A Slow Death (Max Drescher Book 1)

by James Craig

  Yes, but not in the way you think. ‘Not really.’ He headed for the door. ‘Thanks for the beer. I’ll see you at the station bright and early in the morning.’

  8

  Timing his arrival perfectly, Max reached Littbarski's just as an elderly couple were getting up from their table. Skipping in front of a hovering tourist, he plonked himself down on a still warm seat and buried his head in a menu, the better to ignore the dispossessed man’s grumbled protests. Almost immediately, a member of staff appeared to clear the table. Max ordered two bottles of Veltins Pilsener and a packet of HB. He smiled at the pretty young waitress as she read back his order and got a big, bright grin right back for his trouble, which made him feel great. He checked out the girl’s ass as she skipped back inside the café before settling back to watch the crowds on Adalbertstrasse.

  It’s great to be alive.

  The funny thing, Max realised, was that ever since leaving the company of the callow doctor at Charité he had felt fantastic. It was as if he could sense energy and health radiating from his every pore.

  Pulling out a cigarette packet from his jacket, he put the last HB between his lips, crumpled the empty packet in his fist and dropped it into the large, circular metal ashtray in the middle of the table. Lighting up the cigarette, he took a long drag and held in the smoke deep in his lungs for as long as he could manage. Finally exhaling, he took a small brown envelope from his jacket pocket and pulled out the sheet of paper containing his test results. After taking another drag on his cigarette, he carefully set light to one corner of the paper and watched it slowly burn. Fuck knows what happens from here on in, he mused, but it's too late to worry about it now.

  As the waitress arrived with the beers and his fresh packet of cigarettes, Max dropped the burning paper on to the sidewalk. For a moment, he watched it burn half-heartedly on the concrete. Then, stamping out the flame with the toe of his sneaker, he kicked the charred remains into the gutter. Ignoring his eccentric behaviour, the girl carefully placed the drinks on the table, along with a small plate containing his bill.

  ‘Danke.’ Giving her another big smile, Max dropped some coins on to the plate, enough for the beers, the smokes and also large tip. Nodding appreciatively, the girl scooped up the plate and headed over to serve a waiting customer at a nearby table.

  A very pretty couple strolled past the bar, each of them eying Max as they did so. The attention, however casual, further added to his sense of profound wellbeing; if he hadn’t been waiting for someone, the Kriminalinspektor might have asked them to join him. Finishing his cigarette, he tore the cellophane from the new packet, flipped open the top and pulled out another, firing it up and sucking greedily. If nothing else, he was going to up his alcohol and nicotine intake considerably from now on.

  Max had gone through both beers and half a dozen smokes when a familiar face finally appeared out of the throng. Pulling up a seat, Peter Behle looked around furtively before plonking himself down.

  Behle signalled to the waitress for a couple of fresh beers. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ Wiping an imaginary bead of sweat from his forehead, he didn’t look happy. It suddenly struck Max that he couldn’t remember the last time that Peter had looked truly happy. ‘A client kept me – you know what it’s like.’

  Not really, Max thought.

  ‘Endless arguments over irrelevant details,’ Behle grumbled, ‘chiselling away at my profit margin.’ Undoing the top button of his shirt, he pulled off his tie and stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. Compared to Max and the rest of Littbarski's clientele, however, he still looked rather overdressed in his expensive pin striped suit and highly polished black Oxfords.

  You’ve been coming to here for the best part of thirty years, Max thought, but you still look like you don’t belong. The fifty-something, bourgeois geschäftsmann look doesn’t work here.

  Exasperated, Behle waved a hand in the air. ‘People think they can ask for more and more all the time and somehow, as if by magic, nothing gets added to the bill.’

  Mumbling something suitably soothing Max stubbed out his latest cigarette. In truth, he found it impossible to be too sympathetic. Peter Behle was one of the most successful architects in Berlin. And, with the need to rebuild the reunified city, a long-term boom in business seemed assured.

  ‘These days, I am 90% accountant, a lowly bean counter, trying to make sure we don’t get robbed blind.’

