Gaming with Attitudes E-Book

John Clark

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 564

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A Novel from Berlin With her ex-husband bankrupt and her drug designer Father making forays into the world of online gaming, Caro(-lina) contacts Berlin investigator Dani(-ela) to work out what the hell is going on, though when Maria from Miami comes to town, it really isn't clear who is going to prevail....... A Thriller that's an entertaining satire about contemporary Berlin, linking chacter and plot with the new technologies of a networked society.

Leseprobe

With her ex-husband bankrupt and her drug designer Father

making forays into the world of online gaming,

Caro(-lina) contacts Berlin investigator Dani(-ela)

to work out what the hell is going on, though when

Maria from Miami comes to town, it really isn't

clear who is going to prevail.......

John Clark, born 1954, is a British writer and film-maker based in Berlin, Germany, where he has lived for many years. His other works include, 'Urban Weather', 'Ciao Charlie' and 'The Moses Hoffman Trilogy - Lone Hunter, Animal Self and The Swoop'. He is married, with one son.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 1

Later, with all the lucid clarity of blue sky hindsight, among the puzzled few who could be bothered, people would ask why no-one with half a sense of responsibility had recognised what was going on before the situation went so wildly out of control in such a distressing, confusing and destructive fashion.

Why had none of the women recognised why they had been thrown together in such seemingly improbable circumstances?

Hindsight is treacherous, a remarkably confusing tool, with that uncomfortable tendency to make everything seem so glaringly obvious, but foresight is a rarer gift that no-one in this situation seems to have possessed.

But begin at the beginning, whenever that might have been, when nothing was as clear as would eventually seem to have been the case, which as Wittgenstein had ventured about the world was everything that was the case, and the whole situation was most obscure at best and blindingly opaque by any other measure.

More surprisingly, apart from a minor ripple of posts from young online gamers complaining about the crude way Berlin handles innovation and the hopelessly inadequate airports, the media didn't seem to notice that anything very unusual had happened at all.

Maybe it hadn't.

Maybe all this stuff was normal.

By now, it almost certainly is, assuming the implausible becomes normality.

For a whole host of reasons, that there is no particular reason to go into, in the beginning was indeed Berlin and the first to become involved was Caro.

Caro had been entangled in the situation for years before anything had surfaced. Some might say it had started when she was a kid, thanks to her irrepressible and determined Dad, the inimitable Bernhardt Hilberg, but no-one would deny that her husband Klaus had been the principle antagonist once she had grown up and they'd lived together, settling first in Schöneberg, until they'd found this five roomed apartment in Charlottenburg and finally got married.

She is tall, makes a slim silhouette watching from her balcony window on the second floor of the old Berlin apartment house as first there are ten, then twenty, then fifty or more noisy birds, all wheeling and cawing, swooping and swirling and diving against the background of a dull grey sky.

Caro had been wondering whether the window frames need painting, when she was distracted by the noise of the crows clashing with unsuccessful sounds of Chopin. Someone across the street is playing nocturnes very slowly on an old piano that has a twang.

Then a car drives past followed by a white van.

From another direction there's a radio tuned to Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, RBB, with the news. American fresh-water crabs are colonising the Tiergarten, says the reporter, and are click clacking their ways along the footpaths scaring the walkers and bemusing the dogs, before being captured by chefs from local Chinese restaurants, who intend them for the pot.

Maybe the car was an Audi, maybe not.

The van was anonymous.

Could have been a Toyota, as so many are.

The piano player has stopped, mercifully defeated.

Why does Caro keep getting messages saying she can share her contacts with this insurance salesman somebody someone. She doesn't share her contacts with anyone. The social networks have no way of knowing that she has sworn never to speak to that lying bastard again and no she does not want to be his friend, or a friend of his friends. They're creeps of the first order, every single one of them. She shudders, mildly repulsed.

Sometimes Caro, sometimes Lina, Carolina used to think of herself as an anthropologist, of sorts, but she isn't too certain any more. No-one had ever given her an office with her name and 'anthropologist' written on the door, but her study does have bookshelves that are full and a couple of filing cabinets stuffed with papers from old projects. There are degree certificates somewhere.

Apart from the books, the only colour in her study comes from the blue and red carpet, which is a modern copy of a jugendstyl design from 1900. Caro decides she'll repaint the white walls a relaxing apple green, then she notices the bunch of grey and black crows are making an even bigger fuss as they circle the apartment house across the road and supposes this is what crows do, though she hasn't seen anything like it before.

She's no kind of ornithologist, that's for sure. Sparrow, robin, blackbird, crow, seagull, buzzard, eagle, pretty polly, pieces of eight, parrot, penguin, peacock, roc and phoenix, that's about it, apart from chicken and duck, which she relates to from a culinary standpoint, like the slow roast goose at Christmas.

Having tried a search for information about crows, she starts to see adverts for corvine products when she's online and it's still only nine o'clock in the morning. Some-one has a company called Crow Investments in South Bend Indiana, some-one else is producing Crow Feather Gin in New Zealand and there's a new restaurant in Copenhagen threatening the world with crow pie. Somewhere people are being billed for this garbage to be sent to her laptop as targetted advertising. With a 'e', there are famous cricketers and an actor. A Museum in Manchester has included some sacred crow feathers in an exhibition, which Caro actually thinks might interest her.

She had never done the South Sea Island raw, cooked shaman stuff usually required of anthropologists, nor had she lived in Papua New Guinea, or the Amazonian rainforests, but she's networked and charmed her way into the circle of people who think of themselves as someone or something in the Berlin business community, people who in her eyes are a genuinely primitive society, backward, underdeveloped and in a self-serving sense banal as well as greedy, a community of insiders, outsiders and backsliders.

Men do like to believe what women tell them, so Caro is quite successful in her latest role as an anthropo-business advisor, a job title she claims to have invented for her own purposes.

Before turning to entrepreneurial advice as a way of making a living, Caro had managed a couple of businesses. For a while she'd bought and sold apartments with her former husband Klaus then she decided it was bad for their relationship, so she'd jumped ship and went on to advise other people about Berlin property.

