‘I know you. Wilfried Wils.’
‘Wilfried’s a pal of mine, Eduard.’
‘Yeah, of yours…’ the Finger says scornfully.
‘What’s the matter? We’re both policemen, aren’t we? We’ve seen each other around,’ I say.
The Finger snaps back at me, ‘You, a policeman? You’re a mole. I don’t count you as a policeman.’ His squinty eyes are close-set. He keeps staring at me as if he can see right through me, like a surgeon who’s just opened me up to see which bits are rotten. I don’t belong here, maybe not anywhere, and he knows I know it.
‘What’s got into you, Eduard?’ Meanbeard says, trying to rescue what’s beyond rescuing. The Finger and I continue to stare at each other.
‘What’s got into me? Nothing. Everything’s fine.’
‘Leave the lad alone.’
The Finger winks at me. ‘Shall I leave you alone? Seeing as your pal’s asking so nicely.’
I shrug and sip my beer.
‘Come on, Eduard, change the subject.’
‘Fine by me… Have you heard the latest? We got him.’
‘Who?’
‘The bloke who killed Clement like a dog…’ Again he looks at me and hisses, ‘You were there, weren’t you, when we found our Clement?’
I nod. The Finger’s nose really is a distraction. It’s like you’re being studied by an anteater, as if his snout is constantly slapping you in the face. Only now do I notice that he has a moustache as well, more a pencil sketch or something that’s been applied with charcoal, a smudge above his little gall-spewing mouth. His lips form new words, revealing stained, rodent incisors: ‘We beat the shit out of the murdering bastard. We beat him until all he could do was blow little bubbles of blood.’ Again that look at me. ‘Off duty, of course. I wouldn’t want you thinking I give people beatings when I’m in uniform.’ Big grin, yellow teeth.
Meanbeard grins along. ‘You handed him over to our friends afterwards, I hope.’
The Finger gave a short shake of his head. ‘No, not this time. The Germans don’t need to be in on everything. We chucked him in the harbour with everything he had on him, Bonaparte Dock. Blub, blub. He went down like a stone. We won’t see him again. By the way, speaking of Germans…’
Meanbeard looked at his watch. ‘Yes, he should have been here by now. But he’s a busy man. We’ll have to be patient. Landlord, another round!’
The giant puts three foaming beers down on the table and wipes his paws off on his apron.
‘Lucien, this is my young friend Wilfried.’
‘Welcome to my robbers’ den.’
The landlord leans on the table with his fists and asks what’s keeping ‘Red’.
‘I was just telling them. He’s coming,’ Meanbeard replies.
Then the door swings open and a redhead walks in.
‘Speak of the devil and his German appears,’ Lucien laughs. The two exchange nods. The German is as big as the landlord.
Meanbeard is up on his feet right away to shake hands. ‘Mein Freund Gregor, Wilfried. Gregor, hier ist der junge Freund.’
I nod and shake his hand.
Without releasing my hand, Meanbeard’s friend Gregor looks at him, ‘Ist er der Polizist?’
‘Ja, ja,’ Meanbeard laughs, ‘police.’
Gregor slaps me on the shoulder. ‘Krieg macht aus uns allen Polizisten, nicht wahr?’
‘You’re exaggerating, Gregor,’ the Finger says, again looking at me. ‘Even war doesn’t turn us all into policemen!’
‘Schon gut, Eduard. Just joking.’
Gregor nods to Lucien, who goes to pour another round.
It was your father, long ago and before you were born, who ranted to me about the war in Yugoslavia. Everything he knew about it he’d heard on the telly or been spoon-fed by some newspaper or other that made a show of serving up your father’s favourite brand of truth in the hope that he and all the other outraged readers would hold out their bowls for another helping of indignation the next day. He was talking about the occupied city of Sarajevo, about the white trucks of the United Nazis (his words) that the furious residents of the city painted all the colours of the rainbow because they considered neutrality such a massive lie, an excuse for complete inaction. I let him rave on because it seemed to do him good and, what’s more, he seemed to think that I, his grandfather, was the perfect person to condemn a dirty war from the comfort of an armchair. I could tell that was a factor—that he hoped that I, with my past, would reach out to him, the grandson who had and would experience bugger all his whole life, and lend my blessing to his anger, in other words, tell him it was only normal for him to feel like that, that all war was the work of bastards, and he and I were slurping from the same spoon. He started telling me about the snipers in this current civil war, some place that was apparently called sniper’s alley with tall buildings where men with precision rifles lay in wait for a lady trying to do her shopping or a kid that had escaped the attention of its parents. He said everyone had become a target for those murderers and he wanted to know if I could understand that, if I knew how low people could sink and if I’d experienced things like that ‘in my day’. And writing this down for you, I think of the same things I thought about back then when I tried to answer him. Of course I’ve seen people who have been reduced to targets, ready to be destroyed because their time had come—no, actually because there happened to be a demand for it. And now, presumably, I’m supposed to tell you about June 1942, the month that all Jewish men, women and children in this city were ordered to sew a yellow star with a capital J on
