I got home at four in the morning.
A strange thing. Magda was standing guard at the door for me.
– Well? – she fell on me with questions. – Did you find it? Did you blow it up? How did it go? Why are you saying nothing?
Silently I pulled off my jacket, took off my shoes, still silently – stew a bit longer, you little bitch – then went into my room and collapsed face down on the bed.
– Well? – there seemed to be tearful notes slipping into her voice.
– Well nothing. Found it, – I puffed into the pillow.
– Phew. Good man. Blew it up?
– No.
– Why?
I rolled onto my back:
– Because. Found a man who tomorrow, or rather this afternoon, will lead me to that dacha. That’s when I’ll deal with it.
– At what time? I need to know exactly.
– What for?
– So as to buy a train ticket in advance for an ass like you.
– Buy it for eight in the evening. I’ll be here at six.
– So the explosion will be before eighteen hundred?
– It will.
Magda slammed the door. She’s wound up somehow. She might lie down and rest, perhaps. Still, I understand her. A woman with no brains but nothing but nerves. I scraped my chin, pricked myself on the stubble and trudged off to the bathroom.
Hmm. Along the corridor, like a light narcotic, curled the spicy smell of cologne – men’s, incidentally. So while I was freezing my arse off, my companion had been carrying on here with admirers. Interesting. I sniffed at the smell. Perhaps she uses this scent herself and I’m slandering her? No. The smell was definitely a man’s. What is more, one of my acquaintances used to spray himself with the same stuff. Only who? I drew the pleasant aroma into myself once more and, lamenting my weak sense of smell and absent memory, breathed it back out.
Having whipped up the lather on my cheeks, I stood there, looked at my white-bearded reflection in the mirror, winked at myself and set about scraping off the stubble with a Schick. Not the most pleasant of occupations, but one that induces all manner of thoughts.
The first thought was about Magda. She is a remarkable woman, with her own conceptions of life and fate. You won’t take one like that in with chaff; give her a nut and she won’t eat it. You won’t lop that little head off for the fun of it. She has a serious level of unarmed combat, as far as I could tell. Her punch is very well set. This lady is on familiar terms with weapons too. She must knock down ninety-five out of a hundred. A woman like that should be in films, astounding the imaginations of snot-nosed boys, and instead she stands guard over me for nothing. Presumably they’ve promised her a good fee for my scalp. All right. From now on we shall be wary of her.
The second thought was about Hans. The scoundrel! I never harboured any illusions about him, but all the same it seemed he was a man who understood things. A pity that isn’t so. A great pity that Hans no longer needs Arbalet.
I examined my freshly shaved face – handsome fellow! – and set about manuring it with aftershave.
Then again, perhaps I’m wronging Hans. Most likely three slip-ups have accumulated on my account. With the first everything is clear – I showed my face during the raid. With the second and third it’s a dark forest, but one can guess. In the close-knit gangster collective led by Hans I passed for a dim and clumsy lump, a specialist in shooting, hand-to-hand fighting and carrying heavy things. Where brains had to be applied, they tried to manage without me. And a pity too. I was a lad with something up my sleeve, and I wore the blunt-nosed mask deliberately. Life was simpler with a mask like that, calmer. I played the fool without fuss, quietly stuffed my little pockets and didn’t give a damn, knew no cares, ate well, slept soft. And evidently Hans saw through me. He’s an extraordinarily competent bloke after all. On top of that his intuition is astounding. He can smell any trick a mile off. And he must at last have smelled that, while cleaning out banks and so forth, I was simultaneously increasing my bank balance. It was a most agreeable occupation for me. And most importantly – a super-profitable one. Now and then, in passing, you slip a couple of little bundles into your pocket, and in the morning you look – twenty thousand Bundesmarks are pleasantly warming your soul. Yes. I lived quietly, not on a grand scale, of course, but comfortably and snugly. I denied myself nothing in small matters and was closing in on the sum that would gladden me – five hundred thousand marks in an account nobody knew about.
I agreed to the trip to Russia for one reason. I wanted to overshoot the target by a good margin, zero out the treasured account, stuff a little suitcase with multicoloured papers bearing watermarks and leave, travelling light, a foreign country that had not become my Motherland but had taught me something, given me something. A pity, of course, that I slipped up somewhere and now have to think feverishly about how to preserve myself.
To begin with, it would be no bad thing to construct Hans’s logical chain. He evidently smelled that I was quietly warming myself at his expense and clocked two such cases. Then to them was added unlucky case number three – the face shown at the bank. Nothing for it – Arbalet has done the job, Arbalet must go. Hans had a hard rule: an employee who has exposed himself three times is considered a hunchback. And only the grave, as everyone knows, straightens one of those out. So a little hump had grown on me too. What did Hans decide to do? A banal bullet in the back of the head is a sure means, but a witless one. He sent me off to a lousy little resort and started weighing up how to use his former employee to maximum advantage. Such an opportunity soon turned up. Deft traders in drug poison from Russia descended on Germany and set their minds on competing with Hans in that business. And he, having laid down no little blood and sweat on laying the routes from distant sultry lands to the Fatherland, was not interested in such a turn of events. Hans has no use for competitors. What did he think up in the light of what had happened? Summoned Arbalet, thoroughly worn out by his rest, and dispatched him to distant Muscovy on a witless mission – to damp the competitors down. Here variants are possible. The first, unlikely. I carry out the assignment, return contented to Magda’s shelter in order to travel to Germany with her, and receive a leaden greeting from Hans in the back of the head. Variant two, almost a hundred per cent certain. I look for this dacha, maybe find it, maybe not, but in the end the local mafia catches me and rolls me out with an asphalt paver over what used to be a dirt road. There is an advantage for Hans in this case too. The locals will know that somebody is ready to take them on in their own territory. That may cool their ardour, and then, you never know, it may come to an agreement on spheres of influence, to conventions of all sorts… Only all that is neither here nor there to me. I need to start acting according to variant number three, my own. From this day on.