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- Herausgeber: Isis Audio
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Hamburg State Prosecutor Chastity Riley and her friends are held hostage in a hotel bar by twelve armed men set on revenge, in a searing, breathtakingly original, and unexpectedly moving new thriller from the 'Queen of Krimi' ***WINNER of the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger 2022*** ***WINNER of the German Crime Book of the Year Award*** 'Simone Buchholz writes with real authority and a pungent, noir-ish sense of time and space … a palpable hit' Independent 'Reading Buchholz is like walking on firecrackers … a truly unique voice in crime fiction' Graeme Macrae Burnet '[A] nerve-racking narrative … [with] a cunning climax that is shocking and deeply romantic' The Times ____________________ Twenty floors above the shimmering lights of the Hamburg docks, Public Prosecutor Chastity Riley is celebrating a birthday with friends in a hotel bar when twelve heavily armed men pull out guns, and take everyone hostage. Among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel owner, who is being targeted by a young man whose life and family have been destroyed by Hoogsmart's actions. With the police looking on from outside their colleagues' lives at stake and Chastity on the inside, increasingly ill from an unexpected case of sepsis, the stage is set for a dramatic confrontation and a devastating outcome for the team all live streamed in a terrifying bid for revenge. Crackling with energy and populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Hotel Cartagena is a searing, relevant thriller that will leave you breathless. _____________________ Praise for the Chastity Riley series 'Combines nail-biting tension with off-beat humor ... Elmore Leonard fans will be enthralled' Publishers Weekly 'Buchholz doles out delicious black humor ... interwoven in a manner that ramps up the intrigue and tension' Foreword Reviews 'Modern noir, with taut storytelling, a hard-bitten heroine, and underlying melancholy peppered with wry humour … there's a fizz, a poetry and a sense of coolness' New Zealand Listener 'The coolest character in crime fiction … Darkly funny and written with a huge heart' Big Issue 'Fierce enough to stab the heart' Spectator 'A stylish, whip-smart thriller' Herald Scotland 'Combines slick storytelling with substance'Mystery Scene 'Caustic, incisive prose. A street-smart, gutsy heroine. A timely and staggeringly stylish thriller' Will Carver 'With plenty of dry humour and a good old dash of despair, Simone Buchholz is an unconventional, refreshing new voice' Crime Fiction Lover 'With brief, pacy chapters and fizzling dialogue, this almost feels like American procedural noir and not a translation' Maxim Jakubowski 'There is a fantastic pace to the story which keeps you hooked from the first sentence all the way to the end a unique voice that delivers a stylish story' NB Magazine 'A smart and witty book that shines a probing spotlight on society' CultureFly 'Fans of Brookmyre could do worse than checking out Simone Buchholz, a star of the German crime lit scene' Goethe Institute 'Lyrical and pithy … Lots of fun' Sunday Times 'Great sparkling energy, humour and stylistic verve and the story itself is gripping and pacey' Rosie Goldsmith 'A must-read, stylish and highly original take on the detective novel, written with great skill and popping with great characters' Judith O'Reilly 'Constantly surprising an original, firecracker of a read' LoveReading
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Twenty floors above the shimmering lights of the Hamburg docks, Public Prosecutor Chastity Riley is celebrating a birthday with friends in a hotel bar when twelve heavily armed men pull out guns and take everyone hostage. Among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel owner, who is being targeted by a man whose life – and family – have been destroyed by Hoogsmart’s actions.
With the police looking on from outside – their colleagues’ lives at stake – and Chastity on the inside, increasingly ill from an unexpected case of sepsis, the stage is set for a dramatic confrontation … and a devastating outcome for the team … all livestreamed in a terrifying bid for revenge.
Crackling with energy and populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Hotel Cartagena is a searing, stunning thriller that will leave you breathless.ii
iii
HOTEL CARTAGENA
SIMONE BUCHHOLZTRANSLATED BY RACHEL WARD
v
For Alan Rickman
vi
vii
I make myself hold out
Cause if it kills me
I don’t care
—Millie Jacksonviii
CONTENTS
WAS THAT IT THEN, I ASKED
We drive through the city, black holes open up on every corner, they tug at the sheet metal of the ambulance, Stepanovic is kneeling beside the shitty stretcher I’m lying on, he’s holding me, he’s holding my hand and he’s singing something to me, I like the tune but the words make me want to puke.
two days earlier, a hotel near the port in Hamburg
‘Hello love.’
