One Man, One Murder

3

TURKISH PIGS A PLAGUE-I’M PROUD TO BE A GERMAN! I opened the door of the phone booth whose glass panes were covered, inside and out, with more of the same sort of drawings and statements, making it look like a favorite hangout of the juvenile delinquent SS, I lit a cigarette, took Weidenbusch’s card out of my pocket and jammed the receiver under my chin. While I dialed, I read a spidery legend: “Alf is German.”

Before the phone had rung even once, there came a breathless whine: “Sweetheart?”

“No. Kayankaya.”

I could hear him gulp. “Have you found her?”

“I may have a lead. Tell me, for whom did Mrs. Rakdee work before she was employed at the Lady Bump?”

“You mean in Thailand?”

“No, here in Frankfurt.”

I told him about my visit with Charlie, and he seemed genuinely surprised. Sri Dao had indicated to him that she had arrived at the Lady Bump directly from Bangkok, via Frankfurt Airport. He said he didn’t know anything about a pimp.

“Was it her idea to come to Germany, or was she hired by an organization?”

“She didn’t want to talk about that. She said those were just bad memories.”

“So all you know is that she came here the end of December?”

“Why December? June.”

“June …?” I counted on my fingers. “That’s nine months A normal visa is good for three.”

There was a moment’s silence. He was probably torturing his necktie. “You have to ask Koberle about that. He took Sri Dao’s passport after she arrived and only handed it back to her in my presence.”

“Was the visa for the whole period, or had it been renewed every three months?”

“Renewed twice.”

“And when you pondered how to keep your friend in this country, it never occurred to you to figure out how they managed to renew the visa?”

He hesitated again. “Yes, it did occur to me. I even wanted to go to the club and ask Koberle, but Sri Dao didn’t want me to.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“Because she was afraid of those people.”

“I see.” I dropped my cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. Through a curved letter L in “Heil Hitler” I noticed a policeman who was circumambulating my Opel with evident interest.

I had double-parked it and left the engine running.

“Then I’d say there are two possibilities: Either the visa stamps were forged, or your friend told the immigration service that she was getting married to a German citizen.”

“But I told you, Koberle kept her passport all that time.”

“Yes, that’s what you told me.”

Hands clasped behind his back, the policeman now leaned into the open window on the driver’s side.

“Just like you told me this morning that a marriage to her was out of the question. Tell me-why?”

While Weidenbusch was busy composing an answer, the policeman’s green hat reappeared, and the head under it scanned all directions in search of the culprit. Setting his hands in motion, he pulled pad and pencil out of his shoulder bag and proceeded to write a friendly note from your fairy godmother.

“… I would have liked to marry her, but when I suggested it to her, she just shook her head. Later, she even got angry with me. It must be something to do with her culture.”

Right. Tribes outside of Central Europe didn’t need reasons for their actions. They had “cultures.” Now the cop was scrubbing dirt off my registration sticker.

“All right. I’ll be in touch when I have news for you.”

“Will you get her back?”

“I will. Don’t worry. Talk to you soon.”

Before he could say anything else I hung up and ran across the street.

“O.K., O.K.! I’m back! You can toss that ticket!”

He looked up, surprised. He had just started lifting a windshield wiper to place the ticket under it.

“I’m leaving. Just had to make a quick phone call.”

“So? It’s illegal to park in a traffic lane.” He snapped the windshield wiper down over the ticket, straightened his back and adjusted his hat. “And let me tell you something, young man. You need to improve your attitude.”

“I don’t need any advice on attitude from my employees.” While he glared at me, uncomprehending, I opened the car door.

“Just think about it for a moment: I’m paying you a salary for writing tickets so the fines can be used to pay others who write me more tickets, and so on. In that sense, and as far as I’m concerned, traffic cops are a total loss. Nevertheless, I keep on paying my taxes every year so that you can have an apartment, buy schoolbooks for your kids, and go to the movies. Now, think about it-would you go on paying someone who keeps kicking you in the ass?”

He looked at me as if I had lost all my marbles, or as if I had never had and was never likely to have any. I pointed my finger at him across the doorframe. “See what I’m saying? But I keep on paying. How about a conciliatory gesture? How about tearing up that ticket?”

No reaction. Unchanged, frowning, one eye slightly narrowed he stood there as if he hadn’t heard or understood my question.

“Oh, forget it!” I got into the car and leaned out the window. “Loitering in the sun, wearing those threads paid for by the state, and bothering people-some would call that ‘workshy’ behavior.”

Ten minutes later I parked across the street from the immigration office, slammed the door, and ripped the ticket from under the windshield wiper.

