‘How long have you been doing this job?’
‘Almost fifteen years.’ He straps himself in and turns the ignition key. ‘Before that, I was on the drugs squad in Hamburg.’
‘No way,’ I say.
‘Yes way,’ he says, accelerating.
On the edge of town, a dozen gloomy people are cowering by the wall of a building that looks like an abandoned railway waiting room with broken windows. Their faces are white and shiny, their eyes are dark and guttering, they’re all scarily thin. Now and again one stands up and power walks up and down. Then cowers against the wall again.
The wall is about to shatter under the weight of so much misery.
‘Here you go,’ says Wieczorkowski. ‘Here are your freaks.’
‘Thank you very much,’ I say.
I can hardly look.
He stops the engine and undoes his seat belt. ‘Come with me for a moment.’
We get out and walk past the living corpses; we might as well step over them. It feels so awful to just abandon people like that.
We enter a small tunnel next to the tumbledown building. It’s dark and damp inside; I can hear rustling and scurrying, and I see long, thin tails.
Animals. Lots of animals.
On the far side of the tunnel we turn left and stop outside what used to be toilets, and inside, in a corridor, a couple are lying. They look terrible; they really are living corpses – the meth victims back there had lovely complexions in comparison. The pallor of these two is verging on greenish; they look like how kids draw zombies: not meant to be all that hideous but they still turned out that way.
The zombies are just lying there. No idea how old they are. Their faces are sunken. There are green ulcers on their hands, on their arms and on their necks.
‘That’s krok,’ says Wieczorkowski. ‘Also known as krokodil.’
I can’t move and I can’t speak. I want: to scream. To cry.
This is just wrong.
‘It’s one of the worst things on the market. Codeine tablets cooked up with formic acid and match heads. At first it’s like heroin – gives you an incredible high – but it’s much, much cheaper than heroin, and much more brutal. One shot costs two euros fifty.’
I’d like to say something now; I ought to say something, but my throat is squeezed shut.
‘Most of them are dead in six months,’ says Wieczorkowski. ‘And withdrawal takes a whole month and hurts so much that they need tranquilisers or they keep passing out from the pain. So hardly anyone ever gets off it. An American newspaper once wrote that krok was the most horrific drug in the world. I’m telling you – this is meth’s cousin from hell.’
‘We have to call an ambulance,’ I whisper. ‘An ambulance, please.’
‘We will,’ he says. ‘But in a week or two they’ll be back here, believe me.’
I take a deep breath.
For a moment, I’d forgotten to breathe.
Wieczorkowski takes me by the arm and shepherds me back to the Transit. I can hardly put one leg in front of the other.
He puts me in the van and calls the paramedics.
I pay no attention to where we’re driving. I have no idea where I am or what the time is.
In my head are mini forklifts, busy sorting the images onto secret shelves that I won’t be able to get to quickly. In a day or two, we’ll see if it’s worked.
After a while, I find my voice again.
‘And you think that’s what my informant meant by crocodiles?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ he says. ‘In fact, I’m sure of it. I know your informant.’
I look at him sideways; he’s watching the road, notices that I’m looking at him but doesn’t react.
Eventually he says: ‘I’ll explain, I promise, but later; I need two or three beers for that. Or five.’
‘I’d be happy to go for a beer right now,’ I say.
‘So would I,’ he says, ‘but you wanted to go to the Czech side, didn’t you?’
Wanted isn’t the word for it.
But work is work and schnapps is schnapps.
We drive through an idyllic slice of eastern Germany. Small, colourful houses, slender trees, languid fields. White wooden benches under lanky birches or old weeping willows. And every now and then, some more abandoned industry. An old foundry or a brickworks or a hangar or a whatever-factory in crumbling brick. Windows with trees where the glass should be, which always looks a bit like there’s a fairy-tale castle in the pipeline.
I try to fill my mind with it, to pour in something white and soapy, but unfortunately it’s already full. The crocodile couple are filling it to the brim. I don’t think tidying them onto the secret shelves is going to work.
