One Man, One Murder

9

“Come on, come on, try it, double your money-keep your eye on it and win! Where’s the ball? Here? No. Here? No. Here it is! Let’s keep going-a hundred marks on the table, no tricks, no double bottom-this is an honest game. Keep your eye on it.…”

The small white ball skittered from left to right, up and down, bounced off the sidewalk, reappeared sometimes between his fingers, sometimes under one of the three matchboxes, and finally disappeared. Once more he switched the boxes around, stopped, waved a wad of hundred-mark bills in the air and looked around with an innocent expression.

“Where’s the ball?”

He had been kneeling on the sidewalk for ten minutes, whirling things around, and had taken two intoxicated Japanese and a small-town loudmouth in a deerskin outfit for four hundred marks. Twenty or so male heads waved skeptically in the April wind. All of them knew it was impossible to win, but all of them kept staring at his wad of bills.

The wind gusted heavily, cars honked, people ran, and a loudspeaker voice proclaimed a revolution in the realm of dishwashing brushes, but silence reigned in the circle around the shell game guy. After he clapped his hands and got ready to rattle off his spiel again, a Pole took two steps forward, placed a boot on the box to the left, extracted a hundred-mark bill from his wallet, and said: “Show.”

The men in the circle came alive; some of them nodded approval, some turned away, shaking their heads.

The man contemplated the boot. “Do I look like a shoeshine boy?”

The Pole shrugged and bent down. But just as he was about to pick up the box, a short fat guy stumbled out of the void, uttered some drunken babble, and knocked him over. A loud murmur rose from the audience, and before the Pole had gotten up, cursing, and brushed off his pants, and the other guy had vanished again, the ball had changed places.

I leaned against the display window of a sex shop, smoked a cigarette, and studied the entrance to the Eros-Center Elbestrasse.

It was almost six o’clock. The street vendors were packing up their wares.

Just as the Pole got ready to punch out the con man, the plastic door-flaps flew open and Slibulsky came bouncing down the stairs. I waited until he had reached the crossing. Just as I tossed my cigarette away, the Pole came crashing into my side. I fell down on the sidewalk, he fell on top of me, and both of us ended up in the gutter. He was groaning and not making any attempt to get off of me. They must have punched him with a knuckle-duster. One of his incisors was gone, and his mouth was spraying blood like a leaky hose. I pushed him aside, got to my feet, and looked around. Slibulsky had disappeared.

“Sorry, but how could I know that the Pollack would lose his cool that way?” He was a member of the shell game gang; not yet eighteen, milky skin, an old man’s pouches under his eyes. He, too, had made a bet, but he had won. A decoy. Now he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, rubbed his ironclad fist, and waited for my reaction. Maybe he thought I was one of the boys of the red-light district it’s better not to mess with. “But I am sorry, ’cause of your suit, I mean.”

I checked and noted that I did, indeed, look as if I had just come from a butchering party.

“Yeah, that’ll be some dry cleaning bill …”

He retreated a step. “Yeah, well-”

“But maybe we can settle this some other way. I’m sure you know Ernst Slibulsky, the guy who works over there at the center?”

“The guy with the lumpy nose?”

“That’s him. He’s got a broken arm. I’d like to know where that happened.”

“Where he broke his arm? No idea. I just run into him once in a while. And I hear people talk.”

“And where do you run into him?”

“Around here. He’s always in and out of there, and sometimes he’s over there in The Die.”

“Ah-”

“Hey, man, you’re not a cop, are you?”

I looked up and shrugged. “Something like that.”

Looking as if he had stepped on something, he said “Shit!” He ran over to his buddies and gave them the scram sign. Within two seconds, the shell game arena was empty.

In the meantime, the Pole had managed to sit up. He leaned against a car tire and patted his lips with a corner of his shirt.

I lit a cigarette and stuck it between his fingers. He nodded absentmindedly. That was his only reaction. Maybe he didn’t smoke. I slapped him on the shoulder, mumbled a few encouraging words, and crossed the street.

