One Man, One Murder

11

Loaded down with sandwiches, cookies, chocolate, newspapers, a bottle of Scotch, and two bottles of water, I left the main railway station. It was almost ten-thirty at night. I hurried across the square and crossed the first street. At the second crossing I had to stop for a herd of tourist buses. Suddenly a bell rang behind me, and someone screeched hysterically: “Can’t you see? This is a bicycle lane!”

I whipped around and roared: “Don’t you know how to ride that thing? You’ve got ten yards leeway there.”

The bicyclist braked, turned, and approached me with a stem missionary look on his face. It was a young man in a green-glittering Fifties-style outfit, stiff blow-dried hair, and a T-shirt that said Born to Be Wild.

“This is a bicycle lane. It’s for bicycles. I could have knocked you down, and it would have been your fault,” he informed me, nodding to his own words and coming to a stop in front of me. It was obvious that he expected some sign of gratitude or remorse, and it seemed to me that he would have liked to prolong our conversation.

I left him standing and ran across the street to my car. As I passed him a short while later behind the railway station, I was tempted to show him a perfectly legal brake test.

I drove past the convention building and the Plaza Hotel and on to the autobahn, away from the city lights into dark blue night. I passed the time by trying to calculate how long twenty thousand marks would last in some southern clime. If I had kept going, and the Opel had held up, which was unlikely, I could have been sitting under a straw roof on a beach the following morning, enjoying my shrimp and white wine in the company of a waitress and Whitney Houston on the jukebox. I leaned back. It was warm in the car, and the engine was humming almost perfectly. The waitress came to my table and stayed there all the way to the Gellersheim exit.

I stopped by the first phone booth to call Weidenbusch. His phone rang seven times.

“Yes, hello?”

“Kayankaya. Have you abandoned your position?”

“No, no-I was just taking a bath.”

“Well, what’s up?”

“What do you mean?”

There was a tremor in his voice. He must have had a hard day, probably sitting next to the phone, stripping his necktie down to individual fibers, chewing on one piece of peppermint candy after another.

“You did call me this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes. I just wanted to know what you had found out.”

“A whole lot. If I’m not totally mistaken, you’ll have your girlfriend back soon.”

His “Really?” sounded more frightened than delighted. I was taken aback. “Maybe you’re not so happy about that?”

“No, no …” There was a moment’s silence. Then he took a deep breath and said:

“But, you see, I’ve been thinking about all of it today. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it was not a good idea.”

“What wasn’t a good idea?”

“Sri Dao and me. There’s the language problem, and, and God knows what might come up. Her family, her background-those really are imponderables. Like right now, me having to deal with gangsters.”

“Listen, Weidenbusch, I understand that you’re a wreck, but-”

“No, no, it’ll be better for us to separate. I also talked it over with my mother …” A pause. I looked around for the herd of wild horses that I felt galloping over my prone body. There was the sound of paper rustling at the other end of the line.

“In any case, I’ve decided to pay you for four working days and a per diem of three hundred, that’s eleven hundred altogether. If you subtract the five hundred I gave you this morning, I owe you six hundred. I’ll mail you the check, you’ll get it by the end of the week.”

“Excellent. But what do I do about your girlfriend?”

“Well, I thought-”

“You thought I’d go home now and see if there’s anything good on the tube? Let me tell you what I’m going to do: I’ll go on looking for your friend, and when I’ve found her, I’ll slap her around and tell her greetings from Mr. Weidenbusch. I’ll explain to her that it’s in the language of touch, and love, et cetera.”

“Please don’t be so cynical! This has not be an easy decision for me.”

“You don’t say.”

I was about to hang up when he said: “Wait!” And, after a moment’s silence: “Let me know, in any case. Maybe I’m just a little nervous right now. And promise you won’t go to the police-no matter what happens.”

Back in the car, I sat there for a thoughtful moment, jingling my car keys.

