The Spaghetti Detectives

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “Rico!” hissed Mom.

  “Don’t worry.” Mr. Haven grinned without shifting his gaze from me. He didn’t answer the question, but I liked him, anyway. I like Mr. Kirk from the third floor as well, or at least the way he looks. But he’s normally pretty grumpy. He probably doesn’t like children all that much. And Mr. Kirk would never marry Mom; he’s not all that into women.

  “We’re going to bingo tomorrow night,” I said. “At the Gray Bumblebees. Do you want to come?”

  “Rico, go to your room,” Mom ordered. “Please!”

  “Bingo?” Mr. Haven said. “I’ve never … Isn’t that for retirees?”

  “Yes, but there’s a spare place because one of them has just died. Except nobody noticed. And Mom almost always wins, sometimes even with my card!”

  Even the lamest old lady can cross off the numbers on her bingo card faster than I can. But it’s fun all the same.

  “Frederico!” Mom said in a stern voice. “Off with you!”

  It’s always serious when she uses my full name. I wondered what the problem was. It was just getting interesting between her and Mr. Haven—the two of them about to have coffee together, etc. Who knew what they would talk about, and knowing Mom she’d probably say the wrong thing. I could have helped her because I know from Mrs. Darling’s romantic movies exactly what you’re supposed to say so that it all works out, but I couldn’t do anything from my room. So I would miss the whole thing, unless, of course —

  “And if you listen in, I’ll auction you off on eBay! I want to hear your door close behind you.”

  Mom finally poured Mr. Haven some coffee. Mr. Haven looked at me, raised both his hands, shrugged his shoulders, and made a funny face. No help to be had from him, then. He probably really wanted to be left alone with Mom.

  Honestly!

  I ran to my room really fast and banged my door shut behind me. Mom can’t stand it when I do that, but she had nobody to blame but herself. Ten minutes later I heard Mr. Haven saying good-bye in the hallway. I crept to the door and listened. He said thank you for the coffee and all that, but nothing along the lines of see you tomorrow evening at bingo.

  Oh well!

  The front door opened and closed. I shot straight out into the hallway, past Mom, who isn’t used to me being so speedy. I really wanted to say good-bye to Mr. Haven. That much had to be allowed. So I opened the door, rushed out into the stairway, and —

  It was probably the biggest collision 93 Dieffe Street has ever seen. What a mess! In front of our door three men had run into one another, and because I had Mr. Haven on the brain, it took me a few seconds to take the other two in. One of them was Mr. Marrak, who was trying to get up the stairs with all of today’s and yesterday’s mail, or at least half of it, because the rest was scattered across the floor. The other one was Mr. Kirk, who was trying to get down the stairs. At the very moment Mr. Haven had walked out of our door, the other two must have met on the landing, and now all three were tangled up in a big knot. There was a jangling and a clattering while Mr. Marrak tried to collect his letters. He has his own security business, so he always carries a big bunch of keys on the belt of his red uniform, which has a small golden safe embroidered on it. Very fancy.

  Mr. Kirk clasped at his own shirt with one hand and stared wide-eyed at Mr. Haven. Mr. Haven then turned helplessly from one direction to the other, and all of them were muttering: sorry, I wasn’t looking, never mind, it’s not a big deal, I was in such a rush, but nothing serious happened—who does that child belong to?

  Something small had almost got lost in the general chaos. It looked all three men up and down through a visor. Then it called out in horror, “If I hadn’t had my helmet on, I’d be dead by now!”

  Mom was completely flabbergasted that somebody had come to visit me. She’s always complaining that I don’t have any friends. Now I had one. Admittedly, he was a bit small and probably also on the young side, but Mom didn’t seem all that bothered. She was much more interested in Oscar’s blue motorcycle helmet.

  “Since when do people wear things like that to ride a bicycle?” she said.

  She was leaning against the kitchen stove, sipping from the coffee cup she held in her hands. Mr. Haven’s cup was standing all by itself between Oscar and me on the table, only half drunk.

  “I don’t have a bicycle,” Oscar said. His voice sounded muffled, because the visor on his helmet was still pushed down.

  “I bet you don’t have a motorcycle, either.”

