The Girl Who Wouldn't Die Part 20

Ad could see from her wandering eyes that she was already seeking out other people for conversation. Be direct. Be a.n.a.lytical. Be like George. 'So, were you expecting Klaus to say something about Joachim?' he asked her.

Moni short for Monika clutched at her pink leather handbag as though Ad were about to steal it. She was now looking steadfastly at his missing eyebrow. 'Not really. Klaus and Joachim were in the same frat house but they weren't especially close. Not until they went on the exchange year. Then Joachim starts trying to be like Klaus. Starts spouting the same NDP rubbish when he comes back for the weekend.'

'Oh? Wasn't he into that before?'

'I think Joachim's family is pretty conservative. So, I don't know. Maybe. But they wouldn't have wanted Klaus to speak today.'

Ad fingered his s.h.i.+ny bald eyebrow. 'Why not?'

Moni short for Monika glanced over her shoulder as though she was about to impart a great secret. 'Klaus might seem popular but most people think he's a prize a.r.s.ehole. n.o.body apart from the ber-toffs really like him and not just because of his political views.'

'What do you mean?'

She stared at Ad in silence for longer than was comfortable. She seemed to be judging him; a.s.sessing whether he would betray a confidence and go running back to Klaus.

'Honestly, I'm not his friend,' Ad said.

Moni short for Monika chewed her lip and nodded. 'They're all scared of him. Biedermeier's trouble.'

Ad narrowed his eyes. He felt like she had more to say. Perhaps he wouldn't get this chance again. 'What kind of trouble?'

'The wrong crowd kind of trouble.' She winked conspiratorially. 'The other frat boys aren't all cut from the same cloth as him, you know. But there's always a rotten apple in the barrel and Biedermeier's it.' She wiggled her index finger round at her temple. 'He's ...' she seemed to be selecting the correct words from a range of possible insults '... off balance.'

'Where are we going?' Ad asked.

As the gathering dispersed, Klaus had latched back onto Ad, steering him along beautiful cobbled alleyways with pastel-coloured buildings on either side. It was picture-postcard perfect but Ad was sweating freely with trepidation beneath his only suit.

'You'll see,' Klaus said.

Ad could hear boyish exhilaration in his voice and remembered what the mousy Moni had said. Off balance. A euphemism for completely mentally unstable.

Up ahead, a group of five or six frat boys, also in pseudo-military uniform, were clearly making for the same destination. Klaus started to chatter animatedly, as though Ad was an old friend and, perhaps more worryingly, as though he'd had amphetamines with his breakfast potatoes and egg.

'I'm looking forward to this. I know you're going to love it,' he said, clapping Ad on the shoulder.

'Love what?' Ad looked at Klaus.

'You're going to watch me duel.'

'What?'

'A couple of boys have come over from the corps in Freiburg. It's all set up.'

Ad felt dread erupt in his stomach, sending crippling frost up his gullet. He winced, barely able to force words of protest out of his mouth. 'I don't really want to watch a duel,' he said.

'Yes you do,' Klaus said. 'You can tell all those p.u.s.s.ies in Amsterdam what real men do to prove their honour. At a proper university.'

Twenty minutes later, Ad stood in a sports hall breathing too deeply through his nose. His head was still exploding from the hangover. He silently prayed that he wouldn't vomit over his best shoes in the middle of Klaus' duel. It was a surreal feeling, being stuck in a room full of strange men his own age, who had elected to slice each other's faces up in the name of building character. Ad did not like blood. Especially other people's. The memory of the pathologist's wastepaper bin popped into his head. He remembered how it had smelled of scented tissues and pencil sharpenings before he had vomited into it. He swallowed down a lump of unruly bile.

'Bring it on,' Klaus said to the onlookers as he strutted into the room wearing a chainmail hauberk over a leather ap.r.o.n. A high leather collar peeped out of the top of the ensemble. On his face, he wore steel goggles to which was attached a broad metal nose guard. His right arm was covered with a padded leather arm guard. His left hand was hidden behind his back. He wielded his sword with his right hand, slas.h.i.+ng the air with a whipping noise that Ad had only ever heard in samurai or Quentin Tarantino movies.

