You

by Zoran Drvenkar

  Friday, July 3, 2009.

  … and see Taja in the attic, opening the metal case with the gear in it. You see her dragging Oskar’s body out of the living room. Perhaps your brother had started smelling, perhaps she could no longer stand the sight of him. Tanner discovered the freezer that Oskar’s body was stored in.

  Why did she put him in there? you ask yourself and fast-forward through the next few days. You see Taja in the living room, doping up repeatedly, throwing up and tossing and turning in her sleep.

  On the night of July 7 four girls turn up and step inside the living room from the terrace. You lean forward and pause the picture.

  There you are, Stink.

  She still doesn’t have the blue patch under her eye, she still hasn’t met you. You look at the other girls. You haven’t seen any of them before. Your finger taps the space bar and the picture starts moving again …

  Wednesday, July 8, 2009.

  … and Taja shows Stink the merchandise in the attic. They take out the drugs. Nine hours later Stink and one of the girls put the drugs back in the metal case …

  Thursday, July 9, 2009.

  … and then in the evening Stink is back in the attic, taking the merchandise out of the metal case and cramming it into a sports bag. That’s where the DVD ends. An edit of seven minutes and twenty-three seconds. Your brother’s death, Taja’s breakdown, the theft of your merchandise. You take the DVD out of the PC and look at it for a moment before breaking it on the edge of the table.

  “David?”

  He opens the door.

  “Who else has seen this?”

  “Just me.”

  “Good. Wipe the hard drive.”

  “I understand.”

  “And you can all come in.”

  You throw the broken DVD into the wastebasket under your desk and notice how sweaty you are. You know David won’t say a word about the recordings. They all come in. Your son has his hands behind his back and looks like he got called in by the principal. Tanner gets straight to the point.

  “What did the cameras get?”

  “Let’s talk about that later.”

  Tanner looks at David, David holds his gaze, Tanner turns back to you.

  “Ragnar, I want to know what those fucking cameras got. He might have been your brother, but he was also my friend. Did Oskar have a heart attack or—”

  “Taja killed him.”

  “What?”

  Tanner jumps up, Darian’s mouth gapes open, he comes a few steps closer, his hands open and close, Leo’s eyes are closed, his jaw is working. David is the only one who doesn’t react. Tanner is speechless.

  That’s fine.

  “But …”

  “I said we’d talk about it later, that’ll have to do. So do me a favor and sit down.”

  Tanner sits down. You don’t like it when people question you. “What have you found?”

  Leo hands David a file. David glances into it quickly, takes out a photograph, and snaps the file shut again. He sums it up, “Stink’s real name is Isabell Kramer. She goes to the same school as Taja and took part in a school competition with her girlfriends three months ago. We downloaded the photograph from the school homepage.”

  He puts the photograph down on the desk and pushes it over to you.

  “From left to right they’re Sunmi Mehlau, Ruth Wassermann, Isabell Kramer, Vanessa Altenburg, and our Taja. All five have been friends since high school.”

  You look at the photograph. There they are. Stink, Taja, and the three girls you just saw on the DVD. They’re all giving you the finger. You don’t take it personally; at their age you were no better.

  Under the photograph it says “Happy Losers.”

  “What sort of competition was it?”

  “A poetry slam. They all got up on stage together, joked around the whole time, and had to leave after five minutes.”

  “Which of them was waiting on the opposite shore?” you ask your son, who’s standing by the door because no one’s offered him a chair. He looks at the photograph and taps the second girl from the left. It’s the girl who put the drugs back in the metal case with Stink.

  “You see the problem?” you ask, and before your son can answer, you go on: “The problem is that you didn’t scare them enough.”

  His cheek muscles twitch. The boy can’t stand criticism. He needs your attention like a plant needs light, and you treat him like an employee.

  “You’ve got to put that right, do you understand?”

