Guilt

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  “You and your partner bought pills from us. You want to give us 250,000 euros for them. Your partner was arrested on the Autobahn. We’re sorry about that. But you still have to pay the money.”

  Atris swallowed. Frank got caught, he thought. He nodded. She waited till she could be sure Atris had got it.

  “I’m glad you understand. Now I’m going to ask you a question. After I’m done, you can take the barrel out of your mouth so you can answer. When you’ve finished answering, you put the barrel back in your mouth. It’s quite simple.”

  Atris was getting used to the voice. He didn’t have to think. He was just going to do everything the voice said.

  “Where is the money?” she said.

  Atris opened his mouth and said: “The money’s at the station. Buddy swallowed the key, he shat all over everything, I had to …”

  “Quiet,” said the woman. Her voice was sharp. “Put the barrel back in your mouth immediately.”

  Atris stopped talking and did as he was told.

  “Your story’s too long. I don’t want to listen to a whole novel. All I want is to know where the money is. I’m going to ask you again. I want you to answer in a single sentence. You can take your time to work out the answer. When you know what you want to say, open your mouth and say the sentence. But only one sentence. If you say more than one sentence, I’ll cut your balls off. Do you understand?”

  Her voice hadn’t changed. Atris began to sweat.

  “Where is the money?”

  “In a locker in the main station,” said Atris, and immediately bit down on the steel again.

  “Very good, now you’ve got it, this is exactly the way it goes. Now comes the next question. Think about it, open your mouth, say one sentence, and shut it again. Work out your answer. So, here’s the question. Who has the key to the locker?”

  “Me,” said Atris and closed his mouth again.

  “Do you have it here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m proud of you. We’re getting somewhere. Now comes the next question. Where is your car?”

  “In the parking garage.”

  “I see we’re getting on with each other. Now it gets a little more complicated. Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to stand up, but you’re going to do it very slowly. Do you understand? What matters is doing it all really slowly. We don’t want the thing to go off because I get scared. If we’re careful, nothing’s going to happen.”

  Atris slowly got to his feet. He still had the pistol in his mouth.

  “I’m going to take it out of your mouth now. Then you’re going to turn round and walk to the door. I’m behind you. We’re going to drive together to the station now. If the money is there, you can go.”

  Atris opened his mouth and she pulled out the barrel.

  “Before we go, there’s one thing you need to know. There are special cartridges in the pistol. They contain a drop of nitroglycerin. You’re going to walk ahead of me. If you run, I’ll have to shoot. The nitroglycerin will explode in your body. There will be nothing left of you that anyone can recognize. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Atris. Nothing would make him run.

  They took the elevator down. Atris went ahead and opened the door to the parking garage. Someone yelled, “That’s the pig.” The last thing Atris saw was the metal baseball bat. It shone red.

  They’d stolen the wrong Maserati. The car belonged to a rapper. He’d been having dinner with his girlfriend in Schlüterstrasse. Afterwards, when he couldn’t find his car, he’d called the police, but the car hadn’t been towed away. His girlfriend got in a bad mood. She wound him up till he called his old friends from Kreuzberg. Muhar El Keitar promised to take care of it.

  ——

  If you didn’t belong to the police, it wasn’t hard to find out who now had the car. El Keitar was the head of a large family. They all came from the same village, and they were Lebanese Kurds. El Keitar wanted the car. He made that clear. His friend the rapper was a famous man now, and he absolutely wanted to help him. The four men who paid Abdul a visit on Muhar El Keitar’s orders didn’t want to kill him; all they wanted to know was who the car had been for. But something went wrong. When they came back, the men said Abdul had tried to fight back. He’d said where the car was, but then it was all over.

  When Atris regained consciousness, he was on a wooden chair, bound and naked. It was a damp, windowless room. Atris got scared. Everyone in Kreuzberg had heard of this cellar. It belonged to Muhar El Keitar. Everyone knew that El Keitar liked to torture people. They said he’d learned the technique during the war in Lebanon. There were a lot of stories about it.

