Crime (3 page)

While the average con man just cons, Wagner was more skilled. He presented himself as the “tough Berlin kid from the bottom” who’d “made it.” Middle-class people put their trust in him. They thought he was rough, noisy, and unpleasant but, for those very reasons, genuine and honorable. Wagner was neither hard nor honorable. He hadn’t “made it”—not even by his own standards. He was sly rather than intelligent, and because he was weak himself, he recognized the weaknesses in other people. He exploited these, even when it gained him no advantage.

Sometimes Pocol made use of Wagner. He beat him up when he got fresh, when it was too long since the last time, or simply when he felt so inclined. Otherwise, he considered him to be garbage. But Wagner struck him as the right man for this job. Pocol had learned from experience that because of his origins and the way he spoke, nobody outside his own circle would take him seriously.

Wagner was given the task of getting in touch with Tanata to tell him he could buy back both bowl and watches, details to be sorted out later. Wagner agreed. He got hold of Tanata’s phone number and talked for twenty minutes to the secretary. Wagner was assured that the police would not be brought into it. After he’d hung up, he felt terrific, stroked the two Chihuahuas he’d named Dolce and Gabbana, and pondered how he could screw Pocol just a little in the bargain.

A garrote is a thin length of wire with little wooden handles at either end. It was developed from a medieval instrument of torture and execution—until 1974, it was the official instrument of execution in Spain—and even today it is a favored murder weapon. Its constituent parts can be bought at any hardware store; it’s cheap, easy to transport, and effective: The wire is passed around the neck from behind and pulled tight into a noose; the victim cannot cry out, and death is swift.

Four hours after the phone call to Tanata, the doorbell rang at Wagner’s apartment. Wagner opened the door a crack. The gun he’d stuck into the belt of his pants didn’t save him. The first blow to his larynx cut off his breath, and when the garrote ended his life fifteen minutes later, he welcomed his death.

Wagner’s cleaning lady put down the groceries in the kitchen the next morning and saw two severed fingers stuck in the sink. She called the police. Wagner was lying in bed, his thighs clamped together in a vise, two carpenter’s nails in the left kneecap and three in the right. There was a garrote around his neck and his tongue hung out of his mouth. Wagner had wet himself before he died, and the investigating officers racked their brains trying to figure out what information he had divulged to the perpetrator.

In the living room, where the marble floor met the wall, lay the two dogs; their yapping must have disturbed the visitor, who had stomped them both. The trace analysts tried to get a print of the soles from the bodies, but it took the pathology people to locate a little fragment of plastic inside one of the dogs. The perpetrator had obviously worn plastic bags over his shoes.

During the same night that Wagner died, at around five o’clock in the morning Pocol carried the takings from his gambling halls into the hairdresser’s in two plastic buckets. He was tired, and as he bent forward to unlock the door, he heard a high-pitched hum. He recognized it. His brain couldn’t process it fast enough, but a fraction of a second before the ball at the end of the telescoping steel rod smashed against his head, he knew what it was.

His girlfriend found him in the shop when she came begging for heroin. He was lying facedown on one of the two tilting chairs, his arms around it as if to embrace it. His hands were bound underneath it with zip ties; the massive body was jammed between the armrests. Pocol was naked, and the broken shaft of a broom was protruding out of his anus. The medical examiner testified at the autopsy that the force with which the stick had been inserted had also perforated the bladder. Pocol’s body showed 117 lacerations on the back and head; the killer’s steel ball had broken fourteen bones. Which one of the blows finally killed him could not be ascertained with any certainty. Pocol’s safe had not been broken into, and the two buckets of coins from the slot machines stood almost undisturbed in the doorway. There was a coin in Pocol’s mouth when he died, and another was found in his esophagus.

The investigations went nowhere. The fingerprints in Pocol’s shop could be attributed to any number of criminals in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. The torture with the broom handle pointed to Arab involvement, since they ranked it as a particular form of humiliation. There were a few arrests and interrogations of people who might be associated with it; the police thought it was a turf war, but they had nothing definite. Pocol and Wagner had never surfaced together in any police investigation and the homicide division could build no connection between the two cases. When it came down to it, there was only a bunch of theories.

