by R. J. Dillon
Wrapped in this but no luxury package, Sabine still in the clothes she’d worn in Bar Z. Her hair was plastered on her forehead and her eyes flopped around trying to focus. She had everything death promised in her face, the creases and pallor of an overdose victim. Every breath surged in forced unnatural draws, a rasping that he couldn’t bear. She had rolled from her back onto her side and her fingers in their desperation to escape what her body suffered, had opened a seam on the duvet.
A sprinkling of feathers trickled down to the floor partly covering a syringe, spoon, leather belt, plastic lemon and disposable lighter. Nick was no expert but guessed that she’d only just taken her final fix, not cut with talc or bicarbonate of soda, but a mix so pure it packed a hundred per cent hit she would never forget; her head in the clouds for evermore.
‘Sabine,’ he sat on a corner of the bed and his weight caused her damp body to roll into him. ‘Can you hear me?’ Avoiding her red panda eyes he put his hand on her forehead, the skin grey and thin. She was cold and sent a shiver up Nick’s arm. Brushing away lank strands of hair, he tenderly stroked her brow as he would have done for Angie or Tom. Soothing, calming her as the gasps for air lasted longer, becoming spasms and finally stopped with a dry frightening bark. He hadn’t been there for his mother’s death and Tom’s; now he’d shared another, as though someone decided that he shouldn’t have missed out on the anger and guilt. Kicked under the bed Sabine’s purse, a sturdy leather model that held a driver’s licence, ID, loose change, thirty euros in notes and an appointment card for a tattooist in Hamburg called Otto.
He turned off the television and took one final look at Sabine and thought dear old little Lubov, what have you got me into? Outside he lit a cigarette his hands trembling, not from fear but anger, then he followed a different route through Rendsburg for good measure, feeling utter dismay as he tried to forget Sabine’s dying breath.
By mid-morning Nick had arrived back in Hamburg the sleet slowly turning to snow, thick flakes that thudded against the train windows as powdery as moths. Nick sought out a cheap hotel, finally finding one at the top of a dismal alley off Lange Reihe in Sankt Georg. It stood at the back of the main tracks into the Hauptbahnhof and didn’t have any views. Cobbled and narrow, the alley tapered off into a run of tenements where the evening never fully withdrew, where broken and forgotten bodies slipped in and out of flaking doorways in search of their next fix. The hotel’s walls were liberally coated in graffiti, its iron balustrades on the balconies were chipped their rusting bars sunk into the stone staining it where they touched.
Avoiding the pimp who had a permanent corner in the reception, Nick wove around club chairs and palms that must have been freshly potted when the railway was a mere drawing on an engineer’s desk. A clerk in a faded suit appeared when he hammered a quaint brass bell. We’ve gone backwards through time, he thought. I haven’t arrived in modern Hamburg, but Hamburg in the Fifties, the sort of port where my father would come ashore for a tryst with one of his young acrobatic lovers because he believed young foreign women had better orgasms; tarts on a braided naval arm.
‘There is only our best suite remaining, Herr Greiz,’ said the desk clerk, a fabricated smile on his lips. He could have been sixty, a dry dusty relic in a hotel functioning as a brothel. He touched the tip of his moustache, his manicured fingers as smooth in rhythm as a pianist’s.
Nick paid for three nights and the suite turned out to be nothing better than a double. Dismal and dark there was a tangy aroma from its last guest. How long since it had been cleaned was hard to tell, but Nick was determined he’d only sleep on top of the bed and its stained duvet. Dropping his small bag of provisions he’d bought on his return to the city, he abruptly turned his back on his suite. Reaching up to set a telltale on the door, the two halves of his fractured rib ground together. Black and red filters altered his vision, a fusion of colour that lasted for two blocks, hardly able to get his breath until the ache in his chest started to wear off. Clouds loured over the rooftops and emptied thick sleet over the port, adding yet another misery to the passing cold faces.
