The Spaghetti Detectives Read online

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  SPAGHETTI

  DETECTIVES

  Andreas Steinhöfel

  translated from the German

  by Chantal Wright

  For Gianni …

  from me to you

  and back again

  —A.S.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  SATURDAY: spaghetti surprise

  SATURDAY AGAIN: oscar

  SUNDAY: the summer break diary

  MONDAY: the new neighbor

  MONDAY AGAIN: up on the roof

  TUESDAY: up and down

  ALMOST WEDNESDAY: the special edition

  WEDNESDAY: looking for sophia

  WEDNESDAY AGAIN: shadowier shadows

  ALMOST THURSDAY: in the building behind ours

  ALMOST THURSDAY AGAIN: the escape

  THURSDAY: bright and sunny

  About the Author

  Copyright

  SATURDAY

  spaghetti surprise

  The string of spaghetti lay on the sidewalk. It was thin and tacky and twelve inches long. Some dried-up cheese sauce and dirt were stuck to it. I picked it up, cleaned off the dirt, and looked up past the old windows of 93 Dieffe Street into the summer sky. Not a cloud in sight, and definitely none of those white stripes that jet engines leave behind. And besides, I thought, I don’t think you can just open an airplane window and throw out your food.

  I let myself into my apartment building, whizzed up the yellow-painted stairway to the third floor, and rang Mrs. Darling’s bell. She had large, bright curlers in her hair, just as she did every Saturday.

  “Could be capellini. The sauce is definitely Gorgonzola,” she declared. “It’s nice of you to bring me the string of spaghetti, dear, but I didn’t throw it out the window. Why don’t you ask Mr. Fitz?”

  She grinned at me, tapped one finger against her forehead, rolled her eyes, and looked up at the ceiling. Mr. Fitz lives on the fourth floor. I hate him. Also I don’t think the string of spaghetti is his. Mrs. Darling was my first choice, because she often throws things out the window. Last winter she threw out a television. Followed five minutes later by her husband, but he came out the front door. After that she came down to see us, and Mom had to pour her a drop of whiskey.

  “He has a girlfriend!” Mrs. Darling had exclaimed in shock. “And she’s not even younger than I am! Give me another swig of that stuff!”

  The very next day, with the television in smithereens and her husband gone, she bought herself an amazing new flat-screen TV and DVD player. We sometimes watch romantic comedies or thrillers together, but only on the weekend when Mrs. Darling can have a lazy day. During the week she works behind the butcher’s counter at a supermarket. Her hands are always red-raw because it’s so cold in there.

  When we watch television we eat whole wheat crackers with boiled ham and eggs or canned sardines. If it’s a romantic comedy, Mrs. Darling sniffs her way through at least ten tissues, then starts complaining about the movie: “As if that sort of thing really happens! When a man and a woman get together is when the misery begins, but of course they never show that in the movies. What a pack of lies! Another cracker, Rico?”

  “Are we still on for this evening?” Mrs. Darling called after me as I ran up to the fourth floor, two steps at a time.

  “Course!”

  Her door banged shut and I knocked at Mr. Fitz’s. You always have to knock at Mr. Fitz’s. His bell is broken. In fact it probably has been since they built the apartments in 1910.

  I had to wait, wait, wait.

  And listen to the shuffle, shuffle, shuffle behind the old, wooden door.

  Finally Mr. Fitz appeared, dressed, as usual, in his dark blue pajamas with the gray stripes. His wrinkled face was covered in stubble and his stringy gray hair shot up from his head in all directions.

  What a mess!

  A strong smell of mold wafted out. Who knew what Mr. Fitz kept in there? In his apartment, I mean, not in his head. I tried to look past him without him noticing, but he stood in my way. Deliberately! I’ve been in every apartment in the building except his. Mr. Fitz won’t let me in because he doesn’t like me.

  “Ah, the little dimwit,” he growled.