Pocol’s shop and the sidewalk outside it were closed off with red-and-white security tape, and searchlights illuminated the area. Every single person in Neukölln who wanted to know found out during the on-site police investigation just how Pocol had died. And now Samir, Özcan, and Manólis were truly frightened. At 11:00 a.m. they were standing in front of Pocol’s shop with the money, the watches, and the bowl. Mike, the antiques dealer they had sold the bowl to, was putting ice on his right eye four streets away. He had had to give back the bowl and pay a so-called “expense allowance.” His black eye was part of it; those were the rules.

Manólis said what everyone was thinking: Pocol had been tortured, and if they had been part of the discussion, he would, of course, have given them up. If someone had felt confident enough to kill Pocol, their own lives were not going to be worth much. Samir said the thing with the bowl had to be settled, and quick. The others agreed, and finally Özcan thought maybe they should get a lawyer.

The three young men told me their story; that is to say, Manólis did the talking, but he kept wandering off into the philosophical and had trouble concentrating. The whole thing took quite some time. Then they said they weren’t sure if Tanata knew who had done the break-in. They laid the money, the watches, and the little lacquered casket with the tea bowl on the conference table and asked me to return the objects to the owner. I recorded everything as accurately as I could, and I refused to take the cash, as that would have been money laundering. I telephoned Tanata’s secretary and arranged an appointment for that afternoon.

Tanata’s house was on a quiet street in Dahlem. There was no doorbell; an invisible electric eye triggered a signal, a dark gong sound, like something in a Zen monastery. The secretary gave me his card with both hands, fingers outstretched, which seemed a little pointless, since I was already there. Then I remembered that the exchange of cards is a ritual in Japan, and I reciprocated. The secretary was affable and serious. He led me to a room with earth-colored walls and a floor of black wood. We seated ourselves at a table on hard stools; otherwise, the room was bare, except for a dark green ikebana arrangement in a niche in the wall. The indirect lighting was warm and subdued.

I opened my attaché case and laid out the objects. The secretary placed the watches on a leather tray that was standing ready, but he didn’t touch the closed casket with the tea bowl. I asked him to sign the receipt I had prepared. He excused himself and disappeared behind a sliding door.

It was absolutely silent.

Then he came back, signed the receipt for the watches and the tea bowl, took the tray with him, and left me alone again. The casket remained unopened.

·    ·    ·

Tanata was a small man and looked desiccated somehow. He greeted me in the Western fashion, seemed in a good mood, and told me about his family in Japan.

After a time, he went to the table, opened the casket, and lifted out the bowl. He held it at the base with one hand and turned it slowly before his eyes with the other. It was a matcha bowl, in which gleaming green tea powder is beaten with a bamboo whisk. The bowl was black, with a glaze over its dark body. Such bowls were not turned on a wheel, but shaped by hand, and none of them resembled any other. The most ancient school of pottery signed its ceramics with the character raku. A friend had once told me that ancient Japan lived on in these bowls.

Tanata placed it carefully back in the casket and said, “The bowl was made for our family by Chojiro in 1581.” Chojiro was the founder of the raku tradition. The bowl stared out of its red silk like a black eye. “You know, there has already been a war over this bowl. It was a long time ago, and the war lasted almost five years. I’m glad things went quicker this time.” He let the lid of the casket snap shut. It echoed.

I said the money would also be repaid. He shook his head.

“What money?” he asked.

“The money in your safe.”

“There wasn’t any money in there.”

I didn’t understand him at first.

“My clients said—”

“If there had been any money in there,” he interrupted me, “it might have been untaxed.”

“Yes?”

“And since a receipt would have to be presented to the police, questions would be asked. When the charges were presented, I never admitted that the money had been stolen.”

We finally agreed that I would inform the police of the return of the bowl and the watches. Naturally, Tanata did not ask me who the criminals were, and I didn’t ask about Pocol and Wagner. Only the police asked questions; I was able to invoke the attorney-client privilege to protect my clients.

