One Man, One Murder

by Jakob Arjouni

  I waved my thumb. “Down the moving walkway, turn right, go outside, cross the parking lot. If they don’t let you in, ask for Commissioner Höttges and mention my name.”

  “But—you’re not coming with me?”

  I shook my head. “Your girlfriend isn’t there. She is somewhere else.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I can’t. I just do.”

  “Does that mean you’ll go on looking for her?”

  “Are you about to offer me another check?”

  “No! Just because …” He ran the tip of his tongue across his upper lip. Suddenly his demeanor changed. He got agitated: “You treat me as if I were one of your suspects!”

  Then, furious: “But it was I who hired you, and if I feel like it, I can fire you, too!”

  “Any time. Would you like to settle our accounts right now?”

  Undecided, he fussed with his eyeglasses. Then he jammed them back on. “I’m going to the cells. You’ll receive your check, as agreed, and since we probably won’t meet again—”

  He hesitated. Should he shake hands or just leave with a nod?

  I waved a piece of toast at him. “If someone is exerting some kind of pressure on you because of Mrs. Rakdee—I mean, someone apart from your mother—you better tell me about it.”

  He looked completely bewildered. “Don’t you understand? You’re fired!”

  With that, he turned and disappeared into the gray-green mass of a group of senior tourists. I sat there and finished my toast. Soon after that the first journalists arrived. Loaded down with cameras, they trotted through the hall like a bunch of scared chickens, generating excitement among both travelers and personnel. A bomb, hijackers, the Prince of Monaco, or the Kessler Twins? Hundreds of pairs of eyes scanned doors, counters, and seats. Then I spotted Benjamin Weiss. His six-and-a-half-foot tall figure was clearly visible among a group in colorful outfits who stormed through the sliding doors carrying stacks of paper under their arms and immediately started leafleting everybody. I waved and Weiss shuffled over. He was bundled up in an overcoat, scarf, and knitted cap, and what was visible of his face seemed to cry out for bed rest and hot lemon juice. He sank into a chair next to me, stretched his legs, and muttered: “May I have a cigarette?”

  “Not the best thing, in your condition—?”

  He repeated his request, emphatically.

  I lit one and handed it to him. He took a deep drag and exhaled the smoke slowly.

  “First one in three days. In bed, it’s not so bad, but …” He took a second drag. “I’ve been over there. They’re holding exactly thirty-three of them. Three attorneys are talking with them now. The Protestant honcho has promised to help; the Catholic one is at a Silesian Displaced Persons dinner with Wallmann. The entire Social Democrat party is recording a disc for their election campaign, and the refugee ombudsman of the Greens is having a baby. Her replacement doesn’t have a car but is trying to get here soon. What else—oh yes, the Multicultural Office: there, the cleaning woman answers the phone—she doesn’t have a whole lot of German, but as far as I could make out, her employers are attending the opening of a castanet exhibit.…” He stopped and sucked on his cigarette.

  “You found all that out in half an hour?”

  “Most of it. The rest I had no trouble making up. Now it’s your turn.”

  While Weiss kept sliding deeper into his chair, and his cap slowly descended over his eyebrows, I gave a brief description of the alleged forgery gang’s M.O., without mentioning names or localities, and wound up by telling him: “There’s nothing that can be done legally, but I’ll try to get their money and jewelry back.”

  Glassy-eyed, Weiss stared into space for a while. Then he sighed and straightened up. “Let’s see what the attorneys can do about it. I’m going back to talk to them. Will I see you again today?”

  “When I’ve found their money.”

  “I’ll probably stay here overnight.” He wrapped the scarf tighter around his neck. “In case I don’t see you again—”

  “—I’ll come by every day and smuggle a pack of smokes

  into your bed.”

  “Do that. So,” he raised his arm feebly, “good luck.”

  “The same to you.”

  He left, and I walked to the exit. A damp gust of wind met me at the door. I turned up my collar and hailed a cab with my good arm. “To the nearest hospital.”

  “Where’s Heinz?”

  “Dunno.”

  I helped myself to a small open-face cheese sandwich.

