More Beer (3 page)

One more time. “What is this?”

I unlocked my mailbox.

“I have no idea.”

“It is an empty cigarette pack and I found it this morning, on the landing! Because
I sweep
my landing! Do you hear me? I sweep my landing! Here in Germany, we sweep our landings! We’re not in the Balkans here, and you better get used to it, or else go back there! You terrorize the whole building with your garbage … the whole building! He jabbed the pack with his index finger as if to punch
holes in it. “All the other tenants have confirmed that this is the brand you smoke. Well, what do you have to say to that? Well?”

He raised his eyebrows and went on ranting.

“Ha! That strikes you dumb, doesn’t it! But let me tell you something—if ever again I find one of these on the landing, I’ll get the owner and show him the mess. Your mess! Then you’ll have to deal with him. Do you understand?”

I felt like pasting him.

“Come on, say something! You’re always such a smartass, how come you don’t know what to say?”

I took the mail out of my box, locked it again, and advanced. We were still two meters apart when he began to stammer.

“If you do anything to me … if you dare … I’ll, I’ll call the police … and they, they’ll arrest you, and there’ll be some peace in this building, at long last … They’ll put you in jail, and we’ll be rid of you!”

He fluttered his hands in front of me like a man shooing off pigeons.

“Now, now … I’m warning you … if you touch me, I’ll … I’ll call for help …”

He was out of breath. I pushed past him and climbed the stairs to my apartment. Once inside, I pulled off my damp clothes and took a hot shower. I had an unpleasant prickling sensation in my feet. Drying myself off, I thought about Carla Reedermann. Then I put on a pair of wool pants and two pullovers and a pair of hiking boots. The kitchen smelled of burnt onions. I poured myself a tumbler
of Chivas and went to the phone. I dialed the number of my garage and listened to the phone ring for a while.

“Riebl Auto Repair.”

“Kayankaya. Is my car ready?”

“I’m just working on it.”

“It’s been three weeks since you told me you’d have it ready for me in a week.”

“Not to worry, I’ll have it fixed the day after tomorrow at the latest.”

“I’m not worried. I need a car today, and if you can’t do it, I’ll take your limo.”

He giggled. Riebl was one of those people who seem to be drunk all the time while never touching a drop of the stuff. He was just a little goofy.

“That’s no joke. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He kept on giggling and mumbled something. I hung up.

“Be right there.”

Riebl was lying under the hood of my green Opel Kadett. The place smelled of gasoline and lubricant. A radio in a corner was screeching tunes of the German homeland. Then he surfaced.

“Oh, it’s you, Mr.…”

“Kayankaya.”

“Right.”

“What’s with my car?”

He scratched his neck and stared absently at the floor, as if he had just heard an immoral proposition.

“We-ell …”

“Well, what?”

“You know, it’s so easy to make a wrong estimate. At first it just seems to be the sparks, but then it turns out the whole engine is screwy. You know what I mean?”

“Give me the keys to your car. I’ll be back tonight, at half past seven.”

He shook his pinched head.

“Tch, tch, tch, I don’t know …”

“Come on.”

Hesitantly he produced a bunch of keys out of a pocket of his overalls.

“But really … I don’t …”

“See you tonight.”

I left him standing next to my Kadett. Twenty kilometers past Darmstadt, I took the Doppenburg exit.

I first heard it from a guy with red hair in the Zum Grossen Schiff tavern in Sachsenhausen: He insisted on calling the place Dopeyburg, not Doppenburg. However, since he also pronounced “cider” “soyder,” I didn’t pay much attention, but later I noticed that other people of more cultivated speech habits also referred to the place by that pejorative name. Well, I thought, just another instance of that rather less than brilliant sense of humor that turns a professor into a perfesser. Only now, years later and on site in Doppenburg, did I realize how appropriate it was.

Doppenburg was a small town centered around an ugly pedestrian mall. Supermarkets were interspersed with third-rate fashion shops staffed by saleswomen who resembled the sausages in the butcher’s window. Flower planters, round light fixtures, and empty benches adorned the street. Retired people pulled their shopping bags on carts across the pavement, probably attracted by some advertised sale in spite of the wet and the cold. In sheltered corners, housewives discussed the problems of noodle casseroles, children, and varicose veins. At one end of this parody of an urban environment stood the inevitable Italian ice-cream cafe frequented by Coke-guzzling teenagers perched on their motorbikes, cradling helmets under one arm and cracking bad jokes about their girls.

