Jakob Arjouni - One Man, One Murder

I found a telephone and called Gellersheim information for Dr. Schelling’s number. It wasn’t listed. No Dr. Schelling in Frankfurt, Offenbach, Mainz, Wiesbaden, or Kassel, either. After I hung up, I remembered the shovel. I took it back to the tool shed. As I stepped out of the shed, I saw a note pinned to the wall with a pair of garden shears. It said: “Water lilies? New gravel? Trim trees-new ladder!” And there was a phone number.

It rang three times. Then came a cool, businesslike male voice: “Olschewski for Schmitz.”

“Schmitz?”

“Eberhard Schmitz. I am his secretary. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I … You mean Eberhard Schmitz, Georg’s brother?”

“That’s correct.”

“… ”

“Hello?”

“Yes, yes, I’m still here … I wanted to know-see, I’m the gardener at the villa in Gellersheim, and for the trees I need a new ladder-to trim them, you see.”

“Buy one and add it to the invoice.”

“Many thanks.”

“Anything else?”

I cleared my throat. “Well, maybe you could ask the parties who come here from time to time not to walk all over the fresh flowerbeds …”

“You know you don’t have to worry about that. We’re paying you enough to make it worth your while to redo the flowerbeds.”

“I just meant-”

“Don’t mean, just do your work. Goodbye.”

On the drive back I contemplated the best plan of action and arrived at half a decision. Back in Frankfurt I parked in front of the first tavern with a Henninger sign and walked into a dark booze grotto full of stale tobacco smoke. Two guys in their mid-thirties sat at the bar in their cheap Sunday best. They had half-empty drinks in front of them, hand-rolled cigarettes between their fingers. Behind the counter a girl was drying dishes. The proprietor sat reading an illustrated magazine. There was no one else in the joint. Lit-up slot machines stood by the wall, old carnival garlands hung above the tables. The four people turned to look at me. Expressionless, pale, flat faces. The proprietor put his magazine away and crossed his arms.

“Private party.”

Faint smiles on the faces of the guys at the bar. I rammed both hands in my pants pockets and looked at the floor.

“Let’s keep this sweet and short. This is a public place, and I would like to have a beer and make a phone call. But if it so happens that this is a private party, or that the beer taps have been turned off, or that you’re closing this very second-then I’ll be back. Every day. And I’ll bring some friends. Big friends, sensitive friends, friends with baseball bats. We’ll make this joint our neighborhood pub. So you better see about getting some Turkish music, and I don’t think there’ll be much of a demand for your pork chops.”

“All right, all right.”

The proprietor made a resigned gesture. Then he nodded to the girl and returned to his magazine. Disappointed, the guys in their mid-thirties concentrated on their drinks.

“And where is your phone?”

The proprietor took his time. Then he looked up and said: “We don’t have one. We use smoke signals.”

Was that ever a riot. The guys at the bar almost fell off their stools, and the proprietor had to wipe tears from his eyes. While the three kept on erupting into renewed guffaws, the girl put a phone on the counter and pushed it toward me, flashing me an embarrassed smile under cover of the beer taps. After the wild merriment subsided, I dialed Slibulsky’s and Gina’s number. I let it ring for a long time. Then I hung up and received my beer. I sucked it down in one go, nodded to the girl, and walked to the door. A roar came just as I grabbed the doorknob: “Hey, you haven’t paid!” I opened the door.

“I’ll send you a buffalo hide by the end of the week. That should pay for the beer.”

“Come on, come on, try it, double your money-keep your eye on it and win! Where’s the ball? Here? No. Here? No. Here it is! Let’s keep going-a hundred marks on the table, no tricks, no double bottom-this is an honest game. Keep your eye on it.…”

The small white ball skittered from left to right, up and down, bounced off the sidewalk, reappeared sometimes between his fingers, sometimes under one of the three matchboxes, and finally disappeared. Once more he switched the boxes around, stopped, waved a wad of hundred-mark bills in the air and looked around with an innocent expression.

“Where’s the ball?”

He had been kneeling on the sidewalk for ten minutes, whirling things around, and had taken two intoxicated Japanese and a small-town loudmouth in a deerskin outfit for four hundred marks. Twenty or so male heads waved skeptically in the April wind. All of them knew it was impossible to win, but all of them kept staring at his wad of bills.

The wind gusted heavily, cars honked, people ran, and a loudspeaker voice proclaimed a revolution in the realm of dishwashing brushes, but silence reigned in the circle around the shell game guy. After he clapped his hands and got ready to rattle off his spiel again, a Pole took two steps forward, placed a boot on the box to the left, extracted a hundred-mark bill from his wallet, and said: “Show.”

The men in the circle came alive; some of them nodded approval, some turned away, shaking their heads.

The man contemplated the boot. “Do I look like a shoeshine boy?”

The Pole shrugged and bent down. But just as he was about to pick up the box, a short fat guy stumbled out of the void, uttered some drunken babble, and knocked him over. A loud murmur rose from the audience, and before the Pole had gotten up, cursing, and brushed off his pants, and the other guy had vanished again, the ball had changed places.

I leaned against the display window of a sex shop, smoked a cigarette, and studied the entrance to the Eros-Center Elbestrasse.

It was almost six o’clock. The street vendors were packing up their wares.

Just as the Pole got ready to punch out the con man, the plastic door-flaps flew open and Slibulsky came bouncing down the stairs. I waited until he had reached the crossing. Just as I tossed my cigarette away, the Pole came crashing into my side. I fell down on the sidewalk, he fell on top of me, and both of us ended up in the gutter. He was groaning and not making any attempt to get off of me. They must have punched him with a knuckle-duster. One of his incisors was gone, and his mouth was spraying blood like a leaky hose. I pushed him aside, got to my feet, and looked around. Slibulsky had disappeared.

“Sorry, but how could I know that the Pollack would lose his cool that way?” He was a member of the shell game gang; not yet eighteen, milky skin, an old man’s pouches under his eyes. He, too, had made a bet, but he had won. A decoy. Now he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, rubbed his ironclad fist, and waited for my reaction. Maybe he thought I was one of the boys of the red-light district it’s better not to mess with. “But I am sorry, ’cause of your suit, I mean.”

I checked and noted that I did, indeed, look as if I had just come from a butchering party.

“Yeah, that’ll be some dry cleaning bill …”

He retreated a step. “Yeah, well-”

“But maybe we can settle this some other way. I’m sure you know Ernst Slibulsky, the guy who works over there at the center?”

“The guy with the lumpy nose?”

“That’s him. He’s got a broken arm. I’d like to know where that happened.”

“Where he broke his arm? No idea. I just run into him once in a while. And I hear people talk.”

“And where do you run into him?”

“Around here. He’s always in and out of there, and sometimes he’s over there in The Die.”

“Ah-”