Jakob Arjouni - One Man, One Murder

“Hey, man, you’re not a cop, are you?”

I looked up and shrugged. “Something like that.”

Looking as if he had stepped on something, he said “Shit!” He ran over to his buddies and gave them the scram sign. Within two seconds, the shell game arena was empty.

In the meantime, the Pole had managed to sit up. He leaned against a car tire and patted his lips with a corner of his shirt.

I lit a cigarette and stuck it between his fingers. He nodded absentmindedly. That was his only reaction. Maybe he didn’t smoke. I slapped him on the shoulder, mumbled a few encouraging words, and crossed the street.

The Smiling Die should really have been called “The Smiling Chinese.” The probability of a smiling die was as unlikely as the probability of an unsmiling Mr. Wang. No matter if men who had lost everything crawled weeping to his doorstep, the police conducted a raid, or the Mafia broke every fixture in the place-the small man from Hong Kong sat behind the counter, his arms crossed over his chest, and smiled as if the world were one big spring roll. At the time it was said that he was abroad. Two months ago, someone had strangled Mrs. Wang and tossed a young fellow and a wardrobe out of her bedroom window on the fourth floor. Since then, Mr. Wang’s bodyguard was in charge of business. Schlumpi, or “Ass-with-Ears” Peter, never smiled. Even if he had smiled, no one would have noticed: after a car racing accident, the skin on the lower half of his face had been replaced by a graft from his backside.

The two small rooms and bar were down in the basement. They were furnished with tables for roulette, blackjack, and craps, chessboards and timers. The joint, once elegant, had come down in the world. Everything was ramshackle and stained, even the dealer. He was wearing a dark suit and a bow tie, but a button was missing on his shirt, and his cuffs were frayed. Narrow windows permitted a view of high heels ambling back and forth. Eleven guys were sitting around the roulette table, drinking beer and losing money. I stood at the bar, drinking beer and waiting. The woman behind the counter kept glancing at my suit with a mildly horrified look but did not say anything. No one said anything except for the dealer.

Ten minutes later a door next to the bar, marked “Office”, opened and Schlumpi, wearing a white wolf fur coat, stepped behind the cash register. After he had tossed in a bundle of bills and closed the drawer, he looked up and remarked, after a brief pause: “What do you know, it’s the Robin Hood of Istanbul.”

The door opened again, and Slibulsky came out with a man I didn’t know. Slibulsky gave a start. “Kayankaya-what are you doing here?”

“Having a beer, and listening to Schlumpi’s old jokes.”

“Oh …”

While Slibulsky took his leave from the guy I didn’t know, Schlumpi leaned on the counter, pointed at my suit, and whispered through his scarred and lipless hole of a mouth: “Here’s another joke-brand new: Kayankaya’s been giving head to a cunt on the rag.”

“Incredibly funny. But the funniest thing about it is-”

Slibulsky tugged at my sleeve. “Come on, let’s go.” And to the woman behind the bar: “Put his beer on my tab.”

The woman nodded.

“Didn’t know you knew Schlumpi.”

“And I didn’t know you played roulette.”

We crossed Kaiserstrasse in the direction of the railway station. The sun was setting behind the triple arch, and scraps of afterglow lingered to the right and the left. There was a whiff of spring in the air.

“Who told you I was there?”

“A guy in the street.”

We made our way past a bunch of junkies who were attempting a choral version of “We Are the World” while someone played it on a comb.

“I just wanted to ask you where you broke that arm.”

Slibulsky stopped. “You were looking for me to ask me that?”

I nodded. He opened his mouth, closed it with a sigh, then opened it again and said: “In the Center.”

“Where exactly?”

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

I tilted my jaw in the direction of the nearest tavern. “Let’s have a beer.”

“I can’t. I have to go to work.”

“How about later?”

“Not today, not tomorrow. We’re getting some new women in.” He checked his watch. “I should have been there quite some time ago.”

“All right. But if nothing else, tell me how the game went.”

“What game?”

“Becker against-”

“Oh, that … I didn’t watch it to the end. But someone called. Guy called-something to do with trees … Baum?”

“Weidenbusch?”

“Possible. Says it’s urgent. Later.”

Just as Slibulsky disappeared in the crowd, an elderly gentleman wearing a red velvet bow tie appeared in front of me and flashed the inside of his waistcoat with its assortment of wristwatches. “Genuine Swiss watches, Monsieur.”

I bought a particularly ostentatious one, went into a bar and asked for a beer and a corkscrew. Then I lit a cigarette. How deep should the shit get that Slibulsky had gotten himself into before I would decide not to help him crawl back out of it? I was still pondering that when the waiter came back with my order. He was a small fat fellow with greasy hair combed straight back and an equally greasy apron. After he had taken my money, he pointed at the corkscrew and asked me morosely: “You going to clean your fingernails with it?”

I shook my head. “I want to scratch a dedication into the back of a watch.”

“Oh, I see … Well, I was just thinking, I clean mine with it all the time, and we’ve only got one of them here, and I wouldn’t really like it if other people-”

“Not to worry.”

He growled, “Never mind me, I’m a little strange in some ways,” and disappeared. I looked at my beer. It looked quite normal, really, but I pushed it aside and proceeded to scratch fOR MANNE into the back plate of the watch.

A little later I left the bar and drove home to change clothes.

10

The voice on the intercom said: “Who is there, please?”

“The gardener from Gellersheim.”

“Who, please?”

I repeated my phrase and was told to wait. Minutes passed, then the voice returned: “With whom do you wish to speak?”

“Mr. Schmitz.”

“Sorry, but Mr. Schmitz isn’t here.”

“His secretary?”

“Mr. Olschewski isn’t here, either.”

“Did you take a good look?”

“Excuse me?”

On the third floor of the fortress-like building a light went out and a curtain moved.

“Please inform the absent gentlemen that if they don’t become present in one minute, I’ll tell the police what I found while planting bulbs.”

“And what was that, if I may ask?”

“A watch.”

“Just a moment, please.”

A Jaguar slid up the hill, driving on its parking lights, and disappeared a hundred yards farther up in a small cypress grove. In the moonlit night, the outlines of the treetops looked like cutouts against the sky. I could just make out a watchman’s hut. Looking in the other direction, there was a view of Frankfurt, a gigantic lit-up birthday cake twenty miles away. Up here it suddenly felt comforting to be an inhabitant of that cake.

I had lit a cigarette and smoked half of it when the intercom crackled on again: “Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think that a watch found in the garden would be of much interest to the absent gentlemen.”

“But it might be if they were told that there was a man attached to that watch.”

“You mean,” he cleared his throat, “next to the bulbs you were planting?”

“Yes.”

A moment later, he pressed the buzzer, and I proceeded up the paved walk to the front entrance. The massive oak door swung open, and my salt-and-pepper interlocutor bade me enter. “Please follow me, sir.”