Collision of Evil Page 11

  The iron housewife sat silently across from Waldbaer, her farmer husband next to her, equally quiet, waiting for the detective to initiate the conversation now that the required pleasantries had been concluded. Waldbaer had been summoned here by the policeman he had dispatched to inquire at the farmhouses bordering the mountain access road. Herr Andreas and Frau Gisela Schneider, both in their late sixties, had advised the uniformed policeman that, indeed, they had seen vehicles underway to the forest above. They had additionally advised that they had some details about the vehicles. This information having been relayed to Waldbaer, he decided it best to conduct the interview himself.

  “Ja, Herr and Frau Schneider, I’m interested in what you can tell me. My colleague says that you recall having seen vehicles underway above. I’m interested in your recollections.”

  The couple glanced quickly, almost furtively, at one another. The eternally suspicious nature of the farmer, Waldbaer thought unkindly. Herr Schneider pursed his lips and ran the palms of his meaty hands along the surface of the table. His heavyset spouse feigned disinterest, but covertly eyed the police official. Bovine eyes, Waldbaer thought, unable, or at least unwilling to stem his instinctive lack of sympathy for the couple. You are being unfair, he chastised himself, give them a chance.

  After some seconds, the broad-shouldered farmer offered a response. “Naja, I saw something. Why does this interest you, Herr Kommissar? Does it have to do with the murder of the American?”

  Waldbaer did nothing to conceal his sigh. He had expected that these country people would feel free to pose more questions than they willingly answered. Let’s get this out of the way he thought. “As I’m sure you’ll both appreciate, I’m not at liberty to discuss the murder investigation. But I can tell you that the reason I’m here is not unrelated to the murder of Charles Hirter. That’s as far as I can go for the moment. Now, back to my question if you don’t mind, Herr Schneider.”

  The farmer shifted in his chair and nodded as if considering whether he minded or not. His wife stared at her well-scrubbed, folded hands. Her husband looked Waldbaer in the eyes as he spoke.

  “It was just luck that we noticed anything at all. Often we aren’t here. On a farm there’s always something to do, deliveries to town, finance things with the bank, the farmers market.” The farmer paused and Waldbaer arranged his features in the requisite look of sympathy for daily tasks.

  “Anyway, we were here one evening when two trucks drove up the meadow road. It was just after dusk, and we noticed the headlights through the window.” He turned his head a notch and indicated the square panes of glass. “Cars go up there sometimes, just looking around most of them, following a dirt road; tourists. Now and then we see someone from the forestry office from Munich or climbers. But they go up during the day. After dark, well, seldom. But going up at night? Why?”

  “A fair observation, Herr Schneider,” the policeman interjected, oiling the track for more conversation. “I can’t imagine that there would be much reason for traveling up there at night.”

  Frau Schneider released a dismissive snort. Waldbaer was reminded uncomfortably of a mare. “Maybe a local Casanova with a girl, but even they don’t have to travel that far. Whoever drives up to the mountains at night is up to no good, count on it.” The woman darted a hand over her thick bun of pinned-up gray hair, glanced knowingly at the police official, and then returned her gaze to the tabletop.

  “So,” Waldbaer resumed after a gulp of coffee, “perhaps you can tell me what precisely you saw after you noticed the headlights through the window?”

  The farmer made a noise in his throat as if to acknowledge the gravity of the information he had to impart. “Like I said, when I noticed headlights at that hour, I thought it was funny. That made me curious. I was here in the kitchen, so I opened the front door and walked outside to get a good look, Ja? That’s when I noticed that there were two trucks, traveling together. They seemed to know where they were headed, they were moving fast enough. Not like they weren’t sure whether they should turn around or not. They went right by the field in front here, then up past the high meadows and into the trees. I could see their lights in the forest for a few moments. And I heard the motors even longer; sound travels pretty well downhill in this area. And then they were gone.”

  “Andreas is right,” Frau Schneider added, half-turning to her spouse. “I saw the same thing from the window. Two trucks, small ones. Not like those big lorries on the autobahn with all the extra wheels.”

  Waldbaer considered. “You’re sure these were trucks, not those jeep-like things—SUVs like the Americans say?”

  “No, trucks,” Herr Schneider confirmed with a trace of irritation. “With this type of ground it would make more sense if they were all-terrain vehicles, but they weren’t. They were trucks. The kind businesses use to make deliveries.”

  ”Delivery trucks,” Waldbaer muttered. “Used not just to drop things off, but to pick things up.”

  Frau Gisela Schneider issued another equestrian snort. “Nothing to pick up in the forest. Except wood. And there’s lots of that in the valley. More likely dumping garbage or hazardous chemicals or something.”

  “What else can you tell me about the trucks?” Waldbaer had determined that Herr Schneider was the more factual interlocutor, his wife more prone to opinion.

  The farmer scratched at his ear. “Two trucks. Both the same size. It was dark, but they were white or beige, light-toned anyway. They were well past me before I could see more.”

