Oliver was sipping his overpriced cocktail and contemplating the fall of his idol when he became aware of someone by his side.
‘Are you Herr Meierhoff?’ she asked in a foreign accent that Oliver took to be Russian or Polish. He smiled and nodded but his heart thudded in his chest. If it had not been for the accent and the lack of a summer tan, she could almost have been the Sylvia of his youth. No – she was actually much prettier. But prettiness wasn’t the criterion that she had to meet for Oliver. There were plenty of pretty girls whom he could have. The girl beside him was about twenty-two, Oliver figured. She had reddish-blonde hair, crystal-blue eyes and a fresh complexion sprinkled with pale freckles. Oliver found himself involuntarily scanning her from head to foot. She was wearing a blouse that hung loose around a tiny waist yet which was stretched taut by the fullness of her upper arms and breasts. She turned slightly sideways, smiling coyly, knowing what he wanted to see. She wore a pencil skirt which narrowed towards the knee yet which accentuated the fullness of her upper thighs and her magnificent, massive buttocks.
‘Am I what you were looking for?’ she asked. ‘Do I please you?’
‘You, my dear,’ said Oliver with a broad, handsome grin, ‘are sheer perfection.’
6.
Having travelled down to Cologne from Hamburg by train, Maria didn’t have her own car with her. It was part of her strategy: her car was an older Jaguar XJS – in an uncharacteristic moment of flamboyance she had bought it deliberately to turn heads. And that made the XJS far too conspicuous for the type of surveillance work that she intended to carry out. Maria had therefore spent much of her first morning in the city looking for a rental car. Even the small economy models were too obviously new and shiny. Cologne had been sulking under a leaden sky that refused to unburden the snow it had been threatening all day. Maria’s mood matched the weather and her feet hurt. She could simply have phoned around from her hotel room but she knew she needed to see the car that she would use.
It was about three in the afternoon and the sky was already dimming from dull to dark when she left the last rental place. It wasn’t one of the main national or international rental companies and was attached to a servicing garage and second-hand car showroom. The girl behind the rental counter was confused when Maria asked her if she could rent the dark blue Citroen Saxo parked on the lot. A phone call brought to the office a salesman who looked to Maria as if he should still have been at school. He explained that the car could not be rented; it was for sale. Perhaps it was because Maria glanced out at the car through the rental office window that he decided to launch into his pitch, promising Maria that it was an exceptional car for its age. When Maria asked him the price he began his prepared build-up.
‘Never mind the crap. How much is the car?’ Maria fixed him with a withering gaze. The salesman blushed behind his freckles. After she had taken the Saxo for a test drive, she told him he’d take seven hundred Euros less than he’d asked. An hour and a half later, with all the documentation sorted out, Maria drove in the Saxo back to her hotel. She parked in the car park around the corner. The car was perfect: completely anonymous and ideal for surveillance. The paintwork was dark blue but had dulled and there were no dents or trims that would mark it out and Maria removed a colourful sticker from the rear window.
She left the Saxo in the car park and walked to the Karstadt store in Breite Strasse, where she sought out the clothing equivalent of the Citroen: grungy tops and jeans, a knitted hat and a couple of heavier jackets, one with a hood. All the clothes were in muted dark colours. As she ran the cheap clothes through the scanner the assistant at the till cast a surreptitious eye over Maria’s expensive lambswool coat and designer handbag.
‘A present for my niece.’ Maria smiled emptily.
7.
It was as good a hotel as Oliver could pay for in cash without arousing suspicion or undue attention. He had booked in before meeting the amply bottomed escort girl in the nightclub and had used a false identity, as he always did. So when the escort agency telephoned the hotel and asked to speak to Herr Meierhoff, to make sure that he was genuinely a guest there, they were put through to his room. It also meant that there was no embarrassing or conspicuous fumbling with wads of Euros when he brought the escort back. While still in the nightclub, he had passed her an envelope containing cash to the pre-agreed amount. All done calmly, with Oliver’s easy smile never faltering.
