Hotel Cartagena

by Simone Buchholz

  Number One stands up, turns to face us, takes a few steps towards us, ignores Faller and his beer and all his earnest non-chalance, reaches, like nothing has happened, for one of the barstools standing at the bar, and sits down on it. He’s lowered the .45 but doesn’t put it away.

  There are a couple of beads of sweat glittering on his temples. He seems exhausted by the story he’s just been telling, but he doesn’t seem like he’s finished yet.

  He’s far from finished.

  Hoogsmart has used the last few minutes, during which his tormenter has been spilling his guts, to repeat exactly the same thing himself, at great length. He’s been doing the best he can to regain some distance from the sausage in his hand, and he’s distributed any amount of unappetising stuff across his shirt. But clearly he’s also got himself a bit sorted out.

  He looks down at himself and wipes his shirt.

  ‘How would you know,’ he says, ‘that that’s exactly how everything was?’

  Hoogsmart glances briefly at Number One, who doesn’t react to him, so he looks around the room. His eyes are asking: why aren’t any of you arseholes actually helping me?

  Then he looks straight into the camera.

  Makes his face a dramatic pause.

  ‘I’m being paraded here, coerced and tortured, because of a few stories that can’t be proved.’

  Now Number One does turn his head back to him.

  ‘That’s bullshit, Hoogsmart, and you know it. And you’re trying to talk your way out, yet again.’

  He studies the .45 in his hand, apparently wondering what it weighs. And whether he should just whip it up to poor dear Conny’s head again. But he clearly doesn’t yet feel like standing up and carrying on with Hoogsmart.

  ‘Do help yourself to another sausage,’ he says.

  He reaches for the gin bottle beside him on the bar, he reaches for a new glass and ice cubes, he helps himself to a slice of lemon and opens a bottle of tonic and mixes himself a drink.

  I look at the glass in my hand. The highball, not the tumbler of vodka in which I’ve parked my thumb. This thumb that’s laying on an increasingly toxic colour and hurting so badly that there’s no way I can make it disappear inside my trouser pocket again.

  Anne watches me.

  She looks me in the eyes first, then at my hand, then she throws me an enquiring glance. I shrug my shoulders and because my highball glass is surprisingly empty again and because while I don’t need another drink, I’d certainly like one, I stand up, walk to the bar and sit on the stool next to Number One.

  Number One looks at me as if that’s exactly what he’s been waiting for. Faller is sitting three stools along, and it’s possible that that’s helping me, in general and in this moment in particular.

  ‘Finally,’ says Number One, ‘I was starting to think you didn’t like me anymore.’

  I mix myself a gin and tonic.

  ‘Earlier you said you needed me,’ I say, ‘it doesn’t get worse than that, surely?’

  He smiles at me.

  I smile back.

  The rest of the bar holds its breath because everyone seems to understand that I’m trying something here, whatever it may be, but you’ve got to do something. I shift a little closer to Number One so that I can talk quietly. So that I’m closer in.

  So that he can’t get away so easily.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ I ask.

  He looks at the glass in his hand.

  ‘It’s not really about Hoogsmart, is it?’

  He drinks a sip.

  ‘It’s about you.’

  He looks at me.

  Drinks another sip.

  His cheekbones tilt.

  His hand, holding the glass, squeezes.

  ‘You’ll break your glass.’

  ‘No,’ he says, puts his glass down, stands up and pauses. ‘That’s you. You’re breaking it.’

  He raises his hand and swipes the glass off the bar, he shoots a good half-gin-and-tonic to the floor, it smashes, it clatters, there are shards, there are a few shocked voices; for a moment, everything starts to slide.

  Then there’s calm again.

  ‘Oops,’ he says and he looks at me as if I were a mirror. ‘Sod all here is about me. But thank you for asking.’

  Oh yes it is, I think.

  It’s exclusively about you, Number One.

  And that, just now, was a spotless display of emotion. I’d love some more of that.

