Night Driver

by Marcelle Perks

  Dorcas feigned an interest in Tomek. They spoke for a few minutes so fast that Frannie couldn’t comprehend it. She just got the last bit, when Dorcas hung out of the window and said with a coquettish smile to Tomek, ‘You know, if you’re ever this way again, just come on by.’

  Frannie couldn’t decide whether it was professional or genuine. Much to her annoyance, Dorcas and Tomek seemed to be getting on very well. They kept making big eyes at each other. Dorcas kept looking at her with obvious dislike. Frannie tried not to feel jealous. She was a married woman with a bump the size of a basketball, but the third time Dorcas blew smoke in her face, she decided to go.

  ‘Mind you don’t get scabby knees,’ she said sourly, turning on her heel. Dorcas shouted something contemptuous back, but she was gone. Tomek ran to join her.

  Outside her car, there was an awkward silence. She wanted to scratch that woman’s eyes out!

  ‘Same time tomorrow at the café?’ said Tomek, the wind kinking his hair into waves. ‘I will go to this Moonlights club first, then tell you everything.’ He put his arms around her and gave her an affectionate hug. He could see Dorcas had rattled her. ‘Please be there; you are the only friend I have in Germany.’

  She gasped. Dorcas was probably staring their way from her van.

  ‘Please come,’ he said again. ‘If anything happen to me, no one will be there for Anna. I will send a text when I am at the club.’

  She felt dizzy, nodded. He was only here a few more days. She could do that much for him. She stared into his light, laughing eyes and breathed in the sultry night air. Natürlich nothing was going to happen between them – she didn’t want it to, really, she was eight months pregnant for heaven’s sake – but a little attention was good.

  But when she looked at Tomek, all geared up on his bike, it was hard not to feel something. It would be nice to get on the back of that bike of his – and just run.

  This night-driving lark was addictive. If Kurt knew about anything about her secret life, he’d go mad. She had to get back before the serious traffic started, make sure he didn’t find out and put an end to it. She was rushing now, but, when the moon was lonely in the sky again, the world would be hers.

  Chapter

  Nine

  The next day, Lars went to the club around ten. It was the breath-holding time before the rush, when the last diners were finishing off their schnapps and only the keenest punters were in action on the dance floor. He walked through scattered groups looking for Hans. When they’d first shacked up together in a poky flat they’d dreamed of having a place like this to call theirs. Now he couldn’t find the swine in all the retro gloom.

  He went to check the VIP room, but it was locked. They must have changed the keypad. Perhaps Hans was in there with a woman. Lars snorted. The boy was getting out of control. Even Dorcas was getting riled, and she looked the other way a lot. You wanted to give your partner the freedom to explore their desires, but Hans took it too far. Even though the room was soundproofed, he could have sworn that he heard something kicking off.

  He leant his head closer to the door but could make nothing out. Probably shagging, the dirty git! Lars laughed. He was just about to light a cigarette when the door opened and Hans was right there in front of him.

  ‘Are you spying on me, you mad bastard?’ said Hans, looking shifty. He took care to shut the door with a quick slap so that Lars couldn’t see inside. As usual, he looked like an animated mannequin in a fawn grey suit with a navy waistcoat. Hans was all flourish. He wore the extra money he was getting.

  ‘Did you know Dorcas was attacked by a weird punter last night?’ said Lars in a careful voice. He was desperate to gauge the younger man’s reaction. Hans was in the middle of becoming someone else, and Lars didn’t know yet which side he was on.

  Hans looked as if the bar had stopped serving free drinks. ‘Really?’ he said, lifting a hand to his fake pocket. ‘Is she, er, scarred or anything?’

  ‘Just a broken heart,’ said Lars in a tone more serious than he meant it to come out. Hans narrowed his eyes.

  A look passed between them. Just for a millisecond, Lars saw Hans as the older, wilier tyrant he would become. They eyed each other guiltily. Hans looked at him with watchful eyes. Every day he was becoming more of a predator, thought Lars. The young ’un was coming into his own.

