Crime

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  It turned three o’clock and the time for the main hearing would soon be over. There wasn’t much left to do for today. The presiding judge looked at the witness list; only Karim, a brother of the accused, was still to be heard. Hmmm, thought the presiding judge, we all know what to expect from alibis provided by relatives, and he eyed the witness over his reading glasses. He had only one question for this witness—namely, if he actually did mean to assert that his brother Walid had been at home when the pawnshop on the Wartenstrasse was looted. The judge put the question to Karim as simply as possible; he even asked twice if Karim had understood it.

  No one had expected that Karim would even open his mouth. The presiding judge had explained to him at length that, as the brother of the accused, he had the right to remain silent. Now they were all waiting to see what he would do; his brother’s future might hang on it. The judge was impatient, the lawyer bored, and one of the jury kept staring at the clock because he wanted to make the 5:00 p.m. train to Dresden. Karim was the last witness in this main hearing; the minor ones would get heard by the court at the end. Karim knew what he was doing. He’d always known.

  Karim grew up in a family of criminals. It was a much-told tale about his uncle that he’d shot six men in Lebanon over a crate of tomatoes. Each of Karim’s eight brothers had a record that took up to half an hour to read out in court at any trial. They had stolen, robbed, pulled con tricks, blackmailed, and committed perjury. The only things for which they hadn’t yet been found guilty were murder and manslaughter.

  For generations in this family, cousins had married cousins and nephews had married nieces. When Karim started school, the teachers groaned—“Yet another Abu Fataris”—and then treated him like an idiot. He was made to sit in the back row, and his first-grade teacher told him, at age six, that he wasn’t to draw attention to himself, get into fights, or talk at all. So Karim didn’t say a word. It quickly became clear to him that he must not show he was different. His brothers smacked him on the back of the head because they didn’t understand what he said. That is, if he was lucky. His classmates—thanks to a municipal integration plan, the first grade consisted of 80 percent foreigners—made fun of him when he tried to explain things to them. And just like his brothers, they, too, usually hit him whenever he seemed too different. So Karim deliberately set out to get bad grades. It was the only thing he could do.

  By the time he was ten years old, he had taught himself stochastic theory, integral calculus, and analytical geometry from a textbook. He had stolen the book from the teachers’ library. As for class work, he had figured out how many of the ridiculous exercises he had to get wrong in order to be awarded an inconspicuous C–. Sometimes he had the feeling that his brain buzzed when he came upon a mathematical problem in the book that was reputed to be insoluble. Those were the moments that defined his personal happiness.

  He lived, as did all his brothers, even the eldest of them, who was twenty-six, with his mother; his father had died shortly after he was born. The family apartment in Neukölln had six rooms. Six rooms for ten people. He was the youngest, so he got the box room. The skylight was made of milky glass and there was a set of pine shelves. This space was where things found a home after no one wanted them anymore: broom heads without broomsticks, wash buckets without handles, cables for appliances now lost and forgotten. He sat there all day in front of a computer, and while his mother assumed he’d be busying himself with video games like his big strong brothers, he was reading the classics on Gutenberg.org.

  When he was twelve, he made his last attempt to be like his brothers. He wrote a program that could override the electronic firewalls in the post office savings bank and unobtrusively debit a matter of hundredths of a cent from millions of accounts. His brothers didn’t understand what “the moron,” as they called him, had given them. They smacked him on the back of the head again and threw away the CD with the program on it. Walid was the only one to sense that Karim outclassed them, and he protected him against his cruder brothers.

  When Karim turned eighteen, he finished school. He had made sure that he would barely pass his final exams. No one in his family had ever gotten that far. He borrowed eight thousand euros from Walid. Walid thought Karim needed the money for a drug deal and gave it to him gladly. Karim, in the meantime, had learned so much about the stock market that he was trading on the foreign-exchange market. Within a year, he had earned almost 700,000 euros. He rented a little apartment in a nice part of the city, left his family’s place every morning, and took endless roundabout routes to be sure no one was following him. He furnished his refuge, bought books on mathematics and a faster computer, and spent his time trading on the stock exchange and reading.