The offices for names beginning with the letters K to R were on the third floor, in the left-hand hallway, behind the cocoa machine. The hallway was full of people of all pigments, standing, sitting, or lying down, all waiting for their number to come up. There were no benches or chairs. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and botched application forms. Faded posters advertised St. Paul’s and Town Hall-FRANKFURT AM MAIN, CITY OF SIGHTS TO SEE-and above the doors, digital counters showed the current numbers. A video game noise emitted by invisible speakers replaced the old “Next, please”. People weren’t talking much, and only in hushed tones, perhaps because they felt that it was necessary to ration what air remained in the fog of sweat and stale smoke. Due to security regulations, windows could not be opened.

I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall, between an adolescent disco gigolo to my left who kept himself frantically busy smoking Marlboros and fixing his hairdo and a Polish couple and their son to my right. Dad and Mom were nodding out over the daily paper, the kid whiled away the hours making two plastic cowboys go “bang,” “zong,” and “pow” … I felt like going “pow” on him, myself.

Suddenly two men in uniform plowed through and past all the legs, children, and bags, disappeared in the office for S, and soon thereafter dragged a young black man down the hall and down the stairs while he kept protesting in broken German that he hadn’t known about the deportation order. The people waiting followed him with their eyes as if he were an apparition. There was a moment when it looked like everybody was about to say something, but then they just looked at each other and remained silent.

It occurred to me that the posters advertising Frankfurt were not only in poor taste, but-as far as this office was concerned-completely counter-productive. The interests of the immigration authorities would have been better served by pictures of beaches in Beirut-MARBLE, ROCK, AND BROKEN IRON-or desert landscapes in Ethiopia-THERE’S NOTHING LIKE HOME COOKING. A campaign to further national loyalty to crisis areas. One could even conceive a double-barreled approach, with, let’s say, a picture of a Thai girl flanked by her parents-WELCOME TO THE FAMILY this would not only encourage locals to return home, but would also appeal to the German male on vacation … Although it was true that the latter rarely set foot in this building. The video arcade noise interrupted my train of thought, and my number appeared on the display. I entered a standard office with standard furniture, postcards on the walls, potted palm trees by the window. The fortyish woman behind the desk was eating a cake. She wore a platinum blonde wig, a pink blouse, and a gold chain with an Eiffel Tower pendant. Her face was long and narrow and slightly remorseful, and when she spoke, it sounded as if she were reciting an instruction manual for disposable cigarette lighters. The room smelled of one of those perfumes designed to appeal to several tastes at once.

When she was done chewing and had wiped her mouth thoroughly, she picked up a pen and looked at her pad. “Number one hundred eighty three?”

“Right.”

She made a check mark. “Name?”

“Kemal Kayankaya.”

“Spelling?”

“Pretty good, mostly. I have a little trouble with those foreign words.”

She looked up and pursed her lips in a stepmotherly fashion. After she had scanned me and come to a conclusion, she hissed: “The spelling of your name!”

I spelled it for her. Without lifting her pen, she asked:

“Nationality?”

“FRG.”

“Germany,” she corrected me under her breath. Then she looked up again, quite irritably. “German …?”

“You want me to spell that?”

Her left eyelid twitched. While we glared at each other, she pushed the pad to one side and leaned back in her chair, holding on to the armrests.

“If you are a German citizen, Mr.-”

“Kayankaya, How long have you been doing this?”

She looked startled.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“I was just thinking … If every name that doesn’t sound like Wurst takes you that long to memorize, you may not be cut out for this job.”

Her forehead began to turn pink.

“One more crack out of you, young man, and I’ll call security. If you really are a German-”

“I’m a Turk with a German passport.”

Her eyes flashed briefly. She saw an opening. She said: “You mean you’re a permanent resident? Seems to me you’re a little confused.”

I began to get hot under the collar.

“If I had meant to tell you that I’m a permanent resident, I would have told you so. But that’s not what I told you. I told you something else-remember?”

Instead of replying she held on tighter to the armrests of her chair and looked as if she was visualizing my being drawn, beheaded, and quartered. In an adjacent room, a voice rose to a roar: “… you no understand nothing, I don’t give a shit! Here you speak German, no nigger English!” Then someone banged on a table, then there were footsteps, a door opened, another voice giggled, and this was followed by murmurs and finally silence. The woman in front of me was still hanging on to her chair, her face contorted by fury, and seemed oblivious to all the commotion.

I pointed at the wall: “Lovely manners.”

“We’re only doing our job.”

“Why is it always ‘only’? Have you ever given that any-”

She let go of the armrests, leaned forward, and hit the desk with both fists: “Get out of here!”

I shook my head.

“We’re not done. I came here to enquire about my fiancee, Sri Dao Rakdee. Rakdee with two ‘e’s. She is from Thailand. We were going to get married last week, but we still haven’t received the necessary papers. I wanted to know if it would be possible to extend her visa by another month?”

She seemed surprised by the question. Then she smiled triumphantly and told me, in a saccharine tone of voice: “No, that’s impossible.”

She reached for her cake fork.

“All right, then. Would you be so kind as to get Sri Dao Rakdee’s file and note that,” I got up to look at the nameplate on her desk, “Mrs. Steiner has rejected an application for extension of her visa? So that I can inform my attorney.”