  To Max’s relief, the latest beers arrived quickly. For several moments they drank in silence, each man lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘So?’ Behle asked finally, placing his bottle carefully on the table.

  Here we go. Max signalled to a passing waiter for two more beers. Catching Peter’s eye, he smiled sadly and shook his head.

  A stony look fell across Behle’s face. ‘It was that little English hustler you fucked, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Max shrugged. ‘Anyway, does it matter?’

  Nostrils flaring, Behle raised his voice a notch. ‘You selfish bastard.’

  Max looked around the nearby tables. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘You stupid, selfish bastard.’ The voice went up another notch; Max was conscious that those around them were beginning to tune into their conversation. The approaching waiter, sensing a major domestic brewing, placed the beers on the table, along with the latest bill, grabbed the empties and beat a hasty retreat.

  ‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ Behle demanded. He was beginning to play to the gallery now and Max had to resist the urge to reach over and punch him on the mouth.

  Counting to ten, he forced his temper under control. ‘I say that you need to get tested as well,’ he said finally, before starting on his latest beer.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Behle hissed.

  Eyes lowered, Max focused on keeping his voice even. ‘Up to you, but I would go to Charité.’

  Pushing back his chair, Behle got to his feet. ‘You are a fucking asshole.’ Reaching into his trouser pocket, he pulled out a crumpled 20DM note and dropped it on the table. ‘As well as a total idiot.’

  Ignoring the grins of the gawkers around him, Max watched as the angry middle-aged man in the pinstripe suit shuffled on to the sidewalk and disappeared into the late evening crowd.

  All in all, that went as well as could reasonably have been expected. Reaching for the cigarette packet on the table, he retrieved another HB, lit it and let it dangle from his bottom lip. One thing would never change: the world always looked better through the haze of cigarette smoke.

  Slowly, the Kriminalinspektor’s thoughts turned to the four children that had been murdered less than twenty-four hours earlier, little more than a stone’s throw away from where he was sitting. ‘Now that,’ he said to himself, ‘is the work of a real asshole.’

  Kaspar Wuffli staggered out of the Sugar Lounge some time before three a.m., pausing on the street to light up a smoke before zipping up his jacket and heading south down Hans-Otto-Straße. In his more than slightly intoxicated state, Kaspar would have preferred to take a cab home. At this time of night, however, taxis were few and far between; expensive too. And Kaspar was acutely aware of the lack of cash his pocket; the last couple of Gin Slings he’d bought in the bar, in the hope of luring young Oscar what’s-his-name back to his new flat, had more or less wiped him out. With less than 10DM to his name, he now faced a long, lonely walk home.

  Pulling up his collar, Kaspar dropped his gaze to his feet, cursing both the cold wind in his face and Oscar. As soon as the money ran out, and the gin stopped flowing, the young rent boy had shamelessly transferred his attentions to a middle-aged guy from Hamburg who was letting his hair down, what was left of it, at the end of a business trip.

  ‘Bitch.’ Kaspar hissed to no one in particular. Taking a long drag on his cigarette, he launched into a coughing fit. Slinging the stub into the road, he lent against a lamppost, trying to clear his head. ‘You would have thought after six Gin Slings the little shit would have at leas
t been good for a half-decent blow job.’ The thought of Oscar on his knees in front of the businessman made his stomach churn and for a moment he thought he might puke. Vowing never to darken the door of the Sugar Lounge again, he took a couple of deep breaths, drawing the cold night air deeply into his lungs until he could feel the nausea begin to subside.

  Lost in his self-pitying thoughts, he placed another cigarette between his lips. Fumbling for his lighter, he was only dimly aware of voices coming towards him along the street. Lighting up, Kaspar resumed his weary march, almost walking straight into a couple of men coming towards him. Taking up almost the whole of the sidewalk, they stood their ground, forcing him off the kerb and into the mucky gutter.

  ‘Hey.’ Kaspar groaned, letting the cigarette fall from his lips as he inspected the potential damage to his shoes. ‘Watch where you’re going, dammit.’

