The Basel Killings

by Hansjörg Schneider

  “I know,” said Hunkeler.

  “You’re the boss. Send these two policemen away. They’re bad people. They treat us like dogs and want to know our addresses.”

  Hunkeler looked across at the billiards tables, which were empty. Crushed together at the coffee tables beside them were the Albanian customers. Young folk, mostly men, a few couples.

  “Next please,” Madörin, standing before them, said in his sharp officer’s voice. “Precise name, precise address, precise telephone number. And no sly tricks. Anyone who lies will have problems. We check everything.”

  Lüdi was sitting beside him, stony-faced, noting down everything he heard.

  “I liked Hardy,” Skender said, “especially after he stopped drinking alcohol. Who would kill an old man like that?”

  “He wasn’t that old,” said Hunkeler, “he was around sixty.”

  “We are a place for my Albanian countryfolk but also for people from here. We are tolerant, we serve alcohol, even though the Swiss sometimes drink too much. But these are decent premises, we don’t need the police.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s how it has to be. It won’t be any use, but we have to be doing something.” He grinned, tried to wink with his left eye. It wasn’t really a success, he was simply too tired.

  Hunkeler sat down beside Nana at the round table. Laufenburger had brought his Siamese cat, which was purring in his lap. Cowboy’s black dog was lying asleep on the floor. In the twenty-foot-long aquarium a few fish were calmly swimming. A video clip was running on the TV in the corner but no one was watching it. On the table was a half-full bottle of red wine. Hunkeler would have liked a glass, but he ordered coffee.

  “Why did you stay sitting here?” he asked. “Surely you heard the ambulance?”

  “I couldn’t get away because of the cat,” Laufenburger said.

  “But you usually take her everywhere with you.”

  Laufenburger lowered his eyes, picked up his glass and had a drink.

  “I didn’t like Hardy,” he said.

  “Why are you saying that? You can’t have known it was anything to do with Hardy.”

  Again Laufenburger took his glass. His hand seemed to be trembling slightly.

  “Nana ran out to see what was going on. She came back in straight away and said Hardy was dead. Then she rushed out again.”

  He raised his head and looked Hunkeler straight in the eye.

  “Hardy always used to get on my nerves. He wasn’t quite clean. Didn’t you know that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Crooked things, fiddles. Why was he always going away?”

  “He told me,” Hunkeler said, “that he had a hut in Alsace. By Morschwil Pond, I think.”

  “He had, had he? And how did he pay for that? And his diamond was worth a good twenty thousand francs. Where did he get that?”

  “He was a truck driver,” Cowboy said, “before he got stomach cancer. They cut out half of it. He had a large pension. At least, he always had enough money. And he’d always worn the diamond.”

  “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything,” Laufenburger said.

  “Who actually was it who told Hermine?” Hunkeler asked.

  “Me,” said Nana. “I’ve got a mobile phone.”

  Hunkeler looked at her. Her name was actually Natasha and she was a Belarusian. A fifty-year-old woman, hair dyed blonde, a bright, finely featured face, a trace of freckles. He looked at Laufenburger, his ridiculous sailor’s cap, the silver chain round his neck, his nicotine-stained fingers. He suddenly hated this guy, he hated himself.

  “How can you stick it out with this wreck?” he asked.

  “He’s not a wreck,” Nana said. “He’s just drinking too much at the moment. But I cook for him and sometimes he eats a bit. I love him.”

  Hunkeler dumped the money for his coffee down on the table and left. He was now really furious. He hated these pubs, he hated this town, he hated his profession. Riff-raff the lot of them, he thought. Do nothing, don’t work, sit around drawing their pensions. And are even loved.

  Over at the crossing he saw the forensic team at work in the floodlit fog. Two young guys were kneeling down beside the little tree examining the ground. Hardy’s corpse was on a stretcher.

  He walked past without any greeting and turned onto St Johann’s-Ring, heading for Mittlere Strasse.

