Free Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach Page A

now his sweat was mingling with the blood in the bathtub. He had pulled a plastic bag over the man’s head because he didn’t want to see his face while he was working. At first, he’d gone at it the wrong way and tried to sever the bones. Then he remembered how you dismember a chicken, and he twisted the fat man’s arm out of his shoulder. Now it was going better, all he had to do was cut through the muscles and the fibrous tissue. At some point, the arm lay on the yellow tiled floor, the watch still on the wrist. Kalle turned around to the toilet bowl and threw up again. Then he ran water in the washbasin, dunked his face into it, and rinsed out his mouth. The water was cold and made his teeth ache. He stared into the mirror and didn’t know whether he was standing in front of it or behind it. The man facing him had to move in order for him to do likewise. When the water overflowed the edge of the basin and splashed down onto his feet, Kalle pulled himself together. He knelt back down on the floor and picked up the saw.
    Three hours later, he had detached the various limbs. He bought black garbage bags in a grocery store, attracting odd looks from the girl at the checkout counter. Kalle tried not to think about what he was going to do with the head, but he was unsuccessful. If it stays attached to the neck, I won’t be able to get him into the trailer, he thought. There’s no way. He left the store. Two housewives were having a conversation on the sidewalk, the suburban train went by, and a boy kicked an apple across the street. Kalle felt himself getting angry. “I’m not a murderer,” he said out loud as he was passing a pram. The mother turned around and stared after him.
    Back at home, he pulled himself together. One of the handles of the handsaw had come loose and Kalle cut his fingers. He burst out crying like a child; bubbles formed below his nostrils. He cried and sawed and sawed and cried, holding the fat man’s head tightly under his arm. The plastic bag had become slippery and kept sliding out of his grip. When he had finally detached the head from the trunk, he was astonished to find how heavy it was. Like a sack of charcoal for a barbecue, he thought, and wondered how charcoal had popped into his mind. He’d never cooked anything on a barbecue.
    He dragged the biggest bags into the elevator and used them to block the automatic door. Then he fetched the rest. The garbage bags didn’t tear—he’d doubled them for the torso. He pulled the bicycle trailer into the lobby, where there was no one to see him. There were four garbage bags. The only things he’d had to put in his backpack were the arms; the trailer was full, and they would have fallen out.
    Kalle had put on a clean shirt. He needed twenty minutes to reach the park. He thought about the head, about its sparse hair, and about the arms. He felt the fat man’s fingers against his back. They were wet. He fell off the bike and tore off his backpack, then just dropped to the grass. He waited for people to come running and start screaming, but they didn’t. Nothing happened.
    Kalle lay there, looking up into the sky, and waited.
    He buried the fat man in the city park in his entirety. The handle of the spade broke, so he knelt down and used the blade in his hands. He crammed everything into the hole, only a few yards from the dead dog. It wasn’t deep enough, so he trampled the garbage bags together. His clean shirt was filthy, his fingers black and bloody, and his skin itched. He threw the remains of the spade into a garbage container. Then he sat on a park bench for almost an hour, watching students play Frisbee.
    When Irina got back from her girlfriend’s, the bed was empty. The fat man’s jacket and folded trousers were still hanging over the chair. She clapped her hand over her mouth so as not to cry out. She understood immediately: Kalle had tried to save her. The police would find him. They would believe he’d killed the fat man. The