The Spaghetti Detectives Read online

  “Yeah, I know.” She pried the packet open. “But I should still have taken you to school every day for the last few weeks, and picked you up again.”

  Mom works until early in the morning. When she comes home, she brings me a fresh bread roll and gives me a kiss before I leave for school, and then she goes to bed. She usually doesn’t get up until the afternoon, long after I’m back home again. She would never manage to take me to school and pick me up again.

  She held her breath for a second and scratched her nose. “Am I a bad mother, Rico?”

  “Of course not!”

  She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then tipped the deep-frozen fish sticks out of the packet and into the pan. The butter was so hot that it hissed. Mom took a quick step back. “Oh God! Now I stink of the stuff!”

  She would shower anyway before going to work that night. She always showers after fish sticks. It’s the most expensive perfume in the world, she once said; nothing sticks to you like the smell of fish sticks, and that’s the real reason they’re called sticks, she said. So you have to wash lots. While they were sizzling in the pan, I told her about the string of spaghetti I’d found and that Mr. Fitz had destroyed it, which was why I couldn’t find out who it had belonged to.

  “The old grouch,” she murmured.

  Mom can’t stand Mr. Fitz. A few years ago, when we moved into 93 Dieffe Street, she dragged me through the entire building so that we could introduce ourselves to the neighbors. Her hand was very sweaty, and she held me really tightly. Mom is brave, but she still has feelings. She was afraid that people wouldn’t like us when they found out she worked in a nightclub and I was a bit different. Mr. Fitz answered her knock and stood there in his pajamas. Unlike Mom, who kept a straight face, I grinned. That was my mistake. And then Mom said, “Hello, I’ve just moved in, and this is my son, Rico. He’s a bit different, but it’s not his fault. So if he ever bothers you …”

  Mr. Fitz squinted at us and made a face as though he had a bad taste in his mouth. Then, without saying a word, he slammed the door in our faces. Ever since then he’s called me a dimwit.

  “Did he call you a dimwit?” Mom asked.

  “Nah.” There was no point getting her worked up.

  “The old grouch,” she said again.

  She didn’t ask why I absolutely had to know who the string of spaghetti belonged to. That was just another one of Rico’s ideas, and she was right. There was no point asking.

  I watched her as she turned the fish sticks. She hummed a song and shifted her weight from the left foot to the right and back again. While the fish sticks were frying, she set the table. The sun fell through the window and there was the tasty smell of summer and fish in the air. I felt happy. I like it when Mom cooks or does one of those other look-aftering things that moms do.

  “Blood sauce?” she said when she was finished.

  “Yep.”

  She put the bottle of ketchup on the table and pushed my plate toward me. “So I won’t be taking you to school, then?”

  I shook my head. “It’s summer vacation now, anyway. Maybe they’ll catch him before school starts.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeeesss!”

  “Good.”

  She was shoveling down the fish sticks at top speed. “I have to go in a sec,” she said in reply to my questioning look. “I’m going to the hairdresser’s with Irina.” Irina is Mom’s best friend. She works at the club, too. “Strawberry blonde—what do you think?”

  “Is that red?”

  “No. It’s blonde with a hint of red.”

  “What’s that got to do with strawberries?”

  “They have a hint of it, too.”

  “Strawberries are bright red.”

  “Only when they’re ripe.”

  “But before that they’re green. And what sort of hint is it?”

  “That’s just what they call it.”

  Mom doesn’t like it when I keep on at her, and I don’t like it when she talks and I don’t understand what she’s saying. Some things have really silly names, and you have to ask why they’re called what they’re called. I wonder, for example, why strawberries are called strawberries, even though they’ve got nothing to do with straw.

