chapter ten

The Small Square

The café was getting the beginnings of its winter appearance; trying on the drab apparel for the first time. A couple of precautionary raincoats hung by the door, no umbrellas as yet, the real tell-tale sign was the margin of condensation around every window and the necessity to keep the lights on even at ten thirty in the morning. In sum it was a flat, indeterminate weekday in November and Kay stirred her cappuccino with a slow but relentless determination to put some kind of sympathetic spin on her spirits. She should have been looking forward to the next few weeks for a number of reasons; there was more work to be produced, more people in the gallery and most importantly more income between now and Christmas than in all the other months taken together; but today was a bad one, and she knew damn well why.

“What’s bugging you?”

Trisha filled the table with bustling concern and the deeply comforting smell of oil paint. She slapped her notebook down and propped a packet of cigarettes open upon it, removing one and waving it about as she talked, fully aware that Kay and most of the staff were terrified that she would light it and force one of them to tell her to put it out.

“You’re staring into that coffee as if it were a crystal ball. Is this to do with your latest conquest? He doesn’t look that bad, but you can never tell from appearances.”

“No, he’s okay; well quite pleasant actually,” replied Kay.

“Oh, really; do go on,” in her enthusiasm for romantic detail, Trisha almost, but not quite, sparked her lighter. Kay took a long breath of linseed and frying sausages, seeing nothing but the dissolving chocolate dusted foam.

Trisha’s hand, wrist made strong by the multi-coloured fabric woven around it, clamped down over Kay’s, stilling the nervous turning of the spoon. “You know Frank isn’t real. We checked it out, we checked everything out. Frank never existed, he was never your shrink, he had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical company. He’s just more of that shit that you were left with by your parents…”

“By my dad.”

“Sorry, by your dad; but he’s paying for it for the rest of his life.”

“Is he? I don’t think he even knows he’s locked up. Apparently he’s developed some sort of late onset autism. Anyway, what’s prison for? It’s obviously not making him a better person, or any kind of person, and I’m sure society doesn’t care enough about what he… they… did to me to think his sentence constitutes revenge.”

“So?”

“So he knew Frank.”

Trisha was the only person Kay had ever met whom she could read emotionally. Now she sensed the tussle between exasperation and sorrow.

“Drink up. Forget about it. We’ve too much to be doing in the gallery. Your elves are flying out the doors.”

Kay smiled despite herself. “Not literally I hope.” Well done Trisha. Perhaps she was right. In the end, when everything except your memories tell you that someone never existed, and she had to admit her memories had already been shown to be unreliable, perhaps it was better to go along with the general consensus. She shook Frank’s image out of her head and prepared to make more elves. At least they were real.

chapter nine

The Ringstrasse

The medieval roofline seemed defeated now by the infinite expanse above. Centuries of ramshackle storeys steadily rising from the Westphalian earth, seeking to touch the canopy of heaven, suddenly seemed fragile and child-like in the face of the modern scale of the universe and the peripheral nature of those foundations. Frank’s attentions in his third incarnation had turned to wealth, and Cologne had been selected as an industrial centre producing chemicals and pharmaceuticals. It was a theme to which he would return, disastrously, in Frank VI.

Now it was cold; cold enough to keep all but the beggars and the insane indoors, but not cold enough for Frank to feel the motherly touch of his remote home. He let the long skirts of his raincoat flap in the slight breeze created by his rapid steps, regular, counted more often consciously than not in sixes or dozens. The turning into the club happened on five. He resisted the urge to recount; imagine an extra pace, even reconsider the starting point. He knew where that led; another infinity, and conceded that he would be cheating himself if he failed to admit that the turn had occurred on five, but that maybe the turn itself was not a significant event, in fact it was six, the first footfall on the new route, that was the special one. Order re-established he was able once more to consider his environment.

At this moment an old woman, made enormous by her coats and need offered him a sparse fist of roses. He made his habitual response to these requests; a smile that was at once recognition of the beggar’s situation and at the same time an understanding of the entire issue; life, not life, space, vacuum and chance. In these days God was dead and Europe was the gateway to the New Order. Naturally he despised the trivial aspirations and brutal methods of the National Socialists, but this was change at a new level and he intended to make the most of it. He had come to make a fortune from scents and now he found politics standing up before him like one of the denizens of the club to which he was heading. The possibilities were equally as tasty. He felt he was at a more significant turning point. Recently it had been wealth that had attracted him but now he wanted to change the world.

