Trafika Europe 3 - Latvian Sojourn

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. I

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.

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