The Solitaire Mystery Read online

  ‘You should have been given government funding as a philosopher’ was all I said, and these words came straight from my heart.

  When we got back to the hotel that evening, we found a huge cockroach on the floor. It was so big its shell crackled as it walked.

  ‘Sorry, pal, but you can’t sleep here tonight,’ Dad said as he bent down. ‘We booked a double room, and there’s only room for the two of us. More to the point, we’re the ones paying the bill.’

  I thought he’d gone crazy, but then he glanced up at me and said, ‘This is too fat for us just to kill it, Hans Thomas. It’s so big it has to be called an individual, and you never beat individuals to death, even if you do feel a little uncomfortable in their presence.’

  ‘Are we just going to let it paddle around the floor while we sleep, then?’

  ‘Nope! We’ll escort it out.’

  And he did just that. Dad started to herd the cockroach out of the hotel room. He lined up the suitcases and bags to create a long passage across the floor. Then he began to tickle the cockroach’s behind with a match to get it moving. After about half an hour it was in the corridor outside the little hotel room. At that point Dad felt he’d done enough, so he didn’t follow the uninvited guest down to the lobby.

  ‘And now we’ll turn in for the night,’ he said as he closed the door behind him. The moment he lay down on his bed he fell fast asleep.

  I left the bedside light on and continued to read from the sticky-bun book as soon as I was sure Dad had stamped his passport at the border to dreamland.

  ACE OF CLUBS

  … exactly the same figures

  you’d find on playing cards …

  I had been walking through the lush garden all afternoon when I suddenly saw two human figures in the distance. My heart jumped for joy.

  I was saved. Maybe I had arrived in America after all.

  As I walked over to them, it suddenly occurred to me that we would probably not be able to understand each other. I spoke only German, some English, and a little Norwegian, which I’d picked up after being on board the Maria for four years, but the inhabitants of the island undoubtedly spoke a completely different language.

  As I gradually drew nearer, I could see they were bent over a small, tilled patch of ground. At this point I also realised that they were much shorter than I. Were they children?

  When I came closer, I saw that they were gathering some bright roots in a basket. They suddenly turned round and looked up at me. Slightly on the chubby side, the two men were no taller than my chest. They both had brown hair and greasy, nut-brown skin. They were dressed in identical dark-blue uniforms. The only difference was that one of them had three black buttons on the sleeve of his uniform and the other had only two.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said in English.

  The little men put down the tools they’d been holding and stared at me with blank expressions.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked.

  They just threw their arms into the air and shook their heads.

  Instinctively I spoke to them in my own language. And now the man with three buttons on his uniform replied in fluent German. ‘If you have more than three marks, you’re allowed to beat us, but we earnestly beg you not to.’

  I was so taken aback, I was at a loss for words. At the heart of a deserted island in the Atlantic Ocean I was spoken to in my own mother tongue. But that was only part of it. I didn’t understand what he meant by the three marks.

  ‘I come in peace,’ I said for safety’s sake.

  ‘So you should, too, otherwise the King will punish you.’

  The King! So I wasn’t in North America after all.

  ‘I would very much like to have a word with the King,’ I said.

  Now the one with two buttons joined in the conversation. ‘Which King do you want to have a word with?’

  ‘Didn’t your friend say the King would punish me?’

  The two-buttoned man turned to the three-buttoned man and whispered, ‘It’s as I thought. He doesn’t know the rules.’

  The three-buttoned man looked up at me.

  ‘There’s more than just one King,’ he said.

  ‘Oh really? How many are there?’

  The two men sneered. They clearly thought I’d asked some pretty stupid questions.

  ‘There’s one for each suit.’ The two-buttoned man sighed in despair.

  It was only now that I really noticed how small they were. They were no bigger than dwarfs, yet their pint-size bodies had quite normal proportions. At the same time, I wondered whether these Lilliputian people were mentally retarded.

