“Hard to get,” Olli said.
“No,” Martin said. “Hard to keep.”
We’d practiced this script over and over, because if Olli can spare brainpower and words, he’ll save both—which is why his standard phrases are predictable. However, one should not assume he has no brainpower. Olli is clever, which is why he’s the fattest fish in the pond of hot-car dealers. He knew that Martin knew that that convertible had been stolen. We even knew that it was in back in his shop. But Olli didn’t yet know that we knew, and we couldn’t hurl disses at him, either, since that’d be a provocation. But with Olli you didn’t need to lay everything out straight, either; with him you just had to strike the right chord, and I knew that chord. I hadn’t worked for Olli for years for nothing. I knew Olli as well as a small-time car thief with golden hands can know his client.
We’d find out right away if that was good enough.
Olli didn’t say anything and stared at Martin; Martin didn’t say anything and stared at Olli.
“How much do you want to spend?” Olli asked. Also standard.
“I propose a wager,” Martin said, without real conviction.
Olli jiggled again; I hoped he was laughing. “A wager? Well, let’s hear it,” he said.
Martin swallowed. “My girlfriend Birgit used to have a car like that,” he started in a trembling voice. “She saved up a couple of years until she could afford it. She’s totally crazy about cars, and at some point it just had to be that one.”
Olli’s eyes disappeared almost completely behind his rolls of fat, which were squeezing out from top to bottom.
“After a couple of days the car disappeared,” Martin continued. We had agreed that the verb “to steal” in all its principal parts would be avoided entirely.
“She was howling her eyes out, for two specific reasons: first, she loved that car, and second, it wasn’t insured yet.”
Olli bent forward, to the extent that this was at all possible with his galactic corpulence. “Not insured?” he asked. A small twinkle appeared in his left eye. We were on the right track!
Martin shook his head.
“And what’s your deal?” Olli asked.
Martin shrugged. “I don’t care about cars, but I love my girlfriend.”
Now! It had to be about to happen, I thought, and, bingo! We’d done it. Olli was crying. Thick tears were running down his cheeks; he was sincerely touched that this wool-wearing gnome had the courage to enter this lion’s den and get his sweetheart’s car back. The fattest guy since Jabba the Jigglemonster from Star Wars just so happens, when he has time, to spend the entire day watching the sappiest romance movies conceivable. His personal DVD collection ranges from silent black-and-white films to animated movies and everything in between that the lachrymal-gland-squeezers in Hollywood, Bollywood, and wherever else in the world had ever captured on celluloid. And he watches all of them again and again. And he weeps during every movie, even when watching it for the twentieth time. And he loves women with a weakness for cars.
Olli ranks among those men who are not embarrassed of their tears. But he doesn’t make a big deal about it. He pulled a gigantic handkerchief out of his pants pocket, blew snot into it, and returned to the topic.
“You wanted to propose a wager?”
“If my girlfriend’s car key fits in a car that you’ve got here, then I’ll take that car with me.”
Martin’s hands were dripping with sweat, his knees were shaking, but his voice was coming across fairly sensibly. Good thing, too.
“Just like that?” Olli asked.
“Just like that,” Martin confirmed.
Olli pressed a button on his phone, and in the next moment Greenbeard came in. That’s not his real name of course, but one time he ate five liters of woodruff-flavored gelatin on a bet, won the pot, and five minutes later puked everything back out. In so doing, there was certain residue left in his beard. What his real name is, I’ve forgotten.
Olli held out his fleshy hand, and after a brief hesitation Martin put the key into it. Olli handed the key to Greenbeard, and whispered a few sentences into his ear. There wasn’t anything we could do but wait.
That was the most dangerous moment of this whole operation. Olli might bag the key and demand a surcharge from his end customer for that, but my senses told me he would stick to the deal. And in fact after three rather long minutes, the BMW drove out, pulling up to the entrance.
“Come on, we’re getting out of here,” I told Martin, who was standing in front of Olli’s desk the whole time sweating blood and water.
“Just a moment,” Olli said as Martin turned around. “How did you know that you would bust the bank here with your wager?”
Martin shrugged. “It was a message from Sam,” he said with a wink. “Thanks,” he added afterward, but he got no answer because Olli was already weeping again.
We stepped over to the car, climbed in, and drove to Birgit’s place.
Birgit was overjoyed. She drove Martin back to Olli’s, where the trash can was still parked on a side street, Martin got into the trash can and Birgit into the BMW, and everyone went home, happy and content. Except for me, once again no one was paying attention to me; I was bored, and Martin had forgotten to turn on the TV again.
SIX
Martin’s boss was nice about Martin getting to work a half hour late. He took Martin aside and asked him in a collegial tone if he was feeling fit enough to work again, and all that claptrap. I listened in a bit and then went in search of Katrin. She was already deep in conversation with Jochen.
“…acting pretty strange, the past few days,” I heard her say. “And then this mugging on top of it all. But he won’t say anything. I’m slowly starting to get worried.”
Ah ha, they were talking about Martin. His colleagues were gossiping already.
Meanwhile the guy they were gossiping about was pleased as Punch, because visiting him at his desk was none other than Birgit.
“…as just a little thank-you. Because you were having such a hard time with the old headset and its cord was bugging you.”
Scattered on Martin’s desk was enough packaging for Christmas and birthday combined, and his right ear was covered by an earpiece that concealed almost his entire outer ear, with a little boom sticking out in front that presumably contained the mic. Boy, he totally looked like crap in it, though, with his shiner on the left and this cyborg ear on the right, but Birgit was beaming at him. What exactly was this woman’s ideal of male beauty? She probably voted for Alf as Sexiest Man Alive and went soft at the knees seeing the party leaders on the floor of the Bundestag.
Martin in any case was smiling in bliss, dictating “Birgit is the greatest” into his computer. Cool, huh? I left the two love birds to their cooing and roamed through the building in search of something more exciting. Gregor struck me as not the worst option. He was standing in the lobby with his cell phone to his ear, fumbling in his chest pocket for a pen.
“Yeah, go ahead,” he mumbled once he’d found it. He sank down onto one of the chairs in the lobby, took a pad of paper out of his jacket’s side pocket, and jotted down some address that didn’t ring a bell for me right off the bat. Except that it was in the area where Martin and I had gotten our heads smashed in the night before last looking for information about the dead woman.
“And the witness, what’s her name?” Gregor asked, listening carefully and writing a name down. Ekaterina Szszcyksmcnk. All right, obviously that wasn’t really her name, but I found her last name impossible to remember; it was just a string of random consonants no normal person could possibly pronounce.