Your Perfect Year(87)

He turned back to her. “To catch the bus.”

“If I were you, I’d head in the other direction,” she said. “You won’t find a bus over there.”

“Of course not,” he replied and set off in the opposite direction.

“In any case, if it’s the Elbchaussee you’re going to, I’d take the U-Bahn.”

He stopped again. Gave in. It was madness to act as if he had the slightest idea where he needed to go. He’d be better off allowing a hundred-year-old to explain to him how to get where he was going on public transportation.

Twenty minutes later, Jonathan found that the Wallraff comparison wasn’t so far off the mark. From his seat on the U3 line train heading from Hoheluftchaussee toward St. Pauli (where he was to take the number 36 bus heading for Blankenese, his neighbor had impressed upon him), it was clear that there were a good number of people who considered beer to be a suitable breakfast.

Feeling slightly scared, he sat hunched into the corner of a seat and watched two men swaying in the aisle not far from him, each with a can of Astra lager in hand, arguing so loudly that they were almost coming to blows.

Jonathan feared that they could at any moment descend into a brawl, and he could himself get drawn in. He kept his eyes averted so he wouldn’t accidentally provoke the two beer drinkers, and looked around at the other passengers instead.

Most of them were reading, though they weren’t absorbed in newspapers or books but were tapping on their cell phones and tablets. Interesting. And alarming.

He clearly remembered a discussion a few years ago at Grief & Son Books about electronic books, which his father had nipped in the bud by declaiming forcefully, “The e-book is just a passing trend and we’re having nothing to do with it! At Grief & Son Books, we print on paper and that’s that!” Nevertheless, Bode had shortly afterward insisted that the relevant reading devices were obtained for the editors, because, as he had explained, slightly shamefaced, it made checking manuscripts so much more efficient that the editorial staff refused to be without them a moment longer. Now, to judge from what Jonathan could see as he looked around the carriage, it wasn’t only his editors who saw the virtues of digital books.

He left the train at St. Pauli Station, although when the two beer drinkers also got off there, he seriously considered staying on. The poster by the station exit announcing that weapons and glass bottles were strictly forbidden in this area did nothing to make him want to linger here any longer than strictly necessary.

He saw with relief that the bus stop for route 36 was only a few yards away, so there would be no need for him to cross the Reeperbahn and run the risk of bumping into any shady characters who paid no heed to the poster with its arms ban.

He went to stand by the stop and wait for the right bus. According to the timetable, one should be along in a few minutes.

A passing dark-red car caught Jonathan’s eye. It was an old Ford Mustang—a particularly nice, well-maintained model. The car stopped at the Millerntor junction traffic lights, and he saw that the driver was a red-haired woman.

Jonathan had to smile, not only because an image from his vision board had more or less materialized in front of him, but also because he caught himself buying into a stereotype. In this district he would have expected a woman to be in the passenger seat, the car being driven by a pimp. But he had probably simply spent his childhood and youth hearing too many cautionary tales about the Reeperbahn from his parents, whose mission in life had been to keep him away from Hamburg’s red-light district.

Successfully, too, he had to admit. He had never been here, not even as an adult. Why not? Hadn’t every Hamburg citizen had at least one wild night out on the Reeperbahn? From Saturday night into early Sunday morning, with a prawn sandwich from the fish market as the crowning glory of a great night out.

As he stood there looking over at the Mustang, his thoughts miles away, he felt a desire to do it sometime. Apart from the prawn sandwich, of course—he couldn’t stand those. But the rest of the plan sounded remarkably appealing. Maybe Markus Bode would be a suitable companion for a drunken night out in the red-light district? Anything that wasn’t a lonely evening in his hotel must raise a certain enthusiasm, surely?

The light turned green; the woman in the Mustang stepped on the pedal and soon vanished from Jonathan’s sight. He sighed and turned away, a little saddened. It was a really, really good car.





44

Hannah

Monday, January 15, 9:59 a.m.

Udo Lindenberg’s homage to the Reeperbahn was playing on the radio as Hannah drove Simon’s car toward the Millerntor high-rise blocks that marked the entrance to the red-light district. Despite her mood, she sang along with a kind of dark, gallows-humor cheer.

She had been driving around the city in the Mustang for an hour and a half, full of qualms about whether she should really do what she intended to, or whether she was overdoing it in her self-righteous anger. She had finally come to the conclusion that she was perfectly within her rights to overdo things and that she had to take some kind of action to vent the worry, the pain, and, yes, the rage that still boiled within her.

To make her mark. A loud, thunderous mark that would shove Simon from his cloud or wherever he was lounging around. So she headed for the red-light district, in an action that seemed like the only logical consequence of the way Simon had betrayed her.

At this hour of the morning, the entertainment district had none of the glitzy fascination of the night, when it drew in hordes of pilgrims eager to hit the town. No colored lights, no neon ads, no dolled-up women, and no loud music from the bars that lined the street. Everywhere there was dirt, dirt, dirt, and gray misery; the St. Pauli district had hung its pretty dress out on the line to shake off the dust, waiting for the next night. Groups of punks were hanging around on the sidewalk with their huge dogs; here and there outside closed amusement arcades and bars, sleeping bags were huddled where the homeless slept off their last high.