At first George thought that the girls hadn’t noticed him and that they would go past without a look, but as they drew opposite him, the bicycle braked, stopped, and the two girls dismounted. Facing him across the width of the road the three looked not unlike women he had known for most of his life. The tallest, the one who had been pedalling the bicycle, wore her hair twisted into a long plait which fell over her shoulder and the breast on the right. She was sweating a little, breathing hard, her skin flushing underneath the tan.
‘Negro,’ she said, smiling at him, ‘why are you here in our country?’
George stood frozen on the spot, unable to speak. His mind was a blank, except for the disappointment which was sweeping through his entire body. For a moment he had been gripped by a fantasy in which he lay under the trees with these three beauties, stroking their thighs and sucking at their nipples.
Without taking her eyes from his the tall girl put her hand on her crotch, above the light cloth of her dress, and moved it up and down.
‘You want some, negro?’
It struck him that she spoke good German, just as they had been told the locals would, and he had heard the same invitation before, couched in exactly the same words. But her voice had deepened into a tone of anger and contempt and the expression on her face was twisted into a mask of hatred, her lips sneering and scornful. George knew what hatred and contempt looked like. He’d seen it enough, but now he was gripped by a curious and irresistible desire to know one thing. Did she hate him because he was German, or because he was a black man?
He straightened up and opened his mouth to ask, but the group leader’s voice cut in before he could get the words out.
‘Say nothing. That’s an order. These whores are sent to provoke us.’
The girls’ eyes switched to the sergeant standing behind him, and they all laughed, almost in unison, and still with the same edge of contempt.
‘Go home, negro,’ the tall girl said. ‘Wherever you come from. And take your friends with you.’
The girls giggled in chorus, to George’s ears an angry insolent sound which matched the contempt in their eyes. Then they turned and walked away, still ignoring the catcalls and whistles which now reached a crescendo as they walked the gauntlet of the soldiers’ eyes. George watched them until they had gone past the end of the column, then he turned round, catching a sly smile from Muller, who was still standing behind him.
‘Forget it, boy,’ the sergeant said. ‘That’s another one of their tricks.’
That was the end of it. Some time during the night they were ordered back over the border. In the intervening years he had met and fucked a number of women who looked very much like the tall girl, including his wife Radka who was herself a Czech, but he had never forgotten that afternoon, or the heat of the sun, the sneer on the woman’s face, the stink of kerosene on the tank’s ticking metal.
‘Ottenser Hauptstrasse,’ he said now, jogging Valentin’s arm and pointing.
Valentin grunted and swung away from the station into a broad street lined with kebab shops and stores faced with Turkish and Arabic lettering. A little further down the Hauptstrasse he turned off again into the network of narrow streets which linked the station and the waterfront. This was one quarter of Altona which had resisted the creeping tide of prosperous and respectable residency that had begun to take over on the other side of the station, renovating the huge old houses and spawning office buildings, new banks and wine bars. Instead, this district was still the haunt of Turks and Arabs, Africans, dockworkers and whores. Among them moved the newer outcasts – Russians, Uzbekis, Chechens, Serbs, Croats, and Kosovars, groups of waddling women, their heads wrapped in scarves, their eyes lost, shepherded by men in cracked dirty boots and knitted caps.
Valentin turned another corner and pulled up in front of a red brick building. He switched the engine off, then leant forward, opened the glove compartment, took out a gun and stuffed it into the back of his belt.
‘What is that?’ George asked him.
He’d recognised it immediately. It was a nine-millimetre Browning. It was years ago, but he’d seen them often enough, strapped to the waists of his American counterparts on guard duty.
Valentin shrugged.
‘My gun.’
‘I know it’s a gun,’ George said, feeling the urge to hit him. ‘But first, I didn’t know you had it. Second, I want to know why you’re taking it with you.’
‘You want me to leave it in the car?’
Valentin grinned cockily, and George took a deep breath.
‘All right. You can’t leave it here. But when did you get it and why?’ A thought struck him. ‘You’ve been carrying it around? Suppose the cops had pulled you?’
Valentin shrugged again, grinning.
‘That would never happen.’
George sat back, getting over his surprise but determined not to leave the matter there.
‘What’s going on?’
Now he knew what had darkened his mood earlier on. It was Valentin. There must have been tiny clues which told him something was wrong, but his conscious mind had ignored them. The trouble was that he had got accustomed to thinking about what they were doing as a business, just as if he’d been putting on a suit in the morning and going to the office. Negotiating with Gunther and the other dealers was like that. They were, of course, sharp and mean and intent on gouging him for every pfennig they could get, but that was only business. In much the same mood, he had got used to accompanying Valentin when he exchanged cars for the goods he would peddle as if they were undertaking a simple business transaction. In all that time the half-dozen Russians he had encountered were men who he presumed were former army buddies of his cousin. In fact they looked and behaved very much like Valentin; youngish, tough, dressed in jeans, sweaters and long coats, they greeted him without surprise, handed over their merchandise without comment and vanished.
Being ignorant of the details suited George. From the beginning he had understood that the Russian end of the business was a dangerous matter. The men who could afford to buy Victor’s cars would also be violent characters, unimpressed by the niceties of business ethics. When Valentin and his comrades lowered their voices and engaged in conversation, George made a point of moving away and busying himself by examining the goods. After a year he had made his own calculations and he had figured that it would only be a matter of months before he was able to end his involvement in the business. In the meantime he would keep clear of trouble.
Sitting in the Jaguar now, looking at the grin on Valentin’s face, it struck him that he must have been living in a dream, and seeing Valentin’s gun had been like the sudden screeching of an electronic alarm, waking him to the realisation that he was already in a lot of trouble.
‘What’s going on?’ he repeated.
‘Self-protection,’ Valentin said. His expression was suddenly sulky, the lines of his face pulling downwards like a small boy rebuked.
‘You don’t need a pooshka for that,’ George said. He used the word for cannon, translating it from the language of the American movie gangsters, but what was actually running through his head was a proverb he’d heard his mother use sometimes: ‘Strelyat ne pooshek po varabyam: a cannon to shoot a sparrow.’
Valentin grinned.
‘You should speak Russian more often.’ This was a sarcasm, because Valentin knew very well that apart from his mother’s familiar sayings George was uncomfortable venturing a sentence in the language. The smile vanished. ‘But there’s no sparrows in there.’
‘Okay.’