‘The lads in Klatsche’s cellar?’
Inspector Calabretta pulls an irritated face and wets a couple more paper towels for me in the washbasin in the far corner of the room.
‘Why do you say that? Because in the end he’s always been behind everything in this city? Or because executions like that are just his style?’
He sits down again.
I keep working on my hands and tell him about Wieczorkowski’s theory. About Hamburg being lined up as the trading centre for meth in Western Europe. And that there’s really only ever been one person who could get something like that up and running in this town.
‘I also know that those three were involved in a big drugs deal,’ I say. ‘They were probably meant to arrange things, prepare the ground. And then they must have thought they could get away with branching out a bit. There was that bust yesterday where we found three kilos of meth. I can’t imagine that Malaj would hide his stuff that amateurishly…’
I hold my right hand up to the light. It looks quite presentable again.
Calabretta drums his fingers on the table top. ‘Where did the tip-off for the raid come from?’
‘Anonymous, according to Brux and his guys. Probably a source they want to keep below the radar.’
‘That would be an interesting person to meet then,’ says Calabretta.
‘It would,’ I say. ‘But I think our colleagues in drugs would be pretty stubborn. They’re almost as careful as customs. Which is understandable.’
Now my left hand.
‘In any case, I’m pretty sure that the three dealers died over the meth we found in the raid.’
‘Then we can also start by assuming that the crystal really belonged to the big boss and that the three minnows wanted to indulge in an extra bonus for themselves,’ says Calabretta. ‘And keep that going for quite a while.’
‘It’s pure speculation, of course,’ I say, ‘but you could think along those lines. And, yes, I think we should.’
‘OK. Join forces, huh?’
‘Definitely. I’ll speak to Dr Kolb,’ I say, ‘and we’ll all sit round one big table by this afternoon at the latest.’
‘Dr Kolb…’ says Calabretta. ‘She’s the new attorney general…?’
‘Exactly. Last night, for unaccountable reasons, she let me swap hats and go out with the drugs boys. As for the ex-hitman in the hospital, I’ve more or less hung up that hat…’
‘Ex-hitman?’
‘The guy in the St Georg hospital. I told you about him, didn’t I?’ He nods.
‘He was a professional killer in the Kiez.’
‘No way.’
‘Way,’ I say. ‘And he’s also an unofficial source for the drugs team in Saxony and has been on good terms with Gjergj Malaj for years.’
Calabretta shakes his head as if someone has slapped him.
‘He’s a walking, talking contradiction,’ I say, lobbing a pile of damp tissues into the bin. My left hand still has a load of black on it, but that’s OK. It’s supporting Klatsche. ‘We’ll all roll up to the HQ and then take our time to piece things together.’
‘OK,’ he says, standing up and smoothing out his leather jacket. ‘Let’s go.’
Yes.
Let’s go.
Inspector Calabretta’s unshakable pragmatism has become part of the bedrock of my life.
‘How are you doing?’ I ask once we’ve left the Davidwache and are on our way to his car, which he’s parked carabiniere-style right outside the door. ‘About Betty, I mean.’
‘Betty? Betty who?’
He opens the passenger door for me. The blue ‘Police’ sign shines out into the dull morning from the redbrick façade behind his head.
‘Just another crick in my heart,’ he says, walking round his car and getting in on the driver’s side.
Like I always say – hunting criminals isn’t the cure for everything, but it sure helps with all kinds of stuff.
We drive north in the Alfa. Calabretta summons his team together and I phone Dr Kolb, who is happy to nod through my attendance for a second time.
Something’s clanking in the front of the car.
So here we are again. Schulle, Brückner, Calabretta, Brux, Tschauner, Kringe and Bartels. All round one big table. Only Inceman is missing.
I’m not the only one to notice.
‘We just need our man in Istanbul,’ says Schulle.
We all have to bear a moment’s pain. But I need to push it away. I can’t deal with it so well.
