The Carnival Master jf-4

by Craig Russell

  She knew it was a mistake as soon as she entered. The customers in the bar were almost all men, apart from a scattering of brassy-looking female types, some of whom were dressed ten years too young for their ample figures. Maria, her body cloaked in the baggy pullover and jeans, was revolted by their exhibition of age-puckered flesh. She sat by the window that she had selected. A couple of men at the bar followed her progress, exchanged muttered remarks and burst into laughter. The waiter came to her table and she ordered a beer.

  ‘Nothing to eat?’

  ‘Nothing to eat.’ Maria paid for the beer as soon as it arrived. She was aware of the glances being cast across at her by the men at the bar, as well as the hostile, bottle-blonde glares of some of the women. She decided to watch the apartment from here for only a few minutes, and then from the car. Two patrolling policemen passed the window. Unlike the Polizei Hamburg, who had switched to new blue uniforms, the North-Rhine-Westphalia police still wore the nineteen-seventies-designed green and mustard. It made Maria feel strange watching the police officers go by; they seemed like alien creatures. Something, she knew, had become broken inside her and could not be repaired. Hamburg and her job as a detective seemed so very far away from her now.

  ‘Y’awright, darlin’?’

  Maria knew without turning that it would be one of the drunks from the bar. She didn’t reply.

  ‘Asked if you was awright, darlin’?’ the man repeated, then added something in a thick dialect that she took to be Kolsch.

  Maria left her beer untouched and stood up to leave. The man in her way wasn’t particularly tall but he was heavy, with a vast belly stretching his checked shirt. He stood too close to her. She felt her panic rise.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, avoiding eye contact with the drunk.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said in an offended manner. ‘I just asked if you was all right. My friend and I would like to buy you a drink.’

  ‘I’ve got a drink. And anyway, I’m leaving. Get out of my way, please.’

  The heavy man stepped to one side with a shrug, but without allowing her much room to pass. Maria squeezed past him, fighting the revulsion that rose within her at the idea of physical contact. She simply wanted out of the bar: the scene was attracting a fair bit of attention and the barman was clearly considering intervening on her behalf. This was all wrong: surveillance meant keeping the target visible and yourself invisible. As she passed the drunk, she smelled the thick odour of stale beer on his breath. He winked at his partner at the bar. It was then that she felt his hand on her backside.

  ‘Not much there…’ he said loudly and laughed. ‘But you’ll do!’

  The explosion of revulsion, hate and panic within Maria was immediate.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ She screamed into the drunk’s face so loudly and so fiercely that his smile gave way to shock. The laughter in the bar died. ‘You FUCK!’ she screamed again. Her arm arced so fast that no one saw it coming. There was an explosion of glass, beer and blood on the side of the fat man’s face. He staggered sideways and Maria, now clear of the table, slammed her heavy boot into his groin. She looked at him and laughed as he doubled over. A shrill, not entirely sane laugh. Then she looked at everyone else in the bar. No one met her eye. Probably for the first time in years, the brassy bar blondes were trying not to be seen. Maria noticed the barman reaching for the phone. He was going to call the police and she’d seen a foot patrol just two minutes ago in the street. It was all fucked up. Her anger surged again and she kicked the fat man in the face as he lay on the floor. She grabbed her coat and headed for the door.

  ‘I won’t be back,’ she said to the barman as she did so. She eased her pullover up from the top of her trousers just enough for the barman to get a glimpse of the automatic tucked into her waistband. ‘But if you call the police I will.’

  He put the phone down.

  Maria turned to the door and found a couple standing in her way. The girl was a younger version of the other women in the bar, dressed gaudily and with a gold stud in her nostril. He was tall and massive, wearing the same long leather coat he had worn all day while she’d been following him. Viktor looked at the groaning fat man lying in a pool of blood and beer on the floor, at the barman with his hand still on the phone, and then at Maria. He beamed an amused grin and stood politely to one side.

  Maria stormed out of the bar. As soon as the cold night air hit her she started to cry in silent sobs, and headed down the street in the opposite direction from where she’d parked. She’d have to come back for the car later, in case Viktor or the barman noted her licence number.

