The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “I saw Alex’s car a while ago. Did he come with you?” asked a young man with curly hair who was smoking on the cabaña porch.

  I nodded.

  “Are you his doctor?” the man asked.

  “No. I’m a kind of nursemaid.”

  “In my country they’re called bodyguards.”

  “It’s specialized work. More like soul guards.”

  “Raul Cota,” he said, extending his hand.

  He must have been about forty, with a full beard capped by a moustache. There was a sad look about him.

  “Marlowe,” I answered, extending my hand. “How do you know Alex?”

  “He comes around here; he spends his time roaming around my cabaña and telling everybody that he’s in love with my wife. But that would be difficult. I’ve been a widower for two years. Maybe he knew her before. . . I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  I sat on the porch, pushing the sand around with the tips of my shoes. Cota went inside and returned a little later with two cups of coffee. I could hear the sea. Alex suddenly appeared in front of us, rubbing his jaw. I smiled.

  “A cup of coffee?” offered Cota.

  Alex nodded.

  As the sun came up, Alex drove his Fleetwood north at full speed bound for a port on the Pacific called Rosarito. There we had lobsters with tortillas and frijoles for breakfast. I didn’t pay more than two dollars for mine. If things kept going like this, I would never get my expense money from the lawyer in Los Angeles.

  Alex began to walk along the beach. I was getting fed up and stayed at the shack where they had served us the freshly captured lobsters. I was ready for a second cup of coffee with cinnamon. Alex, seeing that I wasn’t following him, came back looking like an angry child.

  “Come, Marlowe, let’s walk along the beach and I’ll tell you about the caves and the rock drawings.”

  “What’s the hurry, gringo? Let him drink his coffee,” the fisherman who had waited on us said.

  “We have important things to discuss,” Alex said in his rapid Spanish.

  I left the coffee to one side. At any rate it was too hot. I lit a cigarette and tried to catch up to Alex, who was walking in a great hurry at the edge of the sea. The doves began to keep us company.

  “Miles south of here there are prehistoric caves, full of rock drawings. They were painted thousands of years ago by a tribe of tall men, much taller than the guaycuras who later settled in this area. You know what we can do, Marlowe? We can get a couple of good cameras and cross the sierra. The caves are incredible: men of two colors, turning themselves into animals with horns . . .”

  He waited an instant for my answer. Then he seemed bored and left me still smoking a cigarette while he went toward the sea, getting his shoes wet every time the cusp of a little wave would reach the shore.

  Alex was getting drunk, like a soldier who just realized he had been fighting on the wrong side. Mezcal after mezcal; not even enough time to warm his tongue.

  I was sitting at the next table surrounded by the noise of fifty simultaneous conversations and a mariachi band whose cornet player tried to blast my brains out by playing his instrument four inches from my ear. The Club Camalias had been the one and only stop after Tijuana. The Fleetwood, full of dust, was parked outside the den, which was a center for nervous drug addicts, sailors from San Diego, pimps and their merchandise, Mexican workers from a nearby construction company who didn’t have the time to remove their hard hats, and a group of policemen headed by my old friend, whose name was Ramirez. After distributing his boys throughout the club, he came to sit at my table. I couldn’t make out his words through the noise, only his smile.

  Alex took note of the presence of my companion and sent for a double mezcal to welcome him.

  “The Mexican police are putas, whores,” said Alex, looking straight at our table and taking advantage of the break in the mariachi music.

  Ramirez smiled, raised his cup, and toasted Alex.

  “Your friend is completely crazy. Surely he wants to commit suicide.”

  “Seems like that to me,” I responded.

  “Why doesn’t he do it on the other side?” asked Ramirez.

  I was left looking for an answer. After all, it wasn’t such a bad question.

