The Spaghetti Detectives

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “I was wondering if you’d remember my invitation and stop by this afternoon,” Mr. Haven said. “We agreed to meet, but …”

  I hadn’t forgotten. Most of all I remembered the warm feeling that flooded through me when I’d been about to tell him the story of my dead dad. How Mr. Haven looked at me and his wintry living room seemed to thaw around me. I felt like a little boat on top of high waves out in the open sea, and Mr. Haven was my port in the storm.

  “… but I had the impression you might have scared yourself with your own bravery.”

  “What’s bravery?”

  “It’s when you are scared of something but you still face up to it.”

  I nodded. I’d learned a new word, but I had no idea how Mr. Haven had begun the sentence. If I admitted that to him, he’d probably think I was an idiot again, and it was important—at that moment it was the most important thing in the world—that Mr. Haven liked me. Mr. Haven had to help me find Oscar.

  I sat in his white living room on his white sofa. I was careful not to look up at the beautiful plaster ceiling so I wouldn’t get thinking about the aquarium and all that. There was a Coke on the table in front of me. I thought about asking Mr. Haven for whole wheat crackers, but he might have thought that was rude. He stood there with the cool scar on his chin, smiling that fantastic actor smile of his, looking down at me.

  “Has your mom been in touch?” he said.

  “I think she tried. The phone rang, but I was asleep.”

  I sipped my Coke carefully. You have to be careful with Coke. I’ve heard that if you drink too much of it, it burns holes in your stomach from the inside, and then the Coke glugs right up through you, and when you’re at the cheese counter at the supermarket, you suddenly notice brown stuff running out of your nose.

  “Don’t you have a cell phone?” said Mr. Haven.

  “Nah. Too expensive.” To be honest, I wouldn’t know who to call besides Mom.

  You’d think Mr. Haven’s cell phone must have heard him, because it suddenly started to jingle, just like it did the last time I’d visited. Mr. Haven rolled his eyes in annoyance. “It seems to be our fate,” he muttered. “Whenever we’re about to have a conversation …”

  He pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket, glanced at it, and suddenly looked as though he’d much rather be talking to the caller than to me.

  “Answer it if you want to,” I said nicely. As long as he didn’t rush out of the apartment again right after the call …

  Mr. Haven’s lips moved as though they were saying “Excuse me,” and the next minute he disappeared from the living room.

  I put my Coke down and looked around. Nothing had changed; everything looked exactly the same as yesterday. Even the empty glass was still standing untouched on the newspaper on the now dried-up water stain. I wrinkled my nose, reached for the glass, and placed it a little bit farther away from me. This was hopeless! Mr. Haven would have to get used to being a bit tidier.

  As I lifted the newspaper to fold it up, I saw a small, open map of Berlin underneath it. There was a felt-tip pen next to it. A few places on the map had been marked in red. The marks made the pattern that was in all the Berlin newspapers that day.

  Six red marks.

  Six kidnappings.

  I stared in horror at the red squiggles. There’s a saying that some people can’t put two and two together. Which might be true, although it’s not my fault that I always get four.

  At least almost always.

  Winter swept over the living room again. I felt as cold as if somebody had turned my heart into a giant ice cube. Oscar’s kidnapping hadn’t been announced until the special edition of the news yesterday evening. But the six red marks on the map in front of me had already been drawn in yesterday afternoon when I’d visited Mr. Haven. Mr. Haven had known about Oscar’s kidnapping hours before the rest of the world had found out about it! And there was something else …

  The jingle-jangle man said if I tell on him …

  I’d just heard the jingle on Mr. Haven’s cell phone again—mice running over the keyboard of a piano.

  Cold and colder. Ice-cold.

  As I got up from the sofa as carefully as possible, I almost thought I heard a snap, like when you break an icicle off a gutter. I crept to the door of the living room and peered into the hall. I could hear Mr. Haven talking quietly but angrily in his kitchen, and what I heard made all the hairs on my arms stand up on end.

