The Basel Killings

by Hansjörg Schneider

  He sat on the right, beside the entrance. He watched the landlord’s wife bringing in the bowls and plates from the kitchen on her powerful upper arms, the waitress, no more than five foot tall, serving the men, putting the soup down in front of him and ladling it out.

  So, he thought, as he finished his soup, you spend the whole night walking round the block where your woman lives. She’s thrown you out for drinking too much beer in the local bars. You try living in your own apartment, but it’s too empty, especially at night.

  You stop drinking beer. You want to keep a clear head, as you know you need this woman. And since she also needs you, she’ll forgive you after a few days or weeks and let you back in.

  That was all normal and logical. And Hunkeler helped himself to a couple of slices of the veal tongue.

  One evening you go to the Milchhüsli as usual and have an apple juice. Two Turkish mafia guys are there as well. They’re playing darts and laughing too loud, but you guess that’s not important. At nine you go out, do one or two circuits, but you can’t keep going round in circles. So you sit down on the corner outside the Cantonal Bank, looking across at the apartment where she lives. You see the glimmer of the TV in her sitting room, a pale light that makes you feel jealous. You know you have to wait. You wait until the light goes out. The sitting room’s dark, Hermine’s going to bed.

  That’s the way it will have been, every evening the same. He took a mouthful of wine. It had a sour taste, but it was what everyone drank there.

  It must have been like that every evening for two months. Apart from that particular evening. You’re not looking across at Hermine’s room, since the square is full of fog. You roll yourself up in your jacket, you lean back in the corner and you fall asleep. Never to wake again because someone strangles you while you’re sleeping and cuts the diamond out of your ear. With a pair of scissors.

  Was that still logical? No, it was unexpected and surprising. Who would do such a thing? What sort of person crossing the square shortly before midnight would have scissors on them anyway?

  Hunkeler nodded as he pulled over the bowl of stewed apples. That was it, the scissors. That was the striking point, the detail that stood out.

  The stewed apples were sprinkled with cinnamon and heavily sugared, and the tartness was refreshing.

  Right. Then there were the other things, his journeys across the Balkans, the black bag in the anglers’ hut. They were astonishing enough. Who would have believed Hardy was still working at his old job, going to Zagreb or Split, to Sarajevo or Tirana, to bring back a truck full of Bulgarian bolts or Turkish secateurs and get them safely across the border with his Swiss passport? And somewhere among the bolts or secateurs would be a few kilos of heroin. Who would have thought the old tramp had even managed to siphon off part of the stuff for himself, hide it in a hut in Alsace and sell it on his own account?

  Hunkeler was almost certain that was the way it must have been. The man had disguised himself as a washed-out alcoholic living on a modest disability pension. Quite a guy then, that Hardy. He’d even managed to give a clue and have a diamond stuck in his ear. And no one had suspected anything.

  Hunkeler grinned as he sipped his coffee with a sense of well-being. Bitter and sweet, those went wonderfully well together. It had been a long time since he’d felt so happy with himself. He’d eaten well. And he’d thought things over well. In the first place it wasn’t very likely that he’d been murdered by the people for whom he’d made the journeys. They would have done it differently, more professionally, they’d have got rid of the corpse, at least for a few days or weeks, in order to gain time. In the second place there was the possibility that the scissors that had been used to cut his earlobe would give them a clue sooner or later. A clue that would possibly take him back to the Barbara Amsler case.

  He was only marginally interested in trips to the Balkans and drugs. That was a lot of effort, he was too old and tired for that. He knew from experience that such cases usually remained unsolved. Those people were usually two or three steps ahead of the police. That was something for Detective Sergeant Madörin, that sharp hunting hound who would get his teeth into it. Moreover, Hunkeler wasn’t even in charge of the investigation.

  The second point interested him even more. He’d almost given up. True, he’d read Barbara Amsler’s farewell letter again and again, he knew it off by heart. But so far the letter was all he’d had to go on, nothing else.

  He’d get going on it again, patient and dogged, as was his way.

