Rygg passed the façade of the Condomerie, a hundred-euro bill pinned to the outsized condom in its window. If it fit you, the sign said, the money was yours. The condom was yellowing and dust had gathered on the scrolled rim. He passed the magazine racks, their banks of glossy covers displaying twisted bodies, in every possible permutation. For a while he stood with a small crowd, watching an oiled Thai girl wriggle in a window. Backtracking, he returned to one of the magazine racks and perused a series of photographs of an aristocratic brunette having her crotch shaved by her butler, peeking up over the edge of the rack every once in a while, looking for shoes.
The second hand crept up to the mark. When he had fifteen seconds to go, he sauntered back out and entered the door across the street. The sign above the door read “Pleasure Hole” in plump pink letters, the o a heart. Inside, carpeted steps led downward, two stripes of pink neon along the ceiling lighting the way. At the bottom, he pushed open a heavy dark-wood door armored in brass knobs. The interior was musty, shadowed, and seemed entirely empty.
The door shut behind him with a loud clack. Four of the bulbs over the bar were burnt out. A half-empty glass stood on the zinc. There was an inept oil of intertwined Indian girls on one side of the bar, and a rectangular mirror painted over with the queen of hearts on the other. The tables were covered with what looked like dark red velvet.
“Do not turn around. I have a gun.” The voice was behind him, male, accented. “Raise your hands, please. Spread apart your legs.” He obeyed. Someone plucked the briefcase away. Then he felt hands on him, firm, squeezing into his armpits, groin, down along his ankles. “Okay. Turn.” He looked around. A man in a leather jacket, with a shaven head, angled the muzzle of a gun at his face. A tattered moustache concealed his mouth. “Who are you?” the man asked.
“Torgrim Rygg. I was sent by Marko. Marko Marin.”
“We will see. Over here, please.”
Rygg followed the man’s gesture to booths along one wall. They were lit by pink lamps recessed in the cornices of the low ceiling. The man allowed Rygg to sit first, then laid the briefcase on a bench and slid in across from him. For a long minute they sat, staring at each other.
“How did you say you were called?” the man asked, finally. He spoke with a faint lisp and broken English. By the pink light, Rygg saw that the moustache hid the scar of a mended harelip.
“Rygg. Torgrim Rygg.”
“And Marin sent you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It was dangerous for him here. He was shot.”
“I know this. And where is he now?”
“He told me not to say.”
“Good. That is good. And I do not want to know. Now first, do you have anything for me?”
“In the briefcase.”
The man pulled the briefcase onto the red velvet tablecloth. “Combination?” Rygg gave it to him. He popped open the lid.
“In the folder there, the green one,” Rygg said.
The man opened the folder.
“Under the papers you’ll find some clippings. Yes. Now look through. You’re looking for the iceberg. There. That one.”
The man lifted out the magazine page and laid it on the table. He shut the briefcase. Then he pulled a folded piece of paper from an inner pocket of his jacket. He spread it out, running his fingers along the creases to flatten the paper. Laying the other one beside it, he leaned over them, then crumpled both together and put them in his pocket.
“Good,” he said. “Very good. Now. My name is Yuri.”
“Yuri. Pleased to meet you.” Rygg extended his hand. Yuri’s grip was like being bound by wire, and his calluses were hard as plastic. His fingernails looked like flakes of flint.
“And now, do you have anything else for me?” He rubbed his forefinger and thumb together.
“Yes—” Rygg began, but Yuri stopped him with a hand flattened on the velvet.
“Good. I believe you. You are Scandinavian. I like Scandinavians. They are straight people. I was in Sweden five times. Stockholm, Gothenburg.”
“I’m Norwegian.”
“I was in Oslo once. Visited the Fram Museum. I like Nansen. He was a good man. Now, you wait. I have ordered some food. We can share.” He went to a door beside the bar and pushed it open and shouted. Then he came back.
“Okay, Mr. Rygg, we are doing a business, yes? I want money, you want story. Okay. But story will take a long time. So we have food, we have vodka, we are friends, yes?”
“Sounds good to me.” He was still jumpy and had no appetite at all.
The door banged open. From a haze of hanging pans and steam, a fat man bustled in with a tray.