Browsing in windows that he used as rear-view mirrors he sampled prices and faces, checking his back was clean; until in a toy shop painted as bright as a kite a face appeared once too often. This one of yours Blümhof is it? Moscow maybe, come to finish what they started? He was a callow youth no older than twenty, and from the way he slouched in such a bored fashion trailing after Nick, he guessed the youth was one of Jack Balgrey’s irregular footpads. So Jack’s sent his greetings decided Nick, letting me know that I’m on his turf. The youth wore baggy skater’s pants, Converse trainers and an olive green military surplus jacket; a tram length between them and closing.
Ducking into the underground station on Königstraße Nick’s return ticket to Bergedorf felt sticky in his hand, the destination was the first button he’d punched on the machine. Warm bodies crowded along the island platform and the youth came up behind him. Approaching from Hamburg-Central a train decreased speed providing Nick’s cue; turning in a fast arc Nick hit the footpad hard in the chest slamming him into his outstretched leg. As the footpad hit the dark tiled platform Nick swooped, his knee pressed into the footpad’s chest. ‘Thief! Robber!’ Nick yelled, pinning the footpad down. A crowd gathered, jostling for a better view of a citizen finally making a stand. ‘Hold him for me,’ Nick ordered a portly white haired traveller in denim shirt, denim jeans, and leather fisherman’s waistcoat. ‘Hold him while I get my things,’ insisted Nick. Not tempted to refuse Nick’s brusque command, the traveller sat on the footpad’s chest as Nick threaded his way through the crowd. Slipping through an exit Nick sprinted up and out of the station.
• • •
Once it must have been a prosperous block built of solid stone cut fine, trimmed with matching delicate ribs; now it had a layer of grime that the brightest of days never penetrated. The tattoo parlour had come after the grime, Nick decided. It nestled between bars where old anarchists came to drink; alongside bookshops that dealt in the political and mysterious shops that took orders by arrangement only. He counted off the door numbers and knew that she was waiting for him. In the doorway a young woman watched him arrive, her gaze lingering in the street as though something kept it permanently there. In trousers, leather jacket and dark glasses she retreated inside as Nick followed her in. He thought she called his name, but when Nick looked she had her phone pressed to one ear and never acknowledged him. One more of Harry’s bizarre network Nick realised, like the tattooist and most probably the entire street.
A room set aside to wait in was frugal and low, partitioned by ceilings of varying heights and styles rather than walls. Colour charts of tattoos on offer competed with a television hanging off a bracket on the opposite wall, the picture disappearing in a blaze of vertical lines. Cigarette smoke curled against the ceiling, reluctantly drawn out of a slit in a sash window held open by a brick. Two Portuguese sailors were arguing, jabbing each other in the chest, a couple in their teens were wrapped in each other’s arms, serenely happy or drunk. None of them objected when the young woman locked the outside door, turning the sign to ‘Closed’. Putting her phone on a shelf behind a counter where clients were invited to discuss their chosen designs or piercings, she approached Nick with a measured walk both surly and independent. Wastefully thin she had hair dyed a vibrant red, a keffiyeh around her neck. She watched him with the arrogance of a student radical, and in the 1970s she’d have supported the Baader-Meinhof group, thought Nick.
‘Otto will see you now,’ she said, seeming never to move her lips.
While she shouted down the sailors’ protests, Nick entered a door marked ‘Studio’. Inside the rich air was soiled with antiseptic and the odour of rubber from a dentist’s chair and couch. Otto was ageless, bald and triumphantly tattooed; washing his hands in a tiny alcove sink, his broad back parting a bead curtain, the beads splayed over his powerful shoulders. He had a strong smile and a fixed way of throwing his we
ight when he walked. Against his white vest his arms showed up a lifetime of ink, stopping short at the wrists like cuffs.
‘Harry, he is a something else,’ said Otto, measuring Nick with small eyes from behind round-wired glasses.
‘Definitely,’ said Nick, declining Otto’s offer of taking a seat on the dentist’s chair, so Otto took it for himself. One tired professional in need of a rest, stretching out his legs, massaging his right wrist, reclining the backrest to an acceptable angle.
‘So you need information?’ Otto asked, comfortable at last.
‘What do you know about Sabine? She had an appointment booked with you.’
Down the back of a yellow door behind the tattooist’s chair, a life-size 48DD cartoon woman with jet black curls and a waist dreamt up by a pervert. In a comic strip pose, she had one leg raised with her knee forward as a python wound round the other.
