More Beer kk-2

by Jakob Arjouni

  I ground my cigarette into the ashtray.

  “So you need a private investigator. Why me? I’m a Turk.”

  His stubby fingers scratched the back of his other hand. “I read about your last case. I think you’re pretty incorruptible.”

  “Depends on the size of the bribe …”

  “What I mean is that you’re not easily swayed by public opinion. If you take this on, you have to be incorruptible in that sense.”

  Pause. It took him at least three minutes to come out with his next question.

  “How did you end up in this profession? Being a Turk, I mean …”

  “I’m a citizen of the Federal Republic.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  He nodded, and as he leaned forward, there was a glint of solidarity in his eyes.

  “Not so easy to acquire, that damn citizenship, is it?”

  “No problem. I mow my lawn, I laugh a lot during the carnival season, and I manage to drink beer and play skat at the same time. Somewhere past Munich lies Africa, that’s where the Negroes live. I hate interruptions during sportscasts. My living-room set has been paid for. And I’m really a dancing Silesian at heart.”

  For a moment he seemed on the verge of the inevitable “You must be kidding,” but he restrained himself and only gave an affected laugh.

  “Seriously, Mr. Kayankaya-how long have you been living in Germany?”

  “My mother died after she gave birth to me. My father took me to Germany. He didn’t last very long, and I was adopted by a German family. I’ve lived in this country for as long as I can remember.”

  He nodded.

  “Forgive me. That’s quite a story.”

  I lit a cigarette.

  “It is?”

  I took a drag.

  “You should have heard the one I told my last client.”

  I blew smoke rings.

  “How did they find your defendants?”

  “That is one of many dubious aspects in the case.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that the police simply stormed their apartment three days after the explosion. There had been no search to speak of.”

  “Maybe someone squealed.”

  “Yes …”

  “Could have been that fifth man.”

  “Maybe …”

  “The police didn’t say how they managed to find the suspects so quickly?”

  “The man in charge, Detective Superintendent Kessler, was quite reticent about it. He merely said that the suspects had been arrested at the end of a quickly organized investigation.”

  “Not a word about the fifth man?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Are they looking for him now?”

  “I assume they are.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Well, he’s just as suspect as my clients are.”

  “What if he made a little deal with the cops? His freedom for the address of your clients?”

  “I don’t think so. Not in a case that has attracted so much political attention. The police can’t afford it.”

  “All right. So the cops are after him-but you think you need a P.I. to chase him too. Who do you think I am? If the guy has half a brain, he’s made tracks, and not just from Sachsenhausen to the North End or the other way round, but much farther. If you like, I’ll take your money and drive around. But it’s a bit out of my league.”

  “In my opinion, a discreet loner may be more effective. Naturally I’ll take care of your expenses …”

  He hesitated.

  “If I didn’t think you were a good detective-I would have got up and left long ago.”

  “I’ve been sitting around in these wet rags for three hours. I can’t stand it when people smack their lips while eating. And I would have preferred to meet your friend alone, on a night with a full moon.”

  “You were none too kind to Miss Reedermann.”

  “There was no full moon, either.”

  “Furthermore, in this case … I don’t know your political views, but …”

  “I’m just supposed to find this guy, right?”

  “Yes, of course, but political views do come into play. People want to see my clients convicted. So-called Green terrorists are grist to the mill for the Right. They’re the best thing that could have happened, from the Rightists’ point of view. Considering the business with the Rhein Main Farben plant, and …”

  “All right. To set your mind at rest, I really believe that hand-knitted socks, free-range chickens, and argumentative women are terrific. I don’t look good in seal fur. But don’t ask me for the next paper recycling date.”

  “Well, then.” He sighed. “So you accept?”

  “Two hundred marks a day plus expenses.”

  “No reduced rates for a good cause?”

  “It’s included. I am the good cause.”

  He nodded, looking a little sour. “How do you intend to start?”

  “First I’ll have a word with your clients. Then I’ll drive to Doppenburg.”

  “My clients? But that’s out of the question. They refuse to talk to anyone but me.”

  “In that case, I need official reports, background information, and so on.” I considered this for a moment.

  “The Bollig plant doesn’t employ a night watchman?”

  “He was knocked out.”

  “And?”

  “He saw the person. At a lineup, he didn’t recognize a single one of my clients.”

  “The fifth man?”

  I stood up and pocketed my pack of cigarettes. “When can I see you in your office?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Around eight, then. Where is Doppenburg?”

  “On the Frankfurt-Heidelberg freeway, past Darmstadt. It has its own exit.”

  “I’ll see you tonight. See if you can make that lakeside camper be there too.”

  I left. The sky had lightened and the rain had slackened to a drizzle. A couple of small clouds stuck to the tall downtown buildings like dirty cottonballs. I turned up my coat collar and hurried to the nearest subway station.

  3

  I pushed the front door and turned on the light in the entrance hall. Almost instantly the greengrocer popped out of his ground-floor apartment. In his corduroy slippers, turned-up jeans, and green nylon pullover, he barred my way, his shiny blond hair combed severely to the right. He was waving an empty cigarette pack excitedly.

