all-night petrol station attached to a fast-food café. The car pulls off into an access road and curves round to come to a grinding halt in the gravel car park. There are only two other cars parked alongside the restaurant. One is very new and red.
‘You come,’ the big man says. He says something else in his own language that sounds like a warning, and I nod.
They walk either side of me as we approach the door. The driver points at the bowsers and the big man shrugs, steering me deftly through the shining glass doors. The brightness of the light hurts my eyes and I am glad of the thick paw on my shoulder, steering me. He pushes me into a booth, takes out a phone and moves away to make a call.
‘I just wish you wouldn’t bring up the war,’ one of the men in the booth opposite says with an American accent. ‘It’s a sore point with these guys. They think we betrayed them.’
‘You did,’ the other man snorts in laconic German-accented English.
The thin driver sits down, and gives the other men a dangerous look, but they are too much involved in their conversation to notice. The big man shakes his head at the thin man.
‘All of that is ancient history. It’s in the past.’ The American’s tone is irritated.
‘Nothing is past here. Haven’t you learned enough to know that?’
Silence falls between them, and I wonder what happened to my original driver. Had he been killed? The driver squints at me and I sense that he is wondering why I do not make an attempt to escape or call for help.
‘We could have got coffee closer to the border,’ the German says.
‘Coffee, sure.’ The American’s voice is ironic. ‘We’ve got a deadline, Klaus. Why don’t you wait until we get somewhere civilised to buy a woman?’
‘You don’t understand,’ the German says with friendly contempt. ‘You don’t understand anything but disinfectant and prophylactics. You’re afraid of everything, including your own shadow.’
The word shadow galvanises me. The thin man opposite notices and narrows his eyes, then he smiles and a gold tooth winks at me. I have the mad desire to laugh, for it seems I have exchanged one sort of farce for another.
‘Aren’t you afraid of getting a disease?’ the American asks, fastidious but curious too. They do not imagine anyone can understand their words. They have not even looked at me, and what would they see if they did?
The German laughs. ‘The danger makes the pleasure more intense. Darker. In fact, you might say that darkness is the specialty of this place.’
‘This place is no place,’ says the American almost plaintively. ‘A stretch of godforsaken highway where the snow looks like dirty sperm. And those women. The way they just loom up suddenly in the headlights with their black leather skirts and fishnet tights and fake fur coats, their eyes like petrol bombs about to blow up in your face. They scare the hell out of me. How can anyone stop? How can you get aroused by that?’
‘They wouldn’t be there if no one stopped,’ the German observes almost coyly. ‘I’ve stopped every time I pass this way, and every time I do, I am afraid. Nothing is more terrifying than to stop and invite one of these women into the car. They take me down into the dark so deep I don’t know if I’ll ever come up, if there is enough light in me to come back.’
‘But they’re just whores, terrible rough whores with scars and thick thighs. I read in Time Magazine that they’re the worst, most dangerous prostitutes in the world.’ The American’s voice is lace-edged with hysteria.
‘It is true,’ the German murmurs.
‘It’s the disease that scares me . . .’ the American says.
The German calls for the bill. As he pays, the big white-haired man returns, dropping the phone into his pocket. He nods at the two men as they pass, then slides into the booth beside me. It occurs to me that the phone call was about me. Will they now kill me or beat me up and leave me for dead? Will they try to ransom me? Or use me as a hostage? These thoughts flutter distantly though my mind, like leaves blown along a tunnel.
The waiter brings us three espressos. The white-haired man must have ordered them. I drink, enjoying the cruel strength of the dark liquid. I have never tasted such bitter coffee before, like the dregs of