Odysseus Haiku

Last week I headed uptown to Weill Cornell for blood work

Then to to the Metropolitan Museum and Explorer Club to write in peace. The synopsis of ALMOST A DEAD MAN. Over 100,000 words reduced to 800.

ALMOST A DEAD MAN

A SYNOPSIS 

BY 

PETER NOLAN SMITH

Hamburg. Night. June. 1982. The Elbe River. The desolate docks. An empty basement, A chic woman on a chair. A black man circles Greta. Sex photos in his hand. The wig slips off Hans’ head. The banker has been embezzling funds to pay for sex with a street boy, Willi. The next audit. Prison for Hans. Cali, a Reeperbahn pimp, and his handsome friend, Kurt, offer an out. Transfer a money wire to a foreign account. He nods his head.

Kurt contacts a failed poet to come work at BSIRs. Sean Coll. A key witness for a NYPD Internal Affairs’ investigation for two murders outside an after-hours club. One a dirty cop. The other a Russian gangster. A Lufthansa ticket waits at JFK. Who pulled the trigger a mystery, but Sean has a good idea who. He leaves for Germany the next day.

A summer solstice party at Lucas Von Brucken’s decrepit forest estate. Close to the East Germany border. The edge of World War III. 

Lukas. Pfennigless. Still a decadent aristocrat. Vanessa, his young angelic wife, dances with Kurt, a butcher’s bastard stepson. Kurt offers the Grad Student a new life.

His police spy saw Cali and Kurt with the banker. Something was afoot. Kurt and Vanessa just clogs in his plot to steal the money wire transfer. His muscle. SS Tommy, Cali’ murderous henchman. The prize. Cali’s reign of the ErosCenter, St. Pauli’s most lucrative brothel.

Lotte Wessel, a scarred dominatrix. Masked pimps beat her for unionizing the Eroscenter women. A losing streak at a hotel casino. Busted. Kurt by the pool. No one knows the sources of his money. Her services are needed to keep Sean Coll here. No sex. 5000 Deutschmarks. More later. Revenge. Her only meaning in life. She takes the 5000.

A day later Sean in Hamburg. No one at the airport. A taxi to a Elbe forlorn mansion. Inside Lotte in leather whips a naked Lukas. Sean says nothing. Lotte looks at him. Her eyes say stupid American. 

Later Lotte’s Porsche tour of the city. Prosperous unlike bankrupt New York. The club, BSirs, successful. The crowd, publishers, rock stars, models, young, wealthy. A smattering of pimps with their girls. His high school German useless. Sean drinks himself into oblivion.

Sean wakes in the mansion. Music. Lukas painting a naked Lotte. All on video TVs. Scars lace her body. Lukas insults Sean. Kurt’s arrival stops any altercation. Outside Kurt warns Lukas has killed people. Sean has never broken the 5th Commandment.

Sean gets a chic penthouse studio and a VW. A visit to the Eroscenter. Even midday the brothel is busy. Kurt leaves him with Cali, annoyed by the question why he stays in Germany.

“Go where? America with the KKK. Africa? No, here is the only place a black man can be king. The Reeperbahn.”

Kurt and Vanessa. The nude beach of Sylt on the Atlantic. A photographer on the dunes. Kurt has seen him before. A cop.

Cali, the King of the Reeperbahn. He will always remember Kurt’s protection as young boys.

Bsir’s. A success. After midnight many pimps. SS Tommy with Vella, a very young redhead from Bavaria. Sean tells the blonde muscle-builder that he find someone older. SS Tommy slugs Sean. Semi KO. No one stands up to the enforcer and Lotte nurses him at home. All men are men. Dangerous to women and themselves.

In the ErosCenter Cali advises SS Tommy to stay away from the American.

A Swiss banker at home. A Sunday call from Kurt, informing him that his son in a Bangkok prison is close to freedom.

