But there were rules.
Blackmail was forbidden, obviously. So was loose talk. The cops and the gossip columnists could be bought off, but why spend money unnecessarily? Better to silence the source. Better to make an example and buy a month or two of peace and quiet. Which is where I came in. My first was a superhuman beauty from Idaho. She was dumb enough to believe a promise some guy made. She was dumb enough to make trouble when it wasn’t kept. We debated disfigurement for her. Cut off her lips and her ears, maybe her nose, maybe pull every other tooth. We figured that would send a message. But then we figured no LA cop would stand for that, no matter what we paid, so I offed her pure and simple, and that’s how I got the down payment for my house. It was quite an experience. She was tall, and she was literally stunning. I got short of breath and weak at the knees. The back part of my brain told me I should be dragging her to my cave, not slitting her throat. But I got through it.
The next seven paid off my mortgage, and the two after that bought me a Cadillac. It was the eleventh that brought me trouble. Just one of those unlucky things. She was a fighter, and she had blood pressure issues, apparently. I had to stab her in the chest to quiet her down, and the blade hit bone and nicked something bad, and a geyser of blood came out and spattered all over my suit coat. Like a garden hose. A great gout of it, like a drowned man coughing up seawater on the sand, convulsive. Afterward I wrapped the knife in the stained coat and carried it home wearing only shirtsleeves, which must have attracted attention from someone.
Because as a result, I had cops on me from dawn the next morning. But I played it cool. I did nothing for a day, and then I made a big show of helping my new neighbour finish the inside of his new garage. Which was a provocation, in a way, because my new neighbour was a dope peddler who drove up and down to Mexico regular as clockwork. The cops were watching him too. But they suffered an embarrassment when we moved his car to the kerb so we could work on the garage unencumbered. The car was stolen right from under their noses. That delayed the serious questions for a couple of days.
Then some new hotshot LAPD detective figured that I had carried the knife and the bloody coat to my neighbour’s garage in my tool bag and that I had then buried it in the floor. But the guy failed to get a warrant, because judges like money and hookers too, and so the whole thing festered for a month and then went quiet, until a new hotshot came on the scene. This new guy figured I was too lazy to dig dirt. He figured I had nailed the coat into the walls. He wanted a warrant fast, because he figured the rats would be eating the coat. It was that kind of a neighbourhood. But he didn’t get a warrant either, neither fast nor slow, and the case went cold, and it stayed cold for forty years.
During which time two things happened. The LAPD built up a cold-case unit, and some cop came along who seemed to be that eleventh hooker’s son. Which was an unfortunate confluence of events for me. The alleged son was a dour terrier of a guy with plenty of ability, and he worked that dusty old file like crazy. He was on the fence, fifty-fifty as to whether the floor or the wall was the final resting place for my coat, and my coat was the holy grail for this guy, because laboratory techniques had advanced by then. He figured he could compare his own DNA to whatever could be recovered from the coat. My dope-peddling neighbour had been shot to death years before, and his house had changed hands many times. None of the new owners had ever permitted a search because they knew what was good for them, but then the sub-primes all went belly-up and the place was foreclosed, and the hotshot son figured he could bypass the whole warrant process by simply requesting permission from whatever bank now held the paper, but the bank itself was bust and no one knew who controlled its assets, so I got another reprieve, except right about then I got diagnosed with tumours in my lungs.
I had no insurance, obviously, working in that particular industry, so my house was sold to finance my stay in the hospital, which continues to this day, and from my bed I heard that the buyer of my house had also gotten hold of my neighbour’s place and was planning to raze them both and then build a mansion. Which got the hotshot son all excited, naturally, because finally the wrecking ball would do the work of the warrants no one had been able to get. The guy visited me often. Every time he would ask me, how was I feeling? Then he would ask me, wall or floor? Which showed his limitations, to be honest. Obviously the coat and the knife had exited the scene in the dope dealer’s stolen car. I had put them in the secret compartment in the fender and left the key in the ignition when I parked the car on the kerb. They were long gone. I was fireproof.
Which brought me no satisfaction at all, because of the terrible pain I was in. I had heard of guys in my situation floating comfortably on IV drips full of morphine and Valium and ketamine, but I wasn’t getting that stuff. I asked for it, obviously, but the damn doctor bobbed and weaved and said it wasn’t appropriate in my case. And then the hotshot son would come in and ask how I was feeling, with a little grin on his face, and I’m ashamed to say it took me some time to catch on. Everyone was for sale. Everyone had a price. The city government, the cops, regular folks, all of them. Including doctors. I have no idea what the son was giving the guy, favours or money or both, but I know what the guy wasn’t giving me in return. The Hollywood I remember was a cold, hard, desperate place, and it still is.
Advent
Kevin Wignall
The regional train from Düsseldorf pulled into Cologne’s main station a few minutes behind schedule at a quarter to nine. Even this late in the evening the station was busy – people with suitcases killing time waiting for night trains, beggars searching out the sympathetic or gullible, passengers jumping on and off the regional trains which buzzed in and out like worker bees.