I parked the Opel in front of Theo Manz Cinema Production and pushed the seat back. Then I put on a black knitted hat, took out my provisions and the Scotch, and settled down to dinner. The lights were still on at Mrs. Olga’s, and Theo Manz was throwing a party. A long line of upper middle class vehicles were parked along the curb. Rolling Stones songs roared out of the windows, and from time to time a chorus of female voices screeched along: “I can’t get no satisfaction” and other select passages. Number Six was completely dark. When I was done eating, I opened the Scotch and began my vigil. The brick villa stood diagonally in front of me, and I could see the street in my rearview mirror. No matter whom Eberhard Schmitz sent along to dispose of the corpse, I would not miss him. It occurred to me that I should have asked Weidenbusch if Larsson had tattoos on his arms.

I took a sip and lit a cigarette. Weidenbusch. Slibulsky. Dietzenbach. Slibulsky, again, and McEnroe. The streetlights went out at midnight. My bottle was down to three quarters. I turned on the radio. Music after midnight, Udo Jurgens on every wavelength: “Show me the place where everybody gets along …” I turned the radio off. A quarreling couple came out of the Manz residence, waving their arms, running to their car. The man opened the door for her, almost tearing it off its hinges. “I said let’s go kick the ball around on Saturday! I didn’t say anything about balling!”

“Oh, Marita plays soccer?”

They leaned on the roof of the car on opposite sides, each of their necks stretched out like a chicken’s, and yelled the street awake.

“Not Marita, her friend, that stupid serial director!”

“So that’s what it’s come to: you make a date to play soccer with a ‘stupid serial director?’ ”

“Yes! It so happens that I wrote that serial!”

Doors slammed, tires squealed. The car shot through the intersection at sixty miles an hour.

I took out another cigarette. I began to ask myself if Schmitz had been so sure his check had withdrawn me from circulation that he had simply gone to bed. The clock on the dashboard told me it was twelve-thirty. I yawned. The sky was overcast again, and the night was pitch-dark. I had some more Scotch, smoked, and stared at the dark outline of the villa. At some point, the bottle must have slipped out of my grasp.

When I woke up, it was dawn. Someone was knocking on the car door, and I heard a voice: “ ‘scuse me, but I saw your Frankfurt plates-could you, could you give me a ride, maybe? Just to get away from here.”

I needed a moment to remember where I was and what I was doing. I roused myself and saw a slightly bedraggled angel behind the side window. Her make-up was smeared and her hairdo had disintegrated into loose strands that hung down around her face. She was banging on the door with a high-heeled shoe. “I can pay you for the gas …” It looked like the party was over.

I looked past her at Schmitz’s villa. The first thing I saw was a silver-colored Toyota jeep standing in the drive. Then I noticed that the lights were on the ground floor. I unlocked the door while my new acquaintance mumbled, “Oh, thank you so much!” I jumped out into the street.

“Sorry, dear. You better look for a cab.”

I was off to a flying start. It was miserably cold, and drizzly rain struck my face. Up over the fence alongside the service entrance, across the alarm wire, from tree to tree and past the terrace-I arrived at the sliding door in no time. The shutters were closed, and I could only see thin streaks of light. I put my ear to the wall. Somewhere there was a faint padding sound. After two or three minutes, the sound approached, took a turn right next to me, and stopped with a muted impact. Then nothing happened for quite a while until a quiet voice spoke: “Hello? Yes, I’ve checked everywhere. Nothing. Must’ve been a hoax. Should I go back to the soccer field? Maybe they know something about it. The dishes? Wait a minute, I’m not a cleaning woman. Besides, that’s Manne’s job. Nonsense, he’ll show up again. All right, all right, but I’ll make Manne pay for this. Later.”

Soon after that the padding resumed, grew fainter, faded away. I straightened my back. I had two choices. If I took my Beretta and went down to the basement and forced the guy whose voice I had heard to take me to the refugees, he would get to see me; even though I wasn’t quaking in my shoes, I did not take Schmitz’s warning lightly. The less contact I had with his people the better. The second choice was the better one. After all, I was just trying to find that woman; at this point, my ambition did not extend to laying bare the corruption of an entire city.

I snuck back to the Opel. Now it was almost daylight.

