Jakob Arjouni - More Beer

“A couple of hours every day. I used to read, write letters to the dead. Whatever old people do to pass the time.”

I brushed off this last with a wave of my hand. “What did Fred Scheigel tell you about the night of the murder?

They had fired him the day before. He was afraid to tell me, so he just went to his hut at the factory as always, but this time only to get drunk. When he heard the shots, he ran outside and found Friedrich. Dead. He must have sat there for a moment, because when he turned around, that Henry was standing behind him. Henry must have gotten rid of the gun. Otherwise, I’m sure, he would have shot Fred too. Then there was that explosion, Henry assured Fred that if he kept his mouth shut he would be given enough money to disappear from here forever. He only had to say that someone had knocked him down. Then Henry took off. A little later Barbara Bollig appeared, and when she too realized that Fred had seen something, she told him the same thing and promised him a lot of money.”

She shrugged, sighed.

“Fred didn’t particularly regret Friedrich Bollig’s death. Besides, he was glad of the chance to get away from her at long last, with the money he was offered. And the detective accepted his story without questioning it.”

“And the detective’s name was Kessler?”

She nodded. I clapped my hands.

“Genius! The guy’s a genius.”

Nina Scheigel looked puzzled. I didn’t go into that, but told her, “It was you, wasn’t it, who killed Otto Bollig back then? With arsenic. You thought that would make everything all right with Friedrich.”

She smiled.

“That’s so long ago. Who cares about it now?”

She was right. Ultimately, I didn’t give a damn. I paced back and forth and tried to clear my head.

“You’ve killed my only remaining witness. Henry’s gone.”

Once again she didn’t understand, and once again I let it ride. I cast a glance at the corpse. “I brought you a bottle of vodka from Nikolai.”

“You are a strange young man.”

“Why did you do it?” I asked, myself more than her. Then I said, a little too loudly, “I have to take you along now.”

She cleared her throat and asked, “May I ask you a favor?”

“Well?”

“Let me pack my suitcase and go to the police by myself. By myself, do you understand? I don’t want to be taken there.”

I nodded and walked to the door.

“You can run away, for all I care. It won’t make any difference.”

She laughed sadly.

“Where would I go? No, no. If you want to be nice to me, send the bottle to jail. There won’t be a whole lot of difference between drinking it there or here.”

I bit my lip.

“Farewell, Mrs. Kaszmarek.”

“ ‘Well’? Don’t poke fun at me, young man.”

In the candlelight, her face was that of a painted old alley cat. Her green eyes were smiling.

I pulled the door shut behind me and walked slowly down the stairs. Halfway down, other ladies living in the building came rushing out to ask me what I knew about the Biblis disaster. I just walked past them. In the street I turned my face up to the rain. The cold droplets felt good.

As we stood outside the door of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, I began to feel queasy. Kollek and Barbara Bollig were both dead, and if Kessler stuck to his story that he had had no idea about any of it, his calendar was my only piece of evidence. And that didn’t seem like a whole lot.

Kessler knew this. He gave me a threatening smile.

“Kayankaya-mark my words, you’ll regret beating me up.”

“I only regret that I didn’t snuff you.”

Slibulsky had preferred to stay in the car. He said he had met enough magistrates to last him a lifetime.

It was almost ten o’clock at night. Lubars had been reluctant to come to his office at such a late hour. I knew him well, and he rather liked me, whatever that was worth. He was a public prosecutor, first and foremost. As soon as I mentioned Kessler to him on the phone, he regretted that he had agreed to come.

Finally he arrived, his hair none too well combed, and not wearing a necktie. He was of average height, bloated, and red-faced. He greeted us, briefcase in one hand, a bunch of keys in the other. “Good evening-good evening, Mr. Kessler. Please excuse my getup. But I thought I was done for the day …”

Kessler laughed tolerantly.

“Right, right. I could think of more pleasant ways to spend an evening too, but …”

He cast a withering glance at me. We entered Lubars’s office. A handsome desk, two visitors’ chairs. While I planted myself in one of them, Kessler said, “Tell me, Mr. Lubars, how is your wife? I heard she was ill?”

At the word “ill” he looked at me and showed his teeth.

“Thank you, thank you, she is doing better. Please be seated.”

Kessler sat down in the chair facing me. Lubars slid behind his desk, put on his glasses, and folded his hands.

“I hope we can clear this up as quickly as possible. Both Mr. Kessler and I have had a strenuous day.” They nodded to each other.

I asked myself how much influence Kessler had in the system. Perhaps it was due to his friendship with “M”?

“Now then, Mr. Kayankaya, when you called you said that you would bring in a murder suspect.” He coughed discreetly, glanced at Kessler. “But surely that was some kind of joke?”

Kessler said, with an impassive expression, “Sometimes my young colleague tends to hyperbole. It does get him into a lot of trouble.” When he said “trouble,” he wasn’t looking at me, for a change, but at Lubars, whose smile was pained.

“Please tell me about your suspicions, Mr. Kayankaya.” Then he mustered his courage and said to Kessler, “There’s got to be something to it-otherwise you wouldn’t have volunteered to come, Mr. Kessler.”

The detective superintendent waved his hand in a gesture of magnanimity. He said, in a low, paternal voice, “I thought it would be best to get the matter cleared up once and for all, in the presence of a higher authority. So the young colleague can return to the firm ground of reality.”

Lubars nodded and gave me a questioning look. I cleared my throat and tried to marshal my thoughts. I was in a lousy situation, and it didn’t help that I knew it. Three hours ago I had been sitting pretty, holding a trump card: Kollek. Now I had nothing but trash cards, and it was time to lay them on the table. To stave off defeat, I decided to start out by bluffing. “Kessler, you’ve lost this game, and you know it. And I would like to ask you to kindly keep your mouth shut, and give Mr. Lubars a chance to listen to me in peace and quiet.”

Kessler made an astonished face and looked at Lubars.

“Do I have to-”

“Please, Mr. Kayankaya, let’s hear it!”

Lubars was desperately moving things around on his desktop and avoiding both our eyes. The blotches on his face had turned a deeper red. I started my tale. I told him about Anastas, about the mysterious fifth man, the ice-cold widow, Schmidi, and so on, finishing with my theory of what had happened on the night of the murder.

Kessler sat in his chair looking cool, with a faint smile on his face, his head cocked to one side. Once in a while he scratched the back of his hand. Lubars seemed immersed in thought. Only his eyes kept darting glances at Kessler and me. Now he came to attention. “So you are saying that five people participated in the plot?”

“Six, to be exact. What alerted me at first were the statements given by one of the camping couple, the woman, and by old Mrs. Bollig, who runs the refreshment concession of the plant. Both of them said they had heard shots, and they confirmed that the shots were fired at Bollig before the explosion. Against these statements, we had Barbara Bollig’s claim that her husband left the house only after the explosion. If one assumes that Kollek’s accomplices had no interest in snuffing Bollig, and that it was impossible for Kollek to sprint back to the house just before the explosion in order to take Bollig out into the factory grounds and shoot him there, only one possibility remains: Barbara Bollig herself lured her husband out of the house on some pretext, and shot and killed him in a spot close to that pipe.”