Hotel Cartagena Read online

  In the end though, they got hung up on the guys who always had cash in their pockets and scooters under their arses, preppies with their expensive jackets.

  And if they did get hung up on him for once, then suddenly he’d be the idiot who didn’t know quite where to go next or whatever. He’d ended up with one behind the wall on the other side of the old Elbe tunnel, he’d had sex with her in the brown grass, it had been very quick and pretty senseless.

  He couldn’t shake off the feeling that there just had to be more in there.

  The only people Henning found less than completely dumb were the autonomists. The colourful people who occupied blocks on Hafenstrasse and sat at the bar in the Onkel Otto at night and actually worked for a better world rather than a worse one. You have to really have guts for something like that, really want to change something, to risk something for it, jail and fights and fire. He’d have liked to move in with them, in one of the dilapidated old flats without power and heating and hot water, he’d have liked to support them in their fight for a future for their buildings and for all people.

  But he felt horribly small in their presence, and so horribly thick.

  They might be dirty and odd-looking but they were worlds brighter than him, they’d read books, they knew what they were talking about, and in great depth. Henning just didn’t dare approach people like that and he meant every word of that thought. He left it at sitting in the Onkel Otto now and then, listening to them and dreaming of one day being as cool and determined as they were.

  In the end, it was always the evenings in the Grünspan, the concerts, the music, that saved him from the days. The evenings in the Grünspan helped him through wiping tables in the pub and they helped him through the twilight at home with his mum’s frayed, boisterous soul. After the concerts, after the guitars, which pumped his heart full of good things, he generally walked to the port and waited for dawn. Then the light came, the cranes stabbed hard and clear into the sky, the gulls flew after the ships, on the search for edible rubbish, and that made him feel very close to them.

  During those hours by the water, something grabbed hold of him, gripped him, took him by the chest, tugged at it, pulled him towards the sea.

  As the summer drew slowly to a close and autumn came, the yearning for another life had grown so huge that he could no longer swallow it back down.

  One morning in September – a storm was blowing up from the west – he nipped home, packed his second pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, pants and a jumper into a sports bag and ran back to the harbour. He looked for a ship, found one to South America and signed on. Working your passage, a simple principle: work for us in return for a bunk. If you see a port you like the look of on the voyage, you just disembark. Or you stay and stay and stay and end up a sailor.

  Henning didn’t want to be a sailor.

  He just wanted to be something other than what he was.

  He stood on deck as the ship sailed, he cast one last glance back at Hamburg, at St Pauli, at Altona, at Blankenese, at the coming storm. Just after Wedel, he headed for the galley and got on with the first job the cook happened to give him.

  A fortnight later, Henning disembarked in Cartagena. Colombia. The ship’s cook had given him a hundred dollars to get started with because he liked him, because Henning had done a good job and because he didn’t want the boy to go under right at the start.

  ‘Get yourself a room, get some shut-eye, find a job,’ he’d said.

  It wasn’t far from the container port to the old town; Henning walked. Halfway there, he found a room in a boarding house at the little Plazuela del Pozo. The room was on the first floor, it had a kind of half-balcony and shutters on the windows. The woman who owned the guesthouse looked ninety but that might just have been because she didn’t have any teeth. On the crossing, Henning had learnt a few scraps of Spanish from a Chilean sailor, not much, but because the old woman was generous to a fault when dealing with foreigners, it was enough to discuss the most important things.

  Where did the young people meet here?

  At the beach.

  Where could he find work?

  At the beach.

  Where was a cheap place to eat?

  At the beach.

  What should he watch out for, dangers and that?

  The action at the beach.

  Henning got some shut-eye and the next morning he went to Bocagrande Beach. The beach looked like it had dropped out of one of those cool American films. Sand and palm trees against a skyline, and music everywhere. For the first time in his life, Henning felt big enough to bear the tininess that a life like that means. As if the thing he’d always dreamt of had finally arrived within him. As if someone had thrown open a window and let it in. Whatever it was.

  He undressed and hung around in the water in his boxers till a salt crust formed on his lips. In the evening, the hunger came. He’d not eaten all day, a bit because he’d forgotten, a bit to save money.

  A few guys his age were sitting under a palm tree.

  They were laughing and drinking beer from little bottles, a couple of them had guitars with them and were kind of strumming on them. In the middle of them was a barbecue, and on the barbecue were fish.

  The guys looked nicer than any other group of guys he’d ever seen.

  Henning plucked up his courage, he had nothing to lose.

  ‘Hola,’ he said.

  ‘Hola, gringo,’ said the tallest of them, standing up; he wasn’t even five-foot-six. Henning made himself a little smaller so the guy wouldn’t have to look up at him so uncomfortably.

  Guys don’t like that, he knew.

  The other man noticed what Henning was doing and smiled.

  Then he said something in Spanish that Henning didn’t understand. Henning said ‘Hola,’ again, grinned his best Steve McQueen grin and shrugged.