As the doors opened on the Düsseldorf train, forty or fifty people spilled out of it, charging along the platform at a brisk pace, none of them quite breaking into a run, but all of them eager to be where they were going. These were not people with luggage, but regular commuters returning home after a day at work, the station so familiar it had become invisible to them.
Karsten Groll, set against this backdrop, looked like someone walking at normal speed through a time-lapsed film. He’d stepped out of the front carriage of the train but walked so slowly that the passengers from the other carriages caught up with him, engulfed him, left him behind.
He hardly seemed to notice them, and anyone watching him might have wondered why he alone was in no hurry to be somewhere. Casually scruffy, but not homeless scruffy, he was wearing jeans and a military-style jacket, a beanie hat, a small, almost empty rucksack on his back.
Only the difference in his walking speed marked him out, but that in itself would have been enough to make the same observer question if everything was well in this young man’s world. Did he have nowhere to go? Again, he didn’t look homeless, but perhaps he’d only just walked out on his old life. Or was it that he didn’t want to go where he was headed, and if so, why did he not want to go there?
That observer might have had misgivings about the young man from the Düsseldorf train, and they would have been right to be concerned. Karsten was on his way somewhere and was determined he would get there, but it was true that he was in no hurry.
Because Karsten Groll was walking towards his own death. He walked towards it with the same certainty that his train had travelled towards Cologne – a few minutes early, a few minutes late, but the destination never in doubt. He was resigned to death, too, a resignation which had developed its own steady momentum.
So Karsten walked slowly but deliberately, and knowing this was the last night of his life, he looked upon the station as none of his fellow passengers had done. In fact, he had chosen it – Messe would have been a little closer, but this station brought back memories of childhood visits with his mother and brother.
He glanced up now at the glass canopy arching overhead, at the orange glow of the lights and the darkness of the city beyond. He noticed a heritage train, the Rheingold, parked on a neighbouring pla
tform – previously he might have sneered at something like that but now it looked wonderful and warm and inviting and filled him with a vague longing he couldn’t quite identify.
He left the ordered hollow vault of the terminus with its tinny echoing announcements in German and English, and descended the steps to the more hectic retail area beneath the station. It was mainly fast-food outlets and cafés, but a few gift shops too – perfumes, chocolates, books – and Karsten guessed it attracted a lot of people who weren’t even travelling because it was crowded with people at cross purposes, some loitering, socializing, others trying only to pass through.
He felt a little in both camps. He was passing through, but he came close to stopping a couple of times to look in one window or another, and finally did stop to look in the window of the chocolate shop. The display was full of advent calendars.
He and Stefan had both been given one as children, to avoid fights over who would have the chocolate behind each window, though he didn’t remember ever fighting with his brother. Perhaps he just remembered it that way now, but seeing these calendars, some shaped like Christmas trees, he wished he could call Stefan to tell him about them, to ask if he remembered how excited they would get about opening each little window.
He wished, too, that some stranger would come and stand and stare at the same display, that they might strike up a conversation. It was never about the chocolates, he wanted to say to that person, but about the anticipation of opening the window, about the rhythm and the warmth that it gave to the Christmas season.
But no one came, and he walked on. He doubted all those calendars would be sold in the next six days, and after that they would be redundant. He wondered what happened to them afterwards. Maybe they were just thrown away. Like him, their time was almost up.
He left the station, out into the biting cold of this November night, across the concourse, climbed the steps and crossed the overpass to the cathedral. He was aware of it to his left, soaring above him like a gothic cliff face as he skirted around it.
This was the other reason he’d chosen to come to this station, so that he could also stroll for one last time through one of the Christmas markets. It was his earliest memory of Cologne but as he reached the far side of the cathedral he realized that dream would not be rekindled tonight. The fair was spread out before him, but unlit, and the shadowy activity filling Roncalliplatz was that of stallholders making last-minute preparations.
He walked through the almost completed market anyway, and as he overheard conversations about the opening the next day he regretted that his actions would fill the newspapers with something unpleasant, possibly even marring the atmosphere for a day or two. It was unfortunate, but he wouldn’t change his mind.
Karsten was heading across the city, to Mohr’s bar. Mohr would arrive there at nine, as he did every night to “check the books” – that’s what Stefan had told him. Karsten would arrive a little later, kill Mohr and then get killed himself, not by choice but he was too much of a realist to dream up a plan that involved getting out alive.
Besides, there wasn’t much left to stay alive for, only memories like this, tarnished forever now by loss and failure. This and the other markets would be full of families by this time tomorrow, and it filled Karsten with wonder and bitterness that his own family had been wiped out so succinctly by bad luck and bad choices – maybe the two were the same.
His father’s death was so firmly lodged in the past that he struggled now to think of it as something that had not been meant to happen, but he guessed his father had known how tired he was before setting off on his last car journey. In truth, there had been nothing inevitable about it, only carelessness and perhaps a desire to be home with his family. Karsten had been only eight at the time.