Samir, Özcan, and Manólis survived.

Samir received a call inviting him and his friends to a café on the Kurfürstendamm. The man who met them was polite. He showed them Pocol’s and Wagner’s dying minutes on his cell-phone display, apologized for the quality of the images, and invited the three of them to share some cake with him. They didn’t touch the cake, but the next day they returned the 120,000 euros. They knew what was proper, and paid an additional 28,000 euros “for expenses”; it was all they could raise. The friendly gentleman said it really wasn’t necessary, and took the money.

Manólis retired, took over one of his family’s restaurants, got married, and settled down. They say there are pictures of fjords and fishing boats in his restaurants, and Finnish vodka, and that he’s planning to take his family and move to Finland.

Özcan and Samir turned to drug dealing; they never stole anything again that they couldn’t classify.

Tanata’s cleaning lady, who’d provided the tip that triggered the robbery, took a holiday in Anatolia two years later; she’d forgotten the whole thing long ago. She went swimming. Although the sea was calm that day, she hit her head on a rock and drowned.

I once saw Tanata again at the Philharmonic Hall in Berlin; he was sitting four rows behind me. When I turned around, he saluted me amicably but silently. Six months later, he was dead. His body was taken back to Japan, the house in Dahlem was sold, and his secretary also returned to his homeland.

The bowl is now the centerpiece of the Tanata Foundation Museum in Tokyo.

Postscript

When Manólis met Samir and Özcan, he was under suspicion for drug dealing. The suspicion was unfounded, and the court-ordered wire tap was disconnected shortly thereafter. But the first contact between Manólis and Samir was recorded. Özcan listened to it on the cell phone’s loudspeaker and joined in.

Samir: “Are you Greek?”

Manólis: “I’m a Finn.”

Samir: “You don’t sound like a Finn.”

Manólis: “I’m a Finn.”

Samir: “You sound like a Greek.”

Manólis: “So what. Just because my mother and my father and my grandmothers and my grandfathers and everyone in my family are Greeks doesn’t mean I have to run around my whole life being a Greek. I hate olive trees and tzatziki and that idiotic dance. I’m Finnish. Every particle of me is Finnish. I’m an inner Finn.”

Özcan to Samir: “He also looks like a Greek.”

Samir to Özcan: “Let him be a Finn if he wants to be a Finn.”

Özcan to Samir: “He doesn’t even look Swedish.” (Özcan knew a Swede from school.)

Samir: “Why are you a Finn?”

Manólis: “Because of the thing with the Greeks.”

Samir: “Huh?”

Özcan: “Huh?”

Manólis: “It’s been going on for hundreds of years with the Greeks. Imagine there’s a ship going down.”

Özcan: “Why?”

Manólis: “Because it’s sprung a leak or the captain’s drunk.”

Özcan: “But why has the ship sprung a leak?”

Manólis: “Shit, it’s only an example.”

Özcan: “Hmm.”

Manólis: “The ship’s just sinking, okay?”

Özcan: “Hmm.”

Manólis: “Everyone drowns. Everyone. Got it? Only one Greek survives. He swims and swims and swims and eventually makes it to shore. He pukes all the salt water out of his throat. He pukes out of his mouth. Out of his nose. Out of every pore. He spits it all out, until he eventually falls asleep, half-dead. The guy is the only survivor. All the rest of them are dead. He lies on the beach and sleeps. When he wakes up, he realizes he’s the only one who’s survived. So he stands up and slays the next person he meets who’s out for a walk. Just like that. Only when the other guy is dead is everything evened out.”

Samir: “Huh?”

Özcan: “Huh?”

Manólis: “D’you understand? He has to kill someone else, so that the one who didn’t drown is dead, too. The other guy has to stand in for him. Minus one, plus one. Get it?”

Samir: “No.”

Özcan: “Where was the leak?”

Samir: “When are we going to meet?”