‘Hello, how can I help you?’
‘I’m from Unimax. About the sprinkler system.’
‘Yes…?’
‘Maintenance works.’
‘Ah, OK. The keycards for the cellar, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Just a sec … both cards?’
‘Two cards would be ideal.’
‘No problem … Here you are then.’
‘Super, thanks. We’ll just leave them on the counter when we’ve finished, same as ever, yeah?’
‘Yes, of course, same as ever.’
‘Perfect. Have a nice day, and, ah, you know, you really are looking great today.’
‘Oh, thank you, how nice of you.’
‘Corporate philosophy.’
Twinkle, twinkle.
Smile.
Back and forth.
Departure.
OPEN UP, POLICE
Stepanovic takes his foot off the gas, he pulls over and switches off the engine. It’s November, it’s dark, it’s cold.
It’s quiet.
No wind.
He gets out, leans against the car and lights a cigarette, the sky gleams orange.
As of a good half-hour ago, he’s supposed to be on the twentieth floor of this hotel at the harbour edge; he’s supposed to be sitting there, celebrating with his colleague Faller, who turned sixty-five today.
And that’s damn-well worth celebrating. If you’ve made it that far without being completely screwed.
Stepanovic drags on his cigarette and watches a woman in the building opposite, on the third floor. Although the woman isn’t wearing conspicuously little, she hasn’t got that much on either, he can see a bare shoulder, a slipped shirt, fair hair pinned up. She’s holding a telephone to her ear with her right hand, with her left hand she’s stirring a pan.
Stepanovic smokes on, the cigarette helps counter this tightness in his chest that he always feels when he’s supposed to do something that he can’t. Finally getting himself up to that hotel bar, for example.
But he could ring that woman’s doorbell and say ‘open up, 4police’ and then he’d stand up there in the doorway and smile at her and create an instant, a situation, something fun, charming, stunning, something at any rate, and she’d let him in, and he wouldn’t need long to get her to fall in love with him, at least for a couple of minutes, or for one night, and then he’d be allowed to eat with her, whatever it is she’s cooking there right now, and he’d be allowed to stay overnight with her, the main thing being not going home, and the main thing being not going to that shitty hotel for this so-called party.
It’s not about parties themselves, a party can be perfectly fine. But not when the guests include two lovers, or ex-lovers, of a woman he loves with everything he has on hand, even if that’s not particularly impressive, but hey, we can only do our best.
What on earth are you talking about, he hears her say.
Yeah, my God, fuck off.
He throws the cigarette in a puddle, locks the Mercedes, walks over the road and presses the bell belonging to the flat on the third floor, left.
The pressure on his ribcage eases a little.
He takes a deep breath, and the night air unscrews his heart, so that the moment that’s about to happen can get in there too.
WHY EXACTLY DO WE NEED ALL THAT GELIGNITE AGAIN?
An empty warehouse by the Oberhafen in Hamburg. Inside the warehouse, thirteen men are sitting on crates, one is standing by a table, he’s bending over something that looks like a building plan. The man has the air of a leader, he’s not overly tall, but hulky. You can see he works out, looks like he’s just finished a work-out. He’s wearing a dark bomber jacket, with a black hoodie under it, on his head there’s a grey knitted cap. His skin is leathery, as if he lives by the sea, under the sun, as if he’s in the wrong place here. The other men watch him as he studies the plan, nobody says anything. The youngest is maybe in his mid-twenties, the eldest around fifty or so, the men come in all colours and all shapes. Some are a little nervous, because a gathering like this, the scent of imminent action, just cries out for nervousness. But because all of them have learnt, over the years, to hide feelings behind faces of cement, what you get is a consciously unruffled conglomeration.
Some light up cigarettes, the ringleader also pulls a packet from his jacket pocket and smokes, and when he’s finished checking out the site plan, he says: ‘OK, men.’
The men nod, a couple of them murmur.
‘Guns?’ asks the ringleader.