  Lars took a step towards him, mock-aggressively. ‘So what’s going down in the kill room?’ He was tired of being excluded. Hans had an iconic face all right but was a raving queen who slept with men and yet still didn’t know he was gay.

  ‘Oh, just a Z-movie actor who thinks he can drink the bar dry for free ’cos he showed his ass on Tatort,’ said Hans in a mocking tone. He hated the fact that Germans didn’t really do celebrity like the good old US of A.

  Hans was a ‘true crime’ nut. He had books in his private office that none of the girls would go near – stuff on autopsy photos and shit. Hans wanted his hero, serial killer Fritz Haarmann, to get the breathy respect that American killers got. Hans had assumed the name of Haarmann’s good-looking younger accomplice. Not that Lars could imagine him really getting his hands dirty. He was too obsessed with getting his end away to get into all that. He was a piece of work alright.

  They made their way uneasily into Hans’s manager’s office. Lars spent a lot of time sitting on the leather sofa here. Even though the décor was traditional, Hans had all the gadgets. Push a button and the door automatically closed. Another and a TV camera ran a live feed of the VIP room. There was a clunky automatic ice machine that they used for their whiskies, and an endless supply of Cuban cigars. You could fuck, smoke or argue.

  The thing Lars liked most about Hans was that he was nimble on his feet. Deftly, he passed Lars a Cohiba and cut it for him so it was ready to smoke.

  ‘Buttgereit was a bit weird this time,’ said Lars, lighting the cigar with a practised touch. ‘Wants me to bring ’em in not quite so dead.’ He started laughing. Hans just sat there, smoking his cigar carefully. His face was beguiling, he had an innocent snub nose, but he sat there alert, ready to rip your emotions to shreds at a weak moment.

  ‘I’ve had an opportunity,’ said Hans, without moving his eyes. He continued to watch Lars’s reaction. ‘There’s this guy who knows a heart surgeon… You know there are people dying without a transplant.’ He took another puff of his cigar. ‘And they’re very hard to come by.’

  ‘You want us to cut ’em up?’ said Lars incredulously.

  ‘No, it’s just, if they’re brain dead, most of the organs can be taken out.’ He flicked a hair from his collar. ‘They call it organ harvesting. It saves lives. And if we did just one a year we could live like kings,’ said Hans as if it was the first time he’d thought of the idea, although Lars guessed he’d been hatching it for some time. He was like that: wily.

  Lars drank down his whisky in one fire-burning gulp. Killing, that was one thing, was what he did. But this – faffing around with the prey, not doing it in, leaving it in the hands of godforsaken medics? No, you could count him out.

  Hans instantly needled him. He just sat there and carried on talking softly. Logical extension, fastest-growing business, blah blah blah. That was Hans. He didn’t do anything crooked himself, but he orchestrated others to carry out every little detail for him. He was like a smooth-faced spider spinning a bloody web.

  Lars’s face was red. Alcohol always went straight to his head. He’d drunk too much and he needed sleep. Still he thought longingly of pulling away in the truck. He wanted to get the fuck out of here right now. Hans was looking at him intently, as if he wanted to monitor his every thought.

  Yeah, he got everyone to lie on their backs, made them all believe in him, but he was heartless. There was a wall of steel where there should have been something pumping blood. This nonsense had to stop.

  Lars stood up, a little unsteady on his feet. He drank the rest of his whisky in one gulp.

  ‘There’s two things I do,’ he said, stan
ding swaggering on his feet. ‘I drive, and I kill. Don’t get in the way of that.’

  Hans just looked at him.

  ‘D’ya hear me?’ said Lars, almost at fever pitch. He badly wanted to put his hands on the wretch. Shake him up a bit.

  Hans just continued smoking his cigar. Smug-faced bastard. Where did he get his cheek from? Lars took another step towards him and put the cigar stub in the ashtray.

  Hans had a Mona Lisa smile that gave nothing away. It meant the person he was talking to had to project their emotion on to him. He stood up right next to Lars and started speaking in a mock-preacher voice. ‘Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Lars.

  ‘Matthew 10, verse 28. It appears on the memorial of victim Fanny Adams, murdered August 24th, 1867,’ said Hans, who knew every detail about every famous murder case by heart.

