The Basel Killings

by Hansjörg Schneider

  He took an outrageously expensive room with a view of the park, the Rhine plain and the Vosges hills, as the receptionist had promised. All he could see was the almost bare branches of a plane tree in the fog. He went down in the elevator to the bathing pool and lay in the warm water, where the ancient Romans had lain to strengthen their weary limbs. He swam a few strokes. Then he stayed lying in a niche where the water was bubbling up, seething and swirling. He almost fell asleep there.

  Later, after a short nap on a white-sheeted day bed, he sat in an armchair in the entrance hall and looked over at the receptionist, who seemed to be asleep. Also there but a proper distance away, so that hardly any of their quietly spoken words could be heard, were an elderly couple. She was a tall, slim lady with an erotic attractiveness that had not entirely faded, a cool beauty. From North Germany, Friesland perhaps? He was a curly-haired businessman, grey from the harsh struggle for existence, weary and relaxed from the hot spring. There was a bottle of red wine in front of them.

  At last the receptionist seemed to wake. He looked up, considered whether he should come over. Then he did come.

  “Is there anything you require, sir?”

  “Aha,” Hunkeler said, recognizing the Italian accent, “sei Italiano. Da dove?”

  “Udine. E Lei?”

  “Basilea, Svizzero. From Basel. And I’d like some caviar to eat and a glass of champagne to drink.”

  “Very well, signore,” the receptionist said, sketching a bow and disappearing through a door that clearly led to the kitchen.

  The caviar was excellent, the champagne likewise. He ate slowly, with a little butter on the toast. He left the little white onions, he didn’t like them.

  The couple talked very little. Clearly they were speaking some kind of Low German. Around eight they stood up, gave Hunkeler a brief nod and went up in the elevator.

  “Who was that?” he asked, simply in order to hear his voice in the silence.

  “A businessman with his wife,” the receptionist said. “Why?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Vittorio. E tu?”

  “Pietro. Can you play cards, jass, for example?”

  “No. Backgammon.”

  “Right then, bring it over. Can one get jasmine tea here?”

  “Of course, signore. Backgammon and jasmine tea.”

  He vanished into the kitchen. After a while, during which the drip, drip, drip of the fog could be heard, he reappeared with the backgammon box under his arm and a tray on which was a silver pot with the tea and a bottle of schnapps.

  “Grappa,” he said, “from home. To help me bear the Schwarzwald melancholy.”

  “Jasmine tea,” Hunkeler said, “to help me bear this Greater German splendour.”

  They grinned at each other.

  “The gentleman is a publisher from Hamburg,” the receptionist said, “that’s just between the two of us. He’s taking the waters, he’s had a heart attack. A delightful couple.”

  They cast the dice and moved the pieces around. It quickly became clear that Hunkeler had no chance at all.

  “Why is the hotel so empty?” he asked.

  “Magnificence of the past, it’s too expensive today. Also, it’s November.”

  At nine Hunkeler interrupted the game and called Hedwig. He heard her voice on the answerphone.

  “I’m in a Roman spa with hot springs,” he said. “I’m playing backgammon with a magician from Udine. He won’t let me win one single time. Otherwise everything’s fine.”

  At eleven he could hardly keep his eyes open any longer. “Before I go to bed,” he said, “I have one more request. I’d very much like to see the register.”

  “The register, certainly. I’ve already realized that you’re a policeman. Actually, it’s not permitted. Però, per te…”

  They went over to the desk and the receptionist put out the register. Hunkeler didn’t need to leaf through it for long, there weren’t that many entries. On Wednesday, 29 October, an Ismail Zara had checked in, in very legible, straight handwriting. He’d stayed until 2 November. On 9 November a Prenga Guma had checked in. He had only stayed one night.

  “This Ismail Zara, what kind of guy was he?” Hunkeler asked.

  “Mafia, a padrino. There aren’t many of that kind left, unfortunately.”

  “Why didn’t the German police arrest him?”

