“Excuse me?”
On the third floor of the fortress-like building a light went out and a curtain moved.
“Please inform the absent gentlemen that if they don’t become present in one minute, I’ll tell the police what I found while planting bulbs.”
“And what was that, if I may ask?”
“A watch.”
“Just a moment, please.”
A Jaguar slid up the hill, driving on its parking lights, and disappeared a hundred yards farther up in a small cypress grove. In the moonlit night, the outlines of the treetops looked like cutouts against the sky. I could just make out a watchman’s hut. Looking in the other direction, there was a view of Frankfurt, a gigantic lit-up birthday cake twenty miles away. Up here it suddenly felt comforting to be an inhabitant of that cake.
I had lit a cigarette and smoked half of it when the intercom crackled on again: “Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think that a watch found in the garden would be of much interest to the absent gentlemen.”
“But it might be if they were told that there was a man attached to that watch.”
“You mean,” he cleared his throat, “next to the bulbs you were planting?”
“Yes.”
A moment later, he pressed the buzzer, and I proceeded up the paved walk to the front entrance. The massive oak door swung open, and my salt-and-pepper interlocutor bade me enter. “Please follow me, sir.”
We crossed the entrance hall and walked down a corridor to the library. Books from floor to ceiling on all four walls, four cordovan armchairs on the dark brown parquet floor. Next to each armchair stood a small table with a lamp and an ashtray; in the middle of the room there was a big table with six chairs. Open on the table, next to further ashtrays, lay an old leather-bound tome.
“Have a seat, sir. He’ll be with you in a moment.”
He left the room and closed the door. After I had walked along the shelves for a while, I sat down in front of the old tome and read. On the lam from the cops, an old geezer was carrying an unconscious guy through the sewers of Paris. The water reached to his hips, and the ground under his feet was uneven and muddy. Just as he saw the lantern carried by a police sergeant and stopped to squeeze himself close to the wall, a voice behind me said: “You want to see me?”
I spun around, and there he stood: a small, hollow-cheeked gentleman with thin reddish blond hair and a tic that kept twitching his head to one side every time he spoke, as if a fly had landed on his face. He was wearing a gray three-piece suit with a dark blue ascot and a silver watch chain across his vest. Arms crossed, right foot slightly forward, on his face an expression of calm combativeness, he stood there against the red and brown background of the wall of books looking like a not entirely successful portrait of royalty—Eberhard Schmitz, the king of the railway station district.
Clumsily, I pointed at the book. “I was reading—very suspenseful.…” I nodded.
He smiled. Then he walked around the table, sat down across from me and pulled a silver case from his vest pocket. It opened with a dignified click, and he offered me a selection of various brands of cigarettes. “Would you like one?”
There was something slightly awesome about his nervous tic. I picked an unfiltered number of a brand I didn’t know. During the subsequent ceremony which consisted of his selecting a cigarette, tapping it against his thumbnail, lighting mine, lighting his, and putting the lighter back in his pocket, the gaze of his yellow eyes never left my face. Finally, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and remarked, with a quick glance at the book: “I’m glad to see that gardeners are able to appreciate things beyond mowed lawns.”
“Yes, indeed.” I nodded again. “The only problem is that I’m in no position to tell you what gardeners appreciate.”
“You’re saying that you have as much in common with gardeners as I have with persons who do not take action when strangers trespass on their property without permission?”
“That’s about it. Even though I don’t know whom you’re referring to.”
“I’m referring to you.”
“Then I may assume that the people whose tracks I found in Gellersheim were no strangers to you? That they had been lodged there with your consent?”
A pause. He used the ashtray, leaned back and ran his palm across the edge of the table, as if to see how sharp it was.
“Who are you?”
“Kemal Kayankaya, private investigator.”
“Private investigator …” He dragged on his cigarette and disappeared for a moment in a cloud of smoke. “One of those dirty types who make most of their money through blackmail.”
“There’s bad apples in every barrel. Private investigators, property owners—you name it. I once saw a Salvation Army officer empty a collection box into his own pocket, and—”
He cut me off. “Let’s get down to business.”
I extinguished my cigarette and took the ostentatious watch out of my pocket. I slid it across the table.
