Karate sank the three.
“And you would like to clean out his office. How are you going to move those files and mountains of paper? In boxes, or in sacks? These days, or so I’m told, they have archives. So maybe you won’t find anything at all in that office, and you’ll have to get the archives and the computers too. I suppose it would be a good idea to call a cab to the front door.”
He slammed the seven in, then scratched on the next shot, and it was my turn.
“I don’t know anyone who’d do such a job without wanting to get paid in advance. And I don’t even know anyone you paid in advance who would do the job.”
I lit a cigarette and walked around the table, looking for a shot.
“Let’s suppose the guy would have no trouble proving that I forced him to do it. As soon as we set foot in police headquarters, he should, in fact, persuade any questioner that I’ve arrested him without a warrant. If we get caught, that’ll give me a chance to get away. I’ll pretend I’m just a dumb private dick who’s been trying to curry favor with the superintendent by this senseless arrest.”
He pulled out a cigarette, rolled it morosely between his lips and growled, “A dumb dick? Not just dumb, totally out of his mind.” He shook his head. “Listen, when you lose your license, I’ll be glad to give you a job. Keep an eye on the place, shoot a little pool. Seven marks an hour. Nice quiet job.”
6
The Dawn Restaurant. The Chinese lettering on the window was scratchy and flaking off. On the glass door, a pale green dragon blew smoke around the menu. Little bells rang as I entered. The booths were dimly lit by paper lanterns and decorated with dusty Chinese parasols. Disco pop was playing on the radio. The small Chinese man behind the counter was chewing on a toothpick and glancing at me with bored eyes.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Slibulsky.”
He pointed his thumb at one of the dark corners. I ordered coffee and walked to the back, the top of my head grazing the colored paper garlands. Slibulsky sat at a bamboo table, drinking beer. The description fit. Short, black curls, puffy cheeks, unshaven, a drinker’s nose. I sat down across from him.
“Ernst Slibulsky?”
He stared into his beer.
“Uh-huh.”
“Kemal Kayankaya. Private investigator.”
He drank his beer. Then he scrutinized me and said, “Aha.”
“I’m told you’re looking for work. I have a job for you.”
My coffee arrived, and he ordered another beer.
“It pays five hundred marks an hour.”
He leaned back, stretched his legs, and grinned. He commented that this would at long last allow him to hire a tax consultant.
“All you have to do is let me handcuff you and take you to the Criminal Investigation offices. Then you have to start carrying on and shouting that I had no right to do that.”
“Shouting?”
“Only as we go in. If we manage to get out again, you better keep your mouth shut.”
“And if we don’t make it out again?”
“Then you go on playing the part, claiming you don’t know anything about anything, saying I pulled a gun on you, told you I was a cop, and so on. They’ll take no interest in you.”
He told me I had a sense of humor and went back to contemplating his beer. I told him pretty much everything that had happened so far in the Böllig case. Not that I really trusted him, but it was my only chance to win him over. When I’d finished, he looked at me and asked, “Who gave you my name?”
I shook my head. I had given Karate my word. Slibulsky took a wooden match and stuck it between his teeth. Then he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.
“And who won?”
“Come again?”
“I’ve never known anyone to visit Karate without shooting a game with him.”
He pointed at my hands with his matchstick. “Blue poolroom chalk.”
“We won one each.”
He took out his wallet.
“Any friend of Karate’s is all right by me. Even if he’s a snooper, and is planning a really weird operation.” He put twenty marks on the table.
“Make it eight hundred, and it’s a deal.”
I talked him down to seven. We paid up and left the Dawn.
“We’ll go by my place first. Get a bit of disguise, handcuffs, and so on.”
“And four hundred marks. The balance tomorrow.”
Someone had stuck red fliers under the windshield wipers of all the cars parked in the street. “Jimmy’s Jean Shop—Great Inaugural Hullabaloo!” I tossed mine into the gutter, and we drove off.
After pulling the brim of my hat down low over my eyes, I shoved Slibulsky into the entrance hall of police headquarters. The woman at the switchboard and the cop on duty looked up. I pushed Slibulsky straight to the reception window. As soon as we were in front of it and the woman slid the window open, he started ranting.
“Lemme go, you shithead, you god damn snooper! I have nothing to do with any of it. Miss, he’ll just tell you a bunch of garbage. He has no fucking right to drag me here. Or to beat me up either.”
I punched him and leaned into the window.
“I have an appointment with Detective Superintendent Kessler. He’ll be here any moment. If he should call from anywhere along the way, please tell him I’ve brought the man in.”
She stared at me, dumbfounded. The cop came to the window.
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Listen, this is urgent. We may have to mount a major operation tonight …”
“You’re dreaming, snooper! I shit on your—”
“Shut up!”
Slibulsky played his part well. The two in the reception area were at a loss.
“All right, then? I’ll wait for Mr. Kessler in his office. He gave me his keys.”
I rattled my house keys.
“Oh well, all right.” Then the cop grabbed his uniform jacket and added, “I’ll come along to make sure he doesn’t give you any trouble.”
I raised my hand.
