The Spaghetti Detectives

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  I didn’t think there’d be anything of interest in the bathroom, but when there were no other rooms left, I thought I might as well take a look. It was kind of an excuse not to go into the bedroom yet. The tiled floor was covered in splashes of water. Mr. Marrak must have taken a shower before going to bed. At least that was something, I thought, even if he’s still a pig because he doesn’t air out his stinky apartment. His work clothes were scattered all over the floor in dark, messy piles. I almost cried out for joy: His big bunch of keys was hanging from the belt of his pants! Shaky with fear, I unclipped it as carefully as possible so that none of the hundreds of keys would begin to clink. A few of them didn’t feel like keys at all. More like pieces of metal with all sorts of bits and pieces sticking out of them. Probably for opening safes and things like that. But it was the normal keys I needed.

  Back outside, in front of the low door to the white-covered stairway on Mr. Marrak’s roof terrace, I held my breath, trying out key after key. After about twenty of them, I found the right one and finally the door swung open. I was standing at the top of the stairs that led down into the building behind ours.

  I was already drenched in sweat.

  Yucky cold filled the stairway. I shivered. It was as though somebody had opened a tomb. The farther down the worn-out stairs I went, the more creepy it felt. The stairs, covered in white mold, creaked and groaned under my unsteady feet. Slime-oozing worms wriggled their way out of the dirty, damp walls and the moaning of long-lost souls clawed its way into my eardrums from the torture chambers under the deep basement.

  Well, maybe not: That’s what it was like in a horror film Mrs. Darling brought home once by mistake. I thought it was great and really wanted to watch to the end, unlike Mrs. Darling, who kept her face hidden behind one of her soft cushions the whole time and only peeked out occasionally to grab another wheat cracker. I don’t know why she was so worked up.

  It was really very cold and dark in the stairway because of the boarded-up windows. It was as though somebody had tied a scarf around my eyes. But I wasn’t afraid. Well, all right, I was a little. The important thing was to be careful not to think about anything creepy. That was easy. In the last few hours I’d done so much thinking that my head felt like a washing machine on the spin cycle, and there was no way I could do any more. What I really had to make sure of was that I didn’t take a wrong step in the dark. There was a reason why this building had been locked up after the gas explosion. Oscar had said that “in danger of collapse” meant every step under my feet and every bit of wall I leaned against could break as soon as I touched it.

  On the other hand, Mr. Haven couldn’t have had any problems. And he’d had to come up from the basement every time; it wasn’t as far for me. I reached the fifth floor pretty quickly, and it was only a couple of floors down to the third.

  More fiddling with the keys. I knew that would happen. That was the most difficult part, without a flashlight or any other lamp, but this time it was even quicker than up on the roof. Just a few tries, and suddenly I was in dead Miss Friedmann’s apartment. The bunch of keys from Mr. Marrak’s security business was the best!

  I pressed the door shut behind me and called out Oscar’s name quietly and nervously. No reply. He had to be hidden in one of the back rooms. He was probably lying in a corner full of straw and hay, gagged and out cold.

  The apartment was totally empty. No furniture, no ghosts, nothing. It smelled of dust and soot, and the slight scent of those pretty purple flowers floated in the air. Violets. That had to be Miss Friedmann’s perfume. It had not only survived the gas explosion and the fire in the apartment, but all the years that had gone by since then, too. The thought made me really sad for some reason.

  I crept through the hall, past the bathroom, the kitchen, and the first room. Nothing and nobody inside. From the outside, a pale light fell through the dirty windowpanes. I nearly had a heart attack when I thought I saw Mr. Haven in his brightly lit kitchen in the front building across the yard. But there was no sign of the monster himself, just steam rising from a small pan on the stove. Mr. Haven surely wouldn’t have left that alone if he intended to check up on Oscar. But maybe he was cooking him something to eat.

  I had to get a move on.

  In Mr. Fitz’s, the apartment opposite Mr. Haven’s, the curtains were drawn. A light was shining behind them. I wondered what the old stinker was doing. Probably counting his collection of kids’ heads.

  I walked along to the end of the hall to where a door led to the two rooms at the back of the apartment.

  Locked.

  Try the keys.

  Success after lots of—well, about nine—tries.

  Door open and in I go.

  Now I could see my own room through the window. It was below me and a little bit to one side. It was dark, of course, but the creepy thought occurred to me that the light might suddenly go on over there and I would see Rico looking over at me, scared, from his window, because at that moment he could see my shadowier shadow.

  Oh God, oh God!

  If I were Mr. Haven, I would have taken the window out or boarded it up, I thought. Then I realized that everybody in the front building would have noticed. So it was better to wait for the cover of night and to play shadowier shadows. And up until now it had worked perfectly. What a sneaky man!

  “Oscar?”

  Still no answer.

  I was getting more and more nervous. I was slowly running out of rooms. But not out of keys. I figured out the next door in a flash. The fact that it was locked made me hopeful. I pushed it open carefully. Pitch-black blackity blackness. The little moonlight that came from the connecting room wasn’t enough to light the farthest corners of the space.

  “Oscar?”