Sean wakes to a silent city. Marchers against Pershing Missiles’ deployment. Lotte returns with food wearing his clothing. Her scars invisible to his eyes. Lotte warns Sean not to trust Kurt. The German brings him to the airport. His first trip to Geneva to pick up money at a bank.

Lukas humiliates Lotte at the studio. He has been using her. She only a tool. He leaves with the videos. The paintings are hers.

The trip to Geneva. Seamless. Back in Hamburg with 200,000 Deutschmarks. The most money he has seen. He gives to Kurt outside the terminal.

Cali’s meeting with a loanshark at the ErosCenter increases SS Tommy’s interest in Lukas’ plot. Something big in the works.

Weeks go by. Vanessa and Kurt need have sex. Sean goes bi-monthly to Geneva. Each trip more money. Temptation. Alex Brucken, a police detective at the airport. Asking questions. Hamburg more and more like New York.

Alex is not happy. This job no longer tracking a man’s wife. He wants out.

The banker calls Cali. Panic. The audit. Next week. Cali has everything in place for the crime.

Kurt at the Von Brucken mansion. Vanessa MIA. The doors locked. He had been a fool. Vanessa has been trapped by Lukas. Cinderella. Kurt on Drugs. Later he picks up Vella on the street. Just to talk.

Summer over. The club empties. Only pimp and their whores. Lotte wants to go. Revenge is more important. Only one more trip to Geneva. The go. Anywhere but Hamburg.

His sister with the Justice Department informs him the FBI want him for questioning. New York is out of the question. Lotte and he make love finally. Kurt ODs. Sean rescues him. One more trip. Enough.

The banker’s hustler Willi is kidnapped by SS Tommy. The safe house. A bunker on the Von Brucken estate. Vanessa by the window. Tomorrow he will ship her to the Emirates. 

Sean on a plane with a million dollars. Direct flight. Temptation. Only Lotte is keeping him here.

SS Tommy and Lukas have Sean attacked. Lotte saves him.

Tomorrow Lukas flies to the Caymans to get the money.

The ticking clock. Cali and Kurt agree this is the week. Willi missing is a problem. Cali suspects interference, but the theft is still a go.

To save Willi the banker sends a fortune to Lukas’ account. SS Tommy takes him to his lover. He stages a murder-suicide to get rid of them both.

In Geneva the banker has nothing for Sean. Kurt outside. The news. The drugs. Heart attack. DOA. Cali tells him to leave the body in Geneva. His henchmen will take Kurt to Paris. Lotte is safe with Cali’s henchman. No one is safe from the pimps.

Lotte escapes from the old pimp. She now knows who attacked her. SS Tommy. He is a dead man. She at the ErosCenter wreaks her revenge. SS Tommy MIA.

SS Tommy breaks into the mansion with an ax. Vanessa his prisoner. Cali suspecting his henchman has follows him. Fight. A shot. Ax to Cali’s side. Almost a dead man. Vanessa kills SS Tommy. 

“Where is Kurt?”

“Paris.”

Sean arrives in Hamburg. The Women of the ErosCenter are in rebellion.  Lotte has savaged the other attacker.  No male is safe. She is not at the mansion. The detective confronts him. Not officially. He goes to her home away from home. The casino.

A doctor tends to Cali. In a studio next to Sean’s apartment. No hospital. Vanessa is in shock. He has yet to tell her Kurt is dead.

Lotte in a hotel room. Luger in her hand. Ready to kill the next man to enter. SS Tommy # 1. Every other male # 2. The first man. 

Sean. She pulls the trigger. Misses. Sean calms her down. She is no saint. Neither is he.

The police have been called to the forest. Two dead bodies in an Audi. Murder-suicide. Police investigate. The mansion door broken. Blood on the floor. The detective had a bad feeling. Lukas’ wife missing. The Baron has returned from the Caymans. Playing the sorrowful husband. The detective doesn’t buy it, but lets the Baron go.

