The name on the mailbox was “Dr. Schelling.” I acted as if I had stopped at the wrong number and walked down the street past the staff entrance. After ten steps or so, I turned, ran back, jumped over the wooden fence and landed on a wire. Held up by plastic supports about three feet above ground it stretched all around the walls of the plot, ending in small gray boxes installed in the corners. I got up and took cover behind the nearest tree. Nothing happened. The alarm must have been turned off. Hunched over, I ran across flowerbeds, overturned a few pieces of garden furniture, reached the terrace, and pressed myself against the glass sliding door. Shielding my eyes with my hands I scanned the room inside and saw a couch, some chairs, a television set. As I slid to one side, the door slid open as well, to my surprise. After casting a quick glance all around, I went in.
Instead of the usual cold stale smell of furniture in vacant houses, I noticed an odor of stale cooking, with a lemony whiff of men’s perfume thrown in. I listened. A wall clock was ticking, a refrigerator humming somewhere in the distance. I touched the radiator. It had been turned off but was still warm. Then I noticed what I hadn’t been able to see from outside: the light was on in the entrance hall. I proceeded cautiously to the door, leaned against the doorframe, pulled my Beretta. Moving past a built-in kitchen and a toilet I reached the stairs. Halfway up the stairs I noticed, diagonally below me, a basement door. I tiptoed back, slipped the safety catch, and went down the steps to a large room furnished with a soccer game machine, a pinball machine, and a ten-meter-long dining table. On the table stood a huge tin bucket in the midst of some thirty plates with remnants of stew and bread on them. There was silverware on the floor, several chairs had been overturned; there were three more games on the pinball machine, and there was a ball in the chute. I walked across the room toward a curtain of gray blanket material. I pushed it aside and found myself in a narrow, yellow-lit hallway with doors to the right and the left. Each one of the rooms was some twenty-five square feet in size and furnished with three army cots, a sink, and the kind of light fixture you find in garages. Only the last room on the left contained something else.
He lay on his stomach, stripped down to his socks, and the gray skin on his arms was tattooed with images of women and weapons. He looked surprised. Under the mustache, his mouth was open, as if he wanted to say “But—?” or something like that. But he wasn’t saying anything, and he would never say anything again. His neck was broken.
I felt his pulse, then covered him with a blanket. I went through his clothes which lay scattered on the floor. There was no wallet or address book, only a box of matches, half a pack of cigarettes, and a nine-millimeter Browning pistol. I slipped the gun in my pocket, pulled the blanket off him again, and read the inscriptions on his arms: “Manne loves Ingrid”; “Manne loves Sabine”; “Manne loves Iris more than all the chicks before!”; and “Manne hates Tempo Hundred!” No last name. I sat down next to him and smoked two cigarettes. Then I went out into the garden behind the house, found a tool shed, took a shovel and dug a three-foot-deep pit next to a basement window. Then I took the cable of the electric lawnmower and went back to Manne. After I had wrapped him and his clothes into a huge sausage, I pulled him to the window and heaved and pushed him outside. A little later, I had covered the shallow grave so that it was invisible to the casual eye.
Then I checked out the house. I went through cupboards, chests, desks, nightstands, I even looked under the rugs, but didn’t come up with anything. Except for the basement, the house was like an empty furniture showroom. There were no letters, no books, there wasn’t even an old toothbrush. Only that stew and Manne, and a heap of vegetable scraps in the kitchen garbage can.
I found a telephone and called Gellersheim information for Dr. Schelling’s number. It wasn’t listed. No Dr. Schelling in Frankfurt, Offenbach, Mainz, Wiesbaden, or Kassel, either. After I hung up, I remembered the shovel. I took it back to the tool shed. As I stepped out of the shed, I saw a note pinned to the wall with a pair of garden shears. It said: “Water lilies? New gravel? Trim trees—new ladder!” And there was a phone number.
It rang three times. Then came a cool, businesslike male voice: “Olschewski for Schmitz.”
“Schmitz?”
