The Snowman (14 page)

“May I ask how long you have been Mr Hackensack's business partner?”

From the way in which she said the words “business partner”, Blum realized that he was on shaky ground.

“Oh, well, only since last week really. We met on Malta, and Harry – I mean Mr Hackensack – asked me to look in on him in Frankfurt. He was going to give me some business advice.”

“Can you tell me what kind of business you are doing here, Mr . . .?”

“Blum. Like a flower in bloom. Well, I'm afraid that's something I'd like to discuss with Mr Hackensack personally.”

“Does Mr Hackensack know?”

“Yes, of course. I just said so.”

Suddenly he was sorry he hadn't snorted another line of coke before going out. The telephone rang. The lady picked it up, but said nothing. She just listened, made a note of something, and hung up.

“Well, Mr Blum, so far as I know Mr Hackensack won't be in until Monday. I'll tell him you were here, and if he thinks it's important he'll get in touch with you. Perhaps you'd leave me your card, or write down here where he can reach you . . .”

Blum lit a cigarette and blew the smoke across the desk. The lady didn't bat an eyelid. She was used to the old fellow's cigars. Typical, really, thought Blum, typical of the man to have a dump like this as his office. Carries on about power and chemicals, and now there's just the crocus on the wall and the umbrella on the coat-stand. And a mummified Prussian female at the
desk to scare away people like me. But I'm old enough not to be scared, mister.

“I can't be reached,” he said, just a little too loud. “Just tell Mr Hackensack I was extremely sorry he wasn't able to show me Frankfurt. Frankfurt by night, of course. That's what he promised me back on Malta. Come to think of it, you can leave out the ‘extremely'. Just ‘sorry' will do. I'll call if I can. Goodbye.”

He turned and left the office without closing the door behind him. There was a graffito carved with a knife in the lift: “Lise doesn't screw”, and he thought: If I ever see him again, I must ask him the first name of the ICA's secretary.

Outside he suddenly wasn't sure why he had reacted so violently. What had he expected? A whole floor of a skyscraper gleaming with neon lights, where Hackensack and 123 employees – assisted by the latest IBM computers – laboured day and night to help people like Blum in their struggle for existence? He'd flared up like a fool. Perhaps a visit to Mr Haq was indicated. Perhaps the Pakistani had more experience in this field than he had so far admitted.

Blum took the tram, but got off again at the next stop. He hadn't been in a tram for fifteen years, and it was unnerving to be crammed among all these people and exposed to their glances. He absolutely had to have a car, but not a hire car. He mustn't sign anything. And the taxi he took cost a small fortune. That was life – talking big about investments in Freeport two hours ago, and now he had to count every coin.

This was getting to be not just hard but unfair too.

When he entered the stairway of the boarding house a ground-floor door opened, and a woman who could have been the ICA secretary's aunt stared suspiciously at him and said, “No vacancies, young man.”

It sounded like a threat.

“I've come to visit one of your lodgers, ma'am.”

“There's no one in the house.”

“Mr Haq – Mr Haq from Lahore, on the third floor, he's expecting me. On business.”

“On business? What kind of business, young man?”

Blum took out one of his visiting cards (Siegfried Blum – business representative – Berlin – Barcelona – Tangiers). She snatched the card from his hand, glanced at it and gave it back with a scornful grin.

“No one here to represent now. They're all gone, the whole lot of them.”

“May I ask where?”

“Taken away, of course. What do you think? I always told my sister she shouldn't allow such riffraff into our place.”

In the ground-floor apartment, from which a sour smell of boiled cabbage and brawn wafted, an ancient voice called: “Emmi, is that the police again? They're not to come into this house! I won't have it!”

Blum wrinkled his brow and took a step back.

“The police were here?”

“Are you hard of hearing, young man? The police, that's right, the police. I'm not letting rooms to any more Turks.”

“Mr Haq is from Pakistan.”

She looked at him as if he were a Pakistani himself, and a particularly unpleasant specimen. “They cooked too, that lot did, they cooked in the rooms even though I told them a hundred times not to. How am I ever to get the stink out of the furniture?”

The ancient voice called again. “No more police, Emmi, I won't have any more police here! Father would never have stood for it.”

“So when were the police here?”

“They were all taken away yesterday evening, every last one of them. So what exactly were you representing for them?”

Perhaps Mr Haq had not made the most profit after all. He was certainly a clever man, and it could be that he had made off just in time. But if not . . .

Blum made his own getaway.

The restaurant had once been an ordinary corner café, and the low ceiling was black with smoke. You perched on uncomfortable coffee-house chairs at tiny marble-topped tables, surrounded by palm fronds, plaster statues and rubber plants, you were snubbed by waiters who had all graduated in communication aesthetics and looked like fencers or ballet dancers, and you paid twice as much for your
salade niçoise
or your
café orange
as you would anywhere else, because there was an extra attraction in the form of Art. Artistic performances were given on a platform in glaring neon lighting, by ladies who were mainly rather stout and who made silly but supposedly lascivious remarks in a voice like a carter's labourer. Blum thought, nostalgically, of Barcelona and Tangiers, of the curry nights at the Phoenicia. But of course nostalgia was out of place here. Cora was standing in the aisle on the way to the toilets, in front of the
art nouveau
posters, speaking to anyone who crossed her path. Her mouth had a rosy sheen, and she had plaited her hair into little braids. Braids, of all things. Doesn't look much like BB any more, thought Blum, but maybe that's just as well. Let's not get sentimental. When I was seventeen I wanted to be a theologian, but God couldn't care less. Now she was whispering to a repulsive character with a reddish beard who wore the dungarees that went with it. He sported the yellow badge of the anti-nuclear protesters. Badges twenty years ago had more zing to them, thought Blum.

