Hotel Cartagena

by Simone Buchholz

  That this kind of thing keeps working.

  STROBE

  Having arrived on the twentieth floor, Stepanovic braces himself against the service-shaft hatch, he kind of grows out of the floor right behind the loos.

  He has only one goal: to get Riley out of here.

  And if anyone gets in his way while he’s doing that, he’ll shoot, the magazine’s full, he’ll be able to take a couple of guys out right away, see about the rest later, he’s had eggs à la Bruce Willis for breakfast: double-hard boiled.

  But something in the mix didn’t work.

  He isn’t working the way he expected to, perhaps he took his own safety catch off too soon, or perhaps it was the exact opposite and he held on to something for too long, perhaps it’s just the smell of fire and smoke and destruction.

  He sees the shards.

  The splinters.

  The people lying on the dark polished concrete.

  None of it makes a coherent picture. As if his basic ability to make individual pieces into a whole has gone astray. His eyes are burning, but on the inside.

  The wind is whistling through the enormous hole in the glass façade, the catastrophe is illustrated by frantic blue light thrown up from below, on the walls, on the ceiling, against the sky. The helicopter is very close, the searchlights are already everywhere, strobe lights in the night. It’s blurring more and more, and everything that was still there to be saved until just now is vanishing into the sirens and the roar of the helicopter engine.

  Stepanovic scans the room.

  Orders his eyes to look.

  Damnation.

  Focus now.

  But he can’t find Riley.

  He finds Calabretta.

  He’s standing in front of someone lying on the floor, but they’re no longer a person, it’s just a shell.

  SEE YOU LATER

  They can hardly believe it – the cellar.

  They’re in the cellar!

  Whatever’s happening outside doesn’t matter now.

  They’re not getting in here for now.

  Not any time soon.

  It’ll be a while.

  Breathe.

  And again: breathe.

  Draw breath. It’s as good as done.

  Four of them heave aside the container filled with just enough water, which the technician and the barwoman placed there the day before. The technician has an emergency keycard of course, for perfectly ordinary reasons of safety and security – and in case anything went wrong with the two other keycards. Always place any such mainstay of a plan in duplicate with several people, Handbook for Bank Robberies and Hostage Situations, chapter one, or two at the latest.

  Waiting behind the container is their grinning colleague with his dusty beard, his enormous drill, his exit. They chuck the SWAT team helmets away so they can see better, along with a little of the other stuff that’s rendering them immobile, then they crawl through the hole in the wall, the last one through heaves the container back into place and then shoves as much rubble as he can find into the hole.

  There’s a branching system of tunnels.

  The tunnels are old, they’ve existed for centuries. Their colleague only needed to bore through the interior walls and add a few beams, gain a fraction of ground every month, that was no great shakes; he had the best job, in retrospect, even if he didn’t see much of the sun that summer. But who does in Hamburg.

  They run at a crouch through the tunnel, the chief tunneller knows the way. Left, then right, then left again, if you didn’t know you’d get lost. They jettisoned more ballast in the very first tunnel, kneepads, elbow pads, chest plates, you know, all the SWAT team junk, and so, even as they were running away and chucking away, they were creating trip hazards in case the cops do come after them faster than they expect, so that maybe they’d fall on their faces a couple more times before getting lost, haha, cops.

  Keep going, just keep on going, guys.

  Just three more turnings and they’re there.

  In the old casino.

  At the very bottom, in the bank.

  X marks the spot.

  The tunnel expert has been making a few preparations here too in the course of the night: barricading the entrance to the bank from the inside, screwing it tight, making it impenetrable from the outside, but in such a way that it looks to anyone who wants to get in as though it’s simply occupied, and if it’s occupied you generally just come back the next evening: the bank gets used for secret meetings, card games, conversations, dealings, or a murder.

  And the tunnel man has laid out thirteen large sports bags, full to the brim with cash. The money from the last few months, and there’s some from the last few decades in there too. Umpteen million times umpteen million, mind-boggling amounts. Dirty money from brothels, earnt from drugs, from blackmail, from everyday arseholery. It soon adds up. It’s lying here, ready to be laundered through property. It’s always just lying around here, waiting till the laundryman can take care of it, because nobody dares touch the laundryman’s business. He’s too powerful, has too much influence, you mustn’t get on the wrong side of him. What if something went wrong or something.

