Crime (4 page)

On the sixth day after Leonhard’s admission to hospital, his condition stabilized. He could be flown to Berlin. When he was admitted to the Charité Hospital, his body was covered with black, leathery, necrotic patches that indicated the death of cellular tissue. The doctors operated fourteen times. The thumb, forefinger, and fourth finger of the left hand were amputated. The left toes were cut off at the joint, as was the front half of the right foot and parts of the back. All that remained was a deformed lump that could barely support any weight, with bones and cartilage pressing visibly against the skin.

Leonhard lay in an artificially induced coma. He had survived, but the effects of the injury to his head could not yet be measured.

The hippocampus is Poseidon’s pack animal, a Greek sea monster, half horse, half worm. It gives its name to a very ancient part of the brain within the temporal lobe. It’s where the work is done that transforms short-term memories into long-term ones. Leonhard’s hippocampus had been damaged. When he was revived from the coma after nine weeks, he asked Theresa who she was and then who he was. He had lost all power of recall and couldn’t hold on to any perception for longer than three or four minutes. After endless tests, the doctors tried to explain to him that it was amnesia, both anterograde and retrograde. Leonhard understood their explanations, but after three minutes and forty seconds he had forgotten them again. He also forgot the fact that he forgot.

And when Theresa was tending him, all he saw was a beautiful woman.

After two months, they were able to move together into their father’s Berlin apartment. Every day a nurse came for three hours and otherwise Theresa took care of everything. At first, she still invited friends to come for dinner; then she ceased to be able to bear the way they looked at Leonhard. Tackler came to see them once a month.

They were lonely months. Gradually, Theresa deteriorated; her hair turned to straw and her skin lost its color. One evening, she took the cello out of its case; she hadn’t touched it for months. She played in the half darkness of the room. Leonhard was lying on the bed, dozing. At a certain point, he pushed off the bedclothes and began to masturbate. She stopped playing and turned away to the window. He asked her to come to him. Theresa looked at him. He sat up, asked to kiss her. She shook her head. He let himself fall back and said at least she could unbutton her blouse. The scarred stump of his right foot lay on the white sheet like a lump of flesh. She went to him and stroked his cheek. Then she took off her clothes, sat down on the chair, and played with her eyes closed. She waited until he fell asleep, stood up, used a towel to wipe the sperm off his stomach, covered him up, and kissed his forehead.

She went into the bathroom and vomited.

Although the doctors had ruled out any possibility that Leonhard could recover his memory, the cello seemed to move him. When she was playing, she seemed to feel a pale, almost imperceptible connection to her former life, a weak reflection of the intensity she missed so much. Sometimes Leonhard actually remembered the cello the next day. He talked about it, and even if he couldn’t make any connections, something did seem to remain captured in his memory. Theresa now played for him every evening, he almost always masturbated, and she almost always collapsed in the bathroom afterward and wept.

Six months after the last operation, Leonhard’s scars began to hurt. The doctors said further amputations would be required. After doing a PET scan, they told her he would also soon lose the power of speech. Theresa knew that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.

The twenty-sixth of November was a cold, gray autumn day; darkness came early. Theresa had put candles on the table and pushed Leonhard to his place in his wheelchair. She had bought the ingredients for the fish soup in Berlin’s best market; he had always liked it. The soup, the peas, the venison roast, the chocolate mousse, even the wine were all laced with Luminal, a barbiturate she had no problem obtaining to treat Leonhard’s pain. She gave it to him in small amounts so that he wouldn’t vomit it up again. She herself ate nothing and waited.

Leonhard grew sleepy. She pushed him into the bathroom and ran water in the big tub. She undressed him. He barely had the strength anymore to haul himself into the tub by using the new handles. Then she took off her own clothes and got into the warm water with him. He sat in front of her, his head leaning back on her breasts, breathing calmly and steadily. As children, they had often sat in the bath this way, because Etta didn’t want to waste water. Theresa held him in a tight embrace, her head on his shoulder. When he had fallen asleep, she kissed his neck and let him slide under the surface. Leonhard breathed in deeply. There was no death struggle; the Luminal had disabled his capacity to control his muscles. His lungs filled with water and he drowned. His head lay between her legs, his eyes were closed, and his long hair floated on the surface. After two hours, she climbed out of the cold bath, covered her dead brother with a towel, and called me.

She confessed, but it was no mere confession. She sat for more than seven hours in front of the two investigators and dictated her life into the record. She rendered an account of herself. She began with her childhood and ended with the death of her brother. She left nothing out. She didn’t cry; she didn’t break down. She sat as straight as a die and spoke steadily, calmly, and in polished sentences. There was no need for intervening questions. While her statement was being typed up, we smoked a cigarette in an adjoining room. She said she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore; she had said all there was to say. “I don’t have anything else,” she said.

