Just before one in the morning the light behind the crochet drapes finally went out. I rubbed my forehead, lit a cigarette, and checked yet again that I’d loaded the pistol with the spare magazine.
Ten minutes later the landlord and his two employees came out into the street. The landlord locked up, nodded to the others, and they all set off in different directions. I forgot my knees and my shoulders, got out of the car, closed its door quietly, and followed the chef’s assistant. I got him in a dark side alley. I quietly made my way to within ten metres and then ran at him. At about the same moment as he spun round in alarm the muzzle of my pistol pressed against his chest.
‘Don’t make a sound!’
I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him into the entrance of the nearest building. His slight body was trembling like an animal’s. Only now did I realise how young he must be. Twenty at the most.
‘Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to you.’
‘Please…’ he begged, gasping for breath. ‘Please… I’m not one of them!’
‘I know. Take it easy.’ I patted him on the shoulder. ‘I only want you to explain a few things to me.’
‘But I don’t know anything. I’m only his nephew. I’m working there to earn money. I don’t have anything to do with that lot.’
He was talking so fast that I could barely understand him. He never took his eyes off the pistol, but at the same time turned his head as far away from it as possible.
‘Listen: I’ll put it away if you promise not to try anything silly.’
‘What?’ He wasn’t listening to me.
‘The pistol. Look…’ I put it in my jacket pocket. ‘Better now?’
He stared at the opening of the pocket for a moment longer before looking hesitantly at my face, as if expecting to see a monster. ‘What… what do you want?’
‘I want you to tell me what you’ve heard at work, or from your uncle, about the Army of Reason.’
‘Army of Reason?’
‘Could be you’ve never heard the name mentioned. It’s a gang that started extorting protection money in Frankfurt about two weeks ago. I assume the Adria Grill is the place where they meet, if only for a beer.’
At the words ‘extorting protection money’ he jumped, and I saw him checking up on opportunities for escape out of the corner of his eyes. I stood a little more foursquare in front of him and shook my head. ‘Don’t even think of it. If you help me we’ll never see each other again, and no one will know that you talked to me. If you don’t, I’ll tell your uncle that you phoned me and tried to sell me information.’
‘Are you crazy?’ It burst out of him before he turned his eyes away and stared at the ground, lips compressed. I waited. Standing there in front of me now without a kitchen apron on, he looked like a youth from another period. He wore pointed shoes with leopard-skin trim, a pair of suit trousers much too large for him, a white shirt with a starched collar, and he had a crew cut. Perhaps his favourite band was The Who, and either that was usual in Offenbach or he had a good chance of leading a revival in three or four years’ time.
‘I… look, I’m going to university in the autumn, I wanted to work through the summer so as not to have to take a job during my first year. I never specially liked my uncle — why am I saying specially? Not at all. But I couldn’t find anything better… I had no idea what I was getting into. Imagine it, you just want to earn some cash, and suddenly you’re right in a…’
He stopped and stared ahead of him again. I lit myself a cigarette and registered the adrenalin closing down for the night in my body, while pain took over again. After a while he raised his eyes and pointed cautiously to my jacket pocket with one finger.
‘They took the bullets out, didn’t they?’
‘I had a spare magazine in the car.’
‘Oh.’ He made a face as if thinking of something really disgusting to eat. ‘… Would you have shot me?’
‘Let’s say at least I wouldn’t have let you get away.’
He thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. ‘They really took you apart.’
‘Yes, and it hurts, and I want to go to bed. Tell me about the protection money gang.’
‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘But you’ll have to…’
‘I won’t have to do anything,’ I snorted. Only just now he’d been close to shitting himself, and now he was a little too inclined to have a cosy chat for my liking. ‘You either trust me or you don’t. I’ll wait another five minutes. If I haven’t heard anything that interests me by then, I shall get your uncle out of bed this very night, and you can start thinking of some place to go and study abroad.’
It took him a little more swallowing, marking time on the spot and looking at the ground, but finally, head bowed, he talked. He turned out to be a bright, inquisitive lad, and half an hour later he’d answered a great many more questions than I had meant to ask.
The Adria Grill functioned as a meeting place for Croatian nationalists who liked to have a drink together, and also for German Nazi and Ustasha fans who were seeking salvation as mercenaries in the Bosnian war. True, the war was officially over, but there were still paramilitary bands of all political colours as fond as ever of murdering each other in the name of a Greater Croatia, Greater Bosnia or Greater Serbia — for a good fat fee. Checking up on the mercenaries and dispatching them was organised by a tall, thin man who was always very smartly dressed, but whose name was never mentioned. He turned up in a Mercedes three times a week and held audience for one or two hours in the back room of the Adria Grill. He hadn’t turned up this evening, and Zvonko — that was the boy’s name — had seen his uncle go to the phone several times after I was flung out to call this man, but without success.
‘Was he there last Thursday?’
‘Thursday… yes, of course, that was the evening when the palefaces didn’t turn up. That’s what I call them to myself. Their faces are powdered and they wear blond wigs. They first turned up two weeks ago, and at the start I thought they were cranks of some kind, a cult or something. How would I know? Suppose Jesus is blond and loves Croatia. You wouldn’t believe what weird characters come into that place. Sometimes I think Yugoslavia and the war was like winning the lottery for all the weirdoes who have some kind of obsession going that won’t get them anywhere here. I heard one of the interviews. The man kept saying how he couldn’t stand his wife any more, that was all he talked about. And he went off there, and the first thing he did was probably to shoot ten Bosnian women between thirty and forty. And then he said Croatia was a wonderful country because of its literature and music. I mean, sometimes it’s quite funny.’
‘What happened next with the palefaces?’
‘After that they turned up almost every evening. Like the tall man. A week ago I saw them giving him money for the first time. After that I looked out for them, and they always bring something. If the tall man isn’t there they give it to my uncle. But only for safe keeping. He’s not a big wheel. He makes himself out important, but…’
I let him whinge on about his uncle for a bit, and then I asked if he knew where the money came from. He did, and that wasn’t all. Most of the ‘palefaces’ were Bosnian refugees blackmailed into working for the gang. If they objected, they were threatened with the deaths of friends or relations who had stayed behind in Bosnia. The job would be done, as Zvonko put it, by ‘German lovers of Croatian literature’. He’d once overheard the tall man explaining to a tearful paleface that after his wilful behaviour they’d be obliged to do something about it.