  But the laundryman just got blasted out of the River Palace Hotel and into the night.

  Oh well.

  They suppress a yell, they suppress the adrenaline and the endorphins, the dolphins in their blood, they pull themselves together one last time, they pull the fake noses and eyebrows and birthmarks off their faces, they’ll deal with the fake hair colour later, at home.

  Each of them grabs a bag with a good million in it, a good million, then out of the dirty money stash again, back into the tunnel system and further north, with a slight spin to the north-east. When they get to the Heiligengeistfeld, they climb through a drain cover into the open. They’re out, easily five hundred metres outside the large area the police have cordoned off.

  Just on to Feldstrasse now. Down into the U-Bahn.

  They say goodbye in Hamburg.

  See you on Curaçao in the spring, take an aeroplane, a boat, a dragon to the edge of the world, to Tugboat Beach, and just don’t fall off.

  COP STORY

  Did everything right, actually.

  Kept every possibility in mind, hopefully, of course you can never be totally certain, but almost.

  But there are some things you can’t keep in mind.

  The dead for instance.

  You can’t factor them in.

  They shouldn’t be allowed, anywhere.

  And if they do suddenly appear, if they’re just lying around in the street in ruins, then things have just gone so very wrong, so fundamentally awry, everything’s so messed up, and then you’re there in the middle of it and for a second you die along with them.

  Those are the sad cop’s eyes that people always bang on about.

  REVOLVER-HERO SQUAD, MINUS ONE

  They’re standing in a circle, they’re standing around a large, dark hole, they’re looking in, and they’re trying to bear it, because lying in the hole is their dead friend.

  None of them can even think his name.

  They haven’t got that far yet.

  For now, come to terms with the hole.

  NO

  They’ve sidelined my left arm, it’s stuck in a solid splint.

  The last people I see are Klatsche and Inceman, they’re standing right by the door and looking at me, but their eyes are powered down.

  I think they’re smoking.

  Then the lids close, first the left, then the right, and then they’re both gone.

  The light in here is too bright.

  I close my eyes and everything that was, until maybe an hour ago, propping me up, and actually the last ten years too, falls in on itself and I fall after it.

  Now there are sirens here, they’re calling for me.

  No. Screw you all. Screw you all sideways, I’m not coming, not with you lot and not with this thing here, no.

  We drive through the cit
y, black holes open up on every corner, they tug at the sheet metal of the ambulance, Stepanovic is kneeling beside the shitty stretcher I’m lying on, he’s holding me, he’s holding my hand and he’s singing something to me, I like the tune but the words make me want to puke.

  Glasgow Central Station, seven months later

  It’s raining and obviously I haven’t got an umbrella on me, but that doesn’t matter because it’s not malicious rain. It’s not painful, it’s not even coming in from the side, it’s simply drizzling gently down onto the earth from above.

  Such a benevolent rain god.

  He’s been there since earlier, when I landed at that airport between here and Edinburgh, and as far as I’m concerned, he can stay. I hold my face up to him with a quiet ‘hey, you’, although I don’t mean the rain but this city, about which I seem to know nothing when it knows a load about me.

  I’m standing on the street, my bag’s sitting in the hotel, in a not-especially-large room on the ninth floor, it’s a room with a view of cranes. The road is called Hope Street, which is so kitsch I can hardly believe it, who the hell do they think they are here? Fucking Hogwarts?

  Well then, anyway, everything suddenly feels very light, and technically there must be some magic involved somewhere. I would never have thought that anything could feel light ever again, after everything that’s happened.

  But now I’m here.

  And Hamburg is in another universe.

  The rain increases a little, although it’s no heavier, certainly not unpleasant. All the same, I step under the bridge. I haven’t got much luggage with me, as usual, and there’s no need for half of it to immediately get so wet that it’s unusable for the rest of the time.

  But what time is that. I haven’t booked a return flight. And I’m to stay on leave for the rest of the year.

  This bridge.

  There’s something up with it.