The Cello

Tackler’s dinner jacket was light blue, his shirt pink. His double chin overflowed both collar and bow tie; his jacket strained over his stomach and made folds across his chest. He stood between his daughter, Theresa, and his fourth wife, both of whom towered over him. The black-haired fingers of his left hand clutched his daughter’s hip. They lay there like a dark animal.

The reception had cost him a lot of money, but he felt it had been worth it, because they had all come: the first minister of the state, the bankers, the powerful and the beautiful, and, most important of all, the famous music critic. That was all he wanted to think about right now. It was Theresa’s party.

Theresa was twenty at the time, a classical slender beauty with an almost perfectly symmetrical face. She seemed calm and composed, and only a little vein in her neck betrayed how fast her heart was beating.

After a short speech by her father, she took her seat on the red-carpeted stage and tuned her cello. Her brother, Leonhard, sat next to her on a stool to turn the pages of the sheet music. The contrast between the two of them could not have been greater. Leonhard was a head shorter than Theresa; he had inherited his father’s features and physique but not his toughness. Sweat ran down his red face into his shirt; the edge of his collar had darkened with it. He smiled out at the audience, friendly and softhearted.

The guests sat on tiny chairs. They gradually fell silent, and the lights were dimmed. And while I was still deciding whether, in fact, I was going to leave the garden and go back into the salon, she began to play. She played the first three of Bach’s six cello suites, and after a few bars I realized I would never be able to forget Theresa. On that warm summer evening in the grand salon of the nineteenth-century villa, with its tall mullioned glass doors opened wide onto the park that was all lit up, I experienced one of those rare moments of absolute happiness that only music can give us.

Tackler was a second-generation building contractor. He and his father were self-assertive, intelligent men who’d made their money in Frankfurt with real estate. All his life, his father had carried a revolver in his right trouser pocket and a roll of cash in the left. Tackler no longer needed a weapon.

Three years after Leonhard was born, his mother visited one of her husband’s new high-rise buildings. The topping-out ceremony was taking place on the eighteenth floor. Someone had forgotten to secure a parapet. The last Tackler saw of his wife was her handbag and a champagne glass, which she had set down next to her on a table.

In the years that followed, a whole cavalcade of “mothers” paraded past the children. None of them stayed longer than three years. Tackler ran a prosperous home; there was a driver, a cook, a whole series of cleaning women, and two gardeners for the park. He didn’t have time to occupy himself with his children’s upbringing, so the one constant in their lives was an elderly nurse. She had already brought up Tackler, smelled of lavender, and was known to one and all simply as Etta. Her main interest was ducks. In her two-room attic apartment in Tackler’s house, she had hung five stuffed specimens on the walls, and even the brown felt hat she always wore when she went out had two blue drake’s feathers tucked into the band. Children didn’t especially appeal to her.

Etta had always stayed; she’d long ago become one of the family. Tackler considered childhood a waste of time and barely remembered his own. He trusted Etta, because she agreed with him about the fundamentals of child rearing. They should grow up with discipline and without what Tackler called “conceit.” Sometimes severity was required.

Theresa and Leonhard had to earn their own pocket money. In summer, they weeded dandelions in the garden and received a ha’penny for each plant—“but only with its roots; otherwise you get nothing,” said Etta. She counted the individual plants as meanly as she counted the pennies. In winter, they had to shovel snow. Etta paid by the yard.

When Leonhard was nine, he ran away from the house. He climbed a pine tree in the park and waited for them to come searching for him. He imagined first Etta and then his father despairing and lamenting his flight. Nobody despaired. Before supper, Etta called that if he didn’t come right now, there would be nothing more to eat and he’d get his bottom smacked. Leonhard gave up. His clothes were full of resin, and he was given a slap on the ears.

At Christmas, Tackler gave the children soap and pullovers. There was only one time when a business friend, who’d made a lot of money with Tackler in the course of the year, gave Leonhard a toy gun and Theresa a doll’s kitchen. Etta took the toys down to the cellar. “They don’t need that sort of thing,” she said, and Tackler, who hadn’t been listening, agreed.

