The Spaghetti Detectives

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “— where you finally found what you wanted—”

  “— I was sorry that I’d used you. I like you, Rico! You were never mean to me, and you risked your life to find me. You’re my only friend.” His last words were a whisper. “You still are.”

  I grumbled a little bit. I didn’t have another friend besides Oscar. It’s strange how people are just as clueless about what to do with somebody who’s not that bright as they are with somebody who’s really intelligent. I thought of the afternoon on the roof terrace and how Oscar had held my hand. That had been really nice, and not a lie at all. I had felt it.

  “How did you get yourself kidnapped?” I said at last.

  I heard him breathe out with relief. “That was simple. I planned it for Tuesday morning, but then I changed my mind because I’d promised to visit you.”

  “Without your helmet?” I said, hardly able to believe it.

  “I’m not as afraid when you’re with me,” Oscar murmured quietly, and continued speaking quickly as though it was embarrassing. “I took the subway to your station and walked toward Dieffe Street. But on Grimm Street, Mr. Marrak was coming in my direction and got into his car.”

  I felt all dizzy. I had seen Mr. Marrak going out of the building from the living room window! He must have bumped into Oscar, or Oscar into him, not a minute later.

  “I couldn’t miss the opportunity!” Oscar said. “So I asked him if he could take me with him—told him my dad hadn’t come home the night before and I wanted to go and look for him and, um, you know … the kind of things you make up on the spot.”

  Or if it’s really happened to you before, I thought.

  “Anyway, he took me with him. We only went past three traffic lights. By then I had made sure to give him Dad’s phone number, and Mr. Marrak sprayed something in my face. I didn’t wake up until the afternoon, when he pulled me out of the laundry bag in his apartment. I was handcuffed and tied up and a bit fuzzy in the head, but I had—”

  “You were in his laundry bag?”

  “I think so. That’s what it looked like.”

  I didn’t know what upset me more: that Mr. Marrak, after drugging Oscar in the morning and somehow tying him up without being noticed, had gone about his work perfectly calmly until the afternoon. Or that I had met him on the stairs and talked to him while Oscar had been bundled up in a bag at our feet. That part, I decided, I would only tell Oscar much later. I was really shocked by that—not to mention the fact that Mr. Marrak probably didn’t have a girlfriend who did his laundry or anything like that.

  “But in the meantime I had almost managed to somehow get one arm free,” Oscar was saying. “And when Mr. Marrak dragged me over to the little white house on his roof terrace, I recognized it, tore the red airplane off my shirt without him noticing, and threw it over the railing.”

  “But why? Mr. Marrak would have freed you once your dad had paid the ransom, if not before. Then you could have been a witness against him and everybody would have had to believe you.”

  For a while all I could hear was Oscar breathing. “I wasn’t sure,” he finally said quietly, “whether my dad would … whether he would get the money together quickly enough. Stuff like that.”

  The last sentence sounded very sad, as though Oscar wasn’t sure if his dad would have paid the ransom money for him at all.

  “And if that was the case,” he said, still quietly, “you were my only hope. There was only a tiny little chance, but it was obviously big enough.”

  There was another silence.

  “A long story,” a voice rang out above us. “But thank you for the revealing explanation!”

  A beam of light flashed on and dazzled us.

  Oscar and I screamed at the same time. We ran at the same time, too—down the stairs. Mr. Marrak, who had been listening from a few steps farther up, thundered after us, which was lucky in a funny way, because his flashlight lit up the way not only for him, but for us, too. We jumped and crashed our way through the building, and I decided whoever had said it was in danger of collapse was completely stupid—it was clearly bombproof.

  At the bottom of the stairs, we stood in front of the door that led out to the backyard. It was locked. I pressed the bunch of keys into Oscar’s hand. He was cleverer than I was.

  “You do it!” I hissed. “I’ll talk to him!”