“I order for you Hamburg specialties. You will like very much,” Yuri told him.
The fat man set down a bowl containing a thick beige stew in which nameless chunks surfaced and sank again. The man placed two glasses of vodka among the crockery, and cutlery wrapped in paper napkins. “Guten appetit!” he cried, and waddled back through the door.
“So what do we have here?” Rygg asked. He was frightened of the stew.
“Mm, mm, mm. I love to come to Hamburg just to eat,” Yuri told him. “To eat and to fuck Turkish woman with big ass.” He had already unwrapped his cutlery and tucked his paper napkin into his collar. He held his spoon in his fist like a child and jabbed at the dishes. “Aalsuppe. From a long fish, black. Úgor, it call in Russian. It swim like—” He waggled the spoon.
“Eel. Ål. It’s the same in Norwegian.”
“Yah, Aal.” He stabbed his spoon into the bowl. “The famous dish of Hamburg. When I am at home I dream of this.”
“Sounds delicious,” Rygg said. Luckily, Yuri was so absorbed in the aalsuppe that he only had to sample a couple spoonfuls. It actually wasn’t bad, with a dense, meaty flavor. He watched Yuri ladle the stew in under his moustache. He ate so fast and so intently that the meal was over before Rygg had taken five bites.
Yuri sat back and cleaned off his mustache with downward swipes of the napkin, then sucked at the ragged ends. He belched. “You like?” he asked.
“Fabulous,” Rygg told him.
Yuri picked up his vodka glass and motioned Rygg to do likewise. He banged them together and said: “Prost!” then drank half of it in a single swallow. He belched again. “Okay,” he said. “We begin.”
Over the next half hour, as Yuri drank vodka and told him his story, Rygg was bemused to remember Yuri’s initial suspicion and precautions. Now, he felt, he was Yuri’s pal for life. He wondered if all Russians were like this: once you’d eaten with them, and clashed your vodka glasses together, you were family.
On April second, Yuri told him, Captain Tamm of the Alpensturm, who Yuri had worked under for eight years, and who was like a father to him, had come to his house. He told Yuri that he was letting him go – Yuri was too lazy and liked his vodka too much to work on the ship any more. Yuri went crazy, shouting, grabbing at the captain – he demonstrated on Rygg’s shirt – but the captain just walked away.
For a day and a night Yuri moped, drinking and raging, but then he decided that he’d give it one last shot. He’d go see the captain and tell him that he needed another chance. He’d work for free for one trip, and if the captain still thought he was lazy, he’d quit, no problem.
He went to the captain’s house, but nobody was around, so he went down to the Kaliningrad docks. It was late in the evening, perhaps ten or eleven. Yuri was, by his own estimation, everybody’s best friend, and he just sauntered in with a wave to the guards. He walked down to the Alpensturm. The ship was dark. There was a car parked in the shadows beyond it. As he stepped toward the ship, two men got out of the car, one tall, one short and square. Yuri drew the figures in the air. They wore ordinary clothes, but didn’t seem like dock workers or even guards.
“They say what I want? I say I need Captain Tamm. They say to me to leave. I say fuck you, I need Captain Tamm. Then they show to me gun, they say to me to leave or th
ey kill me. Okay. I leave.” Yuri lifted his hands in mock surrender. “These men, they no smile, I think they can kill me. But now I am very interested. What is happening with Alpensturm? Maybe on Alpensturm is now drugs, I think.”
Yuri headed out the closest gate. But then he turned right around and came in by the first gate again. He went to a ship berthed on the far side of the wharf, where he had a Filipino friend called Ocho. “I say ‘Ocho, take my clothes, I want to go swim.’ He is very surprise. I take off my clothes. I say ‘Ocho, give me Vaseline.’ You know Vaseline?”
Rygg nodded.
“I put Vaseline. I take my camera, always I have my camera. I buy here, in Hamburg. Three hundred Euro. It can go into water, it very small.”