Oliver had been his usual chatty, charming self all evening and he could see that his professional companion was a little confused about why a man as attractive and urbane as he was would need to pay for sex. But, there again, he had been quite specific about his requirements. In the taxi, however, Oliver fell silent and watched Cologne slide by, occasionally glancing at his companion and smiling. She had explained that her name was Anastasia, and he had commented on what a beautiful name it was, while thinking to himself that it was probably as genuine as Meierhoff. Oliver’s comparative quiet came from his need to anticipate the fulfilment of his desire. He considered these moments to be the most delectable of all, almost better than the fulfilment itself. It was the perfect combination of a growing, hardening lust and the mouth-watering anticipation of a fine meal, whose aromas had already reached him. He became intensely aware of the pressure of Anastasia’s wonderfully full and firm thigh against his.
He gave the taxi driver a reasonable but not lavish tip. Oliver was doing his best not to be remembered by anyone too clearly. He and Anastasia walked straight past reception and to the lifts, again as inconspicuously as he could manage.
‘We’ll have a little nightcap in the room,’ Oliver explained in the elevator. ‘Anastasia’ smiled at him with contrived mischievousness and placed her hand on his groin.
‘Maybe that should wait for after.’ She closed her fingers around him a little. ‘By the way, if you really like what you get tonight, it’s quite in order for you to give me an extra tip.’
The curtains were still open in his hotel room and the main railway station and the massive profile of the cathedral loomed dark against the night sky. Oliver returned Anastasia’s smile as he closed the hotel room door behind him.
I hope, he thought to himself as he dropped the door’s night-bolt lever, that she doesn’t scream. Like the last one did.
8.
Everybody needs to be someone else sometimes, even if it is only for a couple of hours becoming lost in the flesh of another in an anonymous hotel room. Andrea always held that thought at the front of her mind during the first few moments of meeting a client. She didn’t see herself as a prostitute: she would never allow herself to be sold as just so much meat. She was not, after all, what was normally considered feminine. But not everybody had the same ideal of femininity: the work she got through the agency was for a niche market. After all, she was no ordinary woman and the men who paid to be with her were not looking for ordinary sex. Andrea was well aware that the agency she worked for specialised in the more unusual end of the sex industry and she didn’t like to think about what other tastes they probably catered for. She had always suspected that A la Carte was run by gangsters, but her contact with them was confined to the calls they made to her cellphone and the envelopes she mailed them with their percentage of her fees. She knew they had come looking for her, or someone like her.
The first contact had been in the gym where she had been preparing with a few of the other girls for a local competition. It had been a sleazy-looking man called Nielsen who had made the approach. Nielsen had been dressed like a businessman but had had the thick, thuggish build and face of a gangster. He had spoken to Andrea and another three girls. Andrea had noticed that the girls Nielsen spoke to were the only others with the same amount of muscle mass as Andrea had. Nielsen had at first said the work was photographic modelling. He had been quite specific about the type of modelling and it had not bothered Andrea. She was used to parading in a bikini that strained to contain her heavily muscled body: being gawked at without it didn’t
unduly bother her. It was after the second photo session that Nielsen had mentioned that A la Carte ’s main business was providing escorts. Escorts for an especially discerning clientele.
Cologne had been the first German city to levy a tax on prostitutes’ incomes, but A la Carte was less than assiduous when it came to record-keeping. This had meant that Andrea had successfully managed to avoid being registered as a part-time sex worker and therefore was not taxed on her ‘extra’ earnings. The money from the escort work was more than useful, supplementing the income she made from running her cafe; but Andrea knew that she didn’t do it just for the money.
Andrea had been booked for two hours and the agency knew she would phone back to confirm that she had been paid and was safely away from the client. Not that anyone worried seriously about Andrea: it was more than evident that she could easily look after herself. But, she knew, if she were ever to experience difficulties, a couple of heavies were on call.
