“I’m not letting go of him,” Richard panted, squeezing him even tighter, making the young man’s knees give way. “He’s going to be handed over to the police. And then he’ll be locked up.”
Hunkeler took out his phone.
“I already called them,” Niggi said, “as soon as I recognized him. I did it very quietly so he wouldn’t hear me. He ran straight into Richard.”
“Let him get some air,” Hunkeler said, “otherwise he’s going to suffocate.”
“He wouldn’t be any great loss,” Richard said, “he’s played his last dirty trick, the bastard.”
“Stop it! I’ve a question to ask him.”
Richard released his grip slightly.
“Are you Prenga Berisha?” Hunkeler asked.
Gasping for breath, the man nodded. “Yes,” he croaked. “Please save me.”
“Right,” Hunkeler said, “keep him until the patrol car arrives. But God help you if anything happens to him.”
He went back into the Billiards Centre. The customers were all standing at the window to see what was going on outside. The two Albanians were missing.
“Where are those two?” he asked Skender. “Is there a rear exit?”
“Yes, there is. But it’s locked.”
Hunkeler went to the men’s room at the back. There was a door out into the courtyard there. It was locked. Beside it was a window. That was open.
He went back to the barroom and out into the street. A blue light appeared out of the fog, a car stopped with a squeal of tyres. Three men leapt out, among them Sergeant Schaub.
“Handcuff him,” Hunkeler said, “and take him to the Waaghof. Inform Madörin. And take those two with him.”
Across the road, in the entrance to the sex cinema, Hauser was taking photographs.
“Bugger off, bastard!” Hunkeler shouted at him. Hauser nodded and disappeared.
“What’s the guy called?” Schaub asked.
“I assume he’s called Prenga Berisha. He’s from Albania. But I assume he’ll very soon be unable to remember what his name is.”
“Are we to take those two there along with him?” Schaub asked.
“Yes please.”
“Unfortunately that’s not possible, the car’s too small. Should we call for someone else to come?”
“Yes, of course. The two of them caught him. They’re to make a statement. And you can lock them up for the night.”
“Sorry, what did you say?” Richard asked. “The two of us have to go to jail? Is that all the thanks we get?”
“Just for the night. And there’ll be breakfast in the morning at seven.”
“What? At seven, as early as that?” Richard moaned. “I sleep until midday.”
Hunkeler went across the road and into the Milchhüsli. Luise was sitting there with pale Franz and Hauser.
“You swine,” Hunkeler said to Hauser. “I’ll break every bone in your body.”
“Oh come on, Hunki, we’re both just doing our job.”
“The St Johann district as a mini Chicago where no one dares to go out in the street in the evening? What are we doing here then? Didn’t we come on foot?”
“There was something going on there just now,” Hauser said, “outside, I mean. Or was it nothing?”
“An Albanian in handcuffs, with an upstanding Swiss police officer beside him. How exciting.”
“That would be something. If they’d publish it, but I bet they won’t.”
The door opened and Garzoni came in. He gave Milena a brief nod and sat down at the table in the corner at the back.
“Just a minute,” Hunkeler said and went over to him.
“What was going on out there just now?” Garzoni asked. “Would you like to sit down?”
“Certainly, thank you. Richard and Niggi caught an Albanian. It’s presumably the one who set off the tear gas in the Billiards Centre a few days ago.”
“Can’t the police do that themselves? What’s the man called?”
“Apparently he’s a Berisha.”
Milena brought a glass of mineral water. Hunkeler ordered a glass of red wine.
“Well, well, well,” Garzoni said, “the things these Albanians have the nerve to get up to in our district. First Hardy, then the tear gas. What’s the situation with the Gypsy girl in the Allschwil nature reserve?”
Hunkeler didn’t know.
“There’s a lot of discontent in our town. Too many foreigners, too few police. Aren’t you drinking beer any more?”
“Not just at the moment, no.”
“Did Dr von Dach find anything?”
“Nothing serious, fortunately.”
“So no operation?”
Hunkeler shook his head. Garzoni took his bottle out of his pocket and had a swig.
“There’s nothing more they can do for me. Either get rid of it, which means the carcinoma will be gone but my potency with it. Or radiotherapy. In which case I’ll retain my potency. Since I value my potency, I’ve decided on the second option, even though it will shorten my life.”
He took a sip of water.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“I keep asking myself why you changed your name.”
Garzoni gave a friendly smile. Then he shook his head, in amusement, it seemed.
“For years I’ve been doing yoga every day,” he said. “It has helped me in many situations during my life. I don’t lose my composure so quickly any more. But is that not something that is supposed to remain secret?”
Hunkeler smiled too, a sickly-sweet smile. He didn’t know whether that actually was something that ought to have remained secret.
“How did you find out?”
“We checked in your file. We found that those files had a FA and were blocked. FA means Federal Archives and they contain the files of the Children of the Road.”
“I thought that was over and done with. But it’s not over and done with. Once a Gypsy, always a Gypsy.”
He was still trying to say this with a polite smile. But he’d gone very pale.
“So I’m under suspicion. Why?”