  “… only got the two thousand euros together after you had gone public with your tragic story to try and persuade some bank or other to give you a free loan! You don’t quite seem to understand what an impossible position you’ve put me in by doing that! I’m sorry, but the boy’s life isn’t worth a bean now …”

  A heartbeat later I was outside in the stairway. Another heartbeat later it occurred to me that I hadn’t pushed the newspaper back over the map. I whirled around, but it was too late. The door to Mr. Haven’s apartment slammed shut with a thunderous KAZAM!

  As if things weren’t bad enough already.

  Behind the door Mr. Haven called out, “Rico? Rico!”

  I sprinted off.

  What people in thrillers always do wrong when they’re being followed is run to exactly the place that’s most dangerous. Not me.

  In the time it took Mr. Haven to figure out what I had found out in his living room, I didn’t run downstairs to our apartment, where the two-faced kidnapper would look for me right away. Instead I scampered up a floor as fast and as quietly as I could. I always had the KKs’ key in my jeans pocket so that I didn’t lose it. Now I let myself into the rooftop apartment and pulled the door behind me so that it was only open a tiny crack, and listened.

  Not a moment too soon. A door opened on the stairs and then Mr. Haven’s voice called, “Rico?”

  I heard his footsteps going quickly downstairs to the second floor. Heard him ringing our bell. Heard him knocking on our door, then banging it hard.

  “Rico?”

  There was silence for a few seconds. He was thinking. He was arriving at the most obvious explanation: that I must have raced out of the building, who knows where, probably to the nearest police station to tell them I’d found the kidnapper. Finally steps again, coming up the stairs. I held my breath. They stopped on the floor below me. As quietly as I could, I pressed the door shut and pressed my back against it. I waited. And thought.

  Waiting was the easy part. What was I supposed to do now? I didn’t want to go downstairs. Mr. Haven was probably listening for every noise in the building and would catch me on the fourth floor right away. If I shouted out a window, he’d be up here faster than anybody else. He looked like somebody who could easily break down a front door.

  OK, what else could I do? In the apartment directly below me Mr. Fitz was probably mooching around, listening for any noise—and almost certainly mean enough to hand me over to Mr. Haven with an icy smile! He would ask only for my head, because he collected children’s heads and played football with them in his stinky den, and the only thing missing from his collection was the head of a child proddity.

  I couldn’t go any farther up, either, other than out onto the roof terrace. From there I could escape over the roofs of the next-door buildings—provided I didn’t fall. If that happened, all I’d be able to do was wave to Mrs. Darling as I flew past and thank her for all the whole wheat crackers, and that would be it.

  SPLAT!

  I could work my way around the partition onto Mr. Marrak’s roof terrace. With a bit of luck his terrace door would be open; it was a hot summer’s day, after all. But then? Mr. Marrak was probably at his girlfriend’s, bringing her more laundry or kissing her for a change. Then I’d be stuck in his apartment instead of in here. And even if Mr. Marrak was at home, he wouldn’t believe me. I knew he couldn’t stand me any more than Mr. Kirk or Mr. Fitz could. Suddenly I had the terrible feeling that all kinds of people only treated me nicely because they thought they should feel sorry for me.
In any case, Mr. Marrak would think I was being silly and—even worse—drag me off to say sorry to Mr. Haven. Mr. Haven would wait until Mr. Marrak had gone and then cut me into little strips, put them in a box, and send them to Mom, while Oscar’s strips were winging their way to his dad at the same time.

  The simple ideas only come to you right at the end of lots of difficult thinking. My gaze wandered across the hall and landed on the telephone. That was more than just an idea—that could save me! Luckily the suspicious KKs hadn’t hidden it in one of the locked rooms just in case I called one of those expensive phone numbers.

  I went to the phone, picked it up, and stared at it. I don’t know Mom’s cell phone number by heart. That’s why Mom wrote the number down twice for me. One of the pieces of paper is stuck above our own telephone in the hallway, next to the mirror with the little fat cherubs. I put the other piece of paper in my pocket and then I lost it, of course. Since then I’ve meant to write the number down again a thousand times, and I’ve forgotten to do it a thousand times.

  And look where I am now.

