The date on the last file that explicitly mentioned Gjergj Malaj was years ago. It looks as if he’d got right out of everything.
Now he simply manages his empire and clearly has other people to do the work, and to do it so that there’s not the slightest connection to him any more.
I can understand it driving Faller crazy, especially after everything that Malaj did to him, but I don’t understand why he has a sudden urge to collar him now. I don’t understand why he thinks it could work. And I’ve got no idea what he wants to do.
However, I do understand why he thinks that now he can do it his own way, he might manage things better than when he was on the force. The state could poke its nose into Officer Faller’s enquiries, but not a private citizen’s. But … if it comes to aggro with the Albanian, a private citizen would be living far more dangerously than a policeman.
Unless he’s still got a reliable partner and a loaded gun.
And that’s where Calabretta comes in.
I snap the last file shut and put it back in its crate – one of the many stacked around my office since this morning.
It’s late afternoon. The soles of my feet are itchy; I want to get out.
But there’s one more thing to do.
I pick up the telephone receiver and call the Steindamm police station. Ask how enquiries into the Schmilinskystrasse GBH case are going.
They are gathering evidence and searching for witnesses. No concrete leads as yet.
‘We have too few staff and too much drug crime, Ms Riley. The half-dead, like your hospital case, are our daily grind. And we have to ensure that we don’t get twenty more a week.’
Understood.
Nothing to be done there then.
I thank him and say I’ll ring back, but the clerk on the phone and I both know that he probably won’t answer.
I hang up, and then Calabretta calls.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I’ve just chewed my way back through every file on the Albanian.’
He doesn’t answer. He can’t. I can hear that from his breathing. He has no words today. The soft light of yesterday and the day before must have gone out again. Sometimes a wind gusting round the wrong corner is all it takes to blow out a light like that.
‘I can be at the Blue Night in two hours,’ I say.
He exhales.
‘If that’s a yes, just hang up, OK?’
Click.
On the way to the hospital, I buy four bottles of beer. I have the impression that idea of mine went down well yesterday. The bottles clatter in my bag, and when I’m suddenly buffeted as my jacket fills with wind on Lombard Bridge, I feel as though those four bottles give me just enough extra weight not to stagger.
His door is open; a rectangle of yellow light falls onto the squeaky grey lino floor in the corridor. I knock on the door frame for formality’s sake. The head of his bed is raised; he’s sitting motionless, his eyes closed.
But he says: ‘Come in.’
‘Got a headache?’ I ask, pulling a chair up to his bed.
‘It’s amazing what you can see…’ he says. ‘Do you happen to have another couple of beers on you?’
‘Four,’ I say, putting the bottles one by one on the bedside table.
‘What else do you do all day, apart from supplying an old cripple with alcohol?’
‘I sit in my office at the prosecution service,’ I say. ‘Well, it used to be an office. Today it’s a bloody hole. And you’re not a cripple. You’re just out of action at the moment. The doctors say it’ll all be all right.’
‘Why has your office changed? Has someone put up a few walls?’ He opens his eyes and looks at me.
‘Something like that,’ I say, opening two of the beer bottles. ‘I pissed a few people off. And made a few other mistakes. Now they hide me in a cupboard.’
I press a bottle into his left hand. Apparently only the lower part of his left arm is broken; the upper arm and shoulder seem to work reasonably well. At least, his arm is splinted in such a way that Mr Austrian Joe can get his hand to his mouth. Perhaps they actually took care to do it that way. So he didn’t have to be fed. So he could hold onto his dignity. At least I hope that was one of the reasons they did it that way.
‘You’re one of the good guys, aren’t you?’ He looks at me and swigs his beer.
‘Sometimes,’ I say.
‘Sometimes what?’
‘Oh. Good guy, bad guy,’ I say. ‘You can’t always say for certain…’
‘Oh yes you can,’ he says.
We drink and sit in silence. For the whole of the first beer.
It’s a bit like drinking with Faller.
On the second beer, I say: ‘Now, why don’t you just tell me who wanted you in here?’
He looks at me like I’m bad weather. He doesn’t like it when I ask questions.
‘Why don’t you tell me when I’ll get a wheelchair so we can go on an excursion down the hallway?’
‘Shall I take care of it?’ I ask.
‘Care is the word.’
He looks at me, his eyes askew. As if he’s just been off in another world and has surfed his way back.
Calabretta seems to have been halved over night. There’s a concertinaed matchstick man at the bar. His dark hair is hanging blearily over his forehead; the top half of this half-man has tipped face first onto the bar. You couldn’t use him for anything, whichever way you held him.
Standing behind Calabretta, by the jukebox, is Klatsche, both thumbs pointing downwards. Standing in front of Calabretta are an empty glass and half a bottle of vodka. Great, well done.
‘How long has he been like this?’ I ask, pointing at my Italian colleague.
‘Weeks,’ says Klatsche. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’
‘I meant the head on the bar.’
‘He arrived about half an hour ago. He was already fairly well oiled. Then he ordered the bottle of vodka.’
