The Snowman Page 13

  “That’s right, he never could keep his hands off the girls. How odd that you know him too.”

  “We’re colleagues, after all,” said Blum. “Not that a little thing like that counts in this line of trade.”

  James passed his hand over his beret and looked hard at Blum.

  “What do you mean? Sit down, Blum. You make me quite nervous standing there like that.”

  “You know what I mean. You can tell Hermes from me, thanks but no thanks. If he wants the stuff he’ll have to see about it for himself.”

  He ran across the garden, the knife in his right hand, and flung open the door of the VW with his left. Then he saw that Cora had taken the key out. It had still been in the ignition when she parked. He didn’t even think of trying the Mercedes. He simply ran on through the slush and mud. It was dark now. Behind him he heard James calling and the dog barking, but no one was following him. He had taken them by surprise. It was always an advantage to be a little quicker off the mark than other people. Gasping, he reached the road, ran down the slope and disappeared into the woods.

  27

  The breakfast room was also available to guests as a TV room in the evenings. Blum had it to himself. He chose the most comfortable chair and placed another in front of it so that he could put his feet up, and stood yet another chair beside it for his beer, his hamburger and the ashtray. The last two hours were among the worst Blum could remember, and he had known some really bad ones. By comparison, waiting around at Malta airport had been the purest South Seas holiday. First the woods, the darkness and the animals, then two miles along the road when no one would stop to give him a lift, then three-quarters of an hour in the bar attached to the gym in the nearest village waiting for a taxi that had to come out from the local town. You could have four lines of coke inside you in a big city, even on the tram, even in the local government offices, even at a meeting of members of the police sports club – fine, no problem. But a head full of snow in the bar next to the gym of some dump in the Taunus, on a Friday evening before the bowling begins – no thanks. Or not, anyway, after an hour in the woods and on the road, wearing Spanish ankleboots meant for an evening stroll down the avenidas, with your trousers stiff with mud up to the calves, fir needles and birdshit on your jacket, and an icy chill in your limbs that was outdone only by the hatred he felt for Cora. And the taxi ride had been no picnic either, what with the driver’s endless chatter, the fear that the man would simply drop him off at the nearest police station – “Got to be a sex murderer for sure, sergeant, comes straight out of the woods, and he’s not from hereabouts” – and the certainty that by now Cora had been in his room long ago, and the key to the left-luggage locker was gone for ever.

  He bit a piece off his hamburger, drank some beer and switched on the TV. What did the world have to offer? At least the key had still been in place under the bedside table, untouched, where he had moved it, the hair he had left as a precaution still on the sticky tape. The game went on.

  He had taken another bite when he suddenly saw Mr Haq on the screen. No doubt about it – there he stood, surrounded by his fellow countrymen and uniformed police, on an airport concourse, smiling straight at the camera. He was wearing his green suit and black tie. The colours showed up well. Blum found the volume control.

  “. . . the first group of illegal immigrants to be deported to their home countries by the state of Hesse. The Interior Ministry has established that they came to the Federal Republic for purely economic reasons. Most are from Pakistan and travelled by way of East Berlin. The influx of asylum seekers continues. We will now hear what the Frankfurt City Council has to say. Over to our reporter on the crisis team in the Römer building . . .”

  Mr Haq raised his hand, waved, and then made Winston Churchill’s famous V for Victory sign. He’s telling me that we’ll win through, thought Blum. Clever fellow. A professional making his mark. Blum switched over to another channel. So Mr Haq had been deported. Tomorrow he could be eating with his wife again. Perhaps Jeddah would have been better after all. Blum threw the rest of his hamburger into the wastepaper basket. All that good curry. Billiards at the Punjab Club. Daughters. How far would DM 500 go in Lahore? Not far enough for a comfortable retirement, for sure. But perhaps Mr Haq had made most profit after all. At least he was home again.