  Alex’s eyes were glassy; his jaw slightly disconnected. Seeing that Ramirez wasn’t reacting, he looked for something else to grab his attention. He found it easily. One of the American sailors was sitting at a nearby table, absolutely enthralled with a prostitute. Alex stood up and walked toward him. The mariachis began to play “La Paloma,” possibly the only Mexican song to which I know the lyrics, but Alex gave me no time to enjoy it. He was arguing about something with the sailor. Suddenly Alex slapped the woman in the face. I jumped out of my chair. Ramirez didn’t even make an attempt to follow me. The sailor took out a knife and stuck it in the first thing he found – Alex’s left hand, resting on the table.

  Violence, as always, provoked screams and abandonment. Nevertheless, the mariachis continued to play. I pushed the sailor aside and pulled the knife from the table, freeing Alex’s left hand. Blood gushed out profusely. At his table, Ramirez limited himself to a smile.

  Alex insisted on being treated in Mexicali, which is how the front seat of my car became full of blood. I knew I should be mad, but I wasn’t. Alex’s behavior just made me feel melancholy. While he was resting in an overstuffed chair in the waiting room, I spoke to Dr Martinez about Alex’s supposedly incurable disease.

  “Incurable? It would have been fifty years ago, amigo. Now it’s perfectly curable. All he has is a venereal disease, syphilis, and it’s not even an advanced case. He’s already being treated for it.”

  The nights in Mexicali are dark. Music lures you, like bait, from several places at once. Every once in a while a group of drunks crosses you, or a taxi driver stops to try to convince you that the doors of his automobile lead to the gates of paradise. There’s a sense of asphyxiation, from the dirt in the air, the dry heat. It’s a small city, stolen from the desert. Without my hat and jacket, I went walking in the night looking for answers. Maybe the questions applied to me, too. We went down to the south to leave our nightmares there, our worst dreams. Instead, we found ourselves, looking in the mirror, face to face with the dark side of our sadness and our solitude. What fault was it of the Mexicans that Alex had chosen their country to go crazy in?

  “If I swim out there for 181 days, I’ll be back . . .” Alex said, pointing to some place on the other side of the Pacific where he had left a piece of his soul.

  “You should probably wait until your hand is better,” was the only thing that occurred to me to say.

  We returned to Rosarito, this time the two of us in my Oldsmobile. We were eating lobsters on the beach, and Alex allowed himself to drift off to sleep in the hammock. I decided to fight my drowsiness by walking on the beach. I had a few cigarettes with a group of women and gave them a hand cleaning sea snails. In return they gave me a couple of dozen for supper. When I returned I found that Alex had disappeared from the hammock and from sight. His suitcase was still in the automobile. I opened it.

  There really was an old Thompson submachine gun, unloaded and rusty. There were also four or five stacks of Japanese money, printed during the occupation of the Dutch East Indies. Underneath them was a pile of photos of ragged English soldiers, Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders, saluting their flags, probably right after they had been liberated from a concentration camp. Many of them were covered with bandages, or they were on crutches, their hands in slings, with months-old beards, long hair, skeletal bodies consumed by fever, dysentery, and malnutrition.

  Alex offered me a match to light the cigarette hanging from my lips. I accepted it.

  “They want me to return, but I’m staying here. They want to put me in a cage in Los Angeles. Have you heard the Mexican song ‘Jaula de ord’, about a cage of gold?”

  He started to walk toward the ocean. I tried to take him by the
hand, but he freed himself with a quick movement.

  “Don’t you realize, Marlowe?”

  He turned his back to me and continued toward the sea. Then he turned and looked at me with his ice-blue eyes. A wave broke near the shore; the sun was beginning to set.

  I saw him hurl himself into the water, swimming madly straight into the horizon, foam rising with every stroke. The sun floated over the sea. Alex was going further and further away. Fifteen minutes later you could hardly see his head in the distance. Then it disappeared.

  The sunsets in Baja California are unforgettable. I would have to return the money to the lawyer in Los Angeles. I turned my back to the sea. My joints ached. It must have been the humidity. I walked toward the Oldsmobile.

