“And if we don’t make it out again?”
“Then you go on playing the part, claiming you don’t know anything about anything, saying I pulled a gun on you, told you I was a cop, and so on. They’ll take no interest in you.”
He told me I had a sense of humor and went back to contemplating his beer. I told him pretty much everything that had happened so far in the Bollig case. Not that I really trusted him, but it was my only chance to win him over. When I’d finished, he looked at me and asked, “Who gave you my name?”
I shook my head. I had given Karate my word. Slibulsky took a wooden match and stuck it between his teeth. Then he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.
“And who won?”
“Come again?”
“I’ve never known anyone to visit Karate without shooting a game with him.”
He pointed at my hands with his matchstick. “Blue poolroom chalk.”
“We won one each.”
He took out his wallet.
“Any friend of Karate’s is all right by me. Even if he’s a snooper, and is planning a really weird operation.” He put twenty marks on the table.
“Make it eight hundred, and it’s a deal.”
I talked him down to seven. We paid up and left the Dawn.
“We’ll go by my place first. Get a bit of disguise, handcuffs, and so on.”
“And four hundred marks. The balance tomorrow.”
Someone had stuck red fliers under the windshield wipers of all the cars parked in the street. “Jimmy’s Jean Shop-Great Inaugural Hullabaloo!” I tossed mine into the gutter, and we drove off.
After pulling the brim of my hat down low over my eyes, I shoved Slibulsky into the entrance hall of police headquarters. The woman at the switchboard and the cop on duty looked up. I pushed Slibulsky straight to the reception window. As soon as we were in front of it and the woman slid the window open, he started ranting.
“Lemme go, you shithead, you god damn snooper! I have nothing to do with any of it. Miss, he’ll just tell you a bunch of garbage. He has no fucking right to drag me here. Or to beat me up either.”
I punched him and leaned into the window.
“I have an appointment with Detective Superintendent Kessler. He’ll be here any moment. If he should call from anywhere along the way, please tell him I’ve brought the man in.”
She stared at me, dumbfounded. The cop came to the window.
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Listen, this is urgent. We may have to mount a major operation tonight …”
“You’re dreaming, snooper! I shit on your-”
“Shut up!”
Slibulsky played his part well. The two in the reception area were at a loss.
“All right, then? I’ll wait for Mr. Kessler in his office. He gave me his keys.”
I rattled my house keys.
“Oh well, all right.” Then the cop grabbed his uniform jacket and added, “I’ll come along to make sure he doesn’t give you any trouble.”
I raised my hand.
“That won’t be necessary. I can take care of him. Besides, no one’s going to give me any grief later, if I have to use a little force. I’m not a policeman, you see,” I looked at him with narrowed eyes, “but he has to sing.”
He grinned.
“I understand. I’ll notify Superintendent Kessler as soon as he gets here.”
I nodded and guided Slibulsky to the hallway in which I seemed to remember Kessler had his office.
Behind my back, I heard the woman say, “But Mr. Kessler just …”
“Let it be. It’s gotta be something secret.”
At last we stood in front of the door. I took out my skeleton key and worked on the lock. Five seconds later I had the door open.
“If someone shows up and there’s time to get out, you knock on the door. If there isn’t, you start playing your part.”
“I hear you.”
I closed the door quietly and switched on the light. The office was just as I remembered it. Only the silence was mildly unnerving. I sat down at the desk and went through the drawers. Typing paper, rubber stamps, the famous ruler, a city map of Frankfurt. At the very bottom, a pocket calendar. I took it. The skeleton key worked great on the metal cabinets. The first one was empty. The second contained coffee cups, aspirin, cookies, and shaving cream. The third, finally, held twenty-odd files. I went through them all. Was that a knock? No, I guessed not … Then I read, “Investigation of Bollig case.” Now there was a knock. Louder this time. Unmistakable. Slibulsky stuck his head inside and whispered, “You deaf? Hurry up, man!” I stuck the file under my arm, switched off the light, and shut the door behind me. The voices sounded quite close.
“What a mess! I was in the building. You saw me!”
Kessler! Slibulsky dragged me in the opposite direction. We had hardly reached the corner of the hallway before the light came on. We ran down the hall on our toes. Then the shouting began.
“They’ve broken into my cabinets! Don’t just stand there, sound the alarm! They must still be in the building! Block all exits!”
We ran down a flight of stairs. No exit. I tried every door until one opened. The toilet. In the tiled wall at the end of the urinal gutter there was a frosted glass pane.
“That’s our way out.”
“How about taking these off me first?”
I unlocked the handcuffs. At that moment the siren began to wail. “Now we’ll have some fun.”
I took off my coat, wrapped it around my right arm, and smashed the glass pane. The frame was narrow, but we managed. Head first, I let myself drop the two meters down to the wet lawn. Slibulsky popped out behind me. We crawled over to some bushes. The building was brightly lit. A cop ran past us. The entrance had been closed. We had to cross about twenty meters of open space to reach the wall. Another cop appeared, gun in hand. Through the broken window we could hear them crashing into the toilet,
“They got out through here! Everybody outside! Shoot on sight!”
We had no choice. I held on tight to my file. “Now!”
We were up and running.
7
I had turned off the engine. I leaned back, enjoying my cigarette. It was a little past one o’clock in the morning. Lights were still on in The Dawn Restaurant across the street. Slibulsky sat next to me, quietly surveying the scene.
We sat there for a while, listening to the rain.
“Tell me: This job you’re on-who are you working for?”
“The attorney.”
“But he fired you! No, I meant generally. You’re a private investigator. What a load of crap that must be.”
He scratched his chin, ruminating. “The way you’re going about it, at least. It’s like-some kind of a cross between Robin Hood and a cop. That just can’t work out too well.”
“I have to eat. Ask a worker at the VW factory who he’s slapping bumpers onto those cars for.”
“But a VW worker would never risk his life to meet a delivery deadline. And he doesn’t give a shit if the engine blows up after a hundred kilometers. Those guys back there were ready to shoot us. If we hadn’t been lucky, we’d be lying there like a couple of dead rabbits in the grass. And who would give a fuck? Some little dealer from the railroad station, and a Turkish snooper. That doesn’t even rate a mention on the morning news. They’d just plow us under in a hurry. So you risk your life for something you believe is justice, and end up in the compost heap. What’s justice, anyway? It doesn’t exist, not today, not tomorrow. And you won’t bring it about, either. You’re doing the same scheiss-work as any cop. You catch the guys and bring them to court. You may be a little nicer, you may let one of them go, if you think he doesn’t deserve a life behind bars. But you won’t change a thing about the fact that it’s always the same guys who do something, who get caught-not a thing, because the rules are set up that way. So all right, so tonight you pulled a fast one on the cops and you got away with a file. So what?”