Kismet (22 page)

The storeroom was near the entrance. Crates were stacked to the ceiling, sealed and labelled. Mars Bars, Snickers, Milka, Werther’s Original, as well as new names like Berlin Sugar, Oktoberfest Choc Pretzels, Mercedes
Power Bars, Sweet Steffi, and last but not least Orchard Fruits from Germany, Blackcurrant Flavour.

I spent the next two hours in the small glazed office beside the toilets. I read files and correspondence, examined bills, clicked my way through a computer. Locked filing cabinets and passwords were obviously thought unnecessary in Sheikh Soup’s domain. In the end I had worked out the following: Ahrens brought in reject products from all over the world – chocolate that had had a shot of engine oil added by mistake while it was being stirred in the vat, cocoa powder from a plantation next door to a chemical works that had blown sky-high, mouldy nuts, egg on the turn, flavouring agents contaminated for some reason or other, and just about any fat liable to leave you sick or dead – mixed it all together, formed it into bars, stuck a famous or invented name on them, and sold them in countries where Mars or Oktoberfest apparently sounded good enough to make marketing the product worthwhile. Mars, Snickers, and Werther’s Original went to Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and the western part of Russia. Berlin Sugar, Mercedes Power Bars and Sweet Steffi went to Croatia and the Baltic states, as well as Siberia and the Volga, areas where large communities of Russian Germans lived. I imagined a simple young fellow whose great-great-great-grandfather had come to Russia from Swabia, so now he was indulging in a Mercedes Power Bar imported from the West, and not cheap either, in celebration of the day. Perhaps the taste surprised him. Perhaps he dreamed of a land where convertibles sprouted from the ground.

It was to the credit of Slibulsky’s palate that, as the computer recorded, the blackcurrant-flavour fruit sweets
were the only product not to originate in Ahrens’s kitchen with its rubbish ingredients. A perfectly normal sweets manufacturer supplied them free every month, packaged to Ahrens’s specifications. As far as I could work it out from allusions and barely veiled threats in letters and notes, Ahrens knew about some incident in the manufacturer’s life which, if made public, would not quite ruin him but would have a far from innocuous effect. You couldn’t say that Ahrens missed much.

I put the files and papers back, switched the computer off, and set out in search of a door to break down. There wasn’t one. As I might have known in advance, they were all secured by alarms. I smoked two cigarettes to anaesthetise my sense of smell, which was working well again after the treatment the Hessian had given my face – was working too well, in fact, just now – then I gritted my teeth and went back to the toilets.

I stood up and gasped for air for a while.

There was still a light on up on the first floor of the brick building. I went over, tried in vain to open the front door, went round the building, pushed all the windows, and finally set off in search of a ladder. After I had used my chisel to break into a shed belonging to the tyre dealer next door, I found one among all kinds of other junk. A worm-eaten ladder with rungs missing. I put it up against the wall, where it wobbled and creaked, but it held for now. Through the barbed wire again, then down on the other side and over to the window where a light was showing. To look in I had to climb to the top rung of the ladder. Slowly and cautiously I hauled myself up by the window sill. What I saw next moment almost made me
step off into the void. The room was nearly dark, with light coming in only from the corridor, a TV in the corner was showing the regular programme about film stars and celebrities presented by a famous former woman newsreader, and the fat Hessian was sitting on a chair in front of it tossing himself off. Every element of this scene was far from engaging in itself, and in combination they were a complete nightmare. However, I thought that for the first time I understood the secret of the woman presenter’s success. Obviously her bony face with its small eyes, plastered with pink cosmetics, a sly smile suggesting she’d do anything for money like a shot always on her lips, seemed just attainable enough for someone like the Hessian to work up his fantasies. And sure enough next moment, when a young woman – Sandrine Bon-something, the text under her said briefly – appeared on the screen he paused in his activities. She was just too attractive for him to fit her and his paunch into any kind of functioning scenario together.

Considering the state in which he would be found, this was a tempting opportunity to take instant vengeance for my smashed face. Perhaps they’d establish the exact time of death and compare it with the TV schedules. What headlines there’d be!