  “I think there’s something on Two,” said a man whose presence Blum hadn’t even noticed. Had he been sitting here all the time? No, impossible. He was just opening a beer. A tall, sturdy fellow in a badly fitting blue suit worn with a red jersey shirt. Kindly face. Blum switched over to Channel Two. The man sat behind and to one side of him. The programme he wanted was called File XY – Case Still Open. The presenter was just greeting studio guests in Vienna, Zurich and Munich. As Blum didn’t know the series it took him a moment to realize that the studio guests were CID officers, particularly as the detective-superintendent in Munich was a smart young woman. So now he was going to get a survey of the activities of the German-speaking criminal fraternity. Not that East Germany was included, very likely there was no German-speaking criminal fraternity there. And Mr Haq was in his plane flying east. Maybe they’d stop over in Bahrain and he’d succeed in bribing a Bahraini official and going underground. It wasn’t all that far from Bahrain to Jeddah. Hm. That’s life: hard, but sometimes fair. At least mosquitoes don’t live as long.

  The man behind Blum cleared his throat, but when Blum turned round he simply gave a foolish grin and raised his beer bottle. Blum nodded, drank too, and turned back to the film. Or rather it was not a film but real life, or anyway an imitation of real life, so a film after all. A search was going on in the Cologne area for the murderer of a police officer. A large-scale manhunt.

  “The search is in full swing.” A DM 9,000 reward. So a human being was worth less than a bag of cocaine. But cocaine was power. Hermes had planted her on him, and then her conscience pricked her. Blum was beginning to feel queasy. The effects of the cocaine in his head were subsiding, and the sense of being on a high, still in charge in spite of everything, was evaporating. The TV room looked really dreary, and from the street came the usual raucous noise and cowboy music from the American joint on the corner. What a miserable neighbourhood. One of the wanted men would have looked like Blum if his hair had been darker, and he imagined himself already on TV, the subject of a manhunt.

  “The wanted man”, the presenter would say with suitable solemnity, “has no previous convictions, but is notable for considerable criminal energy and does not shrink from threats of violence. He is the kind of character who was frequently found in the 1970s: an educated man who has failed to make his mark in a respectable career. Such people are particularly apt to become involved in economic crime, pornography and the drugs trade. After several unsuccesful attempts to gain a footing in an honest way of life, the man, who briefly attained some fame in certain circles as ‘Buttercup Blum’, had gone to ground abroad, where he obviously made contact with international narcotics rings. On returning to the Federal Republic he immediately became involved in the drugs scene. He is probably under the influence of the fashionable drug cocaine, which has recently attained unfortunate prominence, and we must assume that he is armed. I will now go over to Detective-Superintendent Hackensack of the Frankfurt Special Commission for a situation report . . .”

  Blum mopped the sweat from his brow. Suddenly he thought he smelled the sour breath of the man behind him. An intrusive character. God knew why the man wanted to watch a TV show like this. Maybe he himself was a small-time crook gaping at the big boys. Blum reached for his beer. Lukewarm. He had stomach cramps. It was time to beat a retreat, return to a well-ordered life. After Cora, only strategic thinking would do any good. Even the frogs only seemed to be croaking away in the swamps without a care in the world. The real fact was that everyone had an ulterior plan.

  “Don’t you like it?” asked the big man in tones of concern. “I just thought a bit of excitement wouldn’t hurt.”

 
“I’ve had enough excitement for one day, thanks,” said Blum. At this moment the door opened and another TV fan entered the room.

  The second man was a Mediterranean type – small, wiry, with black hair and curly mutton-chop whiskers at the sides of his face. He was wearing a pale blue silk suit with a waistcoat, and a red-spotted white cravat with a gold pin. The rings on his fingers must weigh a full ounce of gold. He was smoking a cigarette in a black holder. Through the thick lenses of his glasses, his eyes looked like those of a deep-sea fish in an aquarium. They were toad’s eyes, moray eel’s eyes, the eyes of a killer frog. He was smiling extravagantly.

  “I’ope I no disturb? Sit down, sit down, mein ’err! German televisione benissimo.”