‘I would not class it as a crime,’ Otto suggested. ‘But I don’t know anyone called Sabine.’
‘She died,’ Nick explained. ‘Someone gave her an overdose.’
‘Life is tough,’ offered Otto with a streetwise smile.
In the waiting area Nick could hear the Portuguese sailors erupt; high angry shouts that Otto’s assistant quelled with a lengthy yell for order that rattled the inner door. With Otto briefly interested in the noise outside Nick brought the chair up fast, smashing his elbow into Otto’s jaw, his glasses spinning off his nose. Another punch delivered with a straight arm doubled Otto up, bringing tears to his eyes.
‘Harry told me you were going to cooperate,’ said Nick. ‘Harry said I could rely on Otto.’
Massaging his jaw, Otto took some seriously deep breaths.
‘A misunderstanding,’ wheezed Otto. ‘So many girls, so many names sound the same, but now I remember Sabine. Certainly I know her. She was a bit dizzy, but okay, did a good BJ, one of the best I have known.’
‘Have that engraved on her headstone should she? Sabine was wonderful at oral sex.’
Otto had begun to sweat, using a swab to dab his forehead going one way and then back. ‘It was a fact,’ Otto explained hurriedly, squinting at Nick. ‘You wanted facts and I gave you one. A business transaction, that was her payment for two small designs I did on the inside of her thighs, you know where I mean.’
‘I have an idea,’ offered Nick.
‘Took my time, no rush, outline and colours just fine.’
‘I bet you did,’ said Nick. ‘Sabine talked about going to a refuge, she mention it to you?’
Otto made a real attempt to smile, but Nick’s hard eyes changed his mind.
‘Sabine, a totally crazy girl, kept saying she was going to get her head straight, get a fresh start.’
‘But she never made it?’
‘No. She’d met this bum, called him her boyfriend, but I think she was into him for drugs, maybe he was her pimp, who knows with these girls,’ Otto reflected. ‘This boyfriend’s not a pleasant piece of work. I even heard that he might have been offering to sell Sabine out. Does glamour shoots and he’s called Tolz.’
‘Did she ever mention a good friend she worked with?’
‘Good. You joking? Sabine and the other girls, well, they’re okay, but good? What does good mean?’ asked Otto, raising his arms to emphasise this knotty philosophical argument.
‘What about the refuge she was planning to go to?’
‘Supplementary information comes at a price,’ decided Otto.
‘Take it up with Harry, I don’t carry cash advances.’
‘Numa Theatre,’ Otto disclosed unhappily, a man sensing a business transaction fading. ‘Ask for Anke.’ Getting out of the dentist’s chair, he rubbed his jaw again as Nick made for the door.
Sixteen
The Man from Cologne
Hamburg, December
On Königstraße as Nick walked against the flow of heavy traffic, mostly tourist coaches meandering towards the port for midnight sailings, a police car came from nowhere slipping in front of him, its blue light starting to remorselessly flash. Nick checked over his shoulder as a second patrol car pulled up close behind; the officers from the first car ordering Nick to stop, both young with remarkably seasoned faces, their leather jackets glistening in the passing headlights. While one stood clear of Nick his colleague opened the rear door.
‘Please, Herr Torr, you will come with us,’ he said with a tidy smile. ‘You have nothing to fear,’ he added, gripping Nick firmly by the arm.
The skaters had gone home and the policemen kept Nick between them, walking along a path on the lip of the park’s ice-rink; around them bare oak and beeches shuffled their branches in the wind. A walkway running out into the centre of the rink had a timekeeper’s box skewered into the ice by a single metal shaft. As they escorted Nick towards the rink, their holsters chafed against their jackets. Reaching the walkway they stopped, one of them directing Nick forward as though he were about to cross a major road.
‘Please, Herr Torr.’ And with a firm but unceremonious hand, started Nick down the concrete aisle, a groom without a bride.
‘Well old son, isn’t this just a great place for an informal chat?’ Jack Balgrey met him, his face red, his cheeks blown out, Jack a spectre that would not let him rest. In the doorway to the box a figure too slight for the night watched them, as though they were playing out a scene for his benefit alone. Balgrey tucked his scarf round his neck and adjusted his stance.
