The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The city centre is crowded. The usual Christmas madness. First of all to Karstadt, I say to myself. I’m lucky right away. A fat man bustles onto the escalator right in front of me.

  “Excuse me,” I say.

  No reaction.

  “Could you, please, let me pass?”

  He still doesn’t react. So I fire a warning shot. And instantly there is chaos. Women scream, men run away, one even leaps over the handrail. The fat man meanwhile has dropped his shopping bags and stares at me in bewilderment. He puts his hands up in defence. I take his bags, squeeze past him, and a moment later I’m out in the open again. I don’t know if anyone tries to follow, but the Mönckebergstrasse is so busy that no one has a chance of getting me anyway.

  In Kaufhof I’m not quite as successful. I have to go up and down all the escalators at least ten times before I finally find an obstructor. A whole group to be precise. Teenagers. Their bags are probably full of pop music CDs. Just the right thing for our little ones.

  “Could you let me pass, please?”

  “Shut it, gramps!”

  They laugh. Not for long, of course, but this time I need to fire three warning shots, and on the ground floor, as I run for the exit, someone throws a book at me. I shoot his hat off. Forgotten nothing, I think to myself, because you have to be really careful not to accidentally graze the skull instead. But as an ex-armoured car driver I’m quite a good shot.

  At the Central Station everything goes smoothly. I could get a suitcase immediately, but that’s not what I want. I don’t need suitcases, I need Christmas presents. Someone drags along a huge floor lamp. That would be nice for our living-room, I think. But the man makes space for me, as best he can, so he may keep his lamp. However, the man in front does not let me pass. He’s got an especially large shopping bag standing next to him, and he makes no attempt to move it. So I shoot again. The acoustics are particularly good in the Central Station. The girl who was just saying “Attention, please, on platform five . . .” stops her announcement. I quickly fire two more shots, just to make clear that I’m not messing about, and then I grab the promising looking shopping bag. It is lighter than I had thought. Never mind. But now I really can’t carry any more. And it’s time I got out of here. A frail old man blocks my way.

  “Hey, are you sure you want to die so shortly before Christmas?” I ask.

  No, that’s not what he wants. I hurry on. The station police begin to look for the source of all the chaos, but they’re right on the other side of the great hall, the south end. They won’t get me. I take the underground for one stop, then the bus for a bit, then the underground again, until I am quite certain that no one is following me.

  Back home Gerd is still asleep. No harm done. He won’t notice that I borrowed his pistol. When he wakes up, eventually, it’s time for him to go to work.

  “You’re still here, are you,” he growls.

  Yes, I am. And I intend to stay.

  And then it’s Christmas Eve, at last. Monika has fetched some sprigs of fir tree from the cemetery, and meanwhile I have managed to bypass the electric meter. The flat is ablaze with lights. It’s going to be a wonderful Christmas, full of surprises. Although, sadly, without any cuddly toy animals. The parcel I had taken for chocolate turns out to be a box with three rolls of sewing thread in different colours. Frithjof doesn’t know what to do with them. So I show him that they are perfect for unwinding.

  “And who’s going to wind them up again?” Monika hisses.

  I show her. It’s dead easy. All you need to do is fix the reel to the food mixer with sellotape.

  Heidemarie tears the wrapping paper from a book. She is disappointed.

  “I can’t read yet!”

  “Then look at the pictures.”

  “There are none.”

  “Then draw some!” Creativity, that’s important right from an early age.

  Pamela gets a box of cigars.

  “Only to play with,” I say. “Corner shop and the like.”

  “What’s a corner shop?” Pamela asks.

  The biggest present is for Monika, of course.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she says.

  “I’d do anything for you,” I tell her.

  She tears the paper, and a bin comes out, one of those pedal bins. O dear, I think to myself, that was not such a good idea. But Monika only laughs.

  “You little rascal!” she says and gives me a kiss.