Wieczorkowski stares at the road. He said we’d talk later over beer. If that’s how it is, that’s how it is, and that’s fine by me.
After Dresden the idyll’s over. It’s almost a relief. Idyll on top of horror just intensifies the horror.
We drive through long, dark valleys.
‘Arthritis valleys,’ says Wieczorkowski, and looking at the faces of the few people out and about here, I immediately know what he means. Life here hurts, and not just in the joints. We drive through villages called Elend and Oberpöbel: ‘Misery’ and ‘Upper Rabble’. We drive through a larch wood; at first the trees get greyer and greyer with every metre, then suddenly they’re dead. Buckle over the ground, grow down instead of up; and if they’re not dead yet, they’re hideously maimed.
‘For God’s sake,’ I say.
‘Nitrate salts,’ says Wieczorkowski, ‘blowing over the border, over the hill, for decades.’
There’s snow on the hilltop. Grey, naturally.
Beyond the hilltop, the view opens out; I can see as far as the next grey hilltop, the next valley, but there’s nothing anywhere here either. Borderland; impenetrable for so long, and now forgotten. As if it weren’t even there.
The road leads steeply down from the hilltop. The first thing I see is an unwelcoming sign standing idly, a blot on the landscape: Konzum. Behind it is a string of barns – white-grey, single-storey narrow sheds with tiny windows. Standing outside are solitary men in dark clothes, Asians with sullen faces. Arrayed in rows outside the doors are products that can be bought in the barn behind. Outsized garden gnomes. Hanging baskets. Jogging suits.
‘Who buys this stuff?’ I ask, and Wieczorkowski says: ‘Nobody comes here to buy garden gnomes. The meth kitchens are maybe ten minutes’ drive away. If you want to buy something, you tell these gentlemen and one of them drives off, and half an hour later, the stuff changes hands.’
‘And krok?’ I ask. ‘Can you get that here too?’
‘If it’ll kill you, you can get it here,’ he says. ‘But we don’t know much about krok. It’s still very rare at home. We just know it’s there. It comes from Russia and it’s slowly eating its way westwards.’
‘Like a crocodile?’
‘Like a crocodile.’
He’s slowed down – we’re more or less creeping from barn to barn. Before very long, three to five men are standing outside every door, watching our van.
‘You see,’ he says. ‘They know me.’
He pulls two cigarettes from the glove compartment, gives me one and lights the other for himself. He opens the window a crack.
‘Of course they also know that I can’t do a thing,’ he says, dragging on his cigarette. ‘I’m completely reliant on my colleagues on this side of the border.’
He passes me his lighter.
‘And?’ I ask.
‘We work closely together,’ he says; ‘and we’re getting better.’
‘Why are there these markets? Can’t anyone just shut them down?’
‘You tell that to the mayors of these godforsaken villages here. The Vietnamese markets are basically their only functional economic structure. And everyone makes a little something from it.’
‘Corruption,’ I say.
‘I don’t want to piss off my Czech
colleagues,’ he says. ‘They’re doing their best. And like this, at least we can keep an eye on it. Can watch it. Battery farming, you know?’
He glances outside. Meets the eyes of all the men outside the barns. They’re on the verge of nodding to each other. There’ve been years where they’ve been unpleasantly chained together. A sticky relationship.
The internal coldness of this relationship is one of the frostiest things I’ve ever felt.
Wieczorkowski puts the heating on.
‘Cold here,’ he says.
And I think: battery farming.
Dresden Neustadt. A bit like a miniature version of Berlin twenty years ago. We stand at a heavy bar, waiting for our first beer. To shorten the ten-to-twenty-second wait, the barman has already given us two vodkas.
‘At the Ost-Pol,’ Wieczorkowski said earlier, when I asked him the best place to get a few beers. ‘Like the North or South Poles, but in the east.’
