Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach Page B

to issue a caution that would be on Karim’s level. Then he said rather superciliously, “And who would it have been if it wasn’t Walid?” He looked around and the prosecutor smiled.
    “Indeed, who was it?” the prosecutor echoed, which earned him a punishing look from the presiding judge, because this was his turn to examine the witness.
    Karim hesitated for as long as he could, counting silently to five. Then he said, “Imad.”
    “What? What do you mean, Imad?”
    “That it was Imad, not Walid,” said Karim.
    “And who is this Imad?”
    “Imad is my other brother,” said Karim.
    The presiding judge looked at him in amazement, and even the defense attorney suddenly woke up again. An Abu Fataris breaks all the rules and incriminates someone else in his own family? they were all asking themselves.
    “But Imad left before the police got there,” Karim added.
    “Oh yes?” The presiding judge was beginning to get angry. Idiotic babble, he was thinking.
    “He gave me this thing here,” said Karim. Knowing his testimony wasn’t going to change anything, he had begun months before the trial to withdraw varying amounts of money from his accounts. Now that money, in the exact same denominations that Walid had stolen, was in a brown envelope, and he passed it to the judge.
    “What’s in it?” the judge asked.
    “I don’t know,” said Karim.
    The judge tore open the envelope and pulled out the money. He wasn’t thinking about fingerprints, but there wouldn’t have been any anyway. He counted slowly out loud: “Fourteen thousand four hundred and ninety euros. And Imad gave you this on the night of the seventeenth of April?”
    “Yes, Your Honor, he did.”
    The presiding judge paused for thought. Then he posed the question that he hoped would entrap this Karim person. With a certain undertone of contempt, he asked, “You, the witness, can you remember what Imad was wearing when he gave you the envelope?”
    “Ahhh … Just a moment.”
    General relief on the judges’ bench. The presiding judge leaned back.
    Go slow, work a pause in there, and make yourself hesitate, thought Karim; then he said, “Jeans, black leather jacket, T-shirt.”
    “What kind of T-shirt?”
    “Oh, I really don’t remember,” said Karim.
    The presiding judge looked smugly at the court reporter, who would have to write up the judgment later. The two judges nodded at each other.
    “Ahhh …” Karim scratched his head. “Oh, hold on, yes I do. We all got these T-shirts from our uncle. He got a great deal on them from somewhere and gave them to us. There’s something on them in English, that we’re supposed to work and so on. Really funny.”
    “Do you mean this T-shirt that your brother Walid is wearing in the photograph?” The presiding judge showed Karim a picture from the folder of photographs.
    “Yes, yes, Your Honor. Exactly. That’s the one. We’ve got a whole ton of them. I’m wearing one, too. But that’s Walid, not Imad, in the photo.”
    “Yes, I know that,” said the judge.
    “Show us,” said the prosecutor.
    Finally, thought Karim, and said, “Show how? They’re in the apartment.”
    “No, I mean the one you’re wearing now.”
    “Right now?” asked Karim.
    When the prosecutor nodded solemnly, Karim shrugged and opened the zipper on his leather jacket as indifferently as he could. He was wearing the same T-shirt as Walid in the picture in the files. Karim had ordered twenty of them the previous week from one of the countless copy shops in Kreuzberg, handed them out to all his brothers, and left ten more in his family’s apartment, just in case there would be a further search.
    Court was recessed and Karim sent outside. But before that, he heard the judge say to the prosecutor that all they had left was a direct confrontation; they had no other proof. The first round went well, he thought.
    When Karim was called back in again, he was asked if he had ever had a previous conviction, and he said