and there was still no sign of the supply of paintings drying up. The cars were no problem. Valentin had become an expert in choosing the right models – BMWs, Jaguars, Porsches, the occasional top-of-the-range Volkswagen. The streets seemed to flow with the rich, hot scent of their shining metal, sweetened by luxurious spicy touches of leather and rubber; and there was practically no risk apart from the actual moment of opening a door. When Valentin climbed into a motor in the morning he knew that by nightfall it would have travelled a distance of more than a thousand kilometres and across several borders. This was his only regret, he told George. Sometimes the pleasure he experienced when he sat in front of the wheel of a beautiful car was almost as good as sex, and when he drove it into one of the garages they used he would feel the insane desire to keep it, to remain wrapped in the clinging embrace of soft warm leather, if only for a little while longer.
‘Verrückt,’ George had muttered. ‘You’re crazy.’ But, at the same time, he reflected that it was just as well. Their zones of responsibility had divided themselves, as it seemed, quite naturally. George’s job was to sell the paintings. Valentin boosted the cars. Since their first experience with the dealer, Gunther, George had set out to inform himself about the art objects he was handling. He read catalogues and visited galleries, museums and auction rooms, checking the prices carefully, matching his estimates with them. He read about Feofan Grek, and Rublyov and Ushakov, and then leaving icons behind he read about the Wanderers group, the Peredvizhniki, Surikov and Repin, and then Mikhail Vrubel and Diaghilev. Before he had progressed very far, however, he had realised that Levitan, whose painting he had sold to Gunther for a few thousand marks, was a classic example of the nineteenth century Peredvizhniki. The landscapes were famous and highly valued, and he learnt also that there were collectors not far away who would have given him ten or twenty times the amount without a single question. ‘Idiot,’ he muttered to himself from time to time, as he turned the illustrated pages or sat at the back of an auction watching the bidding. ‘Idiot.’
It was a new world in which George immersed himself. At first his wife Radka was puzzled, then delighted at his new-found interest. When he resigned as manager of one of the rent-a-car firms at the airport, the job he’d held down for five years, she had almost panicked, convinced that he was about to return to his old ways. But he’d surprised her with the amount he earnt buying and selling antiques, as he called them. Later on, as the stream of money swelled into something like a flood she began to worry again. But, for a while, George’s happiness with his end of the bargain was complete. Valentin’s adventures didn’t tempt him at all. He had gone boosting with the Russian a couple of times and he hated it all, the rush of excitement as they approached the car, the sucking dread of a humiliating arrest, the stupid babbling euphoria of the escape. George was content to leave that side of the business to his cousin, and when Valentin ran off at the mouth about cars, as he usually did, he merely listened patiently, an ironic smile curling on his lips.
As Valentin swung right climbing up MaxBreuerallee towards the Bahnhof in Altona he was telling George that the Jaguar’s engine made the wrong sort of noise.
‘Like a tank, except it doesn’t smoke and stink of kerosene.’
‘You never drove a tank,’ George said automatically.
Valentin looked round at him, his expression suddenly clouded.
‘I’ve smelt plenty.’
It was a smell George also remembered with an uncomfortable clarity. Once upon a time it had been so familiar that he could go for days without noticing it. But there was still one occasion that he associated with the smell of kerosene and the grinding rumble of the armoured engines, and Valentin’s remark had made his mind leap to it, like turning the knob on a pair of binoculars and suddenly seeing a distant scene in sharp focus, as if close enough to touch.
He was in the army then, twenty years old, only a boy. His unit had been sent over the border on a mission of fraternal assistance against saboteurs and subversives. That’s what they’d been told in the political briefings anyway, but no one in the unit believed it. The invasion of 1968 was nearly ten years in the past, but the boys already knew that they would face scorn and pointing fingers rather than the open arms of a grateful population. The column had made a stop near Karlovy Vary, a long way short of Prague. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun was shining brightly. They were in no hurry, the soldiers had been told, and when the little row of armoured vehicles parked by the side of the country road, some of them went off to piss in the meadow or sprawl under the shade of the trees.
George stood leaning against a tank, smoking a cigarette. He was thinking of his mother. She had clung to him, muttering endearments, her cheeks wet with tears: ‘Malcheek. Chelovechek. My little man.’ Then, after he had turned away, she gripped his elbow and brought her mouth close to his ear. ‘Trust no one.’
He was one of the first to see the girls. They looked German with their fair hair and long brown legs gleaming in the sun, but he guessed that they were local. Two of them were mounted on a man’s bicycle, the third trotted alongside, heads up, consciously ignoring the staring eyes of the soldiers who were getting up from the roadside and standing on tiptoe to get a good look at the girl’s ass as she pumped and wriggled on the high saddle. There were a few whistles, but nothing excessive. Everyone had been warned about how to behave to the local inhabitants.
At first George thought that the girls hadn’t noticed him and that they would go past without a look, but as they drew opposite him, the bicycle braked, stopped, and the two girls dismounted. Facing him across the width of the road the three looked not unlike women he had known for most of his life. The tallest, the one who had been pedalling the bicycle, wore her hair twisted into a long plait which fell over her shoulder and the breast on the right. She was sweating a little, breathing hard, her skin flushing underneath the tan.
‘Negro,’ she said, smiling at him, ‘why are you here in our country?’
George stood frozen on the spot, unable to speak. His mind was a blank, except for the disappointment which was sweeping through his entire body. For a moment he had been gripped by a fantasy in which he lay under the trees with these three beauties, stroking their thighs and sucking at their nipples.
Without taking her eyes from his the tall girl put her hand on her crotch, above the light cloth of her dress, and moved it up and down.
‘You want some, negro?’
It struck him that she spoke good German, just as they had been told the locals would, and he had heard the same invitation before, couched in exactly the same words. But her voice had deepened into a tone of anger and contempt and the expression on her face was twisted into a mask of hatred, her lips sneering and scornful. George knew what hatred and contempt looked like. He’d seen it enough, but now he was gripped by a curious and irresistible desire to know one thing. Did she hate him because he was German, or because he was a black man?
He straightened up and opened his mouth to ask, but the group leader’s voice cut in before he could get the words out.
‘Say nothing. That’s an order. These whores are sent to provoke us.’
The girls’ eyes switched to the sergeant standing behind him, and they all laughed, almost in unison, and still with the same edge of contempt.
‘Go home, negro,’ the tall girl said. ‘Wherever you come from. And take your friends with you.’
The girls giggled in chorus, to George’s ears an angry insolent sound which matched the contempt in their eyes. Then they turned and walked away, still ignoring the catcalls and whistles which now reached a crescendo as they walked the gauntlet of the soldiers’ eyes. George watched them until they had gone past the end of the column, then he turned round,
