“Incredibly funny. But the funniest thing about it is-”
Slibulsky tugged at my sleeve. “Come on, let’s go.” And to the woman behind the bar: “Put his beer on my tab.”
The woman nodded.
“Didn’t know you knew Schlumpi.”
“And I didn’t know you played roulette.”
We crossed Kaiserstrasse in the direction of the railway station. The sun was setting behind the triple arch, and scraps of afterglow lingered to the right and the left. There was a whiff of spring in the air.
“Who told you I was there?”
“A guy in the street.”
We made our way past a bunch of junkies who were attempting a choral version of “We Are the World” while someone played it on a comb.
“I just wanted to ask you where you broke that arm.”
Slibulsky stopped. “You were looking for me to ask me that?”
I nodded. He opened his mouth, closed it with a sigh, then opened it again and said: “In the Center.”
“Where exactly?”
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?”
I tilted my jaw in the direction of the nearest tavern. “Let’s have a beer.”
“I can’t. I have to go to work.”
“How about later?”
“Not today, not tomorrow. We’re getting some new women in.” He checked his watch. “I should have been there quite some time ago.”
“All right. But if nothing else, tell me how the game went.”
“What game?”
“Becker against-”
“Oh, that … I didn’t watch it to the end. But someone called. Guy called-something to do with trees … Baum?”
“Weidenbusch?”
“Possible. Says it’s urgent. Later.”
Just as Slibulsky disappeared in the crowd, an elderly gentleman wearing a red velvet bow tie appeared in front of me and flashed the inside of his waistcoat with its assortment of wristwatches. “Genuine Swiss watches, Monsieur.”
I bought a particularly ostentatious one, went into a bar and asked for a beer and a corkscrew. Then I lit a cigarette. How deep should the shit get that Slibulsky had gotten himself into before I would decide not to help him crawl back out of it? I was still pondering that when the waiter came back with my order. He was a small fat fellow with greasy hair combed straight back and an equally greasy apron. After he had taken my money, he pointed at the corkscrew and asked me morosely: “You going to clean your fingernails with it?”
I shook my head. “I want to scratch a dedication into the back of a watch.”
“Oh, I see … Well, I was just thinking, I clean mine with it all the time, and we’ve only got one of them here, and I wouldn’t really like it if other people-”
“Not to worry.”
He growled, “Never mind me, I’m a little strange in some ways,” and disappeared. I looked at my beer. It looked quite normal, really, but I pushed it aside and proceeded to scratch fOR MANNE into the back plate of the watch.
A little later I left the bar and drove home to change clothes.
10
The voice on the intercom said: “Who is there, please?”
“The gardener from Gellersheim.”
“Who, please?”
I repeated my phrase and was told to wait. Minutes passed, then the voice returned: “With whom do you wish to speak?”
“Mr. Schmitz.”
“Sorry, but Mr. Schmitz isn’t here.”
“His secretary?”
“Mr. Olschewski isn’t here, either.”
“Did you take a good look?”
“Excuse me?”
On the third floor of the fortress-like building a light went out and a curtain moved.
“Please inform the absent gentlemen that if they don’t become present in one minute, I’ll tell the police what I found while planting bulbs.”
“And what was that, if I may ask?”
“A watch.”
“Just a moment, please.”
A Jaguar slid up the hill, driving on its parking lights, and disappeared a hundred yards farther up in a small cypress grove. In the moonlit night, the outlines of the treetops looked like cutouts against the sky. I could just make out a watchman’s hut. Looking in the other direction, there was a view of Frankfurt, a gigantic lit-up birthday cake twenty miles away. Up here it suddenly felt comforting to be an inhabitant of that cake.
I had lit a cigarette and smoked half of it when the intercom crackled on again: “Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think that a watch found in the garden would be of much interest to the absent gentlemen.”
“But it might be if they were told that there was a man attached to that watch.”
“You mean,” he cleared his throat, “next to the bulbs you were planting?”
“Yes.”
A moment later, he pressed the buzzer, and I proceeded up the paved walk to the front entrance. The massive oak door swung open, and my salt-and-pepper interlocutor bade me enter. “Please follow me, sir.”
We crossed the entrance hall and walked down a corridor to the library. Books from floor to ceiling on all four walls, four cordovan armchairs on the dark brown parquet floor. Next to each armchair stood a small table with a lamp and an ashtray; in the middle of the room there was a big table with six chairs. Open on the table, next to further ashtrays, lay an old leather-bound tome.
“Have a seat, sir. He’ll be with you in a moment.”
He left the room and closed the door. After I had walked along the shelves for a while, I sat down in front of the old tome and read. On the lam from the cops, an old geezer was carrying an unconscious guy through the sewers of Paris. The water reached to his hips, and the ground under his feet was uneven and muddy. Just as he saw the lantern carried by a police sergeant and stopped to squeeze himself close to the wall, a voice behind me said: “You want to see me?”
I spun around, and there he stood: a small, hollow-cheeked gentleman with thin reddish blond hair and a tic that kept twitching his head to one side every time he spoke, as if a fly had landed on his face. He was wearing a gray three-piece suit with a dark blue ascot and a silver watch chain across his vest. Arms crossed, right foot slightly forward, on his face an expression of calm combativeness, he stood there against the red and brown background of the wall of books looking like a not entirely successful portrait of royalty-Eberhard Schmitz, the king of the railway station district.
Clumsily, I pointed at the book. “I was reading-very suspenseful.…” I nodded.
He smiled. Then he walked around the table, sat down across from me and pulled a silver case from his vest pocket. It opened with a dignified click, and he offered me a selection of various brands of cigarettes. “Would you like one?”
There was something slightly awesome about his nervous tic. I picked an unfiltered number of a brand I didn’t know. During the subsequent ceremony which consisted of his selecting a cigarette, tapping it against his thumbnail, lighting mine, lighting his, and putting the lighter back in his pocket, the gaze of his yellow eyes never left my face. Finally, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and remarked, with a quick glance at the book: “I’m glad to see that gardeners are able to appreciate things beyond mowed lawns.”
“Yes, indeed.” I nodded again. “The only problem is that I’m in no position to tell you what gardeners appreciate.”
“You’re saying that you have as much in common with gardeners as I have with persons who do not take action when strangers trespass on their property without permission?”
“That’s about it. Even though I don’t know whom you’re referring to.”
“I’m referring to you.”
“Then I may assume that the people whose tracks I found in Gellersheim were no strangers to you? That they had been lodged there with your consent?”
A pause. He used the ashtray, leaned back and ran his palm across the edge of the table, as if to see how sharp it was.
“Who are you?”
“Kemal Kayankaya, private investigator.”
“Private investigator …” He dragged on his cigarette and disappeared for a moment in a cloud of smoke. “One of those dirty types who make most of their money through blackmail.”