The Spaghetti Detectives

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  The Kesslers have been on TV and in the paper and everything. They’re a sensation because Mrs. Kessler had two sets of twins in the same year: two boys in January, two girls in December. They just about manage to fit in Christmas and New Year’s between the two sets of birthdays. Expensive piece of work, Mr. Kessler always says, but with a proud grin. Two sets of twins, he’d like to see anyone compete with that. The twins are six and seven years old. Mrs. Darling can’t stand them. She calls them the buy-one-get-one-free kids.

  She put the bread sticks into a glass and placed it on the table next to the whole wheat crackers. She turned the television on. We always watch the news before we start on the movies: first the local evening news from Berlin, then the national news. Mrs. Darling is crazy about one of the newscasters on the local news. He’s got brown eyes like a teddy bear and his name is Peter Duffel and Mrs. Darling thinks he’s fantastic. The last time she came around for a drop of whiskey with Mom she said she thought he was gorgeous.

  Today Peter Duffel’s beautiful brown eyes looked very serious because the evening news was about Mr. 2000 and the child from Lichtenberg who had been set free. The parents didn’t want to give any interviews, so they were showing photos of the other children, whose pictures every Berliner knew from the newspaper and the TV: two boys and two girls, only one of them older than seven. All of them were smiling in their photos, except for little Sophia. Her photo was slightly blurry, but you could still see how close together her eyes were in her flat moon face. Her lips were narrow and almost as pale as her thin eyebrows, her stringy blonde hair hung down over her shoulders, and she was wearing a wrinkled, dark pink T-shirt with a big red splat of strawberry jam or something like that on it. She looked like someone who would get laughed at or teased on the school playground. Sophia was Mr. 2000’s second victim and I felt more sorry for her than for anybody else. I know what it’s like when other people are always making fun of you for being different.

  The newscaster explained that there was still no sign of the kidnapper and then the news moved on to politics. Next to me, Mrs. Darling made a snorting noise.

  “I wish I had that man’s address.”

  “Peter Duffel’s?” I could remember his name because it flashed up on the screen regularly. Otherwise my memory for names was down the drain.

  “No, the address of the kidnapper.” Mrs. Darling pushed half a tomato into her mouth. “There are times when I’d like to send him a personal invitation to come and collect those Kessler kids. Nobody’d miss ‘em, if you ask me.” She snorted again. “Those buy-one-get-one-free kids are the worst things to have ever lived in this building!”

  Mrs. Darling pushed a pickled onion down after her half tomato. She made little crunches as she chewed on it. Then she licked her fingers.

  “I think Mr. Fitz is worse.”

  She waved away the thought and fished out a few bread sticks.

  “Nah, he’s just putting it on. Another cracker, Rico?”

  PUTTING IT ON: Pretending. You’d think you could use one simple word in the first place instead of three confusing ones.

  I took a whole wheat cracker and a pickled onion. Mrs. Darling chewed her bread sticks, then suddenly she grabbed the remote control and turned down the sound on the television. They were showing pictures of the cathedral and a couple of cranes, but I couldn’t hear what was going on. Quiet spread through the living room. Mrs. Darling looked straight ahead with slightly teary eyes and didn’t move again. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, chewing my cracker and onion carefully. It’s always a bit creepy when she has one of her gray days.

  “What?” said Mrs. Darling after a while, reluctantly, without turning her head in my direction.

  “Maybe you should go out sometimes,” I said.

  “Is that your idea or your mother’s?”

  “Mine.”

  It was Mom’s idea. But I’m not such a nitwit that I don’t know why people have gray days. You have to be careful as a child proddity not to say things you haven’t thought up yourself, though. Otherwise, just like that, people start thinking you’re a liar and actually quite smart after all and then they start giving you math problems to do and other stuff. Anyway, you get gray days because you’re lonely, and you won’t meet other people unless you go out or find somebody on the Internet. I’ve got no idea how old Mrs. Darling is, almost certainly nearly fifty. But there has to be somebody out there who likes eating wheat crackers, too. In any case, no man has turned up at the butcher’s counter for her yet.

