Natasha calls me a couple of times a day, demanding regular reports on my progress. I can’t do anything but ask her for patience. She’s told me that the DNA on the poker cards they’ve found is useless. The worn-out cards have gone through too many hands. Fortunately, there hasn’t been another attack since the assault on the school. But we’re living on borrowed time. The storm will break loose eventually. We both know it.
I fill some vials with neurotoxin, arm my briefcase, and pocket four spare magazines for my Uzi. The Glock’s set back on escalation, step one. Tonight I’ll lay in wait. If this roof-runner shows his face, I’ll catch him red-handed.
9
The muezzin’s just calling folks to five o’clock tea, when I make my way up to the roof of one of the Stalin buildings on Frankfurter Allee. I watch life unfold on the street, lined with car wrecks and garbage heaps, until dusk starts to settle. Wannabees, performing wheelies on their pimped-up motorbikes. Men, beating their wives with belts without worrying about witnesses. Boys, getting a whipping from their fathers. Nothing out of the ordinary. Patiently, I wait until the sun is low on the horizon. Veiled women, six children in tow, scurry home through the twilight to seek shelter inside their apartments until the next morning. It’s not just criminals who live here. But after sunset only gangbangers populate the buildings’ doorways. As electricity gets shut off in the Ghetto, the streets are quickly growing dark. The coughing bouts of sick children fill the night. Does life on other planets look like this, too? Do people who live many light years away also congregate in their places of worship to march in circles around the fragment of a meteorite, lost in trance?
The next morning I’m yawning so much that I almost unhinge my yaw. Besides a few junkies and some teens who stole out of their rooms in the middle of the night nobody has shown up on the roof. I walk down the stairs and leave the Stalin building. Today, I’m not in the mood to return to the subway tunnel.
“Hey, Hauke, yalla,” a homeless guy addresses me. He’s sitting on the stoop of a porticoed doorway. It’s Umit, one of the worst boozers I’ve ever met. He’s close to fifty, his face bloated after thousands of alcoholic binges. Coarse skin, the bags under his eyes could be mistaken for balconies. He’s virtually evaporating booze. His ripe odor keeps the Sharia police away, I guess. Stink to fend off the Islamist guardians of virtue. Life can be really strange sometimes. Umit always carefully combs back his curls. He gels them almost lovingly. He must be very proud of them.
“You’ve fucked with Jihad, yalla,” he slurs.
Jihad. I’ve totally forgotten about this little punk. We’ve left off at escalation step one, if I remember right. “How do you know?” I ask.
“Yalla, Jihad’s sounding off, he’s gonna ice de Pusher, yalla,” Umit replies.
“So?”
“Jihad’s a big guy on de Warsaw, yalla. He’s mighty pissed off, you know.”
“So what? What do I care?” I hand Umit two units of coke. “Guys like him are always pissed off about something.”
“You’d better watch your back, kuffar,” his drinking buddy chimes in.
Umit gives a hoarse laugh. Then he crosses his hands behind his neck and turns his face into the rising sun. It looks like he’s planning to enjoy the warm rays of the celestial body with the help of a bottle of vodka. A perfect day for a homeless dude. His pants are encrusted with last weeks’ urine. Once you’ve reached a certain alcohol level you lose control over your bladder. Before I leave, I give the two of them a casual two-finger salute.
It would be an option to turn around and take a detour to Petersburger Strasse to spend a more or less relaxing day at the Volkspark. But somehow the challenge awaiting me on the Warsaw beckons me. I switch over to the median, where I can hide between the trunks of the plane trees in case of emergency. This early in the morning the street is deserted. The inhabitants of the wooden shacks, set up between the burned-out wrecks of cars, haven’t risen yet. Just a few devout believers are hurrying to morning prayer. I unlock my Glock, open the buckle, and put my finger on the trigger button of the needle in my case. A child excitedly takes off into the building at the kebab store where I had my run-in with Jihad. The kid must have recognized me. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, when adrenaline floods my body. Nervousness dampens my hands. I feel a pulse beating in my neck and my knees start to tremble. Ultimate bliss. Still in his undershirt and a Mac 10 in hand, Jihad comes running out into the street. He seems to mean business. A bare twenty yards in front of me he stops, waving his submachine gun, and starts heaping abuse on many generations of my ancestors. The idea behind it must be to retrace my entire family tree all the way back to Adam and Eve. “Fucker! Fucker! Fucker!” he screams. The impact of my rubber round has left a perfectly round angry spot right
