“How old were you and your husband then?”
“I was twenty-six, Ahmed thirty-seven.”
“Your father isn’t living with you?”
“No. He died three years ago, in an automobile accident.”
I took a piece of paper and made notes of some of what she had told me.
“One more thing: tell me when your husband was murdered and where his body was found.”
“Friday night.”
“And where?”
“In a courtyard, in the rear of an apartment building … near the railroad station.”
She lowered her head and stared at the black linoleum.
“You don’t know the exact address?”
“No, I don’t … It was one of those houses.” The earrings trembled.
Even though her husband had been found dead in a brothel only a short while ago, she had managed to control her emotions quite well until now. I was afraid she was coming close to not managing so well anymore. I got up.
“Good, that’s enough for now. Please give me your address, and I’ll come and see you at three o’clock.”
She gave it to me. We took our leave, and she scurried off.
I lit a cigarette and toyed with the thousand-mark bill for a while. Then I attached it under the desk drawer with a paper clip. Out in the street things had become livelier. The sound of car horns and the occasional shout rose through the open window. I didn’t feel too good. “Near the railroad station, of all places,” I said to myself. I got up, trotted to the door, and locked it from the outside.
2
It was twenty past one. Lunch hour.
I mingled with the citizens in tight and sweaty shirt sleeves who were streaming out of the buildings in groups of three and four. Depending on rank and status, they were either striding to restaurants or undoing sandwich wrappers and cartons of chocolate milk.
My foot propelled an empty beer can against the back of a flannel-clad leg right in front of me.
“Now wait a minute!” The leg’s fat-faced owner stopped and executed a cumbersome turn to face me. “Let me tell you something!”
I gave him a smile.
“Oh, I see! No speaka da lingo, eh?”
He turned to establish eye contact with his three companions. They stood there with big grins on their porcine mugs.
“This Germany! This no Turkey! Here beer cans go in garbage! And Turk fellow drive garbage truck!”
This was accompanied by loud appreciative whinnies. Their potbellies wobbled like jelly. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say suitable to the occasion, I left their company and walked over to the nearby garden restaurant, ordered coffee and a Scotch, and thought about Ahmed Hamul and my assignment. I thought about happy hookers, candy-sucking pimps, and good-natured police officials.
Two years earlier I had had some business in the district around the railroad station. A butcher from southern Hesse had wanted to find his eighteen-year-old daughter. He spent a whole hour in my office, shouting and whining until I could well understand his daughter’s desire to remove herself from his presence.
I never found out why he had decided to hire a Turkish detective. I looked for the butcher’s daughter in all the fleabag hotels, hung out at the station, got punched in the face a couple of times; finally the cops arrested me as a suspected drug dealer. They let me go after twenty-four hours. I called the butcher, told him I was quitting and went to bed for a week.
I ordered another Scotch, another cup of coffee.
Could be some drunken ape had stabbed him in the back just for the hell of it. Or maybe he’d stolen a pair of panties from a whore; maybe he had been running off at the mouth. In the worst-case scenario, Ahmed Hamul had been one of those heroin-dealing Turks that were grist to the mill of the daily papers.
What did I know? All I knew was that there were three round zeroes under my desk.
The neighbouring tabletops were filling up with platters of sauerkraut, bratwurst, and schnitzels. In the muggy air, jaws were tearing into breaded meat, lips smacking, vocal chords groaning and interspersing those noises with occasional speech. Tongues emerged to lick greasy chops.
I had to burp, and a slightly sour-tasting crumb of Sachertorte landed on my tongue. When I began to feel really nauseated, I paid my tab and left.
Ilter Hamul’s address indicated that she lived in the district just beyond the railroad station, not a particularly attractive area. I decided to leave my broiler-like Kadett where it was, and set out on foot.
The sun was white-hot above the city, and the bald concrete looked even balder than usual. The stagnant air smelled of exhaust fumes, garbage and dog shit. In the shade of the few sparse trees, retired folks drowsed on benches, waiting for the evening. Children consumed ice cream and ran around on the sidewalks. I trotted through the downtown area, stopping in front of the window displays of several travel agencies to enjoy their pictorial representations of turquoise seas, endless white beaches, palm trees, and smooth brown Bacardi girls. Only two thousand four hundred and ninety-nine marks a week. I considered how many Ahmed Hamuls would have to bite the dust before I could spend seven days building sand-castles, imbibing rum, and having my feet washed by ladies the colour of instant chocolate.
The sidewalk cafés were jammed. Waiters with damp and ruddy faces navigated huge cargoes of cold drinks between the rows of tables.
I approached the railroad station. The sex-shop signs proclaiming “Moist Thighs” and “Sweaty Nymphomaniac Nymphets” did not seem all that enticing.
In this weather, everybody’s thighs were moist.
A couple of bums reclined on the sidewalk among empty Coke cans and burger wrappings, wavelets of red wine lapping against the insides of their skulls.
On the other side of the station the streets became empty and silent. I looked for the address until I stood in front of an old building with a crumbling facade. Two Turkish kids were kicking a soccer ball against the wall. I wondered if they’d manage to remove the remaining stucco by evening.