The divorce had been due to happen anyway. It didn't take hindsight to recognise that it was inevitable. People had been expecting them to split up long before.

She and Klaus had been together for 23 years, half of the time married. She still lives in the apartment they shared, which is full of stuff they'd bought together. Should she have been more ruthless and thrown things away, even though she'd chosen it? The place is her home, despite his money having paid for most of it.

Is it obligatory to live a spartan existence after a divorce?

Hell no.

Neither of them had ever subscribed to anything like that.

Among her newer clients, her favourites are the developers at 'Network Check', who'd given her a pile of shares for helping them build some of her ideas into their artificial intelligence system, though she knows nothing at all about programming, or computing. Mainly, it just seemed like marketing, identifying new groups of customers and consumers, but they told her she'd helped them with their analog. Tropes, koans, agents of this and subjects of that, or the other. Terminology from ritual, or poetics degrades into algorithmic jargon; it can go either way, or both at the same time, depending on the breaks.

The young developers do the rhetoric without the analysis and catch on fast, adapting terminology as business patter, like market stall barrowboys crying their wares with phrases from theoretical physics. In their mouths, the subtlety of a Buddhist koan became high sounding synonyms for platitude and cliché. Anything you can express statistically is potentially sucked in.

The killer concept she devised for them became known as promantics, a marketing strategy to identify the key motifs and themes for promotional work that plays on personalised romantic associations. You can admit to going weak at the knees without being flagged up as a potential patient in orthopaedics. Going a stage further than place marketing to concentrate on the fantasies of group psychology in time and place, according to the advertising crap, promantics promises individual euphoria and the rapture of deeply personalised sentimental passions.

It reminds her of her Dad and his dope.

He does euphoria on demand.

She won't complain about their generosity. That would seem churlish, ungrateful. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, her Dad had always insisted. The little heap of shares are now worth over half a million and look set to carry on rising.

Then Frau Hedwig Trautmann calls and asks for an appointment. Caro confirms she is fully booked for the foreseeable future and unfortunately has no time to spare.

“Fuck my knee,” says the woman, "Fick mich am knee".

She'll phone again tomorrow at nine fifteen, as she does every day.

Caro is tidying the clutter of papers on her desk when she realises that more and more birds are joining the crowd and soon there are at least a hundred, flapping, circling and stalking the rooftop opposite, loud and aggressive, aggrieved by something she cannot ascertain.

There's something amiss, but what?

Then she sees the predator take flight, the floppy corpse of a dead crow in its talons. The mass of crows harry and mob the buzzard until it drops the cadavre, which falls with a dull thud and a splash of fresh blood onto the pavement.

They caw a rallying cry of protest.

Then they chase.

The buzzard makes its escape and flies off into the distance.

Predator and prey were clear enough to recognise, but what were the flock of crows up to? Which of them were making the decisions, pushing and cajoling, leading them on as a group?

Someone has tethered three brightly coloured kites to fly over the roof, but that hadn't bothered the crows, so Caro paid no more attention to them than she does to the jingle jangle ring tones on other people's mobile phones.

Caro found it impossible to tell how individual behaviour steered the collective.

Which were leading and which were following?

Which of them were setting the pace, those leading the pack to flap and bluster at the buzzard, or those that stood cawing and bowing their aggression from the ridge of the pantiled roof?

A bird the size of a crow is normally considered to be too large to fall prey to a buzzard. Whether wildlife, or people, it doesn't seem to matter, there are hunters who seek out prey that are simply a size too big for them. Berlin is prone to this kind of thing, 'typische Berlin', the throwaway response. Some folk are too big to hunt, then one day, hoppla!, they're prey, which is what happened to Caro's ex-husband, 'dear old Klaus'. Despite the ruthless side of business, he was kind, considerate and gentle, but it hadn't helped at all when the wolves were at the door.

She's due to pick Klaus up from the airport at Tegel, but first she needs coffee, then she'll change.

She'll wear greys and black, like the crows.

A bright red smudge of lipstick is intended as a 'don't mess me about' warning that she's feeling fierce and singularly determined, deeply angry with the man and the games he's played and lost.

A sorry tale that left her sad.

As she leaves her apartment, Caro overhears the voice of an old man. “What we're facing now is like the situation in 1932.” He was talking to someone she recognised, Frank something-somebody, a lawyer who has his office around the corner.

The old man is talking about the forthcoming elections. Maybe he's right, Caro allowed. He's upset. Klaus would have agreed with him. She knows that.

The lawyer does his best to mollify his concerns. “We aren't Nazi's, you know, not in the AfD, we are sincere about the Alternatives für Deutschland.”

They must have been walking towards one another as they met, now they're uneasy, facing one another on the pavement, then moving aside as Caro leaves the house. She hopes they aren't going to start fighting.

“Frank, just because you're sincere, it doesn't mean you're not a fascist bastard. I've known you since you were a kid. You worry me. It wouldn't matter what you belong to, you're trouble. Your father was the same and his father was a fucking disgrace who was lucky to die when he did, before they invented war crimes trials.”

“Fuck you too, Sacha,” said the Frank to the old man and stalked away with a mutter on his lips, “Scheiss kommunist.”

Caro turned to look at the old man.

“The grandfather was a grade one Nazi, that one, and so is he, even if he won't admit it to himself,” said the old man emphatically, looking Caro direct in the eye.

“What happened to the grandfather?”

“A bomb got him, served him right.” The old man laughs, then justifies himself. “He taught round ups and deportations at the Gestapo training centre on the Schloßstrasse, you know, where the Berggruen Museum is now. He'd been giving lessons, officer training, how to be a war criminal, HA! A piece of shit, well paid too, highly praised and generously rewarded. The man was a popular psychopath, as genial a war criminal as he was cruel. They lived on the Kaiserdamm, not far from Hermann Goering's old place, where the filling station is now, the up the road from Alfred Döblin's house. His wife's custom was sought after among the local shopkeepers. You can imagine why. They had extra ration coupons too, which could have been another explanation for their eagerness. She was polite, if arrogant, so I'm told, a quietly spoken woman and a grade A anti-semite. Autumn 1944, when they got him in that air raid. On his way home from giving evening classes to officers on leave. He'd been in France, of course, in Lyons with Klaus Barbie and in Poland, 'not so far from Cracow'. It was a good thing they got him when they did in my opinion. I went to school with the younger son, Rudolf, 'Dolph', like Adolf. He was a sadistic bastard too. It's what they call continuity.”

