by Mark Burnell
'What do you lose?'
'About twenty-five per cent.'
'That's quite high.'
'I know. But he makes it so easy, it's worth it.'
Brankovic and I are waiting for Savic to join us. We're sitting in a café, drinking coffee, watching rain slither down the windows. There are two other couples in the place, Sibelius playing quietly on a radio somewhere. As usual, the conversation has been flowing like a glacier. I find myself thinking about Savic's gold dog-tags when I see the chain around Brankovic's neck.
'Is it true they call you the Spoon because you wear one around your neck?'
He nods.
'Can I see it?'
He doesn't look happy but takes it off anyway and hands it to me. It's completely unremarkable. A cheap metal teaspoon, rather battered, with a crude hole drilled into the end to allow a chain to pass through.
'Why do you wear it?'
'It kept me alive.'
'How?'
He shrugs.
'You don't know?'
He shakes his head.
'So how do you know it kept you alive?'
'It just did.'
I drink some coffee. 'Where did you get it?'
'It's army issue. JNA.'
The Yugoslav National Army.
'You were a conscript?'
He nods.
'How was that?'
'Good.'
Said with genuine warmth.
'Why?'
'It was better, back then.'
'What was?'
'Life. It was simple.'
'In Bosnia?'
'Yes. In Bosnia.'
'Do you miss it?'
'Yes.'
'You don't like it here in Germany?'
'It's okay. Better than Hong Kong.'
'But you'd go home, if you could?'
He nods vigorously. Which is the first time I've seen or heard him do anything vigorously. 'Yes. I miss home. I miss the people. I miss the bakery. Not being able to go home is the worst thing that's happened to me.' He looks out of the window, almost in tears. 'I just want to go home.'
Friday night on Strasse des 17 Juni, a forest of artificial light. The pavements were crawling, the road congested. Stephanie and Savic were in a taxi, stuck behind a bus.
'Look at them all. Polish whores. They come here every Friday and Saturday night. By train, mostly. The Warsaw Express. They earn some money, then go home ready for Monday. You see them here, and along Lietzenburger Strasse and Oranienburger Strasse. Many of them are amateurs.'
'Amateur whores?'
'Girls with shit jobs in Warsaw, whores in Berlin. For some of them, a weekend on their backs here is worth more than a month's wages back home.'
'Are you involved?'
Savic shook his head. 'We looked into it. But it's too casual, too organic. Besides, interference was going to cause us problems.'
'Why?'
'Publicly, officials disapprove of these girls. Privately, they're not so quick to condemn. And the police don't mind too much. Most of the girls are independent. They're working tourists. They don't bring trouble over the border with them.'
'Trouble like you?'
'People like me reduce trouble.'
'Right.'
'Ask the police.'
'They'll vouch for you, will they?'
He was smirking. 'A lot of them, yes. You'd be surprised.'
As soon as he said it, she knew she wouldn't be.
'This is Berlin today.' They were on Wilhelmstrasse, south of Leipziger Strasse. It was a breezy morning, dense white clouds scudding across an intermittently azure sky. Savic was pointing to a huge cheerless concrete building on his right. 'The German Finance Ministry. And across the street you can see …'
A wasteland. Behind a mesh fence topped with barbed wire was an abandoned concrete expanse, waist-high weeds rising through cracks between pools of stagnant water. A hundred yards beyond the fence was the rear façade of a large square building: red brick, commercial, deserted, most of its windows boarded up, the rest broken.
'After reunification there was a huge programme of redevelopment, fuelled by an assumption that Berlin's population would grow massively. It never happened but in those boom years the demand for manual labour outstripped supply, which was good for us. We brought in as many illegals as we could and there was work for all of them.'
'And now?'