  ***

  She walked for a number of blocks before taking a taxi. Once she was back at her hotel she changed swiftly into a completely different outfit and then took a second taxi back to where she had left the car. Maria didn’t look in the direction of the bar or Viktor’s apartment until she was sitting in the dark of the Saxo.

  Fuck, she thought. It’s all completely fucked up. She could hardly have done more to bring herself to Viktor’s attention. She had done so well in tracking him to his apartment. She had addresses or partial addresses for the pick-ups. But she hadn’t been able to see the crucial next stage in the process: when it was Viktor’s turn to hand over the cash. He wouldn’t hang on to that amount of cash for long. Someone would come to him, or he would go to someone to hand it over. Regularly. But now Maria’s face was known to him. In Hamburg, with an official surveillance, it wouldn’t be an issue: there would be a constant circulation of cars and faces. Being followed by a team of five is five times more difficult to detect. She wished she could have called Anna Wolff, who worked with Maria in the Murder Commission in Hamburg. But there was no way of getting Anna, Fabel or anyone else involved. This was Maria’s solo crusade and she had messed the whole thing up. She would have to find a way herself.

  Maybe Viktor and his tart were still in the bar; she could sneak up to his apartment, break in and see if she could find something, some connection between Viktor and the next step up in Vitrenko’s organisation. Maria bit her lip and gripped the steering wheel tightly. She was thinking like an amateur. She was worthless. She was a worthless bag of shit who had failed as a police officer and would now never achieve anything more in her life.

  She started the car and drove without any sense of destination. She crossed the Zoobrucke bridge to the other side of the Rhine. After about half an hour she found a service station with an all-night American burger bar attached. She ordered a massive portion of burger and fries and shovelled the food into her mouth, swallowing huge chunks without chewing properly and washing it down with cola. When it was all gone, she went up and ordered the same again, defiantly staring down the waitress.

  When she had finished the second portion, Maria went into the burger bar’s washroom, knelt down at the toilet bowl and pushed her finger into her throat.

  6.

  Senior Criminal Commissar Benni Scholz was not someone who frowned often, but his broad brow creased beneath the mass of dark hair as he watched the television screen. This was probably the most important, most publicly visible task he had undertaken since he had become a police officer fifteen years ago. Every single officer in the Cologne police department would judge him on how well he handled it. Stress like this was something to which he was totally unaccustomed. So much pressure.

  Scholz’s office was in darkness, other than for a single small desk lamp and the flickering light from the TV. A tall, lean uniformed Commissar sat next to him, his attention also fixed with a frown on the images on the screen.

  ‘Who was behind this, Rudi?’ Scholz asked the uniformed officer without taking his eyes off the television.

  ‘Hasek.’

  ‘Hasek!’ Scholz turned to Rudi Schaeffer with an expression of disbelief. ‘Hasek organised this? That wanker in the Ops Room?’

  Scholz turned again to watch the screen. An elaborately decorated carnival float, capped by a black Model-T Ford with the word ‘PO
LIZEI’ painted clumsily in white on the side and flanked by twenty or thirty men and women dressed as Keystone Cops, slowly progressed along a crowd-lined street. The ‘Keystone Cops’ continually bumped into each other, tripped over, spilled buckets of fake tinsel water over onlookers and hit each other over the heads with oversized rubber batons while others threw handfuls of candy into the crowd, all in carefully choreographed mayhem.

  ‘That was three years ago. He won awards for that float,’ said Rudi unhelpfully.

  ‘I knew it had won an award,’ said Scholz. ‘But I had no idea it was bloody Hasek who had been the organiser that year.’ His mood darkened even more. Everybody had been so certain that Benni Scholz was the man for the job. Everyone knew him for his sense of fun. His wacky humour. The ideal choice as organiser of this year’s Cologne Police float for Karneval. He would rather have taken on another dozen murder cases.

  ‘Did you get the dummy heads sorted out?’ he asked Rudi. The services of Commissar Rudi Schaeffer of the city’s traffic division, and an old friend of Scholz’s, had been volunteered as assistant organiser. It had been Scholz who had volunteered them. No point in suffering alone, he had thought.

