Hotel Cartagena

by Simone Buchholz

  They ate dinner together in one of the expensive restaurants in the old town. Henning, José and this man, whose name was Esteban. He was a good head and shoulders taller than all the other Colombians Henning knew, those little men with hearty laughter in their faces. Esteban didn’t actually look like a Colombian at all, more like someone from Madrid. He looked like a torero. Long and slim and knife-sharp. His hands were something like a fan of scissors.

  But he was very polite.

  He wanted to know how Henning liked it in Cartagena, why he’d left his home, what he liked to do in his spare time. And he was very interested in Hamburg and in the people there.

  Lots of artists?

  Musicians?

  Jet set?

  People with money?

  Everything Henning told Esteban, about the bars and clubs and the various scenes in the city, he took on board with a satisfied smile, without much by way of comment. As if it was simply what he’d been hoping for.

  Later on, after they’d chatted about this and that, about the days after Henning’s arrival in Cartagena, exactly why he’d wound up here and what he was thinking about doing with his future and so on, they were on to the rum by then and smoking cigars, which Henning disliked intensely, Esteban made him the offer that was the reason they were sitting there around this table: if he, Henning, could help Esteban and his business partners do deals with Hamburg, Esteban would be very happy and Henning would never have to wipe tables in sleazy bars again. The corner of José’s mouth twitched a little when Esteban said that, but Esteban wasn’t the kind of guy someone like José would contradict.

  ‘What kind of deals are we talking about, exactly?’ asked Henning and then Esteban smiled that satisfied smile again, the one that was, in a funny kind of way, very cold, and he ordered another round of rum.

  In February, Henning flew to Hamburg. He had four weeks, then his flight would go back to Colombia. Esteban was intending to collect him from the airport in Medellín, and Henning was intending to have something to present over dinner: customers.

  Esteban had given a clear indication that the best thing would be if his prospective business partners could start by coming to Colombia. Ideally with ten thousand marks of dirty money in their pockets.

  And then they’d see.

  All that mattered was for them to be trustworthy. Pros. But not bosses who might try to make their share of the pie bigger than it ought to be. More like slightly younger pros maybe, with a lot to gain but not much to lose. With no need to throw their weight around. And most importantly: no spies, no cops.

  Henning had to guarantee all that and that felt, on one hand, like nothing at all, because Henning was young, but on the other hand it weighed on his shoulders as heavy as a crane – the spies thing was the tricky part. How the hell was he supposed to know that: you couldn’t peer inside a gangster’s brain, a gangster’s brain was even more remote from him than a woman’s, he hadn’t the foggiest what might go on in there, or how or why.

  He realised that when it came to brains, he’d have to take a chance. That nobody won anything without chancing some super-risky shit now and then.

  He’d dared to head out into the world with nothing in his pockets, and he’d been lucky. So he wouldn’t bottle out now, not now. Instead, he’d choose the people as thoroughly as possible.

  And he’d trust to his luck again.

  He’d had two happy years after saving up through nineteen hapless ones. That just couldn’t be all he was getting.

  The Kiez welcomed him, greyer than he remembered it. That was good because it meant he couldn’t get comfortable. He was very careful not to fall back into old habits. He didn’t stay with his mum but at a sleazy flophouse on the Reeperbahn; the owner knew him from before, she gave him a good rate, not that that actually mattered because Esteban had given him plenty of money. He kept away from the Grünspan, the Markthalle and Hafenstrasse. He concentrated entirely on his task, spoke to the key people, the right people, and he was ultra-cautious. He was no longer Henning from St Pauli; he was now a guy working for the Colombians. He put on a businesslike tone and at certain moments, he acted just a notch too cocky.

  And he got results amazingly quickly.

  Three pimps in their late thirties were on a bit of an offensive in their search for new fields of operation. Their core field of operation was prostitution but there was no profit in that anymore. AIDS: a fucking plague. Suddenly people who went to bed with girls who went to bed with other people had to go in fear of their lives.