The doorbells had been ripped out, leaving a hole full of tangled wires. I pushed the door open. The hallway was dark. A blend of kids’ pee and fried potatoes assailed my nose. From one apartment came faint radio music: I don’t love you—you don’t love me. Almost all the mail boxes had been pried open or had lost their covers. People had lost their keys. Presumably. Slowly I ascended the stairs to the third floor. At least one member of the Ergün family had been expecting me: as soon as I arrived on the landing the door opened, and Ilter Hamul bade me enter. She had changed her earrings; the ones she was wearing now were small pearls. They seemed much more austere, as befitted the occasion.
Compared to the apartment, the hallway had been a solarium. Vague shapes loomed in the murk.
“My brother came after all. He took the afternoon off,” she whispered to me as I stumbled over an insanely placed armchair. We tiptoed down the long corridor as if we’d been about to raid the pantry. The living room was at the far end.
Ilter Hamul grabbed hold of my sleeve, and we entered the large room together.
The Ergün family had assembled there, surrounded by a profusion of colourful quilts, cushions, armchairs, and sofas.
“This is Mr. Kayankaya.” She sounded apologetic.
The room was like a glen in the forest. Sunlight streamed through three large windows. Pictures of the homeland hung on the walls. Under different circumstances it would have been quite cozy.
“Good afternoon,” I said, trying to sound friendly. One of them nodded.
Ilter Hamul guided me to an armchair large enough to sleep two with room to spare. A teapot, a cup, and a sugar bowl had been placed on a small brass table in front of the chair. I sat down, took a sugar cube, and considered how best to begin. All of them stared at me in silence. The three young children sat close to each other on a red velvet seat. They looked like wax dolls.
“Right,” I said, stirring my cup of tea. “As you know, Mrs. Hamul h
as hired me to find the person who murdered her husband.” Silence. Looking pensive, my client’s mother cleared her throat. “Or at least, to try to do so,” I added. “That means that I have to ask you a couple of questions. It won’t take long. Mrs. Hamul has already told me the most important things.”
Ilter’s brother was sitting to my right, on a dark blue sofa. He cast a quick angry glance at her, but she kept staring at her shoes.
I pulled notepad and pen out of my pocket, found an empty page, turned to Ilter Hamul. “By the way—where is your sister? Is she working?”
Her eyes strayed from her shoes, her lips parted. “Er …”
Her brother replied for her, in a cold, staccato voice.
“She is not well. She is in bed. She can’t get up now, she has to sleep.”
The atmosphere was about as relaxed as the final minutes of a world soccer championship. All right, stop pussyfooting, I told myself. Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.
“I am, of course, sorry to hear that. Well then, why don’t you all give me your names, dates of birth, professions, and so on …”
Since that elicited no response whatsoever, I conjured up a smile and turned to the brother. “Let’s start with you, all right? And I would also like to hear your ideas on why your brother-in-law lost his life.”
At this point, I was no longer sure what I should ask these people. I didn’t expect to learn a whole lot from them.
“My name is Yilmaz Ergün. I am thirty-four years old. I’m a carpenter by trade, but I’ve been working for quite a while in a cafeteria kitchen. I’m an assistant chef now.” There was a trace of pride in his words.
“What cafeteria? Where?”
“At the Hessian Broadcasting Corporation.”
Bad radio and bad schnitzels, I thought.
“And what is your opinion about your brother-in-law’s death?”
I glanced at Ilter Hamul to make sure that she was all right. She was.
“I don’t know anything about it. It’s a matter for the police.”
I had known his attitude all along. Nothing short of a bottle of raki would loosen his tongue.
“All right, let’s leave it at that. Mrs. Ergün, your turn, if you please. The same questions.”
The grandma was a little more forthcoming, but it seemed to me she wasn’t telling me all she knew. She embroidered her data, digressed into autobiography, even smiled at me once in a while.
She said her name was Melike Ergün. She was fifty-five years old. At the age of eighteen she had married her husband, Vasif Ergün, who had passed away three years ago. They had had three children, Ilter, Yilmaz, and the indisposed Ayse. After they had moved to Germany, she had worked cleaning other people’s houses. Recently, she had been looking after her sick daughter.
“May I ask what is wrong with your daughter?”
Before she could say anything, her son spoke for her. “Until about six months ago she too worked as a cleaning woman. Then she lost her job and became depressed.” His good German, his apparently secure job situation, and everything else about him seemed to indicate that Yilmaz Ergün was an industrious and conscientious person.
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-four.”
“I see. Mrs. Ergün, do you have any ideas about your son-in-law’s death?”
I expected her to have a lot to say.
“I think that Ahmed committed suicide.”
I gave her a nonplussed look.
“But—he had a knife stuck in his back, didn’t he?” I asked Ilter Hamul.
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll see. He killed himself,” Mrs. Ergün said.
I noticed a visible tremor in my client, and decided to change the subject. “All right, I’ll raise that point when I talk to the police. Mrs. Ergün, tell me what your deceased husband did for a living? Where did he work?”
Just like my father, Vasif Ergün had taken care of other people’s garbage, to his dying day.
