Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

“They’ll smell it,” I say and wipe the sweat from my forehead.

“Smell what?”

“Well, that someone was playing with fire. Know right away what went down.”

“So what,” he yells from the office, “does that give them any evidence? Nope! So shut up and keep at it!”

Because the shredder is the hardest working employee this morning, I’ve soon destroyed all the paperwork. While I’m at it, my uncle’s busy using all the toilets in the building to dump bags of drugs and flush them down.

The whole time he’s babbling away: “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Break my neck. Break my bones.”

Once in a while, I see him pause, pick out certain pills from the bag, and throw them down the hatch. I help him flush. A rainbow of pills swirls down the drain. Even after he’s stopped talking to himself, I think about his words. All these years, I’ve never asked what actually goes on in here or what I may be missing. I wasn’t tremendously interested or just thought it was okay. My god, letting the bikers hawk their wares here. But I wouldn’t have done it differently if I was the boss. But that’s exactly it! Who’s actually the boss? Or bosses? Then for some odd reason, I think of an old TV series with a similar name. I think it was Who’s the Boss? Fuck if I know why I thought of that. Just occurred to me.

And then we’re done with all the shit and Axel has collapsed against the wall next to his private throne. I think it was less from exhaustion. More from panic. Or dread. Not necessarily because of the fucking cops that were about to show up here. They didn’t have anything on him anymore. But maybe frightened of other people.

We’re sitting in the space behind the back door and treating ourselves to a coffee, accompanied by a good morning beer. I look at my uncle. He’s on a folding chair that’s dangerously close to splitting because of the mass of muscle it has to bear. Axel’s sitting so bowlegged, it’s as if he has bull’s gonads as big as bowling balls. He’s wearing a pair of black jogging pants with snaps open halfway up his calves. Almost like he’s wearing bell bottoms. His salmon-colored shirt, which clearly needs ironing, is also unbuttoned. Two rivulets of sweat run along the open collar, down to below his chest. He has his elbows propped on his knees. His forehead resting on the palm of one hand. Somewhere beneath there’s still eyes in his sockets and maybe they’re already seeing rather unpleasant things coming his way. His neck is so red. How can it be so red? As if someone had skinned a baboon’s butt and refashioned it as his neck brace.

And then I just say it: “I have the van.”

Any second I expect to catch his fist with my face. But all he does is slowly lift his head.

“Say that again.”

Something has to happen now. Hit me! Then it’s over.

“Say that again.” He repeats himself.

I keep the others out of it. “There was this opportunity that presented itself. Looked like a sure thing. There were… complications.”

“What kind of opportunity?” he asked. His voice was as calm as a storm behind a mountain ridge.

“Some guy from Braunschweig wasn’t careful. Posted all kinds of shit on the web. Open to everyone. I just had to do something. I mean… they’re from Braunschweig. You only get an opportunity like that once in life—” My rib cage blocked. Tightened. Breathing was hard. “I fucked it up. But it wasn’t just my fault! I couldn’t have known that two cars full would suddenly roll up!”

His gaze pierced me. It’s a miracle his head didn’t fall back. Like with a shotgun that kicks.

“And the van?”

“We had to run. Couldn’t save it, and had to leave it there. Went back a couple days ago. Couldn’t do nothin’.”

I show him the picture of the VW on my phone. Any second I expect it to melt away in his hand or be crushed like a can of beer, but he just hands it back.

He sighs loudly. Then he says, “The vehicle is registered with a guy in Hildesheim. A junky. You know that. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“I sent people around to his place. I sent Tomek over there. To find out if he’d sold the car for cash.”

He doesn’t need to say anything else. Don’t even want to know what Tomek and whoever else was along did to the guy. A long silence follows. I can see the hairs on my forearm standing on end.

Then my uncle says, “You’d better go now, Heiko.”

I do as I’m told. Get up slowly and retreat. No sudden movements. I’m afraid he could attack me, like a puma with rabies.

“One more thing,” he says and I stop.

“Why the van? Why not your own car?”

“No Hannover plates.”

He closes his eyes, nods, and his mouth even makes a tiny motion upward. “Okay, sure, understand. Smart.” The moment passes. “Go.” And I go.

After turning from the side street where Wotan is located, I see several police cars and a van in my rearview mirror, coming down the street without their lights on. They turn off toward the gym.