  “What’s going on?” Atris asked the two men who were sitting on a table in front of him. His tongue was all furred and swollen. Between his legs was a car battery with two cables.

  “Wait,” said the younger man.

  “What am I waiting for?”

  “Just wait,” said the older one.

  Ten minutes later Muhar El Keitar came down the stairs. He looked at Atris. Then he screamed at the two men.

  “I’ve told you a thousand times you’re to put the tarp under the chair. Why don’t you ever get it? Next time I won’t say anything and you can see how you get all the shit cleaned up.”

  In fact, Muhar El Keitar didn’t want to torture people. That sentence was almost always enough to get his victims to talk.

  “What do you want, Muhar?” asked Atris. “What should I do?”

  “You stole a car,” said El Keitar.

  “No, I haven’t stolen any car. The boys stole it. The other Maserati was full of shit.”

  “Good, I understand,” said El Keitar, although he didn’t understand at all. “You have to pay for the car. It belongs to a friend.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “And you’ll pay compensation for my costs.”

  “Of course.”

  “Where’s your money?”

  “In a locker in the main station.” Atris had learned in the meantime that there was no sense in telling long stories.

  “Where’s the key?” asked Muhar El Keitar.

  “In my wallet.”

  “You’re morons,” Muhar El Keitar said to the two men. “Why didn’t you check it? I have to do everything myself.” El Keitar went over to Atris’s orange garbage company coveralls. “Why do you have garbage company overalls?” said Muhar El Keitar.

  “It’s a long story.”

  Muhar El Keitar found the wallet and inside it the key.

  “I’m going to the station myself. You guys keep an eye on him,” he said to his men, and then to Atris: “If the money’s there, you can go.”

  He went back up the stairs. Then he came down again backwards. He had a pistol in his mouth. El Keitar’s two men reached for the baseball bats.

  “Put them down,” said the woman with the pistol.

  Muhar El Keitar nodded vigorously.

  “If we all stay calm, nothing’s going to happen to anyone,” said the woman. “We’re going to solve our problems together.”

  Half an hour later Muhar El Keitar and the older of his two men were sitting on the floor of the cellar, bound to each other with zip ties. Their mouths were sealed with parcel tape. The older one still had his undershorts on; Atris was now wearing his clothes. The younger one was sitting in a huge pool of blood. He’d made a mistake and pulled a blackjack out of his pocket. The woman’s pistol had still been in El Keitar’s mouth. With her left hand she’d pulled a switchblade out of the front pocket of her hoodie, opened it, and plunged it deep into the inner part of his right thigh. It was over quickly: he registered almost nothing. He had dropped to the floor at once.

  “I severed your femoral artery,” she said. “You’re going to bleed out, it’ll take six minutes. Your heart will keep pumping the blood out of your body. Your brain will be the first to go; you’ll lose consciousness.”

  “Help me,” he said.

  “Now for the g
ood news. You can survive. It’s simple. You have to reach into the wound and find the end of the artery. Then you have to squeeze it shut between your thumb and your forefinger.”

  The man looked at her in disbelief. The pool of blood was getting bigger.

  “If I were you, I’d get a move on,” she said.

  He’d groped around in his wound. “I can’t find it, dammit, I can’t find it.” Then the bleeding suddenly stopped. “I got it.”

  “Now you can’t let go. If you want to live, you have to stay sitting down. At some point a doctor will get here. He’ll close off the artery again with a little steel clip. So keep still.”

  And to Atris she said, “Let’s go.”

  Atris and the woman drove to the main station in the stolen Maserati. Atris went to the locker and opened it. He set down two bags in front of the woman and opened them.

  “How much money is that?” she asked.

  “Two hundred and twenty thousand euros,” said Atris.

  “And what’s in the other one?”