I parked the car on the main street and strolled uphill into the old part of town, with its rows of half-timbered houses that looked as if children had modeled them out of clay, then baked and neatly painted them. Immaculate streets. Not even the smallest pile of dog shit to offend German cleanliness. Except for a couple of shiny pink tea and health shops, the streets were dead. A young man stood at a deserted intersection waiting for the traffic light to turn green. When he saw me cross against the red, his lips tightened disapprovingly. I think he would have liked to follow me in order to punch me in the face, for the sake of law and Fatherland, but the light didn’t change.

At a refreshment kiosk I asked for directions to the Böllig plant. Two guys stood there in the rain, drinking their dinner.

They grinned.

“Böllisch? With his broken pipe?”

He slapped his companion’s shoulder.

“Our pipes are broken too. Right, Ennst? What does the Mrs. say to that? Hey, Ennst! Broken pipe!”

“How do I get there?”

“Böllisch … Hey, Ennst! How does he get there? Ennst!”

Ernst squinted at me slyly and said, almost choking with mirth, “And how do I get to the opera?”

“Practice. A lot of practice,” I said, and walked away.

“Har, har. That was a good one. The old ones are the best ones.”

The baker’s wife gave me directions. I walked back to the car and followed the flow of traffic down the main street toward Weinheim. After a kilometer or so, tall brick walls appeared by the side of the road, their tops covered with barbed wire: Ruhenbrunn Private Clinic. Just past those walls was the paved entry road to the Böllig plant.

The factory stood on a hillside, with the notorious lake to its right. The dirty yellow water lapped gently against the bright gravel on the shore.

I stumbled across the little wet rocks to the demolished waste pipe. Such concrete pipes did not require major amounts of explosives for their destruction. The action must have been about as exciting as a flat tire in a no-parking zone. I contemplated the shoreline. Where the gravel ended, small clumps of reeds separated the moldering soil from the water. It seemed an unlikely site to choose for a camping trip. I turned around. The factory was a pile of corrugated iron. Out of it, at seemingly random intervals, rose three
mighty smokestacks. On top of one of them, a thin flame flickered. On the side of a warehouse, a row of faded red letters proclaimed that this was B
ÖLLIG DRUGS—FOR LIFE, FOR THE FUTURE, FOR OUR CHILDREN
. Chemical enterprises have a weakness for hyperbolic publicity.

“Hey, you! What are you doing there? This is factory property!”

A skinny fellow wearing a sea captain’s cap came running across the gravel and stopped in front of me, breathing hard.

“Just looking around. The site of that sabotage.”

“You can’t just walk in like that. Do you have a permit?”

“I’m investigating the matter for the public prosecutor’s office.”

He scratched his chin. “You are?”

“I am.”

“But you don’t look the type.”

“So?”

“The public prosecutor’s office, that’s an important office, to do with the law and all … But really, you look … I’m sorry. If you’re really working for them …”

He fussed with the sleeves of his uniform jacket. “Are you the night watchman?”

“Yes, that’s my job.”

“You were knocked out, a while ago?”

“Yes, I was.”

His knees were twitching, and he kept looking back at the factory buildings, as if he were afraid he could be seen from there.

“You saw the man?”

He was trying hard not to avoid my eyes. “I already told the police all about it.”

“So you saw the man?”

“Yes, I did.”

Once again his eyes turned toward the factory. “What did he look like?”

“He didn’t look like anything. He had something over his head, a stocking or a cap, I couldn’t tell. It was dark.”

“Let’s take it from the top. You were on your rounds, and he just came out of nowhere and hit you over the head?”

“No … you see, I was sitting in my cabin, over there …”

He pointed behind his back. As he went on talking, he looked more and more troubled.

“… I was reading, whatever … and suddenly the door slams open, and before I had time to turn around, I was hit over the head, and it was lights out for me. When I came to my senses, the police had arrived. And that was all there was to it.”

