The Snowman Read online

  But the music did not soothe Blum. Far from it – as usual with the music of Parker every note, however lightly, almost fleetingly played, seemed to set off a dark, painful echo. How people could listen to this for pleasure was a mystery to him. It was music with more shadows than Blum wanted to see just now, asking questions more difficult than he wanted to hear. Charlie Parker with “Out of Nowhere” on an afternoon in the north, with the sleet like a grey wall between the penthouse and the nearby motorway access road and supermarket centres, like a wall with Miles Davis blowing holes in it, but there was another wall behind it, said Charlie Parker, and yet another wall behind that. Don’t let them get you down, thought Blum. This is your biggest chance in years, and you are damn well going to exploit it, and neither Charlie Parker nor the sleet nor Hermes with his drop-out blues is going to muck it up for you. What does drop-out blues mean anyway? That man never dropped out of anything. He’ll just keep dropping in all the way to his funeral. You mustn’t take your eye off the ball for a split second.

  “Amazing,” said Hermes, when the disc came to an end. “He has a shadow for every light and a question for every answer. Right, what sort of questions do we have now, Blum?”

  “Do you know any buyers, Hermes?”

  Hermes was standing at the window with his whisky.

  “Listen, Blum, I’m not delivering a seminar, but here’s a few essentials. The cocaine trade is something of a closed shop, and it’s better for all concerned if it stays that way. We all know our own contacts, and that’s it. So far there’ve only been people with clear heads in our line, and the customers show their appreciation with good money. Cocaine isn’t a dirty affair like heroin. Perhaps it will be if it really becomes big business – in ten years, snorting coke probably will be big business, but for now we’re still an exclusive circle. The advantage of that is that the cops can concentrate on their beloved heroin and the poor little pushers in the nearest U-Bahn toilets. That way it’s easier for them to meet their quota of arrests too. Of course I know buyers, Blum – here comes the answer to your question – but I’m keeping them to myself until I’m right out of the trade. However, you’ll have no difficulty getting rid of the few flakes you’ve got there; I’ll buy them from you. Even I don’t get my hands on such good snow so often. How much of it do you have?”

  Blum was prepared for this question. Not for nothing had he lain awake all night, watching the factory chimneys and garbage incinerators emerging from the morning twilight. He mustn’t tell anyone just how much he had.

  “Here.”

  He put the small cellophane bag he had filled with cocaine that morning on the tea-table. About one-tenth of the contents of a can. Henri weighed the bag on a light metal precision scale with mother-of-pearl ornamentation.

  “Exactly 11.35 grams.”

  “Excellent,” said Hermes. “I can survive Switzerland better with that. You’re sure you don’t have any more?”

  He gave his Oriental smile. Blum smiled back.

  “I wouldn’t sell even this if I wasn’t nearly broke.”

  “Right, I’ll give you a cheque.”

  “Maybe we should agree the price first,” said Blum

  “Just as you like. What’s the price per gram at the moment, Henri?”

  “Two hundred marks for the usual stuff, cut. For flakes, uncut, you could ask around 300.”

  “You wouldn’t get it, though. But that’s not the way I operate, and Blum needs the money. So let’s say for 11.35 – given the usual discount between friends – well, I’ll give you a cheque for 2,400 marks.”

  “I’m only accepting cash, Hermes.”

  This seemed to displease Hermes.

  “Cash?” He uttered that delightful word as if it were the punchline of a joke in poor taste told in a bar. “Oh, come on, Blum, cash on a Sunday? I never keep money in the house, understand? I only ever pay by credit card. Do you have any cash, Henri?”

  “Cash?” Henri made it sound like a slightly dirtier version of the joke. He searched his pockets, a derisive smile on his lips. “A tenner – but I need that myself to fill up the car.”

  “I thought everyone dealt in cash in your line,” said Blum.

  “Usually, Blum. Not always. And when they do it’s shifted at once, laundered, stashed away in investments.”

  Blum took back the bag.

  “Then it’s no deal,” he said, making as if to go.