  At this point I should explain that my name is Rico and that I am a child proddity. That’s a bit like being a child prodigy, but also like the opposite. I think an awful lot, but I need a lot of time to figure things out. (Some people find this odd.) There’s nothing wrong with my brain, though. It’s a perfectly normal size. Only sometimes a few things go missing, and unfortunately I never know when or where it’s going to happen. And I can’t always concentrate very well when I’m telling a story. I have a mind like a sieve—at least I think it’s a sieve, it could be a cheese grater or a whisk … and now you see my problem.

  My head is sometimes as topsy-turvy as a barrel full of lottery balls. I play bingo every Tuesday with Mom at the Gray Bumblebees senior citizens’ club and they have a drum full of bingo balls there, which is just the same. I have no idea why Mom enjoys going there so much, because it really is only for retirees. Some of them never seem to go home, because they wear the same clothes every week—just like Mr. Fitz and his one pair of pajamas—and a few of them smell kind of funny. Maybe Mom likes it so much because she wins all the time. She beams every time she goes onstage to collect one of those cheap plastic handbags—she only ever wins cheap plastic handbags, in fact.

  The senior citizens don’t really notice. A lot of them fall asleep over their bingo cards or don’t follow what’s going on. Just a few weeks ago one of them sat completely still at a table the whole time the numbers were being called. When the others left, he didn’t get up, and when the cleaning lady finally tried to wake him up, she realized he was dead. Mom thought he might already have been dead the Tuesday before. I thought so, too.

  “Hello, Mr. Fitz,” I said, “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

  Mr. Fitz looks even older than the retiree who dropped dead at bingo. And he’s really stinky dirty. Apparently he doesn’t have long to live, either. That’s why he wears his pajamas all the time, even when he goes to the supermarket. When he does drop dead, at least he’ll be wearing the right clothes. Mr. Fitz once told Mrs. Darling he’s had a heart problem ever since he was very small. That’s why he gets out of breath so easily, he said, and one day it’ll be KA-POW! But even if he is about to die, he could still get dressed, or at least wash his pajamas sometimes. At Christmas, for example. I wouldn’t like to collapse in front of the cheese counter at the supermarket and smell totally gross, not when I’d only just died that minute.

  Mr. Fitz stared at me, so I thrust the string of spaghetti under his nose. “Is this yours?”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “The sidewalk. Mrs. Darling thinks it could be capellini. The sauce is definitely Gorgonzola.”

  “Was it just lying there?” he asked suspiciously. “Or was it lying in something?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where’s your brain gone? The string of spaghetti, you dimwit!”

  “What was the question again?”

  Mr. Fitz rolled his eyes. Any minute now he would explode.

  “For goodness’ sake! Was your string of spaghetti just lying there on the sidewalk, or was it lying in something? Dog poo, for instance.”

  “It was just lying there,” I said.

  “Then let me take a closer look.”

  He took the string of spaghetti and turned it around in his fingers. Then he put it—my string of spaghetti!—into his mouth and swallowed it. Without chewing.

  And then he slammed the door. KER-ASH!

  He’s not right in the head!!
The next string of spaghetti I find, I’m going to drop it in dog poo, wiggle it around a bit, then bring it to Mr. Fitz, and when he asks if it was lying in something, I’m going to tell him it’s meat sauce.

  I had really wanted to ask everybody who lived in the building about that string of spaghetti, but now it was gone, swallowed up by Mr. Fitz. I was sad. It’s always like that when you lose something. When I had it I didn’t think it was that great, but now it was suddenly the best string of spaghetti in the world. That was how it was with Mrs. Darling. Last winter she was moaning about her husband being a cheat, and now she’s watching one romantic comedy after another and wishing he’d come back.

  I wanted to go down to the second floor, but I thought it over and rang the doorbell of the apartment opposite Mr. Fitz’s first. That was where the new person who moved in two days before lived. I hadn’t seen him yet. I didn’t have the string of spaghetti anymore, but it seemed like a good time to say hello. Maybe he’d let me in. I like visiting other people’s apartments.

