Jakob Arjouni by One Man One Murder

Author:One Man, One Murder
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781612191010
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2011-07-12T05:00:00+00:00

11

Loaded down with sandwiches, cookies, chocolate, newspapers, a bottle of Scotch, and two bottles of water, I left the main railway station. It was almost ten-thirty at night. I hurried across the square and crossed the first street. At the second crossing I had to stop for a herd of tourist buses. Suddenly a bell rang behind me, and someone screeched hysterically: “Can’t you see? This is a bicycle lane!”

I whipped around and roared: “Don’t you know how to ride that thing? You’ve got ten yards leeway there.”

The bicyclist braked, turned, and approached me with a stem missionary look on his face. It was a young man in a green-glittering Fifties-style outfit, stiff blow-dried hair, and a T-shirt that said Born to Be Wild.

“This is a bicycle lane. It’s for bicycles. I could have knocked you down, and it would have been your fault,” he informed me, nodding to his own words and coming to a stop in front of me. It was obvious that he expected some sign of gratitude or remorse, and it seemed to me that he would have liked to prolong our conversation.

I left him standing and ran across the street to my car. As I passed him a short while later behind the railway station, I was tempted to show him a perfectly legal brake test.

I drove past the convention building and the Plaza Hotel and on to the autobahn, away from the city lights into dark blue night. I passed the time by trying to calculate how long twenty thousand marks would last in some southern clime. If I had kept going, and the Opel had held up, which was unlikely, I could have been sitting under a straw roof on a beach the following morning, enjoying my shrimp and white wine in the company of a waitress and Whitney Houston on the jukebox. I leaned back. It was warm in the car, and the engine was humming almost perfectly. The waitress came to my table and stayed there all the way to the Gellersheim exit.

I stopped by the first phone booth to call Weidenbusch. His phone rang seven times.

“Yes, hello?”

“Kayankaya. Have you abandoned your position?”

“No, no—I was just taking a bath.”

“Well, what’s up?”

“What do you mean?”

There was a tremor in his voice. He must have had a hard day, probably sitting next to the phone, stripping his necktie down to individual fibers, chewing on one piece of peppermint candy after another.

“You did call me this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes. I just wanted to know what you had found out.”

“A whole lot. If I’m not totally mistaken, you’ll have your girlfriend back soon.”

His “Really?” sounded more frightened than delighted. I was taken aback. “Maybe you’re not so happy about that?”

“No, no …” There was a moment’s silence. Then he took a deep breath and said:

“But, you see, I’ve been thinking about all of it today. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it was not a good idea.”

“What wasn’t a good idea?”

“Sri Dao and me. There’s the language problem, and, and God knows what might come up.

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