'He looks like an alien,' Ad said under his breath. 'What the h.e.l.l ...?'

Another man, shorter than Klaus by at least five inches, walked to the centre of the room. He was wearing the same medieval-style regalia and bug-like goggles. Ad supposed this was one of the Freiburg frat members. The smaller man mounted a platform, which made him equal to Klaus in height.

There was a sense of eager expectation amongst the men in the room. Ad could see it in the way they fidgeted and spoke too quickly, too loudly. But what was this? An older man stood at the sidelines with a medi-pack and a suturing kit at the ready. Was he a doctor? Ad felt dizzy and had to steady himself against the wall.

To the right of Klaus and his short opponent stood other frat members. He recognised Klaus' partner as Carsten, partic.i.p.ant in the Feuerzangenbowle debacle.

Is Carsten there in case Klaus dies or something? Are they going to stab each other? Yes. They're going to b.l.o.o.d.y stab each other. They're only a few feet apart. He's going to ritually slaughter the short bloke and I'm going to die. Oh my G.o.d. And yet, they're all smiling and nodding.

The excitement in the air was almost palpable, but though he could feel it, Ad did not understand it even in the slightest.

With swords crossed high above their heads, the duelling began. The clash of metal made Ad's fillings throb in his mouth. Klaus sliced downwards at an angle. The short man blocked it, and chopped back at Klaus. Neither man seemed to move or dodge the other's downwards lunges. Klaus' razor-sharp sword slid into his opponent's cheek. The man barely flinched.

'Christ!' Ad said, loud enough to attract angry stares from the others.

He slumped against the wall, increasingly lightheaded as he watched the short man bleed freely down his face. Then Klaus took a hit. More blood. No baulking or reaction whatsoever from the crowd. These people are all mad.

Ad felt vomit rise quickly, ruthlessly in his throat. He sprinted to the toilet just in time to avoid defiling his shoes.

Some time later, he was still leaning over the toilet bowl, spitting into the water, when he heard Klaus' voice on the other side of the cubicle.

'Are you okay?' Klaus asked.

'No.'

'It's over now. You can come out. I won. I've got a new number. I'm 52:35 now.'

Ad blew his nose loudly on some toilet roll, flushed the toilet and unlocked the cubicle door.

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. You look terrible,' he said, cursorily glancing at the red, weeping cuts on Klaus' face.

Klaus raised his hand to touch the wounds. 'They've been st.i.tched.' He spoke in a clipped, mealy-mouthed way, as though he could no longer move his facial muscles freely.

'Do they hurt?'

'Of course they f.u.c.king hurt. We don't use anaesthetic.' There was more than a hint of pride in his voice.

'You're an animal.'

Klaus laughed with a stiff, expressionless face. But his eyes were positively br.i.m.m.i.n.g with joy. 'Come on. Let's go and drink beer. A lot of beer. I've got some friends I want you to meet.'

Ad groaned. He felt like Klaus had reached inside his battered body and punched him in the heart. He had never been so homesick in his life. But at 8pm it was too late to go back to Amsterdam. Ad was stranded in Heidelberg with a psychopath and all his dysfunctional friends.

'What's with the number?' Ad asked, was.h.i.+ng his face in the men's room sink.

He forced himself to look properly at Klaus in the mirror. Klaus looked like he had been carved up for Sunday lunch and sewn back together again.

'The number of my schmissen my cuts. I've now given fifty-two and received thirty-five. We all sign our names with our numbers. I was at 47:33 for a long time because I've been away but now I've got a more impressive number. I'm no longer the fresh faced Fox now. I'm a fully fledged Bursch. It's a mark of my achievements.'

'You think slicing each other's faces up is an achievement?'

