Kismet (17 page)

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?’

‘Sure. Sounds real good. How about your gun?’

‘But I said I want to negotiate.’

‘Sure, shear your carpet and all that, but.’

‘If you agree to my proposition, I’ll throw my pistol down outside the front door – call it the first step in negotiations. Then I could only run away from you. How’s that for an offer?’

‘Not bad! Go on, then!’

There was such outrageous amusement in his voice that it wasn’t hard to imagine them splitting their sides with laughter. Just so long as they didn’t jump out of the window …

‘OK!’ I raised my hand with the pistol in it above the roof of the car, and still it wasn’t shot away at once. ‘I trust you!’

‘Sure thing, Krap! Trust means a whole lot!’

I straightened up, levelling the empty pistol, and we looked into each other’s eyes across the car and a few metres of muddy forecourt. They were both making the grim faces of people who are trying not to fall about laughing at a funeral.

I pointed my pistol at the swing door and smiled with restraint. ‘See you, then. Nice and peaceful, right?’

They nodded, and their eyes looked down at me, sparkling with anticipation of a wonderful bloodbath. If only they came to the door …

I swung my arm back a little way and threw the pistol down on the mud between the Mercedes and the entrance. Then I looked back at the window, and my blood was roaring in my ears. They were still there, looking back. For a moment I thought it was all over. They were young, fast and strong, and presumably had enough ammunition to turn me into something like my jacket ten times over. I felt old and fat, and I had nothing.

We stood there like that for two or three seconds, and if they’d simply climbed out on the window sill and jumped down, I probably wouldn’t even have tried to run for it. The attempt would have been plain ridiculous. But suddenly, as if years later, one of the two made a brief gesture in my direction, grinned again as if he couldn’t understand such stupidity, and next moment they had both disappeared from the window frame.

Ten metres, three to four seconds. Less if they ran. I flung myself behind the wheel of the car, turned the key in the ignition, and shifted the automatic gear-change to Drive. When the engine came on so did the stereo system, with Janet Jackson belting a song out from six or eight loudspeakers. Once I saw the shaved heads appear in the
corridor behind the glass of the swing doors, I stepped on the gas. The car leaped, and our lads opened their mouths wide. Of course they hadn’t put their pistols away, but before they could raise them to the right height the Mercedes was crashing through the door. All they could do was retreat, fast. So far everything was going smoothly. Only the walls of the corridor appeared to be a problem for a split second. About three metres beyond the swing door they narrowed, and the car wouldn’t really fit between them any more. But the walls were plaster, the Mercedes was a Mercedes, and I had no choice anyway. As I drove the car down the corridor with a grating sound, chasing our lads before me, plaster panels and polystyrene linings were scraped off to left and right. Meanwhile Janet Jackson was singing, ‘Whoops now’, and as far as I was concerned we could have gone on like this indefinitely. Once or twice the pair of them swerved towards doors on both sides of the corridor, but in the kind of hostel where the dilapidated chairs were screwed to the floor of course nothing was left unlocked. As a bonus, they dropped their pistols when they grabbed at the door handles.

The corridor of the former youth hostel ran all the way through the building. It was seventy or eighty metres long, and it ended in a blank wall. The last possible way out was the door of the secretarial office. Our lads didn’t know where the corridor came to an end, and because of the poor lighting they couldn’t see it in time. When they realised what was waiting for them, it was too late for the secretarial office door. There were about ten metres of empty space left before they literally started climbing the walls. They dug their fingernails into the plaster and hopped up and down. After I’d passed the office door
myself, I trod on the brake and managed to get the front bumper to a distance of about 0.0 millimetres from their legs. I just had time to see them failing to free themselves from the trap before a cloud of plaster dust fell on us. I took the key out of the ignition, leaned back in the driver’s seat and kicked the windscreen out. A moment later, when I was standing on the bonnet of the car and the dust was settling, I saw the horrified Frau Schmidtbauer looking out over what had once been the wall of her office, but was now lying in the corridor.

