The Snowman (19 page)

“I could have told you so myself, Inspector.”

“Lock your room in future. Frankfurt isn't Charlottenburg.”

“I hear you, Inspector,” said Blum, laying the Berlin accent on thick.

But when the door was closed it was a full minute before he was in any position to kneel down in front of the bedside table and put out his hand. The key was still there, hair and all, untouched. His heart leaped up. He had to steady his hand to light himself a cigarette, but then he was his old self again. Let them steal radios, he thought. Some never learn their trade.

The air was always sultry on level B, even at night, even this night in March. Blum spent half an hour taking soundings. Once you'd been in a
razzia
, you always expect a
razzia
. Under the main police station it did seem to be over, since there was no one around but a few U-Bahn travellers hurrying along the passages, past the boutiques, the pharmacists', the toilets and the dark corners where drunks usually lay in the dirt among their bottles, watching the criminals combing their hair before showing pensioners and nursery school teachers what the underprivileged had on their minds. But today everything was empty down here, and the area with the luggage lockers lay in a ghostly calm. The one human being in sight, a young man in a ski anorak, was studying the pop concert posters outside a cultural sales booth. All was empty even outside the toilets. Blum would have liked to turn back, but he did not intend to spend the night in Frankfurt with 100 grams of coke in his blazer pocket. And he had to feed more money into the luggage locker. He had left the hotel immediately after the police.

“
My plane leaves in three-quarters of an hour
.”

“
Your plane? At this time of night
?”

“
It's a private plane. They're allowed to fly at night
.”

“
Fancy that. May I ask where you're going
?”

“
Vienna
.”

“
Ah, the beautiful blue Danube. How nice. That'll be
345.80, Herr Blum, VAT included. We must put tonight on the bill, of course
.”

“
And stamp it, would you? You know what the taxman's like
.”

First he had thrown them off the scent. After a few miles by taxi towards the airport he told the driver he had to look in on his sick aunt who lived in Neu-Isenburg, next exit. The man must surely have thought he was a terrorist, but in ten minutes' time they had reached Neu-Isenburg, and from there he took two more taxis back to the city centre. Expensive, but if you wanted to survive and get anything out of the operation it was no good penny-pinching for the wrong purposes. The man in the ski anorak pushed off. In his place, two drunks came carefully down the stairs. One was carrying the plastic bag with their bottles, the other was smoking a cheroot. A picture of peace. Blum went off to the luggage lockers.

But there were people there now. They had gathered at the back of the place, anyone who had nowhere else to go. A bottle was being passed round, a girl who couldn't be more than twelve was painting her lips, a Turkish lad with a scarred face was playing cards with a mixed-race boy who must be well under age too. About ten of them in all. The level-B kindergarten. They were not happy about Blum. He knew they didn't take their eyes off him. He opened the locker and turned his back to them. He was just stowing the bag of coke in the travelling bag and putting it in with the sample case when a cough made him jump. It was the girl. Her bold, cherry-red mouth was twisted into a malicious grin.

“Got a fag?”

She was beside him, peering into the locker. He put the bag inside and closed the door. Then he held out the packet of HBs. She took two.

“Looking for business?”

“What did you say?”

“You heard. I'll do it for twenty. I've got a great ass.”

“For heaven's sake, child, get out before I—”

“Before you what? Before you get out your ID. You're a cop, right?”

Finally he had the 1.50 marks ready and fed them into the slot. Then he turned the key and took it out of the lock. The girl followed his movements, hungry-eyed.

“Push off, sparrow.”

“Push off yourself, asshole.”

Now the boys were surrounding him too. The mixed-race kid put out his hand.

“Give me a mark.”

For the church, mister
. But this bunch looked a good deal more dangerous.

“Me too.”

“Me too.”

“And me.”

The Turkish boy summed up. “Give us ten marks and it'll be okay.”

“Why should I give you ten marks? You must be out of your minds.”

“He said he'd fuck me in the ass,” said the red-lipped decoy.

“You better give us twenty, then,” said the mixed-race boy.

For a moment Blum thought he had lost his reason. Too much coke. He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them. He was still standing in front of the lockers, with the children crowding close.

“Hey, old man, you not well?”

“Looks like he'd fall over any minute.”

“I guess he had too much Omo in the stuff.”

“Now let me tell you—”

“Talks like a cop, but he ain't.”

“Hand over the bread, Grandpa, or something nasty might happen.”

The drunks were standing silent by a pillar, watching the scene. Blum shook himself. He had dealt with the others. If only this haziness would clear from his brain . . . He tackled the Turk.

“What does your Dad think of you hanging around here, Mustafa?”

The Turk cast him a scornful glance. Then the mixed-race kid joined in, tugging Blum's sleeve.

“Don't try that on, old man. We know what you're doing here.”

Blum slapped him down, hard. The others caught the mixed-race kid, and then the Turkish boy had a knife in his hand. Blum hit out, and it fell to the ground with a clatter.

“You've got a hell of a lot to learn before you know anything,” he said, but he didn't hang around to teach them. A retreat to familiar territory. You didn't mix it with a horde of precocious teenagers if you had a luggage locker full of coke. The drunks stood where they were, open-mouthed, and forgot their thirst for a moment. Blum waved to them, but they didn't wave back. They had to stick it out even longer on level B. It was cold and rainy up above. Germany was only for those who knew their way around. Blum considered himself one of them, but these young toughs had almost got the better of him. In any place like Calcutta you'd have shown them, he thought, but once they start speaking German you're finished. He went into the nearest snack bar, ordered coffee and a bitters, and took a pinch of coke in the Gents. This was a fine start to the night.

