“You come over here asking dumb questions,” Kong muttered on. “Because you,” he paused, “are a friend of Pascha’s.” Martin sensibly kept his trap shut. “But you seem like,” again a pause, “a man of honor.”
King choked on the smoke from his foul-smelling cigarette. “Man of honor, yeah right,” he gasped.
I hoped his face would get a little redder and he’d keel over dead, but he didn’t do me the pleasure. Too bad, since the dramatic demise of an adversary was always the climax of the action flicks I used to love. And it usually helps get the hero out of his current predicament, too. We could have used help like that just now, and it wouldn’t have been that sad to see this dope done for, but, as I said, he didn’t do us the pleasure. He coughed again and then regained his composure.
“I would really like to get into my car and drive home,” Martin said quietly.
“We’re coming along,” Kong said.
King nodded.
“Certainly not,” Martin said.
“Not to your house,” Kong confirmed. “Just to the closest ATM.”
I think that by now Martin could clearly see which way the wind was blowing.
“What amount are we talking about?” he asked.
“Three thousand,” said Kong.
“Bullshit,” I yelled in between. “I owed Mehmet one thousand nine hundred and not one eurocent more.”
“First of all, that’s a lie, and second of all, you’re welcome to get in the car with me, but then we’ll be driving to police headquarters where my colleagues there will be able to take down your complaint about a theft,” Martin said.
“We’re not filing any complaints, asshole,” King roared.
“You can tell the lady who cleans your toilet all about your colleagues,” Kong muttered. “Give him the key.” He pointed to King.
“No,” Martin said.
I could feel his fear, but as a scientist he was able to evaluate the consequences of potential actions on his own, and it was clear to him we wouldn’t be able to get rid of these two characters at all if he handed over the key now.
“No problem,” King said, smashing in the driver’s side window.
“Hey, stop that!” Martin yelled.
A car thief with any pride at all is not in the habit of stealing French-made toy trash can cars, which is why King didn’t know any of the tricks for opening the door in a flash, and he didn’t have a tool with him. So we had a tiny bit of time to convince the two bruisers that they had better not lay into the chubby little man in the bulky little coat. As fast as I could, I ran down all the information I had about Mehmet and his illegal gambling operation and implored Martin, if his life meant anything to him, to just talk them to death now. And he obeyed instantly.
“Mehmet ought to be keeping things a bit more discreet,” Martin’s mouth quacked obediently. “The regular visitors to his back room would surely not appreciate it if, at five tomorrow morning, the police disturbed their beauty sleep and started asking questions about certain ‘gentlemen’s events.’”
Kong was the smarter of the two. He visibly winced. That this little man standing in front of him knew anything at all about the back room was a shock. But now we were just getting started.
“The poker round last Thursday was illegal solely on the basis that it was ‘gambling for money,’” Martin adlibbed, based on what I was dictating. “Quite apart from the fact that a felon with an open arrest warrant was in attendance, who additionally attempted to engage in the illegal ‘procuration of women for immoral purposes.’”
Kong took a step back; King still had his hand on the driver’s side door. He didn’t move.
“Who are you?” Kong asked.
Martin was able to suppress his instinct to answer the question properly the way his mommy taught him just in the nick of time. Instead, he continued to recite the script I was feeding him.
“Then there is the delicate matter of Mehmet operating the back room without the knowledge of the game hall’s owner, which is putting him into a pretty shitty situation.” The word “shitty” was hard for Martin to get past his lips, but he made an effort.
“Are you a cop?” Kong said in a renewed attempt to put his relationship with Chubby onto a more familiar basis by getting to know him better.
“Shut up,” I said, and Martin actually repeated me! And this time without hesitation and with amazing intensity. And then all on his own he said it again: “Shut up.” Then he turned to King. “Take your hand off of my car, take three steps backward, and let me go before I unload my knowledge about Mehmet at another location.”
I was impressed. He definitely had a long fuse, but when you finally got his ass in gear even Martin the Gosling could turn into a rapacious bird of prey. Well, almost.
King gawked at Kong, who nodded, and the two withdrew. Martin unlocked the trash can and laid in a pretty smooth racing start.
“Hey, nicely done,” I exclaimed. “You really showed them.”
“Shut up,” Martin shouted at me.
He was still in the rush of his newly found register.
“It’s me, Pascha,” I reminded him in the hope we would now resume talking to each other like two reasonable people.
“Exactly, Pascha. Shut up.”
Somehow he was pissed off, and somehow at ME! But I hadn’t smashed in his stupid window. Quite the contrary. I had supplied him with the ammunition that got him out of that sticky situation. And instead of thanking me, he was chewing me out. Again! I was insulted and didn’t say anything else.
He drove to the Institute, opened the door, said good night, and vanished. I disappeared into my morgue drawer and sulked.
FOUR
I just dozed the whole night and only really came to again when the first couple of morgue drawers pulled open. There were two new arrivals, and one body was taken out of the morgue drawer at the upper left and served up for its postmortem. And then a fresh body arrived that was wheeled straight into the autopsy room. I wasn’t particularly interested in all that today; I was still in a bad mood. For me, Mehmet was not out of the running as the murderer. Not after that encounter with his two pool-playing gorillas. Mehmet himself couldn’t have pushed me from the bridge; as I said, I would have gotten a whiff of him even at two hundred meters against the wind what with the cloud of perfume around him that was as unrelenting as it was nauseating. But he might well have sicced his two rabid gorillas on me. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what he hoped to gain by doing that, because a dead debtor can’t pay back his debts, but who knew what exactly was really going on in the cerebral gyri of other people. Anyways, I hadn’t checked him off my list just yet.
And the fat jellyfish who’s been fooling around with my ex lately? What did I know about him? Nothing other than that he was horrifically flabby. And that was a far cry from saying that he couldn’t have been a murderer, too. He’d just be a flabby murderer then—so what?
The fact was that I still didn’t have the foggiest who had pushed me from the bridge onto the sidewalk and thereby promoted me from life to death, and this slight disgruntlement between Martin and me was definitely not helping solve the crime. So I had to make sure he started talking to me in full sentences again and not just in demands of dubious amicability, such as: “Shut up.”
I spirited through the offices and break rooms looking for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I was afraid he was in the autopsy room dissecting bodies. I wasn’t actually that interested in all the snip-snip stuff, but on the other hand I was really restless and wanted to make up with Martin again as soon as possible. So I jetted down there.
With the caps and face masks and gowns, all the figures around the stainless-steel tables looked pretty much alike, but Martin’s chubby form was easy to pick out, and his brain waves ultimately navigated me to the right table. I made an effort not to notice the body lying there.