‘Got the guns,’ one says, standing up, ‘and the ammo’s ready 6too. Take your pick – we’ve got Uzis, we’ve got nice, elegant .45s. Plus two pump guns and a sawn-off shotgun. For those of you who like things a little bigger.’
He sits back down.
Murmuring.
‘Gelignite?’ asks the ringleader.
‘Gelignite’s fine,’ says the weapons guy, ‘we’ve got plenty.’
‘Why exactly do we need that gelignite, I thought we’d got a tunnel to exit by…’ says another, but stops talking when the leader looks at him.
‘Tunnel’s in progress,’ says a small, wiry guy with a beard, who’s chewing the nail on his right index finger.
The ringleader asks about the keycards.
Someone, sitting at the edge, on the left, says: ‘Sorted.’
‘And how about the clothes?’
‘I collected the suits yesterday, from assorted dry-cleaners all around the city,’ says someone in the back row.
‘SWAT team uniforms, helmets, gear?’ asks the ringleader.
‘Ready to go, man.’
‘Crow bars, climbing ropes, rubble chute?’
The leader’s gaze flies around the room and catches on a man with a baseball cap.
‘It’s all there, where it’s meant to be, boss.’
‘And everyone could recite the plan from memory in their sleep?’
Collective nod.
‘Good. Then we’ll run through this thing again.’
MY HEART MAKES AN UNHEALTHY SOUND
The walls are made of glass, dangling from the black ceiling are a couple of dimmed spherical lamps, lying at our feet is the port of Hamburg in its gleaming night-time light. This bar makes such a big deal about the view that I shouldn’t really trust any drink I didn’t mix myself as far as I could throw it. Too much obtrusive beauty, too many look-at-me things, too much distraction. Surely no one can concentrate on their alcohol here.
My people are sitting towards the back, at a large table.
In front of it are loads of stand-up bar tables and barstools, a maze of stilts; beside it, a long, elegant bar. A dimly lit perspective with a spectacular view of this city at each end.
It’s a puzzle to me why Faller has to celebrate his birthday here of all places, after all, we’re more out of place in a joint like this than a pack of mongrels in a plastic bag. Why aren’t we standing at a sticky bar in the Silbersack and drinking bottled beer, why aren’t we sitting in a dark pizzeria being noisy, and where’s the freaking jukebox in this place, oh, there isn’t one, got you, all you get here are two men, and just the sight of these self-same guys instantly crushes something inside me, just glimpsing them out of the corner of my eye is usually enough.
Now I take a head-on look at each of them for a second, first Klatsche, then Inceman.
My heart makes an unhealthy sound.8
‘Hello,’ I say to everyone, partly to distract from that sound.
And everyone’s like: ‘Hello?’
Yes, I know, I’m a bit late.
‘Sorry I’m late, guys.’
‘Not to worry, my girl,’ says Faller, reaching for my hands and smiling at me.
He looks good.
He’s wearing a black roll-neck; he checked his hat and coat in at the cloakroom, just like everyone else checked their things in at the cloakroom. Faller lets go of my hands and I shove them in the pockets of my dark-blue bomber jacket. I’ll never check a jacket or coat in at a cloakroom. That’s like checking a suit of armour in at the cloakroom, you just can’t do that, it leaves you entirely defenceless.
‘Pick yourself a nice spot,’ says Faller.
Now he says that.
There’s only one chair free. Between Brückner and Calabretta, so that makes it a very nice spot, except that it’s also diagonally opposite Klatsche, which makes it a very complicated spot.
I sit down all the same, trying not to look in any particular direction, and ask: ‘Where’s Stepanovic then, don’t they allow cowboys in here or what?’
‘Half of us wouldn’t be here in that case,’ says Faller.
And Carla says: ‘We thought you might know.’ There’s that undertone. ‘We thought you might arrive together.’
I know what she means and I try to give an unobtrusive smile to let her know that I know and, yes, I would actually have expected to turn up here with him, just because we’re pretty good at turning up to places together, but there have been certain moments in the last few months when things have got somewhat difficult between us.9
I told him in high spirits – OK, more in export-strength spirits – that I still repeatedly go to bed with Inceman, and he considered that to be more than a little bit shit.
