The Snowman (2 page)

“Haq,” the Pakistani corrected him. “Hassan Abdul Haq.”

“Of course. Mr Haq. Well, what do you think? I'm not sure how much you know about these things, but there's absolutely nothing to equal this old Danish porn.”

The Pakistani leafed through the magazines while Blum looked round the room. Category D, he thought, spartan but clean. In summer the old palazzo would probably be quite comfortable, but now, in March, a chill still lingered. And there were mosquitoes all the year round. The Pakistani was travelling light – a small plastic suitcase under the wash-stand, two shirts drying on wire hangers, and magazines and paperbacks which didn't look as if they came from Pakistan on the rickety bedside table. However, Mr Haq had a Remington, and he used expensive aftershave. Blum had travelled lighter himself, and he too couldn't always afford category C.

Mr Haq put the magazine down, looked at Blum with some disappointment, and said, “American products strike me as – how shall I put it? – more realistic.”

Blum stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. The tourists were beginning to sing in the inner courtyard, and he was in a hurry.

“You mean brutal. The Americans are more brutal. Now these are from a time when people still knew how to enjoy each other, if you see what I mean.”

Why was he bothering with this? The man probably buggered three sacred cows before breakfast every day. It was crazy anyway, trying to flog porn to Asians.

“What's more, there's nothing else in this line on Malta. So if you want any you'll have to buy mine, Mr Faq. And let me tell you one thing – the Americans will leave your lot in the shit when the Russians come over the Khyber Pass.”

“Haq,” said the Pakistani, unmoved. “Hassan Abdul Haq. Have you ever been to my country, then?”

No, Mr Blum never had, nor did he intend to go there, not right now. What he saw about it in the newspapers was enough for him.

“Afghanis might get some satisfaction from these products, but in my view they have no artistic merit.”

Quite possibly Blum agreed, but no Pakistani was going to tell him so. He picked up a magazine and showed him the best bits.

“These are classics, my dear fellow. Denmark 1968, it's kind of like a vintage wine, know what I mean about vintage wines? Well, no, your sort don't drink, of course. But I can get any price I care to name in Cairo, any price.”

However, Mr Haq was not Egyptian, he disapproved of Egyptians on both personal and political grounds, and 1968 meant nothing to him either. He said he thought the magazines were boring. “Always the same woman, always the same man.”

“Well, it's always the same game,” said Blum. “Maybe the Chinese know a few extra tricks – or the Amazonian Indians, but in itself, as such, it's always the same old thing. Anyway, what do you mean, artistic merit? Who wants artistic merit?”

“American magazines are more interesting.”

The Pakistani was staring at a point somewhere over Blum's shoulder. Blum heard a mosquito whining. He's waiting for me to kill that one too, he thought. He likes to have me kill mosquitoes for him. The Paki sits on the bed running down the porn magazines while the white man chases around the room squashing mosquitoes. Some people might think that funny. Not me.

“Maybe you want pictures of two men fisting each other? Or does watching a blonde do it with a pig bring you off? Perhaps you fancy little kids being screwed, Mr Haq?”

Mr Haq looked at Blum as if he were giving this idea profound consideration, and then said, “I could use a man like you, Mr Blum.”

For a brief, intriguing moment Blum thought the other man was making him a sexual proposition, but then Mr Haq began talking about Saudi Arabia. The people singing in the courtyard struck up “Guantanamera” – three hoarse male and two shrill female voices. Blum was starting to feel he needed a drink.

“I don't want anything to do with Saudi Arabia, Mr Haq. They jail you there for a bottle of whisky. Or give you 100 lashes on the soles of your feet. No thanks!”

“No, no, you can earn good money with whisky. They don't lash you unless you get caught, Mr Blum. And just think of the problem of available sex . . .” The Pakistani seemed to have taken it into his head to enlist this German to help him make his fortune in Saudi Arabia. He told him about the airport built in the middle of the desert sand by German specialists and Pakistani immigrant workers – 15,000 men living in huts, no women and no alcohol, or nothing like enough of either, now wasn't that the kind of golden opportunity that might never come his way again?

