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A Lebanese man carrying diamonds in his bag is on the train from Frankfurt to Basel, a drug mule on the return journey.
At the Basel train station Inspector Hunkeler is waiting for him after a tipoff from the German police.
The courier manages to flush the stones away in the station WC.
Erdogan, a young Turkish sewage worker, finds the diamonds in the pipes under the station.
To him they mean wealth and the small hotel he always wanted to buy near his hometown. T
To his older Swiss girl-friend Erika, the stones signify the end of their life together.
She knows that Erdogan has a wife and children in Turkey.
For the courier, finding the stones is a matter of life and death.
His employers are on their way to ‘tidy things up’.
For Hunkeler the stones are the only way to get to the people behind the drug trade.
They turn out to include not only the bottom feeding drug gangs, but bankers and politicians very high up the Basel food chain.
(translated by Mike Mitchell)
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Extract
Erika Waldis, a rather plump fifty-two-year-old from Weggis on the Rigi massif, was at the checkout of the Burgfelderstrasse shopping centre, entering the prices of the goods that the black conveyor belt was carrying along to the point where she could pick them up. Although it was very busy, her movements were slow and assured. She knew most of the prices off by heart. She picked up only vegetables, fruit, cheese and meat to read the cost before putting them in the trolley beside her. When the till had calculated the total, she said how much it was, waited for the customer to produce a banknote and gave them their change. Those were the few moments when she could stretch her back, look up and give the customers a smile. She knew most of the people by sight and was very popular, because she was always calm and did her best to keep the customers happy. She had time enough for that, eight and a half hours per day – that was how long she worked, there was no point in rushing things. After all, she was mainly dealing with food and one ought to take one’s time over that, Erica thought.
Most of all she liked the slack times around nine in the morning and three in the afternoon. Then the shelves had a charm of their own, the air of an oasis of peace, where nothing bad could happen since there was plenty to eat, all healthy and nourishing. For example, there were twelve kinds of bread on offer, some made with soy flour, some with wheat bran and some with spelt. There were different kinds of yoghurt, plain and with fruit, with full-cream or skimmed milk. Recently there had even been organic potatoes, a bit more expensive than ordinary ones but still quite cheap. No one had to go hungry there.
Erika was at her most polite when she served the old women and men who did their shopping during the slack times. From the contents of their shopping trolleys she could tell which ones had only the state pension to live on and which had additional income. She would wait, with a friendly look on her face, until the old people had got out their purses, and watch patiently as they counted out the notes and coins to get as close as possible to the sum needed. They never handed over high-value notes; they didn’t like parting with them.
She also liked serving the asylum seekers, the Tamils who lived in the block of flats next door. They were expensive modern flats but there was such a shortage of housing that the city had rented half of the block for asylum seekers. Erika knew that three or four of these slim brown men with pitch- black hair shared each room, twelve men in a three-room flat. Most couldn’t understand a word of German, and Erika, who could only speak French along with German, because she’d spent a year looking after children in the Suisse Romande region, had great difficulty communicating with them.
It also sometimes happened that a woman who had just arrived from the Balkans or Anatolia would push her trolley, jam-packed with goods, to the checkout and expect to be able to pay with a twenty-franc note, since that was a lot of money in her home currency. Then Erika had to explain that in Switzerland twenty francs was not a lot, but was, in fact, a quite small amount of money, and it would only be enough for a small proportion of the goods in the trolley. But she was very careful in the way she did that so that none of them felt shown up.
Thank you, Hansjörg Schneider and Random Things Tours
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About the Author and Translator
Hansjörg Schneider, born in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1938, worked as a teacher, and journalist. He is one of the most performed playwrights in the German language but is best known for his Inspector Hunkeler crime novels. Schneider has received numerous awards, among them the prestigious Friedrich Glauser Prize for The Basel Killings. He lives and writes in Basel.
Mike Mitchell lives in Scotland and has published over eighty translations from German and French, including all the Friedrich Glauser Sergeant Studer novels and Gustav Meyrink’s five novels. His translation of Rosendorfer’s ‘Letters Back to Ancient China’ won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.
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Book Link
Publisher: https://www.bitterlemonpress.com/products/silver-pebbles
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