  Hunkeler drove back to St Imber’s Cross, turned off, crossed the stream and parked outside his house. There were still a few leaves on the walnut tree, the nuts were on the ground.

  He went to the house, opened the door and let in the two cats that had heard the noise of the engine and run over. He went into the living room, put some kindling in the stove and lit it. He did the same in the kitchen, adjusting the damper so that it would warm the tiled stove. He put on some water to make tea and opened a tin of cat food. He added some beech logs and sat down at the kitchen table.

  He looked out into the garden. The cherry tree and the meadow could still clearly be seen, the pear tree was just a silhouette and the poplar had disappeared in the fog. He saw the cock scratching about under the willow, the hens beside it, he could hear them cackling. He poured the water for the tea into the pot, waited and then filled a cup for himself. He just sat there for quite a long time, until one of the cats jumped up into his lap.

  After he’d drunk three cups, he went out across the meadow to the old pigsty, where the hen coop was. There were three eggs in it. He collected them and put them on a plate in the kitchen. Then he fetched a basket from the sty and started collecting up the nuts. There were so many he had to get a second basket. He took them into the living room and put them on top of the stove to dry. He got undressed, went to bed, pulled the red-and-white check blanket over himself and fell asleep. He vaguely felt the two cats snuggling up against the back of his knees.

  When he woke it seemed to be dark outside. He heard the sparrows making a racket in the hornbeams, therefore it must be early evening. He could hear the noise of the milking machine in the cowshed opposite, the jerky sucking, the clatter of a chain.

  He got dressed and went across the road. The farmer’s wife was busy. Six cows, four teat cups, one milk basin, two carrying frames with containers for the milk. One bull, three calves, a small dog squatting in the gangway and watching. From behind you could hear the pigs squealing and grunting. Hunkeler sat down on the bench in the shed.

  “I took three eggs,” he said. “I’ll see to the hens this evening. And tomorrow morning as well.”

  She took the cups off the four teats of the cow’s udder, picked up the basin and emptied the milk into the container in the frame. Then she went to the next cow and attached the teat cups again.

  “I just do the same as always,” she said. “When your car’s parked outside in the evening, I know you’re here. Otherwise I look after the hens. I’ll pay you for the eggs, there aren’t many at the moment.”

  “No, I want to pay you for your work.”

  “So we’re quits if that’s all right by you.”

  “It’s certainly all right by me.”

  He always sat there in the evening, when he had time. He loved the sounds of the cowshed. The cows chewing, snorting, the sound of the dung landing in the manure gutter. But this evening it was different.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Where’s your husband?”

  She pushed a strand of hair back under her headscarf and looked across at the dog, which immediately started to wag its tail.

  “The dog doesn’t really like it in the cowshed,” she said, “he’s got too sensitive a nose. But he still follows me round everywhere.”

  Hunkeler waited. He knew she was thinking about what she should and shouldn’t tell him.

  “He’s at the inn in Jettingen. He’s playing cards with his colleagues. They have no animals at
home, they’ve taken early retirement.”

  Taking the fork, she lifted the dung into the cart, carefully, so that she took as little straw as possible.

  “What we’re doing here, what we’ve been doing here all our lives, my husband and I, isn’t worthwhile any more. They wrote to tell us that. We’re to give up producing milk. They’ve offered us a paltry pension. They’re not going to take our milk any longer.”

  “And now?”

  “He’s at the inn. If he’s going to be pensioned off, he says, then he wants to play cards too. Do you think that’s right?” “No,” he said. “It can’t be justified, because there’s no justice.”

  “Don’t say that, Monsieur. What does the bon Dieu say about that? Ce n’est pas juste.”

  No, it wasn’t fair, that was what he thought too.

  “So what do you do with the milk?”

  “We feed it to the calves and the pigs. You could make butter and cheese out of it. Aren’t there enough people going hungry in the world?”

  Hunkeler nodded. Yes, there were enough people going hungry. And there could also be enough butter and cheese to satisfy that hunger.

