Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach Read Free Book Online Page B

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