  Mom pushed away her empty plate. “We still need a few things for the weekend. I could pick up the stuff myself, but …”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You’re a love.” She grinned with relief, got up, and hurriedly rummaged through her pockets. “I made a list, hang on a sec …”

  Mom’s jeans are so tight I’m afraid I’ll have to cut her out of them one of these days. I ask myself why she always stuffs everything into her jeans pockets. She’s won at least ten plastic handbags at bingo, but she never uses them. She doesn’t even keep them. She auctions them off on eBay.

  “It’s not much.” She held out the crumpled shopping list. “There’s money in the drawer. The most important thing is the toothpaste. And butter’s not on the list, but there’s none left. Will you remember, or should I …?”

  I speared the first fish stick with my fork and casually dunked it in the blood sauce. “I’ll remember,” I said.

  Hopefully.

  SATURDAY AGAIN

  oscar

  The shopping went really well. Toothpaste, butter, bread sticks, salad stuff, and yogurt. I held out the money to the woman at the cash register and she gave me my change and said to say hello to my mom. The way she said it, she looked as though she actually wished Mom a really painful death. After we moved to Dieffe Street, Mom went in to see her to explain politely that I can’t do arithmetic and that the last person who tried to cheat me had lived to regret it.

  I went out of the shop. There was a light wind moving the leaves on the trees in the street—I’ve forgotten what they’re called, or I never knew, but they look great. The bark on their trunks peels off like varnish on an old door and underneath you can see lighter bark that’s also peeling off, and more underneath that. You have to ask yourself if it does that all the way through.

  Sunlight shone down on millions of leaves and threw tiny shadows onto the sidewalk. There were people everywhere, lots of them sitting outside in front of coffee shops and restaurants, and music from the open windows of the apartments made its way down to the street. I was very happy at that moment. I felt good about myself.

  Dieffe Street is very long and has everything you need. The supermarket and a late-night corner shop, two fruit and vegetable shops, a liquor store, a baker, butcher—those kinds of places. You don’t have to turn off anywhere, and that’s why Mom picked such a long, straight street for me to live on: because I don’t remember the way very well if it has corners. Mom says my sense of direction is like a drunken pigeon in a windy snowstorm. But from Dieffe Street I can actually go to school by myself. All I have to do is go out of the house, walk a little way to the drugstore on the corner and then turn off upward, in the direction of the canal. From then on I keep going straight, across the bridge to school. The street keeps going past the school, through Little Istanbul toward the subway station, but I’ve never been brave enough to go any farther than the kebab restaurant, just before the station.

  I wondered if I should look for another string of spaghetti on the way home. Maybe it hadn’t flown out the window at 93 Dieffe Street, but a passerby had lost it or dropped it on purpose instead.

  PASSERBY: Pedestrian. Had to ask Mom what we call them again. It’s bad enough translating foreign words into words you understand. The other way around is even harder.

  I shuffled along and thought about Hansel and Gretel, who laid a trail of bread crumbs in the forest so they wouldn’t get lost. Maybe somebody in the area laid a trail of spaghetti strings. If they did, then they are even more of a child proddity than I am. They’ll never find their way back when there are greedy pigs like Mr. Fitz around. Hansel and Gretel had their trail of crumbs eaten up by the birds of the forest, and where did the two of them end up? That’
s right, with the big bad wolf!

  I stopped at the playground. The playground is framed by Grimm Street; it loops around up by the canal and comes back down to meet Dieffe Street, so it’s kind of a double street. The playground is large and always full of moms and toddlers when the weather is good. In the part of the city where we lived before we moved here, Mom often went to the playground with me. I had a shovel and a sieve and all kinds of sand buckets to play with, until I dug a hole and threw them in it. I covered them all up with my hands and never found any of them again.

  I looked at the playground a little longer and smiled at the little kids for a bit, then I remembered the string of spaghetti. I walked slowly over the pavement, looking at the gray cobblestones. I saw a scrunched-up chocolate wrapper, a few pieces of glass lying on the ground in front of the big recycling containers, and an old cigarette butt. Then I saw small feet wearing brightly colored socks in sandals.