  The three men had taken over a club together in the last year, no sex or table dancing, nothing like that, no, no, a proper disco. Small but perfectly formed. They’d done it up a bit, a few new mirrors here and there and front and back, and a new dance floor and loads of glass and all that, and all things considered it really looked a bit like New York. Studio 54, man. Although there was still some fine-tuning to be done on the drug-fuelled excesses, wild sex and unbridled eccentricity. All the same, trendy young people from the scene in Eimsbüttel and Eppendorf were already socialising in the club, English musicians hung around at the bar after gigs, keeping an eye out for groupies, wannabe-artists were drinking away the rest of their bourgeois lives, and the genuine jet set were slowly but surely starting to arrive. Now, getting into the international cocaine business seemed like a wicked idea to them.

  Of course, Henning had already made extensive enquiries about the gentlemen. Well, as extensive as possible considering everyone here always has to tell you an even bigger load of bullshit than the person before.

  As far as Henning could tell from his research, the three had grown up in the Kiez. People knew their families. Well, OK, in as much as you could call them families; people actually knew their mums: as with so many people, their dads were absent to varying degrees.

  In their youth, the three of them had been virtually founding members of the Nutella Bande but had never got beyond mid-management-level pimping in that organisation either. They’d all been in jail, but more for prostitution and gang criminality than for outrageous violence or any kind of idiotic flipping out with guns. They’d always served their full terms, and there was no kind of suspicion that they’d got on good terms with the police. If that was rumoured about anyone, Henning had winnowed them out from the start.

  That hadn’t happened often.

  There were iron-clad rules in the Kiez and if you broke them, you were as good as dead, and if one person more, or one less, got shot off a bar stool it wasn’t such a big deal. So everyone kept to the rules. Well, almost everyone.

  There had to be someone to shoot now and then.

  The three part-time pimps were in their late thirties, a good fifteen years older than Henning, and the perfect age for what Esteban had in mind. One of them was no taller than six foot and had a slight paunch, the other two were kind of broad-shouldered but gangly types, a lanky six-foot-six. Henning stood a little taller on the evening in the Ritze when he explained, over a rather neglected beer, what it was all about.

  He had business partners in Cartagena, he told the men with fat watches and long hair at the backs of their necks, and pulled a suitably important face.

  ‘Uh-huh, fancy that.’

  His business partners were very anxious to build links to Hamburg.

  ‘Oh right, that’s interesting.’

  His business partners hadn’t previously had any connections with Germany, so it would be an exclusive arrangement.

  ‘Oh right, that is interesting.’

  Maybe they could start by having a couple of weeks’ holiday on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, getting to know the country and the people.

  ‘Sounds very sensible.’

  All entirely non-binding, of course. If they didn’t agree a deal, nobody would get hurt, and they surely deserved a holiday at least.

  ‘We’ll have to think about it, come back tomorrow evening.’

  When he got to the Ritze the next evening, they were already sitti
ng at the bar, playing with their wristwatches, as excited as toddlers; mind you, Henning got the feeling that the one with the belly was the most excited, although he probably was in general anyway.

  Four days later, he and Knut, Heinz and Norbert got on a plane to Colombia.

  Everything was arranged: they’d be met in Medellín, not by Esteban but by a driver, and from there they’d go direct to Cartagena, to a hotel with a pool, get settled in, get acclimatised.

  Holiday!

  In the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic, the initial tension started to ease a little in Knut, Heinz and Norbert, and they talked about their new business, but only in code.

  Precautionary measures.

  The boys from Hamburg felt like they were in the movies.

  Knut: ‘Course then we’ll see how we can get these Miami Vice episodes played to the people back home.’

  Norbert: ‘We’ll need special video recorders.’

  Knut: ‘Mobile video recorders. Lots of little video recorders.’

  Norbert: ‘Yeah, but big ones too.’

  Knut: ‘Extra-large.’

  Heinz: ‘I spoke to Schnulli about that, he’s sorting out the recorders.’

  Knut: ‘What d’you mean, you spoke to Schnulli?’