Lukas drives to the house on the Elbe. He overpowers Sean and drags Lotte from the house. Cali arrives in time, but in no shape to fight Lukas. The detective arrives to stop the carnage. He sends away Sean, Lotte, and Cali. Just him and Lukas. One bullet ends Lukas’ life. Not better or worse.

Night time on the autobahn. Out of Germany into France. Paris. The morgue. Kurt on a slab. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is. Cremation in Pere Lachaise cemetery. The story is over. Another begins.

Later at the Explorers Club I redacted Homer's Odyssey's 140,000 words to a haiku.

Fall of Troy
Ulysses
Sails away
Ten years later
Home
Kills all

Sixteen syllables.

Count them

Writing THE END

Yesterday I typed THE END to ALMOST A DEAD MAN.

348 pages.

Then spell check.

Only seven typos

Then I hit search for God. Only seventeen times. No bad for an atheist.

I first wrote it in Ireland in 1997. I showed it to Shannon who read it in a single night. I sent the manuscript to a few publishers and then left the USA for Thailand where I wrote three more novels sending them overseas to the US. Nothing, but I kept writing.

I rewrote ALMOST A DEAD MAN in 2016, but was too broke to send it anywhere.

When my diamond job ended in Christmas I decided to clean up THE 2016 version. Two and a half months

348 pages

Now the hard part

Finding and agent or publisher

Next a synopsis and outline and talk about it all the time

Along with everything else

I'm hoping to fly to Bangkok and Hong Kong next month.

I start selling jewelry in Montauk this weekend.

It was a long wintah.

Mary Heaton Vorse reportedly said, "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Today

Recovering from post partem THE END. I woke this morning, thinking, "Are you mad?"

A novel about pimps and whores with XXX sex scenes, BDSM, and violence and love and redemption and a woman's revenge against man, and fairy tales.

Off the food stamps to see if I can get more.

I had told them months ago that I was homeless, because I feel homeless. Insecure. Adrift. Apart. Like always do I'm comfortable that way.

Wish me luck.

Since the jewelry store in Montauk closed for the winter I've been revising a novel I wrote in 1997

Opening paragraphs of ALMOST A DEAD MAN

Hamburg 192

The scurry of claws across the filthy 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 on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned 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 dusty 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.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Cali is still with us.

Opening paragraphs of ALMOST A DEAD MAN

Hamburg 1982

The scurry of claws across the filthy 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 on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned 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 dusty 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.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Hamburg
>Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft (HDW) Hamburg,
1972

I wrote this novel in the autumn of 1997 while living several months in Ballyconeeley under the Connemara Mountains or the Seven Pins. I returned to New York and only showed the finished work to Shannon Greer. He read it in one night. I never showed it to anyone else, although in 2016 I revised it another time.

Last Christmas Winick Diamonds, the jewelry sore in Montauk, closed for the season. With no job I went on the hustle for money and filled my spare time writing a new version of ALMOST A DEAD MAN. I'm nearly finished. First destination. Shannon Greer. He's a great photographer and has a better than good eye.

ps Calle Schwensen survived the Gross Freiheit of the Reeperbahn.

If you find him there, give him my regards.

Hamburg 1982

The scurry of claws across the filthy 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 on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned 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 dusty 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.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Hamburg
>Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft (HDW) Hamburg,
1972

I wrote this novel in the autumn of 1997 while living several months in Ballyconeeley under the Connemara Mountains or the Seven Pins. I returned to New York and only showed the finished work to Shannon Greer. He read it in one night. I never showed it to anyone else, although in 2016 I revised it another time.

Last Christmas Winick Diamonds, the jewelry sore in Montauk, closed for the season. With no job I went on the hustle for money and filled my spare time writing a new version of ALMOST A DEAD MAN. I'm nearly finished. First destination. Shannon Greer. He's a great photographer and has a better than good eye.

ps Calle Schwensen survived the Gross Freiheit of the Reeperbahn.

