Kismet (11 page)

‘Oh yes? And do I give the dead bodies back too?’

‘You just explain to this Ahrens how it happened – self-defence. They understand such things in those circles.’

‘But I don’t move in those circles. And you’re forgetting about my face. How about that?’

Romario shrugged slightly and hummed and hawed. Perhaps he thought a smashed-in face didn’t alter my appearance too drastically. I also suspected that it was just because of my face he was trying to persuade me to drop the whole thing. Up to now his plan had been to get the insurance money, go underground for a while, and try his luck again somewhere else once the situation had calmed down. The fact that I wasn’t letting it go, and he was in it
with me whether he liked it or not, meant that his plan was in danger, and so, not least, was his own face. In particular his own face. A reverse projection of that kind was the only way I could account for the touching and apparently completely unselfish nursing care he had lavished on me all afternoon.

At that moment the phone rang. Grateful for the interruption, Romario jumped up and brought it over to me. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. I took the receiver off and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Hey, Kayankaya,’ an obviously elated Slibulsky shouted in my ear, ‘you sound as if you’d found those bloody Army characters and they’d chucked a concrete bar in your face by way of hello.’ He laughed cheerfully, and after my rather stuffy evening in the company of Granny Romario it was like a breath of fresh air. ‘What’s up? Been screwing Deborah under a ventilator and caught a cold?’

‘I did find those bloody Army characters, and they did indeed chuck a concrete bar in my face by way of hello.’

‘What? No joking?’

I told him briefly what had happened, and how I was beginning to feel a bit better after the injection. ‘Your face is bandaged up?’

‘That’s right.’

‘When does the bandage come off?’

‘No idea.’

‘Are you fairly recognisable all the same?’

‘What are you getting at? Is this a confession that you feel deprived if you don’t get to see my face every few days?’

‘Gina’s giving a dinner party next Friday, the whole works, candles and tablecloth and all. She’s been appointed
head of a department at the museum. So a lot of her women friends and colleagues are coming. Very elegant ladies, some of them. But if all they can see is your pot belly, those aren’t exactly the best conditions for a first meeting.’

‘You’ll find this hard to believe, but at the moment …’

‘I know, I know: the Army and your conscience and no spare time and so on and so forth. Look, if you’re reasonably presentable next Friday and you don’t drop in, we have a real problem. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Heard anything of Tango Man?’

‘You could certainly say so. A performance of
No Fairer Land
under the shower this morning, and at the moment he’s polishing my kitchen to a high gloss.’

‘Still not joking?’

‘No. He’s alive. And how.’

‘Well, tell me about it some other time. I have to go back to my vendors. We’re having a little party – three years of Gelati Slibulsky, who’d have thought it?’

‘Congratulations. By the way, I think you were right about those sweets. There’s something funny about them.’

‘Aha,’ he said, satisfied, and we said goodbye until next Friday at the latest.

In the kitchen Romario was busy scouring lime marks off my sink with a sponge pad. He had taken off his shoes and socks and unbuttoned his shirt. Another day or so and he’d probably be running about my place naked – singing, cleaning, shedding pubic hair.

He smiled at me over his shoulder and said, ‘Just making myself a bit useful.’

‘But only a very little bit. Listen, Romario: I’m
carrying on with this case, and I don’t want anyone around here who isn’t happy with that.’

He turned, shoulders drooping, scouring pad in his hand. ‘I was only making a suggestion. And I did it mainly for your sake because they beat you up. What was it the doctor said? “You were lucky”. Well, if that’s luck …’

Water was dripping from the sponge pad on to his bare feet. Didn’t he notice? Or was he just pretending not to notice so as to show how upset he was? When Romario presented a picture of misery I was never quite sure where the picture stopped and the misery began.

I took what cash I had out of my trouser pockets, two hundred-mark notes and a few tens, put it on the kitchen table, and said, ‘Find yourself a hotel for tonight, and let me know tomorrow where you’re going to be for the next few days. Sorry, but that’s how it is.’