  All emotions: to me.

  I’ll eat them up.

  Just ask the others.

  He gives me one last look, shakes his head. Confused. As if he has something to shake off, an animal or something.

  Then he goes back to Hoogsmart, who still has an Uzi to his head.

  Interestingly, I can no longer think of Hoogsmart without an accompanying Uzi. That happened pretty fast. And the Uzi doesn’t even bother me much. One, he seems to deserve it, and two, I still have the probably entirely unfounded feeling that nobody here will get shot if everyone plays along.

  ‘So,’ says Number One, taking a step back towards the bar, pulling up his stool and sitting on it. ‘We’d better continue. It’s getting late.’

  ‘I need the toilet,’ says Hoogsmart, ‘urgently.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ says Number One.

  ‘Can I get up?’ asks Hoogsmart.

  ‘No,’ says Number One.

  Hoogsmart looks enquiringly at him.

  Number One tilts his head.

  ‘Just let it out, Conny.’

  The men stare at each other for a long time, without anything happening. It’s like a still from a film. Nothing and nobody moves, the gin in my glass freezes almost to ice while my thumb goes up in flames a second time, the fire’s reached my wrist now.

  Konrad Hoogsmart takes a few hard breaths because there are tears in his eyes and, uh, well, when he really can’t hold back the water any longer, he just lets it out.

  THE DESIRE TO FLIP HIS LID

  The four men are sitting in one of the dark-blue police buses that have split the crossroads between them. They’re sitting at a table, bent over a plan of the hotel. The sliding door is open so that the people inside can follow everything the people outside do and vice versa. It’s time for very short chains of command.

  Meier, the guy from Frankfurt, is letting Himmelmann bring him up to speed, and Stepanovic and Rönnau are only sitting in the bus for two reasons:

  Meier wants it that way. He says that without the negotiators here absolutely nothing will work at all because they have to be in on everything just in case anything becomes the case at a moment’s notice.

  It’s total brass monkeys out there. The damp cold, combined with a light but persistent wind, combined with the time of night – just before midnight – is simply easier to handle in a police bus than in one of those police tents. Let alone out on the street.

  The lukewarm coffee from the thermos jugs standing around in all the tents is like a slap in the face.

  Stepanovic would really like to walk two streets over to get a decent coffee from the one 24-hour kiosk that’s pretty much OK, but then he’d feel mean and lacking in solidarity, and he couldn’t exactly supply decent coffee for everyone.

  Although.

  He is actually thinking about it.

  ‘What about the roof?’ asks Meier. ‘Would we be able to get in through there in an emergency?’

  ‘Tricky,’ says Himmelmann, pulling his face into one big crease and rubbing his forehead. ‘Nowhere’s all on one level, it’s all chopped up by the ventilation system, so a helicopter couldn’t land there.’

  He takes a swig from the paper cup in front of him.

  ‘We’d have to abseil.’

  ‘Helicopter so close to the scene is a dead loss anyway,’ says Meier, ‘makes much too much of a racket: by the time we were ready to go, they’d have shot everyone just in case. I just wanted to know, in case of emergency.’ He stares intensely at the blueprint. ‘If we have to get i
n.’

  ‘We’ve got an emergency access SWAT team on the eighteenth floor,’ says Himmelmann, ‘that should be enough if we need speed.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Meier, ‘just in case, the lads there’ll get in quicker than via the roof.’

  Meier’s got a paper cup standing in front of him too, he gulps from it and the corners of his mouth turn down.

  ‘Whoa. Who brewed that?’

  Apologetic look from Himmelmann. Stepanovic and Rönnau stay right out of it. As far as the coffee’s concerned, there really is no negotiation to be done.

  ‘Man.’

  Meier pushes his cup away.

  ‘But I’d say that for the time being, by and large, we’ll do everything the way you’ve set it out.’

  He looks at the screen that’s set up on the inside of the window.

