Brother Kemal (7 page)

‘You mean there were other girls before me?’ she asked, and I had the disagreeable impression that she’d have liked to be the only one.

‘Frau de Chavannes, in case this isn’t clear to you yet: Abakay is a pimp. And if girls didn’t want to go along with him he pumped them full of heroin. You can forget about art and romantic films. You happened to be lucky.’

And with that little lecture I left her alone. Abakay, Abakay, I thought on my way along the corridor, you really have a knack for it: a little social kitsch, cheap drinks, terrible films, and great big gold rings on your fingers, and the girls come running! I wondered whether Valerie de Chavannes herself
had landed in those white satin sheets after a couple of glasses of Aperol.

When I reached the front hall of the apartment Abakay’s mouth was open, he was groaning, and he was clearly about to come back to his senses. I hit him on the head again with the pistol, and then I searched his pockets. In his trouser pocket I found one thousand two hundred euros in hundred and two-hundred-euro notes, along with some fives and tens. Presumably there had been exactly one thousand five hundred there an hour ago. Maybe Abakay had made out that Marieke was a virgin; that would have explained the high price. Then Marieke had been difficult, and to calm her down Abakay had gone to buy heroin with some of the money he had obtained in advance from fat Volker. One thousand two hundred and a few squashed notes were left.

I took the bigger bills and stuffed them into the pocket of fat Volker’s jeans.

Then I went into the kitchen and searched the drawers for a sharp knife. The shower was running in the background. I hoped Marieke would never tell her mother that she had slept with Abakay.

I returned to the entrance hall of the apartment with a butcher’s knife about thirty centimetres long, knelt down beside Abakay, and cut and stabbed him lightly in the chest and the stomach. Not deep wounds; I just wanted it to look as if there had been a fight, and I wanted Abakay’s blood on the blade. Abakay groaned again and twitched, but he didn’t come round. I crawled over to fat Volker, wiped the handle of the knife on my T-shirt, and closed his cold hand round it. The small wound, level with his heart, had stopped bleeding.

I took a roll of parcel tape from the office, a teacloth from the kitchen, gagged Abakay and bound his legs together.

After that I went back into the office, turned on the computer, and typed ‘Marieke’ into the window of the search engine. The name appeared on a list of various girls’ names
with pseudonyms after them. The pseudonym Laetitia, in brackets, followed Marieke’s name, and then it came up in a kind of catalogue. The file was entitled ‘Autumn Flowers 2011’. The photographs were simple snapshots of fully clothed teenagers in the street or cafés, usually laughing. Laetitia was described as:
Clever, demanding upper-class girl, political interests, likes conversations, will go to great lengths in her search for adventure if the tone is right, ready for almost anything, exotic, milk-coffee colour, very well developed, still fourteen for several months
.

Fourteen; that accounted for the price.

Another girl with the pseudonym of Melanie was described as:
Happy, natural suburban girl, loves horses, likes to have fun – laughter above all. More for the conventional ride than delicate games, blonde, fresh, youthful type. Sixteen
.

Probably eighteen.

And then there was Lilly:
Super special! Sweet little mouse in knee-length socks, still plays with dolls, virgin, to highest bidder
.

I deleted all the data about Marieke, typed
de Chavannes
into the search engine, brought up Valerie de Chavannes’s address and a few photos of her taken secretly in the café. I deleted those as well. In the bookshelf I found a carton of photographs labelled
Frankfurt in the Shadow of the Bank Towers
. With the carton under my arm I went into the front hall and kicked Abakay as hard as I could between the legs. In spite of the gag he grunted out loud, fluid ran from his nose, and he doubled up before falling on his side unconscious again.

‘That’s from Lilly.’

As I waited in the kitchen for Marieke, I leafed through the photographs. Most of them were black-and-white photographs of devastated, wrinkled, old or prematurely aged faces against the background of the high-rise bank buildings of Frankfurt. An old Roma woman with a toothless grin and a cigarette end in the corner of her mouth, a dark-skinned
youth with an Elvis quiff, a child’s guitar and only one eye, a junkie whore with an entirely vacant expression and an
I Love Frankfurt
button on her blouse, and so on. Not so bad, but not so new either. I felt as if I’d seen these photos many times before.