“I have to get moving, or I'll be late,” said Caro as she started to walk to the car and shrug off the attention of this nearly blind old seer.

“Na ja, just you remember what I told you.”

“I will, I promise.” She wants to get to the car.

“Just one more thing.” “What's that?”

“Remember, it is incredibly easy to kill people, and that means it's also incredibly easy to get killed, if that's what someone has decided. If I can find out who you are, then so can anyone else who wants to look.”

He makes it sound like a warning, not too far removed from a threat.

Had he meant it that way? Perhaps not. She turns away from the old man and whispers a hurried goodbye.

“I have to go.”

“You be careful, we have troubles to spare around here. Maybe I'll see you in the 'Esel' tonight for a shit of gold and a beer. Auf wedersehen.”

He's unnerved her.

She's never seen him in the 'Gold-Esel', the 'Golden Ass' before, but she doesn't drink there often and she certainly won't be there that evening. Prophesying doom and disaster is a kind of hobby among Berliners, but some days it touches a nerve and this is one of them.

She's frustrated to have been delayed starting out for the airport, but there isn't a lot of traffic, so once she's picked up some flowers, she's there in less than fifteen minutes and parks the car within the inner ring of the polygonal Tegel terminal.

Everything is quiet.

She wants to get things over with.

Her errand really is a thankless task.

At least the Terminals are convenient.

A crowd of youngsters arriving Berlin for a games convention are clustered near the arrivals board, but apart from them, there aren't any crowds or queues at all.

The Tegel Airport has a wonderfully efficient design from the traveller's point of view. It's due to be closed. There are not enough shops there to sate the modern airport business model of security checks and futile delay, entrapping passengers as paying captives in shopping malls filled with over priced junk.

Besides the question of resurgent right wing local politicians, Caro has other preoccupations, mainly connected to Klaus.

The gambit that made Klaus rich was simple. Find some pleasant slightly run down apartment building, buy it up via a friendly Danish investment fund then lean on the sitting tenants until they finally realise that resistance is futile and chose to accept the compensation on offer and move out. The moment he had control, he sold on. Klaus was an everyday property shark. Lots of them about.

His argument was that there's far too much money in the world and a lot of it needs throwing away, which is what investors and the funds are up to in Berlin. Keynes made a similar point about the benefit of digging unneeded holes to ensure money stayed in circulation. It costs too much to leave cash in the bank. Investors are desperately trying to dispose of money with no-where else to go, injecting the city with the virulent disease of low cost finance and burgeoning housing costs under the dubious name of gentrification. Anything goes, so long as it's not yet illegal and there's the paperwork to go with it, so Klaus had volunteered to help.

They threw. He pocketed. The investment managers anticipate huge profits and swiftly sell everything on. It was beautiful. It was even legal. The tax people seemed happy.

Politicians flocked to sing his praises. Here at last was the new dynamic Berlin they'd been romanticising about for years.

You have to laugh.

Klaus' fetish was finance and he played by the first law of bubbles, get in early, pump like hell, then get out fast and look on, incredibly relaxed as other people twitch with panic when they recognise they've been well and truly fucked over.

He didn't even need to use his own money.

His investors stood in line. And the Next!!!

Everyone Klaus met had been a potential target for his ploys, rich, poor, frail, or smug, it mattered not one jot. Eventually even the know-all foreign investors would look around, puzzled and wonder where their money had gone.

But business is business, so who cares? It's a game, or rather it isn't, but it is open to being gamed according to the jargon that no-one really believes about their over simplified versions of events in the business world. The economists will tell you how their outcomes come replete with self-fulfilling calculations that look good whichever way you choose.

When his house of cards collapsed Caro felt as embarrassed on Klaus' behalf as she did over her own tangential role in his affairs and the need for as much creditor evasion as humanly possible in a city of only three million people.

Spartan lifestyle, humble pie, stay away from the crowds, a tedious, but symbolic necessity.

After ten good years, they'd finally caught Klaus twiddling the numbers to flatter his personal bank balance and that was endgame, not even the chance of a final spin of the market roulette wheel. It had been too late for a rescue from the moment the accountant uttered the word 'insolvent'. With hindsight his downfall was seen to be inevitable.

Maybe Klaus resembled the city more closely than anyone but he himself had recognised. He was totally discredited, a laughing stock. His opinions counted for less than little.

Forty three years old and he'd never even got round to owning a football club, or building a folly. Yet he had creditors on every continent except Antarctica.

The judge had said that Klaus was morally and ethically bankrupt.

Secretly, he agreed.

The bankers had simply said he was bankrupt, 'pleite' was their word, insolvent, broke.

So were they, he'd told himself bitterly, “The bastards”.

The investors let it be known he was toast. Fair weather friends, he'd shrugged. They'd been happy enough to bank the profits of his earlier successes.

To Caro's profound discomfort, 'Dear old Klaus' became a source of entertainment, the subject of gossip on every Charlottenburg street and a variety of shady corners, some of them very shady indeed.

Whatever else he may have been, Klaus was neither Keyser, nor Söze, not a Moriaty, or even a Harry Lime. He would never have hurt anyone physically. He had never been malicious, on that much, everyone agreed. Klaus wanted to be nice to everyone and, like him, help themselves towards a happier future.

The insolvency process seemed so unfair. Even the insolvency people had told Caro that much. Everyone liked Klaus. Eventually, he'd taken himself off to Greece, leaving Caro angry and alone to face the people who ignored the fact that they were divorced and assumed she'd shared in the spoils. He sold the Merc in Austria and bought a modest house on a Peloponnesian mountain side with the last of his resources. Caro was still angry and alone, without it looking as though things were about to change.