She always thought of her clients as small men. They probably thought of themselves that way too. It didn’t have to do with height – this client was at least 180 centimetres tall – it had to do with the way they saw themselves. How she saw them. The client was in his forties, thin and pale; his suit was middle-budget, as was the hotel room. He sat on the edge of the bed, his expression a mixture of nervousness and excitement. Andrea did nothing to put him at his ease, which was as it should be. She confirmed his name and demanded the envelope with the money: Andrea always asked for cash. She checked the amount and stuffed the envelope into her bag.
‘Strip,’ she commanded and removed her raincoat, jeans and baggy woollen top. Beneath she was dressed in an assembly of black leather straps and buckles that left her breasts and genitals exposed. As usual she had done a full workout before coming out to her client and her oiled muscles were hard and sleek. The man on the bed gazed at her with an expression of awe. He was now naked and Andrea looked down at his erection with an expression of contempt.
‘Stand,’ she ordered. He obeyed. ‘You can touch me.’
The client ran trembling fingers over her body. Not her breasts or her pudenda, but her arms, her stomach, her thighs. She stood solid, firm and unresponding. The truth was that Andrea enjoyed her work; she enjoyed the feeling of power, of control, that it gave her. She knew that Cologne was full of dominatrixes, but this was something else. Her clients didn’t get off by being ordered around to clean toilets and polish shoes. This was less psychological and more physical. Her clients lusted after her body; wanted to touch her. Sometimes it would end in penetrative sex. Other times, like this, the client had asked for something very particular.
The client removed his hands but his eyes still ranged over her bulk.
‘Are you ready?’ she asked. He nodded.
‘But not the face…’ he said and his voice trembled.
‘Not the face,’ she repeated. ‘I know.’
There was a short pause. Andrea filled her mind with the image of the acne-faced youth who had created a scene in her cafe and then she slammed her fist into the client’s naked belly. He gave a gasp and buckled slightly. Andrea realised that she hadn’t hit him hard enough; that he wasn’t getting his money’s worth. She placed another image in her mind: a much older image. She hit her client again and he doubled over, suppressing a cry of pain.
Andrea pushed him onto the bed, straddled him and hit him again. And again.
9.
It took nearly four hours for Fabel to drive from Hamburg to Norddeich, slightly longer than usual. It was not a journey that he liked to make much in the winter, unless he took the train. But his mother’s recent heart attack and advancing age meant he felt the need to make the trip more often; and the idea of six hours of solitude in the car there and back had appealed to him. Time to think. However, as the skies grew darker, that appeal started to fade. Friesland is flat; it is hill-less and lies defenceless against the temperaments of the North Sea. As Fabel crossed the landscape he had grown up in, a wind from the west, unopposed by anything resembling a hill, tugged at his steering wheel and the rods of rain against his windscreen became beaded with sleet.
Fabel drove without the radio or the CD-player on, frowning through the rain at the grey ribbon of the A28. He needed the thinking time. He had decided to spend the journey imagining two futures for himself: the one that Bartz had offered, where Fabel’s expensive tastes could more easily be met and where he would be free from a world of horror and violence; but the other offer, made by van Heiden and the BKA, was a lot more attractive than he liked to admit. It was flattering, no matter how much he tried to deny it, to be considered the leading expert in his professional field. Fabel tried hard to view each future objectively. As he did so, he fought to keep something else from his mind: the Cologne file. A distraction he didn’t need. But it kept creeping back into his thoughts.
Fabel got a shock when he realised that he had no recollection of the last half-hour of driving, as if he had been on some kind of autopilot while his mind had wandered over his future, his relationship with Susanne, and a faceless killer in a city he hardly knew. Suddenly he realised that Norden had taken a monochrome form around him. He continued along Norddeicher Strasse towards the North Sea and his mother’s home.
10.
