65The ice-cream parlour’s staff rooms were basically junk closets. Wonky plastic chairs huddled around a few rusty bistro tables, and boxes of ice-cream cups, plastic spoons and uniforms were piled high along the walls. Dragan was already there, nervously smoking. Though his muscular six-foot-four radiated an arrogant brutality, amid this shabby ambience he seemed a little out of place in his designer suit. Like a tiger hiding out in the meerkat enclosure.

‘At last,’ was his greeting.

‘Sorry, there was heavy traffic. I was just on my way to the lake with Emily.’ Professional as I was, I’d managed to get my pulse back to nearly normal. This was just an unnecessary meeting, nothing more.

‘Who’s Emily?’

My pulse quickened. ‘My daughter!’ A certain indignation started brewing inside me. Dragan obviously didn’t have a clue that he was the one blocking me from the time island I had dedicated to my daughter.

‘Ah, right. You know I love children, but you shouldn’t let your family get in the way of your work.’

There was no point in talking to someone like Dragan about such a thing as ‘work–life balance’. But then I wasn’t his shrink, just his lawyer. And I just wanted to get back to my daughter.66

‘So let’s talk about work: what happened?’

‘They’re looking for me.’

‘Why?’

‘Some drug courier got a few scratches in a motorway lay-by.’

I knew from my first job with Dragan that his precis were always creatively optimistic and usually didn’t even reveal the tip of the iceberg he’d rammed into full steam ahead. Obviously, scratches would be the least of it.

‘And why are the police looking for you?’

‘Because I kind of gave that moron … a few knocks.’

‘We’re sitting here because of a few knocks?’

‘Well, no … because the bloke is dead.’

When a bank cashier is faced with a robber, most are well trained enough to adopt an admirably professional demeanour. Simply treat the gangster like a highly strung customer and run through the usual routine until they run off with the money. Only then can the cashier let their jelly start to wobble. I still harboured a vague hope that after a professional lawyer’s chat Dragan would simply leave, at which point I could mindfully breathe away the stress. So I switched to my professional mode, took a deep breath as I sat down, and felt my pulse going back down to about a hundred.

‘What happened exactly?’

‘For a few months now, product has been offered in our sales area at half our going rate.’

OK, at first glance, this looked like an economics problem. Nothing special for a lawyer dealing with white-collar 67crime. Financially, the trade in classic drugs like heroin or cocaine is like a relay race. At each stage, the baton is resold at a profit, and most of the profit is made just before the finish line. Cutting the drugs and portioning it for individual users creates margins that exceed the imaginable. Even at half price, you still stand to earn a lot of money. If a competitor snatches up your territory, however, you lose your chance at any profit.

I looked at Dragan questioningly. ‘And you know this how?’

‘From Toni.’

Toni was the sales manager for Dragan’s narcotics division. A hard-hitting wholesale dealer who was in no way Dragan’s inferior when it came to brutality. As with many successful felons, the intellectual acquisition of complex constellations of facts wasn’t one of his core competences. But he did have an intuitive sense of how to gain an advantage or avert a disadvantage. This intuition enabled him to make the largest turnover in Dragan’s operation, and he considered himself number two in the organisation. Not everyone saw it that way, least of all Dragan.

‘OK, so why doesn’t Toni fix it?’ I asked.

If Toni had done his job as described in the organisational chart I created, I wouldn’t have to be sitting in this junk room right now.

‘Toni thinks Boris’s boys are behind it,’ Dragan replied.

Boris was Dragan’s closest competitor. The two had started out as pimps together. Once best friends, they’d at some point fallen out. After some bloody back-and-forths, 68both had staked out their territories, and for some years a more or less reliable peace had been established – which was also due to the fact that I’d secretly given Boris a few tips on legalising his earnings as well.

‘OK, but what does all this have to do with the dead guy in the lay-by?’ I asked.

‘Sasha and I got a tip that someone would be showing up there to deliver drugs to Igor, who would then distribute them on our turf.’

Igor was Boris’s right hand in all his drug dealings, and Sasha was Dragan’s driver and personal assistant. A Bulgarian, Sasha had studied environmental engineering back home and come to Germany the day after graduating. Once here, he quickly learned that his diploma wouldn’t be recognised, so he didn’t become an engineer, but initially applied to work at one of Dragan’s bars.

‘I see. And the tip came from whom?’

‘Murat.’

Murat was Toni’s deputy. Dragan stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray.

