Jakob Arjouni - One Man, One Murder

“Pretty good, mostly. I have a little trouble with those foreign words.”

She looked up and pursed her lips in a stepmotherly fashion. After she had scanned me and come to a conclusion, she hissed: “The spelling of your name!”

I spelled it for her. Without lifting her pen, she asked:

“Nationality?”

“FRG.”

“Germany,” she corrected me under her breath. Then she looked up again, quite irritably. “German …?”

“You want me to spell that?”

Her left eyelid twitched. While we glared at each other, she pushed the pad to one side and leaned back in her chair, holding on to the armrests.

“If you are a German citizen, Mr.-”

“Kayankaya, How long have you been doing this?”

She looked startled.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“I was just thinking … If every name that doesn’t sound like Wurst takes you that long to memorize, you may not be cut out for this job.”

Her forehead began to turn pink.

“One more crack out of you, young man, and I’ll call security. If you really are a German-”

“I’m a Turk with a German passport.”

Her eyes flashed briefly. She saw an opening. She said: “You mean you’re a permanent resident? Seems to me you’re a little confused.”

I began to get hot under the collar.

“If I had meant to tell you that I’m a permanent resident, I would have told you so. But that’s not what I told you. I told you something else-remember?”

Instead of replying she held on tighter to the armrests of her chair and looked as if she was visualizing my being drawn, beheaded, and quartered. In an adjacent room, a voice rose to a roar: “… you no understand nothing, I don’t give a shit! Here you speak German, no nigger English!” Then someone banged on a table, then there were footsteps, a door opened, another voice giggled, and this was followed by murmurs and finally silence. The woman in front of me was still hanging on to her chair, her face contorted by fury, and seemed oblivious to all the commotion.

I pointed at the wall: “Lovely manners.”

“We’re only doing our job.”

“Why is it always ‘only’? Have you ever given that any-”

She let go of the armrests, leaned forward, and hit the desk with both fists: “Get out of here!”

I shook my head.

“We’re not done. I came here to enquire about my fiancee, Sri Dao Rakdee. Rakdee with two ‘e’s. She is from Thailand. We were going to get married last week, but we still haven’t received the necessary papers. I wanted to know if it would be possible to extend her visa by another month?”

She seemed surprised by the question. Then she smiled triumphantly and told me, in a saccharine tone of voice: “No, that’s impossible.”

She reached for her cake fork.

“All right, then. Would you be so kind as to get Sri Dao Rakdee’s file and note that,” I got up to look at the nameplate on her desk, “Mrs. Steiner has rejected an application for extension of her visa? So that I can inform my attorney.”

She put the fork down, chewed and thought this over for a moment. Then she pushed her chair back from the desk and got up. “It’ll be a pleasure.”

She left the room. I went over to the window feeling pretty good and lit a cigarette. I thought I had reached the end of the trail. Whether Sri Dao Rakdee’s first German was a pimp, as Charlie claimed, or one of those guys who liked mail order brides, his name had to be in that file; and Mrs. Steiner would hardly miss the opportunity to beat me over the head with it, to justify calling me a liar and a criminal and throwing me out of her office.

There was no other explanation for a visa extended twice for periods of three months. It all fit together. According to Weidenbusch, Sri Dao had shouted “this is my man” during the fracas next to the VW van. Contrary to Weidenbusch’s fond assumption, it had not been her intention to express her readiness to defend him . No, she had simply referred to her “man”, to the guy who had brought her to Germany and had promised marriage both to her and the authorities; who had then lost interest in her and sold her to the Lady Bump outfit. That guy knew when her visa expired and what brothel keepers were willing to pay for her. Today he had picked her up, with a three-thousand-mark bonus, in order to sell her again.

Given all that, there could be several possible reasons for Sri Dao’s rejection of Weidenbusch’s marriage proposal. First: her memories of the other guy were such that the mere word “marriage” made her nauseous. Second: she was willing to risk deportation to keep her previous story a secret from Weidenbusch. Or third: she suspected that the immigration authorities would not approve such a change of bridegroom and therefore reject any further attempt to extend her visa.

So all I needed to do now was to look up the name of the guy in the phone book. Then I could return Sri Dao to Weidenbusch this evening, if not sooner.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Steiner returned, flanked by one of her colleagues from security. She slammed the door shut and wagged her chin at me: “That’s him!”

The colleague was in his forties, balding, his few remaining strands of hair plastered sideways across the top of his skull. He wore a pale blue bomber jacket with a plethora of gold-colored zippers. He gave me the once-over. Then he pushed his thumbs under his belt, hitched up his pants, cleared his throat and stepped closer so that his fat face was a yard from mine. He flashed his teeth and spoke in a rapid-fire machine gun rattle: “What’s your name, nigger?”

So, I said to myself, this must be their guy with the communication skills. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and studied its glowing tip for a moment. His beery breath struck my face. I looked at him and said very quietly:

“Listen, pig. Another word out of you, and I’ll see to it that you won’t be able to stand up, sit down, or fuck-ever again.”

While Mrs. Steiner suppressed a scream, my threat seemed to have the desired effect on her colleague. He was speechless. However, it didn’t look like this situation would last very long, so I added: “Where is the file?” Just as quickly came the reply from a safe distance: “There is no file for Rakdee.” Mrs. Steiner had one hand on the doorknob; the other hovered in the vicinity of a vase. I kept glancing back and forth between them, a proper little Hawkeye.

“If you’re not telling me the truth …”

“I beg your pardon …!” Despite her obvious fear that our argument might turn into a free-for-all, Mrs. Steiner looked indignant. “I am a civil servant.”

In other circumstances I would have grinned, but now it seemed important to get closer to the door. The security guy looked like he’d explode any second, and I didn’t feel like getting punched. On the other hand, I had better things to do than jail time for grievous bodily harm.

“All right, that’s all I wanted to know. You could have saved yourself all this excitement. And if you want to know my name, there it is, on her pad. Take a good look at it. If we ever meet again, I would like to be addressed correctly.”

Now the guy looked like his head and shoulders were about to burst. He stood leaning forward a little, arms bent like a wrestler’s, ready to pounce. Mrs. Steiner stepped aside, I grabbed the doorknob and touched my forehead. “Thank you all.”

I pulled the door shut behind me, stepped over the Polish kid who was still busy with his gunfighters, and ran down the stairs. Nothing happened until I had reached the landing below. Then a roar came from above, and I picked up speed. A guy in uniform met me at the exit.

“Hey, hey, what’s the rush?”