  ‘We’ll carry on freezing our arses off and watching on while the poor sod up there pisses himself.’

  ‘The other hostages seem to be doing fine so far,’ says Himmelmann.

  ‘And the hostage-takers clearly have very chilled nerves,’ says Rönnau, ‘at least I don’t get the feeling that the whole situation is likely to escalate any time soon.’

  ‘Hm,’ says Stepanovic, pointing at Hoogsmart, who’s wet himself and is in the middle of puking copiously – having been forced to gorge himself on a fifth sausage in quick succession a few minutes ago, he must have needed to get rid of it equally quickly.

  ‘Escalate any further, I mean, of course,’ says Rönnau.

  ‘The important thing,’ says Meier, ‘is not to run around like headless chickens or make any stupid Hollywood passes. No rush and no long balls forward. Instead we need calm, intelligent build-up. That’s how I resolved the thing in Frankfurt, that’s how you’ve set things up here from the start, and that’s how we’ll secure the win here too. Men.’

  Stepanovic is certainly finding Meier a little arrogant now, but on the other hand, both the arrogance and the Frankfurt element are helping him feel that he’s in good hands. If, in the course of the night, he were to feel the desire to flip his lid, there’d be two guys on hand, in Meier and Himmelmann, who could take control of a team. And he personally would have the opportunity to be well looked after while losing his marbles.

  ‘In fact,’ says Meier, ‘the only really shit thing is that the arseholes up there have got the technician in their possession.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Himmelmann, ‘that’s a very big plus for them.’

  At that very second, the final floodgates open on the screen. Hoogsmart is crying like a baby.

  ‘Whoa,’ says Stepanovic, ‘he really is done in now, huh?’

  Himmelmann’s phone rings.

  ‘Ugh,’ he says, ‘the incident room.’

  He looks at Stepanovic.

  ‘Magath. Do you want to take it?’

  SHIT-SPINNER-WHIRLIGIG

  Number One is leaning on the bar, smoking, but relatively close to the Hoogsmart action. Everyone else is trying to keep as far from events as possible, except for the hostage-taker who’s holding the Uzi to Hoogsmart’s head. Hoogsmart is all half-digested sausage and wet trousers.

  Things are slowly starting to smell a little off around here.

  Most of us are breathing through our mouths.

  My thumb is pounding and pumping, meanwhile the knuckle has started yelling for attention too.

  The cut is swollen, fat and red.

  I’ve got a funny feeling in my mouth and my eyes are hot.

  I stand up and say I need to go to the toilet. Carla gives me a funny look. Or am I just thinking that? It slips away from me.

  A man with a sawn-off shotgun accompanies me and waits outside the door.

  Wonder exactly what he’s guarding against now.

  How’re you meant to run away here, OK, maybe I could flush myself down the loo, born slippy, why the hell not, go on, away with it, Riley.

  Away with you.

  Now, in the bright light cast by the bathroom mirror, I look at the red stripe on my skin. It’s stretching from the wound on my thumb towards the crook of my arm. And I’m still hot, yet also cold. There’s an internal shivering.

  I feel my forehead.

  Oh, wow.

  That’s where the heat’s coming from.

  And something else about the eyes.

  Yes, the eyes too.

  I lay my hand on my eyelids, it hurts.

  I realise that this isn’t a particularly good development, but now let whoever is better off cast the first stone or something. I rest my head against the window, the glass is cool on my brow, but my face and my lips feel like I might be able to smoulder my way outside.

  Maybe that was what was worrying the kidnapper.

  Over there on the Heiligengeistfeld, they’re in the middle of setting the Dom up again, the perennial Hamburg funfair, soon it’ll be all crazy glitter and lights around the concrete blockhouse where people used to hide themselves away from Second World War bombs by night.

  Some people like that.

  When I come out of the ladies, I briefly consider high-fiving the sawn-off shotgun man, although, well, maybe not such a brilliant idea after all.