If you find him there, give him my regards.

As for Kurt he never left Paris.

Lady Snowblood (1973) 修羅雪姫 - Movie Trailer - Far East Films

From ALMOST A DEAD MAN

The casino at Hamburg's Hotel-Intercontinental was quiet on weekday afternoons. The only action was a solo woman at the roulette table and a Japanese businessman playing baccarat. The head executive in a Savile Row suits displayed no emotion, as his fingers slashed down like samurai sword to take a hit. Win or loss was not as important as his wager’s fearlessness. The money was all black money unspendable in Japan.

After another losing hand the Joshi or boss nodded to his three underlings. The youngest separated from the table and went to the polished roulette table. The low-echelon salaryman did not understood the rules. His boss glared at him and he placed a chip on black, while observing the play of the towering brunette in four-inch stiletto heels.

Her short hair stuck out in punk spikes. Her right eye moved independently of the left. Forces had ravaged her visage. The woman in her mid-twenties resembled Meiko Kaji, if the Japanese movie actress had crashed a Porsche into a wall. There was no beauty in the gaijin gyaru.

The Japanese company man considered Occidental women ugly. This woman was more scarred as a battle-word samurai warrior. irginity was a requirement for a naked sushi body back in Japan. His boss was not so fussy in Germany. His boss was not so fussy in Germany. All the women in Hamburg were whores to them, yet she emanated a defiance rarely displayed by Japanese women other than Meiko Kaji. The pink film star was a goddess. The nameless company man loved the 1973 classic revenge movie THE LADY IN SNOWBLOOD, WHICH TARANTINO LIFTED FOR KILL BILL.

ALMOST A DEAD MAN's gaijin gyaru or western woman is Lotte Wessel, once the leader of the women of the Reeperbahn working women seeking to form a union to overthrow the pimps or Zuhalterai. They almost kill her and now she is seeking revenge.

I wrote this novel in the west of Ireland 1997.

All the cow farmers in the pub beneath the Connemara Mountains asked, "Why yer writing a book about Germany in Ireland?"

"My mother's death wish was that I go to Ireland and marry someone like my sisters or aunts."

"Now that's a death wish. How ye faring with that task?" Mikey came up to my chest and lived in a stone hut on the ocean.

"I'm here drinking with youse." None of the first born farmers had married. Women fled the West of Galway before they could get knocked up by family or friends.

I wrote THE END in December. I returned to New York. Shannon Greer, photographer read it back then in an evening. p>I rewrote it several times without submitting it to publishers or agents.

It's now on page 289 of the 2025 rewrite.

Good then, better now.

ALMOST A DEAD MAN - CHAPTER 2

Howling sirens drove the panicked East Villagers into the Astor Place Subway. Most failed to pierce the scrum at the head of the stairs to the station and they raised their eyes to the speck falling to Earth. A white flash vaporized New York into the ionosphere.

“DOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAA."

The subhuman scream ping-ponged up the canyon of East 10th Street tenements. Inside the third-floor railroad flat’s bedroom a man’s naked body twitched on the floor futon. An arm over his face failed to block out the madman's wail and the thirty year-old tossed off the damp sheet to jump out of the bed. The blood drained from his skull and he collapsed toward the window. The temperature was climbing into the 90s. All June had been hot since his return from Paris. Outside a middle-aged Polish woman fled down the sidewalk from a dope-sick junkie mauling a parked car with an iron pipe. Sparkling fragments flew in the sunlight. Sean’s motorcycle was a single car-length from this psycho-storm. Down below the madman arched his face to the broiling sun and emptied the ashes of his soul.

"DOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAA."

No woman answered his two-syllable aria. A cop car rounded the corner. The madman stood erect and waved to the officers. His good posture masked his mania Nothing short of an 'officer-down' call was extricating the policemen from their air-con cruiser. With the cruiser out of sight the junkie demolished another windshield.

