When I’m finished, I dress and tell Lyuba I’m going out. If she hears me, she doesn’t acknowledge it.
Outside, the rain is gone, and there’s even a weak little sun in the sky. Somehow, the neighborhood in daytime is less ominous than the neighborhood in nighttime, and the concrete apartment blocks have an orderly symmetry about them even in their decaying state. An old woman in a striped smock hoses the sidewalk in front of a pharmacy and glowers at me as I pass, as if irritated by having to share her world with the young. I find a café tucked into a corner and spend a euro on coffee and a day-old sausage roll. The roll is tepid and greasy and terrible, but it’s cheap calories and that’s all that matters.
For a long while, I nurse the coffee and think, staring down at the Formica tabletop as if the facts and inferences and suppositions were spread out across it. But there’s no librarian to ask for help, no textbook telling me how to do this. So how do I even start?
Start with the reason you’re in Berlin, a voice tells me, start with the two men who killed Hamid. It seems logical you don’t send a novice to Paris for a job like that. You use someone who has done this before.
I open the iPhone and thumb through the pictures once more. There they are: Gunther punching Lukas in the groin. Lukas bent over a line of coke as Gunther downs a stein of beer. Lukas punching Gunther in the groin. The world of men having fun: coke and beer and ball punching. They are not totally alike, though. Gunther is leaner than Lukas, and fairer. And their wardrobes are different, too. Lukas preferred, at least on this night, a form-fitted undershirt, while Gunther preferred a baggy striped oxford rolled up at the sleeves, thug-prep.
Then I see it, the thing they have in common. The tattoo. On the inside forearm of each. It’s a crude outline of the European continent, the Spanish snout nuzzling an unseen Mediterranean, balancing on Italy’s stiletto-heeled leg and the Balkan-Greek haunch. And around Europe, a coiled, equally-crude cobra, it’s head about where Norway and Sweden and Finland should be.
Two teenage girls enter the café noisily, distracting me from my thoughts. One is a prissy-looking redhead with good shoes—Germany’s answer to Astrid Foogle. The other is a blond with short hair who wears pink sneakers. They order coffee and chocolate croissants, then take a table in the middle of the room. The redhead discloses some heretofore-secret news that causes the blond to gasp, “Doch!”
Astrid Foogle. Wonder if she’s found a new enemy yet? And Mr. Lawrence. Ask me about the benign indifference of the world now, fucker. I have a better answer.
I rise to leave just as the woman working the counter clears out the display case, removing a tray of cakes and rolls to make room for fresh inventory.
“How much?” I ask, nodding to the old ones.
“I was going to throw them out,” she says.
“I’ll give you three euros for them all.”
She puts her hands on her hips and sucks at something in her teeth. “Five,” she says.
*
I clear away an ashtray and a spread of magazines and a skyline of liquor bottles from the kitchen table in the apartment and set the bakery box down in the center. Lyuba approaches like a suspicious cat and carefully picks out a pastry, eyeing me the whole time. I ask if Marina is back, and she gives me a silent nod. I lift a fragile, crumbling fruit tart with what looks like raspberry filling from the box and wrap it in a napkin.
Marina is on her bed, legs crossed beneath her, a stack of notecards on her lap. “Don’t bother me. I’m studying.”
I set the tart on the bed before her like an offering. “What are you studying?”
“Cocktail recipes.” She picks up the pastry and scrunches her nose. “What’s this?”
“I thought you might be hungry,” I say.
“You brought some for Lyuba?”
“Of course.”
“You shouldn’t do that. Now she’ll expect it every day, and when you don’t, she’ll hate you for it.” She peels back the napkin and starts eating.
“She hates me already.”
“Lyuba’s from Moscow. They breed them to be bitches there.”
I notice a homemade bandage of cotton and masking tape over Marina’s right earlobe. Blood has soaked through and stained the cotton brown.
“What happened to your ear?” I say.
“Leo,” she says, and wipes her mouth on her sleeve.
“Leo?”
“Leo is our sutenyer. He tore out my earring.”
I struggle with the word. “Sutenyer?”
She squints at me. “Marina fucks for money, Lyuba does cams, the sutenyer takes a cut. What kind of Russian are you not to know this?”
Pimp, she means. I smile defensively. “They call it something else in Armavir.”
“Anyway, mostly Leo’s a teddy bear. Handles the bad clients.”
“If he’s such a teddy bear, why do you let him do that?”
“It’s not about ‘let,’ novichka. If not him, someone worse.” She shrugs in resignation. “The world belongs to men. It is theirs. We are theirs. Trees, rocks, sky—theirs.”
“So what you told me, about how all Marina needs is Marina. That was just an act?”
“A wish. For someday.” She sets the stack of notecards on the bed.
I climb onto the bed next to her and pull out the iPhone, scrolling through the photos until I come to one where the tattooed arms of both Gunther and Lukas are visible. “I need a favor, Marina. I want you to look at something.”
She takes the phone and studies the picture. “VIP room at Rau Klub. You can tell from the orange couch they’re on.”
“The tattoo both of them have. What does it mean?”
She shrugs casually. “Criminals. Mafia.”
“You’re sure it was taken at Rau Klub?”
“Of course. I work it sometimes. Marina’s dream, Marina’s absolute dream, is to be a bartender there. A thousand euros on a good night.”
“Can you work it tonight?” I ask. “I want a look.”
“Take you, you mean. Who doesn’t even know what a pimp is.” She studies me carefully with squinted eyes. “You run from mafia like these guys, country mouse. Not toward them.”
“Just for a look. Please.”
A shake of her head, a sigh, then a long pause. “You can look, but anything more and Marina is gone, understand?”
Fourteen
You hear Rau Klub before you see it, the thump of house music drumming the air like distant cannon fire. To get there you get off the U-Bahn at the last stop in a nasty-looking wasteland and walk maybe a kilometer down a road lined with closed-up factories.
It’s a dark path but well traveled, filled with club kids all heading the same direction like we’re all on some sort of pilgrimage. It’s mostly German being spoken, of course, and a little Russian and Turkish, but no English. Either the tourists haven’t heard of Rau Klub or it’s too rough for them to dare. Once in a while, a Benz or BMW or rented limo crawls past, the driver tapping the horn for the road to clear, the kids squinting at the windows to see who’s inside.