“I found it on a dead man. In your house. And there was enough stew left for half a regiment. Tell me where those people are now, and I’ll give you time to remove the corpse.”
After he had examined the watch from all sides, he carefully put it back on the table and shook his head.
“That house has stood empty for three years. Only the gardener has a key.”
“That’s not what I understood from your secretary.”
“It must have been a misunderstanding.”
“What about the dead man?”
He stressed each word separately: “That, too, was a misunderstanding.”
“So be it. Guess I’ll go to the police, to clarify all the misunderstandings.”
I reached for the watch but he was faster. “You’ll leave that here.”
“You like it that much? I can tell you where you can get one. Quite cheaply, too.”
He ignored me and slipped the watch into his breast pocket, pulling out a checkbook with the same motion. “You won’t go to the police. At this time, I can’t afford any publicity, no matter how far-fetched.” While the butt of his cigarette glowed and darkened in the ashtray, and I wondered if he’d really let me off so easily, he made out a check for twenty thousand marks.
He handed it to me, and my jaw dropped. “Holy smoke! It has to be a major misunderstanding.”
With a condescending little smile, he put his fountain pen and check book back where they belonged, pushed himself away from the table, and stood up. “I’m used to such affairs, and I know that I can save myself a lot of grief by spending a few dimes. Dimes—you understand?”
I nodded. “Sure. Dimes.” I folded the check. He waited until I had put it in my wallet. Then he pointed at the door. I would have liked to find out the title of the book about the old geezer, but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask. As we walked out into the entrance hall he looked almost contented. “You see—you are a blackmailer.”
“You don’t want to know why I searched your house? It doesn’t interest you at all?”
“No, it doesn’t.” We walked a couple of steps.
“What if I go to the police anyway?”
He stopped and looked down at the floor. For several seconds, all that was heard was the sound of our breathing. Finally, he looked at me and said, with a mildly sad tinge to his voice: “Listen carefully, young man. You better not do that, if you want to cross a street safely in this city, or in this country, or anywhere in the world. I am a peace-loving man—hence that check—but a mere hint from me would suffice to wipe you off the face of the earth. In case you haven’t quite got the picture: You’re talking to Eberhard Schmitz. And who are you? There’s a difference. One of the greatest magnitude.”
“For sure.” I nodded, for the last time. “You may well be right about that.” Then I pointed at his chest. “But we’ll both die of lung cancer.”
11
Loaded down with sandwiches,
cookies, chocolate, newspapers, a bottle of Scotch, and two bottles of water, I left the main railway station. It was almost ten-thirty at night. I hurried across the square and crossed the first street. At the second crossing I had to stop for a herd of tourist buses. Suddenly a bell rang behind me, and someone screeched hysterically: “Can’t you see? This is a bicycle lane!”
I whipped around and roared: “Don’t you know how to ride that thing? You’ve got ten yards leeway there.”
The bicyclist braked, turned, and approached me with a stem missionary look on his face. It was a young man in a green-glittering Fifties-style outfit, stiff blow-dried hair, and a T-shirt that said Born to Be Wild.
“This is a bicycle lane. It’s for bicycles. I could have knocked you down, and it would have been your fault,” he informed me, nodding to his own words and coming to a stop in front of me. It was obvious that he expected some sign of gratitude or remorse, and it seemed to me that he would have liked to prolong our conversation.
I left him standing and ran across the street to my car. As I passed him a short while later behind the railway station, I was tempted to show him a perfectly legal brake test.
I drove past the convention building and the Plaza Hotel and on to the autobahn, away from the city lights into dark blue night. I passed the time by trying to calculate how long twenty thousand marks would last in some southern clime. If I had kept going, and the Opel had held up, which was unlikely, I could have been sitting under a straw roof on a beach the following morning, enjoying my shrimp and white wine in the company of a waitress and Whitney Houston on the jukebox. I leaned back. It was warm in the car, and the engine was humming almost perfectly. The waitress came to my table and stayed there all the way to the Gellersheim exit.
I stopped by the first phone booth to call Weidenbusch. His phone rang seven times.
“Yes, hello?”