  This apartment had been empty for a long time because it was so expensive. Mom had thought about renting it. There’s more light on the fourth floor than on the second and even a bit of a view. You can look out through the trees over the old, flat-roofed hospital on the other side of the road. But when Mom found out what the apartment would cost, she had to drop the idea. Luckily for me, because then Mr. Fitz would have been right next door to us.

  The new person’s name was Mr. Westhaven. That’s what it said on the sign under the doorbell. He wasn’t at home, and I was actually a little bit happy about that. It made me nervous, thinking that I’d have to say his name out loud. East and west, if you see what I mean. I always get left and right mixed up, even on the compass. When it’s a matter of left or right, the lottery balls in my head always start to jumble.

  I was angry as I ran down the stairs. If Mr. Fitz hadn’t destroyed my evidence, it would have been a great day to be a detective. The pool of suspects was very small. For example, I could rule out the two fancy apartments on the fifth floor. The Kaminsky-Kowalskys had gone on vacation the day before, and Mr. Marrak, who lives next door to them, hadn’t been seen for two whole days. He was probably staying at his girlfriend’s, who also did his laundry for him. Every few weeks Mr. Marrak could be seen running around with a giant bag of laundry. He ran out of the building, back into the building, back out, back in, and on and on it went. Mrs. Darling once said that the young men of today were useless. Once upon a time they would just take a toothbrush with them when they went out, and today they took half their wardrobe. Mr. Marrak wasn’t at home, in any case. Yesterday’s junk mail was still sticking out of his mailbox in the hall downstairs. If you watch murder mysteries instead of smoochy movies, you start noticing things like that right away.

  OK, that was the fifth floor crossed off. Mr. Fitz and the new man with the compass thing in his name live on the fourth floor. On the third floor, across from Mrs. Darling, lives Mr. Kirk. There’s no point knocking on his door until the evening, anyway, because he’s out at work during the day. He works as a dental technician in a laboratory.

  On the floor below are Mom and me, and across from us the six Kesslers, two adults and four children, but they’re on vacation, too. The Kesslers own their apartment and there’s a staircase connecting their second-floor apartment with their other apartment on the floor below. Mr. and Mrs. Kessler need a lot of space with all those kids.

  Most of all I had been looking forward to visiting the other apartment on the first floor, the one below Mom and me. That’s where Julie lives, along with Bert and Massoud. They’re students. But I couldn’t go and knock without the string of spaghetti. Bert is all right. I can’t stand Massoud, because Julie likes him more than me. And that’s all I’m saying on that subject for the moment. I should have started my investigation down there, or at old Mr. Mommsen’s, the superintendent—he lives on the ground floor.

  Oh well, never mind.

  So it’s back to the second floor, and home.

  As I went into the apartment, Mom was standing in the hall in front of the gold mirror with the little fat cherubs on it. She was looking at herself in a worried way and prodding her body all over. I could see her thoughtful face in the mirror.

  A lot of people stare at Mom in the street. She looks fantastic. She always wears short skirts and low-cut tops. High-heeled, silver or gold strappy sandals. Her blonde hair loose, long, and silky, and a whole bunch of ringing, jingling bracelets, chains, and earrings. I like her fingernails best of all. They’re really long. Mom glues something new onto them every week. Tiny glittering fish, or a small ladybug on each one, for example.

  “At some point everything’s going to start sagging,” Mom said to her reflection in the mirror and to me. “Another two or three years and gravity will have its way. Life’s all about crossing off the days.”

  I didn’t know what gravity was. I would have to look it up. I always look up things I don’t know in the dictionary, so that I get smarter. Or sometimes I ask people. Mom or Mrs. Darling or my teacher, Mr. Meyer. I write down what I’ve discovered. Like this:

  GRAVITY: When something is heavier than something else, it pulls the other thing toward it. For example, the earth is heavier than almost everything else, that’s why nothing falls off it. A man called Isaac Newton discovered gravity. It is dangerous for apples. And possibly for other round things, too.

  “What will you do then?” I said.

  “Then I’ll have a tune-up,” Mom said decisively. She sighed and turned to me. “How was school?”