'Berlin is bankrupt. Apart from one or two prestige projects – the redevelopment of the Olympiastadion for the FIFA World Cup or the Lehrter Bahnhof – there is no new construction. As for all the deprived areas that were promised regeneration – tough shit. They have no chance. That's what gives this city its feel today; brand new designs full of futuristic vision right next to the decaying architecture of the past. I guess it's great if you're the Chancellor in the Neues Kanzleramt but not so good if you're living out in Hellersdorf in housing stock that was condemned when Honecker was still in charge of the GDR.'
'What about the illegals?'
'It's not as easy as it was, but it's still not too hard. There's always plenty of work that Germans won't do. There are even jobs that Turks consider beneath them.' Savic smiled mirthlessly. 'Can you believe that? The Turks!'
Gunther Katz was the first one to be identified, a week after her arrival in Berlin. As soon as she saw him, Stephanie knew she'd seen him before. But not in the prefabricated offices of Katz Europa, a haulage firm located on Motzener Strasse in Marienfelder, just inside the city boundary.
It was a functional business park, bound by a security fence, with a central depot and two modern warehouses, each with six drive-in loading bays. Stephanie and Savic were in Katz's office: a grey nylon carpet, black plastic chairs, a protective grille over the window. For decoration there was an Energie Cottbus team photo on the wall. The gasp of air-brakes and the grumble of diesel engines never ceased. Every time a lorry trundled past, the office reverberated.
Recognizing Katz was the easy part. He had shiny purple scar tissue over the right side of his face. Half his mouth was paralysed. When he spoke, it slurred his speech, making him sound intoxicated. Much of his right ear was missing, along with his right thumb and forefinger. The rest of the hand was a charred mess, but instead of using his left he preferred to wedge his Camel cigarette between the remaining stumps of the right, so that when he took a drag his fist covered his mouth.
Stephanie asked where he operated.
'Mostly through eastern Europe. I have commercial agents in Poznan, Warsaw, Kiev, Prague, Minsk, Moscow. But I will deliver anywhere.' A grotesque smile transformed him into a gargoyle. 'Location: not important. Route: not important. Cargo: not important. As long as my lorries are carrying, that's all that matters. I detest empty containers.'
Katz described the rest of his business. Every now and then he'd say something to Savic in Serb, which generally led to laughter or a wistful sigh. They drank coffee laced with plum brandy.
'You two go back a long way, then,' Stephanie said.
'Before Time itself. I knew Milan when he was in nappies.'
Milan, not Martin. They were casual with one another, she'd noticed. As Savic had been with the others he'd introduced her to. That meant one of two things: Katz was either sloppy, or very secure. She knew which she thought it was.
Katz's real name – his pre-Gemini name – was Marko Kovacevic. The only official photograph of Kovacevic and his scars – the one she'd seen in London – had been taken seventy-two hours after the car bomb that had caused them. In it, he was half-bald, fifty per cent of his hair incinerated, his burns weeping, giving his skin a sickening gloss. Then, as now, he should have been one of the easiest Balkan war criminals to apprehend. But he'd escaped from his military hospital bed and had never been seen since. Yet here he was, living in Berlin, running a successful haulage company, trading stories with another target, both of them wanted, both completely unconcerned.
Kovacevic was a Serb who'd meandered into central Bosnia in t
he late summer of 1993 and had ended up serving with Darko and the Jokers, a predominantly Bosnian-Croat paramilitary unit who were fighting Muslims in what was essentially a civil war. A civil war that had nothing to do with Kovacevic. But it provided him with the opportunity to indulge his murderous talents with impunity, so their cause became his.
A highlight from the Lasva Valley: Darko's men had buried huge quantities of explosives in their own trenches and had then provoked a gunfight with local Muslims. A short while later they initiated a retreat. The Muslims, believing they had Darko and the Jokers on the run, pushed forward and overwhelmed the abandoned trenches. Which was when Kovacevic hit the trigger, blowing them all to pieces, an event he recorded, using several carefully placed cameras. Edited into a single piece of film, Kovacevic later produced copies of the tapes and sold them for profit. The footage was particularly popular with Serb paramilitaries. Kovacevic had later boasted that the proceeds had paid for his white Mercedes.
