‘Put the child down again,’ I said, waving the pistol.
Gregor looked even more incredulous. In the process the pupils of his eyes grew ever larger and ever emptier, and I had the feeling I was facing a horror dummy. The kind of thing that could be used at cinema entrances to advertise films like The Massacre Man or The Devil’s Dinner.
He turned his head to the desk. ‘Who’s this arsehole?’
Frau Schmidtbauer bit her lower lip, looked at my pistol, and didn’t seem to think Gregor’s choice of words very sensible. ‘Er,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.
I said, ‘This arsehole is the character who’ll shoot holes in your knees if you don’t let go of the child.’
It was as if something inside him exploded. His head whipped round, and with his teeth bared and his eyes popping he clamped Leila to his chest and held her out in my direction. ‘Oh, so that’s your idea? You think you’ll shoot holes in me?’ he roared, chin jutting. ‘Go on, then! But you’ll have to shoot through the girl first. Didn’t think of that, eh? Shoot holes in me! I could kill you with one hand.’
‘With your little toe for all I care. But we’re not here for a fight, and I don’t want to shoot you in the chest either. Just in the kneecaps. You’d need to be holding a wall in front of you to stop me doing that.’
‘Please, Gregor!’ begged Frau Schmidtbauer, and at the same moment she started crying.
Gregor was now snorting like a horse. He began twitching and sweating, looking around him as if his good friend coke had left him in mid-flight, and now he was sailing alone through some kind of cosmos that was a total mystery to him.
‘The child,’ I said, trying again, but he wasn’t listening any more. He looked at the floor, froze for a moment as if hypnotising himself, his snorting and twitching died down, and whereas he had just been gleaming with sweat it now looked as if he had a layer of grey dust on his skin. Nothing indicated the presence of a brain any more. It was pure reflex when he assumed a close-combat position. Then he bent his knees, braced his shoulders back like someone putting the shot, and tensed his biceps. A slippery film formed between the pistol and my hand.
When Leila came flying towards me, I shoved her to my left and under the desk, threw myself to the right, saw two metres of cokehead above me, and fired my pistol. Gregor, hit in the legs, bellowed, froze briefly in a kind of jazz-dance distortion, grabbed his thighs and collapsed. At the same moment Frau Schmidtbauer started screaming.
I lay gasping for air and trying to steady my trembling arm. Gregor’s body, barely three metres away from me, wasn’t moving any more. He had obviously fainted. Dark patches were spreading over his tracksuit bottoms. I’d emptied my entire magazine into his legs and the wall behind them. Even sober, Gregor probably wouldn’t have allowed me to keep cool. Pumped full of drugs he’d looked to me, for a moment, like the last person I would ever meet on earth. Still, I hadn’t aimed any higher.
Frau Schmidtbauer kept on and on screaming. Finally I struggled to my feet, went over to her and slapped her face until she covered it with her hands and began whimpering quietly. Then I bent to look under the desk. Arms around her knees, T-shirt torn, feet bare, Leila was cowering in the furthest corner with her eyes and mouth tight closed, and tears running down her cheeks.
I straightened up and looked for the cigarettes in my jacket pocket. The girl was beginning to get on my nerves now too. Why didn’t she run away? Why, whatever she was threatened with and whatever happened, did she stick around in the secretarial office, a horrible place in every respect? Whether Leila knew anything or not, I was beginning to think I’d have had a really successful afternoon without her: half an hour at the most to crack Frau Schmidtbauer, about another twenty minutes for her to spill all the details of the link between this hostel and the Army, and last, with a little luck, information about two brief lives which for one reason or another were unpleasant enough for no one to mourn their end much. Even now I had a chance. A little poking about in Gregor’s wounds, and Frau Schmidtbauer would probably have given me all she knew in writing. But this way. I could neither haul Leila out from under the desk and put her outside the door, nor use the methods of a military junta in front of her. The question was, what could I do instead? I smoked, and thought about it.
‘… oh, baby, your life’s up the spout, you just don’t know it yet,’ came a grating voice from the floor. Gregor seemed to be coming round. ‘I’ll finish you, you bastard… I’ll smash you up but I won’t let you die… I’ll crush your balls until you’re throwing up your own shit… and you’ll bleed so much you’ll wish so much you’d never put your bloody wog face out of your bloody wog mother…’
He went on like this until I went over and kicked him in the head. He gurgled something else, and then we had peace and quiet again.
‘Right,’ I said, turning to Frau Schmidtbauer, ‘now tell me how we get out of here.’
But Frau Schmidtbauer didn’t want to tell me anything. She wanted to weep and wail and call me names in a stifled voice. ‘You murderer! You’ve killed him! You’re a murderer!’
‘Nonsense. He can take it. The question is how much you can take. I am now going to call the police and tell them the story of a crazed cokehead — if you’ll back me up. If not I’ll have to try the truth on them: how your hostel is pretty well under the command of a German-Croatian Mafia, and you and Gregor here are more or less running it for them.’
‘… you murderer!’
‘Oh, do stop that. He’ll be beating someone up again in three weeks’ time. At the latest. Unless you go on howling like that much longer, and then maybe there’s a chance he’ll bleed to death.’
‘You… you…’
‘If you’re going to say “murderer” again I’ll murder you.’
‘You… you’re brutal, cruel…’
‘OK, let’s tell them the truth.’
I went over to the phone, raised the receiver and dialled. Before it began to ring a thin arm shot past me and a small hand, with bitten nails painted pink, came down on the cradle. ‘No!’
I turned and looked into Leila’s tearful face.
‘Please!’ Her eyes, which had little burst veins in them, looked pleadingly at me.
‘You don’t want me to call the police?’
She shook her head.
‘Why not?’
Before she could open her mouth someone who had apparently just come into the secretarial office snapped, ‘Because her tart of a mother’s involved! That’s why, you great child-lover!’
I turned and looked at Frau Schmidtbauer, astonished. In spite of everything that had happened I could hardly believe the voice that had greeted me so merrily, barely half an hour ago, came from the same human being as the one that now sounded as if hatred was its principal register.
With a triumphant grin, she defiantly pushed her face, now visibly flushed in spite of the sun tan, towards me. ‘Didn’t think of that one, did you? Her mother’s the worst of the lot! And this little witch is just as depraved! See how she’s wrapped you round her little finger!’
Worst of the lot? Depraved little witch? Was she simply making up some kind of fantasy, just so long as she thought it sounded tough and might induce me to leave?
I shook my head slightly. ‘What is it you people here have about mothers? Are we in some kind of ghetto movie, or in Italy, or what?’
‘But I’m telling you the truth! Her mother’s a tart! I could tell you stuff to make your hair stand on end…’
Suddenly I guessed something. I’d only ever heard anyone crack up as furiously as this when there was jealousy involved, and the more furious Frau Schmidtbauer grew, the further she leaned towards me and the more garishly did the colours of the jungle-animal print of her blouse hit me in the eye. I thought of Gregor’s watch, and how there might be reasons other than a few marks of hush money why someone like Frau Schmidtbauer, who said things like, ‘I could tell you stuff to make your hair stand on end’, would let herself act as general dogsbody to a Mafia gang.