  Gerd never came back. I’ve read in the papers that he got arrested in St Pauli. Gerd Kubitzki – The Central Station Gunman, that’s what the press called him. He denied all charges, but then they compared the bullets with his pistol – for which he didn’t have a licence, by the way – and that proved it. And with his criminal record, he’ll probably get locked away for quite a while. The papers also wrote that the whole thing might never have come out, if he hadn’t lost his passport on the escalator.

  The Agency for Work is closed over Christmas and New Year. But I’ll go right back afterwards and ask whether any job vacancies have come up in the meantime. Or if they at least have any leftover Father Christmases.

  If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll just have to keep going a bit more. Maybe not quite as spectacular as that day before Christmas, but still in the same style. For, you know, I learnt things in prison. I don’t have to shoot. There are other ways. Hamburg is the town of escalators. And if you happen to block my way on one of those escalators, please don’t be surprised if you later find that your wallet is gone. Because it’s your own fault.

  Translation by Ann-Kathrin Ehlers.

  Voices in the Head

  Altaf Tyrewala

  I am an abortionist. I run a nursing home in a seedy by-lane of Colaba. On the steely innards of trains crawling along the Harbour Line, you will find badly-spelled fliers advertising my services. I get one or two customers every day. Sad cases, angry faces, embarrassed women, careless men, swelling tummies, a cut, tears, and we all go home happy. Yes, happy. I spread happiness. Relief. I save families, lives, marriages. Now I need to be saved. From all the unborn-baby voices in my head.

  This morning a client walked into my nursing home. Her stomach had just started to stick out. I could see through her cheap nylon kurta. Three more weeks and it would have been obvious. But she was safe now. I handed her a form asking for personal information. She filled it out and handed it back to me. I don’t talk to my clients. No one talks to anyone in my nursing home. I don’t bother to read the forms either. They always lie.

  I locked the entrance to my nursing home and nodded to the nurse. She went into the adjoining room to prepare for the operation. It was over in half an hour. Don’t. Don’t ask me about the foetuses. They stopped registering after my third abortion. Now, I only see them as knots of blood and gore. Abdominal tumours that threaten to wreck the lives of decent, god-fearing people.

  I am married. She has the mentality of a farmer. Won’t let me touch her willingly. I am violent with her every night. She says she won’t give herself to me willingly till I stop harvesting the wombs of mothers. She even has the rhetoric of a farmer. If only she saw the gratitude in my clients’ eyes. Like the lady this morning. She kissed my hand before I administered the anaesthesia. When she regained consciousness she wanted to know if it was a boy or a girl, she wanted to know if it was fair or dark, she wanted to know if it was normal or deformed, she wanted to know . . . “Or is it too early to tell? Can you tell? This soon? Tell me, doctor! Am I right? Can you tell this soon?”

  I didn’t answer her. I don’t talk to my clients. No one talks to anyone in my nursing home. I too will have a child some day. I will have several children. Several. I will have a child for each time the doors to my operation room have been sealed. The collective cries of my children will drown out the unborn-baby voices in my head.

  This is how my flier reads. Yes, it is badly written, unimaginative, but it gets the message across.

  Get Rid of Unwanted Pregnuncy in One Hour
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  Rupee 300

  Absolutely Secrative

  Shamma Nursing Home

  Opp. Janvi Manzil (Bahind Colaba P.O.)

  I wrote it. The nun pun makes me burst into amused hiccups every time I read it. It is the only comic relief in my life. The family dramas that are occasionally staged in my nursing home don’t amuse me any more. Their horrible echoes don’t die for days. Daughters pleading with incensed fathers, husbands kneeling before heartless wives, brides begging with misogynist mothers-in-law.

  I have heard that in America abortion is a source of perennial controversy. If you are pro you are a murderer, cruel, careless. If you are anti you are stupid, religious, but still careless. I am neither.

  And I am never careless. You can either be qualified or careful. I am very, very careful. That is why I get repeat business. Mostly from slim, college-going girls of the neighbourhood. There was one who visited me six times in two years. Haven’t seen her for three years now. Doubt if I ever will again. Also, married women with their husbands. The first time is shameful and painful. The second time, the routine sets in. Like visiting a dentist to deal with a recurring cavity on a sweet tooth.

