The Snowman (20 page)

The sky in Wiesbaden was bright blue. Blum took a taxi drive through the town twice, to Biebrich and to Dotzheim, until he decided that there was no one tailing him, and yet when he got out at Central Station he had that sense of being watched again. And 100 marks were gone too.

The rollneck pullover he'd bought that morning cost DM 129. A cappuccino cost 3.50. A steak and salad was 17.80. A ticket to Amsterdam cost 104.30. You had to struggle to make ends meet in this country. But that was no reason to double-cross him the way Cora had. He wasn't mixing baby powder with the coke to stretch five pounds to ten. No, you could keep clean even if you were wading through filth, but to understand that you had to be sure of yourself.

There wasn't a word in the newspapers about the big police raid. However, the asylum seekers were making headlines again. Mr Haq had not, of course, been seeking asylum, but a discussion of business and the qualities of modern life. That's no reason to deport someone straight away. My dear Mr Haq, you didn't tell me the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so we're equal but not quits. Tell the barman in the Punjab Club to crush that ice.

The Intercity train to Cologne was announced. Blum stayed on the platform until the last minute, watching the people getting in, but what use was that? Anybody could be one of them.

Blum found a seat next to the corridor. He didn't need to watch the landscape going past. It all looked the same anyway. It was the people who were important. Dangerously important. The well-preserved lady in her seventies with waved white hair who kept her gloves on even when eating chocolate; the bespectacled man with the bush of grey hair accompanying the man with shaky hands who consumed half a bottle of vodka; the thin man in the striped green suit going through a whole pile of model railway magazines with the gloomy expression of someone in his last semester of teacher training – they were the sights worth seeing, the Binger Loch of this journey, the Loreley rock. So he couldn't take his eyes off the corridor for a moment, or put his sample case in the baggage compartment.

The bespectacled man disappeared at Bingen. Before they reached Koblenz he came back without the vodka-drinking man, but with a strong smell of alcohol about him, and as elated as if he'd thumbed his nose at the whole world. The attendant with the drinks trolley came along. Blum bought a coffee. The thin man was hungry, and spent his time over the next thirty miles taking a plastic knife out of a cellophane bag and using it to spread cellophane-packed plastic sausage on a cellophane-wrapped slice of plastic bread. Blum leafed through the Bahamas handbook and informed himself about offshore banking. A pleasing subject, but it wouldn't do to start dreaming about it. The bespectacled man and the thin man would have been a good choice for a syndicate's commando squad. They were definitely filmable. And just because the lady was over seventy didn't mean she was necessarily retired.

Nothing happened in the corridor. The passengers pored over their files, looked out of the window looking bored, allowed the leading articles in the newspapers
to lull them to sleep. Blum gradually relaxed. The old lady struck up a conversation about the Bahamas with him. Blum recommended her to invest in Freeport. When he explained the Hawksbill Creek Agreement which had set up the free trade zone of Grand Bahama, the two men suddenly left the compartment. So much for syndicates

“It's too late for me, of course,” said the lady at last, “but why don't you risk something on it, young man? Everything here is going to the dogs.”

“Madam, it's never too late,” replied Blum.

Shortly before they came into Cologne Central Station, the train stopped for several minutes. Blum stood in the corridor staring into a dirty back yard. The soot of a hundred years lay on the walls. A blouse fluttered from a window. Cartons of empty beer bottles stood on the garbage bins. A woman's hand drew a curtain aside, opened the window and brought the blouse in.

Blum saw a man in his undershirt behind her, laughing and raising a beer bottle. Then the window was closed again, and Blum felt a pang in his heart. The train jerked, and came into Cologne Station.