  He had a restless night, even though he was dead tired. He curled up in the foetal position, which usually gave him a sleep that dissipated all his worries: hands over his temples, knees drawn up, wreathed in the warmth of the blanket. And he did manage several times to submerge and dock with things that were unknown to him, with the old familiar realm of the undefined, where he felt at home. But he kept on waking with a start, having to emerge from the protective world of dreams. It was a painful rising that took place at breakneck speed and was almost physically painful. And then he would see Hardy’s face tipping to the side once more.

  Hunkeler had had too much coffee. He wasn’t used to coffee late in the evening. He’d ordered an espresso when he went into the Milchhüsli at ten and sat at a table by himself because he wanted to reread Barbara Amsler’s farewell letter. Again. Barbara had been a whore who paid tax on a regular but not particularly high income as a prostitute. Having grown up in Schinznach Dorf in Aargau canton, she’d had a difficult youth; her father had originally been a farmer and wine-grower, and later had worked at the power station down on the Aare. Her mother had been an incomer called Rosa Minder; both parents were dead. Barbara had run away from home at a very young age, with almost no education, and had been in various children’s homes and institutions. Then she’d come to Basel and worked as a cashier at a grocer’s. On 14 August, aged just thirty-two, she’d been found in Allschwil Pond, strangled with a noose of white raw silk. Allschwil Pond was in the Basel Rural Area. And since the place where the body was found determined who had investigative responsibility, the Basel Rural CID was in charge. However, as the murder had possibly taken place in the city, Inspector Hunkeler had also been called in.

  It was in her apartment in Schneidergasse that he had found the letter he called her farewell letter. It said, If you kick me, I will long for you. If you hit me, I will crawl back to you. If you kill me, I will stay with you for ever.

  Hunkeler had read these lines time and time again, as if they held the key to the murder case. He’d got caught up in this case in a way that was rare in his career. And he refused to even contemplate the idea that he couldn’t solve it. The North Italian Enrico Casali, for whom Barbara had worked in the Singerhaus and the Klingental over in Lesser Basel, had a cast-iron alibi. And her colleagues had no information to offer at all.

  Hunkeler couldn’t forget her slim face with the full mouth that reminded him of a plant. He himself came from the Aargau. He had a soft spot for those kinds of women, who were dear and gentle like the valleys from which they came.

  In the Milchhüsli he had gone over to the regulars’ table at eleven and drunk three small beers. He’d needed company, human warmth. He’d left the place after twelve and found Hardy’s dead body. Around two he’d had another coffee in the Milchhüsli and then one more later on in the Billiards Centre. And that had clearly been too much.

  He could feel his pulse pounding. It wasn’t something he was used to. Usually he slept like a log; sleeping was one of his strengths. Now his heart was thumping, as if he’d been climbing a mountain. Was it old age, was his circulation collapsing?

  He heard the nearby clock tower striking; he counted: one, two, three, four times.

  He got up, went to the telephone and dialled a Paris number. He let it ring fourteen times until Hedwig answered. “Yes?” she said, almost in a whisper.

  “I need you,” Hunkeler said, “right now. You have to talk to me.”

  “What’s wrong? I was fast asleep. Call me in the morning.”

  “No, don’t hang up. I need your voice.”

  “What do you want wi
th my voice? You must be joking.”

  “Are you alone?”

  She giggled; she’d finally woken up. “No, I’m with someone. With a dream.”

  “I’ll kill the guy!” he screamed.

  Hedwig laughed, taking her time. “I’m with Seurat and Sisley. They’re pure light.”

  “Seurat I know. He’s the one with all the dots. He can’t even draw a decent line. Come over to me.”

  “In the middle of the night? Are you crazy?”

  “Hardy’s dead. Someone broke his neck.”

  Silence. She was shocked.

  “Are you still there?” he shouted.

  “Yes. Is he the nice alcoholic, the one with the sexy voice?”

  “Yes. Him. But he hadn’t had a drink for two months.”

  She waited, he heard her sitting up.