  In a wilful attempt to decay and self-destruct, I have started smoking. Never in the nursing home. Always on the street, outside the front door. I deliberately don’t carry matches or a lighter. Asking for a light is my only excuse to talk to others. Unfortunately, the only people in the by-lanes of Colaba are pimps and German tourists in search of Aryan India – they first want to know if you are Brahmin. The man next door, the one who owns a souvenir shop, doesn’t talk to me. He is a Jain, the epitome of non-violence. Won’t even eat potatoes because the act of extracting them from the earth deprives and kills underground insects. I am an abortionist and a Muslim to boot.

  I have grown used to people avoiding me. Friends and relatives have gradually forsaken me over the years. They avoid me at the mosque. My wife and I are invited to marriages only out of formality. Even then, we are ignored. Treated like well-dressed gatecrashers who can’t be ejected (because you never know), but are watched from a distance.

  Five years ago, Ma, my mother, had gone to Mecca for Haj. For my sake. Just before boarding her flight, right there in the crowded departure lounge, she had looked at a point about three feet above my head and said, “Oh Allah! I am undertaking this journey to the heart of your home so that you may forgive my son and cause a change of heart in him so that he may find a cleaner occupation and may stop taking the lives of children, so that when he has a child of his own he can love the child with all his heart and realize what a wondrous thing it is to nurture life in all its forms and in all the situations that you may put us in.”

  When I am in an irreverent mood, I like to believe Ma paid with her life for such convoluted appeals to Allah.

  She was trampled while running towards the Satan’s pillar at Haj. Of all the physical metaphors that thrive under an otherwise abstract Islam, the Satan’s pillar at Mecca is the most potent. On the fifth day, after the morning namaaz, as is traditional, two million pilgrims made a dash towards the Satan’s pillar. They all wanted to be the first to stone it.

  A woman who had been with her told me that Ma ran the fastest that morning. She pushed at the burgeoning crowds the hardest. She cursed the Devil the loudest. Like some hysterical lioness whose cub was being snatched away. But in that crowd, there were people far more desperate than Ma. People whose sons were worse than abortionists. They, too, wanted to attack and vanquish the Devil with all their might. These very people, these desperate, god-fearing fathers and mothers of sinners, were the ones who ran over Ma and pounded her body into the Holy Ground.

  Of the 300 Indians who had gone to Haj that year, Ma was the only one who died in the stampede. She and three Nigerians. My father, my wife and I got the news a day later. By then, they’d already buried Ma’s two-dimensional remains on the outskirts of Mecca.

  When I try to imagine how she died that day in the Holy City, I stop believing in Allah. But only for a short while. I can’t afford to remain godless for too long. The only way I can hide from myself is by being religious – or delusional. Call it whatever the hell you want. Ma’s voice is now a part of the unborn-baby voices in my head.

  Noise.

  “Buy the cassettes! For fuck’s sake, man, I need the cash. My whole collection for 300 rupees only. Come on dude! Buy the friggin’ cassettes . . .”

  I didn’t say no. I had bought all five audio cassettes from the drunk American who barged into my nursing home six months ago. I didn’t ask him what kind of music it was. I didn’t care. I wanted him out of my nursing home. He was making my nervous customers (a young couple) even more nervous. It happens all the time: cash-starved foreign tourists randomly barge into places of business in Colaba to sell their personal belongings.

  After the couple left, I examined the cassettes I had been forced to buy. They had bizarre covers with outlandish words written on them. Nirvana, Radiohead, Secret Samadhi and so on. English music, unfortunately.

  It was the last day of Ramadan. The next day was to be Eid. I was to put on laundered clothes and go to the mosque for the morning namaaz. At the mosque, no one was to give me the three congratulatory hugs that Muslim men are meant to exchange on auspicious occasions. I was to come back home with a dry mouth, jerk my wife out of her sleep, open the cabinet in my hall, insert one of the English cassettes into my old player and rewind it all the way to the beginning. I was to press the play button.