There was only one problem. Marko Kovacevic was a veteran of the Gemini network but he was not one of the nine names on the torn list.
Savic was getting dressed. 'What are you thinking?'
'That I'm surprised you'd go for someone like me.'
'Why?'
'I pictured you with blondes. With surgically enhanced breasts. Like Ceca.'
'She's not blonde.'
Arkan's widow was olive-skinned and dark-haired. Savic's tone suggested be resented the implication.
'You know what I mean. The beautiful dumb ones you don't have to talk to.'
'I've had my fair share.'
Stated as a bald fact, not a boast.
'I'm sure.'
'And plenty of others. I don't have a type. I even dated a journalist once.'
'That's strange. I never pictured you as a pervert.'
Once he was gone she searched the flat, looking in all the places that were off-limits when Savic was around. It was the first opportunity she'd had. The apartment had two bedrooms. The smaller one was being used for storage. But in the corner, by the window, there was a small pine table and a laptop. She examined the computer without touching it, wondering whether Savic took measures of his own. And decided probably not.
Half an hour yielded nothing. No mention of Gemini, no names from the list, no business details. Not even hidden among the system files. She switched it off and turned her attention to the rest of the apartment.
There were photographs in frames, although none in Savic's bedroom. She looked at the ones on the mantelpiece in the living room: a family of four, two young girls in front of their parents, all of them laughing; a boy of about fifteen in a bad grey suit with a pencil-thin red tie; a house by the edge of a frozen lake; a Red Setter coming towards the camera with a branch in its mouth. Stephanie wasn't sure about the shots. She'd lived in too many places where the personal touches were the most impersonal aspects of all. Set props designed to give an impression.
There were two very large sets of shelves in the living room. Both were full. Rows and rows of paperbacks – Pasternak, Austen and Zola through to Suskind, Allende and Greene. Looking at the spines, she couldn't imagine Savic reading any of them. She could hardly picture him reading the sports pages of a newspaper.
Ninety minutes passed with no hint of Gemini.
There was a hint of something else, though. Another woman. In a chest of drawers under a dust sheet in the second bedroom she'd come across underwear. In one of the cupboards there were two pairs of women's shoes. In the cabinet in the second bathroom there was a box of tampons and a small bottle of Chanel No.5.
It annoyed her that she'd been so slow. Petra never made such elementary errors. She was supposed to be too good for that. The paperbacks started to make sense. Why hadn't she seen it before? Nothing here belonged to Savic. She hardly knew him, yet she knew him well enough to know that these weren't his things. Except, perhaps, the Bang & Olufsen sound system.
She thought of the name-plate by the front door. Who was Freisinger?
It began to rain. They headed east, Savic driving a battered black Alfa Romeo with mud down each flank. The windscreen wipers squeaked on each return stroke. In Marzahn, close to the Springpfuhl S-Bahn, they came to a residential estate on Allee der Kosmonauten. A relic of the archaic Soviet system of planning, prefabricated concrete apartment blocks were clustered around a communal centre; asthmatic trees, balding grass, supermarket, pharmacy, bar. Stephanie had seen grimmer versions in Moscow – Bibirevo, for one – but the contrast seemed greater in Berlin.
Savic parked outside one of the blocks. There had been some remedial work to the exterior. 'See that? Typical. Dumps like this were supposed to be replaced. When they ran out of money they did a little work on the outside and said it wasn't so bad after all.'
On the ground floor the communal parts were spotless: an old grey linoleum floor, still shiny, institutional cream gloss on the walls, a list of regulations pasted to one of them. The lift was out of order so they took the stairs. The first floor landing was over-heated. On the second floor the front doors had been reinforced, cladding secured by iron studs. The higher they went, the worse it became: broken windows, smashed overhead lights, graffiti on the walls, litter everywhere.