  He nodded briefly to the other man and simply pushed Blum back down in his chair. Then he sat down by the door. Blum forced himself to keep calm. They’d got him. Never mind who they were. Rossi, the “other side”, it made no difference. If they’d wanted to kill him they’d have done it by now. So they were just keeping him here until the others had searched his room at their leisure and found the key. Now he remembered the funny way the porter had looked at him. It wasn’t the state of his suit. No, it was the instructions he’d had from the leader of the gang. Too bad for Hermes, who must certainly be on his way too. Blum’s thoughts became muddled, clashed, came up against the gratings being let down all over his mind because it was closing time in the store. If only he’d done the deal with James. Fifteen grand wouldn’t have been a bad way to conclude it. Expecting half a million was crazy anyway. A hundred grand, that might have come off, that was within the realms of possibility, he’d almost been there before in the past. But in view of his run of bad luck over these last few years, even fifteen grand wouldn’t have been too bad. Just enough for him to go underground somewhere, wait till all this had blown over and then start again somewhere else. With fifteen grand you wouldn’t have to wash glasses in the Punjab Club, and the boom in Freeport was more of a fairy-tale told for losers anyway. Fifteen grand would have done nicely. A good round little sum. But then James knew Hermes . . . Cora and Hermes . . . Hermes and Henri – no, that would never have worked either. The cocaine trade is something of a closed shop. Not for amateurs, and if amateurs did try they’d be shown where the line was drawn.

  A sex murder had been committed in Zurich, and Frankfurt announced the theft of bars of silver to the value of DM 1.1 million. The reward for information leading to the arrest of the thief and the recovery of the silver was DM 110,000, “the 10 per cent usual in such cases”. So a good tip was worth almost more than five pounds of coke.

  The Italian clicked his tongue and offered Blum a cigarette. Didn’t people on death row get a final cigarette before the execution? Were they going to stuff a toad down his throat next, or what exactly did the syndicate do to people who meddled in their business? He’d blame it all on Rossi, and rightly so, of course – Rossi had given him the left-luggage receipt, and then there were the strikes in Italy – no connection – shaving foam, capisco? – Madonna salvani. But probably Rossi was turning his room inside out at this very moment. Blum gave the Italian a light. His hand was perfectly steady, although he noticed both the men looking at him.

  “Good cigarette. What brand is it?”

  “Sigaretta arabica. Cairo.”

  “Ah, Egypt. Oriental tobacco. Tastes like it.” “

  Si.”

  There was nothing for it, Blum had to go on watching the XY programme. If he kept calm surely he’d be all right. Suddenly he felt the plastic bag containing the 100 grams he’d been carrying around with him all day. Cora had spoken of 100 grams. James too. Remarkable how ridiculous their little agreements were. But the 100 grams were still in his right inside pocket, where he usually kept his wallet. Blum was clever, he didn’t put his wallet in his left inside pocket, like all other right-handers. A hundred grams, that would be twenty grand if he went about it the right way. The picture on screen was flickering before his eyes, but he forced himself to listen. They were wondering why the murderer of the policeman, still on the loose despite a major manhunt, had shot the officer. He had no previous form except for breaking and entering.

  “He must somehow have gone off the rails,” the superintendent was saying.

  “That’s very illuminating,” replied the presenter. Outside, the sirens howled. Trains often got derailed at night. It was only from the reaction of his two guards – for by now they had openly stationed themselves one on each side of him, beer bottles between them, a cosy Father’s Day picture – that Blum realized something was wrong. From down below in the hotel lobby came noise, agitated voices, the banging of doors. The Italian glanced at the German. He rose and opened the door a crack. A woman’s indignant protests could now be clearly heard – it must be the manageress – and above a babble of voices there suddenly came the sound of a fist hammering on a door, and the unmistakable words: “Open up there! Police!”

  Next moment both Blum’s guards were out of the door and on the stairs, but they were already being restrained by two men in leather jackets. Passport control. A razzia. Terrorism. Blum had to get a grip on himself so as not to break into crazy laughter.

  “Your ID, please.”

