The Cambodian Book Of The Dead (Detective Maier Mysteries 1) by Tom Vater

Author:Tom Vater [Vater, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Next Chapter
Published: 2021-08-18T22:00:00+00:00

II

The White Spider

22

Thirit’s Wisdom

You could rely on the Germans, even when it came to death.

They’d phoned Dani Stricker immediately after Thirit, her turtle, had died. Dani wasn’t surprised. Her time in Germany was coming to an end. Without Harald, she felt more like a stranger every day, more than she’d felt for the past twenty years.

She hurried through the rainy park to the Mannheim botanical house.

Harald had brought her here when she’d first arrived in Germany. The heavy, humid air reminded Dani of the rainy season back home. She got homesick every time she entered the huge building, but she’d never told Harald. And they’d come back, as often as Harald had found the time, to admire the crocodiles in the entrance hall, and the Mongolian gerbils racing about in their enclosure, or they walked through the butterfly garden, before they drifted across to the reptiles who lived in several rows of glass tanks. Only the large turtles lived outside.

Citizens could support one of these slow creatures and for her twentieth birthday, Harald had registered Dani as the godmother of Thirit, a tortoise from Southeast Asia.

In the years that followed, Thirit had become the closest connection Dani had to home. Once she had mastered some German, she’d taken the tram to the park every month and had told Thirit about her childhood. Thirit had known all of Dani’s secrets, had listened to the young Cambodian woman for hours, as she had told her of her unfortunate sister Kaley. Thirit had had to listen to terrible stories, of murdered monks Dani had seen lying on the road in her village, of communes where people only worked and never ate, of friends’ parents who had been picked up for ‘training’ by Angkar one night and had never been seen again. Thirit had never commented or thrown in a critical remark. A real friend never did that.

The guard of the botanical house, a young man in a muscle shirt, welcomed Dani. He was utterly taken by her, she noticed. Some western men were fascinated by Asian women and the park employee probably had no idea that she was ten years older than him. She felt something like longing, but the feeling was quickly swept away by thoughts of the coming weeks.

“Very sorry, Frau Stricker, but Thirit died last night. These animals have a life expectancy of ten to fifteen years. Yours was almost twenty years old.”

Dani wasn’t sure how she was to react. The Germans expressed their commiserations like other people, but surely no one expected tears for a turtle.

Dani didn’t have any.

“Can I see Thirit one more time?”

The young man shrugged his shoulders in embarrassment and looked at the floor.

“Unfortunately, one of my colleagues already disposed of the animal. We had hoped that you might want to sponsor another turtle…”

Dani shook her head sadly.

“I’m leaving Mannheim in a few days. Thanks for informing me.”

She left the man standing there, admiring her, and walked through the doors of the botanical house.

Her life in Mannheim was over.

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