  “Is Slibulsky here?”

  “Don’t know that either.”

  “Charlie?”

  “I’m not allowed to know.”

  I took a bite, chewed, studied her. She was in her early forties, built like a sumo wrestler. She wore a wig and a pale blue dress with a flower pattern and busied herself knitting a vest for a dog. On the table next to her lay Kohl in fifty pieces.

  “So you’re Heinz’s wife?”

  The knitting needles stopped clicking, and two hooded eyes gave me the once-over.

  “If what you mean by that is that I get to push him down the Zeile once a week in his wheelchair—yes, I am. And I get him his videos, and on Mondays I get him his soccer weekly. But I don’t have to darn his socks. So, I can’t complain.”

  She pursed her lips in a hint of a smile. I smiled back, tossed two coins on the counter, and walked down the pink hallway past rows of female legs on both sides. Shoo-be-doo music trickled from speakers in the ceiling. It was almost eight-thirty in the evening. I joined the line of johns winding its way past the rooms and up the stairs all the way to the fourth floor and back. Up on the fourth, I stepped over a barrier that said “Private”, ascended two more landings and knocked on a rust-brown metal door. The door opened and Charlie peered out, a question mark on his face. He was wearing a white silk suit, no shirt, no shoes, and held a box of matchbox automobile models in one hand. When he recognized me, his mouth opened in amazement. Then he raised his arm in a welcoming gesture.

  “Hey, what do you know, it’s the little brown guy with the big mouth! Well, this is a surprise.” He shouted over his shoulder: “Sweetheart? We’ve got company. Two glasses, and a bottle of Asbach!” Then, back to me: “Let’s have a drink!”

  Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed my shoulder, kicked the door shut with his bare heel, and dragged me over to the couch. All over the glass table and the fluffy rug was an array of what looked like almost a thousand colorful little metal cars. On the table stood a bottle of rubbing alcohol next to a pile of white rags and a beaker filled with toothbrushes. While he kept kneading my shoulder with one hand, he picked up one of the cars with the other, held it up to the light, and exclaimed happily: “Nineteen seventy-one, yellow jeep, brown top, tow bar—isn’t it terrific?”

  “Super-terrific.”

  Carefully, he put the miniature back. “My collection. Eight hundred and ninety-two models. I clean ’em up every spring, it’s a job—but, snooper,” his hand waved across the colorful pile, “tell me, ever see anything like it?”

  “I need to have a word with you, Charlie.”

  That startled him.

  “I’m showing you my car collection, and you ‘need to have a word’?”

  “You got it.”

  His arm slid off my shoulder like a dead man’s. Then he flashed a grin. “I know what you need, snooper, you need a drink.” He patted my knee and snapped his fingers in the direction of the bathroom. “Sweetheart—what’s with those drinks?”

  “Coming right up, Charlie.”

  A girl entered the room. In her jeans, knit top, and gym shoes she looked no older than sixteen. She had a blue bow in her hair. She smiled politely at me and disappeared behind the bar. With her round snub-nosed face, small firm breasts, and an ass like two honeydew melons, she looked like a teenager who spends her mornings in the schoolyard, her afternoons at an ice cream parlor, and her evenings with the captain of the soccer
team. That impression was marred, however, by a big green bruise around her right eye and bright red scratch marks on her cheeks and neck. She had tried to cover all that up with make-up, but the result made her look like a monster.

  Charlie leaned back and gave me a wink. “Sweet, eh?”

  “A little worse for wear.”

  He wagged his head. “That’ll pass.” And, louder: “Right, sweetheart? In two or three days, I’ll have my princess back.”

  “Yes, Charlie.”

  “You know I didn’t mean any harm. On the contrary. It was just because I love you, and because I’m a proud man.”

  “Yes, Charlie.”

  “I don’t think you’d have found a guy like me in Klein-Mörlenbach. Right, sweetheart?”

  “Absolutely right.”

  After two snifters of Asbach had been set down next to the matchbox cars, and the girl had retired to the bed with a notepad and a pencil, we clinked glasses to eternal friendship. Then I asked him: “Do you know a guy who looks like a steam roller and answers to the name Axel?”