  The policeman was wearing a blue raincoat and had a weary face. The corners of his mouth showed the malice of which he was capable. Inspector Cassar had looked quite different but just the same. Normally, however, Blum could deal with this kind of thing. You only had to decide on the right mixture, faster than you’d need to make a salad dressing, of course – a little vinegar but not too much, a dash of oil, but not too little. He produced his identity card and business cards like a conjuror taking a rabbit out of a hat, but anyone looking closely at him could have detected his tension. The conjuror was doing magic tricks to save his life. The policeman did not look closely. He probably still had five more hotels to check.

  “You’re registered in Berlin, Herr Blum. What are you doing in Frankfurt?”

  “I’m here on business, Inspector. Here’s my card. I’m in the antiques trade. I was taking a look around. Frankfurt still has something to offer in that field . . . but listen, what’s all this about?”

  “We’ll have to check your details. Tomaczek!”

  His assistant took Blum’s ID card and went off with it.

  “You don’t mean to say terrorists . . .?”

  “I don’t mean to say anything. You’re staying in this hotel?”

  “Yes, of course. I was watching TV.” He pointed to the set. The presenter was just closing the programme with the words: “So perhaps this evening may come up with a surprise yet.”

  The policeman wrinkled his brow. A typical police officer’s frown. Perhaps he didn’t like the programme either.

  “Show me your room.”

  They went the two floors up. Doors were being opened and shut everywhere; complaints, protests, curses and shouting came from the rooms. Uniformed officers with machine guns were standing by the lifts, staring into space. If Rossi is in the room now, thought Blum, we’re all in the shit. In deep shit. His steps became heavier and heavier. Number 523, the Phoenicia. I open the door and we’re facing chaos. If it was all connected then the scene would be repeated – shredded mattresses, broken lamps, and what would be sticking out from under the bed? Blum’s heart was thudding so loud he could hear it echoing back from the walls. A policeman in a leather jacket stood outside the door. Blum hesitated. The police officers looked at him with bored expressions, but under the boredom their professional reflexes lay in wait.

  “I’m afraid it’ll be rather untidy,” Blum brought out. “I had a visit.” He cleared his throat and tried for a grin. “You know how it is. Travelling on business.”

  The cops looked at him expressionlessly. He was a rat, like all the rest, but a rat with rights – for now, anyway. Blum put the key in the lock, noticed that the door wasn’t locked, noticed the police noticing it. They straightened their shoulders. Only a pro would notice
that kind of thing. Blum was a pro too: a pro in the art of doing what had to be done. He opened the door.

  The window was wide open. The wind made the curtain billow out and slammed the door. To Blum, it sounded like a shot, but policemen were used to shots of a different calibre.

  Whoever had been about to search the room had only just begun. The bed was no untidier than after a quickie with the chambermaid, the contents of Blum’s travelling bag were scattered on the floor, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything either. The man in the leather jacket looked distinctly disappointed. Perhaps he’d expected smashed champagne glasses, shredded silk stockings, the ripe aura left by the inmates of a whole brothel. Or at least an under-age fixer in the bathtub, a girl who would shout obscenities at him while they waited for the duty doctor. The cop in charge went to the open window and looked out. Blum knew what he was seeing – the garage roof three floors below. A pro could make it down. He didn’t close the window until he had examined the roof carefully. Then he examined Blum, not quite so carefully, but Blum was only 5 feet 10 inches tall.

  “Looks as if someone broke in here. Is anything missing? Take a look.”

  Blum would have loved to take a look, but to do so he would have had to kneel down in front of the bedside table. He cast a quick glance over his scattered possessions. They didn’t look impressive for an antiques dealer. Then he saw that something was in fact missing. His transistor radio. However, he managed to shake his head.

  “No, nothing, and I left the window open myself, Inspector. I need fresh air to sleep.”

  Now the man in the leather jacket was looking around, in the bathroom, in the cupboards, but so casually that Blum realized they didn’t really suspect him. To them, he was just a man looking around the flea markets, no better than a shoelaces rep, the mere dust of the big city thrown up and cast aside by the rollers of the sweeping machines in the early morning.

  “Are you self-employed, Herr Blum?”