The Basel Killings

by Hansjörg Schneider

  “I have two questions,” said Hunkeler, “if that’s permitted.”

  Suter gave him a venomous look, but didn’t say anything.

  “Go ahead,” said Füglistaller. “This is in the Basel Rural District area, so I make the decisions.”

  “Did the young woman say anything? Or was she unconscious? And secondly, did the woman have anything in her earlobe?”

  “Ask Frau Căldăraru, she’s her mother.”

  Hunkeler turned to the woman to repeat his question. But she’d understood it.

  “When I came up to the pond,” she said, “Eva was lying unconscious on the ground. I talked to her quietly and she opened her eyes. I asked her who it was. She said she saw a shock of red hair. That was all she said.”

  “That’s right,” the man in the yellow outfit said. “They spoke briefly to each other. I couldn’t understand, it was in a foreign language.”

  “Eva didn’t have anything in her ear,” the woman said. “She’s only sixteen. But he’d slit her.”

  “Where did you learn to speak such good German?” Hunkeler asked.

  “Transylvania. We used to go there often. If she dies,” she went on, “then the beauty’s gone from my life. Then I’ll curse this inhuman city.”

  “In all probability she won’t die,” said Dr Ryhiner. “He did try to strangle her, but he didn’t quite succeed. The cervical vertebrae, artery and windpipe do seem to have been crushed but have suffered no terminal damage. And she’d only been in the water for two or three minutes.”

  “Who would do a thing like that?” the woman asked. “A young, innocent girl?”

  Her whole body suddenly started quivering. She seemed to be swaying, but she managed to stay on her feet.

  “Come with me,” Haller said. “There’s no more help you can give us here. I’ll take you to your family.”

  He went away with her.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Füglistaller said to Hunkeler. “You’re the one who’s most familiar with the Barbara Amsler case. I’d like to work with you on the Eva Căldăraru case, if that’s possible.”

  He looked across at Suter, who briefly snorted, as if a fly had flown into his nose.

  “Right,” said Suter, “that’s agreed. I’ll expect to see you in my office at five o’clock this afternoon, Inspector Hunkeler.”

  “Unfortunately that’s not possible this afternoon,” he said. “Could it not be tomorrow morning?”

  “Why? Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “I’ve things to do this afternoon. Until late in the night.”

  “If you insist. Tomorrow, Saturday, my office.”

  Hunkeler went through the slush to his car. He suddenly felt dead tired. Most of all he’d have liked to lie back against a tree stump here in the woods and have a little sleep. Then he realized that he wasn’t just tired but also very calm. He was sure of what he was going to do now.

  He went to the nearest bookstore and asked for an etymological dictionary, just to consult it. He looked up the word Schlitzohr. “Slit-ear, to slit”, it said: a punishment in the Middle Ages for thieves whose ears were slit open. It was also used to identify Travellers.

  “Do you have a book about Gypsies in Switzerland?” he asked the assistant.

  “You mean Travellers?” she asked.

  “If you like. You know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s an excellent standard work, published in 1987. I haven’t got it in stock. I can have it here by midday tomorrow,” she said.

  In the grocer’s next door he bought three bananas and a bar of milk chocolate, went to sit in his car and started to eat the chocolate, slowly and with pleasure. Then he called Enrico Casali and asked for Angel’s number.

  “I don’t like giving those out,” Casali said. “I have to safeguard my girls’ privacy.”

  “I’ve no time for jokes,” Hunkeler said. “And since you’re not her pimp, I’m sure you can have no objection to private contacts.”

  He was given the number and called it. Angel was at home.

  “Hola, hombre,” she said, “qué pasa? Quieres hacer el amor?”

  “No, I’m calling on business. Back then, when I visited you in the Singerhaus, what was it you said about Barbara Amsler? That she was a puta?”

  “Por amor, hombre, definitely not. That’s not a nice word.” “What was it then?”

  “Fuera una gitana. Didn’t you know that?”

  No, he hadn’t known that. He’d been too stupid.

