The Spaghetti Detectives

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  Hours later, when Mom got up, I was still sitting in the thinking chair. I’d already jumped up a hundred times, run to the window, and looked out over Dieffe Street. At one point I saw Mr. Marrak leaving the house and walking off, on the way to his car that was parked nearby. But that was it.

  No crash helmet anywhere.

  No little spot of blue.

  No Oscar.

  I dragged myself over to Mom in the kitchen, in such a bad mood that I felt as heavy and sad as an elephant. Elephants go into the jungle to die. They go to a place where other elephants have died before them, and before those elephants, other elephants who were looking for a place to die near other dead elephants. A giant elephant graveyard.

  Our kitchen was not a graveyard, but I had to go somewhere. I sat at the table and moaned about my bad luck. Mom poured herself a cup of coffee and sat across from me.

  “He stood you up, huh?”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. Oscar had been standing up when he left the building yesterday, but I couldn’t remember if I was standing up or sitting down. That couldn’t be what she meant. But instead of saying something, I nodded quickly. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to show Mom that I don’t get things.

  “Well, it looks as though both of us are having a bad start to the day,” she continued. “I have to go away for two or three days.”

  And that was that. There were dark shadows under her eyes. Maybe she’d slept badly. I looked at her, waiting. She looked back. She sipped her coffee. Finally she sighed.

  “Do you understand, love? I’ve got to leave this afternoon. That means there won’t be any bingo for us this evening.”

  That means … what?!

  “I’m sorry, Rico! I know how much you were looking forward to it.”

  Great, no bingo, either! Where was she going? She probably wanted to do a tour of all the hairdressers in the city with her friend Irina to get new hints put in her hair. Well, I was used to being left standing up and all alone. One day Mom would come home after a pipe had burst or something and I would be lying drowned in the hall, next to a letter telling her that I had to repeat the school year. It would serve her right!

  “Where are you going?” I asked her grumpily.

  “Do you remember Uncle Christian?”

  Only a little bit. I don’t like him at all. Uncle Christian is Mom’s older brother; he lives somewhere in Germany down at the bottom and left. A few years ago, before we moved into this apartment, he visited us in Berlin. He and Mom had such a fight that I hid under my bed. He left that same day. I couldn’t remember what he looked like anymore or how his voice sounded.

  “Yes, he’s not very nice,” I said. “What about him?”

  “He’s not very well. I have to go and see him.”

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Cancer.”

  Everybody knows what cancer is, even Forrest Gump. If Mom was saying such a serious word as though there was nothing to it, then something was wrong. She said cancer as cheerfully as Mrs. Darling would say, “A tiny bit more, perhaps?” at the meat counter.

  “Will he die?” I asked slowly.

  “Yes. He might.”

  If the train takes a long time, Uncle Christian might be dead when she arrives, then our bingo game will have been canceled for nothing.

  “Do you have to go today?” I said.

  “Oh for God’s sake!” Mom shouted at me just like that. “Do you have to be so self-centered? Can’t you think about somebody else for a change?”

  SELF-CENTEREDNESS: When you only think about yourself. There’s also the opposite thing, when you only think about other people, and if you can do that you’re a saint. But saints usually get treated badly and burned at the stake. It’s important to find out how to do both so that you get what you want and make other people happy at the same time.

  Mom poured herself another cup of coffee without looking at me. She took a sip. She started to cry. It was as though a rain cloud had squeezed its way into the kitchen. I can’t bear it when Mom cries. The world looks as dark as if God has switched off the light.

  I should probably have noticed much earlier that something wasn’t right, because even her Japanese robe hung off her sadly. Instead of thinking about Mom, I had been busy with my own problems. When I saw her crying, I was sorry I’d thought up the burst-pipe story. Somebody not showing up and a canceled bingo evening are not as bad as a dying brother, even if you can’t stand him. Mom’s unhappiness was bigger than mine.