Klaus planted lettuce, carrots and cannabis, drank Becks from the bottle and supermarket wine, charmed the English lady tourists, then got caught out a second time in a wave of collapsing property values as another round of the financial crisis refused to go away.

Then a Balkan Bank had yanked on his last paltry line of credit till it snapped.

And now he was dead.

Falling from the Parthenon into the Theatre of Dionysis was a spectacular, technically demanding farewell, involving an improvised paraglider to fly over the ancient stone stage, but Klaus had managed it with panache, floating gentle over the arcs of seating to slip out of the safety harness and land in a heap of splashing blood and crunching bone to the applause of a group of bekilted Scottish tourists who assumed the deed was a gag put on for their benefit.

The body had been rushed away to the morgue as fast as possible. The city authorities don't like corpses littering major tourist attractions. He was identified by the wad of 23 credit cards in his wallet and a yellow jacketed copy of Sophocles' 'Theban Plays' in a dual language Ancient Greek and German edition, which was found in his pocket. His name had been scrawled on the back cover almost thirty years earlier. Klaus had signed that as a gangly fifteen year old condemned to classics.

Thus for everyone who knew him, the death of Klaus was forever linked to the birth of tragedy.

When she heard the news, Caro was left speechless and quite frankly, to begin with she didn't believe a word. Then, report by report, on radio, on the net, on tv, then in the press, she realised it must be true and prepared herself to begin from the beginning once again.

She had been flown out to identify the body and now she's come to the airport for the ashes. By this time, Caro is not in the best of moods, what with crows, cantankerous old men and neo-Nazi's in denial. At least it has arrived as the undertaker had promised and she takes possession of the gritty grey dust. He'd been a part of her life for such a long time, it's difficult to believe these ashes are all that is left. They just don't feel authentic. They aren't at all like Klaus. They're more like that organic fertiliser you use for roses. Maybe she should talk to one of the local potters about having them ground up to make bone china. There should be sufficient for a paperweight, or two to remember him by.

He'd done the deed and succeeded, which is why there is a modest crowd of fourteen or fifteen, maybe twenty people gathered around the small square of a modern open grave in the old cemetery in Schöneberg, where the Brothers Grimm, a broad spectrum of Berlin's bigwigs and a tragic list of Aids victims are buried in the shade of four hundred trees. The mourners wear black, or grey and so do the birds. Were these those same crows who'd chased the predator and is there a buzzard among them who'd held Klaus in his claws, or are they just a flock of scruffy city pigeons fluttering about and pecking in the Brandenburg sand?

The mourners mumble among themselves. The birds twitter and caw. The S-bahn rattles past. The rain has stopped.

There's a gentle breeze and a nightingale sings in the sunshine.

Caro had driven with the remains direct from the airport and had a rush to get the paperwork finished in time for the burial. The Greek death certificate had to be translated and a fistful of forms needed to be filled out before she was allowed to take possession of the 'human remains'. Talk about 'last minute'. The man really looked like being late for his own funeral, but now he's there and his ashes will vibrate and gradually settle to the reassuring rumble of cream and red S-bahn trains passing on their way between Wannsee and Oranienburg, but it doesn't matter, does it?

Ashes are ashes, dust is dust, what's over is over and Klaus is certainly that, laid to rest in a green and gold Grecian urn.

Some of the mourners are friends and former colleagues, three are actors and among the others are folk who wished they'd gotten their revenge in first. Caro has shaken hands, avoided smiling, embraced women she never liked and pecked kisses with menfolk she detests. She is as stricken as anyone can be without actually weeping and wailing, bemoaning her fate.

There had been a couple of reports on local radio that morning about 'the Icarus of Berlin finance', and the 'Superman who fell to earth', but there had been a lot more about football and a competition for concert tickets. Ten tickets for Barenboim playing Boulez, nice prize.

Lukas Winkler looks Caro in the eye and shrugs, then walks away. He'd known Klaus longer than anyone and they always described one another as friends, though Lukas is a cop, a Kriminale Kommissar, an Inspector who calls and drinks till four o'clock in the morning, whether he's on duty, or not.

The graveyard is overwhelmingly green in summer, compared to Berlin's skull grey winter gloom, the time of year when most Berliners imagine they will die. The mourners pay their respects to Caro and try to express some level of commiseration, but she doesn't care what any of them think and they know it. Katherina Jana Jonson, Fr. von Braun, Rudolf Hanneman, Uwe and Ulrike, Elfie Malzenberger, Dan Daenger, 'Fat' Pete Branitz, Senta Quist, Peter-Paul Prinz, Alex 'Sasha' Schmidt and the rest all stood silently round the hole in the ground and tried to avoid each others' gaze.

He'd made them all money. He'd made some of them laugh and some of them cry. Even Marie-Hélène keeps her mouth shut, which is wise on her part.

Detlev and Franz look as if they're about to start an a cappella duet, but noting Caro's disapproving frown, they desist and Klaus' ashes are spared the indignity of facing the final curtain to the sound of would-be crooners doing a wobbly Frank Sinatra imitation. They look like well scrubbed schoolboys with matching beards and as a sign of respect, they're wearing their very best Rolex' and made to measure suits from Biskeys, the gentlemen's tailer of Goethestrasse.

Despite the divorce, Caro has been cast in the role of grieving widow. Protean charcoal Chanel jacket, a chic hat, a modest veil, sunglasses and ear rings, all black 'Natalie Portman' dramatic. She catches the eye and invites the shedding of a tear. A widow with allure, and skinny enough to bring it off with panache.

The supporting cast included her Dad, Bernhardt, who had always rather enjoyed Klaus' improptu roguish air of urban piracy, the inimitable off-key degenerate charm. He'd turned up at the last minute and stood loyally next to Caro as the ceremony progressed, then ostentatiously paid the undertaker's bill in cash, which wasn't necessary, but was noticed and helped sustain the fiction that Caro was facing hard times and that Klaus might have died leaving her impoverished.

