Blankenese, a speckgurtel district of Hamburg.
Blankenese was one of the affluent 'bacon-belt' areas of the city, where the well-fed had their homes. Those neighbours knew little of the man who kept himself to himself, whose wife they rarely saw, whose children were taken by car to school and driven home. His name was not in the newspapers, he did not entertain locally, and offers of drinks or summer barbecues were always politely refused – 'We are already committed on that evening/ weekend / lunchtime, and so are unable to accept your kind invitation.' It was the way of the pate that the least should be known about him.
He had come far in his life from the village north of Shkodra in the Albanian mountains close to the border with Montenegro.
A VW Passat had been parked on the main road, backed into a driveway so that its occupants could see up the dead-end street and respond easily to whichever way his car turned on the main road: north towards the Blankenese station for the S-Bahn line, or south and the Elbchaussee. Timo leaned across the Bear's shoulder and peered into the mirror. A woman was driving the Passat with a man as her front-seat passenger. Sometimes the surveillance on him was covert, and needed his instinct – and the Bear's – to spot. Sometimes the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat section put a car on his tail in the full knowledge that it would be instantly identified.
It was a gesture, covert or obvious, and one to be ignored. Lesser men than Timo Rahman were in the maximum-security wing of the gaol at Fuhlsbuttel.
Other than to visit a blood relation eleven years back he had never been there, and such visits were now inappropriate and beneath his stature.
He did not remark on the Passat, two cars back in the traffic behind them, neither did the Bear.
It was the assumption of Timo Rahman that every remark he made – in his bedroom, his kitchen, his car, at a business meeting – was overheard by audio devices. He had been told that the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat boasted to favoured politicians that the equipment available to them was the best in Europe. Nothing that incriminated him ever passed his lips and those he dealt with were schooled at the same desk. He discussed with the Bear, as the VW Passat followed them, the weather forecast for that day in northern Germany, as any of his neighbours would have.
Inside the speed limit, the Bear drove down
Elbchaussee. Set back from the wide road, which wound down from the high ground above the river, were the great mansions where the elite of the city's commerce and banking had made their homes, with views across the estuary to the Airbus factory. He could have lived there, could have moved Alicia and the girls into an Elbchaussee home, but it would have drawn attention to him. Timo lived in Blankenese, without the views, among the chief executives and principal department heads, and did not draw comment. But his financial empire, always moving on a steady path to greater legitimacy, based on stocks and bonds, property holdings and aircraft leasings, could have bought him the best.
Fewer than a dozen men – and the woman whose face had been at the upper window of his home
– could have brought down the empire of the pate, could have consigned Timo Rahman to the
Fuhlsbuttel gaol by their testimony He had no fear of them. Alicia, watched by her aunt in all her waking hours at the villa, was incapable of action. The Bear could have sent him to the prison they called 'Santa-Fu', but the idea was ludicrous. The net of loyalty around Timo – of which the Bear was part – was the same in Hamburg as it was in the mountains of Albania. It was based on the centuries-old diktats laid out in the Canun of Lek Dukagjen, was based on the besa, which was a man's word of honour – and violation created an inevitable hakmarrje, the blood feud. As his father had in Albania, Timo Rahman sat at the head of a clan, a fis, in Hamburg. He had brought with him the disciplines of the Canun from the village north of Shkodra to the richest of German cities, and with his baggage had been the im-penetrable strength of the fis.
The route the Bear took him that day was past the old fish market, where he had been shot by a Russian in the right side of his upper chest. It was when the Russians had come, refugees, into the city, sensed the wealth of the pickings – narcotics, weapons, girls
– and sought to muscle aside the power in place. Some of the Russian groups had been 'persuaded' at gunpoint to go elsewhere; some had laughed at the advice and had fought for territory. Timo's way had sent the message five times. Russians dead, packed like herrings into ice boxes, then dumped in the boots of cars, which were pushed off the quay of the fish market car park into the waters of the Elbe. The man who had shot him, spitting through his gag, struggling to break the rope on his elbows, had gone into the boot of his Mercedes and he – Timo – had slammed down the lid. All the way to the quay's edge there had been kicking inside the b o o t… and he had helped to push the car over the edge. He had had no more difficulties with Russians. Three or four of the men who had helped him in those days, twelve years before, could have put him with their testimony into a cell at the Santa-Fu, but they were all the gjak, blood relations, who would not have contemplated betrayal.