  He started the car and drove off. He went across the viaduct, past the station and out onto the autobahn. He grinned bitterly, he was furious with himself. Why had he forgotten the word gitana? It was a lovely word, he’d known it since he was young, when he’d discovered flamenco. And why hadn’t he looked up the term Schlitzohr ages ago to see what that meant? Because he was pig-headed, stubborn, a mule from the Aargau.

  After Rheinfelden he was driving into thick fog. He took his foot off the gas and switched on the headlights. Schirmer, he thought, had he not been a gitano? A vagabond, as Hermine had said? That meant there must be a man in Basel who had it in for Gypsies or travelling folk. Who punished them with death by strangulation and then marked them by slitting them. That was the word the Gypsy woman had used, up there in the nature reserve. “He’d slit her,” she’d said.

  Who was this man? What made someone at the beginning of the twenty-first century carry out such cruel punishments, like some kind of medieval kangaroo court? Where did such hatred come from?

  He almost missed the rear lights of a truck flashing in front of him in the fog. He slammed on the brakes, pulled over to the right and parked on the shoulder. There he switched off the engine. He waited until his pulse had calmed down. And he decided that from now on he’d drive slowly and cautiously.

  After Frick he left the autobahn and headed off towards Staffelegg. Ueken appeared: long rows of farmhouses, two inns. Empty, foggy fields, then came Herznach. He saw a small filling station with the Adler Inn right after it. He pulled up and went in.

  There were three old men sitting at the table beside the bar. They turned their heads to see who was coming in. They didn’t say a word. He went over to them, rubbing his hands as if he felt cold.

  “Chilly outside, isn’t it?” he said.

  The one smoking a Brissago cigar nodded slowly. The two others just stared.

  “May I?” Hunkeler asked, sitting down with them. The one with the Brissago nodded.

  “Bloody fog,” Hunkeler said, “you can’t even see your hand in front of your face.”

  “The sun’s shining up there on the Staffelegg. Are you going to Aarau?”

  “No, to Schinznach Dorf.”

  “Why to Schinznach Dorf?” the one in the cardigan asked.

  “Visiting relatives.”

  “Really? What are your relatives called?”

  “Amsler,” Hunkeler said.

  “Aha, the Amslers,” the man in the woolly hat said. “One lives in the upper village, Walter, he’s as old as me. Is that the one?”

  Hunkeler nodded and ordered a coffee from the waitress.

  “He recently lost his daughter,” the one in the cardigan said, “she was a tart.”

  “No, that was the other one. That was Werner,” said the one in the woolly hat. “He lived in the Römerhof up there and he died five years ago.”

  “But his daughter was a tart all the same.”

  “She was a streetwalker,” the man with the Brissago said.

  “The filling station over there,” Hunkeler said, “it used to belong to a Garzoni, didn’t it?”

  “I’ve no idea,” the one with the woolly hat said, “who the filling station used to belong to.”

  Hunkeler stirred three sugar cubes into his coffee, nice and slowly so that they’d dissolve completely.

  “I heard,” he said, “that old Garzoni immigrated from Lombardy.”

  “Really, from Lombardy,” the man with the Brissago said.
“Why on earth? Why would he move here from Lombardy, to the back of beyond?”

  Hunkeler sipped his hot coffee. He was going to have to be careful if he wanted to learn anything here.

  “I know his son,” he said, “he lives quite close to me, in Basel. He’s the one who owns the Burgfelder Pharmacy.”

  “We don’t know anyone called Garzoni,” the man in the cardigan said. “Or am I wrong there? Do we know anyone called Garzoni?”

  “No, we don’t know a Garzoni,” the man in the woolly hat said.

  Hunkeler looked at the three men, sitting motionless by half-empty beer glasses, their eyes on the ashtray with the glimmer of the Brissago. He emptied his cup.

  “The bill,” he shouted.

  “Already settled,” the man in the cardigan said. “We don’t like policemen here.”

  After Densbüren the climb up to the Jura heights began. Hunkeler grinned, partly out of rage but also out of amusement. He liked talking to people, especially country people. But here, with the men from Herznach, he’d been banging his head against a brick wall once again.

