Фолькер Кучер - Goldstein

The woman from Welfare also stood up and moved towards the door. ‘You’re right. She doesn’t trust any of us. She probably thinks I want to stick her in a home. Why not try your luck alone?’

‘But you need at least one witness,’ the cop said.

‘This isn’t to conduct an official interview. It’s about regaining trust, so that an interview is possible. I’ll call you back in when we’re ready.’

Charly waited a moment for the door to close.

‘Now, take a seat,’ she said, ‘or do you really want to stand the whole time?’ The girl hesitated but sat in the chair. Charly pushed a carton of Juno across the table. ‘Do you smoke?’ she asked. Another hesitation, but she took a cigarette.

‘Don’t like talking much, do you?’ Charly said, after she had given her a light. ‘Afraid of saying the wrong thing…’ Charly lit a Juno for herself too. ‘You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. You can just nod or shake your head. No one’s writing down anything you say, anyway. It’s between us.’

The girl drew greedily on the cigarette, avoiding Charly’s gaze.

‘Does it hurt?’ Charly gestured towards the fresh bandage. According to the statement, several officers had to hold the girl still to inspect and re-bandage the wound. The panic in those eyes! No wonder. ‘How did it happen?’

The girl tensed on her chair, and Charly realised she had asked the wrong question.

‘There’s no need to be scared. No one’s going to be angry with you for defending yourself. We want to help you.’

The girl looked out of the window in silence.

‘You didn’t have money for a ticket, is that it?’

Silence.

‘You know, I got caught by a conductor once too. I must have been about the same age as you. My parents weren’t too pleased, but it wasn’t the end of the world.’

The girl remained silent, and it didn’t look as if that were about to change. Charly could imagine a simple cop losing his patience when confronted with this sort of obstinate behaviour.

‘We can’t help you if you don’t help us,’ she said. ‘If you tell us your name and where you live we can send you home. Otherwise we’ll have to keep you locked up until we find out.’

This was the first time she had issued a threat, but it had just as little effect as everything else. ‘I don’t want to lock you up, and I’m sure you don’t want that either. But you have to give us something.’

The girl seemed to be thinking. That was progress at least. Just when Charly hoped she might say something, there was a commotion in the corridor outside. A babble of voices, a loud cry, worse than a band of hooligans being brought before the magistrate. She tried to ignore the din, but it wouldn’t let up.

Finally she placed the Juno in the ashtray and stood up. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, opening the door to the corridor and total chaos. Most of the offices stood wide open, and everyone had gathered in little groups in the corridor. Handcuffed figures were being led in by uniformed officers. Their clothes were ragged and most of them had scratches to their faces or arms. One held a gauze bandage to a gash on his forehead. Everyone was talking and shouting. The boorish sergeant from the 81st precinct whom Charly had just scolded sat hunched on a wooden bench normally reserved for felons, face buried in his hands, with the woman from Welfare trying in vain to comfort him.

‘What’s going on?’ Charly asked.

The woman shrugged. ‘A group of unemployed who banded together on Frankfurter Allee. They shot a police officer, someone just said.’ She looked towards the distraught officer. ‘I didn’t catch his name, but he seems to have been a friend of the sergeant here.’

‘They killed Emil, the bastards!’ The cop screamed, his face a deep shade of red. ‘They should kill ’em all, Communist swine!’

He sprang to his feet and tried to collar a gaunt-looking man who was being led through in handcuffs. Two colleagues had to wrestle him to the floor.

What in God’s name is happening here today, Charly thought.

Whether or not the sergeant was fit for duty was something she could decide upon later. First, she had to take care of the runaway, but when she returned to the room she found the chair the girl had been sitting on empty; two cigarettes burned in the ashtray, and the window to Magdalenenstrasse stood open. She rushed to the windowsill and looked onto the street, feeling her knees give way. The girl had disappeared.

Alex gripped her ankle. Only now did she feel the throbbing pain.

When the woman from the court or whatever she was, had stood up and gone to the door, she had sniffed her chance. With all the noise outside, no one heard her climb onto the windowsill and lower herself onto the wide ledge above the ground floor window. It was still a good two metres down to the pavement, but she had to move quickly before they noticed she was missing.

The drop was too great, but what choice had there been? She had dangled from the ledge, legs frozen for a moment in mid-air, before letting go. An intense pain shot through her left leg upon impact, but she got straight back to her feet and limped behind a car parked a few metres away. A little boy on a scooter gazed curiously at her. She put a finger to her lips, and the little boy nodded.

She looked up at the window as the court lady gazed out and then was gone. Someone else could look out at any moment, but she couldn’t stay here forever. She had to move before the cops gave chase. It didn’t matter if every step hurt like hell. She put as little weight as possible on her left leg, but a piercing pain shot up from her ankle. It felt as if it were about to snap. She gritted her teeth and limped onwards, keeping her eyes ahead. Making it to the U-Bahn station was her only chance. As long as there wasn’t some idiot conductor… but don’t think about that now!

Almost at Frankfurter Allee she turned around again. There was no one behind her, neither in uniform nor in plainclothes. Was she actually going to get out of this in one piece? Traffic noise spurred her on, the staccato, stabbing pain becoming more and more rapid, her breathing too. Damn it, first her injured hand and now her ankle.

At the steps to the U-Bahn, she looked back again. There was some commotion taking place further down Frankfurter Allee, probably the unemployed taking their anger out on the cops; the furious cries of the proletariat could be heard from almost a kilometre away. Police uniforms were like blue dots in the milling mass. From somewhere she heard the wail of police sirens and began to realise why her escape had been so easy. The cops had more pressing concerns than an eighteen-year-old guttersnipe who had done a runner.

She made her way down the steps unnoticed. No one on the platform paid her the slightest bit of attention. A girl with a limp – so what? She hauled herself a few metres along the platform, leaned her head against a cool steel beam, closed her eyes and yielded to exhaustion. Someone pressed something cold into her uninjured right hand. She opened her eyes and looked at a one-mark coin.

She wasn’t a beggar. Her first thought was to return the money, but to whom? There was no sign of her benefactor, and people here seemed as distracted as ever, focused on their own concerns. Not knowing who to thank, she pocketed the coin. At least she’d have some money if she ran into a conductor again. They had taken her knife along with everything else in her bag, even the six-pack of Juno she had just opened.

A train arrived through the eastern tunnel. Where should she go? Flat B was too risky, Flat A too dangerous. Benny was dead, Kalli was dead. There was no one in this vast city who could help her, not a single place where she felt safe.