  I stepped in blindly, five, six steps. Then two things happened at once: Miss Friedmann’s violet scent turned into the smell of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. And I banged my knee and my forehead so hard against a wall that I gave a muffled shout and swore.

  “You found my airplane, didn’t you?” said a quiet voice.

  My knee and forehead were forgotten right away. I grinned so widely that I thought the corners of my mouth would meet over my head.

  “Only by chance,” I answered. “It was in the trash can.”

  “And after that you went to see Sophia.”

  “Yes, but she didn’t tell me anything. She was afraid for you. I figured out everything myself, by thinking.”

  Well, almost everything. I could tell him about the clue Sophia didn’t realize she’d given me, the one about the jingle-jangle man, later. For now it was enough being able to really impress Oscar.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” said his voice. “Where did you get the key from?”

  “Stole it from Mr. Marrak.”

  “Very clever. OK, now lock the door again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s a contact switch built in to it. The light only goes on when the door is closed and locked, so no one outside can see it.”

  “I didn’t know there were things like that.”

  “It’s similar to a fridge, just the other way around.”

  Imagining something the other way around is always very difficult, especially when you have difficulties imagining it the right away around. “Are you trying to say,” I thought out loud, “that there’s no light on in a fridge when it’s closed?”

  Oscar gave a quiet groan.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “Just lock the door,” came the reply.

  It took a while, and a dangerous amount of jangling, until I found the key I had come in with. Oscar waited without saying another word.

  When the light finally went on, I saw through scrunched-up eyes that he was crouching on an old, worn-out mattress, surrounded by a load of plastic bags and McDonald’s wrappers and dozens of empty Coke cans. What a pigsty! Mr. Haven had put large cushions against the wall. They looked as though they were filled with cotton. The ceiling was
covered in them, too, and a lonely energy-saving lightbulb was dangling down from the middle. I’d seen things like this in thrillers. Padded cells to stop the noise—if you shouted in here, nobody outside could hear you.

  The cushions were light green. The green room, I thought, and for the first time since I’d set off, an ice-cold shiver ran down my spine.

  Oscar himself looked spotless. Well, he’d only been locked in here since yesterday. But somehow I had pictured him in torn clothes, with a dirty face and stuff. Without his blue helmet he looked a bit helpless, and his sticky-out ears were really unbelievably big, but that was it. The only unusual thing was that he was fastened to the wall above him by a short chain and a cuff around one of his wrists. The chain was so short he couldn’t lie down. He would even have to sleep sitting up.

  That was the second cold shiver.

  I looked around for a toilet. There had to be one somewhere, otherwise the room wouldn’t have smelled of cheeseburgers, but of pee.

  “It’s out there in the hall, behind the front door,” Oscar said as though he had read my thoughts. “It’s just as soundproof as this room.”

  So it was just as I had thought. Whenever Mr. Haven had taken a child to the bathroom, the shadowier shadows had crept through Miss Friedmann’s apartment!

  Oscar beamed at me with his green eyes and his large, unbrushed teeth—another thing Mr. Haven should have on his conscience—and all at once I felt the way an older brother must feel. My face turned bright red with pride. I had saved Oscar! Or nearly, at least.

  “What kind of chain is that?”

  “Quality steel, I would say,” said Oscar. “Probably unalloyed, which means it has less than point eight percent manganese and point five percent silicon. If the percentage of either was higher, then —”

  “Stop! How do I get it off you?”

  He raised his right arm. “The key is with the rest.”

  “With the rest of what?”

  “The rest of the keys! The ones in your hand.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  Normally I would have been angry, but I swallowed it. You probably get a little crabby if you’re forced to eat dozens of hamburgers and cheeseburgers and that sort of stuff. Before I could embarrass myself by stupidly asking how on earth Oscar could have put away so much food and above all so much Coke in such a short space of time without brown stuff running out of his nose, I realized that the garbage must have come from all six victims.

  This thought bothered me somehow — I suddenly had that same nagging feeling the lottery balls in my head had rolled around in the wrong direction between the front and the back, the right and the left, the before and the after. But it was just as hard to figure it out as it had been the last time—even harder, in fact, because this time I had to concentrate on setting Oscar free.

  I quickly found the key — it was the smallest of them all—and unlocked the handcuff. Oscar slipped it off and rubbed his wrist. When he got up from the mattress, his knees cracked and a tiny groan of pain slipped out of his mouth.

  “Did you just sit around the whole time?” I asked.

  “What do you mean just?” He looked at his sore wrist, and an angry horizontal line appeared on his forehead. “Sitting is a very complicated matter.”

  ALMOST THURSDAY AGAIN

  the escape

  Dear Mr. Meyer,

  I don’t want to hear any complaints about the diary getting serious at this point! The following events were dramatic, and you should be happy that they even let me write my diary in the hospital.

  It’s time for you to start thinking about my bonus.

  Yours sincerelier,

  Frederico Doretti

  Walking seemed to be less complicated than sitting, or at least Oscar didn’t complain. Through the window in one of the front rooms I checked that there was still a light on in Mr. Haven’s apartment. There was. You could even see the child-chopper-upper himself. He was getting something to drink from the fridge and talking on his cell phone. He was probably being rude to Oscar’s dad again. All the better. If Oscar and I didn’t make the building collapse, we could sneak out unnoticed and tell the police. They would probably believe Oscar if he was standing there in front of them, in the flesh. Unlike me alone, who’d they’d just say was a proddity. But we had to get a move on before Mr. Haven remembered his beans.

