Crime

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  I didn’t have any questions for Abbas. The presiding judge looked at me in surprise; after all, Abbas was the only potential alternative killer. I had something else in mind.

  Famously, the most important rule for a defense attorney when examining a witness is never to ask a question to which you do not already know the answer. Surprises are not always happy ones, and you do not play with the fate of your client.

  The trial produced almost nothing new; the contents of the files were laid out step by step. Stefanie’s girlfriend, to whom she had admitted why she had turned to prostitution, merely cast a shadow on Boheim, who had taken advantage of the girl’s plight. One of the female jurors, who seemed to me to be on our side, shifted uneasily on her chair.

  On the fourth day of the trial, the policeman we’d been waiting for was called as the twelfth witness. He hadn’t been part of the Homicide Division for very long. It had been his job to secure the video from the surveillance camera in the garage. The presiding judge asked how the policemen had handled the video’s transfer from the security team at the hotel. Yes, he had immediately checked the time coded on the video on the monitors in the hotel’s security office. He had been able to establish that there was a mere thirty-second deviation from the actual time. And he had written this up in his report.

  When the defense was invited to cross-examine, I first asked him to confirm that the date he had secured the video was October 29. Yes, that was correct. It was a Monday, around 5:00 p.m.

  “Sir, did you ask the watchman at the hotel whether he moved the clocks back to winter time on October twenty-eighth?” I asked.

  “Excuse me? No. The time stamp was correct, I checked it.…”

  “The video was taken on October twenty-sixth, which still falls within summer time. The changeover to winter time only occurred two days later, on October twenty-eighth.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the policeman.

  “It’s quite simple. It could be that the clock setting inside the surveillance camera was showing winter time. If this clock registered three o’clock in summer, it would actually be two o’clock, but if it were winter, three o’clock would be the correct time.”

  “Right.”

  “On the day of the murder, October twenty-sixth, it was still summer time. The clock showed three-twenty-six. If the clock hadn’t been reset, it would actually have been two-twenty-six. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said the policeman, “but that’s all very theoretical.”

  “The theory is the point. The question is whether the clock was correctly set. If not, then the accused left the room an hour before the maid discovered the body. This hour would have allowed any other person to kill the victim. That, sir, is why it would have been critical to ask the hotel’s security staff this question. Why did you not ask it?”

  “I can’t remember if I asked or not. Probably the security people told me.…”

  “I have here a statement from the head of the security team that we obtained some days ago. He said the clock had never been reset. Ever since the camera was installed, it has run on the same time, which is winter time. Could you now try to better recall whether you asked him this question or not?” I handed the presiding judge and the district attorney’s staff a copy of the statement.

  “I … I think I didn’t pose that question,” the policeman said.

  “Your Honor, would you please show the witness sheets twelve to fifteen from picture folder B? It concerns the pictures that show the accused leaving the garage.”

  The presiding judge found the yellow picture folder and spread out the prints from the video camera in front of him. The witness stepped over to the judges’ table and looked at them.

  “There it is: three-twenty-six-fifty-five—that’s the time,” said the policeman.

  “Yes, the wrong time. May I direct your attention to the accused’s arm as it appears in image number four? Please look carefully. His left hand is clearly visible because he’s pressing the buzzer. Mr. Boheim was wearing a Patek Philippe that day. Can you make out the numerals on the picture?”

  “Yes, they’re perfectly legible.”

  “Sir, what time are they telling?”

  “Two-twenty-six,” said the policeman.

  Unrest broke out on the jammed press bench. ADA Schmied now approached the judges’ table himself to look at the original pictures. He took his time, picked up the photos one by one, and inspected them closely. Finally, he nodded. That gave us the sixty minutes needed to present the theory of an alternative killer and free Boheim. The rest of the trial would be over quickly now; there were no other pieces of evidence against Boheim. The presiding judge declared a recess.