  His family, assuming “the moron” was now dealing dope, was content. Of course he was far too slight to be a true Abu Fataris. Karim never went to the kickboxing and extreme-sports club, but he always wore gold chains like the others, and satin shirts in garish colors, and black nappa leather jackets. He talked Neukölln slang and even earned a little respect for never having been arrested. His brothers didn’t take him seriously. If they’d been asked about him, the answer would have been simply that he was part of the family. Beyond that, nobody thought about him twice.

  Karim’s double life went unnoticed. No one was aware either that he owned a completely different set of clothes or that he’d used night school for fun to sail through his school-graduation certificate and attended lectures in mathematics twice a week at the Technical University. He had a small but significant fortune, he paid his taxes, and he had a nice girlfriend, who was studying comparative literature and knew nothing about Neukölln.

  Karim had read the charges against Walid. Everyone in the family had seen them, but he was the only one who understood their significance. Walid had raided a pawnbroker, robbed him of 14,490 euros, and raced home to establish an alibi. The victim had called the police and given them an exact description of the perpetrator; it was immediately clear to the two investigators that it had to be one of the Abu Fataris family. The brothers looked almost unbelievably alike, a circumstance that had already saved them more than once. No eyewitness could tell them apart at a lineup, and even tapes from security cameras didn’t pick up much difference.

  This time, the policemen moved fast. Walid had hidden the loot on his way back and thrown his weapon into the River Spree. When the police stormed the apartment, he was sitting on the sofa, drinking tea. He was wearing an apple green T-shirt with the luminous yellow slogan FORCED TO WORK on it in English. He didn’t know what it meant, but he liked it. The police arrested him. On the grounds of “imminent danger,” they made a mess of a house search, slicing open the sofas, emptying drawers onto the floor, overturning cupboards, and even ripping the baseboards off the walls on the suspicion that these might conceal hiding places. They found nothing.

  But Walid remained under arrest—the pawnbroker had described his T-shirt exactly. The two policemen were pleased to finally have picked up an Abu Fataris who could be put away for at least five years.

  Karim sat on the witness chair and looked up at the judges’ bench. He knew that nobody in the courtroom would believe a word he said if he merely gave Walid an alibi; when it came down to it, he was an Abu Fataris, one of the family pursued by the district attorney’s office as major repeat criminals. Everyone here expected him to lie. That wouldn’t work. Walid would be swallowed up in the prison system for years.

  Karim recited to himself the saying of Archilochus, the slave’s son, which was his guiding motto: “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog only one thing.” The judges and the prosecutors might be foxes, but he was the hedgehog and he’d learned his skills.

  “Your Honor …” he said with a catch in his voice. He knew this wouldn’t move anyone, but it would raise the general level of attention a little. He was making an enormous effort to sound stupid but sincere. “Your Honor, Walid was at home all evening.” He let the pause linger as he saw out of the corner of
his eye that the prosecutor was writing a provision that would be the basis of a legal proceeding against him for perjury.

  “So, indeed, at home all evening …” said the presiding judge, and leaned forward. “But the victim identified Walid unequivocally.”

  The prosecutor shook his head, and the defense attorney buried himself in his papers.

  Karim knew the photos of the scene of the arrest from the files. Four policemen who looked exactly like policemen: little blond mustaches, pouches, fanny packs, sneakers. And then there was Walid: a head taller and twice as broad in the shoulders, dark-skinned, green T-shirt with yellow writing. A ninety-year-old half-blind lady, who hadn’t been there, could have “identified him unequivocally.”

  Karim’s voice caught again, and he wiped his sleeve across his nose. It came away with little things stuck to it. He looked at it and said, “No, Your Honor, it wasn’t Walid. Please believe me.”

  “I remind you once again that when you testify here, you are under an oath to tell the truth.”

  “But I am.”

