Hotel Cartagena

by Simone Buchholz

  He’s medium height and medium weight and generally looks like someone who doesn’t get thrown off balance easily.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘as far as I can tell, the lights are still on.’

  The guy I call Number One turns to him and smiles.

  ‘The lifts,’ he says, ‘we need you for the lifts.’

  ‘I almost thought as much,’ says the technician. ‘I’d do the same in your place.’

  ‘OK then,’ says Number One, ‘let’s head over to the central control box.’

  ‘Back left, right next to the stairwell door,’ says the technician, pointing towards the hotel corridor. ‘But would you please stop holding a gun to my head? I can’t think like that.’

  Number One nods to his two head receptionists and they lower their weapons. He, the technician and one of his colleagues, who was watching our group until just now, leave the bar; the technician is signalling his cooperation with his every fibre, and he’d be pretty stupid if he weren’t. I’m assuming they’ll be back soon and that of course they know, even without the technician, how you switch the damn lifts off in that box. Well, I would if I were pulling a stunt like this.

  They probably only need the techie for the code that, in case of fire, sends the lifts plunging irrevocably down to the ground floor. After that, all they’d have to do is shoot up the control box and barricade the steel doors to the stairs.

  Done.

  Although.

  The roof.

  The roof could be the weak link.

  But hey, that’s not my problem.

  I move the thumb of my left hand, which definitely is my problem, the cut just won’t stop stinging. I have no way of assessing the wound, it’s so dark here. Hard to make anything out. I don’t want to take a closer look anyway, there’s no need to draw unwelcome attention to yourself right away.

  But it’s very clearly stinging.

  I try to read the faces of the other people up here with us. There are the bar staff, two guys and a woman. The two guys look insanely similar. They’ve got the same style of beard, the same nickel glasses and the same braces over the same black shirt, as if that were the uniform for the job here. The woman also has those stupid braces clipped over her fitted blouse, but she’s got a face of her own and looks, all in all, as if she could just as well be standing behind the bar in a corner pub three streets away. She’s tied her hair up in a tight plait, and reflected in her face is the kind of life you live if you don’t always want to fit in everywhere. She looks like a woman who knows more swearwords than a Scottish steel worker. The way she keeps her eyebrows raised, the way she doesn’t just let them down again, the way she gives off scorn, arrogance and composure is simply nuts. She makes it unmistakably clear to everyone in the room that she doesn’t like her situation here, but that she basically doesn’t give a shit what’s going on around her.

  I make a mental note for later.

  In case it ends up mattering who you can rely on here and who you can’t. When you get down to it, people who are that non-conformist are the ones I like relying on the best.

  Most of the clientele among the hostages look like tourists who packed a few OK-ish-smart things to wear for this one evening in the bar, they might even have been to one of those dire musicals first. Only four people make a different impression. Because they’re different, because they stand out from the middlingly dressy middle class: two men in very expensive-looking suits, the shirts beneath them are slim cut and unbuttoned that particular smidge too far. One of them has a belly that wants to get out but he keeps pulling it back in. The pair of them have two dolled-up young women with them, each in a little black dress and dizzyingly high heels. I’d say the men are here on business and the women too, only their business is the two men.

  I don’t particularly like the two women, but I like the two guys much less. Because they clearly think it’s a good idea to buy women. That it’s legitimate, and so they do it, just because they can.

  But maybe I’m being unfair, like so often when I want to burn down capitalism. Maybe they’re just two very well-to-do couples who’ve forgotten that too expensive very quickly turns cheap. But if I think about it properly, I’m inclined to plump for version one.

  And, however I dish out my sympathies here, there’s one thing every face in this bar shares, even those belonging to the hostage-takers: every person here looks like a car that’s fallen in the river. Each of us knows that, right here, nothing is the way it ought to be, that life has just taken a pretty sharp turn, that after this performance, nothing will be the same as it used to be. Could be that we all die tonight, or maybe first thing tomorrow, or not for another two days.

  Every single face in the room is showing different shades of this knowledge, but fundamentally it’s what’s uniting us now.

  The only one of us who looks different around the eyes is Inceman. He’s put that moment behind him, he experienced it when his right arm flew off. He looks like it wouldn’t faze him if he died, as if it’d be perfectly fine by him. And as always when I look at him like that, his marble face, the dark five o’clock shadow, the thick but shaved hair on his head, the eyes like black diamonds, I sense that for him I’m not part of the solution. But then who is, for anyone. People are never part of the solution. Perhaps we all ought to start talking to more animals. Just start by asking a zebra out for a drink this evening.

  My eyes catch on the barwoman again.

  Oh, of course, I should have known. Seems like she’s pigeonholing this fear differently too. As if she falls from the sky every day and this here is nothing at all. Either she’s a go-between for the Federal Crime Agency – but what the hell would they want here – or she knows the feeling of dying or not like the back of her hand.

  What on earth is wrong with her, or, to put it better: why does she look so right to me when I look so wrong?