So I write on the big white wall with a firm hand and a black pen, listing everything we know, just like everything’s fine, and then I use a blue pen to add everything we suspect. Brux and Calabretta stick a few photos up too. There’s no photo of Joe – officially he hasn’t got a role to play. I try to keep him hidden as far as possible. I don’t know why, but I feel like I owe him that.
We end up with a picture like this:
Gjergj Malaj wants to make the Port of Hamburg into the crystal-meth hub for Western Europe. That would be a low-risk, long-term, highly profitable spring, gushing with money that could be laundered via his property business in Hamburg, or his hotels and casinos in Prague. Drob, Adlo and Ronny stupidly tried to muscle in on it in some way, and now they’re dead.
It goes without saying that we won’t be able to pin the murders on him. He wouldn’t be Malaj if he’s made any silly mistakes. A couple of pros did it for him and if we catch them, we’d be awesome, because they will have left the country a long time ago.
But we can fuck up his drugs business.
And we need to find out about the krok Joe mentioned.
‘What we need is a concrete statement from your informant,’ says Brux.
‘I’ll head straight there,’ I say, ‘but don’t hold your breath.’
‘It’s important to have an in-depth dialogue with Leipzig and Prague too,’ says Calabretta.
‘I’ll discuss it with Wieczorkowski,’ says Brux. ‘Not a problem.’
Just at that moment, my phone rings, and it’s Wieczorkowski on the line and at the table.
‘Fancy that,’ I say. ‘We were just talking about you. How are you?’
‘I think I’m on my way to Hamburg.’
‘You think you’re on your way to Hamburg? How come?’
‘I was hanging around the Vietnamese markets for a bit this morning…’
The line crackles and crunches and slurs. He’s in the car. The phone network is still very patchy out east.
‘In your highly inconspicuous Ford Transit?’ I ask.
‘I was travelling on foot,’ he says. ‘The Transit waited patiently in the forest.’
Of course the Indian talks about his car like it’s a horse.
‘Let’s talk turkey,’ he says and his voice keeps chuckling like it chuckled the first time we spoke on the phone.
‘Great,’ I say. ‘We love turkey.’
‘OK,’ he says, ‘listen up. Suddenly there was this lorry. Hamburg plates, a haulier based in the container port. The driver stopped at the market for a coffee while his truck stood alone behind one of those sheds. I couldn’t see exactly what happened, but something happened while the driver was gone. Because when he came back half an hour later, he resealed the doors of his container. That means someone removed the original seal, and you only do that if you want to get at the load.’
‘And you think there are drugs on board the container now?’ I ask.
The others are staring at me.
‘Well it won’t be garden gnomes,’ says Wieczorkowski.
‘Where exactly are you?’ I ask.
‘Between Dresden and Leipzig,’ he says. ‘I reckon we’ll see you in Hamburg in four or five hours.’
‘What’s the haulage firm called?’
‘Wellinghausen,’ he says.
‘We’ll go straight there,’ I say. ‘Look after yourself. Call every half-hour. And keep your phone on; we’ll try to get a fix on you, OK?’
‘O
K. Speak soon.’
Collective breath-holding around the table. It’s as if someone has planted a bomb among us.
‘Wieczorkowski is tailing a lorry that might have a load of meth or whatever for the port in Hamburg. He’s near Leipzig. The lorry belongs to a haulier called Wellinghausen.’
Tschauner gets on the computer and looks up the address.
‘Here,’ he says. ‘Wellinghausen. Got it. They’re on Veddeler Damm, right next to the Köhlbrand Bridge.’
The men around the table stand up almost simultaneously and reach for their jackets.
Brux says: ‘Kringe, Bartels, Tschauner, we’ll go and see the hauliers. Ms Riley, are you coming?’
I glance over at Calabretta.
He nods.
‘We’ll keep in touch over the day and make sure that we get something going on the three murders.’
Then bam, bam, bam, we all leave the room; we all know what we have to do and where our paths are going. It’s a bit like playing football for Barcelona.
On the way to the haulage firm, I call tech. They need to get a line on Wieczorkowski’s mobile.