I kind of got the impression that it really niggled at him.
But I can’t help him there. I’m just the rather confusing kind of woman.
I shake my head and say: ‘Haven’t heard from him for days. But he said last week that he was coming.’
‘Then he’ll be here,’ says Faller, determined not to let anything or anyone spoil the mood, least of all his friends.
He’s probably the only person in the room who knows, with every fibre of his heart, just how confusing I am, and not just me, but us all, every person in the whole damn world even. Faller knows about the huge knot we form, which I can sometimes only vaguely perceive when I stumble past someone and in doing so catch hold of a hand and feel the little cracks, the damage to the surface and think: wow, you too?
Stepanovic’s hands are full of them and while I’m thinking about his hands like that, I notice that there isn’t a chair for him if he really does come along later, and Rocco must have noticed too because he says: ‘Guys, we’re a chair short.’
Faller smiles around at us all.
‘I didn’t actually expect all of you to turn up.’
‘I was totally expecting it,’ says Klatsche, and looks at me with that certain uh-huh look, and perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Inceman is looking at me with a similar I-can-see-into-your-every-last-corner look.
Well.
We’ve got a situation here.
I’ve got a situation with my ex-lover and my on-and-off lover, but then all the rest of us have heaps of situations with each 10other too. Calabretta, Carla and Rocco, for example, yes, everyone here has a past with everyone, and the resulting situation can be found in full and in detail at this table. Perhaps it’s just as well that Stepanovic isn’t here, perhaps it would even be a relief if he didn’t come at all now, because our situation already feels positively designed to overflow. As if just one more person coming along and sitting in the bathtub with us and then plunging their hand in there, into all the interconnections between us, would mean water everywhere.
I’d probably be the first to cry.
Why, I can’t say, I just feel a bit wobbly. That’s another reason why I’m definitely not the one who’d care if Stepanovic joined us, and the lot of you can take a running jump.
Instead, I try to sort things out a little. The situation and myself.
Sitting at one end of the table is Faller, who wants to celebrate his birthday.
To his left are Inceman, Schulle, Brückner, then me.
Sitting opposite Faller is Calabretta.
Round the corner next to him are Anne Stanislawski, Klatsche, Rocco.
Then Carla, who’s just laid a hand on Faller’s left forearm and asked him if he’s OK.
He nods.
Question and nod make me realise, in a heartbeat, that we’re not here for our own sakes, that we don’t matter a damn just now. Hey, friendship means stepping out of our own egocentric circles too.
We’re here for Faller’s sake, and all the lawn and flowerbeds and so on between us that have been trampled over in recent years are utterly irrelevant, and Carla’s question is the only one that matters: How’s the old man doing?11
If I’m interpreting the expression on his face correctly, he’s quite content. After everything he’s been through in his life. There are two dead women anyway, two dead prostitutes, so women whose lives already weren’t playing out on the sunny side, and then along came Faller. He loved the first of them, Minou, and because he did and because he thought it was that simple, because he thought he was allowed to love whoever he liked and was allowed to save whoever he liked, she had to die. He didn’t even know the second. There had been absolutely no need for an introduction to her before getting mixed up in her death. Having tangled with the Albanian mafia was enough. And so the kid was dead. Lying in bed next to a knocked-out Faller, her underwear soaked in blood. Sometimes I still find myself asking how a man’s soul actually survives a thing like that. Well. The injuries are still clearly visible, at least for people who know a bit about injuries. Then there was the bullet right through his shoulder, which must definitely have left a few splinters in his memory, and which was my fault. After all that, a few years ago, he started fighting again, for justice, for his soul, to avenge his dead. And now he’s sitting here surrounded by people who like him. Sometimes, that liking even borders on love, but of course I can only speak for myself, and maybe for Calabretta too. The light in the bar lays a dark-gold filter over Faller’s face, softens the deep creases around his mouth, around his nose, around his eyes. He looks at us one after another.
The waiter comes and asks me what I’d like to drink. There are all kinds of drinks on the table, everyone’s ordered something different, whoa, yet another keg of confusion, just stop that for a second please.
‘Is that a negroni?’ I ask Carla, who’s playing with the glass in her hand.12
‘What else?’ she says, and her voice sounds as though she’s just found the formula for liquid happiness.
