The offices for names beginning with the letters K to R were on the third floor, in the left-hand hallway, behind the cocoa machine. The hallway was full of people of all pigments, standing, sitting, or lying down, all waiting for their number to come up. There were no benches or chairs. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and botched application forms. Faded posters advertised St. Paul’s and Town Hall—FRANKFURT AM MAIN, CITY OF SIGHTS TO SEE—and above the doors, digital counters showed the current numbers. A video game noise emitted by invisible speakers replaced the old “Next, please”. People weren’t talking much, and only in hushed tones, perhaps because they felt that it was necessary to ration what air remained in the fog of sweat and stale smoke. Due to security regulations, windows could not be opened.
I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall, between an adolescent disco gigolo to my left who kept himself frantically busy smoking Marlboros and fixing his hairdo and a Polish couple and their son to my right. Dad and Mom were nodding out over the daily paper, the kid whiled away the hours making two plastic cowboys go “bang,” “zong,” and “pow” … I felt like going “pow” on him, myself.
Suddenly two men in uniform plowed through and past all the legs, children, and bags, disappeared in the office for S, and soon thereafter dragged a young black man down the hall and down the stairs while he kept protesting in broken German that he hadn’t known about the deportation order. The people waiting followed him with their eyes as if he were an apparition. There was a moment when it looked like everybody was about to say something, but then they just looked at each other and remained silent.
It occurred to me that the posters advertising Frankfurt were not only in poor taste, but—as far as this office was concerned—completely counter-productive. The interests of the immigration authorities would have been better served by pictures of beaches in Beirut—MARBLE, ROCK, AND BROKEN IRON—or desert landscapes in Ethiopia—THERE’S NOTHING LIKE HOME COOKING. A campaign to further national loyalty to crisis areas. One could even conceive a double-barreled approach, with, let’s say, a picture of a Thai girl flanked by her parents—WELCOME TO THE FAMILY this would not only encourage locals to return home, but would also appeal to the German male on vacation … Although it was true that the latter rarely set foot in this building. The video arcade noise interrupted my train of thought, and my number appeared on the display. I entered a standard office with standard furniture, postcards on the walls, potted palm trees by the window. The fortyish woman behind the desk was eating a cake. She wore a platinum blonde wig, a pink blouse, and a gold chain with an Eiffel Tower pendant. Her face was long and narrow and slightly remorseful, and when she spoke, it sounded as if she were reciting an instruction manual for disposable cigarette lighters. The room smelled of one of those perfumes designed to appeal to several tastes at once.
When she was done chewing and had wiped her mouth thoroughly, she picked up a pen and looked at her pad. “Number one hundred eighty three?”
“Right.”
She made a check mark. “Name?”
“Kemal Kayankaya.”
“Spelling?”
“Pretty good, mostly. I have a little trouble with those foreign words.”
She looked up and pursed her lips in a stepmotherly fashion. After she had scanned me and come to a conclusion, she hissed: “The spelling of your name!”
I spelled it for her. Without lifting her pen, she asked:
“Nationality?”
“FRG.”
“Germany,” she corrected me under her breath. Then she looked up again, quite irritably. “German …?”
“You want me to spell that?”
Her left eyelid twitched. While we glared at each other, she pushed the pad to one side and leaned back in her chair, holding on to the armrests.
“If you are a German citizen, Mr.—”
“Kayankaya, How long have you been doing this?”
She looked startled.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“I was just thinking … If every name that doesn’t sound like Wurst takes you that long to memorize, you may not be cut out for this job.”
Her forehead began to turn pink.
“One more crack out of you, young man, and I’ll call security. If you really are a German—”
“I’m a Turk with a German passport.”
Her eyes flashed briefly. She saw an opening. She said: “You mean you’re a permanent resident? Seems to me you’re a little confused.”
I began to get hot under the collar.
“If I had meant to tell you that I’m a permanent resident, I would have told you so. But that’s not what I told you. I told you something else—remember?”
