Guilt
Page 7
Now the Russian was talking about the drug-sniffing dogs. He knew everything about them. “In South Korea they even clone them because they’re so expensive,” he said. You had to weld a metal box into the car and then prepare it by stuffing bags of garbage, coffee, and wash powder into it, all separated by thick wrappers; it was your only chance to stop the dogs smelling something. Then he went back to talking about the war. He asked Atris and Frank if they’d ever killed anyone. Frank shook his head.
“With the Chechens it’s like it is with potato chips,” the Russian said.
“What?” said Frank.
“Potato chips. With the Chechens it’s like with a bag of potato chips.”
“I don’t get it,” said Frank.
“Once you start killing them, you can’t stop till they’re all gone. You have to kill them all. Every single one of them.” The Russian laughed. Then suddenly he turned serious, and stared at his crippled hand. “Otherwise they come back,” he said.
“Ah,” said Frank. “The revenge of the chips … Now could we talk about the pills again?” He wanted to go home.
The Russian screamed at Frank: “You stupid asshole, why don’t you listen? Look at your friend. He’s a lump of meat but at least he’s paying attention.”
Frank looked over at Atris, who was sitting in the corner of the sofa. A dark blue vein was standing out on his forehead. Frank knew that vein, and knew what was going to happen next.
“We’re talking about the war here, and you don’t have time to listen? We can’t do business this way. You’re idiots,” said the Russian.
Atris stood up. He weighed 230 pounds. He lifted one side of the glass table until it was on edge. Bottles, glasses, and ashtrays landed on the floor. He went for the Russian, who was faster than they’d expected and sprang to his feet, pulling a pistol out of his waistband and pressing the muzzle to Atris’s forehead.
“Easy, my friend,” he said. “This is a Makarov. It makes big holes, big ones, better than those American toys. So sit down or there’s going to be one hell of a mess.”
Atris’s face had flushed a deep crimson. He took a step back. The mouth of the pistol had left a white mark on his forehead.
“So. Sit down again. We have to drink,” said the Russian. He summoned a waiter. They sat down and started drinking again.
It would be a good piece of business. They would make a lot of money and there would be no problems. They just had to pull themselves together, thought Atris.
There was a bus stop opposite the café. Nobody noticed the woman waiting on the bench. She had pulled the hood of her black sweater over her head; in the darkness she was hard to distinguish from her surroundings. She didn’t get into any of the buses. She seemed to be asleep. Only when Atris leapt to his feet did she open her eyes for a moment. Otherwise she didn’t move.
Atris and Frank didn’t notice her. They also didn’t see the Russian give her a brief signal.
Atris stood on the balcony of the apartment on the Kurfürstendamm looking out for the dark blue Golf. It was drizzling. Frank would be back from Amsterdam in twenty-four hours and they would have the new designer drugs, better than anything on the market. The Russian had said he would give them the pills on commission. They would have three weeks to pay him the 250,000 euros.
Atris turned round and went back into Frank’s apartment. It was built in the classic old Berlin way: twelve-foot ceilings, moldings, parquet floors, five rooms. They were almost empty. Frank’s girlfriend was an interior designer. She’d said, “The spaces have to work.” Then she’d had the sofas and chairs and everything else taken out. Now everyone had to sit on gray felt cubes with tiny backs. Atris found it uncomfortable.
Before he left, Frank had told Atris what he had to do. His instructions had been clear and very simple. Frank always spoke clearly and simply to him. “It’s not hard, Atris, you just have to listen really carefully. First: Don’t let the key out of your sight. Second: Keep an eye on the Maserati. Third: Only leave the apartment when Buddy has to shit.” Buddy was Frank’s mastiff. Frank made him repeat it. Five times. “Key, Maserati, Buddy.” He wouldn’t forget. Atris admired Frank. Frank never made fun of him. He’d always told him what he had to do and Atris had always done it. Always.