The driveway to Arnim’s house is full of dark, boxy transport vans. Plates from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, hell if I know. The cocksuckers have boxed me in. Arnim should hire a fucking valet service. The smell of zoo, animal shit and urine, penetrates the house and coats everything. I climb the narrow, creaking stairs. Brought the bucket I always use to bring Siegfried his bones. I hear people speaking Russian in the kitchen. Arnim has tried to teach me some over the years. But it never amounted to any more than standard stuff like “hello,” “thanks,” and various insults and curse words. Never really wanted to learn Russian. Think it’s better if I don’t understand what Arnim’s visitors are saying every year or half year. The conversation falls silent when I come into the kitchen. The three guys with typical Russian canister-shaped skulls and cruel faces stare at me. I’d like to tell them that they can keep on talking shit because I don’t understand a word. But they don’t speak any German, either. Probably not even English. They blink at me from underneath their Neanderthal-like foreheads. One of them has a harelip beneath his mustache, splitting his upper lip. It looks like someone’s tied a thread from his gums, out his mouth, and over his head, pulling it back. He’s wearing a baby-blue Camp David shirt, unbuttoned. I can recognize horizontal stab scars on his small pot belly. The next one is wearing an army-gray vest covered with pockets. His bare arms make it look as though he’s wearing a fucking tight, patterned long-sleeve shirt. All of it tattoos. Tanks, howitzers, those Russian churches with onion-shaped towers, ornamented crosses, and countless broads with big racks. The third guy, who’s supporting himself on the sink with his seven remaining fingers, has a goatee. Splotches on his face that look like burns and a scar along his throat like a tight necklace.

“Privyet,” I say.

They only nod grimly. I walk into the yard. The camouflage netting is back up. Arnim is standing with a couple of other people around the pit where his fucking tiger is supposed to live soon. The oversized wooden cover is pushed to the side. He explains something in Russian, fat chest extra swollen with pride. Really cleaned up today, even putting on a shirt to match his stained cargo shorts and the flip-flops. He’d set up industrial-strength construction floodlights pointed toward the ground, providing indirect lighting that reached the faces of those present but left their eye sockets with shadows. Makes these figures seem even more dodgy than they already were. This is the true dregs of society. Yet the press is always picking on us. If they only knew. At least we smash each other’s faces in and don’t have it done by some poor shitty animals who have no choice. Nights like these, I sometimes wish the cops would roll in and lock up all these thugs. But that never happens. Arnim is just too careful. He organizes these fights here too infrequently. Precisely because it’s so risky in Germany. The scene mostly happens in the former East Bloc states, the Balkans, and over toward Turkey. It’s much easier to grease the police’s palms there. If they’re not already standing in the arena in the first place with some banana republic’s funny money clutched in their hands. He told me once there’re only two other guys in the whole country who hold animal fights on this scale. One behind Hamburg. The other near Frankfurt, by the Polish border. But they just do dogs, he said, it’s boring, my boy, you have to offer people something, my boy. It makes me think of my first year living with Arnim. All of it was completely new to me, so I looked in as it was going on, behind the shed. Thought I was imagining when they had a fucking brown bear fight against two pit bulls. Even tag-teaming, the dogs didn’t have a snowball’s chance. After they’d tranquilized the victorious bear and pulled out the tattered carcasses, and I popped behind the shed to barf, I just wanted out. I haven’t let myself be drawn into that shit ever since. All the fucking creatures we’ve had here. That bear, sure. But we’ve also had wolves. And a fucking steer! And then two years ago there was that old, feral male chimpanzee. It’d been brought here by some Armenian who stank of drug and weapons money. He’d showed up with a bevy of bodyguards and had Arnim doing his bidding. He even had an arsenal of weapons for the fucking ape! I saw how he presented the animal to Arnim. Razor blades attached to leather arm cuffs and twisted shit like that. Couldn’t keep my eyes shut that night. Till they left with the chimp. But before that. Lay in my darkened room and had to listen to the monkey howling nonstop. Fucking hell! But that was the good thing: toward morning, just before it got light, the whole filthy squad of gangsters packed up their animals and fucked off. At least there was that. That morning I had half a mind to sneak down into the living room and wrap my hands around Arnim’s neck, while he was down there sawing logs. Squeeze tight till all the air had slipped from his lungs and his eyeballs were bulging from their sockets. But I just buried my head under my pillow. Things like that pass. And then you just skip out for a night or turn up the music in your headphones till they’re ready to bust.