“That won’t be necessary. I can take care of him. Besides, no one’s going to give me any grief later, if I have to use a little force. I’m not a policeman, you see,” I looked at him with narrowed eyes, “but he has to sing.”
He grinned.
“I understand. I’ll notify Superintendent Kessler as soon as he gets here.”
I nodded and guided Slibulsky to the hallway in which I seemed to remember Kessler had his office.
Behind my back, I heard the woman say, “But Mr. Kessler just …”
“Let it be. It’s gotta be something secret.”
At last we stood in front of the door. I took out my skeleton key and worked on the lock. Five seconds later I had the door open.
“If someone shows up and there’s time to get out, you knock on the door. If there isn’t, you start playing your part.”
“I hear you.”
I closed the door quietly and switched on the light. The office was just as I remembered it. Only the silence was mildly unnerving. I sat down at the desk and went through the drawers. Typing paper, rubber stamps, the famous ruler, a city map of Frankfurt. At the very bottom, a pocket calendar. I took it. The skeleton key worked great on the metal cabinets. The first one was empty. The second contained coffee cups, aspirin, cookies, and shaving cream. The third, finally, held twenty-odd files. I went through them all. Was that a knock? No, I guessed not … Then I read, “Investigation of Böllig case.” Now there was a knock. Louder this time. Unmistakable. Slibulsky stuck his head inside and whispered, “You deaf? Hurry up, man!” I stuck the file under my arm, switched off the light, and shut the door behind me. The voices sounded quite close.
“What a mess! I was in the building. You saw me!”
Kessler! Slibulsky dragged me in the opposite direction. We had hardly reached the corner of the hallway before the light came on. We ran down the hall on our toes. Then the shouting began.
“They’
ve broken into my cabinets! Don’t just stand there, sound the alarm! They must still be in the building! Block all exits!”
We ran down a flight of stairs. No exit. I tried every door until one opened. The toilet. In the tiled wall at the end of the urinal gutter there was a frosted glass pane.
“That’s our way out.”
“How about taking these off me first?”
I unlocked the handcuffs. At that moment the siren began to wail. “Now we’ll have some fun.”
I took off my coat, wrapped it around my right arm, and smashed the glass pane. The frame was narrow, but we managed. Head first, I let myself drop the two meters down to the wet lawn. Slibulsky popped out behind me. We crawled over to some bushes. The building was brightly lit. A cop ran past us. The entrance had been closed. We had to cross about twenty meters of open space to reach the wall. Another cop appeared, gun in hand. Through the broken window we could hear them crashing into the toilet,
“They got out through here! Everybody outside! Shoot on sight!”
We had no choice. I held on tight to my file. “Now!”
We were up and running.
7
I had turned off the engine. I leaned back, enjoying my cigarette. It was a little past one o’clock in the morning. Lights were still on in The Dawn Restaurant across the street. Slibulsky sat next to me, quietly surveying the scene.
We sat there for a while, listening to the rain.
“Tell me: This job you’re on—who are you working for?”
“The attorney.”
“But he fired you! No, I meant generally. You’re a private investigator. What a load of crap that must be.”
He scratched his chin, ruminating. “The way you’re going about it, at least. It’s like—some kind of a cross between Robin Hood and a cop. That just can’t work out too well.”
“I have to eat. Ask a worker at the VW factory who he’s slapping bumpers onto those cars for.”
“But a VW worker would never risk his life to meet a delivery deadline. And he doesn’t give a shit if the engine blows up after a hundred kilometers. Those guys back there were ready to shoot us. If we hadn’t been lucky, we’d be lying there like a couple of dead rabbits in the grass. And who would give a fuck? Some little dealer from the railroad station, and a Turkish snooper. That doesn’t even rate a mention on the morning news. They’d just plow us under in a hurry. So you risk your life for something you believe is justice, and end up in the compost heap. What’s justice, anyway? It doesn’t exist, not today, not tomorrow. And you won’t bring it about, either. You’re doing the same scheiss-work as any cop. You catch the guys and bring them to court. You may be a little nicer, you may let one of them go, if you think he doesn’t deserve a life behind bars. But you won’t change a thing about the fact that it’s always the same guys who do something, who get caught—not a thing, because the rules are set up that way. So all right, so tonight you pulled a fast one on the cops and you got away with a file. So what?”
The wind was driving the rain against the windshield. I watched the drops stream across it, running like a herd of hunted animals across the pane.
“I’m starving.”
“There’s an all-night place just around the corner where you can get hamburgers and breaded schnitzels.”
“You want to go?”
“What about that fucking file?”
“Later.”
I pushed the file under the seat, and we got out. We walked the hundred meters to the Schnitzel Fritz. It looked like a waiting room with fluorescent lights, green plastic tables, and chairs. Behind the counter a fat guy stood flipping burgers. The place was busy. There were some Turks, a couple of ladies of the night, and a table with giggling high-school kids gorging themselves on french fries and Cokes. We ordered schnitzels, potato salad, beers, and shots of schnapps. I had two shots and a beer in rapid succession. The schnitzel was cold, the potato salad drowned in vinegar.
