Hotel Cartagena

by Simone Buchholz

  They served drinks, they danced, and they flung their arms round men’s necks.

  A truly beautiful young woman with bleached hair and a sequin dress, possibly intended to imitate the sea, came over to them with a tray of colourful drinks.

  Henning, Knut, Heinz and Norbert each took a glass. They were too nervous to clink them, they just knocked the brew down. A few hundred yards to their south-west lay the Bocagrande Beach like a gigantic chain of lights under the night sky. Henning let the sweet alcohol run down his throat and it washed down his fear, which was mingled with the general excitement.

  The trick seemed to be working a treat on the three pimps too.

  ‘Hot chicks here,’ bleated Heinz after the first glass, ‘and that view, wow, uh, hello, chica, could I have another of those drinks, thanks. Man, have you seen the pool dudes, the water’s green…’

  ‘That’s not the water, that’s the lights in the water, you doofus,’ said Norbert.

  Knut’s eyes were also resting on the pool, but with less interest in the water; he was busier in his mind with the girls in the golden bikinis, moving through the water as though they were on their way to some fricking nymph competition.

  After the second drink, he tore himself away from the phony mermaids and looked at Henning.

  ‘Can you introduce us to our future business partner now?’

  Henning nodded and looked around the roof. He spotted Esteban on the edge of the terrace. The Colombian was leaning against the glass parapet like a statue. The cigar in his hand sent a single, long smoke signal into the sky.

  ‘OK, lads,’ said Henning, ‘this way.’

  He forged a path through the crowd, cautiously, don’t barge anyone, don’t stand out or get found out, let alone chucked out. Knut, Heinz and Norbert waddled behind him. They’d checked the cool walk in at the cloakroom.

  When Esteban saw them coming, he laid his cigar in the nearest ashtray, spread out his arms and smiled his refrigerator smile, which Henning found more than appropriate in this case, and hey: it was a smile.

  He embraced Henning, said ‘amigo’ loudly and whispered into his ear that he was very grateful to him for these amusingly dressed men, but if even one of the three turned out to be a cop, Henning was a dead man.

  Henning knew that Knut, Heinz and Norbert were everything but cops.

  They were boys from his manor, with all their weaknesses they were just plain St Paulianers, and that was their strength. They came from the very bottom and wanted something from life. They were like the girls in the gold bikinis.

  Esteban let go of Henning and held out his hand to Knut, Heinz and Norbert, clapping them on their shoulders with his other hand.

  ‘How nice of you to visit me,’ he said, and Henning immediately began to interpret for him, because that was now his job, that much at least was clear to him.

  Knut, Heinz and Norbert fired off a few pleasantries about nice to be invited, good party, great club, best girls, we’re connoisseurs you know, hahaha, dumb laughter got scattered around, the nerves vanished.

  Then confidence-building measures.

  More drinks.

  Standing up.

  Cocaine.

  Sitting down, and in the private rooms to be found a floor below.

  Girls. Also in the private rooms, lying down, and yes, later, standing up, why not, that’s what they were there for, just in passing, you know. The stand-up fucking was the result of all the coke.

  Henning didn’t touch the coke, and after four Cuba libres, he left the rum out and just drank cola. He felt the need to stay alert, wanting to watch out for the boys a bit, after all, he’d brought them here. His feeling was right, as he realised when he saw Heinz with his trousers down at one of the pool bars in the middle of the terrace, seeing to one of the bikini girls from behind, as if he’d drunk a whisked billy-goat.

  Henning was glad that he didn’t need to look either Heinz or the girl in the face, and went to find Knut.

  He found him and Norbert bent over a silver tray with white powder, and he asked them kindly to reel their mate Heinz back in, pronto. They’d still got stuff on in Cartagena, and after all, tomorrow was another day.

  He felt like one of those old madams from the Kiez.

  Knut and Norbert reluctantly packed it in with their noses and, after a veritable bollocking, also packed Heinz up, then they thanked Esteban for his hospitality and said their goodbyes.