Thorsten Wellinghausen is in his mid fifties maybe, and the junior partner at the hauliers. He’s wearing a brown parka over a green tweed jacket and a red-and-blue checked shirt. You can’t look at him too long or it hurts your eyes.
He’s standing in the yard, surrounded by an impressive fleet; next to the entrance to a large corrugated-iron hall is a small corrugated-iron kiosk where you can buy sandwiches and coffee. On offer today: ground pork and fresh onions. Not that stale onions could make it any worse.
‘We mainly transport car parts from the Czech Republic,’ he says; ‘every day from Mladá Boleslav to the Port of Hamburg.’
‘And where do the goods go from there?’ asks Brux.
‘All over Northern and Western Europe,’ says Wellinghausen, looking round petulantly. ‘What do you want from me anyway? I’m always glad to see customs on my doorstep, but I’ve never known the drugs squad to be interested in a heap of metal before…’
‘The container was opened and resealed just before the Czech border,’ I say. ‘We suspect that your driver took on a load that doesn’t belong in the container.’
‘Why would my driver do that, if you please?’ Wellinghausen wrinkles his moustache.
‘Money?’ suggests Tschauner.
‘I pay my guys well,’ Wellinghausen says. ‘They don’t need to do anything like that.’
‘Where are the car parts loaded onto the ship?’ I ask.
‘At the Eurogate Terminal,’ says Wellinghausen, puffing out his belly. For some reason that seems to make him proud.
Eurogate. Ha.
He probably wrestles wild animals after work.
‘Can you tell us who is driving the lorry from the Czech Republic today?’ asks Brux.
‘I can,’ says Wellinghausen, leafing through the sheets on a clipboard he’s been holding the whole time.
‘Alexander Jepsen,’ he says. ‘Family man, decent bloke. I can’t imagine him getting into that kind of bullshit. Shall I phone him?’
‘Definitely not,’ says Brux. ‘May I ask you for your telephone?’
‘You can’t take my phone off me.’
‘I’m not taking it off you,’ Brux says. ‘I’m just taking it into safe keeping.’
‘And I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to spend the next few hours at the police HQ,’ I say, as Tschauner phones for a patrol car.
Wellinghausen gasps.
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘but we have to make sure nobody tips your driver off.’
‘I want to speak to my lawyer at once.’
In the background, the wind sways a couple of outrageously thin birches to the right.
Industrial woodland.
Wieczorkowski is every control freak’s dream – he actually rings every half hour. We know where he is all the time. At the moment, he’s somewhere near Hanover.
Meanwhile we’re hanging around near the motorway between the Horster Dreieck and Maschener Kreuz junctions, waiting for instructions.
I’m back in the middle of fucking nowhere. Arable farmland in Lower Saxony. Crops and fields and cows and horribly flat land as far as the eye can see.
Bartels is on the phone to the back office. After hanging up, he says: ‘Alexander Jepsen has gambling debts, probably a high five-figure sum. So he could use an extra euro or two.’
‘There you are,’ says Brux. ‘So something fits.’
On the other side of the road, a few brown and black-and-white cattle are standing by an electric fence, putting their heads together. It’s an indescribably boring picture. I keep my eyes on it and notice that I’m slowly slipping into a tunnel. And with every kilometre closer Wieczorkowski gets, my tunnel stabilises.
Calabretta rings.
After a tiny moment of surprise at getting a signal in my tunnel, I answer it.
‘We’ve found three guns in the bins in the yard behind Klatsche’s cellar,’ he says. ‘Three small-calibre pistols with silencers and the serial numbers filed off.’
‘Any other prints?’
‘Loads,’ he says. ‘But I’m almost sure that there won’t be anything we can’t trace to you or Klatsche or Rocco or the three victims. Lads who use guns like that generally wear diving-suit type things to work. They don’t leave traces. They’re not stupid.’
I can hear him lighting a cigarette.
So I do too, because he only smokes when I do.
‘Then I rang the airport and checked flights from Italy,’ he says.
‘Italy?’ I ask.
‘Call it intuition,’ he says. ‘It’s an old mafia hitman thing to just leave the weapons at the scene. Then you can’t get caught with them later.’