  Half an hour later, the district attorney’s office lifted the order of detention on Boheim, and at the next day’s proceedings, he was formally exonerated without any further evidence being heard.

  ADA Schmied congratulated Boheim on the verdict. Then he went back down the long hall to his office, finished a summary report on the outcome of the trial, and opened the next file that was lying on his desk. Three months later, he retired.

  Abbas was arrested that same evening. The police interrogator was skillful. He explained to Abbas that Stefanie had only prostituted herself to save him, and read him the statement from the girlfriend to whom Stefanie had told the whole story. When Abbas understood the sacrifice she’d made, he broke down. But he had had experience with the police, and he didn’t confess—the crime remains unsolved to this day. Abbas could not be charged with it; the evidence was insufficient.

  Melanie Boheim instituted divorce proceedings four weeks after the end of the trial.

  · · ·

  Schmied didn’t cotton onto the whole time business until some months later, after he’d retired. It was a mild autumn day and he just shook his head. It wouldn’t justify a retrial, nor would it explain the time as shown on Boheim’s watch. He kicked a chestnut out of the way and walked slowly down the allée, thinking how strange life was.

  Self-Defense

  Lenzberger and Beck were ambling along the platform. Shaved heads, military pants, Doc Martens, big strides. Beck’s jacket said THOR STEINAR; Lenzberger’s T-shirt said PITBULL GERMANY.

  Beck was somewhat shorter than Lenzberger. Eleven convictions for assault, his first when he was fourteen and went along with the big guys, joining in when they kicked a Vietnamese to a pulp. It only got worse from there. He was fifteen when he did his first stretch in juvie; at sixteen, he got himself tattooed. Above the knuckle on each finger of his right hand was a letter of the alphabet; taken together they read H-A-T-E; on his left thumb he had a swastika.

  Lenzberger had only four convictions on his sheet, but he had a new metal baseball bat. In Berlin, they sell fifteen times more baseball bats than balls.

  Beck started by picking on an old lady, who became frightened. He laughed and took two big strides toward her with his arms held high. The lady’s little steps grew quicker; she clutched her purse against her chest and vanished.

  Lenzberger swung the bat against a garbage can. The reverberation rang through the station; he didn’t need much strength to put a dent in the metal. The platform was almost empty, the next train, an intercity express to Hamburg, would not be leaving for forty-eight minutes. They sat down on a bench. Beck put his feet up; Lenzberger squatted on the armrest. Bored, they threw the last beer bottle down onto the tracks. It broke, and the label peeled off slowly.

  That was when they discovered him. The man was sitting two benches away. Mid-forties, bald on top, the rest of his head surrounded by a fringe of hair, glasses with standard-issue black frames, gray suit. A bookkeeper or a clerk, they thought, some bore with a wife and children waiting for him back home. Beck and Lenzberger grinned at each other: a perfect victim, easily frightened. It hadn’t been a good night so far, no women, not enough money for really good stuff. Beck’s girlfriend had split up with him on Friday; she’d had enough of the brawling and the booze. Life
this Monday morning was shit—till they came across the man. Their fantasies running to violence, they clapped each other on the shoulder, linked arms, and went up to him. Beck sat down with a thump on the bench next to him and burped in his ear, releasing a stench of alcohol and undigested food. “Hey, old man, had a fuck today?”

  The man pulled an apple out of his pocket and polished it on his sleeve.

  “Hey, asshole, I’m talking to you,” said Beck. He hit the apple out of the man’s hand and crushed it underfoot so that flesh spurted over his Doc Martens.

  The man didn’t look at Beck. He stayed sitting, motionless, looking down. Beck and Lenzberger took this as a provocation. Beck jabbed his forefinger into the man’s shirt. “Oh, someone doesn’t want to talk,” he said, and hit the man over the ear. The glasses slipped down, but the man didn’t push them back into place. He still hadn’t moved, so Beck pulled a knife out of his boot. It was a long knife, the tip sharpened on both sides and the back serrated. He brandished it in front of the man’s face, but the man’s eyes didn’t move. Beck stabbed it a little into the man’s hand, nothing deep, a pinprick. He looked at the man expectantly as a drop of blood welled up on the back of his hand. Lenzberger was enjoying the idea of what would come next and swung the baseball bat against the bench in his excitement. Beck stuck a finger into the blood and smeared it around. “Well, asshole, feeling better?”