Naturally, she was ordered to be detained because of the murder charge. I visited her almost every day in prison. She arranged for books to be sent in, and didn’t leave her cell even when the prisoners had their yard exercise. Reading was her anesthetic. When we met, she didn’t want to talk about her brother. Nor did the imminent trial interest her. She preferred to read to me from her books, things she’d sought out in her cell. It was like a series of lectures in a prison. I liked her warm voice, but at the time I didn’t understand: It was the only way she had left to express herself.

On the twenty-fourth of December, I was with her until the end of visiting time. Then they locked the bulletproof glass doors behind me. Outside, it had been snowing. Everything was peaceful; it was Christmas. Theresa was taken back to her cell; she sat down at the little table and wrote a letter to her father. Then she tore the bedsheet, wound it into a rope, and hanged herself from the window handle.

On the twenty-fifth of December, Tackler received a call from the attorney on duty. After he’d hung up, he opened the safe, took out his father’s revolver, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

·    ·    ·

The prison administration placed Theresa’s belongings in the house vault for safekeeping. Under our powers of criminal procedure, we as lawyers have the right to receive objects on behalf of our clients. At some point, the authorities sent a package with her clothes and her books. We forwarded it to her aunt in Frankfurt.

I kept one of her books; she had written my name on the flyleaf. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
. The book lay untouched in my desk drawer for two years before I could pick it up again. She had marked the passages she wanted to read to me in blue, and drawn tiny little staves of music notes next to them. Only one place was marked in red, the last sentence, and when I read it, I can still hear her voice:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
.

The Hedgehog

The judges put on their robes in the conference room, one of the jury arrived a few minutes too late, and the constable was replaced after he complained of a toothache. The accused was a heavily built Lebanese man, Walid Abu Fataris, and he was silent from the very beginning. The witnesses testified, the victim exaggerated a little, and the evidence was analyzed. The case being heard was that of a perfectly normal robbery, which normally carries a sentence of five to fifteen years. The judges were in agreement: Given the previous record of the accused, they would give him eight years; there was no question about his guilt or his criminal responsibility. The trial babbled on all day. Nothing special, then, but there had been no expectation of that anyhow.

It turned three o’clock and the time for the main hearing would soon be over. There wasn’t much left to do for today. The presiding judge looked at the witness list; only Karim, a brother of the accused, was still to be heard. Hmmm, thought the presiding judge, we all know what to expect from alibis provided by relatives, and he eyed the witness over his reading glasses. He had only one question for this witness—namely, if he actually did mean to assert that his brother Walid had been at home when the pawnshop on the Wartenstrasse was looted. The judge put the question to Karim as simply as possible; he even asked twice if Karim had understood it.

No one had expected that Karim would even open his mouth. The presiding judge had explained to him at length that, as the brother of the accused, he had the right to remain silent. Now they were all waiting to see what he would do; his brother’s future might hang on it. The judge was impatient, the lawyer bored, and one of the jury kept staring at the clock because he wanted to make the 5:00 p.m. train to Dresden. Karim was the last witness in this main hearing; the minor ones would get heard by the court at the end. Karim knew what he was doing. He’d always known.

Karim grew up in a family of criminals. It was a much-told tale about his uncle that he’d shot six men in Lebanon over a crate of tomatoes. Each of Karim’s eight brothers had a record that took up to half an hour to read out in court at any trial. They had stolen, robbed, pulled con tricks, blackmailed, and committed perjury. The only things for which they hadn’t yet been found guilty were murder and manslaughter.

For generations in this family, cousins had married cousins and nephews had married nieces. When Karim started school, the teachers groaned—“Yet another Abu Fataris”—and then treated him like an idiot. He was made to sit in the back row, and his first-grade teacher told him, at age six, that he wasn’t to draw attention to himself, get into fights, or talk at all. So Karim didn’t say a word. It quickly became clear to him that he must not show he was different. His brothers smacked him on the back of the head because they didn’t understand what he said. That is, if he was lucky. His classmates—thanks to a municipal integration plan, the first grade consisted of 80 percent foreigners—made fun of him when he tried to explain things to them. And just like his brothers, they, too, usually hit him whenever he seemed too different. So Karim deliberately set out to get bad grades. It was the only thing he could do.