  Once we were in the boarded-up stairway, we held on to each other’s hands. It was as black as coal again. As I took the first step up to the little white house on the roof, Oscar pulled me back with a start. It was strange to hear his voice without seeing him.

  “Are you crazy?” he hissed. “We’ll run right into him if we go that way!”

  “We’ll run right into him if we go down there,” I answered. “He comes up through the basement, after all.”

  “Which basement?”

  “The one he brought you up through.”

  Maybe it was the darkness that was making Oscar so slow to understand. Maybe, I thought, child prodigies are only really smart when it’s light.

  “Why should he bring me through the basement?” Oscar said.

  “Because he’s got no other way of getting into the building.”

  “You got here!”

  Slowly he was beginning to get on my nerves. While we were blabbing on here in the dark, Mr. Haven might be drawing closer.

  “I came through Mr. Marrak’s roof terrace,” I explained, forcing myself to be patient. “Through the little white stairway house. Don’t you remember? With Mr. Marrak’s keys. How is Mr. Haven supposed to get ahold of those?”

  “Mr. Haven?” Oscar’s voice sounded clueless. “What does this have to do with Mr. Haven?”

  And that was the third shiver down my back. It was also the third time I got that feeling I had gone in the wrong direction with my thoughts somewhere—but now it was no longer a nagging feeling but a feeling that sank its teeth in me and wouldn’t let go. I was a complete idiot! I was the biggest child proddity of all the child proddities in the world! My mistake had nothing to do with right or left, forward and back. It was a mistake with before and after: Mr. Haven had only been living at 93 Dieffe Street for a week! But I had seen the shadowier shadows much, much earlier—the first time had been a few months ago when the kidnappings had begun. Why and how would Mr. Haven have brought his victims here?

  Suddenly a light went on in my head.

  “It’s not Mr. Haven—it’s Mr. Marrak!” I whispered in horror. “Alarms, Safes, and Locks … Sales, Service, and something or other!”

  “That’s how I tracked him down,” said Oscar. “Sophia remembered his jangling bunch of keys. And his red work uniform with the golden safe on it.”

  “And Sophia,” I said. “How did you find her?”

  “I asked around for her at all the grade schools in the Tempelhof neighborhood.”

  “Why her? Why not one of the other children?”

  “She was the second victim. And there were photos in the newspapers. Sophia looked like she would talk if she knew anything.”

  “The bunch of keys and the red uniform,” I repeated quietly. “Mr. Marrak. Oh God, oh God! Sophia should have told the police!”

  “She was afraid!”

  “She’s still afraid. But then you should have told the police.”

  Oscar was quiet. I could picture him talking to Sophia. How Sophia told him things you would only tell another kid. How she gave Oscar her little red airplane, happy that she had somebody to talk to. How Oscar, just as happy, pinned on the airplane, a little boy with a blue helmet on his head who normally didn’t have any friends because he was too brainy.

  “I promised her I wouldn’t tell,” Oscar murmured. “My mom always said you shouldn’t break promises.”

  I swallowed. Something was pressing against my shoulders and my heart as though the darkness was crushing us. “And then?” I whispered.

  “Then I copied down the contact details for all the security companies
in Berlin from the phone book,” Oscar continued. “Every afternoon after school I went to look for them, one by one. It took weeks. I eventually found Mr. Marrak by chance. The phone book only has his cell phone number, not his address. He dropped in at another security company that I happened to be watching. Maybe he was visiting a friend. I was standing on the other side of the street and saw him getting out of his car and knew I had him. At least almost. He didn’t stay long. But long enough for me to hail a taxi and follow him.”

  “Hey, I took a taxi, too!”

  “But you didn’t get thrown out halfway, did you? The stupid driver turned to me at a red light and wanted to know if I could pay. I didn’t have enough money with me and he refused to go any farther. I could see Mr. Marrak turning off onto Grimm Street, so I followed him on foot. His car was parked on Dieffe Street, but I didn’t know which apartment building he’d disappeared into. I waited. About two hours later he left number 93. There were two possibilities. Either he had just visited a customer …”

  “… or he lived there,” I said. “Right? And you crept around Dieffe Street to find out. And that’s when you met me.”

  I couldn’t see Oscar, but I could tell that he was nodding. I also had a bitter taste in my mouth.

  “You used me to get into the building! To look for Mr. Marrak! To find out if he lived here!”

  No answer again. I didn’t say anything else, either. Silence spread like a jet-black puddle. We should have been getting out of there. Instead we were standing in a stairway that was in danger of collapse, unable to see our own hands in front of our faces and not knowing what to say to each other—me because of disappointment, and Oscar because he didn’t know how to say sorry.

  “In the beginning,” he said finally, and was quiet again for a second. “In the beginning I didn’t care about you. I really just wanted to get into the building. But up on the roof terrace —”