He paused in a hemisphere of darkness and briefly checked the street for prying eyes. The paranoia of the era chafed but was necessary. Anyone could find themselves denounced by a jealous neighbour or over-zealous supporter of the party and Frank’s plans did not include dealing with the late-night attentions of brown-shirted thugs. Satisfied that he was unobserved he passed into the Brewhouse. There were few drinkers as the party dictated how workers should spend their leisure time; Frank quickly spotted the over-weight man nursing a glass of Früe Kölsch as an unofficial inspector for Kraft durch Freude. He paid for his own modest dry sherry and moved towards the back room. The security men recognised him and one took his coat as the other opened the door just enough to allow his entry. The sudden lull in the conversation continued as he was examined by each man sitting around the centrally placed circular table. Von Schröder broke the silence.

“Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Herr Kørner. He shares many of our views about the new Chancellor, and he will be able to help us with his special talents in the field of biological chemistry.”

His audience suitably relaxed, Frank took the stage.

chapter eight

Casa Branco



The cars screamed dust into the briefly dry air; two fat opalescent Cameros already muted and slowed by distance as their tyres dissolved into the haze hanging over the track that led to the forest. Iglesias dropped a heavy arm onto Frank’s shoulders and guided him into the courtyard.

“Now we are alone, Professor Kørner, I want to congratulate you on your excellent way of doing business. If you can convince those hijos de la gran chingada you can convince anyone. We are going to be doing a great deal more business together…. A great deal.”

Frank wondered what the fat Ecuadorian meant by alone. The presence of five slightly jumpy guards stroking Kalashnikovs was making him feel positively crowded. Iglesias seemed to read his mind.

“Hombre! Son Sordomudos! Ciegos! You can do anything and they see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, nada. You can shit in front of them, fuck even! You don’t believe me? Try it, I get you a nice muchacha. I think they make it kind of special.”

“Not just now Alejandro. I’m happy they’re around to protect my ass, not watch it bump up and down,” replied Frank, conjuring exactly the right blend of machismo and humour to see off safely the threat of public intimacy with a female minor. He followed Iglesias’s example and sat to a large wooden table. A maid who Frank believed he could otherwise have found himself performing with placed a decanter and two glasses before them.

“Ribera del Duero,” announced the big man. “I only celebrate with the best vinos de España. These Portuguese tíos would drink my piss and get drunk. How long until we can get another cargo out?”

“Patience, amigo,” said Frank, immediately regretting mimicking the habit of dropping Spanish into his sentences. Iglesias obviously did it as a way of affirming the superiority of his Spanish colonial roots over the Portuguese that provided the language of Brazil. He was surely aware that his own nationals were commonly regarded as the most degenerate of the continent, and for this reason he surrounded himself with tokens, such as this Vega Sicilia, emphasising the refinement possible only to one of a pure Spanish descent. Frank recognised the tang of racial supremacy, and as always it hid the truth that those who promoted such views, like the overweight drug baron before him, were themselves genetically infected by that which they despised. Iglesias’s mother was reputed to be a half-caste whore from somewhere in the mountains and his father a chemist from Sao Paolo who had self-medicated himself into a communal grave in the slums a few months before his son’s birth.

For a moment Frank thought of his own fierce Sami mother, but he had changed himself too much, or not enough, and once more he adopted the role of a lifetime.

“Remember Alejandro, we are not cutting the cocaine. That’s what they expected and they didn’t find it. This is genetic modification of the plant itself. These plants are producing coca at the same rate as normal, but I have increased the narcotic effects by a factor of about sixteen. You don’t cheat anyone, you run no risks apart from those inherent in the business, and yet you make sixteen times the money. Also my adapted plants are even more addictive than the normal. The dealers will listen to their customers and you, my friend, will be the supplier they will all want, so you charge, if you like, a premium rate.”

“You are a beautiful man, Professor Kørner,” said Iglesias, filling his antique glass to the brim. “Chiquita! Venga, taste some churro.” Frank watched the girl bend to her task and counted the days until he could liquidise the fat man’s brain.