Instead of replying she held on tighter to the armrests of her chair and looked as if she was visualizing my being drawn, beheaded, and quartered. In an adjacent room, a voice rose to a roar: “… you no understand nothing, I don’t give a shit! Here you speak German, no nigger English!” Then someone banged on a table, then there were footsteps, a door opened, another voice giggled, and this was followed by murmurs and finally silence. The woman in front of me was still hanging on to her chair, her face contorted by fury, and seemed oblivious to all the commotion.
I pointed at the wall: “Lovely manners.”
“We’re only doing our job.”
“Why is it always ‘only’? Have you ever given that any—”
She let go of the armrests, leaned forward, and hit the desk with both fists: “Get out of here!”
I shook my head.
“We’re not done. I came here to enquire about my fiancée, Sri Dao Rakdee. Rakdee with two ‘e’s. She is from Thailand. We were going to get married last week, but we still haven’t received the necessary papers. I wanted to know if it would be possible to extend her visa by another month?”
She seemed surprised by the question. Then she smiled triumphantly and told me, in a saccharine tone of voice: “No, that’s impossible.”
She reached for her cake fork.
“All right, then. Would you be so kind as to get Sri Dao Rakdee’s file and note that,” I got up to look at the nameplate on her desk, “Mrs. Steiner has rejected an application for extension of her visa? So that I can inform my attorney.”
She put the fork down, chewed and thought this over for a moment. Then she pushed her chair back from the desk and got up. “It’ll be a pleasure.”
She left the room. I went over to the window feeling pretty good and lit a cigarette. I thought I had reached the end of the trail. Whether Sri Dao Rakdee’s first German was a pimp, as Charlie claimed, or one of those guys who liked mail order brides, his name had to be in that file; and Mrs. Steiner would hardly miss the opportunity to beat me over the head with it, to justify calling me a liar and a criminal and throwing me out of her office.
There was no other explanation for a visa extended twice for periods of three months. It all fit together. According to Weidenbusch, Sri Dao had shouted “this is my man” during the fracas next to the VW van. Contrary to Weidenbusch’s fond assumption, it had not been her intention to express her readiness to defend him. No, she had simply referred to her “man”, to the guy who had brought her to Germany and had promised marriage both to her and the authorities; who had then lost interest in her and sold her to the Lady Bump outfit. That guy knew when her visa expired and what brothel keepers were willing to pay for her. Today he had picked her up, with a three-thousand-mark bonus, in order to sell her again.
Given all that, there could be several possible reasons for Sri Dao’s rejection of Weidenbusch’s marriage proposal. First: her memories of the other guy were such that the mere word “marriage” made her nauseous. Second: she was willing to risk deportation to keep her previous story a secret from Weidenbusch. Or third: she suspected that the immigration authorities would not approve such a change of bridegroom and therefore reject any further attempt to extend her visa.
So all I needed to do no
w was to look up the name of the guy in the phone book. Then I could return Sri Dao to Weidenbusch this evening, if not sooner.
Five minutes later, Mrs. Steiner returned, flanked by one of her colleagues from security. She slammed the door shut and wagged her chin at me: “That’s him!”
The colleague was in his forties, balding, his few remaining strands of hair plastered sideways across the top of his skull. He wore a pale blue bomber jacket with a plethora of gold-colored zippers. He gave me the once-over. Then he pushed his thumbs under his belt, hitched up his pants, cleared his throat and stepped closer so that his fat face was a yard from mine. He flashed his teeth and spoke in a rapid-fire machine gun rattle: “What’s your name, nigger?”
So, I said to myself, this must be their guy with the communication skills. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and studied its glowing tip for a moment. His beery breath struck my face. I looked at him and said very quietly:
“Listen, pig. Another word out of you, and I’ll see to it that you won’t be able to stand up, sit down, or fuck—ever again.”