  Then I grinned. There’s one telephone number that I do know by heart. It only has three numbers. Even someone like me can learn it. Mom made me repeat it at breakfast for weeks on end: “Who do you call if you’re in trouble and you can’t reach me?”

  I took a deep breath, dialed the emergency services, and listened hard. It took a long time for somebody to pick up. If Mr. Haven had been after me with a knife, I thought, he would have sawed off my nose and both my ears in that time. Then, finally, as I was starting to think I’d dialed the wrong number —

  “Emergency,” a man’s voice squawked into my ear. “How can I help?”

  All at once everything was too fast for me. I hadn’t thought about what I wanted to say. Now I was confused before I’d even had time to get confused.

  “Hello?” I said nervously.

  “Emergency services. Speak up, please!”

  “My … my name is Frederico Doretti,” I stammered. “I’m a child proddity. That’s why I can only walk in a straight line and I would like to report a kidnapper. Hello?”

  “Young man, listen to me—”

  “Mr. 2000!” I shouted. “The ALDI kidnapper who abducted Oscar, the one without the helmet! I know where he lives! Please, you have to believe me!”

  There was a quiet whistle from the telephone, as though somebody was breathing out very slowly in an effort not to lose patience. Who knows how many people called him every day, I thought, to report Mr. 2000, when they were really just playing a trick on the police? I might die because of them!

  “Really?” said the man finally. “Where are you, kid?”

  “Mr. 2000 lives at 93 Dieffe Street in Kreuzberg,” I said very slowly and very clearly and very proudly. “On the fourth floor, in the front building on the left or the right. Mr. Haven. I mean, he’s really called East … no, Westhaven. Simon Westhaven!”

  I took a deep breath. There was a short break on the line, as though the compass points had confused the emergency man, too. Then an angry voice said, “Listen, young man. I can see your number on my display! If you call here again interfering with operations—”

  DISPLAY: A lighty-up thing that shows all kinds of stuff, like phone numbers, for example, or the price at the cash register in the supermarket or the title of the movie in the DVD player. It’s a funny word and I don’t really know why everybody uses it. You could just as well say “lighty-up thing.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I hung up the phone quickly without letting the man finish. I should have known from the start no one would believe me. At least nobody could complain that I hadn’t tried. But it didn’t really get me any further, either.

  Keep calm, Rico!

  It couldn’t be all that difficult to concentrate a bit and think clearly. Seeing as how I was trapped at the KKs’, I might as well think about what might happen next with Oscar and Mr. Haven. Oscar was, after all, in much bigger danger than before. Mr. Haven didn’t give a bean for his life. Beans come in cans, so maybe he was keeping Oscar in a can factory.

  Nonsense.

  Where do you hide somebody that you’ve kidnapped? It depends how you treat them. If you make sure they have enough to eat and drink and that there’s a toilet nearby, you can keep them pretty far away from you because the victim can take care of himself. But Mr. Haven’s victims were small children. They could stand in front of a packed fridge and still go thirsty and hungry and wet themselves with fear. Then he’d be in trouble. No, the longer I thought about it, the more convinced I was that Mr. Haven was keeping the kidnapped children somewhere nearby, and …

  Near him was near me!

  Good thinking, Rico!

  At this point I have to admit that it took me about two hours to figure out that last part. Well, almost three, actually. In the meantime I had moved to the KKs’ kitchen. Outside it was already pitch-black. The only light coming through the windows was from the moon. There were no curtains and I didn’t dare put the light on. Once he realized that I hadn’t gone to the police, Mr. Haven would certainly be on the lookout for me.

  I drank some water from the tap and searched the kitchen for something to eat. I knew that the fridge was empty, but I looked inside again all the same. Nothing. In a cupboard I found a box of spaghetti, but the KKs’ gas stove has so many knobs and buttons it scares me. You could set out to boil an egg and suddenly the whole apartment might blow up around your ears. So I opened the box of spaghetti and sucked one dry stick after another, looking out at the building behind and waiting for the ghost of Miss Friedmann to appear, looking for her ashtray.