“Mrs. Hamul—this morning you told me that you didn’t really know, these last couple of years, what your husband did for a living. What exactly did you mean by that? Did he spend a lot of time away from home? Did he travel, stay away overnight?”
I was relieved to see that her brother did not think he had to speak for her too.
“No, no. He came home almost every day,” she said, a little hesitantly.
“What did he do? Or wasn’t he working?”
“No, he was working.”
After Ilter and Yilmaz had exchanged some words and angry glances, it turned out that no one really knew what Ahmed Hamul had been up to for the last two and a half years. Before that he had worked a regular job in a factory, but then he had quit. After that he had told them that he was working as temporary help in the post office, and also in a kebab shop. He had never told them much, but he had always brought home enough money for them to get by. No one knew anything about his friends, or whether he had had any. This was, obviously, a rather taciturn family.
It was equally obvious that my client’s mother and brother had not been particularly fond of Ahmed Hamul. I decided to wind up the conversation.
“All right, that’ll do. But tell me—would it be possible for me to have a moment with your sister sometime soon?”
All of them opened their mouths, but only the brother spoke. “That won’t be possible anytime soon.”
Why had I even bothered to ask, I told myself. I stood up.
“OK, I’ll take a look around the neighbourhood. I’d like to drop by again sometime tomorrow. Will someone be home?”
“Yes. I’ll be here. Because of Ayse.”
I turned to Ilter Hamul. “Before I forget—I need a photograph of your late husband.”
“Of course.”
She went to a desk, opened a drawer, and handed me a large portrait photograph in colour.
Ahmed Hamul had had a thick head of black hair, an equally vigorous moustache, and ears that stuck out, just like any number of his compatriots.
“Thank you.”
“Will the police make trouble for us when they find out that my sister has hired an investigator?”
I was beginning to find this brother irritating.
“No, they can’t do that. Believe me, they can’t.” Silence. “Time for me to go.”
With greater or lesser degrees of cordiality, all of them said goodbye to me. The children, who had become increasingly restless during the last ten minutes, came alive and started tickling each other. They did not seem particularly concerned about their father’s demise. It probably hadn’t really dawned on them yet. Ilter Hamul piloted me back through the tunnel. I ran down the stairs and came to a halt outside the front door of the building.
I stood there for a moment, lit a cigarette, and watched the traffic at the beer kiosk across the street.
The interview hadn’t been all that exciting. But what else could I have asked those people? Nothing, I told myself. I crossed the street to have a beer. Three hairy creatures leaned about the place, clutching their bottles of Henninger beer. The air had a sour smell. Dim eyes embedded in swollen pink rolls of flesh scrutinized me with sideways glances. One character exploded into a series of hearty burps. Small food particles flew through the air. Between burps, he managed to exclaim, “Hey, I could sure use a Jägermeister!”
“One Pils, please,” I called across the vacant counter. I waited.
“I need a Jägermeister! Right, Hans? We all need a Jägermeister!” Silence. “Right?” Clinging to the counter, he turned, slowly and cautiously.
“Right, Hans, we need a Jägermeister! Hans!”
Hans was busy pissing in the gutter. He grunted and passed his hand through the yellow jet as if to make sure that everything was in order.
Finally the door at the back of the kiosk opened, and Madame Hulk trundled in. “A Pils, please,” I said, and put two marks in the money tray.
“Why don’t you tell me now how many you’ll be having? So I w
on’t have to run back and forth all the time.” She was a pro.
“OK then, make it two.”
“That’s more like it.”
She heaved herself over to a refrigerator that looked like a pack of cigarettes next to her ample form and managed to extract two bottles.
“Could you open one of them, please,” I said, and added the proper amount to the coins on the plate.
The opened bottle landed on the counter so hard the foam flew. Then Madame Hulk trundled back to her den.
I drank my beer and pondered why Ahmed’s mother-in-law believed he had killed himself. Then I noticed that the third member of the Jägermeister club was staring at me. He addressed me, with some effort. “You speak good German. You’re from the Balkans, right?”
He waved his thumb past his ear, indicating the presumed direction of the Balkans.
“No, man. I just spent two weeks on Majorca.”
“Oh, right.” A pause. “Nice down there?”
“It’s nice, all right. A little dangerous, though, because of the Indians.”
“Oh, right.” He mulled that one over.
“Were you able to communicate with them?”
“Sure. I used my talking drum,” I told him. I finished my beer and walked away without waiting for the next “Oh right.”
3
First of all, I wanted to check with the cops to find out what exactly had happened to Ahmed Hamul. I wasn’t sure they’d tell me. They probably wouldn’t.
It was a bit of a walk to their headquarters, and the second bottle of beer was sticking out of my coat pocket. Since I couldn’t very well visit the cop shop with a bottle under my arm, I opened it with the aid of the next metal edge I saw and finished it off. Before I got to my destination, I bought a pack of chewing gum. Then I entered the police headquarters.
The entrance hall was large and painted a light yellow. A long wooden counter stretched across it. Behind that counter I spotted a human head. The head did not turn in my direction, but said, “Can I help you?”
Happy Birthday, Turk! Page 2