  I got up, went around the table, and put my arms around her. Mom buried her face in my shoulder. Her hair smelled of a mixture of shampoo and the nightclub. She held me so tight I could barely breathe. That’s how Molly One must have felt right before the crack.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, she let go of me. She drew the back of her hand across her eyes. “I’ll make it up to you, love, I promise,” she sniffed. “But right now—”

  “It’s OK.”

  “You’ll have to take care of yourself for a few days. You’ll manage, won’t you? You’re a big boy.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll leave you some money, and if you need anything, you go and see Mrs. Darling, all right? I’ll leave her a note and try to call her at the supermarket.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll go and see her this evening and tell her myself.”

  “I just want to make sure you’re safe, Rico. Remember you can call me anytime on my cell phone.” She took hold of me by the shoulders, pushed me a little distance away from her, and looked into my eyes. “I love you more than anything! You know that, don’t you?”

  I really wanted to say I was sorry and tell her I hadn’t meant to say what I said, but suddenly I was all mixed up. I’d just thought of something terrible and not even the lottery balls in my head were working right. They clacked together for a moment or two, then fell still, as though they were frozen. The terrible thought was this: If Mom’s brother had cancer, maybe she’d get it, too, because she —

  “Rico?”

  “Hmm?” Tears were running down my cheeks and snot was dribbling out of my nose and I didn’t have a tissue.

  “Cancer isn’t catching. Do you hear me?”

  I snorted something.

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  I snorted again, but I felt better. Mom never lies to me. She raised one hand and wiped my face with the sleeve of her robe. She finally had a smile on her face, even if it was as faint as a snail’s tracks.

  “Christian phoned very early this morning,” she explained. “Then I couldn’t fall asleep, but I must have dozed off, and now it’s late and the train leaves at two thirty. I wish I could do something about your little friend with the helmet, but I still have to pack, take a shower, get myself together, and buy a ticket at the station….”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  I watched her as she stumbled out of the kitchen past her bedroom. The door was open. I could see her four-poster bed with the fancy shiny sheets and the posters of dolphins and whales on the walls.

  I slowly calmed down. Mom wasn’t getting cancer, we’d go to bingo next Tuesday, and Oscar would show up at some point. I remembered that he’d said he had something important to do today. Maybe that was more important than taking a walk by the canal and he would show up later. And even if he came tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, I still had something to look forward to: Mrs. Darling would definitely feed me whole wheat crackers this evening and we’d watch television together, even though it wasn’t a weekend! If I could convince her to watch a Miss Marple movie, that was almost as good as playing bingo. I wouldn’t be able to convince her to play bingo, though. Mrs. Darling thinks bingo is for old fogies who hitch their pants up under their armpits.

  Life had just been shadowier than the shadowiest shadowy shadows. Now it was bright again. I felt bad for a minute that I didn’t feel sorry for Uncle Christian, but he shouldn’t have shouted the way he did when he’d
argued with Mom. I had been so afraid that I’d hidden under the bed, and that’s where I’d found Molly Two. She was all the way in the back in an old sneaker I’d grown out of. Maybe she’d been looking for other hamsters back there.

  The sneaker stank.

  Just after two o’clock Mom’s taxi arrived. I went downstairs with her. The driver stashed her big suitcase in the trunk. Mom blew me a kiss from the backseat and then they drove off. I waved after her. I almost thought I could see the sad black rain cloud floating after the taxi.

  I went upstairs and sat back down in the thinking chair for a while. I didn’t know what I was going to do until the evening. I could water the KKs’ flowers, but what if Oscar showed up just when I was upstairs on the fifth floor?

  But Oscar wasn’t going to show up.

  It was my own fault. I should have asked him for his telephone number or at least what his last name was so that I could look it up in the phone book. I didn’t really know anything about him, not even where he lived.

  “It’s your own fault,” I repeated quietly.

  Now I would have to spend the entire day by myself until I went to Mrs. Darling’s in the evening.

  I read a comic.

  I drank orange juice.

  I ran downstairs to the first floor and rang Bert’s bell.