The Smiling Die should really have been called “The Smiling Chinese.” The probability of a smiling die was as unlikely as the probability of an unsmiling Mr. Wang. No matter if men who had lost everything crawled weeping to his doorstep, the police conducted a raid, or the Mafia broke every fixture in the place-the small man from Hong Kong sat behind the counter, his arms crossed over his chest, and smiled as if the world were one big spring roll. At the time it was said that he was abroad. Two months ago, someone had strangled Mrs. Wang and tossed a young fellow and a wardrobe out of her bedroom window on the fourth floor. Since then, Mr. Wang’s bodyguard was in charge of business. Schlumpi, or “Ass-with-Ears” Peter, never smiled. Even if he had smiled, no one would have noticed: after a car racing accident, the skin on the lower half of his face had been replaced by a graft from his backside.

The two small rooms and bar were down in the basement. They were furnished with tables for roulette, blackjack, and craps, chessboards and timers. The joint, once elegant, had come down in the world. Everything was ramshackle and stained, even the dealer. He was wearing a dark suit and a bow tie, but a button was missing on his shirt, and his cuffs were frayed. Narrow windows permitted a view of high heels ambling back and forth. Eleven guys were sitting around the roulette table, drinking beer and losing money. I stood at the bar, drinking beer and waiting. The woman behind the counter kept glancing at my suit with a mildly horrified look but did not say anything. No one said anything except for the dealer.

Ten minutes later a door next to the bar, marked “Office”, opened and Schlumpi, wearing a white wolf fur coat, stepped behind the cash register. After he had tossed in a bundle of bills and closed the drawer, he looked up and remarked, after a brief pause: “What do you know, it’s the Robin Hood of Istanbul.”

The door opened again, and Slibulsky came out with a man I didn’t know. Slibulsky gave a start. “Kayankaya-what are you doing here?”

“Having a beer, and listening to Schlumpi’s old jokes.”

“Oh …”

While Slibulsky took his leave from the guy I didn’t know, Schlumpi leaned on the counter, pointed at my suit, and whispered through his scarred and lipless hole of a mouth: “Here’s another joke-brand new: Kayankaya’s been giving head to a cunt on the rag.”

“Incredibly funny. But the funniest thing about it is-”

Slibulsky tugged at my sleeve. “Come on, let’s go.” And to the woman behind the bar: “Put his beer on my tab.”

The woman nodded.

“Didn’t know you knew Schlumpi.”

“And I didn’t know you played roulette.”

We crossed Kaiserstrasse in the direction of the railway station. The sun was setting behind the triple arch, and scraps of afterglow lingered to the right and the left. There was a whiff of spring in the air.

“Who told you I was there?”

“A guy in the street.”

We made our way past a bunch of junkies who were attempting a choral version of “We Are the World” while someone played it on a comb.

“I just wanted to ask you where you broke that arm.”

Slibulsky stopped. “You were looking for me to ask me that?”

I nodded. He opened his mouth, closed it with a sigh, then opened it again and said: “In the Center.”

“Where exactly?”

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

I tilted my jaw in the direction of the nearest tavern. “Let’s have a beer.”

“I can’t. I have to go to work.”

“How about later?”

“Not today, not tomorrow. We’re getting some new women in.” He checked his watch. “I should have been there quite some time ago.”

“All right. But if nothing else, tell me how the game went.”

“What game?”

“Becker against-”

“Oh, that … I didn’t watch it to the end. But someone called. Guy called-something to do with trees … Baum?”

“Weidenbusch?”

“Possible. Says it’s urgent. Later.”

Just as Slibulsky disappeared in the crowd, an elderly gentleman wearing a red velvet bow tie appeared in front of me and flashed the inside of his waistcoat with its assortment of wristwatches. “Genuine Swiss watches, Monsieur.”