——
When he was fourteen, Atris had been the weakest boy in his class, and in Wedding the weakest got beaten up. Frank had protected him. Frank had also got him his first anabolic steroids; he’d said they’d make Atris strong. Atris didn’t know where Frank got the stuff. When he was twenty, the doctor diagnosed liver damage. His face was covered with pustules and oozing lumps. When he was twenty-two, his testicles had almost disappeared. But Atris had become strong in the meantime, nobody beat him up any more, and he didn’t believe the rumors that anabolic steroids come from cattle breeding.
Today he was going to watch some DVDs, drink beer, and go out with the mastiff now and then. The Maserati was downstairs in the underground parking garage. The key to the locker was on the kitchen table. Frank had written it all down on a piece of paper. “6 p.m. Feed Buddy.” Atris didn’t like the huge animal; it always looked at him in such a peculiar way. Frank had once said he’d given Buddy steroids too, something had gone wrong, and the animal just wasn’t the same as he’d been before. Everyone thought Atris was dumb, but nothing was going to go wrong for him this time.
He went back into the empty living room and tried to switch on the Bang & Olufsen TV. He sat down on a felt cube and took a long time to work out how to use the remote. Atris was proud that he was the one Frank had entrusted with his apartment, his dog, and the locker in the new main station. He picked up a joint from the table and lit it. They were going to be rich, he thought. He would buy his mother a new kitchen, the one with the double-wide range he’d seen in a high-end decorating magazine of Frank’s girlfriend’s. He blew a smoke ring and sucked it right back in again. Then he put his feet on the table and tried to follow the talk show.
The dog food consisted of pieces of beef chopped up small; the bowl was on the kitchen table. The mastiff was lying on the black-and-white-tiled floor. It was hungry. Smelling the meat, it got up, growled, and then began to bark. Atris dropped the remote in the living room as he ran to the kitchen. He got there too late. The mastiff had pulled the tablecloth to the floor. The chunks of flesh were flying through the air in a sticky clump, and Atris saw the mastiff go up on its hind legs, mouth open, waiting. Suddenly something glinted amidst the bits of meat and it took a mere fraction of a second for Atris to understand. He screamed, “Out …” and leapt from his position in the doorway. The mastiff was quicker. It didn’t so much as look at him. The mass of meat landed in the dog’s jaws with a smack. It didn’t even chew; it just swallowed. Atris skidded across the floor and hit the wall in front of the dog. The dog licked the flagstones clean. Atris yelled at him, yanked open his mouth, and looked into his maw, got him in a headlock and throttled him. The dog growled and snapped at him. Atris wasn’t fast enough; the dog got his left earlobe and tore it off. Atris slammed his fist against the dog’s muzzle, then sat on the floor, his blood dripping on the flagstones and his shirt torn. He stared at the dog and the dog stared back. Frank hadn’t been gone for more than two hours and he’d already screwed things up: the dog had swallowed the key to the locker.
They almost beat him to death. It was an oversight.
Once past the border, Frank had been followed by members of a special task force. He needed to use the toilet so he drove to a rest stop. The leader of the task force was nervous. He made the wrong decision and gave the order for an arrest. Later the state police had to reimburse the owner of the gas station for both broken washbasins, the lock on the toilet door, the door itself, which had been smashed in, the air dryer, and the cleanup. They put a sack over Frank’s head, dragged him out of the toilet, and took him to Berlin. He had put up a fight.
The woman in the hoodie had been following Frank’s Golf since he left Amsterdam. She had
watched the task force with a little pair of binoculars. Once everything was over, she used a phone booth to call the number of a stolen cell phone in Amsterdam. The conversation lasted twelve seconds. Then she went back to her car, typed an address into the GPS unit, pushed back the hood of her sweater, and drove onto the Autobahn again.
Atris waited eight hours to see if the dog would spit the key out again. Then he gave up and dragged Buddy down into the street. The rain had started coming down more heavily in the meantime, the dog got wet, and when he finally got into the Maserati, it stank up the car. He would have to clean the upholstery later, but first he needed the key.