Slipping into the frigid water, he swam to the Alpensturm, carrying the camera, and squirmed in through the galley porthole, which was always open. Inside it was “black as fuck” and he didn’t dare switch on a light. He heard snoring and peeked into the control room. By the light of the console, he saw Captain Tamm sleeping on a cot. “This is very strange. Why he sleep on Alpensturm? Why he not sleep in nice bed at home? Never before I see him sleep on Alpensturm.”
Yuri fetched the master keys from a secret hiding place that only he and the captain knew about, the whereabouts of which, for some reason, he refused to divulge to Rygg (and you will never guess!). He made his way to the hold, opened the metal doors with the keys, and felt his way inside. He was expecting drugs, in bags or concealed in tins. What he found were twelve long boxes. He measured them roughly with his feet. Each was around four meters long, one meter wide, and one meter high. Yuri fumbled around on the wall until he found a monkey wrench and jimmied one of the boxes open from the bottom – “Only five centimeter.” Reaching in, he could feel something hard: a firm, rounded surface. Demonstrating with his hands, Yuri showed how he slipped the camera in and took two pictures. Then he replaced the wrench and the keys and left, slipping out the porthole.
As he was swimming back to Ocho’s ship, he saw the square goon at the sentry box, and knew he was being fingered. So he swam for half a kilometer through the freezing Baltic, clutching the camera, until he got beyond the wall of the port. “When I come out, I have no clothes, I am naked, with Vaseline. Very funny.” He had an almost girlish way of putting his hand in front of his mouth when he laughed. “There is window open. I take curtain from window and put on my body. I get into taxi, I tell driver story about how I am thiefed.” Yuri laughed again, hand cupping his mustache.
“So what did the pictures show?” Rygg asked.
Yuri nodded. “I cannot look at them very good, I have not computer. You see, I have to leave Kaliningrad very quickly. But I think they show something interesting, okay? Something very interesting to Marko Marin.”
“Do you have them?”
Yuri shook his head. “Not here.”
“Why didn’t you bring them with you?” Rygg asked, exasperated.
“I don’t know who is coming to shoot this time. I am frighten. Maybe they find me. So I leave the pictures somewhere. A secret place.”
“Can we go get them?”
“You meet me tomorrow.”
“Here?”
“No!” Yuri looked shocked. “No, no, no, no. We meet in café. You know the Speicherstadt?”
“Down by the water?”
“Ya, along the canal.”
“Sure.”
“You come tomorrow. Is café, Café Mendelssohn. Very nice. You feel like rich man. Eleven o’clock. Sit beside me on the bar. Don’t speak, don’t look to me. You will find there my cigarettes. Marlboro, ya? When I go, I leave my cigarettes. You take.”
“I got you.
“Marlboro.”
“Got it.”
“What time?”
“Eleven.”
“Okay. Now I take the money.”
Rygg paused.
“You have information. I take the money please.”
“I will wait until I get the pictures. Marko said after I get all the information.”
“You don’t give me money, I don’t give you pictures. All my money, I have used. I have no work, like I tell you. Tonight I want to drink vodka, I want find nice Turkish girl. You want pictures?”
Rygg made the decision. “I’ll give you half,” he said. “Half now, half on delivery of the pictures. Hand me the briefcase.” He unpeeled the leather from the bottom and took out the envelope. It seemed very slim. He opened it and counted out ten five-hundred euro bills and slid them across the table. Yuri counted the bills again, carefully, slipping his forefinger under his mustache to wet it.
“Okay,” he said. “I like you. Okay. Tomorrow. Eleven. You will take the cigarettes and leave the envelope. I am Yuri. I will be there.”
Emerging from the Pleasure Hole, Rygg marched fast away from the entrance, stopping once he got outside of the Reeperbahn, checking for shoes, checking for anything familiar. Once, looking up from buying a bag of apples, he thought he recognized a pair of black Vibram-soled loafers, and quickly ducked into an alley, walked across to a parallel street, and took a taxi to the Chilehaus bar. He stayed there the whole afternoon, making sure to let the bartender know that he was back in Hamburg to do more work on the Evagas project and that he’d spent the morning in the office.