His Yamaha 650XS was on deck for batting practice. Sean rushed to fill a trash bag with water from the brimming tub in his kitchen to save his motorcycle. Quickly aiming, he heaved the heavy plastic sack out the window. Liquid beads sprayed from its rupturing seams. Ten pounds of water accelerated from forty feet and the impact leveled his target to the sidewalk.

The torn plastic shroud flapped over the flattened man. Water dropped from that height could be fatal. Sean reached for the phone to call 911. As the phone rang, the madman staggered to his feet off in the directions of Tompkins Square Park. It was hard to kill junkies. There were no witnesses on the street. He hung up the phone.

Sean flopped on the living room couch. The floor fan pushed sullen air around the living room. Sweat ran down his body like he was a martyred saint’s miraculous weeping statue. The madman had only been a menace to property and his Yamaha XS 650 wasn’t worth a life. Every psychiatrist and girlfriend had blamed his violent streak on his childhood. His parents had provided him everything necessary to be normal and he tried to examine his past for the millionth time to discover what set him apart from everyone else. Dyslexia, bullying, and speech impediments were clue to a mystery not yet solved and now these dreams of nuclear destruction.

He lay on the battered sofa. Seconds swelled to minutes and the hours thickened until a tainted breeze from the distant Hudson stirred heat-swollen air. Sheet lightning crackled across the sky and the thunder echoed the rumbling of the nine-pin balls from Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Nobody read him anymore.

The WINS radio reported not a hint rain ahead to relieve the overheated city. He shut off the radio and slipped into the tub in the kitchen. It had been full for several days.The water wrapped around his body like a discharged placenta.

After the murder at the Continental in the winter of 1982 Sean had fled New York. Lisa had sworn to meet him in Paris. A week later heard from a friend that she had gone to LA to get into the movies. He didn’t blame her for not coming to France, but she was always on his mind. His fingers wrinkled after twenty minutes. They were ready to become thirty. The ringing of the telephone broke his trance. He leaped from the bath and grabbed the phone on the third ring.

It was an oversea call. Lisa wasn’t on the other end. A German was.

"This is Kurt Oster. You remember me?" A man's voice crackled over trans-Atlantic connection.

"Who can forget Paris?" The German possessed a jet set life of multiple-city dwellings, cars, and beautiful women. Sean had translated some documents for his teletype business in his second-story house on Rue Des Deux Pont. Kurt liked when asked if he needed anything Sean had requested champagne. He served him Moet. It was 10am. They had done drugs together more than a few times. The two of them were acquaintances more than friends.

“Sure, I remember you.”

A puddle of water spread beyond his bare feet. He wrapped a towel around his waist and sat on a kitchen chair. Outside in the alley the willow branches were still in the breathless heat.

"New York in the summer. Hell, no?"

"Pretty close to it. Only me, the poor, the depraved, and the dying."

"You speak a little German, yes."

His high school class had ridiculed Sean’s reading of Kafka's DAS URTEIL, until the warty Bavarian teacher had snubbed out his Pall Mall.

"Herr Coll's accent is better than the rest of you hairdressers."

Sean had a lisp and a stutter as a young man. He didn’t even speak English well. "Ein bissen."

"You are Irish, yes?" This was an interview.

"Irish and American." That nation had granted second-generation blood citizenship in both Ireland and the EEC.

"Good, because you need papers to work at my new club in Hamburg. Your friend, Bertram Bellepas, will be the DJ. You know him.”

“Yes.” They had worked together in Paris.He was almost a friend. As much a ny junkie can be a friend.

“The city is beautiful in the summer. The women more so. It’s the summer solstice and the days are long. I will pay you a thousand Deutschmarks a week, plus a one and a half percentage of the gross, which I figure about two-thousand marks a month. If you agree, a ticket will be waiting at Lufthansa. I will meet you at the Hamburg airport. It will be summertime and the living is sleazy.”