“You’re not directly under suspicion. We’re simply looking into Hardy’s background. And you’re part of that. You were Hermine Mauch’s lover. Afterwards that was Hardy Schirmer. You own the pharmacy where Hermine Mauch works, the apartment where she lives. Our interest in you is clearly logical.”
“That is understandable, yes.”
“But it doesn’t explain why you changed your name.”
“But it does contain an explanation. I decided very early on to make a career for myself. And I have done so. I was in a relationship with a really beautiful, successful woman. I’ve made money and purchased a property in an excellent location. That wouldn’t have been possible for me under my original name.”
“Why not? Gerzner doesn’t sound all that bad.”
“Possibly not for you. But for a lot of other, important people it is. They would have been wondering what kind of person I was. Perhaps they would have done some research. And if they’d found out how I’d grown up, they would have turned away from me at once.”
Perhaps, Hunkeler thought, perhaps some people would actually have behaved like that.
“What is your specific suspicion?” Garzoni asked.
“There’s no specific suspicion. I would just like to get to know you better.”
“And to do that you go nosing round in my past and open my file, which presumably was secret? Do I not, like any other citizen, have a right to my private life?”
“As far as our research is concerned, the obligation to maintain secrecy will naturally be maintained.”
Garzoni shook his head indignantly. The colour had returned to his face.
“Maintaining secrecy, what does that mean? The only effective maintenance of secrecy I’ve come across was the maintenance of secrecy about where my parents lived. I’ve no idea whether my mother’s still alive. And I was twentythree before I found my father. I�
�ve always considered you a reasonable man who treats people without prejudice. Now I see that you’re just a lousy little cop, out for what he can get. And you’re just wrong in what you think about me. I’m not some poor jailbird you can make into a galley slave. I know how to deal with that kind of thing. Now I’m asking you to leave my table.”
Hunkeler got up, made a slight bow and went out. There he saw the number 3 heading for the border. Across the road a car was parked with some young people in it and excessively loud music booming out into the night. He could hear laughter. The car started up again and zoomed off in the direction of the town centre.
He felt wretched. Like some bastard, a lousy, devious cop who was going after a man simply because he’d a Yenish mother. Who was he anyway? A country policeman pursuing the Travellers into the depths of the forest then giving them their marching orders to send them on a specific route across the border? Someone hunting out beggars who would hand over the Gypsies to the executioner if they caught them a second time?
And yet it had to be.
He crossed the road and had a look in the Billiards Centre. The regulars’ table was empty. He carried on a few steps to where Laufenburger lived and rang the bell. The door opened. Up in the kitchen he joined the others and had a dish of pureed peas that Nana had made. There was a lively discussion going on as to whether or not the Albanian caught by Richard was the man who had murdered Hardy. If he was the murderer, the bookseller said, he wouldn’t have come back. Oh yes, he would have, Joseph maintained, murderers always returned to the scene of their crime.
At one in the morning Hauser and pale Franz joined them. At half past Garzoni came. He sat down at the table without a word and drank some of his whiskey.
Hunkeler felt worn-out and tired. But he stayed there in his chair. Once he thought he’d heard himself snore. He started, Nana had given him a dig in the ribs.
“Go home,” she said, “and lie down in bed. Then go and see Hedwig tomorrow.”
He looked at the faces all round him. The glasses on the table. The light from the bulb. The tobacco smoke hanging in the light. But he stayed there.
Finally Garzoni got up. “OK,” he said, “come with me.”
He went on ahead down the stairs and out into the street. The Billiards Centre was dark, as was the Milchhüsli across the road. It must have been after three but that didn’t bother Hunkeler. He realized that Garzoni was drunk. He was walking without swaying, but his movements looked as if he was consciously controlling them.
He lived just round the corner, on the fourth floor, next to a Heinz Marti. It was a very large room with steel and black leather furniture. In one corner was a light-coloured mat on the floor. Beside it was a coat stand with a white outfit hanging on it. It consisted of a jacket, trousers and a belt.
“Is that not a judo outfit?” he asked.
“Could be,” Garzoni said. “But I use it for yoga.”
“Linen or silk?”
“Whichever.”
He opened a cupboard in which there were some thirty bottles and filled two glasses. On a glass-and-steel stand beside it was an aquarium. Hunkeler went over and saw that there were tiny turtles in it. They were lying in the tank, motionless, their heads just above the water. They seemed to be asleep. At the bottom was the glitter of coarse-grained sand.
“That’s the best Irish whiskey there is,” Garzoni said, putting the glasses on a little table. “May I ask you to take a seat?”
Hunkeler did so, picked up one of the glasses and took a sip. He didn’t like whiskey.
“You don’t like whiskey,” Garzoni said. “I can tell from the expression on your face. You ought to stick to beer, or red wine if you like. Only I haven’t got any.”
“Why do you keep turtles? You can’t talk to them.”
“I don’t want to talk. I just want to have something living in the room.”
He raised his glass to his nose, sniffed, then drank.
“I can drink this round the clock, it tastes like honey. And I don’t get drunk. As least not so drunk that it becomes noticeable.”
He put his glass down again.