  “Oh, come along,” said Hermes, “hold on a minute. Sit down in this nice chair and have another nice whisky and enjoy the nice view and give me an hour or so, and then you can have it in cash.”

  Hermes left. Blum lit an HB, his last. He really needed that cash. Numbers clicked through his head like the coloured figures in the fruit machines: 10 ×12 = 120 . . . 120 × 20 = 2,400 . . . 2,400 × 200 = 480,000 . . . Bingo. Henri leafed through his magazine, and when he had finished it he picked up another. He didn’t deign to address another word to Blum. Perhaps someone with a mere 11.35 grams was beneath Henri’s notice, even if it was Peruvian flake, 96 per cent. Blum fed the number 300 into his calculations instead of 200. That would make 720,000. Better stick with 200, he told himself. Let’s not go mad. He stared out at the sleet. In the dim light, the coloured figures shot up and down in his head.

  It was over two hours before Hermes was back with the DM 2,400. He took the bag of coke and gave Blum the money.

  “That right?”

  Blum held his gaze. “That’s okay, Hermes.”

  Then Hermes took a pinch of the bluish snow, and his daughter came into the room. She was now wearing a long, peach-coloured silk housecoat, and she set out tea things. The look she gave Blum, however, had nothing inviting about it.

  “You’ll stay to tea, will you, Blum?” asked Hermes.

  “A cup of tea wouldn’t hurt.”

  When he left Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were playing “Perdido”. Henri was snorting a line. Hermes was lying on the sofa, and the Eurasian girl was sitting beside him, holding his hand and reading L’Homme révolté.

  Outside, the slush trickled over the top of his ankle-boots at every step he took. The supermarket on the corner had a placard advertising its offer of the week. “GOOD THINGS COME IN SMALL CANS”, said the ad.

  11

  That evening Blum went to a party. A girl with her hair dyed green, and a freckled nose on the end of which he saw a trace of cocaine, had given him the address in a café on Leopoldstrasse, where he was sitting thinking about his next move. The girl was in the company of two unisex figures with safety-pins in their ears, and seemed to be inviting anyone who looked a likely prospect to this party. Perhaps she saw Blum as a classic example of the bourgeois type. That was okay by him – good camouflage was extremely important now. And he had long considered himself a classic.

  The villa belonged to a writer and stood in a garden run wild. A rowing boat was rotting away among the bushes. Crows on the garage roof, a half-moon on the skyline, the house brightly illuminated, garlands of lights even in the garden, where sleet was still falling, and in all the rooms loud music, a crush of people, confused voices.

  “We’re moving to the country,” his hostess told him. “The mortgage rates here are sending us just crazy. My husband will be able to work again in the country, and I shall grow vegetables. Do you write too?”

  “Only figures,” said Blum. The hostess in her model dress was already moving on to greet the next guests. Blum helped himself to whisky. This writer didn’t seem to be doing so badly. The tables in the big room were groaning under the weight of dishes: soups and salads, platters of hors d’œuvres, champagne buckets, shining batteries of bottles of wine and whisky. Blum helped himself to a seafood salad, following it up with a powerful chilli dish and some cheese. He watched the guests. Although most of them were his age, they wore an air of carefree youth. Many of the women seemed to be in hysterical high spirits. The few really young people, on the other hand, despite their bizarre appearance, bore themselves like account
ants unable to conceal their glances of disapproval, even after working hours. Blum soon felt slightly nostalgic for Larry’s nightmares, Mr Haq’s fantasies, those Thursday evenings in the Pegasus Bar. He put his plate down and went to look round the house.

  The old guard of pot-heads were assembled in a darkened room. Candles, musky scents, Afro hairstyles, lilac dungarees, loads of Indian jewellery, a nargileh in the middle of the room and the inevitable idiot fidgeting with bongo drums by the wall. Blum took the little tube of snow out of his pocket. They were interested.

  “A gram costs—”

  “Oh, come on, man, cool it!”

  The fact that Blum insisted on cash payment defused suspicion but made him appear rapacious. He put the tube away again.