  His phone rang. It was Lüdi. “Listen,” he said, “something’s happened that I want to tell you about.”

  “Just a moment, hold the line. I’ll only be a minute.”

  He went back across the road and sat down in the kitchen.

  “I’m ready now. I’m sitting in my kitchen in Alsace.”

  “I don’t want to disturb you in your idyll,” Lüdi said, and his hoarse bleating laugh could be heard.

  “It isn’t an idyll. They’re not collecting the milk from my neighbours any longer.”

  “All the worse for him. Milk and butter and cheese, it’s enough to make you cry. Tastes good, doesn’t it?”

  “Get on with it.”

  “Shortly before two this afternoon a red Suzuki van exploded on the Dreispitz industrial estate. Madörin drove over there immediately. He found the front licence plate. And do you know what?”

  Yes, Hunkeler did know. But he said nothing.

  “The van was registered to a firm called Albolives that appears to import olive oil. The firm belongs to an Albanian family called Binaku. The father’s Ismail, the son Gjorg. And that Gjorg was sitting in the Billiards Centre last night.”

  “Well well, what a coincidence,” Hunkeler said. “Where is he now?”

  “He’s disappeared. We’ve put out a warrant for his arrest. Madörin’s had his father taken in, he’s seventy-two. The magistrate wasn’t very keen, but Madörin’s determined to keep him inside.”

  “I want to see him,” Hunkeler said.

  “That you can, we’ve got him here. But there’s even more. Hardy Schirmer regularly drove trucks from the Balkans back to Switzerland for this Albolives firm, about every two months.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “Hermine told us. It’s her opinion that those trips weren’t clean.”

  “What was he transporting?”

  “Olive oil. First-class stuff, mostly from Greece and Turkey. Here Albo olive oil costs a good forty francs per litre.”

  “And in a few bottles with special labels there were presumably those plastic bags with the white powder. Is that what you think?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I think.”

  “Just a minute,” said Hunkeler, “I need to think.”

  “What are you thinking about? Do you know something?”

  Yes, Hunkeler knew far too much. He ran over things quickly in his mind. It was no use, there was no way out. Alois Bachmann knew he’d been at the pond, and he’d tell people about it.

  “Hey, are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Hunkeler said. “As you know, I’m not involved in the case. What’s more, I’ve been more or less put on ice. Well, this morning I took a walk, by Morschwil Pond. A Basel angling club, of which Hardy was a member, rents it. In the fog I saw a red Suzuki van drive off. I couldn’t quite read the writing on it.”

  “Now you know what it was,” Lüdi said drily.

  “A man who was fishing there – he’s called Alois Bachmann – told me several things. Just before I arrived, he’d heard a man creep up and go into the hut, fetch something and then go. He said he didn’t look because it was nothing to him. However, he was sure the man had taken a black bag that belonged to Hardy. And he was equally sure that this bag contained underwear and drugs. He also told me about Hardy’s Balkan trips. He told me everything he knew. And now I’ve reported all this to you. I’ve done what I’m supposed to do, haven’t I?”

  “Depends how you look at it. When exactly were you at the pond?”

  “How should I know, I didn’t look at my watch.”

  It was no use, it had to come out. He heard Lüdi’s quiet laugh.

  “Shortly before midday.”

  “You’re a little late with it,” Lüdi said.

  Hunkeler thought feverishly. “Suter expressly forbade me to get involved in the case,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t report it.”

  “No, that’s no good. If you’d reported it right away, we could perhaps have intercepted the van.”

  “There was no signal. The battery was flat. I had to charge it first. Then I was going to call, but you beat me to it.”

  “It sounds a bit weak,” Lüdi said, “but OK, I’ll help you. We’ll sort it out. The next meeting is tomorrow at 4 p.m.”

  “Thank you, my angel.”

  He put his phone back down on the table. A blasted thing it was, unavoidable, inescapable, he hated it. He could only hope that Lüdi’s call hadn’t been checked.