  Then everyone laughed and made room for him and offered him a beer and some fish. Several hours passed like that. Beer, fish, beer, fish. By the time the sky slipped into the sea, Henning had, for the first time in his life, found a gang that wasn’t totally dumb, but just as dumb as it needed to be at that age.

  Miguel and the others came to the beach every day, all at different times, but there was always one of them there.

  Henning learnt to surf and to play the guitar, he kept learning Spanish, and he got a job in a beach bar belonging to Miguel’s Uncle José. At first, he was just wiping tables again and washing the dishes, and everyone made wisecracks about him because he, the German guy, was so thorough, but he didn’t care. He was now living in a country where the sun always shone, he was earning a little money, he went swimming whenever he wanted, and there were absolutely crazy nights, but more of that later.

  When Henning’s Spanish improved, he was allowed to help out in service now and then, and after four months he had a proper job as a waiter. Uncle José, as everyone called him even though he didn’t look at all uncle-like but more like Al Pacino, let him live in the apartment over the bar, for a song. One condition: if Uncle José needed the room, he was to piss off. Uncle José was married and had four children, but he always said he wasn’t that type of man, and he just needed a bit of a change now and then, and basically it was fine by Henning because then he practically had to stroll through the bars in the old town because that was the very best place to disappear, even for a gringo. He then always followed the same plan, the same paths, he walked along the beach to the Plaza Santa Teresa, where he had a beer or two and watched the girls who looked even more beautiful by the yellow light of the old lanterns than they did in daylight on the beach. Although they had less on in the daytime. But Henning was the type who liked the light of old lanterns and the way it put a spell on the girls’ faces. From the Plaza Santa Teresa, he’d head for Plaza Santo Domingo, where there was a cocktail bar he liked, except that he paid so little attention to the route that he often just got lost somewhere, but in a nice way: he walked this way and that, and with an open soul, through t
he streets of the old town. Music came crawling out of every crack, the lanterns grew more beautiful from one corner to the next, the light grew warmer from one corner to the next, and the flowers hanging from the balconies grew more colourful from one house to the next, and at some point he’d always land up on the other side of the Parque Del Centenario, in the Café Havana. There he’d dance all night with women who seemed to him like goddesses cast adrift.

  For his part, things could have gone on like that forever.

  But at the end of his second year in Cartagena, Uncle José took him aside one evening. Henning had just finished his shift in the bar and was cashing up.

  ‘Listen,’ said José, ‘about Germany.’

  Henning stopped sorting the notes and looked at him.

  ‘There’s someone who’d like to make you an offer.’

  HAS SHE GONE TO BED NOW OR WHAT

  Stepanovic is sitting in the Mercedes, smoking. He’d drunk a glass of wine with the woman, but hadn’t stayed for something to eat; and although he really would’ve fancied the dessert that was possibly on offer and that they were possibly both thinking about, it would still have been a bit sleazy. It really would’ve been on the cards, he’d noticed that, the woman was just as lonely as him. He’d only needed to look her in the eyes once for those yawning chasms to split the ground under his feet, the depths he knew so well and which attracted him like nothing else.

  Her eyes were saying: now this’ll sting a bit, but in a good way.

  She didn’t even bother asking what he wanted when he stood in her doorway.

  She asked him in.

  She poured the wine.

  Then they sat at her kitchen table, he talked a bit of nonsense about investigations in the area, and when she stood up to fetch her cigarettes, he could’ve just walked after her, boom, quick left-right-combo into the bedroom.

  She was sexy, she looked strong and like someone with a clue about life, perhaps it wouldn’t even have fazed her just to tumble into bed with this stranger and then to lose him again, and/or to chuck him out on his ear. It had been Stepanovic who hadn’t been strong enough, it had been his fault, it had been his fault yet again that something hadn’t worked out.

  But it was the season too.

  November.

  Darkness.

  Difficult month for someone who’s afraid of the dark.

  He’d probably have felt safe with that woman in his arms, but having to beat it afterwards, oh God, that would’ve been a catastrophe. He only slept with women if he could be sure that he’d stay overnight with them. He basically only ever slept with women to be allowed to stay with them afterwards. It was never about the sex. It was about the night that he had to get through.

  Now his main job is to go to this party. He’s promised Faller, and he’s told Riley that he’ll come, so he bloody well will pop in, for a bit at least. He’ll wish him a regulation happy birthday, drink a beer or two, keep away from Bülent Inceman and that other guy too, the one Calabretta had said would be there, and finally he’ll keep away from Riley, and then he’ll just leave again.

  That could work.

  He tosses his cigarette butt through the open window, it sizzles as it lands in the little puddle outside the car. He gives one last look up to the flat belonging to the woman with the bare shoulders. The windows are dark.

  Has she gone to bed now or what, but then the main door opens, oh, look at that.

  She’s wearing a thick jacket and a thick scarf and is heading off somewhere.