  I was about to ask how many ‘suits’ there were, to find out how many Kings there were on the island, but I decided to skip that question.

  ‘What’s the name of the most powerful King?’ I asked instead.

  They looked at each other again and shook their heads.

  ‘Do you think he’s trying to trick us?’ the one with two buttons asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said the one with three, ‘but we have to answer.’

  The two-buttoned man brushed away a fly that had landed on his greasy cheek and said, ‘As a rule, a black King is allowed to beat a red King, but it is also possible for a red King to hit the black.’

  ‘That’s rather brutal,’ I said.

  ‘Those are the rules.’

  We suddenly heard a loud crash in the distance. It sounded as if some glass was being broken. Both dwarfs turned in the direction of the noise.

  ‘Idiots!’ exclaimed the man with two buttons. ‘They break more than half of what they make.’

  While they stood for a moment with their backs to me, I made a disturbing discovery: two black clubs were drawn on the back of the one with two buttons on his jacket. The other had three clubs. They were exactly the same figures you’d find on playing cards. This suddenly made the conversation I’d become entangled in slightly less absurd.

  When they turned around again, I decided to try a totally new tack.

  ‘Are there many people living on this island?’ I enquired.

  But they looked at each other with puzzled expressions now, too.

  ‘He asks a lot of questions,’ one of them said.

  ‘Yes, he’s rude,’ said the other.

  I thought this conversation was worse than if we hadn’t understood each other’s language at all, because although I understood every single word they said, I couldn’t grasp what they meant. It would almost have been better if we’d used sign language.

  ‘How many are you?’ I tried again, and now I was getting impatient.

  ‘You can see for yourself that we are Two and Three,’ replied the one with the three of clubs on his back. ‘If you need glasses, you’d better talk to Frode, because he’s the only one who knows how to cut glass.’

  ‘How many are you, by the way?’ asked the other one.

  ‘There’s only one of me,’ I said.

  The one with two buttons on his jacket turned to the one with three and whistled loudly.

  ‘Ace!’he said.

  ‘Then we’ve lost,’ replied the other, dumbfounded. ‘He’ll beat the King, too.’

  With that he took out a miniature-sized bottle from his inside pocket. He took a swig of a sparkling drink and passed the bottle to his companion, who also drank thirstily from the bottle.

  ‘But isn’t Ace a lady?’ exclaimed the one with three buttons.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said the other. ‘The Queen is the only one who is always a lady. He might be from another pack.’

  ‘Nonsense! There aren’t any other packs. And Ace is a lady.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. But he needed only four buttons to beat us.’

  ‘Us, yes, but not our King, you know that. So he has fooled us!’

  They continued to drink from the little bottle, and their eyes grew heavier and heavier. Then, without warning, the two-buttoned man’s body started to twitch all over. He looked me straight in the eyes
and said, ‘The goldfish does not reveal the island’s secret, but the sticky bun does.’

  With that they both lay down on the ground, mumbling, ‘Rhubarb … mango … kurberry … dates … lemon … honya … shuka … coconut … banana …’

  They continued to say the names of all sorts of fruits and berries, I had heard only a few of the names before. Finally they rolled onto their backs – and fell asleep instantly.

  I tried to kick them awake, but they didn’t stir.

  Once again I was left alone. It occurred to me that the island might be a sanctuary for the incurably mentally ill and the substance which the two men drank from the bottle was a kind of sedative. If this was the case, then a doctor or a nurse would soon be along to accuse me of upsetting the patients.

  I started to walk back across the field. A dumpy man soon came toward me. He was dressed in the same dark blue uniform, except that he had a double-breasted jacket with a total of ten buttons. He had the same greasy brown skin.

  ‘When the master sleeps, the dwarfs live their own lives,’ he exclaimed, waving his arms about and glancing at me shiftily.

  He’s mad, too, I thought to myself.