  “Sure do. Big Beef Axel. Was a pretty good heavyweight once. Now he deals in used cars and motorbikes.”

  “Including Toyotas?”

  “He drives one. Why?”

  “Is it a silver-colored jeep?”

  He raised his eyebrows suspiciously. “Are you trying to give me the third degree again?”

  “I just want to know if this Axel drives a silver Toyota jeep.”

  “What if he does? Is it against the law?”

  “Does the name Höttges mean anything to you?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Commissioner Höttges of the immigration police.”

  “Hey, man, am I a Negro? Why should I know any immigration cops?”

  “But when I mentioned the name Köberle to him, he didn’t seem particularly surprised.”

  “He didn’t, eh.… Listen,” he gave me the stare, “what’s all this bullshit?”

  “Yesterday, I came to see you about Mrs. Rakdee. Remember?”

  He groaned. “Oh, not that again.” He reached for the Asbach and leaned back. His toes toyed idly with the fluffy rug. “So? Did you find her?”

  “No. But I know who kidnapped her.”

  “Yeah?” He swirled the brandy in the snifter.

  “Yeah. A guy named Manne. But he’s just one of a gang. The others are Höttges, Axel, Slibulsky, and …”

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye. His surprise seemed genuine. His voice grew deep and ominous.

  “What are you telling me, snooper?”

  “They tell refugees, illegal aliens, that they can provide them with forged papers. The refugees pay three thousand marks a head, and then they get locked up in a predetermined location where Höttges and his guys come and pick them up. Today they got thirty of them; that’s a total of ninety thousand marks. It’s really a smart and simple scam … And I think your brother is the one who came up with it.”

  “Heinz did?”

  He grabbed my lapels and came so close that I felt his breath. “Say that again.”

  “Get your hands off me first.”

  “I’ll keep them on you as long as I please. So?”

  “A man by the name of Köberle is involved in this business. And if it isn’t you—”

  “Is there any evidence for that?”

  “No, but it fits, and it’s enough for the news hounds.”

  “The papers …?”

  He gave me a searching look, and his grip on me relaxed.

  Then he shook himself and hissed: “Man, if you’re shitting me, I’ll turn you into hamburger. But if it is true,” he let go of me, “my brother’s sold his last candy bar.”

  After another searching glance, he rushed to his closet and tossed shoes, socks, and a shiny gray suit into the room. The girl had almost stopped breathing. Hiding behind her notepad under the covers, she watched Charlie’s actions and seemed to consider if it would be wiser to pick up his things or to play dead. Suddenly he stopped and leaned against the closet door, his jaw jutting out at an angle.

  “Why are you telling me all that stuff?”

  “First of all because I want to know where the gang is hanging out now.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And secondly, as I told you, I don’t have any proof, and since the cops are involved in it, an official investigation would be over before it even began. Charlie, I want you to kick some ass.”

  His shoulders stretched the fabric of his white jacket. “Don’t worry, I will. But, you know,” he shuffled his feet on the rug, “it would be best not to go to the papers right away. I want to take care of this before my boss finds out about it. Otherwise it might look as if I had no control over my boys here.”

  I nodded. “Eberhard Schmitz wouldn’t like that.”

  Charlie looked at me. “No, he wouldn’t like it at all.” There was a curiously ecstatic expression in his eyes.

  “All right then. I’ll wait until tomorrow night.”

  His eyes cleared. A grateful smile.

  “You’re O.K., snooper.”

  While he changed, picked a shirt and checked his tie in front of a mirror, he kept up a steady stream of curses. I twirled a cigarette between my fingers and waited. “My brother’s in cahoots with the cops—God, I’m glad our Mom’s no longer alive. She was the greatest whore in all of Sachsenhausen—what a body … She was the toast of the whole fucking Occupation Zone. ‘Boys,’ she used to say, ‘boys, remember one thing: never tell the cops anything. Only a cowardly swine would call the cops. It was cops who dragged your grandpa to the ovens.’ ”

  He shook his head. “And now the fucking crip goes and helps them rip off bimbos …”

  He slewed around to glance at the bed. All that could be seen was a hank of hair.