  “The German police won’t catch a padrino like that. By the time they’d realized he was the wanted Ismail Binaku, he was gone.”

  “And this one there, Prenga Guma? What kind of guy was he?”

  “Herr Guma’s a mafioso as well. His actual name is Prenga Berisha. He eats his caviar with a soup spoon. And he can afford it too. But he’s not up to being in a difficult situation. He’ll soon get caught. Fortunately – if you’ll allow me to say so – there are still just a few civilized Swiss policemen left.”

  The next morning, after a splendid sleep right through the night, Hunkeler breakfasted at a table with a white cloth, served by Vittorio. He had scrambled eggs with capers, three slices of smoked ham, quark with chives and dark, bitter bread, followed by fresh, juicy pineapple. He felt good, there was hardly any sign of his lumbago. Despite that, he decided to go to the hot spring again and stretch out in the warm bath.

  Shortly before twelve he got into his car and drove off, not heading for the autobahn but up the narrow road into the hills. His idea was to have an excursion, an old man’s trip through the dark woods. He went along in second gear, bent right forward over the steering wheel, in order to be able to see any approaching headlights as quickly as possible. He didn’t meet anyone, he was alone on his journey.

  Halfway up, on an almost level stretch through meadows, he was suddenly faced with a wall of snow, grey in the dark fog, white in the glow of his headlights. He pulled onto the right-hand shoulder of the road and waited. The snow was falling so thickly that everything around turned white within seconds. He stayed sitting in the car, the wipers working furiously, hardly able to keep the front window clear. He listened to the wind whistling over the roof of the car, the frozen snow rattling on it. Then all was calm again.

  He switched off the wipers and got out. He almost fell over, so icy had the ground suddenly become.

  He grinned, contented. So he had his adventure, unexpectedly thrown down from the overcast sky onto the asphalt of the mountain road, on a quite normal weekday. He went to the tailgate, opened it and set about looking for the chains. They were right at the bottom, under cardboard boxes, woollen blankets, old jackets and worn-out shoes he’d intended to throw away ages ago. Kneeling down beside the left front wheel, he tried to fit one of the chains round the tyre. He remembered that he hadn’t done this for years. It was all so much like back in the early days, when his wife and little daughter had always waited in the car until, swearing, groaning and eventually almost weeping, he’d managed to attach the two chains. He cut his left hand on the mudguard, his fingers were numb, the rubber band was too short to attach them properly, the hooks were ice-cold. Once he thought he’d done it, but the chain slipped back onto the ground. He worked determinedly, feeling the sweat on his forehead, then he’d managed it. As he drove off, cautiously, he could hear the rattle of the chains on the asphalt: they were holding.

  He grinned, proud of his achievement. He was a genuine specimen of pre-war excellence, born shortly before the Second World War, defying snow and storm. He drove on slowly, taking care not to come off the road.

  Just before the top the fog was gone. He was driving into sweeping countryside with dark clouds hanging over it. Long ridges, the black of the pines covered over by the brightness of the snow. To the left was the western slope of the Belchen, unexpectedly massive and steep.

  He drove down into the Wiese valley, followed the river to the Rhine and crossed the bridge into Alsace. There he carried straight on to Hésingue, then up the rise until he took the turn-off to his house. He lit the stove, fed the cats and set about clearing the
garden. The flowers were Hedwig’s thing. She was the one who had planted them and lavished her care and attention on them, she knew their names. Most of them had not survived the previous night’s frost, the flowers were hanging down slack on their stems.

  Once he’d finished he went back into the kitchen, put some more logs in the stove and sat down at the table. He wrote down what he’d been thinking about while he was working in the garden.

  Question one: Is the person I’m looking for actually a man? Couldn’t it also be a woman? Answer: No. I cannot see a woman cutting open a whore’s earlobe.

  Supplementary question: Why ever not? Answer: I don’t know.

  Question two: Was it the same person in both cases? Answer: Yes. The procedure was so specific it must have been the same person.

