In the Shadow of the Wall by Richard Wake

Author:Richard Wake [Wake, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manor and State, LLC
Published: 2020-12-16T22:00:00+00:00

28

We left Red Rolf, and I took Petra back to her place because she had to work on a presentation for class. That left me with nothing to do but drink alone, and I decided to do it while watching television. “Blue Light” was on, and that was more than fine. It was a drama series that dealt with an investigative team from the Kripo, solving all manner of criminal crap — but not murder so much. If it had been a Kripo murder squad show, based in Berlin, I would have nit-picked every detail and hated it. But given that it was the “Kripo second division” — that’s what we called our esteemed, non-murder squad brethren behind their backs — and the stuff they were solving was assault and theft and such, I only nit-picked about half of it. So it was fine.

The episode that night was called “Black Petrol,” and it was way too complicated — or maybe the afternoon beers at Red Rolf’s followed by the night vodkas from a juice glass compromised my attention span just a hair. When the show first came out, almost all of the incidents involved West Berlin criminals coming over to our side to do their dastardly shit, and then getting caught by Captain Wernicke and the fellas. The rampart kind of shot that whole thing in the ass, though, seeing as how moving from West to East was no longer as simple as riding three stops on the U-Bahn. I wondered how many scripts they had to throw out when Honecker started rolling out the barbed wire. And right after that, I wondered about the barbed-wire king of Berlin, the man sharing my ex-wife’s bed, and what I might or might not have to end up telling Karl Grimm about him. But the thought passed quickly, one of the benefits of the juice glass.

Anyway, now the “Blue Light” writers did these logical and logistical gymnastics that didn’t make much sense — and, no, this wasn’t the vodka talking. In the one I was watching, a guy escaped to the West, killed a guy, then came back, worked for a refiner, and started stealing petrol and selling it to a guy who ran a black market petrol station. How he got over the wall and then got back without a ton of repercussions was, shall we say, glossed over.

It kind of made my head hurt. But I was able to congratulate myself in seeing that the guy’s girlfriend — a character named Christa Becker, the daughter of the guy who ran the refinery, and a quite lovely specimen — would be his downfall. When she caught him stealing a key to a storage facility or something, and she told her father, and the two of them went to the Kripo, I actually shouted at the television, “I told you she was going to fuck you in the end.” Then I knocked over the juice glass.

It was when I was wiping up the mess that I heard the knock on the door.

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