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Reproaches, climb-downs, offers, a couple of new bids for sympathy, and any number of variations on the familiar subject of his poor hand, but finally he had to see that there was no negotiating with me this evening. When he closed the door behind him a little later with elaborate care – see what a quiet, harmless creature you’re turning out into the street so heartlessly – I even thought for a moment I could breathe through my swollen nose again. Then I took a few precautions: I put some empty bottles just inside the door as an alarm system, laid out all my weapons beside the bed, got my bulletproof vest out of the wardrobe and hung it on the window catch. Then I took the TV set into the bedroom, swallowed painkillers, and lay down to watch a French film in which a man being attacked pleaded with the thief, ‘It’s not my money.’ To which the
thief impatiently replied, ‘I’m not stealing it for myself either.’ As the final credits were rolling I turned off the TV and the light. It was Saturday evening. A song by Heino was coming up from the greengrocer’s flat: ‘Come into my wigwam, wigwam …’ Did he think it was good music to go with sex? I heard his entire programme: dog-like panting, corks popping, the disc from the beginning again, singing along to it, more panting. Around two the front door of the building closed, and finally it was quiet.

I spent the next two days in bed. No one disturbed my orgy of television, baked beans and chocolate ice cream. Outside it was drizzling, and according to the weather forecast it was going to stay that way for the rest of the week. The cool, damp weather was just right for someone with a swollen face. I got a fright only once, when the racketeer’s mobile alarmed me. A text message said the mobile was going out of circulation at once.

On Tuesday afternoon I felt reasonably all right again, and called the Albanian. We’d met at a billiards tournament five months before, and then drank a couple of aniseed schnapps together. Soon after that I discovered by chance that his two daughters went to the same expensive boarding school as the son of Slibulsky’s tax adviser. From what the tax adviser said, the Albanian’s daughters weren’t having a great time there. Their class teacher obviously thought it educationally valuable to connect their poor school work with their ethnic origin, doing so at regular intervals and in front of the other pupils. Apart from the fact that they had both been born in Frankfurt, and spent more holidays in Florida than Albania, you might have expected that for school fees of two thousand marks a month each, plus extras, you could at least expect teachers who don’t trumpet their own backwoods prejudices. Normally I wouldn’t have thought anything of it – injustice in institutions for the rich elite was not among
the things that bothered me. In this case, however, I had an opportunity to improve my relationship with the Albanian. After I’d been through interrogations first by a bodyguard and then by a private secretary about the reason for my call, their boss finally came to the phone. I told him about his daughters’ problems, and judging by what he said this was the first time he’d heard about them. The girls were presumably embarrassed to tell him. As so often when such things happen, it’s the wrong people who feel ashamed. I took care to give the impression that I would continue to keep him up to date with his children’s school lives, and finally he thanked me warmly and actually gave me the number of his mobile. That number could be worth gold in my job. I never knew exactly what happened to the class teacher who also taught the girls German and sports, but a little later he had to give up teaching sports.

I exchanged a few remarks with the Albanian about his daughters, whose marks had improved to a remarkable degree over the last couple of months. Then I told him in rough outline, without mentioning names and places, what I knew about the Army. Not only could he keep his mouth shut surprisingly often for a gangster boss, he could certainly never be called talkative in general either. If he wasn’t discussing his daughters, phoning him was rather like playing tennis up against a wall. His tone of voice changed too. Warm and melodious a moment ago, it now sounded like a warped wooden door being moved back and forth by a slight wind.

‘I need a few more days to find out what its structure is like, who does what where and how much longer this outfit is expected to operate, but then we could strike.’

‘Pick the time and we will.’

‘It’s a small factory. We’d need about forty men to surround it.’

‘Forty.’

‘But we don’t want a bloodbath. You’ll get my information only if you can promise me your people will keep a grip on themselves. We want to stop the Army operating, that’s all.’

‘That’s all, then.’

‘And the boss is my affair.’

‘And the boss is your affair.’

‘OK, then, I’ll be in touch within the next few days.’