  One of the men stepped into the gutter in front of Kaspar, pushing forward his neck until their faces were less than ten centimetres apart. ‘What did you say, pretty boy?’ His German was heavily accented but the mocking tone was still clear.

  ‘Well …’ suddenly feeling woozy, Kaspar felt himself sway slightly. He tried to take a step backwards, but found the second man had moved behind him, blocking his escape.

  ‘Got any money?’

  ‘No,’ Kaspar groaned. In the soft glow of the gas-powered street lights, he caught sight of something glinting in the hand of the man in front of him. A knife. Resisting the renewed urge to puke, he instinctively flat-handed the knifeman and began sprinting down the street.

  ‘You fag bastard,’ the men screamed in unison as they gave chase.

  He barely made it five metres down the street before for they were on top of him, bouncing his head off the tarmac and covering his torso in a hail of blows. Trying to crawl into a foetal position, he tried to scream for help. However, all that came out of his mouth was a weak stream of reddish brown liquid. Kaspar watched it spread slowly across the tarmac, listening to the abuse of his attackers as they retreated down the street in search of richer pickings.

  9

  Why do I get all the shitty jobs? Not for the first time, Martina Sammer wished that she’d followed the advice of her father when he had tried to persuade her to become an accountant. Looking at the wretched creature in front of her, Martina shook her head. Papa had been right; numbers were infinitely preferable to people.

  ‘Follow me,’ she barked, setting off at a brisk pace in the hope that the movement would help dissipate the smell. Even then, it was difficult not to gag as she weaved her way through the Polizeipräsidium, breathing through her mouth as she tried to ignore the amused looks and off-colour comments of her colleagues.

  Doing as he was told, Kaspar Wuffli bowed his head and followed a respectful distance behind his host. After three hours in the Emergency Ward, the last thing he had wanted to do was talk to the police. If it had been down to him, he would have just limped out of the hospital and crawled home. Instead, some over-zealous cow of a nurse had called the police and they had dragged him down here, to spend another three hours being moved around a freezing police station trying to find someone willing to take his statement. Eventually, the female officer with the name tag Sammer had typed up his account of the assault in five minutes flat on an ancient-looking typewriter that looked like it belonged to the days of the Weimar Republic. Once the report had been completed, it had taken her longer to find a pen for him to sign the damn thing. Job completed, a glimmer of grim satisfaction flickered across her face as she tossed the carbon in the bin and dropped both copies of his statement into a wire tray overflowing with similar sheets of paper. No one will ever look at that again, Kaspar though wearily, and this whole charade is a complete waste of time.

  After keeping him waiting all this time, the officer was now hassling him out of the building as quickly as possible. That was fine by Kaspar; with bruised ribs and a shitty hangover, all he wanted was to go home, fall into bed and stay there for a couple of days.

  Sitting at his desk, the Kriminalinspektor watched the puke-covered guy with the battered face wandering through the station, following in the wake of a very pissed-off looking Martina Sammer. ‘What a smell.’ he groaned. ‘You would have thought that they would have hosed him down in the cells.’

  ‘The latest victim of the 36Boys,’ Michael muttered, not looking up from his newspaper as he sat with his feet on his desk.

  ‘Another one?’ The 36Boys were a gang of Turkish immigrants from Kreuzberg; taking their name from one of its postal districts, Südost 36. Normally, they got into fights with neo-Nazis. More recently, however, they had branched out into a semi-organised programme of gay-bashing. Not that they were the only ones. The Neo-Nazis, East German hooligans, you name it. No one liked the fags. There had been more than a hundred reported assaults on homosexuals in the city in the last year alone; the number of unreported attacks would be much higher. ‘How many is that now?’

  ‘No idea. I suppose it’s running about three or four a week at the moment. People only really pay attention when someone like Volker gets mugged.’

  ‘Ha.’ Max chuckled. Kevin Volker was a high-profile banker with political ambitions. ‘That was probably a stunt. Only in Berlin could you get beaten up outside a gay club at four in the morning wearing a pair of crotchless leather jeans and boost your chances of getting elected to the city council. It was good for his image.’