The whole affair is unconvincing, the mourners are respectful, but no-one, Caro included, actually seemed sad, resigned maybe, disappointed, angry some of them, but sad, no, not actually sadness.

A black clad pastor spoke, proposed they pray, muttered rapidly and gave the impression of being completely uninterested. Once he'd completed his prayers, the po-faced Protestant simply turned on his heels and walked away as though he too had secrets he urgently had to hide, or perhaps he just needed to take a leak.

“Ooh, a nihilist, deep stuff. Theologically, I believe that was an expression of what is called Doubt, with a capital 'D',” Dan Daenger said to Alex Schmidt with whispered sincerity and Alex gave an atheist chuckle, “Oi, you lot, prepare to meet thy doom!”

“Maybe he bought one of Klaus' flats.”

“God help us, one and all,” added Dan with a beatific smile for the whole assembly. He had grown up in catholic Bavaria and equated Christianity with toothache and child abuse.

Klaus' brother Erik arrived late and rushed off as soon as his trowel of sandy earth fell silently into the grave. He'd given Caro a nod of recognition and seemed to be crying. No-one else was, unless there'd been a crocodile tear or two, she'd failed to notice.

By that time, the online edition of the gutter press BZ were on the story, brief and to the point. “Splat!” (two letters shorter than the German 'Platsch!') was their good natured headline and a vignette of the carnage replete with kilted celts, was superimposed over a photo of Klaus arriving at court for his trial, when they'd called him the 'once upon a time man'. They even ran a 72-word story about Caro, the girl who got away (and took the money with her?). A picture taken that morning showed her scowling at the camera as she had been putting the urn in her car at the airport.

She did look grim.

Once the simple funeral was over, most of the mourners left for the Akademie der Kunst at PariserPlatz near the Brandenburg Gate to revive their spirits and enjoy the opening of an exhibition of paintings in the academy gallery by another of their friends, who was happily still in the land of the living, prefers bright colours and likes to drink a lot, which cheered everyone up. Even Lukas Winkler decided that a good cop needs to keep up with the latest trends in art and culture and headed after them in the hope of a decent glass of white, some gossip and a snack of wild boar knackerwurst.

The S-bahn connection got the whole crowd there directly in ten minutes, super convenient, couldn't be better. Most Berlin artists are more accomplished at drugs and drinking than art, which is why they're stuck in Berlin. So are the politicians, which is why they're stuck in city politics and fail to make it on the national scene. 'Bloody Mary', the recently appointed Senator for Finance will be there, as will the Staatsekretar for Planning, Michaela Brandt. She'd skipped the graveyard bit to avoid the media quips about digging her own grave. The other Airport, the infamous brand new BER, still hasn't been completed and she is carrying the political responsibility for twenty years of bungling. Thankfully, it has never been implied that Klaus had anything to do with that.

No-one suggested Caro should join them for the opening. Naturally, Klaus had been on the guest list, but the invitation still lay on his desk, unopened. An ill-informed marketing assistant from hospitality marked him down as a no show, which wasn't actually wrong, just disrespectful. Klaus had given them something to talk about and good reason to conjure up a thirst to celebrate their own survival, so it was expected to be quite a party.

Berlin is getting on without him, and so is Greece.

Caro would like to get over him too. He'd been a big part of her life since her first year as a student at the Free University in Dahlem and much as she once adored him, he'd eventually become an encumbrance.

Once the last of the mourners had sloped off to the Academy Gallery, Caro and her father were left alone, with only the gravediggers patiently waiting for them to leave, so they could tidy up the plot and dig another small hole to prepare for the following day's interment.

Then that was that. It hadn't taken very long at all.

In fact, the whole business of putting a pot of ashes in a hole in the ground had been surprisingly perfunctory, or that was how it seemed to Caro, who felt she should have been more moved than she actually was.

In the days when people had been buried in coffins, the holes in the ground were much bigger and the thought of a recently functional body being laid forever in the box, made the whole business that much much more macabre. She suspects the gravediggers feel that way too, when all there is to bury is a pot of ash and bone.

When they finally leave the graveyard, Caro feels disorientated, but as much as anything, she simply felt relieved it was all over and wanted to go home and get some sleep.

By late afternoon, after they'd been to a meeting with Klaus' lawyer, Caro's Father drove her away from Berlin and the two of them picked up a holiday flight to Cuba from the airport at Leipzig. Caro sleeps on the plane under the watchful gaze of her Dad and a few short hours later they settle into the five star luxury of a shore-side bungalow in the Caribbean, where friendly waiters catered to their every whim.

Bernhardt can work anywhere, as long as he can get online, but Caro was quietly moved that he showed how much he cared by looking after her this way. They swam together, drank a lot, enjoyed good food and reminisced. He told her about the day he met Castro on four different occasions and all Fidel had said was 'You again, you seem to get about.'

He did.

He still does.

He cheers her up.

Ten days after the funeral, apart from the bit about the missing millions, it was almost as though Klaus had never existed.

Almost?

More, or less.

Well, maybe,

.....sort of.

The people at 'Network Check' are pretty thorough and reported nothing unusual, no untoward viruses, serious hacks, latent crisis, or personal threats, so Bernhardt and Caro could sleep easily and they did, soothed by the gentle sounds of waves breaking on the nearby beach.

With thirty eight million registered users and more every day, 'Network Check' are getting better and better all the time. Their systems will soon reach a level entitling them to claim 'online dependability' and the big shift from data mining to personalised social management can begin. People are beginning to wonder whether a take-over might be in the offing. The shares are gaining value, though Caro hasn't checked their price.