  “Sorry, friends, all you get on credit is the Vienna Woods.”

  “Vienna Woods yourself,” said the girl with green hair.

  “Bad karma, that,” said one man dressed Indian-style. The Stones were wailing from all the loudspeakers:

  “Please, Cousin Cocaine, place

  your cool hands on my head

  Hey, Sister Morphine, you better

  make up my bed . . .”

  Blum wandered into the next room. A flickering candle on the windowsill, two chess players in thoughtful mood in front of a board. Nothing to be got out of them for sure. They already had their kicks. On the first floor, a beauty with a Madonna face was putting up with the conversation of two useless characters.

  “He’s finished, I tell you, absolutely finished, a burntout case, done for – all he does is repeat himself . . .”

  “But he started brilliantly, you have to admit. That half-dead woman with the Nazi boots photographed through the striptease ad, no one’s going to trump that in a hurry . . .”

  The Madonna nodded devoutly.

  A balding, four-square man in a dinner jacket approached Blum. “I just heard there’s charlie in the house. Is that you?”

  “Sorry, my name’s Blum.”

  “No, no, man, I mean charlie like C, like in coke, get it? Is that you?”

  And here came the creative characters, the opinion-formers, clad in their 50 per cent silk mix: the creators of films, books, art, fashion, newspapers, able to soften you up, to chat you up. They all seemed very stylish, but when Blum mentioned cash they couldn’t produce the goods: “Not in funds at the moment, old boy, but call me in a couple of weeks, then I’ll have the new advertising budget . . . my production expenses . . . the money from Bonn . . . my legacy from Hamburg. . . my wife’s salary . . . the money from the Goethe Institute. . . the dough from the Intelligence Agency . . .”

  “The Federal Intelligence Agency?”

  “Even Intelligence is getting into cultural politics, and about time too, I may say. When I think what the CIA’s wasted its money on . . .”

  “Who said anything about cultural policy? I’m talking about a pound of cocaine.”

  “My good friend, haven’t you ever heard of the opium aura?”

  Blum understood. Life was hard but art was even harder, you couldn’t twist a person’s arm. But Blum, unfortunately, had to twist their arms.

  “I really do need cash, friends. Maybe you could try getting a little credit?”

  But they probably wouldn’t believe I have five pounds of coke under my bed in the Metropol, he thought as he walked on. They can probably tell that I haven’t yet got beyond trying a few assorted jobs – a freight-car of European Community butter, a Titian, a load of Danish porn mags. You lot have Bonn behind you, or Federal Intelligence, or at least culture. I have to take what comes. And when it comes I have to try to sell it as dear as possible.

  He went on looking around. All the guests were making the most of their chances. A poet was sitting under a blue lamp holding court. He was drinking wine from a two-litre bottle and playing a note on a jew’s harp now and then. His audience was fascinated.

  “He’s overcome the symptoms of his block – complete recovery is close,” said a gay man, repeating it into the cassette recorder someone brought him.

  “Got a cigarette on you, mate?”

  A man with the beard of an old seadog and the eyes of a basset hound brought up in an animal shelter tapped Blum with a nicotine-stained finger. They drank a whisky together.

  “I’ve published six volumes of poetry – two of them with famous firms – and I’ve written twenty-one radio plays and a hundred essays on the spirit of the times,” confessed the seadog, “but one day suddenly none of it was worth anything – we don’t need any more arts sections, they said in the editorial offices, we want the raw originality of the production line, the cog-wheels of psychic impoverishment. All demolished overnight, over and done with – as if I wasn’t being ground down by those cogwheels myself. Is that bottle empty? If you don’t know where to spend the night there’s still a corner free in Prince Gorki’s potato cellar . . .”

  Shortly after midnight Blum noticed some of the scroungers filling their coat pockets with leftovers from the cold buffet. I could use a man like you, Mr Blum. Oh, children, children. He left his corner and went on exploring the house. If he couldn’t find any buyers he might at least look for a woman.

