Parkhotel Koblenz, Schillerstrasse 5, Munich, Germany
September 19, 2009
4:48 a.m.
The green glow of a battered digital clock radio illuminated the dark of the room like a sickly full moon. The beer of the dinner and the cheap whiskey of a solitary bar crawl back to his cheap hotel pushed down on Quinn’s forehead with a dull throb, a ripple of nausea turning his stomach when he raised his head from the spongy foam pillow to check the time.
4:48 a.m.
Needing some water to wash out the heavy funk of too much alcohol, Quinn got up, squeezing himself into the minuscule bathroom to fill a plastic beaker at the sink. The extremely cold water tasted brackish as it rinsed his rough throat and chilled the tops of his spine and lungs. Returning to the bedroom window, he pulled aside a curtain and looked down on the wet, deserted street below. It was empty, a temporary silence having finally fallen on the run-down, trashy Hauptbahnhof district.
Quinn had seen it all after he refused the collector’s offer of a lift back to his hotel at the end of their dinner and walked instead. He had wanted—needed, in fact—to be alone, to let his mind turn over all that Graf had said. Enjoying the buzz of the beer from the dinner, he stopped for more in a sequence of good-natured bars along the way. At some point, he couldn’t precisely recall when, he’d left beer behind and made the switch to cheap whiskey and then, at the last bar before the hotel, the Café Istanbul, he also left Graf’s “coziness” behind.
To the tinny blast of overly loud turbo-folk, he found himself within a maelstrom of other cultures, a dislocation of Turks, Eastern Europeans, Southern Italians, the darkest of African girls, all talking and drinking at the same time as if desperately trying to savor every hard-fought second of their lives. Through the windows, the neon signs of their world blinked back at him: “Casino,” “Internet,” “Sexy World,” “Handy Phone,” “Tabletop,” “Laptop,” “Non-Stop.” When finally he left its sweaty smog after one last drink too many, the fresh air hit him like a cold shower but still left him feeling dirty. His head spinning, Quinn had heard Graf’s dinner conversation all over again as he stumbled back to his hotel, the social and racial tinderbox the collector had described on the streets all around him.
Awake now, in the darkest hour before dawn, he could only lean his aching forehead against the cold glass of the window and think about Graf himself. The collector was odd and fanciful, no doubt, the ringmaster of his own inanimate freak show, but for all his doom and gloom, his slightly barbed comments, Quinn couldn’t dislike him. There was an almost confessional honesty, a repressed gentleness to the man that kept him hovering above the abyss that so clearly fascinated him. Quinn even found himself in agreement with much that Graf said about the world, about its history, about him even. His was, indeed, a simple life, pursuing the interest he loved as Graf had pointed out. Yet it hadn’t been so simple since that last summit. Death, coma, murder, cremation, legal harassment, recurrent nightmares—his mind cascaded through it all until stopped by a stark realization.
Graf is collecting me.
Quinn chided himself for being so melodramatic and tried to reassure himself that he was merely a source for a somewhat eccentric antique dealer. Quinn’s ice axe, bearing its tiny swastika to Mount Everest, was a significant item for such a man, or so he said—one that could lead to more interesting finds that the man had coveted for years.
That’s all—or was it?
He turned back into the room and saw the old axe on the desk sat alongside the Leica camera that Graf had urged him to take and look at.
Was he correct in his recall of the sum of money that Graf was offering to pay him if he could find a similar camera on the Second Step? It was crazy if he was. Impossible to refuse even if he wasn’t sure there was anything else up there.
Quinn reached for his phone to text the collector that he would come by his shop at 9:00 a.m. to continue their discussions. He’d switched his phone off during the dinner and, as the alcohol flowed afterward, forgotten it. Turning it back on, it chimed its irritating welcome and immediately began a manic, beeping vibration of incoming data that sent the black plastic clam dancing in his hand. Multiple missed calls and messages; some names he recognized, some new numbers he didn’t, but they all said the same thing. “Call as soon as possible.”
He immediately tried to ring them. With a growing sense of frustration and then panic, he got voice mail after voice mail, but no answer until a hesitant female voice finally said, “Hello?”
Quinn took a breath of relief at someone finally replying. “This is Neil Quinn speaking. I think you rang me earlier.”
“Yes, I did. I’m Nikki, a friend of Soraya. Doug Martin gave me your number. Look, we’ve not met, although actually you were … Look, shit, none of that matters. You should know she’s been attacked. I am actually in the Chamonix hospital now. She’s pretty badly beaten up. They are keeping her under sedation at the moment.”
The shock of the girl’s words twisted Quinn’s insides. “What? When did this happen? Who did it?”
“We don’t know much yet, but she’s in a really bad way. We think it happened on her way home from work at the bar, maybe around two in the morning, two-thirty. We’re not sure. She was found by a couple of guys at about three. The police were only briefly able to speak to her as she was drifting in and out of consciousness. It seems that it was some crazy French guy, and he was looking for you. But she was really messed up and couldn’t say any more than that. The doctors stopped the police from having any more contact with her.”
Quinn couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Fuck. Could she describe the guy that did it?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you. I think the Cham police are trying to get in touch with you. You should call them.”
“Okay, but how is she now?”
“A real mess. I’m staying here until the morning. I’ll call you when the doctor’s been around again.”
The call ended. Quinn had no doubt that it was Sarron, Henrietta Richards’ words at the cremation ringing out in the silence of the hotel room: “He’ll be back for you, Neil … sooner or later.”
If Sarron had attacked Soraya demanding news of Quinn, it was inevitable that she would have told him what she knew, and she knew he was there to see an antiques dealer. If he drove through the night, the Frenchman could be there later that day. However Quinn didn’t remember telling Soraya the name of the antiques dealer. Sarron was going to have to find him first and Munich was a big city, surely with many antiques dealers.
Still unnerved by the news about Soraya, he typed a text to Graf: “Something has come up. Meet at shop early. 8:00 a.m.?”
His phone almost immediately announced a response: “Jawohl, mein führer!” A winking, smiley emoticon followed.
“Shit, that guy really is a piece of work,” Quinn said to himself as he sat back on the bed, trying to work out what the hell he should do next.
The phone bleeped again.
“Bring the axe and the camera.”