In his place, the Kapitan – with Twenty at his side – had set about turning the Municipality into the nation Aldo had intended it to be. And for seven years all had been well. Under the Kapitan the Grandsons branched out from protection rackets into drugs and prostitution and illegal firearms. They made sure they got on well enough with the city authorities to keep police visits to a minimum, they made a good living, their numbers swelled.
And then the Swimmer had arrived, and the civil war had begun.
ALTHOUGH IN TRUTH it had only been a war for about a week, and the bloodshed had been awful. Xavier’s followers lost more than half their people, the Kapitan roughly the same. After that everything had settled down into an armed standoff punctuated by moments of extreme violence. After a few tense moments at the beginning, the authorities had decided to keep out of it for now and negotiate some kind of accommodation with whoever survived. It was less labour-intensive, they reasoned, to let the Grandsons thin out their own ranks.
Numerous skirmishes saw the Kapitan finally in control of Buildings 1 and 2, Xavier occupying 3 and 4 and the two groups facing each other across the desolate wasteland of rusting jungle gyms and roundabouts and concrete biking ramps and skateboarding pits, occasionally shooting at each other, occasionally running infiltrations into each other’s territory.
For the Kapitan, the war was nothing short of a catastrophe. He had a large and diversified criminal network to run, and for the last year or so he had had no one to run it with. Gangs from other cities, sensing opportunity, had started to move in to Berlin while the Grandsons’ attention was elsewhere. Already half the Kapitan’s protection rackets had fallen to Chechen incomers from Hamburg, and the drugs business had been entirely taken over by a patchwork of mafiye organisations from all over Greater Germany.
He sat behind his desk in his office and worked his phones and he watched the empire that Aldo had founded and he had worked so hard to consolidate drifting away like a fog, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The Grandsons’ hold on Berlin’s underworld had been predicated on extreme violence and weight of numbers, and while they were locked in this face-off there was very little he could do to stop things falling apart. The moment he sent any significant numbers of people out to attend to business, Twenty and his people would over-run the Kapitan’s half of the Municipality and that would be the end of that story.
The tour over, he went down to the refectory and sat alone with a cup of coffee and stared into space. Years ago, when the Municipality was built, the architects had wanted each block to be a self-contained little microcosm of society – an arcology, almost – with shops and kindergartens and communal cafés. Much of that experiment had failed quietly. The cafés had gone out of business, the kindergartens had run out of funding, the shops had closed. Residents drifted away to the new ribbon developments out in the countryside, the blocks began to fall into disrepair and disorder.
The Grandsons had reversed that. They had reopened the kindergartens, turned the cafés into spartan but passable canteens. They had even taken down the shutters on some of the shops, mainly to use them as fronts for fencing stolen goods or marketing drugs. With a potential army of almost two thousand people ready to repel any action by the authorities, the polizei were reluctant to intervene and start a war, so the shops flourished. Outwardly, the Municipality had come back to life in rather sprightly fashion. You just had to ignore the all pervading air of criminality.
Hearing something behind him, the Kapitan turned in his seat and looked across the refectory, but could see no one. Just ranks of empty chairs and tables.
He finished his coffee and took the cup back to the counter – discipline in all things – and went down ten flights of stairs to the building’s foyer. The foyer was dimly lit by battery-powered lanterns – the great glass wall which had given a view out onto the central space of the development had been boarded up and barricaded and reinforced – and a team was stationed there at all times with a Gatling railgun in case the Revisionists tried a frontal assault. All the windows on the lower floors – up as high as the fifth floor – had been bricked up and the rooms sown with antipersonnel mines. The Kapitan presumed Twenty had ordered similar measures on the other side of the Parade Ground. He chatted with the railgun team, offered some words of encouragement, made sure they were being well-supplied with food and coffee, and moved on across the foyer to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.
The ground under the blocks was wormed with networks of utility tunnels and rooms. At one time they had all connected up, so one could move from block to block without ever seeing daylight. In the wake of the outbreak of hostilities, the Kapitan had ordered large amounts of builder’s rubble to be trucked in and piled up in the tunnels leading to the Revisionists’ blocks, and here too he had stationed railgun teams. As in the foyer, he spoke with each of the teams, hearing their reports – Twenty’s people periodically tried to clear a way through the piles of brick and earth and concrete filling the tunnels – and here too he had the itchy sensation that he was being followed.
Finally fed up with it, he went up to the twentieth floor of Building 1 and consulted with Doktor Rock.
“It’s hardly a surprise,” said Doktor Rock. “You barely sleep, you don’t eat properly, and your enemies are trying to kill you. A little paranoia’s to be expected.”
Kapitan Todt shifted uncomfortably on the chair in the doctor’s consulting room – a former hairdressing salon. “Can you give me something for it?”
“Almost certainly. You probably wouldn’t be able to function effectively for days afterward, though.”
“Fuck you.”
“And fuck you too, Kapitan.” Doktor Rock was sixteen years old, his face inflamed with acne. He took out a small joint and lit it – as the only doctor in the building he was exempted from the rules about on-duty substance abuse. It was the only way he could keep going. “Alternatively, I prescribe a holiday.”
The Kapitan snorted. “Malta?” The doctor was obsessed with Malta, for some reason.
The doctor inhaled on his spliff, held the smoke for longer than was probably medically advisable, and breathed out. “There are worse places.”
“I should hear your report, while I’m here.”
Doktor Rock sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “I’m short of everything. End of report.”
The Kapitan looked levelly at the doctor.
The doctor sighed. “Field dressings,” he said. “I have none left; we’re tearing up T-shirts and boiling them to make them sterile. Antibiotics. Hardly any. Surgical sutures – well, let’s just say that I’d rather no one needed surgery. Painkillers. Rationed. Anaesthetics. Ditto.”
“Noted. What about the general health of the population?”
The doctor looked at him. “When did we last have one of these little chats?”
“Last week.”
“Well, nothing much has changed since then, Kapitan.” He took his feet down off the desk and leaned forward. “I expect to start seeing scurvy quite soon. It’s a miracle we haven’t had typhus and cholera yet, but when they start they’ll go through the blocks like a fire through a dry eucalyptus forest. Pubic lice are at epidemic levels. I’m noticing a lot of nervous skin complaints, insomnia, short tempers, listlessness…” He sighed. “This has gone on too long. People are just falling ill from being cooped up in this place. Eventually we’ll have cases of rickets among the children, and then, dear Kapitan, I am off.”