I can’t think of a name that would suit this place better. Clear and uncompromising and dark and glorious and perfectly off-beat. The predominant colours are light brown, dark brown, and orange, or all at once, preferably in decades-old wavy or checked patterns. All the men have untrimmed beards; lots of them are wearing peculiar caps. A punk band is playing in the room next door. They’re torturing their guitars; a woman with a very loud and very sad voice sings: ‘Now it’s broken’.
Everyone’s smoking. We down the vodka. Then come two bottles of beer.
‘Your health, Chastity,’ says Wieczorkowski.
‘Cheers, Hannes.’
We toast each other and drink.
The cigarette smoke wreathes around our heads, enveloping us and comforting me. The vodka warms me from inside out.
Wieczorkowski stares at the wall behind the bar. ‘Do you have kids?’
I shake my head.
‘I’ve got two sons,’ he says. ‘They’re eleven and thirteen. And whenever I stand outside a school like we did this afternoon, watching that parade, I can’t sleep for a couple of nights.’
‘Shall we sit here all night then?’
‘If you like,’ he says. ‘But I booked a hotel room for you, just round the corner.’
‘Thanks,’ I say.
‘No problem,’ he says, gulping his beer.
‘How often do you watch the parade?’
‘Too often.’
He devotes his attention to his jacket sleeve, flips it over and back again.
‘Have you been outside your boys’ school?’
He nods. ‘But they go to school here, because they live with their mother,’ he says. ‘It’s not quite as bad in Dresden. Leipzig’s definitely got it worse.’
‘Why?’
He shrugs. ‘Dresden’s stuffy. Not much happens apart from in thislittle area. Leipzig’s full of parties and clubs. Stuff like that spreads faster there.’
He finishes his beer and orders two more. I hurry to catch up. And another two vodkas.
‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
The woman next door sings that it’s broken now for one last time, then the concert’s over.
‘Don’t you live with your family?’ I ask.
‘Sometimes yes, sometimes no,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a room in Leipzig and a small flat in Dresden. And sometimes I’m together with them all in the big flat. My wife and I have seen better days.’
He flags down another vodka and clings onto his empty beer bottle until the shot glass comes.
‘The gloss comes off even true love eventually.’
I drain my bottle. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never had a true love. So there’s no gloss to come off. Everything’s rusty from the start with me.
‘Everything’s rusty from the start with me,’ I say and then the new beers come and Wieczorkowski downs his vodka and starts laughing, and the barman takes our empty bottles from the bar and says: ‘That would make a great song for our house band.’
We clink bottles and drink, and once the barman’s stopped paying us any attention, Wieczorkowski slips a little closer to me and says: ‘This Austrian in your hospital in Hamburg…’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s something I need to explain.’
I look at him. His profile hardens.
‘He’s my confidential source.’
I choke on my beer.
Cough.
‘Sorry?’
‘We’ve known each other since my time in Hamburg,’ he says, staring at his hands.
I stare at my hands too and carry on coughing because I don’t know what else to do. Or what to say. I decide on: ‘Oh.’
A thin strand has worked loose from his knot of hair. He strokes it slowly out of his face, as if he’s playing for time.
‘Who is the man?’ I ask.
‘A ghost,’ says Wieczorkowski. ‘There are very few people who even know he exists. And probably nobody who knows his real name.’
‘Do you know it?’
He shakes his head; the hair falls down again. ‘He’s a hitman.’
A hitman.
In my head, a few jigsaw pieces shift position, and I quickly try to make a picture out of them, but I can’t do it.
‘You hired a hitman as a grass?’
He takes a huge swig of beer. ‘Not officially. It just happened.’
It just happened. Right. And it just happened that the man I’ve spent a week feeling responsible for isn’t a victim but a perpetrator, and a high-calibre one at that – probably in both senses of the expression. The jigsaw pieces start whirling, a carousel ride through the last few days starts up, and during the ride, piece after piece drops into place. The black suit. The workmanlike, cynical, sordid view of the world. The stupid mysteries and silence. Everything about that tough old bloke. The chopped-off index finger: the three guys wanted to really screw him over, to fuck with the trigger for ever; but they were sadly misinformed.