  The local news was over. Peter Duffel disappeared. Mrs. Darling pressed the off button on the remote control firmly. The screen went black, then the pink logo of the DVD player appeared.

  “We’re watching a murder mystery,” said Mrs. Darling as she pushed herself up from the sofa and went over to the cupboard with the film collection. “Miss Marple.”

  This time I did cheer out loud.

  Later, when I was back home lying in bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. Part of it was Miss Marple’s fault. I always get really nervous when I watch one of her murder mysteries because I’m afraid that something will happen to her. I get so worked up that I always forget I’ve seen the movie before and that she survived every other time.

  Part of the problem was that it was a full moon. It lit the dark, dull windows of the empty apartments in the building behind ours. Old curtains were still hanging in many of them. It’s just my luck that it’s the third floor that I can see especially well from my bed. That’s where Miss Friedmann killed herself. Miss Friedmann was an old lady. One day she got lung cancer and didn’t want to go to the hospital. She turned on the gas, lit a final cigarette, and waited a while. Then, KA-BOOM!

  At first they thought the building hadn’t been damaged all that much by the explosion. The apartments where everything was smashed got new windows and stuff, but when they looked at the stairway, they realized the explosion had left cracks in the walls of the fourth and fifth floors. The whole place was in danger of collapse and everybody who lived there had to move out.

  The windows in the stairway were boarded up, the door in the yard that led to the apartment building behind ours got a big new security lock, and since then the various owners of the apartments have been fighting over who should pay to have it rebuilt.

  That was years and years ago. But Miss Friedmann has been haunting her old rooms since then. That’s what the superintendent, Mr. Mommsen, told me right after we moved in. He thinks her ghost is still looking for an ashtray in her old apartment.

  Something makes me look over there, whether I want to or not. I’ve often thought of asking Mom to put up curtains or blinds, but then she might think I was a softy. Sometimes I think I can see even more shadowy shadows behind the shadows in Miss Friedmann’s apartment, flitting through the empty rooms. I know I’m just imagining the shadowier shadows, but that doesn’t make it easier. Especially when you really have to go to the bathroom but aren’t brave enough to get up—and I’ve never been brave enough when Mom is at work at night and I’m alone in the apartment. I haven’t wet the bed for a long time, but if I watch the shadowier shadows flitting around for longer than a minute I just might. That’s why I usually pull the blanket over my head before going to sleep.

  Just like today.

  Under the blanket I thought about Oscar and whether I would ever see him again. Then I fell asleep.

  SUNDAY

  the summer break diary

  I’ve taken most of Sunday to write down Saturday. But that’s OK; I had nothing else to do because Mom was asleep all day. She stays at the club longer than usual on weekends. She didn’t come home until ten in the morning and fell into bed right away. Which is why she didn’t notice that I was sitting at the computer all day. If my experiment goes wrong, then at least she won’t be disappointed.

  All this writing was my teacher’s idea. That was the reason I had to go and see him on Saturday, even though it was already summer vacation. It started with a stor
y about the canal that I wrote two weeks ago.

  The canal flows almost right behind 93 Dieffe Street. You can sit very comfortably on the bank under the giant weeping willows or just on the grass in between all the other people. You can look out over the shining water or tease the paddling swans. Now and then a boat with tourists passes by and you can wave at them. They wave back very excitedly, as though they’ve never seen a boy sitting on a canal bank before. It’s all in the story.

  Mr. Meyer said he was extremely impressed by my story—that’s why he wanted to talk to me about it again.

  “Your spelling is hair-raising, Rico,” he said. “But there’s something about the way you write. You’re a good storyteller—leaving aside the long part about the North Sea.”

