Hotel Cartagena

by Simone Buchholz

  So what if they did.

  He’d been somebody else, and the few people who had known Henk on the island told themselves he was dead, had ended up in the sea, as shark food.

  Henning Garbarek, who’d set off from Hamburg to Colombia as a young man, wasn’t even a memory. If there was anything official to be dealt with, he used Emeric’s papers. But most things on Curaçao were better settled by way of kickbacks anyway, official papers were a joke.

  He’d employed young people from the island, including a couple he liked a lot.

  Now and then he caught himself thinking about leaving them everything.

  Just like that: Surprise!

  DIDN’T WE WANT TO SHOOT OUT THE SMOKE DETECTORS?

  Too many guns, too many men in suits. If you look at it like that, the situation is no shittier than everywhere else in the world.

  Then again, if my observations are correct, everyone’s got a fresh drink in front of them now, at our table and at all the other tables too. We don’t look around very much, stay in small groups by ourselves: it’s more and more as if we were sitting along a bar, albeit a very unusual one. And, in the way of international bar relationships, the small groups or pairings congregate according to their internal states of matter.

  Rocco and Carla have created their own gasiform bubble, in which they’re sitting silently, holding hands and presumably communicating telepathically, now and then they look at each other and give each other a fleeting kiss. Calabretta, Schulle, Brückner and Faller make up the second team. Solid state. They’re talking medium-softly about football, about the pitfalls of positional play and who has what job to do in what position, but of course they’re talking about a very specific team, namely the one that’s determining the tactics in this room. How does our team move and in which direction, what should we break, what should we take with us, what ought victory to look like. I consider it pretty risky, but hope that our captors are too preoccupied to get what my friends there are really up to.

  Klatsche, Inceman, Anne Stanislawski and I make up the third team, and we’re something between liquid and plasma. Let’s just call it heart clinic. No idea how things are for Anne right now, but I get the impression that she fits quite well into our broken group, just because she seems to know a load about what it’s like living among fragmented people. When the situation across the board is so fragile that it could liquefy or go critical at any second.

  In the heart clinic, there aren’t many more phrases being tossed to and fro between the patients than in the Carla-Rocco bubble: so basically, almost none.

  Now and again we look at one another, communicate our respective conditions to each other with our eyes, and every couple of minutes someone says some little, meaningless thing, just to give the others the feeling that not everything is lost. That our chances of getting out of here intact aren’t all that bad. Although, of course, none of us has ever been entirely intact, well, uh, maybe Inceman, as a child.

  I was hit hard at the age of two, Klatsche at two days, or even in his mother’s belly – she was allegedly as drunk as a skunk when she brought him into the world. Anyway, what’s become of him is a miracle.

  That anything came of him at all.

  I mean, it’s quite an achievement: from a drunkard’s brat to the burglar king to entrepreneurial locksmith to restaurateur to family man with a terraced house in Rahlstedt.

  Hats off to you, I think yet again, as I so often do when I look at him, while at the same time I could thump him one for the business with the family and the house.

  I miss him every day, every night, every hour. Since he left me, my world no longer has a security system, it’s more unsettled than ever, it feels as though it could explode at any time, boom, gone. But it could do that anyway, of course, every button is flashing red irrespective of whether or not an idiot like me has had a love story blow up around her ears.

  Klatsche looks at me, and I wonder yet again exactly how he’s really doing and whether he can read my thoughts – it’s crazy how much I’d love to lie down beside him.

  He glances at the floor.

  The corner of his mouth twitches.

  Then he says, more for the other two than for us, that he has the feeling a storm could blow up soon and he wonders what that would be like up here, whether you’d feel it, be able to, want to.

  Inceman says he’d prefer some heavy rain, ah c’mon, he’d even take a thunderstorm, one of those rare autumn thunderstorms, but the two of them don’t look at each other while they speak, they just look at me.

  For once I don’t feel like lobbing weather metaphors around the place.

  I leave the two men as they are because that always was what I was best at, stand up and walk over to Number One at the bar.

  ‘Are we OK to smoke?’ I ask, because it really is about time, and not just for me.

  Number One looks at the ceiling, then he looks at the barwoman and says: ‘I was just wondering about that myself.’

  The barwoman looks for a moment at the technician, who’s standing very nearby and nods calmly. She pulls a packet of cigarettes from her trouser pocket, takes out a fag, sticks it in her mouth and says: ‘Weren’t you guys trying to knock the smoke detectors out earlier? If not, what was all the shooting in aid of?’

  She pushes the packet over the bar to Number One. He seems to think about it for a few seconds, then he takes a fag from the pack.

  I can’t begin to tell you how smart that was of her, probably smarter than anything anyone here in this room has even done. She’s made herself an ally, but not in any way that would be putting a rope round her neck.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Number One. He knows exactly what she’s just done. And what he’s done by accepting her offer. The cigarette plus her official permission or, yes, dammit, her request – a positively urgent one, as befits the circumstances – to finally get the hell round to shooting out the smoke detectors.

