“Oh, I didn’t know …”
“Yes. Herta Böllig, Otto Böllig’s widow, is still alive. When you drive up to the plant, you’ll pass a refreshment kiosk where an old woman sells cigarettes and beer.”
The female Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Slowly I closed my mouth again. The Polish woman understood.
“So you’ve met her? Right. Soon after Friedrich got married to Brigitte, the latter decided that the old lady was an encumbrance to the household. Friedrich resisted at first, but she was soon relocated to an outbuilding that had been used as a storage space. Her next and final stop would have been the old folks’ home. Without consulting anybody, Herta Böllig fired the man who was running the kiosk, furnished the back room, and moved in. You can imagine what a scandal that was, here in Doppenburg. Friedrich tried everything to get her out of there, but she wouldn’t leave. Finally he let his wife convince him that it was the best arrangement for all concerned. People got used to it. Among the employees it became a taboo subject. I am the only person she still talks to. I, the former mistress of her husband.”
Such a story, such vodka. God, the stories I would be able to tell when I was sixty … But maybe I was more like one of those plays without a plot, I told myself; and besides, who would want to drop in on me?
“Now that we’ve opened this can of worms—tell me, what happened to Friedrich Böllig’s son? I’m told he is in an institution?”
She had another hefty slug of vodka, leaned against the window bench, held her glass with both hands. Eastern Europeans have a special wooden leg for the stuff.
“That’s all I know. I’ve never seen the child. He lives in a closed ward. Meningitis, right after he was born.”
“You know the name of the institution?”
“Sorry, I don’t even know the boy’s name. All I know is that neither Friedrich nor his wife cared for him much. They’ve really buried him in silence. You are the first person in years who has asked me about him.”
She walked out of the room, holding herself exaggeratedly erect. I heard the toilet flush. Then she returned with a bottle of mineral water. She put the vodka away. I drank three glasses of water in a row and felt more or less human again.
“Do you know a guy named Henry? An acquaintance of Brigitte Böllig’s?”
“She has many acquaintances. I haven’t paid any attention to their names.”
A key turned in the front door. A moment later, Fred Scheigel padded into the salon. His hair was wet, and he looked perplexed.
He cast a disapproving look at me, at his wife, at the glasses. He nodded and mumbled, “Good evening.” She said, “Fred, you’ve met Mr. Kayankaya. He wants to know why you didn’t go see a doctor about your head injury.”
An amazing memory. I wouldn’t have remembered why I had come here.
Fred Scheigel slowly divested himself of his overcoat and folded it carefully over the back of a chair.
“But I did explain that to him.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it an explanation. But I have another question: Before you were attacked—did you hear gunshots?”
He got annoyed. “Questions, questions, always the same questions! I told the police everything!” He looked at me grimly. “I was out cold before the explosion!”
“The shots were fired before the explosion.”
Both of them stared at me.
“But …”
“There are witnesses.”
The Polish woman closed her eyes and did some quick thinking.
“But what was Friedrich Böllig doing down by the waste pipes, in the middle of the night?”
“I’ve asked myself that. What do you think, Mr. Scheigel? Did your boss sometimes patrol the grounds, check up on things?”
He hesitated. “Once in a while, I suppose.” After a pause: “Quite regularly, really. He would drop by the cabin to see me.”
His wife gave him a suspicious look. I couldn’t tell whether I or the presence of his wife embarrassed him. I would have liked to talk to him alone. But I couldn’t do that now. It was after six o’clock, and I had found out enough for one afternoon.
“It’s getting late, and I …” I looked at Scheigel and asked him without warning, “You didn’t happen to call the police about the conversation we had yesterday?”
He looked surprised, shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”
Heavy with vodka, I rose cautiously off the couch and tried life in the vertical position. It felt precarious, but I managed.
“About your vodka, madam—is it available only to fellow Slavs?” I did not want this to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. She smiled.
“I’ll give you the address.”
While she was out of the room, I handed Scheigel my card.