Ad made a mental note that Klaus seemed impervious to fear, other people's sensitivities and pain. It was like someone had switched off his humanity. At that moment it occurred to Ad that Klaus did indeed have the ideal predisposition to be a murderer. And yet, there was a side to him that seemed lonely and vulnerable; desperate for acceptance.

Klaus held open the toilet door. 'You Dutchmen have no breeding, do you? But that's all right because I've got another educational surprise up my sleeve.'

Inside a heavy metal pub on the other side of town, atonal death metal blasted from large wall-mounted speakers in every corner of the pub with screaming, snarling vocals that could have been recorded by the Devil himself. The sticky floor shook with the unrelenting thud of the music's frenzied base drum. The walls were black. The clientele stank of patchouli and sweat. Almost everyone there was tattooed, full of piercings, with shaven heads or short Mohicans.

Klaus and Carsten looked like flamboyant stuffed parrots on a supermarket shelf full of bald battery chickens. But several of the men at the bar greeted Klaus with obvious warmth and familiarity.

'Hey, fellas! It's the Graf. All right, Graf?' one of the men said in a thick Swabian dialect.

They engaged in a complicated handshake with Klaus, nodded at Carsten, looked suspiciously at Ad.

Ad noticed that two of the men had badly executed blue-grey swastika tattoos on their necks. Like almost everyone else in the room, the three men wore washed out heavy metal T-s.h.i.+rts and drainpipe jeans or long combat shorts. One, with a bad blond Mohican and a strange ring embedded in his earlobe that made his ears look distended like an Amazonian tribesman's, wore a beat-up biker's leather jacket. He had a tattoo of a skull and 'SS' in gothic script on the side of his shaven head. These men were clearly in their late twenties or early thirties. Their pot bellies and prematurely lined faces betrayed a decade of heavy drinking and smoking.

'What's up then, Klaus?' the Mohican said. He gesticulated at Klaus' face with his beer gla.s.s. 'You been fighting again?'

Klaus laughed. He s.h.i.+fted from one foot to another; jittery, animated. 'You know me. Keeping up traditions. Now I'm looking for a bit of R&R.' He winked at the Mohican and put a wad of notes on the bar.

'You want the usual?'

Klaus nodded. 'Yes.'

The Mohican counted the money out of Ad's line of sight. He stuffed the wad in his inside pocket and gestured to one of his skinhead friends with a nod of his head. The skinhead walked over to a man sitting in a corner on the other side of the pub. Ad struggled to get a good look at the man through the cl.u.s.ters of drinkers gathered around tables in the pub. A girl stood up at the wrong moment and obscured his view.

Klaus seemed to be following the skinhead's progress. The skinhead started to make his way back and nodded to Klaus. Both men moved towards the toilet and disappeared behind the door. Carsten followed two minutes later, leaving Ad standing at the bar with the Mohican. The numb feeling Ad had experienced after the duel was quickly stripped away and replaced by blind panic.

'Who are you?' the Mohican said, eyeing Ad's suit up and down.

'Friend of Klaus.'

The Mohican nodded and smiled, revealing four gold incisors in the front of his otherwise rotten smile. 'Any friend of Klaus is a friend of ours, isn't that right, Friedrich?'

Friedrich, the second skinhead, grinned at Ad and punched him hard in the shoulder. 'You're a bit dark, though. You sure you're not a Jew boy? You've got a funny accent.'

Ad swallowed hard and pushed his gla.s.ses up his nose. 'I'm Dutch. My mother's family were French. Olive skin, see.'

The Mohican seemed to be weighing up this information. He frowned and looked into his stein of beer. 'The French are okay. Some good boys down there. Especially in the South of France. Got to keep on top of all those Muslim b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. But the Dutch. Bunch of n.i.g.g.e.r-loving f.u.c.king hippies ...' He looked back up at Ad with hard blue eyes. 'Are you a n.i.g.g.e.r-loving f.u.c.king hippy?' He grabbed Ad roughly by his s.h.i.+rt collar and pulled a scabbed fist back, ready to strike.