  I drop it, just nod to him.

  He nods back and smiles at me, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say that there’s something soothing resonating in that smile, as if he wanted to reassure me that I don’t need to worry or something like that. Sod the fact that my body happens to be going nuts. I stop, look at him for slightly too long and give him a kiss on the cheek because I’m so moved by his smile, his look.

  He holds the shotgun to my chest.

  ‘Cut that out.’

  Of course, I think, bloody hell, what was that, what am I on.

  Let’s not kid ourselves: every damn thing is wrong with me right now. I hope that nobody saw me lose my mind just then, walk back to our table and sit down.

  In front of me there’s that gin and tonic.

  My pulse races.

  I’d better stop drinking.

  Number One has a good drag on his cigarette.

  ‘And then, Conny, you did business with Knut, Heinz and Norbert.’

  He launches himself from his barstool with elan and lands in the middle of the room, others would say in the depths of the room, OK, let’s all say it together: he’s standing in the depths of the room.

  He says things that I can no longer assess, but they sound something like this:

  ‘Cocaine, Colombia, loadsamoney, real big bucks. Regardless of whoever or whatever cops it along the way.’

  When Number One says that, something happens inside him, I can feel it, I can see it in him from behind, it penetrates through everything, into an area in my brain that I can’t describe more closely. I don’t understand exactly what just happened either, I just know that it was important, but who for – yes, who for?

  Hoogsmart lets his head drop forward, and then loll from left to right.

  ‘I just kind of fell into it,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  Fell into it, yeah right.

  Like I fell into my life, or into the thing we call life, all of us just keep falling into places, don’t we, we don’t determine anything, do we, isn’t it more like it determines us, and the hits leave scars, sticky surfaces that mean we keep on getting stuck on the same shit, or on the same people, which doesn’t exactly make it easier, but in the moment it does sometimes make it beautiful.

  Getting stuck on another person feels like it could be healing one day, hurrah, bullshit.

  My pulse.

  Wow.

  The thrill of speed.

  And here comes something, appearing before my eyes.

  Between our table and the Hoogsmart-sausage-to-camera-performance. It’s literally growing out of the floor. An, ah, a, well then: a fairground ride.

  Clearly an apparition from the Heiligengeistfeld.

  A thing made of twinkles, a monster of lights, a chairoplane.

  It glitters an
d gleams in bright colours.

  It feels like the childhood I never had, at least not in that merry-go-round kind of way.

  I stand up and a glass drops, but that doesn’t matter. My thumb’s as big as a balloon.

  That doesn’t matter either.

  I walk towards the chairoplane, dragging the giant, throbbing thumb behind me and look for a seat.

  The seat is cold, I’m hot.

  And then the chairoplane starts turning.

  And then the music starts.

  I don’t know the song, and yet I do know it because it’s my song, it’s my beat, they’re my lyrics, it’s my cares, my shit that’s being slung all around the bar while the chairoplane spins, it’s just like every night in fact, I have no home.

  I have no trust

  I’m alone

  even when you’re all with me

  I hold on to my pain

  deep buried within me

  no mother

  no father now

  all of you love me and that scares me

  but if worst comes to worst

  if I let it out

  I douse it in booze

  though that won’t always help

  pay no heed to my bad heart

  pay no heed

  oh please guys

  take care of me.

  ‘But that’s what I kept trying to do. I spent almost ten years trying to take care of you, you silly cow.’

  Oh.

  Klatsche’s climbed aboard.

  He’s sitting next to me.

  well not of you, he says,

  no one can take care of you

  in the end you always do

  what you like

  no, I tried to care for

  our love

  oh boy how I tried

  how I fought

  Simone Buchholz

  over and over

  but then always you

  with your flaming sword of ice

  I stood still

  parried the blows

  didn’t flinch

  thought, this way could work

  but then

  life just came up

  I’d have rammed your sword

  into my heart