On the platform there were American women with plastic backpacks, Turks with cardboard suitcases tied up with string, sausage-eating commuters, chain-smoking teenagers all wearing the same trousers, the same hairstyles and the same badges, and police informers studying timetables anxiously like travellers fearing that all trains would fail to stop at their station. The Amsterdam train was on time, and Blum found an empty first-class compartment. It was heated, and the red upholstery with its warmed-up aroma of sweat and perfume was reminiscent of the salons of old-fashioned brothels in Algeciras and Ceuta. Blum sat next to the corridor, hand on his sample case.

Two men joined him in the compartment at Deutz, a fat man with a briefcase who sat by the window, and a grey-haired Englishman reading the
Daily Telegraph
. The fat man opened his briefcase and took out a new men's magazine. He moved his lips as he read. If I were still in the porn magazine business he'd be a good customer, thought Blum. Ah, those happy days with the porn magazines, he thought. Söderbaum's “Spring Awakening”, those fat Danish tits, all milk and honey – if that was supposed to be perverted, then what was all that out there? He noticed how awkwardly the men sat, either with legs crossed, free hand clasping an ankle, or leaning heavily forward, left hand turned in and propped on the thigh, head bent, and with the right foot curled round the left so as to keep from sitting comfortably, or – like himself – with his right hand clutching his case, a burning cigarette smelling of dung in his left hand, his face red and running with sweat. They were all slaves on vacation, and out there was their district – rolling-mill trains, blast furnaces, atomic piles. Car cemeteries, mines, potash factories. Plastics markets, poison manufacturers, satellite towns, the sun itself a tranquillizer substitute. Housing estate after housing estate, like kraals where the natives danced around a fetish to the shrill howl of the sirens.

The Englishman got out at Oberhausen. The fat man put his men's magazine back in his briefcase, loosened his tie and started studying a sex magazine. The flat landscape was covered with a sulphurous haze. Blum had to go to the toilet. He took the sample case with him. The fat man looked up and grinned.

In the toilet Blum splashed water on his face. It looked to him emaciated and haggard. When he came out into the corridor he saw a man he knew standing
outside the toilet in the adjoining second-class compartment. Panic rose in him; his heart raced. He was already hurrying back down the corridor, his case colliding with the doors. The blue suit, the mutton-chop whiskers, the glasses over those froggy eyes, and the fat man with the sex magazine in his own compartment – you see, Blum, we know who you are, you won't escape us. The train was slowing down. A station. Blum clutched his sample case more tightly, and swiftly passed his compartment. He didn't look inside. He would have to abandon his travelling bag, his shirts, his cravat, the Bahamas handbook. The train juddered and came to a halt. He opened the door and looked round. No one else seemed to be getting out. He jumped down on the platform. To his left he saw an exit notice and made for it. The station master was already blowing his whistle. The words on a signboard announced: “Welcome to Wesel”.

Saturday afternoon. Those in gainful employment were taking their overfed families out for walks. In the shopping street, they let the mothers and children off the leash and withdrew with the family dog to a corner pub. Half an hour to go to the sports show, guessed Blum. He knew he didn't have much time. His pursuers would get out at Emmerich, summon reinforcements at once and start back to Wesel. The others would stay in Emmerich, at the station, on the roads. He had to give them the slip again between Wesel and Emmerich, and for good this time. It would be best if he got into a train going the other way. Back to Cologne, and take a plane from there – but where to? There were security checkpoints and customs barriers at every airport. No, he must go to Amsterdam. He could get rid of the stuff at once in Amsterdam. Not for a great deal of money, obviously, but yesterday evening he'd have been happy with fifteen grand. And this way he could easily make 100 grand out of it yet. The Dutch guilder was a good currency too. The only problem now was getting to Amsterdam. Taxi? But anyone going so far by taxi would arouse suspicion. A hire car was no use. He mustn't leave any documentary evidence behind him in Wesel. He must never give his name again.

He reached the cathedral. There was a builders' fence in front of it, and someone had painted SIEG on the boards in black paint. A dachshund raised its back
leg and did a pee. A beery twilight prevailed in the marketplace pubs, the jukebox played evergreen hits – “Sonny Boy” – and all who were not cast into gloom on a German Saturday afternoon were assembled on the benches. Blum ordered a Pils and drank it straight down.