I’d like a bit of that.
‘I’ll have one of those too, please,’ I say.
Klatsche grins at me, and what a grin he’s got. Shameless and sexy that grin is, almost unbearable, my God, how I’ve missed that grin.
‘I thought alcohol had to be see-through,’ he says, taking a swig from his beer.
‘Things change,’ I say and look him in the eye for the first time since he popped back into my flat for a bit, a good couple of years ago now, and then left forever. His expression drops into the middle of my heart and explodes. Oh wow, what a mess, now I’ll have to clean everything up again.
Six months ago, he once tried to call me.
I didn’t answer.
Brückner leans over to me and asks quietly if he should swap places with his colleague Inceman. So that we can sit next to each other.
‘Oh,’ I say, and reckon that’ll have to do as an answer.
Inceman and I sit next to each other all the time, at least three times a week we sit next to each other at great length, as a matter of fact. First we walk next to each other through the streets for an eternity, by night, I always walk on his right, maybe because I think I might be able to stand in for his right arm that way, and whenever we reach a place where we can sit next to each other, at a serious bar that is, at a sturdy lump of wood that carries us like a ship, we drink just that precise drop too much that lets us forget histories, sentences, moments and in the end, when we’ve done that long enough for the last scrap of sense to have fallen in the water, we lie on top of one another in bed, mostly in mine.13
He’s never bothered with a flat, he says the whole city’s his flat, and that it’s better that way, feels better.
So anyway, then we lie around on top of each other and, as if by the by, a couple of earthquakes happen.
My drink arrives.
Klatsche shakes his head, pushes his beer aside and orders a pina colada.
I see: anything you can do, I can do better, bitch.
Although I think a pina colada’s a bit over the top for tit-for-tat. A mai tai would really have done.
I raise my glass and toast Faller; the others follow suit.
‘To you, Faller,’ I say.
‘Well, then,’ he says, ‘to you all.’ And then he stands up.
Carla claps her hands.
‘Speech!’
She loves speeches.
‘Just a little toast,’ says Faller, rubbing his white stubble.
He stands straight and looks at us.
He could say that it’s a miracle that we’re here, together at this table. And that each of us deserves great respect for having survived the journey to this day.
He could say that Carla gets more beautiful with every passing year, that her dark brilliance grows more intense, her face clearer and her curls wilder, the whole world is reflected in her eyes, and if you don’t walk past those eyes quickly enough, you’ll topple in.
He could say that Rocco’s lost his boyish air, that he’s suddenly, unmistakably, heading for forty, that the second-hand suits he loves wearing so much don’t even look second-hand anymore, they just look as though he’s been wearing them for over twenty years. And that there’s more than 14simply the lust for adventure rioting in his eyes these days and that now it’s almost soothing to look at him sometimes, whereas, until a couple of years ago, he was always so unsettling for everyone around him, but in a good way.
He could say that, unlike Rocco, Klatsche never was a boy, but always a grown-up man, except that the genetic lottery handed him that boyish face that he’ll still have in ten years, no matter how hard he plays at being a father. But oh, he’s not even playing at being a father, he is a father now, you can see it in his shoulders, in the way he holds himself, in the slight tiredness, sustained by tenderness, in his eyes, in the slightly broader waist. He’s more stable than ever, and that suits him so well that I ought to break into pieces here and now, like a church window exploding in slow motion, but I pull myself together and just carry on looking unobtrusively at him, and keep on looking at Faller too.
He could say now that Anne Stanislawski is the future, that she looks like a vixen, cunning and quick and wild and royal at the same time, fervent yet composed. Today, she’s wearing her reddish-blonde hair down, which she rarely does – why is she, oh my God, she’s a strawberry queen, and did she count her freckles when she was a child?
Faller could say that the silver stripes in Calabretta’s hair suit him very well, the way they’re multiplying and getting more and more out of hand, the way they’re seizing possession of his head, and that he really ought to stop giving a damn about his receding hairline because the liberated brow draws all the attention to his finely carved face, to his unassuming wisdom, to the fact that he’s a man who never, really absolutely never, boasts about anything, who always is the way he is, which is mad really, they don’t make them like that anymore.15
He could say that Brückner and Schulle remind him of his daughters, that casual optimism, that absolute engagement, that respect for all living beings, that somewhat simple but not in the least silly sense of humour, yes, they could be brothers, or Faller’s daughters, and in any case they’re probably simply sons of the north wind.
