I went back to the field, sat down on the edge of an overturned bench, and lit a cigarette. I had smoked about half of it when, some thirty yards into the woods, two headlights appeared. I took cover.
The silver Toyota jeep stood in front of a concrete wall with a gray steel door. The wall was set into a hillock overgrown with shrubs. I had detected no movement for the last ten minutes.
I was huddling behind a tree, my coat collar turned up, the Beretta in my lap. I regretted my choice of shoes; my feet felt like dead fish. After another ten minutes I decided I’d had enough. Cautiously, my shooting iron at the ready, I ran from one tree to the next until I reached the running board of the jeep.
Brimming ashtrays, dozens of music cassettes, two empty Bacardi bottles, boxing and racing magazines, a dog muzzle, and a box of dog food. A plastic guitar and a heart made out of fabric dangled from the rearview mirror. A sticker on one of the side windows said Afri-Cola All the Way to the Oder. Suddenly the steel door opened and a white beast with a porcine face slipped outside. I crawled under the jeep, but the creature had noticed me. On short, bowed legs it waddled up, stopped in front of me, and looked at me out of blood-shot eye slits. He looked bored, did not growl, didn’t even seem to breathe. He just stood there and stared. Heavy footsteps approached, and a martial voice called out: “Come on, Rambo!” But Rambo didn’t come. Rambo kept his eyes on me and yawned. This caused his head to split into two halves and show a whole army of small white teeth, shiny as knife points.
“Rambo!” The footsteps grew fainter. Rambo stayed where he was. In slow motion I tried to raise the Beretta. My heart was racing. Rambo observed my movements without any sign of interest.
“Come on!” Thinking along the lines of “all right then, be a good Rambo,” I tried to smile at the beast and slipped the safety catch off my gun. Our eyes took each other’s measure. Just as I was about to pull the trigger, Rambo grabbed me. He did not bite, he grabbed. Like a wolf trap—just once. And held on, just like a wolf trap. My shot went wide of the mark. I lay on the ground, screaming, my arm between his jaws. The teeth had penetrated my sleeves and embedded themselves directly in my flesh. Granted, he did not bite my arm off. Calmly, without any particular effort, he stood above me. A dog who tore flesh the way other dogs dozed in the sun. Twigs were cracking behind me. Crazed with pain, I roared: “Get your fucking dog off of me!” I tried to see the asshole who was his master, but Rambo didn’t let me. Whoever that asshole was, I hated him, hated him even more than I hated his bull terrier. There was a draft of air, my skull exploded, and I zoomed into the void.
“Wake up, my friend. Wake up …”
A smooth warm hand stroked my forehead. I squinted.
At first I didn’t see anything, and when my eyes focused, all I saw was concrete. Concrete ceiling, concrete walls, even my head seemed filled with concrete. Fluorescent lights glared from the walls around me. I remembered the generator. The room was approximately twenty by sixty feet. No windows and no sign of any heating or anything else. To the left and right, along the walls, sat some thirty people on rough wooden benches, giving me questioning looks. On the floor between the benches three children were playing with marbles. Now and again the marbles clicked and there was a brief whispered exchange. Otherwise all was quiet.
The hand touched me again. I forced my head to turn a little and looked into the wrinkled face of a black man who held me on his lap and quietly repeated his “wake up”. His voice had the reassuring timbre of smokers who have managed to grow old. While I tried my best to comply with his wish, a woman in a glittering red outfit whispered something in Arabic, and a fat guy next to her nodded. It seemed to me they had decided I wouldn’t be much help.
After what seemed a long time. I managed to sit up. Keeping my eyes closed, I managed to find a cigarette and put it in my mouth. The back of my head felt funny, and when I squeezed it, it oozed red liquid. The black man gave me a light and smiled. He had to be at least seventy. His hair was short, gray, and wiry, and he wore a dark blue suit with a handkerchief in his breast pocket, shirt and tie, patent leather shoes, and a whiff of expensive perfume. Next to me in my muddy and bloody clothes—my right sleeve hung in shreds—he looked like one of the truly wealthy who find it amusing to mingle with the common folk sometimes and to enjoy a hot dog in their company. I smoked and examined the consequences of Rambo’s repulsion of the Turkish invasion. Gingerly I picked bits of fabric out of the wound and tried to keep my arm elevated. Then I scanned the silent circle of faces. The place felt like a cross between a dentist’s waiting room and an air-raid shelter.