  I raised my head. The boy who was standing there in front of me only came up as far as my chest. That is to say, his dark blue crash helmet only came up as far as my chest. It was the kind of crash helmet that motorcycle riders wear. I didn’t know you could get them in children’s sizes, too. He looked like he had a screw loose. The see-through thing on his helmet was pushed up.

  VISOR: A see-through thing. I asked Bert about it because he rides a motorcycle. He told me that Julie and Massoud had gone on vacation together. Hmph …

  “What are you doing?” the boy said. His teeth were enormous. They looked as though they could tear entire pieces out of large animals: horses or giraffes or animals like that.

  “I’m looking for something.”

  “If you tell me what it is, I can help you.”

  “A piece of pasta.”

  He searched the pavement. As he lowered his head, a beam of sunlight struck his helmet and bounced off it. I noticed a tiny, bright red toy airplane fastened to his short-sleeved shirt with a safety pin, like a badge. One of the airplane’s wings had broken off. The small boy also looked in the bushes in front of the playground fence; I hadn’t thought of that.

  “What kind of pasta is it?” he said.

  “Definitely a lost piece. Capellini, but I’m not sure. I won’t know that until I find it, otherwise it wouldn’t be lost.”

  “Hmm …” He put his head to one side. The mouth with the large teeth opened wide. “Are you not all there, brains-wise?”

  Well, thanks a lot!

  “I’m a child proddity.”

  “Is that a fact?” Now he looked really interested. “I’m a child prodigy.”

  Now I was interested, too. Even though the boy was much smaller than I was, he suddenly felt much bigger. It was a strange feeling. We looked at each other for such a long time that I thought we would still be standing there when the sun went down. I had never seen a child prodigy, apart from on TV in one of those talent contests. There was a girl who played something really difficult on the violin and at the same time the host of the show called out numbers a mile long and she had to say if they were prime numbers or not. Mrs. Darling swallowed down a Mallomar in one go and said that the little girl would go far in life, which is why I thought prime numbers were something important. Turns out they’re not.

  PRIME NUMBER: A prime number is a number that you can only divide by the number 1 and by itself, if you want to avoid fractures. Broken arms, for example. If I had been that TV host, I would have asked the girl why she didn’t play the flute or the trumpet instead of the violin. That way, if you fracture your arm, you can keep on blowing.

  “I’ve got to go now,” I said to the boy finally. “Before it gets dark. Otherwise I might get lost.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Over there, in the yellow building. Number 93. On the right.”

  I could have kicked myself as soon as I said on the right. First of all I didn’t really know if it was on the right—it might have been on the left. Secondly the old hospital is across from the row of apartment buildings, stretched out like a sleeping cat, and you can tell right away that that isn’t a building where people live.

  The boy followed my outstretched arm. When he saw number 93, he wrinkled up his forehead as though he had just made an amazing discovery and then wrinkled it down again as though he was thinking deeply about something.

  Finally his forehead smoothed out and he grinned. “You’re really not all there, are you? If something is right in front of you and all you’ve got to do is keep going straight, you can’t possibly get lost.”

  At least I’d got the right side of the street. I was getting just a little angry, anyway. “Oh yeah? Well, I can. And if you are really as smart as you say you are, you would know that there are people who can.”

  “I—”

  “And another thing. It’s not funny at all!”

  All the lottery balls had turned red and were clacking against each other. “It’s not my fault that sometimes things go missing from my brain! I don’t mean to be stupid. I’m not stupid because I’m lazy!”

  “Hey, I—”

  “I bet you’re one of those superbrains who knows everything and always has to show off about something because otherwise nobody is interested in them unless they play the violin on TV!”

  It’s very embarrassing, but when I get really worked up about something, when something isn’t fair, for example, I start to cry. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. The boy looked shocked under his crash helmet.

  “Don’t cry! I didn’t mean to—”

  “And I know what a prime number is!” I shouted.

