Crime

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  The prosecutor was wrong; a divorce was precisely what had not been an option for Fähner. The most recent reform of the code of criminal procedure has dismissed the oath as an obligatory component of any sworn testimony in a criminal case. We ceased believing in it a long time ago. When a witness lies, he lies—no judge seriously thinks an oath would make him do otherwise, and oaths appear to leave our contemporaries indifferent. But, and this “but” encompasses whole universes, Fähner was not what you’d consider one of our contemporaries. His promise, once given, was inviolable. Promises had bound him all his life; indeed, he was their prisoner. Fähner could not have freed himself; to do so would have amounted to betrayal. The eruption of violence represented the bursting of the pressurized container in which he had been confined his whole life by his oath once given.

  Fähner’s sister, who had asked me to take on her brother’s defense, sat in the public gallery. She wept. His former head nurse held her hand. Fähner had become even thinner in prison. He sat motionless on the dark wooden defendant’s bench.

  With regard to the practicalities of the case, there was nothing to defend. It was, rather, a problem of judicial philosophy: What is the meaning of punishment? Why do we punish? I used my summation to try to establish this. There is a whole host of theories. Punishment should be a deterrent. Punishment should protect us. Punishment should make the perpetrator avoid any such act in the future. Punishment should counterbalance injustice. Our laws are a composite of these theories, but none of them fitted this case exactly. Fähner would not kill again. The injustice of his act was self-evident but difficult to measure. And who wanted to exercise revenge? It was a long summation. I told his story. I wanted people to understand that Fähner had reached the end. I spoke until I felt I had gotten through to the court. When one of the jurors nodded, I sat down again.

  Fähner had the last word. At the end of a trial the court hears the defendant, and the judges have to weigh what he says in their deliberations. He bowed and his hands were clasped one inside the other. He hadn’t had to learn his speech by heart; it was the encapsulation of his entire life.

  “I loved my wife, and in the end I killed her. I still love her, that is what I promised her, and she is still my wife. This will be true for the rest of my life. I broke my promise. I have to live with my guilt.”

  Fähner sat down again in silence and stared at the floor. The courtroom was absolutely silent; even the presiding judge seemed to be filled with trepidation. Then he said that the members of the court would withdraw to begin their deliberations and that the verdict would be pronounced the next day.

  That evening, I visited Fähner in jail one more time. There wasn’t much left to say. He had brought a crumpled envelope with him, out of which he extracted the photograph from their honeymoon, and ran his thumb over Ingrid’s face. The coating on the photo had long since worn away; her face was almost a blank.

  Fähner was sentenced to three years, the arrest warrant was withdrawn, and he was freed from custody. He would be permitted to serve his sentence on daytime release. Daytime release means that the person under sentence must spend nights in jail but is allowed out during the day. The condition is that he must pursue a trade or hold a job. It wasn’t easy to find a new trade for a seventy-two-year-old. Eventually, it was his sister who did this: Fähner worked as a greengrocer—he sold the apples from his garden.

  Four months later, a little crate arrived in my chambers, containing ten red apples. There was an envelope enclosed and in the envelope was a single sheet of paper: “The apples are good this year. Fähner.”

  Tanata’s Tea Bowl

  They were at one of those free-for-all student parties in Berlin. These were always good for a couple of girls ready to get it on with boys from Kreuzberg and Neukölln, just because they were different. Perhaps what attracted the girls was an inherent vulnerability. This time, Samir seemed to have struck it lucky again: She had blue eyes and laughed a lot.

  Suddenly, her boyfriend appeared. He said Samir should get lost or they’d take it out onto the street. Samir didn’t understand what “take it out” meant, but he understood the aggression. They were hustled outside. One of the older students told Samir the guy was an amateur boxer and university champion. Samir said, “So fucking what?” He was just seventeen, but he was a veteran of more than 150 street fights, and there were very few things he was afraid of—fights were not among them.