  Question three: What had Hardy Schirmer been hiding? What kind of past did he have? Answer: I’ll have to talk to Hermine about that.

  Question four: Who was Barbara Amsler’s farewell letter intended for? Was it love, was it servitude, was it sexual dependence? Answer: I need to talk to Casali again.

  Question five: What kind of scissors were used to cut open the earlobes? Would a pair of nail scissors have been enough? Answer: Yes, probably.

  Question six: What kind of person is Skender from the Billiards Centre? Is he genuinely the decent husband and father he appears to be? Is it possible to understand a man from the Balkans? Or does that reservation border on racism? He hesitated as he wrote down this last question. Basically, he thought the exemplary nature of his outlook was superfluous. But that was the way things were in the Basel police department. No one would have admitted to being racially prejudiced.

  He went on writing.

  Answer: No, that question does not come close to being racially prejudiced. This reservation has to be taken into account. So that means another discussion with Skender, taking note of what he says.

  Question seven: Is it right to exclude the Albanian drug mafia from the equation? Might a falcon, a snake or an eagle be worth considering, e.g. Prenga Berisha? Answer: Yes, that might be worth considering.

  Question eight: Was the killing of the man in the red Punto actually part of a blood feud? Was it Gjorg Binaku? Answer: Give Bardet a call.

  Question nine: Is anyone from the late-night bars on Missionsstrasse a possible culprit? Laufenburger, Garzoni? Answer: No, that is unlikely.

  Question ten: Why does Stallinger recite poetry all the time? Answer: Because a poem is language given form that lives on in time. Stallinger recites poetry because he is afraid of death.

  Question eleven: Why am I pursuing a murderer so doggedly? Answer: Because that’s my job. And because I want to stop him doing it a third time.

  Question twelve: Is the wait-and-see tactic the right one? Answer: Yes, because I have no other choice. That’s also the reason why I’m staying here and not going off to Paris. I must be here if and when something happens.

  Then he wrote down one more question.

  Question thirteen: Why is the rose killed by frost but not the aster? Answer: I don’t know. Perhaps because the rose is too beautiful.

  That was nonsense, he thought, an aster was beautiful as well.

  He picked up his mobile phone and called Bardet.

  “Listen, Monsieur,” he said, “I have two questions.”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “Was the corpse in the burnt-out car wearing a ring?”

  “What makes you suspect that?”

  “I’m assuming it was a ring with a black stone and a falcon engraved on it.”

  “Perhaps it was an onyx, who knows? Perhaps the heat had made it crack.”

  “Thank you. At least that point is clear.”

  “Clear? What is clarity? You can’t see your own hand in front of your face in this fog.”

  “In the second place,” Hunkeler said, “I have a piece of information. I’ve read a book about blood feuds. A novel by Ismail Kadare.”

  “And the book is called?”

  “Broken April. It says in the book that it’s only a case of blood feud if the victim is shot in the forehead by someone standing in front of them.”

  “Interesting,” said Bardet. “It could well be that a bullet hole in the forehead of that corpse was established. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes. It seems that there are three families involved. However, a blood feud is carried out between two families. At least according to the Central European concept.”

  “That too is an interesting point of view indeed,” Bardet said, and it was clear that the formal, stilted mode of expression was amusing him. “Only it is clear that the blood feud carried out here in no way corresponds to the Central European conception of justice.”

  He giggled. The click of a cigarette lighter could be heard.

  “Moreover,” he went on, “it seems that in this case other interests are involved, interests that overlap with the family interests. Large-scale financial interests. In any case, a further corpse was pulled out of a pond the day before yesterday in the Petite Camargue near Blotzheim, which is just across the border from Basel. Once again a young man, this time with a stab wound to the heart. A nice piece of work but, according to your definition, not part of a blood feud. And the man had a ring with a snake engraved on it. His name is unknown.”

