Brother Kemal

Chapter 11

The Book Fair wasn’t hell, it just smelled a bit like it. Huge halls over several stories, each with a floor area about the size of two football fields, were filled partition after partition with the stands of millions of publishing houses, right to the last corner. A sweating, unwashed, perfumed crowd of humanity, drenched in alcohol, hungover and smeared with hair gel, pushed its way along aisles and past stands, up and down escalators, into toilets and through entrance doors, never stopping. The greasy vapours of sausages, pizza, Chinese food, Thai curry and chips wafted overhead, invisible radiators seemed to be turned up to maximum — or maybe it was just all those bodies producing such heat — and only the few doors opening and closing brought any fresh air into the place.

From Maier Verlag’s small hospitality room behind me came the odours of filter coffee stewing on a hotplate, egg and Harz cheese rolls that no one touched and smelled stronger as the day went on, and a homemade coconut and banana cake brought by a young American author for the staff of the firm — For you guys, for all the amazing work you do! It seemed to be made of Bounty bars and rotting fruit.

The stand of Maier Verlag was about twenty-five metres long by five metres wide. Portraits of authors and posters of book jackets hung on the walls, stacks of new releases lay on several shelves. The seating consisted of simple wooden benches and chairs, with small round tables and on each a dish of biscuits and another of salted crackers. A part of the wall some five metres wide in the middle of the stand, as well as a table positioned there with four chairs in front of it, differed from the rest of the furnishings. The wall was adorned with a fishing net, two plastic lobsters, a plastic octopus, a bottle with a letter inside it, a small buoy and five copies of Hans Peter Stullberg’s new novel hanging in the net. Its title was An Occitanian Love. The table was in the classic French bistro style, with an iron foot and a marble top, the chairs were folding wooden garden chairs in red and yellow. ‘The colours of Occitania,’ as Katja Lipschitz explained to us.

When we arrived, Rashid had commented dryly on the special presentation of Stullberg’s novel with, ‘On account of his back trouble.’

There was a whole shelf full of copies of his own novel, Journey to the End of Days, with a quotation from Le Monde above it. ‘Seldom have relevance of content and formal expression achieved such perfect symbiosis.’

‘A great quotation,’ said Katja Lipschitz.

‘Well, Le Monde is always Le Monde,’ agreed Rashid.

And I said, ‘Makes you want to read it right away.’

Katja Lipschitz gave me an expressionless look before pointing to the corner next to the hospitality room. ‘We thought you could sit there. You’ll have a good view of the stand, and you’ll be relatively inconspicuous. Malik will be interviewed by journalists and talk to readers and booksellers at the table in front of you.’

‘Great,’ I said, putting the bag containing my ironed shirt and pin-stripe suit for the evening occasion with Dr. Breitel down on the chair intended for me. Rashid pushed his gleaming black rucksack with a little Canadian flag patch sewn onto it and the inscription Vancouver International Writers’ Festival in red under the table, explained that he was going off for a moment to see people, and began walking round the stand saying hello to the publishing staff; with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks for the women, and a hearty handshake for the men. ‘Great book, Malik!’ ‘Immensely touching!’ ‘A really important text!’ ‘My favourite new book this year!’

While Katja Lipschitz turned away to use her phone, I looked around for places where Rashid and I could take cover if need be. In front of us was the aisle with the constant flow of visitors to the Book Fair, to the right the Maier Verlag tables where staff members were discussing sales figures, developments at the Book Fair, personal details, events they were going to attend and the latest Book Fair gossip — ‘Gretchen Love!’ — ‘She’s bound to be on the non fiction best-seller list next week!’ — ‘Crazy!’ — ‘Scandalous!’ To our left there was the partition between Maier Verlag and the neighbouring publisher. On that partition was Rashid’s shelf with new copies of his novel, some three hundred of them, the quote from Le Monde blown up large, and a photo of Rashid propping his head on three fingers and looking as amused and superior as he had when I walked into the lounge of the Harmonia Hotel.

So the only possible cover was the hospitality room. But by the time we had got the sliding door behind us open and closed again, and flung ourselves down among the trays of rolls and crates of bottled water, any assassin worth his salt would have finished off Rashid with a knife taken from the nearest pizza trolley and disappeared into the throng of visitors again.