Ad closed his eyes tightly.

'Only joking, pal!' the Mohican said, putting Ad down. He brushed the front of his suit carefully with the same hand he had been about to punch him with. 'You're all right if you're Klaus' mate,' he p.r.o.nounced. 'Now drink.'

The Mohican ordered Ad a stein of strong lager, and Ad, more frightened at that point than at any other time during the weekend, was obliged to drink. He wondered in merciful silence if these men were behind the bombings. Was Klaus just some upper-cla.s.s current account to them? This is what Moni had meant by the wrong company. I've got to get the h.e.l.l out of here.

Klaus emerged from the toilet looking waxy and talking too fast. He rubbed Ad's cropped hair. 'Fancy a couple of lines?' he asked.

Ad looked at him blankly and then made the narcotic connection. 'Er, no thanks. I have painful sinuses. I'll stick to beer.'

While forcing himself to make small talk about music with the skinhead, Ad strained to eavesdrop on a conversation between Klaus, Carsten and the Mohican above the death metal din. He picked up on Joachim's name and mention of the NDP but that was all he could make out.

Ad's phone buzzed in his pocket. He repaired to the toilet, holding the door open for a man with a limp. The man's face was so badly disfigured that Ad was felt compelled to look away. What a crazy place.

Inside a cubicle, he read the text. It was from George.

Van den Bergen confirmed Remko's dead. Get evidence if u can. Come home 1st thing.

Ad was uncomfortably hot in his suit, but that was just the beer, not panic or grief. He felt bolstered by alcohol; gripped by determination. This weekend would not be a waste of time.

He willed himself to urinate, flushed, splashed his face with water and went back into the fug of the pub. He threw himself into raucous chatter, pretended to get blind drunk and pulled out his best politically incorrect jokes, much to the delight of the others. He clasped Klaus, Carsten, the Mohican and the two skinheads to his chest and took pictures of himself with them using his cell phone. Over the course of two hours, Ad made sure that he took chummy photos that encompa.s.sed everyone in the room from different angles.

By 3am, a fight had broken out between four skinheads. One was bottled in the head. Another sliced his best friend's finger off with a pen knife. The floor was wet with blood and beer. But the Mohican still stood, propping the bar and watching in amus.e.m.e.nt.

Ad had just made the silent decision to leave when someone planted a punch on one of the skinheads, sending him reeling into the barstool next to Ad. That's it. I'm off. I don't care if I have to sleep in the doorway of the train station until the first train leaves.

Ad sidestepped the mayhem and put on his jacket but the Mohican seemed to antic.i.p.ate his departure. He gripped Ad's shoulder with fingers of iron.

'Where do you think you're going, Jew boy?'

Chapter 21.

Stena Hollandica ferry, North Sea

A nun's habit and wimple are hot garments to wear, particularly in the lounge of an overheated ferry. But the layers of heavy cloth were not the only reason for Ella fanning her face with a fast-food menu. Underneath her vestments, her pulse thumped furiously as though it was counting down the seconds to the grand finale, the showdown, the shootout.

'I'm dying in here,' she said to Tonya, rolling her eyes. She shoved a finger underneath her wimple and had a good scratch. 'I don't know how those poor cows wear these.'

Serviette in hand, Tonya lifted up her habit, showing thick black stockings, wrinkled at the ankle. She surrept.i.tiously shoved her hand under the black cloth and up to her chest. She looked around cautiously and started to rub her midriff with the serviette. 'My t.i.ts are pouring with sweat 'cos of the plastic. It's f.u.c.king minging.'

'Oi. Stop swearing,' Ella said, feeling a rictus grin set hard on her clammy face. 'Nuns ain't supposed to swear.'

An elderly woman in a lilac fleece and polyester elasticated trousers pa.s.sed close by to them and nodded. 'Sisters,' she said, smiling.

Tonya sucked her teeth at the woman. The woman gave Tonya a confused look, smile faltering now.