Maria Klee walked by the restaurant again. She had done so a dozen times over the last two days, wearing something different each time. She had even donned scruffy jeans and a sweatshirt, tucking her blonde hair into the knitted cap that she had bought at Karstadt. She had learned her lesson. If this restaurant was under any kind of federal surveillance, then the frequency of her passing by it would not be noticed.
The owners of the Biarritz were not Ukrainians, but the restaurant had been one on a twenty-page list of German businesses included in the BKA file that were suspected of using Ukrainians trafficked by Vitrenko’s outfit. Maria felt at a disadvantage. In Hamburg – Hanover, even – she knew the lie of the land. But here she was hunting across an unknown landscape. She felt exposed. She was after dangerous quarry and she could just as easily find herself becoming the hunted and not the hunter. She had found a way to get to the back door of the Biarritz: a circuitous route of lanes and alleys. She knew that the Ukrainian boy did the most menial tasks and that in a restaurant kitchen there is always trash to be taken out and sorted. She watched the rear of the restaurant from an alley lined with waste and recycling bins. The back of the Biarritz was windowless on the ground floor and the fire door was heavy and sheeted with metal. This security meant that the management had clearly felt that a CCTV system was unnecessary; and that allowed Maria to approach him without the encounter being recorded or even witnessed. If she wanted the Ukrainian to talk, he would have to feel safe. That was if she could get him to talk.
It was cold. Maria had wrapped up well. She had grown to hate the cold, something that had never bothered her before that night. As she had lain in the long grass, with Fabel’s face close to hers, she had felt a chill like no other she had ever experienced. She had fought to stay awake and her breathing had been short and shallow. Fabel’s breath had been warm on her cold cheek and Maria had realised that Death is cold. Since then, she had made sure that she never felt cold.
The restaurant’s rear door opened and a skinny man in his early twenties appeared. He was wearing a white T-shirt, along with a stained apron that hung from his waist to his shins. He cast a glance over his shoulder back into the kitchen before lighting a cigarette and leaning against the wall. He looked tired and gaunt and smoked the cigarette with the appreciation of someone snatching a precious and rare private moment. He stood up when he saw Maria approach. He turned to go back into the kitchen.
‘Wait!’ Maria called. She held up her oval bronze Criminal Police disc. ‘Police…’ She was relying on the young Ukrainian not challenging her and asking to see her police identification card, which would, of course, reveal that she was several hundred kilometres outside her jurisdiction. The young man looked
startled. Afraid. ‘It’s okay,’ Maria said, with a tired smile. ‘I’m not interested in your status here. I just need to ask a few questions.’
The Ukrainian nodded tersely. Maria took her large black notebook from her coat pocket.
‘You are…?’ Maria made a show of searching for his name in the notebook, as if she had it recorded somewhere, which she hadn’t.
‘Slavko Dmytruk…’ said the young Ukrainian, seeming eager to cooperate. He still stole a peek back into the kitchen to make sure no one could see them. He stepped out a little from the doorway and pulled the fire door almost closed. He fumbled in his pocket for his ID card and handed it to Maria. It proved he was illegal: the ID card was not German, his photograph was captioned in Cyrillic writing and the yellow trident on a blue field identified the card as Ukrainian.
‘I have not done anything wrong,’ said Slavko; his German was almost impenetrably accented. ‘I want stay in Germany. I good worker.’
‘I didn’t say that you had done anything wrong. I just want to ask you a few questions,’ said Maria.
‘About what?’
‘About how you got here.’
Slavko’s unease shifted into genuine fear. ‘I don’t know what you talk about.’
‘How you got here from Ukraine,’ said Maria in as soothing a tone as she could manage. She could see that Slavko was becoming more and more agitated. She found herself wishing she had Fabel’s knack of putting people at ease. ‘There’s no need to be alarmed, Slavko. No one will know that it was you I got the information from. I promise. But, if you don’t cooperate, then I will be forced to inform immigration.’ Maria spoke slowly and in simple German, giving him time to take in what she had said. ‘Do you understand, Slavko? I need to know who arranged your transport here, got you the job, somewhere to live…’
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