  I was upset, that was about the only thing I did know at that moment. The boy didn’t say anything else. He looked down at his sandals. Then he looked up again. He stretched out his hand. It was so small that both of his would have fit into one of mine.

  “I’m Oscar,” he said. “And I would like to apologize sincerely. I shouldn’t have made fun of you. It was arrogant.”

  I had no idea what he meant by the last word, but I understood he was sorry.

  ARROGANT: When somebody looks down on somebody else. So Oscar can’t be all that smart because at the end of the day he’s a lot smaller than I am and has to keep looking up at me.

  You have to be nice when somebody apologizes. If somebody is just pretending, you can keep on being mad, but Oscar meant it sincerely. He’d said so himself.

  “I’m Rico,” I said, and shook his hand. “My dad was Italian.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said was.” My teacher, Mr. Meyer, told me that one of the strengths of my writing is the tenses: the past, present, and future, and the if-I-were-you tense.

  “I’m sorry. How did he die?”

  I didn’t answer. I’ve never told anybody how my dad died. It’s nobody’s business. It’s a very sad story. I wrinkled my nose, looked over the fence at the playground, and tried to think of something else. For example, whether there were shovels and buckets and sieves buried there, too, and if so, how many and which colors. There were probably hundreds. If I dug them up, Mom could auction them off on eBay with her handbags.

  Oscar wasn’t sure what to do when he realized I wasn’t going to say anything else. At some point he nodded his head and said, “I have to go home now.”

  “Me too. Otherwise the butter will melt.” I lifted up the shopping bag. And then, because he looked so neat and tidy in his funny clothes, like one of those kids who have to eat fruit and vegetables and sugar-free muesli from the health food shop, I said, “We ran out of butter because we had fish sticks with blood sauce for lunch today.”

  I walked off and decided not to turn around. I didn’t want to give him the impression that I thought he was great with his crash helmet and his monster teeth. But then I did turn around after all and I saw him disappearing down Dieffe Street in the other direction. From a distance he looked like a very small child with a very large blue head.

  It was only when I was ba
ck at home and I’d put the butter in the fridge and begun to scrape the ice out of the freezer compartment that I realized I hadn’t asked Oscar what he was doing there all by himself on our block. Or why he had a small, bright red airplane on his shirt. Or why he was wearing a motorcycle crash helmet, even though he was on foot.

  Mrs. Darling’s curls had turned out very nicely. I gave her the bread sticks as she let me in. The evening light was all red-golden and fell into the hallway through the open door of the living room. There were little pictures in plastic frames all over the walls; most of them contained drawings of small children with very large eyes who were standing in different places—in front of the Eiffel Tower, or on a bridge in Venice, for example. There were pictures with clowns, too, and other things. Half of the children were crying.

  “I’m not doing too well, my dear,” said Mrs. Darling, and closed the door to the apartment. “I’m having one of my gray days.”

  I almost cheered. A gray day meant that we wouldn’t be watching a romantic film. I’ve got nothing against them, but they make me a little bit nervous. There are no romantic films about proddities — it’s as though nobody loves people like me. OK, there’s Forrest Gump, but that film doesn’t have a happy ending, and I can’t stand Forrest, anyway. He’s so pushy and greedy.

  Mrs. Darling placed a hand on my shoulder and guided me into her living room. I’m not so stupid that I would lose my way in her little apartment, but I didn’t say anything. Her gray days aren’t easy and you have to be a bit nice to her.

  “Did you find out who the string of spaghetti belonged to? Was it Mr. Fitz?”

  “Nah.”

  I didn’t tell her that the stupid man had swallowed it up. I planted myself on the sofa and glanced at the table. There was a plate on it full of boiled ham, pickled onions, and tomato halves. My stomach started rumbling.

  “If it wasn’t Mr. Fitz,” she thought out loud, “then it was probably one of those Kessler brats.”

  “Nah. The Kesslers are on vacation. They went yesterday. Just like the Kaminsky-Kowalskys.”