“Incompetent man,” the Kapitan said.
“You should get rid of him, before he goes across the Parade Ground.”
Kapitan Todt snorted. “Xavier’s welcome to him. It would probably work out in our favour.” He looked out of the window – painted with one-way reflective paint ever since the sniper incident – and after a few moments he said, “You think he’s getting ready to defect?”
“That sort are only ever in the fight for the rewards,” said Brandt. “As soon as they start drying up they’re off looking for someone else to leech onto.”
“Well I’m not going to keep hurling resources at him if he gets things this badly wrong,” the Kapitan said mildly. “I’d have to be an idiot to do that.” He sighed. “He knows where too many bodies are buried to take the chance. Bury him with them.”
“Yes, Kapitan.”
“And Brandt?”
“Yes, Kapitan?”
“I’m constantly reviewing everybody’s loyalties.”
Brandt seemed to falter momentarily, searching for an answer. Finally he said “Yes, Kapitan.”
BEFORE BRANDT THERE had been Mundt, and before Mundt there had been Falkenberg, and before Falkenberg there had been Meyer, and before Meyer there had been Xavier.
Xavier. Xavier X, who encouraged people to call him ‘Twenty’ because of his initials and who wore under his shirt a necklace of ears reputedly cut from the heads of shopkeepers and businesspeople who had been shortsighted enough not to join in with his protection rackets.
Kapitan Todt had found the boy hiding from the Anhalter Bahnhof polizei one rainy night in March, ten years ago. The Grandsons – they had still not quite geared up to make the jump from football hooliganry and medium-level racism to running their own country – had attacked another gang of supporters in the station concourse. The private security police had broken the fight up and everyone had scattered, the Kapitan and his predecessor, Kolonel Aldo, finding themselves in a little-visited area of dumpsters and piles of refuse bags behind some of the station’s fast food franchises.
As they crouched, panting quietly, waiting to see whether anyone had followed them, Aldo heard something moving under a nearby pile of bags. The two young men threw the bags aside, and found a filthy boy crouching under them, the neck of a broken bottle clutched in one hand and a brand new Sony microtainment centre, still in its box and somehow smuggled out through the Sony franchise centre’s security procedures, at his side. What struck the Kapitan, even then, was that there was no fear at all in the boy’s eyes. He would have tried to kill them both if he had to.
“Crazy little fucker,” Aldo chuckled.
“We should keep him,” said the Kapitan, who in those days was still known as Florian.
Aldo raised an eyebrow. “I bet he’d be handy in a fight,” he allowed. “How about it, kid?” he asked the boy. “How’d you like to join the Grandsons of Gavrilo Princip?”
“Fuck off, granddad,” the boy spat scornfully. But when Aldo and Florian decided the coast was clear and made to move off, he followed them back to one of their clubhouses, where the frauen made a fuss of him and cleaned him up and it turned out he was on the run from a state orphanage and had nowhere else to go, and by then there was never any doubt about whether he would stay with them or not.
Not a single one of them could have said who Gavrilo Princip was without recourse to Google, and if it wasn’t for voice recognition software most of them wouldn’t even have been able to do that because the majority were illiterate. Like Twenty – he demanded to be called Twenty, it was only some months later that they discovered the name’s derivation – most of the Grandsons were either graduates of or runaways from Berlin’s notoriously tough orphanage system. Even the ones who had homes and families wouldn’t have called them conventional or loving. They came together out of a common love of football and a common hatred of opposing clubs and supporters. They fought with a finely-honed desperation against fans of other Berlin clubs, other German clubs, other European clubs. Italian Ultras were the best. Ultras literally refused to stop; they just kept coming, long after more rational opposition would have faded away. It was a privilege to fight Ultras.
Aldo was in Plötzensee now, eight years into a life stretch for torching a Somali community centre in Dahlem and killing fourteen people. The state had demanded the death penalty, but was contenting itself with periodically withdrawing Aldo’s segregated status in jail and waiting to see how long it took the Moslem inmates to try to kill him. So far, the longest he’d survived in the general population without being attacked was fifteen minutes. The Kapitan visited, when he could. Aldo knew the prison guards would intervene in any disturbance, but even so, eight years of it were starting to take their toll. His hair had gone completely white.
Aldo was almost forty, the oldest of the Grandsons, basically a Methuselah figure. A true visionary. While Xavier was fighting his way up through the ranks, Aldo was proving his visionary credentials by meeting with the leaders of other supporters’ groups, cutting deals, forging alliances. The Grandsons began to join with some of the other gangs, then to absorb them, then to overwhelm them. By the time Aldo was arrested the Grandsons of Gavrilo Princip were almost two thousand strong and they ruled their own country.
NOTWITHSTANDING TODAY’S OUTRAGE – to which he was already planning an apocalyptic response – mornings tended to be fairly quiet times. The Grandsons’ fondness for industrial quantities of beer and schnapps and, quite often, substances which had not yet been legalised for human consumption, meant that mornings were, for the most part, times of introspection rather than violence. The Kapitan ruled his half of the Municipality with a fist which aspired to be fair but which was still, when all was said and done, a fist. He had his followers divided into watches, and woe betide anyone who indulged in any kind of stimulant stronger than coffee less than twelve hours before their next watch.
So when the rocket attack began this morning, all of his people were alert and compos mentis and doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, which was only as it should be, and they were still doing their jobs now, calmly and methodically. Of course, as soon as their Watch was over they would do their best to get entirely off their faces…
Kapitan Todt considered himself to be a genuine military commander. Aldo had taught him discipline and its value, and those lessons were paying off now. When the war with the Revisionists was over and the Municipality was unified again, perhaps they could relax. But not yet.
Aldo had also taught him to trust his instincts, but Aldo’s advice was no help as he walked down the corridors of his kingdom with the strangest feeling that he was being followed. The small group of advisers and lieutenants walking with him seemed not to notice.
Aldo’s plan to unify or absorb or simply erase all the other football gangs in Berlin had reached its apotheosis when he decided his new army needed its own country, and he set his sights on the Municipality, an old housing development a few minutes’ drive from the swanky new blocks in East Kreuzberg.
The Municipality was four huge apartment blocks arranged in a square around a patch of ground the size of a football stadium. In the past, the open ground had been a park, a play area, a place for children to ride their BMX bikes and skateboards, but the development’s former residents had been moved out to newer estates around the city and it was almost empty. The few anarchists and Greens who were squatting there moved out in a hell of a hurry when Aldo led his people to the Promised Land. Like Moses, however, Aldo was fated not to live in the Promised Land. Within a day or so of the Grandsons taking over the blocks and fortifying them against the authorities – who had better things to do than worry about winkling a group of teenagers out of a couple of old blocks of flats – Aldo had been lifted off the street and advised by his lawyer that he would be on trial for his life.