Thanks to a minor indiscretion over lunch, her bank manager has mentioned just how many shares she owns and how much wealthier Caro is than she had been just a few weeks earlier, a little nugget of news that is gossiped from one side of Berlin to the other in less than an hour. The bank manager has always found launching new rumours one of the most satisfying aspects of her job. Sometimes they're true, but more often than not, they simply reflect the way she thinks things ought to be and sometimes they're merely mischief-making. She's never been threatened with the sack, or even warned off rumour mongering by her bosses. They find it convenient to make use of her loose tongue, when they want things said but don't want to risk being the source of a quote. Had she known, Caro wouldn't have been surprised.

She'd heard a lot of the woman's more fanciful notions over the years and learned to ignore most of what she said.

People feel irritated by the rumours of Caro's unexpected prosperity, and in bars and offices across the city, eyebrows are being raised in critical surprise, rather than congratulation.

What else might Caro have managed to get away with, while Klaus was busy arranging to kill himself in Greece? The prank with the hang-glider had left them all looking like fools.

Chapter 2

“So what was that all about?” Georg (pronounced 'gay-org' in the German manner) asked, when his girlfriend Dani finished what had been a twenty minute phone call, in which she'd done almost all the listening.

He refilled her glass without being prompted. Georg is commendably pragmatic. He was still sprawled across the bed, while she sat propping herself up against the pillows, as he successfully refilled their glasses without a drop being spilled.

“That was Caro, remember her? The woman who was married to Klaus,” replied Dani with a sigh of resignation. “She's back in Berlin.”

“Don't get involved, whatever it is she's up to. Klaus was a second rate crook and the chances are a thousand to one that she is too. It's late, come back to bed.”

Dani and he don't always agree, but this time, she suspects he might be right. His view of the world is simpler and more benign than hers. He's a bedroom boyfriend, a nice guy and a good fuck, not a partner, not a potential husband.

Georg doesn't get in the way. The wine buyer for a chain of supermarkets, he only gets to Berlin two or three times a year, which from Dani's perspective is quite enough to be going on with.

She also has other beaux in tow.

He'll be off to Argentina in a few days time to sample the latest harvest that's ready for bottling.

Another decade of sipping and slurping samples of cheap red will see Georg's liver expand like a rotting beetroot, then implode from cirrhosis, so she doesn't see him as part of her long term future, or indeed his own. He could be right about Caro though. Her reputation has preceded her, all those scandals with Klaus.

Dani has no great expectations.

People say old Klaus left Caro next to nothing when the businesses went down, so by now, she's probably hard up, unless she cashes in her shares from 'Network Check'. Is she being unfair? Not at all. At least half Dani's clients have problems paying their bills. About one in five don't even bother to try.

She and Caro have already run into each other once or twice without getting to know one another, a brief introduction ages ago in the company of other people at a theatre, then another (Oh hello, smile.. smile.. I suppose we must have met somewhere, haven't we?...smile...smile....turn away.. nothing ventured.. who the hell was that) at a party a couple of years ago. Based on this 'half know' minimal interaction, they seem unlikely to become great friends. Nothing had attracted either woman to the other.

Now comes this late-night phone call and the suggestion they meet. Given a choice, Dani would turn the job down, but like every other freelance in Europe, she can't afford to say no. There is income tax to be paid from the previous tax year and she doesn't want to dip into her savings. There's going to be trouble.

It feels inevitable.

A kind of strangeness is creeping into the way of things in Berlin. It had begun with phrases seeping into everyday chatter that would have been totally unacceptable only a few years earlier. Then came racist attacks on the streets, the terrorist murders at the Christmas market and the nasty Party are racking up the tension as they try to win votes with the age old 'us and them' tactics of intolerance.

Georg agrees with Dani that the city is losing its charm.

Whatever, Dani had agreed to be at a bar known as 'Soph-Am', near StuttgarterPlatz, the following morning at eleven, so being a reliable kind of person, she will be there.

Daniela Mendel, known to some as 'Dani', less often to others as 'Ela', is slender and fit. A year or two younger than Caro, she's turning forty. She likes flying and is fond of dogs, preferably large hairy dogs like Georg. She can growl with conviction and sometimes she howls.

Contrary to expectations, Dani's bite is worse than her bark. There's a new nine millimetre semi-automatic in her shoulder bag.

She does running. She trains hard. She would make a great valkyrie.

Things aren't quite getting out of hand, but it's getting uncomfortably close. It isn't Georg's fault. Nothing is ever Georg's fault, he's too amiable for that, too close to turning fifty.

Anyway, he'd already left for Frankfurt by the time she'd woken up. She'd slept soundly.

Awoken.

Morning.

Nothing exceptional.

Dozens of bottles of wine in the kitchen, which is nice of him.

At least there isn't going to be a third world war in the next couple of days, not like the one she'd dreamt about during the night, which had all been over in a flash. The Hungarians had been to blame, but it hadn't made any difference. The news from Ukraine is still dire. Trump is Trump. Macron is diminishing. People in a dozen countries are being squeezed and bombed and starved thanks to their governments, rebels and their big power sponsors. Thanks to Trump's vulgarity no-one says twerk any more.

Dani is feeling deflated and gloomy.

Not that she's in a bad mood exactly, just a bit tetchy.

Events are askew. Turkey is a mess. North Korea is a mess. Venezuela is a mess. They needn't be, need they?

It could get worse.

Catalonia comes to mind. Myanmar.

According to DeutschlandRadio there will be a debate in the Bundestag in the afternoon. A minister might resign, but no-one cares which one. An actor is in a play, so is an actress, says the radio reporter. There were people in the audience at the theatre. A director has completed a film. Police are expecting a riot, somewhere or other. Footballers are being paid a lot of money. What else is new?

According to a survey, the Greek economy will soon be booming. According to another survey, Greece is no longer in recession.

According to a third survey, Greek society is on the point of disintegration and poverty is threatening the well-being of millions.

Dani wonders which of them is more likely to be right.

The IMF disagree with one of the surveys.

For the moment there's no government, just Merkel. 'To Merkel' has officially been recognised as a verb, without anyone knowing what it stands for. There will have to be a new election, eventually. They might even have achieved something innovative, the 'do nothing Parliament' when people were elected and took their places in the Bundestag, but never actually met to make decisions, before another set of elections were called. Scientists claim there could be an earthquake in a far off land and in Baden-Baden there might be some sunshine later in the afternoon, though according to the weather forecasters there's a real possibility it might rain a bit too.