  “So that’s it for Paris next weekend,” she said coolly.

  “Yes. But I’ll call you every night.”

  “Listen,” she said after a pause, “I do like that kind of call now and then. But I’ll be switching off my phone the next few nights. I’m taking this sabbatical to have a good rest.”

  She hung up.

  He went out onto the balcony and looked down into the courtyard. He could see nothing but fog. All that could be heard was a quiet rustling. It must be the last autumn leaves of the maple tree.

  It was already nine when he woke, but that didn’t bother him. There would be difficulties anyway, you could bet your bottom dollar on that. There had been huge restructuring when the public prosecution office had moved out of the Lohnhof and into the Waaghof. Anyone who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – adjust to the new structures was sure to be faced with difficulties sooner or later. And one of those people was old Inspector Peter Hunkeler.

  However, he didn’t feel as old as he was. But that was presumably one of the main difficulties associated with getting older. The image you had of yourself lagged behind the reality.

  He paused for a moment while he was soaping his face in the bathroom to scrape off the grey hairs, and looked at himself in the mirror. He knew the face he saw very well; after all, it was his own face. He quite liked it, though not particularly. It was just his own face looking at him from the mirror.

  He picked up his razor and started, as always, at the bottom right. That face would last the few years until he was pensioned off, at least he hoped so. And until then he had no intention of letting himself be substantially restructured.

  Out in the street he decided to leave his car there because of the fog. He went into the Restaurant Sommereck and sat down beside Edi at the regulars’ table and ordered coffee. He picked up the papers and leafed through them both, but there was nothing about Hardy. Hauser the newshound hadn’t been that quick after all.

  “I’ve got a lovely piece of Alsace ham there,” Edi said when he brought the coffee. “The farmer’s wife fattened up the sow on nothing but kitchen scraps and potatoes. It grazed in the meadow, wallowed in the stream and was smoked in the fireplace. With fresh white bread it’s superb.”

  “No thanks,” Hunkeler said. “I don’t like ham in the morning.”

  “Pity,” Edi said, cutting off some slices from the ham and stuffing a few in his mouth. “Pity about Hardy. Who killed him?”

  Hunkeler shrugged. He drank his coffee slowly.

  “If you ask me,” Edi said, “it’ll have been those Albanians from the Billiards Centre. They all have a knife on them and they use them at every opportunity.”

  “Hardy wasn’t stabbed.”

  “And the cut on his neck? Where did that come from?”

  “How should I know? Don’t chatter so much this early in the morning.”

  “Early in the morning? It’s almost ten.”

  Hunkeler paid and went out. He squeezed through between the cars waiting at the red light. Their wipers were on, even though it wasn’t raining. The drivers ignored him, seeming to be asleep with their eyes open. He crossed the forecourt of the Cantonal Bank and saw that it wasn’t cordoned off any longer. So they thought they wouldn’t find anything else. Or they didn’t want to find anything else.

  He got onto a crowded number 3 and went to Barfüsserplatz.

  When he went into the Waaghof, Frau Held waved to him from the reception desk. He went over and gave her a friendly greeting, as friendly as was possible for him on that wet morning.

  “What have you been up to?” she asked. “People are saying you were boozing last night in Basel’s worst dive with a man who’s dead now.”

  “So that’s what people are saying, is it?” He leaned forward and once more regarded the beautiful curve of her lips. “I’ll tell you a secret. I was in the Milchhüsli in Missionsstrasse last night. That’s Basel’s jolliest bar – that’s a tip. You must go there sometime. Perhaps we’ll met there and share a bottle of wine.”

  He winked his left eye, she giggled.

  In his office he sat down on the wooden chair he’d brought from home. He looked round the room. There were no pictures anywhere – he really liked white walls. In one corner was the swivel chair that could be adjusted to give the correct position for your back. On shelves along the walls box files, beside the computer on his desk two exercise books, piles of handwritten scraps of paper. He felt as mute as a fish in an aquarium. He leaned back, put his feet on the edge of the desk, first the right one, then the left, tilting the wooden chair. He put his arms round his knees and rested his head on them. That always felt good, despite his beer belly. He breathed out, waited for the moment of emptiness, then breathed in again, without stopping. He liked that, the flowing transition, he concentrated on that alone.