  Mr. Meyer meant my favorite part, where I imagined how it would feel to be a dead body floating in a canal. Imagine it’s winter and you’ve just broken through the ice. The current carries you under the blue-black ice from the canal into the Spree River. I looked at the map of Germany to see where you would go from there: The Spree flows into the Havel River and the Havel flows into the Elbe River and the Elbe flows into the North Sea and the North Sea belongs to the Atlantic. So if you drown in the canal, it’s really quite a trip. You get to go on a fantastic journey down three rivers, one sea, and finally into the ocean, unless, of course, you get caught in a ship’s propeller and get totally chopped up, which would be annoying.

  Mr. Meyer had a strange look on his face. “Are you worried about Mr. 2000? Does it frighten you, all this stuff with the kidnappings?”

  So it was about the chopped-up dead body. I shook my head. I had been thinking about somebody else while I was writing, not about the kidnapper, but that was none of Mr. Meyer’s business.

  He nodded and looked at the wall with all the photos of his kids and his wife and his dog and his motorcycle, which is nowhere near as nice as Bert’s.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “What would you say to keeping a diary? About your summer vacation? The things you think about, the things you do … Are you and your mom going away anywhere?”

  “No. Is this homework?”

  “Let’s put it like this: If you give it a good try, I’ll let you off some other homework assignments after school starts again.”

  That sounded good.

  “How much am I supposed to write?”

  “Let’s say … I’ll be happy with three pages. If you manage six, I’ll throw in a bonus.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An extra reward.”

  That sounded even better. Even so, I was a bit nervous. Six pages is a lot.

  “And the spelling mistakes?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Don’t worry about that. Don’t you have a computer at home?”

  “Mom’s got one. From eBay.”

  Mom not only gets rid of her plastic handbags from bingo on eBay, she also buys cheap stuff there, like clothes.

  “Does the computer have a word-processing program with an auto-correct function?”

  “What does auto-correct mean?”

  “It’s like a built-in teacher.”

  BUILT-IN TEACHER FUNCTION: Now and again somebody explains a word and then you’re even more confused. In the beginning, anyway. With auto-correct, for example, you might well be asking yourself how a teacher can possibly live inside a computer.

  Sometimes Mr. Meyer puts together extralong words and sentences just to annoy us. If I’m having a bad day, I get worked up and then the lottery machine starts up. But today I wasn’t going to get annoyed. It was summer vacation. And besides, I have to admit, I was pretty excited by his idea. A diary …

  It took a while, but then I sorted out all his words and understood them. When Mom bought our computer, a word-processing program and a lot of other stuff came with it for free. Mom uses it now and then to write letters. I nodded.

  “Good,” said Mr. Meyer. “Because a program like that corrects your spelling mistakes automatically.”

  I was astounded. “Really?”

  “Really. But do me a favor and at least look at some of the worst mistakes. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  Was he off his rocker? If I looked at each mistake one by one, the lottery balls would go crazy.

  “Deal?” said Mr. Meyer.

  “Deal.”

  He grinned and raised his hand. “Give me five.”

  I pushed my chair back, stood up, quickly said good-bye, and left. If he was about to move on to math, that would ruin everything.

  Well, that’s it up until now. And I’ve written more than six pages. So I can take a break. Writing is hard work. But I’ll get my bonus! Mr. Meyer will be amazed.

  The automatic-correction thing isn’t all that great, though. A few pages back I’d written a word the wrong way, swones instead of swans. The program suggested the following sentence: You can look out over the shining water or tease the paddling scones.

  MONDAY

  the new neighbor

  Around lunchtime there was a knock at the front door. Mom had just got up and shuffled past my room. I heard her swooshing around in the kitchen, making coffee.

  “Can you answer?” she called.

  I’d never seen the man at the door before. He was tall and thin with short black hair, electric blue eyes, and a small scar on his chin. He looked like an actor.

  “Hello!” He smiled and stretched out his hand. “I thought it was time I came by and introduced myself. I moved in a few days ago, upstairs on the fourth floor. I’m Simon Westhaven.”