“Eberhard Schmitz. I am his secretary. What can I do for you?”
“Well, I … You mean Eberhard Schmitz, Georg’s brother?”
“That’s correct.”
“… ”
“Hello?”
“Yes, yes, I’m still here … I wanted to know—see, I’m the gardener at the villa in Gellersheim, and for the trees I need a new ladder—to trim them, you see.”
“Buy one and add it to the invoice.”
“Many thanks.”
“Anything else?”
I cleared my throat. “Well, maybe you could ask the parties who come here from time to time not to walk all over the fresh flowerbeds …”
“You know you don’t have to worry about that. We’re paying you enough to make it worth your while to redo the flowerbeds.”
“I just meant—”
“Don’t mean, just do your work. Goodbye.”
On the drive back I contemplated the best plan of action and arrived at half a decision. Back in Frankfurt I parked in front of the first tavern with a Henninger sign and walked into a dark booze grotto full of stale tobacco smoke. Two guys in their mid-thirties sat at the bar in their cheap Sunday best. They had half-empty drinks in front of them, hand-rolled cigarettes between their fingers. Behind the counter a girl was drying dishes. The proprietor sat reading an illustrated magazine. There was no one else in the joint. Lit-up slot machines stood by the wall, old carnival garlands hung above the tables. The four people turned to look at me. Expressionless, pale, flat faces. The proprietor put his magazine away and crossed his arms.
“Private party.”
Faint smiles on the faces of the guys at the bar. I rammed both hands in my pants pockets and looked at the floor.
“Let’s keep this sweet and short. This is a public place, and I would like to have a beer and make a phone call. But if it so happens that this is a private party, or that the beer taps have been turned off, or that you’re closing this very second—then I’ll be back. Every day. And I’ll bring some friends. Big friends, sensitive friends, friends with baseball bats. We’ll make this joint our neighborhood pub. So you better see about getting some Turkish music, and I don’t think there’ll be much of a demand for your pork chops.”
“All right, all right.”
The proprietor made a resigned gesture. Then he nodded to the girl and returned to his magazine. Disappointed, the guys in their mid-thirties concentrated on their drinks.
“And where is your phone?”
The proprietor took his time. Then he looked up and said: “We don’t have one. We use smoke signals.”
Was that ever a riot. The guys at the bar almost fell off their stools, and the proprietor had to wipe tears from his eyes. While the three kept on erupting into renewed guffaws, the girl put a phone on the counter and pushed it toward me, flashing me an embarrassed smile under cover of the beer taps. After the wild merriment subsided, I dialed Slibulsky’s and Gina’s number. I let it ring for a long time. Then I hung up and received my beer. I sucked it down in one go, nodded to the girl, and walked to the door. A roar came just as I grabbed the doorknob: “Hey, you haven’t paid!” I opened the door.
“I’ll send you a buffalo hide by the end of the week. That should pay for the beer.”
9
“Come on, come on, try it, double your money—keep your eye on it and win! Where’s the ball? Here? No. Here? No. Here it is! Let’s keep going—a hundred marks on the table, no tricks, no double bottom—this is an honest game. Keep your eye on it.…”
The small white ball skittered from left to right, up and down, bounced off the sidewalk, reappeared sometimes between his fingers, sometimes under one of the three matchboxes, and finally disappeared. Once more he switched
the boxes around, stopped, waved a wad of hundred-mark bills in the air and looked around with an innocent expression.
“Where’s the ball?”
He had been kneeling on the sidewalk for ten minutes, whirling things around, and had taken two intoxicated Japanese and a small-town loudmouth in a deerskin outfit for four hundred marks. Twenty or so male heads waved skeptically in the April wind. All of them knew it was impossible to win, but all of them kept staring at his wad of bills.
The wind gusted heavily, cars honked, people ran, and a loudspeaker voice proclaimed a revolution in the realm of dishwashing brushes, but silence reigned in the circle around the shell game guy. After he clapped his hands and got ready to rattle off his spiel again, a Pole took two steps forward, placed a boot on the box to the left, extracted a hundred-mark bill from his wallet, and said: “Show.”