  “What is this? Tell me, what is this?”

  His head bounced forward and back, as if pummeled from behind by an invisible fist.

  One more time. “What is this?”

  I unlocked my mailbox.

  “I have no idea.”

  “It is an empty cigarette pack and I found it this morning, on the landing! Because I sweep my landing! Do you hear me? I sweep my landing! Here in Germany, we sweep our landings! We’re not in the Balkans here, and you better get used to it, or else go back there! You terrorize the whole building with your garbage … the whole building! He jabbed the pack with his index finger as if to punch holes in it. “All the other tenants have confirmed that this is the brand you smoke. Well, what do you have to say to that? Well?”

  He raised his eyebrows and went on ranting.

  “Ha! That strikes you dumb, doesn’t it! But let me tell you something-if ever again I find one of these on the landing, I’ll get the owner and show him the mess. Your mess! Then you’ll have to deal with him. Do you understand?”

  I felt like pasting him.

  “Come on, say something! You’re always such a smartass, how come you don’t know what to say?”

  I took the mail out of my box, locked it again, and advanced. We were still two meters apart when he began to stammer.

  “If you do anything to me … if you dare … I’ll, I’ll call the police … and they, they’ll arrest you, and there’ll be some peace in this building, at long last … They’ll put you in jail, and we’ll be rid of you!”

  He flutter
ed his hands in front of me like a man shooing off pigeons.

  “Now, now … I’m warning you … if you touch me, I’ll … I’ll call for help …”

  He was out of breath. I pushed past him and climbed the stairs to my apartment. Once inside, I pulled off my damp clothes and took a hot shower. I had an unpleasant prickling sensation in my feet. Drying myself off, I thought about Carla Reedermann. Then I put on a pair of wool pants and two pullovers and a pair of hiking boots. The kitchen smelled of burnt onions. I poured myself a tumbler of Chivas and went to the phone. I dialed the number of my garage and listened to the phone ring for a while.

  “Riebl Auto Repair.”

  “Kayankaya. Is my car ready?”

  “I’m just working on it.”

  “It’s been three weeks since you told me you’d have it ready for me in a week.”

  “Not to worry, I’ll have it fixed the day after tomorrow at the latest.”

  “I’m not worried. I need a car today, and if you can’t do it, I’ll take your limo.”

  He giggled. Riebl was one of those people who seem to be drunk all the time while never touching a drop of the stuff. He was just a little goofy.

  “That’s no joke. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  He kept on giggling and mumbled something. I hung up.

  “Be right there.”

  Riebl was lying under the hood of my green Opel Kadett. The place smelled of gasoline and lubricant. A radio in a corner was screeching tunes of the German homeland. Then he surfaced.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mr.…”

  “Kayankaya.”

  “Right.”

  “What’s with my car?”

  He scratched his neck and stared absently at the floor, as if he had just heard an immoral proposition.

  “We-ell …”

  “Well, what?”

  “You know, it’s so easy to make a wrong estimate. At first it just seems to be the sparks, but then it turns out the whole engine is screwy. You know what I mean?”

  “Give me the keys to your car. I’ll be back tonight, at half past seven.”

  He shook his pinched head.

  “Tch, tch, tch, I don’t know …”

  “Come on.”

  Hesitantly he produced a bunch of keys out of a pocket of his overalls.

  “But really … I don’t …”

  “See you tonight.”

  I left him standing next to my Kadett. Twenty kilometers past Darmstadt, I took the Doppenburg exit.

  4

  I first heard it from a guy with red hair in the Zum Grossen Schiff tavern in Sachsenhausen: He insisted on calling the place Dopeyburg, not Doppenburg. However, since he also pronounced “cider” “soyder,” I didn’t pay much attention, but later I noticed that other people of more cultivated speech habits also referred to the place by that pejorative name. Well, I thought, just another instance of that rather less than brilliant sense of humor that turns a professor into a perfesser. Only now, years later and on site in Doppenburg, did I realize how appropriate it was.

  Doppenburg was a small town centered around an ugly pedestrian mall. Supermarkets were interspersed with third-rate fashion shops staffed by saleswomen who resembled the sausages in the butcher’s window. Flower planters, round light fixtures, and empty benches adorned the street. Retired people pulled their shopping bags on carts across the pavement, probably attracted by some advertised sale in spite of the wet and the cold. In sheltered corners, housewives discussed the problems of noodle casseroles, children, and varicose veins. At one end of this parody of an urban environment stood the inevitable Italian ice-cream cafe frequented by Coke-guzzling teenagers perched on their motorbikes, cradling helmets under one arm and cracking bad jokes about their girls.

  I parked the car on the main street and strolled uphill into the old part of town, with its rows of half-timbered houses that looked as if children had modeled them out of clay, then baked and neatly painted them. Immaculate streets. Not even the smallest pile of dog shit to offend German cleanliness. Except for a couple of shiny pink tea and health shops, the streets were dead. A young man stood at a deserted intersection waiting for the traffic light to turn green. When he saw me cross against the red, his lips tightened disapprovingly. I think he would have liked to follow me in order to punch me in the face, for the sake of law and Fatherland, but the light didn’t change.

