Hotel Cartagena Page 8

  ‘What kind of business was that?’

  ‘Oh, that bank, you know. The anarchists. The ones who forced those investment guys to stand naked in the windows.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember.’ Stepanovic uses the moment to bring some calm into play. A little normality and ordinariness. ‘Are the ninja turtles on their way?’

  ‘They’re just getting tooled up, and the armoured squads from Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein are coming too, the senior officers are just getting it sorted.’

  More and more vehicles are arriving outside the hotel, vans, cars, full of police and equipment. And the ambulances with the emergency medics inside them.

  ‘OK,’ says Stepanovic, ‘I’ll let the guys know that I’m here.’

  ‘Oh, don’t they know how lucky they are?’

  ‘Nobody ever knows that, mate.’

  Stepanovic hangs up and shoves the phone back into his coat pocket.

  Maybe he should have stayed with the woman after all. Phone somewhere down in the depths, and him too. Something cracks in his head because it was such a cowardly thought.

  He peels away from the group outside the hotel and walks towards the uniformed officers, a couple of them are already starting to transfer the evacuees into surrounding hotels, restaurants and bars, so that they can get away from here for now, but not right away, you know. They’ll then arrange the witness statements in the various locations.

  Stepanovic holds his right hand out to the incident commander, showing his ID with his left.

  ‘Hello, Ivo Stepanovic from SCO44.’

  The incident commander shakes his hand and narrows his eyes to slits, the better to read the ID.

  ‘Himmelmann,’ he says, ‘Davidwache.’

  ‘I happened to be in the area,’ says Stepanovic.

  Himmelmann looks at him.

  ‘Is that right?’

  He’s clearly not inclined to be fucked around. Stepanovic looks up at the hotel, his eyes stick to the bar on the twentieth floor.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, ‘I was just passing.’

  He offers Himmelmann a cigarette; he shakes his head.

  ‘Thanks, maybe later.’

  Stepanovic pulls out his lighter, but doesn’t light the fag, lets it hang dry from the corner of his mouth.

  Stares up at the bar again.

  ‘SCO44, right?’ asks Himmelmann.

  Stepanovic nods.

  ‘You ought to be in the situation room really.’

  ‘Yes, I ought really,’ says Stepanovic.

  He looks at Himmelmann.

  ‘Just give me something to do, OK? You’re the incident commander.’

  Himmelmann’s eyes turn to slits again, but this time it’s not because he can’t make something out. Quite the reverse.

  ‘Who’s up there, mate?’

  ‘I’ve already told HQ.’

  ‘Who?’

  Stepanovic takes a deep breath, then does light up, and says: ‘Four of our colleagues from the murder squad, a retired cop and a state prosecutor.’

  ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘You said it.’

  Himmelmann looks up to the bar.

  ‘But maybe it’s not such a bad thing.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ says Stepanovic.

  Himmelmann looks at him.

  ‘Someone there who might play the hero at the wrong moment?’

  Stepanovic tilts his head once to the right and once to the left.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet my life that Calabretta wouldn’t.’

  He drags on his cigarette.

  ‘Or me, if it comes to that.’

  ‘Vito Calabretta?’ asks Himmelmann.

  Stepanovic nods.

  ‘Whew,’ says Himmelmann. And again: ‘Whew.’

  ‘He won’t screw up.’

  ‘No, he won’t, no, let’s just not worry about it.’

  He rubs his left hand over his forehead.

  ‘Could I have a smoke after all?’

  Stepanovic pulls out his packet, Himmelmann helps himself to a cigarette, lighter, thanks, don’t mention it: ‘Whew, huh.’

  The two men smoke, the first supply tents are being put up at the crossroads.

  ‘So that’s why you’re staying here, I see.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Stepanovic, ‘absolutely, let’s just not discuss that any further.’

  ‘The negotiators from SCO2 are already on their way,’ says Himmelmann. ‘How about joining them, are you any good at negotiating?’

  Stepanovic shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘I seem to be pretty good at most things.’

  ‘Want to latch on there?’