Sean had seen the city in Wim Wenders AMERICAN FRIEND, the film-noir 1977 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s RIPLEY’S GAME. It looked dangerous, but the name also conjured up the Beatles at the Star Club, a vast harbor on the North Sea, and sex trade on the Reeperbahn. Working six months came to roughly fifty thousand marks or roughly $30,000.

"Ich musste uber es zu denken."

“What’s there to think about?”

Sean’s savings from working the winter at a Paris nightclub were down to a couple of hundred dollars. Rent was due on the first of July. There was only one reason to stay here and Lisa had been gone over six months, still Sean answered, "I'll tell you tomorrow."

"You'd be making a big mistake not to come. Here’s my number.”

Sean wrote it down. “Tschus.”

Sean said the same. It was more familiar than Auf Siedersehen. The line went dead.

He had not expected fate to provide a salvation in Hamburg. At worst Bruder Karl had to be smiling in heaven at the prospect of his worst student working in Germany. Hopefully his classmates were destined for hell. They all had been Tyrannen or bullies, except for the one black student in the class. For some reason they left him alone, which was inexplicable in a Boston suburb. The long summer's day surrendered to night without any temperature drop. It was the solstice and the was setting at the western terminus of 10th Street.Sean got on the Yahama and drove up 1st Avenue to East 77th Street. He parked the bike on the corner and walked halfway down the block. The windows of the third-floor apartment across the street were dark. Lisa's name remained on the mailbox and last week the building super had said her rent had been paid in full for three months. She had to show up some time. A bottle whistled by his head.

"Bastard. Man. Bastard."

A wizened woman in shredded plastic bags searched the garbage for another missile.

"I'm the only crazy on this block. You're not crazy. You're only in love with a woman who left you for another man and she’s never coming back. You don't think I see you, because I'm nobody, but I've seen you and your whore. You didn’t lose your girlfriend. Just your turn. She was fucking that Russian and everyone else. All you bastards want is for us to be whores, and when we’re not your mothers, then you throw us out on the street.”

He had seen the old woman many times. He sometimes gave her a dollar. Her name was Estelle. She never told her story and never had a kind word for anyone. He expected no less. The old woman tore apart her plastic sheath. Her skin was caked with rivulets of sweat. He returned to his motorcycle. The kickstart ignited the 650cc engine with a flaming backfire. Dogs barking joined the howl of car alarms. He revved the motor and raced up the block to 2nd Avenue.

Only one thing was capable of erasing the old woman’s accusations. He burned the next red light. A newspaper truck missed him by inches. It was just a question of time, until an impact with steel car exorcised his obsession with Lisa.

At 23rd Street he broke free of the traffic flow and shifted into fifth gear. At this speed any crash was fatal. At 14th a redhead the same height as Lisa was getting into a taxi. Sean braked and swerved to a halt. A man in a suit ran up and lifted the young redhead’s skirt. She laughed, while he forced her into a taxi.

The yellow Checker pulled away from the curb. Sean blasted through the red light in pursuit. A siren whooped behind him. The redhead turned and Lisa's mirage dissolved into another woman’s face. No cop in the New York would believe his having seen his ex-girlfriend’s double, but running from the police was always a bad idea, unless he had a few day’s head start.

Sean veered to a stop at the curb and pulled off his helmet. Two car doors slammed and cop shoes flapped against the pavement. A flashlight beam blinded his vision. A gruff voice ordered, "Get off the bike."

"What's the problem, officers?” Sean balanced his bike on the kickstand and lifted his hands.

"You see what I see, Kev?"

"I can't friggin' believe my eyes. Sean Coll in the flesh."

"I told you that was his bike, but you said, "Naw, Seano's out of town.” Guess you were wrong," the tobacco-harsh voice commented with the pleasure of being right.

