At some point around noon Martin did a short walk-through of the building to check on me, and I thought that was exceptionally nice of him. That’s how it should be. He still remembered I had once had a body, and he perceived me as a feeling, whole being—OK, well not entirely whole, but still, as whole as somehow possible. His concern touched me, and I could tell him that directly without having to think some carefully formulated sentence into a port. It did occur me that he might be checking on me only to keep me from getting up to no good with my newly discovered gift of communication, but I quickly pushed that thought aside. I needed a bit of support, and I was determined to find it in Martin’s behavior. Basta.
At quitting time, Martin stopped briefly at a street food stand to pick up a veggie burger with a tofu patty and colorful side salad. That’s the kind of dinner guinea pigs eat, or people with colostomy bags, but he shoveled that health fodder into his mouth with a full appetite. Meanwhile I was dreaming of a big, thick hamburger with meat, sauce, and onions gushing out on all sides, gunk running down your sleeve to your elbow. People’s tastes are so different.
You could say that about Ekaterina Something as well, because her apartment, which apparently had not been updated since the war, stank of rancid grease and cabbage. Every surface that Martin touched with his hand—before he wised up—was sticky. The woman herself looked the way you would expect someone who lives in an apartment like this to look: just as greasy and sticky as everything else in her environment. Perfect camouflage, one might well say, if this woman were a chameleon and not an approximately one-hundred-year-old Russian, Belorussian, or Ukrainian—if there’s any difference among those.
The idea that she’d discovered the photo of the body during her morning perusal of the Cologne Advertiser over coffee and rolls and then called the police is something neither Martin nor I could really picture. However, we didn’t need to ask how she came across the photo, because when she opened her refrigerator door to grab some butter to set out with the dust-dry crackers for us on the table, we saw that issue of the newspaper: apparently some fishmonger had used it to wrap up the woman’s purchases. The photo of the deceased girl’s lovely face was wrapped around six plump sardines whose heads were bloody and eyes cloudy. The stench took Martin’s breath away.
“You told the police that you recognized the woman from the photo in the paper,” Martin started.
“Da, da, I tolt police everything.”
The accent she spoke with was bad enough, but the fact that she had only a few teeth in her mouth all sticking out crooked from her lower jaw didn’t improve things. I didn’t want to try to imagine what Martin’s computer might write if she were dictating to it.
“It would be great if you could repeat it for me,” Martin said.
“Girl lived here, above me,” she said.
“Do you know her name?”
She shook her head. “No name on door, never tolt me.”
“Did you ever speak with her then?” Martin asked.
She nodded. “Hello and such.”
“Did she speak German?”
“Yes, but mother tonkue from Balkan or such.”
“Did she live alone?”
“Da, da, alone. But man sometimes was there.”
The toothless grandma winked at Martin! I roared with laughter, but Martin winced so big that you see it even through his duffle coat.
“What kind of man?” Martin asked after pausing to recover, during which he attempted, and totally failed at, a friendly smile.
“Tall.” She held up her arms in a gesture that meant more “fat” than “tall.”
“Bik man with nice car,” she added.
Our ears pricked up. “A small, silver, fast car?” I suggested, like the SLR, and Martin repeated the question for the grandma.
“Not small. Bik man, bik car.”
Ah ha, too bad. But actually that made sense. Fat men drive fat cars.
“Did she spend a lot of time at home, or did she have a job?” Martin asked.
“In day at home, in night away.”
“Maybe she served tables at a restaurant?” Martin suggested.
The grandma energetically shook her head, and then made a gesture that is understood internationally. Martin turned beet-red. The grandma grinned again and set her hand on his arm. Martin stared.
She let go of his arm. “Not on street.” For the next gesture, she rubbed her thumb and index finger together.
Ah ha. She meant that the dead woman hadn’t been some cheap streetwalker. But could a centenarian like this tell that? A woman who was running a shelf-life experiment in her fridge with sardines marinated in newsprint?
I answered the question for myself with a resounding yes. The woman was not stupid; she just had a strange view of modern residential environments, hygiene, and food preparation. But she had life experience, and that’s what we needed here. I took her at her word.
The only thing that was still bugging me now was the question of why this woman, who so obviously lived in her own world, had contacted the police. It certainly may be a prejudice on my part, but I have never before had the impression that those of our fellow countrymen and women with a westward-oriented immigration background had any particular fondness for German law enforcement. You get what I mean, right? That Russians piss on German cops wherever and whenever they can. Martin evidently had the same idea, but articulated it in a higher linguistic register.
“Ask her,” I said.
“She might interpret that as an insult,” he said.
“So what?” I said. “That’s actually what we want to know.”
Martin asked. Worded nicely. So nicely that at first Ekaterina didn’t at all understand what Martin wanted from her. Then the penny dropped.
“Where I am comink from, you can buy police like woman. Here, police goot.”
Sometimes it’s as simple as that. Now, in my short life I used to screw the cops over whenever I could, and here this antique matron loved the German police for their white vests, and so she performed her civic duty with great attentiveness. I was embarrassed. Secretly, of course, so Martin wouldn’t notice.
We left the apartment, the building, and that neighborhood, and I asked Martin what we wanted to do with the rest of our evening now.
“I’m dropping you off at the Institute,” he said. “Then I’ve got something else planned.”
Birgit! I could feel it, even though he was exerting his maximum effort to withhold these thoughts from me. “OK,” I said.
We drove to the Institute, Martin came in with me, turned the TV on in Conference Room Two, went down to the autopsy section, scrubbed his hands with hot water and disinfectant, and then called “see you tomorrow” and disappeared.