  A shaven-headed character in a shimmering silk shirt was now squatting in the room where the two men had been playing chess, a snake around his neck. Three incense candles were burning, and in the sultry haze above a mattress three sari-clad women were holding hands and uttering throaty sounds at rhythmic intervals, with their eyes closed:

  “Awawawa – ah!”

  “Ululululu – uh!”

  A film projector was whirring in a large, darkened room. The film was black and white and taken without artificial lighting, but the images left no doubt about the action: a woman was being torn apart by three bloodhounds while a naked man masturbated. The audience did not seem happy with the film.

  “Aesthetically it leaves much to be desired,” explained a man with a Wagnerian quiff of hair. “You don’t show people suffering unless art permeates every moment of that suffering as the immanent will towards an aesthetic.”

  In the kitchen a man in a cardigan and brogues was eating pea soup, and the hostess of the party – now wearing a severely cut riding outfit – was saying, “I do hope you’re all having a good time. My husband hopes so too, don’t you, darling?”

  “No,” said the man in the cardigan, fishing a piece of pork out of his soup. “I hate the cinema, I hate art. Joseph Goebbels was 100 per cent right: when he heard the word culture, he reached for his gun. Unfortunately I don’t have one or I’d mow you all down.”

  “The critics misunderstood his last novel so badly,” explained the writer’s wife.

  “They understood it perfectly well,” said the man, with his mouth full. A pea rolled down his chin.

  Blum found himself beside a small, slim woman with long, dark hair who was gazing sadly at the writer. She wore a long dress that emphasized her slender figure. Blum pressed a glass of champagne into her hand, which had a wedding ring on it. She took the glass and smiled at him, surprised.

  “Come along,” said Blum, “and I’ll show you something.”

  They went out into the hall and found a place to sit beside a lesbian couple.

  “He was once so gifted,” said the woman, “and now all this wretched stuff. Why do they go to the bad so quickly, can you tell me?”

  She looked at Blum as if his answer really interested her. Blum nodded, like a man who asks himself such questions on a daily basis.

  “One never tires of talent. He delivered the goods by the yard, made a killing and then gorged on it.”

  “You say that very certainly.”

  “Something wrong with it?”

  “No, probably not. What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m in another line entirely.”

  He produced the tube and opened it. He had not been wrong. She knew what it was and took a pinch at once.

  “That’s great,” she said. “So are you the charac
ter who has so much of it and is selling for cash only?”

  “Was your husband one of those men in dinner jackets?”

  “My husband’s in a monastery in Thailand.”

  “Good heavens, what’s he doing there?”

  “I imagine he’s looking for himself. Perhaps he’s looking for me too. Or for a cure for hay fever. You know, you’re not at all the type to be dealing in cocaine.”

  “Is there a definite type?”

  She laughed, and put a hand on his arm.

  12

  “Like some more snow?”

  “No thanks, I only ever take a very little. To the Incas, coca was a gift of the gods, and now we’ve made cocaine of it. A business.”

  “Well, we can’t be expected to turn into Incas.”

  “That’s why I try to see more in the powder than just an expensive pleasure. What about you? Don’t you use it at all?”

  “Yes, but even less often than you. And not at all while I’m dealing in it.”

  “Do you think you’ll succeed?”

  “Why not?”

  “Drugs aren’t like vegetables, Blum. They’re magic. They’re connected to force-fields beyond our control.”

  “Tell that to the Mafia. They’ll fall about laughing.”

  “But you’re not the Mafia. I don’t want to discourage you, far from it – I think it’d be fantastic if you can bring it off. But you have to adjust to the magic, or the stuff will destroy you. It’s more powerful than any of the people who sell it.”

  “Mm. So this character in Frankfurt is a friend of yours?”

  “For heaven’s sake, no. All I know is that he’s quite big in the trade.”

  “How big?”

  “Like I said, quite big. Just how big you may find out. I’ll call him tomorrow morning and make you an appointment.”

  “He’s someone you have to make an appointment with?”

  “Believe me, it’s best. Then you can call him at the number I’ll give you now.”

  He had her write the number on the back of Hackensack’s business card.