  ‘With the negotiators?’

  ‘Uh-huh, I can see that working.’

  ‘OK. You’re in charge.’

  ‘I can’t exactly hand that over to you right now.’

  ‘You don’t want to anyway.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Negotiator then,’ says Stepanovic.

  Himmelmann nods and says: ‘Exactly. Negotiator.’

  ‘All right. Then I’ll make myself at home in one of the tents. What are you doing?’

  ‘We’ll be fully set up soon,’ says Himmelmann, ‘first we’ll put the situation on ice and wait for our special-forces colleagues.’

  ‘OK,’ says Stepanovic, ‘OK, OK. We’ll work it out somehow.’

  He slaps Himmelmann on the shoulder, then clears off. It could be ages before there’s anything to negotiate here.

  Curaçao, summer 2001

  They’d been on the island for a year and a half now. Mariacarmen, the thirteen-year-old Arturo and Henning, who now called himself ‘Henk’ and acted like he was Dutch, as did most of the Europeans stranded in the former Dutch colony – they either were Dutch or they acted like they were. Mariacarmen had found a job as a cook in a restaurant on Tugboat Beach, although the ‘restaurant’ was more of a hastily knocked-together wooden shack south of Willemstad than a serious gastronomic hotspot. Arturo spent his days messing about in the water in front of the restaurant, with a view of a rusty, disused refinery, which looked like a cemetery full of floating coffins. Mariacarmen stood in the overheated kitchen and stirred iguana soup and cactus soup, she deep-fried reptiles and she pulled keshi yena out of the oven – baked cheese balls stuffed with meat. Henk sat in a wooden shack behind the official wooden shack, polishing the dodgy Dutch he’d picked up on the fly; sometimes he played a bit of guitar or nailed fallen boards back up, painting them over in bright colours. Curaçao seemed to him like a heap of glaring colours, which was just trying, in all its insistent vibrancy, to cover over the underlying rottenness.

  Henk had grasped relatively quickly that they weren’t the only ones on this island who needed to hide from someone and who had one main aim: not to attract attention. If he did end up attracting anyone’s attention, he’d be screwed. There were various connections between the island and the Venezuelan mainland, and there were superannuated Colombian gangsters hanging around on every corner.

  If he attracted anyone’s attention, it’d only be a matter of time till they got him.

  Whoever.

  The cartel.

  The DEA.

  The Colombian narcotics police.

  In summary, the prospects were shit all round.

  Henk spent most of his time in this makeshift shack that, in a broken kind of way, they lived in.

  Then in October, the time came. For a moment, it was almost good that the waiting was over, but only for a fraction of a second, and then everything fell apart, then everything was shredded and devoured.

  The cartel had sent two hitmen.

  Henk, Mariacarmen and Arturo were in the miserable wooden shack that was hung with a few colourful scarves, still lying on the large mattress they shared, when the door burst open. Henk had to kneel down, Mariacarmen and Arturo were jammed into a corner. The muzzle of a pistol was pointed at Henk’s head, but when the hitman pulled the trigger, he only heard a click. At the same moment, the secon
d hitman shot first Henk’s wife and then his child.

  After maybe a minute and a half the two men had gone again.

  Henk spent another hour lying beside his dead family, possibly another two or three or four, he lay on top of them and wept for them, he kissed them, he begged for forgiveness, but he knew that there would be no forgiveness, because his world no longer existed.

  Nothing held anymore, the safety catch had been taken right off everything. When the day, and its backstabbing warmth, came stumbling round the corner, Henk stood up, walked into the sea, swam out and waited for sharks.

  MY HAND IN THE VODKA

  Displacement activity: I ask myself which of the hostage-takers I’d sleep with.

  The two guys guarding the entrance: no. Neither good-looking nor exciting. And one of them is a head shorter than me and looks unappealingly rectangular and obedient to authority.

  The one guarding the drinks cabinet: no. There’s a vicious twist to his mouth.