  Mr. Marrak crashed down behind us like somebody who’d taken a running jump into a swimming pool and found it was empty. His flashlight fell to the ground with a bang and rolled away. Dust flew up into the air. In the beam of light from the floor I could see Oscar standing next to me without moving, as though now was the moment he had chosen to try out how it felt to be a tree or a traffic light or something. I think it’s called being frozen with fear. Behind him three shadows were stuck to the wall: two small ones and one giant one.

  “End of the line!” said Mr. Marrak.

  If you could weigh anger, then his weighed at least a ton or even more. A lot, in any case. I had no idea how I was going to stop him, to give us some time and to unfreeze Oscar. But I would have to think of something. I could feel the lottery machine slowly starting up. If I waited five more seconds, it would be too late. So I threw him the first best question I could think of, like throwing a bone at a guard dog, though I would rather have asked it really casually over a cup of hot chocolate or something. Preferably while there were bars between us, with him in a maximum-security prison.

  “Why did you phone Oscar’s dad after the kidnapping instead of writing him a letter like you usually do?”

  Mr. Marrak glared at me nastily, but his answer shot out as though from a gun. “To hurry things up,” he growled. “So that I could get rid of this irritating super-smarty-pants as fast as possible!”

  Oscar didn’t even bat an eyelid in his deep freeze as the brawny face of his kidnapper pushed right in front of his.

  “You are the weirdest and most irritating child I have ever met!” Mr. Marrak snorted at him. “Do you know how they would have treated you in the Middle Ages? Like a freak! Like a punishment from God! Brats like you would have been burned at the stake four hundred years ago!”

  “The Middle Ages,” Oscar said scornfully, “ended more than five hundred years ago. The Renaissance began after that, you ignoramus!”

  I had never heard of the Renaissance, but it must have been terrible, because Mr. Marrak winced. For a moment I was afraid he would hit Oscar. Instead he put on the sweetest face of all time. In crime thrillers that’s always a sign that the criminal’s gone loopy and has bats in the belfry. Mr. Marrak, and I was one hundred percent certain of this, didn’t even have a belfry.

  “I actually like children!” he said in a sugary-sweet voice. “I really like them, in fact. But their parents should keep a closer eye on them. That’s all I ever wanted! It’s a bad world out there. I didn’t care about the money. Yes, yes, it’s true, I like children. Even educationally challenged ones!”

  Now he spun around with a jerk and turned to me. Over his shoulder I was glad to see that Oscar had finally snapped out of it. He began to fiddle with the lock carefully and without making a sound.

  “But I like my freedom, too!” Mr. Marrak breathed right into my face. His grin was as lopsided as if somebody had sliced a clown’s mask in two, right down the middle. “You shouldn’t have stuck your nosy nose into my business, Rico Doretti! Now I’m afraid I’ll have to cut it off.”

  He took a step toward me.

  I wrinkled my brow.

  That wasn’t right.

  “You’re doing it in the wrong order,” I said.

  Mr. Marrak paused, puzzled. “Which order?”

  “The cutting-off part. The ears come first.” I began to list everything, mightily proud that I’d remembered all Felix had told me.

  “Kidnappers always cut the ears off first. Both of them. Then one hand, and then —”

  “You stupid little—”

  “Please don’t interrupt me!”

&
nbsp; Honestly, when you finally remember something, someone like that comes along! I was so angry I just kept going, shouting:

  “And then the arm that belongs to it! The other one has to stay on so that you can still write begging letters! But I’ll tell you right now, the most my mom can do is crack open the piggy bank for you! And, well … that’s it!”

  It felt really good to shout at Mr. Marrak, even though I must admit that what I had to say wasn’t particularly sensible. If he wasn’t going to get any money out of Mom, he could saw off both my arms before moving on to the legs. Luckily for me, however, he had no time to think of that himself.

  Behind him, there was a click.

  The door flew open. Pale, milky moonlight poured into the stairway. I shot past Mr. Marrak like a bolt of lightning.

  If Oscar hadn’t been so small, I might not have tripped over him. I have no idea why he didn’t sprint off at the same time. He could even have had a head start, but he seemed to be waiting for me. I bowled right into him in the middle of the doorway.