While Mrs. Steiner suppressed a scream, my threat seemed to have the desired effect on her colleague. He was speechless. However, it didn’t look like this situation would last very long, so I added: “Where is the file?” Just as quickly came the reply from a safe distance: “There is no file for Rakdee.” Mrs. Steiner had one hand on the doorknob; the other hovered in the vicinity of a vase. I kept glancing back and forth between them, a proper little Hawkeye.
“If you’re not telling me the truth …”
“I beg your pardon …!” Despite her obvious fear that our argument might turn into a free-for-all, Mrs. Steiner looked indignant. “I am a civil servant.”
In other circumstances I would have grinned, but now it seemed important to get closer to the door. The security guy looked like he’d explode any second, and I didn’t feel like getting punched. On the other hand, I had better things to do than jail time for grievous bodily harm.
“All right, that’s all I wanted to know. You could have saved yourself all this excitement. And if you want to know my name, there it is, on her pad. Take a good look at it. If we ever meet again, I would like to be addressed correctly.”
Now the guy looked like his head and shoulders were about to burst. He stood leaning forward a little, arms bent like a wrestler’s, ready to pounce. Mrs. Steiner stepped aside, I grabbed the doorknob and touched my forehead. “Thank you all.”
I pulled the door shut behind me, stepped over the Polish kid who was still busy with his gunfighters, and ran down the stairs. Nothing happened until I had reached the landing below. Then a roar came from above, and I picked up speed. A guy in uniform met me at the exit.
“Hey, hey, what’s the rush?”
“Be right back. I’m illegally parked …”
Before he was able to react, I was out the door and ran to the Opel. Seconds later, the security guy and the one in uniform charged out into the street. I slid way down in my seat and waited until they gave up and trotted back into the building. I started the car and drove off.
At the first refreshment stand I saw I bought a paper cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate and took them back to the car. So much for my theory, I thought; the stamps in Sri Dao Rakdee’s passport were forgeries, provided by Charlie or someone else. She had been in this country illegally for at least six months. As far as her former guy was concerned, my only proof of his existence was a statement made by a half-crazed pimp. In her situation, forged papers or stamps had been her only recourse. Which left “Mr. Larsson” who had a mustache and drove a VW van. There could be a hundred reasons why he knew the dates of Sri Dao’s visa. Maybe he wrote poetry in his spare time and belonged to Weidenbusch’s circle of acquaintances.
I drank my coffee and decided to drive to the asylum seekers’ center in Hausen.
4
A field the size of two soccer fields, covered with gravel, stretched out beside the road. At the far end, its boundary was marked by the buildings of a sawmill. Spaced out at regular intervals on the field stood metal containers, twelve feet wide, forty feet long, and a little less than ten feet tall-three rows of twenty. In the walkways between them tall streetlights rose out of the gravel. Each container had one door, one window, an outside faucet, and a washing line. On top of some containers lay piles of what looked like broken bicycle parts. On closer examination, these turned out to be homemade television antennas. Between the containers, children were playing games, men were sitting on folding chairs. The area was surrounded by a three-foot-high wire mesh fence, and the air was filled with the incessant screeching of sawmill machinery: auditory smog.
I walked along the fence to the entrance and its red and white barrier. Right next to it stood the administration building, a two-story prefab with faux half-timbering and a flower bed of pansies complete with garden gnome—as if it wanted to show the refugees, when they came to get their daily mail, the cozy German idyll to be defended against their “flood”. I walked along a newly laid path of “natural” paving stones to the building and into the front office. The office was empty except for two goldfish in a bowl on the counter. Next to the counter was a bell-rope with the sign PLEASE RING, amplified by a drawing of a stick figure pulling a rope and causing musical notes to fly through the air to summon another, smiling, stick figure.
I pulled the rope and lit a cigarette, watching three adolescents amble toward the entrance. One of them was carrying a boom box.