Of course nothing would come of it. Ahrens would have that fat bag of lard buried somewhere, and in the worst case he might cancel the meeting of the Army on Saturday or hold it somewhere else. I climbed down the ladder and looked through window after window on the rest of the first floor. After more offices I found a conference hall. As far as I could see by the beam of my flashlight, crates of champagne and cognac were stacked against the
walls. Next door there was a kitchen, containing a huge electric grill standing at an angle which suggested that it had only just been delivered.

Apart from the Hessian there didn’t seem to be anyone in the building.

I took the ladder back to the tyre dealer’s place, climbed the fence into the street, sat down on a ledge by the wall and lit a cigarette. It was just after ten-thirty. Either I drove to Ahrens’s home now, or I hoped that something else would happen here this evening. A photograph had been printed to accompany the report of the Croatian economic delegation’s visit, specially mentioning the Ahrens company. It showed Dr Ahrens and his wife amidst a crowd of smiling men in suits. His wife was a strong woman in her late thirties, chin jutting assertively and with a huge pile of bottle-blonde hair. She looked amiable, but not amiable enough to let Ahrens play around with other women at home.

Just as I was becoming only too well aware that everything I had intended to do and imagined happening this evening was based on a possibly completely mistaken assumption that Leila’s mother was somewhere very close to Ahrens, headlights at the end of the street fell on to my shoes. I jumped up and pressed close into the shadow of the wall. Next moment a BMW purred by as quietly as if the whole thing had been a dream. When it had turned into the entrance to the Ahrens premises, I followed it on tiptoe and peered round the corner. The doors opened, and out came two men who, from a distance, looked just the same as the bodies that Slibulsky and I had buried last week. Blond hair, short back and sides, cream suits, totally silent. They went up to the door, pressed the bell and
waited. After a while the Hessian appeared and let them in. It was about ten minutes before they came out again. At least, I supposed it was them, for by now they had dark hair and wore jeans and leather jackets. They took two bicycles from a bicycle stand, and next moment they were cycling past me towards the city centre. The Hessian drove the BMW round behind the brick building, came back, cast a glance around him, adjusted his balls and went back inside. Half a cigarette later the next BMW purred in. Bell-ringing again, the disguised men let in again, they rode off on bikes again. Then came the third BMW, and the fourth, and the fifth. Business was booming.

When the sixth pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street, I just nodded, feeling bored with the show by now. But after the car had stopped in the yard and the doors had opened, I heard voices for the first time that evening.

‘Right, lads, see you Saturday. Work in the morning first, pleasure in the evening!’

By now I was back at the corner of the wall, and I saw Ahrens laughing. Two huge hulks in suits stood beside him.

‘Don’t worry, boss, the faggots will get what faggots always hope for – they’ll die in their sleep.’

At that moment the passenger door opened, and at first I was simply amazed – the way you’re amazed when something turns out almost exactly as you imagined it. Black hair loosely braided at the back of the neck, slim body, economical movements. I saw her only from behind, in a light-coloured coat, but it had to be her, no doubt about it. Hesitantly, like a woman facing something disagreeable but inevitable, she approached the front door.

‘Wait a minute, pet!’ Ahrens waved to the two hulks, turned and followed her. As the doors of the BMW closed, Ahrens came up to the woman from behind and put his Michelin man arms around her waist. Then the BMW drove out of the entrance, I had to retreat into the shadows, and when I next looked round the corner the door was just closing behind them.

I stood there for a while motionless, as if my head had been swept empty. Finally I lit a cigarette and paced up and down for a bit. I couldn’t make it out. Leila’s mother might not have looked happy, but she certainly hadn’t looked as if he were mistreating her either. And what did I know about her – about her relationship with Ahrens, any deal she might have made to get her husband out of jail, or her chance of getting hold of a great deal of money? Certainly not enough for me to shoot my way in through the door here and now, and get her out of there. The one thing I was sure of was that, although she was obviously relatively free to move about, she hadn’t sent Leila any news of herself since Sunday. And if she could find the time to screw around with Ahrens, you’d have thought a quick call to the refugee hostel wasn’t too much to ask. With Ahrens, too! Even if it was a case of getting hold of large sums of money, or for all I knew freeing the most wonderful man in the world from jail – surely no human being with the faintest aesthetic sense could do that.