  Your son says that he understands. He goes and stands by the door again, legs spread, hands in front of his crotch as if protecting his balls. Tracksuit bottom, tracksuit jacket, running shoes. He reminds you of a bouncer. You notice him glancing at Tanner. Tanner ignores him. He’s your son’s godfather. Tanner helped him out of a few tight spots while he was at school, but those days are over and Tanner has other problems to deal with right now. You can see it in his face. Taja as a murderer. Never. He can’t get it into his head. Unlike you, Tanner likes the kid and doesn’t understand your problem with her. And how could he? Whenever he sees Taja, he sees Taja and you see Majgull.

  “What else have you got?”

  “We know from the school office that Taja was absent all last week. The other girls have been missing for three days, they weren’t at home either. From the look of Oskar’s living room, it must have been a wild party.”

  You say nothing, you know better.

  “What’s with the cell number?”

  David looks at Leo. Leo says, “It belongs to this girl Stink. Fabrizio located the phone without any difficulty. The girl isn’t in Berlin anymore.”

  “What?!”

  “When you called the number an hour ago, Stink was sitting on the Alster in Hamburg, in a café called the Treasure Chest. Since Fabrizio located her, he’s been checking the coordinates every ten minutes; she’s still in Hamburg. We got Taja’s cell number off Oskar’s phone and checked it too. Same location. We’re assuming the whole gang’s in Hamburg.”

  “And the missing Range Rover?”

  David takes over.

  “I talked to the garage. Only the Mercedes is being repaired. They think it wouldn’t be a problem to track down the Range Rover. Oskar fitted both cars with tracking devices after the Porsche got jacked last year. As soon as we’ve found the access code for the Range Rover, we can call the tracking device and it’ll text us back its location.”

  “Simple as that?”

  “Simple as that.”

  They wait for your reaction. Even you are waiting for a sensible reaction, your mind has to process all these facts. However hard you try, you can’t see any sense in all of this.

  What the hell are they doing?

  You want to tell your men to leave you alone, but what comes out of your mouth sounds different, noisy and furious: “ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THAT SOME IDIOTIC SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS HAVE GONE TO HAMBURG IN MY BROTHER’S RANGE ROVER WITH FIVE KILOS OF HEROIN AND WE COULDN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT?”

  Your voice rebounds in the room. You see your son lowering his head so that he doesn’t have to meet your gaze.

  “Perhaps someone’s been helping them,” Tanner says, openly ignoring your fury because it doesn’t get any of you anywhere. You’re grateful to him for that. You breathe, you breathe, your clenched fists relax.

  “Yes, perhaps,” you say with Tanner’s calm, and regret your outburst. You thank Leo and David for the good work they’ve done and ask Tanner who you’ve got in Hamburg.

  “As far as I know, the Greeks are fully occupied again. Markus is back in Fuhlsbüttel. Then we’ve got the Dietrichs. Their boss is fresh out of jail.”

  “What about Oswald and Bruno?”

  Tanner hesitates.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Rather not? Why?”

  “You know.”

  Of course you know. The last time you worked with Oswald and Bruno, a failed delivery turned into a bloodbath. Bruno explained lat
er, there was no other way around it; and Oswald said sometimes you have to do what you have to do. You don’t much care for that kind of esoteric bullshit, but you do know that Oswald and Bruno get results. They are outposts, they enjoy immunity. Their biggest shortcoming is that they’re too violent, which makes them a risk. But they get results.

  “Send the picture of the girl to their cell phones and give them the address of the café. With a bit of luck the matter will be sorted out in half an hour.”

  They’re standing beside the shop window wondering if there’s something wrong with the colors, or whether it’s their eyes. Everything looked different in the shop. Oswald’s shirt is too pink, Bruno’s T-shirt is too blue. They look like iced lollipops on legs.

  “I look like a fucking Smurf,” says Bruno.

  “Shit,” says Oswald.

  The day started so well. They were about to sit down in Starbucks when Bruno had to stop by the shop window.

  “Nothing looks really good in artificial light,” he says.

  “Shit,” Oswald says again.

