More Beer

4

I looked him straight in the eye. “You won’t get away with that, Kessler. I still have your fucking calendar.”

He looked away.

“It’s a deplorable business, you’re right about that …” He ran his palm across his forehead. “But that calendar won’t do it, not in my case.”

Suddenly Slibulsky appeared. He stood next to me and eyed the scene in bewilderment.

“Allow me-Detective Superintendent Kessler, this is Ernst-”

Slibulsky snapped, “Shut up! You want him to write me postcards?” Kessler smiled, I took the keys to Meyer’s office out of my pocket and handed them to Slibulsky.

“Release that little guy. Tell him that he is Numero Uno at Bollig Chemicals until further notice. He’ll enjoy that.”

Slibulsky nodded and made tracks. I spotted a decent bottle of bourbon behind the house bar, poured myself a stiff drink, plopped myself on the couch, and encouraged Kessler to have a seat as well. He refused, stood there with his hands in his overcoat pockets, and asked me calmly,

“What are we waiting for?”

I put down my glass and lit a cigarette.

“I want to tell you something about Kollek.”

“What if I’m not interested?”

“Then you’ll listen to me anyway, or else I’ll put you through the shredder!”

I put my feet up on the cocktail table and told him the story. Kessler pretended to be bored, cleaned his nails, sighed at regular intervals. But his eyes were wide awake.

“On November seventeenth, nineteen sixty-nine, nine months after her marriage to Friedrich Bollig, Barbara Bollig gives birth to a son, Oliver Bollig. How touching, one might think, the kid was conceived on their wedding night … But on December tenth, almost a month later, Herbert Kollek, head of the firm’s publicity department and an old college buddy of Friedrich’s, is summarily dismissed from his job. A little later, he moves to Frankfurt. Oliver Bollig, for his part, is transferred quite soon after his birth to the Ruhenbrunn Private Clinic run by a Dr. Kliensmann, where he is busy constructing things out of clothespins to this very day.

“I went to see the kid today. He doesn’t particularly resemble his official father, as far as I can tell from photographs. And Kliensmann has been receiving, for many years, an excessively generous consultant’s salary from the Bollig firm, without having to provide any tangible services.”

“How nice for him.”

Kessler smiled, back in his balloon-man mode.

“This is how I figure it all hangs together: Barbara Bollig cheated on her freshly caught factory owner on that same wedding night, and she did it with Kollek. After the kid was born, it became evident that Friedrich Bollig couldn’t be his father, and it didn’t take Friedrich long to find out whose offspring it really was. So he kicked Kollek out and made the infant disappear, not wanting a daily reminder of his cuckoldry. He must have paid off Kollek. Then he paid, and kept on paying, Kliensmann a lot of money to have the child put away as a retarded person in that loony bin next door. It was just a coincidence that I ran into Kollek on my first visit here, as Henry, the friend of the family. It was only today, after something the business manager said, that I realized that Kollek and Henry had to be one and the same. He and Barbara Bollig had kept up their relationship all these years, and you helped them solve the problem that Friedrich Bollig’s continued existence was to them.”

Kessler raised his eyebrows.

“I helped them?”

I lit my next cigarette.

“Kollek reached the goal he had pursued for seventeen years. He had the lady, he had the factory, he had made it.”

I smiled at Kessler.

“And you thought, all the while, that he had killed Bollig for whatever you or your mysterious friend M. paid him to do it. Or that’s what you thought until I called you this afternoon.”

Kessler pricked up his ears at my mention of M. His eyes were tiny and alert.

“Not to belittle the results of your more or less,” he coughed discreetly, “accurate research-but what does all that have to do with me?”

He got up and strode through the room. He stopped next to Henry’s corpse and raised his index finger.

“All I’m concerned with is the fact that this man,” he touched the corpse with the tip of his shoe, “is the fifth man we were looking for.”

Like some petty criminal protesting his innocence, he spread out his arms. “I received a tip, and I drove here today. However, the suspect wanted to avoid arrest, and in order to prevent his escape I had to use my firearm. Unfortunately,” he clapped his hands above his head in a gesture of regret, “I slipped on that rug, and so the bullet, unfortunately, did not strike him in the leg, but in the chest.”

I looked at the corpse. “Unfortunately indeed. You plugged him right through the heart.”

“Yes, well.” He rubbed his hands and grinned provocatively. “That’s my story.”

Outside, night had fallen. I got up and switched on the light. Then I walked over to him.

“Maybe the magistrate would find your version quite acceptable. But-there is proof that Kollek was your undercover agent, not just some hoodlum you happened to shoot dead. Yesterday morning you were still bragging to me about your finely spun web of informers. Does it no longer exist?”

I stopped in front of him and looked into his eyes. He didn’t flinch this time, and whispered, “That may well be true. But except for you and me, no one knows anything about it, and I am a German Detective Superintendent, and you, Kayankaya, are just a Turkish alcoholic with a private investigator’s license. Don’t you see?”

I whipped out the Beretta and pushed it into his stomach. With my left, I grabbed his collar. “Don’t you see?”

Then I relieved him of his gun and let him go.

“You’re lucky. I really would like to remodel your face, but I still have to take you to the public prosecutor’s office. And La Bollig will come along too.”

I turned. “Where is she, anyway? Her limo is right there in front of the door …”

Kessler sat down and stretched his legs.

“Barbara Bollig has gone to a tea party. There’s a note.” He pointed at a shelf. I picked up the note and read it. “I’m at Scheigel’s for tea. She has smelled a rat. I’ll bring her to her senses. Later, BB.”

I rushed to the phone, whipped out my notebook, and dialed Scheigel’s number. No one answered. At that moment, Slibulsky toddled in and made a cheerful report. “That little guy was lying there, trembling like a fish. Boy, did he make tracks … I’ve never seen anyone so happy …”

“Shut up! Here!”

I tossed Kessler’s gun at him. He caught it in surprise.

“Keep an eye on him! If he tries to get away, shoot him in the legs!”

I looked at Kessler pointedly, Slibulsky opened his mouth, shook his head, and watched me go. Halfway down the drive, I had an idea. I ran back into the house, ignored their amazement, and got the phone book. What was her maiden name again? Kasz … Kasz … Kaszmarek. Nina Kaszmarek, Am Sudhang number five. I dialed the number. It was busy.

“Kessler, give me your car keys!”

He pursed his lips. “Do I have to?”

I took two long steps and punched him in the jaw, twice. He tumbled to the floor. His keys in hand, I repeated my instructions to Slibulsky and ran to his car. I sped down the drive, across the factory grounds, and down the main street into town. I stopped at a tavern and asked for directions to Sudhang. They were given to me with typical South Hessian deliberation, and I jumped back into the car. Sudhang was in the outskirts of town, one of the less successful housing developments of the sixties: Tall yellow buildings with one- to three-room apartments, surrounded by narrow strips of lawn and a tidy children’s playground. There was a bicycle path, a picnic area shared by three buildings, an Edeka chain store, an ice-cream bar, a “Dogs Must Be Leashed” sign, and a wastebasket next to every lamp post.

I screeched to a halt in front of building number five, ran to the door, and slapped my palm on the buzzers. A faint voice came over the intercom.

“Who is it, please?”

“Public Emergency Force!”

“Oh my God my God!”

“A reactor at the Biblis nuclear power station is about to go critical in just a few minutes!”

“Oh I see!”

I waited for her to buzz me in. Instead she asked me, “Should I close my windows?”

I roared that she should let me in, first of all, and then I charged up the stairs like a madman, knowing it was too late.