I stood there in the entrance, looking up with revulsion at Ahrens’s desert domain, now bathed in warm yellow light. Was he telling her something about the constellations on the ceiling? Or the wonderful world of the children of Nature? No, she’d know all that off by heart. It would be
romantic hits on the CD player, and rumpy-pumpy among the coconut and banana cushions!

I turned away, striding fast, picked up my bag and marched down the street to my car. She could wait till Saturday. Which might even suit her. And after all, I had something more important to do. I was in the business of chasing a Mafia gang out of the city, I couldn’t waste time bothering with a woman who had, perhaps, looked hesitant, but had gone straight from the car to the front door of the building. And that was the whole point: do you go to the front door of a building or don’t you? There are always reasons. Reasons are the most tedious things in the world.

I roared the engine, put the car into gear, and stepped on the gas.

‘Saturday evening, I’m just about certain.’

‘Just about …’ repeated the Albanian. But it didn’t, like his usual repetition of a word, sound like a sign that he was paying relative attention, or like a way of unsettling whoever he was talking to; it sounded distrustful. I was standing near the toilets in the Owl, holding the telephone receiver and a glass of cider, and I wanted to get this conversation over with as quickly as possible. Phoning the Albanian, but not really caring in the least what he thought and thus possibly striking the wrong note, wasn’t the kind of thing you really wanted to try in this town.

‘Well, you can’t be absolutely sure until you’re there watching the lads eat their dinner.’

‘Ah, I see. So you can’t. Tell me, is this case proving a little too much for you?’

‘Too much for me? How do you mean?’

‘Well, you sound so … oh, I don’t know … agitated, nervous. Not a good state to be in for pulling off something like this.’

‘That’s nothing to do with it. Private business.’

‘Fine. I’m relying on you …’

That, in his mouth, wasn’t reassuring. I cleared my throat. ‘So if nothing else happens, I’ll meet you in the New York on Saturday morning.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to tell me where this Army of Reason will be meeting? You have my word that
everything will go as you want. But suppose something happens to you …’

‘Nothing’s going to happen to me.’

‘I lost two more of my men last night, and a woman who sells sausages over in Sachsenhausen died.’

The bit about the sausage seller was a lie. They had said on the radio that a snack bar had been blown up, but the proprietress got out alive. And if his boys couldn’t get their guns out of their trouser pockets fast enough, that wasn’t my problem.

‘Sorry to hear that.’

He audibly breathed in and out. ‘I just want to make sure that if we have to wait until the day after tomorrow to get after this gang, we’ll really be able to strike hard then.’

‘Look, I’ll have to go. My small change is running out.’

‘Small change …?’ he asked, as if I had told him I was planning to fight with a bow and arrows on Saturday. ‘Don’t you have a …’

I pressed the rest of the phone down. Another discussion of mobiles and I might actually have forgotten my respect for him, just for a moment. Wiser to break off in mid-conversation.

I bought another glass of cider and called Slibulsky.

‘How’s it going? Where are you?’

‘In a phone box.’ The Owl was one of the bars we patronised. It more or less stood for relaxation after work, silly jokes, cheerful boozing. To say I was here would have been a lie.

‘In a phone box? Since when do you hear loos being flushed from a phone box?’

‘Since when did I have to tell you exactly where I’m calling from?’

‘Oh, what a great mood you’re in. Was there anything else, or shall we ring off?’

‘How’s Leila?’

‘Lying in front of the TV. Like you said, she’s all strung up but OK otherwise. Have you found her mother?’

‘More or less. I’ll tell you tomorrow. And how are the two of you getting on with Leila?’

‘I’m on my own. Gina’s at the museum. But we’re not having any problems. She says what she doesn’t want, and I can guess the rest. You’re right, she’s delightful in her way. She even watched half an hour of table tennis with me just now. If she keeps this up she’ll be someone’s dream woman in a few years’ time.’