The man sits leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Dark linen pants, black shirt, sleeves rolled up. He could be about your father’s age. You wish you had a better view of his eyes. Eyes reveal everything. His are black puddles. After you’ve taken the battery out of your phone, he pats the bench beside him and says, “I’ve heard about your offer. Take a seat.”
“I’d rather stand.”
You feel his gaze on you. He’s turning your Tic Tac box over and over in his right hand. Gradually it dawns on you that this wasn’t such a great idea. He’s going to wait until you’re sitting next to him. You sit down. He sets the Tic Tac box on his thigh and looks across the football field as if he could make something out in the darkness.
“You’re fifteen? Sixteen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Take the sunglasses off, it’s just us.”
You take the sunglasses off, and at last you can see better. Every wrinkle in his face, the color of his eyes. His mouth is mocking you with a smile as if he knows everything about you.
“You’re aware that your age is irrelevant. You could be ten years old and I wouldn’t care, because at the moment we share the same problem, and that’s all that matters.”
He looks at you again.
“Do you know how drugs get tested? Some people just need to taste them. They swear they can define the differences in quality and how much the drugs are cut by tasting them. You follow me? Of course it’s all nonsense. No one can establish quality like that. You know what this is?”
He taps the Tic Tac box with his index finger. You don’t react.
“I thought you didn’t. You probably think this is cocaine or speed. A forgivable mistake. The ordinary citizen doesn’t often get to see white heroin. At school I’m sure they’ve told you that heroin’s brown. That’s correct as well. Normal heroin is brown and reaches the streets with a purity of twenty percent, and that means it’s good gear. Ten percent and below is normal. The more it’s cut, the more additives are mixed in with it, usually bitter-tasting materials so as to maintain the supposed authenticity. Have you ever tried heroin?”
You shake your head.
“It’s really bitter shit. But let’s get back to the problem at hand. People who work seriously with drugs test their product in the laboratory. I have a chemist who’s responsible for nothing but that. Can you guess what he discovered an hour ago?”
“That my stuff is crap?”
“No, that your stuff is actually my stuff.”
You freeze, he smiles.
“You know what I’m trying to say? What we have here is eighty-eight percent pure heroin. Five kilos of it. We’re talking about a market value of two and a half million euros. And this is all in your possession. On a day like today? In a year like this one? You’ll have realized that there are no more misunderstandings.”
You don’t know how he did it, but his arm is around your shoulders now, he’s scarily close and speaking into your ear.
“That kind of thing doesn’t happen twice in a city like Berlin. Not in these amounts, not with this quality. The question is, how on earth does someone like you get hold of drugs that my little brother is storing?”
His question hangs in the air. You had anticipated everything. You were even sure for a long time that he was really a cop, and that you’d soon be spending three hundred hours doing social work. But this has taken you completely by surprise. Little brother? Storing? The equation is quite a simple one. Taja’s uncle is sitting next to me and his little brother is Oskar, who’s lying in a freezer right now, and by the way I’m really fucked. You quickly dismiss all those thoughts as if Taja’s uncle could see inside your head, and start calculating your chances. You’ve always been good at that. Your mind works best under stress, as if you need trouble to function right. What now? If you react right away, you might manage it. A forward jab, catch him in the face with your forehead, and while he’s spitting out his teeth, you run off and disappear down Neue Kantstrasse to join Ruth on the opposite bank and—
“Don’t even think about it,” he interrupts your thoughts. “I could break your neck so fast you wouldn’t even notice.”
You look at each other. There’s an affinity, and the affinity repels you. He’s got a deep tan, he’s clean-shaven. His mouth smiles amicably, no more mockery, as though he could be nice if he wanted. But it’s deceptive, it’s all deceptive when you look at those eyes. Metal. Those eyes don’t intend to be nice. On his left cheek there’s a small sickle-shaped scar, the skin’s lighter there. You automatically want to touch your own skin where Taja’s elbow caught you. The skin has turned purple there. What does this asshole see when he looks at me? you wonder, and find the answer in his eyes.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, because I don’t really exist for him.
His hand rests flat on your back, it gives off an unpleasant kind of heat. As if a fire were creeping up your spine.
“Let go of me,” you hiss at him.
The hand disappears. You get to your feet. He sits where he is. His voice is still calm, you wish he would show more emotion.
“It’s up to you now. Whatever you promise me in the next minute, I’ll take you at your word. And if you break your word, I will hunt you down. Have I made myself understood?”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be afraid, girl, you should be shitting yourself in fear.”
He gets up. He’s a head taller than you. You try to resist looking up at him. You look up. He wants to know what your plan was.
“You turn up without my merchandise, and then?”
“I’ve got it all in a bag. I’ll fetch it once I’ve got the money.”
“It’s exactly so.”
You and your plans. When you got out with Ruth at the station Kaiserdamm, you explained that you didn’t trust anyone, and you put the sports bag in a safe-deposit box. Your plan was to swap the key to the box for the money. You were of the opinion that that’s what professionals do.
At this moment a professional should look different. Not so surprised. Standing facing Taja’s uncle, you understand that it would be the end of the line for you here if you’d brought the drugs. It is a feeling as if someone is standing by your grave waiting for you to lie down in it.
He’d never have let me go.
“Good plan,” says Taja’s uncle. “In your place I wouldn’t have trusted my son either. You can go now. You and I are done.”
He looks at his watch.
“I give you till tomorrow morning. You bring my goods back to where you stole them. I don’t want to know how you managed to rob my brother. I’ll drive out to see him tomorrow morning, and when I ask him where the heroin is, he’ll open his metal case and the heroin will be in there and I’ll slap him happily on the shoulder and have breakfast with him. After breakfast I’ll have forgotten that you and your friend over there ever existed. Have you got all that?”
You grip the safe-deposit box key in your right hand and nod, you’ve got it, no problem, that’s exactly what you’ll do. You’re almost about to thank him, when your brain processes what he’s just said. After breakfast I’ll have forgotten that you and your friend over there ever existed. You look across to the shore of the Lietzensee. How does he know that Ruth’s over there?
“… involved?”
“What?”
He repeats his question patiently, he’s not in any hurry.
“Is Taja involved?”
You hesitate for a moment too long, that’s answer enough for him.
“I’ve never liked that kid,” he admits, and turns away from you. He has said what he wanted to say, you can go. You leave the football field. As you’re going up the steps to the street, you cast one last glance through the fence—Taja’s uncle has his phone to his ear, and is standing with his back to you, legs spread like a footballer defending his goal. He has already forgotten about me, you think and then you hear him say, “Hurt her.”
He snaps his cell phone shut, turns around and looks at you.
“Run,” he says.
And you run as you have never run before.