Klatsche reaches for me and pulls me into his arms. He smells of man and freshly mown grass. I could so easily let him eat me up.
‘Why give him a bottle of booze?’ I ask.
‘Because I’m not a monster. Our friend here looked like Betty had sent him an invitation to her wedding.’ He lays a hand on Calabretta’s head. ‘The stupid cow should have ripped out his brain along with his heart, so he wouldn’t have to keep missing her. Women are brutal.’
I know that he knows what he’s talking about. Klatsche’s had plenty of experience of women. My own inner brute is always on the point of breaking out. She’s scratched his face a couple of times already. But she shies away from his heart, because she knows that wide-boy hearts have superpowers. If you want to hurt them, with a bit of bad luck you only end up hurting yourself.
Klatsche’s hand is still resting on the Calabretta head.
‘Shall we bring him back to ours tonight?’ he asks.
‘Sure,’ I say. He puts two highball glasses on the bar in front of us and fills them with ice, lemon, vodka and tonic, then he stows the vodka bottle back on the shelf. We’re about to clink when his phone rings. He says hello; he listens, nods then he says: ‘OK, I’m on my way.’
He pushes my drink over to me. ‘Can you take over for me till Rocco gets here?’
‘Your drink or your bar?’
‘Both. Gran’s run away. They’ve rounded her up already, but now she won’t stop crying. I’ve got to go over there.’
I give him a kiss and make my way round behind the bar. I’d better polish the glasses.
‘How does your gran keep doing that?’
Klatsche shrugs. ‘How would I know? Secret plane. Propeller in her nightie. Or she’s got an accomplice.’
I know that he wishes she had one. His parents were drunks and are dead. He didn’t have much to do with them. His gran was the only constant in his life. His value system – unshakeable, if not exactly off-the-peg – came from her. Now she’s strapped to her bed and can’t tell day from night or her grandson from her nurse.
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He grabs his leather jacket from the hook and leaves.
He’ll spend the night by her bed, hold her hand and tell her stories. When he comes back tomorrow morning, he’ll say that she’s thinner and more translucent than ever.
He hopes she’ll die soon, and he hates himself for hoping that.
I bend over the bar to Calabretta, stroke his hair and say: ‘It’s shit needing nursing. You get yourself back on your feet, you hear.’
Then I familiarise myself with the situation behind the bar and wonder what actually happens if customers come in. Realisation: I’m mistress of the alcohol, but not mistress of the situation.
But after two vodkas the world seems to fit me a whole lot better again. When a group of young people arrives, I manage to get beer from the fridge without incident and even remember to take money for it. Note: for the first time in what feels like an eternity, I feel really useful for something.
Things run on merrily for a good while. Mostly I sell beer; sometimes I mix a stiff drink. I don’t need to worry about the jukebox; right at the start I decide on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on an infinite loop. ‘I Put a Spell on You’, over and over; a wall of noise in between whiles. Nobody moans, and Calabretta sleeps deeply and peacefully, and I think to myself that we’ll get him home and straightened out a bit too. And so, slowly, I start to really enjoy my new job as a barmaid.
Just under two hours later, I’m really in the swing of it, including a corner of a tea towel tucked into my waistband, when the door opens and Carla and Rocco are there. They look tired, but freshly showered and everything, as if they’ve got plans. Carla’s wearing a black roll-neck jumper, skinny jeans, an oversized, dark-grey coat and dizzyingly high heels. Her dark curls gleam radiantly in the candlelight, like her eyes. Rocco’s wearing one of his perpetual pinstripe suits, a particularly well-fitting one. He has neither a jacket nor a coat on, just a woollen scarf round his neck and a flat cap on top. His ankle boots are brown and set the tone for the whole outfit. Together, they’re stunning: a dark brilliance. You just can’t look away when they show up. It was wise of them both to marry each other. They’re carved from a single piece of wood.
They come through the room towards me, and it occurs to me again that the most beautiful thing about them, by far the most beautiful human feature of all, is when you can read someone’s story in the way they move. Rocco walks like you walk when your dad was a street-corner violinist, when you grew up a hairsbreadth from the kerb yet despite all the hardship there was always a warm bosom to embrace. He walks with the tides in his feet and freedom in his face. Great Freedom – both the best name for a street ever and heartbeat of this city.
Everything about Carla is water and sunset and olive oil and Lisbon.
‘Interesting barmaid this evening,’ says Rocco, looming in front of me, his hands in his trouser pockets.
‘Meaning?’ I ask, lighting a cigarette. Time for a well-earned break, I feel.
‘Interesting barmaid,’ says Rocco with a grin.
Carla has squeezed in next to Calabretta, but it looks more like she’s holding him up.
‘What’s up with Sorgenboy?’ she asks, stroking his hair.
‘Worry Boy’s downed half a bottle of vodka and pressed the off switch on his brain,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Has something happened?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ I say.
Rocco waves it off. ‘Part of the process, girls. Classic reset, when a man thinks he’s suffered enough. You wait. He’ll be much better tomorrow.’
His words settle above our heads like a sermon, and Carla says, ‘Right.’
