Jakob Arjouni - One Man, One Murder

After my fourth cigarette I heard the first siren. Then the second, the third, finally a whole concert. They approached rapidly, emitted one final howl, and fell silent. Then there was engine noise; there were commands and voices through megaphones, barking dogs and footsteps. A key turned in the lock, the door opened. I tossed the butt and listened to a whole bag of pennies dropping in my head.

The first man to enter was less than five feet tall, thin as a board and just as stiff. His uniform fit him like a second skin. A neat oval of facial hair framed his mouth; otherwise he was clean-shaven and exuded one of those masculine fragrances that make the air taste like soap. Legs far apart, he stood in the doorframe, holding a pistol in his right, a radio transmitter in his left hand. When he spoke it sounded as if he was chewing on ice cubes. “On your feet, chop chop, get in line. Need to check your papers.” Two men in uniform armed with submachine guns took up positions to the right and the left of the door. I was one of those who remained seated.

“Come on, I told you, chop chop!”

“Good afternoon. Rank and serial number, please, or I won’t comply.”

The submachine guns swiveled quickly to point at my chest. The faces above them, adolescent and pimply, looked as if they thought they had to save the world, at the very least, and were pretty damn scared by the prospect. Trigger fingers jerked nervously back and forth.

“And tell your kids to put their toys down. We don’t want them to pull the trigger by mistake.”

The commanding officer dissected me with his eyes. Then he moved his chin in my direction, and his cohorts rushed forward. In no time at all they pulled me off the bench, made me stand between them, and patted me down. I no longer had my Beretta, and my wallet was gone, too. My I.D. was in the wallet. With short, abrupt steps, the commanding officer came up and stopped right in front of me. I could feel his breath on my face; it smelled of peppermint. Old Spice and peppermint. It was a knockout.

“Your I.D.”

“Your serial number.”

“One one two eight one eight. Inspector Hagebrecht. Your I.D.”

“Someone stole it.”

“Under arrest.”

“Just a minute!” I resisted. I stopped when they were about to break my arms. “I’m a German citizen.”

A thin smile appeared on his face.

“A likely story. Take him away.”

“When your boss hears about this, he’ll take your head off. Then you’ll be just four feet-ouch! I bet you’re supposed to take care of this business as discreetly as possible. Good luck with telling your boss that Kemal Kayankaya is one of your refugees! Better start practicing …”

Minutes later I had been handcuffed and put on the bus, next to a guard, and watched through the barred windows how people were escorted out of the bunker, one by one. Some had to be punched to make them move, others were carried, many were weeping. The children came last. Separated from their mother, they were dragged into a car. They were screaming. Their marbles scattered onto the muddy ground and lay there, blinking. I turned to my guard.

“Who sent you here?”

Staring straight ahead, his chin rigid, his cap pulled down low over his forehead, he mumbled: “Official secret.”

“Doesn’t it seem strange to you that your strike force leader had a key to that bunker?”

“Not within the parameters of my task to find that strange.”

After Hagebrecht had latched the bunker door and given marching orders, the vehicle column took off. We drove along the road through the woods back to the Gellersheim soccer field. I saw my Opel and through its back window the party angel. She was still fast asleep. We drove through Gellersheim and on to the autobahn. The driver turned on the radio, and the officers nodded their heads to the rhythms of Bavarian brass band music. It was raining. At the Frankfurt intersection we turned off in the direction of the airport.

“… and I was going to Mannheim today. Haven’t missed a game this year, not one minute. Even in Dortmund, I was there to the very end. And what an end it was. They scored six goals against us-six! Just imagine … After that I was quite fed up, but then-well, I just felt I couldn’t leave the guys in the lurch, just like that. So I kept on going, every Saturday, and now we’ve got the worst behind us. With Bein and Falkenmayer on board, we may even make it to the UEFA Cup next year, or we get the championship, and then we’ll be back on the international scene, and then-” He stopped and looked at the iron bars. Behind them lay an empty landing with green walls and three yellow light fixtures. The shadows cast by the bars divided our cell into narrow segments. Again, no windows. A faucet stuck out of one wall, and next to it there was a dirty white plastic toilet. Seventeen of us were sitting there on iron bedsteads, gray blankets wrapped around our shoulders. People smoked in silence. The women had been locked up in another cell down the hall. Once in a while one of them would call out, and one of the men would answer. It sounded like a conversation between people who were drowning. We had been there for four hours. A female officer had brought us some bread.

This was the deportees’ holding tank at Frankfurt airport. The next flight to Beirut left in four hours. It was a little past three.

I huddled next to the young guy with the brushstrokes under his nose and contemplated the glowing end of my cigarette. His name was Abdullah, he came from South Lebanon, and in four hours he would be on his way back there. In front of us, on the floor, lay a fellow Turk murmuring prayers. Now and again he stopped, raised his head, and explained something to me in Turkish.

Abdullah cracked his knuckles.

“But maybe it’s just the way things balance out. The Eintracht team stays on top, and I go down, or the other way round.”

“So, if you shoot yourself in the head, the Eintracht wins the championship?”

His tongue made clicking sounds against his palate. “Fate is our master.” And, after a glance into the hallway: “No, there really is a law that makes things balance out. For instance-after I passed my college entrance exam, my girlfriend took off. Honest to God.”

I nodded and blew smoke rings. I kept thinking about ways to save these people from their flights. Attorneys, newspapers, church people-as long as I was not allowed to make a phone call because the immigration police believed that they had to put me on the evening flight to Istanbul, it was all pretty pointless.

One of my smoke rings floated right onto the praying fellow’s nose. He looked up, waved his arms furiously, and started talking a mile a minute. Maybe he had asthma? I shrugged and smiled apologetically. When he didn’t stop babbling-my smile was set in concrete by then-Abdullah got irritated and intervened.

“Please get it through your thick skull-he doesn’t understand a word you’re saying. He’s a Turk, all right, but he doesn’t speak Turkish.”

“Is that so? But why? Is he too stupid?” The guy’s upper lip curled disdainfully. “Or is he ashamed?”

His German was almost perfect, and I was annoyed with myself for having tried to communicate with him in a kind of sign language.

“I never learned it, that’s all.”

“What is your father’s name?”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“What’s his name?”

“Tarik Kayankaya.”

He waved his hand as if to say, “There you are.” Then he said: “Well, what did I say, you’re a Turk.”

“Amazing. You found that out, just like that?”

“You’re denying your origin!”

“Why don’t you just go on praying a little more? And I’ll stop smoking.”