  The man still didn’t react. Beck lost his temper. The knife sliced through the air twice from right to left, a mere fraction of an inch from the man’s chest. The third time, it made contact, slashing his shirt and making an eight-inch gash in his skin, almost horizontally, which bled into the material and left a thickening red streak.

  A doctor who was intending to take the early train to Hannover to a conference of urologists was standing on the platform opposite. He would testify later that the man barely moved; it all happened so fast. The CCTV camera on the platform recorded the incident, showing only individual images in black and white.

  Beck swung again and Lenzberger whooped. The man gripped the hand holding the knife and simultaneously struck the crook of Beck’s arm. The blow altered the direction of the knife without interrupting the swing itself. The blade described an arc as the man aimed the tip between Beck’s third and fourth ribs. Beck stabbed himself in the chest. As the steel penetrated the skin, the man struck Beck’s fist hard. It was all one single motion, fluid, almost a dance. The blade disappeared completely into Beck’s body and pierced his heart. Beck lived for another forty seconds. He stood there, looking down at himself, clutching the knife handle, and seemed to be reading the tattoos on his fingers. He felt no pain; the nerve synapses were no longer transmitting any signals. Beck didn’t realize he was in the process of dying.

  The man rose, turned toward Lenzberger, and looked at him. His body language didn’t convey any message; he just stood there and waited. Lenzberger didn’t know whether to fight or flee, and because the man still looked like a bookkeeper, he made the wrong decision. He swung the baseball bat high in the air. The man hit him only once, a brief chop to Lenzberger’s neck that happened so fast the CCTV camera couldn’t capture it on the individual frames. Then he sat down again without casting another glance at his opponent.

  The blow was precise, hitting the carotid sinus, which is a brief surface dilation of the internal carotid artery. This tiny location contains a whole bundle of nerve endings, which registered the blow as an extreme increase in blood pressure and sent signals to Lenzberger’s cerebrum to reduce his heartbeat. His heart slowed and slowed, and his circulation did likewise. Lenzberger sank to his knees; the baseball bat landed on the ground behind him, bounced a couple of times, rolled across the platform, and fell onto the train tracks. The blow had been so hard that it had torn the delicate wall of the carotid sinus. Blood rushed in and over-stimulated the nerves. They were now transmitting a constant signal to inhibit the heartbeat. Lenzberger collapsed facedown on the platform; a little blood trickled into the ridged tiles and pooled against a cigarette pack. Lenzberger died: His heart had simply stopped beating.

  Beck remained standing for another two seconds. Then he, too, fell; his head banged against the bench and left a smear of red. He lay there, eyes open, seeming to be looking at the man’s shoes. The man straightened his glasses, crossed his legs, lit a cigarette, and waited to be arrested.

  A policewoman was the first to arrive. She and a colleague had been dispatched when the two skinheads went onto the platform. She saw the bodies, the knife in Beck’s chest, the man’s slashed shirt, and she registered that he was smoking. All information being processed in her brain with equal importance, she pulled out her gun, aimed it at the man, and yelled, “Smoking is forbidden everywhere in the station.”

  “A key client has asked for our help. Please take the case and we will be responsible for the costs,” said the lawyer when he called. He said he was calling from New York, but it sounded as if he was there right next to me. He was making it urgent. He was the senior partner in one of those corporate law firms that have at least one branch in every industrialized country. A “key client” is one who produces a large stream of business for the law firm, hence a client with very special rights. I asked him what it was about, but he didn’t know anything. His secretary had received a phone call from the police; all she’d been told was that someone had been arrested at the station. She didn’t get a name. It definitely involved “manslaughter or something,” but that was all she knew. It had to be a “key client,” because they were the only ones who were ever given that number.