“Kayankaya. Have you abandoned your position?”
“No, no—I was just taking a bath.”
“Well, what’s up?”
“What do you mean?”
There was a tremor in his voice. He must have had a hard day, probably sitting next to the phone, stripping his necktie down to individual fibers, chewing on one piece of peppermint candy after another.
“You did call me this afternoon.”
“Oh, yes. I just wanted to know what you had found out.”
“A whole lot. If I’m not totally mistaken, you’ll have your girlfriend back soon.”
His “Really?” sounded more frightened than delighted. I was taken aback. “Maybe you’re not so happy about that?”
“No, no …” There was a moment’s silence. Then he took a deep breath and said:
“But, you see, I’ve been thinking about all of it today. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it was not a good idea.”
“What wasn’t a good idea?”
“Sri Dao and me. There’s the language problem, and, and God knows what might come up. Her family, her background—those really are imponderables. Like right now, me having to deal with gangsters.”
“Listen, Weidenbusch, I understand that you’re a wreck, but—”
“No, no, it’ll be better for us to separate. I also talked it over with my mother …” A pause. I looked around for the herd of wild horses that I felt galloping over my prone body. There was the sound of paper rustling at the other end of the line.
“In any case, I’ve decided to pay you for four working days and a per diem of three hundred, that’s eleven hundred altogether. If you subtract the five hundred I gave you this morning, I owe you six hundred. I’ll mail you the check, you’ll get it by the end of the week.”
“Excellent. But what do I do about your girlfriend?”
“Well, I thought—”
“You thought I’d go home now and see if there’s anything good on the tube? Let me tell you what I’m going to do: I’ll go on looking for your friend, and when I’ve found her, I’ll slap her around and tell her greetings from Mr. Weidenbusch. I’ll explain to her that it’s in the language of touch, and love, et cetera.”
“Please don’t be so cynical! This has not be an easy decision for me.”
“You don’t say.”
I was about to hang up when he said: “Wait!” And, after a moment’s silence: “Let me know, in any case. Maybe I’m just a little nervous right now. And promise you won’t go to the police—no matter what happens.”
Back in the car, I sat there for a thoughtful moment, jingling my car keys.
I parked the Opel in front of Theo Manz Cinema Production and pushed the seat back. Then I put on a black knitted hat, took out my provisions and the Scotch, and settled down to dinner. The lights were still on at Mrs. Olga’s, and Theo Manz was throwing a party. A long line of upper middle class vehicles were parked along the curb. Rolling Stones songs roared out of the windows, and from time to time a chorus of female voices screeched along: “I can’t get no satisfaction” and other select passages. Number Six was completely dark. When I was done eating, I opened the Scotch and began my vigil. The brick villa stood diagonally in front of me, and I could see the street in my rearview mirror. No matter whom Eberhard Schmitz sent along to dispose of the corpse, I would not miss him. It occurred to me that I should have asked Weidenbusch if Larsson had tattoos on his arms.
I took a sip and lit a cigarette. Weidenbusch. Slibulsky. Dietzenbach. Slibulsky, again, and McEnroe. The streetlights went out at midnight. My bottle was down to three quarters. I turned on the radio. Music after midnight, Udo Jürgens on every wavelength: “Show me the place where everybody gets along …” I turned the radio off. A quarreling couple came out of the Manz residence, waving their arms, running to their car. The man opened the door for her, almost tearing it off its hinges. “I said let’s go kick the ball around on Saturday! I didn’t say anything about balling!”
“Oh, Marita plays soccer?”
They leaned on the roof of the car on opposite sides, each of their necks stretched out like a chicken’s, and yelled the street awake.
“Not Marita, her friend, that stupid serial director!”
“So that’s what it’s come to: you make a date to play soccer with a ‘stupid serial director?’ ”
“Yes! It so happens that I wrote that serial!”
Doors slammed, tires squealed. The car shot through the intersection at sixty miles an hour.
I took out another cigarette. I began to ask myself if Schmitz had been so sure his check had withdrawn me from circulation that he had simply gone to bed. The clock on the dashboard told me it was twelve-thirty. I yawned. The sky was overcast again, and the night was pitch-dark. I had some more Scotch, smoked, and stared at the dark outline of the villa. At some point, the bottle must have slipped out of my grasp.