He could say that Inceman’s lost right arm is, strictly speaking, on his account, because he was kicked into retirement too early back then, because that’s why they needed a successor, who turned out to be Calabretta, so then they needed a new fourth member for his former team in the murder squad, and because that fourth man then turned out to be Bülent Inceman, previously the hottest shot in drugs. First it was bottoms up, then my heart got blown up, then firebombs rained in through a window, and then his arm was gone.
Sometimes I wonder if Inceman wishes he’d just stayed put in drugs, then there’d still be a right arm in his life, but then again he wouldn’t have me or the looks that constantly flit back and forth between him and Klatsche.
Sometimes I wonder that.
He could have had so much: his peace, wholeness, a wife, a family maybe, all he once wished for before he met me.
Faller could say that he didn’t actually want to get the evening here started until Stepanovic finally turned up, but, hey, you just never know with him, and in the end you can always trust that he’ll be there when he’s needed.
Can’t you?
Won’t he?
Where is the pea-brain anyway?
Hey, he can’t leave me on my own here.
But on the other hand, the bathtub’s full already.16
In that respect.
Of course, now would be the moment when Faller could say something to me, or about me or for me or right through me, but he doesn’t do that either.
He says none of all that.
He tries to sum it up with a helpless but really sweet gesture, with a kind of circle that he draws in the air, then he adds a couple more spirals to it, then puffs out his cheeks and lets the air out again through his teeth, then he gets wet eyes and says something like:
‘Yes, then, good, so, well, uh cheers.’
So now that’s floating over the table like a neon sign, and if I look at all of us like that, you couldn’t actually have put it better.
He sits down again.
Carla talks to Rocco, Anne Stanislawski talks to Calabretta, Faller Inceman, Schulle and Brückner make up a flat back four, Klatsche and I look into each other’s eyes. Help.
‘So?’ he says.
‘So?’ I say.
‘What are you up to, then?’
‘I’m trying to give up smoking.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since five minutes ago.’
He shakes his head. ‘Can’t you talk seriously to me?’
His pina colada arrives, there’s a lump of coconut and an impressive disc of pineapple stuck on the side.
‘I should talk seriously to someone with a salad in his drink?’
He breathes in and out again, he rubs his hand over his forehead, and I know that was mean. The waiter gives me an ice-cold look.17
‘OK, let me take the greens out,’ I say, ‘and then let’s try again.’
He smiles at me the way he always used to smile at me, with that blend of cheek and love. He pushes his glass over to me, but does so rather too fast, I jam my left hand pretty much into the pineapple, and the leaves or thorns, or whatever they are, as sharp as a dragon’s teeth, rip open the inside of my thumb, I say, ‘wow, deep,’ Klatsche says ‘oh,’ Anne Stanislawski raises her eyebrows and says ‘fuck,’ Carla says we’d better put some disinfectant on it, and stands up to go to the bar, and that’s the exact moment that the first shots are fired.
St Pauli, summer 1984
Henning stood at the harbour, the night having just shattered on him. The light and the Elbe were creeping up from the east, they almost sank into the sounds that the morning sent through the city, and that would have been fine by Henning too, just sinking somewhere.
He looked at the water and watched the ships leaving, the warm wind tickled the back of his neck, he had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was hungry. He still had a little change on him, but it wasn’t even enough for a fish roll.
He had spent all his money on the girl.
Elisabeth or whatever her name was.
He’d met her in the Markthalle, at the Black Flag concert he’d been looking forward to for weeks. When she’d given him a kind of sideways smile, he’d had a few seconds when he didn’t know who he had a bigger crush on, Henry Rollins or her. Then they danced, she was wild and laughed, and that flooded his bloodstream with happiness; after the concert, with all the loud music in his bones, he invited her back to St Pauli; she was kind of scared to come at first, but he talked her three friends round and they all went off to the Kiez together.
They went on foot; it was warm after all.