  Someone knocked on the door. He didn’t react. He heard them come in. He recognized Madörin’s footsteps.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  Hunkeler released his knees, took his feet off the edge of the table and let his chair come down again.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” he said. “I’m really worried about you. There was a time when I liked you very much. I’ve learned a lot from you, you know that. But for some time now you’ve been letting yourself go. You’re letting yourself fall and you’ve fallen quite a long way already. And you won’t let anyone help you, not even your closest colleagues.”

  “What’s got into you?” Hunkeler asked. “You don’t usually talk this much.”

  Madörin shook his head with the sad look of a devoted hound. “Your sardonic wit won’t help you any more. Nor your sharp mind.” He got up, seemed about to leave, but stood there for a moment longer. “As you know, Suter’s attending a psychology congress in Baden-Baden. I’ve informed him. He’ll be back at 2 p.m. The meeting will be at four. It would be nice if you took part in it.”

  “Are you crazy?” Hunkeler screamed. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “In your place I wouldn’t shout so loud,” Madörin said. “I think you’re mistaken about your situation. The fact is that someone peed on the trunk of the tree outside the Cantonal Bank. And they spewed up as well.”

  He quietly opened the door and went out.

  Hunkeler watched how the door was shut – very slowly, as if someone was leaving a sickroom. What was going on? Of course they’d established that someone had peed and thrown up. And of course they suspected that it had been him. But what was so bad about that? Was he an old model who had to be pestered until they got rid of him?

  There would have been no problem taking early retirement. He’d have enough to do in his house in Alsace. Moreover, he had a woman he loved and who, so he believed, also loved him, even if at that moment she was in Paris gazing adoringly at the pointillistes.

  A sabbatical, huh! The things they thought they could do, these kindergarten women, the liberties they could take! Those spoiled state employees dancing ring-a-ring o’ roses with cute kids? He wasn’t dealing with children himself but with strangled whores and old men with broken necks. He could do with
a sabbatical as well.

  He grinned – a bitter grin, for it had just occurred to him that he too was a state employee. A state cripple, safeguarded against crises and destitution, secure in the Helvetian net of prosperous uprightness. That was presumably the reason why he kept on plunging down into the world of the lost nightbirds. Because he needed human contact. Because he wanted to live. Because he wanted to breathe.

  No, he wasn’t going to let them freeze him out. He was still in charge of the Barbara Amsler case, even if he couldn’t solve it.

  He took the farewell letter out of his jacket pocket and read: You have shown me what love is. What you have shown me will stay with me. You are part of me. If you kick me, I will long for you. If you hit me, I will crawl back to you. If you kill me, I will stay with you for ever.

  Hunkeler took out his phone and called his doctor.

  “I need two appointments,” he said. “One with a urologist and one with a heart specialist.”

  “Why?” the doctor asked.

  “My ticker’s going haywire and I have to pee all the time.”

  “After how many beers?”

  “Yesterday it was after three small glasses. I didn’t even manage to get home.”

  The doctor thought it over. He knew Hunkeler very well; they’d been at high school together.

  “An inspector who urinates in the gutter,” he said drily, “should be pensioned off.”

  “It wasn’t in the gutter, it was on a shitty little tree in a tub.”

  “Why does it always have to be a tree?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Then come over here and talk to me.”

  “No,” Hunkeler said, “I need specialists. I want to know what’s going on. Leave the details on my home answerphone.”

  He hung up and sat there calmly for a while. Yes, that was right. Perhaps the damage could be repaired, for the moment at least.

  He left the Waaghof and went the few steps to the highrise building. There he took the elevator up to Harry’s sauna. He had three sessions in the steam room, a quarter of an hour each. He couldn’t relax, he could feel his heart pounding again.