Two types of Kaunas exist in my head: Kaunas of trains and Kaunas of busses. The Kaunas of trains contains museums, food, and Laisvės Avenue until the underpass. If there’s still some tourist energy left at that passage, the train Kaunas also includes the old town with the town hall, but not the Vytis monument, as it’s already too difficult to reach.
On the other hand, the bus Kaunas is completely functional – several times a year, the express bus takes me from the Vilnius–Klaipėda highway to Savanoriai Avenue and stops at the Kalniečiai marketplace stop a few minutes later, where my godfather awaits me. In his apartment, we snack and talk in detail, discussing all the accumulated news until late at night, and the next morning, I head back home. Or vice versa – the godfather comes to my apartment on Savanorių Avenue in Vilnius. The routine has stabilized over several decades. I visit my Christian relative in Kaunas more often than he visits me in Vilnius, but he usually stays longer.
Today’s trip to Kaunas wasn’t planned, as my godfather had just returned from a three-day visit to Vilnius (we talked about everything, literally everything!), and upon getting home, he called me and asked me to come immediately because there was an important matter to discuss. I traveled anxiously, mentally arranging the standard unpleasant scenarios, specifically the one involving a fatal illness.
Uncle A. (I call my godfather uncle, as is customary in our country) was waiting for me at the Kalniečių market stop. He seemed normal and when I heard the reason for my summoning, I breathed a sigh of relief: there were no illnesses, but my uncle’s apartment was robbed while he was visiting me in Vilnius. I didn’t ask why the godfather didn’t call the police, because I knew the answer – I was the police to him. Well, of course, you can’t call me an officer, I just look after the Police Department’s databases for pay, but Uncle A. doesn’t care about details, and the crime series he watches non-stop show that it’s the database specialists who end up getting involved in the most difficult cases.
My godfather wanted to discuss the circumstances of the theft at the scene, so we walked in friendly silence. A trolleybus with an advertisement offering invisible hearing aids passed us. I promptly joked that on the other side of the trolleybus, there could be an ad for glasses that would allow you to see invisible hearing aids, but Uncle A. didn’t appreciate the humor because a hearing aid was a necessary element for his comfortable life. Just like glasses.
We walked, listening to the sounds coming from open kitchen windows and playgrounds. Parking lots made their own noises too – we heard the approaching yelp of an alarm, that particularly annoying, intermittent beeping with long pauses when it seems the owner has come and turned it off, but it resumes again and again.
We approached the car making the noise.
“Well, policeman, what can you tell me about this whole thing?” the godfather asked.
Having read and watched so many detective stories he liked – especially upon our meetings – to show off his deductive skills, sometimes assuming the role of Sherlock Holmes, sometimes Watson, but most often both, leaving the role of an inarticulate hero for me.
I inspected the car and began.
“It is clear that the alarm has been working for a long time but not more than two days, otherwise the battery would have already died.”
“And your insight is confirmed by the fact that there is a note attached to the windshield.”
The author of the note quite categorically and obscenely tells the car owner to better fix his alarm system, reinforcing the suggestion again with swearword-filled alternatives that could harm both the car and its owner.
“I think the note’s author has children because they used a wide range of markers in four colors, including pink, to write the message,” I added another insight. The author underlined the most important words of the message in pink.
“The letters are smudged. It only rained at night, so the note appeared on the car last evening when the incessant alarm started to particularly annoy someone,” Uncle A. found an important detail.
“But it’s worth noting that the note appeared after someone broke the wipers because the paper is attached to the windshield with tape. If the wipers had still been there, the author would have tucked the note under them.”
“It can also be cautiously suggested that the note’s author or the wiper breaker returned to the car during the night while it was still raining, broke the driver’s side window, and tried to disable the alarm: the driver’s seat is still damp.”
I took down the note and crouched. There was a Slavic word carved with a sharp tool on the car door, which I could interpret in various ways: as both a threat and a statement of fact. After a quick graphological analysis, I made another conclusion, “In any case, it can be confidently stated that at least two people were actively annoyed by the incessant alarm. Look here – the note writer has a very specific way of writing the letters ‘P’, ‘Z’ and ‘C’, but in the same word carved on the door, the letter ‘P’ is shaped entirely differently.”
Having decided that the case of a non-disabled alarm should be finalized by the cut tires, we finished the deduction session. A few minutes later we got to my godfather’s apartment on the fifth floor and started investigating the theft. Things looked fishy from the get-go. The criminal tried to break the door for a very long time. He (or they, or she) tried to break the lock tongues with a chisel and after failing to do so, attempted to cut them off. Failing that as well, the loser punched out the cores of the locks, and only then used a crowbar, widened the frame, and finally broke in.
“What about the neighbors?” I asked.
Only two apartments are occupied on this floor. I live in one and a young, nice family with a baby lives in the other. They say they’ve been away, so they’re no help. The third apartment was rented out, but it has been emptied for a few months. Shall we go inside?”