So if the whole thing had to be summarised for a prosecutor, it’d sound like this: Dragan, head of a criminal ring, was on his way to Slovakia with his assistant, Sasha. On the way, Dragan got a call, not from the head of his narcotics department, Toni, but from that man’s assistant, Murat. Murat told Dragan that Boris, Dragan’s nemesis and head of a rival criminal ring, had sent his right hand, Igor, to a motorway lay-by. There, on Dragan’s territory, Igor was to conduct a narcotics transaction that was illegal, not just 69under the Misuse of Drugs Act, but also according to the two syndicates’ own code, because it took place in another syndicate’s territory.

‘And that was reason enough for you to bump off the guy with the drugs?’

Dragan pulled his next cigarette out of the packet – an impressive sight, because the man’s giant hands were more like mitts. But as he pulled out the comparatively delicate cigarette, he stuck out his little finger as if he were drinking an espresso. On his right ring finger was a showy signet ring that had marked his flesh over the years.

Unfortunately, this casual act didn’t quite match what he casually remarked next:

‘I didn’t beat the guy with the drugs to death, I beat Igor to death.’

‘Well, that might’ve been a little silly.’

I saw my time island engulfed by ever-higher waves. When the head of one syndicate personally kills the right hand of the head of a competing syndicate, the general mood tends to be negatively affected.

Clearly, immediate action was required.

‘Sasha and I just wanted to calmly go over our territorial boundaries, but things somehow got out of hand.’

‘Going over territorial boundaries’ is based on an old German tradition. In the past, after landowners set the boundaries of a leased patch of land, they’d take the tenant’s children out to the boundary marker of the tenancy in question. There, they slapped the children once on their left cheek and once on the right. This ensured the children 70would never forget the spot and remember exactly where the boundary ran for the rest of their lives.

‘Dragan! Why do you still insist on doing these things personally? Why didn’t you leave it to Sasha or Toni? I thought you were eager to get to Bratislava?’

‘I wanted to go to Bratislava with Sasha. On the way, Sasha got the tip-off. The lay-by was on our way, so I wanted to treat myself to a little bit of fun with the courier. Plus, when it comes to Boris, everything is personal.’

A little bit of fun? And nobody considered what I’d say? My pulse shot up to a hundred and seventy. The fact that my client had interrupted his own weekend trip to ‘treat himself’ to a murder didn’t give him the right to demand I interrupt mine.

There simply wasn’t enough space in the small windowless room to breathe away my anger, and seeking out the closest toilet would have taken me past Ms Bregenz. But I couldn’t possibly just leave now. Dragan suffering a spontaneous heart attack was the only thing that could’ve helped me at that moment. I looked at Dragan, but he was far from collapsing. On the contrary, the story seemed to have put him in a chipper mood.

Pretending to think, I closed my eyes for a moment to in- and exhale three times, my pulse going back to one hundred and fifty before I opened my eyes again. ‘Are there any witnesses?’

‘Well, really there shouldn’t have been any. The lay-by is usually deserted that time of night. But then this fucking coach drove up.’71

‘What kind of coach?’

‘One of those intercity ones.’

‘Full of myopic pensioners?’

‘More like precocious schoolchildren.’

‘How many children?’

‘No idea. How many fucking twelve-year-olds fit on a coach like that, maybe fifty?’

‘“Fucking twelve-year-olds”? I thought you loved children?’

‘Children bring sunshine to the world, but not in a lay-by at four in the morning.’

‘How many of the children saw the brawl?’

‘All of them, I think?’

‘How many of them held up mobile phones to film the proceedings?’

‘Pfft … Kids being kids – probably all of them as well.’

‘So there are now fifty different video recordings showing you beating someone to death in front of fifty schoolchildren?’

‘Not at all. Forty-nine at most.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I jumped in front of the bus, kicked the door in and went inside for a bit. I smashed the first boy’s phone out of his hands, stamped on it and told the others to do the same with their phones.’

‘And how many twelve-year-olds filmed that part?’

‘The other forty-nine. But the sound is guaranteed to be grotty, because all of a sudden they started screaming hysterically.’72

Had this madman beaten those children up too?

‘And then?’

‘Then the police showed up, and we were off.’

‘Has the video already been posted online?’

‘Yes.’

‘On telly?’

‘There too.’

‘Are you recognisable?’

‘Well, it’s very shaky. If it’d come from a speed camera, you could certainly dispute it.’

