Midnight in Berlin (8 page)

Corvino’s was hidden behind a whole bunch of greenery on Savignyplatz, not far from the Erotica Museum and Berlin Zoo. You can probably guess which place I’d bothered to check out when I was on a break. The guy who ran Corvino’s called it a “Bar Américain”, although far as I could tell, I’d been the only American thing in the place. It was a cozy little nook, with mellow décor and warm lighting. Before they brought in the smoking laws, it used to get so you could hardly see your hand in front of your face—or so the guy told me. He said it like he mourned the passing of the good old days, but I was just as happy not to die of lung cancer before I hit thirty. Also, I preferred to be able to see the man I was hitting on. Although come to think of it, that approach hadn’t done me a whole lot of good lately.

It was midafternoon when we got there, and the place was dead. Just a half-dozen tourists sitting on the chrome barstools, drinking cocktails real slow because ambiance comes cheaper than alcohol. Jon was behind the bar, and he gave me a big old happy wave when he saw me. “Dude! You know, you freaked the shit out of me last time I saw you. How are you, man?”

“I’m good,” I lied. The warm rush of familiarity had faded almost as soon as it’d hit me, and now it was making me jumpy, being in a place this small with all these strangers. I realized I could differentiate between the scents of the people in there. Just like you can tell a hamburger from a bowl of chili with your eyes shut.

My stomach rumbled. I told it to shut the fuck up before my teeth heard it and started getting ideas.

“Man, I hope you’re not after your job back,” Jon said with a smile, his scent turning nervous.

“No.” It came out sounding rough. Growly. “Need help, though. Can we talk outside?”

Jon’s eyes shifted, resting on Silke awhile before turning back to me. “Hey, I’d like to help you out, but you know I can’t leave the bar.”

I had to swallow a mouthful of saliva before I could talk to him again. “Okay. Here’s the edited highlights: I’m in shit, and I need money. And a place to stay, but I figure you’re still at the hostel, right?”

“What kind of shit?” Jon glanced at Silke again, but she kept on eyeballing the floor. Maybe she was itching to clean it or something. “And hey, no offence, but since when did you start hanging around with girls?”

“Silke’s just a, uh— Damn it, Jon, are you going to help us out or not?”

A couple more customers walked in the door, making straight for the bar. The guy was kind of lean, but the woman looked good enough to eat… Damn. I needed to get out of there. “Jon, is Timmi out back? Yeah? Just yell at him to cover for you, and get outside, okay? I’ll be waiting.”

I didn’t wait for an answer. I figured if I gave him any more time, he’d come up with an excuse. I just grabbed Silke by the hand and dragged her outside. We stood there, blinking in the sun for about a century until Jon came out, his jacket slung over his shoulder. “I’ve got five minutes, and that’s all. So you’d better talk fast.”

“Okay, here’s the short version.” I talked fast, but I thought even faster. “I got mixed up in some serious shit—safer if you don’t know what sort, believe me. Now these guys are after me. I need money for gas and food until I can get far enough away from here to stop running.”

“What about your, uh, friend?” Jon gestured at Silke.

Damn it, would he ever let that go? “Silke’s in trouble too. With the same guys. Now can you help me or not?”

“Silke?” He pronounced it “silky” and smiled at her. “Cool name.” His scent altered subtly.

Silke huddled closer to me, and Jon’s face fell. Then it darkened, and he took a step forward. “What happened to her?” he demanded like I’d been personally responsible.

Way to get your priorities screwed. “Nothing compared to what’s going to happen if we don’t get out of here, okay? So are you going to help us or not?”

Jon gave Silke another sad, angry look, then shook himself. “I can give you, uh…” He rummaged in his pants pockets, bringing out a crumpled twenty euro note and a handful of change. “Sorry, dude, but that’s all I got.” He held it out toward me.

I stared at him in disbelief. “Twenty euros? Just how far do you think that’s going to get us?” We’d come all this way, dragged him out of the bar, for twenty fucking euros? What the hell were we going to do now? I hadn’t realized just how much I’d been relying on Jon being able to bail us out of this mess. I snatched the money anyhow, seeing as it was twenty euros more than I’d had before.

Jon gave a sort of apologetic shrug. “Hey, it’ll buy a meal for the two of you.” His eyes narrowed as he gave Silke a look that said she’d damn well better be the one getting extra fries before the money ran out.