  “You are risking severe punishment. You could go to jail,” said the judge, wanting to issue a caution that would be on Karim’s level. Then he said rather superciliously, “And who would it have been if it wasn’t Walid?” He looked around and the prosecutor smiled.

  “Indeed, who was it?” the prosecutor echoed, which earned him a punishing look from the presiding judge, because this was his turn to examine the witness.

  Karim hesitated for as long as he could, counting silently to five. Then he said, “Imad.”

  “What? What do you mean, Imad?”

  “That it was Imad, not Walid,” said Karim.

  “And who is this Imad?”

  “Imad is my other brother,” said Karim.

  The presiding judge looked at him in amazement, and even the defense attorney suddenly woke up again. An Abu Fataris breaks all the rules and incriminates someone else in his own family? they were all asking themselves.

  “But Imad left before the police got there,” Karim added.

  “Oh yes?” The presiding judge was beginning to get angry. Idiotic babble, he was thinking.

  “He gave me this thing here,” said Karim. Knowing his testimony wasn’t going to change anything, he had begun months before the trial to withdraw varying amounts of money from his accounts. Now that money, in the exact same denominations that Walid had stolen, was in a brown envelope, and he passed it to the judge.

  “What’s in it?” the judge asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Karim.

  The judge tore open the envelope and pulled out the money. He wasn’t thinking about fingerprints, but there wouldn’t have been any anyway. He counted slowly out loud: “Fourteen thousand four hundred and ninety euros. And Imad gave you this on the night of the seventeenth of April?”

  “Yes, Your Honor, he did.”

  The presiding judge paused for thought. Then he posed the question that he hoped would entrap this Karim person. With a certain undertone of contempt, he asked, “You, the witness, can you remember what Imad was wearing when he gave you the envelope?”

  “Ahhh … Just a moment.”

  General relief on the judges’ bench. The presiding judge leaned back.

  Go slow, work a pause in there, and make yourself hesitate, thought Karim; then he said, “Jeans, black leather jacket, T-shirt.”

  “What kind of T-shirt?”

  “Oh, I really don’t remember,” said Karim.

  The presiding judge looked smugly at the court reporter, who would have to write up the judgment later. The two judges nodded at each other.

  “Ahhh …” Karim scratched his head. “Oh, hold on, yes I do. We all got these T-shirts from our uncle. He got a great deal on them from somewhere and gave them to us. There’s something on them in English, that we’re supposed to work and so on. Really funny.”

  “Do you mean this T-shirt that your brother Walid is wearing in the photograph?” The presiding judge showed Karim a picture from the folder of photographs.

  “Yes, yes, Your Honor. Exactly. That’s the one. We’ve got a whole ton of them. I’m wearing one, too. But that’s Walid, not Imad, in the photo.”

  “Yes, I know that,” said the judge.

  “Show us,” said the prosecutor.

  Finally, thought Karim, and said, “Show how? They’re in the apartment.”

  “No, I mean the one you’re wearing now.”

  “Right now?” asked Karim.

  When the prosecutor nodded solemnly, Karim shrugged and opened the zipper on his leather jacket as indifferently as he could. He was wearing the same T-shirt as Walid in the picture in the files. Karim had ordered twenty of them the previous week from one of the countless copy shops in Kreuzberg, handed them out to all his brothers, and left ten more in his family’s apartment, just in case there would be a further search.

  Court was recessed and Karim sent outside. But before that, he heard the judge say to the prosecutor that all they had left was a direct confrontation; they had no other proof. The first round went well, he thought.

  When Karim was called back in again, he was asked if he had ever had a previous conviction, and he said no. The prosecutor’s office had secured an extract from the criminal register to confirm this.

  “Mr. Abu Fataris,” said the prosecutor, “you must be aware of the fact that your statement incriminates Imad.”