She put the fork down, chewed and thought this over for a moment. Then she pushed her chair back from the desk and got up. “It’ll be a pleasure.”

She left the room. I went over to the window feeling pretty good and lit a cigarette. I thought I had reached the end of the trail. Whether Sri Dao Rakdee’s first German was a pimp, as Charlie claimed, or one of those guys who liked mail order brides, his name had to be in that file; and Mrs. Steiner would hardly miss the opportunity to beat me over the head with it, to justify calling me a liar and a criminal and throwing me out of her office.

There was no other explanation for a visa extended twice for periods of three months. It all fit together. According to Weidenbusch, Sri Dao had shouted “this is my man” during the fracas next to the VW van. Contrary to Weidenbusch’s fond assumption, it had not been her intention to express her readiness to defend him. No, she had simply referred to her “man”, to the guy who had brought her to Germany and had promised marriage both to her and the authorities; who had then lost interest in her and sold her to the Lady Bump outfit. That guy knew when her visa expired and what brothel keepers were willing to pay for her. Today he had picked her up, with a three-thousand-mark bonus, in order to sell her again.

Given all that, there could be several possible reasons for Sri Dao’s rejection of Weidenbusch’s marriage proposal. First: her memories of the other guy were such that the mere word “marriage” made her nauseous. Second: she was willing to risk deportation to keep her previous story a secret from Weidenbusch. Or third: she suspected that the immigration authorities would not approve such a change of bridegroom and therefore reject any further attempt to extend her visa.

So all I needed to do now was to look up the name of the guy in the phone book. Then I could return Sri Dao to Weidenbusch this evening, if not sooner.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Steiner returned, flanked by one of her colleagues from security. She slammed the door shut and wagged her chin at me: “That’s him!”

The colleague was in his forties, balding, his few remaining strands of hair plastered sideways across the top of his skull. He wore a pale blue bomber jacket with a plethora of gold-colored zippers. He gave me the once-over. Then he pushed his thumbs under his belt, hitched up his pants, cleared his throat and stepped closer so that his fat face was a yard from mine. He flashed his teeth and spoke in a rapid-fire machine gun rattle: “What’s your name, nigger?”

So, I said to myself, this must be their guy with the communication skills. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and studied its glowing tip for a moment. His beery breath struck my face. I looked at him and said very quietly:

“Listen, pig. Another word out of you, and I’ll see to it that you won’t be able to stand up, sit down, or fuck-ever again.”

While Mrs. Steiner suppressed a scream, my threat seemed to have the desired effect on her colleague. He was speechless. However, it didn’t look like this situation would last very long, so I added: “Where is the file?” Just as quickly came the reply from a safe distance: “There is no file for Rakdee.” Mrs. Steiner had one hand on the doorknob; the other hovered in the vicinity of a vase. I kept glancing back and forth between them, a proper little Hawkeye.

“If you’re not telling me the truth …”

“I beg your pardon …!” Despite her obvious fear that our argument might turn into a free-for-all, Mrs. Steiner looked indignant. “I am a civil servant.”

In other circumstances I would have grinned, but now it seemed important to get closer to the door. The security guy looked like he’d explode any second, and I didn’t feel like getting punched. On the other hand, I had better things to do than jail time for grievous bodily harm.

“All right, that’s all I wanted to know. You could have saved yourself all this excitement. And if you want to know my name, there it is, on her pad. Take a good look at it. If we ever meet again, I would like to be addressed correctly.”

Now the guy looked like his head and shoulders were about to burst. He stood leaning forward a little, arms bent like a wrestler’s, ready to pounce. Mrs. Steiner stepped aside, I grabbed the doorknob and touched my forehead. “Thank you all.”

I pulled the door shut behind me, stepped over the Polish kid who was still busy with his gunfighters, and ran down the stairs. Nothing happened until I had reached the landing below. Then a roar came from above, and I picked up speed. A guy in uniform met me at the exit.

“Hey, hey, what’s the rush?”

“Be right back. I’m illegally parked …”

Before he was able to react, I was out the door and ran to the Opel. Seconds later, the security guy and the one in uniform charged out into the street. I slid way down in my seat and waited until they gave up and trotted back into the building. I started the car and drove off.

At the first refreshment stand I saw I bought a paper cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate and took them back to the car. So much for my theory, I thought; the stamps in Sri Dao Rakdee’s passport were forgeries, provided by Charlie or someone else. She had been in this country illegally for at least six months. As far as her former guy was concerned, my only proof of his existence was a statement made by a half-crazed pimp. In her situation, forged papers or stamps had been her only recourse. Which left “Mr. Larsson” who had a mustache and drove a VW van. There could be a hundred reasons why he knew the dates of Sri Dao’s visa. Maybe he wrote poetry in his spare time and belonged to Weidenbusch’s circle of acquaintances.

I drank my coffee and decided to drive to the asylum seekers’ center in Hausen.