The wind had risen to blow the drizzling rain across the field. I lit a cigarette and let him squirm a little.

“It was dark, and you didn’t have time to turn around? That’s strange. This morning, someone told me there had been a lineup of suspects … Was he just putting me on?”

“No, there was a lineup, all right. But … Why don’t you ask the police? They have all the information.”

“And he was wearing a stocking over his head. Maybe you should have sent your wife to that lineup.”

“But see, the superintendent had arranged that lineup just as, like, a shot in the dark.”

He raised his hat and wiped his forehead.

“When you came to, the police were there? Immediately? You opened your eyes and saw green uniforms?”

“What? No. Mrs. Böllig arrived first. She woke me up, so to speak. They live right there, you see.”

“When Mrs. Böllig woke you up—had she already found her husband?”

“I don’t know … I think …”

“Don’t you think a woman would mention it if she had just found her husband riddled with bullets?”

“Everything happened so fast, and … but you’re right, I remember now. Yes, she was falling apart, she was hardly able to utter a sensible word …”

He smiled at me cautiously. Following classic cop procedure, I took out my cigarette pack and offered him one. He lit up and we smoked. As soon as he looked a little more relaxed, I resumed my questioning. “He must have hit you hard.”

“Yes, with a club. I can still feel it.”

“I see. May I take a look?”

His eyes opened wide.

“Come again?”

“I’d like to see where he clubbed you. Come on.”

He took off his cap in slow motion.

“But … after six months? Of course it’s healed over by now.”

“When you get hit like that, you keep the scars for life,” I said, and after I had checked his head and found no marks, “All right.”

I said no more as we strode across the wet gravel to the factory, passing barrels, pipes, and trucks, walking through a shed filled with huge stacks of numbered crates, turning a corner next to a forklift, and finally reemerging back into the rain through a large doorway. The Villa Böllig stood a hundred meters farther away on a hillside. It was a luxurious white bungalow with a roof garden and a tennis court to one side. Bushy little Christmas trees dotted the English lawn, which had a pile of scrap metal as its centerpiece. A silver Mercedes convertible was parked in front of the garage, next to a black compact.

I took my leave of the night watchman, assuring him that I would drop by again soon. I crossed the parking lot and reached the wrought-iron gate guarding the paved driveway that snaked across the lawn. A bell and an intercom were embedded in a marble gatepost. I pushed the brass button and waited for the German shepherd, but the only growl I heard emanated from the intercom speaker. “Who is it?”

“Kayankaya. From the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt.”

“The prosecutor’s office?”

This was followed by a moment’s silence. Someone shouted. Then the voice returned.

“Come on in.”

The buzzer sounded, and I pushed the gate. The pile of scrap metal turned out to be a work of art; I thought I
could discern some intertwined fish shapes, but couldn’t be sure. The layout, including the house, had the atmosphere of an abandoned first-class service area along the freeway. When I arrived at the front door, I used the antique door knocker and was immediately and unexpectedly admitted by an attractive blonde in her forties.

“How do you do? I’m Barbara Böllig. What can I do for you?”

Her voluptuous body was sheathed in a plain black wool dress that clung tightly around her hips. Her hair was tied back with a glittery red ribbon. Her green eyes scrutinized me.

“Kayankaya, from the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt. I have to ask you a couple of questions.” It didn’t look as if she would grace me with the enchanting smile of which her mouth looked quite capable. She crossed her solarium-tanned arms over her chest and cocked her head.

“I don’t know that I have anything left to tell you.”

“Do you always let callers stay out in the rain?”

“When they call at an inconvenient time.”

She seemed disinclined to let me into the house. I looked at it. I looked at the garden.

“So, all of this is now yours?”

“So what?”

I pointed at the cars. “Those too?”

“The Mini belongs to a friend.”

“Who is standing by your side during these difficult months?”

“If you wish.”

“So you don’t feel that you’re lacking in support?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“People tend to be particularly solicitous of pretty widows who own factories. It’s the dream of all divisional managers, isn’t it? The boss croaks, and his lady looks for a successor. In every which way.”