Crime Read Free Page A

out during the day. The condition is that he must pursue a trade or hold a job. It wasn’t easy to find a new trade for a seventy-two-year-old. Eventually, it was his sister who did this: Fähner worked as a greengrocer—he sold the apples from his garden.
    Four months later, a little crate arrived in my chambers, containing ten red apples. There was an envelope enclosed and in the envelope was a single sheet of paper: “The apples are good this year. Fähner.”

Tanata’s Tea Bowl

    They were at one of those free-for-all student parties in Berlin. These were always good for a couple of girls ready to get it on with boys from Kreuzberg and Neukölln, just because they were different. Perhaps what attracted the girls was an inherent vulnerability. This time, Samir seemed to have struck it lucky again: She had blue eyes and laughed a lot.
    Suddenly, her boyfriend appeared. He said Samir should get lost or they’d take it out onto the street. Samir didn’t understand what “take it out” meant, but he understood the aggression. They were hustled outside. One of the older students told Samir the guy was an amateur boxer and university champion. Samir said, “So fucking what?” He was just seventeen, but he was a veteran of more than 150 street fights, and there were very few things he was afraid of—fights were not among them.
    The boxer was heavily muscled, a head taller, and a good deal more solidly built than Samir. And he was grinning like an idiot. A circle formed around the two of them, and while the boxer was still taking off his jacket, Samir landed the toe of one shoe right in his balls. His shoe caps were steel-lined; the boxer emitted a gurgle and almost doubled up with pain. Samir seized his head by the hair, yanked it straight down, and simultaneously rammed his right knee into the boxer’s face. Although there was a lot of noise on the street, you could hear the boxer’s jaw snap. He lay bleeding on the asphalt, one hand over his crotch, the other over his face. Samir took a two-step run-up; the kick broke two of the boxer’s ribs.
    Samir felt he’d played fair. He hadn’t kicked the guy’s face and, most important, he hadn’t used his knife. It had all been very easy; he wasn’t even out of breath. He got angry because the blonde wouldn’t take off with him, just cried and fussed over the man on the ground. “Fucking whore,” he said, and went home.
    The judge in juvenile court sentenced Samir to two weeks’ custody and obligatory participation in an anti-violence seminar. Samir tried to explain to the social workers in the juvenile detention center that the conviction was wrong. The boxer had started it; it was just that he himself had been quicker. That sort of thing wasn’t a game. You could play football, but nobody played at boxing. The judge had simply failed to understand the rules.
    Özcan collected Samir from jail when the two weeks were up. Özcan was Samir’s best friend. He was eighteen, a tall, slow-moving boy with a doughy face. He’d had his first girlfriend when he was twelve, and had videoed everything they got up to with his cell phone, which earned him his place as top dog forever. Özcan’s penis was ridiculously large, and whenever he was in a public lavatory, he positioned himself so that everyone else could see. The one thing he was determined to do was to get to New York. He’d never been there and he spoke no English, but he was obsessed with the city. You never saw him without his dark blue cap with NY on it. He wanted to run a nightclub in Manhattan that had a restaurant and go-go dancers. Or whatever. He couldn’t explain why it had to be New York, specifically, but he didn’t waste any time thinking about it. Özcan’s father had spent his whole life in a factory that made lightbulbs; he had arrived from Turkey with nothing but a single suitcase. His son was his hope. He didn’t understand the New York thing at all.
    Özcan told Samir he’d met someone