  He went out into the corridor and unplugged his landline. He wanted to be unobtainable for as long as possible, ideally for the rest of his life. He was in a sticky situation again, in the soup up to his eyeballs. Of course he should have reported his visit to Morschwil Pond immediately. The Suzuki would possibly not have blown up, and Gjorg Binaku might have been caught.

  But he hadn’t wanted to. He gave a bitter laugh as he went out across the meadow to the old pigsty. The hens were there already, waiting for their food. Hunkeler took a handful of grains out of the brown-paper sack by the door and scattered them over the floor. He watched them pecking and cackling. He put the light out and bolted the door.

  He cooked the eggs and ate them. Then he fetched a bottle of beer from the shed and sat down at the TV. He zapped around until he found a black-and-white film with Jean Gabin. A fairly young woman, so much he deduced, had had a daughter by a doctor. The doctor had gone off with another woman, which drove the younger woman to despair. She was admired and loved by an old writer, but she refused to get involved with him despite claiming to love him. In reality, though, she was sleeping with various other men. When Hunkeler started watching, her daughter had just disappeared. A kidnapping, Jean Gabin suspected. But who was the kidnapper: the doctor, the writer, or some person hired by the mother as a trick to get the doctor back?

  Hunkeler would have liked to find out; the film was so good he would have liked to follow it through to the end. However, as his eyelids were closing, he switched off the TV, opened the window and went to bed.

  At nine the next morning he drove back to Basel. He’d slept for over ten hours. The high road through Trois Maisons was almost empty, the early morning frenzy of commuters was over. He drove at a leisurely pace through the fog, he wasn’t in a hurry. He knew that he was going to have to be patient, look round, ask around, for days, for weeks on end.

  At half past nine he went into the Sommereck. Edi was sitting in his usual place, two Zurich tabloids in front of him.

  “Look,” he said, “just read that. It’s horrible. That’s yesterday’s edition. You can clearly see the cut in his ear.”

  Hunkeler ordered a cup of milky coffee. He didn’t feel like looking at the newspaper.

  “Why didn’t the Basler Zeitung have that?” Edi asked. “An old man has his neck broken and a diamond torn ou
t of his ear right on your doorstep. And all the BaZ has is a brief report. And the rock is said to have been worth around 30,000 francs. Where did Hardy get that? Fat Hauser has been saying he was carrying drugs in the trucks. Do you know anything about that?”

  Hunkeler shook his head, had a drink, then reached for the newspapers after all. In the previous day’s edition there was a big picture of Hardy, dead and with the wounds to his throat and ear. In the latest edition Hermine could be seen, stony-faced. Beside it was a longish report on Bernhard Schirmer. Clearly a decent fellow who had taken some hard knocks in life but who, thanks to his unrelenting energy, had always managed to get back on his feet again.

  The wreck of the burnt-out van was also to be seen. Hunkeler glanced through that report as well, looking for the name Binaku. It wasn’t there. Even fat Hauser hadn’t been that sharp.

  So those smart guys from Zurich were thinking of making it into a substantial story.

  Edi came out of the kitchen with a plate. “That’s hare pie from the Markgräflerland, straight from the hunt. With spring onions and gherkins it’s a revelation. Would you like some too?”

  “No, not so early in the morning.”

  “It’s almost ten. At that time a man needs something in his belly.” He hacked a piece off, put it in his mouth and closed his eyes in rapture.

  “All this guzzling’s going to kill you,” Hunkeler said. “Can’t you give it up?”

  “No, I don’t want to. Eating’s such a joy. And I want to die joyfully. This diamond,” he went on as he cut off another piece, “it was very striking, of course. But no one suspected Hardy was such a sly bugger. I did realize that he wasn’t a true alcoholic. I do have an eye for that. He did always have a glass of beer in front of him, but he could sit there for an hour with the same glass. An alcoholic couldn’t do that.”

  “Did he come here often?”

  Edi wiped a few drops of sweat off his forehead. Clearly the pie was making him warm.

  “Not very often. The last time was about ten days ago. He was here with two of those mafia guys.”