I cleared my throat. “Is there, by any chance, a lady here by the name of Sri Dao Rakdee?”
No one answered. Nothing changed in the expressions of three Thai women huddling in a corner. Before I had recovered from my surprise and disappointment, a fellow with two black brushstrokes under his nose and a lot of gold in his face asked me: “Who are you?”
“Kemal Kayankaya, private investigator.”
Now all of them looked startled. The children stopped tossing marbles, and my Samaritan moved a little farther from me. From all sides came the choral exclamation: “Police!?”
I shook my head very gently. “No.”
Deep breaths. A pause, then the next question: “Are you here for papers?”
That was the glitter lady.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Larsson who claims he is able to provide people with forged identity papers.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Aren’t you here because you don’t have residence permits?”
Some people looked tense again, others avoided my eyes.
All of them acted as if the question did not apply to them. I pointed at the door: “Is it locked?”
A lean character out of a jeans ad, with lots of patches on his jacket and Walkman earphones round his neck, stood up and said: “What if it is? It’s for protection. So no one can find us—it’s quite all right.” He repeated that for emphasis: “Totally perfectly all right.”
“But what if no one at all comes to find you? And they just forget about you? I assume that Mr. Larsson, or whatever his name is, has already received his fee?”
“He even got our jewelry,” the glittering lady lamented.
“All our jewelry!”
“Oh, that jewelry. He just took it because most of us didn’t have enough money. He let me keep my Walkman.”
My adoptive father scratched his chin.
“That’s just a piece of plastic.”
The jeans guy gave him a contemptuous look.
“Just like your patent leather pumps, Grandpa. Haven’t seen a pair of those since we had to leave Iran ten years ago. You’re totally retro, Gramps, totally retro—what do you want a German passport for? Go back to Oogah-Boogah and pick bananas.”
The old man smiled.
“We’re all here for the same reason.”
“Sure.…” The guy looked around. “Only I’m not as scared as you are. This Larsson is on the level. I had a word with him yesterday, I told him that I am Ramin Ben Alam, so don’t even dream about fucking us over. He heard me. Then we talked about movies, Eddie Murphy and so on.”
“You’ve been locked in here since yesterday?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“And before that, you were downstairs in the villa?”
He nodded.
“Did Larsson explain why you had to move?”
“Because of that neighbor. The old bag called the cops.”
I forgot my demolished skull and leaned forward. “Really?”
“Right. I told you, we’re here for our own protection.”
Suddenly it dawned on me why the immigration office had no file on Rakdee when I visited them. And that wasn’t the only thing that dawned on me. But the question remained: what was going to happen now? I leaned back slowly and carefully.
“When will you receive your papers?”
“Tonight.”
He beamed. “Then we’ll party. First a great dinner with my girlfriend, and then we’ll disco down at the Marilyn.” He took a couple of dance steps, wiggled his hips and croaked, in English, “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad—yeah.…”
People observed him with pity. He tossed his head back. “Yeah, with my girlfriend Gabi, Gabi Schmittke!”
I extinguished my cigarette butt. “This Larsson, did he have tattoos on his arms?”
The old man sitting next to me nodded.
“And what does the guy look like who brought me in?”
Two girls in headscarves giggled. A little fellow with a goatee got up and raised his arms to indicate something as wide as a wardrobe. “Much meat, much beard, and much, much smell.”
I sighed. Then I looked around. “I don’t suppose he brought you anything to eat or drink?”
No response. The goateed fellow sat down again.
“And what if he won’t bring you anything tonight, either? What if he won’t be back, ever?”