Besides my suit for that evening, my bag also contained a baseball bat, pepper spray and a pair of handcuffs. I unzipped it and placed the handle of the baseball bat close to the side of the bag so that I could get at it as quickly as possible. I also took my pistol out of my back holster behind me and put it in the right-hand side pocket of my corduroy jacket. No one could spot the gun there, and I could shoot through the jacket itself.

‘I hope you’ll be careful with that.’ Katja Lipschitz came up to me and pointed to my jacket pocket. ‘I’ve been observing you. I mean, there can also be exuberant fans who might want to embrace Malik.’

‘Then that’s their bad luck. I rather like firing at random, you know. Right here in the aisle with all the visitors coming to see the show you’re bound to hit someone. By the way, do you have those threatening letters with you?’

We looked at each other.

After a pause, Katja asked, ‘Do you have a wife, I wonder?’

‘You mean am I gay?’

‘No, just wondering if anyone lives with you?’

‘You’d be surprised: I’ve been in good hands for more than ten years. We share an apartment, no affairs — at least on my part — which is why I’m so good-tempered, so easy to please, a man surrounded by the warmth of a feminine nest. Sorry about that, in case you were interested in your chances.’

Katja Lipschitz uttered a brief laugh.

‘How about those threatening letters?’

‘Would the letters change anything in your approach?’

‘Yes. I’d know whether I can rely on the information of the lady who hired me.’

Another pause. I heard a cry from one of the other Maier Verlag tables. ‘Here, see this text message! Number one!’ — ‘I don’t believe it!’ — ‘Well, to be honest, I wouldn’t mind having someone like Gretchen Love on our list too — you can always sell it as art!’ — ‘Spermaboarding as art? I don’t know about that.’ — ‘Is that the title? Spermaboarding?’ — ‘Yes, and something else as well.’

Finally Katja Lipschitz said, ‘A few weeks ago Malik said he’d received letters like that. Unfortunately he hasn’t brought them yet. I’ve asked him several times.’ She looked at me challengingly. ‘Happy now?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’s all the same to me what you people do to crank up sales. But it’s part of my job to estimate roughly the extent of the danger for the person I am protecting and for myself. I’ll assume even more now that we shall have a peaceful afternoon.’

It took her a moment to overcome herself, and then she said, ‘Glad you are so relaxed about it. I’m sorry, working with authors’ — she hesitated — ‘well; they have their oddities, surprises — if you see what I mean?’

‘Of course — because they think too much.’

She smiled wearily. ‘Then that’s all right.’ And looked at the time. ‘I must get back to the phone now. If you need anything, then as I said, please ask me. See you later.’

Soon after that Rashid sat down at the table in front of me, and Katja Lipschitz’s young assistant, wearing a chic blue trouser suit, served him a cup of stewed coffee and a slice of coconut and banana cake.

‘Thanks, darling.’ He winked at her. ‘Mmm, that smells good. Let’s hope our young colleague writes as well as he bakes.’

‘Oh, he does,’ said the assistant with a friendly smile. ‘A great book, really moving. If you need anything please ask. The man from the Bamberger Allgemeine will be here in five minutes.’

‘What about the Wochenecho interview?’

‘We’re still working on it, Herr Rashid. Katja is doing all she can. The problem is that the journalist who agreed to do the interview had to withdraw at short notice for health reasons. I’m really sorry. As soon as there’s any news I’ll let you know.’

She turned to me. ‘Would you like a piece of cake too?’

‘No thank you, just a glass of water, please.’

As the assistant went to get the glass of water from the hospitality room behind me and a cloudy aroma of Harz cheese and banana enveloped me from the open door, Rashid turned to me, glancing at the hospitality room. ‘Sweet, isn’t she?’ Then he held his cake fork aloft like a little sword. ‘An interview in the Wochenecho! If that comes off then the sales …’ And he drew a line slanting up in the air with his fork.

‘Great,’ I said.

A little later Katja Lipschitz’s assistant brought the journalist from the Bamberger Allgemeine to Rashid’s table. He was a stout, unshaven, uncombed, comfortable-looking man in his mid-forties in trodden-down shoes and a raincoat so crumpled that he might have spent the night in it. He let his apparently heavy shoulder bag drop on the floor and greeted Rashid exuberantly. ‘… A great honour for me … Very glad to … What a brave book … thank you for giving me your time.’