Dragan tapped on his phone and handed over a YouTube video that obviously came from an N24 news report. It was a sensationally high-definition shot of Dragan jumping out of a van with an iron bar and using it to beat a man who was lying on the ground. The brightness of the recording was due not only to the technical specifications of the twelve-year-olds’ phones, but also to the fact that the man on the ground was in flames – just like the van, which the man had probably just leapt out of to save himself. Then Dragan had showed up with his iron bar, and soon the man on the ground was no longer moving, just burning.

I paused the video.

I felt sick to my stomach. And I couldn’t breathe away the sight of a burning man beaten to death by the man sitting opposite me, as I could hardly stand up now – feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, chest out – and ‘feel my breath’.

This only made me angrier. Dragan couldn’t just torpedo twelve weeks of mindfulness training in one morning; 73I needed to dig a little deeper into my mindfulness toolbox to find the appropriate strategy to counter my abhorrence, my anger, my fear, disorientation and disgust. I breathed where I sat, going through my memories from the past twelve weeks. Breitner had revealed to me that it wasn’t anything that happened that caused us to worry, but our own perspective on what happened. Rephrasing Epictetus, Breitner stated that:

What causes us to worry is not whatever may have happened. It is only after we classify what happened that it frightens us. No single event is good or bad in itself.

I tried to watch the video from this point of view. So there was a man who was on fire. OK. And there was another man who beat the burning man to death. OK. The fact that the beating man must be a psychopath was just my assessment of the situation. Not OK. Had the burning man tried to kidnap my daughter, I’d be much more understanding of the guy who lit him up and then beat him to death. It wasn’t the burning and beating to death that was so disgusting; that was just my assessment – or at least that’s what the theory suggested.

In fact, the man who’d been beaten to death hadn’t attempted to kidnap my daughter. He didn’t even know my daughter. Unlike Dragan. He knew about Emily, but couldn’t remember her name. He knew my situation at home, but he just didn’t care. He knew about my plans for the weekend, but fucked them up anyway. In the video, 74he’d been faced with a living person, but just beaten him to death …

At that moment, my phone rang, so I got a brief respite. It was coming from the firm’s conference room. Another shock: had something happened to Emily?

‘Hello, what is it?’

It was Clara. ‘Mr Diemel? Emily just coloured on a leather chair in the conference room.’

‘Is she OK?’

‘Well, she’s having fun, but the chair …’

‘Then why are you calling me?’

‘Because I don’t know what to do now. If Ms Bregenz sees …’

To hell with Ms Bregenz.

‘How many office chairs are there in the conference room?’

‘Two, four, six … twelve … fifteen.’

‘Then please tell Emily she’s doing a great job, and don’t call me again until she’s finished all fifteen.’

I ended the call.

Dragan was staring at me.

‘Have you gone off your trolley?’ he snarled. ‘I’m in big trouble and you’re talking about office chairs?’

‘Look, Emily’s up there, and when it comes to her, I always pick up the phone.’

‘I don’t give a fuck who’s up there, mate, this is where the kettle boils. And if that doesn’t suit anyone up there, I’ll personally go up there to clarify things.’

That would be all I needed. I tried to get Dragan back on topic.75

I pointed to the freeze-frame of the man on fire.

‘Is that Igor?’

Dragan was briefly irritated. He took a closer look – as if the lay-by had been littered with burning people.

‘Yes, that’s Igor, the guy on the ground.’

‘Why is he on fire?’

‘Well, we just lit a little spark under his bum.’

In Dragan’s world, that wasn’t a metaphor. It meant someone’s arse got splashed with lighter fuel and usually only noticed it when it was hit with a lit Zippo. As a rule, however, the fire was usually snuffed out as soon as the first blisters started to appear on their bum cheeks.

‘Well, as I said, the situation got a little out of hand. That bender couldn’t wait in the van until we’d put his arse out. He just had to rush out.’

‘And the guy with the drugs?’

‘That’s another thing: it turns out he didn’t even have any drugs. He only wanted to peddle Igor a crate of hand grenades. But by then, Igor’s arse was already on fire.’

‘Well, if that’s all. Where’d the bloke go?’

‘Sasha knocked him out back in the van. He won’t be any trouble.’

He won’t be any trouble, so he was dead too. I shook my head, grasping for one clear thought: ‘Could it be that the tip-off about the drugs was someone taking the piss and subsequently putting you in deep shit, and me right along with you? Is one unverified call from some assistant of Toni’s reason enough for you to run entirely amok?’

I’d never spoken to Dragan like this before. But it did 76me good. Dragan didn’t seem to have noticed my change in tone. He was preoccupied by other issues.