There had been no choice in his mother’s death, of course – no one would choose cancer – and it was still too raw for him to think about even five years later. What he did think about was the failed promise. He’d been twenty at the time, Stefan only seventeen, and Karsten had promised her as she lay dying, had promised that he would look after Stefan, make sure nothing happened to him.
He left the market behind and threaded through streets that were quieter, heading by memory and instinct towards the river and the Deutzer Brücke. On one of the side streets there was some building work going on and he had to walk in the road.
Stefan had made choices too, in getting together with Martina, in staying with her even when he realized she was a junkie, believing he could get her clean. But Stefan had failed in his bid to look after Martina, just as Karsten had failed to look after his brother.
His mind raced back, wishing Stefan hadn’t warned her pusher off, wishing the pusher had listened, wishing Stefan hadn’t gone round there and flushed his drugs and beaten him up. Stefan had known too well what would follow, which is why he’d bought the gun.
Even thinking of it made Karsten suddenly aware of the slight weight of it in his rucksack, a gun wrapped in a towel, lightly bouncing against his back as he walked. He’d test-fired it once in the woods, making sure he understood it, but only once, one single round, because he hadn’t found spare ammunition and, unlike Stefan, didn’t know where to get it. The remaining bullets in the clip were the sum of his armoury.
In the end, Stefan had left the gun with Karsten because he’d persuaded Martina to get away somewhere, hide out with him. That had been a choice too, and only an optimist in love could have failed to imagine that Martina would call her pusher as soon as the craving got too great.
As far as the police had been able to tell, they’d picked Stefan up on the street, driven him out of town. His body had been found a few days later. They’d beaten him to death, nearly every major bone broken, his skull cracked in three places, one eye ruptured, massive internal injuries. That’s what those simple words concealed – he’d been beaten to death.
Karsten saw a girl huddled in a doorway, looking cold and strung out and lonely. She mumbled something as she looked up at him but he didn’t hear her and didn’t break his stride because the world was full of people like Martina and it always would be. Any sympathy he’d had, learned from Stefan, had long since disappeared.
But Martina was no longer one of those people – she’d died two weeks after Stefan, an overdose. One of her friends had claimed it was intentional, a grief-stricken suicide, and Karsten wished he could believe that, but he couldn’t. Nor could he forgive her for confirming what he’d known from the start, that Stefan’s death had been pointless.
He reached the bridge and started across its open expanse, cars tearing past, the tramlines in the middle. There were a few people cycling and walking on both sides too, but not many. The cold was raw and fierce out here with a wind whipping up off the river.
Even so, halfway across he stopped and looked back at the twin towers of the cathedral, illuminated against the night sky. He could just see, below the metal arches of the distant railway bridge, that the floating Christmas market was also being prepared for opening day.
It occurred to him that even though the news might be upsetting when it broke, he was actually about to give the city a gift, that the Christmas markets would open tomorrow and one of the city’s biggest drug dealers would be dead. It wouldn’t make the problem go away, of course, but it would be something.
That had been the excuse given by the police for not finding Stefan’s killers in over two months, that the problem was bigger than Mohr. There were two big rival drug gangs, so maybe the other had killed him because dealings between these various gangs were complex.
He’d reminded them again that Stefan hadn’t been in a gang, that the pusher he’d beaten up was one of Mohr’s. “Trust us,” they’d said. “Trust us, it may not look like it, but things are happening, we’re investigating.”
Why did they not see that Karsten had no trust left, that he had used it all up? A week ago he’d called them one last time and had been spoken to as if he were the criminal. No mention o
f the two rival gangs, of Mohr and the Turk, no mention of ongoing enquiries, just a curt reminder that they were busy, that his was not the only case, that there were many innocent victims out there.
Innocent had been said in such a way as to differentiate it from his calls, as if Stefan had somehow been part of the underworld that had killed him. Stefan had been able to get hold of a gun, he’d had a junkie girlfriend, but he’d been no criminal.
A long express train crossed the rail bridge heading into the main station, an array of lit windows passing behind the metal trellis, revealing in silhouette the countless pedestrians ambling along looking at the thousands of love padlocks that adorned the bridge.
Perhaps there were couples attaching their own padlocks as he stood there watching, an expression of their love and commitment. And though he felt a city and a lifetime away from that other bridge, it made him smile to think that good things were happening in the world, that good things would continue to happen after he was gone.
He walked on. A tram passed him and he involuntarily picked up his pace, as if trying to pursue it. The little illuminated universe of the tram grew smaller and smaller, merging with the other lights on the bridge, calling him on to his fate.
He checked his watch and walked faster still, spurred on, fearful that if he walked too slowly Mohr might have left again. By the time he reached the far side of the bridge, his eyes were streaming with tears from the cold wind, but he didn’t stop, just wiped them on his sleeve and kept walking.
He turned right, cutting through side streets, and his pace only slowed when he saw the bar up ahead of him. It was open but looked quiet. It wasn’t the kind of bar that attracted casual clientele and the regulars were mostly in Mohr’s employ or hangers-on.
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