The Carnival Master

6.

Senior Criminal Commissar Benni Scholz was not someone who frowned often, but his broad brow creased beneath the mass of dark hair as he watched the television screen. This was probably the most important, most publicly visible task he had undertaken since he had become a police officer fifteen years ago. Every single officer in the Cologne police department would judge him on how well he handled it. Stress like this was something to which he was totally unaccustomed. So much pressure.

Scholz’s office was in darkness, other than for a single small desk lamp and the flickering light from the TV. A tall, lean uniformed Commissar sat next to him, his attention also fixed with a frown on the images on the screen.

‘Who was behind this, Rudi?’ Scholz asked the uniformed officer without taking his eyes off the television.

‘Hasek.’

‘Hasek!’ Scholz turned to Rudi Schaeffer with an expression of disbelief. ‘Hasek organised this? That wanker in the Ops Room?’

Scholz turned again to watch the screen. An elaborately decorated carnival float, capped by a black Model-T Ford with the word ‘POLIZEI’ painted clumsily in white on the side and flanked by twenty or thirty men and women dressed as Keystone Cops, slowly progressed along a crowd-lined street. The ‘Keystone Cops’ continually bumped into each other, tripped over, spilled buckets of fake tinsel water over onlookers and hit each other over the heads with oversized rubber batons while others threw handfuls of candy into the crowd, all in carefully choreographed mayhem.

‘That was three years ago. He won awards for that float,’ said Rudi unhelpfully.

‘I knew it had won an award,’ said Scholz. ‘But I had no idea it was bloody Hasek who had been the organiser that year.’ His mood darkened even more. Everybody had been so certain that Benni Scholz was the man for the job. Everyone knew him for his sense of fun. His wacky humour. The ideal choice as organiser of this year’s Cologne Police float for Karneval. He would rather have taken on another dozen murder cases.

‘Did you get the dummy heads sorted out?’ he asked Rudi. The services of Commissar Rudi Schaeffer of the city’s traffic division, and an old friend of Scholz’s, had been volunteered as assistant organiser. It had been Scholz who had volunteered them. No point in suffering alone, he had thought.

‘Sure did.’ Rudi smiled good-naturedly. ‘I’ve got the prototype outside…’

Scholz watched, despondently, as Hasek’s perfect, award-winning float continued its flawless progress. Rudi reappeared, his head encased in a mass of painted papier mache.

‘What the fuck…’ said Scholz twisting around in his chair. ‘And allow me to repeat for the sake of clarity… what the fuck is that supposed to be?’

‘It’s a bull…’ said Rudi, plaintively, his voice muffled by the dummy head. ‘Just like you asked for. You know, big joke, we all dress up as Bullen.’ Rudi referred to the derogatory nickname in German for a police officer. The Americans and British called their policemen ‘ pigs ’; the French ‘ les Flics ’; the Germans called them ‘ Bullen ’.

Benni Scholz was considerably shorter than Rudi Schaeffer and had to reach up to put his arm around his colleague’s shoulder. Rudi turned his huge papier-mache head toward him.

‘Rudiger, my dear friend,’ said Scholz, ‘I fully appreciate that you are from Bergisch-Gladbach. And I do make allowances for that… I really do. But I’m pretty sure that even in your formative years, you never saw a bull, cow or any form of cattle that remotely resembled whatever the hell that thing on your head is supposed to be. Unless, that is, Bergisch-Gladbach is twinned with Chernobyl.’

‘It’s only a prototype…’ replied Rudi defensively from within the cavern of the dummy head.

At that point a young detective came into Scholz’s office. He paused for a moment, staring at Scholz with his arm around a uniformed officer wearing a bizarre head. Scholz removed his arm.

‘Can you guess what this is meant to be?’ Scholz asked the young officer.

‘Dunno, Benni… the Elephant Man?’

Rudi slunk out, his massive dummy head bowed.

‘What is it, Kris?’ Scholz asked the young detective.

‘The Biarritz restaurant on Wolfsstrasse. One of the kitchen staff has been turned into mince by some guy with a meat cleaver…’