They went through an apartment on the fourth floor. The front door was wide open. The only pieces of carpet that remained were those that were too heavily stained with … what? Oil, blood, excrement? All the fittings had been torn away: light switches, plug sockets, door handles, skirting boards. The smell of urine was as ubiquitous as the rubbish; discarded needles, broken bottles, crushed cans, a single shoe, half a phone directory. On one wall, in a red as dark as dry blood, someone had scrawled in German: Please kill me …
'People just walk away. Then the junkies come.'
'Why here?'
'I'll show you.'
They went up to the top floor, passing more abandonment and decay, finally coming to another apartment with a secure door. Savic rang the bell.
'Who is it?'
'Milan.'
Stephanie noticed a small camera attached to a wall-bracket above the stairwell. It was pointing at them. She heard the clunk of heavy locks, then the door scraped open.
It was Brankovic. In his right hand Stephanie recognized a Korth Combat Magnum, a German gun – possibly the most expensive revolver in the world – notable for having no safety device. Behind him a stranger appeared, thin, pale, with light brown hair parted on the right, falling in a greasy slant over his left eye.
'Hey, Milan, how's it going?'
'Good. You?'
He sniffed. 'Not too bad. I was in Monaco last week.'
'Powdering European royalty?'
'You know what? The fourteen-year-olds are sucking for blow.'
'They don't have money?'
'They're loaded. It's got nothing to do with money. I swear to you, there's nothing I can teach them. Who's this?'
'Petra.'
'Hi, Petra. Klaus von Harpen.'
Stephanie noticed puncture scars running from his wrist to his elbow.
Savic said to Brankovic, 'How long have you been here?'
'Ten, fifteen minutes.'
'Is it all here?'
He nodded. 'In the pink bathroom.'
Von Harpen's squat was, in fact, two apartments. Or had been, when the building had first been erected. More recently – very recently, by the look of it – somebody had demolished the partition between the two. There was a rugged hole in the wall, approximately circular, plaster and dust everywhere. Savic stepped through and led her to the grimy window on the far side. Stephanie became aware of other people in the squat; music from another room, a squeaking door hinge, coughing, the flush of a toilet. A mobile phone rang but no one answered it.
She'd already seen the wasteland in front. The new view was only slightly different: a few shrubs over a mound of dead grass, a burnt-out block on the far side, a rusting car, pylons beyond and, in the distance, a smoking industrial chimney
.
'Being able to see both sides is good for security,' Savic said.
'Apart from the fact that you're stranded on the top floor.'
'With access to the roof, though. We have entry points into every block that is connected to this building. Also, we always have two cars parked somewhere in the centre and one right by Allee der Kosmonauten.'
Von Harpen followed them down a corridor lit by a single blue bulb to a room at the far end; a bedroom once, judging by the indentations on the carpet. The green curtains were drawn. There were narcotics on the floor, divided by class and quantity.
Von Harpen lit a Lucky Strike. 'Ecstasy is fifteen euros a tablet. We offer better purity than anybody in Berlin. Our average crack rock – about 150mg – is around twenty-five euros. Cocaine varies a lot, depending on purity and supply. From fifty euros a gram to more than one hundred sometimes. The majority of the business is heroin.'
The bags he showed her were mostly brown because they'd been cut. Probably with caffeine, she supposed, but she'd known dealers to cut with ground stone, or even pulverized glass. For those with more acute tastes there was also pure heroin: a soft, white powder, twice the strength of morphine. Von Harpen said cut heroin retailed between seventy-five and one hundred and fifty euros a gram depending on market conditions.
Stephanie watched in silence, learning nothing new. She recognized the drugs, she recognized the squat – a dealer's place, everything on the floor, squalid mattresses in some of the rooms, clothes and rubbish everywhere.
A phone rang. A male voice called out for von Harpen. Stephanie waited until he was out of earshot before saying to Savic, 'I didn't know you were into narcotics.'
'I'm not. This is von Harpen's business.'
'You seem friendly.'
'The guy's a fucking maggot. There are plenty like him in my line of work. You have to get on to get on. That's all.'
'Why are we here?'
'To collect some gear.'
'Gear?'
