One Man, One Murder

1

I was at my desk, jotting down a dream line-up for the Gladbach soccer team on my calendar-and getting bored with Mr. Kunze.

Mr. Kunze was my landlord. He was reciting to me, over the phone, all the reasons why my rent had to be raised next month by thirty per cent, and why life was not a bowl of cherries. “Wife and children” was his groaning refrain. I placed Sieloff, Mill, Kamps, and myself on the reserve bench and seated Weisweiler, the coach, on a cloud. Then I interrupted Mr. Kunze. “Mr. Kunze, if I understand you correctly, you feel that I’m the best tenant in the world, and if you had your druthers, you’d pay me a little something just to keep me on. On the other hand, your wife couldn’t possibly make do with less than ten fur coats without coming down with migraines and making your life a living hell. That’s all right. All of us have to look out for Number One. Nevertheless, I find a thousand marks for a one-room office with a sink-and regular power failures-a little excessive.”

“I agree! I quite agree! I always say that fifty percent of our quality of life consists of the quality of the workplace-the remaining fifty of that on our living quarters and personal relationships-those are, of course, the most important things. But just try to put yourself in my shoes: eleven buildings to take care of here in Frankfurt, a riding stable, four cars-you can imagine the taxes I have to pay! Then there’s the repairs, and, and, and …”

I placed a cushion on top of the phone, retrieved a couple of Alka-Selzers from a desk drawer, tossed them into a glass of water and watched them effervesce, supporting my head with both hands. Under the cushion, Mr. Kunze’s voice sounded like a trapped bumblebee.

It was nine o’clock in the morning of the last day of March, nineteen hundred and eighty-nine. I had debts but no jobs. The faucet was dripping, the coffee maker was busted, and I was tired. My office looked like a task force objective for Alcoholics Anonymous. Files and empty beer bottles lay scattered over floor and shelves. My deck of blank index cards smelled of spilled Scotch. The only wall decorations were a four-year-old Chivas Regal calendar and a postcard from the Bahamas. It was from a guy who cheated women out of their money with false promises of marriage. I had tried to track him down last fall. On the card, he invited me to come celebrate his fiftieth birthday: “… my golden anniversary as a bachelor, as it were. It would be so nice to see you here.” The rest of the decor consisted of stained gray wall-to-wall carpeting dotted with cigarette bums, wallpaper yellowed by tobacco smoke, and the scattered remains of my exploded coffee maker. All things considered, a move might not be a bad idea.

I drank down my Alka-Selzers and went to the window. Full-fledged April weather: clouds charging across the sky like elephants. Once in a while a patch of blue, a sunny spell, then more rain. An old woman with a cane and a poodle was struggling along, keeping close to the wall. Children were swept down the sidewalk like empty plastic bags. A hat was sailing along in the gutter. The heat from the radiator caressed my knees, and I remembered my desperate and ruinous visits to offices of apartment buildings and landlords that one winter six years ago. By and large, these visits had followed a uniform pattern. It involved confronting a guy behind a desk who sat there, hands neatly folded, with a saccharine smile and ominously narrowed eyes, asking me in a manner that indicated he had better things to do: “Well, then, Mr. Kayankaya, I see you are a private investigator. That’s an interesting name … Kayankaya.”

“Not really that interesting. Just Turkish.”

“I see.” The saccharine content of his smile increases; his eye-slits are no wider than razor’s edges. “Turkish. A Turkish private investigator? What do you know … I hope you don’t mind my asking, but-how come you speak such good German?”

“It’s the only language I know. My parents died when I was a child, and I was raised by a German family.”

“But-but you are a Turk? I mean-”

“I have a German passport, if that makes you feel better.” His tongue darts out nervously to moisten his lips; then it disappears and modulates a voice that brings to mind innocent little kids skipping down a lane:

“Mind showing it to me?”

I hand him the little green book. He turns the pages. He subjects it to sub-molecular scrutiny.

“Not that we have any trouble renting to people of Turkish origin. And since you even are a German citizen … Nevertheless, we do have to know with whom we are dealing.”

He closes the little book and hands it back to me.

“I would have thought you came from one of the Arab countries. Your profile, your manner-you’re not a typical Turk.”

“What is he like, your typical Turk?”