April 19
As the days passed, Dmitri got to know the commandos. At first, in their wet suits and balaclavas, they had seemed like a tribe of identical siblings: burly and barking. His fear had homogenized them. But they had removed their balaclavas and were dressed now in looser khaki. And though they still brandished identical squat machine guns, and were all shaved down to the scalp, he began to discern them. The kitchen commando, who watched over Dmitri and Ilya in the galley, was a ropy, sour character. Once, Dmitri had offered him a piece of raisin bun, and he’d snarled and told him to keep his treats. But a couple of the others were more jovial, and one, a blue-jowled, blue-eyed giant whose forearms were completely submerged in tattoos, even cracked an occasional joke while he was watching over their meals.
Dmitri, almost unconsciously, began to divide the hijackers into two groups. The first group, to which the kitchen commando belonged, spoke flatter Russian, some of them with a high-class accent, others with a foreign accent. They were surlier, more taciturn, and watched over their charges with a steadier gaze.
The second group, which included the jovial giant, spoke to each other in a salty Russian that Dmitri occasionally found incomprehensible. He’d heard the argot before, though, in certain bars: it was the Russian of the criminal class. He noticed something: the commandos watched over their meals in pairs. And the pairs always contained one commando from each group. Dmitri couldn’t be sure, but he thought the “elite commandos” were in charge, because once or twice he’d heard one of them say something to his companion in a sharp tone.
The ‘criminals’, as Dmitri thought of them, were all intricately tattooed. When he commented on this one evening in the room, Wolfie said that they were from Siberia.
“How do you know?” Dmitri asked.
“I was in prison for five years. I got to know all the tattoos. These are the Siberia guys. Look at the backs of their necks. They’ve all got the little shape, looks like a spider. Like an evil little spider crawling up their necks. The Siberians are the worst. They aren’t afraid of anything.”
“But why are only half of the commandos tattooed?”
“Fuck knows. Best thing not to think about it.”
That was the advice Ludo had given him, but Dmitri couldn’t help it: he thought about it all the time, and it was torturing him. Why were there two groups of hijackers? What were they protecting? What was in the hold?
Chapter 6
Speicherstadt
April 27
The next morning, Rygg left himself a good hour to get to the Speicherstadt. He sauntered across the canals, swinging the briefcase normally, checking the passing shoes automatically, looking for anything static: so
meone reading on a park bench, someone buying roses. He glared suspiciously at a man tying his shoe, then laughed when the man looked up at him in alarm and walked quickly off. Easy there, Torgrim, he thought. You’re fine. No one’s on your tail.
He came down Speicherstadt from the canal, looking at the ducks on the water. The ducks trailed long, intersecting Vs of light on the water, which widened and batted the shore. He leaned against the railing, watching the webs of light. He still had seven minutes. And in a quarter of an hour or so, you’re all done, he told himself. He felt almost sorry. It seemed too easy, after all the preparation. Once, when he had looked down at the briefcase and thought about the concealed knife, he felt a little surge for action – that sensation he’d stepped away from twenty years ago and still craved.
Gold flickered across the ducks’ wakes, slipping into the furrows and brushing the tops of the waves again. He looked up to see where it was coming from. A hundred yards to his left, the rump of a car stuck out from an alley, and he recognized the blue-and-silver coloring of the Hamburg police vehicles. A strobe beat from the roof of the car, gilding the railings along the canal. Above the car, on a sign supported by scrolled ironwork, he read “Café Mendelssohn”. Beneath the words was the painted portrait of a pale, dark-haired man with immense sideburns.
Walk, he thought. Walk away. Slowly. Easy, easy. Swing your briefcase. That’s right. He walked along the canal for a few feet, then turned north along a side street. Backing into a doorway, he looked down the street, left, right, checking for passing shoes. There seemed to be no one else around. He waited until his heartbeat subsided a little. It’s real, he kept thinking. It’s real. Up to now it had seemed a little game, with artificial dangers, like hide-and-seek. Okay, what’s the plan now?
He knew he had to come up with something smart to fit the situation. He needed the information from Yuri and weighed the danger against the reward: he could walk away, but then he would have to do it immediately and not look back. No – the information was too important to walk away from. He’d come this far and if the police were there, the danger was over. Or at any rate, it was less than it had been. “All right,” he muttered aloud. “This is your chance. This is why I’m here. This is action.”
Chasing the Storm Page 6
