The Moment (20 page)

“But surely the fact that you were living here . . .”

I explained that we kept different hours, had very separate lives.

As this interrogation was going on, another two officers were scrounging around the apartment, pulling open drawers, pulling books down from shelves, heading upstairs to my lair to undoubtedly search everywhere. Thank Christ I had managed to get all evidence of his addiction off the premises—and was quietly holding my breath, wondering if Alaistair had stashed away some other drug paraphernalia (or, worse yet, the junk itself) elsewhere.

In the middle of all this, one of the paramedics shouted over to the cop that “The patient is stabilized” and they were going to move him.

“Will he make it?” I asked.

“He lost a lot of blood, but we have managed to stop the hemorrhage. If you hadn’t have found him when you did, he’d have died ten minutes later.”

I looked at the cop after the paramedic said this. He merely shrugged and continued pounding me with questions: “What do you do? Are you working here illegally? Where can I see proof that you write books?” Meanwhile, the paramedics lifted Alaistair onto a gurney, a transfusion bag suspended above him, a tube connected to his ravaged veins. They pushed him toward the front door, the wheels streaking the floor with blood as they headed off.

“One last thing,” the paramedic told the cops. “Check this out.”

Lifting the sheet that was covering Alaistair, he pointed to the track marks that were running up and down the nook of his arm.

“A junkie,” the paramedic said.

“Did you know this?” the cop asked me, his tone now indicating that he was incensed.

“Not at all.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth.”

The cop shouted at his colleague to search the place even more thoroughly, as they were now on the hunt for Class A drugs. Then he turned to me and said:

“Show me your arms.”

I did as ordered. He inspected them carefully, clearly disappointed that they were so clean.

“I still don’t believe you didn’t know he was . . .”

But the officer was interrupted by the arrival of his colleague, together with the man from the corner shop. The accompanying cop pointed to me and asked him:

“Is this the man who ran in to your shop, yelling at you to call for the police?”

The guy knew me, as I made a point of stopping in there at least once a day to buy something. He was Turkish, in his mid-fifties, always downcast, but now wide-eyed as he surveyed the smashed-up studio and the blood that was everywhere.

“Yes, this is the man,” he said, nodding toward me. “He’s a regular customer.”

“And was this the man you saw returning with Herr Fitzsimons-Ross last night?”

“No, not him.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know the other man, because he is a regular customer, too. But this man wasn’t with him. In fact, I’ve never seen them together.”

“So who was the other man with Herr Fitzsimons-Ross?”

“That is his name?” the shop owner asked.

“You say he was a regular customer and you don’t know his name?”

“I don’t know the names of most of my customers.”

“Describe the other man with Fitzsimons-Ross.”

“Short, shaved head, with a tattoo on one cheek.”

“What kind of a tattoo?”

“Some sort of bird, I think. It was dark.”

“Was this the first time you saw this man with Fitzsimons-Ross?”

“I think so. The times I did run into him early in the morning he was usually with some man.”

Now the officer was looking at me.

“So Fitzsimons-Ross often picked up men and brought them back late at night?” he asked.

“As I told you before, though we were friendly, I had little in the way of contact with him.”

The officer shook his head, displeased with my response, while tapping my American passport against his thumb.

“Get a full statement from the shopkeeper,” he told his colleague. “And meanwhile, Herr Nesbitt, we will see what the search of the premises uncovers.”

A very nervous hour passed, while the two policemen assigned to the task pulled the place apart. Meanwhile, the officer took a full deposition from me. One of the officers came down with the one and only copy of my Egyptian book that I had brought with me—and showed the investigating officer my author photograph on the inside jacket flap. The officer also read my biographical sketch on the same flap and even opened the book to the first chapter and scanned the opening page.

“So you are who you say you are,” he finally said. “And you are evidently an observant man, given what you do for a living. That is, if you make a living at it. Yet you still try to tell me that you hadn’t a clue that Herr Fitzsimons-Ross was an addict who had the habit of picking up stray men and bringing them back here.”

“As you can see, sir, I live in a self-contained unit upstairs. I come and go at different hours from Herr Fitzsimons-Ross—and we barely see each other. But honestly, sir, I can’t say that I know much about the man beyond the fact that he is a very fine artist with whom I have shared a beer perhaps twice since I moved in some weeks ago.”

The officer wrote this all down, his skepticism still so apparent. When his colleagues finally finished their controlled ransacking—and informed their superior that the place was clean—I could see the officer’s disappointment was acute.

Again he tapped my passport against his thumb, pondering his next move. Finally he said:

“If Herr Fitzsimons-Ross survives, we will be naturally taking a deposition from him. If all this checks out, then you will be ruled out of our investigation, and the passport will be returned to you.”

“But as the shopkeeper has clearly stated I wasn’t with Fitzsimons-Ross.”

“Do you have any need for the passport immediately? Are you planning to travel in the coming days?”

“Not in the next week or so, no.”

“Well, hopefully, we will have this matter cleared up by then.”

He then reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a hefty notebook. Opening it he wrote out an official receipt for my passport, informing me it would be kept at the
Polizeiwache
in Kreuzberg. And if he needed to phone me?

I explained that there was no phone here at the apartment, but that messages could be left at the Café Istanbul.

“Ah yes, artists do not need phones,” the officer said dryly. “We know where to find you when we need you, Herr Nesbitt.”