  Of the eight men guarding us, I find one fairly attractive, he’s got reddish hair, wise eyes and moves in a gangly, sauntering way, as if he isn’t quite sure what he’s doing here. I call him ‘Red’ and make a mental note for some future point, if we ever get out of here. Think about just asking him for his number over the course of the night. I mean: we’ve got nothing else to do, so we might as well occupy ourselves with each other.

  Inceman looks at me and gets what I’m doing, I look him briefly in the eye and hastily away again. I take a swig of the vodka, then I put my hand back in the glass. I’d sleep with Number One like a shot, but that’s been obvious from the start.

  The two suits in the right-hand corner start whispering quietly and altogether it seems to me like the light here’s just been turned down. I try to make myself comfortable with my thumb in the alcohol and, because I’m not particularly good at comfiness and such things, I look at Faller – his mere presence can be a great help in such an undertaking. He smiles back, not necessarily knowing but still having an idea.

  His eyes seem to have got darker over the last hour.

  ‘Congratulations on the party, old man,’ I say, ‘who’d have thought there’d be such emotional fireworks, eh?’

  He raises his glass, I raise mine, but first I take my thumb out, then we clink.

  ‘Had it planned out way in advance,’ he says.

  ‘I knew it,’ says Rocco quietly, and Carla says: ‘Could you get us a couple of drinks now too, yeah?’

  Rocco nods, gives her a kiss on the brow, stands up and walks to the bar. Turns back to the table quickly and looks round the circle.

  ‘Anyone else for a drink?’

  The table raises its hands as one, and Klatsche says: ‘Fourteen beers, please.’

  I’m not sure, but I reckon the psychological fog up here is getting thicker and thicker, even the hostage-takers’ faces have taken on that typical tarnished bar-sheen. The only ones who look like they’ve still got pretty good visibility are the barwoman and the technician.

  HIS HEAD IN THE CIRCULAR SAW

  Stepanovic is sitting in one of the supply tents, he’s got his hands on his knees, contemplating the tent walls from the inside and trying not to smoke.

  He knows that he’ll smoke enough over the course of this night, and maybe tomorrow too, and the night after that and the day after tomorrow as well.

  It could drag on for days.

  As long as the guys up there don’t start shooting hostages, incident command is in no hurry. Just change shifts every eight hours, apart from the negotiators, who stay permanently in play: that’s at least one reason why this might not be such a bad position. Himmelmann thinks he’s pushed him out with this negotiator thing. Stepanovic knows that he’s been pushed in as deep as it gets.

  He’ll stay here, whatever happens.

  He’ll stick as close to her as possible, he’ll keep watch here on the street, he won’t abandon her, and maybe he’ll even get himself up there somehow, because of course that’s the goal.

  But that doesn’t concern anyone in this dive.

  The thought that someone could hurt her without him being there to protect her feels as though his head’s got caught up in a circular saw.

  Someone comes in and puts thermos jugs of coffee and tea on a folding table.

  Curaçao, winter 2001

  Henk couldn’t have said how long he drifted in the water.

  A couple of hours.

  A couple of days.

  All he could say was: the sharks hadn’t come, they’d left him alone.

  Instead, Emeric found him, level with his diving station in Westpunt. The current had simply carried Henk northwards and then back to the coast.

  Emeric had fled to Curaçao thirty years earlier.

  He’d grown up in St Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast, where he’d worked as a fisherman, like his father and his grandfather, and presumably every other man in his family before him. He’d sat on the beach in a wooden hut on stilts, day in, day out, and thrown nets out, hauled nets in, mended nets.

  Until the day when his five-year-old son was caught by a wave, a few hundred yards southwards, and dashed against the rocks.

  Emeric had been sitting on the beach, smoking, it had happened so quickly, he still had the cigarette in his hand when suddenly his son was lying there.

  His son’s death had been like a sudden ambush, as if someone with a machine gun had come along and riddled him with holes.

  His wife had left him only a few days later, and Emeric had forgotten who he wanted to be.

  So he’d climbed aboard a container ship and sailed away, he’d gone ashore somewhere in the Caribbean and then, like so many people, landed up on Curaçao. By then he was sixty and didn’t yet suspect there was a spot on his pancreas preparing for a war within his body.