The vet had said on the phone that he had to come. Atris started the car. He was in a rage. He gave it too much gas, and the car shot out of the parking space, its right wing making contact with the bumper of the Mercedes in front of it with a metallic sound. Atris got out, cursing, to look at the scrape in the paintwork. He tried polishing the damage with his finger but a splinter of the lacquer tore his skin and he started bleeding. Atris gave the Mercedes a kick, got back in the car, and drove off. The blood on his finger stained the pale leather on the steering wheel.
The vet’s offices were on the ground floor of a building in Moabit. The blue sign outside said SMALL ANIMAL PRACTICE. Atris couldn’t read very well. After he’d deciphered the sign, he wondered if Buddy qualified as a small dog. He hauled the beast out of the car onto the street and gave him a kick in the backside. Buddy snapped at him but missed. “Filthy monster, you small animal,” said Atris. He didn’t want to wait, so he yelled at the nurse. She let him jump the queue because he was making too much noise. When he got into the examination room, he put a thousand euros in fifty-euro notes on the vet’s steel table.
“Doctor, this damn fucking dog swallowed a key. I need the key but I need the dog too. Cut the beast open, get the key out, then close him up again,” said Atris.
“I have to x-ray him first,” said the vet.
“I don’t give a fuck what you do. I need the key. I have to leave. I need the key and the damn dog.”
“You can’t take him with you if I cut him open. He’ll need to lie flat, undisturbed, for at least two days. You have to leave him here.”
“Open him up, and he’s coming with me afterwards. He’s tough: he’ll survive,” said Atris.
“No.”
“I’ll give you more money,” said Atris.
“No. Money won’t heal the dog.”
“Crap,” said Atris. “Money heals everything. I’m not giving the money to the damn dog, I’m giving it to you. You open him up, you take the key out, you close him up again. You take the money. Everyone goes home happy.”
“It’s impossible. Please try to understand. It’s simply impossible—no matter how much money you give me.”
Atris paced up and down the examination room and thought. “Okay. Next possibility. Can the damn dog just shit the key out again?”
“If you’re in luck, yes.”
“Can you give him something to make him shit quicker?”
“You mean a laxative? Yes, that could work.”
“Right. So how stupid are you anyway? Why do I have to explain everything to you? You’re the doctor. Give him the stuff to make him shit. A lot, enough to work on an elephant.”
“You have to give him natural laxatives. Liver, lungs, or udders.”
“What?”
“It helps.”
“Are you out of your mind? Where am I going to get udders? I can’t set the dog on a cow to rip off her udders.” Atris looked at the nurse’s tits.
“You can get these things at the butcher’s.”
“Give him a pill. Now. You’re a doctor. You give people pills. A butcher gives people udders. Everyone has their own job. Do you get it?”
The vet didn’t want any more argument. The week before, he’d had a letter from the bank to say that he needed to balance his account. There were a thousand euros lying on the table. In the end he gave the mastiff Animalax, and because Atris put another two hundred euros on the table, the dose was five times what was recommended by the manufacturer.
Atris dragged Buddy out into the street again. The rain was sheeting down. He cursed. The vet had said the dog needed to be kept moving; it would make the medicine work quicker. He had no desire to get wet, so he jammed the lead into the passenger door and drove off slowly. The dog trotted along beside the Maserati. Other cars honked. Atris turned the music up louder. A policeman stopped him. Atris said the dog was sick. The policeman yelled at him, so he pulled the mastiff into the car and drove on.
At the next corner he heard it. It was a dark, ominous rumbling. The mastiff suddenly opened its jaws, panted, howled in pain, then voided itself. It hunched over in the front seat, forced its rear end backwards and up between the armrests, bit into the upholstery, and tore out a large mouthful. The liquid shit sprayed over the seats, the windows, and the hat rack. The dog spread it around with its paws. Atris braked and leapt out of the car, closing the driver’s door. It lasted twenty minutes. Atris stood in the rain while the car windows steamed up from inside. He kept getting glimpses of the dog’s nose, its red gums, and its tail, he heard its high-pitched yowling, and waves of shit kept hitting the windows. Atris thought about Frank. And about his father, who’d told him while he was still a child that he was too stupid even to walk in a straight line. Atris thought that maybe his father had been right.
