
“I don’t have all evening, Blum.”
“One really ought to put on clean underwear after screwing.”
Rossi didn’t answer but inspected his fingernails.
“I have the case, yes, Rossi, but the stuff isn’t in it any more. Who’d go to Ostend with cocaine? No, I gave it to some people in Amsterdam. It was making me too nervous.”
“If you’re looking for your other sock, it’s hanging from the vase of flowers.”
“Oh, so it is. Smart dollybird, that Mona. How did you know I’d be going to the Roxy?”
“Anyone who knows you slightly can count off the likely places on the fingers of one hand. Ostend’s nothing but a village.”
“Then all that was intentional – with Mona?”
“You can wonder about that until your life’s end. Which won’t be too far in the future, given the mistakes you’re making.”
“What kind of mistakes? I mean, okay, admittedly it may have been a mistake to take the left-luggage receipt from your – er – wig . . . and I see you have the wig back again . . . but anyone would have done that.”
“Your biggest mistake was not selling the cocaine at once.”
“No one had the money. And I can’t complain. I had a good time.”
“At my expense, yes.”
Rossi helped himself to the whisky that Blum had had sent up. Blum sat on the bed and tried to get his boots on.
“So what’s going to happen now?”
“Guess.”
“Why didn’t you get the stuff off me in Amsterdam?”
“We wanted to see what you’d do with it. But you’re so nervous, Blum. Here, have some whisky.”
Meanwhile Blum was putting his jacket on. He felt the weight of the knife.
“And in case you have any kind of clever trick in mind,” said Rossi, as if he had guessed Blum’s thoughts, “forget it. Francesco here is a karate black belt.”
Francesco made a jerky bow and then returned his attention to the comic book. Blum was dressed now. The white suit looked good on Rossi, although Blum himself wouldn’t have worn a chequered tie with it. Italians weren’t what they used to be. He still hadn’t given up all hope of the coke yet.
“Right, Blumo,” said Rossi, “let’s go and get that stuff now. Give me the locker receipt.”
“Think again, Rossi. I handed the case in only three hours ago. The man will remember me. It’ll be best for me to do it myself.”
“Okay. You may even be right. But don’t forget – you have no chance of getting away with the stuff now.”
“And what’s going to happen when you have the stuff?”
Rossi’s smile matched his brutal chin.
“I’m sure we’ll think of something. Andiamo, Blum.”
It was just after eight now. They left the Roxy through the door in the wallpaper, down a corridor and out of a side exit. It was raining again. Rossi the great coke dealer had an American car, but he didn’t fool Blum that way. This is out of his league too, he thought. The neon lights of the bars and restaurants were flickering in Lange Straat, then the dock lay ahead of them and the outline of a ferry was in their headlights.
They turned into the railway station forecourt. The car stopped. They got out. Rossi went ahead, Francesco kept close beside Blum. Two American women were just handing in their backpacks at the left-luggage office. Blum took the receipt out of his wallet. One Italian to his left, another to his right. As soon as he had the case in his hands he must do something, but he had no idea what. He could hardly kick up a racket. But if he did nothing the five pounds of coke would be gone for good. The American women got their left-luggage tickets but still stood about near the office, studying a map of the town. Rossi nudged Blum.
“The receipt, Blumo.”
Blum gave the man on duty the receipt. He saw three other men standing about at the back of the left-luggage office, smoking and looking at the three strangers. There couldn’t be a lot to do in the Ostend left-luggage office on a Friday evening. While the left-luggage man was still looking for the sample case, Blum had an idea. He turned his head and whispered to Rossi behind him: “Rossi, police!”
He felt Francesco twitch. Rossi nudged him again, gently.
“Don’t talk nonsense, Blum!”
The man put the sample case on the counter.
“I don’t have any Belgian money, Rossi.”
Rossi put the money down, the official gave him change, which Francesco pocketed, and Blum reached for the case. This was the moment, but he could think of nothing to do. The Americans were in the way. They walked around them, and then, at the same time, they saw the man standing in the doorway of the buffet just treading out his cigarette.
It was Larry the Australian
“He’s a cop, you idiot!”
Blum was already in motion, still with the case, and then everything happened all at once: Rossi’s partner tried to attack Blum, Larry tripped him up, a man in a raincoat stood in Blum’s way and snatched the case from him, the American women screamed, a uniformed policeman caught Rossi at the exit, Blum stumbled and was caught by Larry, Larry whispered something in his ear that he couldn’t make out, they were already crowding out of the concourse, the Italians flanked by policemen, Blum by Larry and the man in the raincoat. Larry had the case now, the ferry sounded a signal, rain was running down Blum’s face, and he had just one thought in his head: this is finally it. Curtains for you in Ostend.
He was steer
ed into a car, Larry sat in front, two men beside Blum in the back, hard, expressionless faces, no handcuffs, but what would be the point? They had him.
The cops won out in the end. You imagined a bug-bear and it came to life. And here was Larry as police chief, a narcotics agent, of course. Making out he’d been in Vietnam. You could believe it of him. They drove off. Blum felt himself falling down a black hole. Everything was giving way, there was nothing to hold on to, he was tumbling, plunging. Jail. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t utter a sound. How much did you get for this? Three years? Eight? Ten? He wouldn’t survive even one year, not at forty. It would be all over tomorrow.
The car stopped somewhere, in a dark quarter of town, huge cubes of empty hotel blocks, he could hear the sea, it was high tide. They entered one of the cubic buildings, neon lighting, a lobby, looked like a hotel, carpets, chandeliers, the lounge, of course, these were no ordinary cops. Larry could be grinning, the bastard. I’ll take you to Gozo with me, you’ll be safe from your girlfriend there. The dentist’s wife. Oh Madonna, no more women. How long for? No woman for three years? For eight years? Ever?
I’d rather be sliced up small. I’d rather die.
Lift, corridor, carpets muffling their footsteps, the bearded man in the windcheater going ahead with the case, the sample case, the case with the coke inside it. He opened a door, waved Blum in. The raincoats stopped. Why did you have to do everything they wanted, even go through this door? They pushed you, so you went in, and there sat Hackensack in his shirt and suspenders, sipping a glass of whisky.
41
Except that it wasn’t whisky Hackensack was drinking but apple juice, and on the table behind which he sat enthroned a long row of pillboxes, packets of tablets and ampoules of liquid had been set up. A bright green plastic cap was perched on his head, giving his face a wan, unhealthy colour. Even his nose looked pale.