“Shorter, I’d say, more Asiatic, more inscrutable, somehow-well, just different.”

Is he going to rent me an office or isn’t he? I clear my throat and ask. He is evasive, makes small talk, finally writes my telephone number on a scrap of paper that looks predestined for the wastebasket. I take my leave. A week later, his secretary expresses his regrets.

I wiped cigarette butts and dead insects off the windowsill, leaned against it, my back to the window, crossed my arms and contemplated the office. “A little clean-up, some new carpeting, and a new calendar,” I told myself. “That could improve the quality of this workplace tremendously.” When I lifted the cushion off the phone, Mr. Kunze had hung up. A moment later, the doorbell rang. I hit the buzzer. The door opened, and in rolled a colorful sphere. Tasseled loafers, brown; white pants, red belt; blue and white striped shirt; green tie with little dots; blue coat, big belly, short legs. Exuding joie de vivre from top to toe, he came to a halt just inside the door and scanned the office, looking perplexed. He just stood there and stared; and the longer he stood there, the less he seemed to know why he had come. Finally I said: “What can I do for you?”

Cautiously, as if worried his shoes might get moldy, he crossed the room, stopped in front of my desk, and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he adjusted his pink-framed eyeglasses and whimpered: “My name is Weidenbusch. I would like to hire you.”

He really whimpered. Either his stomach exerted pressure on his vocal cords from below, or his collar was too tight; in any case, he whimpered like a puppy. My overall impression of him was that of your average schmuck from Frankfurt’s West End. A guy who sips his red wine like a connoisseur even though he can’t tell beer from Sprite, likes his underwear ironed, and thinks that pink eyeglass frames and colorful wristwatches are signs of an individualistic sense of style. All he would have needed to complete the picture was a carefully cultivated four-day stubble.

“To do what?”

“Well …” He cleared his throat, glanced around again. “I hope I’m not bothering you in the middle of a move?”

A two-ton hint, that.

“No-a,” I growled. I picked up an empty cigarette pack, crumpled it and tossed it across the room. “This is just my style.”

“Oh.”

He tried to respond to my smile. He almost managed that, and after we had smiled at each other for a while, and it began to seem as if we wouldn’t be able to stop, I asked him: “But surely you didn’t come here just to discuss my office decor?”

“No, of course not …”

I pointed to the clients’ chair. People who liked me called it an antique.

“Have a seat.”

He turned, took two steps, saw the chair, and stopped.

“But if you’d rather talk standing up …”

He nodded gratefully: “You know, often it is easier to talk in a standing position.”

“Good, then. So, let’s have it. I have a manicure appointment in half an hour.”

He took that without batting an eyelid.

“I’m sorry. You see, this is …” His eyes expanded to the size of plums. “It’s a case of kidnapping.”

“Of whom, or what?”

“My girlfriend.”

“When?”

“Today.”

I looked at my watch.

“Today?”

He nodded.

“I’m sure it has occurred to you that she might have a breakfast date, or an appointment with her hairdresser?”

“No, this is different-I mean, I know where she is.”

“I see. You know where she is.” I leaned back. Somehow, we seemed to have trouble getting started. “That’s pretty unusual in kidnapping cases.”

He shook his head.

“You don’t understand. I knew what she was planning, and … you see, she is …”

Once again, he adjusted his glasses. He did it all the time, or whenever he wasn’t fussing with his necktie or running his fingers through his hair.

“… my girlfriend is from Thailand.”

He looked down. I arranged the wrinkles on my forehead to simulate thought. To liven things up a little, I asked him:

“And you forgot to pay the last installment? Or was she just a sample?” The question startled the human spheroid into a surprisingly lively spasm.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind. Tell me more.”

He hesitated for a moment. Then he started pacing, giving me looks intended to make me feel like I had said something about his mother. The corners of his mouth twitched.

“Yes, she came from Thailand. But not the way you think.”

“I really don’t think at all,” I mumbled, more to myself than to him. He nodded his assent. I almost began to like him.

“We met in quite normal fashion, at a disco. Or that’s the way it was, at first. She said she was on her way to visit relatives. Our first days together were like a dream.”

He went on to rhapsodize about the international language of love. Thai or German, feelings speak more than a thousand words, and so on. Then he seemed to reach an impasse; he sighed and fell silent. I stuck a cigarette between my lips and joined him. When it seemed to me that I had waited long enough, I asked: “And?”

