AnonUser Red: u r saving my life AnonUser Scholar: how?
AnonUser Red: by just being there AnonUser Scholar: i want to help more AnonUser Red: i wish you could AnonUser Red: but its not safe AnonUser Red: got to go AnonUser Scholar: g wait
AnonUser Red: sorry gtg <<AnonUser Red has signed off>> AnonUser Scholar: i miss u
Thirteen
It’s all men here, Skyping with family back home, looking at porn, gaming. I’m the only woman in the Internet café, and they remind me of it with their eyes every second I stay.
“Funf Euro, zwanzig,” the bored kid behind the counter tells me. I pay and head out onto the street. It’s afternoon in New York but night here. Very night. The rain doesn’t seem to stop, ever. It followed me from Paris, and here in Berlin, fills the black air with icy crystals that sting the skin of my cheeks. I make my way down the street, keeping close to the buildings and out of the buzzy yellow cast of the streetlamps. I pass the creepy bars, the creepy porn shops, the creepy cop hanging out on the corner looking for someone to hit, sticking to myself, eyes down, nothing to see here.
This will be my second night on the Berlin streets. I have money, but three hostels in a row asked for my passport, and I don’t know how good the Sofia papers really are. At the Internet café, I searched the Paris news sites. All I found was a single article about two unidentified bodies found on the street, apparent victims of a motorcycle accident. No word of Yael. No word of Hamid. No word even of the shot-up Volkswagen. It could mean she got away clean, or it could mean the opposite, that she was captured and maybe French intelligence got involved. How long before they link Yael to me, then me to this Sofia? How long before they tell the Americans?
There’s a knot of junkies in front of the entrance to the Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof—the Bahnhof Zoo, they call it here, both because it’s the train station next to the zoo and because it is a zoo in itself. One of the junkies has found half a discarded pizza, so they ignore me as I slide past them and through the doors. It smells like piss in the train station, fresh and still hot, but it’s out of the rain and well lit and relatively safe. I spent last night here—my first in Berlin—and the cops left me alone because I don’t look like the other Penner, bums, spread out across the floors and benches. I’m reasonably clean and my clothes reasonably neat, but by now, the cops will have seen me hanging around and the one thing I can’t risk is them taking me to jail for vagrancy and finding out who I really am. Which, come to think of it, is a good question.
Still, Berlin is a good city for a girl on the run, no matter who she is. Cheap, dark, and a whole stew of nations and languages to get lost in. Of the languages I speak, German—which I picked up when my dad was stationed in Vienna—is my worst and I can’t even come close to passing for native. But it turns out a lot of the younger people speak English, and you never have to dig too deep to find a Russian speaker anywhere. So I try to speak my rusty, elementary-school German with a Russian accent, squishing the vowels, frowning more. It’s easy so long as I remember to do it. Nobody cares too much for pronunciation and grammar in the Berlin of refugees and runaways.
My best bet in the Bahnhof Zoo is the cheap little d?ner kebab joint on the street level. It’s open until three a.m., and the Turkish guy working the counter didn’t kick me out last night for falling asleep in one of the booths even though all I bought from him was a single kebab and a bottle of Coke. Lucky for me, he’s working again tonight and actually smiles hello as I enter, the first smile of any kind I’ve seen in Berlin. A slab of d?ner meat the size and shape of a piano leg spins on a vertical skewer, and he expertly shaves off an extra thick pile of it for me and mounds it onto the pita. He throws on shredded onions and cucumber, then drenches the whole mess in spicy white yogurt sauce. It’s basically the same as the gyros I loved in New York, and to my mind, no food ever served to an emperor or pope is better.
I give him five euros, the inflated train-station price, and park myself in an out-of-the-way booth near the back. The food is warm and delicious and an effective stand-in for a bed and blanket and kiss good night. The grease runs down my chin and onto my neck, but I’m so hungry I don’t bother wiping it off until I’m finished. A group of drunk soccer fans rolls in wearing their blue-and-white jerseys, chanting and singing, but I’m so tired I fall asleep anyway, slumping low in the booth, my head on the table.
*
I ran from Paris—Jesus, how I ran. To the Metro, back to the dance studio, then away again, every man on the street a cop, every car or motorbike another killer. I grabbed what I could from Yael’s place. My backpack, my clothes, my new ID, some food for the journey. Left behind were the remains of my old self—my army jacket and old passport.
I vomited twice, first outside the Metro, then in the bathroom of a dirty little café near the Gare du Nord. It was there I washed the blood from the passports and wallet and mobile phone I’d taken. Hamid’s killers were German. Berliners, specifically—Gunther Fess and Lukas Kappel. Thus my destination. I used the cash from the wallet to get a ticket on the overnight Paris-Berlin express.
The killers were just a little less than handsome, if you judge from their passport pictures and not from their corpses. Athletic young guys in their twenties, they looked a little like the douchey junior stockbroker types who hang around in the fake Irish pubs on Third Avenue. The phone I took from Gunther, the driver of the motorbike, is a newer iPhone. There was no e-mail account set up on it, no social media, and all the texts had been deleted. A work phone, apparently, scrubbed clean of everything incriminating. Almost everything. Everything except the photos: The two killers at play. Their friends. Parties at clubs. Lots of women. Lots of bottles. Lots of coke on the tables.
*