He would have liked to plunge into the commotion of the big city, but Frankfurt was more of a boggy
pond; all the flowers grew from the same plant, all the dragonflies danced above the same water. He didn't fancy spending his money on a whorehouse. He needed a place for the night, somewhere to stay during the hours when everything was still in the balance. And since the others knew that too it might be better just to let himself drift. He began drifting.

In the next bar they greeted him as if he belonged there, and a man in dungarees asked if he had another two grams.

“Two grams of what?” asked Blum, frowning, pokerfaced.

“What do you think, man? Coke, of course.”

“Coke? You mean fuel for your stove?”

“Hey, don't you remember me? I'm Detlev.”

“Oh, the anti-nuclear protester. I get it now. Coke instead of nuclear power. Coke power: nuclear coke. Do you build your own nucleus – biologically or with cellophane? I recommend shaving foam. Guaranteed sterile.”

Detlev looked at him in horror and retreated. “Wow, man, that's terrible stuff. I'd noticed.”

“Really? I was going to change to brown coal anyway.”

But of course he couldn't go on clowning all night. Maybe the tragic approach was better. He sat in a bar for an hour, staring at his glass. Then the barmaid asked if anything was getting up his nose, and he left. It was raining. He thought he saw Cora in another bar – same hair, same figure, but she was wearing a long dress – except that when he looked at the woman from in front the effect wasn't so much Bardot as, at the most, Anita Ekberg. Seen too many movies, he thought, and paid. It was still raining. The steel scaffolding on the Opera House gleamed. It was being
rebuilt in honour of “Truth, Beauty, Virtue”. All very well and good, thought Blum, given a million I'd be with you. Perhaps Cora is right, he thought, and it's no kind of life to be thinking in figures all the time, travelling about in a state of distrust, turning paranoid and insisting on cash. It somehow makes everything dirty . . . right, baby, but what's clean is there to be made dirty, isn't that so? Anyway I'm too old to begin all over again, and if I could I'd probably do the same as before. There's really no point in it, I don't believe in love but I've always paid for it, and when I have my bar on that island some day it will say above the door: All Currencies Accepted. That's a kind of faith too, thought Blum. It had stopped raining. Now it was snowing.

At three in the morning Blum was outside a bar that was just closing, rubbing the snow off his sunglasses with his scarf. A patrol car glided past. The man in the passenger seat looked at Blum. Now he'll report back to the officer leading the manhunt that I'm still out and about, thought Blum. He'll go through my data again, send for the files. Something odd about this customer, he'll think. Look at this, Tomaczek, the man spent a year abroad, we must latch on to that. Telling us he buys up old rugs. One of those fake Berliners, Tomaczek, making out they were there in the fifties. Aha, here we have it! So he was in Tangiers. I can smell narcotics 100 yards away against the wind. Call through to Interpol and connect me up, and you bring in that dealer, Tomaczek, squeeze him till the pips squeak, then bring me what's left and don't forget to wipe the floor clean. With Vim.

A taxi stopped. Two men in long raincoats tumbled out, and they too discovered that the bar had closed. The taxi drove off. They whispered to each other.
Blum realized that one was looking sideways at him. In the wan light they both had pale faces. Snowflakes were melting on their dark, uncombed hair. Blum wanted to move away, but he felt rooted to the spot. Finally the two men came over to him. Junkies, thought Blum. That's all I needed.

“I guess you have something to sell,” said the taller man.

“Me? What makes you think that?”

“It's kind of in the blood,” said the shorter man nonchalantly.

Yes, they were junkies.

He went back to their apartment with them. Crazy, he thought, but it was all the same to him now. He had the little tube of coke with him. Somehow nothing mattered any more. You had to let things take their course. Take it as it came, go with the flow. It might sound corny but there could be something in it, and drugs had to do with magic. The apartment was large and gloomy, in an old building with a view of the street, trees in front of it. A dirty kitchen, the rest of the place the same as everywhere, the same pointless lumber. Junkies were junkies, that was the only difference. He gave them a pinch, and they mixed the cocaine with heroin and injected it in their veins, right in front of him, brazen as Asian street beggars and with the cold objectivity of surgeons.

“Don't you want to try it too?”

“No thanks, I don't like needles.”

“You're missing out on the very best there is.”

He shook his head and explored the apartment. The door of one room opened, creaking, and a girl with frizzy red hair stood there blinking in the light of the corridor, clutching an old dressing gown together over
her breasts. She struck him as familiar, but he couldn't place her.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“A ghost,” he said.

“I've seen you before,” she remarked, lighting a cigarette. Her fingernails were very long, and blood-red.

“I feel the same,” he said.

“I know where. On the Iron Bridge. You're the guy who had the cocaine.”

“And you were driving the tall man.”

“Still got any of that stuff?”

They went and sat down with the junkies. The redhaired girl sniffed some coke. Blum asked her why the tall man had called the deal off.

“Oh, him,” she said dismissively. “He just talks big. Acts like the Emperor of China, but there's nothing behind it.”

Blum nodded. A tram rattled along in the distance. One of the junkies put a record on: reggae.

Then they just sat around, and the red-haired girl wanted to go to bed with Blum, but he didn't want any junk or any sex either. All Blum wanted was the money, 200 marks for a gram, junkie money with blood on it, blood money, ashes for snow. The red-haired girl began painting her toenails, and Blum lay down on a sofa and listened to the junkies – one had been constipated for six days, the other was talking about some dirty deal or other, and they both seemed to be discussing the same thing, interchangeable symptoms of the
same condition, the same incurable illness. He saw the day slowly dawning behind the trees, the city coming to life, going on again, Frankfurt am Main in the Federal Republic of Germany.