Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  I’m here for their old school. Their disciple, finally. Otherwise they’d have put me someplace else. Not in front of a window that looks out on the inner-city highway, of all places. Six lanes. Right in the middle of the flight path to Berlin-TXL too! Claro. To make it finally clear to me who’s the commander. Yessir! That’s right, officer, sir! Click my heels with a real fine BANG! Nay nay nay nay nay—that crash came from up above. And it wasn’t a bang either! Cool down: that was a thunderbolt. ’Cause up above the floodgates are opening. Thank God. And there’s a bolt of lightning too now. Down southwest. But the picture, wasn’t it down here? Claro: three cars, one crumble-zone. Clean job! Repomng-rear-end-crash-highway-north-two-lanes-blocked-heading-Tegel-airport-Jakob-Kaiser-Platz. Heavenly soundtrack for sure. Another bolt now. Southeast. Sweet little baby bolt. Waitasec. Hangon. What’s that little cloud there, right under the—where did they come from, those four helicopters? How come I didn’t hear them? Shit. I was fixed on the highway. Major mistake. Stay flexible and cover the whole area—I blew it. That’s losing points for good. Now cool all down and start again: The first helicopter keeps going. The second is tumbling. The third—waitasec! Hangon! There wasn’t any bolt anywhere! Why is it exploding? Ohmygodmagn’m! Its ass is being torn up! So that’s what it looks like. But where’s the—oh, there. Tumbling too, now. Turn back, man, turn! There—that’s a bolt. That is—that means—bullshit, no. We haven’t got that far yet—although: it couldn’t be any harder to get a Strela than all the other toys, nowadays. Yeah, sure. Claro! All he needs to have is a safe place somewhere in Berlin-Mitte. Or Pankow. A Strela will knock everything out of the sky. If it’s flying low enough. Like helicopters. Airplanes approaching the runway. Well well well. But one away. Wonder where the others came down. The second one in the community garden next door? Pieces of the third all over Westhafen, probably. The fourth too, but intact. Let’s wait ’n see if it’ll explode on impact. Silly trees! And if it keeps on pouring—what’s happening on the highway, by the way? If it keeps on pouring like this, I won’t be able to see a thing. Have the burning pieces gone down there? Nay: that’s the middle car burning. Yeahyeah, keep on running. Leave your fucking cars behind and try to get outa there! That’s good. Beautiful. God, what heavenly peace.

  Oh, I see? Waitasec. Hangon. Was that what she was talking about, new school and stuff? Nay nay nay nay nay. Couldn’t have known about it. Besides, I would never instruct anybody to carry around fifteen kilos. For me, those eleven pounds were just enough. More than two sacks of potatoes. That’s typical male. And typical blunder. With me, that kind wouldn’t have reached training phase two. There was a lot more than one minute between those two shots. Plus, he even sets one rocket off. At least. The 72mm Strela being the most accurate thing you can get! And four helicopters like neatly pinned to the clothesline of any silly soap commercial being the easiest picking you can dream of! Bet he’s always practiced cozily lying in his glorious nook. Over there, in his better Germany. Make sure you don’t really have to work, huh? But now he’s had to stand up for the first time. On the balcony of his privileged three-room flat. For peace-loving combat forces and other honorable hopes of mankind. In one of those prefab prestige boxes looking like housing projects. On Leipziger Strasse. Holzmarkt. That neighborhood. Or even behind his rayon curtains. Terrific camouflage!

  His thunderstorm camouflage though—that’s some idea. Not all silly.

  They’re all outa their minds. What do they want anyway. Didn’t I provide for the fattest increase of the Berlin Heart Center? It was big in the paper. AIRLIFT FOR EUROPE’S HEART PATIENTS—DONOR FLOOD IN BERLIN. Four-inch letters. And that was even before I got those bloody bullets at last. Twelve three-round magazines of duplex 7.62 × 51. Those were original NATO indeed. Don’t want to know what kind of gap they’d come pouring through. Hadn’t those Baader-Meinhof creeps emptied munitions depots too? Claro. That stuff was kind of burial offerings for some of their buddies, before they dumped them in Stasiland. Behind the Iron Curtain. Sooner or later. Because that sweaty little pug who sold them to me—bet he hasn’t set foot in the West up till today. All crying nostalgia for the good old East. Bet he can’t even imagine that the words “black market” do not sound alien to people who lived under the Warsaw Treaty either. The time it took him to only accept listening to me! Bet if someone in the West offers him a real rare Black Angus, with the correct little blood rivulet, that is, he’ll just scream: Miss, the chop isn’t done! No doubt he never held a Mauser SP66 in his arms before that deal. Claro. According to him I should have chosen one of his Makarovs or Stetshkins.

