‘What are you doing there?’ I ask, but instead of answering, he takes two steps forward and pulls me to him in the corner. He presses me against the wall and sticks himself to me. At my back is the cold stone, in front is his warm, charged body, sizzling under the beads of sweat. His eyes gleam as dark green as Loch Ness. I remember standing there once, years ago; he took my hand by the deep, cold loch and said: ‘Imagine if this were forever.’
It gave me a shock and I pulled my hand away.
In the evening, it cost us a bit in beer and whisky until we were OK again.
He presses me harder against the wall. He thrusts one hand under my T-shirt and undoes first my belt buckle and then his; he does all this very quickly and skilfully, and there’s a weight behind it, an urgency – there’s no way, absolutely no way at all, of resisting it, and he keeps on, and then he lifts me up a bit, and I say ‘Oops’, and for a second I think: seriously, now? Against the wall? And then there’s no more thinking and I hear the people up above calling for beer and Klatsche hears them too, but we don’t care.
We’re back up there again before they can leave.
Later on, when it’s almost morning and all the customers have gone, we go back down to the cellar again. Because it feels like that’s our hot new place – a place that suits us better than anywhere else. And before we go home, Klatsche takes a thick, black felt-tip and draws a bed on the damp wall.
‘So it’s more comfy for you next time,’ he says, although he knows I’m not much into cosiness.
When we turn down our street, the sky’s just turning pink and the first birds are twittering their crazy songs.
Just for the record: this is a highly unusual night and unusual nights are always giving notice of something.
2003, summer.
FALLER,GEORG
They say he wants to take a back seat. Get out of business operations.
I can imagine why. He’d rather sit in his comfortable villa on the Elbe and let his army of gangsters do the work. The main job being to spread fear and terror through the Kiez. Stop anyone from thinking this’d be a good time to start anything.
As for his other important job – his property businesses in the Hafencity – he’s got the city Senate to do that for him.
You just have to keep shaking the right hands and tormenting the right souls.
Everyone knows, but shush.
Don’t talk about it.
It could be bad for business. It could screw up the money.
That’s the general plan, and his particular plan too.
But I’m going to take you down, you arseholes.
Sweated through three shirts today.
MALAJ, GJERGJ
Five cousins from Tirana. Boys, hungry guys.
I said they can show me their moves for a while. Do a few things for me. Whoever does best can try for my legacy. I’ve had it up to here with scummy nightclubs. I’m getting into the better clubs now.
They’ve sorted out the public prosecutor. It was all getting too obvious with him. But a new one’s on order.
And a new pool.
CALABRETTO, VITO
I’m the chief ’s right-hand man.
The other two are fine with that. They act as his legs and do a lot of running around outside. It suits them down to the ground. They’re both the more outdoors type anyway.
Meanwhile the chief and I do a lot of sitting in the office and talking about the Albanian and the structure he’s built up. We’re looking for holes in it. Places to stick in our fingers and winkle out information. Perhaps we’ll even make a few holes in it ourselves.
We investigate with sharpened pencils behind our ears and our minds racing.
I think the boss sees me as the Neapolitan Camorra specialist. Hmm. OK, so I spend my summers with my family near Vesuvius, but I really don’t have much to do with the Camorra.
I once mentioned in passing that my uncle was killed doing antimafia work. Perhaps it made too much of an impression on the chief.
I barely knew my uncle. But I always thought his carabinieri uniform looked ultra-smart in most of the photos. And I liked the fact that his patrol car was an Alfa. A dark blue 165. All carabinieri drive Alfa Romeos. There’s one outside every barracks, ready to roll. When you’re a carabiniere, you just jump in and drive off, blue lights flashing, to drink your coffee. Otherwise they don’t get themselves worked up over much. Or that’s always my impression.
But when I watch my boss with the Albanian business eating away at him, it worries me a bit.
I don’t know if he’s still got enough distance from it. Maybe he should be a bit more of a coffee-carabiniere.
Sat in the office in a vest and shades today.
RILEY, CHASTITY
Nobody wanted the job.
Red-light district, organised crime.
Too much politics, my colleagues said. But you’ll be fine, Ms Riley.
My predecessor was an impenetrable guy. My colleagues say that too. ’Cos of all the politics, they reckon. You don’t want to go round being too transparent, or it’ll come back to bite you.
Dunno what they mean. I’ll keep well out of it. I’ve always kept out of that kind of stuff. Politics and criminal prosecution are two different kettles of fish.
If you mix them, the end result will taste weird.
It just sounded interesting, especially after all the pretty criminality. So I waved my straight As around. You can always leave. And I live in St Pauli, don’t I?
That works, said the attorney general. Schubert, that creep.
Whatever. So long as I don’t have to sit on his lap.
I’m glad about Faller. He’s a bit like my dad. A Robert Mitchum type.
I have to be careful that I don’t just lay myself down by him one day. Head on his shoulder. Daddy. But he always looks so kindly at me.
We’ll be working together a lot from now on, he says.
Why, I asked, are you organised crime as well as the murder squad?
So he tapped his hat, turned and said: You know.