There is laughter in the dark and a mystery is coming to television: 'Black Zero - Curse or Blessing', 'Schwarze Null - Fluch oder Segen', sounds exciting, but is actually a studio discussion about the German tendency to hoard rather than use government money to pay for useful things like schools and roads. Once upon a time there was a Minister of Finance called Schäuble, who was indestructible.

Three large kites are flying from the roof of the house opposite. One is red, one is green and the other deep blue and purple. She wonders if they are Mongolian.

There's a turqoise Audi parked nearby, a study in bad taste.

Dani does a bit of yoga, then stares out of the window for ten minutes, wondering what the kites are for. They're pretty though.

Three cups of coffee and a hairwash later, the 'bio' egg she cooks for breakfast is too small to eat from an eggcup, so she ends up squidging it on toast, which is extremely annoying. The yolk is anaemically pale. Why on earth should modern eggs have become too small to fit into traditional eggcups? Don't the chickens get any proper dinners?

Breakfast over with.

The egg had tasted surprisingly good.

She'd been hungry.

She recognised the face in the mirror successfully. It is her own.

She's in no hurry.

A thorough wash is a pleasure. Her lips are slowly lipsticked.

An eyebrow is given a pluck, but right at the last moment she succumbs to an unusual desire to wash her ears with old fashioned soap and hot water. Super clean ears are one of life's very personal minor pleasures, she tells herself. The lipstick will need re-doing once she's dried her face.

When all that's completed, Dani doesn't look any different, but she does feel better.

She isn't going to try and compete with her client's sense of fashion. Never compete with a client. Caro is known to be chic, decisively chic, incisively chic, intensely chic, assertively chic, whereas Dani has become pragmatic about her looks.

She looks into the bathroom mirror again and decides she looks no worse than yesterday, then quickly smooths in some face cream, on the assumption it won't do any harm to repress a few wrinkles and she finalises the lipstick. A dark green top, moss green it's called, black leather biker's jacket and jeans, her new leather shoulder bag, saddle brown. After years of looking, she's finally found a bag that can deal with all the stuff she needs to carry and not just some of it. The little gun weighs no more than the reserve battery for her tablet, but the bag has a well made holster pocket she can open quickly if she's in a hurry to brandish the weapon and shoot. And with her tablet safely stowed inside its leather and kevlar cover, the bag is effectively bullet proof. She can use it as a shield, assuming a shield might be necessary.

Another glance in the mirror.

She will do.

She's ready to go.

Dani is a punctual person.

She'll be at the rendezvous ten minutes before they're due to meet. Yet another Thursday, sunny, warm, late summer, maybe a hint of rain. Soon it will be October.

She hums the September song.

May seems a long long time ago, surabaya Johnny; then Joe ... a red bandana, plays a …....mean piana..... down in Mexico. She can't remember all the words, but mimes and sways to the rhythm of the 'The Coasters' and felt it was worth the listen. It's a new genre 'Tex-Mex-Brecht', 'a dance I've never seen before', about as multiculturally politically correct as you'll get, despite being just a little bit ever so sexist.

Dani suspects Caro will be one of those women who judge people by their sense of fashion, which is something she despises. Actually, she suspects this Caro is judgemental in general and that in the negative sense. She has a reputation for being sharp tongued and cynical, which isn't very promising. A sign of the times, though taking the business with her husband into consideration and bearing in mind the way the media went for them both, she has more reason than most to be touchy. Dani hesitates about going to the meeting, but then decides to turn up after all. Don't diss your day-job.

Humming a tune she can't remember the words to, Dani decides she looks acceptable and is at least pleased about the effect of the shoulder bag. Her humming isn't very musical. The way she's feeling, she wouldn't mind a little drizzle. There's nothing wrong with light rain on a warm day.

Summer rain might sound like a melancholic French chanson – love, regrets, men called Yves. Autumnal drizzle doesn't, but it still involves cool drops of mildly polluted water and doesn't do anything for your hair.

Maybe she should head for Paris.

The dinners are usually better than Berlin, even if the romance can be a bit of a let-down.

Soon it will be time to go.

All she has to do is walk downstairs, cross the street and in five minutes a big creamy yellow double-decker bus will arrive on time and stop at the bus-stop.

She can be confident of that.

The drivers do their best to be gruff and rude, but they're also dependable. In Berlin the buses are always on time. Once it sets off, the bus will take her to within a couple of minutes walk of the 'Soph-Am' and that's her journey to work.

Twelve minutes, door to door, including the wait and the walk. There's no point having a car in Berlin and you get wet riding bikes, so on most days the bus is a good option.

This isn't one of them.

She got as far as the bus-stop.

She has her travel pass.

It's valid.

As a distraction she noticed two crows playing with a chestnut, a simple pleasure, both for her and the birds. Crows have been people watching and people have been crow watching for tens of thousands of years and for their part, crows do seem to know they're entertaining. They're very aware of being watched. She took another look up at the three kites, then she heard the bus come around the corner.

Then things got worse, considerably, catastrophically worse.

There was a poignant moment of incipient disaster, as everyone instinctively recognised that nothing was going right, nothing at all, but they felt frozen, motionless, as though the crash was inevitable, impossible to avoid, impossible for anyone to intervene. Even Dani, who wasn't watching the traffic could sense that something terrible was happening out of sight behind her.

Two beats of a rhythm later, there were tears, screams, howls of horrific pain and gut wrenching shock. Dani turned to look, then gasped with horror, taken aback.

The smell of diesel emphasised abrupt physical change.

There was blood.

There were bits of things in heaps and tangles, stuff scattered.

The bus was supposed to have been driven round the corner and slowed to a halt at the bus stop, but it hadn't. It had come around the corner and carried on.