  Oscar looked at her as though she wasn’t all there, brains-wise. But he did push up his visor. You still couldn’t see his whole mouth, just the top row of his large white teeth.

  “It’s dangerous without a helmet,” he explained, as though Mom was the child and he was the adult. “Accidents happen all the time.”

  “Not in my kitchen they don’t, young man!” Mom sounded almost insulted. “I’m sure Rico will confirm that for you.”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “But I did bang my head on the fridge last week.”

  “That wasn’t an accident,” Mom said firmly. “You came out of the hall too fast and ran into the open door.”

  Oscar didn’t feel comfortable with Mom there, I could tell. He peered out from under his helmet like a tortoise. He was wearing a different shirt today, but the bright red airplane with the broken wing was pinned just above his heart. His little fingers were tapping on the table nervously, rap tee-tap. Oscar was probably afraid that Mom would think he was rude and demand that he take off his helmet.

  He wasn’t completely wrong about that, but not completely right, either. Mom can deal with strange people. Her first rule is, never put pressure on anyone if they don’t want to do something. At least not with words. But she looks. She looks at people for so long they can’t take it anymore and finally give in.

  She was looking at Oscar now the way a scientist would look at a completely new type of plant she’d just discovered. I was wondering myself what Oscar looked like under his helmet. Maybe he wasn’t actually afraid of accidents. Maybe he had two funny ears and was ashamed of them. Or no ears at all—like one of Mr. 2000’s victims who hadn’t raised enough ransom money.

  Oscar’s fingers got slower and slower, and then they stopped their tapping. He raised his head, looked Mom right in the eyes, and said, “You can stare at me as long as you like. I don’t care. But I’ll stare back.”

  And that’s what he did. For the first time I noticed how green his eyes were. They really gleamed. Not nastily or angrily. They were gleaming because Oscar enjoyed staring back. At that moment I was really jealous of him being a child prodigy. Whenever Mom stares at me, I always look straight at the floor, as though something really interesting is going on down there, like colorful ants running around or a fire on the carpet. Till I saw Oscar I’d never thought of staring back.

  I wondered which one of them would win. Mom was my mom so I probably should have taken her side. She was good at staring and didn’t bat an eyelid. But Oscar was just a little kid and I thought the whole staring contest was a bit unfair. Either Mom thought that, too, or she lost interest.

  Whichever it was, she suddenly said, “I need new toenails.”

  Oscar and I both looked at her toenails. There was a tiny dolphin on each one; the two little toes were the only places too small for them to fit.

  “What do you want to put on them instead?” Oscar said. It sounded like a peace offering.

  Mom shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe some other kind of fish.”

  She put her coffee cup down on the sink, pulled her Japanese robe around her, and went out of the kitchen. Oscar waited until she was out of earshot, then he said quietly in my direction, “Dolphins aren’t fish.”

  “She likes you,” I said.

  He shook his head. “She doesn’t know if she likes me yet. She thinks I’m funny because of the helmet.” He pulled the visor back down. His voice sounded muffled again. “Every year almost forty thousand children in Germany die in
accidents. Almost a third of them are passengers in cars. Almost forty percent are on bikes. And twenty-five percent are pedestrians.”

  Math! I’ve already told you it’s not my strong point.

  “Most of them are knocked down on their way to school and while playing in the afternoon,” Oscar murmured darkly. “Most of the cyclists are killed because they’re using the wrong lane. Most of the pedestrians because they run across the street without looking. I always look. Always!”

  I am learning that one of the big differences between Oscar and me is that I am in a good mood nearly all the time, but I don’t know very much, whereas Oscar knows all kinds of strange things, but he is always expecting the worst. That’s probably what happens when you’re very smart—you can’t just think of nice things, you have to think of terrible things, too.

  I jumped up. I’d had an idea. “I’ll show you something,” I said. “It’s not dangerous at all and it’s great!”

  “What is it?”

  “Wait, I have to ask Mom something first.”

  I burst into the living room—today really was a fast day! Mom was curled up on our thinking chair in front of the windowsill. She was looking out the window. She was miles away. There wasn’t a trace of nail polish or new stickers for her toes. She’d probably lied and just wanted some peace and quiet.

  “What do you think of him?” I whispered.