  ‘Sure did.’ Rudi smiled good-naturedly. ‘I’ve got the prototype outside…’

  Scholz watched, despondently, as Hasek’s perfect, award-winning float continued its flawless progress. Rudi reappeared, his head encased in a mass of painted papier mache.

  ‘What the fuck…’ said Scholz twisting around in his chair. ‘And allow me to repeat for the sake of clarity… what the fuck is that supposed to be?’

  ‘It’s a bull…’ said Rudi, plaintively, his voice muffled by the dummy head. ‘Just like you asked for. You know, big joke, we all dress up as Bullen.’ Rudi referred to the derogatory nickname in German for a police officer. The Americans and British called their policemen ‘ pigs ’; the French ‘ les Flics ’; the Germans called them ‘ Bullen ’.

  Benni Scholz was considerably shorter than Rudi Schaeffer and had to reach up to put his arm around his colleague’s shoulder. Rudi turned his huge papier-mache head toward him.

  ‘Rudiger, my dear friend,’ said Scholz, ‘I fully appreciate that you are from Bergisch-Gladbach. And I do make allowances for that… I really do. But I’m pretty sure that even in your formative years, you never saw a bull, cow or any form of cattle that remotely resembled whatever the hell that thing on your head is supposed to be. Unless, that is, Bergisch-Gladbach is twinned with Chernobyl.’

  ‘It’s only a prototype…’ replied Rudi defensively from within the cavern of the dummy head.

  At that point a young detective came into Scholz’s office. He paused for a moment, staring at Scholz with his arm around a uniformed officer wearing a bizarre head. Scholz removed his arm.

  ‘Can you guess what this is meant to be?’ Scholz asked the young officer.

  ‘Dunno, Benni… the Elephant Man?’

  Rudi slunk out, his massive dummy head bowed.

  ‘What is it, Kris?’ Scholz asked the young detective.

  ‘The Biarritz restaurant on Wolfsstrasse. One of the kitchen staff has been turned into mince by some guy with a meat cleaver…’

  7.

  The Teteriv river was beautiful at this time of year: crusted with ice but still flowing and free of the thick viscous algae that sleeked it in the summer. The lodge was wide and low and had its face to the Teteriv. It was fringed by forest, the trees thickly iced with frozen snow. Along one side of the lodge was a large wooden frame on which hunters would hang and gut their kills.

  The others had already been there a day by the time Buslenko arrived. The road from Korostyshev was ancient, probably first forged by ox-driven chumak wagons four hundred years before. The deep snow had made the road all but impassable, but the drivers of each of the three Mercedes four-by-fours had been trained to negotiate every type of condition, from arctic waste to desert. As Buslenko approached the lodge, he was cheerfully greeted by a thickset man in his early forties, a sporting rifle slung over his shoulder. Buslenko smiled to himself at Vorobyeva’s seeming casualness. Vorobyeva was a member of the Titan Spetsnaz and would have had Buslenko’s four-by-four in his sights for the last ten minutes, only lowering his high-powered rifle when he was satisfied that it was Buslenko behind the wheel. And that he was alone. The Titans were specially trained to provide close protection for individuals as well as guarding key Ukrainian government sites. In the spirit of the free enterprise that the government had so enthusiastically embraced, they were even available for hire on a contract basis. If you were rich enough.

  When Buslenko opened the door of the lodge the warm, rich odour of varenyky being cooked on the wood-burning stove embraced him.

  ‘Smells good…’ he said.

  ‘You’re just in time, major.’ The man stirring the varenyky was Stoyan, the Crimean Tatar, whose dark good looks spoke of the blending of Mongol and Turk a thousand years before. ‘Want some?’

  ‘You bet. You’d better take some out to Vorobyeva too.’ Buslenko took off his outer wear and greeted the group that sat at the heavy rough-hewn wooden table playing Preferens. Buslenko joined them and they joked and laughed their way through the meal, complimenting Stoyan on his cooking skills. They could have been any group of people in thick knitwear and hiking boots, gathered around a hunting lodge’s hot stove, eating dumplings and drinking vodka and taking a break from their dull jobs to gather for a weekend’s fishing or hunting in the wilds. But they weren’t.