  While Bruno is changing his clothes in the bathroom, Oswald orders coffee, mineral water, and brownies. And while Oswald is getting changed, Bruno finds a seat outside and stirs milk into his coffee and tries not to light a cigarette. Since he gave up smoking, he’s felt terribly healthy. He hates fresh air, and the company could be better. Even though everyone claims they’d died out in the mid-nineties, most of the people sitting around him are yuppies—severe–looking women in shiny polyester blouses that are supposed to make them look ten years younger; guys with tousled hair and the look of eternal students, who earn five-figure sums a month and behave as if they’d just got out of bed. Everything changes. Yuppies have a new disguise. They try to look ordinary. They’ve given up putting their wealth on display, because even yuppies get lonely, so they try and look young, lost, and casual. Bruno wonders who they’re actually trying to fool. They can’t change anything about their behavior—they yell into their phones or sit over their MacBooks and adjust the display every thirty seconds because the sun’s so bright. Bruno feels vindicated. When the light is wrong nothing works. Oswald comes outside wearing his old clothes now, and says he feels like himself again.

  “Ditto,” says Bruno.

  They drink their coffee, eat the brownies, and stretch their legs. They can’t know that in four minutes they’ll get a call from Tanner. They can’t even guess how quickly any form of light can make way for darkness.

  Bruno’s driving today, Oswald’s responsible for everything else—air conditioning, music, snacks, drinks. When Bruno’s the passenger they mostly listen to Steppenwolf and it’s always too hot in the car. Oswald favors a cool breeze, the sound of Ghinzu, and an ice-cold beer in his hand. “Mine” is on at the moment, and even Bruno can’t help smiling. They’re similar in many ways. They have no conscience, they see brutality as a refined kind of sport, and never doubt one another. And they’re learning English together.

  “Man, I love that sound.”

  “It is strange, but strange is good.”

  “It makes my nerves tingle.”

  “That’s very nicely said.”

  “Thank you.”

  For four years Oswald tried to join the fire brigade, but he failed every psychological test. For a while he earned his money as a bodyguard, until one day the Lasser family discovered him. One small job was followed by the next small job, and soon the jobs changed and became too big for Oswald to do on his own. That’s when Bruno arrived on the scene.

  Bruno served for three years with the French Foreign Legion, and worked his way up to officer. He liked the job, but couldn’t cope with the new recruits. Most of them came from Russia and Romania, and he didn’t like their mentality. So Bruno went back to Germany, where he met Oswald at a Lasser family party. After that they joined forces and since then they’ve been doing their jobs together. They are street mercenaries and their big dream is to be hired as real mercenaries by Aegis Defence Services. To pass the admission test, they’re polishing up their English and taking language courses. They always sound like tourists as soon as they start talking English to each other.

  “There’s this new restaurant where you pick everything you want to be fried and then you put it in a little bowl and the chef fries it and a waiter brings it to your table so you can eat it with rice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m hungry, that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “You had a brownie.”

  “I know.”

  “Guess what.”

  “What?”

  “I’m hungry too.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “How about a nice steak with fries and herb butter?”

  “Man, shut up, my juices are flowing.”

  “Yeah, mine too.”

  Bruno parks the car behind a Range Rover; they get out and put on their sunglasses. Lots of people think they’re brothers, the same physique, the same gestures. But that’s how it goes when you’ve been working together for a long time. The differences blur, you’re each reflected in the other, and habits overlay one another like transparent foil. Bruno calls it “character assimilation.” Oswald doesn’t yet know what to make of the definition.

  The café has twelve tables outside. The tables are standing around a spreading chestnut tree, all of them are occupied. A sunny day in Hamburg means that the streets are crowded, and anyone who isn’t in the street is strolling along the Alster, or sitting in cafés.

  “There they are.”

  Oswald points at one of the tables. The girls are impossible to miss. Bruno licks his lips. Girls are his thing. Oswald prefers older women who have nothing more to lose.

  “I’m going for a snack,” Bruno says and moves closer like a dark wave. He stops by the table and takes off his sunglasses. The girls look up at the same time and see a bald man in his mid-thirties, leather jacket, goatee beard, twice-broken nose, weary eyes.

  “Girls, Ragnar Desche sends us.”