I put the carton aside and wondered what weapon, or what tool, could make such a narrow but deadly wound.

We reached the inner courtyard by way of the back stairs, and went through the gateway to the street. The aroma of grilled meat wafted out of the kitchen windows of Café Klaudia. It was lunchtime, and I felt hungry.

‘We must find a taxi. My colleagues used our car to take Abakay away.’

‘How about Volker?’

‘There’s a doctor with him in the stairwell.’

‘Why didn’t you want us to go out the front?’

‘So that he wouldn’t see you again. There are cases where the customer, or rapist or whatever you like to call someone buying underage girls for sex – anyway, there are cases where the man tries making advances to his victim later, especially when it went wrong the first time. Naturally we want to avoid that. I don’t want him to get a chance to imprint your face on his mind.’

‘I don’t think he’s feeling very well.’

‘He’ll soon be better.’

We were standing on the pavement, and I was looking out for a taxi. My bike was gleaming in the sun twenty metres away.

‘Won’t he have to go to prison?’

‘What for?’

I looked at her. After her shower, the blonde Rasta braids tied behind her head with a blue velvet bow, in jeans and a white blouse, the square-framed designer glasses on her nose, she looked just like the stern and slightly condescending girl in the photos on Valerie de Chavannes’s glass-topped table. She’d been in shock half an hour ago, but it was clearly wearing off.

‘Attempted rape?’

‘It’s always rather difficult to prove that kind of thing. Particularly when the alleged victim has previously had a voluntary relationship with the pimp involved.’

Marieke’s features froze. For a moment she looked as if she were about to turn and march away, maybe spitting at my feet first, or something like that.

‘You’re wrong!’

‘Am I?’

‘Erden isn’t a pimp, he’s a photographer, and what’s more he’s a good friend of my mother!’

‘No,
you’re
wrong there. Maybe he’s a friend of your mother, but if so he’s not a good one.’

She shook her head in annoyance.

‘Erden’s far from being a pimp! He just wanted to do Volker a favour, he needed money and Volker has plenty of it. And to be honest, if he hadn’t behaved like such a pig with that nasty talk, and wanting me to get undressed at once and so on … I’m not usually such a prude.’

She gave me a brief, inquiring look, to see if I was shocked, and then went on, ‘And that’s why there weren’t any other girls before me. You just thought that idea up to make it all worse. Because you’re a policeman and so that you can put Erden in a cell. Maybe you’ll get a pay raise or a medal or something!’

‘My God! If people got medals for arresting little bastards like Abakay, I’d have gone into the metal trade long ago.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Apart from that – well, I don’t know how you imagine a pimp, but pimps with any intelligence at all will of course go to great pains
not
to resemble the image of their profession.’ As I said that, the big gold rings on Abakay’s fingers flashed into my mind, and I thought that either he was less intelligent than I had assumed, or I had less of a grasp of the subject than I thought. Maybe pimps with any intelligence at all played about with the familiar notions because that sort of thing turned some women on. The way Deborah had first turned me on in a bar at three in the morning: high heels, a generous décolletage and an eloquent smile, speaking in an affectionate whisper – ‘You’re something special. I can see that right away, and I’m something special too – together, darling, we’ll fly through paradise all night, only four hundred marks.’

‘That doesn’t make Abakay’s profession other than what it is … It’s like petrol stations that advertise their concern for clean air.’

Marieke did not reply. She was staring furiously ahead, both hands clutching the straps of her leather bag, presumably deep in thought about my coarse and heartless nature. Compared to Abakay: cuddles, sweet talk, sensitive films, sympathy, artistic talent, social responsibility – why had she freaked out like that when he said: ‘Darling, I’m sure ours is a great love, we’re so lucky, but to live with that great love we need money, sad to say those are the facts of society, so be nice to Volker, he’s a good friend who needs a little affection, and kissing a stranger can’t affect our great love, can it?’

Maybe we ought to have left through the front door after all, I thought. Volker’s corpse and the gagged body of Abakay would presumably have been impressive enough to keep Marieke away from the apartment for some time.