  Up high, at Asp, he drove into bright sunshine. He was almost dazzled, the light was so glaring. He put his foot down, letting the engine show what it could do, which wasn’t all that much. At the top of the Staffelegg pass he took the left bend, heading off in the direction of the Schenkenberg valley. He stopped, parked and got out his old walking boots. He put them on and set off, at first over meadows with a thin layer of snow, then through woods with spruce and pine trees. He reached the top of the ridge after an hour, sat down on a limestone rock and looked at what he could see.

  The sun was low in the west, casting its light straight out over the sea of fog filling the valley of the Aare and the relatively flat part of Switzerland. The eastern cliffs of the Wasserfluh on the right were in shadow, the Alps to the south gleamed white. He could only see the spur of the Gislifluh. Beyond it the dark ridge of the Lägerns emerged from the fog.

  He stayed sitting there for half an hour, enjoying what he could see. Then he set off back to the car and drove down into the Schenkenberg valley.

  When he came to the first vines the fog started again. Thalheim, Kasteln Castle, Oberflachs, old villages of the Jura with limestone walls three feet thick. Then Schinznach Dorf. He drove through the upper village, turned off down to the church and stopped outside the Hirzen Inn.

  He sat down at one of the long wooden tables. Outside it was gradually getting dark. He saw the fog illuminated by a tractor’s headlights.

  There were framed photos on the wall by the stove. He went over to have a look at them. The Men’s Gymnastic Club of 1928 could be seen, men with moustaches in white clothes. The women’s squad of 1944. The male voice choir of 1952. The wine press of 1914. The fire brigade of 1963. Beside them was a notice about the local rules for playing jass.

  Hunkeler ordered a glass of white wine from the wood, and to eat: black pudding and liver sausage with sauerkraut and slices of dried apple. On the table next to his was a cloth for playing jass, a pack of cards and a slate with two chalks and a sponge.

  He remembered that he had a dentist’s appointment the next day. She intended to insert two screws for implants. He called her, recording his message on her answerphone.

  “Good evening, Frau Dr Steinle. Hunkeler here. Unfortunately I can’t come tomorrow, I have too much to do.”

  That wasn’t entirely correct. The truth was that he was afraid of the noise of the drill, of the buzzing in his bones.

  He ate slowly and carefully, chewing on the right side alone. Black pudding with apples, liver sausage with sauer-kraut, it was pure poetry.

  The place began to fill up around eight. A larger group of three oldish couples, presumably coming from outside the area. They also ordered the assorted cold cooked meats and sausages with sauerkraut. A younger couple, oddly nervous and fidgety, dressed like hippies from the sixties. Three young men speaking a language Hunkeler couldn’t understand. An old man with a strangely anaemic-looking face, whom the waitress addressed as Cousin Sepp. He ordered the meat soup.

  Three men of Hunkeler’s age had taken the table beside his. They had come to play cards but took their time getting down to it. They ordered a half-litre of red wine and talked about Ernst Wiesel in the house across the road, who was now confined to his bed; about the farmer down by the bend in the road who had now also given up farming. There were only a few dairy cows left in the village and their days were numbered too. There used to be one dung heap after the other, in both the upper and the lower village. The jangle of bells could be heard throughout the village when the cows came down from the meadows in the evening. Now all you could hear was the through traffic.

  Hunkeler stood up, put his card on their table and introduced himself.

  “Weren’t you here a few months ago?” one asked. “You were sitting over there with the mayor. It was because of Barbara Amsler.”

  “That’s right,” Hunkeler said, “but he wouldn’t really say anything.”

  “That’s the way he is, our Alois, a real politician. What do you want to ask us?”

  “I’m looking for a serial killer. Three people strangled.”

  “Really? Wasn’t there something again, yesterday I think, just outside Basel? I read something about it.”

  Hunkeler nodded.

  “Join us if you like. I’m Fritz Riniker, that’s Jakob Zulauf and that’s Gottlieb Hartmann. Let’s have a drink together.”

  Hunkeler let him fill his glass and all four drank to each other.

  “Right then,” Hunkeler said, “I’d like to know if Barbara Amsler was a Traveller.”

  They were silent for a while. It almost looked as if they were going to break off the conversation.

  “She certainly wasn’t a Traveller any more,” Fritz said. “But what has that got to do with it?”

  “She, like the two other victims, had had one earlobe slit open. In the past they used to punish Travellers that way to mark them out.”

