Jakob Arjouni - One Man, One Murder

I drove past the convention building and the Plaza Hotel and on to the autobahn, away from the city lights into dark blue night. I passed the time by trying to calculate how long twenty thousand marks would last in some southern clime. If I had kept going, and the Opel had held up, which was unlikely, I could have been sitting under a straw roof on a beach the following morning, enjoying my shrimp and white wine in the company of a waitress and Whitney Houston on the jukebox. I leaned back. It was warm in the car, and the engine was humming almost perfectly. The waitress came to my table and stayed there all the way to the Gellersheim exit.

I stopped by the first phone booth to call Weidenbusch. His phone rang seven times.

“Yes, hello?”

“Kayankaya. Have you abandoned your position?”

“No, no-I was just taking a bath.”

“Well, what’s up?”

“What do you mean?”

There was a tremor in his voice. He must have had a hard day, probably sitting next to the phone, stripping his necktie down to individual fibers, chewing on one piece of peppermint candy after another.

“You did call me this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes. I just wanted to know what you had found out.”

“A whole lot. If I’m not totally mistaken, you’ll have your girlfriend back soon.”

His “Really?” sounded more frightened than delighted. I was taken aback. “Maybe you’re not so happy about that?”

“No, no …” There was a moment’s silence. Then he took a deep breath and said:

“But, you see, I’ve been thinking about all of it today. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it was not a good idea.”

“What wasn’t a good idea?”

“Sri Dao and me. There’s the language problem, and, and God knows what might come up. Her family, her background-those really are imponderables. Like right now, me having to deal with gangsters.”

“Listen, Weidenbusch, I understand that you’re a wreck, but-”

“No, no, it’ll be better for us to separate. I also talked it over with my mother …” A pause. I looked around for the herd of wild horses that I felt galloping over my prone body. There was the sound of paper rustling at the other end of the line.

“In any case, I’ve decided to pay you for four working days and a per diem of three hundred, that’s eleven hundred altogether. If you subtract the five hundred I gave you this morning, I owe you six hundred. I’ll mail you the check, you’ll get it by the end of the week.”

“Excellent. But what do I do about your girlfriend?”

“Well, I thought-”

“You thought I’d go home now and see if there’s anything good on the tube? Let me tell you what I’m going to do: I’ll go on looking for your friend, and when I’ve found her, I’ll slap her around and tell her greetings from Mr. Weidenbusch. I’ll explain to her that it’s in the language of touch, and love, et cetera.”

“Please don’t be so cynical! This has not be an easy decision for me.”

“You don’t say.”

I was about to hang up when he said: “Wait!” And, after a moment’s silence: “Let me know, in any case. Maybe I’m just a little nervous right now. And promise you won’t go to the police-no matter what happens.”

Back in the car, I sat there for a thoughtful moment, jingling my car keys.

I parked the Opel in front of Theo Manz Cinema Production and pushed the seat back. Then I put on a black knitted hat, took out my provisions and the Scotch, and settled down to dinner. The lights were still on at Mrs. Olga’s, and Theo Manz was throwing a party. A long line of upper middle class vehicles were parked along the curb. Rolling Stones songs roared out of the windows, and from time to time a chorus of female voices screeched along: “I can’t get no satisfaction” and other select passages. Number Six was completely dark. When I was done eating, I opened the Scotch and began my vigil. The brick villa stood diagonally in front of me, and I could see the street in my rearview mirror. No matter whom Eberhard Schmitz sent along to dispose of the corpse, I would not miss him. It occurred to me that I should have asked Weidenbusch if Larsson had tattoos on his arms.

I took a sip and lit a cigarette. Weidenbusch. Slibulsky. Dietzenbach. Slibulsky, again, and McEnroe. The streetlights went out at midnight. My bottle was down to three quarters. I turned on the radio. Music after midnight, Udo Jurgens on every wavelength: “Show me the place where everybody gets along …” I turned the radio off. A quarreling couple came out of the Manz residence, waving their arms, running to their car. The man opened the door for her, almost tearing it off its hinges. “I said let’s go kick the ball around on Saturday! I didn’t say anything about balling!”

“Oh, Marita plays soccer?”

They leaned on the roof of the car on opposite sides, each of their necks stretched out like a chicken’s, and yelled the street awake.

“Not Marita, her friend, that stupid serial director!”

“So that’s what it’s come to: you make a date to play soccer with a ‘stupid serial director?’ ”

“Yes! It so happens that I wrote that serial!”

Doors slammed, tires squealed. The car shot through the intersection at sixty miles an hour.

I took out another cigarette. I began to ask myself if Schmitz had been so sure his check had withdrawn me from circulation that he had simply gone to bed. The clock on the dashboard told me it was twelve-thirty. I yawned. The sky was overcast again, and the night was pitch-dark. I had some more Scotch, smoked, and stared at the dark outline of the villa. At some point, the bottle must have slipped out of my grasp.

When I woke up, it was dawn. Someone was knocking on the car door, and I heard a voice: “ ‘scuse me, but I saw your Frankfurt plates-could you, could you give me a ride, maybe? Just to get away from here.”

I needed a moment to remember where I was and what I was doing. I roused myself and saw a slightly bedraggled angel behind the side window. Her make-up was smeared and her hairdo had disintegrated into loose strands that hung down around her face. She was banging on the door with a high-heeled shoe. “I can pay you for the gas …” It looked like the party was over.

I looked past her at Schmitz’s villa. The first thing I saw was a silver-colored Toyota jeep standing in the drive. Then I noticed that the lights were on the ground floor. I unlocked the door while my new acquaintance mumbled, “Oh, thank you so much!” I jumped out into the street.

“Sorry, dear. You better look for a cab.”

I was off to a flying start. It was miserably cold, and drizzly rain struck my face. Up over the fence alongside the service entrance, across the alarm wire, from tree to tree and past the terrace-I arrived at the sliding door in no time. The shutters were closed, and I could only see thin streaks of light. I put my ear to the wall. Somewhere there was a faint padding sound. After two or three minutes, the sound approached, took a turn right next to me, and stopped with a muted impact. Then nothing happened for quite a while until a quiet voice spoke: “Hello? Yes, I’ve checked everywhere. Nothing. Must’ve been a hoax. Should I go back to the soccer field? Maybe they know something about it. The dishes? Wait a minute, I’m not a cleaning woman. Besides, that’s Manne’s job. Nonsense, he’ll show up again. All right, all right, but I’ll make Manne pay for this. Later.”

Soon after that the padding resumed, grew fainter, faded away. I straightened my back. I had two choices. If I took my Beretta and went down to the basement and forced the guy whose voice I had heard to take me to the refugees, he would get to see me; even though I wasn’t quaking in my shoes, I did not take Schmitz’s warning lightly. The less contact I had with his people the better. The second choice was the better one. After all, I was just trying to find that woman; at this point, my ambition did not extend to laying bare the corruption of an entire city.