People stared at the floor. I got up, swayed to the door and checked if it could be dealt with. One might as well have tried to kick the concrete wall in. When I turned back, the children were clinging to their voluminous mother. One of them was crying, her face smeared with bunker dust and tears. The other two watched me with wide-open eyes.
Suddenly I got furious. “ ‘So no one can find you’—what a great idea! Larsson has collected his money, you haven’t told anyone who you were going to meet, and the cops are glad that you’re gone.” I spread out my hands and barked: “We’ll all die of suffocation here, most likely!”
Now the other two kids were crying, too, and a palpable atmosphere of fear spread in the room. Even the kid in jeans looked troubled. The dream of a life outside the hells of Beirut, Teheran, Colombo, or Istanbul seemed to vanish into thin air. The military, murdered relatives, torture, and hunger were suddenly present. Someone screamed. The old man closed his eyes.
They had fled. They had traveled halfway around the world with two suitcases. They had filled out applications, they had been rejected, they had applied again and had been rejected again, they had sought shelter in barns or shared a room with nine others. They had gone into hiding and lived without papers, and now they wanted to get at least these forged ones. Out of the void they had conjured up three thousand marks—they had tried everything just to be able to say, one day: tomorrow I’ll sleep late, or I’ll save up for a video recorder, I should be able to get one next year, or this weekend I’ll get so smashed I’ll crawl home, and if a cop shows up, I’ll just stand up and pull out my wallet. But they never had a chance. Those who were rejected would remain so: the refugee “in whose native culture torture is a common and traditional method of interrogation:” the refugee “who, if he had not become politically active, need not have feared reprisals—and who was fully conscious of the risks of his activity;” and the “economic asylum seeker” who is labeled a parasite in the world of German supermarkets, as if hunger and poverty were a kind of “human right” for three quarters of the planet’s population. He or she was merely the ghost of the “at our expense” notion, never mind the fact that we have lived for centuries at his expense, and that he is trying to go where “our” pedestrian malls, “our” air force and “our” opera houses have been built—at his expense. He is a “parasite,” never mind that coffee, rubber heels, and metal ores do not grow in the forests of Bavaria. Sooner or later these people would be caught and put on the next plane out. But now they had been cheated out of even that fate. While I lit another smoke, most of the others tried to calm down the screaming guy. The kids’ mother uttered an excited burst of Arabic. Then she started scolding me.
“Why are you putting such bad thoughts into our heads?” And, pointing at the weeping children: “See what you’ve done!”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. In the meantime, they had made the man lie down on a bench. Staring up at the ceiling he talked, in a breathless, monotonous blend of English and Tamil, about his native village. As far as I could understand, that village no longer existed, and he had been forced to do something to his daughter. The daughter did no longer exist, either. He was the only survivor of his family.
I sat down next to the old man who had erected an invisible wall around himself. Arms crossed over his chest, his gaze fixed on his patent leather shoes, he whispered:
“You shouldn’t have said that. This is a room full of very many people. There’s no room for fear.” And, after a pause: “You think we are stupid, but we have no choice in the matter.” Then he got up, walked across the circle of people who looked as if they were at their wits’ end, reached the man from the village, and put his hand on the man’s forehead.
I clenched my teeth. Was it my fault that we were cooped up in this room? And wouldn’t I be a victim, too, when we ran out of air? They could all go fuck themselves, for all I cared. I closed my eyes, chain-smoked, and hoped that someone would come over and tell me to stop polluting the air, giving me an excuse to punch them in the nose. But no one came. Or at least, no one came the way I had imagined.
After my fourth cigarette I heard the first siren. Then the second, the third, finally a whole concert. They approached rapidly, emitted one final howl, and fell silent. Then there was engine noise; there were commands and voices through megaphones, barking dogs and footsteps. A key turned in the lock, the door opened. I tossed the butt and listened to a whole bag of pennies dropping in my head.