The men in the circle came alive; some of them nodded approval, some turned away, shaking their heads.
The man contemplated the boot. “Do I look like a shoeshine boy?”
The Pole shrugged and bent down. But just as he was about to pick up the box, a short fat guy stumbled out of the void, uttered some drunken babble, and knocked him over. A loud murmur rose from the audience, and before the Pole had gotten up, cursing, and brushed off his pants, and the other guy had vanished again, the ball had changed places.
I leaned against the display window of a sex shop, smoked a cigarette, and studied the entrance to the Eros-Center Elbestrasse.
It was almost six o’clock. The street vendors were packing up their wares.
Just as the Pole got ready to punch out the con man, the plastic door-flaps flew open and Slibulsky came bouncing down the stairs. I waited until he had reached the crossing. Just as I tossed my cigarette away, the Pole came crashing into my side. I fell down on the sidewalk, he fell on top of me, and both of us ended up in the gutter. He was groaning and not making any attempt to get off of me. They must have punched him with a knuckle-duster. One of his incisors was gone, and his mouth was spraying blood like a leaky hose. I pushed him aside, got to my feet, and looked around. Slibulsky had disappeared.
“Sorry, but how could I know that the Pollack would lose his cool that way?” He was a member of the shell game gang; not yet eighteen, milky skin, an old man’s pouches under his eyes. He, too, had made a bet, but he had won. A decoy. Now he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, rubbed his ironclad fist, and waited for my reaction. Maybe he thought I was one of the boys of the red-light district it’s better not to mess with. “But I am sorry, ’cause of your suit, I mean.”
I checked and noted that I did, indeed, look as if I had just come from a butchering party.
“Yeah, that’ll be some dry cleaning bill …”
He retreated a step. “Yeah, well—”
“But maybe we can settle this some other way. I’m sure you know Ernst Slibulsky, the guy who works over there at the center?”
“The guy with the lumpy nose?”
“That’s him. He’s got a broken arm. I’d like to know where that happened.”
“Where he broke his arm? No idea. I just run into him once in a while. And I hear people talk.”
“And where do you run into him?”
“Around here. He’s always in and out of there, and sometimes he’s over there in The Die.”
“Ah—”
“Hey, man, you’re not a cop, are you?”
I looked up and shrugged. “Something like that.”
Looking as if he had stepped on something, he said “Shit!” He ran over to his buddies and gave them the scram sign. Within two seconds, the shell game arena was empty.
In the meantime, the Pole had managed to sit up. He leaned against a car tire and patted his lips with a corner of his shirt.
I lit a cigarette and stuck it between his fingers. He nodded absentmindedly. That was his only reaction. Maybe he didn’t smoke. I slapped him on the shoulder, mumbled a few encouraging words, and crossed the street.
The Smiling Die should really have been called “The Smiling Chinese.” The probability of a smiling die was as unlikely as the probability of an unsmiling Mr. Wang. No matter if men who had lost everything crawled weeping to his doorstep, the police conducted a raid, or the Mafia broke every fixture in the place—the small man from Hong Kong sat behind the counter, his arms crossed over his chest, and smiled as if the world were one big spring roll. At the time it was said that he was abroad. Two months ago, someone had strangled Mrs. Wang and tossed a young fellow and a wardrobe out of her bedroom window on the fourth floor. Since then, Mr. Wang’s bodyguard was in charge of business. Schlumpi, or “Ass-with-Ears” Peter, never smiled. Even if he had smiled, no one would have noticed: after a car racing accident, the skin on the lower half of his face had been replaced by a graft from his backside.
The two small rooms and bar were down in the basement. They were furnished with tables for roulette, blackjack, and craps, chessboards and timers. The joint, once elegant, had come down in the world. Everything was ramshackle and stained, even the dealer. He was wearing a dark suit and a bow tie, but a button was missing on his shirt, and his cuffs were frayed. Narrow windows permitted a view of high heels ambling back and forth. Eleven guys were sitting around the roulette table, drinking beer and losing money. I stood at the bar, drinking beer and waiting. The woman behind the counter kept glancing at my suit with a mildly horrified look but did not say anything. No one said anything except for the dealer.