Oh, right, yeah. So I’ve heard. There must be overlaps.
There was a time when the Albanian mafia were bumping people off almost like a production line. And then it did get political; even I heard about that.
Well, I’ll see; find the most sensible way to keep out of it.
Talking of keeping out – last week, I got a new neighbour. Very young. Bristly dark-blonde hair. Green eyes, freckles. Over six foot tall. Kind of a cross between a skater and a small-time gangster. Wears a rank leather jacket and oversized self-confidence.
On the stairs yesterday, I felt like he was staring at my arse. I didn’t know what to do.
I mean, that’s not my style – flirting on the stairs etc. And I’m at least ten years older than him.
It’s insanely hot again today, everyone’s going round in unbuttoned shirts and tiny, thin dresses. I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt and boots.
I’m not making a spectacle of myself.
KLASSMAN, HENRI
New gaff.
Plus new neighbour. Classy girl. But dressed like she was on an expedition to the North Pole.
Maybe someone could give her a bikini.
Well, now. I don’t have time for women. Got to look after my new business. I’m a businessman now. Yessir.
St Pauli Key Service. Quick, cheap and friendly. Open twenty-four seven!
With your experience of locked doors, says Rocco, you’ll eat them for breakfast.
I’m going for a beer, barefoot.
MALUTKI, ROCCO
I live in a little hut by the beach and I’m building a boat.
I’m learning on the job. Mirko’s teaching me. I always wanted to learn. When the boat’s ready, I get my pay. Then we build the next boat.
But before that we go out on the lash, says Mirko, in Dubrovnik.
We drive over in the morning, drink all day and all night, and dance with the prettiest girls, and the next day we d
rive back to our beach.
Our beach is pebbly. The water glitters turquoise and there are diamonds dancing on the tiny waves. It’s so hot and the air is so soft. This is the Caribbean, not Croatia, I tell Mirko every day, and he laughs and says: Perhaps.
He used to have a restaurant in St Pauli. His parents went to Hamburg before the Iron Curtain closed. After the war in Yugoslavia, Mirko went back to Croatia, where he’d never been till that day.
My home, he says, looking at the mountains behind the coastline.
One evening, when we were sitting by the water with a couple of bottles of beer and a barbecue and two steaks, he asked me where my home was.
Hmm, I said. St Pauli, maybe. Or maybe South America. Or Poland.
South America? Mirko asked.
Someone in my mother’s family is from there.
Poland?
My father was a Pole.
Oh, Mirko said.
My mother, I said, always told me I had gypsy blood.
Then you’re in the right place with me, Mirko said, licking his knife.
In the mornings, when I can get up and do, or not do, whatever I like, when I could go where I want; in the mornings when I have the strongest sense of not being banged up, that’s when I find myself thinking about Klatsche.
I wonder whether his key business is working out. Whether he’s got a girl.
Guys like him always have a girl.
Klatsche Klassman and I were released at almost the same time. I picked him up when he got out.
He took me to the station when I left for Croatia.
We slapped each other on the shoulders and laughed. Now I miss him. Funny – in jail you usually make enemies, not friends.
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, it’s hot here.
VELOSA, CARLA
A scorching summer.
It’s been hot and dry for weeks now. At night you can see Mars gleaming. It shines more darkly than all the other stars in the sky.
It’s not a star, say the clever dicks, it’s a planet.
I don’t care.
I met someone, at a fish stall in Övelgönne.
An odd woman. She’s got a funny name, something American, hard to remember. Her hair’s American too, so glossy and thick and shiny; her hair belongs in a TV series. She can drink like a man. And she’s a public prosecutor.
Not at all what I was expecting.
We laughed so much. When a big ship went past, followed by a big wave, the harbour water caught us. Everyone at the stall was soaked through. And I was feeling so silly that I stuck a herring in my mouth. Sideways. She was great.
She’s planning to pop into my café at the weekend. Then I’ll make her the best coffee in the world and then she won’t be able to stop popping in.
JOE
Three at a stroke, and they didn’t notice till the last second that they were for it.
That matters to me.
I don’t want them to suffer for long.
Hunter’s honour.
ESPERANTO
No idea how we made it home. It’s pretty impressive that we made it at all in our twisted condition. I wake up briefly when Klatsche gets up around noon to go shopping, but fall asleep again immediately. He’s always the one who goes shopping. He lugs food home, he fills his fridge, and he always brings me back the things I need – milk, coffee, vodka and a few apples and bananas.
He looks after me and now I can actually bear to let him.
When I finally wake up, because Klatsche’s come home from shopping, it’s half past three. That took him a while.
He puts the paper bag of my things on the landing and drags therest of the bags into the kitchen, where he divides his booty between his caves – fridge, larder, kitchen table. I keep my eyes shut and listen to the racket. Family sounds, I think, and don’t know what to make of that.
I open my eyes, look into the sky and see a tentative March sun. I turn over; my shoulder blades hurt. I remember the wall from last night again, and I’m almost a bit embarrassed. Klatsche and I have known each other for years, and for years we’ve been sometimes more and sometimes less a couple, more often more these days. But when we stood against that cold wall in the cellar yesterday it was like a stormy encounter between two strangers. Lights that had accidentally collided and become entangled in each other. A hasty miniature firework.
