Jakob Arjouni - More Beer

He hesitated. “Once in a while, I suppose.” After a pause: “Quite regularly, really. He would drop by the cabin to see me.”

His wife gave him a suspicious look. I couldn’t tell whether I or the presence of his wife embarrassed him. I would have liked to talk to him alone. But I couldn’t do that now. It was after six o’clock, and I had found out enough for one afternoon.

“It’s getting late, and I …” I looked at Scheigel and asked him without warning, “You didn’t happen to call the police about the conversation we had yesterday?”

He looked surprised, shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

Heavy with vodka, I rose cautiously off the couch and tried life in the vertical position. It felt precarious, but I managed.

“About your vodka, madam-is it available only to fellow Slavs?” I did not want this to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. She smiled.

“I’ll give you the address.”

While she was out of the room, I handed Scheigel my card.

“Just in case. You can call me any hour of the day or night. Should you feel like it.”

Hesitantly he looked at the card, then at me.

“Your story is lame. You know that as well as I do. Sooner or later, you’ll be found out.”

His wife came back, and he slipped the card into his pants pocket.

“Here-I wrote a few words of recommendation on it. Nikolai is a sweet person, but don’t let him overcharge you. He likes to exaggerate.”

I thanked her, and she walked me to the door. Scheigel stayed in the salon, after shaking my hand without meeting my gaze. I took my leave of the Polish woman.

“Until next time.”

She ran her fingers through her tousled hair.

“You want to hear more of my blather?”

I laughed.

“Oh, get going, young man.”

I walked down the cobbled street. At the corner I turned to look back. The pink robe had disappeared.

The door was ajar. It was quiet. A little too quiet. I pushed the door slowly open with my foot. The three large mirrors that had adorned the entrance hall to the right and to the left now lay distributed in shards all over the pale carpet. I tiptoed to the office, toward the quiet whimpering I could hear coming from it. I entered and almost tripped over a broken chair. The desk had been overturned, three of its legs sticking up in the air, the fourth lying in the chaos of desk drawers, books, and all kinds of documents. The leather armchairs had been slit open. The stuffing swelled out of the gashes. The papers rustled in the draft coming from the broken windowpanes. Someone had spray-painted large black letters on the wall: ACTION COMMANDO FREEDOM AND NATURE.

I waded through the debris to the whimpering closet. It was locked, and there was no key. I kicked the lock, and my foot crashed through the closet door. I could hear Anastas squealing. I managed to break down the door. Behind it, Anastas lay folded into the narrow space like a fat baby. His hands had been tied with his necktie and his nose was bleeding, a result of my kicking in the door. He had been blindfolded with a kitchen towel. I unknotted it and the necktie, helped him to his shaky legs, and put him in a chair. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

As far as I could tell, he wasn’t seriously injured. No black eyes or missing teeth, not to mention unnaturally dangling arms. His nosebleed had stopped. His cheeks were red and swollen, though, and he had lost the buttons on his shirt. It looked as if he had been slapped around. The room was freezing. I stuck pieces of cardboard in the broken window, turned up the heat, and went to look for a calorific drink. When I came back with a half-full bottle of Remy Martin, Anastas was crawling through the debris, looking for something.

“Here, have a hit, it’ll do you good.”

He looked at the bottle as if it were poison and said plaintively, “No, no thanks.”

“If not, not,” I said to myself, tilted the bottle for a hearty slug on his behalf, and reclined in an armchair until I realized that Anastas was crawling around looking for his glasses. I found them for him, under the radiator. The right lens was broken. He put them on and surveyed what was left of his office. Then he took a deep breath, took the bottle out of my hand, and knocked back at least a centimeter.

“Smoke?”

He nodded. After a couple of puffs, he said, “I thought I’d die in that closet.”

“A few slaps won’t kill you.”

He looked at me grimly.

“They won’t? You smartass. What about all this?”

He leaned toward me and yelled, “They beat me up! They tortured me!”

“And who were they?”

“Who! My clients, their friends, their sympathizers-what do I know. Just look at this!”

He gestured grandly at the chaos. I took the brandy back and returned to my chair while he went on ranting.

“And to be honest with you, it’s your fault! It happened because of you. Why do you think they came here? To tell me to fire you! Let me tell you, I’ll pay you what I owe, right now, and that’ll be the end of our collaboration. I’m not a street fighter, I’m an attorney!”

I lit a cigarette.

“So that’s news to you, isn’t it? If only I had known, I-”

“Let’s take it from the top. How many of them were there, and when did they get here? Pull yourself together.”

He waved his arms in the air and shouted, “Pull myself together! I’ve just been assaulted, brutally, and you talk about pulling myself together! Put yourself in my place!”

He was gasping for air. When he seemed to have calmed down, I asked politely, “Well?”

He leaned against one of the legs of the desk and started talking, more to himself than to me.

“There were two of them. The doorbell rang around six thirty. I had been arranging books on my library shelves. I went to the door. Two men, all in black with pantyhose over their heads, grabbed me and dragged me into my office, beating me up as they went. It was pointless to resist, they would have killed me. One of them was at least two meters tall. A monster with huge shoulders, and he had a gun.” He stopped, looked at me, and shouted, “I’d like to have seen what you could have done!”

I mumbled something and asked him to go on with the story, but he stayed on this sidetrack for a while, graphically describing how I would have fared, how I would have begged for mercy, and so on. He was quite imaginative. Somewhere along the line he lost the thread and fell silent.

“Did those two say who or what they were?”

“You’ve seen it. Action Commando ‘Freedom and Nature.’ ”

“Right. But what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Supposed to mean, supposed to mean! How would I know what that’s supposed to mean? They said they were comrades of the ecological front, united in the struggle for life and nature. So you see, Bollig, the lake, clean water-it all fits.”

I got up and gave him a little pat. “Mr. Anastas, that’s a bad joke. ‘Freedom and Nature.’ I can’t believe that your clients’ friends would parody themselves like that.”

“You just know that, don’t you.”

I rounded on him and shouted, “Yes, I do, I fucking well do know it! And I know a few other things too! I know practically everything! And if you don’t stop acting out, I’ll see to it that you start feeling homesick for those two playmates of yours. Now then: Why did those thugs make such a mess of everything?”

He cleared his throat, looked cowed.

“All right … if you have to know. They accused me of having hired a cop.” He avoided my eyes. “They said I was a traitor, not worthy of defending their friends in court, and so on. Believe me, they meant it too. While I tried to explain, they busted up my office. They had tied me up, so I couldn’t do anything about it. Finally, after I promised to dismiss you, they locked me in the closet.” He reverted to the complaining mode. “Why me? Why didn’t they visit you? It would have made more sense. To victimize me, after all I’ve done for those people.”