Ten minutes later the paramedics closed the doors to one of the 'Rettungswagen' ambulances and drove slowly away without bothering with the flashing blue emergency lights and siren. Five more ambulances are lining up to receive the injured, with several others still arriving. Stretchers, oxygen, firemen with equipment to prise car doors open, the whole deal.

The old man had been trying to cross the road when he'd been hit by the lorry, which had swerved to avoid the oncoming bus and failed. A Skoda, an Audi and a Fiat were also involved.

The truck driver had been thrown through the windscreen fairly unscathed, but fell under the wheels of the bus that Dani had been waiting for and was fatally injured by the impact of a damaged shock absorber which had broken away from its mount and speared first spleen then aorta. Not much speed, but a forty tonne load means a lot of momentum, so the fully laden truck made quite a crunch, taking out the bus shelter as well as the front end of the bus. The bus driver was shocked but also basically ok, apart from a broken arm and some cuts, until the windscreen came to rest sharply across his belly. A transparent guillotine.

Suddenly, he was much worse.

There was blood, an enormous amount of blood flooding

everywhere as he screamed in horror, aghast at the sight of his own intestines bulging like links of sausage through the glass. The rescue guys looked away and grimaced, as he groaned, then sighed his last, the body neatly sliced from side to side to separate top from bottom. Someone from the bus company will inform his next of kin.

He was popular, a nice guy.

The sirens made a lot of noise and in Dani's eyes, the flashing lights were unnecessarily intrusive. There's a large heap of metal near her feet. It could be lorry. It might have been bus. In fact it was a pale-blue painted bicycle.

Some were bleeding, some had stopped bleeding and some would never bleed again.

A camera team from the local tv station, RBB, arrive in a red and white mini-van and begin to film, then Rainer the bald headed reporter puts his story together and does a piece to camera.

Three dead and four seriously injured, all at a speed very little more than walking pace. Seventeen passengers suffering different degrees of injury and shock.

Three more ambulances were full and driven away, lights flashing.

Dani was unscathed, but shaken and relieved to have survived.

The police were unimpressed.

They were hoping for dashcam videos of what had happened, but there weren't any, though there are videos emerging online from people who had heard the carnage and reached for their mobile phones. None of them, not even the passengers, caught the crash itself, just its appalling aftermath.

Dani told the police what she'd seen.

She mentions the crows.

They're dismissive.

She'd been looking at the kites, she explained.

One was red, one was green and one deep blue and purple.

They still are. The noise of their flapping had caught her attention.

That was all.

Then the smell and the screams.

Of course, she'd turned to look, as the crows flew off in alarm.

No, she has no idea how fast the bus was travelling.

She'd tried to help, but she didn't know what to do.

She hadn't noticed the lorry.

Maybe there was a bicycle, she isn't sure.

Despite standing next to the bus stop, she just hadn't seen anything of the accident until it was almost over. She'd heard it, experiencing a series of disconnected sensations for compilation to become her version of events. The images imprinted on her memory are a series of still visuals captured as she responded to the sounds.

First a shudder of emergency deceleration, then the gasps, groans and crunching sounds as metal squealed to crumple and fracture against metal, plastic, bone and flesh, drawing her attention away from the kites.

By the time she turned to look, apart from the oozing streams of anti-freeze, sprays of blood and jets of fuel, everything was still-life motionless, street sculpture, a 3-D installation of an impromptu, rather than conceptual kind, though the kites flew on. A wide-eyed head bounced onto the pavement giving a silent scream.

Sympathetic to people's ills, she might be, but Dani is annoyed by the accident and tells the police she can't describe what happened. She doesn't feel responsible. Hopeless witness, the police agreed and having taken her details, name, address, identity card number, let her go. She decides to ignore the maybe Mongolian kites and calls a cab to take her to the 'Soph-Am'.

The rain starts, quite heavily.

She has a small umbrella in her bag that doesn't want to unfold and open properly, so she throws it away.

Will the rain be sufficient to wash the blood from the street?

She doubts it.

More upset than she realises, when he finally shows up, she yells at the cab driver to get her out of there.

No-one had even noticed the cyclist who had been flattened first by the swerving truck, then squashed under the back wheels of the bus. He would be identified later in the day as someone who was married to someone Dani knows. But she had never met him and now she never will. He was sixty years old and the father of four children by three different girlfriends, though Dani didn't know that either. Details of that kind are worse than distracting, they're the building blocks of nightmares she can do without.

As news of the crash percolated through the local media, there was general dismay, but half a dozen of those who heard the reports were delighted by every detail. You may be alone in Berlin, but you're rarely short of an enemy.

The cab ride took only seven minutes and two of those were spent waiting for a red light to change on the Bismarckstrasse, as a couple of ambulances drove past. The emergency services had flagged the bus crunch as a major incident and 'Network Check' flashed warnings.

“Terrible thing, accidents like that,” said the taxi driver, “No sooner have you got used to being who you are, then suddenly bang and all of a sudden nothing works properly any more, and that's if you're lucky enough not to get killed outright.”

“Can you shut the fuck up,” she says bluntly.

“Oh, like that is it.”

She had a feeling the driver had been heading in her direction anyway, probably to one of the taxi ranks near the S-bahn station, so the six Euros he charged her was a lucky if modest bonus. At least he hadn't asked her to describe the crash.

There's Adele playing on the radio. She can sing, so Dani listens.

Once she got out of the cab, the driver simply stayed in the same place as a middle aged man in a calf length raincoat emerged from the bar, gave Dani a dismissive glance, swept past her and got into the back seat.

The cab pulled away, once a mid-blue end of an era VW Skunk had belched past leaving a mucky cloud of diesel fumes in its wake. There's a mild smell of horse shit in the air.

Did she know the guy in the raincoat?

No.

He seemed flustered, but excited and happy.

She wondered why, then concluded he could be forgotten. Who? Him? No idea.

Cashmere loser, probably, from one of those families that don't talk about how they'd made their money? Probably, no certainly. She remembers his name. Peter-Paul Prinz, sort of friend of Klaus, funeral attendee, owner of about 50 apartments inherited from his