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whose bosses claimed there were old drug-dealing accounts stilloutstanding, Gina shut her door. Perhaps she actually didn’t mind just being something to take his mind off things. Perhaps she saw Slibulsky in the same light. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet would have come to some such arrangement if they’d survived.
    ‘In case you’re really interested, I still have Deborah.’
    ‘Deborah? Don’t you mean Helga?’
    ‘She calls herself Deborah, so I call her Deborah too.’
    ‘But she’s a tart!’
    ‘So what?’
    ‘I meant something else.’
    ‘You said “a screw”.’
    ‘All the same, there’s a difference.’
    ‘Between a tart and a good screw to make up for things? Not much of one, if you ask me.’
    ‘Don’t start going on about true love.’
    ‘I wasn’t going to.’
    ‘Good.’
    A little later we reached the spruce wood where we were planning to dispose of the bodies. I looked in the rear-view mirror to make sure there was no car behind us and no one could see us, turned off the road onto an unmade path, and drove on the sidelights. The path came to an end after about a hundred metres and branches slapped against the windscreen. When we got out we were surrounded by the smell of resin and earth. The ground was covered with a thick layer of spruce needles. No sign of forestry workers or people going for walks.
    While Slibulsky took the spades off the back seat, he asked, ‘What are you going to do with the car?’
    I ducked down under some branches, shining a flashlight as I looked for a suitable place to dig. ‘Leave itsomewhere near the rail station, as bait. The thing’s worth so much, even a successful gangster would be glad to have it back. And perhaps someone will get behind the wheel and be idiot enough to lead me to his boss.’
    ‘Well, just in case you change your mind, we’d get a year’s earnings for that car.’
    ‘A year of whose earnings, yours or mine?’
    ‘Mine, of course. With yours you could just about buy the music system,’ he said, opening the boot. ‘In its present condition.’
    ‘Very funny,’ I muttered. Then I found a place. A large root stuck up above ground and could be pushed aside.
    We spent the next forty minutes digging. Our faces were dripping with sweat, and blisters formed and broke on our hands. When the hole was wide and deep enough we pushed the bodies into it. We shovelled the earth back, trod it down, covered it with spruce needles, and finally I put the root back in place.
    While Slibulsky reversed the car out of the wood, I tried covering up the tyre tracks as best I could. Back on the paved road, Slibulsky asked, ‘How exactly did you see that, about using the car as bait? Are you going to stand beside it the whole time?’
    ‘I’ll get Max to build in a transmitter with a signal that I can follow by radio.’
    ‘And then what?’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘What will you do then? March in, say: “Hey, I shot a couple of your gorillas, but if you let my mate go on running his bar we’ll say no more about it?” ’
    ‘What are you talking about? Do you tell people: “Hey, buy my ice cream, there’s nothing in it but sugar and milkpowder and sometimes a couple of salmonella bugs, but give me ten marks for a cornet and I’ll turn a blind eye?” ’
    Slibulsky made a face as if I were slow on the uptake. I lit a cigarette.
    ‘OK,’ he said, ‘you’ll be cleverer than that, but however clever you are this is a team that drives BMWs, wears Italian suits, and asks six thousand a month from the manager of a miserable little place serving warmed-up beans – about as much as all the furnishings are worth, if that. What I mean is, these guys don’t do things by halves. Maybe they’ll go crazy and overreach themselves, and then their outfit won’t last long, but while it does last there’s no compromising with them, no negotiating, nothing. Either you get rid of the rest of them or they’ll get rid of you.’
    ‘So what do you think I