I turned off the engine. The party angel was fast asleep in the back seat. I pulled out a blanket from under the passenger seat and covered her up with it. Her features had composed themselves, and she had curled up looking almost contented in a setting of bits of foam rubber bursting out of the seams of the seat, old newspapers, and an oilcan. Hers was the kind of cool beauty one could admire in practically every movie of the past; it has now been replaced by so-called faces with character. Her eyelashes spread over her cheeks like fans, and she wore a string of pearls around her neck. I wouldn’t have minded taking her back to Frankfurt. I also didn’t mind her sleeping in my car. Before it occurred to me to have any objections against dashing back into the drizzly cold, I faced the dashboard again, sipped a little Scotch, and got out.

FIRST FC GELLERSHEIM was what the faded red letters said on the wall of the clubhouse. Iron bars protected the window of the small dusty room. I saw a row of cheap trophies arrayed on the back wall. I turned and looked across the empty soccer field. Overturned and rotting wooden benches lay next to the sidelines, the corner flag posts were broken, and a torn goal-net fluttered in the wind. The field had deteriorated to scattered tussocks of grass. I kicked an empty beer. bottle across the sand and scanned the surrounding woods. The only sound I heard was a hardly perceptible hum. I attributed it to my own head, crossed the penalty area, and found a muddy road. Soon there were nothing but trees on both sides, with little light filtering down from the treetops. I found myself in a desolate half-darkness, twigs crackling underfoot. I decided that this had not been a good idea and turned back. This time I passed the clubhouse on its rearside which sported the remains of a derelict shack: the former locker room. Half of its roof had caved in and piles of splintered glass lay under the gaping windows. I stopped. No head in the world could generate a hum this loud. This was the hum of a generator. I found it under a lean- to behind the locker room. For whom or what was it generating electricity? The non-existent floodlights? Or the empty lidless freezer next to the club bar counter?

I went back to the field, sat down on the edge of an overturned bench, and lit a cigarette. I had smoked about half of it when, some thirty yards into the woods, two headlights appeared. I took cover.

The silver Toyota jeep stood in front of a concrete wall with a gray steel door. The wall was set into a hillock overgrown with shrubs. I had detected no movement for the last ten minutes.

I was huddling behind a tree, my coat collar turned up, the Beretta in my lap. I regretted my choice of shoes; my feet felt like dead fish. After another ten minutes I decided I’d had enough. Cautiously, my shooting iron at the ready, I ran from one tree to the next until I reached the running board of the jeep.

Brimming ashtrays, dozens of music cassettes, two empty Bacardi bottles, boxing and racing magazines, a dog muzzle, and a box of dog food. A plastic guitar and a heart made out of fabric dangled from the rearview mirror. A sticker on one of the side windows said Afri-Cola All the Way to the Oder. Suddenly the steel door opened and a white beast with a porcine face slipped outside. I crawled under the jeep, but the creature had noticed me. On short, bowed legs it waddled up, stopped in front of me, and looked at me out of blood-shot eye slits. He looked bored, did not growl, didn’t even seem to breathe. He just stood there and stared. Heavy footsteps approached, and a martial voice called out: “Come on, Rambo!” But Rambo didn’t come. Rambo kept his eyes on me and yawned. This caused his head to split into two halves and show a whole army of small white teeth, shiny as knife points.

“Rambo!” The footsteps grew fainter. Rambo stayed where he was. In slow motion I tried to raise the Beretta. My heart was racing. Rambo observed my movements without any sign of interest.

“Come on!” Thinking along the lines of “all right then, be a good Rambo,” I tried to smile at the beast and slipped the safety catch off my gun. Our eyes took each other’s measure. Just as I was about to pull the trigger, Rambo grabbed me. He did not bite, he grabbed. Like a wolf trap-just once. And held on, just like a wolf trap. My shot went wide of the mark. I lay on the ground, screaming, my arm between his jaws. The teeth had penetrated my sleeves and embedded themselves directly in my flesh. Granted, he did not bite my arm off. Calmly, without any particular effort, he stood above me. A dog who tore flesh the way other dogs dozed in the sun. Twigs were cracking behind me. Crazed with pain, I roared: “Get your fucking dog off of me!” I tried to see the asshole who was his master, but Rambo didn’t let me. Whoever that asshole was, I hated him, hated him even more than I hated his bull terrier. There was a draft of air, my skull exploded, and I zoomed into the void.