  I didn’t answer. I stared at the scar on his chin, then at his outstretched hand, then back at his chin again, and wished he was just called Mr. Haven. A small needle on a compass was spinning crazily in front of my eyes—west, east, west, east. I turned red and began to sweat. That’s the problem with the lottery balls: They start to roll around whether it’s a good time or not. I could hear them clacking against the inside of my skull.

  Mr. Haven was still wearing a friendly smile, but there were suddenly two tiny question marks in his eyes, as though he’d never seen a boy sweating so badly before. His hand was still hanging in the air in front of me. He must have thought I was crazy. I thought I’d better pull myself together. A name with a single compass point in it shouldn’t be that difficult, even for a child proddity like me.

  “Who is it?” Mom called from the kitchen.

  “Mr. Easthaven,” I yelled back. “The new neighbor from the fourth floor.”

  Clack, clack, clacker-dee-clack.

  “I can always come back …,” Mr. Haven began, and then his voice seeped away like the rain in one of our gutters. He looked over my shoulder with wide eyes. I turned around.

  Mom had come into the hallway in her bare feet. She was fiddling around with her freshly dyed strawberry-blonde hair, trying to tie it into a ponytail at the neck. She looked very pretty, but I would have preferred it if she’d been wearing more than a man’s shirt to come to the door—it was so short you could see her panties!

  Mr. Haven looked her up and down very quickly without moving his head. His cheeks started to turn red. If he begins to sweat, too, that’ll be that, I thought.

  “Just a second,” Mom said as though he was only the postman, and slipped into the bathroom. There was a splashing of water. You could hear her gargling.

  “She’s using mouthwash,” I whispered to Mr. Haven.

  He nodded in a friendly way and pretended to be looking around our beautiful hallway, but he kept glancing at me strangely. Seconds later Mom came out of the bathroom in her Japanese robe with the painted symbols on it. We sometimes guess at what they might mean — Good Morning, maybe, or Peace on Earth or Eat More Vegetables!

  “Sorry,” she murmured, standing in front of Mr. Haven before finally grabbing his outstretched hand. “Tanja Doretti.” She smiled. “At least I think so. I’m not quite awake yet.”

  “Simon Westhaven. I hope I haven’t —”

  “Not at all. Co
me on in.” She turned around and headed toward the kitchen. “Coffee?” she asked over her shoulder. “I’ve just put the machine on. I’m not much use before I’ve had my first cup.”

  I once watched a film with Mrs. Darling about a famous Greek hero … his name began with O and he was in a wooden horse in a war and then he sailed around and about on his ship for years to get back to his wife. She’d stayed at home, where she was being chased by a thousand men who all were in love with her. O clearly didn’t know this, otherwise he might have got a bit more of a move on. Instead he kept getting lost in his boat and had all these crazy adventures, but in the end he finally got back to his wife and got rid of all the other guys with bows and arrows, etc. What a cool story!

  Anyway, at some point during one of the journeys when he got lost in the middle of a storm out at sea, O sailed past an island, and there were singing ladies there, some kind of mermaids. Anybody who heard them went completely crazy and tried to reach them, and a few of O’s men jumped into the water and drowned gruesomely. One of the sailors said the ladies’ voices were like honey and milk, even though Mrs. Darling didn’t think their warbling was all that great. She almost changed the channel to watch the late-night lotto drawing, but she really wanted to know what would happen to O’s wife. Anyway, O got the other sailors to tie him to the mast and that’s how he escaped with his life.

  Nobody had tied up Mr. Haven. He followed Mom into the kitchen as though she’d just sung him a beautiful song, and he looked almost exactly the same as when O couldn’t escape from the ship’s mast. Mom pointed to a chair and placed two cups on the table without saying a word. The coffee machine bubbled away. I sat down across from Mr. Haven. He looked much more handsome than the actor who’d played O. And he looked really at home in our kitchen.

  “Are you married?” I said.

  He started to grin and shook his head. His teeth were very clean and white.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”