Blue Night

by Simone Buchholz

  Now I breathe in the cold air and say: ‘I’m going round to Faller’s. He doesn’t like people visiting him at home. It’s a neat way to put him off his stride.’

  Calabretta looks down to the sleepy street.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll find out what he’s actually planning.’

  Calabretta looks at me. ‘And then?’

  ‘What do you mean, “and then”?’

  ‘I’m not at all sure,’ he says, ‘that what Faller’s up to is actually that bad.’

  ‘Well, on the face of it, he’s a nice, old grandpa who wants to pick a fight with the biggest predator in town,’ I say. ‘Of course it’s that bad.’

  ‘He’s not a nice, old grandpa. He’s a cunning old dog. And I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘When? Yesterday evening with your head on the bar?’

  ‘That’s unkind.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Calabretta slurps his coffee and eyes the houses opposite. There’s a gang of tradesmen turning cheap flats into expensive ones. Polish the floorboards, replaster the walls, shove in a spa-style shower head, and, wham, seventeen euros a square metre. Excl. bills.

  ‘I don’t reckon we could stop him,’ says Calabretta, ‘whatever he’s planning.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But if we knew a bit more, we could keep a bit more of an eye on him.’

  ‘Or help him,’ he says.

  I stir my coffee.

  Maybe Calabretta has gone mad after all. Sure – let’s help Faller take the Albanian down. All on our lonesomes. What a superb idea.

  ‘You’re not serious?’ I mutter.

  He finishes his coffee and stands up. ‘Well, I’ll be off then. Thanks for taking me in and looking after me so well.’

  He stands erect and very straight on my balcony, raises his arms in the air, stretches briefly, and then he’s gone.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d have said he spent yesterday evening weight training.

  I finish off my coffee, suck another load of cold air into my lungs and wonder whether to smoke a cigarette or run a lap of the park.

  I decide on running. Running time is thinking time.

  I don’t usually get any results, but it’s worth a try.

  The good thing about this city is that if you don’t feel like getting a bus or a train or a taxi, you can just take the boat. Faller lives close to the Elbe beach, so I get off the ferry at Övelgönne. I watch it sail on for a while because I like the way the old ships tramp over the water. Then I walk the few hundred metres to Faller’s house. A white fence, a couple of pruned rose bushes, an apple tree with an old wooden ladder leaning against its trunk. The house is slightly askew – a little beachside idyll. To the left of it is a kind of courtyard. It used to be home to benches and a table; now it’s home to the Pontiac. It looks a little wistful here, in this spotlessly swept paradise. As if it were still hoping for this not to be quite the end, please. Hoping that, one day, it will go back to the wide, endless roads on the other side of the Atlantic.

  I prefer not to speak to it. I don’t want to lie.

  Faller comes to the door in slippers, a mug of coffee in his hand.

  ‘Aha,’ he says.

  ‘Good morning,’ I say.

  He looks at me, wrinkles his brow, grimaces, turns away, heads towards the hallway and says: ‘Well, you’d better come in.’

  I’d love to, thanks: he hates having visitors.

  Or maybe he only hates having me visit.

  Because it mixes up his two lives: the filthy murder squad life, where he was always having to tackle death and the devil, and where he ended up knocked out, humiliated and shot at; and the nice life where he can climb up a wooden ladder to pick apples. I can understand that. I have two lives too. There’s my professional blend of grey and clouds and a wooden feeling in my soul; and then there are the other moments of steaming food at Carla’s or a light on still at Klatsche’s.

  We stand in the kitchen, at the counter under the window. Hanging in front of the window are eggshell-coloured curtains, stopping about halfway down and all flounced and ruffled. It’s funny how men always put up with what their wives want.

  I don’t think Faller’s the type to care much about the house. So long as nobody from his other life visits him here.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asks, holding up a mug. There’s a cat on it.

  ‘Lovely,’ I say.

  He pours filter coffee into the cat mug; it smells sour – my belly twitches. But I’ve got to go through with it now.

  Faller hands me the mug. I add a little milk and a lot of sugar.

  ‘But you didn’t just come round for a coffee,’ he says.

  ‘True,’ I say, stirring the cat mug. ‘I came because I know you’re planning something to do with the Albanian.’

  He recoils slightly, then says, robotically: ‘Also true.’

  It’s just how I imagined it playing out – knocking him down with it, leaving him so gobsmacked and softened, he’d crumble and be dead easy to crack.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ I say.

  He looks at me, serious, honest and without a trace of mockery in his eyes. Takes a sip of the dishwater coffee. Leans his elbows on the worktop so that he can stare through the window under the half-curtains for a round.

  After a long five minutes, he says: ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I want you to leave it,’ I say. ‘It won’t get you anywhere. It’ll just get you into trouble.’

  He carries on staring out of the window.

  We drink our coffee in silence and the longer we say nothing, the more it dawns on me that this is a different silence from normal. Normally it feels great to sit in silence with Faller. Now it’s like this: instead of not saying anything, we’re not talking to each other, and that doesn’t feel good at all.

