For a moment we stared at each other as furiously as if, for two pins, we’d have got in ahead of Knee Expert and his corpse-counting friend, who were presumably here to silence us as far as possible, by doing ourselves in instead. Then I heard those long, confident everybody-listen strides that Berliners have coming down the corridor, pulled Leila away from the door and signed to her to keep quiet.
When the steps moved on I whispered, ‘OK, I’ll take you with me — for now, anyway. We’ll go out to my car, very calmly. We won’t run, and we…’
‘My money! I can pay!’
‘Oh, God, I’ve heard you say you can pay quite often enough!’ I snapped, hoping to make a few things painfully clear when I added, ‘But you can’t pay me! Forget it! I cost more than a few lollipops or collectable stickers!’
‘Collectable? Stickers…?’
There was a rather foolish pause. Of course, I could have said to myself, from her broken German, that she didn’t know what collectable stickers were. But something in her eyes told me that at least she could guess the probable nature of collectable stickers, and her astonishment was solely to do with the likely fact that while a girl her age might collect all sorts of things, stickers were not among them.
‘I…’ she said, pointing at her chest, ‘can…’ she added, aware that she was repeating herself and enjoying it, ‘. pay! I have money. Much money! And I.’ here she pointed to her chest again, and I was beginning to feel as if I were standing in a corner with the Albanian or some Mediterranean gangster boss, ‘… want you find my mother.’
The boss was waiting for a nod, so I nodded. ‘OK,’ I sighed. ‘Where’s the money?’
‘In my room. I get it. Videos too.’
‘Videos?’
‘So you know what my mother look like,’ she explained impatiently. ‘You private detective or…’
Or what? I thought I heard a half-swallowed A and R, and perhaps even the hiss of an S. Before long I’d be entirely in agreement with Gregor’s way of dealing with this girl.
‘Hurry up, then! I’ll wait exactly five minutes and then I’m going whether you’re back or not!’
‘What you mean, whether back or not?’ she asked, her hands fluttering back and forth as usual. ‘I talking to Schmidtbauer about my mother! Then you break into office, make trouble with Gregor. Now you say: whether back or not! Am I stupid fucking sow or what?’
Fucking sow.? For God’s sake, who taught them German around here? I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just put up with the look she gave me as she left the room: you got me into this, you can get me out again or you’ll be sorry — and then, finally, she was outside.
I lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke. My new client. We’d see if she was going to let me help her with the investigations now and then.
Next moment what I’d been fearing for some time happened. Doors began slamming, footsteps echoed down the corridor, I heard shouting. ‘Can’t be far away!’ ‘I’ll do that bastard!’ ‘Hey, Krap, here we come!’
And they were indeed coming right towards me. I couldn’t get out into the corridor now, and there was no other way I could leave the visitors’ room. Or no quiet and reasonably elegant way. After I had briefly and unsuccessfully tried wrenching one of the chairs from its angle-irons to throw it through the window, and myself after it, I jettisoned the chair idea. The window sill was about a metre from the muddy forecourt of the hostel. I put my jacket over my head, with ends of its sleeves covering my hands, listened once more for a moment to the steps that were still approaching, took a run and jumped through the glass, one shoulder hitting it first.
About three seconds, an enormous crashing and clattering, and one belly-flop landing later I raised my face from the mud, heard a shout of, ‘Hey, there he goes!’ in the building, and worked my way round on my front to shelter behind the boot of the Mercedes.
‘Look at that, then!’
‘Krap’s James Bond, who’d’ve guessed?’
‘James Bond don’t leave no tracks like a baby crawling. Hey, Krap! Don’t get our car all dirty!’
‘Come on out, let’s talk sensibly!’
I peered round one tyre and saw the two of them looking my way through the empty window frame, which was rimmed with jagged shards of glass. Their right hands, and what they were holding in them, stayed below the level of the sill.
I had to find out if a peaceful settlement was at all possible. Perhaps Ahrens really had sent them with instructions to negotiate or to bribe me. Perhaps he was finally getting sick and tired of shoot-outs. So I took off my muddy jacket, now spiked with splintered glass, and held it briefly out from behind the tyre. A peaceful settlement was not possible. Next moment what had recently been a garment on my back was a pile of rags riddled with holes lying in front of me in the mud, graphic evidence of what our lads understood by ‘talking sensibly’.
I turned my head and saw what I already knew: I couldn’t get away from the shelter of the car. They could see the whole forecourt from the window, there was no cover except for the Mercedes, and after my panic-stricken burst of fire at Gregor’s legs I had no ammunition left to shoot back with. Although they didn’t know that yet, and they obviously hesitated to harm the gleaming, brand-new metal of their vehicle
I crawled round to the side of the car facing away from their window, and saw that the driver’s door was half open. They’d been in such a hurry and they liked to put on such airs that I hoped the key might be in the ignition. As I crawled on I called, ‘I thought you wanted to talk? Doesn’t look like talking to me! Apart from the fact that that was my favourite jacket — and always assuming you know what a jacket is.’
‘Oh wow, man, is Krap ever witty!’
I reached the open driver’s door and saw the picture of the Croatian president welded into a key tag hanging from the driving column.
The car was about three metres from the entrance to the hostel. The swing door and thus the corridor beyond it looked to me a little wider than the bonnet of the car.
‘Seemed like it was just some old rag!’
There were barely ten metres between the visitors’ room and the swing door. That would take them three or four seconds, less if they ran. Or they might jump out of the window — in which case all I could do was throw mud at them.
‘Hey, lads, what next?’
‘I said we talk sensibly, OK?’
‘What about?’ I peered cautiously across the driver’s seat. The car was an automatic. ‘About what’s next.’
I thought I heard a suppressed splutter of laughter. They thought themselves such a superior force, and indeed they were. If I’d suddenly begun weeping or praying, they’d only have seen it as further confirmation of their superiority. That was my chance.
‘You mean that?’
‘Sure we do.’
‘I’d like to talk sensibly to Ahrens.’
‘Ahrens? Why not? We can drive you there.’
That suppressed splutter again.
‘But we have to agree on something first.’
‘Oh yeah? What?’
‘Everything’s nice and peaceful from now on.’
‘Why, sure. Word of honour.’
‘OK… then I suggest we meet here outside the entrance, unarmed.’
A pause, one of them cleared his throat, then my partner in the negotiations spoke up again. ‘Why not just come out from behind the car? Like we said, it’ll all be peaceful now.’
‘Well, let’s say as evidence of your goodwill. Down here we’ll be on the same level, and I can see if you’ve really put your pistols away.’ I stopped for a moment, and then went on in an increasingly defensive tone, making it sound as if I was making a great effort to stay cool. ‘I mean, boys, believe me, I’m sick to the teeth with all this violence! Normally I just go looking for dogs and husbands and so on. Honest, I’d like to be well out of this. So what I think is, it’d be best for us to look each other in the face here, and then sit down around a table with Ahrens like grown-ups and discuss the rest of it. I could have one or two other things to tell you that I’m sure would interest Ahrens. About the Albanian and what the police are planning. We Turks have a proverb: if you soil a stranger’s carpet, you must shear your own sheep for him. Understand?’