He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket.
“Um—wait a second,” she said.
She vanished into the office behind the counter and reappeared two minutes later with a few still-warm sheets of printer paper.
“Here you are.”
Martin briefly looked through the papers, tucked them into his pocket, nodded at her, and walked back to the trash can, which was parked around the corner. With a car like that you simply cannot park right in front of a convention center and not attract attention.
We got into the trash can and read through the printout. It’s positively dreadful what all topics people hold conventions on. “Feminizing the World Experience of Preschool and Elementary School Children” was a symposium with a panel discussion by some association of preschool teachers.
We didn’t expect either Dr. Strangelove or Il Papa to be among the preschool teachers. So we kept reading.
“Traduttore, Traditore: Language Professionals’ Self-Conception between Taking Sides and Risking Lives.” Hmm. Translators, right? Maybe interpreters? We lacked both certitude and mutual agreement, but nonetheless the two of us shared a rather gloomy expectation of finding the friend we sought amid the illustrious world of polyglots. Although Il Papa did sound quite Italian…But we decided to keep looking for now.
“Germany as a Place for Business: Is Globalization Passing Us By?” Woo hoo, that sounded promising. Could our steel entrepreneur Dr. Strangelove be interested in globalization? Martin added a checkmark. Truly a systematic person. We continued through the list.
The “Annual Meeting of Speechwriters” didn’t inspire us, and with a snort Martin dismissed the “Christian Lifestyle League: Uncompromising Action in a Society in Moral Decline.”
“I actually do consider myself a Christian,” he said, “and I even dutifully pay my church tax. But if ‘uncompromising action’ means forgoing organ transplants or medically necessary procedures because they desecrate the inviolability of the person, to say nothing of wanting to ban forensic medicine to avoid disturbing the dead…”
He interrupted himself mid-sentence, which is not at all like him, and he gaped at the paper, which he was holding perfectly still as though he were playing jackstraws and feared losing if he so much as twitched.
“Have you turned into a pillar of salt there, speaking of being a good Christian?” I asked, proud that I was able to leverage one of the two stories from the Bible I know. The other is the one with the ark. I always liked that one a lot. Two of every sort, then everybody gets the boat rocking by screwing until the sun comes out. What a great image.
“Christian,” Martin whispered. Was he lost in some kind of religious trance? Or was he just engaged in some intense reflection? I couldn’t make out any supernatural waves, so I cleared my throat loud and clear.
No reaction.
“What now?” I asked after a while, hoping my words would get me further than coughing.
“Dr. Eilig,” Martin mumbled.
“No, Dr. Strangelove,” I said, correcting him. Was he getting all mixed up now, already?
“No,” he said. “There is a Bundestag representative whose name is Dr. Christian Eilig.”
“Ah ha,” I said. Active listening. We covered that before, remember?
“He’s against organ transplants, and lately he’s come out against autopsies, too,” Martin said.
“Rings a bell,” I said, because I vaguely recalled some discussion along those lines in the break room at the Institute.
“The guy is more Catholic than the Pope,” Martin said.
Stupid saying, never liked it. Plus, I didn’t understand why Martin was making such a pregnant pause right now, of all times. Sometimes it’s pretty annoying that I never went to college.
“Um, what are you trying to tell me?” I asked, slightly irritated.
“Il Papa,” Martin said. “That’s Italian. It means ‘the Pope.’”
“You’re not trying to tell me that the Pope was there?” I asked.
“No. But Dr. Eilig was.”
“And?” I said. I could certainly understand Martin getting into a tizzy about this guy drawing his whole profession into question, but we were right in the middle of a murder investigation, and we had much better things to do than ponder the latest lunacies that some wingnut had brought up two weeks ago at the convention center.
“Dr. Christian Eilig, or ‘Dr. Christian’ for short, is more Catholic than the Pope, as they say; he lives in a nice area out past Bergisch Gladbach in the hills east of Cologne, but as anyone who reads the local papers here knows, he has an apartment in town from which he has a view of Cologne Cathedral. And, he collects cars.”
“Matchbox?” I asked Martin.
“No, real ones,” Martin replied. “When asked about this vice, he says, ‘Everyone has to have a vice, otherwise we’d all be saints, not people.’”
Hmm.
“In addition, he’s married.”
I’d have liked to nod pensively, but that wasn’t possible, obviously, so I said hmm again.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Martin asked.
“I think so,” I said. “How do we find out if the Pope had an SLR?” I asked.
“The newspaper,” Martin said. “If the Pope is driving an SLR, they’ll know about it.”
He took out his cell phone, dialed a number he knew by heart, and then gave his name and mentioned “coroner’s office.”
“No, we haven’t got any interesting bodies right now, at least not on my end,” he said apparently in response to a question. “This time I’ve actually got a non-business-related question, if that’s all right. I’ve found myself in a silly bet with someone, and I’m hoping you can confirm that I won.”
He listened for a moment and then laughed. “All right, does Dr. Eilig, a.k.a. Dr. Christian, own a Mercedes SLR?”
Martin’s face grew long. “No? Are you sure?” The corners of his mouth that had sunk down in disappointment suddenly shot up.
“Are you sure? Wow, I’m so relieved.”
He laughed again, promised to keep sending official press releases to the e-mail address he already had, and hung up.
“That guy is a freelancer over at the Cologne Advertiser, and he owes me various favors,” Martin explained with a very satisfied expression on his face. I was amazed because I hadn’t at all expected Martin to keep an account like that. Once again I’d been completely wrong about him, and once again he’d surprised me. I was going to have to start getting used to the idea that people can be complex and interesting even outside the environment I’d been hanging out in the past few years. It’s actually kind of exciting to see the world this way. Even women here weren’t just bed bunnies but human beings, with intellect and personality. OK, I wasn’t quite that far yet, but hanging around with Martin had started to open my mind up to all kinds of new possibilities.
“Eilig did have an SLR, but it hasn’t been seen for about ten days. After a reporter had asked him about it three days ago, he said he’d gotten an excellent offer for the car from a prospective buyer abroad, and he sold it to him.”
“Well now all my warning lights are flashing,” I said.
“Exactly,” Martin said, his voice squeaking with excitement. “We got him.” He said it aloud. And he said it again: “We got the bastard.”
NINE
We drove to Eilig’s address in Cologne, which Martin had elicited from another reporter so no one would notice his sudden interest in the man. His apartment was one of six in the building, each seventy square meters according to the poster in front advertising the two empty units. These were condos, actually, but that didn’t surprise us. If the arrangement of the doorbells and nameplates matched the arrangement of the apartments, then Eilig’s apartment was on the second floor on the right. Martin positioned the car in front of the entry while I orbited the building and got a marvelous view through the gigantic wall of glass into the living room where Eilig was sitting in a deep leather armchair staring into space. Strictly speaking he was staring at the flat-screen TV hanging on the wall in his line of sight, but the TV was turned off, and I didn’t think that Eilig was staring at the dark glossy rectangle.