  So, on the one hand, everything seems to have got confused while, on the other hand, things have sorted themselves out miraculously: let’s just carry on in that direction, it’s nicer for everyone.

  He gives one of his men a sign.

  ‘Right, we did actually want to shoot them out, the smoke detectors, didn’t we?’

  The guy takes his revolver and, one by one, shoots every smoke detector off the ceiling; even as they’re falling to the floor, some of them start to perform their unappealing concert. Those ones just get shot at again, until they’re quiet.

  Then about ten cigarettes start burning at once.

  The two guys in the expensive suits are sitting on two bar stools at a round bar table in the other corner, and one of them flinches when the smoke detectors get destroyed, but it’s not because of the shooting, no, that was a different kind of flinch, but … I can’t quite put my finger on it. My gut tells me it was an indignant flinch. A condemnation. As if it’s something to him somehow – whether or not the technology is shot to bits.

  I smoke right-handed, my left hand is in my trouser pocket, burning more beautifully than any tobacco.

  ‘It’s my friend here’s birthday today,’ I tell Number One. I nod towards Faller. ‘We’re celebrating.’

  ‘Is it a milestone?’ asks Number One, looking over to our table.

  ‘Sixty-five,’ I say. ‘Quite an achievement.’

  He goes behind the bar, mixes another gin and tonic and holds it out to me.

  ‘Then here’s another one for him, on the house.’

  ‘He doesn’t drink hard liquor,’ I say, ‘something with beer at most.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Number One, ‘well, the drink was more for you anyway.’

  I look him in the eyes: blue metal, but not steel, not quite such a hard material, there’s even a little of the ocean mixed in there.

  He doesn’t just hold my gaze, he makes something of it.

  Whoops.

  Not bad.

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ I say. ‘Stockholm syndrome?’
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br />   ‘No idea,’ he says, ‘what did you have in mind?’

  ‘I don’t think I ought to make any more plans for today,’ I say, ‘unless the SWAT team rock up about now and kick the artillery out of your hands – all your hands.’

  Now he gives me a sharp look.

  Aha.

  He’s trying stuff out on me.

  I reckon he’d like to scare me, like to see how I react to another mode of address. What discomfort does to me.

  He’s coming into my life just a little bit late for that, but of course he can’t know that.

  ‘Nice try,’ I say, and at that moment my voice sounds so much like Lauren Bacall that I’m a mystery to myself.

  He sips at his G&T, then he looks at me in yet another completely different way.

  Almost tenderly.

  The most peculiar hostage-taker of my life, right now.

  ‘I like you,’ he says, ‘and whether you believe me or not, I’m not intending to shoot you or anyone else here.’

  ‘Then just let us all go,’ I say.

  That sentence has to be worth a try.

  He shakes his head.

  Possibly that wasn’t Lauren Bacallesque enough of me this time.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘I need you.’

  ‘You can’t say that sort of thing to me, we barely know each other.’

  ‘Damn,’ he says, tapping the fingertips of his left hand on the bar, ‘schoolboy error.’

  He smiles at me, the way men over fifty smile at women. If it’s just a bit later on during the party.

  ‘There, I almost went and introduced myself.’

  ‘Yeah, damn,’ I say and smile back, after all, why not, ‘that would’ve been a thing, eh?’

  I take my drink and stand up.

  ‘I’d better go and sit back down, don’t want to keep you from your work.’

  As I walk back to our table, I feel his eyes on my back, and now I can feel my left thumb again too, very distinctly. I pull it out of my pocket, finally let some air to it, and sit down.

  Anne Stanislawski looks at me with raised eyebrows, a little amused, a little radical.

  ‘Are you crazy,’ says Klatsche, ‘yeah, you’re completely crazy.’

  He makes the cuckoo gesture, yeah, wow, he actually taps his index finger against his forehead and makes the cuckoo gesture, I haven’t seen that for years. Do people even still do that?

  ‘Hey, you can’t flirt with him!’

  ‘I’m just trying to establish a connection that might come in useful for us,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ says Inceman, ‘you’re always good at that. And then you stand up and kick the connection up the arse.’

  He twinkles at me, his gaze shoots into my belly and does things there that disintegrate me and put me together, that are terrible and beautiful all at once, in a single breath.

  Yes.

  He’s in that state.

  Plasma.

  He’s a live wire, he feels stuck, and so he is. He’s very bad at enduring it in the long term. He used to be better at it, if I remember rightly. It hardly bothered him then. He had this unshakeable calm within him, this solidity. He wasn’t always part of the plasma group. Perhaps he’s been spending too much time with me since then and is taking on my bad habits. Perhaps he’s just understood that freedom is all that remains when you’ve lost all manner of things.

  Plasmification in times under rock.

  Although, weirdly, I’ve felt more imprisoned in other situations than I do in this one here, I’ve lived through days in the office that I found tougher.

  In any case, Inceman’s in a state where, technically speaking, you can only calm him with sex. But that’s quite difficult right now for a variety of reasons. Of course, I could sit on his lap later on, maybe if Klatsche goes to the loo, or if Inceman and I get the chance to sneak off to the toilets together for a bit, and just as I’m thinking that and looking at him, I notice that my mere thought seems to relax him a little. And me too, actually.

