Splinter

6

Eddy Valka’s shop smelt of cat’s piss and roses. Not an unusual combination to anyone reasonably well-acquainted with him. All that surprised Benny was that Valka had wanted to see him so soon. He’d only been out two days, and the ultimatum didn’t expire until next week.

‘What is this, a proposal of marriage?’ He laughed and rubbed his left shoulder, which those two knuckleheads had almost dislocated when throwing him into the boot. He’d have got in of his own free will. You didn’t object when Valka wanted a word with you. Not for long, anyway.

Valka threw him a quick glance, then redevoted himself to the long-stemmed roses lying on the counter in front of him. Picking them up one by one, he assessed their length, trimmed them with secateurs and inserted them in a galvanized bucket.

‘You’ll have to ask my parents’ permission first.’

‘Your parents are dead,’ Valka said in an expressionless voice, decapitating another rose. He evidently disliked its colour. ‘Did you know that cut flowers should be dunked in boiling water when they droop?’ He clicked the secateurs warningly at a Blue Chartreuse that was preparing to jump up on the counter.

‘Head first or stem first?’ Benny quipped.

He watched the cat scamper off to join its siblings under a radiator. Nobody knew why Valka put up with them. He didn’t like animals. He didn’t like any living creatures, if the truth be told. He had opened the florist’s only because he could hardly declare his true sources of income to the tax inspector. And also because he didn’t want his tame rose-sellers – the poor devils who hawked their wares around the city’s bars and pubs at night – to buy their stuff elsewhere. If Valka controlled a business, he controlled it a hundred per cent.

Benny looked around for somewhere to park himself, but the stuffy little shop wasn’t equipped to accommodate waiting customers. In fact, it didn’t seem interested in attracting customers at all, being far too remote from Köpenick’s main shopping streets and bang next door to a boxing gym whose burly habitués weren’t exactly a florist’s preferred clientele.

‘Great name, by the way,’ said Benny, glancing at the grimy shop window, on which a semi-circle of self-adhesive letters spelt out the word ROSENKRIEG – ‘Rose War’ – in mirror writing. ‘Very apt.’

Valka gave a gratified nod. ‘You’re the first person to notice.’

His was a Czech surname meaning ‘war’. As the uncrowned king of East Berlin’s nightclub-bouncer fraternity, Eddy Valka was inordinately proud of it. He wiped his hands on a green rubber apron and looked Benny in the eye for the first time.

‘You’re looking better than you used to. Not as flabby. Been working out?’

Benny nodded.

‘Well, I’m damned, that funny farm seems to have done you good. How come they let you out so soon?’

‘They reassess you every couple of months. It’s regulations.’

‘I see.’

Valka extracted an exceptionally long-stemmed rose from the bucket and sniffed it appreciatively.

‘So the shrinks thought you’d ceased to be a danger to the public?’

‘Yes, once my beloved brother had finally withdrawn his statement.’ Benny fingered the frond of a yucca palm beside him. ‘They released me after that.’

‘They could always have consulted me,’ said Valka.

Benny couldn’t help grinning. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure you’d make a trustworthy sponsor in the eyes of the law.’

The corners of Valka’s mouth turned down. He looked affronted. ‘Nobody’s better qualified than me to testify that you wouldn’t hurt a fly. How long have we known each other?’

‘Getting on for twenty years,’ Benny replied, wondering when Valka would get to the point. This meeting had to be more than just a chat about old times.

‘Christ, my current girlfriend wasn’t even born then.’ Valka’s smile went out like a light. ‘We didn’t want you in with us to start with, Benny. You were just too soft.’

Another rose lost its head.

‘And that’s precisely what I’d have told the shrinks who locked you up. I’d have told them that my former associate is an HSP.’

Benny smiled. It was very rare for someone to know the technical term for his disorder. But Eddy Valka was one of those people who you couldn’t judge by appearances. His bulldog features, bullet head and crooked teeth made him look like the archetypal roughneck. In reality, he had graduated from school and had even studied psychology for four terms before discovering that he wanted to be the cause of his fellow men’s nightmares, not the solution to them.