By the time he was ten years old, he had taught himself stochastic theory, integral calculus, and analytical geometry from a textbook. He had stolen the book from the teachers’ library. As for class work, he had figured out how many of the ridiculous exercises he had to get wrong in order to be awarded an inconspicuous C–. Sometimes he had the feeling that his brain buzzed when he came upon a mathematical problem in the book that was reputed to be insoluble. Those were the moments that defined his personal happiness.

He lived, as did all his brothers, even the eldest of them, who was twenty-six, with his mother; his father had died shortly after he was born. The family apartment in Neukölln had six rooms. Six rooms for ten people. He was the youngest, so he got the box room. The skylight was made of milky glass and there was a set of pine shelves. This space was where things found a home after no one wanted them anymore: broom heads without broomsticks, wash buckets without handles, cables for appliances now lost and forgotten. He sat there all day in front of a computer, and while his mother assumed he’d be busying himself with video games like his big strong brothers, he was reading the classics on Gutenberg.org.

When he was twelve, he made his last attempt to be like his brothers. He wrote a program that could override the electronic firewalls in the post office savings bank and unobtrusively debit a matter of hundredths of a cent from millions of accounts. His brothers didn’t understand what “the moron,” as they called him, had given them. They smacked him on the back of the head again and threw away the CD with the program on it. Walid was the only one to sense that Karim outclassed them, and he protected him against his cruder brothers.

When Karim turned eighteen, he finished school. He had made sure that he would barely pass his final exams. No one in his family had ever gotten that far. He borrowed eight thousand euros from Walid. Walid thought Karim needed the money for a drug deal and gave it to him gladly. Karim, in the meantime, had learned so much about the stock market that he was trading on the foreign-exchange market. Within a year, he had earned almost 700,000 euros. He rented a little apartment in a nice part of the city, left his family’s place every morning, and took endless roundabout routes to be sure no one was following him. He furnished his refuge, bought books on mathematics and a faster computer, and spent his time trading on the stock exchange and reading.

His family, assuming “the moron” was now dealing dope, was content. Of course he was far too slight to be a true Abu Fataris. Karim never went to the kickboxing and extreme-sports club, but he always wore gold chains like the others, and satin shirts in garish colors, and black nappa leather jackets. He talked Neukölln slang and even earned a little respect for never having been arrested. His brothers didn’t take him seriously. If they’d been asked about him, the answer would have been simply that he was part of the family. Beyond that, nobody thought about him twice.

Karim’s double life went unnoticed. No one was aware either that he owned a completely different set of clothes or that he’d used night school for fun to sail through his school-graduation certificate and attended lectures in mathematics twice a week at the Technical University. He had a small but significant fortune, he paid his taxes, and he had a nice girlfriend, who was studying comparative literature and knew nothing about Neukölln.

Karim had read the charges against Walid. Everyone in the family had seen them, but he was the only one who understood their significance. Walid had raided a pawnbroker, robbed him of 14,490 euros, and raced home to establish an alibi. The victim had called the police and given them an exact description of the perpetrator; it was immediately clear to the two investigators that it had to be one of the Abu Fataris family. The brothers looked almost unbelievably alike, a circumstance that had already saved them more than once. No eyewitness could tell them apart at a lineup, and even tapes from security cameras didn’t pick up much difference.

This time, the policemen moved fast. Walid had hidden the loot on his way back and thrown his weapon into the River Spree. When the police stormed the apartment, he was sitting on the sofa, drinking tea. He was wearing an apple green T-shirt with the luminous yellow slogan
FORCED TO WORK
on it in English. He didn’t know what it meant, but he liked it. The police arrested him. On the grounds of “imminent danger,” they made a mess of a house search, slicing open the sofas, emptying drawers onto the floor, overturning cupboards, and even ripping the baseboards off the walls on the suspicion that these might conceal hiding places. They found nothing.

But Walid remained under arrest—the pawnbroker had described his T-shirt exactly. The two policemen were pleased to finally have picked up an Abu Fataris who could be put away for at least five years.

Karim sat on the witness chair and looked up at the judges’ bench. He knew that nobody in the courtroom would believe a word he said if he merely gave Walid an alibi; when it came down to it, he was an Abu Fataris, one of the family pursued by the district attorney’s office as major repeat criminals. Everyone here expected him to lie. That wouldn’t work. Walid would be swallowed up in the prison system for years.

Karim recited to himself the saying of Archilochus, the slave’s son, which was his guiding motto: “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog only one thing.” The judges and the prosecutors might be foxes, but he was the hedgehog and he’d learned his skills.

“Your Honor …” he said with a catch in his voice. He knew this wouldn’t move anyone, but it would raise the general level of attention a little. He was making an enormous effort to sound stupid but sincere. “Your Honor, Walid was at home all evening.” He let the pause linger as he saw out of the corner of his eye that the prosecutor was writing a provision that would be the basis of a legal proceeding against him for perjury.