  Her cool kindred spirit, the technician, comes back; with him are Number One and his colleague, both of whom now look outrageously cheerful. There’s no way they’ll let the technician go again. It’s far too good to have him. A technician like that could be the joker in this game.

  Number One gives a curt nod to his men.

  All right.

  The lifts are down, the steel doors to the stairwell are sealed.

  Presumably.

  Anything else would be utterly unprofessional.

  ‘So,’ says Number One, ‘sadly, we need to reduce our party a little.’

  A woman and two men burst into tears at once. My knees go a bit soft too. But they surely won’t start on shooting people right away, it’s far too soon for that, come on boys, really.

  Number One sticks his revolver in his waistband.

  ‘All the women can leave.’

  Oh right.

  Unlucky to have women aboard, or what?

  We’re not on the high seas here, though.

  Anne Stanislawski looks at me, her expression is a shake of the head.

  I look at Carla. She takes Rocco’s hand. Of course she’ll stay with him.

  The barwoman looks at her two colleagues, who are up to their necks in the need to cry. She leans on a pillar.

  The two barbies in the skyscraper heels are the first to pick up their bags and step forward. Now I like them. You can buy almost anything, but solidarity is beyond price.

  ‘Handbags stay here, ladies,’ says Number One; the ladies drop their bags on the spot.

  Then more and more women step forward, only a few stay with their men, maybe they’re the ones without children. If I had a child, I’d go.

  It takes one, two minutes, and thirteen women are ready to march.

  Number One nods to two of his men.

  ‘If you’d escort the ladies to the stairs, please.’

  They march off, a peculiar little baggage train of people who want to get out of here very fast while, at the same time, dragging sackfuls of guilty conscience behind them.

  So, our hostage-takers will open the steel
door to the stairwell one last time. When they’re back again, whatever’s about to get going will get going.

  Hamburg-Blankenese, autumn 1997

  A rainy night, the drizzly stuff coming in from all sides, but in the house there was a fire burning in their heads, in their bodies and in their noses: it was a cold fire, but a mighty one. It spread quickly and it squeezed things out of people that would have been better staying in there. A massive casino of souls, wins were only a sham, in the end too much was lost.

  Three of the party guests were police. One of them had been there a few times before, had told his colleagues about it one evening on the quiet. Now they were checking it out, but not the way their colleague had thought.

  They radioed GO GO GO, from the toilet.

  The Narcotics Investigation Team had been put on alert the evening before, they were waiting only a street away.

  The house was busted, along with the organiser of the whole shebang: Konrad ‘Conny’ Hoogsmart, wayward son of rich parents from the Elbvororten and one of Knut, Heinz and Norbert’s main customers.

  The cocaine orgies in the house he’d inherited from his grandfather had become a permanent fixture in the party calendar for the heirs of Hamburg’s merchants. In the week, they managed their parents’ Hanseatic businesses, ready to take them over one day, while on Saturdays, they snorted their noses raw at Conny’s.

  Now they were all arrested and they all sang with one voice, a song of songs about Conny. Conny in turn sang like a robin almost before they’d got him into the police car, in an effort to save his useless skin somehow.

  That same night, the message got through to Knut, Heinz and Norbert.

  ‘Shit!’ roared Knut, thumping his hand on Norbert’s desk. ‘That arsehole’s grassed us all up.’

  They grabbed the remaining cocaine stored in the office stash, flushed it down the toilet and stumbled out of the back door, full to the brim with the stuff themselves, but the police were already there waiting.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  That was that.

  Knut and Norbert kept their traps as shut as if they’d been sewn up, Heinz spilt every last bean onto the interrogation table after twenty-four hours.

  The names Esteban Higuita and Henning Garbarek had reached the investigative world.

  Heinz was first ignored in jail, then bumped off. They used a blunt bread knife. His throat was more ripped open than slit.

  He’d been the one who’d brought Conny along and vouched for him.

  Meanwhile, the Hamburg police, via the Federal Crime Agency, had got in touch with the narcotics man at the German embassy in Bogota, who contacted the DEA, which in turn notified the Colombian drugs squad. Operation Flat White was called into being:

  1 Identify and find Henning Garbarek: that would be easier than looking for a Colombian called Esteban Higuita, after all, that kind of name could be anyone’s.

  2 Send somebody.

  3 Rip this Esteban and his people a new one.

  A BREATH OF WIND GETS UP FOR A WHILE

  Thirteen women leave the hotel bar.

  Some of them find their knees giving way on them in the stairwell, some start crying somewhere around the eighteenth floor, some surpass themselves and support, comfort, placate.

  Meanwhile, down in the lobby: uproar.

  What’s wrong with the lifts?

  Why were they sent down to the ground floor?

  Fire alarm?

  If yes, where?

  What exactly is wrong in the bar?

  Why isn’t the bar’s telephone working?

  Why isn’t the technician answering his?

  And where is he anyway?

  Two hotel staff walk up the stairs, somebody’s got to see what’s going on up there. Between the eighth and ninth floors, the two men meet the women, minor hullaballoo, explanations, halting, just don’t scream, you never know, careful, for heaven’s sake, a hostage situation.