“Just in case. You can call me any hour of the day or night. Should you feel like it.”
Hesitantly he looked at the card, then at me.
“Your story is lame. You know that as well as I do. Sooner or later, you’ll be found out.”
His wife came back, and he slipped the card into his pants pocket.
“Here—I wrote a few words of recommendation on it. Nikolai is a sweet person, but don’t let him overcharge you. He likes to exaggerate.”
I thanked her, and she walked me to the door. Scheigel stayed in the salon, after shaking my hand without meeting my gaze. I took my leave of the Polish woman.
“Until next time.”
She ran her fingers through her tousled hair.
“You want to hear more of my blather?”
I laughed.
“Oh, get going, young man.”
I walked down the cobbled street. At the corner I turned to look back. The pink robe had disappeared.
4
The door was ajar. It was quiet. A little too quiet. I pushed the door slowly open with my foot. The three large mirrors that had adorned the entrance hall to the right and to the left now lay distributed in shards all over the pale carpet. I tiptoed to the office, toward the quiet whimpering I could hear coming from it. I entered and almost tripped over a broken chair. The desk had been overturned, three of its legs sticking up in the air, the fourth lying in the chaos of desk drawers, books, and all kinds of documents. The leather armchairs had been slit open. The stuffing swelled out of the gashes. The papers rustled in the draft coming from the broken windowpanes. Someone had spray-painted large black letters on the wall: ACTION COMMANDO FREEDOM AND NATURE.
I waded through the debris to the whimpering closet. It was locked, and there was no key. I kicked the lock, and my foot crashed through the closet door. I could hear Anastas squealing. I managed to break down the door. Behind it, Anastas lay folded into the narrow space like a fat baby. His hands had been tied with his necktie and his nose was bleeding, a result of my kicking in the door. He had been blindfolded with a kitchen towel. I unknotted it and the necktie, helped him to his shaky legs, and put him in a chair. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
As far as I could tell, he wasn’t seriously injured. No black eyes or missing teeth, not to mention unnaturally dangling arms. His nosebleed had stopped. His cheeks were red and swollen, though, and he had lost the buttons on his shirt. It looked as if he had been slapped around. The room was freezing. I stuck pieces of cardboard in the broken window, turned up the heat, and went to look for a calorific drink. When I came back with a half-full bottle of Rèmy Martin, Anastas was crawling through the debris, looking for something.
“Here, have a hit, it’ll do you good.”
He looked at the bottle as if it were poison and said plaintively, “No, no thanks.”
“If not, not,” I said to myself, tilted the bottle for a hearty slug on his behalf, and reclined in an armchair until I realized that Anastas was crawling around looking for his glasses. I found them for him, under the radiator. The right lens was broken. He put them on and surveyed what was left of his office. Then he took a deep breath, took the bottle out of my hand, and knocked back at least a centimeter.
“Smoke?”
He nodded. After a couple of puffs, he said, “I thought I’d die in that closet.”
“A few slaps won’t kill you.”
He looked at me grimly.
“They won’t? You smartass. What about all this?”
He leaned toward me and yelled, “They beat me up! They tortured me!”
“And who were they?”
“Who! My clients, their friends, their sympathizers—what do I know. Just look at this!”
He gestured grandly at the chaos. I took the brandy back and returned to my chair while he went on ranting.
“And to be honest with you, it’s your fault! It happened because of you. Why do you think they came here? To tell me to fire you! Let me tell you, I’ll pay you what I owe, right now, and that’ll be the end of our collaboration. I’m not a street fighter, I’m an attorney!”
I lit a cigarette.
“So that’s news to you, isn’t it? If only I had known, I—”
“Let’s take it from the top. How many of them were there, and when did they get here? Pull yourself together.”
He waved his arms in the air and shouted, “Pull myself together! I’ve just been assaulted, brutally, and you talk about pulling myself together! Put yourself in my place!”