  Half an hour later, I give up and pack away my silly idea – the idea that he’d talk to me, that at least he’d want my concern, or at the very least understand it. I shove all those visions back into my badly equipped communication toolbox and make tracks. When there’s nothing to be gained, you should stop digging – give up the desperate hope that just maybe you might find a stupid worm after all.

  As I leave, I think: I’m watching you, Faller. He stands in the front doorway with a mug of cold coffee in his hand, looking right through me. We don’t often part like this.

  At the beach, I get on the next ferry back to town.

  I stand on deck and breathe in the pictures.

  The gulls.

  The waves.

  The wind.

  The dusty light.

  The ballet of bustling boats.

  The Blohm & Voss shipyard.

  There’s a rusty ocean giant, only held together by good will.

  On the other side are the tourists. They struggle down the jetties in all weathers. They sometimes make it past the souvenir shops, but usually get sucked in by not quite the best fish sandwiches in town. Actually, it’s like this: half an hour on the jetties and you start feeling sick. I get out at Bridge Three and head up to the street and take a taxi to St Georg, leaving the tourists to the fish sandwiches and their fate. It’s not that I don’t want to help. As always, I gave a couple of challenging looks, and as soon as anyone looked back, I said quietly: ‘You can go to other places, you know.’

  But, as always, nobody reacted; they all – mainly the ones with southern German accents – looked at me like I wasn’t quite all there.

  Some stupid, big-city bitch.

  And they’re not far wrong.

  My taxi driver is a punk. Not just a fashion punkanista but the real deal. Smell and all. You run into one now and again. He asks briefly where I want to go, then turns his music on again. Fierce, a din that blows your ears out. It’s quite something.

  ‘What is this?’ I yell.

  ‘Radio Schizo!’ he yells back. ‘Berlin!’

  Radio Schizo.

  Berli
n.

  I don’t know why, but in a sick kind of way I feel in a very good place with that band name running through my head and the back seat of this taxi under my arse. We dispense with conversation; the roar of Radio Schizo will only tolerate a city rushing past the window, although Bucharest might be more in keeping with the sound than Hamburg.

  Four quick songs later, the taxi spits me out again at the Steindamm police station. The punk driver can barely hide his disdain for my destination, but I don’t mind that. There’s a home port for everyone.

  I pull myself together just in time to not accidentally wave after him when he does an illegal U-turn and bombs off towards the railway station.

  Inside the police station, a single word flashes at me from every eye I meet: OVERLOAD. It’s accompanied by constant questions: Who? Where? What? When? Excuse me? Could somebody just…? Can’t you speed it up a bit?

  I pause on the threshold for a moment and watch. My colleagues look as though they’re trying to lift enormous beams that it’s vital to keep up in the air. But the beams aren’t all that stable, and there are heavy loads weighing them down: drugs, child prostitution, violence and insanity.

  When one of the desk clerks notices that I’m standing there, he looks frantically at me, and then, in despair at the prospect of new jobs to do, asks how he can help me. I say: ‘It’s fine. I’ll come again another time.’

  He’s already gone, turning his attention to the next ringing telephone. I vanish as if I were a ghost. I’m now certain that I won’t make any progress on the Austrian here, whatever his name actually is.

  On the way to the same mysterious Austrian, I decide to refine the business with the beer, so I pop into the nearest deli to buy a bit of ham and cheese, and a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. It’s lunchtime after all.

  ‘Does he speak to you?’ the policeman outside the hospital room asks, looking ruefully at me. ‘For days I’ve been wishing the man a good morning, or a good afternoon or a good night. And all I get in return is a scowl.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally,’ I say. ‘He only speaks to me when I force him to.’ I hold up the bag of grub, the wine bottle peeking out of the top.

  ‘You’re bribing him,’ the policeman says sternly.

  ‘Wait a minute or two,’ I say, ‘then you can have some too.’

  I slip into the ward kitchen, fetch three plates, three glasses and look for a reasonably sharp knife. The thing I find is a joke. A knife like you used to get in aeroplanes, but don’t any more, because somebody actually thinks you could seriously injure someone with one, which is an even bigger joke. Any child in St Pauli has sharper knives. I leave the knife in the drawer. As well as his army pistol, my dad left me a mountain of Swiss Army knives; I always have one on me.

  I divvy up the food between the plates: cheese, ham and bread for the Austrian and his guard, cheese and bread for me. Red wine for everyone, even though two of us are on duty. When I present the officer in the hallway with his set menu, he gives me a brief look of surprise. I look wryly back at him, and with that the matter is settled.

  ‘OK, then,’ he says.

  ‘Enjoy,’ I say.

  Instead of ‘Hello’ or ‘Thank you for the delicious food and good company’, the Austrian says: ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Are you that keen on hospital slop?’

  ‘I mean your colleague outside,’ he says.

  ‘It’s for me to decide whether he’s necessary or not.’

  ‘No one will do anything to me,’ he says.

  ‘Looking at you,’ I say, ‘I beg to differ.’

  He puts his head slightly to one side, as far as he can in his current plastered condition. ‘I mean, nobody will kill me.’