  “Oh.”

  They were thinking about what to say. Fritz was the first to make up his mind.

  “There used to be a lot of Gypsies around here. They were mainly Yenish folk who’d been here for ages. The Aargau used to be a kind of no-man’s-land where there was no centralized power. The Frick valley, ruled by the Habsburgs, was a long way away from the centre of power. The federal governors in the Confederation changed every year. They didn’t bother much with the Travellers. The Bernese did, though, they tried to keep the Travellers out of their district. But their power didn’t extend to the out-of-the-way valleys of the Jura. Moreover, it was pretty easy to keep out of the way of their country policemen. You just had to cross over into the valley or the Confederation.”

  “How do you know all this?” Hunkeler asked.

  “I was a primary school teacher here for forty-two years. As a teacher you had to give talks and write things for the New Year edition of the paper. You automatically become a local historian.”

  “The Hartmanns are also partly descended from the Yenish people,” Gottlieb said. “My great-grandmother was an Amsler. I got that from old Marie who lived over there in the Rinikers’ house. We all went to her school.”

  “True,” said Jakob, “and we always had to pray with her. Then we got a stick of liquorice from her to suck – we used to call them bear turds.”

  They all three nodded, presumably remembering the late Marie and the liquorice.

  “So the Amslers are a Yenish family,” Hunkeler said, trying to get the conversation back on track.

  “Originally, yes,” said Fritz, “but they have long since merged with the settled population. Barbara’s mother, she was Yenish. She was called Rosa Minder and originally came from the old part of the Aargau. She went to school with us but often played truant.”

  “Roseli,” Gottlieb said, “she was a lovely girl. She had very bright eyes and laughed a lot. Sometimes she’d tear her handkerchief apart in front of us to show
off to us lads. She was born in the Aarau cantonal hospital. Because her mother suffered from depression.”

  “Oh come on,” Fritz said, “she didn’t have depression. She was forcibly interned in Königsfelden by the anti-Yenish aid organization Children of the Road, who worked on behalf of the government. Little Rosa was taken away from her immediately after birth and taken to a foster family in Aarau. She never saw her mother again. At least that’s what she told us.”

  “So what happened to her mother?”

  “She died of grief, people said, but no one knew anything precise. What’s more, that so-called aid organization was partly financed by the Pro Juventute charitable foundation, above all through the sale of postage stamps.”

  “I took part in that,” Hunkeler said.

  “We all did,” said Jakob, “we went from house to house selling those Pro Juventute stamps. We all thought what we collected was to go to the poor orphans.”

  “That was Dr Siegfried,” Gottlieb said, “he thought that up.”

  “Why have we never heard about this?” Hunkeler asked.

  “People do know,” Fritz said, “if they want to know. But they’re ashamed of what happened.”

  “What happened to Rosa?”

  Rosa came to our village when she was around eight. They lodged her with Stephan Müry, down by the stream, he was paid for her maintenance. But he wasn’t good to her, she kept on running away. Once she got over the Staffelegg and down as far as the Rhine. The police brought her back. The pastor then went to see how she was and looked for a better place for her.”

  “That’s right,” said Gottlieb, “with my relatives. She grew up with their son, Werner Amsler. She married him later on. He treated her well, but she never became a proper farmer’s wife.”

  “She was very beautiful,” Jakob said, “and she really loved dancing.”

  “But things didn’t work out with Werner,” Gottlieb said. “He’d had polio and was lame in one leg. And then she had Barbara, her only child. She was just like her mother. She also liked to take things too far.”

  “I taught her at primary school,” Fritz said. “I liked her very much. She was actually quite clever, but she hardly ever did her homework. She could easily have got into the district school that prepared kids for high school, but she wasn’t interested in that. At twelve she went off on foot and got as far as the French-speaking region. She was picked up there and put away in various institutions. We here in the village lost touch with her. Once she worked as a waitress in the railway station up by the Bözberg tunnel, for three months. Another time we heard that she was in Thailand. Eleven years ago she returned to Switzerland and worked as a store assistant in Basel. Then we heard she’d become a prostitute. That was the way things were for Barbara, she didn’t have much luck.”