“There’s three of us,” I corrected him moodily. But on the plus side, one of us would be putting the other two seriously off their food. “And we need gas too.”

Jon chewed his bottom lip, frowning like he was constipated or something. “Look, I’ll tell you what. If you can hole up for a couple of days, I’ll ring my dad and get him to send me some cash, okay?”

I could have kissed him, but I guessed that would have weirded all three of us out, not to mention any passersby. Then I realized the flaw in the plan, and my spirits rode the crest of that roller coaster and plunged back into the depths. “Hole up where? They know about the hostel—I can’t go there.” Hell, maybe it wasn’t even safe for Jon to go back there. “It’s those guys you saw me with—but there’s more of them, and they’re trouble with a capital S, H, I… You get the picture.”

He chewed on his lip for a while longer. “Are they going to be after me for being a friend of yours?”

It was one hell of a time for him to suddenly grow a brain cell. “I don’t know,” I muttered, feeling guilty for bringing him into this. “Maybe. I guess they might want to talk to you.”

Jon nodded slowly. “For an easy-going guy, you’re bad news, you know that? Okay. Before I got here, I was in Florence, staying in a hostel in an old villa a little way out of town. It was pretty cool, you know? Still had fountains in the grounds—”

“Is there a point to this?” I interrupted. All this talk of Schreiber’s pack looking for us was starting to make me feel nervous about standing around in the open.

“Oh, yeah. I met this Turkish dude whose uncle owns a hostel in Kreuzberg. I figure he’d let us stay for a while.”

I sensed a catch. “If you knew about this place, how was it you ended up in Bahnhofstrasse?”

Jon’s gaze shifted past my left shoulder. “Uh, he said it’s pretty basic. But I figure it won’t matter for a night or two.”

If it was basic compared to Bahnhofstrasse, that probably meant bare floorboards and hot-and-cold-running rats. I shivered. Still, what was it they said about ports in a storm? “Okay. Can you take us there now?”

Jon cast a regretful eye back at Corvino’s and nodded. I guess neither of us would be welcome there again after he’d skipped out halfway through a shift. Ah, what the hell. The tips were lousy anyhow.

“Listen, I’d better warn you about the guy we’re with,” I began as we walked briskly back to the Porsche. I’d have kept a look out for werewolves, but Silke was doing just fine, jumping at every passerby. “He’s kind of a mess.”

“Uh, how? You mean he does drugs or something?”

“No.” Although come to think of it, he might want to start after what had happened to him. “It’s his face. It got kind of mangled.”

Jon chewed his lip some more as he loped along, like it was the on switch for his brain or something. “This is all part of the shit you’re in?”

If I said yes, would he refuse to help us? “Not exactly. This happened before.” Hell, it wasn’t even a lie.

“Oh. Okay, that’s cool.”

We rounded the corner to the side street where we’d left Christoph and the Porsche. I relaxed a little when I saw they were still there. “Jon, can you give us directions to this place, or do I need to Google it?” I asked, remembering I’d gotten my cell phone back with my backpack.

“I figure I can find it— Whoa!” Jon had just gotten his first look at the new, improved Christoph.

I opened up the passenger door of the Porsche. “Christoph, this is Jon. He knows someplace we can stay tonight, and he’s going to get us some money tomorrow.”

Christoph nodded.

Jon seemed to jump out of suspended animation. He held out a hand, a bit jerkily. “Nice to meet you.” Christoph shook it briefly, staring at him. “Uh, maybe you should sit in back so I can give Leon here directions?”

Maybe Christoph had chewed off his own tongue while he was waiting for us. He didn’t say a word, just got out the car. As the sun hit his face, he tensed, or maybe it was just his joints had stiffened up again. “I’ll drive.”

What the fuck? “I’m driving,” I said firmly.

He gave me a full-on stare. “It’s my car.”

“So? You’re a mess.” Damn. “You’re injured, okay?”

Jon stepped up, making
cool it
gestures. “Dude, does it matter? If he wants to drive, let him drive, okay? He looks like he can handle it.”

By the time I’d finished getting distracted by the voice of fucking reason there, Christoph had slid into the driver’s seat. I got in back and folded my arms. Silke smiled at me. Damn. Even she wasn’t scared of me anymore.

