Фолькер Кучер - Goldstein

He was tempted to ring her doorbell before disappearing into Charly’s flat but, in the interests of domestic peace, resisted. It was Charly who’d bear the brunt, not him.

As quietly as possible, he opened the door and groped his way into the kitchen without switching on the light, only doing so once he had closed the door behind him. There was a note on the table. He removed his hat and read as he shrugged off his coat.

Dear Gereon,

I did wait up for a while, because I was hoping to see you, but now I’m too tired, almost too tired to write these lines. And tomorrow I have to leave early again. Annoying about your car. Tell me what happened in the morning.

P.S. There’s an open bottle of red wine in the cupboard. I wanted to share it with you, but we’ll do it some other time. If you like.

He opened the cupboard door. The bottle was more than half full. Charly must have drunk two glasses on her own. He imagined her sitting there, some legal book or other open on the table, wine glass at hand, growing more and more weary as she waited for him. He would have liked nothing more than to take her in his arms, but she wasn’t there, she was in bed sleeping and he couldn’t wake her.

Next to the wine stood the bottle of cognac he had brought from Luisenufer. He only had to think for a moment, before leaving the wine untouched. It was a long time since he had drunk cognac before going to bed, and not just because Charly complained about the smell. He no longer needed it; sleeping by her side was enough to banish those nightmares that, for a time, had haunted his dreams. The smell of her body was enough to keep the demons at bay.

There was a pitter-patter across the hallway floor, and a scratching at the door. Rath opened it and a black dog looked up at him. ‘Did I wake you, Kirie?’ he asked, letting her in.

By the time he fetched the glass from the cupboard, she had curled up under the table as if she knew exactly where her master was going to sit.

Kirie was the living reminder of a murder investigation. She had belonged to a victim, and no one wanted to take her, not even the parents of the deceased. Rath had adopted the sweet little neglected pup who had been trapped in the flat of her dead mistress and, since then, had turned into a rowdy chit of a hound.

‘We’ll need to think of something for you,’ he said. ‘Your mistress can’t keep you anymore, so you’ll have to be a police dog again.’ Kirie pricked her ears up, and tilted her black, canine head to one side.

Rath opened the bottle of cognac and sniffed its neck before pouring. The familiar smell recalled the times he had sat alone in his Kreuzberg flat wrestling with the day’s problems before taking himself off to bed. Charly could grumble all she liked, today had been hard, damn it, and cognac alone offered the solution.

He felt his anger rise, rapid as a thermometer in boiling water. He cursed Abraham Goldstein, and he cursed Bernhard Weiss for foisting the assignment on him in the first place.

Czerwinski and Henning had been waiting an hour and a half when he and Goldstein finally reappeared in the Excelsior . However, Rath didn’t know the extent to which Goldstein had ruined his evening until later, after he had left the Yank with Plisch and Plum and gone back out to Wedding to retrieve his car. He had travelled by taxi, determined to drive his expenses higher still, so furious he couldn’t even look out of the window. The Buick was parked where he had left it: Kösliner Strasse, a notorious Communist area, and a neighbourhood in which sports cars were seldom left on street corners. Someone seemed to have guessed that the car belonged to a cop, or had taken it for a capitalist’s plaything. Either way, they had serviced it good and proper.

Despite the flat tyres and smashed headlights, Rath was most annoyed about the scratches in the paintwork. Sheer vandalism and envy, nothing more. That jobless rabble! Rath had gone to the Rote Laterne on the corner, the same bar he had visited or, rather, passed through, hours before. It was already closed, even though it wasn’t yet ten o’clock. He felt sure that Goldstein had recruited the people who had wrecked his car here. How, he wasn’t sure, but money seemed the likely answer.

Then came the problem with the tow truck. He had had to run to the S-Bahn, to Senefelder Platz, to find a public telephone, which of course was out of use. After hailing a taxi on Reinickendorfer Strasse he found a late-night garage which could tow the defective Buick. By that point, however, the hands of his wristwatch already showed half past ten, and the garage was somewhere out in Reinickendorf.

He poured himself another cognac, then a third. He would charge the repairs to the Free State of Prussia, that much he had already decided in the taxi to Charly’s place.

Meantime, Kirie had fallen asleep. Listening to her snore quietly, he rinsed his glass and placed it in the sink. In the bathroom he brushed his teeth extra carefully and downed two large glasses of water. The last thing he needed was trouble at breakfast. Charly mumbled something as he lay beside her, turning to place an arm around his shoulder, and he nestled close to her warm body, carefully, so as not to wake her. As the scent of her skin reached his nostrils, that scent which belonged to Charly alone, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

The shop lay quiet and dark, the gas lamps on Rigaer Strasse were switched off, and moonlight shone dimly through the clouds. There wasn’t a single light on in the building. Alex had been watching the street for almost an hour, but since the last S-Bahn spat out its half a dozen or so passengers she hadn’t seen a soul.

It was late by the time she reached Rigaer Strasse, much later than anticipated. She ought to have been exhausted, but her rage kept her awake: rage at Kalli, rage at the cops, rage at that stupid caretaker who had forced her to climb over all those roofs until she finally located a skylight in the front building.

After today’s incident, Flat B was too dicey. Alex would return for a final time, but only to pick up her stuff. She hadn’t wanted to run the risk earlier. First, she had to take care of business in Kalli’s shop.

Although certain that the street was deserted and no one was watching from the window, she took a final, precautionary, glance in all directions before emerging from the dark entrance, crossing the street and heading towards the shop. The carefully drawn letters on the sign told her it was closed. As she set about the door with her skeleton key she realised it wasn’t locked. She pushed it open as slowly as possible, to avoid triggering the bell which announced new customers. A shy pling , then everything was still. She listened into the darkness. The open door made her suspicious. Better safe than sorry!

Alex couldn’t help thinking of Benny, and the memory pained her. She saw his laughing face, then the grimace of the cop who killed him, his boots stamping on Benny’s fingers as if he were treading out a cigarette, and her rage rose once more.

She was surprised that Kalli had forgotten to lock up. True, he was prone to getting drunk, and sometimes slept on the sofa in the back, which was why she had brought the knife. She wasn’t scared of him, having dealt with far worse in the past. If need be she would extract the money by force.

The thought of a snoring Kalli in the backroom made her proceed as quietly as possible. Not daring to switch on the light, she groped her way forwards until she found the counter, following its contours with her fingertips to the cash register. She didn’t know how much he left in the till overnight, but her plan was to take whatever money she could lay her hands on. There had been quite a sum in the drawer when she visited at lunchtime.