When I woke up, it was dawn. Someone was knocking on the car door, and I heard a voice: “ ‘scuse me, but I saw your Frankfurt plates—could you, could you give me a ride, maybe? Just to get away from here.”
I needed a moment to remember where I was and what I was doing. I roused myself and saw a slightly bedraggled angel behind the side window. Her make-up was smeared and her hairdo had disintegrated into loose strands that hung down around her face. She was banging on the door with a high-heeled shoe. “I can pay you for the gas …” It looked like the party was over.
I looked past her at Schmitz’s villa. The first thing I saw was a silver-colored Toyota jeep standing in the drive. Then I noticed that the lights were on the ground floor. I unlocked the door while my new acquaintance mumbled, “Oh, thank you so much!” I jumped out into the street.
“Sorry, dear. You better look for a cab.”
I was off to a flying start. It was miserably cold, and drizzly rain struck my face. Up over the fence alongside the service entrance, across the alarm wire, from tree to tree and past the terrace—I arrived at the sliding door in no time. The shutters were closed, and I could only see thin streaks of light. I put my ear to the wall. Somewher
e there was a faint padding sound. After two or three minutes, the sound approached, took a turn right next to me, and stopped with a muted impact. Then nothing happened for quite a while until a quiet voice spoke: “Hello? Yes, I’ve checked everywhere. Nothing. Must’ve been a hoax. Should I go back to the soccer field? Maybe they know something about it. The dishes? Wait a minute, I’m not a cleaning woman. Besides, that’s Manne’s job. Nonsense, he’ll show up again. All right, all right, but I’ll make Manne pay for this. Later.”
Soon after that the padding resumed, grew fainter, faded away. I straightened my back. I had two choices. If I took my Beretta and went down to the basement and forced the guy whose voice I had heard to take me to the refugees, he would get to see me; even though I wasn’t quaking in my shoes, I did not take Schmitz’s warning lightly. The less contact I had with his people the better. The second choice was the better one. After all, I was just trying to find that woman; at this point, my ambition did not extend to laying bare the corruption of an entire city.
I snuck back to the Opel. Now it was almost daylight.
I turned off the engine. The party angel was fast asleep in the back seat. I pulled out a blanket from under the passenger seat and covered her up with it. Her features had composed themselves, and she had curled up looking almost contented in a setting of bits of foam rubber bursting out of the seams of the seat, old newspapers, and an oilcan. Hers was the kind of cool beauty one could admire in practically every movie of the past; it has now been replaced by so-called faces with character. Her eyelashes spread over her cheeks like fans, and she wore a string of pearls around her neck. I wouldn’t have minded taking her back to Frankfurt. I also didn’t mind her sleeping in my car. Before it occurred to me to have any objections against dashing back into the drizzly cold, I faced the dashboard again, sipped a little Scotch, and got out.
FIRST FC GELLERSHEIM was what the faded red letters said on the wall of the clubhouse. Iron bars protected the window of the small dusty room. I saw a row of cheap trophies arrayed on the back wall. I turned and looked across the empty soccer field. Overturned and rotting wooden benches lay next to the sidelines, the corner flag posts were broken, and a torn goal-net fluttered in the wind. The field had deteriorated to scattered tussocks of grass. I kicked an empty beer. bottle across the sand and scanned the surrounding woods. The only sound I heard was a hardly perceptible hum. I attributed it to my own head, crossed the penalty area, and found a muddy road. Soon there were nothing but trees on both sides, with little light filtering down from the treetops. I found myself in a desolate half-darkness, twigs crackling underfoot. I decided that this had not been a good idea and turned back. This time I passed the clubhouse on its rearside which sported the remains of a derelict shack: the former locker room. Half of its roof had caved in and piles of splintered glass lay under the gaping windows. I stopped. No head in the world could generate a hum this loud. This was the hum of a generator. I found it under a lean- to behind the locker room. For whom or what was it generating electricity? The non-existent floodlights? Or the empty lidless freezer next to the club bar counter?
One Man, One Murder Page 8