  The first Spanish edition of The Long Goodbye appeared in 1973. I read it three times. I added it to what I had learned from Simenon, Durenmatt, Hammett, and Le Carré, and was certain that crime literature offered me the best possible scenario for the stories I wanted to tell. Three years later my novel was published. I don’t know how much of Chandler was left in it; probably little, because what I was trying to do with Dias de combate was launch a new genre, the new crime novel in Mexico, and not simply follow the tradition of the hardboiled with a change of scenery. But no doubt Chandler was there; in stories built on dialogue and characters and atmospheres, rather than anecdotes, but which still managed to tell a story. For me, influenced by the Mexican baroque and magical realism, neorealism in the style of Chandler was the best option. Maybe no one can find traces of these influences in my books; it’s not that important. I know how to recognize my debts; I know that Chandler is there somewhere in my novels, and I’m grateful to him.

  Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Translation by Barbara Belejack

  Escalator Obstructors

  Juergen Ehlers

  They’d never have got me, if those guys hadn’t stood in the way. On the escalator.

  “Excuse me,” I’d asked. “Could you please let me pass?”

  Really friendly, although in truth, of course, I was in quite a hurry. No reaction. Nothing.

  “Excuse me,” I said again.

  No one moved. Stand on the right, walk on the left – they should really put up a sign at every escalator, until even the last idiot gets it. Maybe that would have helped back then. Maybe. But there were no signs, and so they got me. The coppers. That’s five years ago now, but at last I’m a free man again.

  Yes, of course I’m glad to be free again.

  “Is something wrong?” asks Monika.

  Luckily she still has our old flat. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to start looking.

  “No, everything’s fine,” I say.

  Strange to see that she has also aged five years in the meantime. Somehow I hadn’t expected that. We haven’t seen much of one another lately.

  “Come on, tell me, something is wrong.”

  Yes, I think, something is wrong. But what?

  “It was tidier in prison,” I say at last.

  “Tidy all you like,” says Monika.

  Actually I thought that she should do that, but of course she’s right. I suppose I have more time at the moment than her with her part-time job and the kids. The kids are playing in the living-room. Somehow there are more than when I was home last.

  “The blond one is new,” I say.

  Monika shrugs. “You weren’t here.”

  True. But I still don’t like it. Of course Monika sees immediately that I’m not pleased.

  “We could put him in the baby hatch,” she suggests.

  “Nah, I don’t know,” I say. I don’t think that’s a good idea. “I don’t think they will want him now . . .”

  “Why not? He’s only three.”

  Later I realize that Monika is only joking. She gives me a kiss.

  “You need a job,” she says.

  The good old Job Centre is now called Agentur für Arbeit, Agency for Work. Nice name. And they’ve got new furniture, too, since I came here last time. But they don’t have any work for me. The interviewer seems annoyed at me for even asking. She takes my details. What have I done last, she wants to know.

  “In prison?” I ask.

  “No, before.”

  “Driving armoured cars.”

  The woman looks up.

  “I don’t think we’ve got anything for you,” she says coldly.

  She doesn’t even look into her computer.

  I suggest that I could do something else.

  What have I learned, she wants to know.

  In prison? Loads of things. But I’d better not tell her that. My only other qualification is the measly report I got after the obligatory nine years of school. And my driving licence, of course.

  She says that business is a bit on the slow side in security at the moment, and that she can’t give me much hope. But I could try the In-house Service – Education. She means retraining.

  “Nothing for you?” Monika asks as I come back.

  “We all got a Father Christmas . . .”

  “Couldn’t you at least have brought three? For the kids.”

  “No, nobody got more than one. You can have him, I don’t like chocolate. Anyhow, they didn’t have any work for me. I suppose we’ll have to live off our savings for now.”

  Monika looks at the Father Christmas.

  “Why don’t you ask again next time? I’m sure they always have leftovers at the end.”

  She weighs him in her hand.

  “He’s hollow,” I say.

  “Of course, what did you expect? From the Job Centre?”

  “A shame it didn’t work out. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little extra money.”

  Although we still have our savings. The stuff from the robbery at the jeweller’s. Well hidden. No one ever found it. Not even Monika knows where I left the booty back then.