The flashlight shut off and Sean blinked away the sunbursts. The two NYPD officers grinned like drunken hunters discovering a snared animal. Kevin Driscoll was thinner than his partner, but still had forty pounds and a few inches on Sean. Neither cop was shy about tossing around their weight.

They were the pride of the 9th Precinct. The setting for the TV show KOJAK. Nothing on that show snitched out these two cops’ crimes.

"Welcome back, Seano." deRocco took off his perforated summer-weight cap and scratched his balding head. “We heard you were in Paris. You shoulda stayed out of town."

"I'm leaving as soon as I can." Sean had not counted on deRocco and Driscoll. They were as lucky as he was unhappy that they were still in uniform.

"You believe that, Kev?" deRocco was the brains of the pair.

"Nah, it's bullshit." Kevin Driscoll waved on the gawking drivers and deRocco stepped closer. The whiskey heavy on his breath never a good sign in hot weather. "Drop yer fuckin' hands. This ain't no arrest. We just wanna talk with you."

"I haven't talked to no one about the night Johnny Fats was killed."

"Why should we believe you?" Driscoll slapped the flashlight into his palm.

One thin dime changed this balance of power.

"If I had ratted you out, would I be here now?”

“No, you would be in a grave.”

“A cop in jail isn't a pretty sight."

"You threatenin’ us?" Driscoll dropped his hand to his .38. The citations above his badge attested to multiple cold-blooded shootings in line of duty to the NYPD.

"Not at all.”

Seven months ago on a snowy evening Sean had discovered the precinct's bagman in the Caddy parked behind their after-hour club on East 14th Street. A single bullet hole perforated Johnny Fat’s left temple. A gun in his left hand. Johnny Fats was right-handed. Somehow a Grand Jury ruled it 'death by misadventure'. The ensuing IAU investigation suspended fifteen cops from the Twentieth Precinct. Two were in upstate prisons serving long term for various crimes. None of them murder. No one had all the answers to the whys and whos. Sean possessed more than most.

“Just I saw you leave with Johnny Fats.”

"We weren’t involved with his death." Driscoll protested, not knowing what if anything the bagman had said to Sean.

"Shut up, Kev." deRocco's eyes were blank of emotion. “We came back before he was offed."

"Sgt. Ferguson thinks that piece of timing is a little off." The IAU sergeant had plenty of theories, mostly of them unprovable hunches on the money.

"That cocksucker." deRocco spat out the words.

Sean smirked, having heard the precinct cops gossip about deRocco's sexual leaning. They had once been staking out of dope drop on East 4th Street. Te gang member made them and approached the unmarked car. They discovered two men engaged in a sexual act. Queer had saved both their lives.

"What you smilin' about?"

"Nothing." Cops had a hard job in New York City, however these two were well past redemption. AS lucky as they had been, bad luck was waiting for the, but not tonight. “Today I got a phone call today from Germany. They offered a job at a nightclub there. Maybe I should go?” “And stay away for a while too.” deRocco lit a cigarette. "You're a lucky fuckin' Mick, Seano."

"You want to contribute to my bon-voyage fund?"

Driscoll feigned a punch and Sean ducked to his right.

“Don’t push it, Seano. Consider yourself another asshole from Boston who lived in New York too long. Just get the fuck out of town. You have three days.”

"Sure, I'll send you a postcard. Ich liebe dich.” The two officers returned to their blue-and-white cruiser, and then u-turned across 14th Street into the Ninth Precinct. Sean had to face the truth that he had come back to the scenes of the crimes, because of his love for Lisa. Thousands of other women lived in this city. Falling in love with one seemed cursed by his obsession with Lisa. She was not coming back any time soon. Of this he was sure.

Sean obeying all the lights back to his apartment.

By the time he reached East 10th Street, he thanked deRocco and Driscoll for forcing him to accept Kurt's offer. Maybe a life a few thousand miles away from New York might free his soul. Something had to someday.

Photo (th Precinct Investigation Unit 1979

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.