  I pointed to the two men who were lying asleep a little way off. ‘It looks as though the dwarfs have fallen asleep, too,’ I said.

  With that he hurried on his way. Although he ran as fast as his short legs could carry him, he didn’t get very far very fast. He fell down several times and got up again, got up and fell down. I had plenty of time to count the ten clubs on his back.

  I soon came to a narrow cart track. I had not followed it very far before I witnessed a terrible uproar. At first I heard a thundering sound right behind me. It sounded like horses’ hooves getting closer and closer. I turned around quickly and jumped to the side.

  The six-legged animals I had seen earlier that day were coming towards me. Riders were sitting on two of them. A dwarf ran behind them swinging a long stick in the air. All three men wore the same dark blue uniforms. I noticed they had double-breasted jackets with four, six, and eight black buttons respectively.

  ‘Stop!’ I cried, as they charged past me on the path.

  Only the one on foot, the man with eight buttons, turned round and slowed his pace a little.

  ‘After fifty-two years the shipwrecked grandson comes to the village,’ he shouted in a frenzy.

  With that, the dwarfs and the six-legged animals were gone. I noticed that the dwarfs had the same number of clubs on their backs as they had buttons on their double-breasted jackets.

  Tall palm trees with tight clusters of yellow fruit the size of oranges grew along the roadside. Under one of the trees was a cart half-filled with the yellow fruit. It was a bit like the cart that Father used to transport his bread at home in Lübeck, but it was not a normal horse hitched to the front of the cart underneath the palm tree. Here, one of the six-legged animals was used as a workhorse.

  Only when I walked round to the front of the cart did I discover a dwarf sitting under the tree. Before he spotted me, I noticed his jacket had a simple fastening with five buttons. Otherwise it was identical to the other uniforms. All the dwarfs I had seen so far had one other thing in common: their round heads were covered with thick brown hair.

  ‘Good afternoon, Five of Clubs!’ I said.

  He glanced up at me with a look of indifference. ‘Good after –’

  He stopped in mid-sentence and sat staring up at me without saying a word.

  ‘Turn round,’ he said eventually.

  I did as he asked. When I turned back to face him, he was sitting scratching his head with a pair of chubby fingers.

  ‘Trouble!’ he sighed, and waved his arms in the air.

  The next minute two fruits were thrown down from the tall palm tree. One of them landed in the Five of Clubs’s lap; the other narrowly missed my head.

  I wasn’t surprised to see the Seven and Nine of Clubs come climbing down from the tree a few seconds later. I had now met the whole lot of them, from Two to Ten.

  ‘We tried to knock him out with the shuka fruit,’ said the Seven.

  ‘But he jumped aside just as we threw it,’ said the Nine.

  They sat down under the tree, beside the Five.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll forgive you all, but first you’ll have to answer some simple questions. If not, I’ll wring all your necks. Is that understood?’

  I managed to scare them enough to keep them sitting in silence under the tree. I looked into their dark brown eyes in turn.

  ‘Right – who are you ?’

  With that they stood up one after the other and each recited a crazy sentence:

  ‘The baker conceals the treasures from the magic island,’ said the Five.

  ‘The truth lies in the cards,’ said the Seven.

  ‘Only a lonesome joker sees through the delusion,’ concluded the Nine.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I thank you for this information,’ I said. ‘But who are you ?’

  ‘Clubs,’ replied the Five at once. He’d obviously taken the threat seriously.

  ‘Yes, that is clear. But where do you come from? Did you all just fall from the sky – or did you sprout from the ground like clover leaves?’

  They quickly glanced at one another. Then the Nine of Clubs said, ‘We come from the village.’

  ‘Oh really? And how many of these … um … field workers like you live there?’

  ‘None,’ said the Seven of Clubs. ‘I mean, just us. Nobody is identical to us.’

  ‘I see, you can’t really expect that either. But all in all – how many fieldworkers live on this island?’

  They quickly looked at each other again.

