Jakob Arjouni - One Man, One Murder

“Any time. Would you like to settle our accounts right now?”

Undecided, he fussed with his eyeglasses. Then he jammed them back on. “I’m going to the cells. You’ll receive your check, as agreed, and since we probably won’t meet again-”

He hesitated. Should he shake hands or just leave with a nod?

I waved a piece of toast at him. “If someone is exerting some kind of pressure on you because of Mrs. Rakdee-I mean, someone apart from your mother-you better tell me about it.”

He looked completely bewildered. “Don’t you understand? You’re fired!”

With that, he turned and disappeared into the gray-green mass of a group of senior tourists. I sat there and finished my toast. Soon after that the first journalists arrived. Loaded down with cameras, they trotted through the hall like a bunch of scared chickens, generating excitement among both travelers and personnel. A bomb, hijackers, the Prince of Monaco, or the Kessler Twins? Hundreds of pairs of eyes scanned doors, counters, and seats. Then I spotted Benjamin Weiss. His six-and-a-half-foot tall figure was clearly visible among a group in colorful outfits who stormed through the sliding doors carrying stacks of paper under their arms and immediately started leafleting everybody. I waved and Weiss shuffled over. He was bundled up in an overcoat, scarf, and knitted cap, and what was visible of his face seemed to cry out for bed rest and hot lemon juice. He sank into a chair next to me, stretched his legs, and muttered: “May I have a cigarette?”

“Not the best thing, in your condition-?”

He repeated his request, emphatically.

I lit one and handed it to him. He took a deep drag and exhaled the smoke slowly.

“First one in three days. In bed, it’s not so bad, but …” He took a second drag. “I’ve been over there. They’re holding exactly thirty-three of them. Three attorneys are talking with them now. The Protestant honcho has promised to help; the Catholic one is at a Silesian Displaced Persons dinner with Wallmann. The entire Social Democrat party is recording a disc for their election campaign, and the refugee ombudsman of the Greens is having a baby. Her replacement doesn’t have a car but is trying to get here soon. What else-oh yes, the Multicultural Office: there, the cleaning woman answers the phone-she doesn’t have a whole lot of German, but as far as I could make out, her employers are attending the opening of a castanet exhibit.…” He stopped and sucked on his cigarette.

“You found all that out in half an hour?”

“Most of it. The rest I had no trouble making up. Now it’s your turn.”

While Weiss kept sliding deeper into his chair, and his cap slowly descended over his eyebrows, I gave a brief description of the alleged forgery gang’s M.O., without mentioning names or localities, and wound up by telling him: “There’s nothing that can be done legally, but I’ll try to get their money and jewelry back.”

Glassy-eyed, Weiss stared into space for a while. Then he sighed and straightened up. “Let’s see what the attorneys can do about it. I’m going back to talk to them. Will I see you again today?”

“When I’ve found their money.”

“I’ll probably stay here overnight.” He wrapped the scarf tighter around his neck. “In case I don’t see you again-”

“-I’ll come by every day and smuggle a pack of smokes

into your bed.”

“Do that. So,” he raised his arm feebly, “good luck.”

“The same to you.”

He left, and I walked to the exit. A damp gust of wind met me at the door. I turned up my collar and hailed a cab with my good arm. “To the nearest hospital.”

“Where’s Heinz?”

“Dunno.”

I helped myself to a small open-face cheese sandwich.

“Is Slibulsky here?”

“Don’t know that either.”

“Charlie?”

“I’m not allowed to know.”

I took a bite, chewed, studied her. She was in her early forties, built like a sumo wrestler. She wore a wig and a pale blue dress with a flower pattern and busied herself knitting a vest for a dog. On the table next to her lay Kohl in fifty pieces.

“So you’re Heinz’s wife?”

The knitting needles stopped clicking, and two hooded eyes gave me the once-over.

“If what you mean by that is that I get to push him down the Zeile once a week in his wheelchair-yes, I am. And I get him his videos, and on Mondays I get him his soccer weekly. But I don’t have to darn his socks. So, I can’t complain.”

She pursed her lips in a hint of a smile. I smiled back, tossed two coins on the counter, and walked down the pink hallway past rows of female legs on both sides. Shoo-be-doo music trickled from speakers in the ceiling. It was almost eight-thirty in the evening. I joined the line of johns winding its way past the rooms and up the stairs all the way to the fourth floor and back. Up on the fourth, I stepped over a barrier that said “Private”, ascended two more landings and knocked on a rust-brown metal door. The door opened and Charlie peered out, a question mark on his face. He was wearing a white silk suit, no shirt, no shoes, and held a box of matchbox automobile models in one hand. When he recognized me, his mouth opened in amazement. Then he raised his arm in a welcoming gesture.

“Hey, what do you know, it’s the little brown guy with the big mouth! Well, this is a surprise.” He shouted over his shoulder: “Sweetheart? We’ve got company. Two glasses, and a bottle of Asbach!” Then, back to me: “Let’s have a drink!”

Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed my shoulder, kicked the door shut with his bare heel, and dragged me over to the couch. All over the glass table and the fluffy rug was an array of what looked like almost a thousand colorful little metal cars. On the table stood a bottle of rubbing alcohol next to a pile of white rags and a beaker filled with toothbrushes. While he kept kneading my shoulder with one hand, he picked up one of the cars with the other, held it up to the light, and exclaimed happily: “Nineteen seventy-one, yellow jeep, brown top, tow bar-isn’t it terrific?”

“Super-terrific.”

Carefully, he put the miniature back. “My collection. Eight hundred and ninety-two models. I clean ’em up every spring, it’s a job-but, snooper,” his hand waved across the colorful pile, “tell me, ever see anything like it?”

“I need to have a word with you, Charlie.”

That startled him.

“I’m showing you my car collection, and you ‘need to have a word’?”

“You got it.”

His arm slid off my shoulder like a dead man’s. Then he flashed a grin. “I know what you need, snooper, you need a drink.” He patted my knee and snapped his fingers in the direction of the bathroom. “Sweetheart-what’s with those drinks?”

“Coming right up, Charlie.”

A girl entered the room. In her jeans, knit top, and gym shoes she looked no older than sixteen. She had a blue bow in her hair. She smiled politely at me and disappeared behind the bar. With her round snub-nosed face, small firm breasts, and an ass like two honeydew melons, she looked like a teenager who spends her mornings in the schoolyard, her afternoons at an ice cream parlor, and her evenings with the captain of the soccer team. That impression was marred, however, by a big green bruise around her right eye and bright red scratch marks on her cheeks and neck. She had tried to cover all that up with make-up, but the result made her look like a monster.

Charlie leaned back and gave me a wink. “Sweet, eh?”

“A little worse for wear.”

He wagged his head. “That’ll pass.” And, louder: “Right, sweetheart? In two or three days, I’ll have my princess back.”

“Yes, Charlie.”