Rashid tried to return the compliments as far as he could. ‘… Very glad to meet you myself … thanks for your time … Bamberger Allgemeine, a great little paper …’

Then the journalist took an old-fashioned tape recorder out of the shoulder bag — ‘Afraid we don’t run to modern technology at the Bamberger Allgemeine yet’ — spent five long minutes getting the recorder to work, and finally began asking questions that he had noted down on a small piece of paper covered with food stains.

It was the first interview of Rashid’s that I had heard, and there were to be another eight that afternoon: with the Rüdesheimer Boten, the Storlitzer Anzeiger, the student journal Randale, with Radio Norderstedt and someone or other — and little as I liked Rashid myself, by at least the third or fourth interview I was feeling sorry for him all the same.

‘My dear Malik Rashid,’ went on the man from Bamberg, after a few trivial questions about Rashid’s place of birth and biography, ‘now let me take the bull by the horns: is your masterly, compelling novel Journey to the End of Days not, above all, the subtle coming-out of a man from North Africa who has lived in Europe long enough to throw off the religious and traditional chains of his native land publicly and, so to speak, on behalf of many … how shall I put it? Like-minded men?’

‘What?’ Rashid’s mouth stayed open. He really did seem taken entirely by surprise. He had certainly expected journalists to broach the subject, but he was obviously not prepared for it to be the kernel, not only of this but of all the following interviews on his first day at the Fair. However much he explained that his central character’s homosexual love for a young hustler was a mixture of sexual frustration, longing for freedom, the desire for forbidden fruit, with at most a very slight amount of natural inclination, and that he as a writer was simply devising a conflict that would help him to describe the present state of Moroccan society — the one thing that interested the mostly unprepared and cheaply dressed men and women of Bamberg and Storlitz was: DOES THE MUSLIM AUTHOR PUBLICLY ADMIT TO HIS HOMOSEXUALITY?

Just after four o’clock, Sheikh Hakim called me on my mobile. I was standing at the wash basins in the gents’ toilet for the third time that afternoon, waiting for Rashid. Maybe it was the scalding coffee that he tipped cup after cup down his throat during the interviews, maybe it was the interviews themselves, but he was suffering from diarrhoea. As I stood next to the room full mainly of men urinating and watched how they carelessly soiled the floor, I gathered from their talk that there were three main topics of conversation at the Book Fair that day. First, Gretchen Love’s future best seller Spermaboarding, or How a Hundred Men Came On Me All at Once, just published by a large and famous firm, a kind of account of a Berlin porn star’s self-exploration. Second, the Wochenecho journalist Lukas Lewandowski, well known to everyone but me, judging by the general interest and all the laughter, who claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in the high-speed train between Hannover and Göttingen on his way to the Book Fair, and thereupon dropped everything worldly, including his work, to devote himself entirely to that experience. Third, a presumably powerful literary critic whose name wasn’t mentioned but who was referred to as Blondi a couple of times — whether after the pop band, Hitler’s German Shepherd or simply his hair colour was not clear to me — who had published a novel entitled Oh, My Heart, My Heart, So Heavy Yet So Light under a pseudonym. That morning his supposedly top-secret pseudonym had been aired in several newspapers, and Blondi had marched up to one of the journalists responsible at the Fair and slapped his face. ‘Or more likely spat and scratched the little queen!’ said someone in the corner. ‘Oh, my heart, my heart, so heavy!’ Everyone laughed.

At that moment my mobile rang.

‘Good afternoon, my brother.’

‘Good afternoon. As far as I know I don’t have a brother. Who’s speaking?’

‘Sheikh Hakim.’

More laughter about something near the urinals.

‘Wait a minute, it’s rather noisy here.’

I went out into the corridor near the entrance to the toilet.

‘Herr Hakim?’

‘Kemal Kayankaya,’ he stated, pleased. He emphasised the Turkish pronunciation of my name.

‘Yes, you have the right number.’

‘Not a very Christian name.’