  The men accompany the women back down.

  The head concierge calls the police, the emergency plan is activated, the hotel evacuated. But no announcement, too dangerous.

  The information lands in the rooms via the smart TVs, via phone calls, via gentle knocks on the doors. It takes a while till everyone’s down the stairwell and outside.

  A breath of wind gets up for a while.

  The police decide quickly: terrorism.

  And Detective Chief Inspector Stepanovic gets a phone call from the situation room.

  ‘Yes? Stepanovic here.’

  ‘Terror incident, Ivo, where are you, we need you at HQ.’

  ‘I’m on the way to the Hafenkrone. Personal business.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ivo?’

  ‘Where exactly are you?’

  ‘Davidstrasse, just past the police station, I was looking for somewhere to park, what the hell’s going on?’

  ‘Wait a moment, mate, stay on the line.’

  Stepanovic pulls in.

  Window down.

  Cigarette lit.

  He leaves the motor running.

  ‘Ivo?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So for a moment I thought … but now … well, we do need you at HQ.’

  ‘First tell me what’s going on. Why’d you want me to stay on the line, don’t fuck about, has something happened here? Close by?’

  ‘We’ve got a hostage situation. At the River Palace Hotel. In the bar.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Stepanovic switches off the engine.

  ‘A hostage situation at—’

  ‘Yes, I got that bit, uh, well, I’ll call you right back…’

  ‘Ivo! Wait…!’

  Stepanovic puts his phone away. He sits in the car three seconds longer, drags on his cigarette, then gets out and locks the banger up. Barely a hundred metres to the River Palace. From here, everything looks normal, calm, just a couple of people running at a somewhat hastened tempo down the street that leads first to the hotel and then down to the harbour.

  Probably plain clothes cops from the Davidwache.

  Stepanovic heads off.

  Hostage situation, right.

  In that hotel on the harbour edge.

  In the bar.

  In the place where a few people he’s quite fond of are trapped, and not just them but: Riley.

  The pressure on his chest increases again.

  But this time it’s not because he ought to do something he doesn’t want to, but because he ought not to do something he desperately wants to.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, he wants to go straight in there and fetch her out, no matter what’s going on.

  As he slowly approaches the hotel, a good dozen uniformed colleagues run past him, heading in the same direction.

  Aha, he thinks, here we go.

  Nobody’s pretending anymore.

  A few patrol cars feel their way forward at a moderate speed.

  Cartagena, 1997

  The German newspapers, which Henning bought regularly, informed him fairly soon about what had happened in Hamburg: a drugs ring centring around major dealers Knut E, Heinz B and Norbert K had been busted because a Conny H from the Elbvororten had grassed on them the moment he was arrested. Unimaginable quantities of cocaine had been involved, Hamburg had been virtually flooded with the stuff, but now the city had finally been saved.

  That was more or less how the police report went.

  Henning sold Esteban the story rather less spectacularly.

  The guys from Hamburg had had the feeling that someone was on their tail and so they’d left Germany indefinitely. The arseholes had just bailed. So, frustratingly, the deal was dead.

  Esteban took a while to respond. He dragged on his cigar and sent up the smoke. Then he said: ‘Amigo.’

  Henning gulped.

  ‘Such things can, of course, happen.’

  Henning gulped again, although his mouth was entirely d
ry in any case.

  ‘But they shouldn’t.’

  Henning tried to hold Esteban’s gaze.

  ‘Still, we’ve worked well together for ten years.’

  Henning nodded.

  Esteban crushed his cigar in the ashtray as if it were a living thing, and then there was a mountain of tobacco crumbs, tobacco leaves and ash lying there.

  ‘First let’s let the smoke clear a little.’

  Henning let air out of his lungs.

  ‘But in the long term, a replacement would be useful.’

  Henning wasn’t quite sure what Esteban meant and looked questioningly at him.

  ‘You’re my broker, I’ve given you a bar, and I’m sure you want to keep the bar, huh? For a nice, secure life with Mariacarmen and little Arturo – how old is he now?’

  ‘Seven,’ said Henning, and it didn’t feel right that Esteban should utter the names of his wife and son.

  ‘They say Munich is also a juicy market.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Henning.

  ‘You can do it,’ said Esteban.

  Then he stood up and left, leaving the bill lying on the table for Henning.

  After that conversation, Henning spent two years trying to forget the whole Esteban thing, and what had, after all, been a very clear threat. Basically, he tried to forget everything that had happened over the last twelve years in that regard. He’d have liked best of all to cast it off like an old skin, but that was impossible. Firstly, Esteban came to Henning’s bar every Friday to eat, and then to drink three or four rums. He always asked, every time, whether Henning had had any thoughts yet. About Munich. Or Frankfurt. And what about Berlin? Henning generally acted as though he hadn’t understood the question. And he tried to wipe the little knickknacks that Esteban left behind in the bar from his memory as rapidly as possible. The notches that he cut in the counter, overtly and flagrantly, with a little knife. The wine glass with a nick broken out of it. The cigar cut into two pieces.