The Passat remained behind them, and took the same turn away from the fish market. Political friends, men bought with money, told him of the director of the unit that dealt with what they designated organized crime. The pinnacle of the director's police career would be the conviction of Timo Rahman, but he would never reach it.
The Bear headed for the Reeperbahn. It was where Timo had begun, where he had been knifed. He took the narrow cut through and they were held up behind a tourist bus that paused for photographs of the street with the high wall at its end and the gap through which only pedestrians could go to the brothels. At the police station, high and brickbuilt on the corner of the Reeperbahn, where the detectives had always failed to link him to ownership and 'immoral earnings', the Bear swung right and into the wide street.
Young, fresh from Albania, he had dismissed the Germans who ran the Reeperbahn, fought them and overwhelmed them. Three or four of those who had been at his side in that little war of guns and knives, all Albanians from the northern mountains, could have sworn evidence and imprisoned him, but they were miqs, relatives by marriage, and would have died rather than be accused of treachery against him.
Now, increasingly, he was clean. His business activities were distant from the wars on which he had built his empire. The Bear brought him to
Schauenburgstrasse and the premises of one of the oldest and most respected legal companies in Hamburg. A fellow guest, but arriving by a different doorway off the street, would be a city politician against whom no stigma of corruption existed. In a private room, over lunch, there would be discussion on the development funds necessary for the building of high-quality offices on one of the few bombsites remaining from the Feuersturm; minor investment and major profit in return for development permission being nodded through Planning. Neither the politician nor the lawyer who would chair the discussion, knew of the Canun or of the fis, had little comprehension of the reach of a blood feud and the vicious reprisals that could be brought down on them and their families, but they understood the threat of public disgrace that an appearance in court would bring them and those they loved, and they would not have lasted a sentence of imprisonment in the Fuhlsbuttel gaol. He was safe from them.
For Timo Rahman the meeting was routine. A matter of greater complexity was nagging in his mind as he took the lift to the upper floor where the lawyer practised hospitality. That matter, the rewards for which were great and the challenge huge, would take him to the western coastline. It excited him because the ground to be covered and the cargo to be delivered were new to him, and the risk to his security was devastating. He shook the lawyer's hand and was ushered inside. What nagged at him was his feeling of certainty that the man he must rely on was a foreigner with no understanding of the loyalties of Timo's people, the grandson of his father's comrade in war, Ricky Capel. The coded name Timo had given him, spoken with contempt, was 'Mouseboy'.
Rubbish day, and from the window Sharon Capel, matriarch certainly of number eight and probably of all Bevin Close, saw the bin lorry edge into the top of the cul-de-sac. Her own wheelie was outside her front gate, on the pavement, but her daughter-in-law next door received better treatment because the boys came down the side of that house to collect her wheelie, then put it back by the kitchen door. Joanne had that small luxury because nothing that concerned her husband, Ricky, was too much trouble for the bin-boys.
Sharon had lost track of time. If she had realized how late it was in the morning she would not have been dusting in the front room. She kept the house spotlessly clean because there was little else for her to do. It hadn't always been that way. She had been in Men's Underwear at British Home Stores for most of Ricky's childhood, and spent evenings washing up in a cafe, all the years that Mikey was 'away' doing bird and his share of what had not been retrieved by the Old Bill was running down. Mikey had been in Brixton, Wandsworth and Pentonville too long and too often… and when he was out she had kept up the jobs because the big one that he was going to retire on always fucked up. Mikey had been between release and rearrest on a day when the bin lorry had come into Bevin Close. That same day, Ricky had been a month past his twelfth birthday – and from that day his sisters, Therese
