Nina finished her coffee-serving ritual, accompanied as usual by a hastily swallowed “fuck” as she touched the mugs not on the handle but on the body, thereby ascertaining that the ceramic was indeed hot. I glanced into the kitchen and thanked providence that Martin could see only the living room, and I caught myself wondering what degree of civilization one could expect from someone whose kitchen is smaller than the guest bathroom at my parents’ house.
Nina came over and sat across from Martin.
“Have you heard that Sascha Lerchenberg passed away?” he asked, and actually said “passed away.”
“Yeah.”
Just a one-word answer out of the mouth of a woman whose vital functions, unlike those of most people, didn’t consist of inhaling and exhaling but of inhaling and chattering. I have never caught her just exhaling air. Words were always part of it; her whole body seemed to be filled with them, and they seemed just to pour out of her. Nina can jabber, blabber, blather, yap, drivel, gabble, prattle, ramble, and just about anything else that in some way has to do with speaking.
But here and now on her couch I wasn’t getting the impression that Nina was unable to say more because she was overwhelmed with such great sorrow; instead, the reason for her uncharacteristic linguistic inhibition was something else. She looked irritated, and presumably she wasn’t totally sure what reaction was expected from her, so she held back accordingly. She crossed her long legs in her shiny pink polyester track pants and tried to smile.
“Would you think it possible that he was murdered?”
What kind of a question is that supposed to be? Would you think it possible that ten million years ago dinosaurs lived on earth? No? Well, then, there must not have been any! I really wanted to pull out my hair, but as some kind of eviscerated ethereal entity this reaction was of course precluded. Martin, wake up! You’re the cop, she’s a suspect, put the screws on her!
Martin nervously wiped his hand over his forehead.
“Um, well, I don’t know,” was the poorly qualified answer from my dear ex-hag, but you can’t in any seriousness expect a sensible answer to an idiotic question. I hastened to share this conclusion with Martin, and in response he grew even more nervous.
“Would you know anyone who might have any reason to kill him?” he asked.
“Pablo,” Nina said without hesitating. “I don’t know what his real name is, but Pablo thinks it’s Sascha’s fault he’s in prison.”
“But if Pablo is in prison, he can’t have killed Sascha,” Martin objected.
Nina shrugged, pouted, and thought. At least, she pretended to. Whether any actual activity takes place in her brain in a situation like this, I have never been able to ascertain.
“Why do you ask?” she suddenly wanted to know. “Sascha and I haven’t been together for a couple of months.”
Hopefully he doesn’t answer now, I thought. If Martin were a cool guy in a cool movie, at this point he’d say, “I’m asking the questions here,” but I didn’t think Martin was capable of that. And I was right—he let the opportunity pass. Still, he didn’t answer, either, but instead asked another question.
“Why aren’t you together anymore?” he asked.
“Because he conned me.” She literally spit the words.
“That’s not true,” I yelled before Martin could continue. “It wasn’t like that.”
“What happened?” Martin wanted to know from Nina, and we both starting talking at the same time.
“Not over each other,” he yelled, irritated, and Nina gawked at him as though he’d suddenly put on a red and white cap and started singing “Jingle Bells.”
“What do you mean ‘over each other’?” she asked. She narrowed her eyes into slits; her expression was truly frightening. Provided, of course, that one could be frightened of a skirt.
“Pardon me; I meant, please start again,” Martin stuttered. I forced myself to keep my trap shut because otherwise he’d totally screw up the questioning, which already seemed doomed.
“He was supposed to fix my car, but he wangled me out of the money because he said he had to buy replacement parts. The beater ran after that, but a week later it wouldn’t start up again. So he took my money for parts again, and then it worked well for a week, but that was it. I asked a friend of mine to take a look at it, and he thought that there weren’t any new replacement parts in it at all.”
“And then?” Martin asked as Nina sucked on her cigarette butt, her anger heating up like a can of ravioli on the stove.
“So then he was supposed to sell the piece of junk for me, which he did, but then he told me he got only four hundred for it. Later on someone told me that was a lie, too; he’d actually gotten six hundred. So he stole two hundred euros from me, too.”
I kept my mouth shut. Nina was wrong, but I didn’t need to saddle Martin with that. I’d moved her car for a cool eight hundred. To a half-blind Turk who wanted to drive that bedpan on wheels back home to his brother-in-law in Anatolia. I suspect he didn’t even get it across the Rhine, but since he didn’t know my actual name, I didn’t really care. Incidentally, I used the extra four hundred to settle my gambling debts—and, as we well know, gambling debts are debts of honor. So it was an honorable thing, the story with Nina’s car.
“Would you have any reason to think that his death was connected with this, uh, auto sale?” Martin asked, and I was slowly but surely developing a deep disinclination toward questions that began with “Would you…”
“Uh-uh,” Nina said, stubbing out her cigarette. “Why would anyone have waited so long? He conned me over the car months ago now.”
“Well, then…” Martin mumbled, standing up. He had taken only two sips of his coffee, and he made no effort to finish the mug before he left. “Thank you very much,” he added, briefly shaking Nina’s hand, and walked out the door with his coat over his arm. I had to hurry to keep up.
“What did these enhanced interrogation techniques produce in terms of actionable information?” Martin asked in a tone that wavered between irritability and resignation once he was finally seated back inside his hamster wheel, having locked the world outside.
“It wasn’t her,” I said, because I had decided not to pepper him with criticism right away.
“How do you know that?”
“She can’t lie. If she had pushed me, it’d have been all over her face.”
Martin relaxed a little.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
Secretly I had to admit he was right, of course, but I needed him, so I sucked up to him a little. “Well, that was a pretty good start.” Somehow at that moment I felt glad that I didn’t have a face anymore because I couldn’t have kept a straight face at such a bald-faced lie otherwise. Even I’m not that good.
“Best you jot down some notes,” I suggested, because I didn’t have any idea what the memory capacity of a disembodied corpse is. Martin nodded.
“And then take me back to the Institute,” I added. Of course, I didn’t feel like spending a boring night inside Morgue Drawer Four, but I was smart enough not to ask Martin for anything else tonight. And his reaction confirmed I was right. When the scope of my request really seeped into his brain, he quickly started nodding with such enthusiasm I was worried his head would shake right off his neck. The man urgently needed a break. He put the car into gear and drove to the Institute. As we were just stepping through the main entrance, a man walked up to us from inside, and it turned out this guy was Martin’s best friend and a true-blue plainclothes.
“Hello, Gregor. Did you bring me some new work?” Martin asked, vigorously shaking his counterpart’s hand.
“No, our attractive new colleague is on this one,” Gregor answered. He gave a wide and, as I soon realized, slightly suggestive grin. “The lovely Katrin.”