  The uncooked spaghetti felt snappy in my mouth. Capellini, I concluded, without any excitement. With a sad feeling in my stomach I thought about how fat Freddy had probably thrown the string of spaghetti out the window of his room or over the roof terrace railing before the KKs had gone away. It was just the kind of thing he’d do. Everything had begun with that string of spaghetti and now everything would end with a final string of spaghetti that Mr. Haven would shove into my cutoff ear.

  On the third floor of the building behind, Miss Friedmann’s shadowier shadow marched past one of the windows in her old apartment. I spat out a mouthful of crunchy spaghetti bits and stared, too shocked to really be afraid. I had never seen a shadowier shadow so clearly. It came from one side, let’s say from the right, moved to the other side, that must be the left, vanished for a while, came back, and disappeared in the same direction it had come from in the first place, which must be … left?

  It doesn’t matter. The shadowier shadow disappeared. And something clicked inside me. At first I thought it was the lottery balls, which up until then had been strangely quiet. But this felt and sounded different. It felt and sounded as though a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that up until now had been waiting patiently had just fallen into place.

  Now I knew everything.

  Well, almost everything.

  In any case, I knew what I had to do next.

  ALMOST THURSDAY

  in the building behind ours

  Once I’d gotten through the partition I found Mr. Marrak’s roof-terrace door wide open. Even so, Mr. Marrak’s apartment smelled stale and of old socks. His girlfriend must have used a really useless laundry detergent. From the hall, I peeped through the slightly open bedroom door. Mr. Marrak was alone in bed. His silhouette was moving steadily up and down. He was snoring.

  SILHOUETTE: Outline or shape. Whoever thought up such a mishmash of letters? Exactly! The French! I’ve held a grudge against the French ever since Julie said they were good kissers. They also eat frogs and snails and things, and probably right before kissing, too. Yuck!

  My heart was in my mouth. It had been almost impossible to squeeze myself through the rustling bamboo canes of the partition on the roof terrace. Then I had almost broken my neck when I slid on the slippery spiral staircase down to Mr. Marrak’s apartment and only just managed to hang on to the handrail. The moo
n was high in the sky, but considering it was shining almost two hundred and forty thousand miles away, it was nearly as dark in here as it was in the basement of 93 Dieffe Street.

  The basement …

  That was the way—and I was almost certain of it now—that Mr. Haven moved his victims into the locked building behind ours without being noticed. The basements of the two buildings were connected. Residents aren’t actually allowed to go down there—there’s water everywhere. Nothing makes me as frightened as water. That’s why I only peeked into the basement once, with Mom, after we had just moved onto Dieffe Street. Dim light from a single, bare bulb. Damp air. A disgusting smell and dripping noises that sounded as though they came from bottomless pits. No thank you!

  Mr. Haven must have unloaded the children from the trunk of his car and dragged them into the building after they had been knocked unconscious and were all tied up so that nobody noticed them, maybe in a large suitcase or a big laundry bag like Mr. Marrak’s. Then past the superintendent’s ground-floor apartment into the basement, through the pitch-black splish-splash and everything else, and finally up into the building behind ours, where he kept the children prisoner on the third floor until their ransom money had been paid. Mr. Haven stuck sticky tape over their mouths or gagged them with stinky old hankies so that they couldn’t scream. And whenever he went to see them to bring them something to eat or let them go to the bathroom and stuff, the shadowier shadows crept past the windows in Miss Friedmann’s apartment.

  That’s how far I’d got with my thinking while sucking on dry sticks of spaghetti. But then there was a gap—something was missing, and this something wouldn’t stop bothering me. It had to do with forward or backward, with right or left, with before or after, but I just couldn’t figure it out. At one point the lottery machine in my head had been drumming so hard that I was afraid the KKs would come back from their vacation to find me on their kitchen table with an overcooked brain. A fine mess. So I’d given up.

  My eyes got used to the darkness in Mr. Marrak’s apartment faster than I expected. I left my search of the bedroom for last — with Mr. Marrak in there snoring, that was the most dangerous place. Hopefully I would find what I was looking for in one of the other rooms. I felt my way all over the place at a snail’s pace. Nothing—but then …