  “He could well have been a Prela,” Hunkeler said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’d very much like to know where Ismail Binaku is hanging out. He’s said to have been staying in Badenweiler. Do you know anything about that?”

  Again Bardet giggled, and Hunkeler could hear him puffing out smoke.

  “It could be that his work is done. I’ve no idea where the falcon is flying now. Presumably to another country. Is that everything?”

  “Yes, thank you, Monsieur.”

  He picked up his notebook again and wrote down one final question.

  Question fourteen: How can an old Swiss inspector understand all that? Answer: He can’t understand it any more.

  He looked out of the window into the fog, watching the hens who were scratching, pecking, scratching again and pecking again. He liked them. Then he phoned Casali and arranged to see him on Sunday evening in the bar at the Klingental. He called the pharmacy on Burgfelderplatz and was told that Hermine Mauch would not be back until Monday.

  He stayed in Alsace for three nights, he had no idea what to do in Basel. In the evenings he sat in his neighbours’ cowshed and listened to the milking machine, the chomping of the cows and the farmer’s wife’s moaning. From the farmer he heard that there was someone living in Bisel who had donkeys and might sell one or two. Bisel was a bit to the west, between Feldbach and Seppois-le-Haut. The man even had a small cattle truck and would bring any animals ordered up there, only if paid in cash, of course.

  Hunkeler was uncommonly pleased at that. He immediately bought a few bales of straw and hay from the farmer and took it all across the road in the cart to put it in the old pigsty. The straw he scattered around by the hen coop, the hay he piled up in one corner. The straw for them to lie on, the hay to eat.

  On Sunday evening he took a taxi across Dreirosenbrücke to the Klingental restaurant. It took its name from a convent that had been established close by in the Middle Ages. It was one of the nicest places in Basel, an inn like the ones you got round Les Halles in Paris fifty years ago, with whores for the simple man and warm food until the early hours. Now, early in the evening, it was only half full: two taxi drivers, an Italian family with whiny children, weary couples. Sitting beside the way through to the bar, where the prostitution business would begin at ten, were two old men Hunkeler knew. They were Jürg Federspiel and Werner Lutz and both were writers; he’d hung around the streets with them when they were all younger. He joined them and said,

  Poetry is something

  that’s there beside us

  goes on in parks

  in public lavatories

  on the trains
>
  at stations of course

  seldom at airports.

  “Does anyone know how that goes on?”

  “No,” said Federspiel, “but I do know that it’s a poem by Manfred Gilgien. How long is it now since he died?”

  “Ten years,” said Lutz.

  “Then I’ll buy a bottle of wine, if that’s OK,” Hunkeler said.

  It was very much OK. And the food Hunkeler ordered was good as well. Sauerkraut with juniper berries and bacon, and watery potatoes to go with it. He liked sitting there and talking to writers. They talked about their fellow author Rainer Brambach, who’d died twenty years ago. Simply fallen off his bicycle and dead, the best of them all. About Dieter Fringeli, who’d drunk himself to death. About Guido Bachmann, who’d succumbed to whiskey. About Adelheid Duvanel, who’d gone out into the wood and lain down to die.

  “Basically, Basel’s a poet’s town,” Lutz maintained, “full of hidden beauty, full of poetry. Though hardly anyone notices. That’s why the authors in this town come to a bad end.”

  “That’s not right,” Hunkeler said, “not all of them come to a bad end. The two of you are still alive. And you have a good life.”

  “What do you mean by good?” Federspiel asked. “I live to write. I can’t write any more because nothing occurs to me any more. What do I have to live for?”

  “You’ve written enough. You’ve already become a classic.”

  “What’s that to me? I can’t live as a classic.”

  A pensioner had sat down at the neighbouring table with a black lady of the night. He’d ordered spaghetti bolognaise for her and a half-bottle of red wine for the two of them. He watched her lovingly as she ate. He had his hand between her thighs the whole time. That didn’t seem to bother her, she ate with great relish. Then they emptied their glasses and went upstairs.