  “One point one kilos of cocaine,” said Atris.

  “Good. I’ll take both. The thing is all settled. I’m leaving now, you’ll never see me again, and you’ve never seen me,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Repeat it.”

  “I’ve never seen you,” said Atris.

  The woman turned, picked up both bags, and headed for the escalator. Atris waited for a moment or two, then ran to the nearest phone booth. He picked up the receiver and dialed the police emergency number.

  “A woman in a black hoodie, just under five feet tall, slim, is in the main station, heading for the exit.” He knew how the police talk. “She’s armed, she’s carrying a bag of counterfeit money and a kilogram of cocaine. She’s stolen a blue, no, a red Maserati. It’s in parking garage number two,” he said and hung up.

  He went back to the locker and reached into it. Behind the coin slot—invisible from the outside—a second key was taped. He used it to open the next-door locker and took out a bag. He looked into it for a moment. The money was still there. Then he went back into the main hall and took the escalator up to the suburban train platforms. Down at the lowest level he saw the woman lying on the ground, surrounded by eight policemen.

  Atris took the first train to Charlottenburg. As it came in, he leaned back. He had the money. Tomorrow the big package from Amsterdam with the pills in it would reach his mother. Frank had even included a windmill in the package that lit up red and green. She loved things like that. The post office didn’t have drug-sniffing dogs yet, the Russian had said; they cost too much money.

  The woman would be sentenced to four or five years. The cocaine was admittedly only sugar, but Frank and Atris had once fallen for the counterfeit money trick themselves. Aside from which, there was still possession of a weapon and the theft of a car.

  Frank would be set free in a few days; nothing could be proved against him. The pills would find a ready market. When Frank got out, he’d give him a puppy, or definitely a smaller dog. They had saved 250,000 euros, and the woman’s arrest was the Russian’s problem: these were the rules. Frank would be able to buy himself the new four-door Maserati.

  After he’d told me the whole story, Atris said, “You just can’t trust women.”

  Lonely

  Today she walked past the house again for the first time in a long time. It had all happened fifteen years ago.

  She sat down in a café and called me. Did I remember her? she asked. She was a grown-up now, with a husband and two children. Both girls, ten and nine years old, pretty children. The younger one looked like her. She didn’t know who else to call.

  “Do you still remember it all?” she asked.

  Yes, I still remembered it all. Every detail.

  Larissa was fourteen. She lived at home. The family’s only income was from welfare; her father had been out of work for twenty years, her mother had once been a cleaning lady, and both drank. Her parents often came home late. Sometimes they didn’t come home at all. Larissa had gotten used to this, and to the beatings, the way children get used to anything. Her brother had moved out when he was sixteen and never been heard from again. She was going to do the same.

  It was a Monday. Her parents were in the corner liquor store. That’s where they were almost always to be found. Larissa was alone in the apartment, sitting on the bed, listening to music. When the bell rang she went to the door and peered through the peephole. It was her father’s friend Lackner, who lived next door. She was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties. He asked where her parents were, came into the apartment, and checked that she really was alone. Then he pulled the knife. He told her to get dressed and come with him or he’d slit her throat. Larissa obeyed; there was nothing else she could do. She went with Lackner, who wanted to be in his apartment where no one could disturb him.

  Frau Halbert, the neighbor who lived in the apartment across the hall, was coming up the stairs towards them. Larissa tore herself free, screamed, and ran into her arms. Much later, when it was all over, the judge would ask Frau Halbert why she hadn’t protected Larissa. Why she had detached herself from Larissa’s embrace and had left her to Lackner. The judge would ask her why she had watched as the man took the girl away although she was begging and crying. And Frau Halbert would always answer in the same way. To every question she replied, “It wasn’t my business; it was nothing to do with me.”