  She turned to me and wrinkled her nose. “I think he’s a bit weird. Where did you dig him up? I’ve never seen a kid with a crash helmet….”

  “I don’t mean Oscar. I mean Mr. Haven.”

  “Oh …” Suddenly she looked really tired, as though she hadn’t slept for a week. Her eyes closed slowly and then opened again and then she talked, slowly and firmly.

  “Rico. Listen. I know you would really like a father. And I wish for both of our sakes that there was one here, believe me! But that doesn’t mean I’m going to fall for every man you think might fit the job.”

  Oh well, so she thought Mr. Haven was awful. Maybe it had something to do with her job in the nightclub. She was always being bothered by some guy or other. Maybe she just didn’t want to do the same stuff at home. But if Mom wasn’t careful, she might suddenly find herself having a gray day. Up until now she had never brought a boyfriend home, even though she met loads of men at work, a lot more than Mrs. Darling did behind the meat counter. One of them had to be right.

  “OK. But what do you think of him? Please!” It was important to me that she liked Mr. Haven, even if it was only a little bit. I liked him.

  “Simon Westhaven.” She thought hard. “Well, I … I’d say he’s far and away the hottest thing I’ve met in my entire life.”

  I wanted to be excited, for her and for me. But Mom just looked out the window again. Now she not only looked tired but a little sad, too, and even though she was right in front of me, she seemed far, far away, like a lonely speck on the horizon. Sometimes I don’t understand my mom at all.

  HORIZON: The spot right at the back of the world where earth and sky meet. Or is it the sea and the sky? It can’t be the earth and the sea, that would have to be vertical, and then it would almost certainly be called something else. Like the searizon.

  MONDAY AGAIN

  up on the roof

  I took Oscar out of our apartment. The knot of men had untangled itself and there was nobody else to be seen. As I pulled the door shut behind me, I had a thought. “Who let you into the building, Oscar?”

  His visor was up again. He took a deep breath, as though he had been expecting the question for ages and could now finally, finally give an answer. “Nobody. The front door was open!” he let out in disgust. “Your neighbors should be more careful. Anybody could come in! Murderers, burglars, drunks who pee in the hallway. How can they be so careless?!”

  I shrugged. I had left the door to the building open a few times myself. It has a little hook at the back that clicks into a holder on the wall if you push it open hard. Not a big deal, unless your name is Oscar. In Oscar’s life everything is dangerous—or at least he seems to think so.

  “And how did you know which bell to ring?”

  “From the list of names at the entrance.” His voice had gone all squeaky and rang up the stairs in front of us like a siren. “It was open!”

  “Yes, all right, I heard you the first time.” I was becoming nervous. If he kept ranting on like that, we’d bump into Mr. Fitz as well. I jumped up the stairs. “So, how did you figure out my name?”

  He quickly stumbled after me on his short legs, and finally he calmed down a little. “You said your father was Italian. Doretti is the only name on the list of names next to the doorbells that sounds Italian.”

  I was annoyed I hadn’t thought of that myself; Oscar was very detectivey.

  “Do you know Miss Marple?” I asked.

  “No. Does she live here, too?”

  Ha! Now I could show him! Everybody knows the Miss Marple movies! But maybe child prodigies don’t watch television; they just appear on it, rattling off prime numbers on talent shows and stuff. I swallowed my not-very-nice-but-very-funny comment. If you like somebody, you shouldn’t make fun of them, and Oscar could probably make fun of me ten times better than I could make fun of him, and he’d be able to find one hundred times more chances to do it. That made me think about little Sophia with her moon face and the big, fat strawberry stain on her creased T-shirt—I bet she was really badly made fun of at her school.

  “Don’t run so fast!” Oscar wheezed. He was having difficulty keeping up. If his visor had been shut, it would have steamed up from all his breath. “Where are you taking me?”

  Reluctantly I slowed down a little. We’d almost arrived at the fourth floor—Mr. Fitz’s territory. And Mr. Fitz gets grumpy when it gets noisy on the staircase. He hates noise even more than Mrs. Darling does.

  “We’re going up to the fifth floor,” I said in a low voice.

  “What’s up there?”

  “The fifth floor, of course.”