“Wake up, my friend. Wake up …”

A smooth warm hand stroked my forehead. I squinted.

At first I didn’t see anything, and when my eyes focused, all I saw was concrete. Concrete ceiling, concrete walls, even my head seemed filled with concrete. Fluorescent lights glared from the walls around me. I remembered the generator. The room was approximately twenty by sixty feet. No windows and no sign of any heating or anything else. To the left and right, along the walls, sat some thirty people on rough wooden benches, giving me questioning looks. On the floor between the benches three children were playing with marbles. Now and again the marbles clicked and there was a brief whispered exchange. Otherwise all was quiet.

The hand touched me again. I forced my head to turn a little and looked into the wrinkled face of a black man who held me on his lap and quietly repeated his “wake up”. His voice had the reassuring timbre of smokers who have managed to grow old. While I tried my best to comply with his wish, a woman in a glittering red outfit whispered something in Arabic, and a fat guy next to her nodded. It seemed to me they had decided I wouldn’t be much help.

After what seemed a long time. I managed to sit up. Keeping my eyes closed, I managed to find a cigarette and put it in my mouth. The back of my head felt funny, and when I squeezed it, it oozed red liquid. The black man gave me a light and smiled. He had to be at least seventy. His hair was short, gray, and wiry, and he wore a dark blue suit with a handkerchief in his breast pocket, shirt and tie, patent leather shoes, and a whiff of expensive perfume. Next to me in my muddy and bloody clothes-my right sleeve hung in shreds-he looked like one of the truly wealthy who find it amusing to mingle with the common folk sometimes and to enjoy a hot dog in their company. I smoked and examined the consequences of Rambo’s repulsion of the Turkish invasion. Gingerly I picked bits of fabric out of the wound and tried to keep my arm elevated. Then I scanned the silent circle of faces. The place felt like a cross between a dentist’s waiting room and an air-raid shelter.

I cleared my throat. “Is there, by any chance, a lady here by the name of Sri Dao Rakdee?”

No one answered. Nothing changed in the expressions of three Thai women huddling in a corner. Before I had recovered from my surprise and disappointment, a fellow with two black brushstrokes under his nose and a lot of gold in his face asked me: “Who are you?”

“Kemal Kayankaya, private investigator.”

Now all of them looked startled. The children stopped tossing marbles, and my Samaritan moved a little farther from me. From all sides came the choral exclamation: “Police!?”

I shook my head very gently. “No.”

Deep breaths. A pause, then the next question: “Are you here for papers?”

That was the glitter lady.

“I’m looking for a Mr. Larsson who claims he is able to provide people with forged identity papers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Aren’t you here because you don’t have residence permits?”

Some people looked tense again, others avoided my eyes.

All of them acted as if the question did not apply to them. I pointed at the door: “Is it locked?”

A lean character out of a jeans ad, with lots of patches on his jacket and Walkman earphones round his neck, stood up and said: “What if it is? It’s for protection. So no one can find us-it’s quite all right.” He repeated that for emphasis: “Totally perfectly all right.”

“But what if no one at all comes to find you? And they just forget about you? I assume that Mr. Larsson, or whatever his name is, has already received his fee?”

“He even got our jewelry,” the glittering lady lamented.

“All our jewelry!”

“Oh, that jewelry. He just took it because most of us didn’t have enough money. He let me keep my Walkman.”

My adoptive father scratched his chin.

“That’s just a piece of plastic.”

The jeans guy gave him a contemptuous look.

“Just like your patent leather pumps, Grandpa. Haven’t seen a pair of those since we had to leave Iran ten years ago. You’re totally retro, Gramps, totally retro-what do you want a German passport for? Go back to Oogah-Boogah and pick bananas.”

The old man smiled.

“We’re all here for the same reason.”

“Sure.…” The guy looked around. “Only I’m not as scared as you are. This Larsson is on the level. I had a word with him yesterday, I told him that I am Ramin Ben Alam, so don’t even dream about fucking us over. He heard me. Then we talked about movies, Eddie Murphy and so on.”

“You’ve been locked in here since yesterday?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“And before that, you were downstairs in the villa?”