“I work at my job because I wasn’t able to go to law school. At first I thought that being a private investigator was a little bit like being a family doctor. Neither one can do anything about the great massacres and all the other shit that goes on all the time, but what he does do may be important to one individual or another. Once I had a killer explain to me that it was beneath his dignity to be caught by a dago, so he asked for a real cop to arrest him. Just before that I had offered him a shot of schnapps and told him that I would have preferred to send the other people involved to prison rather than him. Well, so. I’ve learned that it really doesn’t matter one bit whether I exist or not. I do my work the best I can. That’s all.”
We kept ordering shots of schnapps to get rid of the aftertaste of our schnitzels. It started to grow dim, and I realized I wasn’t all there anymore. The rounds kept coming, and I kept knocking them back. I didn’t notice that Slibulsky was pouring his shots on the floor under the table. We attracted the attention of two high-heeled girls at a neighboring table. Their working days and nights had carved traces under their eyes. One of them got up and slid next to me on my chair, letting her leather miniskirt slide up over her thigh.
“Hello there, fellows—still up and about this late? Lonely in the night? Still up for fun and games, eh?”
She smiled, but her eyes were contemptuous. She lit a cigarette, scrutinized me through the smoke, and said provocatively, “I can tell that you could use a little loving.” She ran her fingers through the hair on my neck. I closed my eyes.
“How about a visit to our little drawing room? It’s just around the corner. A whole house full of pretty girls with wild ideas.”
She shook my shoulder. “What do you say?”
I don’t recall what happened after that. At some point, I regained consciousness and found myself walking arm in arm with the woman who told me her name was Fanny. We stopped in front of a building with a lot of red lights that blended into one Red Sea. I noticed Slibulsky, who must have been trotting along behind us. He grabbed my sleeve and I almost fell down, but Fanny helped me regain my balance. Slibulsky started saying things to me, and while he was talking, he was rummaging in my pockets. He pulled out my car keys and wallet, then spoke to Fanny and handed her a bill. I didn’t understand any of it.
What did I care! Let him spend my money, let him toss the fucking file in a garbage can, let him drive my car into a wall! I was yelling at him. I said I hadn’t asked him for any favors, and I told him to leave me alone, to mind his own fucking business. And anyway, this shithole of a world could go to hell for all I cared, and he with it. I was about to attack him when Fanny managed to drag me into the building, Men slunk past us on the staircase; a half-naked woman sat on a landing reading a newspaper. At last Fanny unlocked one of the green pressboard doors and dragged me to a bed with a blue silk cover. She lit a cigarette for me and took my clothes off. Then she sat down next to me and helped me take her clothes off, down to the last little bits, which she removed herself. I felt her skin against mine, naked and warm. My hands groped along her legs. Later I felt her moving above me, but all I saw was her breasts before I lost consciousness.
It was half-past four when I woke up and looked at my watch. My throat felt like a tanned piece of leather. It was still dark outside. Fanny lay beside me, asleep. I could see her face in the light cast by a street lamp. She had taken off her makeup. I could remember only half of the night, and would have preferred to forget even that part. I got up quietly, gathered my things, and put my clothes back on. I went to the window. The streets were still empty. Then I remembered the business with my keys and wallet. I cursed alcohol and Slibulsky and the whole world. If that file was gone … I was an idiot. In a corner I found a carafe with water for my poor head. Fanny sighed in her sleep. I took her lipstick, wrote Thanks for Everything on the mirror, and mentally apologized for my quiet departure. I tiptoed down the stairs and through the plastic swinging doors out into the street. My watery knees took me in the direction of the Opel. A ragged creature on the
curb was singing “Without you I can’t go to sleep tonight,” and tossing empty beer bottles into the street.
“Shut your face!” someone roared from the opposite building.
The old fellow pulled himself up with the aid of a parking meter, shook his fist, and yelled, “Come on down … if you wanna knuckle sandwich, you ass-asshole!”
Then he slumped back and burst into sobs.
“What a shitty country … an’ shitty people … an’ nothin’ to drink … Shit, it’s all sh-shit!” He lay down on his side and began to snore.
My Opel was still there, with a note on the windshield: “It’s open.” I opened the door and reached under the seat. The file was gone.
Dazed, I leaned against the car and stared at my surroundings. The rain had stopped. Then I saw that the light was on in the Chinese restaurant. This struck me as strange, and I walked over and tried the door. It was open. At the table closest to the door sat Slibulsky, bent over a stack of papers, a steaming cup of tea next to him. He growled, “There’s coffee too, behind the counter. I bet it’s still hot.”
I helped myself to some and sat down at his table.
“Amazing what the cops manage to write about just a single case. This file is a gold mine. But what you’re looking for isn’t here.” He pointed to the seat. “There’s your wallet, and your keys. The shape you were in, you might’ve treated the whole bordello to champagne. I gave Fanny a hundred marks. That’s less than the nightly rate; I don’t know why, but she took you along for a hundred.” He grinned. “Maybe she felt sorry for you.”
“That’s enough.”
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