“So, indeed, at home all evening …” said the presiding judge, and leaned forward. “But the victim identified Walid unequivocally.”

The prosecutor shook his head, and the defense attorney buried himself in his papers.

Karim knew the photos of the scene of the arrest from the files. Four policemen who looked exactly like policemen: little blond mustaches, pouches, fanny packs, sneakers. And then there was Walid: a head taller and twice as broad in the shoulders, dark-skinned, green T-shirt with yellow writing. A ninety-year-old half-blind lady, who hadn’t been there, could have “identified him unequivocally.”

Karim’s voice caught again, and he wiped his sleeve across his nose. It came away with little things stuck to it. He looked at it and said, “No, Your Honor, it wasn’t Walid. Please believe me.”

“I remind you once again that when you testify here, you are under an oath to tell the truth.”

“But I am.”

“You are risking severe punishment. You could go to jail,” said the judge, wanting to issue a caution that would be on Karim’s level. Then he said rather superciliously, “And who would it have been if it wasn’t Walid?” He looked around and the prosecutor smiled.

“Indeed, who was it?” the prosecutor echoed, which earned him a punishing look from the presiding judge, because this was
his
turn to examine the witness.

Karim hesitated for as long as he could, counting silently to five. Then he said, “Imad.”

“What? What do you mean, Imad?”

“That it was Imad, not Walid,” said Karim.

“And who is this Imad?”

“Imad is my other brother,” said Karim.

The presiding judge looked at him in amazement, and even the defense attorney suddenly woke up again. An Abu Fataris breaks all the rules and incriminates someone else in his own family? they were all asking themselves.

“But Imad left before the police got there,” Karim added.

“Oh yes?” The presiding judge was beginning to get angry. Idiotic babble, he was thinking.

“He gave me this thing here,” said Karim. Knowing his testimony wasn’t going to change anything, he had begun months before the trial to withdraw varying amounts of money from his accounts. Now that money, in the exact same denominations that Walid had stolen, was in a brown envelope, and he passed it to the judge.

“What’s in it?” the judge asked.

“I don’t know,” said Karim.

The judge tore open the envelope and pulled out the money. He wasn’t thinking about fingerprints, but there wouldn’t have been any anyway. He counted slowly out loud: “Fourteen thousand four hundred and ninety euros. And Imad gave you this on the night of the seventeenth of April?”

“Yes, Your Honor, he did.”

The presiding judge paused for thought. Then he posed the question that he hoped would entrap this Karim person. With a certain undertone of contempt, he asked, “You, the witness, can you remember what Imad was wearing when he gave you the envelope?”

“Ahhh … Just a moment.”

General relief on the judges’ bench. The presiding judge leaned back.

Go slow, work a pause in there, and make yourself hesitate, thought Karim; then he said, “Jeans, black leather jacket, T-shirt.”

“What kind of T-shirt?”

“Oh, I really don’t remember,” said Karim.

The presiding judge looked smugly at the court reporter, who would have to write up the judgment later. The two judges nodded at each other.

“Ahhh …” Karim scratched his head. “Oh, hold on, yes I do. We all got these T-shirts from our uncle. He got a great deal on them from somewhere and gave them to us. There’s something on them in English, that we’re supposed to work and so on. Really funny.”

“Do you mean this T-shirt that your brother Walid is wearing in the photograph?” The presiding judge showed Karim a picture from the folder of photographs.

“Yes, yes, Your Honor. Exactly. That’s the one. We’ve got a whole ton of them. I’m wearing one, too. But that’s Walid, not Imad, in the photo.”

“Yes, I know that,” said the judge.

“Show us,” said the prosecutor.

Finally, thought Karim, and said, “Show how? They’re in the apartment.”

“No, I mean the one you’re wearing now.”

“Right now?” asked Karim.

When the prosecutor nodded solemnly, Karim shrugged and opened the zipper on his leather jacket as indifferently as he could. He was wearing the same T-shirt as Walid in the picture in the files. Karim had ordered twenty of them the previous week from one of the countless copy shops in Kreuzberg, handed them out to all his brothers, and left ten more in his family’s apartment, just in case there would be a further search.

Court was recessed and Karim sent outside. But before that, he heard the judge say to the prosecutor that all they had left was a direct confrontation; they had no other proof. The first round went well, he thought.

When Karim was called back in again, he was asked if he had ever had a previous conviction, and he said no. The prosecutor’s office had secured an extract from the criminal register to confirm this.