‘Who told you that?’ Benny asked.

‘Well, I often wondered what was wrong with you. Why you were so different from your brother, who never ducked a fight.’

Valka tugged at a jammed drawer beneath the counter and opened it with difficulty.

‘I mean, I never saw you with a girl, so I thought you were gay or something. But then I came across this.’

He produced a newspaper article. ‘HSP,’ he read aloud. ‘Highly Sensitive Person. Generally described as someone suffering from a pathological hypersensitive disorder. Such individuals are considerably more sensitive to their environment than normal test subjects. They sense, feel, see, taste and smell everything far more intensely.’

Benny made a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s all humbug.’

‘Oh yeah? It says here that HSPs used to be sages and advisers at the royal courts of old. Or, thanks to their ability to empathize with the thoughts and emotional state of others, they became diplomats, artists, financial experts…’ Valka glanced at Benny over the top of the paper. ‘That would explain why you were always on at me to put mercy before justice, go easy on my enemies, and all that shit.’ He snorted noisily. ‘It also explains why I made you my bookkeeper.’

Benny’s expression didn’t change even now that Valka had finally came to the real reason for this meeting: money.

‘But it also says’ – Valka looked down at the article and clicked his tongue – ‘that HSPs have a regrettable tendency to become depressive. Lots of them go insane and commit suicide.’

‘I’m still alive.’

‘Yes, thanks more to your brother than yourself.’

‘Must we talk about Marc?’

Valka guffawed. ‘Glad you reminded me of what I really wanted to show you. Come with me.’

Tossing his apron on to the counter, he picked up the secateurs and gave Benny an unmistakable signal to follow him into the back room.

Valka used the windowless room next door as a storeroom. Not for flowers, fertilizer or vases, but – as Benny was appalled to see – for garbage. Human garbage, and this specimen was still alive.

‘It’s time we cured you of this HSP disorder of yours,’ said Valka, pointing to a naked man lashed to a St Andrew’s cross. Jammed into his mouth was an orange bit ball with a central aperture the diameter of a drinking straw – his only means of breathing. He was on the verge of asphyxia, given that he couldn’t inhale any air through his nose, which was broken.

‘I want you to pay close attention,’ said Valka. He turned on an inspection lamp dangling from the ceiling, rhythmically clicking the secateurs in his other hand as he did so. The gagged man’s eyes widened at the sound. He couldn’t see the blades because his head was imprisoned in a sort of clamp that prevented him from turning it. The retaining screws were inserted in his ears, and blood was already seeping from the left one.

Benny started to turn away.

‘No, no, no.’ Eddy clicked his tongue several times as though quietening a horse. ‘Watch carefully.’

He went right up to the naked man and held the secateurs immediately in front of his face. The blades struck sparks from his victims’ pupils, he was breathing more and more frantically.

‘That article really opened my eyes, Benny. It said that HSPs are exceptionally sensitive to pain. Is that correct?’

Benny was speechless with horror.

‘Many of them don’t even respond to anaesthetics. Imagine the torture of going to the dentist!’

Valka thrust his victim’s upper lip aside with the secateurs. The man had bad, nicotine-stained teeth.

‘But what I found most interesting, Benny, was that people like you are said to be particularly sensitive to the sufferings of others. It seems they often feel other people’s pain more intensely than their own.’

Valka raised the man’s right eyelid with his thumb.

‘Stop it,’ Benny whimpered, although he knew it was futile. Valka wanted to demonstrate what would happen to him if he failed to repay the 90,000 euros he’d borrowed.

Valka turned to him one more time. ‘That makes things simpler for me, my sensitive young friend. It means I can inflict pain on you without harming a hair of your head.’

Benny stared at the rhythmically heaving chest of the naked man, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Looking into those bulging eyes, he smelt the fear in which the dank little room was steeped. He could feel it on his skin and taste it under his tongue, and he knew that, in the next few seconds, he himself would be in excruciating pain – as if his own eyeball were being scooped from its socket and the optic nerve severed with a pair of rusty secateurs.