  The boxer was heavily muscled, a head taller, and a good deal more solidly built than Samir. And he was grinning like an idiot. A circle formed around the two of them, and while the boxer was still taking off his jacket, Samir landed the toe of one shoe right in his balls. His shoe caps were steel-lined; the boxer emitted a gurgle and almost doubled up with pain. Samir seized his head by the hair, yanked it straight down, and simultaneously rammed his right knee into the boxer’s face. Although there was a lot of noise on the street, you could hear the boxer’s jaw snap. He lay bleeding on the asphalt, one hand over his crotch, the other over his face. Samir took a two-step run-up; the kick broke two of the boxer’s ribs.

  Samir felt he’d played fair. He hadn’t kicked the guy’s face and, most important, he hadn’t used his knife. It had all been very easy; he wasn’t even out of breath. He got angry because the blonde wouldn’t take off with him, just cried and fussed over the man on the ground. “Fucking whore,” he said, and went home.

  The judge in juvenile court sentenced Samir to two weeks’ custody and obligatory participation in an anti-violence seminar. Samir tried to explain to the social workers in the juvenile detention center that the conviction was wrong. The boxer had started it; it was just that he himself had been quicker. That sort of thing wasn’t a game. You could play football, but nobody played at boxing. The judge had simply failed to understand the rules.

  Özcan collected Samir from jail when the two weeks were up. Özcan was Samir’s best friend. He was eighteen, a tall, slow-moving boy with a doughy face. He’d had his first girlfriend when he was twelve, and had videoed everything they got up to with his cell phone, which earned him his place as top dog forever. Özcan’s penis was ridiculously large, and whenever he was in a public lavatory, he positioned himself so that everyone else could see. The one thing he was determined to do was to get to New York. He’d never been there and he spoke no English, but he was obsessed with the city. You never saw him without his dark blue cap with NY on it. He wanted to run a nightclub in Manhattan that had a restaurant and go-go dancers. Or whatever. He couldn’t explain why it had to be New York, specifically, but he didn’t waste any time thinking about it. Özcan’s father had spent his whole life in a factory that made lightbulbs; he had arrived from Turkey with nothing but a single suitcase. His son was his hope. He didn’t understand the New York thing at all.

  Özcan told Samir he’d met someone who had a plan. His name was Manólis. It was a good plan, but Manólis “was nuts.”

  Manólis came from a Greek family that owned a string of restaurants and Internet cafés in Kreuzberg and Neukölln. He had passed his high school diploma and started to study history, with a sideline in drugs. A few years ago, something had gone wrong. The suitcase that was supposed to have cocaine in it turned out to be full of paper and sand. The buyer fired at Manólis when he tried to flee in his car with the money. The buyer was a lousy shot, and eight of the nine bullets missed. The ninth penetrated the back of Manólis’s skull and lodged there. It was still in Manólis’s head when he collided with a squad car. It wasn’t till he was in the hospital that the doctors discovered it, and since then Manólis had had a problem. After the operation, he announced to his family that he was now a Finn, celebrated the sixth of December every year as Finland’s national holiday, and tried in vain to learn the language. Besides this, he had moments when he was completely out of it, so perhaps his plan wasn’t really a fully worked-out one.

  But Samir still thought it had some potential. Manólis’s sister had a friend who worked as a cle
aning lady in a villa in Dahlem. She was in urgent need of money, so all she wanted from Manólis was a small cut if he broke into the house. She knew the alarm code and the one for the electronic lock, she knew where the safe was, and, most important, she knew that the owner would soon be away from Berlin for four days. Samir and Özcan agreed immediately.

  The night before the break-in, Samir slept badly, dreaming about Manólis and Finland. When he woke, it was two in the afternoon. He said, “Fuck judges,” and chased his girlfriend out of bed. At four o’clock, he had to be at the anti-violence class.

  Özcan picked up the others at 2:00 a.m. Manólis had fallen asleep, and Samir and Özcan had to wait outside his door for twenty minutes. It was cold; the car windows misted up. They got lost and screamed at one another. It was almost three o’clock when they reached Dahlem. They pulled the black ski masks on in the car; the masks were too big and slipped down and scratched, and they were sweating underneath them. Özcan got a tangle of wool fluff in his mouth and spat it out onto the dashboard. They put on latex gloves and ran across the gravel path to the entrance of the villa.