Frank woke out of the coma in the prison hospital in Berlin. The task force had overdone it: he had a severely fractured skull, bruises all over his body, and they’d broken his collarbone and his upper right arm. The examining magistrate read him the warrant at his bedside; the only charges were resisting arrest and bodily harm—one of the eight officers had had his little finger broken. The police had found no drugs, but they were convinced these must be somewhere.
I took over his defense. Frank would remain silent. The DA’s office would have a hard time proving drug trafficking. The custody hearing was in thirteen days’ time, and if nothing new turned up, he would be set free.
“You stink of shit,” said Abdul.
Atris had called him. Before that he had searched the Maserati for an hour, and his shirt and pants were smeared with it. He hadn’t found the key; it must still be inside the mastiff. Atris hadn’t known what to do. Abdul was his cousin; in the family he was rated as intelligent.
“I know I stink of shit. The car stinks of shit, Buddy stinks of shit, I stink of shit. I know that. You don’t have to say it.”
“Atris, you really stink of shit,” said Abdul.
Abdul did business out of one of the countless converted spaces under the arches of the Berlin suburban railway. The railroad company rented out these spaces. There were auto body shops, storerooms, and junk dealers. Abdul recycled old tires. He got paid to get rid of them, loaded them onto a truck, and threw them into a ravine he’d discovered in a forest in Brandenburg. He earned good money. Everyone said he was a talented businessman.
Atris told Abdul about the thing with the dog. Abdul said he should bring Buddy inside. The mastiff looked wretched, and its white coat was all brown.
“The damn dog stinks too,” said Abdul.
Atris groaned.
“Tie him to the steel post,” said Abdul.
He showed Atris the shower in the back room, giving him a freshly washed set of coveralls from the city garbage collectors. It was orange.
“What’s this?” said Atris.
“I need it for the recycling work,” said Abdul.
Atris undressed and packed his old things into a garbage bag. Twenty minutes later when he came out of the shower, the first thing he saw was the jack, lying in a pool of blood. Abdul was sitting on a chair, smoking. He pointed to the body of the dog on the floor.
“Sorry, but you’d better get undressed again. If you cut him open, you’ll get a mess all over you again. That’s the last clean set of coveralls.”
“Shit.”
“And the Maserati?”
“I’ve already made a phone call. The boys are going to steal another one, exactly the same model. We just have to wait. You’ll get the new one.”
Atris came back to the apartment on the Kurfürstendamm at two o’clock in the morning. He had parked the new Maserati in the underground parking garage. It looked completely different; it was red, not blue, and the seats were black instead of beige. It was going to be hard to explain to Frank.
Atris took the elevator up. The key seemed to stick a little in the door of the apartment, but he was too tired to notice. He couldn’t fight back; he didn’t even try. The woman was petite, she was wearing a hoodie, and he couldn’t see her face. Her pistol was enormous.
“Open your mouth,” she said. Her voice was warm.
She shoved the barrel between Atris’s teeth. It tasted of oil.
“Walk backwards slowly. If you make a false move or I stumble, the back of your head will blow off, so you’d better be careful. Do you understand?”
Atris nodded carefully. Inside his mouth, the bead on the barrel struck his teeth. They went into the living room.
“I’m going to sit down on the stool. You are going to kneel in front of me. Very slowly.” She was talking to him the way a doctor talks to a patient. The woman sat on one of the felt cubes. Atris knelt down next to her. He still had the barrel in his mouth.
“Very good. Now if you do everything right, nothing’s going to happen. I don’t want to kill you, but it doesn’t matter to me whether I do or not. Do you understand?”
Atris nodded again.
“So, I’m going to explain it to you.”
She spoke slowly, slowly enough for Atris to understand it all, and leaned back on the stool, crossing her legs. Atris had to follow her movements and bend his head forward.