  “Hey, you silly little cunt, pay attention when I’m talking about my family!”

  Slowly, her face emerged. “But Charlie, I’m listening.”

  He growled contemptuously, over his shoulder. “That’s what she always says. But all she really wants to do is write letters to her girlfriends, ‘Frankfurt is so exciting’ and ‘oh, I’m so happy here …’ ” He jabbed the air in front of her face with his index finger. “What would your friends say if they saw you looking like that? Eh?”

  And, while he took a .32 automatic out of a drawer in the bedside table: “And anyhow, what’s the use writing letters when you can pick up the phone.”

  The girl had pulled the covers over her head. The bedspread trembled like a sick dog. Charlie slapped the clip into the gun. “Don’t think I give a shit about your bawling.”

  I checked my watch. It was nine-fifteen.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where you headed with that cannon?”

  “Where …” He stuck the automatic in his waistband.

  “… Oh, have a beer, get a little fresh air …”

  “That suits me just fine. I could use a beer.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I got up and went to the window. It was raining again. The wind was blowing the rain almost horizontally down the street, and the wet windowpane made the neon signs look like runny watercolors. People huddled in entrance ways.

  “A little fresh air never hurt anyone.”

  Charlie scratched his ass pensively.

  “Just take care you don’t catch a cold.”

  14

  The cloud cover tore open and moonlight flooded the premises of Wolf’s Car Repair Shop. To the right, a pile of hubcaps, to the left, a heap of rusty fenders, and behind that, car doors of every shape and size. A narrow puddled road led past the mounds of scrap to a flat building at least fifty meters long. Half of the building was occupied by the shop. The other half was taken up by an office and a storeroom for parts. Cars were parked in front of it, among them the silver Toyota jeep. A wide-mesh wire fence ran around the perimeter, with a locked entry gate and two rough-hewn wooden doors, b
oth of them unlocked. We slipped in through one of them and cautiously walked up to a wide concrete slab in front of the office door. It stood ajar. A narrow beam of light fell on our mud-encrusted shoes.

  Charlie pulled his automatic. “You go first.”

  I shook my head. “Guy with the artillery goes first.”

  He prodded my chest with the gun. “You first.”

  I said, “As you wish,” and put my hand on the doorknob. It didn’t look like an easy trick to slip on the concrete step, but I was going to try my best. I jerked the door open to the left, shifted my weight to the right, and spun around like a top. The edge of my hand struck Charlie straight in the stomach. While he bent over, gasping for air, I punched him twice in the face. His nose cracked and blood ran over his mouth. With an incredulous expression on his face, he crashed down on the gravel. I picked up his automatic, rubbed my knuckles, and listened. Except for Charlie’s subdued groans, the place was as quiet as a graveyard.

  I prodded him with the tip of my shoe and hissed, “Get up.”

  He was holding his remodeled face with one hand, clutching gravel with the other. He managed to raise his head and stare at me.

  “What was that—”

  “Shut up, and get up.” I pointed the automatic at his forehead. “One—”

  By the time I said two, he was on his feet.

  “Onward.”

  Like a drunken sailor he staggered to the door, leaned against it and stumbled into the entrance hall, a rough corridor with a bare lightbulb and rusty coat hooks on the wall. Two gray blankets hung over the entrance to the storeroom. Behind them, a radio was playing. I grabbed Charlie’s collar and stuck the automatic in his ear. “Not a peep.”

  He trembled. We approached the entrance slowly. Now we could hear voices over the radio music. When we got to the blankets, I gave Charlie a shove that made him fly inside, head first, jumped after him and crashed into a shelf full of headlights. Axel and Slibulsky were sitting at a table with two bottles of beer and a pile of jewelry in front of them. They looked thunderstruck. Then Axel pulled a .221 Remington Fire Ball, a weapon suitable for hunting elephants or shooting down small aircraft; one could also use it as a weight to hold down the roof in a hurricane—but for fast shooting, it’s about as useful as an eggbeater.