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n an ironic twist of fate,
K-shev
is now dying of cancer
in this sterile private German clinic – as much as it may
look like a hospital, it's obviously little more than a very
expensive hospice. The still-breathing corpses lie inside,
while outside nobody waits for them anymore. At best, a
battle is raging to divide the spoils.
In this case everything was gathered into a small, thin
briefcase.
It was a brand-new briefcase, or at least it was new when
they put it in the safety deposit box in the bank vault. A
very well-insulated place, that vault – I can vouch for that
now that I’ve brought the briefcase back to my hotel room
and can still catch a scent of new leather, as if it had been
bought only yesterday.
To kill time, I measured its height, width and depth with a
box of cigarettes: 1 x 5 x 3, more or less.
Just as he told me, there is more than a million inside. I’ve
never seen so much money in one place. But besides this
cliché, I can also tell you that there is nothing
optically
unusual about this huge amount of cash. Or maybe I was
already numb, perhaps my senses were dulled like his from
the life-support machines whirring away behind the doors
lining the white corridors. You absorb old people’s
anesthesia by induction, the opiate of medication, the
opiate of age.
I