  It’s both beautiful and sad to stand underneath it with rain falling on either side. As if hundreds and thousands have already stood here like me. People who were sent here from somewhere else and didn’t have the foggiest what they were meant to do in Glasgow, but now that was how it was and they were just kind of standing here waiting for the rain to ease.

  I stand under the bridge for quite a while, I don’t register exactly how long, maybe half an hour, maybe more. Then I set off, heading east. Towards the East End. I don’t know much about the place, only what my father told me in moments of gentleness.

  About Eoin Riley, my great-great-grandfather, who, at the end of the century before last, got on a ship in Glasgow to seek his fortune in the United States, in North Carolina, as a navvy. Eoin was born in the East End, in a small flat in a grey tene ment, in a grey slum. I walk through the streets of this city, there’s a lot of grey, and I wonder whether Eoin was sick of the grey, but I don’t really think so. The grey can’t have been the problem. Presumably more the hunger that usually goes hand in hand with grey places. I reckon he was sick of the hunger.

  I’m heading slightly uphill now, heading under steel bridges and past more and more towers with clocks. I stop at a corner shop. I go in, the rain’s got heavier again. The cigarettes cost over twelve pounds.

  Maybe I should start smoking again.

  THANKS

  Karen Sullivan, for your endless support and power.

  Rachel Ward – you are sound system.

  West Camel, for super-elegant editing.

  Kid Ethic!

  Everyone at Suhrkamp, especially Thomas Halupczok and Nora Mercurio.

  Werner Löcher-Lawrence, anyhow.

  Oliver Erdmann, for the cake afternoons and phone calls, for that incredible wealth of knowledge and stories, and for the fun.

  Kerstin from the KDD, of course.

  Jessica Kurschat and André Schulz, for your generosity and technical tricks.

  Karenina Köhler, for being absolutely wonderful.

  Frank Göhre, because you always help as soon as you’re needed, oh, how I appreciate that.

  Edgar Rai, for the pigeon shit, an image like that can really carry you for miles.

  Bernd Begemann, for the winter drinks that were way too sweet.

  Fabian, for your critical voice in my head.

  Graeme Macrae Burnet, for Glasgow, for the inspiration, and for your unconditional care, especially in the final metres.

  Will Carver, for being my sister in crime in front of all these vending machines at night, or as we call them: supplier automats (and I don’t know what’s fucking wrong with THAT).

  And, naturally, Rocco, Domenico, Romy and Wilhelm, without your love and generosity everything would be nothing, I repeat: nothing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972. At university, she studied philosophy and literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg. In 2016, Simone Buchholz was awarded the Crime Cologne Award and was runner-up in the German Crime Fiction Prize for Blue Night, which was number one on the KrimiZEIT Best of Crime List for months. The next in the Chastity Riley series, Beton Rouge, won the Radio Bremen Crime Fiction Award and Best Economic Crime Novel 2017. In 2019, Mexico Street, the follow-up in the series, won the German Crime Fiction Prize.

  She lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son. Follow Simone on Twitter @ohneKlippo and visit her website: simonebuchholz.com.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Rachel Ward is a freelance translator of literary and creative texts from German and French to English. Having studied modern languages at the University of East Anglia, she went on to complete UEA’s MA in Literary Translation. Her published translations include Traitor by Gudrun Pausewang and Red Rage by Brigitte Blobel, and she is a Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. She has previously translated Simone Buccholz’s Blue Night, Beton Rouge and Mexico Street for Orenda Books.

  Follow Rachel on Twitter @FwdTranslations, on her blog www.adiscounttickettoeverywhere.wordpress.com, and on her website: www.forwardtranslations.co.uk.

  COPYRIGHT

  Orenda Books

  16 Carson Road

  West Dulwich

  London SE21 8HU

  www.orendabooks.co.uk

  First published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag AG, Berlin 2019

  This edition published in the United Kingdom by Orenda Books 2021

  Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2019

  English translation © Rachel Ward 2021

  Simone Buchholz has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–1–913193–54–6

  eISBN 978–1–913193–55–3

  Typeset in Garamond by www.typesetter.org.uk

  Printed and bound by 4edge Ltd, Essex

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut

  For sales and distribution, please contact info@orendabooks or visit www.orendabooks.co.uk.

 

 

 
uttons">share