Then we decide that Carla will take over the bar while Rocco and I get Calabretta back to my place.
She takes off her coat, and every eye watches.
It’s always an impressive sight.
I hand over my tea towel, Rocco wraps one of Calabretta’s arms around his own neck, I take the other, and together we drag our beloved drunk to the exit.
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins sings as we go:
‘I shot the sheriff but I swear it was in self-defence.’
The moon hangs outside my window; it’s waning, and the harbour dust has layered one of its special filters over it. It looks like a large, yellow potato.
I sit on the windowsill. As always when I don’t know where to put myself. Lying on my couch is Calabretta; earlier he was waning too, but now he’s giving off amazingly strong vibes. He’s breathing calmly, he’s breathing quietly. He thanked Rocco and me briefly after we’d hauled him up the stairs, then he just lay down, pulled my grey woollen blanket over himself and closed his eyes. It seems to me that he’s starting to take care of himself. To sort himself out. It’s a bold claim, of course, when he’s just drunk himself unconscious, but something’s telling me he’s on the right path. Perhaps it’s just Rocco’s diatribe about the self-healing powers of wounded men that he subjected me to in the taxi on the way home.
I tilt the skylight, light a cigarette and look up at the gibbous moon. If I were a wolf, I’d howl. I find myself thinking about Faller, who’s always hounded on and on by his hunting instinct. I find myself thinking about the Austrian – about Joe, if that is his name – but nothing much comes to me about him. I find myself thinking about Klatsche’s gran and light a candle in my head. Maybe I should pay a visit to the old lady with my victim-protection hat on. I find myself thinking about my dad, who’s no longer here; about my mum, who was never there; and about the fact that I never had any proper friends until I had Faller, Calabretta, Klatsche and Carla.
I can’t stop staring at the damn moon.
I smoke another three to eight cigarettes, and someone knocks on the door, two long, three short. I stand up and let Klatsche in, and now the moon is no longer the only thing to hold on to around here.
1995, autumn.
FALLER, GEORG
There’s a law that applies in every system where people earn a lot of money. It’s this: money is earned quietly, we don’t make a big deal out of it, and everyone who’s in on the earning, kindly shut your gobs.
It’s the same for boardrooms, public authorities and mafia families.
It’s more than a law for our Hanseatic businesspeople: it’s in our DNA – a knowledge, an attitude that people here have had for centuries.
Maybe that’s why guys like the Albanian can do better business here than in Naples.
I’m always saying it. I shout it to everyone. But nobody listens. Nobody wants to hear it.
Bollocks, they say. Not on our patch.
Oh man, Faller. Stop that, they say. Never mind about the Albanian.
I ought to stop provoking him. I ought to keep out – out of the Kiez. I ought to shut my mouth and worry about normal dead people.
They can piss right off though. Not the dead – they can’t help it. The others. All the ones who don’t get it.
Every evening, before I go to sleep, I take aim at him in my mind, at his power and his despotism. Annoy him, disturb his comfort zone, make myself a nuisance to him. Stop him getting past me. And make sure he knows about it.
MALAJ, GJERGJ
He’s annoying.
CALABRETTA, VITO
They actually accepted me.
I’m joining the police.
RILEY, CHASTITY
It doesn’t matter what I do. It won’t bring my dad back.
But he once said: You could be a lawyer.
OK, then. I’ll do that. Even if it doesn’t help me.
Amazingly, law doesn’t bore me. Lawyers do though – they bore me rigid.
VELOSA, CARLA
They want to go back to Lisbon.
I can understand that. But I don’t want to go back.
I belong here now. By the harbour. To the gulls.
It’s my harbour.
They’re my gulls.
What would I do in Lisbon? I don’t even speak decent Portuguese any more.
I told my parents to go if th
ey want to. Not to be sad. I’ll take over the shop.
KLASSMAN, HENRI
You pocket the comics.
Then you smile.
Then you walk out again.
Then you sell the comics at school for half-price and now everyone wants to buy their comics from you.
It’s that easy.
MALUTKI, ROCCO
It works best with rich women from Eppendorf, aged thirty or so. They like to splash the cash. They like a little rascal on their arm.
And if the little rascal gets into a jam and has no idea how it could have happened, they help him.
Of course they never have to do that twice. By then, the little rascal’s long gone, he’s never coming back.
JOE
I’ve got a new client.
Can’t get his measure. Doesn’t matter. In the end, I get everyone’s measure.
But we could make something solid of it.
We’re equally invisible.
RADIO SCHIZO
Klatsche’s still asleep. My colleague Calabretta and I are drinking coffee on the balcony. It’s cold but dry, and diving into this icy cold air is good for our heads. At first I thought Calabretta had finally flipped when he said we should drink our coffee outside – when he took my arm and said he always does it, even if it’s snowing. Now I think his idea is fabulous. I feel like I’m in pole position for the day. Last night I’d have bet that my first coffee of the morning would only have silently blown my head off, leaving me helplessly roaming the streets in the hope that nobody noticed its absence.
Blue Night Page 5