I bought a particularly ostentatious one, went into a bar and asked for a beer and a corkscrew. Then I lit a cigarette. How deep should the shit get that Slibulsky had gotten himself into before I would decide not to help him crawl back out of it? I was still pondering that when the waiter came back with my order. He was a small fat fellow with greasy hair combed straight back and an equally greasy apron. After he had taken my money, he pointed at the corkscrew and asked me morosely: “You going to clean your fingernails with it?”

I shook my head. “I want to scratch a dedication into the back of a watch.”

“Oh, I see … Well, I was just thinking, I clean mine with it all the time, and we’ve only got one of them here, and I wouldn’t really like it if other people-”

“Not to worry.”

He growled, “Never mind me, I’m a little strange in some ways,” and disappeared. I looked at my beer. It looked quite normal, really, but I pushed it aside and proceeded to scratch fOR MANNE into the back plate of the watch.

A little later I left the bar and drove home to change clothes.

10

The voice on the intercom said: “Who is there, please?”

“The gardener from Gellersheim.”

“Who, please?”

I repeated my phrase and was told to wait. Minutes passed, then the voice returned: “With whom do you wish to speak?”

“Mr. Schmitz.”

“Sorry, but Mr. Schmitz isn’t here.”

“His secretary?”

“Mr. Olschewski isn’t here, either.”

“Did you take a good look?”

“Excuse me?”

On the third floor of the fortress-like building a light went out and a curtain moved.

“Please inform the absent gentlemen that if they don’t become present in one minute, I’ll tell the police what I found while planting bulbs.”

“And what was that, if I may ask?”

“A watch.”

“Just a moment, please.”

A Jaguar slid up the hill, driving on its parking lights, and disappeared a hundred yards farther up in a small cypress grove. In the moonlit night, the outlines of the treetops looked like cutouts against the sky. I could just make out a watchman’s hut. Looking in the other direction, there was a view of Frankfurt, a gigantic lit-up birthday cake twenty miles away. Up here it suddenly felt comforting to be an inhabitant of that cake.

I had lit a cigarette and smoked half of it when the intercom crackled on again: “Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think that a watch found in the garden would be of much interest to the absent gentlemen.”

“But it might be if they were told that there was a man attached to that watch.”

“You mean,” he cleared his throat, “next to the bulbs you were planting?”

“Yes.”

A moment later, he pressed the buzzer, and I proceeded up the paved walk to the front entrance. The massive oak door swung open, and my salt-and-pepper interlocutor bade me enter. “Please follow me, sir.”

We crossed the entrance hall and walked down a corridor to the library. Books from floor to ceiling on all four walls, four cordovan armchairs on the dark brown parquet floor. Next to each armchair stood a small table with a lamp and an ashtray; in the middle of the room there was a big table with six chairs. Open on the table, next to further ashtrays, lay an old leather-bound tome.

“Have a seat, sir. He’ll be with you in a moment.”

He left the room and closed the door. After I had walked along the shelves for a while, I sat down in front of the old tome and read. On the lam from the cops, an old geezer was carrying an unconscious guy through the sewers of Paris. The water reached to his hips, and the ground under his feet was uneven and muddy. Just as he saw the lantern carried by a police sergeant and stopped to squeeze himself close to the wall, a voice behind me said: “You want to see me?”

I spun around, and there he stood: a small, hollow-cheeked gentleman with thin reddish blond hair and a tic that kept twitching his head to one side every time he spoke, as if a fly had landed on his face. He was wearing a gray three-piece suit with a dark blue ascot and a silver watch chain across his vest. Arms crossed, right foot slightly forward, on his face an expression of calm combativeness, he stood there against the red and brown background of the wall of books looking like a not entirely successful portrait of royalty-Eberhard Schmitz, the king of the railway station district.

Clumsily, I pointed at the book. “I was reading-very suspenseful.…” I nodded.

He smiled. Then he walked around the table, sat down across from me and pulled a silver case from his vest pocket. It opened with a dignified click, and he offered me a selection of various brands of cigarettes. “Would you like one?”

