Craig Russell - The Carnival Master

‘Nothing to eat?’

‘Nothing to eat.’ Maria paid for the beer as soon as it arrived. She was aware of the glances being cast across at her by the men at the bar, as well as the hostile, bottle-blonde glares of some of the women. She decided to watch the apartment from here for only a few minutes, and then from the car. Two patrolling policemen passed the window. Unlike the Polizei Hamburg, who had switched to new blue uniforms, the North-Rhine-Westphalia police still wore the nineteen-seventies-designed green and mustard. It made Maria feel strange watching the police officers go by; they seemed like alien creatures. Something, she knew, had become broken inside her and could not be repaired. Hamburg and her job as a detective seemed so very far away from her now.

‘Y’awright, darlin’?’

Maria knew without turning that it would be one of the drunks from the bar. She didn’t reply.

‘Asked if you was awright, darlin’?’ the man repeated, then added something in a thick dialect that she took to be Kolsch.

Maria left her beer untouched and stood up to leave. The man in her way wasn’t particularly tall but he was heavy, with a vast belly stretching his checked shirt. He stood too close to her. She felt her panic rise.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, avoiding eye contact with the drunk.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said in an offended manner. ‘I just asked if you was all right. My friend and I would like to buy you a drink.’

‘I’ve got a drink. And anyway, I’m leaving. Get out of my way, please.’

The heavy man stepped to one side with a shrug, but without allowing her much room to pass. Maria squeezed past him, fighting the revulsion that rose within her at the idea of physical contact. She simply wanted out of the bar: the scene was attracting a fair bit of attention and the barman was clearly considering intervening on her behalf. This was all wrong: surveillance meant keeping the target visible and yourself invisible. As she passed the drunk, she smelled the thick odour of stale beer on his breath. He winked at his partner at the bar. It was then that she felt his hand on her backside.

‘Not much there…’ he said loudly and laughed. ‘But you’ll do!’

The explosion of revulsion, hate and panic within Maria was immediate.

‘Don’t touch me!’ She screamed into the drunk’s face so loudly and so fiercely that his smile gave way to shock. The laughter in the bar died. ‘You FUCK!’ she screamed again. Her arm arced so fast that no one saw it coming. There was an explosion of glass, beer and blood on the side of the fat man’s face. He staggered sideways and Maria, now clear of the table, slammed her heavy boot into his groin. She looked at him and laughed as he doubled over. A shrill, not entirely sane laugh. Then she looked at everyone else in the bar. No one met her eye. Probably for the first time in years, the brassy bar blondes were trying not to be seen. Maria noticed the barman reaching for the phone. He was going to call the police and she’d seen a foot patrol just two minutes ago in the street. It was all fucked up. Her anger surged again and she kicked the fat man in the face as he lay on the floor. She grabbed her coat and headed for the door.

‘I won’t be back,’ she said to the barman as she did so. She eased her pullover up from the top of her trousers just enough for the barman to get a glimpse of the automatic tucked into her waistband. ‘But if you call the police I will.’

He put the phone down.

Maria turned to the door and found a couple standing in her way. The girl was a younger version of the other women in the bar, dressed gaudily and with a gold stud in her nostril. He was tall and massive, wearing the same long leather coat he had worn all day while she’d been following him. Viktor looked at the groaning fat man lying in a pool of blood and beer on the floor, at the barman with his hand still on the phone, and then at Maria. He beamed an amused grin and stood politely to one side.

Maria stormed out of the bar. As soon as the cold night air hit her she started to cry in silent sobs, and headed down the street in the opposite direction from where she’d parked. She’d have to come back for the car later, in case Viktor or the barman noted her licence number.

She walked for a number of blocks before taking a taxi. Once she was back at her hotel she changed swiftly into a completely different outfit and then took a second taxi back to where she had left the car. Maria didn’t look in the direction of the bar or Viktor’s apartment until she was sitting in the dark of the Saxo.

Fuck, she thought. It’s all completely fucked up. She could hardly have done more to bring herself to Viktor’s attention. She had done so well in tracking him to his apartment. She had addresses or partial addresses for the pick-ups. But she hadn’t been able to see the crucial next stage in the process: when it was Viktor’s turn to hand over the cash. He wouldn’t hang on to that amount of cash for long. Someone would come to him, or he would go to someone to hand it over. Regularly. But now Maria’s face was known to him. In Hamburg, with an official surveillance, it wouldn’t be an issue: there would be a constant circulation of cars and faces. Being followed by a team of five is five times more difficult to detect. She wished she could have called Anna Wolff, who worked with Maria in the Murder Commission in Hamburg. But there was no way of getting Anna, Fabel or anyone else involved. This was Maria’s solo crusade and she had messed the whole thing up. She would have to find a way herself.

Maybe Viktor and his tart were still in the bar; she could sneak up to his apartment, break in and see if she could find something, some connection between Viktor and the next step up in Vitrenko’s organisation. Maria bit her lip and gripped the steering wheel tightly. She was thinking like an amateur. She was worthless. She was a worthless bag of shit who had failed as a police officer and would now never achieve anything more in her life.

She started the car and drove without any sense of destination. She crossed the Zoobrucke bridge to the other side of the Rhine. After about half an hour she found a service station with an all-night American burger bar attached. She ordered a massive portion of burger and fries and shovelled the food into her mouth, swallowing huge chunks without chewing properly and washing it down with cola. When it was all gone, she went up and ordered the same again, defiantly staring down the waitress.

When she had finished the second portion, Maria went into the burger bar’s washroom, knelt down at the toilet bowl and pushed her finger into her throat.

Senior Criminal Commissar Benni Scholz was not someone who frowned often, but his broad brow creased beneath the mass of dark hair as he watched the television screen. This was probably the most important, most publicly visible task he had undertaken since he had become a police officer fifteen years ago. Every single officer in the Cologne police department would judge him on how well he handled it. Stress like this was something to which he was totally unaccustomed. So much pressure.

Scholz’s office was in darkness, other than for a single small desk lamp and the flickering light from the TV. A tall, lean uniformed Commissar sat next to him, his attention also fixed with a frown on the images on the screen.

‘Who was behind this, Rudi?’ Scholz asked the uniformed officer without taking his eyes off the television.

‘Hasek.’

‘Hasek!’ Scholz turned to Rudi Schaeffer with an expression of disbelief. ‘Hasek organised this? That wanker in the Ops Room?’

Scholz turned again to watch the screen. An elaborately decorated carnival float, capped by a black Model-T Ford with the word ‘POLIZEI’ painted clumsily in white on the side and flanked by twenty or thirty men and women dressed as Keystone Cops, slowly progressed along a crowd-lined street. The ‘Keystone Cops’ continually bumped into each other, tripped over, spilled buckets of fake tinsel water over onlookers and hit each other over the heads with oversized rubber batons while others threw handfuls of candy into the crowd, all in carefully choreographed mayhem.