I took a sip and lit a cigarette. Weidenbusch. Slibulsky. Dietzenbach. Slibulsky, again, and McEnroe. The streetlights went out at midnight. My bottle was down to three quarters. I turned on the radio. Music after midnight, Udo Jurgens on every wavelength: “Show me the place where everybody gets along …” I turned the radio off. A quarreling couple came out of the Manz residence, waving their arms, running to their car. The man opened the door for her, almost tearing it off its hinges. “I said let’s go kick the ball around on Saturday! I didn’t say anything about balling!”
“Oh, Marita plays soccer?”
They leaned on the roof of the car on opposite sides, each of their necks stretched out like a chicken’s, and yelled the street awake.
“Not Marita, her friend, that stupid serial director!”
“So that’s what it’s come to: you make a date to play soccer with a ‘stupid serial director?’ ”
“Yes! It so happens that I wrote that serial!”
Doors slammed, tires squealed. The car shot through the intersection at sixty miles an hour.
I took out another cigarette. I began to ask myself if Schmitz had been so sure his check had withdrawn me from circulation that he had simply gone to bed. The clock on the dashboard told me it was twelve-thirty. I yawned. The sky was overcast again, and the night was pitch-dark. I had some more Scotch, smoked, and stared at the dark outline of the villa. At some point, the bottle must have slipped out of my grasp.
When I woke up, it was dawn. Someone was knocking on the car door, and I heard a voice: “ ‘scuse me, but I saw your Frankfurt plates-could you, could you give me a ride, maybe? Just to get away from here.”
I needed a moment to remember where I was and what I was doing. I roused myself and saw a slightly bedraggled angel behind the side window. Her make-up was smeared and her hairdo had disintegrated into loose strands that hung down around her face. She was banging on the door with a high-heeled shoe. “I can pay you for the gas …” It looked like the party was over.
I looked past her at Schmitz’s villa. The first thing I saw was a silver-colored Toyota jeep standing in the drive. Then I noticed that the lights were on the ground floor. I unlocked the door while my new acquaintance mumbled, “Oh, thank you so much!” I jumped out into the street.
“Sorry, dear. You better look for a cab.”
I was off to a flying start. It was miserably cold, and drizzly rain struck my face. Up over the fence alongside the service entrance, across the alarm wire, from tree to tree and past the terrace-I arrived at the sliding door in no time. The shutters were closed, and I could only see thin streaks of light. I put my ear to the wall. Somewhere there was a faint padding sound. After two or three minutes, the sound approached, took a turn right next to me, and stopped with a muted impact. Then nothing happened for quite a while until a quiet voice spoke: “Hello? Yes, I’ve checked everywhere. Nothing. Must’ve been a hoax. Should I go back to the soccer field? Maybe they know something about it. The dishes? Wait a minute, I’m not a cleaning woman. Besides, that’s Manne’s job. Nonsense, he’ll show up again. All right, all right, but I’ll make Manne pay for this. Later.”
Soon after that the padding resumed, grew fainter, faded away. I straightened my back. I had two choices. If I took my Beretta and went down to the basement and forced the guy whose voice I had heard to take me to the refugees, he would get to see me; even though I wasn’t quaking in my shoes, I did not take Schmitz’s warning lightly. The less contact I had with his people the better. The second choice was the better one. After all, I was just trying to find that woman; at this point, my ambition did not extend to laying bare the corruption of an entire city.
I snuck back to the Opel. Now it was almost daylight.
I turned off the engine. The party angel was fast asleep in the back seat. I pulled out a blanket from under the passenger seat and covered her up with it. Her features had composed themselves, and she had curled up looking almost contented in a setting of bits of foam rubber bursting out of the seams of the seat, old newspapers, and an oilcan. Hers was the kind of cool beauty one could admire in practically every movie of the past; it has now been replaced by so-called faces with character. Her eyelashes spread over her cheeks like fans, and she wore a string of pearls around her neck. I wouldn’t have minded taking her back to Frankfurt. I also didn’t mind her sleeping in my car. Before it occurred to me to have any objections against dashing back into the drizzly cold, I faced the dashboard again, sipped a little Scotch, and got out.
FIRST FC GELLERSHEIM was what the faded red letters said on the wall of the clubhouse. Iron bars protected the window of the small dusty room. I saw a row of cheap trophies arrayed on the back wall. I turned and looked across the empty soccer field. Overturned and rotting wooden benches lay next to the sidelines, the corner flag posts were broken, and a torn goal-net fluttered in the wind. The field had deteriorated to scattered tussocks of grass. I kicked an empty beer. bottle across the sand and scanned the surrounding woods. The only sound I heard was a hardly perceptible hum. I attributed it to my own head, crossed the penalty area, and found a muddy road. Soon there were nothing but trees on both sides, with little light filtering down from the treetops. I found myself in a desolate half-darkness, twigs crackling underfoot. I decided that this had not been a good idea and turned back. This time I passed the clubhouse on its rearside which sported the remains of a derelict shack: the former locker room. Half of its roof had caved in and piles of splintered glass lay under the gaping windows. I stopped. No head in the world could generate a hum this loud. This was the hum of a generator. I found it under a lean- to behind the locker room. For whom or what was it generating electricity? The non-existent floodlights? Or the empty lidless freezer next to the club bar counter?
I went back to the field, sat down on the edge of an overturned bench, and lit a cigarette. I had smoked about half of it when, some thirty yards into the woods, two headlights appeared. I took cover.
The silver Toyota jeep stood in front of a concrete wall with a gray steel door. The wall was set into a hillock overgrown with shrubs. I had detected no movement for the last ten minutes.
I was huddling behind a tree, my coat collar turned up, the Beretta in my lap. I regretted my choice of shoes; my feet felt like dead fish. After another ten minutes I decided I’d had enough. Cautiously, my shooting iron at the ready, I ran from one tree to the next until I reached the running board of the jeep.
Brimming ashtrays, dozens of music cassettes, two empty Bacardi bottles, boxing and racing magazines, a dog muzzle, and a box of dog food. A plastic guitar and a heart made out of fabric dangled from the rearview mirror. A sticker on one of the side windows said Afri-Cola All the Way to the Oder. Suddenly the steel door opened and a white beast with a porcine face slipped outside. I crawled under the jeep, but the creature had noticed me. On short, bowed legs it waddled up, stopped in front of me, and looked at me out of blood-shot eye slits. He looked bored, did not growl, didn’t even seem to breathe. He just stood there and stared. Heavy footsteps approached, and a martial voice called out: “Come on, Rambo!” But Rambo didn’t come. Rambo kept his eyes on me and yawned. This caused his head to split into two halves and show a whole army of small white teeth, shiny as knife points.