  ‘So?’ It was Lars who was being combative this time.

  ‘The body’s not what’s important. It’s the significance of it,’ said Hans slowly, seductively. He leaned forward so that he was within kissing distance. ‘Take one life, save thirty lives. It’s a good tradeoff.’ He casually refilled Lars’s glass. ‘And then I could buy the club outright rather than just running it.’

  Silence. Lars fought with himself. If he took the glass and sat down then invariably he’d go along with any little scheme the young ’un had cooked up. But if he just left and ran out into the night, then what?

  Outside the window, the vastness of the inky night sky seemed to call him. In his mind’s eye he saw the open road, its white lines winking at him, urging him to take it faster and faster like a ramshackle whore that couldn’t say no. In some distant part of him Lars knew that his Hans, the one that had been young and naive, had crossed a line. He just didn’t know how far this interloper was willing to go.

  ‘Let me put it to you straight,’ said Hans, stroking down the perfect crease of his suit trouser leg. ‘It’s become too risky to twat about with killings for the body farm. If you don’t come on board, I’m going to have to put the kill room out of bounds.’

  Lars looked at him like a man fresh out of a hundred-year sleep.

  Hans was so far up his own arse, he’d turned himself inside out.

  The third night she went out, Frannie felt as if she had a routine. She’d slept, but not so deeply that she needed to splash her face with cold water. She was wide awake but deeply relaxed. Her stomach rumbled; perhaps she should grab a burger at the gas station whilst she was waiting for Tomek.

  She couldn’t wait to see him. She had had a text at one a.m. to say he’d arrived at the club. Perhaps he’d found his sister already. She hoped he would still stay in Germany a few more days. It was so much more fun following his motorbike.

  Her car made it to the petrol station at twenty to three; plenty of time for a snack. She had the place to herself tonight, with only the ticking of the clock on the wall to keep her company.

  At ten past three, she pushed away her empty plate and tapped her heels on the floor. Was he going to turn up? Perhaps a strawberry milkshake might be a good idea. At half-past, she bought a Sudoku magazine and a pen. By four am she’d given up. She felt suddenly weary. Did he even care that she was sitting here waiting? She leaned back in her chair, remembering his embrace, the hard, muscular grip of him. No, something was up. He’d been so insistent that she come.

  She imagined Tomek being hit by a car, or someone beating him up at the club. A dozen negative scenarios played out in her mind. She went to the public bathroom and emptied the contents of her stomach down the toilet.

  She looked at her sad reflection in the mirror. Her pregnancy was beginning to add water tension to her face. The reflected light was harsh, uncompromising. Something was up, she just knew it. She shivered. As sure as she was pregnant, she knew that his plan to find his sister had gone badly wrong.

  It was becoming a proper mystery, and, if she dared, she could get herself out there and drive to find him. She was the worst person for the job, and scared shitless just thinking about it. But she was it. The cavalry. The only friend Tomek had in the country.

  Chapter

  Ten

  Once, when Tomek was little, he’d woken up to find the room in complete darkness. His trusted night-light inexplicably gone. In its absence the world was blank. No chink of light, no shadows, nothing. Only his fear pinning him to the bed. The world reduced to a claustrophobic space loud with his laboured breathing. Just existing filled the room.

  He wasn’t afraid of ghosts or monsters or Freddie Kruger coming to get him. It was not what could be in the dark, it was the dark itself. What he was afraid of, what kept him from falling soundly back to sleep, was the thought of this nothingness creeping all over his face and invading him. To be stilled in the terribly hungry dark was unthinkable.

  When he reached his hand out, it was worse than he thought. He could feel something hard. This was no dream he could wake out of. Surely they hadn’t buried him alive? His breaths got raggedy. Frantically, he touched the sides. No, there was air coming from near his head, so he couldn’t be actually buried. But he was trapped and hurting.

  With his feet and fists he desperately tried to push and flail out. But it was no good. There was a smell of something sweet and sticky, slightly rotten. He had come to the club but, before he had got to speak to this Hans, someone had got him from behind. Now he was lying trapped in the waiting dark. How long? Could be an hour, or a day. There was no time in this realm.