  At a refreshment kiosk I asked for directions to the Bollig plant. Two guys stood there in the rain, drinking their dinner.

  They grinned.

  “Bollisch? With his broken pipe?”

  He slapped his companion’s shoulder.

  “Our pipes are broken too. Right, Ennst? What does the Mrs. say to that? Hey, Ennst! Broken pipe!”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Bollisch … Hey, Ennst! How does he get there? Ennst!”

  Ernst squinted at me slyly and said, almost choking with mirth, “And how do I get to the opera?”

  “Practice. A lot of practice,” I said, and walked away.

  “Har, har. That was a good one. The old ones are the best ones.”

  The baker’s wife gave me directions. I walked back to the car and followed the flow of traffic down the main street toward Weinheim. After a kilometer or so, tall brick walls appeared by the side of the road, their tops covered with barbed wire: Ruhenbrunn Private Clinic. Just past those walls was the paved entry road to the Bollig plant.

  The factory stood on a hillside, with the notorious lake to its right. The dirty yellow water lapped gently against the bright gravel on the shore.

  I stumbled across the little wet rocks to the demolished waste pipe. Such concrete pipes did not require major amounts of explosives for their destruction. The action must have been about as exciting as a flat tire in a no-parking zone. I contemplated the shoreline. Where the gravel ended, small clumps of reeds separated the moldering soil from the water. It seemed an unlikely site to choose for a camping trip. I turned around. The factory was a pile of corrugated iron. Out of it, at seemingly random intervals, rose three mighty smokestacks. On top of one of them, a thin flame flickered. On the side of a warehouse, a row of faded red letters proclaimed that this was BOLLIG DRUGS-FOR LIFE, FOR THE FUTURE, FOR OUR CHILDREN. Chemical enterprises have a weakness for hyperbolic publicity.

  “Hey, you! What are you doing there? This is factory property!”

  A skinny fellow wearing a sea captain’s cap came running across the gravel and stopped in front of me, breathing hard.

  “Just looking around. The site of that sabotage.”

  “You can’t just walk in like that. Do you have a permit?”

  “I’m investigating the matter for the public prosecutor’s office.”

  He scratched his chin. “You are?”

  “I am.”

  “But you don’t look the type.”

  “So?”

  “The public prosecutor’s office, that’s an important office, to do with the law and all … But really, you look … I’m sorry. If you’re really working for them …”

  He fussed with the sleeves of his uniform jacket. “Are you the night watchman?”

  “Yes, that’s my job.”

  “You were knocked out, a while ago?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  His knees were twitching, and he kept looking back at the factory buildings, as if he were afraid he could be seen from there.

  “You saw the man?”

  He was trying hard not to avoid my eyes. “I already told the police all about it.”

  “So you saw the man?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Once again his eyes turned toward the factory. “What did he look like?”

  “He didn’t look like anything. He had something over his head, a stocking or a cap, I couldn’t tell. It was dark.”

  “Let’s take it from the top. You were on your rounds, and he just came out of nowhere and hit you over the head?”

  “No … you see, I was sitti
ng in my cabin, over there …”

  He pointed behind his back. As he went on talking, he looked more and more troubled.

  “… I was reading, whatever … and suddenly the door slams open, and before I had time to turn around, I was hit over the head, and it was lights out for me. When I came to my senses, the police had arrived. And that was all there was to it.”

  The wind had risen to blow the drizzling rain across the field. I lit a cigarette and let him squirm a little.

  “It was dark, and you didn’t have time to turn around? That’s strange. This morning, someone told me there had been a lineup of suspects … Was he just putting me on?”

  “No, there was a lineup, all right. But … Why don’t you ask the police? They have all the information.”

  “And he was wearing a stocking over his head. Maybe you should have sent your wife to that lineup.”

  “But see, the superintendent had arranged that lineup just as, like, a shot in the dark.”

  He raised his hat and wiped his forehead.

  “When you came to, the police were there? Immediately? You opened your eyes and saw green uniforms?”

  “What? No. Mrs. Bollig arrived first. She woke me up, so to speak. They live right there, you see.”

  “When Mrs. Bollig woke you up-had she already found her husband?”

  “I don’t know … I think …”

  “Don’t you think a woman would mention it if she had just found her husband riddled with bullets?”

  “Everything happened so fast, and … but you’re right, I remember now. Yes, she was falling apart, she was hardly able to utter a sensible word …”

  He smiled at me cautiously. Following classic cop procedure, I took out my cigarette pack and offered him one. He lit up and we smoked. As soon as he looked a little more relaxed, I resumed my questioning. “He must have hit you hard.”

  “Yes, with a club. I can still feel it.”

  “I see. May I take a look?”

  His eyes opened wide.

  “Come again?”

  “I’d like to see where he clubbed you. Come on.”

  He took off his cap in slow motion.

  “But … after six months? Of course it’s healed over by now.”