  The diving station at the northern end of the island worked out well, more and more tourists with more and more money came every year and booked in with him, and he was precisely as content as a man can be when he’s lost his child: things kind of went on somehow.

  At least he got up every day, to dive.

  When he saw Henk floating in the sea, he saw a not-quite-so-young man, who was about the age his son would have been by now.

  He’d have pulled him out either way but, in this case, he had the feeling that he was fishing one last task out of the water.

  Henk wasn’t unconscious, just in a kind of zombie mode. He looked at Emeric as they both lay gasping on the beach and Emeric, who could read in Henk’s eyes that the water hadn’t been an accident, thought: well, let’s see about that, dying and so on.

  He brought him to his house, dried him off, gave him something to drink and to eat and to do.

  It took twelve months until Henk wasn’t suicidal every hour of the day. During this first year with Emeric, he thought constantly about dying but just didn’t have the strength to do it. But all the same, being alive would have been different, being alive would have meant feeling the sun on his skin, the warm wind, the sand under his feet. Being alive would have meant being hungry and thirsty, being different people in his sleep and when wakeful. But Henk was like a blank LP, where the needle ran in its groove, yet didn’t make a sound.

  Sometimes he suspected that he might actually have become a zombie.

  And despite this, the old diver seemed to love him with an unconditionality that Henk had previously only felt from Arturo. This meant that he didn’t actually want to feel it, love had become an emotion that seemed to be strewn with a thousand landmines, he couldn’t even begin to go there, to that emotion, and what even were emotions anyway, dammit. But Emeric’s constant being-with-him meant that he didn’t stop breathing at least.

  Yet Emeric was ageing at such a rate that now and then Henk came to suspect him of wanting to vanish as fast as possible. Days came when he was so weak that he stayed lying in bed and left the work and the clients to Henk. Henk suspected that Emeric was in pain but didn’t ask about it, partly be
cause he knew that he wouldn’t get an honest answer.

  At some point, Emeric’s face began to fall apart and fall in at the same time, now he looked like the sharks that Henk had waited for years back and in the end the penny finally dropped. Emeric had been the shark he’d needed.

  One morning, when Henk got up, Emeric was no longer there. And one of the two boats had gone.

  On the kitchen table, in a large envelope, was a will. When Emeric had realised how ill he was, he’d gone to see a notary in Willemstad, deposited a second will there, and left Henk the diving station.

  In the envelope, Henk found a handwritten note:

  My friend, I’m ill but nobody’s getting me into a hospital, let the Atlantic get me, that’s where I belong. And now, you arsehole, you’ve got a job to do, like I had one in you. Make something of it.

  Henk found himself smiling when he read that, for the first time in a very long time; he’d actually given up smiling after his life was blown sky high in Cartagena. He waited to see if he’d find himself crying too, but that didn’t happen till weeks later, when he was sitting by the campfire at night, telling a genuinely friendly couple from Utrecht, who’d come for the diving, about his friend Emeric.

  The woman loved it so much she almost freaked out – a man who can cry, good grief.

  ‘If only you knew,’ said Henk, blubbing the rest of the night away.

  The next morning it seemed to him that something had flowed out of him, a poisonous snake, or something. He could breathe differently again, more deeply, more consciously, more strongly. He cautiously allowed the air into his system. He knew that he had to draw a line.

  He was forty now.

  ‘I’m starting again,’ he said aloud, and let a deep draught of the unfamiliar air into his lungs.

  So Henk started again, with all his former yearning for adventure now transformed into an entrepreneurial spirit. He invested in the diving station; within a few years, the diving station developed into a small, but very smart, luxury diving resort; the guests, who came from Europe and the USA, got ever more exclusive, sometimes so exclusive that they made Henk sick, but he was set on getting something on its feet, and there was nothing left, either externally or internally, to link him to the Henning who’d been hunted by so many people. He no longer felt a single inner spark of fear of being busted, either by the DEA or by anyone else.