  Karim nodded. Shamefaced, he looked at his shoes.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Well”—he was even stuttering a little by this point—“Walid is my brother, too. I’m the youngest; they all keep saying I’m the moron and so on. But Walid and Imad are both my brothers. Do you see? And if it was another brother, Walid can’t end up in the can because of Imad. It would be better if it was someone quite different—I mean not one of the family—but it’s one of my brothers. Imad, and so on.”

  And now Karim went for the coup de grâce.

  “Your Honor,” he said. “It wasn’t Walid, honest. But it’s true, Walid and Imad look exactly like. See …” And he pulled a creased photo out of his greasy wallet with all nine brothers on it and held it out uncomfortably close to the presiding judge’s nose. The judge reached for it irritably and laid it on his table.

  “There, the first one right there, that’s me. The second, that’s Walid, Your Honor. The third one’s Farouk, the fourth one’s Imad, the fifth one’s—”

  “May we keep the photograph?” asked the court-appointed defense counsel, interrupting; he was a friendly, older lawyer and suddenly the case didn’t look anything like so hopeless.

  “Only if I can get it back; it’s the only one I have. We had it taken for Auntie Halima in Lebanon. Six months ago, sort of all nine of us brothers together, you get it?” Karim looked at the members of the court to be sure that they got it. “So Auntie could see all of us. But then we didn’t send it, because Farouk said he looked stupid in it.…” Karim looked at the picture again. “He does look stupid in it, Farouk, I mean. He’s not even—”

  The presiding judge waved him off. “Witness, go back to your chair.”

  Karim sat down in the witness’s chair and started over again. “But see, Your Honor, the first one there, that’s me, the second one’s Walid, the third one’s Farouk, the fourth—”

  “Thank you,” said the judge, exasperated. “We understood you.”

  “Well, everyone gets them mixed up; even in school the teachers couldn’t tell them apart. Once they were doing this exam in biology class, and Walid was really bad in biology, so they …” Karim plowed on, undeterred.

  “Thank you,” said the judge loudly.

  “Nah, I need to tell you about the biology thing, the way it went was—”

  “No,” said the judge.

  Karim was dismissed as a witness and left the courtroom.

  The pawnbroker was sitting on the spectators’ bench. The court had already heard him, but he wanted to be there for
the verdict. He was, after all, the victim. Now he was called to the front again and shown the family photo. He had understood it was all about number two, that he had to recognize him. He said—rather too quickly, as he himself acknowledged later—that the perpetrator was “the second man in the picture, naturally.” He had no doubt that man was the perpetrator; yes, it was completely clear. “Number two.” The court settled down a little.

  Outside the door, Karim was wondering meantime how long it would take for the judges to get a handle on the situation. The presiding judge wouldn’t need that much time; he would decide to question the pawnbroker again. Karim waited exactly four minutes and then went back, unsummoned, into the courtroom. He saw the pawnbroker at the judges’ table, standing over the photograph. Everything was going the way he’d planned. Then he burst out that there was something he’d forgotten. They had to hear him again, please, just quickly; it was really important. The presiding judge, who had an aversion to interruptions like this, snapped, “So now what?”

  “Excuse me, I made a mistake, a really dumb mistake, Your Honor, just stupid.”

  Karim was immediately the center of attention of the entire courtroom again. They were all expecting him to withdraw his accusation against Imad. It happened all the time.

  “Imad, Your Honor, it’s Imad that’s the second one in the picture. Walid isn’t number two, he’s number four. I’m so sorry; I’m just all muddled up. The questions and everything. Please excuse me.”

  The presiding judge shook his head, the pawnbroker turned red, and the defense counsel grinned. “The second, yes?” said the judge in a fury. “So the second—”

  “Yes, yes, the second. You see, Your Honor,” said Karim, “we wrote on the back who everyone was, for Auntie, so that she’d know, because she—Auntie, I mean—doesn’t know all of us. She wanted to see us together, just once, but she can’t come to Germany, because of Immigration and stuff, you know. But there are so many of us brothers. Your Honor, turn the picture over. You see? All the names are right there in a row, in the same order they are on the front, in the picture. And when can I get it back?”