  ‘Why are you so sure of that?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve got life insurance,’ he says, and with his Austrian lilt it sounds almost like he’s said ‘honoured to make your acquaintance’.

  I put a slice of ham on some bread for him and press it into his left, unbandaged, hand.

  ‘Do you have what they call “life insurance” in the Kiez,’ I ask, ‘or a piece of paper with the name of a big company at the top?’

  He bites into his bread and chews. He seems to be enjoying it.

  ‘Something in between,’ he says; chews, swallows. ‘Could I have some of the cheese please?’ He opens his mouth.

  Somewhat taken aback, I nod and pop a bit of cheese between his teeth.

  ‘“Something in between”? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘That,’ he says, chewing, ‘can mean whatever you want it to. Aren’t you eating? And what about the wine?’

  ‘Tell me what you mean about the life insurance,’ I say, ‘and I’ll give you a glass.’

  He looks out of the window for a while. A tiny bit of the sun is about to break through the clouds.

  ‘I’ve got a bank box in Switzerland,’ he says. ‘If I die, sooner or later people like you will come and have the box opened. There are a couple of other people who know that I’ve got the bank box, you see – and it is not in their interests for that to happen.’

  I don’t believe it. A bank box full of great, big secrets. And I don’t even know the man’s real name.

  ‘Which other people?’ I ask.

  He screws up his forehead, twists his mouth, shakes his head a fraction and says: ‘Mh.’

  I’ve only seen this way of not talking about things from Calabretta. And certain gentlemen in the vice squad. I make a note of it and hand him the glass, half full of red wine. As I do so, I notice his right hand, which seems to have been freshly bandaged.

  ‘How’s your hand?’ I ask.

  ‘How should it be? There used to be five fingers and now there are only four.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’ I ask.

  A grin plays around the corners of his mouth. ‘Because they didn’t know I’m left-handed.’

  ‘Who didn’t know?’ I ask, sliding a little closer to his bed. ‘Come on, spit it out. Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ he asks.

  ‘You’re not allowed to smoke in here,’ I say with growing impatience and point at the bandage. ‘Joe, who did this?’

  He empties his glass and holds it out to me. I refill it.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, downing it again. In one. The whole glass.

  I can guess what’s going to happen in the next second, and it does: drinking red wine so fast, on top of the painkillers – it’s like liquid tar on his eyelids. I can actually see them getting heavier.

  ‘You’re one of the good guys,’ he says. ‘Like I said, just believe me.’

  I put my hand on his arm. ‘Joe,’ I say.

  He’s not really trying to keep his eyes open, but I think he’s listening.

  ‘Who did you mess with?’

  ‘I underestimated them,’ he says quietly. ‘I thought I was too big for them.’ He yawns. ‘But they have no respect.’ He yawns again. He yawns like he wants to eat me. ‘That’s very bad.’

  I scent the chance to catch hold of his subconscious and maybe get some information.

  ‘What’s your name, Joe? What’s your real name? Tell me who you are, please.’

  His eyes are shut.

  ‘I were a good boy,’ he whispers. ‘I were a very good boy.’

  Then he falls asleep.

  He breathes slowly and deeply, and great peace spreads over his face.

  Who could have known the guy drinks red wine like apple juice?

  I refill my own glass, take a piece of bread and a lump of cheese and chew away in frustration.

  Then something occurs to me.

  Going out of the door, I’m glad to see my colleague on the hard chair is enjoying his lunch. I look for the nurses’ station and, because no one’s there, I simply call down the corridor:

  ‘Could I speak to a doctor for a moment, please?’

  2002, spring.

  FALLER, GEORG

  He won’t get
rid of me.

  HE.

  WON’T.

  GET.

  RID.

  OF.

  ME.

  And there’s something not quite right about this prosecutor.

  MALAJ, GJERGJ

  There he sits. Mr Public Prosecutor. In front of an expensive glass of wine.

  His pale suit has dark stains under the arms.

  The guy is made of fear and arrogance. I swear he’ll lick my balls yet.

  RILEY, CHASTITY

  Going to Hamburg soon. Got a job in the public prosecution service.

  I don’t think I’ll stay long. I really want to get to Berlin.

  CALABRETTA, VITO

  Murder squad, four weeks now.

  All OK there.

  And I like my boss.

  He’s snappish as an old watchdog.

  KLASSMAN, HENRI

  That was a dead cert, a sure thing. Copier out of the lobby and into the car and out of the car again to the fence.

  No partner. No one to talk. Nothing to go wrong.

  For the life of me, I’ve no idea who grassed me up.

  Now I’m sitting here with this weirdo cellmate. Hey ho. I’ll stick out a couple of months. Jail doesn’t break you that fast.

  I’ll be fine. I hope.

  MALUTKI, ROCCO

  I know him by reputation. I thought he wanted to be the next burglar king. He thought so too. Seems it didn’t quite work out.

  I give him half my bread every evening. The kid’s always starving; must be still growing.

  I don’t like this ugly rye bread you get here. And there’s no one to bring you a decent white loaf. Or a slice of cake.

  That’s all.

  VELOSA, CARLA

  My first slice of cake.

  My first latte.

  My first customer.