And then all that stuff about paying the hospital bill in cash.
My jaw drops. You could probably hear it.
Wieczorkowski looks at me with a gaze that speaks of sympathy – for me, for him, for us both and for this whole weird situation we’ve found ourselves in. But maybe it’s only badly packaged amusement. Right at this moment, I’m not in a fit state to assess anything; it’s as if I’m up a mast in a basket and looking down, and I’m about to fall, and there’s absolutely nothing down there.
‘Obviously, I’m perfectly well aware that it’s anything but legit,’ he says. ‘But he’s not working as a hitman any more. He’s retired, however stupid that sounds. And he was the best line I could get. The man had premium information, and he shared it with me.’
‘What kind of information?’
‘All kinds,’ he says. ‘Drug stuff going down in the Hamburg underworld. Structures, distribution channels, involvements. Your colleagues on the narcotics squad did very well out of it – I often had a good tip-off for them.’
Beside me, a woman squirms her way to the bar and orders four Polish rockets, whatever they are.
‘Why did Joe do that for you?’ I ask, once the woman’s withdrawn with four little red shots on a tray. ‘He must have had a bloody good reason, mustn’t he?’
‘Oh, he did, believe me,’ he says, turning the melody in his voice down to zero and waving to the barman. For vodka. Or maybe to say: stop asking questions, woman.
‘OK,’ I say.
‘OK,’ he says.
We drink our vodka and wait for everything to settle a bit. Which is good for the jigsaw carousel in my head.
After a while, Wieczorkowski starts again.
‘I last heard from Joe ten days ago. He said something about a big crystal deal between the Czech Republic and Hamburg. He was sure that something was about to happen. But he kept it very vague – it was all hints; he wouldn’t or couldn’t say anything else. A couple of days ago, I tried to get hold of him again. I didn’t know until this morning that anything had happened to him.’
‘Now you do,’ I say, lighting a cigarette. ‘Do you happen to know anything about his life insurance in Switzerland?’
Wieczorkowski looks at me. ‘Did he tell you about that?’
‘He mentioned something along those lines,’ I say, ‘while explaining why he didn’t need a guard on his door.’
‘Hmm.’
Wieczorkowski swigs his beer.
Thinks.
‘So,’ he says. ‘There’s a bank box in Switzerland that presumably has some rather unsavoury things in it. I know that, and so do the few people who could be a danger to him. If Joe doesn’t contact me for longer than four weeks, I can have the box opened.’
‘Which bank?’ I ask.
‘I’d find out at the time,’ he says, putting down his beer bottle and heading for the loo.
He can’t really believe that I believe that he doesn’t know which bank Joe’s life insurance is in. He can’t really believe that.
I try to keep him in sight but all I see is the toilet door clicking shut behind him.
He’s already out of beer again.
I drink mine up too and order two more.
They land on the bar at precisely the moment that Wieczorkowski gets back.
‘Very thoughtful,’ he says, clattering his bottle against mine.
He notices that I’m miffed.
‘What would you actually do if you knew which bank is looking after Joe’s bits of paper?’ he asks. ‘March in with a search warrant and play Rambo?’
I shrug.
‘There’s no need to know everything, Riley,’ he says, taking another swig from his bottle of beer. ‘You only need to know the things that make a difference.’
‘Such as?’
‘Your people on the Hamburg drug squad have been aware of the potential meth deal for a while, and so have our colleagues in Prague. We’re waiting, and we’ve got all our feelers out.’
He twists the beer bottle in his hand, puckers his lips a bit, his jaw bones move. He looks more wiry and angular than before; he looks like he’s in battle mode – there’s a little light and a little shadow falling on his face. It looks as though the Sioux chief has put his war paint on.
‘OK, so tell me what I need to know about the Czech Republic and crystal.’
Blue Night Page 11