  “I need a rifle, not a pistol. I’ve already got one.”

  “So take a Simonov. Or Kalashnikov. They load 7.62 ammo too. And what’s more, you can use our cartridge stock for them. No waiting for supplies. We’re overstocked with those.”

  “They don’t have 51mm length. Doesn’t make sense for me!”

  “But the M43 is top of the line. And given how short it is, it’s really fast ’n precise.”

  “But not fast and precise enough!”

  “Your decision. Anyway, the Mauser’s currently in short supply. I’m not sure if I can get near NATO midsize bullets these days—the price would be according, of course.”

  Claro, Comrade Dealer. You’re a quick study. Free market economy is when customers are supposed to be so silly that you can tell them a Mauser SP66 7.62 is incredibly difficult to find, right? Too bad if one of them just happens to know that it goes all over the world and may as well come back from there. Really fast ’n precisely. Even to the Jueterbog dump south of Berlin. To former Redarmyland.

  Well well well. That’s gonna be red alert. Major disaster alarm. All precincts. Must be coming from the industrial harbor, that smoke. It’s Westhafen down there. One more real bolt of lightning somewhere, and that’ll be it. Bingo. No more planes coming in? Claro: They must have seen it in the tower. Wonder if they reroute them. To Tempelhof? Or Schönefeld southeast of the city—poor passengers. They’ll have to squeeze into S-Bahn trains on top. Change trains three times. ’Cause taxicabs—forget about them. One half-filled Fokker 50, and they’re all gone. ’Cause the drivers still don’t know West Berlin and need twice as long. Pius, after forty years of being better human beings amid the warmhearted solidarity of socialism they don’t feel like calling colleagues when there’s business for everybody! I know them. Tried often enough to hail a cab for my crazy hell-raisers who were scheduled for a gig in the West, but stuck in some cheap hotel in the East! Ah, that’s the silliest joke of all, the one about how you only need to tell Eastern cabbies your name and they know the address automatically. ’Cause they’re all former Stasi agents. But how to get to that address—ah, forget it. Anyway, down there the sky is finally clearing. The rain’s finally easing too. Actually the kind of weather like the day of my first Mauser mission. Changing real fast, with a thunderstorm brewing. Quite precisely. Breadknife weather. For days. If that pug down in Jueterbog hadn’t been so slow with the magazines—given that handicap, it’s been an absolutely fantastic job! I’d had no time at all to get used to that rifle. And a Mauser’s a bloody different feel from the HK G3 I used to work with. For six years. Of my own bloody life! Six damn years of illusion about myself finally getting outa my jail and spreading my wings.

  But I simply couldn’t miss out on that wedding parade. There were twenty of them, maybe thirty, all at once! Okay, the Mauser is four inches longer and more than a pound heavier—so what! Is it my fault that precision guns for police snipers are so difficult to find that I couldn’t afford one? Am I Eveline Hartbold? Do I pay lousy wages to the employees of my husband’s company for taking care of a bunch of decked-out, coked-out rock stars? No. I’m not. I wouldn’t have named the company German Security Technicians Inc., to begin with, and I wouldn’t have stuffed it with the kind of lamebrains who just watching them makes you think of German Sleeping Tablets Inc. instead! Claro. Security technicians—fffhhh. They can’t even s
pell the word “manstopper”! All they can do is play Dick Tracy when they catch another one of those guys playing hooky. ’Cause that’s how the boss makes his money nowadays. Li’l bit of personal protection, li’l bit of violation of privacy. Big deal. He doesn’t even get near the real Big Deal. Industrial espionage, that stuff. Not for him. Not since Treuhand’s gotten the world’s largest corporation. Public tycoon privatizing en gros. The whole ex-GDR. He wouldn’t interfere with state security! He’s far too—let alone her! Personally checking the gun cases, each time I was done with my shift. To make sure I wouldn’t do anything stupid, at least not with toys registered to Strapsky … Harsh! Wonder who came up with that name. Big joke, for sure. Bet they had a big laugh all together. When the Holy Couple was not around, of course. Claro. Otherwise. Otherwise they all tuck in their tails at five hundred yards distance from the GSTI door. Except for Lincoln, claro. But he feels no need either. He too knows his quality. A-one shot. Ex-GI, what else. And a specialist in surviving. Wonder how he copes with his anger. Another one whom they wouldn’t promote. All those white pork bellies. Claro. That’s something they can’t stand, a black man who tops them. The new ones even less, those ex-Stasis. No sense of honor. Never lift their visor. No wonder their jokes all fall flat. Claro. Eveline Hartbold as Strapsky—harharhar! If one of those two has to do with straps it’s him, I bet, Hans-Ruediger. She’s the harsh one. On the ball too. Gets pissed each time somebody calls in sick. Means he costs money. Claro. Cuts in her cash for buying another rotten tenement house in East Berlin to speculate with. Means she’ll have to find another company willing to pay GSTI a bundle, to check if one of its workers happens to not lie sick in bed but makes some bucks on the side. Sooner or later. Those folks, they catch them all sooner. Claro. Because it’s unjust. Absolutely unfair. German Social Terror Inc.!