‘Within the next few days,’ he replied, but as I was about to ring off I sensed him suddenly hesitating, as if he had to venture into unknown terrain. I kept the receiver to my ear until he finally asked, ‘Who are you working for?’

‘Myself.’

‘Unpaid?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘The Army made me do something I didn’t like at all, and I can’t leave it at that.’

‘Hm,’ he said, and after a pause, ‘If you try taking me for any kind of ride, I’m finished with you. Is that clear?’

‘That’s clear.’

‘Well then, good luck.’

I rang off and remembered how I’d lost to him in the semi-finals of the tournament. A fair opponent, no fooling about, no tricks. The problem was his retinue of henchmen who always had their hands on either their guns or their pricks in their trouser pockets, and were constantly on the
point of taking out one or the other to let fly with it. But he’d promised they would do no more than I wanted, and a boss like the Albanian really couldn’t afford to break his promises. That kind of thing got around, and it was bad for business. Or so I hoped, anyway.

I looked at the time. One-thirty, a good time to have had an accident at work and come off my first shift of the day, trudging round dogs’ homes.

‘Hello, Frau Beierle.’

‘Herr Kayankaya – dear me, you sound as if you have a bad cold!’

‘Well, I had a little accident. Just now, in Oberursel, I thought I’d found Susi at last, and I went into the pen. But it was a different dog, one that likes jumping at people’s faces. And well, it broke my nose.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘It’s not too bad, but I have to go to the doctor now, and maybe I can get back to searching for Susi at the end of the week.’

‘Of course, of course! You must look after yourself. Take your time. Injuries to the head should never be taken lightly.’

‘I’m just sorry for Susi. Now she’ll have to be shut up longer in one of those awful pens.’

‘Oh, Susi will be all right. It’s really amazing how many animal rescue centres there are around Frankfurt.’

‘Yes, amazing.’

‘Because people are so cruel, specially in this town. Or that’s my opinion, anyway.’

‘An interesting opinion. Although after today’s incident I have to say,’ I added, chuckling hard, ‘the animals in this town can be quite cruel too.’

‘Of course, you poor thing! I mustn’t keep you here talking. You go off to the doctor, and then go to bed.’

‘Thank you for being so understanding, Frau Beierle.’

‘Oh, never mind that. And if you need anything, just call me.’

We said goodbye, and I wondered when the day would come on which she realised that her bow-wow was probably never going to come back with my assistance. And I also wondered how much longer I wanted to play the pop-eyed Turk for her benefit. Because of course the Islamic scholar had picked me from the yellow pages on account of my name, and of course when we first met she had explained to me at length what the Turks were like, myself included. Industrious, proud, strong on family values, keeping up old traditions, the secret rulers of Asia – in short, I was a whole great nation in myself. Not for the first time, I was fascinated to discover what having a good education and a university degree did
not
mean. But as I’d been out of a job for weeks, and as my normal daily retainer fee had automatically doubled the moment I set foot in her villa with its large garden, I didn’t shake her belief that she had practically invented the Ottomans. Only when she played me some appalling music, and I could see from her face that she was obviously expecting me to drum along with it or do a little dance, did I suggest that even in a people who appeared to be of one and the same origin, individual tastes might differ. Whereupon she said I didn’t really know what I liked any more, Western values and the Western lifestyle had distorted my true identity. To keep her sweet, I did her a small favour when we came to the business part of the deal: I tripled my retainer, just like that, and let her haggle until she beat
me down to double the retainer, as if I usually did that kind of thing. Her small, knowing smile as she wrote me her cheque seemed to be saying: you see, that’s how the Orientals live. Once I had the Army business behind me and set out looking for Susi again, supposing I actually found her I’d have to find out how the Orientals felt about rewards. Perhaps there was some nice fifteenth-century proverb: find my watchdog and I will shower you with gold.

I made fresh coffee, drank a cup, dressed, cleared away the bottles from inside the door, and went to the supermarket. The manager there told me that the Ahrens company had stopped delivering three months ago for unknown reasons. When I asked whether Ahrens Soups had sold well, he said, ‘No worse than other products of the same kind.’