  Bert is a lot of fun, but he wasn’t at home. Just my luck. And if Oscar had showed up in the meantime and rung the bell, double bad luck, but then I could at least drop in on old Mr. Mommsen the superintendent on the ground floor. He tells exciting stories sometimes, like the one where Miss Friedmann exploded, and he always has some chocolate in the cupboard. But mostly he’s just drunk and it’s the booze talking.

  BOOZE: Everything that makes you drunk. Alcohol. Usually the cheaper stuff. After drinking it most people come up with nonsense, which is what is meant by “it’s the booze talking.” I didn’t have to look that up. You can figure some things out all by yourself.

  Mr. Mommsen is a widower and fat and he doesn’t have nice teeth. He probably doesn’t brush them very much. Julie once said he was an old goat and no woman would be interested in him, so he probably has gray days, too. If today was one of his gray days and if it spread to Mrs. Darling’s apartment, I wasn’t sure I could cope. After Mom’s rain cloud and my own elephant feeling, I’d had enough sadness for one day.

  So I went back upstairs.

  There was nothing happening on the stairs. It was so quiet in the building that it was almost a bit creepy. Normally there’s noise coming from somewhere: Bert and Julie and Massoud have their music turned up, or the Kessler twins are screaming at each other, or there’s some classical tra-la-la from Mr. Kirk’s apartment. You can even hear noise coming from the very top floor when the KKs’ chubby son, Freddy, brings his friends home and plays PlayStation with them with the volume turned up. Mr. Fitz has complained a hundred times, but it doesn’t stop them.

  Today there was zilch. Absolute quiet.

  I went back into the apartment.

  I turned the TV on and five minutes later I turned it off.

  I put my dirty laundry in the washing machine.

  I made my bed.

  I sat on my bed.

  Boring.

  There was no point waiting. Oscar wasn’t coming. And if he did come, he could go and jump in the canal. I wasn’t going to let the KKs’ flowers die of thirst just because of him.

  So up I went.

  By the time I got to the top, I wasn’t angry at Oscar anymore. It wasn’t his fault that I was bored. It wasn’t his fault that our walk along the canal filled up my head like a balloon and that there wasn’t any room for anything else.

  Most of the KKs’ plants were still wet enough. I watered the rest.

  Then I went back downstairs.

  I bumped into Mr. Marrak between the third and second floors. He was wearing his fancy red work clothes and carrying his laundry bag, which was full to bursting. The first time Mrs. Darling saw him struggling with it, she put both hands to her head. “Typical man!” she said. “He waits until he’s down to his last pair of underpants and his last shirt and then his girlfriend’s supposed to stay up all night just so he has something to wear!” Nobody has ever seen his girlfriend at 93 Dieffe Street, but clearly Mr. Marrak doesn’t have a washing machine.

  “Hello, Mr. Marrak,” I said, and tried to get past him.

  “Hi, Rico.” He put his laundry bag down with some effort and nodded at me. “Are you wandering around again? Whose apartment are you nosing in today?”

  He didn’t mean it nastily. When I went to look at his apartment after we moved in, he even offered me a Coke. Of course by then Mom had already told him I was a child proddity and that I liked to look at other people’s apartments because I could only keep going straight on the street and didn’t get to see much of the world. Mom had told everybody in the building and, except for Mr. Fitz, all the neighbors were very kind and let me in when I knocked on their door. Some of them let me in a few times, like Mrs. Darling or Bert, Julie, and Massoud. The Kesslers have asked a couple of times if I want to drop by again, but their twins get on my nerves.

  Last time I went to Mr. Marrak’s he even gave me his business card, the one with the golden safe on it. Now when we bump into each other we’re very polite, but he’s never invited me into his apartment again. I always hope that one day he’ll open the little white house on the roof terrace with one of his many keys, but it doesn’t seem likely. Grown-ups are always worrying about doing things that are illegal.

  ILLEGAL: When you’re not allowed to do something because it’s forbidden and the police might not like it. LEGAL means it’s allowed (and OOPS means that you’ve done something you’re not allowed to and are hoping nobody will notice).