  Heinz: ‘Only about the re-cord-ers, man.’

  Knut: ‘But he hasn’t the faintest about Miami Vice, has he?’

  Heinz: ‘Course he hasn’t, dude, I’m not stupid.’

  Knut: ‘OK.’

  Heinz: ‘OK, man.’

  Norbert: ‘You talk too much, Heinz.’

  Heinz: ‘I do not.’

  Norbert: ‘You do too.’

  Heinz: ‘Kiss my arse.’

  Norbert: ‘Bend over then.’

  Heinz: ‘Ha ha. You stupid arsehole.’

  Nobert: ‘You’re the arsehole.’

  Knut: ‘Guys …! Stop it now.’

  Guys: [Grumbling]

  Knut: ‘Well, I can’t wait to see how many episodes of Miami Vice they offer us anyway.’

  Heinz: ‘The whole first series, surely, there you go, that’s the least they can do, heh.’

  Hahaha, heeheehee, hoohoohoo, and, oh God, they called themselves Crockett and Tubbs and Zito.

  Henning had the feeling that not even Knut, Heinz and Norbert themselves knew what they were on about there, and all in all the guys were a bit of an embarrassment to him. But for one thing, almost everyone else on the plane was Colombian and didn’t understand their babble, and for another, he didn’t have to make friends with them. He just had to hand them on to Esteban.

  Mind you, he hoped that he wouldn’t find Knut, Heinz and Norbert too stupid to deal with. Although, hey, the Colombian wanted people from the Kiez, and now he was getting them: people from the Kiez. And they were all professional crooks, but not the worst type.

  Esteban couldn’t ask for more than that.

  Esteban was highly satisfied when he met Henning for dinner the next evening. The driver had given him a detailed report on the guests from Germany the night before, and apparently Knut, Heinz and Norbert were exactly what Esteban had been looking for. Picture-perfect small-time and impressionable crooks, easy to mould into shape for the long term, and to subjugate.

  ‘Look after them a bit to start off with,’ he said to Henning as he stuck a lump of meat in his mouth. ‘Show them the city, the beach, the girls, tell them how things work, get them ready for me. On Saturday there’s this party at my club. Bring them to me then.’

  ‘OK,’ said Henning, ‘will do.’

  City, beach, girls, party. Sounded like a good job.

  Esteban chewed on his steak as if he were chewing on Henning, and his eyes bored into Henning’s face as he, still chewing, pushed a roll of dollar bills over the table to him.

  From that moment on, Henning realised that it was no longer down to him to say ‘OK, will do.’ From now on, he had to do what Esteban wanted.

  He waited till Esteban had finished chewing, and swallowed, then he took the money, and with that, the deal was sealed.

  Knut, Heinz and Norbert were sweating. They didn’t know what to do with their leather jackets, and their mullets were itchy as hell too.

  They desperately needed other clothes.

  Dude.

  ‘Whoa, it’s hot here, let’s start by buying some new clothes, man,’ said Norbert, when Henning picked the three of them up from the hotel in the morning.

  ‘Yes,’ said Henning, ‘we’ll go shopping.’

  The Hamburgers looked like complete idiots here in Cartagena. Their shirts were too thick and too tight, their jeans were too high-waisted, topped off by those slightly grilled faces, which had had a couple of days out of their familiar dark bierkellers by then. And they couldn’t make themselves feel better by punching someone’s face in, because you didn’t know what would happen here if you did. Maybe everyone had knives.

  OK.

  They had knives too.

  But not on them.

  ‘Come on,’ said Henning, ‘we’ll get you something looser.’

  Later, they sat in a beach bar in pale trousers, their shirts as brightly coloured as the drinks in front of them, hanging off the backs of their chairs were pastel-coloured sports jackets, and the rest was made up of girls and the sea.

  Knut, Heinz and Norbert were starting to settle down as they settled into Cartagena. Their faces were relaxing visibly. It did you good to sit under palm trees.

  ‘Nice in the shade,’ said Knut.