  I didn’t know I was to rattle with sorrow for the next thirty minutes.

  I did. Like a laboratory skeleton dangling in an earthquake. Like a sceptic to whom a saint had revealed his sainthood. I shook and wept tearlessly. The music that bled from the speakers matched the cacophony of unborn-baby voices in my head. Discordant and raw and numbing.

  A single baby’s voice is beautiful. The collective googoos and gagas of a hundred children is grotesque. But concentrate on these hundred voices long enough and you’ll realize the beauty of each infantile voice. So it was with the music bleeding from the speakers. It consisted of singular strands of guitars so exquisite that they unfolded your leaden heart inside out and scraped away the pain and rage coagulating on its inner walls.

  But these singular strands weren’t what overwhelmed me. Beauty stopped seeming beautiful to me a long time ago. It was the collective noise of ten, hundred, millions of strands of guitars playing together that made my body convulse and my gaze still. Afsana, my wife, stood in a corner of the hall and watched me. Side A reached its end and the player bled silence.

  I haven’t played any of those English cassettes again. It was enough that I had come across an analogue to the unborn-baby voices. I wasn’t going to allow a new cacophony to compete with them. It was the least I could do for my dead mother, whose aural imprints are part of the unborn-baby voices in my head.

  And the least I can do for my father? To let him be. He threw out Afsana and me the day Ma’s death washed up on our jagged beach. Having never opposed my occupation until then, he had called me a bastard abortionist and told us to vacate in an hour. My wife and I now live in a building nearby. I haven’t spoken to my father since.

  I see him often. He too works in Colaba. Has been a salesman in a shoe-shop for fifteen years. Sometimes, we take the same train to work. If we spot each other on the platform, we wordlessly board the same compartment and wade towards each other through the working-class crowd. Our actions would seem comic to an acquaintance. A father and son going through all this trouble to be near each other in a packed Harbour Line train, only to not exchange a single word. Like sulky kids.

  I want to show him how the circles around my eyes have started invading my cheeks and forehead, making me darker every day. How on the sides of my neck I have started developing raisin-like moles that could prove to be cancerous or could end up as rubbery playthings for my curious grandchildren. My father has remained the same. This is what he wants to display
. Black hair. Still a mouthful of teeth. No shrinkage even at sixty-five.

  The Harbour Line has slums on either side. Every morning, male slum-dwellers shit on the railway tracks. There’s no point hating them for their shamelessness. The route is a busy one, with trains going to and fro every two minutes. For privacy, a slum-dweller would have to wait until nightfall. Only women can bear the wait.

  One morning, post-Ma, my estranged father and I were on our way to work. The train was nearing our destination – Victoria Terminus. We moved towards the same exit and fought our way to the front. The signal turned red. The train stopped. My eyes wandered and landed on a woman squatting between two railway tracks. She was facing our train. Her left hand was covering her face. Her right hand was struggling to hide her exposed parts.

  The train didn’t move for four minutes that morning. The woman remained frozen. She would’ve been a forgotten freak sight had the train moved on. But with each passing minute, her presence turned piercing, painful like the sun. I craved to watch her as one would a rare animal trapped by a hunter. But her will hurt my eyes and I looked away. My father was standing behind me.

  Our fellow-commuters turned restless. In the vast urban landscape visible from the train, this singular sight of a beggarly woman struggling to maintain her modesty took on monumental proportions. Someone from the adjoining First Class compartment flung a full Bisleri bottle at her. It struck her shoulder with a deep thuck. A bone had been hit. She toppled over like a bowling pin. But her left hand was still hiding her face. Her right hand was still clutching at her exposed parts. My father winced on the woman’s behalf. As he and a few others started abusing the First Class compartment, the train set into motion, its steely innards groaning at the futility of it all. The beggar woman lay there like a fallen queen of the gutter.