“The way I see it, fiction's a harder drug than anything you can shoot up,” said the man sitting beside Blum. He was tall and thin and good-looking in an unobtrusive way. Cora had introduced them, but Blum couldn't remember names. However, the man was a writer.

“Have you been shooting up already?” asked Blum, sipping his whisky.

“I meant purely metaphorically,” said the man. “Your whisky there, addiction to the opposite sex, just about anything that gives us hope of realizing our true selves – they're artificial paradises. But fiction, now, that's the area where we can tread in the certainty of being bowled over by what we shall never be.”

“An interesting idea,” said Blum, suppressing a yawn. Cora had disappeared.

“Look at our Utopias,” began the writer again, apparently inspired by having found an audience at last. “With drugs, you see, we want to experience ourselves. Sounds cheap, but it isn't. However, of course it leaves us just where we were before. But experiencing other people, and according to Sartre hell is other people – ah, that would be worth any mutilation.”

“And I always thought writers led a quiet life,” said Blum after a pause that threatened to go on rather too long. “Do you make a good living from your books? Are you successful?”

“As Greene said, writers are never successful.”

Maybe I ought stock up on a little anthology of quotations, thought Blum. If the cops get me after all I could say: Do you know something, gentlemen? Fiction is a harder drug than anything you're about to fit me up for.

“Yes,” he said finally, “that's life – hard but fair.”

A large woman in a cloche and a feather boa minced over from the bar to the aisle. A kiss here, a greeting there. The star of the evening.

“Have you known Cora long?” asked the writer.

“Depends what you mean by long.”

She had reappeared now and was talking to the star. I hope this isn't going to turn into another artists' party, thought Blum.

“And what do you think of cocaine?” he asked the writer.

“A dangerous drug,” the man pontificated, drawing on his pipe. He smoked a tobacco that smelled like sheep dung. “A cynical, vain, paranoid lady, our Peruvian Lady. Remember, Hitler took pervitin daily during those last years, and you could call pervitin the number one wake-up drug.”

“Really? I only know Wakey Wakey that we took during our final school exams. So carry on about cocaine.”

“Maybe cocaine is the
poule de luxe
ultimately behind everything.
Cherchez la femme
.”

“Ah. And did you ever . . .?”

The writer was evasive. “Words are my drugs – the opium of nouns, the heroin of adjectives, the chemical compounds of verbs.” Then, rather disdainfully: “But the authentic drugs are only useless palliatives, methods of withdrawal from fiction, like giving methadone to an addict.”

Cora waved to Blum in full view of everyone. The star diseuse inspected him through a lorgnette hanging around her fat neck. Blum was annoyed. The writer leaned back and thoughtfully inspected him through the smoke.

“I had a thing with Cora once,” he said at last, “but it didn't work out. Writers don't need nude models, and it got to be rather a nuisance explaining why she doesn't
feature in my books.” He knocked out his pipe. “Writers ought to live alone.”

“And do you?” asked Blum, rising. A waiter immediately hurried over to him. He paid and mopped his brow.

“Another fiction,” said the writer, opening his tobacco tin.

In the corridor, Cora put an arm around his shoulders and whispered, “Do you have two grams? Detlev's already waiting in the Gents.”

Blum withdrew from her arm. “I told you it's too hot for me here. You waved to me in front of everyone – what's the idea? What do you mean, two grams? I have five pounds of the stuff, and you go on about two grams. I mean, this is ridiculous . . .”

“Every little helps,” said Cora, turning back to the star diseuse.

In the Gents two men were standing at the urinal, and of course one of them was the dungaree-clad character. He pointed excitedly to the open door of the WC cubicle. The other man relieved himself, acting as if he hadn't seen anything. Blum went into the WC and slammed the door. He felt quite ill with anger. Here he was – Blum of the EC butter coup, Blum of the Titian theft – lurking around in dark toilets for customers wanting cocaine, like the last heroin hawker outside the Zoo Station. The lavatory flushed, footsteps, the rattle of the roller towel, the squealing door. Then there was a knock. Blum opened the door and was about to go out, but instead Detlev pushed his way in.

“This is safer,” he whispered. He stank of garlic. His face was red; drops of sweat glistened in his red beard.

Blum took the cellophane wrapping off his cigarette packet and pressed it into his customer's hand.

“How much do you want? I don't usually sell small quantities.”

“Two grams for 300, that's what I agreed with Cora.”

“You're joking, son. One gram costs 250, and that's almost giving it away.”

“If it's good I'll take more. I know a lot of . . .”

“Mister, I hear that ten times a day.”

Someone in hobnailed boots came into the Gents and wanted to use the WC.

“Take it easy,” growled Blum.

“Shit faster, can't you, mate?” said the someone, and hobnailed his way out again.

“Two grams costs 400,” said Blum. “Got the money?”

“Yes, but only 300.”

The smell of garlic was overpowering, but Blum stood his ground. He hadn't spent a year in the Med for nothing.

“Hand it over,” he said. The red-bearded man pressed three 100-mark notes into his hand. Blum held them up to the light one by one, while his customer became increasingly nervous.

“You wouldn't be the first to try passing duds off on me,” said Blum. He put the money away and brought out the pillbox in which he had put a couple of grams.

“Hold out the bag.”

“Don't you have an envelope?”

“Where do you think we are, the post office?” said Blum, and began very carefully tipping the cocaine into the bag. The other man's hand was trembling so much that he spilled a little. He immediately bent and licked it off the lavatory lid. Blum, disgusted, made a face.