Free Guilt by Ferdinand von Schirach Page B

and had simply disappeared. Hassan had been looking for him for weeks. He stopped the car, took the hammer out of the glove compartment, and followed the man to the entrance of a building. Seizing him by the throat, he threw him against the wall. The shopping bags fell to the ground. The other man said he wanted to pay but it was taking a little time. He begged. Hassan wasn’t listening to him any more; he was staring at the little gift parcels lying in the hallway. He saw the printed Father Christmases and the golden gift ribbons and suddenly it all came together in his head: Jana and the baby, the heat of Lebanon, his father and his future wife. He realized he couldn’t change any of it now.
    It took far too long and a neighbor said later he’d heard the blows interspersed with the screams, a dull, wet sound like you hear at the butcher’s. When the police were eventually able to pull Hassan off the man’s upper body, his victim’s mouth was a mass of blood. Hassan had smashed eleven of his teeth with the hammer.
    Snow did fall that night. It was Christmas.

The Key
    The Russian spoke German with a heavy accent. The three of them were sitting on three red sofas in a café in Amsterdam. The Russian had been drinking vodka for hours while Frank and Atris drank beer. They couldn’t work out the Russian’s age, maybe he was fifty; his left eyelid drooped since his stroke, and his right hand was missing two fingers. He said he’d been a career soldier in the Red Army. “Chechnya and all that.” He held up his mutilated hand. He liked talking about the war. “Yeltsin is a woman, but Putin, Putin’s a man,” he said. It was a market economy now, everyone understood that. A market economy meant you could buy anything. A seat in parliament cost $3 million, a ministerial post $7 million. Everything had been better during the war with Chechnya, and more honorable; men had been men. He had respected the Chechens. He’d killed a lot of them. Their children would already be playing with Kalashnikovs; they were good fighters, tenacious. They should drink to them. A lot of alcohol was drunk that evening.
    They’d had to listen to the Russian for a long time. Finally he got around to the pills. Ukrainian chemists were going to make them; they’d lost their state jobs and were out of work. They’d had to privatize; their wives and children had to eat.The Russian had also offered Frank and Atris everything imaginable: machine guns, howitzers, grenades. He’d even had a photo of a tank in his wallet. He’d looked at it tenderly and passed it around. He said he could get viruses too, but that was a dirty business. They all nodded.
    Frank and Atris didn’t want weapons. They wanted the pills. The previous night they’d tried out the drugs on three girls they’d taken along from a nightclub. The girls had told them in a mixture of English and German that they were going to study history and politics. They had all driven to the hotel, where they drank and fooled around. Frank and Atris had given them the pills. Atris found himself thinking repeatedly about the things they did next. The red-haired one had lain down on the table in front of Frank and tipped the ice from the champagne bucket on her face. She’d screamed it was too hot for her and they were to hit her, but Frank didn’t want to. He had faced the table with his trousers down, smoking an enormous cigar, while his hips kept moving in the same rhythm and the girl’s legs rested on his chest, as he kept up a complicated monologue about the dissolution of Communism and its consequences for the drug trade. The cigar made it hard to understand him. Atris lay on the bed and watched him. After he’d forbidden the two girls between his legs to keep going, they’d fallen asleep, one of them with his big toe still in her mouth. Atris realized the pills would be perfect for Berlin.
    Now the Russian was talking about the drug-sniffing dogs. He knew everything about them.