  Lackner took Larissa to his apartment. She was still a virgin. When he had finished, he sent her home. “Say hi to the old guys” were his farewell words. Back in the apartment, Larissa took a shower under such hot water that it almost scalded her skin. She closed the curtains in her room. She was in pain, she was terrified, and there was no one she could tell.

  In the next few months things went badly for Larissa. She was tired, she threw up, and she couldn’t concentrate. Her mother said she shouldn’t eat so much candy, it caused her heartburn. Larissa gained almost twenty pounds. She was in the middle of puberty. She had only just taken down the pictures of horses from her wall, and hung up photos from teen magazines. Things got worse, particularly the pains in her stomach. “Colic,” said her father. Her periods had stopped coming: she thought it was because of the revulsion.

  On the twelfth of April she barely made it to the toilet. She thought her bowels would explode—she’d had cramps in her stomach all morning. It was something else. She reached between her legs and felt something strange that was growing out of her. She touched sticky hair and a tiny head. “It mustn’t be inside me,” she said later. This had been her only thought, over and over again: It mustn’t be inside me. A few minutes later the baby dropped down into the toilet bowl; she heard the water splash. She stayed sitting. She lost all track of time.

  At some point she stood up. The baby was lying down there in the toilet bowl, white and red and greasy and dead. She reached up to the shelf above the washbasin, took the nail scissors, and cut the umbilical cord. She dried herself off with toilet paper but she couldn’t throw that on top of the baby, so she stuffed it into the plastic bucket in the bath, then sat on the floor till she got cold. When she tried to walk, she wobbled, but she fetched a garbage bag from the kitchen, supporting herself against the wall and leaving a bloody handprint. She pulled the baby out of the toilet, its tiny legs as thin as her fingers. She laid it on a towel. She looked at it, a brief look that was far too long; it lay there, its face blue and its eyes closed. Then she folded the towel over the baby and pushed it into the bag. Carefully, like a loaf of bread, she thought. She took the bag down to the cellar, carrying it with both hands, and set it between the bicycles, weeping silently. On the steps back up she began to bleed. It ran down her thigh, but she didn’t notice. She made it as far as the apartment, then collapsed in the hall. Her mother, who had come home, called the fire department. In the hospital the doctors took care of the afterbirth and alerted the police.

  The policewoman was friendly; she wasn’t in unifo
rm, and she stroked the girl’s forehead. Larissa lay in a clean bed; one of the nurses had brought her a few flowers. She told them everything. “It’s in the cellar,” she said. And then she said something that no one could believe: “I didn’t know I was pregnant.”

  I visited Larissa in the women’s prison. A judge who was a friend of mine had asked me to take her on as a client. She was fifteen. Her father gave an interview to the tabloids, saying she’d always been a good girl and he just couldn’t understand it. He was paid fifty euros.

  There have always been repressed pregnancies. Every year in Germany alone, 1,500 women recognize too late that they’re pregnant. And year after year, almost 300 women only realize it when they give birth. They misinterpret all the signs: menstruation has ceased because of stress, the stomach is distended because of overeating, the breasts are enlarging as a result of some hormonal disturbance. These women are either very young or over the age of forty. Many have already had children. People can repress things, though nobody knows how the mechanism works. Sometimes it’s totally successful: even doctors are deceived and refrain from further physical exams.

  Larissa was set free. The presiding judge said the child had been born alive, it had drowned, its lungs had been fully developed, and coliform bacteria had been found in them. He said he believed Larissa. The rape had traumatized her and she hadn’t wanted the child. She had repressed everything so powerfully and so completely that she literally had no knowledge of her pregnancy. When she had delivered the baby on the toilet, she had been astonished. As a result, she was in a state in which she could no longer distinguish right and wrong. She was therefore not guilty of the death of the newborn infant.

  In a separate trial, Lackner was sentenced to six and a half years.

  Larissa took the streetcar home. All she had with her was the yellow plastic bag that the policewoman had packed for her. Her mother asked how it had been in court. Larissa moved out six months later.