He looked up with an expression compounded of worry and longing. He raised his arms in a pleading gesture.

“Don’t you see that I’m trying to tell you how important she is to me? You think I’m just one of those guys with a taste for Thai girls, but I’m not like that at all. I … You know, we just sat down together, just like that. She asked me a question with her eyes, and I answered by touching her …”

I slapped the desk with my palm.

“And just as you wanted to explain to her where the ladies’ room was, she jumped out the window! For God’s sakes, man, wake up! I can see that you’re in love. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, suffering the pains of the damned because my office isn’t furnished with little bistro tables … And I don’t give a damn if she’s from Thailand. That’s your problem. But she has been kidnapped, and maybe I can help you find her again. Maybe-if you’ll tell me what happened, instead of giving me all this bullshit about love’s Esperanto.”

He opened and closed his mouth. His chin began to tremble. Then he closed his eyes, rubbed his eyelids with thumb and index finger, dislodging the pink glasses, and turned away from me. His shoulders shook. I sighed. At that moment, a burst of sunshine came through the window, and I felt like walking out into the street, into town, to have a beer. Instead, I scrambled out of my chair, went over to the multi-colored sphere, and grabbed a shoulder.

“Stop driving yourself nuts. We’ll find her.” His plum eyes looked up with a moist sheen. I grinned. “And you’ll regret that, soon enough. Both of you. At least when you’ve learned to speak the same language. Then there’ll be no more touchy-feely jive-then you’ll be discussing the soup, the shampoo, the weather report. No more palpitations and candlelight. Take out the garbage, and no more World of Sport for you.”

I couldn’t tell if he was laughing but sensed a hint of that. I slapped him on the back and went back to my chair behind the desk. He sniffled a little more, and then, slowly, masticating his words as if they were a day-old bun, he continued his tale of woe. “A week later I found out that she worked in one of those clubs. You know what I mean. I was very upset at first, but then I decided to do everything in my power to get her out of there. I visited her three times-at her workplace. It was terrible, truly terrible.” He shook himself. “You can’t imagine what that’s like.”

“Right. Well …”

I wagged my head noncommittally. “A savior of whores,” I thought. “A candy-colored, pink-bespectacled savior of whores. And I’m supposed to help him because he’s afraid he might catch something in one of those dumps.” But I thought wrong, and this, in a concise form, was what he told me in the course of the next half-hour while padding back and forth in my office: He, Weidenbusch, had paid five thousand marks for Sri Dao, his girlfriend, a sum she allegedly owed the club for air fare, accommodations, and meals. Then she had moved in with him. After their days of wine and roses they began to consider the next move. Sri Dao’s visa was due to expire in three weeks, and she had neither the means nor the desire to return to Thailand. An asylum appeal might prolong things a little, but it was one hundred percent certain that it would be rejected. According to Weidenbusch, neither one of them wanted to get married. Unable to arrive at a decision, they let time pass, and her visa had already expired some days ago when they ran into a passport check. The police officer took Sri Dao’s personal data and threatened her with deportation if she did not leave the country within the next three days. If Weidenbusch hadn’t been with her, she would have been arrested on the spot. The following morning, as Sri Dao was packing her bags, the phone rang. A man who introduced himself as Larsson offered them forged papers for a price of three thousand marks. He told them they had half an hour to make up their minds. He would call back. Weidenbusch and Sri Dao decided to go for it and made the following arrangements with the caller: At seven o’clock next morning, Sri Dao would be waiting, with the money and a passport photograph at a taxicab stand by the east entrance of the main railway station. Alone. A gray VW van would pick her up and take her to a secret destination where the papers were manufactured. Twenty-four hours later she would be returned to the Weidenbusch residence.