“May I ask why you came up to my apartment with me at this late hour?”
“Of course you may. I have no answer to that. But I am wondering why you asked me.”
“Because I want to tell you something. Do you have a spare moment?”
Hunkeler nodded and was about to light a cigarette.
“Please don’t smoke in here. This room is clean and should stay that way.”
Hunkeler put the cigarette back in the packet.
“I’m sure you know,” Garzoni said, “that I did an apprenticeship as a fitter in Emmenbrücke. That will have been in my file. What is not in it is the fact that I had a sister. At the time I was seventeen. One evening the pastor came round and told me she had been sent by the authorities to live with a farmer in the neighbouring village. The next Sunday I went there and found her. She was twelve at the time. She knew no more about me than I had about her. We went for a walk up in the woods. We talked a lot and told each other about our experiences. We were delighted to have each other. We agreed to meet again on the Sunday in three weeks’ time. Three weeks later I went there. She wasn’t there any more. The farmer said a man had come and taken her away. He had no idea where. I’ve never seen my sister again.”
He closed his eyes and seemed to be concentrating entirely on his breathing. His face slackened, the blood drained from his lips. Then he looked up again.
“In the Sonnenberg reformatory we often had to do work outside. The skin on our hands was always rough. We could wash them as often as we liked, we could never get them clean. On Sunday mornings the governor would come. We had to stand in a row and show him our hands. He had a stiff brush that was usually used for scrubbing the floor. If he found someone he thought hadn’t washed their hands clean enough, he would scrub them with the brush until they were dripping with blood.”
Again he closed his eyes. He was breathing very quickly.
“The dirt sticks to us,” he said quietly. “It’s stuck there inside us. You can scrub as much as you like. We’re like the plague that can’t be eradicated. They were trying to re-educate us by putting us in institutions and reformatories. They tore our families apart in order to isolate us. They thought that that way we would adjust to normality. They wanted to save us from ourselves. They didn’t succeed.”
He took up his glass and downed it in in one. He refilled it.
“How I hate them for not succeeding. I could kill the lot of them for the botched job they made of it. I hate myself, I hate my people for being the way they are. As tough as old boots, you can hit them as much and as hard as you like, they won’t change, they can’t change. Even though the way things are at present they have no chance at all. They should see that it’s the way things are, they aren’t welcome anywhere on earth. That they’re driven out from one country to the next, across every border to the next border. They ought to finally understand that, but they’re too stupid, too idiotic. What’s going round in the streets is poor-quality goods. It has to be got rid of, root and branch.”
He leaned back in his chair. He was panting as if he were close to suffocating.
“I can’t understand how a person can so demean themselves the way I have. How can a person despise his origins, his own mother, his own sister? Just now you had a look at my turtles, showed an interest in them. That delighted me. They’re the only living beings I can live with. They’re the only reason I can stand it in this apartment. They respect me and I respect them.”
He stretched out his hands.
“Look at my hands. Is there anything that strikes you about them?”
Hunkeler looked at the hands Garzoni was holding out towards him. They were soft, well-groomed hands, the nails neatly manicured.
“No,” Hunkeler said, “there’s nothing that strikes me.”
“Have a closer look. It must strike you.”
“Oh yes,” Hunkeler said, feeling really rotten, “now I can see it. That one, the middle finger of the right hand, there’s some dirt on it.”
“Where?”
“There, under the nail. You ought to cut it again sometime.”
Garzoni had gone deathly pale. He put his hand in his right jacket pocket and took out a pair of scissors in a case. They were small, curved nail scissors and he used them to cut off a piece of the nail on his middle finger. He made such a deep cut that the blood started to flow. He put his finger in his mouth and sucked it.
“Now it’s OK,” he said, “now it’s clean.”
He stopped sucking and took his finger out of his mouth. He looked at his guest as if he was surprised to see him there.
“May I ask what you’re doing here in my apartment? Who are you actually?”
“You invited me up. Don’t you remember?”
Garzoni made an effort to think, but he couldn’t remember. He picked up his glass to have a drink. But his glass was empty.
“I must ask you to leave this room,” he said slowly, as if he had to search for every word. “You’re a stranger here. This apartment belongs to me.”
Hunkeler got up and went out quietly.
*
The next morning he was woken by the striking from the nearby clock tower. He counted along with it: eleven o’clock. He felt light and as if floating on air – it was presumably the Irish whiskey that made him feel like that.
As he drank his tea at the kitchen table it seemed as if there was a stench hanging round the apartment. He opened the cupboard and the cooker. Then he looked in the waste bin. It was the remains of the sheep’s cheese he’d thrown away. He took out the bin liner, tied it shut and carried it down and out onto the pavement. It was Wednesday morning, 26 November. The rubbish collection was on Thursday morning.
He got into his car and drove up to the Spitzwald restaurant. He tried to park there, but it wasn’t possible. Two men were constructing something: two uprights, one on either side, and a crossbeam six and a half feet above the ground.
“What are you doing here?” Hunkeler asked.
“We’re doing what we’ve been told to do,” the foreman, a fat man of around sixty, said.
The Basel Killings Page 20