‘The fuck was I supposed to know a coach would be stopping there? And with schoolchildren in it!’ he ranted. ‘Which driver in their right mind would stop a coach full of schoolkids at an unlit lay-by in the middle of the night? Tell me that! You don’t do that kind of thing to children. I love kids!’

I turned back to the phone and clicked resume. What Dragan meant by loving kids became clear in the next shot, which showed from inside the coach how Dragan first smashed the windscreen, kicked in the door, then knocked a phone out of the hand of a boy who couldn’t be older than ten, threateningly tilting the kid’s small, trembling chin with his right mitt as he shouted: ‘You haven’t seen shite, get that? Or I’ll beat you all to death.’

The footage of the forty-nine children’s phones obviously provided enough newscast nuggets to splice together a whole story. It cut to a different recording and ended with a close-up of Dragan’s Porsche Cayenne, which was apparently lacking number plates. You could see Dragan jumping into the back seat and then speeding out of the lay-by. In the background, the burning van leapt up as the crate of hand grenades exploded, probably tearing the alleged drugs courier unconscious inside into a thousand pieces. A coherently edited piece that would’ve played to a thrilled audience on the big screen.

So we were not just dealing with some bloke who’d gotten ‘a few scratches’, there was also a human torch, a 77witness torn apart by hand grenades, one clear instance of manslaughter and fifty traumatised schoolchildren. For Dragan perhaps incidentals, but for me as a criminal defence lawyer rather essential.

‘But where’s Sasha?’

‘Downstairs in the ice-cream van, he drove me here.’

‘No, I mean: where’s Sasha in these videos? Is he also recognisable?’

‘Nope, he was in the van with me at first, and when the coach showed up, he fetched the Cayenne right away. With a pullover over his face, as a mask like.’

‘And the Cayenne’s number plates?’

‘Sasha tore them off and tossed them in the car.’ Sasha did good.

‘Where’s the Cayenne now?’

‘Airport, long-stay parking. Sasha got the ice-cream van and then brought me here.’

‘Your phones?’

‘In pieces on the motorway. I’m not stupid.’ I didn’t comment on that.

I looked at Dragan. ‘And what am I supposed to do?’

‘You’re the lawyer, so do something, settle this shit.’

I felt anger catch hold of me again. ‘Sure,’ I blustered, ‘but I’m a lawyer, not a plumber. And when we’re treading in turds this massive, I, too, reach my limits.’

‘You do your lawyer thing right now, or I’ll make you eat shite yourself.’

My carotid artery started throbbing like a maniac. We were silent for a moment. Dragan was right, there was no 78point fighting it. In any case, he was holding the longer end of the stick.

‘OK,’ I said, as calmly as I could. ‘Option one: you turn yourself in. If you do that, however, I won’t be able to get you out so easily. Not with the evidence against you. Even if I give all the children on the bus a puppy and then threaten to kill it, the footage will still be online.’

‘Have you gone mental? You want me to turn myself in?’

‘Option two: you don’t turn yourself in. If you do that, cops aren’t your biggest problem. If Boris finds you, you might even wish you were in prison. It won’t sit well with him that you set one of his men alight and then beat him to death.’

Dragan slapped both hands on the table.

‘Hold up, lawyer man, our roles have been clear for years: I have a problem, you have the solution! So, what do we do?’

He stared at me unblinking, waiting for an answer.

Considering his state of mind, I didn’t want to point out the real problem: that Dragan had obviously been lured into a trap. In my distress, I tried some black humour: ‘Lie low until all this commotion has died down – in like thirty or forty years …’

Dragan’s eyes narrowed to slits. I suddenly felt hot and cold at the same time, sure he was going to grab me by the throat. But then, very slowly, his mouth relaxed into a wide grin. Dragan reached over the table and patted me on the shoulders.

‘That’s what we’ll do.’79

The moron thought keeping a low profile for the next few decades was actually a solution.

‘Dragan, you won’t even make it out of this building. Coppers in civvies are already waiting for you outside. They’ll tear your ice-cream van apart.’

‘Then we’ll just take your car.’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘I’ll hide in the boot, and you’ll drive me out of town. Then we’ll figure out what’s next.’

