I pointed at the walclass="underline" “Lovely manners.”
“We’re only doing our job.”
“Why is it always ‘only’? Have you ever given that any-”
She let go of the armrests, leaned forward, and hit the desk with both fists: “Get out of here!”
I shook my head.
“We’re not done. I came here to enquire about my fiancee, Sri Dao Rakdee. Rakdee with two ‘e’s. She is from Thailand. We were going to get married last week, but we still haven’t received the necessary papers. I wanted to know if it would be possible to extend her visa by another month?”
She seemed surprised by the question. Then she smiled triumphantly and told me, in a saccharine tone of voice: “No, that’s impossible.”
She reached for her cake fork.
“All right, then. Would you be so kind as to get Sri Dao Rakdee’s file and note that,” I got up to look at the nameplate on her desk, “Mrs. Steiner has rejected an application for extension of her visa? So that I can inform my attorney.”
She put the fork down, chewed and thought this over for a moment. Then she pushed her chair back from the desk and got up. “It’ll be a pleasure.”
She left the room. I went over to the window feeling pretty good and lit a cigarette. I thought I had reached the end of the trail. Whether Sri Dao Rakdee’s first German was a pimp, as Charlie claimed, or one of those guys who liked mail order brides, his name had to be in that file; and Mrs. Steiner would hardly miss the opportunity to beat me over the head with it, to justify calling me a liar and a criminal and throwing me out of her office.
There was no other explanation for a visa extended twice for periods of three months. It all fit together. According to Weidenbusch, Sri Dao had shouted “this is my man” during the fracas next to the VW van. Contrary to Weidenbusch’s fond assumption, it had not been her intention to express her readiness to defend him. No, she had simply referred to her “man”, to the guy who had brought her to Germany and had promised marriage both to her and the authorities; who had then lost interest in her and sold her to the Lady Bump outfit. That guy knew when her visa expired and what brothel keepers were willing to pay for her. Today he had picked her up, with a three-thousand-mark bonus, in order to sell her again.
Given all that, there could be several possible reasons for Sri Dao’s rejection of Weidenbusch’s marriage proposal. First: her memories of the other guy were such that the mere word “marriage” made her nauseous. Second: she was willing to risk deportation to keep her previous story a secret from Weidenbusch. Or third: she suspected that the immigration authorities would not approve such a change of bridegroom and therefore reject any further attempt to extend her visa.
So all I needed to do now was to look up the name of the guy in the phone book. Then I could return Sri Dao to Weidenbusch this evening, if not sooner.
Five minutes later, Mrs. Steiner returned, flanked by one of her colleagues from security. She slammed the door shut and wagged her chin at me: “That’s him!”
The colleague was in his forties, balding, his few remaining strands of hair plastered sideways across the top of his skull. He wore a pale blue bomber jacket with a plethora of gold-colored zippers. He gave me the once-over. Then he pushed his thumbs under his belt, hitched up his pants, cleared his throat and stepped closer so that his fat face was a yard from mine. He flashed his teeth and spoke in a rapid-fire machine gun rattle: “What’s your name, nigger?”
So, I said to myself, this must be their guy with the communication skills. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and studied its glowing tip for a moment. His beery breath struck my face. I looked at him and said very quietly:
“Listen, pig. Another word out of you, and I’ll see to it that you won’t be able to stand up, sit down, or fuck-ever again.”
While Mrs. Steiner suppressed a scream, my threat seemed to have the desired effect on her colleague. He was speechless. However, it didn’t look like this situation would last very long, so I added: “Where is the file?” Just as quickly came the reply from a safe distance: “There is no file for Rakdee.” Mrs. Steiner had one hand on the doorknob; the other hovered in the vicinity of a vase. I kept glancing back and forth between them, a proper little Hawkeye.
“If you’re not telling me the truth …”
“I beg your pardon …!” Despite her obvious fear that our argument might turn into a free-for-all, Mrs. Steiner looked indignant. “I am a civil servant.”
In other circumstances I would have grinned, but now it seemed important to get closer to the door. The security guy looked like he’d explode any second, and I didn’t feel like getting punched. On the other hand, I had better things to do than jail time for grievous bodily harm.
“All right, that’s all I wanted to know. You could have saved yourself all this excitement. And if you want to know my name, there it is, on her pad. Take a good look at it. If we ever meet again, I would like to be addressed correctly.”
Now the guy looked like his head and shoulders were about to burst. He stood leaning forward a little, arms bent like a wrestler’s, ready to pounce. Mrs. Steiner stepped aside, I grabbed the doorknob and touched my forehead. “Thank you all.”
I pulled the door shut behind me, stepped over the Polish kid who was still busy with his gunfighters, and ran down the stairs. Nothing happened until I had reached the landing below. Then a roar came from above, and I picked up speed. A guy in uniform met me at the exit.
“Hey, hey, what’s the rush?”
“Be right back. I’m illegally parked …”
Before he was able to react, I was out the door and ran to the Opel. Seconds later, the security guy and the one in uniform charged out into the street. I slid way down in my seat and waited until they gave up and trotted back into the building. I started the car and drove off.
At the first refreshment stand I saw I bought a paper cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate and took them back to the car. So much for my theory, I thought; the stamps in Sri Dao Rakdee’s passport were forgeries, provided by Charlie or someone else. She had been in this country illegally for at least six months. As far as her former guy was concerned, my only proof of his existence was a statement made by a half-crazed pimp. In her situation, forged papers or stamps had been her only recourse. Which left “Mr. Larsson” who had a mustache and drove a VW van. There could be a hundred reasons why he knew the dates of Sri Dao’s visa. Maybe he wrote poetry in his spare time and belonged to Weidenbusch’s circle of acquaintances.
I drank my coffee and decided to drive to the asylum seekers’ center in Hausen.
4
A field the size of two soccer fields, covered with gravel, stretched out beside the road. At the far end, its boundary was marked by the buildings of a sawmill. Spaced out at regular intervals on the field stood metal containers, twelve feet wide, forty feet long, and a little less than ten feet tall-three rows of twenty. In the walkways between them tall streetlights rose out of the gravel. Each container had one door, one window, an outside faucet, and a washing line. On top of some containers lay piles of what looked like broken bicycle parts. On closer examination, these turned out to be homemade television antennas. Between the containers, children were playing games, men were sitting on folding chairs. The area was surrounded by a three-foot-high wire mesh fence, and the air was filled with the incessant screeching of sawmill machinery: auditory smog.
I walked along the fence to the entrance and its red and white barrier. Right next to it stood the administration building, a two-story prefab with faux half-timbering and a flower bed of pansies complete with garden gnome-as if it wanted to show the refugees, when they came to get their daily mail, the cozy German idyll to be defended against their “flood”. I walked along a newly laid path of “natural” paving stones to the building and into the front office. The office was empty except for two goldfish in a bowl on the counter. Next to the counter was a bell-rope with the sign PLEASE RING, amplified by a drawing of a stick figure pulling a rope and causing musical notes to fly through the air to summon another, smiling, stick figure.