gun back, and fuck off!”
He was only inches away from grabbing the guns. Blood began to boil in my ears. Suddenly, a voice behind me said “April Fool!” There were two gunshots, and Axel’s head snapped back, now covered in a paste of brains and hair. He was dead before the echoes of those shots subsided.
Charlie shook. He had jumped up from his chair and was staring at the huge bleeding body toppling to the floor. He turned as pale as only a man shaking with fear in a dirty yellow light could turn pale. A red puddle was spreading out around Axel’s head. I turned. Slibulsky sat where he had been sitting all along. The only difference was that he held a pistol in his left hand. Slowly he slipped it back into the side pocket of his jacket and took the match out of his mouth. His lips twitched a little.
Without a word we dragged the corpse past fenders and hubcaps to a grassy spot where the ground was softer. While Charlie kept vomiting between two wrecked cars, Slibulsky and I dug a hole. The moon stood directly overhead. I seemed to be evolving into a gravedigger.
After the ground had been flattened out again and the shovels had been returned to their shed, Slibulsky handed me my wallet. I went to the office to order two taxicabs. Meanwhile, Slibulsky got a black suitcase from the Toyota. After that we went back to the warehouse, stuffed the dead dog into a plastic bag, and collected the jewelry.
The three of us regained the street, and I dropped the plastic bag into a public wastebasket. Green-faced, Charlie leaned against a lamppost, staring vacantly into space and crumbling a small cigar between his fingers. Slibulsky sat on the curb. I stepped into the light of the streetlamp and lit a cigarette.
“If any of this becomes public, I’ll blame it all on you-a fight over the loot, something like that. If that should happen, Schmitz’s name would hit the papers, too, and I’m not sure who would get the worst of his fury, you or me.”
Charlie nodded.
A little later, the first cab arrived, and Charlie got in. Soon after that the second one came, and Slibulsky and I got in the back with our suitcase full of money and the bag of jewelry. I told the cabbie to take us to the airport.
We rode in silence for a while, and the cabbie cast several suspicious glances at us in the rearview mirror. Then he started to discuss the pointlessness of Daylight Saving Time, all by himself, and all by himself he stopped discussing it. Finally he decided to turn on the radio.
When we got to the autobahn, I asked Slibulsky: “Why didn’t you hand me that gun?”
Leaning forward a little, Slibulsky fussed with his cast. “You already had two,” he replied without looking up. “No one can use three guns at the same time.”
“But if I had really searched you, how do you think I would have reacted?”
Slibulsky didn’t say anything. I looked out the window at the passing lights of American high-rises. My arm throbbed, and I could still feel the tetanus and rabies shots in my ass.
“What I don’t understand is why Schmitz let you use that villa. Never mind what his cut may have been, those are ridiculous sums by his standards.”
“He gave it to us because Axel was his nephew.”
I gave a start. “So it was Schmitz’s nephew you-.” I stopped myself just in time. The cabbie seemed to find it hard to get comfortable in his driver’s seat. Slibulsky must have forgotten him, or he just didn’t give a damn at that moment; in any case, he shrugged and said: “Axel would have killed you. He kept ranting all day about his moment of weakness there in front of the bunker. And after his doggie got atomized … I had no choice. Unless you had pulled the trigger-and it didn’t look like you would.”
When we arrived at the airport and I handed the driver his money, he did not look at me, and his hand shook.
On the way to the police sub-station I bought two soccer magazines. Then we had to wait a while until Benjamin Weiss got rid of a female reporter who had managed to get into the attorneys’ room. She explained that she was working for the illustrated magazine Schampus and wanted to secure an exclusive “picture story” on the refugees in the bunker. As they were released, the refugees could recreate scenes of that “heavy time”, and the “kicker” would be that they would all be wearing “the new Gaultier winter collection, with sunglasses, the women with veils but otherwise real sexy.”
After she was gone, we handed the money and the jewelry to Weiss. He drank a schnapps with us, chased it with aspirin, chain-smoked and told us that no one had been deported so far and that the attorneys thought no one would be during the next few days or weeks. Then I went to the cells and gave Abdullah the soccer magazines. We left the building. Outside, police guards with helmets and pistols were stationed at five-yard intervals. Facing them, a dozen reporters hung out next to a potted palm, passing thermos bottles to each other. The area between them was covered in discarded leaflets.
“Now what? Would you like me to buy you a drink?”
Slibulsky shook his head. “I have a date with Schlumpi.”
“A midnight date?”
The sliding doors flew apart, and we entered the arrival hall. Slibulsky stopped. Looking determined, he told me: “I think we’re quits now, and if I have a midnight date with Schlumpi, then that is where I have to go. But we can have a drink afterwards.”
“If you’re still able to lift a glass.”
He gave me a suspicious look. Then he waved his hand at the ceiling. “I don’t care what you think, but you better stay out of it.”
15
The blocks around the railway station were really jumping. It was the Americans’ night off, and the Eintracht team had taken a bath in Mannheim, zero to one. Frustrated G.I.s and even more frustrated soccer fans reeled down the sidewalks, and cars shaking with music were gridlocked around the block. Shell game artists gathered crowds on street corners. Flickering neon; honking horns, shouting and singing blended into one garish surge. We passed two derelicts fighting over a can of beer while a third one was busy spilling its contents over his shirt front and reached the entrance to The Smiling Die.
Slibulsky went inside. I sat down on the trunk of a parked car. Two women were patrolling the sidewalk. The air was warm and smelled relatively clean; for this night, at least, the rainy weather had washed exhaust fumes and male odors into the gutter.
Turkish music was playing behind a window. I took a cigarette from my pack and noticed that I was out of matches.
“Need a light, darling?” One of the women planted herself in front of me and smiled. Thirtyish, she had a pretty but slightly fleshy face. Her white patent leather outfit didn’t quite cover her ass, and her legs were encased in tall pointy boots.
I nodded, and she produced a lighter.
“Got an ashtray, too, upstairs.”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but I’m waiting for somebody.”
She checked me out, from top to toe. “You like the exotic types better? My roommate’s the sweetest seductive thing since chocolate …”
I shook my head again. “I told you, I’m just waiting for somebody.”
“For the guy you were with? Charlie’s pet? You may have to wait a long time.”
“How so?”
“Cause he’s a loser.”
I dragged on my cigarette, expelled the smoke through my nose, and shrugged. “None of my business.”
“So why are you sitting here?”
“When he comes out, we’ll go have a drink.”
“He’s a buddy of yours?” She made a face. Then she looked me up and down again and asked, contemptuously: “What kind of an asshole are you?”
