Splinter

22

Benny knew he ought to answer Eddy Valka’s call at once.

At once. Without fail.

He couldn’t afford to ignore this muted call or his life would end sooner than he’d planned. Very probably tomorrow morning. By midday at the latest, but only if he was in luck and Valka felt like a lie-in.

He knew what was at stake. They had agreed that he would confirm that the job was done by eleven that night, and it was long past that.

But there were two reasons why it was impossible for him to put out his hand and take the mobile from the passenger seat.

The first reason was that, an overwhelming fit of depression was paralysing him inwardly. The second wore a green peaked cap over her chin-length fair hair and was shining a flashlight in his eyes.

‘Traffic control. Papers please.’

He nodded and leant towards the glove compartment, but his brain refused to transmit the requisite impulses to his muscles.

Many of the thugs he’d got to know through Valka poked fun at his fits of depression. They categorized them as a woman’s disease, a luxury of affluent society peculiar to gays and chicks. He envied their ignorance of the truth. Genuine depression was like a sponge inside your chest that absorbed dark thoughts, getting heavier and heavier until you could physically feel its weight. It began by affecting your breathing and swallowing, but later it paralysed your every movement until you couldn’t even extricate your head from under the bedclothes.

‘A bit faster, if you can.’ The young policewoman looked over at her colleague for help, but he was busy checking another car a few metres away.

Benny knew why she’d plucked him out of the stream of traffic on Brunnenstrasse. He’d been driving much too fast because the radio oracle had distracted him.

Will I make it?

He couldn’t understand why he’d reverted to this silly game of Marc’s, tonight of all nights. It had never brought them anything but aggro.

The rules of the oracle were simple but hard and fast. You asked a question, for instance: Will I ever be rich and famous? Or: What do I have to do so Nicoletta from the tenth grade lets me feel her up at last? Or, like today: Will I make it? Then you turned on the car radio and the lyrics of the first song you heard supplied the answer.

Many years ago they had let the radio oracle decide whether they should really dump their father’s car in the flooded gravel pit.

Benny had been fifteen, Marc sixteen, and they should never, of course, have been driving Frank’s estate. But nothing had ever gone wrong before on their nocturnal jaunts through Berlin. No accidents, no police checks, no stains on the seats. Everything went brilliantly. They crashed three parties a night and the girls let their ‘heroes’ paw them on the back seat because they were just the coolest in their gang: the only teenagers with wheels of their own.

Until one night, around four in the morning, they drove home to find their father’s parking place outside the falafel restaurant occupied – a parking place reserved by local custom for ‘the lawyer’. Unfortunately, some unwitting idiot with Hamburg licence plates had left his environmental hazard exactly where Lucas Sr would be looking for his car in three hours’ time.

Marc had consequently suggested dumping the Mercedes in the gravel pit before the shit hit the fan and they were packed off to boarding school. So they’d made one more circuit of the block and turned on the car radio just as ‘Sailing’ came on. This allowed only one possible interpretation, especially as they knew Rod Stewart was singing the song and it was a incontrovertible rule that the oracle counted only if you could identify the singer.

So they’d dumped the car.

‘Here they are.’

Benny had somehow managed to hand his papers through the window without passing the policewoman the crumpled list of names that had also been in the glove compartment.

While she was suspiciously eyeing his driver’s licence he picked up his vibrating mobile.

‘Call you back right away, Eddy,’ he said, but he earned himself an irritable frown for all that.

‘Please get out,’ she said.

Although surly, her voice was far more enthusiastic than Valka’s at the other end of the line: ‘Am I hearing you right?’ His words were overlaid by loud dance music. He was probably propping up the bar in one of the discos or lap-dancing establishments he controlled. ‘Like hell you will!’

Did this refer to him calling back or was Valka forbidding him to get out of the car? Benny wasn’t sure.

‘How long is this going to take?’ he asked, loudly enough for Valka to hear him.

Valka was totally unimpressed. ‘Done it?’ he asked.

Benny gave an affirmative cough.

‘That’s entirely up to you,’ the policewoman said briskly, and repeated her request that he get out. Valka went on talking too.

‘Good, then bring me the proof.’

‘Hang on a moment.’

‘To hell with that!’

Benny laid the mobile aside without ringing off. Summoning up all his energy, he hoisted himself out of the car. The dark sponge inside him made every movement torture.

He shut his eyes and blew into the breathalyser, long and hard.

‘You wait here,’ the policewoman said curtly. She went over to the police van, doubtless to run a check on his papers.

Benny put the mobile to his ear again. ‘Eddy?’

‘Are you crazy, you dickhead, keeping me hanging on like this?’

‘Listen, there are cops here. I can’t speak now.’

Valka yelled something unintelligible and the background music abruptly faded. Then he came back on the line. ‘I want proof that you’ve done the job.’

‘It’s in my boot.’

‘Which brings us to job number two. Get rid of the garbage.’

‘No worries, I’ll do that as soon as I’m past this traffic control point.’

The door of the police van slid back and the blond policewoman emerged.

‘And then get out of town.’

‘Doing a John Wayne, are you?’ asked Benny.

‘I mean it. That’s job number three: Beat it. I never want to see your face in Berlin again.’

The policewoman came marching over.

‘Okay, give me a couple of days.’

Benny thought of the list. Only two names had been crossed off. Two out of ten.

‘You’ve got two hours.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘Shit, I think my mobile’s playing up.’ Valka laughed. ‘I thought I heard you say no.’

‘I need a bit more time.’

‘What for? To pack your sports bag?’

‘I…’ Benny gulped. He couldn’t possibly tell Valka the truth. ‘I’ve got to say my goodbyes.’

‘Who to?’ Valka laughed again, more derisively this time. ‘Don’t mess me about, amigo. I can’t afford to let people think I’ve gone soft. Get that consignment out of Berlin and never come back, understand?’

Benny pocketed his mobile just as he caught a whiff of the policewoman’s perfume behind him. ‘Escape’ by Calvin Klein.

Escape…

He couldn’t help smiling at the irony.

‘Your reading was zero,’ the policewoman said, sounding almost disappointed, and returned his papers.

‘You haven’t been out long, have you?’

His smile vanished. ‘Is that it?’

She gave him a lingering stare. Then she did the thing he’d been dreading most: she pointed to the boot.

‘Just the breakdown triangle and the first-aid kit, please. Then we’re through.’