  “I was watering the Kaminsky-Kowalskys’ flowers,” I explained to Mr. Marrak. “They’re on vacation.”

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “The flowers or the Kaminsky-Kowalskys?”

  I looked at him, puzzled. Was he winding me up? Since when do houseplants go on vacation?

  He was grinning. “Just teasing. A Rico tease. Don’t you get it?”

  He must have a screw loose!

  “Didn’t even notice that my charming neighbors had taken off,” he added as though nothing had happened.

  I would have liked to tell him he wasn’t likely to notice anything when he spent all day running here, there, and everywhere with his jangling bunch of keys, carrying his stinky underwear around in a huge laundry bag. What an idiot!

  “Don’t look so angry!” He thumped my arm. “It was just a joke. A little bit of ribbing from one man to another. I didn’t mean to upset you. Sorry, OK?”

  “OK,” I said slowly.

  I don’t like having my leg pulled. But in this case I made an exception and I decided to be only a little bit angry because Mr. Marrak is usually friendly to me. But that was as far as I would go. He’s big and tall and has a chunky face, but otherwise there’s nothing unusual about him. He isn’t a good choice for Mom. He already has a girlfriend, after all, and it wouldn’t be much fun washing his clothes while he went out with another woman. And then there’d be cleaning and tidying up and everything. Mr. Marrak is very messy. When I visited his apartment it looked like a bomb had hit it. If he wasn’t careful, he’d let himself go and end up like Mr. Fitz, stinking in front of the cheese counter at the supermarket.

  “OK, moving on, then!” He bent down to pick up the bag of laundry. “Say hello to your mom from me.”

  “I can’t; she’s gone away for a few days.”

  He stopped what he was doing, stood up straight again, and looked at me. “And who’s keeping an eye on you till she gets back?”

  “Me and Mrs. Darling.”

  “I see.” His bottom lip was sticking out as if he didn’t like what he’d heard. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t understand some parents. They bring children into the world and then leave them to their own devices all
day, either in front of the TV or the computer—”

  “I don’t spend all day sitting in front of—”

  “Or they let their little ones romp around alone. If you ask me, Mr. 2000 should be a lesson to them all!”

  “My mother doesn’t leave me—”

  “If those children who were kidnapped hadn’t been running around alone in the big city, nobody would have been able to snatch them! That’s just my opinion, of course!”

  Now I was angry again, but instead of answering back, I just nodded. I should have stuck up for Mom, but Mr. Marrak wasn’t listening to me, anyway. His pale face had gone all pink and looked like one of Mom’s bath sponges. If I said anything, he would just keep on complaining, and when he’d finally gotten it all out of his system, he might ask me to help him carry his bag.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said, finally balancing the huge bag of laundry on his shoulder. “Take care.”

  “Yup.”

  I jumped down the final steps to the second floor. As I let myself into the apartment, I could hear Mr. Marrak huffing and puffing his way up the stairs. “Stupid fifth floor,” he grumbled. “Next time I’m moving in somewhere with an elevator!”

  It’s his own fault, I thought. He should buy himself a washing machine!

  I’d only been back in the apartment a few seconds when the boredom picked up where it had left off.

  I sat in the thinking chair.

  I flicked through the dictionary and learned three new words.

  I looked out the window and snoozed.

  I forgot the three new words.

  I went into the kitchen and drank some more juice.

  I ate some more Crunchy Nut Clusters.

  I washed the glass and the cereal bowl and the spoon.

  My eyes fell on the trash can. The bag was full to the brim—something to do! If I took the garbage out to the yard and then wrote in my diary, the afternoon would go much faster.

  So I went back downstairs again.

  The giant trash cans are in the backyard, along the wall we share with the building next door. You have to pull pretty hard on one half of the large double doors that lead into the yard, because it’s been sticking for a few weeks. The other half doesn’t open at all. Mr. Mommsen, the superintendent, should have fixed it a long time ago because it’s just getting worse, but he’s too busy boozing. Even the garbage men have complained about it.