“You've got a good thirst on you,” said the man beside Blum.

“I guess I've earned that beer,” said Blum, looking more closely at his neighbour. The man was a study in brown: dark brown, neatly parted hair, red-brown wrinkled face, raincoat of shimmering green-brown fabric, turf-brown suit, mustard-brown shirt, horse-dung-brown tie. In his brown, fleshy hands the beer in the glass shone like liquid gold. He must be somewhere between fifty-five and sixty, but had no grey in his hair yet, and his eyes were like two blue marbles.

They fell into conversation. Something about the man seemed familiar to Blum, and at the same time he felt intrigued. You could still spend whole evenings discussing beer in Germany, but Blum was in a hurry and quickly moved on to something else. He was a commercial traveller, said the man in brown, a sales rep for a soap powder firm. He trudged round the marketplaces and pedestrian shopping malls of the smaller towns, from the Lower Rhine to the Sauerland, flogging obscure washing powders. Blum could well imagine it: under a damp awning in the pedestrian zone of Neheim-Hüsten, with Spring Awakening soap-flakes and Lambswool detergent, two products which for fifty-seven years had been conducting a hopeless campaign against the giant Henkel company, in front of two housewives with headaches and three school-kids, including two from Asia Minor, on a Thursday
afternoon with DM 13.30 in your pocket, and the prospect of sausage with potato salad for supper and a cold bed in the Christian Hostel. If you could imagine it, it didn't mean that the same fate was in store for you, yet a shiver ran down Blum's back, a fear rooted deeper than the fear of any syndicate.

“And who do you travel for?”

“Oh, you mean because of my case – no, I'm not a rep. It's just my things in there.”

“In a sample case? Then you must have been a traveller once.”

“No, no,” Blum assured him. “I've always worked in other lines – the construction industry, restaurants, antiques, magazines, well, anything that came along.”

“A lot will come along yet,” said the sales rep, “you have a lot ahead of you. I didn't always represent washing powders either.”

But he wouldn't say what he had done before. He ordered two more Pilses. Blum looked at the time.

“Not in a hurry, are you?” asked the traveller. “On a Saturday afternoon?”

“I have to go on to Holland.”

“What do you want there? The Dutch don't like us.”

“But they do business with us.”

“Everyone does. That's in the nature of business. And what kind of business do you have in Holland?”

“Oh, I'm – I'm looking around the restaurants. You see, I'd like to open a restaurant myself some time, so I'm gathering information about the kind of opportunities there are in that field.”

The sales rep drank his beer and smiled mildly.

“Is that why you're sitting in marketplace pubs?”

“Even if they may not always look it, bars like these can be a goldmine.”

“And you'd like a goldmine too?”

“Wouldn't we all?”

“Ah, you still have illusions,” said the sales rep, wiping the froth from his mouth. “One does at your age. But when I hear the word mine, I think of the mines that killed our comrades and the trenches where we buried them. Back then in Russia, see? We still had illusions then too. We thought when we came back Germany would be there again.”

“And nothing came of that?”

“You know that as well as I do, friend. Nothing came of it. Are you catching the night train, or spending the night here?”

Blum had to pull himself together to find an answer. There was an aura of hopelessness about the sales rep that settled on the brain like murky mist. Yet the man could be useful to him.

“That's just what I'd like to talk to you about. But maybe somewhere else, where we won't be disturbed?”

The sales rep nodded, as if he had assessed Blum correctly from the first. “Let me invite you to supper. Eggs and fried potatoes – I expect you can eat that?”

It was not a question but a demand.

Outside, the mist was grey now and getting darker fast. For a while they followed a country road, and then went a little way along the Rhine. People out walking were standing on the bank, looking west across the river. Crows rose from the fields. A coal barge chugged downstream in the evening mist.