He was gasping for air. When he seemed to have calmed down, I asked politely, “Well?”
He leaned against one of the legs of the desk and started talking, more to himself than to me.
“There were two of them. The doorbell rang around six thirty. I had been arranging books on my library shelves. I went to the door. Two men, all in black with pantyhose over their heads, grabbed me and dragged me into my office, beating me up as they went. It was pointless to resist, they would have killed me. One of them was at least two meters tall. A monster with huge shoulders, and he had a gun.” He stopped, looked at me, and shouted, “I’d like to have seen what you could have done!”
I mumbled something and asked him to go on with the story, but he stayed on this sidetrack for a while, graphically describing how I would have fared, how I would have begged for mercy, and so on. He was quite imaginative. Somewhere along the line he lost the thread and fell silent.
“Did those two say who or what they were?”
“You’ve seen it. Action Commando ‘Freedom and Nature.’ ”
“Right. But what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Supposed to mean, supposed to mean! How would I know what that’s supposed to mean? They said they were comrades of the ecological front, united in the struggle for life and nature. So you see, Böllig, the lake, clean water—it all fits.”
I got up and gave him a little pat. “Mr. Anastas, that’s a bad joke. ‘Freedom and Nature.’ I can’t believe that your clients’ friends would parody themselves like that.”
“You just know that, don’t you.”
I rounded on him and shouted, “Yes, I do, I fucking well do know it! And I know a few other things too! I know practically everything! And if you don’t stop acting out, I’ll see to it that you start feeling homesick for those two playmates of yours. Now then: Why did those thugs make such a mess of everything?”
He cleared his throat, looked cowed.
“All right … if you have to know. They accused me of having hired a cop.” He avoided my eyes. “They said I was a traitor, not worthy of defending their friends in court, and so on. Believe me, they meant it too. While I tried to explain, they busted up my office. They had tied me up, so I couldn’t do anything about it. Finally, after I promised to dismiss you, they locked me in the closet.” He reverted to the complaining mode. “Why me? Why didn’t they visit you? It would have made more sense. To victimize me, after all I’ve done for those people.”
He raised a fist. “But this does it. I’ll pay them back.”
“Whom?”
“Whom? Who has such friends, won’t hesitate to commit a murder. I’ve realized that I am not defending innocent people.”
“I see. You’ve realized that. Gosh, that’s really sharp.”
I turned away from him and strode back and forth. “That’s really great PR for your practice. Someone slaps you around a bit, and you drop your clients like hot potatoes.”
“It’s easy for you to talk big. Anyone of my colleagues would give up a case under such conditions.”
“Time for me to go, then. And that’ll be four hundred marks.”
For a moment he looked as if he wanted to protest, but then he found his checkbook, wrote the check, and handed it to me. “Scared?” I asked him. He waved his arms.
“Of course I’m scared. They’ll come back! They’re a gang of murderers and bomb throwers. They’ll kill me!”
“You better take very good care of yourself the next few days.”
He looked flabbergasted. “What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t believe this bullshit about ‘Freedom and Nature.’ I told you I’d find the fifth man, if he exists. So I’ll go on looking. Since your clients were unlucky enough to get hold of such a wet blanket of a lawyer, they at least deserve a halfway decent detective.”
He turned purple and snarled, “No, you won’t! Because then they’ll believe … You have no right to do that!” He came toward me, pointing at me. I’ll inform the police! You are threatening my life, you’re inciting the entire mob to go for my throat. I’ll demand protection!”
I grinned. “You won’t die. Guys like you don’t die that easily. But you’ll stay scared until this case has been solved. You’ll stay scared even if they station half the guys in the precinct at your front door. What a hell of a guy you are.”
I tapped my forehead and left. He followed me into the hall. “You’ll leave the case alone, won’t you? If I hadn’t hired you, you would never have thought of …”
I pulled the door shut behind me.