‘And what do they say at the airport?’
‘Three brothers from Catania got a plane to Hamburg yesterday evening. They’re well known to our Sicilian colleagues but there’s nothing definite on them. Not even mafia links.’
He drags on his cigarette and I don’t take my eyes off the cows. Now they’re grazing.
‘The men haven’t flown back yet.’
‘So they’re still in the country,’ I say.
‘Could well be,’ he says; ‘they might even still be in Hamburg. I’ve put out descriptions of them, here and across Europe. Does your Austrian have enough protection, by the way?’
‘He’s not my Austrian,’ I say. ‘There’s a policeman sitting outside his door on the ward.’
‘That won’t be enough in an emergency. If a pro wants to silence an ex-pro they won’t give a fuck about the police.’
‘We can’t station a whole century outside his door – I told him that too. It has occurred to him that things could get uncomfortable in the hospital.’
‘We could get him to safety,’ says Calabretta.
‘A killer?’ I ask.
‘An informant,’ says Calabretta. ‘And if we can inveigle him in as a state witness, he might lead us to Gjergj Malaj.’
‘Never,’ I say. ‘He won’t blow the whistle. I’d bet my arse on it.’
‘Leave your arse where it is. I’ll drive round to St Georg with my guys and pick up the Austrian and our colleague from the hospital.’
‘Good luck,’ I say.
‘When’s Wieczorkowski due in Hamburg?’ he asks.
‘In a good hour or so.’
‘Well, good luck to you too,’ he says.
‘Exactly,’ I say and disappear back into my tunnel of chewing cows and endless waiting.
Half an hour later, Wieczorkowski calls.
‘I’ll be at the Horster Dreieck shortly,’ he says. ‘You can get moving; I’ll be in touch.’
We set off. And we’ve just got onto the motorway, the only part of Lower Saxony that’s full of people, when Calabretta rings again.
A palaver at the hospital – I can hear down the line that there’s all sorts going on. The policeman outside Joe’s hospital door was put
out of action. Bam. Cosh to the head.
How, when and by whom, nobody quite knows.
A few minutes ago, everything was OK. Suddenly it’s been knocked sideways.
‘What about Joe?’
‘Gone. And the wheelchair too.’
Sitting in the car with me are Brux and Tschauner. Behind us, in another car, are Kringe and Bartels.
I’ve put it on speaker. Brux is shaking his head and won’t stop; Tschauner is staring straight ahead over the wheel and just keeps saying that it can’t be true.
‘Calabretta?’
‘Yes?’
‘Where’s Faller?’
‘Why?’
‘Call him, please.’
I bet he won’t be able to get hold of Faller.
The good thing about those American wheels is that you can get a whole heap of stuff in them.
Just as we reach the outskirts of Hamburg, I see the white Ford Transit ahead of us. Two cars in front is a container lorry. I call Wieczorkowski.
‘Yes?’
‘We’re not far behind you,’ I say; ‘the dark-blue Audi.’
‘Ah. Hello.’
‘You all right?’
‘I could do with taking a leak.’
‘That’s fine. We’ll take over.’
‘Thanks. I’ll be right back.’
He heads to the nearest lay-by and we latch on to the lorry.
About ten minutes later, Wieczorkowski’s behind us again. I turn round on the back seat and raise my hand in greeting. He hesitates a moment. Then he follows suit.
We drive. On and on down the overcrowded motorway.
Then here comes the port. Huge and powerful, suddenly everything around us is angular. I can see the cranes. The Köhlbrand Bridge, that old steel snake.
I’ve stood there some nights, wanting to jump. That was a long time ago.
The lorry indicates. Wieczorkowski phones.
‘Where’s he going?’
‘Theoretically, he’s going to the Eurogate Terminal,’ I say.
But suddenly he turns off.
‘He’s turning off suddenly.’
‘The Waltershof services,’ says Tschauner, ‘I bet you.’
Right. Services. A petrol station in the middle of the port area, next to a dingy transport café that’s keeping its head down – kind of a filter-coffee filling station.
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