  Esteban hugged all four of them and let Henning know that it had gone very well. The next party would be in three days, they’d find out where. Then they’d start to talk business.

  The next day they all lay on the beach, but in the shade, please, yes definitely in the shade.

  Knut, Heinz and Norbert moaned a little about apparently massive headaches, although they were actually very pleased with themselves, although Heinz got a roasting about once an hour because he’d let himself get carried away with that terrace business.

  ‘On the whole it went pretty well,’ said Henning, ‘don’t worry about it.’

  He had no idea how it had really gone, he didn’t know what Colombian drug dealers expected from north German business partners, but he thought it couldn’t do any harm to give them all a little pep talk, and after all, Esteban had said that he was satisfied with the gentlemen from Germany.

  Over the next two weeks, things continued to exactly the same beat.

  There was a party in a different club every time, with drinking, snorting and – in the designated shagging rooms – shagging; all that was perfectly fine, hell yeah, it was practically the done thing, and in between times, Esteban kept vanishing into the designated consultation rooms to consult with the Hamburgers on the important matters.

  The ‘modus’ as Knut called it.

  Henning was there as an interpreter, but otherwise he kept out of it.

  His place for drinking and dancing was the Café Havana: his friends were there, Miguel and the boys were there, the girls he liked were there, that was real life.

  Everything in the clubs that Esteban invited them to was made of crystal.

  The Café Havana was also where he’d met Mariacarmen one evening. She’d grown up in Cartagena’s old town and had been studying something technical for a year. She consisted entirely of dark curls and a bright laugh, and for Henning she was the most exciting woman in the whole world.

  On their third evening together, he’d been allowed to walk her home, they’d kissed outside her parents’ house, things had gone no further. They danced, they talked, they laughed, then Henning took her home and they snogged a bit – done.

  He could hardly bear it.

  He wanted to share everything with her.

  He told her nothing about his job for Esteban, to her he was just a waiter in José’s beach bar. He sensed that she wouldn’t let him come to her door if she found out about Esteban. Mariacarmen was always saying how much she despised people who hoarded up money and power at other people’s expense. Who’d kill anyone who questioned the length of their dicks, and who grew a second pair of balls if there was actual killing to be done.

  When Mariacarmen had been drinking, she’d punch her left first into the air and proclaim the revolution in the Café Havana.

  Henning fell more deeply in love with her every time she did that, and, for the first time in his life, he was scared of losing someone.

  Esteban was afraid of nothing, Henning felt that again every time he met him, and that was what made the Colombian so terrifying. Esteban just couldn’t be doing with certain things: the Colombian cocaine police and the DEA, the narcotics detectives from the USA.

  The police in Cartagena didn’t bother him, he’d got them under control, or that’s how it seemed to Henning when Esteban made jokes about them.

  At no time did he make jokes about Knut, Heinz and Norbert, which meant that he took them seriously. And so, as the three men’s return flight to Hamburg drew closer, they agreed on a trial run: there was a general cargo ship
that ran regularly from Cartagena to Hamburg, and two kilos of uncut Colombian cocaine would be transported in it.

  Price in Colombia: five thousand dollars.

  Street value in Hamburg: a hundred and sixty thousand marks.

  The Hamburg guys would pay down three thousand dollars out of the dodgy funds they’d brought. The remaining two thousand were due with the first real deal.

  Mutual trust, as Esteban called it.

  On the evening before they flew back, though, verification seemed the way to go after all. There was too much money at stake, both now and in the future.

  Knut and Norbert came into José’s bar, unarmed of course, as two men verified with considerable care, before meeting Esteban in the back room.

  Esteban introduced them to the sailor who’d hide the cocaine between the decks of the cargo ship and who’d hand it over in Hamburg once they’d docked. Then he held up a waistcoat, a kind of jungle-kit thing with loads of pockets. The cocaine was sewn into the waistcoat in flat packets, as Knut and Norbert in turn verified with considerable care.