  ‘Come on!’ said the Nine of Clubs. ‘Let’s beat it!’

  ‘But are we allowed to beat him?’ asked the Seven of Clubs.

  ‘I said, let’s beat it, not beat him!’

  With that they threw themselves into the cart. One of them whacked the white animal on the back, and it now ran off as fast as its six legs could carry it.

  I had never felt so powerless. Of course I could have stopped them. I could undoubtedly have wrung their necks as well. But none of it would have made me any the wiser.

  TWO OF CLUBS

  … He waved two tickets

  in the air …

  The first thing I thought about when I woke up in the little hotel room in Venice was Baker Hans, who’d met the strange dwarfs on the magic island. I fished the magnifying glass and the sticky-bun book out of my jeans.

  As soon as I had turned on the light, however, and was about to start reading, Dad let out a lion’s roar and was awake as fast as he usually fell asleep.

  ‘The whole day in Venice.’ He yawned. The next minute he was out of bed.

  I had to smuggle the sticky-bun book back into my pocket under the blanket. I. had promised the old baker in Dorf that everything in it would remain a secret between him and me.

  ‘Are you playing hide-and-seek?’ Dad asked.

  ‘I’m looking to see if there are any cockroaches here,’ I answered.

  ‘And you need a magnifying glass for that?’

  ‘They might have babies,’ I replied. Of course, it was a dumb answer, but I couldn’t think of anything better in time. To be safe I added, ‘You never know, there might be some dwarf cockroaches living here.’

  ‘You never know,’ said Dad, and disappeared into the bathroom.

  The hotel we were staying at was so basic it didn’t even serve breakfast. This suited us just fine, because the night before we’d already discovered a cosy outdoor café which served breakfast between 8 and 11 a.m.

  It was pretty quiet outside, both on the Grand Canal and along the wide pavements banking the canal. At the restaurant we ordered juice and scrambled eggs, toast and orange marmalade. On our trip, this breakfast was the only exception to the rule that it is best to eat breakfast at home.

  It was during this meal that Dad got another of his brig
ht ideas. At first he stared into space, and I suddenly thought the dwarf had reappeared.

  ‘Now you stay here, Hans Thomas. I’ll be back in five minutes,’ he said.

  I didn’t have a clue what he was up to, but I’d been in similar situations before. When Dad got an idea, almost nothing could stop him.

  He disappeared through a big glass door on the other side of the square. When he returned, he sat down and ate the rest of his scrambled eggs without saying a word.

  Then he pointed to the shop he’d just been in and asked, ‘What’s written on that poster over there, Hans Thomas?’

  ‘Sartap-Anocna,’ I read backwards.

  ‘Ancona-Patras, yes.’

  He dipped a piece of toast in his coffee before putting it into his mouth. It was amazing that he managed to get it in, since the whole of his mouth was one big grin.

  ‘And what about it?’ I asked. Both words were Greek to me, whether I read them one way or the other.

  He now looked straight into my eyes. ‘You’ve never been to sea with me, Hans Thomas. You’ve never been on a proper sailing trip.’

  He waved two tickets in the air and continued : ‘It’s not right for an old seaman to drive around the Adriatic. And I’ll be damned if we’re going to be landlubbers any longer. Now we roll the Fiat on board a huge boat – then we sail to Patras on the west coast of the Peloponnese. It’s just a few miles from there to Athens.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Damn right, I’m sure,’ he said.

  It was probably because he’d soon be back at sea that he was swearing so freely.

  So we didn’t end up spending a whole day in Venice after all. The boat to Greece sailed that evening from Ancona, which was almost 250 miles away.

  The only thing Dad insisted on taking in before he got behind the wheel was a study of Venice’s famous art of glassblowing.

  To melt the glass you need open space for the fires. As a precaution against fire hazards, the Venetians had moved the town’s glass manufacture onto a small island in the lagoon. This was in the Middle Ages. The island is called Murano.