  I drove to the Homicide Division in the Keithstrasse. It makes no difference whether police stations are in modern high-rises built of glass and steel or in two-hundred-year-old guardhouses—they’re all alike. There is gray-green linoleum in the corridors, the air smells of detergents, and there are oversize posters of cats in all the interrogation rooms, along with postcards that colleagues have sent from their vacations. Clippings with jokes are stuck to computer screens and cupboard doors. There is lukewarm filtered coffee from orange-yellow coffee machines with scorched warming plates. On the desks there are heavy I LOVE HERTHA mugs, green plastic pencil holders, and occasional photos of sunsets on the walls in glass holders without frames, taken by some clerk. The decor is practical and light gray, the rooms are too cramped, the chairs are too ergonomic, and on the windowsills are plastic-looking plants in self-irrigating pebble trays.

  Chief of Homicide Dalger had conducted hundreds of interrogations. When he had arrived at Homicide sixteen years earlier, it was the leading division in the whole police structure. He was proud to have made it, and he knew that he owed his successful rise to one quality above all others: patience. When necessary, he listened for hours on end; nothing was too much for him, and even after all the long years in the police, he still found everything interesting. Dalger avoided interrogations right after an arrest, when everything was still fresh and he didn’t know very much. He was the man for confessions. He didn’t use tricks, he didn’t use blackmail, and he didn’t use humiliation. Dalger was glad to leave the first interrogation to his juniors; he didn’t want to start asking questions until he felt he knew everything there was to know about the case. He had a brilliant memory for details. He didn’t rely on instinct, even though that instinct had never let him down in the past. Dalger knew that the most absurd stories can be true and the most believable stories false. “Interrogations,” he told his juniors, “are hard work.” And he never forgot to finish by saying, “Follow the money or follow the sperm. Every murder comes down to one or the other.”

  Although we almost always had conflicting interests, we respected each other. And when I had finally talked my way through to him and entered the interrogation room, he seemed almost delighted to see me. “We’re not getting anywhere here” was the first thing he said. Dalger wanted to know who had retained me. I gave him the name of the law firm. Dalger shrugged his shoulders. I asked everyone to leave the room s
o that I could speak to my client undisturbed. Dalger grinned. “Good luck.”

  The man didn’t look up until we were alone. I introduced myself; he nodded politely but didn’t say anything. I tried it in German, English, and rather bad French. He just looked at me and didn’t utter a word. When I set out a pen for him, he pushed it back toward me. He didn’t want to talk. I put a power of attorney form in front of him; somehow, I had to be able to document that I had the authority to represent him. He seemed to be thinking, and then suddenly he did something strange: He opened an ink pad that was on the table and pressed his right thumb first into the blue color and then onto the space for the signature on the power of attorney. “That’s another possibility,” I said, and collected the form. I went into Dalger’s office, and he asked me who the man was. This time, I was the one to shrug my shoulders. Then he gave me a thorough rundown of what had happened.

  Dalger had taken custody of the man the day before from the federal police, who were responsible for the station. The man hadn’t uttered a single syllable either when arrested or while he was being transported, or during the first attempted interrogation in the Keithstrasse. They had tried with different interpreters; they had read him his rights before the interrogation in sixteen languages—nothing.

  Dalger had ordered the man to be searched, but they found nothing. He had no briefcase, no passport, and no keys. He showed me the so-called Search Protocol, Part B, which listed the objects that had been found. There were seven:

  Tempo brand paper handkerchiefs with a price tag from the station pharmacy.

  Cigarette packet with six cigarettes, German customs sticker.

  Plastic lighter, yellow.

  Second-class ticket to the central station in Hamburg (no seat reservation).

  16,540 euros in bills.

  3.62 euros in coins.