  Both of us fell. I crashed into the backyard next to Oscar and slid over the rough, hard ground on one elbow. I could feel it starting to bleed. Then something heavy hit me in the stomach and there was a shout as Mr. Marrak tripped over me and fell to the ground like a tree that had been chopped down. Next to me Oscar got to his feet and stretched out a hand. I grabbed it and got up with a groan.

  “Quick! Let’s go!” I coughed.

  We took off again, Oscar in front of me, but I was quicker than Oscar and overtook him to reach the large door to our building first.

  The large, sticking door!

  I pressed both hands down on the handle and pulled with all my strength on the part that was supposed to open, but it barely moved—two or three inches at most! The crack that opened up was too small even for Oscar to slip through.

  I spun around, the hard door at my back. Oscar pressed himself against me, his arms around my waist. In the moonlight I could see that Mr. Marrak had got back on his feet. He stared at us with wild eyes, then charged like a raving-mad bull.

  “Police!” cried a voice above us. My head shot up. Up above, on the fourth floor, Mr. Haven was standing in the window, a pistol in his outstretched right hand. “Don’t move or I’ll have to shoot!”

  But Mr. Marrak had already caught up to us. He reared above Oscar and me like a mountain. I covered Oscar’s head with my arms to protect him, then stared right into Mr. Marrak’s eyes. Unfortunately Mom and Oscar are a lot better at the staring trick than I am. It didn’t work at all.

  The last thing I heard was a loud roar. The last thing I saw were two things coming down from the sky, one above me and one above Mr. Marrak. What came down on me was Mr. Marrak’s fist. It hit me right on the forehead and, as I slowly fell over and everything went black, Mr. Marrak made a strange face, grabbed his bleeding forehead, and fell over, too.

  Millions of years later I came to. I was being carried through the entrance hall to our apartment building. I looked up and saw Mr. Haven’s face. I was in his arms. Somebody was holding the front door open, probably the superintendent, Mr. Mommsen. Somebody was crying, probably Mrs. Darling. Somebody was babbling on in excitement about something, probably Oscar. Flashing red and blue lights lit up the street in front of 93 Dieffe Street, but I was still looking up at Mr. Haven. It was like in a dream: I could hear my own voice murmuring, and Mr. Haven held me close to his chest and listened to every word.

  “One day my dad went out in a boat with friends, off the coast of Naples. It was a stormy autumn day. The waves were high and black and foamy. My dad threw out a fishing line. A very large fish took a bite; a huge struggle broke out. The fish won. It pulled Dad overboard. My dad drowned in the deep blue sea.”

  THURSDAY

  bright and sunny

  Mom has just visited me in the hospital. Nobody else has been allowed in yet: not Mr. Haven, not Mrs. Darling, not Bert. Not Mr. Kirk or Mr. Mommsen, either, even though it’s nice that both of them have asked about me. They won’t even let Oscar in; I won’t see him until tomorrow. And all because of a little bump on the head!

  “The press is waiting down there.” Mom was standing at the window of my private room, looking out. “They’re lining up as far back as the canal.”

  “Will I be famous now?”

  She sighed. “You will. There’s no way around it. You and Oscar. But only for a few days. We live in a fast world that forgets fast.”

  When she first came in and took me carefully in her arms without saying a word, I started to cry right away. She was wearing black clothes that made her look as dark as midnight, and her face looked very worried. I thought it was all my fault. But that wasn’t true. Uncle Christian had died the day before. I knew that Mom hadn’t gotten along well with him, but he was her brother all the same.

  Mom came up to Berlin because of me, though she had to go back down to the bottom and left again after a while, because of the funeral and everything. I felt really sorry for her, but I was happy that Uncle Christian would lie in his coffin without me after all. I was sure it would be more comfortable for him that way, too.

  “Do you know what the crazy thing is?” Mom said, and came over from the window to sit on the edge of my bed. “The crazy thing is that Christian bequeathed everything to me. He didn’t have anybody else. It’s sad somehow, don’t you think?”

  “What does bequeath mean?”

  “He left everything to us. The money, the car, everything.”

  “Are we rich now?”