I looked at him, stunned. My heartbeat spiked. He couldn’t possibly be serious. The fucker didn’t just want to dock at my time island for a quick chat; he wanted to take over the whole place. I’d either have to leave Emily at the office or bring her in the car. Both would be difficult to keep from Katharina. Doing either would shatter the promise to save our relationship I’d so solemnly made to Katharina less than an hour earlier. When I’m taking care of Emily, I’m taking care of Emily, no one else. That was the deal. And now that would all be destroyed? By this arsehole, of all fucking people?

‘Dragan, please, I’ve got my little girl here with me! I can’t go driving halfway across Europe with you in the boot.’

‘You don’t need to drive me across Europe, just out of town. Emma will love sitting in front.’

Emma? That was just too much. I yelled at him, ‘Emily! The kid whose weekend you’re ruining is called Emily!’

Luckily, these staff rooms were soundproofed fairly well.

Dragan yelled back, ‘Fuck Emilia! This is about my life!’

Then he became very still and stated: ‘I’m going down to the car park, where Sasha will lock me in your boot. You’ll 80come down with Emilia, and then you’ll drive me out of town. When the cops see you with your little brat, they’ll never suspect you’ve got someone hidden in the boot.’

Fuck Emilia? Little brat? Did the guy who was making me break the serious promise I had made my wife to save my family just call my precious angel a brat?

‘Her name is Emily, you wanker …’

I froze. What had I done? Directly insulted the most brutal gangster in town? That wasn’t very mindful of me, a better word would be … suicidal.

Dragan stood up, grabbed me by the collar with both hands and got right in my face. I could smell the nicotine on his breath.

‘Nobody. Calls. Me. A. Wanker.’ He was breathing heavily. ‘If I didn’t need you for my escape, you’d be dead. If you don’t do exactly as I ask, you’ll no longer have a child, nor be able to make a new one. Is that clear?’

I nodded. ‘Crystal,’ I croaked out. I didn’t recognise my own voice.

Dragan shoved me back into my chair and sat back down.

‘Well then, if you get me to safety, I’m prepared to forget this little incident. But if you screw this up, mister lawyer man, if the escape doesn’t work, if for some reason I don’t end up safe but with the coppers, you’re a dead man. Is that clear?’

I nodded again. My thoughts were racing, but I couldn’t think of any way out of this. Alive, that is. I had to bend to Dragan’s will, get him out of here. Maybe I could even 81make sure Emily never had to know about Dragan. Maybe I could still drive Emily to the lake house after. If I was lucky, if I was really fucking lucky … Katharina wouldn’t even have to find out what happened.

‘That’d be obstruction of justice,’ I sheepishly wheezed. This put a smile on Dragan’s face.

‘There he is again, my smart-arse!’

‘And where should I take you?’

‘Take me to the lake house! That’ll give me a bit of a breather.’

I slumped in my chair. This was an utter low point for me as a husband, a father, a lawyer. I was done.

But at that very moment, when even the last spark of hope was about to go out, something fantastic happened. Right then, my entire twelve-week mindfulness training really paid off. Like a celestial glow beaming through the black clouds brewing over my soul, I felt a complete calmness within me. In this sudden moment of clarity, I saw myself standing outside Breitner’s door again, too late and wondering whether I should ring a second time. My inner voice said: When I’m waiting outside a door, I’m waiting outside a door.

When I’m ‘going for ice cream’ with a hardened criminal, I’m ‘going for ice cream’ with a hardened criminal.

When I’m driving a getaway car, I’m driving a getaway car.

When I’m at the lake, I’m at the lake.

It was so clear. It was so simple.

Thinking through every single scenario, all the possible consequences for my daughter, my marriage, my freedom, 82none of it would be any help. I might be heading straight for a fall, but that also meant I hadn’t yet actually fallen.

I surveyed the situation: one floor above me, at that very moment, was my daughter, my squeakily cheerful daughter, and I would be spending the weekend with her one way or another. I was still alive, I had a wife who didn’t know what I was doing, and I wasn’t in prison.

Right then, all was true and plumb. There was simply no way to know what might happen at a later date. So there was absolutely no point in being afraid of this later date before it even arrived.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Here are the keys. I’ll see you in the car park.’

Dragan took the car keys with a look that probably meant ‘why not right away?’ Then he got up and took the lift down. I waited for it to come back up and headed to the fourth floor.

In my office, I kept several prepaid phones in the bottom drawer of my desk. Although the legal hurdles for a warrant to tap a lawyer’s phone were enormous, the technical hurdles were not.

If Dragan really wanted to go into hiding, we needed a secure means of communication.

If I was planning an escape, I was planning an escape.

I hated my job, but I knew how to do it.