‘Hi!’ I called wittily, and waved to her. ‘I did tell you not to summon reinforcements.’

She looked at me, shook her head as if to dispel a hallucination, and disappeared behind the heap of rubble. The sound of cries and running footsteps came from the stairwell. I turned to the lads. Covered with white dust, shoulders stooped, faces distorted by fear, they looked up at me as if I were some barbarian king famous for cutting off his prisoners’ ears.

‘Well, lads? Good show, eh?’

They didn’t reply. Only now did I notice that it probably wasn’t just fear distorting their faces. A distance of 0.0 millimetres between the bumper and their legs had been a fair estimate, but in fact it was a few centimetres less. Those legs had an unusual bend in them, and they were standing so still that every movement must be extremely painful. My friend who liked counting his victims seemed to be in a particularly bad way. Though that could also have been because one of the Evangelical posters had caught on his jacket, and with the declaration
I’m all for multi-ethnicity!
all over his chest he looked as if a few kids from a Rudolf Steiner school had been playing
a Nazi practical joke on him.

I threw them the car key. ‘Park it somewhere else. I don’t think this is a great place for it.’ I winked at them. ‘Fun and games with Krap.’ Then I tapped my forehead by way of goodbye, turned, climbed over the roof of the car and jumped down on the floor. Gregor was sitting on a chair in the secretary’s office, legs up on the desk and a puddle of blood under him, and behind him Frau Schmidtbauer was phoning. He was very pale in the face, but otherwise looked in pretty good shape, considering. It was probably because of my muddy, dusty appearance that, as I passed, we looked at each other like two people trying to work out where they’d met before. A few metres further on, the first baffled hostel inmates came towards me, looking curiously around them. They were soon followed by a man in a suit, sweating heavily, gasping hysterically and now and then exclaiming things like, ‘No!’ ‘Heavens!’ ‘Catastrophic!’ Probably the hostel manager. When he grabbed my sleeve and asked, panting for breath, what all this was about, I shrugged. ‘No idea. I’m the electrician, but to be honest the openings in the walls are a bit too big now for me to do any rewiring.’

‘Openings in the walls …?’

‘Mmph. If you want the wiring to go under the plaster, that is. I’d rather have rewired over the plaster anyway. A bit of paint on it and hardly anyone would notice. Would have come a lot cheaper too.’

‘Cheaper!’ he uttered, with his eyes popping. Then he let go of my arm and hurried on.

Leila was waiting where the swing door had once been. She was wearing an expensive-looking dark brown fur jacket, green wool tights and walking boots. Two leather
suitcases stood on the floor beside her.

‘What happen?’ she asked, half anxious, half reproachful as her eyes moved over my dirty figure.

‘We found it hard to say goodbye.’ I picked up her cases and nodded at the forecourt. ‘Let’s get out of here. And pick those pistols up.’ Then we splashed through the mud and puddles to my Opel, and she contented herself with looking back two or three times at the entrance. Perhaps, apart from one of the cases in which it seemed possible that she might be carrying lead piping, she wasn’t such a bad client after all.

We were sitting in the car on the way to the Ostend district and my office. As my private address and my private phone number weren’t in any public directory, or available online either, I assumed that if Ahrens had wanted to send me any warnings, threats or offers I’d find them at the office. After our meeting and my performance at the Adria Grill, which would certainly have been reported to him, I thought it was out of the question that he’d simply let me carry on in the same way. Now at the very latest, after extensive phone conversations with Frau Schmidtbauer, he must react somehow. I suspected he’d try bribing me and thus get his chance to finish me off.

‘… my father is Croat, my mother is Srbkinja. I am born in Bosnia. My father is worker in engineering works, is not soldier. And when the war begin he is against it. He talks big: better dead than leave mother Serbia. Always talks big. So he imprisoned in Croatia or Bosnia, somewhere. My mother says, always say you Bosanka, never Srbkinja. Bosanka is like hostel manager’s poor old dachshund. All people say: aah, that poor old dachshund. Srbkinja is like hostel manager’s wife.’