“Possibly,” said Blum. He stacked the magazines together again. “But I can do okay in Cairo too. Don't you at least want these few? I can give you a good price.”

The Pakistani seemed to be waiting for something. Blum did him the favour of killing another mosquito, but Mr Haq clearly had something else in mind. He sat on the bed with his hands folded and stared into the last of the daylight.

“I have good contacts in Jeddah,” he said quietly. “One American made a fortune in three months there with watered whisky.”

“Maybe he needed it,” said Blum.

“And you don't, Mr Blum?”

“Not enough to get mixed up with the Saudis.”

“I always knew the Germans were prosperous.”

“I must go, Mr Haq.”

“Do forgive me for not having offered you anything . . .”

“I'm here to offer
you
something.”

“Here, have some of this chocolate. Maltese, but it doesn't taste bad.”

Finally Mr Haq deigned to buy two magazines, but he haggled over fifty cents so long that when Blum closed the door he had a bitter taste in his mouth, and not just because he was thirsty.

Even when business was bad or deportation threatened, Blum allowed himself a good dinner in an agreeable bar at least once a week, and in Malta he had chosen Thursdays for this purpose. On Thursdays they had a curry night in the Pegasus Bar of the Phoenicia Hotel. Blum liked the place – a hotel in the colonial British style, a bar decorated with fake medieval weapons, a sarong-clad waitress on duty specially for the curry night, Englishmen in the textiles industry who sighed and had second helpings of everything, and American tourists tearing their President to shreds after the third bourbon. The dollar was at rock bottom again.

Mr Hackensack did not hold forth about the President. Nor was he a tourist.

“I'm a loyal American citizen,” he said, having lit his Davidoff. “A patriot. Just so long as no one catches him selling the White House silver spoons to the Russians, the President's above suspicion, that's the way I see it.”

Hackensack was a corpulent man of around sixty who squeezed his bulky body into check suits much too small for him, and planted excessively colourful hats on his massive head. The rolls of flesh on his chin and cheeks compressed his mouth so that its pursed lips made it look curiously small and delicate. There were flashy rubies set in solid gold on the middle and ring fingers of his left hand, and a matching tie-pin glittered in his spotted tie. Blum had often had a drink
with Hackensack before, but only this evening did the American let slip that he himself had worked for the government.

“You were with the CIA?”

Hackensack's face assumed an affected smile.

“I'd once have felt flattered to be asked if I was with the Firm, but nowadays . . .”

“I hope I didn't insult you. I don't know a lot about these secret service affairs. What you don't know won't make trouble for you, that's my philosophy.”

Hackensack laughed, but it was only his rolls of fat creasing up. His eyes were not laughing. Blum felt he was being sized up, but that was Americans for you, and Hackensack seemed to need someone to talk to. He ordered another two drinks. The textiles trade mingled with the tourist trade in the Pegasus Bar, and the Maltese godfathers sat in the corner in their black suits, watching the boxing on TV. Blum's policemen friends couldn't find him here. Inspector Cassar's expense account probably didn't stretch to more than a lemonade at the kiosk over by the bus station. The curry was being cleared away. While Hackensack explained to him why power was not just the salt of life but its very essence, Blum looked the women tourists over, but there was no one here today who seemed a hopeful prospect for him, and as she took the dishes away the beauty in the sarong was billing and cooing with the chef, a man weighing two hundredweight from the Weser Mountains who had cooked for the specialist supply troops in Saigon. Hackensack raised his glass and cleared his throat.

“Why so thoughtful, Blum? Business in a bad way, or has someone gone off with your girl?”

The American's nose was beginning to glow, and his cauliflower ears had a rosy tinge. But the bourbon left
his eyes cold. He had said he came from Tennessee, but Blum didn't think he was really a southerner.

“In a bad way is about right, Mr Hackensack.”

“What, and you a German?”

Blum was tired of this. Did the whole world think all Germans were winners because Hitler had lost the war?

“Not every German is a millionaire just because the mark is strong, Mr Hackensack.”