  As soon as the meal was over, the dishes were cleared away and everyone’s attention was sombrely fixed on Buslenko. He took his laptop and several document folders and laid them on the table.

  ‘This is a “Greater Good” operation,’ he began without preamble. ‘As such, we are being asked to carry out a mission that is illegal, under both Ukrainian and international law. But it is an operation that is fully in the interests of justice, internal order and the external reputation of Ukraine. Some of you may feel that the illegality of this operation is incompatible with your roles as law-enforcement officers. I also have to tell you that there is a considerable chance that we may not all come out of this alive. And if any of us are caught, we will go to prison abroad and without the recognition or intervention of the Ukrainian government. So if any of you feel that you don’t want to take part in the operation, now’s the time to say. You can leave now and no one will think any the less of you for it.’

  Buslenko paused. ‘I also have to tell you this mission isn’t just black, it’s wet.’ A ‘wet’ Spetsnaz mission was one where blood was spilt; where people died. Buslenko’s audience remained silent, their attention fixed on him and waiting for him to continue. He grinned and carried on.

  ‘Okay, now that that crap’s out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks.’ He turned the screen of his laptop in their direction. He used a wireless mouse and the handsome face of a middle-aged Ukrainian officer appeared on the screen.

  ‘This is our target. I know you all have heard of him. Colonel Vasyl Vitrenko, formerly of the Berkut counter-terrorist unit.’ Buslenko nodded an acknowledgement to Belotserkovsky, the Berkut member of the team. ‘I want you all to take a moment to think of the most dangerous person you have ever come across in your career.’ Buslenko paused. ‘Now imagine someone twenty times more dangerous and you’re beginning to understand Vitrenko. He was nearly caught in Hamburg, Germany two years ago. He was being tracked by his own father, also a former Spetsnaz officer, as well as the Hamburg police. Vitrenko arranged a little spectacle for the Hamburg cops. He wired his own father up to an anti-tank mine and put it on a timer so that the investigating cop could bear witness to Dad being splattered across half the city. When it comes to killing, Vitrenko sees himself as a poet. An artist. He has a taste for the symbolic and the ritualistic. Before he took up his command post in the Berkut in nineteen-ninety, he’d already had a distinguished Soviet career in Afghanistan and had then volunteered to help our Russian cousins
in Chechnya. The story is that he went renegade, converting the loyalty of his men from the “Motherland” to personal loyalty to him. This group forms the basis of the criminal organisation he has built. Vasyl Vitrenko is as skilled a killer and torturer as you are ever likely to experience. Like I said, he sees himself as an artist…’ Buslenko clicked the mouse and another image filled the screen. It took a moment for the explosion of blood and meat to be recognisable as the remains of a human being. ‘He believes that Ukrainians are descended from Vikings, which is partly true, so one of his specialities is to copy the Viking Blood Eagle ritual. He tears the lungs from victims while they are still alive and throws them over their shoulders as the wings of the eagle.’

  Buslenko paused to let the image sink in. But this wasn’t an audience to be easily shocked. Buslenko clicked the mouse again. Another face replaced Vitrenko’s.

  ‘Now say hello to Valeri Molokov. Russian. Forty-seven years old. Ex-cop. Former member of the Russian OMON special police Spetsnaz. Turned the people he was supposed to be hunting down into business associates. For a while he was considered to be a highly effective OMON operative, because one way or another he was taking down so many of Russia’s key targets in organised crime. Turned out he had been steadily eliminating his competitors, or carrying out contract killings for other crime bosses with whom he cooperated. It soon became known that if you wanted someone taken out nice and cleanly, then Molokov was your man. Despite having served with OMON and their history in Chechnya, Molokov is known to have very strong links with the Obshchina Chechen mafia. Wanted in Russia for smuggling, drug-trafficking, seven counts of murder, eight counts of conspiracy to murder, rape and false imprisonment.’