‘You should have made it more obvious, Jack,’ said Nick, falling in step. ‘Taken a full page in the local paper or organised a civic reception.’ Jack Balgrey, a jaded regular SIS officer winding down his career. Jack a seasoned hand with a stain on his record for having an attitude and a fondness for booze.
Balgrey swung on his heels, his gauche face as heavy as a hammer; his flat nose flared and his eyes had long ago run out of sparkle, his hair thick and oiled ended in a natural quiff.
‘We don’t want to be falling out in front of our host,’ he hissed, leaning forward, his face close, alcohol and recent garlic on his breath. ‘Just be bloody grateful that I’m here to hold your hand. It’s a damn sight more than you deserve old son after what you did to my boy.’
Stocky and plump he had one of those faces Nick had often drunk with in the Riyadh Hyatt Hotel or a Hong Kong bar; a well-travelled company rep, a boring companion for a long hot expatriate night endlessly bragging of tax fiddles and tales of how to beat the local boys.
‘You’ve saved me again, Jack, pretty soon I won’t have a life to call my own.’
‘Cut out the funnies, old son, you’re well in it and I can only do so much. Now come on and say hello to this nice man who has come all the way from Cologne to meet you. Isn’t that an honour?’
Jack’s friend from the German internal security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the BfV based in Cologne stepped out to meet them. A wafer of a man with an unspoilt face and small intense eyes, he wore practical clothes for the season; a fastidious observer of tradition, he was in his early fifties with an overcoat that didn’t come off the peg. A mendicant air to him Nick thought, and this is your monk isn’t it Jack, your very own confessor.
‘Herr Döbeln,’ began Balgrey with impressive formality, ‘this is...’
‘Thank you, I am aware,’ said Döbeln, abruptly. Perhaps to make up for this curious style he offered Nick his hand; swinging it out stiffly from the shoulder in one graceless leaden arc, his palm very soft and damp.
‘I forgot to ask permission for operating on your patch, sorry,’ Nick said without meaning a word.
‘That is not the issue,’ he replied, a handkerchief swiped firmly across his nose. He had a peculiar stillness to his voice, while his eyes roamed nervously unable to rest.
‘Why not speak your mind?’ suggested Nick affably, sensing Jack’s displeasure nonetheless.
‘Very well,’ agreed Döbeln, pocketing his handkerchief. ‘What concerns my senior colleagues and myself, is the impact that your ho
stile actions will have.’ Nick looked unimpressed, engrossed by something far away.
‘So what can I offer you?’
‘You flatter yourself,’ said Döbeln raising a trite smile, removing his glasses, bending back the crook to obtain a snugger fit. ‘You are not in a position to make offers.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Be reasonable, there’s concern in certain quarters that’s all,’ Balgrey assured him. ‘No one’s ruling out cooperation,’ he said, fidgeting with his feet.
‘This is correct,’ Döbeln said very quietly. ‘If we were only interested in arresting you, this I could have achieved already. You prefer that I should continue?’ he wondered smoothing down his short hair.
‘We all have ideals, old son. Sometimes we’ve just to modify them a touch. Let a bit of reality see the light of day, remind us where we’re going,’ Balgrey suggested.
‘Thanks for the backing Jack. I’ll do you a favour sometime, remind you how it feels to have friends.’
From somewhere out in the port or the river, a large ship blasted a leaving or an inward greeting on its siren; a deep bass echoing boom unfolding in the night.
‘It is sensible advice,’ confided Döbeln with too much effort.
‘And what is the reality?’ demanded Nick, squaring up to Döbeln, ‘Care to tell me that?’
Döbeln paused, deliberately concentrating on the precise movement of staring Nick in the eye.
‘You can be added to our watch list,’ he proposed. ‘A very simple procedure.’
‘Flag me up, I don’t care.’
‘Think about it old son,’ urged Balgrey, turning in a circle and slapping his gloves together to fend off the cold. ‘We don’t need to upset friends,’ he added, passing them on his tight circuit.
‘If I don’t agree?’ asked Nick as though this was a natural conclusion.