  Manólis punched in the code on the lock pad. The door opened with a click. The alarm was in the entryway. After Manólis had fed in a combination of numbers, the little lights switched from red to green. Özcan had to laugh. “Özcan’s Eleven,” he said out loud. He loved movies. The tension eased. It had never been so easy. The front door clicked shut; they were standing in darkness.

  They couldn’t find the light switch. Samir tripped on a step and hit his left eyebrow on a hat tree. Özcan stumbled over Samir’s feet and grabbed his back for support as he fell. Samir groaned under his weight. Manólis was still standing, but he had forgotten the flashlights.

  Their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Samir wiped the blood off his face. Finally, Manólis found the light switch. The interior of the house was Japanese—Samir and Özcan just didn’t see how anyone could live this way. It took them only a few minutes to locate the safe—the description they’d been given was a good one. They used crowbars to pry it out of the wall, then dragged it to the car. Manólis wanted to go back into the house—he’d discovered the kitchen and he was hungry. They argued about it for a long time, until Samir decided it was too dangerous. They could easily stop at a café on the way back. Manólis grumbled.

  They tried to open the safe in a cellar in Neukölln. They had some familiarity with heavily armored safes, but this one resisted them. Özcan had to borrow his brother-in-law’s high-powered drill. Four hours later, when the safe opened, they knew it had been worth it. They found 120,000 euros in cash and six watches in a box. And there was also a small casket made of black lacquered wood. Samir opened it. It was lined with red silk and inside was an old bowl. Özcan thought it was hideous and wanted to throw it away, Samir wanted to give it to his sister, and Manólis didn’t care—he was still hungry. Finally, they agreed to sell the bowl to Mike. Mike had a little shop with a big sign outside. He called himself an antiques dealer, but basically all he had was a small truck, and most of his business was clearing out apartments and dealing in junk. He paid them thirty euros for the bowl.

  As they left the cellar, Samir clapped Özcan on the shoulder, said “Özcan’s Eleven” again, and they all laughed. Manólis’s sister would get three thousand euros for her friend. Each of them had almost forty thousand euros in his pocket, and Samir would sell the watches to a fence. It had been a simple, clean break-in; there wouldn’t be any problems.

  They were wrong.

  Hiroshi Tanata stood in his bedroom and looked at the hole in the wall. He was seventy-six years old. His family had left its mark on Japan for many hundreds of years; they were in insurance, banking, and heavy industry. Tanata didn’t cry out; he didn’t wave his arms; he simply stared into the hole. But his secretary, who had served him for thirty years, told his wife that night that he had never seen Tanata in such a rage.

  The secretary had a great deal to do that day. The police were in the house, asking questions. They suspected the employees—the alarm had certainly been switched off and there was no sign of forced entry—but their suspicions hadn’t yet focused on anyone in particular. Tanata was standing up for his employees. The crime-scene investigation wasn’t producing anything much, either. The technicians found no fingerprints, and there wasn’t even a question of DNA evidence—the cleaning lady had done a thorough job before the police were called. The secretary knew his employer very well, and his answers to the officers were evasive and monosyllabic.

  It was more important to get word to the press and the leading collectors: Should the Tanata tea bowl be offered to anyone, the family who had owned it since the sixteenth century would pay the highest price for its return. In such an instance, all Mr. Tanata would ask would be the name of the seller.

  The hairdresser’s on the Yorckstrasse had the same name as its owner: Pocol. The shop window displayed two faded advertising posters for styling products that dated from the 1980s: a blond beauty in a striped sweater with too much hair and a man with a long chin and a mustache. Pocol had inherited the shop from his father. In his youth, Pocol had actually cut people’s hair himself, having learned to do this at home. Now he ran some legal gambling joints and many more illegal ones. He kept the shop, sat all day in one of the comfortable tilting chairs, drank tea, and conducted his business. Over the years, he’d grown fat—he had a weakness for Turkish pastries. His brother-in-law owned a bakery three doors down and made the best balli elmali—honeyed apple fritters—in the city.

