Olli’s a car smuggler. Of course he’s not listed in the Yellow Pages under “Car Smugglers.” He’s listed under “Car Repair, Purchase, and Sales,” and basically that’s pretty accurate, too. Only he sells way more cars than he buys because his procurement system proceeds largely without sales contracts and other pesky paperwork. Olli is a really big operator with contacts in Eastern Europe. I’m sure you’re thinking Russia or Poland, but that’s not where his customers are. Nowadays any old cleaning lady is doing business with Russians and Poles; they’re so mainstream now they’ve become white-bread again. Olli does business with a crew from one of those tiny countries; I’m not that good with that corner of the map, I don’t recall the name.
Doesn’t matter. Anyways, Olli knows the whole north-south-east-west car smuggling scene like his own back pocket. He knows me pretty well, too; I used to work for him off and on until we had a stupid run-in with each other this one time because of this thing. Normally it’d be way beneath him to ever take notice of my existence again, but last night he sent one of his tools over to my place. He gave me the job that I was in the middle of executing right now.
I don’t want to give away any details, since stealing an SLR is a delicate matter, and I’m kind of proud of being one of the few guys who has the necessary tricks and talents. So that’s why I won’t pass them on, even though, unfortunately, this knowledge isn’t going to be of any use to me anymore. But to make a long story short: I stole the ride from the parking lot. Unfortunately because of my good night’s sleep and long walk into town, this happened somewhat later than planned, so the fat cats whose wheels were parked in the lot were already marching back out into the lot like tin soldiers in three-piece uniforms right as I started the engine. Now, the sound that an SLR makes cannot be confused with that of pretty much any other car, which is to say that about fifty sets of eyes turned my way as I raced the car out of the lot. In my rearview mirror I could just make out the hint of a wave, like in a stadium, as forty-nine arms pointed in my direction and one hand sank into the front pocket of a suit jacket, presumably to extricate a cell phone and call the cops. But then I lost interest in the scene behind me, focusing on driving my new acquisition fast, but not too fast, through the dark streets of downtown Cologne toward the entrance to the autobahn. During evening rush hour in winter when it’s dark, with freezing drizzle, even a semi can vanish into the thick of things faster than someone who can’t swim vanishes over Niagara Falls, and in that moment I had good reason to think my heist had gone OK.
I resisted the urge to drive too fast, tailgate other drivers, pass on the right, change lanes at the last moment before turning, and all of the other urges that make driving a car so supersonically awesome, because I did not want to catch anybody’s attention. If you’re sitting in a stolen car, you should drive more properly than you would even for your driver’s test. I kept at it. I was going to need twenty-seven minutes to make the agreed rendezvous, and I made it with forty-five seconds to spare. Shit! I could have used another couple of minutes, because before you hand off a stolen car you’ve got to empty it out. You’ve got to dig everything that you can make use of or sell out of the glove compartment, all the storage cubbies and pockets, the trunk, and under the seats. So now I needed to do a turbo pass through the car. Glove compartment: maps, condoms, sunglasses, a set of pens. Under the seats: a wad of cash, couldn’t count it at a glance, no matter, grabbed it. In the trunk: a naked woman.
I slammed the trunk back shut, hyperventilated a bit, opened the trunk again, and looked at her lying there. Half on her back, her knees fully bent, her arms at her sides, her body turned a bit. She was small and delicate, but she totally filled the tiny trunk. I nudged her with my finger; she was ice cold. I pushed one of her arms a bit to the side and jumped when I saw how the underside of her arm was purple. I pressed a finger to the spot where I thought her carotid was: nothing. She had tattoos around her ankles, she was quite pretty even though her makeup was on too thick, and she was dead as a tire iron. I shut the trunk back over her, carefully, as though she might have minded if I slammed it with a loud bang. Then I leaned on the driver’s side door, fumbled a cigarette out of my jacket, lit it, and sucked so deeply that I smoked half the cigarette in one breath.
I had to ditch it. The body, not the cigarette. You don’t hand a car smuggler a car with a corpse in the trunk, not even if it’s an SLR. Or all the less if it’s an SLR? I was confused, but I knew the woman had to disappear. It’s not like she was going to do it for me, so it was time for me to come up with a really clever solution for this highly unusual problem, and fast. I took one more deep drag, flicked the butt away, and was just about to get back into the car when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I flinched so much I hit my chin on the top of the car.
“Hey, Pascha, you’re on time. Good job.”
The guy grabbing me and praising me like some lame-ass nursery school teacher was Kevin, and he had a goatee that looked like his girlfriend had painted it onto his jaw with fine eyeliner, and he was always smirking. Maybe he suffered from Bell’s palsy. But in any case I always found him repulsive, especially right now. He held out his palm.
I was gasping for air and howling because I hadn’t just hit my chin but also bitten my tongue, and I was frantically running through my options for making the body in the trunk disappear before Kevin took the ride to Olli. It was no use, my brain was a crashed hard drive, and so, totally exhausted, I just dropped the keys into Kevin’s hand, and he said his buddy could drive me back into town. I stood there motionless in the parking lot for a solid five minutes until I could bring myself to puke the remains of my greasy midnight burger into the bowl of a rest-stop toilet. Then I felt a bit better, and I made my way home.
It would definitely have to be public transit this time, and I thought about what would probably happen next. Kevin had several hundred horsepower under his ass and would crash, and the car would catch fire, rendering both Kevin and the dead woman into fine ash. That was my favorite vision. But there was another. Kevin drove straight to Olli, who glanced into the trunk, got annoyed that I had served him up a mummy on the side that he had not ordered, and immediately dumped the body at the front door to my building. Or he would distribute leaflets with a photo of the dead woman with the words: “Are you looking for this woman? Ask Pascha, Telephone 022…” Most likely, however, was that either Kevin or Olli would discover the body in the trunk, drive down the closest forest road, unload her there, and then sell the car to the East, just as planned. After all, I hadn’t seen any pools of blood or other contaminants in the trunk, so the transaction involving the almost brand-spanking-new SLR could go off without a hitch.
Having arrived at this reassuring thought, I got out of the overcrowded bus and walked the short distance to my favorite gambling joint and slid a few coins into the slots. Slowly I started breathing normally again, although my tongue still hurt like hell when hot coffee with four spoons of sugar flowed over it.
I played for five hours until I didn’t have a cent left. Not just all of my money, including the five hundred smackers out of the SLR, but worse: I owed Mehmet, the guy who runs the gambling joint, for several out-of-pocket loans, so my total debt at the end of the day ran a cool nineteen hundred euros. Not just debt from the slots, but that must already be obvious to you brainiacs. Mehmet was furious because officially he wasn’t allowed to give out loans, and now he’d have to pay up for the loss himself. I kept on telling him about my big job, and I promised I’d bring him the cash as soon as I got my cut. I hoped I would in fact get the dough Olli had promised me. My honeymoon would last forty-eight hours, and then Mehmet would hunt me down. The day had started out crappy, it had a catastrophic climax, and it had now ended in disaster.