  Monika cuddles up to me. She wants something, I think. In the end she says:

  “Damn, I haven’t told you yet. About Christmas. The children need new animals.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Surely we can get them a used hamster or something from the animal home. Or a cat, if necessary.”

  “No, I mean cuddly toy animals.”

  “What?” I ask. “Even more? Their beds are teaming with creatures, aren’t they? At least they were when I was here last.”

  Monika shakes her head.

  “All gone. Little Pamela brought home lice from primary school one day. You know, head lice.”

  “But that’s nothing to fret about,” I say.

  “No, usually not. But when that happens, you have to put all the toys and everything into this quarantine . . .”

  “Into what?”

  “Quarantine. That’s what it’s called. But really it’s only a bin bag. They have to go in there for a few weeks. The toy animals, I mean. And if there are still lice on them, they die. Because they don’t have any heads anymore on which they can graze. So, I put all the animals into the bin bag and tied it up.”

  I don’t know what Monika wants to tell me.

  “Well, and then, when everything was over, we made this big thing of opening the bin bag again.”

  “Good.”

  “No, not good! – There was nothing but rubbish in the bag.”

  “Rubbish?”

  “Yes. I must have taken out the wrong bag that Tuesday.”

  “Oh,” I say. “That’s awful.”

  “Yes, you can’t imagine how the kids cried.”

  “Oh yes.” I also feel like crying. “Is the panther still there?” I ask.

  Of course it isn’t. Monika shakes her head in silence. I had sewn the jewels into the panther. Now we really are poor.

  This is not the last unpleasant surprise of the evening.

  “You don’t mind Gerd sleeping here tonight, do you?” asks Monika. “After all, he must sleep somewhere.”

  “That’s okay,” I say.

  Gerd is the father of the little blond one, Frithj
of. I gathered that pretty quickly.

  “You can take the couch for now,” she says.

  I say that Gerd could also sleep on the couch.

  “Nah,” says Monika. “It’s better to keep it the way it is now. Gerd is always so easily offended when things don’t go his way, and then he gets terribly mean . . .”

  Gerd works in St Pauli.

  “You don’t want to know the details,” says Monika.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “You really don’t want to know the details,” she insists. “Believe me, it’s better that way.”

  He has to be quite bad then.

  Gerd comes home late at night.

  “Get rid of that bastard,” he tells Monika when he sees me.

  But Monika doesn’t want to hear any of that. Very decent of her. And brave, too. I don’t know what Gerd did with her that night in our bedroom, but they had a fight, and the next morning Monika has a black eye and generally looks a bit battered.

  “All that just because of me?” I ask.

  Monika nods.

  “Perhaps you should find a different place to stay for now after all,” she suggests.

  “Or you,” I say.

  “Not so easy,” she says.

  Wherever she goes, she’s scared Gerd will fi nd her.

  I go into the bedroom. Gerd is still sleeping.

  “Be careful,” Monika whispers.

  Yes, I’m careful. But I’m not afraid of sleeping men. I search his clothes. Gerd Kubitzki is his name. At least that’s what it says in his passport. And he has a pistol. Just as I had thought.

  “I’ll borrow this for a bit,” I say.

  “You can’t do that,” Monika says.

  Yes, I can.

  “I still have some unfinished business,” I say.

  Monika laughs. She doesn’t think I’m capable of finishing any sort of business. Not with a pistol, at any rate.

  “This is a Glock,” I tell her.

  At that moment Gerd coughs. A disgusting, rattling smoker’s cough. We leave him alone.

  Yes, I really do have some unfinished business. Remember the thing about the escalator obstructors? Well, they’ll pay for it, you’ll see. I leave the house.

  It is chilly outside, and it is snowing a little. I’m cold. Good thing I brought my mittens. For a moment I ponder whether I shouldn’t move out of our flat after all. Go away and give it a completely fresh start. But where would I go? No job, no money, no place to live. Impossible. So, I begin to set to work.