  Just like that guy with his bloody Strela! Outa his mind too. Who does he think he is—exterminating little people in their little gardens! That’s something completely different from—but it was precisely like today, two weeks ago! Bright again, really fast. The rain slipped away at once. The ambulances visible from far away. Took quite a bit to come though. Well well well For those three it was too late anyway. Tough job for someone used to twenty-round magazines. Not that I’m keen on continuous fire. But having twenty rounds reserve you can afford a few misses. And I did not, just the same. Not a single one. Even though that Mauser’s got quite a recoil that I’m not used to. It was precision work, absolutely. Especially since it got dark all of a sudden. Just before the first bolt. Then the downpour. I was nearly sure they wouldn’t come anymore, they’d given up the idea of celebrating a wedding by roaring along Schlachtenseestrasse to their bikers’ joint at Avus-Treff. And I’d have to pack up and take the next S-Bahn back. But they did come. And how! Didn’t look like the usual Rambos from the Harley-Davidson Club this time. No riding a high horse anymore. Eased off on the gas instead, scared shitless. At the first bolt! No more rrroang-grrroang-grrroang. Nestled up all together side by side, like chickens! Too late, you assholes! And thanks a lot for driving slow! For being so quiet! Makes my hand even quieter. Steadier than ever. My first one’s got the driver with the white ribbon at the handlebar and the chick behind. Precisely between his helmet and his bulletproof vest. Yeahyeah. They were all wearing one. Good boys. Quite a few bucks invested, haven’t you? Hit the left artery. Bloody porridge, that throat. Gone for good, that guy. The second duplex into some neck somewhere in the middle of the gang. The third at the last man’s helmet. Where the ear is. And right into it. Precisely one second before he could crash into the whole jumble. Three hits and a dozen dead, at least. Of the rest, some are still not sure to survive. No one’s got away clean. That’s how things are done, you Strela bungler. None of them will ever jerk off again revving up his engine, panicking everybody on the sidewalk! None of them will ever roar again across a sidewalk nearly wiping out anyone who happens not to be fast enough for jumping! None of them will ever shred my eardrums again! Never. That’s it. Over. Bingo.

  The downpour, too, was real precision work. The few passengers standing around at Schlachtensee station on a Saturday afternoon had taken cover fast, and I had the chance to take the Mauser apart and put it back into the golf bag. And slip out of my briarpatch behind the bushes on the lake side of Schlachtenseestrasse with my parasol and my folding chair. And move over to the other side of the battlefield to enjoy the effects of 7.62 duplex bullets from close up. Claro: All those ambulance horns blaring, that sure was some more torture. But after them there was peace. Heavenly peace. Absolutely quiet. I even had a chat with two guys from my old squat. Claro! Yeah, too bad one can’t see anything from down there at the lake, really too bad, otherwise you’d sure get a damn good eyewitness report for once. Then, even Harry Gross showed up, that rat. Fucking friendly, for the first time. That should have warned me. Claro claro claro!

  But I had been ready to put on the internal blue helmet, bloody shit! I had made my peace with having been fired. You don’t have to earn your living with the Berlin police. Someone with a decent sharpshooter training and a lot of practice does not depend on the parading politician pack. There’s plenty of clients, more than plenty—-fffhhh. Claro: Given all that going crazy about Berlin being the capital now. They’re all outa their minds. Stress, that’s the only thing they’re producing! If it were for the motorbikes only. No. You’ve never ever seen so many customized BMWs and Porsches here. You had to go to Hamburg for it. Or Munich. But now the Wall’s come down, and now we finally are somebody: we have to come rattling in now with our own planes. And anyone who even faintly looks like being able to fart up some investment in the capital might be a capital target for an assault, right? Claro! He’d best be supplied with a complete police snipers special unit of his own right away, huh? Not to mention the stars from glitterland! Shit-scared by their fans all of a sudden, right? Definitely in need of bodyguards now. Claro. Fine with me. No problem in the beginning. Basically, these pop kids are easy to handle. Can’t tell a revolver from a pistol, let alone a tear gas gun from a rifle. To them it’s all gun. Or cannon. Seen too many cheap mystery movies. Should be faced with a real cannon for once, in front of their coke-noses! Ah, forget it. At least you can put on your earphones as soon as the concert starts.