With Christoph driving, Jon got his good side. I wondered if it bothered Christoph that his scars were on full view to the public through the window. Then I wondered if it bothered the public. But if the freak show caused any accidents, I missed them. We drove at the usual snail-crawl city pace, stop-starting east toward Checkpoint Charlie. As we got into Kreuzberg, the number of kebab stands quadrupled and half the women sprouted headscarves. I figured we couldn’t have much farther to go.

I was right. We pulled into a narrow alley just off Kottbuser Damm and came to a halt behind an overflowing garbage bin. Nice. I wondered just how long we could leave the Porsche here before someone set fire to it. “Jon? You’d better go in ahead and make sure this guy you met wasn’t shitting you around.” Also, get them to say we could stay
before
they caught sight of Freddie Krueger’s less good-looking friend here.

He nodded and hopped out of the Porsche, disappearing through a door with three different colors of paint flaking off it. Silence fell with an audible thud. “Hey, Christoph, you got any bright ideas if this turns out to be a bust?” I asked just to break the tension. Somehow I thought if he’d had a plan B, we’d have been following it already.

“Schreiber has access to the addresses of everyone I know well enough to ask for help,” Christoph confirmed.

I didn’t waste my breath asking Silke. Hell, this was probably the first time she’d been out the house. Just before the atmosphere got so heavy you could choke on it, Jon reappeared with a grin on his face and a dark-skinned, black-haired guy beside him. “Guys, come on in,” Jon said, opening the car door. “Christoph, if you give Burak your keys, he’ll park the Porsche someplace safe.”

Christoph handed over the keys like he suspected it was the last he’d ever see of them or the Porsche. I figure Burak didn’t notice, what with all the trying not to stare and/or barf he was doing. He zoomed off around the corner as we stepped into the hostel.

The place was basic all right, but it was cleaner than my Grandma’s front porch. Bare light bulbs without a speck of dust, the floor covered with linoleum that had been worn thin by scrubbing, and walls as pockmarked as the face of the older Turkish guy who showed us to our rooms. There were two of them, each with twin, hard-looking beds and a tiny sink in the corner with a mirror fixed to the wall above it. I figured that’d mean Silke in one, with the rest of us drawing straws for the floor in the other, but Jon had other ideas. “Uh, Silke?” he said, drawing her aside when our host had muttered something in heavily accented German and waddled back down the stairs. “I told the guy you were my girlfriend. I hope that’s cool. I figured we ought to keep the room count to a minimum.”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him away from her. “Jon, you asshole, she’s fucking traumatized. You seriously think she wants to spend the night with a strange man who’s trying to get into her pants?”

“I’ll take the room with Silke,” Christoph announced, though how that was supposed to stop her from getting nightmares, I couldn’t begin to guess.

Maybe she had the same thought, as she touched Christoph’s arm gingerly, like it was wired up to the mains, and they had a low conversation in the corner. Jon’s German isn’t so hot compared to mine, and I could only make out about one word in ten, so I figured he was totally lost. When they came back, she walked straight up to Jon and looked him in the chest. “It’s okay. I trust you.”

She trusted him? She’d barely met him.

Women.

Thank God I’ve never wanted to date one.

Chapter Eight

Jon headed downstairs to catch up with his friend Burak and maybe charm us up a few cups of tea. Silke disappeared into one of the bedrooms to go do whatever it is girls do. Christoph headed for the bathroom—I guess he was well overdue for a shower.

I slung my backpack in a corner of the other room and started trying to wash Sven’s blood out of my T-shirt in the sink. Then I got busy trying not to puke at the sight and smell of all that rust-colored water going down the drain. Christoph came back when I was halfway through, making me startle guiltily and slop water on the floor. He’d gotten rid of the crusted-on blood and the grime of captivity, but the half-healed wounds on his face were still raw and ugly, the scar tissue that was forming raised and puckered. In a way it looked worse than it had before—with it all laid bare, there was no more kidding myself the damage probably wasn’t as bad as all that underneath the blood.

“You, uh, you want me to take a look at that?” I offered, my eyes fixed on his wounds, though I was damned if I knew what the hell I’d do about them if he accepted.

“No.” Christoph’s reply was curt, angry even. I guess he’d gotten a good look at himself in the bathroom mirror, poor bastard. I wanted to reach out to him, let him know he wasn’t alone. But my hands were all wet, and he was sending out strong
don’t touch me
vibes anyhow, so I just stayed at the sink and scrubbed at the bloodstains, feeling useless.