The pair did as they were told, except for one thing: Sri Dao did not arrive alone. The gray VW van drove up, a guy sporting a mustache and sunglasses jumped out, opened the sliding side door and shouted “schnell, schnell” to Sri Dao. At that moment, Weidenbusch stepped between her and the guy and demanded to be told where she would be taken. The mustachioed fellow shoved him aside and pushed Sri Dao, who was shouting “No, no” and “This is my man” in English, into the bus, slammed the door shut and got into the driver’s seat. Weidenbusch almost tore the passenger door off its hinges but got a pistol stuck in his face before he could utter a sound. It took only seconds for the van to disappear, and Weidenbusch found himself sitting on the sidewalk in a state of shock. At some point during the next hour it occurred to him to consult a private investigator, and here he was. Trembling and waving his arms he stood in front of me and said, over and over again: “With a gun, a real gun-here,” and he pointed at the right side of his face, “one false move, and …” He covered his face with his hands and shook his head.

I offered him a cigarette. He took it without even looking at it. Then he came to a sudden halt, stared at the thin white cylinder in astonishment, dropped it on the floor and stepped on it with his tasseled loafer. While I was still marveling at his unexpected adaptation to my house style, he sank into my visitor’s chair, stretched his legs, and gave a high falsetto command: “I want to find her again, and I want you to rearrange that hoodlum’s face!”

The bit about rearranging a face sounded as if he had memorized it for the day.

I concentrated on cleaning my fingernails with a match. “How did you find me?”

He looked startled. His eyelashes fluttered irritably. He didn’t say anything.

“You must have checked the Yellow Pages. But why Kayankaya, why not Muller?”

“Because she’s Thai, and I thought …”

“You thought Thailand and Turkey both start with a T?”

“How could I have known that you’re a Turk? On the contrary, I expected-but …”

Unfinished, the sentence hung between us as if someone had strung barbed wire across the room.

They visit exhibitions in New York and go on safaris in Africa; they smoke hashish in Cairo, eat Japanese food, and propose to teach democracy to the Muscovites; they are “international” down to their Parisian underwear-but they’re not able to recognize a Turk unless he’s carrying a garbage can under his arm and leading a string of ten unwashed brats. I thanked my lucky stars that Weidenbusch was not my prospective landlord. I tossed the match on the floor and examined my fingernails. “What’s the name of the club your friend worked for?”

“It’s the Lady Bump. On Elbestrasse.”

“And to whom did you pay the five thousand marks?”

“To a man called Korble or Koble …”

“Koberle? Charlie Koberle?”

“That’s it.”

“Who else knew the expiration date of her visa?”

“Oh-a couple of friends, and my sister.”

“What does your sister do?”

“She works at a day care center. She does therapy there, child therapy.”

“She’s a kindergarten teacher?”

“Something like that.”

I fished out a cigarette and rolled it between my fingertips.

“You don’t really look like a guy who’d fall for mysterious phone calls. You should have known that people like that aren’t harmless pranksters.”

“But I wouldn’t have agreed to it, if.” He gulped, closed his eyes for a moment. His hands locked together like a couple of fighting octopi. “You see, yesterday morning, what with her bags all packed, everything happened so quickly, and then …” His shoulders sagged with exhaustion.

“Do you know anyone else who received an offer like that? Maybe one of her former colleagues at Lady Bump, for instance?”

“No, I don’t.”

“All right. Two hundred marks a day, plus expenses. Your address, your phone number, where you can be reached during the day, and your girlfriend’s complete name. I’ll see what I can do.”

Five hundred-mark bills emerged from his alligator skin wallet and wandered across my desk.

“One more thing. I’m not into strong-arm stuff. If you need someone to rearrange faces-”

“No, no-I was just so excited when I said that. I’m sorry.”

I accepted his apology and took the money. “Your profession?”

“Artist.”

I was dumbfounded. “Huh?”

With an eager but nervous glitter in his eyes he explained: “Yes, I’m a sculptor and painter. I write, too-short stories for television. I may even get to make a movie sometime soon. And I write things for the radio, as well.”

I stared at him. “You do all those things at once?”

“I can’t help it. I have to do things, I have to work and be creative. If I don’t, I go nuts.”

“I see. You ever try television and beer?”

He gave me a sweet and sincere look and said in a confidential tone: “I can’t stand that. I really can’t. I envy you for being able to do that.”

I wasn’t sure he’d gotten my point, but I didn’t really care.

“Your address?”

He handed me his card. A little flower on the left, a little flower on the right, and in the middle: Manuel Weidenbusch.

“Sri Dao Rakdee. Rakdee with two ‘e’s.”

I flicked the card with my thumbnail and said: “See you later.”