Etta considered their upbringing complete when brother and sister could behave themselves at table, speak proper German, and otherwise keep quiet. She told Tackler she thought they’d come to a bad end. They were too soft, not real Tacklers like him and his father. It was a sentence he remembered.

Etta got Alzheimer’s, slowly regressed, and became gentler. She left her birds to a museum of local history, which had no use for them and ordered the stuffed creatures destroyed. Tackler and the two children were the only ones at her funeral. On the way back, he said, “So, now that’s out of the way.”

Leonhard worked for Tackler during the vacations. He would rather have gone off with friends, but he had no money. That was how Tackler wanted it. He took his son to one of the building sites, handed him over to the foreman, and told him to “really let him have it.” The foreman did what he could, and when Leonhard threw up at the end of the second day from exhaustion, Tackler said he’d get used to it. He himself had sometimes slept on building sites with his father when he was Leonhard’s age and shat in the open air like the other bar benders. Leonhard shouldn’t get any ideas he was “better” than the others.

Theresa had vacation jobs, too; she worked in the company bookkeeping department. Like Leonhard, she received only 30 percent of the average salary. “You’re no help; you actually create work. Your pay is a gift, not something you’ve earned,” said Tackler. If they wanted to go to the movies, Tackler gave the two of them a total of ten euros, and since they had to take the bus, it was only enough for one ticket. They didn’t dare tell him that. Sometimes Tackler’s driver took them into town secretly and gave them a little money—he had children himself and knew his boss.

Other than Tackler’s sister, who was employed in the company and had always given up every one of her secrets to her brother since her own childhood, there were no relatives. The children began by fearing their father, then hated him, until finally his world became so alien to them that they had nothing more to say to him.

Tackler didn’t despise Leonhard, but he loathed his softness. He thought he had to harden him; “forge” him was the way he put it. When Leonhard was fifteen, he put up a picture in his room of a ballet production he had gone to with his class. Tackler tore it off the wall and roared at him that he’d better be careful or he’d be turning gay. He was too fat, Tackler said to Leonhard; he’d never get a girlfriend like that.

Theresa spent every minute with her cello and her music teacher in Frankfurt. Tackler didn’t understand her, so he left her in peace—with one exception. It was summertime, shortly after Theresa’s sixteenth birthday. She went skinny-dipping in the pool. When she came out of the water, Tackler was standing at the edge. He’d been drinking. He looked at her as if she were a stranger, picked up the towel, and began to dry her. As he touched her breasts, he smelled of whiskey. She ran into the house. She never used the pool again.

On the rare occasions they all had dinner together, conversation revolved around Tackler’s themes of watches, food, and cars. Theresa and Leonhard knew the price of every automobile and every famous make of watch. It was an abstract game. Sometimes their father showed them financial statements, stock market and business reports. “This will all belong to you someday,” he said, and Theresa whispered to Leonhard that he was quoting from a movie. “The inner self,” he said, “is nonsense.” It gained no one anything.

All the children had was each other. When Theresa was accepted at the conservatory, they decided they would both leave their father together. They wanted to tell him at dinner and had rehearsed it, working out how he would react and what their responses should be. When they began, Tackler said he didn’t have time today, and disappeared. They had to wait for three weeks; then Theresa took the lead. The two of them thought that if she were the one, Tackler would at least be unable to hit her. She said they were both going to leave Bad Homburg now. “Leave Bad Homburg” sounded better, they thought, than saying it directly. Theresa said she was going to take Leonhard with her, that they would make their way somehow.

Tackler didn’t understand, and kept eating. When he asked Theresa to pass him the bread, Leonhard screamed, “You’ve tortured us enough,” and Theresa, more quietly, said, “We don’t ever want to become like you.” Tackler let his knife drop onto his plate. It echoed. Then he stood up without a word, went to his car, and drove to his girlfriend. It was almost 3:00 a.m. when he returned.

Later that same night, Tackler sat alone in the library. A silent home movie was running on the screen he’d had built into the bookshelves. It had been transferred to video from a Super-8 camera. The footage was overexposed.