“Can’t you (she said du) read? There’s no smoking here!” I turned around and almost fell through the window. Instead of the customary gatekeeper in shapeless uniform and television-induced daze, I confronted Miss Hospital. Her face was narrow and cleverly made up, she had huge brown eyes, and her blonde hair had been pinned up carelessly, as if she had just gotten ready to take a shower. Her luxuriant measurements were covered by a starched and ironed nylon uniform with a Red Cross emblem. On her, even clogs would have looked sexy.
I removed the cigarette from my mouth and took care not to stare at her breasts.
“Normally I’m a little sensitive about that, but if you insist …,” I grinned, “I don’t mind your using the familiar form of address.”
For a moment, she looked surprised. Then she said coolly:
“I’m sorry, I mistook you for one of the residents.”
“Are you the director?”
“I’m the nurse on duty. Mr. Schafer is not here.”
“My goodness. Compared to the nurses where I had my appendectomy—”
“No one has asked you to compare. Your cigarette—”
“Oh, yes.” I went to the door and flicked the butt into the pansy plantation. A mistake. I heard a sharp intake of breath. I wasn’t doing too well in my endeavor to find out something from her. I took care to close the door without breaking the glass or the doorknob.
“Two days ago, three men disappeared from here. I would like to know if, before that, they received any unusual visitors or phone calls.”
“Are you a police officer?”
“Kemal Kayankaya, private investigator.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Private investigator?”
“Oh, you know, one of those really tall guys with broad shoulders and a chin like a gun butt.”
Her expression remained impassive. Then she took another look at me, and I saw that I had managed to make her smile.
“Oh, yeah.”
I nodded. “So, what can you tell me about those men?”
“You have to talk to Mr. Schafer about that. I’m not allowed to give out that kind of information.”
“And when will Mr. Schafer be back?”
“Next week.”
“Next week …?” It was Tuesday. I looked out the window. Two women with scarves round their heads were dragging a tub full of laundry across the square. “Well, then I’ll just have to ask the folks here in the camp.”
“The center. And besides, you won’t be able to
do that. Strangers are not allowed on the grounds. Unless you’re visiting someone in particular.”
“Well, then I’ll visit someone in particular.”
Unruffled, she stepped behind the counter and picked up a pad and a pen. A blonde strand of hair fell across her face. She pushed it back behind one ear with a gesture that seemed to threaten that strand with the scissors next time.
“Name and dwelling number?”
I looked at the goldfish. I was beginning to feel that I should have just enjoyed them and gone away.
“Listen, nurse, I’m sure you’re doing everything by the book, but this happens to be a criminal case, and I can’t wait a week or play games with you. So, if you don’t want me to walk around your center, then please let me have some answers. No one will know about it, and I’ll forget that I ever saw you.”
A pause. She put the pen down and looked up. Then she raised her eyebrows. She said “Oh, really?” And smiled, the second time.
A little later, certain that I was on the trail of a gang of forgers, I squeezed past the red and white barrier back onto the road. Last Friday, the three men had been notified of the rejection of their appeals for asylum, and of deportation orders effective immediately. On Saturday, Miss Hospital had received and transferred a call from a Mr. Larsson, and on Sunday they had found the center’s safe ransacked and the trio gone. We had not managed to exchange phone numbers—or only unilaterally and rather unsuccessfully. She had tossed my card into a tray marked “Orders for Electrical Appliances: Television Sets, Washers, etc.”
Clapping my hands over my ears against the screeching of the saws, I ran back to the Opel. Two silent children pressed their faces against the wire mesh and watched me get in and drive away.
5
For the second time that afternoon, I entered the brown immigration service building. Ready for trouble, I approached the uniformed guy checking I.D.s at the entrance. Apparently there had been a change of guard; this was not the same fellow who had pursued me into the street. After giving me the usual suspicious up down up—left side right side—deep into eyes—well all right then look, he let me pass without further ado. I ascended past the floors crowded with applicants to the superintendent’s offices. An empty corridor. My footsteps were loud. “Department of Residence Violations—Superintendent Höttges, Inspector Klaase” read the sign next to a door. I knocked.
One Man, One Murder Page 4