He nodded.

“Did Larsson explain why you had to move?”

“Because of that neighbor. The old bag called the cops.”

I forgot my demolished skull and leaned forward. “Really?”

“Right. I told you, we’re here for our own protection.”

Suddenly it dawned on me why the immigration office had no file on Rakdee when I visited them. And that wasn’t the only thing that dawned on me. But the question remained: what was going to happen now? I leaned back slowly and carefully.

“When will you receive your papers?”

“Tonight.” He beamed. “Then we’ll party. First a great dinner with my girlfriend, and then we’ll disco down at the Marilyn.” He took a couple of dance steps, wiggled his hips and croaked, in English, “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad-yeah.…”

People observed him with pity. He tossed his head back. “Yeah, with my girlfriend Gabi, Gabi Schmittke!”

I extinguished my cigarette butt. “This Larsson, did he have tattoos on his arms?”

The old man sitting next to me nodded.

“And what does the guy look like who brought me in?”

Two girls in headscarves giggled. A little fellow with a goatee got up and raised his arms to indicate something as wide as a wardrobe. “Much meat, much beard, and much, much smell.”

I sighed. Then I looked around. “I don’t suppose he brought you anything to eat or drink?”

No response. The goateed fellow sat down again.

“And what if he won’t bring you anything tonight, either? What if he won’t be back, ever?”

People stared at the floor. I got up, swayed to the door and checked if it could be dealt with. One might as well have tried to kick the concrete wall in. When I turned back, the children were clinging to their voluminous mother. One of them was crying, her face smeared with bunker dust and tears. The other two watched me with wide-open eyes.

Suddenly I got furious. “ ‘So no one can find you’-what a great idea! Larsson has collected his money, you haven’t told anyone who you were going to meet, and the cops are glad that you’re gone.” I spread out my hands and barked: “We’ll all die of suffocation here, most likely!”

Now the other two kids were crying, too, and a palpable atmosphere of fear spread in the room. Even the kid in jeans looked troubled. The dream of a life outside the hells of Beirut, Teheran, Colombo, or Istanbul seemed to vanish into thin air. The military, murdered relatives, torture, and hunger were suddenly present. Someone screamed. The old man closed his eyes.

They had fled. They had traveled halfway around the world with two suitcases. They had filled out applications, they had been rejected, they had applied again and had been rejected again, they had sought shelter in barns or shared a room with nine others. They had gone into hiding and lived without papers, and now they wanted to get at least these forged ones. Out of the void they had conjured up three thousand marks-they had tried everything just to be able to say, one day: tomorrow I’ll sleep late, or I’ll save up for a video recorder, I should be able to get one next year, or this weekend I’ll get so smashed I’ll crawl home, and if a cop shows up, I’ll just stand up and pull out my wallet. But they never had a chance. Those who were rejected would remain so: the refugee “in whose native culture torture is a common and traditional method of interrogation:” the refugee “who, if he had not become politically active, need not have feared reprisals-and who was fully conscious of the risks of his activity;” and the “economic asylum seeker” who is labeled a parasite in the world of German supermarkets, as if hunger and poverty were a kind of “human right” for three quarters of the planet’s population. He or she was merely the ghost of the “at our expense” notion, never mind the fact that we have lived for centuries at his expense, and that he is trying to go where “our” pedestrian malls, “our” air force and “our” opera houses have been built-at his expense. He is a “parasite,” never mind that coffee, rubber heels, and metal ores do not grow in the forests of Bavaria. Sooner or later these people would be caught and put on the next plane out. But now they had been cheated out of even that fate. While I lit another smoke, most of the others tried to calm down the screaming guy. The kids’ mother uttered an excited burst of Arabic. Then she started scolding me.

“Why are you putting such bad thoughts into our heads?” And, pointing at the weeping children: “See what you’ve done!”

I opened my mouth and shut it again. In the meantime, they had made the man lie down on a bench. Staring up at the ceiling he talked, in a breathless, monotonous blend of English and Tamil, about his native village. As far as I could understand, that village no longer existed, and he had been forced to do something to his daughter. The daughter did no longer exist, either. He was the only survivor of his family.

