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stupid.”
    Karim was immediately the center of attention of the entire courtroom again. They were all expecting him to withdraw his accusation against Imad. It happened all the time.
    “ Imad , Your Honor, it’s Imad that’s the second one in the picture. Walid isn’t number two, he’s number four. I’m so sorry; I’m just all muddled up. The questions and everything. Please excuse me.”
    The presiding judge shook his head, the pawnbroker turned red, and the defense counsel grinned. “The second, yes?” said the judge in a fury. “So the second—”
    “Yes, yes, the second. You see, Your Honor,” said Karim, “we wrote on the back who everyone was, for Auntie, so that she’d know, because she—Auntie, I mean—doesn’t know all of us. She wanted to see us together, just once, but she can’t come to Germany, because of Immigration and stuff, you know. But there are so many of us brothers. Your Honor, turn the picture over. You see? All the names are right there in a row, in the same order they are on the front, in the picture. And when can I get it back?”
    ·    ·    ·

    After they’d pulled slides of Imad out of the files and examined them, the court had to let Walid go.
    Imad was arrested. But, as Karim knew perfectly well, he had stamps in his passport for both arrival and exit, proving that he’d been in Lebanon at the time of the crime. He was released again after two days.
    The district attorney’s office finally brought charges against Karim for perjury and casting false suspicion on Imad. Karim told me the story, and we decided that from now on he wasn’t going to talk about it. And his brothers, as close relatives, could invoke their right to remain silent. The district attorney ran out of means of proof. In the end, all that remained was a strong suspicion concerning Karim. But he had gamed it all out in advance and couldn’t be charged. There were too many other possibilities; for example, Walid could have given Imad the money, or one of the other brothers could have traveled on Imad’s passport—they really did all look that alike.
    Naturally, they still kept smacking Karim on the back of the head, not understanding that he’d saved Walid and defeated justice.
    Karim said nothing. He just thought about the hedgehog and the foxes.

Bliss

    Her customer had been in politics for twenty-five years. As he undressed, he recounted how he’d worked his way up. He had put up posters, given speeches in the back rooms of little taverns, built his constituency, and won three successive rounds of voting to become a minor member of parliament. He said he had many friends and was even the head of a committee of inquiry. Naturally, it wasn’t one of the major committees, but he was the head of it. He was standing in front of her in his underwear. Irina didn’t know what a committee of inquiry was.
    The fat man found the room too small. He was sweating. Today he had to do it in the early morning; he had a meeting at 10:00 a.m. The girl had said it was no problem. The bed looked clean, and she was pretty. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, beautiful breasts, full mouth, at least five foot ten. Like most girls from Eastern Europe, she wore too much makeup. The fat man liked that. He took seventy euros from his briefcase and sat on the bed. He had laid his things carefully over the chair; it mattered to him that the creases not be messed up. The girl took off his undershorts. She pushed up the folds of fat in his stomach; all he could now see of her was her hair, and he knew she was going to need quite some time. But that’s her job, he thought, and leaned back. The last thing the fat man felt was a stabbing pain in his chest; he wanted to raise his hands and tell the girl to stop, but all he could do was grunt.
    Irina took the grunt to be a sign of assent, and she went on for several minutes before noticing that the man was silent. She looked up. He had turned his head to the side,