His first wife is holding the two children by the hand; Theresa is probably three years old and Leonhard two. His wife says something; her mouth moves soundlessly. She lets go of Theresa’s hand and points into the distance. The camera follows her arm; there is the ruin of a castle in the blurry background. Pan back to Leonhard, who hides himself behind his mother’s leg and cries. Stones and grass blur in the foreground; the camera is passed to someone else while it’s still running. It pans upward again, showing Tackler in jeans and an open shirt, his chest hair exposed. He roars with soundless laughter, he holds Theresa up to the sun, he kisses her, he waves to the camera. The image flares and the film breaks off.

That night, Tackler decided to arrange a farewell concert for Theresa. His contacts should suffice; he would “put her right on top.” Tackler didn’t want to be a bad person. He wrote each of his children a check for 250,000 euros and put them on the breakfast table. He felt that was enough.

The day after the concert, there was an article in the regional newspaper that bordered on the euphoric. The great music critic certified that Theresa had a “brilliant future” as a musician.

She didn’t register at the conservatory. Theresa believed her gift to be so great that she could still take her time. For now, it was something else that mattered. The two of them spent most of the next three years traveling through Europe and the United States. She gave a few private concerts and otherwise played only for her brother. Tackler’s money made them independent, at least for a while. They remained inseparable. They took none of their love affairs seriously, and there was scarcely a day in those years that either of them spent away from the other. They seemed to be free.

Almost two years to the day after her concert in Bad Homburg, I encountered the two of them again at a party near Florence, in the Castello di Tornano, a ruined castle from the eleventh century, surrounded by olive trees and cypresses amid the vineyards. The host described them both as “gilded youth” when they arrived in a 1960s open sports car. Theresa kissed him and Leonhard doffed his idiotic Borsalino straw hat with studied elegance.

When I told Theresa later that I had never heard the cello suites performed with more intensity than in her father’s house, she said, “It’s the prelude to the first suite. Not the sixth, which everyone thinks is the most important and is the most difficult. No, it’s the first.” She took a mouthful of wine, leaned forward, and whispered in my ear, “D’you understand, the prelude to the first. It’s all of life packed into three minutes.” Then she laughed.

At the end of the following summer, the two of them were in Sicily. They spent a few days with a commodities trader who had rented a house there for the summer and was somewhat infatuated with Theresa.

Leonhard woke up with a light fever. He thought it was due to the alcohol of the previous night. He didn’t want to be ill, not on a glorious day like this, not when they were having the time of their lives. The
E. coli
bacteria colonized his body at great speed. They had been in the water he’d drunk at a gas station two days before.

They found an old Vespa in the garage and were headed toward the sea. The apple was lying in the middle of the asphalt; it had fallen off one of the harvest trucks. It was almost round and glinted in the noonday light. Theresa said something, and Leonhard turned his head to hear her properly. The front wheel went over the apple and slid sideways. Leonhard lost control. Theresa was lucky; she only sprained her shoulder and had a couple of abrasions. Leonhard’s head got wedged between the back wheel and a boulder and burst open.

During the first night in the hospital, his condition deteriorated. Nobody tested his blood; there were other things to do. Theresa called her father and he used the corporate Learjet to send a doctor from Frankfurt; the man arrived too late. Leonhard’s kidneys had released their poison into his bloodstream. Theresa sat in the waiting area outside the operating theater. The doctor held her hand as he spoke to her. The air-conditioning was loud, and the pane of glass Theresa had been staring at for hours was clouded with dust. The doctor said it was a sepsis of the urinary tract, engendering multiple organ failures. Theresa didn’t understand what he was telling her. Urine had spread through Leonhard’s body, and the chance of survival was 20 percent. The doctor kept talking, and his words gave her some distance. Theresa had not slept for almost forty hours. When he went back into the operating room, she closed her eyes. He had said “Decease,” and she saw the word in front of her in black letters. They had nothing to do with her brother. She said, “No.” Just “No.” Nothing else.