Almost A Dead Man - Chapter 1

ONE

The damp scurry of claws across the floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous in Hamburg’s harbor district. The woman had expected rough sex. Instead two men had been waiting in the disused warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

“These are very arty.” The muscled interrogator slapped a set of grainy photos. “I can’t see that you are a man and your friend’s skin almost is as white as ivory in black and white. Very good composition.”

“They are only souvenirs.” The thirty-two year old banker shivered in the slick plastic dress. He had dressed for sex, not an interrogation by Hamburg’s most notorious pimp.

“Expensive souvenirs, nicht war?” A private collector might pay $20 for the explicit photos. They were worth much more to the right people.

“Yes, they are.” The wicked weekend in a St. Pauli hotel had cost over 2000 Deutschmarks or half his monthly salary. The photos’ cheap thrill had failed to satisfy his desires and Hans had raided various accounts within the bank to supplement his perversions for the past two months. He had yet to add up how much.

“And now you are in trouble.” The black man was as tired as his vicious role as any actor performing Hamlet for the ten-thousandth time. Still his audience flinched on cue, when he dropped the lurid snapshots on the man's skirted lap.

“You know who I am, yes?”

"You are Cali Nordstrum." The newspapers regularly featured stories about the pimps. Only last week he had escaped a murder attempt. The police had no leads on the identity of the failed assassin. The list of suspects ran into the hundreds.

"Stop your sniffling. Some of my best friends are Transvestis and Schwules.” Cali backed away and his scarred black face melted into the gloom. “We are not here to hurt you or blackmail you, but because my best hustler has fallen for you."

"Es tut mir lied." The transvestite buried his veiny hands in the fake hair like a muff. "All I want is to protect Willi. I can pay you."

"I am not running a marriage service for the Huren or Husen of the Reeperbahn.” Cali lunged forward like a cobra and the man on the stool toppled backwards. The pimp caught his arm. "Maybe I'll send Willi away.”

"Not that." A high heel slipped off his foot. "I will do whatever you ask.”

“Whatever?” Cali kicked the shoe into the corner.

Two months ago his best rentboy had mentioned a cross-dressing client bragging about paying for sex with pilfering funds from a leading bank. The pimp related the Kalbflesch's story to his partner in crime, who suggested that the hustler discover his lover’s actual position in the bank. Several days later Willi Stief learned Hans Roth oversaw money transfers throughout the Europe. Cali advised the hustler to fall in love with the banker. A month of delightful deceit led Hans Roth to this basement. There was only one way out and Cali crouched by the chair. "Do you have an open mind?"

For ten years Hans had protected his name, job, and family from disgrace. Liaisons with street boys lasted one night. Sex with Willi had incarnated his true persona and he asked hopefully, "Why?"

"First, you are woman trapped in a man's body. Second, Willi is too expensive for your salary,” Cali explained, because most people required more than one motive to cross the line from good to bad.

“Finally you have been stealing money you can never repay to the bank."

“Willi told you everything.” Tears seeped from Han’s eyes.

"Only because we can help each other." Cali mapped out his scheme with the persuasiveness of an airline ticket salesman selling the last helicopter seat at the Fall of Saigon. “This is a chance to get enough money for you and Willi. No one will think of searching for you in Thailand. Not as a woman. Were you lying about your commitment to Willi?"

"No." The man’s Adam’s apple gulped in hope. The desperate always bet on long shots.

"Your first name is Hans, yes?"

"I prefer Greta."

"Greta, I am a better friend than enemy. You can contact me at this number in an emergency. Tell Willi nothing. This is 'our' secret." He handed the banker a wad of 100-DM notes. "Give him this slowly. It will come out of your cut later."

“I’ll follow your every command.” His hand reached for the money and Cali snatched the man’s ear so hard that the cartilage partially snapped from the skull. A butcher at the city slaughterhouse had taught him the trick. The ear staying on Hans’ head was not a sign of weakness. This had only been a warning.

"Greta, you understand there's no backing out?"

"Yes," Hans said through watery eyes and Cali released him.

“What else?"

"Thank you.” The young man arranged his wig. He had started wearing dresses after playing with his sister’s dolls. The material was softer than his trousers and shirts. Lingerie on a man was not a sin. Only a forbidden nocturnal pleasures with Willi.

"Thank me, when this is all over." Cali nodded and his friend opened the basement door for a young black leather angel with bleached white hair. Willi was pretty, although heroin had got the better of his youth. The black pimp hated drugs. They cut into productivity. His associates became sloppy. Mistakes cost time, money, and lives in his business.

The banker was blind to Willi’s deterioration. They embraced as man and woman. They boith had earned privacy.

“Let’s leave the lovers alone.”

Neither his friend nor he needed to witness the hustler’s performance. On the stairway Kurt Oster pulled out a cigarette. The flame from a gold lighter illuminated a rugged face.

"Are we really going to cut him in?”