  Esteban slipped the sailor an envelope containing five hundred dollars. In Hamburg, once everything had been processed, he’d get another five hundred from Knut and Norbert in the gents’ in the Silbersack.

  Everyone looked a bit tense.

  Then a polaroid photo of Knut and Norbert was taken so that the sailor would remember the two of them when he had a couple of days’ shore leave in two-and-a-half weeks. He’d turn up in St Pauli, in the Silbersack, and hand over the delivery. It was decided that Knut and Norbert would be sitting at the bar between six and ten p.m. on three separate evenings.

  Then they all drove to the port together in a black minibus, Esteban, Henning, Knut and Norbert, the sailor, the coke, the polaroid photo and Esteban’s gorillas. The sailor was escorted aboard the cargo ship by the gorillas, Esteban slipped a few notes to a man standing on the gangway, guarding the ship.

  The sailor wouldn’t run off with the cocaine, of course, because Esteban knew where his wife and children lived.

  After barely fifteen minutes, which felt like hours to the Hamburg guys, the gorillas came back ashore. The men drove to the hotel, where Heinz was sitting with the money.

  Three thousand dollars changed hands without Heinz giving too much of a commentary.

  Esteban, very pleased with the smooth operation, laid another vacuum-packed bag on the table: a hundred grams of the finest white powder. As a bonus. As a sign of their friendship – well, business partnership. At most. And, of course, so that Knut, Heinz and Norbert could show off the fantastic quality of their gear as soon as they got back to Hamburg. After that, they toasted the future with Cuba libres and Bacardi and Cokes.

  They flew out the next morning.

  Knut had hidden the little bag of free cocaine in the depths of his unmarked suitcase, between four pounds of Colombian coffee.

  Over the next two weeks, Henning went to ground. He put in double shifts at José’s and acted like he had nothing to do with anything, least of all an international drugs deal.

  He only met Mariacarmen once.

  He hardly went out.

  Esteban beat a retreat to his lodge in the mountains near Medellín. There was no reason to fuss. Knut, Heinz and Norbert started work the very day after landing in Hamburg.

  They needed a place, a super-secret cocaine-hiding place, where the stuff could be stashed away for the long term, a stash that wouldn’t be directly linked to them if – in an unfavourable turn of events, say – it did get raided.

  After all, things wouldn’t stop at the two kilos the sailor had in his waistcoat. They’d be importing quantities that could get you put away for years.

  In the end, they chose Norbert’s safe-deposit box down in the cellar of the Reeperbahn Casino – very popular with criminals and senators alike – as their stash. It was the most practical option. The safe-deposit boxes had been installed when the place was opened in the late seventies. Large safe-deposit boxes. Everyone in the Kiez who had dirty money to stash away possessed a box and a key. Norbert had barely used the box in recent years, the money from the club they owned together was actually mainly clean. There was still a sports bag lying in the furthest corner of the box with a few tens of thousands of marks of hooker cash. A little getaway dough, you know.

  Not only was the box not associated with anybody in particular, but also sports bags didn’t attract that much attention; there was always somebody traipsing towards the cellars with a sport bag, and that was actually the best thing about this solution. And at the cellar lobby, people were very careful to ensure that there was only one person busy with the boxes at any time, for personal space, you know. There was only one key to each box.

  The human barrier who watched over the door to the strongbox room, and kept an eye on the rest of the cellar while anyone was busy at a box, was Norbert’s brother Lothar. Nobody had anything against involving him, up to a point. And Lothar would never grass because he’d come into the world deaf. He’d always talked with his fists.

  After the matter of the stash was sorted, they had to clear up how the business would run. It was decided that sales would be transacted in Norbert’s office for now, because it had a lockable door and a small safe. A kind of practical second stash. The office in the back room of their club belonged to all three of them, of course, but Norbert was the only one who was any good with numbers, so in that respect he was also the only one always sitting at the desk, so in that respect it was Norbert’s office. Now and again there might be a girl in there too, and the girl might be there to see Knut or Heinz instead, but that had to be arranged in advance.