  Waldbaer nodded affirmatively but felt defeated. The couple was cooperative, but they offered a limited array of facts. At least he knew now that two trucks had traveled up to the cavern, the existence of which was clearly not known to the Schneiders. But this information was insufficient to bring the investigation further. Waldbaer realized with a sinking feeling that his investigation in any serious sense was quite possibly over.

  “Thank you for your time,” the police officer said, intent on hiding his disappointment. “I’ll be going now.”

  The farmer swiped a large hand in the air indicating that his guest should sit back down. “Why go now? I told you about what I saw when the trucks went up. Don’t you want to hear what I saw when they came back down?”

  Waldbaer slipped back onto the kitchen bench and eyed the man intently.

  “I told you earlier, the trucks traveled up and later on traveled back to the valley. The return trip was a lot later. Three hours anyway. It was late because I was about to head up to bed. Close to midnight maybe. I heard the engines first; that gave me some time. I put on a jacket and went out front. I stood under that oak tree near the road. There’s a bit of brush there, and I didn’t want them to see me watching. It pays to be careful. They drove out of the tree line and down past the meadows. Slower this time than before. I could tell that there were two people in the cab of each truck; four people in all. I noticed something else. The cars had BGL license plates. I can’t remember the numbers.”

  “BGL,” Waldbaer interrupted, “Berchestgardner Land.”

  “Right. But not just that. On the back bumper of both trucks there was a decal. There was enough moonlight for me to read it. Sixt.”

  Waldbaer leaned forward. “Sixt? The rental car company? Are you certain?”

  The farmer gave a self-satisfied smile. “One hundred percent. Sixt rental cars. And the decal also read ‘Bad Reichenhall.’ That was smaller, but I could make it out.”

  Waldbaer felt his depression evaporate. The trucks were rented, and from the Bad Reichenhall affiliate of the German firm Sixt, not forty kilometers distant. Easy enough to trace and determine who had rented delivery trucks over the last several days. For a criminal investigator, it was like winning the lottery.

  The elated detective reached across the table and slapped Herr Schneider on the shoulder. “Well done, Herr Schneider. If you ever run into me in the Alte Post, I’ll buy you a beer. This has been a splendid afternoon.”

  “You reall
y do want to get out of here don’t you, Herr Kommissar?” Schneider’s rustic visage broke into a smile. “You see, there’s one other detail that I didn’t mention yet. There were four people in those two trucks. I couldn’t make out much naturally, under those light conditions. But the passenger in the second truck, the fellow closest to where I was standing, I got a decent look at him. Not like I could identify him if I saw him again. But enough to see one thing for certain. He wasn’t German. His truck might have originated from Bad Reichenhall, but you can trust me that he didn’t.”

  Frau Schneider whinnied in unrestrained amusement.

  Chapter 17

  Two trucks. Rented by two men who arrived together and were acquainted with one another. Yes, Waldbaer thought, that was the advantage of small cities like Bad Reichenhall; the businesses did not have so much to do that the employees were incapable of remembering customers.

  The twenty-year-old, bleached-blonde girl who worked the Sixt rental car counter evidenced an eye for detail and her recollections hit the right note, neither too vague nor implausibly detailed. She advised that someone had dropped the two men off and driven away. The two men who rented the trucks were taciturn. Although they arrived together, they went out of their way not to communicate in the rental office, as if to promote the fiction that they were unacquainted. Both men were polite but not conversational; responses to questions about extra insurance and fuel-refill policy were simply negative or affirmative, no banter, no requests for elaboration.

  “You are most helpful. I’m sorry, your name again was?”

  “Sieglinde Reuth, Herr Kommissar.” The girl smiled self-consciously, and in a true anachronism almost curtsied, a bit nervous but intrigued by her first brush with the exotic world of police work. She brushed at a stray strand of hair. She still has pimples, Waldbaer noticed.

  For a second he was transported back to his youth, that distant epoch upon which he reflected so little, and to a lost sense of unrelenting yearning, and the face of another girl, grown misty with time but not erased. In those days, of course, girls did not wear studs in their nose, an affectation to which Sieglinde had succumbed. A shame he thought, then chided himself for his antique sentiments.

  “Frau Reuth, tell me what these men looked like, in your own words. I want you to think of the first man that rented one of the trucks. Think of his appearance. His features, how he was dressed, short or tall. It would be of great help.” He left it there, not wanting to get too theatrical.

  The girl nodded, a look of concentration on her face. She touched a finger momentarily to the stud in her nose. “The first man was shorter than his comrade. Solid too. Not fat like our beer hall guys, but heavy. He had black hair, and it was really thick.” She giggled. “His hairline was halfway down his forehead. I remember that when he talked he showed bad teeth and smelled of garlic. Funny, that I would remember that.”

  “How old?” the detective prompted, having allowed a conversational pause, not wanting to interrupt the flow of recollection, a mystic stream that should be permitted to run its course.

  “Older. Maybe forty. It’s hard for me to tell age after about forty. He could be fifty, maybe, but I think more toward forty.”

  Waldbaer nodded sagaciously, feeling certain that the girl regarded him as likely on his last assignment before being pensioned. “Any more details?”