5
The windows were open onto the steady patter of rain. I was leaning my elbows on the desk in my office. The other agencies and physicians had all closed up shop, and I was alone in the building, except for the janitor watching television in his basement apartment. Scraps of music wafted from the Chicken Inn across the street. It was time to have my client chair reupholstered. My bottle of Chivas lay in the drawer. I tried to think about something else. Women. Once I knew a girl with whom I spent rainy days drinking tea and playing backgammon. Now and again, one of us would go out for cigarettes. In the evenings we lit candles and sipped champagne … and so forth.
There was a water stain on my ceiling. The credit agency above me had installed a bathtub not too long ago. It was useful for keeping the beer cold, the cashier had told me.
A bathtub. Cold beer. Women. I pulled the Chivas out of the drawer and treated myself to a drink. I had to find the fifth man, and I had an idea. Normally I have no megalomaniacal tendencies, but now I saw only one way to make progress in this case.
I walked up Kaiserstrasse in the direction of the main railroad station. Except for a couple of whores with umbrellas on the comer, the block was deserted. A small but raucous bunch of Americans went into a brothel. The neon lights looked dim in the rain, and there was no clientele to lure into the strip joints. A police car drove by on its rounds. In front of the Rio stood a lumpy figure in a napa leather coat. He looked like he’d been standing there for a long time. He grabbed my sleeve. “Hey, Mustafa—come see classy women. Great tits, great ass. Real classy! No lie. And real cheap.” I crossed the street. A blonde informed me she’d do it tonight for just twenty. “See, buddy, it’s like a going out of business sale.”
Finally I reached Ellermann’s Game and Sports Center. The poolroom was on the second floor. As a frequent visitor, I knew the assistant manager. The poolroom was as desolate as the street. Two Japanese were shooting. Two five-hundred-mark bills lay on the side table. I watched one of them sink the eight ball and pocket the bills. Without a word they renewed the bet and racked the balls for a new game. In the back, an elderly gentleman
was practicing bank shots. The assistant manager stood by a window and watched the goings-on in the hot-sheet hotel across the street.
“Evening. What’s happening?”
He clicked his tongue.
“She’s been haggling over the price for half an hour.”
Now both of us were watching. “All right! She’s got the bills. Now she closes the curtains.”
He turned.
“Quite an odd show, that. But in this filthy weather business is bad, and prices go down. Red-dot specials in the red-light district.”
He slapped my shoulder.
“Well, Isnogood, how about a game?”
I nodded, and he went to get the balls. Karate—this had been his nickname ever since he’d kicked in the face a patron who had been unwilling to pay—was a born-and-bred native of this part of town. After doing some time for auto theft and bodily injury, he had stayed clean and was on friendly terms with both cops and pimps. Both cops and pimps came to shoot pool at his place.
He returned and racked the balls. I took the first shot, and we alternated all the way to the eight ball. Both of us missed it three times. Then he triple-banked it elegantly into a pocket, noting, “Your left arm is like jelly.”
“I had an accident.”
He grinned. “And the doctor prescribed schnapps? You stink like a still.”
I growled noncommittally, and we played another game. As he was lining up his shot, I asked him, “Do you know anybody who’d like to make a little money? Five hundred marks an hour.”
He made his shot, straightened his back slowly. “And what would he have to do during that hour?”
“Stand watch in front of the offices of the Criminal Investigation Unit. And maybe crack a safe.”
“The Crime Squad, eh? I see.”
We continued our game. After a while, he said:
“If you’re not feeling too good—my girlfriend is on vacation. You can come stay with me for a couple of days.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“That’s even worse.”
“I’m looking for a murderer—or an accomplice who has connections to the police. His name should be on a list of informers. At least, that’s what I think. In any case, he must have turned in four alleged suspects in exchange for being let go, and he’s probably under contract now. The detective superintendent in charge of the case is tremendously proud of these successful arrests, and I’m the last person to explain to him that he has released the only truly guilty party. On the contrary: He’s busy weaving his web of informers, and he’s worried that I might destroy it.”
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