The first man to enter was less than five feet tall, thin as a board and just as stiff. His uniform fit him like a second skin. A neat oval of facial hair framed his mouth; otherwise he was clean-shaven and exuded one of those masculine fragrances that make the air taste like soap. Legs far apart, he stood in the doorframe, holding a pistol in his right, a radio transmitter in his left hand. When he spoke it sounded as if he was chewing on ice cubes. “On your feet, chop chop, get in line. Need to check your papers.” Two men in uniform armed with submachine guns took up positions to the right and the left of the door. I was one of those who remained seated.
“Come on, I told you, chop chop!”
“Good afternoon. Rank and serial number, please, or I won’t comply.”
The submachine guns swiveled quickly to point at my chest. The faces above them, adolescent and pimply, looked as if they thought they had to save the world, at the very least, and were pretty damn scared by the prospect. Trigger fingers jerked nervously back and forth.
“And tell your kids to put their toys down. We don’t want them to pull the trigger by mistake.”
The commanding officer dissected me with his eyes. Then he moved his chin in my direction, and his cohorts rushed forward. In no time at all they pulled me off the bench, made me stand between them, and patted me down. I no longer had my Beretta, and my wallet was gone, too. My I.D. was in the wallet. With short, abrupt steps, the commanding officer came up and stopped right in front of me. I could feel his breath on my face; it smelled of peppermint. Old Spice and peppermint. It was a knockout.
“Your I.D.”
“Your serial number.”
“One one two eight one eight. Inspector Hagebrecht. Your I.D.”
“Someone stole it.”
“Under arrest.”
“Just a minute!” I resisted. I stopped when they were about to break my arms. “I’m a German citizen.”
A thin smile appeared on his face.
“A likely story. Take him away.”
“When your boss hears about this, he’ll take your head off. Then you’ll be just four feet—ouch! I bet you’re supposed to take care of this business as discreetly as possible. Good luck with telling your boss that Kemal Kayankaya is one of your refugees! Better start practicing …”
Minutes later I had been handcuffed and put on the bus, next to a guard, and watched through the barred windows how people were escorted out of the bunker, one by one. Some had to be punched to make them move, others were carried, many were weeping.
The children came last. Separated from their mother, they were dragged into a car. They were screaming. Their marbles scattered onto the muddy ground and lay there, blinking. I turned to my guard.
“Who sent you here?”
Staring straight ahead, his chin rigid, his cap pulled down low over his forehead, he mumbled: “Official secret.”
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you that your strike force leader had a key to that bunker?”
“Not within the parameters of my task to find that strange.”
After Hagebrecht had latched the bunker door and given marching orders, the vehicle column took off. We drove along the road through the woods back to the Gellersheim soccer field. I saw my Opel and through its back window the party angel. She was still fast asleep. We drove through Gellersheim and on to the autobahn. The driver turned on the radio, and the officers nodded their heads to the rhythms of Bavarian brass band music. It was raining. At the Frankfurt intersection we turned off in the direction of the airport.
12
“… and I was going to Mannheim today. Haven’t missed a game this year, not one minute. Even in Dortmund, I was there to the very end. And what an end it was. They scored six goals against us-six! Just imagine … After that I was quite fed up, but then—well, I just felt I couldn’t leave the guys in the lurch, just like that. So I kept on going, every Saturday, and now we’ve got the worst behind us. With Bein and Falkenmayer on board, we may even make it to the UEFA Cup next year, or we get the championship, and then we’ll be back on the international scene, and then—” He stopped and looked at the iron bars. Behind them lay an empty landing with green walls and three yellow light fixtures. The shadows cast by the bars divided our cell into narrow segments. Again, no windows. A faucet stuck out of one wall, and next to it there was a dirty white plastic toilet. Seventeen of us were sitting there on iron bedsteads, gray blankets wrapped around our shoulders. People smoked in silence. The women had been locked up in another cell down the hall. Once in a while one of them would call out, and one of the men would answer. It sounded like a conversation between people who were drowning. We had been there for four hours. A female officer had brought us some bread.
One Man, One Murder Page 9