  The rest would emerge once they’d treated the jet set to a few snorts.

  The day after the ship from Cartagena docked, the sailor arrived in the Silbersack as arranged.

  One point five kilos were deposited in the stash, five hundred grams went straight into the second stash in Norbert’s office.

  The business was a firecracker from the very first night; just a week later, they booked a flight to Colombia for Knut. Only one of them would ever fly out, so as not to attract attention.

  And so everything flourished.

  Every two weeks, a cargo ship came in with one sailor wearing a five-kilo waistcoat, eight hundred thousand marks street retail value per month. Every six weeks either Knut or Heinz or Norbert flew to Medellín with almost thirty thousand dollars in his pocket.

  After a year, the quantities were doubled.

  There were just two sailors per ship.

  At the Hamburg end, they’d built up a stock of bulk buyers, who sold the stuff on across the city.

  One looked after the scene and the actors in Eppendorf, another dealt with the artists and musicians in Eimsbüttel, one pushed the stuff to the jet set in Winterhude and Uhlenhorst, another supplied the high society in the Elbvororte, and yet another had sole responsibility for a hotel on the Alster where certain politicians, dignitaries and senators regularly let the day fade away in the bar and then later in the rooms.

  They were all making a killing, but Knut, Heinz, Norbert and Esteban were doing best of all.

  It was all running perfectly.

  Things between Henning and Mariacarmen were running smoothly too. After the first trial deal, it hadn’t taken long for Henning to feel that he was out of the matter again, both morally and gangster-wise. His only responsibility was to pick up whoever arrived in Medellìn from Hamburg, drive him to Cartagena, and then smooth out everything between Esteban and his German partners that needed smoothing in Colombia. He ensured that Knut or Heinz or Norbert felt good, cleared away cultural differences before they could arise, translated from German to Spanish and back again, and simply left out half of what Heinz said.

  At first he was still paid in cash, but then it got better.

  Much better.

  Esteban gave him the freshly renovated cocktail bar on Plaza Santo Domingo, the one Henning had liked so much when he fir
st got to Cartagena. The place was established and running well, and that suited him because on the third night they spent together amid the waves on the shore, Mariacarmen, who’d kept him dangling for over a year, got pregnant.

  Lying in the surf with Mariacarmen was everything Henning wanted, her legs were wrapped behind his back, her voice was in his ear, everywhere – yet far enough away – were the lights of Cartagena, it was so perfect, it was a cliché, and yet it was right, and it seemed to Henning that the night was singing him a song, for them both, and only for them.

  Those are the moments when new people are formed.

  He was so bloody happy.

  And so, in the third year of the big deal, Arturo was born. The bar was running itself by then, Henning had staff by then, and he himself only worked nights because that was the work he liked best. When everyone had drunk enough and didn’t need much more. When nobody got ideas about moving quickly. Then he sat on the bar and played the guitar. He played music from the sea, north German and Colombian songs, Mariacarmen danced with the sleeping baby in her arms and carried on planning the revolution, sometimes she was still studying a bit but, basically, she had everything she wanted. And Henning was almost a celebrity in Cartagena by then.

  The German with the guitar.

  The musician, the bar boss, the good husband and father.

  The whole city seemed to like him, and most of the time he forgot who he actually worked for and the precise nature of the stuff on his hands.

  He never thought about getting out. Firstly, he wasn’t even really in. Secondly, you didn’t get out of the drug business, you never got out of there your whole life, you stayed in for eternity, every child knew that.

  So why think about it.

  It was all so damn easy and the sun shone on his belly for another seven years, until that night in this house in Blankenese.

  BUT THEY SURELY WON’T START SHOOTING PEOPLE RIGHT AWAY

  The technician is met at the door, and guns are held to his head, although they don’t seem to impress him much. He looks around, his expression says something like: ah, got you, I always thought this kind of stuff could happen. And now here we are.