  That could only mean one thing. Something bad must have happened to Anna. Terrible images flashed in his mind. Tears ran silently down his face. Anna had always been so wild and misunderstood, but she was his older sister. He couldn’t imagine life without her.

  He shivered. Although he wasn’t a little boy any more, he was back there again: afraid, alone. There was only one person who could help him. He just prayed to God that, whatever Frannie was going to do, she would do it soon.

  Hugo was getting louder. It was what happened when he drank. He was a great bear of a man with a rubbery belly and a shock of black hair like fur. Every time he moved, he sweated so much that the girls flinched when they had to lap-dance for him. Lars sniggered. The fat fuck!

  About a month ago, Hugo had mysteriously appeared with Hans as if he was his best friend. Lars could hardly see Hans at the club without party-boy Hugo in tow. He didn’t know what the mutual attraction was: Hugo was definitely straight, in fact he shagged everything that moved. And their dog.

  The three of them were sitting right in the middle of the club, working it up. Three empty pitchers stood used in the middle of the table. A couple of lap-dancers were radiating around Hugo and Hans as if their lives depended on it.

  ‘Harder, baby.’ Hugo slapped a couple of twenties on to the lapdancer’s butt. She was gyrating on his knee. She had a grip that could kill, figure of a gymnast with tits. When he attempted to grab her flesh she flexed from his grip like an angry python.

  Hans looked on, laughing. Elli was naked on his lap. Hans was trying to fit in. He was at his best when he was uncomfortable; Lars suspected that it was because the jarring unease he felt day-to-day then felt real. He tipped the last of his drink down in one go. Shit, the last pitcher was already dry.

  ‘More, more, MORE!’ shouted Hugo. He was getting out of control, shaking the lap-dancer as she tried to go through her moves. The girl – Candice, Lars thought it was – yelped and looked to Hans for assistance, but he was too busy mechanically fondling Elli’s inner thigh to notice.

  ‘Hey, you know touching is not allowed,’ shrieked Candice, making a startling noise for someone so tiny. She looked like she was being mauled.

  Hans paused in mid-kiss and rolled his eyes at her. He seemed to lap up her unease. He pushed Elli to the side so hard that she nearly fell. She cried out, a half-hearted, ‘Hey, baby,’ as if it he’d
done it a million times before.

  In a second Hans stood next to Hugo and grabbed Candice’s arms. She started. Laughing, they held her together and forced her to perform on Hugo’s knee. She looked like a dog dry-humping something not canine. She squealed but went through the motions jerkily.

  Hans looked as if he was going to kiss her. He stared into her eyes. ‘The man paid for a lap-dance. You gotta dance on his dime.’

  Hugo broke into a huge guffaw of laughter. Candice started to shake. Her legs started buckling. Other patrons stared on, uneasily. One man stood up and opened and closed his mouth like a fish. Hans laughed.

  Lars stepped in and swooped up Candice in his arms. Carefully, he set her down. She stood there, naked, trembling. ‘Just go out back and take a break,’ said Lars, as gently as he could. He reached out to pat her on the shoulder and slipped her a fifty. ‘On second thoughts, take the rest of the night off.’ She scuttled off in her clackity heels.

  Lars glared at Hans. If the young ’un didn’t know that look by now, it was time to give in. Hans just faced him down without smiling. Lars fidgeted with his long fingers.

  ‘You know, it’d be easy to ruin what you’ve got,’ said Lars. Still the eyes bored into his, just watching. Lars felt as though his head was going to burst.

  Hugo stood up and whooped. He waved his arms at a passing waitress as if he was about to save a goal. ‘Another two pitchers, sweetheart,’ he shouted, ‘And yer tits!’ He grinned round as the other punters stared. Hans was sat down again, voraciously kneading Elli’s left breast. All the time he looked Lars full in the face, as if it were a competition. Elli just sat there, trying to grin. Her smile was appeasing, as if she were on the wrong end of a gun.

  ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,’ said Hans evenly.

  Hugo grinned as if they were discussing football. He moved obscenely close to Lars, made a face as if he knew some fabulous secret.