"Just because we are criminals doesn't mean we have to be dishonest." In the beginning it was always luckier to believe no one was going to get hurt. “Everyone will get what they deserve. I’ll see to that.”

He climbed from the basement. He hated the the smoke. Cigarettes killed thousands of people every year. The police never arrested the manufacturers. Persecuting the pimps made better headlines. Sex and crime sold well for the Hamburger Morgenblatt.

From the warehouse loading dock he surveyed the street. Only three cars were in sight. None were running and no one sat behind the wheel. It was a hot night for June.

“Anything wrong?” Kurt flicked the cigarette at his shadow on the cobblestones.

“Someone is out there.” He felt eyes on him everywhere.

“No one comes to the harbor at night.”

The two walked to Cali’s 1982 Mercedes-Benz 380SL.

“We did.”

Cali’s premonitions were his early radar warning.

“And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

Kurt’s reddish hair had been cut two days ago in Milan. The jean jacket came from World’s End, a punk s on the King’s Road and the gold-buckled loafers were from GUcci in Milan. Only one shop in Paris carried 501 jeans. Kurt drove a 1961 Thunderbird. He had purchased after seeing Wim Wender’s AMERICAN FRIEND. He had expensive tastes in women too.

“Yet?” Cali spoke German, ate sausages, liked Schlager rock. His black skin condemned that he was an Auslander to nearly every German, except one person and that person wasn’t his mother. Kurt and he had been friends from a tough childhood on Hafenstrasse by the Elbe.

“Which is why I have an American for the Sonderboch.” German police loved arresting international criminals. “Someone from Hamburg might suspect something, but the American nothing.”

“Is he stupid?” A sucker to hold the bag might buy them a few hours’ head start, if things went bad.

"No, worse. Broken-hearted."

"Ach." Nothing blinded a man more completely than love. Kurt added another missing ingredient.

"Plus Petra will act as the lure."

"Are you mad? She is dangerous.”

"The greater the risk, the greater the gain.”

"Just once I would like someone to lie to me." Cali held no illusion about this enterprise ending in failure. The State severely punished bank robbery. His associates imposed the death penalty.

“I’ve never lied to you.”

“Not once?” His Swiss bank account he’d enough to finance flight, but not in Europe.

“Not about anything important.” Kurt was overextended to several loansharks. The money from this robbery was all he needed to get the woman of his dreams and she had been chosen from the stars.

“You don’t want to do this, I understand.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Last week Cali had exited from Cuneo,a Italian restaurant off the Reeperbahn. A 5-DM coin lay in the gutter. He had been raised poor and bent over to pick up the Sechser. An unseen gunman pumped five shots over his head from a BMW. He saw the face in the car. Cali had never seen before seen the man. He had many enemies.

The next day he had ordered a Jurnfernstieg jeweler to dip the lucky piece in gold for a medallion. The preceding King of the Reeperbahn had died in his bed, because a rival had stabbed him in the heart. He had been thirty-six. Leaving a good-looking corpse was the goal of a fool.

“I could use a long holiday and stealing millions isn’t any different from stealing an apple. The trick is not getting caught.”

"At least not by the wrong people." Neither were worried about the police. A score like this one attracted another kind of trouble.

Kurt’s daydream upset Cali. His friend should have been concentrating on the job ahead, instead of another man’s wife. He popped open the trunk of the Benz. Cali loved the new car smell. He reached into the trunk's secret compartment and handed over a manila envelope.

“That enough money?”

"For now it is.” The thickness was more than enough to open an account in Switzerland. Within one month it will grow into several million Deutschmarks. One plus one sometimes equal more than two, but that equation needed a few more people.

“Never.” Kurt tucked the envelope inside his jacket. People feared them, but no one offered them respect. Millions changed their opinions.

Cali was placing his life in his friend’s hand again. They had grown up on the docks. Neither of them had known their fathers. Maybe Kurt might now pass for Mittel-Klasse, but pimps and whores were Cali’s life. Few of his fellow 'Zuhalterei' had completed high school.

SS Tommy, his right-hand man, oversaw their control of half Hamburg's prostitutes with violence. The bodybuilder had paid cash for his Ferrari 308 GTSI. Mack 'Die Alte’, his enforcer, beat the rival pimps into submission. His recent investment in Pattaya’s go-go bars had earned him a fortune.

Cali’s fellow pimps understood the extreme measures necessary to control Hamburg's streetwalkers, part-time call girls, gay rent-boys, and underage 'Strichmadchens'. Fear was his greatest defense against their turning on the illegitimate son of a black US Army sergeant was an 'Auslander'. That and no mercy.

“This is me and you.”

“Against the world.”

“As always.” They shook hands to seal their childhood pact once again. He walked to his electric-blue 1960 T-bird, lost in the dream of a better world to come. Cali checked the street again. No one was there. No one he could see, but it paid to act, as if someone was there, because that way the unexpected came as no surprise.