  The light of the streetlamps brushes her face, there’s a twist in Stepanovic’s belly, he finds her far more beautiful now than he did earlier at her kitchen table.

  He’s already got his hand on the door handle, he could get out quickly and follow her and then say: ‘Hey, there’s a thing, fancy that, I was just heading to the pub too, just gone off duty.’ But then he gives himself a bollocking: Ivo, stop it now, he takes his hand away from the door again, lights the next cigarette, lets in the clutch and turns the key in the ignition.

  ANY MORE THAN TWO HOSTAGES AND THINGS GET MUDDLED

  There are twelve of them in total. They’re wearing dark suits; they just pulled the guns out from under their jackets. Uzis, short pump guns, sawn-off shotguns, .45 Colts. All kinds of shit that makes quite an impression. The shots went into the ceiling, nobody got hurt, but in a way we still did of course.

  Nobody moves.

  As if our blood has been siphoned off.

  They’ve herded us into the farthest corner of the bar and promptly rounded up the phones, the whole operation took less than two minutes.

  A man is standing at the bar, holding his Uzi to a barman’s head, the barman is to phone reception.

  He says there was a short circuit, yeah yeah exactly, something made a hell of a bang, he guesses the lights shorted, at any rate it’s pitch-black up here, any chance the technician could pop up ASAP? Yes? He’s coming? OK, thanks.

  The barman hangs up, the bar phone’s taken off him. The batteries are taken out of the phone. Now it’s dead.

  I take a closer look at the guys in the dark suits. They look neither nervous nor particularly tense, they seem pretty sure of their business. Pros, the lot of them. Not necessarily all pros at hostage situations – those are pretty rare after all – but they’re probably all very experienced at their specific jobs, and it looks as though the whole lot of those jobs involve a gun in the hand. They carry their guns like women carry handbags.

  The guy who seems to be directing the rest of the team, I’ll call him Number One from now on, has his finger on his lips as he looks at us. He has hair cropped to a millimetre and a weathered face, but it’s hard to say exactly what tanned his features like that, the sun, the sea, the wind, or the slaps in the face dished out by life. Could’ve been all of them. He looks like an extinguished lighthouse. Dark and abandoned, and also slightly cold, but you can imagine what it was like when the light was still burning.

  And I can immediately see all that there used to be.

  Spirit of adventure.

  Courage.

  Yearning.

  Piracy.

  A whole Department for Passion.

  And the courage is still showing through.

  Oh boy.

  If only we’d met in different circumstances: any except these ones here would be fine by me.

  ‘Nothing will happen to anybody so long as you stay calm,’ he says and smiles in a way that could really make you think: oh, he’s such a nice guy, you know.

  If he didn’t have a .45 sticking out of his waistband.

  ‘And nobody plays the hero, OK?’

  I see Calabretta from the corner of my eye and register the way his jaw muscles tense, the way the entire man is unbending around the shoulders, and I think: that goes for you too, my friend. Nobody. Plays. The. Hero. I saw him hand over his phone. One phone. But he always has a second one stuck into his ankle boot and, sometimes, on very Italian days, stuck down there next to the phone, there’s a knife.

  I don’t know what exactly I ought to hope for right now.

  Faller seems to be feeling similar, I can see it in his eyes, and the forceful way they’re resting on his successor. He knows just as well as I do that Calabretta is the one in our circle most likely to get the idea that he wants to bust everyone out of here. And if he manages to exchange three, four looks along those lines with Klatsche, he’ll join in right away. So that settles the allocation of tasks: Faller keeps Calabretta in check and I do the same for my former partner, the man I was not together with for ten years and who is now a bit too close to Calabretta for my liking. But if he were closer to me, that would be kind of problematic too.

  The rest of our little family party has itself pretty well in check. The other serving police officers – Schulle, Brückner, Stanislawski – are vigilance incarnate, but unobtrusively, i.e. just the way good coppers should be. Inceman is keeping out of all the little groups forming. He’s standing right back in
the corner, leaning on the glass outside wall, as if he were standing on the edge of a fairground ride at a carnival, perhaps the dodgems. Rocco and Carla look around in confusion and hold hands and probably haven’t even grasped what’s going on here, just like the rest of the clientele.

  Nobody utters a sound.

  Except the cut on my left thumb, which takes the floor with a sudden burning, but it’ll shut its trap too, and if it doesn’t, I’ll just tell it to.

  Two guys are standing at the entrance, securing the bar against anything that might come from outside.

  Not much will come.

  There are a lot of us, thirty, forty people maybe. Five hostages would easily be enough to stop the police getting involved; come off it, any more than two hostages and things get muddled. You start by freezing situations like this until the hostage-takers speak up and make something like demands.

  And so we stand there, shaped into a kind of human ball, eight of them have formed a semi-circle around us and trained their weapons on us, and essentially we’re all waiting for the technician.

  It’s Tuesday evening, just before eight.

  Cartagena, early 1987