Ten minutes later a door next to the bar, marked “Office”, opened and Schlumpi, wearing a white wolf fur coat, stepped behind the cash register. After he had tossed in a bundle of bills and closed the drawer, he looked up and remarked, after a brief pause: “What do you know, it’s the Robin Hood of Istanbul.”
The door opened again, and Slibulsky came out with a man I didn’t know. Slibulsky gave a start. “Kayankaya—what are you doing here?”
“Having a beer, and listening to Schlumpi’s old jokes.”
“Oh …”
While Slibulsky took his leave from the guy I didn’t know, Schlumpi leaned on the counter, pointed at my suit, and whispered through his scarred and lipless hole of a mouth: “Here’s another joke—brand new: Kayankaya’s been giving head to a cunt on the rag.”
“Incredibly funny. But the funniest thing about it is—”
Slibulsky tugged at my sleeve. “Come on, let’s go.” And to the woman behind the bar: “Put his beer on my tab.”
The woman nodded.
“Didn’t know you knew Schlumpi.”
“And I didn’t know you played roulette.”
We crossed Kaiserstrasse in the direction of the railway station. The sun was setting behind the triple arch, and scraps of afterglow lingered to the right and the left. There was a whiff of spring in the air.
“Who told you I was there?”
“A guy in the street.”
We made our way past a bunch of junkies who were attempting a choral version of “We Are the World” while someone played it on a comb.
“I just wanted to ask you where you broke that arm.”
Slibulsky stopped. “You were looking for me to ask me that?”
I nodded. He opened his mouth, closed it with a sigh, then opened it again and said: “In the Center.”
“Where exactly?”
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?”
I tilted my jaw in the direction of the nearest tavern. “Let’s have a beer.”
“I can’t. I have to go to work.”
“How about later?”
“Not today, not tomorrow. We’re getting some new women in.” He checked his watch. “I should have been there quite some time ago.”
“All right. But if nothing else, tell me how the game went.”
“What game?”
“Becker against—”
“Oh, that … I didn’t watch it to the end. But someone called. Guy called—something to do with trees … Baum?”
<
br /> “Weidenbusch?”
“Possible. Says it’s urgent. Later.”
Just as Slibulsky disappeared in the crowd, an elderly gentleman wearing a red velvet bow tie appeared in front of me and flashed the inside of his waistcoat with its assortment of wristwatches. “Genuine Swiss watches, Monsieur.”
I bought a particularly ostentatious one, went into a bar and asked for a beer and a corkscrew. Then I lit a cigarette. How deep should the shit get that Slibulsky had gotten himself into before I would decide not to help him crawl back out of it? I was still pondering that when the waiter came back with my order. He was a small fat fellow with greasy hair combed straight back and an equally greasy apron. After he had taken my money, he pointed at the corkscrew and asked me morosely: “You going to clean your fingernails with it?”
I shook my head. “I want to scratch a dedication into the back of a watch.”
“Oh, I see … Well, I was just thinking, I clean mine with it all the time, and we’ve only got one of them here, and I wouldn’t really like it if other people—”
“Not to worry.”
He growled, “Never mind me, I’m a little strange in some ways,” and disappeared. I looked at my beer. It looked quite normal, really, but I pushed it aside and proceeded to scratch fOR MANNE into the back plate of the watch.
A little later I left the bar and drove home to change clothes.
10
The voice on the intercom said: “Who is there, please?”
“The gardener from Gellersheim.”
“Who, please?”
I repeated my phrase and was told to wait. Minutes passed, then the voice returned: “With whom do you wish to speak?”
“Mr. Schmitz.”
“Sorry, but Mr. Schmitz isn’t here.”
“His secretary?”
“Mr. Olschewski isn’t here, either.”
“Did you take a good look?”
One Man, One Murder Page 7