  “I mean, what are we going to do up there?”

  I grinned. “You’ll see. I hope you don’t get dizzy.”

  “Dizzy?” shrieked Oscar. He sounded like a wailing siren. “You’re not taking me up on the roof?”

  The next second, a door flew open and a wave of stinkiness hit us. Mr. Fitz was standing before us in his tattered striped pajamas as if he’d just escaped from a thrift store. He hadn’t shaved since I saw him on Saturday, or combed his hair, and he looked like a mop that had had an electric shock.

  “Could you possibly be any louder?” he thundered. “I’ve got a heart condition. What’s all this noise about —” He stopped suddenly and stared in surprise at Oscar, who was at least ten feet smaller than he was. Oscar quickly snapped his visor into place and stared back.

  “What kind of strange creature are you?” said Mr. Fitz.

  No reply.

  “Can’t you talk?” Mr. Fitz tapped on the helmet three times with his finger. “Hello? I asked you a question.”

  “You stink!” Oscar suddenly shouted through the visor. “In developing countries, lack of hygiene is one of the biggest causes of illness! We have warm running water and soap. And you should use it.”

  Mr. Fitz eyed him as if he were an irritating insect he was about to squash with the palm of his hand. His gaze moved from Oscar’s helmet to the bright red airplane on his shirt and back to the helmet. I held my breath.

  “Who are you?” Mr. Fitz finally growled.

  “Oscar. Who are you?”

  “None of your business. And now buzz off before I rip your heads off and play football with them!”

  That was the worst thing I had ever heard! Mr. Fitz spun around and the door went SLAM! Oscar took two quick steps forward, stretched out one hand, and pressed the bell firmly.

  “Don’t do that!” I hissed. “He’ll make mincemeat out of us if we annoy him again!” Either that or he really would rip our heads off.

  “The
bell’s broken,” Oscar snorted as if he hadn’t heard me. He hammered on the door as though he wanted to break it down.

  “What are you doing?” I grabbed his wrist and pulled him away. I was beginning to get angry, too.

  “He’s rude!” Oscar pushed up his visor. His face had turned as red as a tomato. “I’m not being treated like that just because I’m a child!”

  “That’s Mr. Fitz. It’s just the way he is. He probably doesn’t mean it.”

  I was absolutely certain that Mr. Fitz did mean it, but Oscar was angry enough already.

  “And I’m not a strange creature!” he roared through the closed door.

  “He says that to everybody. You can’t get upset about it,” I urged. “Now come on!”

  He followed me in the end. But as we were taking the last set of stairs up to the fifth floor, he kept turning around as though he expected Mr. Fitz to pop up again and chase after us. And he kept his right hand clenched in a fist until I had let us into the Kaminsky-Kowalskys’ apartment.

  Before the KKs zoomed off on vacation last Friday, they asked me if I’d water their houseplants and the flowers on the roof terrace for a little bit of pocket money. Of course, I said. There was a new baseball cap I really wanted, although I probably won’t buy it now after all. I’ve decided to put all my money in my piggy bank, just in case Mom has to buy the biggest possible piece of me from Mr. 2000.

  When you enter the KKs’ apartment, you go through a large, open hallway into an even bigger living room and kitchen. There’s a nice view from the windows over the flat-roofed hospital and the streets, all the way over to the airport. A narrow staircase leads directly up from the kitchen to the roof terrace. There’s nothing else to see, though. They’ve closed off all the other rooms, even fat Freddy’s, the one who always makes fun of me when nobody else is there. They probably think I’d go nosing around. They’re so suspicious. Before they went away they put all of their houseplants on the kitchen table for watering. I steered Oscar past the table and up the stairs in front of me. He didn’t even want to look around.

  The roof terrace is the shape of a beach towel. When you go out of the terrace door, you can go over to the railing and look down into the backyard, or you can go to the other side and look down onto Dieffe Street. There are a few flowerpots and buckets with green stuff growing out of them. Most of the space is taken up by wooden chairs, a table, and a bench, and if you have a cushion to put under your rear end and a comic and a Coke, it’s a nice place to sit. You can hear all the noises of the city, a never-ending, muffled humming, buzzing, and hissing. And the view is phenomenal.