  Michael looked doubtful. ‘I’m not sure that his wife sees it like that.’

  ‘She’ll live,’ Max grunted. ‘I hear she’s too busy shagging some lawyer from Charlottenburg to worry too much about what her husband gets up to.’

  ‘Anyway, that was supposed to be the 36Boys as well.’

  ‘You would have thought the Turks would have more important things to worry about.’

  ‘They need someone to bully, why not the gays?’

  Reaching forward, Max picked an eraser off his desk and threw it at his sergeant. It smacked into his paper with a satisfying thwack, before falling to the linoleum.

  ‘Sorry.’ Michael returned his feet to the floor but kept reading. ‘But you know what I’m saying.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the Kriminalinspektor conceded, ‘you’re right. The Nazis attack the Turks, the Turks attack the queers. And the queers just end up in police stations, covered in puke. That’s just the way it is.’

  ‘Everyone’s gotta have someone to hate,’ Michael observed. ‘Plus, for the 36Boys, it’s a way of raising a little cash.’ With the paper, he gestured towards Wuffli, who was slowly disappearing down the stairs. ‘Sometimes, anyway. I hear they got all of ten marks from that poor bastard before he puked all over them.’

  ‘Serves them right. Where did they attack him?’

  ‘Near the Sugar Lounge.’

  Max nodded. ‘They should have got him before he went in and spent all his cash in the hope of getting his dick sucked.’

  Michael finally looked up from behind his paper. ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’

  ‘That’s the great thing about criminals,’ Max opined, ‘they tend to be thick as shit.’

  ‘Most of them.’

  ‘Most of them,’ Max agreed. ‘The problem is that there are so many of the buggers. The good thing about the 36Boys used to be that they only shat on their own doorstep. Now that they’ve started chasing queers around the city, they’re causing trouble all over the place. There just aren’t enough poofs around Kottbusser Tor.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Michael grinned.

  ‘Laugh all you like, but it is a problem for us. We don’t want those bastards fanning out across the city.’

  ‘No,’ Michael agreed. ‘Better to keep them in Kreuzberg.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll go and have a word with Volkan.’ Volkan Cin, head of the 36Boys was a self-proclaimed hard nut. ‘Ask him to keep his boys on a shorter leash.’

  ‘Why?’ Michael closed the paper, folded in half and tossed it onto the desk. ‘It won’t d
o much good.’

  ‘Gotta at least make the effort,’ Max responded. ‘Show the authority of the state. Tell him to keep his boys under control. Apart from anything else, it’s not good for the image of the city.’

  ‘What’s not good for the image of our great city?’ Sweating profusely from every pore, Kriminalkommissar Martin Marin stood, hands on hips, in the doorway of his office, glaring at each of them in turn. ‘What are you two fish wives gossiping about?’

  ‘Queer bashing, boss,’ Max replied, in a voice loud enough to elicit a few chortles from the assembled officers lounging around the room.

  Marin muttered something that suggested that particular issue was not very high on his list of priorities. Moving swiftly on, he pointed at the clock on the wall. As always, it showed 3.55, having been broken long before Max had first arrived at Stresemannstraße.

  ‘What time do you call this?’

  Trying not to yawn, Max made a show of looking at his watch. ‘According to my calculations, it’s just after ten thirty.’

  Retreating further behind his desk, Michael Rahn suppressed a smirk as he shook his head.

  ‘I need you two in my office, right now,’ Marin hissed, turning away, scuttling back into the office, slamming the door behind him.

  Max turned to his sergeant. ‘Is he having a tough morning?’

  ‘Nothing that unusual,’ Michael shrugged.

  ‘Then let me go and get a coffee and we’ll get on with it.’

  Five minutes later, they were sitting in Marin’s office, waiting for the Kriminalkommissar to look up from his impressive pile of papers. In the lull before the expected storm, Max took a cautious sip of his drink and winced. The coffee was lousy, weak and oily, but it made him feel a little better. The previous evening had turned into a major bender and he knew that getting through the rest of the day was going to be a struggle, even with the help of the broadest possible range of stimulants at the disposal of a Berlin cop.