My godfather lived in a one-room apartment. I looked around – everything appeared the same as during my last visit. The kitchen was minimalist, in the hallway there was a coat rack with a winter coat ready, and in the room, a single bed with a nightstand beside it holding an electric alarm clock and radio, a wall unit, a TV, a writing desk, a coffee table, and two armchairs. A sheet of paper lay on the desk.
“The list of missing things,” Uncle A handed over the sheet.
It neatly listed the losses: 1. Raincoat (not new). 2. Matryoshka doll (incomplete set, the smallest figure is missing). 3. P. Žalkauskas’ brochure “Crimes against public order”, 1983. 4. New electronic alarm clock. 5. Two plates, chipped. 6. Wooden ruler. 7. Cognac Hennessy V.S.O.P, 0.7 l bottle, emptied more than halfway.
“Yeah…” I continued, “Unbelievable. An inexperienced thief breaks into an apartment with great effort and takes demonstrably insignificant things. That door must have been worked on for several hours. Unbelievable. Maybe it’s part of some kind of bet here; competition for novice burglars?”
The godfather nodded his approval. I read the list of stolen items again.
“You had two alarm clocks?” I pointed to the nightstand where the clock’s green numbers were glowing. “Not two, three,” Uncle A. seemed a bit embarrassed. “It was a really good deal. Three alarm clocks for the price of one.” “Where do they give away alarm clocks like that?” I asked, intrigued. “Oh, on a TV shopping channel,” my godfather mumbled.
Suddenly, we both jumped. The small room was filled with a painfully shrill, hysterically frequent beeping. My godfather rushed to the alarm clock and gave it a good whack. The crazy noise stopped. A child cried behind the wall.
“It works like a tank. If you don’t turn it off, it’ll go until the batteries die,” my godfather praised the device and immediately justified himself, “It wakes me up from my afternoon nap. I don’t want to miss my evening shows. And I need the maximum volume because I sleep without my hearing aid.”
“And the alarm clock doesn’t turn off by itself?” I asked, mentally piecing together the only possible version of the mysterious robbery.
I spent another half an hour with my uncle A., and we agreed that I would look for similar crimes in the Police Department’s database and then I said goodbye.
I climbed down the stairs very loudly, waited for a minute on the ground floor, and then silently climbed back up to the fifth floor. The godfather’s neighbors’ apartment was quiet. Remembering that they have a child, I knocked instead of ringing the bell. A minute later they opened. I turned my work ID to the crack that opened.
“Police department,” I introduced myself without lying. “Can I come in for a moment? It is about a neighboring burglary.”
In the corridor, the investigator was met by a pale petite blonde and her large bespectacled husband.
“Witnesses claim that you were in your apartment at the time of the theft. Is it true?” I bluffed in a friendly way and that was enough.
The pair looked at each other desperately, the man shrugged and nodded.
“How long have you suffered before you took action?” I asked curiously.
“For almost eight hours. Uncle A’s alarm clock, as we call the neighbor, went off, as usual, at five o’clock,” the wife began to explain. “It was awful. The baby cried nonstop. Finally, exhausted, he fell asleep around midnight but then the car alarm went off and we lost it. An absolute nightmare. The baby woke up again, and tried to cry but was too tired and just gasped. My husband saw through the window that the neighbors were smashing the window of that blaring car and decided to do something too… Well, go to the neighbor’s and turn off the damned alarm clock. We knew that Uncle A. had gone to Vilnius for a few days, so my husband felt pretty safe. He obviously didn’t know how to do that…
“… I didn’t have much luck, but I found an instruction on YouTube on how to pull apart the doorpost. I went in, turned off the alarm, and faked a burglary. I took all kinds of crap…”
“… which we will return,” the wife declared. “We’ll find them somewhere in the basement corridor and give them to you. Except for cognac. Uncle A. cannot drink alcohol due to his kidneys.”
“…When I came with the stolen things, my wife and child were already asleep. I passed out too because the alarm was not bothering me anymore. I don’t deny my guilt, you can arrest me,” the bespectacled man finished his confession.
“Well, the arrest will have to be postponed. Uncle… More precisely, your neighbor hasn’t written a statement yet, and I have a feeling he won’t. But when uncle… that is, when your neighbor fixes the door, ask him for a spare key,” I advised and left. Before I left, I asked how many neighbors were banging on the car window and was surprised to learn that there were twelve angry men.
I listened in the yard. It was quiet! Even the car with the alarm was silent. As we predicted with the godfather, the tires were punctured and the hood was open, someone had silenced the car by pulling out the wires. I had already missed my bus, and there was still an hour left until the next one, so I decided to give my Kaunas bus option a cultural touch and went to see the shiny sculpture of a bull with a golden cross on its head in the middle of the avenue.