  “Yes. He was dark. I don’t mean that he was a black guy, but dark like a Turk. He was wearing an acrylic sweater, but I can’t recall the color. It was cheap though, like something you find at C and A, not Izod or Ralph Lauren boutique stuff. You know what I mean, Herr Kommissar?”

  “Of course,” Waldbaer replied. He pictured a foreigner, and not a prosperous one. “Any accent detectable?”

  Young Frau Reuth frowned. “I guess so. But he really only gave yes and no answers. We didn’t have a normal conversation. But I don’t think he was born in Germany.” Her frown transformed into a smile. “At least he didn’t speak Bavarian, you know.” she added in country dialect.

  Waldbaer smiled in kind, sharing the bond of a common local language, a vestige of ancient tribes and peoples.

  “The second man had a beard, too, and lots of black hair, but his was matted, like he hadn’t showered for a while. Taller, he was, and thin.”

  “Was he also a foreigner?”

  The girl nodded without hesitation. “Yes, like the first man.”

  Waldbaer considered. Non-Germans. The girl’s comment had been corroborated previously by the farmer, Herr Schneider. Progress was being made. Still, he could not rid himself of the sense that he had little time left to find these anonymous foreigners, men who were presently no more substantial than shadows.

  “Frau Reuth, is there anything else that you recall? Anything to help identify these fellows?”

  Frau Reuth wrinkled her forehead before responding. “No, I think that’s everything, Herr Kommissar. One was tall and thin, the other one was shorter and stockier. Both had black hair, and the tall one had a beard. They were dressed in cheap clothes. They were Turks or Pakistanis or something. One more thing: I didn’t like them; I found them strange. That might sound prejudiced, but a lot of people come in here, and I like most of them. There was something about these two that I didn’t like.”

  Waldbaer nodded sympathetically. “I’ve learned in this profession to dismiss neither intuition nor feelings, Frau Reuth. Now, perhaps we can have a look at the forms these two men filled out and signed?”

  Frau Reuth smiled slightly, like a woman in a Botticelli painting, Waldbaer thought with a fleeting sense of delight. The girl moved to a computer, an invention for which Waldbaer felt only loathing, and busied herself with the keyboard. Waldbaer had purposely not asked for the rental forms until now, wanting to hear the girl’s commentary untainted by what he might read. It was an established habit with him, if an idiosyncratic atavism. The room filled with a low grinding noise and a printer behind the counter produced two sheets of paper.

  Frau Reuth offered him the sheets. Most of the material was numerical—license plates, vehicle identification number, credit card information. It was valuable for the investigation, but it reminded Waldbaer once again to what degree mankind was in thralldom to the cold rule of digits. He turned his attention to the name on the forms. Al-Assad. Not a name he was familiar with. The same with the second form; the name Baran meant nothing to him.

  “Sehr gut,” he intoned to the Sixt girl, “very good, just what I was hoping for.”

  Frau Reuth beamed. She pointed to the sheets Waldbaer was holding. “I always check forms carefully. It’s easy to get sloppy, but I don’t get rushed, even when there are customers lined up. It has to be done correctly.”

  Waldbaer smiled at this perfect expression of the Teutonic desire for order in things large and small. “You are to be commended,” he said, wanting to make her day a bit memorable and to buttress her fledgling sense of individual responsibility. He hoped that at some point in the future her world would broaden beyond the rental car counter.

  Waldbaer drove to work with more speed than usual the next morning, his sense of urgency enticing him to pass cars that he might normally have coasted behind. The asphalt of the autobahn rolled noiselessly under his wheels, and he drank in the sounds of Christian Thielemann conducting Carmina Burana on his CD player. He now had substantial threads in hand and needed to weave them together to produce a tapestry of the murder. He was anxious to see what hits might have surfaced on the identities on the rental car forms. Still, he could not shake the feeling that he was dealing not only with a crime committed but with crimes yet to transpire. He eased the gas pedal farther to the floor.

  Once inside the familiar confines of the police station, Waldbaer braced the young sergeant responsible for assembling background information on suspects. “Karger, what do you have on my rental car driver, al-Assad?”

  Julius Karger had the lean and pallid features of an ascetic, and was regarded by his law enforcement coll
eagues as proficient but humorless. Nothing in his demeanor on this morning contradicted that assessment.

  “There are a few indisputable facts at present, Herr Kommissar. First, the name Mohammed al-Assad is real, not fictitious. Second, Herr al-Assad was born in Cologne of a Turkish mother and a Syrian father, both deceased. Third, he is a German citizen. Fourth, he is unmarried and without children. Fifth, his registered place of residence is Gamsdorf. And finally, al-Assad is the proprietor of the Doener kebab snack shop down the street from here.” Having delivered this information, Karger sat back in his desk chair and gazed at Waldbaer without evident emotion.

  Waldbaer stared back at the twenty-something sergeant whose unremarkable features were framed by wire-rimmed glasses and close-cropped dark hair. “You mean the Turkish carryout? He’s the owner? I must have seen him a dozen times in the past year.” Waldbaer tried but could not summon up a face, an image. Such are the penalties of our anonymous society, he concluded. “Photo?”