“Call me Harry. Yes, I know, Blum. My firm has a branch in Frankfurt. Drop in when you have business there.”

Blum took the card and put it in his wallet.

“I don't expect to be in Frankfurt in the near future, but thanks all the same. What line of business are you in, if I may ask, or does that come under the heading of state secrets?”

Hackensack spluttered, swallowed the wrong way, and went purple. In his tight suit with his sweaty little hat on his head, he now looked like a boxing manager who hasn't had a winner on his books for ten years. Probably just a poor sap like the rest of us, thought Blum.

“I'm a company adviser,” said Hackensack, when he had got his breath back. “And if I were to advise
you
some day you'd get a discount – after all, both of us here on Malta, that counts for something.”

“I'm only a one-man firm, but if I do need advice I'll be happy to get in touch. Another drink? The next round's on me.”

Naturally Hackensack would like another drink. He tipped bourbon down his throat like water with no obvious effect, except that the broken veins of his nose took on a darker hue.

“What lines of business would you say are on the up now?” asked Blum.

“Anything to do with power,” said Hackensack, wiping the sweat from his neck with a red flowered handkerchief, which deprived his words of much of their force. “Naked, profitable power with no regard for human feelings, Herr Blum. Of course that's nothing new, as you must know yourself. You Germans have thought a good deal about it too, but you always see the problem in an abstract light, too metaphysically. Power is something concrete, like the whiskey in this glass and its effects.”

What nonsense, thought Blum – I could be with a woman somewhere, or trying to flog those porn magazines, and instead I sit here listening to what this jerk has to say about power, which is nothing very new. But what
was
new? His own story, his dreams and failures were nothing new either. Perhaps he might yet find out whether the old fellow was simply feeding him sugar lumps like a monkey for no good reason, or whether there was any point to all this talk.

“So right now I'd say information is big business. And anything that alters the structure of the little grey cells, of course. Chemicals, Mr Blum. Yessir, chemicals are really big business. Combine information with chemicals and the world's your oyster.”

“I don't see much chance for me to get a foot in the door,” replied Blum. “I mean, it's rather too late in the day to start in that line . . .”

Hackensack looked hard at Blum, and said, before raising the cigar to his delicate lips, “It's never too late. You just need the right attitude, my dear fellow, then you'll always fall on your feet. Take me – I've come a cropper many a time, from the Korean War to Berlin and south-east Asia, and I've always fallen on my feet. You have to in my line of business.”

“I thought you were a company adviser.”

“An adviser, man, let's just say an adviser.”

Blum wasn't about to insist on knowing the difference, nor did he want to spend any more time with this sweating colossus, who was beginning to strike him as bogus. He was getting on Blum's nerves. Information, chemicals, south-east Asia – all very well, but what would Hackensack say if Blum told him about Inspector Cassar? He'd better get moving. He was just wondering how to shake Hackensack off when he saw a woman tourist who had come into the Pegasus alone, and was now standing at the bar looking rather helpless. She was tall and thin and short-sighted, and wore a flowered dress and a knitted jacket. She was no beauty queen but she might save the day. He waved to the barkeeper, and showed his remarkably good teeth when he smiled at her.

“I think you must be from Germany too,” he said, turning away from Hackensack.

A male cockroach grabbed a female of the species with its forelegs and mounted her. When they had slid over to the title of the “Don't Go Breaking My Heart” track, Blum put a coin in the slot of the jukebox, pressed the button and watched the cockroaches mating. The jukebox was full of cockroaches dead and alive. Rock freaks, thought Blum. Dancing on the machine's hot electric belly, rocking and screwing themselves to death. Have fun, you two. The cockroach let go of the female. She slid over “Sailing” and “La Barca” and lay motionless on “Please Don't Go”. Her lover had killed her. With scorpions it's the female, with cockroaches the male. That's life, girlie. Blum picked up his beer and looked out at the street again where, to the roar of the music, young girls on the make were lying in wait for tourists who were just wondering whether to allow themselves a half-bottle of wine at lunch, or buy their wives the T-shirt saying “I lost my heart in Malta”.