“Can you tell me to which hospital Herr Fitzsimons-Ross has been taken?”

“Not until we have interviewed him. Good day, sir.”

And he left, followed by his colleagues.

In the immediate aftermath of his departure, I found my head reeling. As my brain played cartwheels—a reaction to all the adrenaline that had been charging through my system from the moment I found Fitzsimons-Ross on the studio floor—another thought quickly took over: where was the essay I wrote for Radio Liberty . . . and why the hell hadn’t I made a Xerox copy of it at the local corner shop (and, by the way, God bless its owner for clearing my name)? The reason my fear about the essay so instantly flooded my thoughts was simple: if it had been torn up, confiscated, or destroyed during this search, it would have taken me another day or so to rewrite it. Or, worst yet, the police might approach Radio Liberty, informing them that this would-be contributor was under suspicion of a violent incident with his gay junkie roommate. Once word got around the studio, I doubted if Petra would even bother to say more than two words to me—
“No, thanks”
—when I finally got up the courage to ask her out.

So moments after the cops were gone, I found myself charging up the stairs to my apartment and moving immediately to the shelf on which I kept my typewriter. It had been moved to the worktable, the cover taken off it, several keys depressed—as the cops were evidently verifying the fact that I hadn’t secreted a small packet of some psychotropic substance inside its frame. My essay had been placed underneath the typewriter on the shelf—and though my first view of the empty shelf was just a little heart stopping, a quick glance at the floor showed that all eight pages had been randomly strewn about the place. I gathered them all up, reordering them according to page number and stacking them neatly on my worktable. Then I double-checked that all my assorted notebooks were still there. Again they had ended up on the floorboards—and several of them had been opened and rifled through. But these were not the thought police, interested in my perceptions of Berlin life. They just wanted to find drugs.

I spent the next two hours slowly putting my rooms back together again. All my clothes had been dumped out of the chest of drawers or pulled off their hangers in the wardrobe. Every kitchen utensil and item of cutlery and all the cleaning supplies under the sink had been haphazardly tossed around. Even my espresso maker and my kettle had been opened and inspected. At least they hadn’t done that cheesy Greek restaurant stunt of smashing up all the plates, as these had been stacked on the floor by the sink. Still it took time to rearrange everything, and tackle the medicine chest in the bathroom, given the fact that they squeezed out the entire contents of my toothpaste tube and smashed open a very ordinary bottle of body powder and dumped its contents on the floor, and emptied the entire can of shaving cream, and upended the shampoo, and everything else in which I might have hidden some sort of contraband.

And to think I had just cleaned the bathroom of all that vomit.

Still, nothing important was missing or damaged (they even left the batteries to my radio/cassette player near the machine itself). And I certainly hadn’t suffered the same fate as poor Alaistair. Coming downstairs, I saw that the walls were splattered everywhere with blood and paint, the worktable and chairs also covered with this amalgamation of gore and synthetic color. I walked into the bedroom. The attack had evidently started here, as the sheets were also stained crimson and the cops had just added to the chaos by dumping his clothes everywhere. I started surveying all that needed to be done here when I was taken aback by the sound of a key in the front door lock. Hurrying back into the front room—and grabbing a chair as possible protection—I found myself face-to-face with Mehmet. He was taking in the catastrophe and also eyeing me—and the fact that I had a chair in one hand—with alarm.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, dropping the chair. “Something terrible has happened.”

“Where’s Alaistair?”

“In the hospital. There was an attempted robbery last night. And he was stabbed repeatedly. I was upstairs asleep when it happened—and had drunk so much last night that I slept through it all.”

“Is he alive?”

“Just about. When I found him . . . well, put it this way, if I hadn’t found him he would have died within a half hour. Or, at least, that’s what the ambulance team told me.”

“And the man who did this? Did they catch him?”

“No. But I gather he climbed in through an open window while Alaistair was asleep. There was a struggle. And . . .”

Mehmet began to shake his head very slowly. Turning away from me, he said in a voice barely above a whisper:

“There is no need to lie to me. I know it wasn’t a thief who broke in here and did this. I know how Alaistair lives.”

I looked squarely at Mehmet and saw in his face the same look that a constantly betrayed wife often has, especially if she has decided to accept the fact that her husband is someone who has repeatedly strayed and will continue to do so for as long as they are together. Anyway, who was I to speculate what the nature of their relationship actually was, or whether there were any bonds beyond the three afternoons they spent together every week? What was clear was that Mehmet was so profoundly shaken by the sight of such destruction, and by the fact that I couldn’t tell him more about his lover’s condition.

“Why didn’t they tell you the name of the hospital?” he demanded.

“Because the medic rushed him off and the cops spent all their time getting a deposition from me.”

“How will you know where to find him?”

“I’ll start phoning around. Once I’ve found out, we can go see him together.”

“No, that is impossible for me,” he said.

“I understand,” I said.

“No, you don’t understand. Nobody understands. If it was to be made public—our ‘friendship’—my life would be over. I would be finished. A dead man.”

We fell silent. Mehmet reached into his jacket and fished out his packet of cigarettes. Flipping one into his mouth, he tossed me the packet. I took a cigarette and tossed the pack back to him, hunting around my pockets for my Zippo and lighting up. After a few deep drags, I said:

“One thing we could do for Alaistair . . . we could repaint the studio and deal with the blood on the floor and the furniture.”