  Consider supplying Klatsche with another large beer so he’ll have to disappear for a minute or two soon.

  ‘How’s your thumb?’ the man himself now asks, rather inopportunely, dragging me out of my brainfuck with Inceman.

  Hello, heart clinic here.

  I look at my hand. The cut is deep and the bloody red is mingled with a trace of yellow. The skin around the cut is slowly, but single-mindedly, taking on a dark colouration.

  ‘Iodine ointment might be a good idea,’ says Anne Stanislawski, now entirely part of the solid, pragmatic clique.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say and I’m about to shove my hand back in my jeans pocket, but it stings like hell when the denim touches the wound, so I abandon the idea and just set it down on my leg.

  ‘We need to get that checked out,’ says Klatsche.

  ‘Not an option,’ I say, ‘none of us can check out right now.’

  ‘Stop hating me,’ he says, and I say: ‘I don’t hate you, quite the reverse.’

  Inceman lets air out through his nostrils, inhales again loudly, reaches for my gin and tonic and tips most of it down his throat in one gulp.

  Meanwhile, the hostage-takers are in the middle of setting up a soft-drinks orgy. Each of them has a bottle of cola, and some have orangeade too.

  There are times when sugar’s better than coke.

  Red’s poured himself a mix and grins at me. He seems to get the kind of cohesive yet heterogeneous little group we are.

  As for the other hostages, now and then one or another of them walks slowly up to the bar, fetches something to drink and sits back down again; this all happens very cautiously and with consideration, but not necessarily unsteadily. Only the two guys in the expensive suits have yet to move from their seats. They’re the only ones who don’t have full glasses in front of them, and their eyes are eagle-like, and I like them less and less. Their presence means something unpleasant, I’m just not sure exactly what it’ll be yet.

  Anne Stanislawski watches the way I’m watching.

  ‘I noticed that too,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘something isn’t right about them. They could still be trouble.’

  ‘And what’s your assessment of our minders here?’ she asks quietly. ‘You know, after the first close contact with the enemy.’

  ‘I don’t get the impression that they mean to harm us,’ I say, ‘but ask me again later, and just don’t ask me what this is all about.’

  ‘It just gets better and better,’ says Inceman. ‘One brief, smouldering glance from Madame and, hey presto, she’s a regular expert.’

  He breathes deeply in and out again, and I think: lap, lap, lap.

  He looks me in the eyes.

  I know, man.

  But I also know that the two of us, of all people, will never get out of there.

  Whether that’s here or anywhere else.

  But here for starters.

  OK?

  I hold my thumb in the vodka that’s still in front of me, lukewarm by now. But the thumb is so hot it almost sizzles, and even if I can’t hear it, I can at least feel it.

  Our colleagues on the football-tactics team have got to the rapid counterattack by now, they’re talking about exactly where is the best place to reclaim possession, and I don’t think that’s good news.

  Number One is standing at the bar like he’s fallen out of an old film, something that’s all face and sepia-coloured light. He drinks up his gin and tonic, straightens his belt, draws his gun and says: ‘So, let’s get started.’

  Curaçao, November 2017

  Diving guests from Germany. From Hamburg. Four men, four women. The women, with their in-your-face beauty, didn’t exactly fit with the rather obese guys of around forty. Henk would’ve bet on escort girls, and one of his staff, who’d previously worked in another expensive resort on the island, said: ‘They’re bought, definitely.’

  On the third day, the diving instructor booked by the group wasn’t available, his wife
had had their baby in the night. So Henk took the Hamburg guys on. But he avoided speaking German to them, they communicated in English, and only the bare essentials. He spoke with a Dutch accent. He didn’t particularly like these people.

  During a lunchbreak – the guy who’d paid for the whole shebang on the island had vanished to the toilet for a while – Henk heard the other three talking about him. The women were in bikinis, lying in the sand and pretending to sleep, presumably so the guys would leave them alone.

  They called him Conny.

  Conny owned a small empire in Hamburg. He came from a time-honoured merchant family in Blankenese, if you could talk of honour there. He was some kind of property tycoon, and he’d come into his wealth entirely dishonourably. For almost two decades he’d acted as ‘the bank’ in St Pauli. He not only stashed all kind of people’s dirty money – money from the brothels, human trafficking and the drugs trade – in a now-abandoned casino on the Reeperbahn, he was also the go-to guy when it came to laundering the filthy lucre through property dealings. He was permanently looking after umpteen millions in notes and bullion; he had his fingers on money that had been lying in the casino cellars for ages and no longer belonged to anyone because the owners had died in jail or had the misfortune to be shot off some barstool or other.

  His latest coup had been to pinch someone’s lifetime dream: possibly one of the last property tycoons in St Pauli who did have a tiny scrap of honour had built a five-star hotel on the harbour, part of the new Hamburg skyline, known as the Hafenkrone. A cracker, a prestige property and, just before the old man died, Conny had fleeced him of it. He’d muscled in as an investor, to force the old king out with a few shady moves.