‘How are your lips?’

She kept her eyes on the ground.

‘I expect Abakay might not have hit you so hard but for those rings …’

‘Stop it! It was a scuffle! Don’t you understand? An accident! And we were all a bit drunk.’

‘If you carry on in that vein you’ll end up in court as a witness after all, but for the defence.’

‘Do you know what he needed the money for?’

‘No idea. Golden ornaments for his prick?’

‘You’re just disgusting! For a Roma family in Praunheim. He wants to film a photo-documentary about their daily life. Dreadfully poor people, no social support, not even health insurance, nothing at all, with five children – and people are always complaining about beggars, but what else can they do? And do you know the worst of it? The grandparents were murdered in a concentration camp. This is Germany! I know what I’m talking about … My family’s relatively prosperous, but look at the colour of my skin, my father is black, so for the people around here I’m like a Gypsy, a foreigner! And that’s what Erden wants to achieve with his photo-documentaries: he wants all the foreigners, people of other colours, from other places, of other faiths, all the outcasts to get together and form a movement and later a political party. The Foreigners’ Party! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I mean you’re an Italian or something. Magelli, wasn’t that it?’

‘What’s the name of this family?’

‘What?’

‘The name of the Roma family in Praunheim. A family with five kids and no medical insurance – well, of course that won’t do. I’ll call social services and make sure they get insurance as quickly as possible.’

There was a pause, and Marieke stared at me, taken aback.

‘Is that meant to be another joke? Are you laughing at them?’

‘Not in the least. But to help them I’ll need their name or their address.’

‘I suppose you think they haven’t tried everything already?’

‘Then some social worker may have committed an indictable offence by refusing them insurance. Medical insurance is obligatory in Germany. In the interests of and for the protection of the community as a whole. Imagine if the children are incubating some dangerous infectious disease and not getting treatment. Or the family is living here illegally – in that case I’d get in touch with an organisation that helps refugees and knows all about such cases.’

Marieke was still looking at me as if I wanted to stamp the Roma family’s papers as ‘to be deported’.

‘Or maybe this family doesn’t exist at all? Could it be just a symbol? The Roma family in Praunheim with forebears murdered in a concentration camp, shunned today as they always have been? I can easily imagine that as a photo-novella.’

‘Do you know something?’ said Marieke, suddenly very calm and determined. ‘I really, really don’t like you. Now please take me home.’

We spent the next five minutes standing side by side in silence. Marieke was looking straight ahead, deliberately unmoved, while I looked up and down the street in search of a taxi. As I did so, my eyes fell on the blackboard outside Café Klaudia, with the dish of the day written in white chalk: shashlik on a skewer with rice and red peppers.

A shashlik skewer, I thought, would leave a thin, narrow wound behind.

I wanted to ask Marieke to wait a minute so that I could ask the waiter whether there had been a skewer missing when he cleared the plates away in the morning, and if so whether he could remember the guest who had taken it, but just then a taxi came round the corner. I put off questioning the waiter until I came back for my bike, and flagged down the cabby.

‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

‘At the far end of Zeppelinallee,’ replied Marieke, looking at me for the first time in five minutes. If I was not much
mistaken, there was a touch of triumph in her eyes.

‘Well, that’s a terrific district. Maybe a little too noisy and exciting, isn’t it? It wouldn’t do for me.’

She rolled her eyes. I laughed, and held the door of the cab open for her.

‘Marieke!’

Valerie de Chavannes ran through the front garden, swept her daughter into her arms and fell with her to her knees, hugged and kissed her, with tears running down her face.

‘Marieke, my darling! My dearest darling!’

‘Hello, Mama,’ said Marieke. She returned the hug, but apart from that let her mother’s greeting wash over her.

I stood at the garden gate, watching the scene and trying to smile like a friendly police officer.

After a while Valerie de Chavannes cast me an inquiring glance over her daughter’s shoulder with her happy, reddened eyes.

I tapped my forehead. ‘Magelli, Frankfurt Police.’

‘Oh.’ Valerie de Chavannes acted surprised. ‘Police?’ she asked, without letting her daughter out of her arms.