  ‘Sure is, dude,’ said Norbert.

  Heinz couldn’t say anything just then, he was too distracted. He felt as though God had poured out beautiful girls with a watering can. Those long, dark curls, all those bare legs, all those wonderful feet in the sand, and the way they could walk, and what that did with their hips, my God. That stuff just didn’t exist in Hamburg.

  All three belched.

  The Bacardi and Coke.

  Norbert re-ordered and Heinz decided he needed to slim down a bit more before the party with their new business partners on Saturday.

  Knut wondered aloud if he should buy one of those silver shirts after all, the one’s he’d seen in the city, the other two nodded, and Norbert thought that it would be Knut who had to have a glittery shirt, that old show-off.

  The big party made Henning nervous. He’d briefly toyed with the idea of ditching and dropping everything and running away, just getting away from Cartagena, to Argentina maybe.

  Or better, straight to the South Pole.

  In his dreams there were so many different versions of how this stuff here could go wrong, and every single one of them ended with a bullet in his head.

  So it didn’t help to tell himself he’d just kind of slipped into it.

  A shot in the head was a shot in the head.

  Knut, Heinz and Norbert were standing at the bar in their hotel, drinking Bacardi and Coke. They drank Bacardi and Coke pretty much non-stop, Knut felt that you just couldn’t help it in this heat. Henning ordered himself a Cuba libre.

  They drank quickly then headed off. The pimps from Hamburg had spent the week learning a kind of loose, relaxed walk and they now shambled away with it. Their moves were only kind of middling cool. Henning was expecting the Colombians to ask questions about that.

  But on the way he found himself up to the ears in questions anyway, because the gentlemen were evidently just as nervous as him, and while nerves made Knut and Norbert clam up, they made Heinz all the more talkative.

  ‘What do we do when we first get in there? Do we shake hands? Will there just be Esteban? On business? Or will there be others? Will there be coke? Should we do a line too? Or just stick to Bacardi and Coke? What about girls? Are we allowed to touch them? What if they want to mug us? What if they’re just taking the piss? Maybe they just want to shoot us, Henning, do they want to shoot us?’

  Henning couldn’t answer any of the questions except the one about whether they should shake hands with Esteban: Yes, they should, why the
hell wouldn’t they? And would there be coke – was there sand on the beach?

  You could count on cocaine in Colombia like you could on corn schnapps in Hamburg.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said, cutting through all Heinz’s questions and generally trying to act like this wasn’t his first time too.

  Then he laughed and the others laughed too, but there was something slightly hysterical about the laughter, and then in the end, when Heinz still wouldn’t stop and the questions kept getting dafter – ‘what if I get the runs from doing coke’ – Norbert said: ‘Just shut your gob, man, I’m shitting myself here as it is.’

  Heinz still kept on talking but at least he didn’t ask any more questions. It felt like half an hour’s walk, but they were actually there in only fifteen minutes.

  Esteban’s club was an exclusive joint on the top floor of a high-rise by the sea. Knees wobbling, they stepped into the concrete building, rather plain on the outside, and took the lift to the roof terrace on the twenty-third floor. Standing at the entrance were two large, bull-necked guys in dark, loose-cut jackets. Their suits looked like uniforms and there could easily be multiple weapons under those jackets. The two of them worked their way down the queue.

  When it was the Hamburg guys’ turn, Henning told them his name and that he was a friend of Esteban’s. They were waved through to the roof terrace without further checks, which Henning found interesting at least, if not pretty impressive. He’d clearly been admitted into some kind of alliance.

  The rooftop was full of people. The men were wearing outfits of trousers, sports jacket and T-shirt, or trousers and shirt, in every shade yielded by the current pastel-fad. The women were in glittery fabrics, dancing back and forth between the men. Henning took less than ten seconds to grasp that every single one of the women was paid to be there. Their dresses were just that notch too short and their expressions were just that notch too sexy. None of them was on the roof because she wanted to party. They were on the roof because Esteban and his friends had hired them.