There was something slightly awesome about his nervous tic. I picked an unfiltered number of a brand I didn’t know. During the subsequent ceremony which consisted of his selecting a cigarette, tapping it against his thumbnail, lighting mine, lighting his, and putting the lighter back in his pocket, the gaze of his yellow eyes never left my face. Finally, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and remarked, with a quick glance at the book: “I’m glad to see that gardeners are able to appreciate things beyond mowed lawns.”

“Yes, indeed.” I nodded again. “The only problem is that I’m in no position to tell you what gardeners appreciate.”

“You’re saying that you have as much in common with gardeners as I have with persons who do not take action when strangers trespass on their property without permission?”

“That’s about it. Even though I don’t know whom you’re referring to.”

“I’m referring to you.”

“Then I may assume that the people whose tracks I found in Gellersheim were no strangers to you? That they had been lodged there with your consent?”

A pause. He used the ashtray, leaned back and ran his palm across the edge of the table, as if to see how sharp it was.

“Who are you?”

“Kemal Kayankaya, private investigator.”

“Private investigator …” He dragged on his cigarette and disappeared for a moment in a cloud of smoke. “One of those dirty types who make most of their money through blackmail.”

“There’s bad apples in every barrel. Private investigators, property owners-you name it. I once saw a Salvation Army officer empty a collection box into his own pocket, and-”

He cut me off. “Let’s get down to business.”

I extinguished my cigarette and took the ostentatious watch out of my pocket. I slid it across the table.

“I found it on a dead man. In your house. And there was enough stew left for half a regiment. Tell me where those people are now, and I’ll give you time to remove the corpse.”

After he had examined the watch from all sides, he carefully put it back on the table and shook his head.

“That house has stood empty for three years. Only the gardener has a key.”

“That’s not what I understood from your secretary.”

“It must have been a misunderstanding.”

“What about the dead man?”

He stressed each word separately: “That, too, was a misunderstanding.”

“So be it. Guess I’ll go to the police, to clarify all the misunderstandings.”

I reached for the watch but he was faster. “You’ll leave that here.”

“You like it that much? I can tell you where you can get one. Quite cheaply, too.”

He ignored me and slipped the watch into his breast pocket, pulling out a checkbook with the same motion. “You won’t go to the police. At this time, I can’t afford any publicity, no matter how far-fetched.” While the butt of his cigarette glowed and darkened in the ashtray, and I wondered if he’d really let me off so easily, he made out a check for twenty thousand marks.

He handed it to me, and my jaw dropped. “Holy smoke! It has to be a major misunderstanding.”

With a condescending little smile, he put his fountain pen and check book back where they belonged, pushed himself away from the table, and stood up. “I’m used to such affairs, and I know that I can save myself a lot of grief by spending a few dimes. Dimes-you understand?”

I nodded. “Sure. Dimes.” I folded the check. He waited until I had put it in my wallet. Then he pointed at the door. I would have liked to find out the title of the book about the old geezer, but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask. As we walked out into the entrance hall he looked almost contented. “You see-you are a blackmailer.”

“You don’t want to know why I searched your house? It doesn’t interest you at all?”

“No, it doesn’t.” We walked a couple of steps.

“What if I go to the police anyway?”

He stopped and looked down at the floor. For several seconds, all that was heard was the sound of our breathing. Finally, he looked at me and said, with a mildly sad tinge to his voice: “Listen carefully, young man. You better not do that, if you want to cross a street safely in this city, or in this country, or anywhere in the world. I am a peace-loving man-hence that check-but a mere hint from me would suffice to wipe you off the face of the earth. In case you haven’t quite got the picture: You’re talking to Eberhard Schmitz. And who are you? There’s a difference. One of the greatest magnitude.”

“For sure.” I nodded, for the last time. “You may well be right about that.” Then I pointed at his chest. “But we’ll both die of lung cancer.”