  “All right.”

  She knows not to say anything about my special classes, because I hate talking about them. For years Mr. Meyer has been trying to sort out the lottery balls in my head. I’ve thought about suggesting that he should turn off the lottery machine before he starts messing around with the balls, but I never actually have. If he doesn’t know that, that’s his tough luck.

  “Why did Mr. Meyer ask you to come in today?” said Mom. “I thought yesterday was the last day of school.”

  “It was for a summer project. Some writing.”

  “You, writing?” She wrinkled up her forehead. “What are you writing?”

  “Just something about me,” I murmured. It was more complicated than that, but I didn’t want to let Mom in on it until I’d tried it out successfully.

  “I see.” Her forehead smoothed out. “Have you had anything to eat?” She ran one hand through my hair, leaned over, and kissed me on the forehead.

  “Nah.”

  “So you’re hungry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK. I’ll make us some fish sticks.” She disappeared into the kitchen. I tossed my backpack through the open door into my bedroom, then followed her, sat at the dinner table, and watched.

  “I need to ask you something, Rico,” Mom said as she melted butter in the pan—fried in butter is how we like fish sticks best.

  My head automatically slipped down between my shoulders. Whenever Mom asks me something and uses my name at the same time, that means she’s been thinking about things, and when she’s been thinking about things, it’s usually something serious. And by serious I mean difficult. And by difficult I mean lottery balls.

  “What?” I asked cautiously.

  “It’s about Mr. 2000.”

  I wished the fish sticks were already done. Even an idiot could tell where this conversation was going.

  Mom opened the fridge, scraping and digging around in the freezer compartment with a knife to free the packet of fish sticks from its covering of blue ice. “He let another child go,” she continued. “That’s the fifth already.”

  Mr. 2000 has been keeping everybody in Berlin on the edge of their seats for three months. On television they said he was probably the most cunning child kidnapper of all time. Some people call him the ALDI kidnapper, after the cut-price supermarket, because his ransoms are so low. He lures little boys and girls into his car and driv
es off with them, and afterward he writes their parents a letter:

  DEAR PARENTS: IF YOU WOULD LIKE LITTLE CLAUDIA BACK, IT WILL COST YOU ONLY 2000 EUROS. THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE GETTING THE POLICE INVOLVED OVER SUCH A RIDICULOUSLY SMALL SUM, BECAUSE IF YOU DO, YOUR CHILD WILL COME BACK TO YOU PIECE BY PIECE.

  Up until now none of the parents have told the police until after they had paid up and their child popped up safe. But everybody in Berlin is waiting for the day when some little Claudia or Alexander doesn’t come home in one piece because their parents have messed up. Maybe some people would be secretly happy that their child had been kidnapped and wouldn’t cough up a penny. Or they might be really poor and only have fifty euros to their name. If you only gave Mr. 2000 fifty euros, it’s likely that the only piece left of your child would be a hand. The interesting question is what would he send back—the hand or the rest of the body? My bets are on the hand. It would be less noticeable. And a giant box for everything-minus-the-hand would cost fifty euros in postage all by itself.

  If you ask me, two thousand euros is a ton of money. But in an emergency, as Bert once explained to me, anybody can get their hands on the cash if they put their mind to it. Bert is studying for an Em-Bee-Ay, which has something to do with money, so he must know what he’s talking about.

  “Do you have two thousand euros?” I asked Mom. You need to be prepared. In an emergency she could break into my piggy bank. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember and I’m pretty sure I must have saved enough for an arm or a leg. For twenty or thirty euros, Mom would at least have a small piece to remember me by.

  “Two thousand euros,” she said. “Who do you think I am?”

  “Would you be able to get that much money?”

  “For you? Even if I had to kill for it, love.”

  There was a crack and a thick piece of ice landed on the kitchen floor. Mom picked it up, made a noise like pfff or hhmmph, and threw it into the sink. “This freezer really needs defrosting.”

  “But I’m not as small as the kids who were kidnapped. And I’m older.”