  “Depends on how you look at it. He had a house, too.”

  “Do we have to move now?” I called out in fear.

  “We don’t have to.” Mom stroked my bandaged arm. She looked deep into my eyes. “But we will.”

  That was the last straw! It’s difficult to think when you’ve got a concussion. But something inside me thought all by itself: that I would lose Oscar as a friend if I had to move to the bottom and left on the map, and Mrs. Darling and the whole wheat crackers, too. That I would have to go to another school before Mr. Meyer had read my summer vacation diary. That it would never work out with Mr. Haven and Mom and that there was definitely no bingo club at the bottom and left. How could Mom have made such a decision without talking to me about it? I looked at her, horrified, and wondered what there was to grin about.

  “You know, I hear,” she said very slowly, “that in a certain building on Dieffe Street there’ll be an empty apartment available very soon. Up on the fifth floor. With a roof terrace. The view over Berlin is supposed to be phenomenal.”

  It took me a little time, and then I realized what she meant.

  “We can live above Mr. Haven!” I burst out.

  “Yes, Rico. Directly above a policeman.”

  It was still really embarrassing to me that I had got it so wrong about Mr. Haven. But how could I have known that he was not only a police detective, but also in charge of the kidnapping investigation? That’s why he’d been able to put six red dots on the map before the public was told about Oscar’s kidnapping. That’s why he’d been talking to Oscar’s stupid dad and had told him off on the cell phone. And that’s why the man on the emergency number had thought I was putting him on. I had tried to tell him that the kidnapper was the police detective in charge of the investigation. Really, you wouldn’t even be able to think that up with a normal brain! Well, maybe Miss Marple would have figured it out; she’s a lot smarter than I am. But my butt is nowhere near as big as hers, and from now on I can ask Mr. Haven for help if anybody else gets kidnapped.

  “Do you still think he’s the hottest thing you’ve ever met in your entire life?” I asked Mom carefully.

  Maybe I should have dropped it, because suddenly there it was again, the mixture of tiredness and sadness on her face that had been there in the thinking chair after Mr. Haven’s visit on Monday. Only this time there was a very small smile, too. And even though Mom did not reply, and only kissed the bandage on my forehead when
she said good-bye, I felt a little bit of hope come back.

  Well, that’s it. Vacation time for my vacation diary. I have to take a break so that the lottery machine can sort itself out. I wrote all of the last part by hand, in the notebook I asked Mom to bring. Next week, when I’m let out of the hospital, Mr. Meyer says I have to copy it all over to the computer, because of my orthography.

  ORTHOGRAPHY: Means spelling in complicated speak. It’s no wonder I find it difficult, because it’s got the word GRAPH in it, so it’s like math, which I’ve already told you isn’t my strong point.

  I have to get a move on, because it’s nearly dinnertime and if the nurse finds out that I’ve spent the whole afternoon writing away secretly, there’ll be trouble. She’s great and very pretty, too. So I’ll put the notebook away. I’ve actually told everything there is to tell.

  Except for one thing.

  Apparently Mr. Fitz kept a boulder in his stinky apartment, which is what hit Mr. Marrak right on the forehead the night he was chasing us, but the biggest question is, why were there hundreds of other stones lying around it, large and small? That’s what the police found when they questioned him. But Mr. Fitz didn’t want to tell anybody why, not even Mr. Haven, even though he’s a neighbor, and not the people from the newspapers and the television, even though Mr. Fitz is a hero now, like Oscar and me. Mr. Fitz of all people! He grumbled that it wasn’t against the law to keep stones in his apartment, and he’s probably right. I’m just glad it wasn’t a kid’s head he chucked down into the yard that night. All the same, I think Mr. Fitz has a secret. No normal person collects stones and throws the biggest one out the window in the middle of the night, and Mr. Fitz said it wasn’t to hit Mr. Marrak or us two boys screaming our heads off and disturbing his peace and quiet, but for other reasons!

  Oh God!

  Maybe I should tell Oscar about it tomorrow.

  Yes, I’ll definitely tell Oscar about it tomorrow.