  Oswald has materialized on the other side of the table at the same time. He watches as the girl with the red hair grabs a fork. Move once more and I’ll break your damn wrist, Oswald thinks. He knows where to strike. He knows the sound the bone would make as it broke. As if the redhead could read his mind, she looks up and sees a bald man in his mid-thirties in a skin-tight red T-shirt and beige pants, clean-shaven, tattoo on his neck, birthmark in the corner of his mouth. The man isn’t smiling. The redhead looks away.

  Lucky you, thinks Oswald and hears Bruno saying: “Girls, Ragnar Desche sends us.”

  “So?”

  Bruno thinks he has misheard. The girl reminds him of that actress in Kill Bill. He can’t think of her name. Lucy something. Her hair is like black ink. He likes the way she says So? He imagines her saying Fuck me! and Yes, make me come! He points over his shoulder with his thumb.

  “Our car’s out back, we’ve got to talk.”

  “Our car’s out back as well,” says Lucy, “but we’re not talking to you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s so.”

  “Oswald?”

  “Yes, Bruno.”

  “Take the blonde.”

  And then Oswald takes the blonde.

  The blonde is the best choice. Beaten and with a black eye, she’s the ideal victim. Oswald grabs her hair with his right hand and makes a fist. A second later the blonde is standing on tiptoes and he has his arm around her neck. It’s going as smoothly as closing a zipper.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” asks a woman from the next table.

  “Police,” says Bruno and smiles and shows her the gap between his front teeth and the gap in his leather jacket from which the butt of his pistol protrudes. The woman quickly looks elsewhere.

  “You’re definitely not cops,” says the redhead.

  Bruno shrugs.

  “And you’re not nice little girls driving around in Daddy’s car, are you?”
>
  “Let me go, you jerk!” hisses the blonde, and tries to break free. Oswald tenses his arm against her throat; she pants, gives up, and raises her hands in defeat, Oswald loosens his grip, Bruno clears his throat and says, “I’m only going to repeat it once. Our car is out back, we need to talk.”

  This time they obey, this time they stand up. They actually are good girls, thinks Bruno and winks at Oswald. Oswald winks back, then his mouth makes an O and he pushes the blonde away as if she were on fire.

  “What the—?”

  Oswald regrets taking his eyes off the redhead for even a second. He looks down at himself. The fork is sticking out of his inner thigh. It’s really stupid. A fork is a fork. Oswald has had worse things in his arm and his back. Knives, screwdrivers, bolt cutters, and once even the broken end of a broomstick. A fork is just a fork. But Oswald hates surprises. He knows what’s going to happen next. After he’s pulled out the fork, he’ll grab hold of the redhead and only let go when she whines for mercy.

  “You rotten little bitch!”

  Oswald pulls the fork out of his thigh and is about to grab the redhead when something warm trickles down his leg. I’ve pissed myself, he thinks with alarm. His right trouser leg is dark from the thigh to the shoes.

  That’s not piss, that’s …

  The blood from his wound is spraying bright red across the table. Oswald drops the fork and presses his hand to his leg. His thoughts are reduced to a single sentence that wanders through his head in a panicky loop and doesn’t seem to want to end: The kid’s hit my artery The kid’s hit my artery The kid’s hit my artery The kid’s hit The kid’s hit The kid’s gone and fucking hit my artery.

  It takes Bruno a moment to understand what’s actually happening. He sees Oswald’s surprised face and then the blood spraying across the table as Oswald pulls out the fork. The girls recoil, a chair tips over, someone screams. Oswald tumbles backward, one hand on his thigh, his face a grimace, and it’s only then that Bruno is ready to react. Only then.

  That means a delay of about five seconds.

  Five seconds that Bruno’s lost.

  Lucy’s so close that he can smell her breath. He doesn’t know how she can be so quick. With his left elbow he feels that his gun has gone from his shoulder holster. How the hell did she do that? The barrel presses against his belly, he automatically tenses his muscles as if stomach muscles could stop a bullet. Even though Bruno knows for sure that the safety catch was on, there’s no guarantee that the safety catch is on right now.