I sat down next to the old man who had erected an invisible wall around himself. Arms crossed over his chest, his gaze fixed on his patent leather shoes, he whispered:

“You shouldn’t have said that. This is a room full of very many people. There’s no room for fear.” And, after a pause: “You think we are stupid, but we have no choice in the matter.” Then he got up, walked across the circle of people who looked as if they were at their wits’ end, reached the man from the village, and put his hand on the man’s forehead.

I clenched my teeth. Was it my fault that we were cooped up in this room? And wouldn’t I be a victim, too, when we ran out of air? They could all go fuck themselves, for all I cared. I closed my eyes, chain-smoked, and hoped that someone would come over and tell me to stop polluting the air, giving me an excuse to punch them in the nose. But no one came. Or at least, no one came the way I had imagined.

After my fourth cigarette I heard the first siren. Then the second, the third, finally a whole concert. They approached rapidly, emitted one final howl, and fell silent. Then there was engine noise; there were commands and voices through megaphones, barking dogs and footsteps. A key turned in the lock, the door opened. I tossed the butt and listened to a whole bag of pennies dropping in my head.

The first man to enter was less than five feet tall, thin as a board and just as stiff. His uniform fit him like a second skin. A neat oval of facial hair framed his mouth; otherwise he was clean-shaven and exuded one of those masculine fragrances that make the air taste like soap. Legs far apart, he stood in the doorframe, holding a pistol in his right, a radio transmitter in his left hand. When he spoke it sounded as if he was chewing on ice cubes. “On your feet, chop chop, get in line. Need to check your papers.” Two men in uniform armed with submachine guns took up positions to the right and the left of the door. I was one of those who remained seated.

“Come on, I told you, chop chop!”

“Good afternoon. Rank and serial number, please, or I won’t comply.”

The submachine guns swiveled quickly to point at my chest. The faces above them, adolescent and pimply, looked as if they thought they had to save the world, at the very least, and were pretty damn scared by the prospect. Trigger fingers jerked nervously back and forth.

“And tell your kids to put their toys down. We don’t want them to pull the trigger by mistake.”

The commanding officer dissected me with his eyes. Then he moved his chin in my direction, and his cohorts rushed forward. In no time at all they pulled me off the bench, made me stand between them, and patted me down. I no longer had my Beretta, and my wallet was gone, too. My I.D. was in the wallet. With short, abrupt steps, the commanding officer came up and stopped right in front of me. I could feel his breath on my face; it smelled of peppermint. Old Spice and peppermint. It was a knockout.

“Your I.D.”

“Your serial number.”

“One one two eight one eight. Inspector Hagebrecht. Your I.D.”

“Someone stole it.”

“Under arrest.”

“Just a minute!” I resisted. I stopped when they were about to break my arms. “I’m a German citizen.”

A thin smile appeared on his face.

“A likely story. Take him away.”

“When your boss hears about this, he’ll take your head off. Then you’ll be just four feet-ouch! I bet you’re supposed to take care of this business as discreetly as possible. Good luck with telling your boss that Kemal Kayankaya is one of your refugees! Better start practicing …”

Minutes later I had been handcuffed and put on the bus, next to a guard, and watched through the barred windows how people were escorted out of the bunker, one by one. Some had to be punched to make them move, others were carried, many were weeping. The children came last. Separated from their mother, they were dragged into a car. They were screaming. Their marbles scattered onto the muddy ground and lay there, blinking. I turned to my guard.

“Who sent you here?”

Staring straight ahead, his chin rigid, his cap pulled down low over his forehead, he mumbled: “Official secret.”

“Doesn’t it seem strange to you that your strike force leader had a key to that bunker?”

“Not within the parameters of my task to find that strange.”

After Hagebrecht had latched the bunker door and given marching orders, the vehicle column took off. We drove along the road through the woods back to the Gellersheim soccer field. I saw my Opel and through its back window the party angel. She was still fast asleep. We drove through Gellersheim and on to the autobahn. The driver turned on the radio, and the officers nodded their heads to the rhythms of Bavarian brass band music. It was raining. At the Frankfurt intersection we turned off in the direction of the airport.