I try to stretch my shoulders. It hurts. I shut my eyes again.
Klatsche’s making coffee. It clatters and then starts bubbling. Between me closing and opening my eyes, he’s sitting next to me on the bed, holding out a mug.
‘Hot stuff, baby,’ he whispers.
I’ve stopped bothering to tell him not to call me ‘baby’. He won’t stop anyway. He always says he’ll stop when I stop all the other stuff. And I don’t want to think about ‘all the other stuff’, so I scoot up a bit, take the coffee from him and say, ‘Thanks.’
He looks at me as if it’s the first time I’ve woken up in his bed, as if we’ve only met yesterday, and it’s actually a bit like that. He looks at me like that for quite a while. I like it.
I drink coffee and look back at him.
Then it seems like he’s looked enough and he switches mode.
‘I spoke to a few people,’ he says, ‘about Faller.’
‘When?’ I ask, sitting upright.
‘Just now,’ he says. ‘I went back to the Blue Night because I wanted to check that we locked up properly this morning. And I bumped into some guys.’
‘And what do those guys say?’
‘They’re all wondering why old Faller is suddenly prowling round the Kiez so ferociously.’
‘What d’you mean, prowling ferociously round the Kiez?’
‘Well,’ says Klatsche, ‘he seems to be in a different joint every evening. Always drives up in style in his Pontiac, drinks two beers and drives off again.’
‘That’s it?’ I ask.
‘No,’ says Klatsche with a frown. ‘He tells stories.’
‘What kind of stories?’ I ask, instinctively knowing they won’t be funny ones.
‘He talks about the Albanian,’ says Klatsche. ‘He tells anyone he can get his hands on about everything Gjergj Malaj’s done in the last twenty, thirty years. He really does tell them everything.’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ says Klatsche. ‘He talks and talks and talks. Every evening.’
‘What does that mean then?’
Klatsche raises his eyebrows. ‘Pure provocation,’ he says. ‘Beats me what he thinks it’ll achieve.’
‘Perhaps he wants to break through the Albanian’s reserve,’ I say. ‘Make him react to his blathering … so he slips up…’
‘But he can’t really think that’ll work, can he?’
‘It’s the only explanation I can think of.’
‘The most the Albanian will do is set one of his guard dogs on him,’ says Klatsche. He takes a gulp of his coffee. ‘And to be honest, that’s not so unlikely.’
‘To be honest,’ I say, ‘it’s highly likely. Malaj’s officially – and very skilfully – pulled himself out of everything these days, and gets invited to the very best parties. He’s not exactly going to let himself be screwed over by the cop he went to all that effort to get rid of, back in the day.’
‘So who’s going to get the old boy to drop the bullshit now?’
Klatsche stares out of the window as if the answer to his question might just fly past.
‘I’ll try,’ I say. ‘Can you find out where he’s already been?’
‘I can,’ says Klatsche. ‘And I can light a candle for him now, to be on the safe side.’
Let’s hope candles are like umbrellas – if you’ve got one, you won’t need it. If you haven’t got one, you’ll get soaked.
The Austrian holds his face into the last remnants of spring sunshine. The wind’s moved on. The sun isn’t really warming, but it’s nice to know it’s there. It’s a first glimpse of what it’ll be capable of in six or
seven weeks’ time.
He looks pale. Hair and face almost seamlessly grey. Everyone’s pale at this time of year, and the effort of clinging onto a hard wheelchair when you’re so broken makes you a notch or two paler. This man, who acts like he’s made of granite, has a whole lot of cracks.
But smoking seems to help a bit. I’m not so bad with a fag in my mouth, Doctor.
We’ve been here in our smokers’ corner for a good half-hour. He was already sitting in the wheelchair when I arrived at his room. He didn’t exactly look like he was waiting for me, but it wasn’t far off.
And now it doesn’t exactly look like he’s bursting to tell me something – but that’s not far off either. His face is turned more towards the sun than to me – I can only see his profile – but for the first time I sense that he might really be prepared to talk to me.
‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Spill the beans.’
He opens his eyes a little, but keeps his face in the sunlight. ‘Hmm.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Mh.’
‘I’m not letting up,’ I say. ‘If you want me to stop pestering you, you need to tell me who beat you to a pulp.’
‘Well, listen up then,’ he says.
‘I’m listening.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘It won’t take long.’
‘I believe you.’
He says: ‘OK.’
He breathes deeply in and out again. Smoke into the lungs and smoke out of the lungs.
‘It’s to do with drugs. The bad shit. It’s meant to come to Hamburg and then go on to Western and Northern Europe, on a massive scale. Someone wants to build solid structures, east-west distribution channels. They’re not there for this stuff yet. But they soon will be.’
He looks at me. ‘You can’t do anything about it, it’s all wrapped up already. You and your people might bust a delivery now and then, but it won’t bother anyone, the structure’s too big and too well constructed.’
Blue Night Page 8