  Pocol was short-tempered and brutal, and he knew that this was the capital he traded on. Everyone had heard the story at least once about the café owner who’d told Pocol he should pay for what he ate. That was fifteen years ago. Pocol didn’t know the café owner and the café owner didn’t know Pocol. Pocol threw his food at the wall, went to the trunk of his car, and came back with a baseball bat. The landlord lost the sight in his right eye, his spleen, and his left kidney, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Pocol was sentenced to eight years for attempted murder. The day the sentence was handed down, the landlord fell down the stairs in the subway in his wheelchair, breaking his neck. After Pocol had served out his sentence, he never had to pay for another meal again.

  Pocol read about the robbery in the newspaper. After a dozen phone calls to relatives, friends, fences, and other business associates, he knew who’d broken into Tanata’s house. He sent off a torpedo, an ambitious boy who did everything for him. The torpedo told Samir and Özcan that Pocol wanted to talk to them. Now.

  The two of them showed up at the hairdresser’s a short time later—you didn’t make Pocol wait. There were tea and pastries; the atmosphere was friendly. Then suddenly Pocol began to scream, grabbed Samir by the hair, dragged him through the shop, threw him in a corner, and started kicking him. Samir didn’t fight back, and between kicks he offered a cut of 30 percent. Pocol grunted, nodded, turned away from Samir, picked up a flat piece of wood he kept in the shop for things like this, and slammed Özcan in the forehead with it. After that, he calmed down, sat back in the tilting chair, and summoned his girlfriend from the room next door.

  Pocol’s girlfriend had still been working as a model a few months ago and had managed to be selected as Playboy’s September Playmate of the Month. She was dreaming of becoming a catwalk model or making it big with a music producer when Pocol discovered her, beat up her boyfriend, and became her manager. He called it “plucking.” He arranged for her to have her breasts enlarged and her lips plumped. In the beginning, she believed in his plans, and Pocol really did try to get her taken on by an agency. When it became too much of an effort, there were appearances at discos, then strip clubs, and finally in the kind of extreme porno movies that were illegal in Germany. At some point, Pocol gave her her first shot of heroin, and now she was dependent on him and loved him. Pocol didn’t have sex with her anymore, not since his friends had used her as a urinal in one of the movies. She was still ar
ound only because he wanted to sell her to Beirut—human trafficking also went on in that direction—and, finally, he needed to get back the money that had gone to the cosmetic surgeon.

  The girlfriend bandaged Özcan’s laceration, and Pocol made jokes about how he now looked like an Indian, “Y’know, a redskin.” More tea and pastries appeared, the girlfriend was banished, and negotiations could proceed. The split was agreed at 50 percent, and Pocol would get the watches and the bowl. Samir and Özcan acknowledged their mistake, Pocol stressed that it was nothing personal, and as they said good-bye he hugged Samir and gave him a big kiss.

  Shortly after the two of them had left the shop, Pocol called Wagner. Wagner was a liar and a con man. He was five feet two inches tall, his skin had turned yellow from years in tanning salons, and his hair was dyed brown, with a quarter of an inch of gray regrowth at the roots. Wagner’s apartment was a 1980s cliché. It was a duplex; the bedroom, with its mirrored closets, flokati rugs, and a gigantic bed, was on the upper floor. The living room downstairs was a landscape of white leather sofas, white marble floors, lacquered white walls, and diamond-shaped side tables. Wagner loved everything shiny; even his cell phone was encrusted with little pieces of glass.

  Some years previously, he had declared personal bankruptcy, dividing his property among his relatives, and because justice in these matters is slow, he continued to accumulate debts. In fact, Wagner owned nothing anymore; the apartment belonged to his ex-wife, he hadn’t been able to pay his medical insurance for months, and he still owed the beauty parlor for his girlfriend’s total makeover. The money he had earned so easily in earlier years had all been spent on cars and champagne and coke parties on Ibiza. Now the investment bankers he used to party with had all disappeared and he could no longer afford new tires for his ten-year-old Ferrari. Wagner had spent a long time waiting for the big opportunity, the one that would make everything good again. In cafés, he told waitresses he needed a big one, and then roared with laughter every time over the hoary joke. Wagner had spent his whole life struggling with his own insignificance.