  The GSTI was no problem either at first. Easy to milk, those ex-Stasis running about in companies like that! So proud that not everything they’d had in hand behind their Wall was crap—well well well! Anyway, that CZ52 was no question of short supply. It was a question of two days. Go to the guy and order. Return and pick it up. Nag a bit that this is none of the Ceskas for export and the trigger pulls too softly and the whole thing looks somewhat silly, doesn’t it, and did Czechoslovakian soldiers really work with it? How’s the guy supposed to know I master a NATO gun? I can handle even the softest trigger. Of every pistol too. Besides, Motzstrasse is not half as far away as Jueterbog.

  Of course I didn’t rub it in at GSTI! Just kept on dutifully taking that silly tear gas toy from Eveline Hartbold and returning it to her just as dutifully. Lincoln was the only soul to figure out I had a pistol. But that’s okay. By then we were buddies. He hasn’t blown the whistle on me! Like he’d tried to jump on me only once. What was it, actually? Something super cool. Stupid talk. Anyway, I’d just asked him back how old he is and does he remember Aretha Franklin. God, what a dumb glance he had! Really like—whaaa? Well, I said, on account of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, you know. Grinning. Leaving him standing there, in the middle of all them white pork bellies. He showed up at the Metropol concert hall half an hour late. Left me doing the band’s transport from the Hotel Stadt Berlin all by myself. Bangs a book in front of me, some thriller, by a Melody such and such, USAmerican. Plus a page number. It said something like: A woman who wants to be real free has to lay the guys flat. Well, either draw them to bed or blow them away, that is, according to that Melody. And all the time Lincoln’s checking my face. Must’ve had precisely that dumb whaa-glance,
I guess. Claro. But then he grins and shakes my hand the way he does with his brothers. It wasn’t him. No way.

  It was this whole bloody shit here. Nothing but stink and noise lately! Getting more and more. Makes you freak out. Stop it. Bequietbloodyshit! There’s even those first-aid helicopters coming now! Military. The little yellow civil one too. Claro: Must be hell down there in Westhafen. Too bad I can’t see the gardens. Judging by the noise—now that’s insane! Slop it! I want my Walkman! I can’t stand it! The whole time lately. Getting worse and worse. And warm very early too. In March already. Must’ve multiplied like rabbits, those biker assholes. You can’t possibly enjoy any spring or summer anymore in this city! They’ve all freaked out! Such a lovely evening. All I did was go roller-skating. Just peacefully. On one of the first warm evenings in March. Didn’t do nobody no harm. Just Lincoln’s Tracy Chapman tape in my earphones, and down along Ku-Damm, quiet and peacefully between the walkers. All slowly. Lots of people dwelling. And there’s this goddamn piece of shit on his giant bike coming along, blasting my ears with his insane rrrummm-rrrummm-brrummm! Right through Tracy Chapman. Brr-rummm-brrrummm! Louder and louder. Closer and closer. Must be completely insane that creep! Stopityouasshole! Blowsmyhead! Brrrummm-grrrunnng.

  I could’ve kissed myself for being on skates. The shot was inaudible, too, absolutely. Timed precisely with his last brr-runnng. Claro!

  It’s true. The first cut is the sweetest. No big plan. Just straight from the—maybe that, too, was it: I started planning more and more afterward! That’s shit! The shot kind of fades too far from focus. Claro. It’s not spontaneous anymore, like someone shreds your ear and bang! Away with him! Instead, it’s wait. Check out a good spot. A new one each time. Preferably after dark. All day long, a dozen Fat Boys or Ferraris may saw your nerves apart—you wait. Until someone happens to appear in front of your barrel down in the bushes where you’re crouching. At night. And maybe nobody does! Bloody possible. Appearing instead are three horny bulk chatting you up! The best spot was Olivaer Platz. The hottest racetrack indeed. And someone’s always crossing the park there. Zoom—three in a row. None of them wearing a helmet. Even better! Just let them drive past and—zoom. Neck’s height. The people in the park squeak and spread away. That was okay. There was something spontaneous about it. And afterward, a curry sausage at Oli-Food stand on the corner, inhaling the feedback. Claro. Very supportive. People seemed to like it.