His speech rhythm had the monotony of an electric kitchen machine, and he had a strong accent, but grammatically his German was perfect. His sentences sounded as if he had learnt them with heart — as if speaking German was for him a job to be carried out perfectly, like a dutiful official or a high-class whore, but that hardly interested him at all.

‘To me it’s just my name.’

He laughed, coughing.

‘Why do you fight the fact that you came into the world a Muslim?’

‘I don’t fight it, but I don’t make a big thing of it either. I didn’t choose it. Is that why you’re calling — for a discussion about the religious traditions of my parents’ native land?’

That coughing laugh again.

‘My secretary tried to arrange a meeting with you.’

‘He told me that you want to see me, and I advised him to fix a time. I’m not often in my office.’

‘So I see.’

‘You see what?’

‘Well, I am sitting in your office at this moment and it really doesn’t look as if you spend much time here.’

I took a great deal of trouble to go on in a calm voice. ‘Really? Did I forget to lock up?’

That laugh again. It was as mechanical and empty of feeling as his German, and had nothing to do with any kind of amusement.

‘Do you know what’s interesting?’ he asked, without answering my question.

‘A great many things in the world, Herr Hakim. But I assume you mean something that I won’t think of at once.’

‘As far as I can see there’s nowhere for you to sleep in your office. Forgive me, but I’ve never had a chance to see a real private detective’s workplace before, and it could have been like the films: that you earn just enough for schnapps and a folding bed behind the desk. And so, at least, I take it that you have a private apartment somewhere. The curious thing is that Methat has searched your office, has looked through all the drawers and files with meticulous care, and he found no address anywhere to confirm my supposition. Do you understand? As if you had calculated on a situation like this and were intent on leaving no traces in your office leading to your private life. Maybe because there is a woman you love in your private life, maybe even children?’

‘Herr Hakim, I know that you are active in the field of heavy hints and impenetrable remarks, but I am probably not wrong in assuming that you’re not concerned with religion at the moment. If you want to talk about your deplorable nephew, go ahead. If you just want to beat about the bush I’m hanging up. Oh, and kindly get out of my office at once.’

That coughing laugh. Rashid emerged from the toilets beside me, pale-faced. I signalled to him to wait.

‘I’d like to put it more plainly but we’d better not do that on the phone.’

‘Why not? I have nothing to hide — or, as you would say, I have a clear conscience. How’s your conscience, Herr Hakim?’

‘Where are you now? I can come to you at once.’

‘Sorry, but I’m working. I have no free time until Monday afternoon.’

‘I can’t wait as long as that.’

I thought of his threat to find out where Deborah and I lived. ‘Okay, if Methat tidies up after him and replaces the lock on the door, if it suffered when you broke in, then we can meet late tomorrow evening for a little while in some public place.’

‘How about in my mosque?’

‘As I understand it, Sheikh, a mosque is more of an intimate place where you talk to the Lord God. I suggest Herbert’s Ham Hock at the railway station. If you’re hungry they serve salad too.’

He said nothing. I thought I could sense him shaking his head.

Finally he said, suddenly with an icy tone to his voice, ‘Don’t go too far, Kemal Kayankaya. Very well, tomorrow evening, Herbert’s Ham Hock — around eleven?’

‘Right at the back of the dining room there’s a nook on the left where we can talk undisturbed. I’ll have it reserved for us. See you tomorrow evening, then.’

I broke the connection and turned to Rashid. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting. How are you?’

‘Ah, well …’ He sighed. ‘I must have caught some bug. Or maybe there was something wrong with the egg salad yesterday evening.’

‘If I were you I’d lay off the coffee at the Maier Verlag stand. And the coconut and banana cake, too.’

‘I only had a small piece. I mean, a colleague’s home-baked cake — you have to try it at least once to be polite.’

‘Even if Hans Peter Stullberg had baked it?’

Rashid raised his slightly clouded, sickly eyes from the floor and looked at me. ‘He’d have been more likely to heat up some sangria and then do us a dance. Unfortunately his back doesn’t allow it.’

I grinned, and we set off back to the Maier Verlag stand.

‘Come to think of it,’ Rashid said, ‘I’m glad that I don’t have to take your tone earlier today personally.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, when you were phoning your client just now you sounded just as grumpy.’

‘Hmm. Tell me something: the Wochenecho, is Lukas Lewandowski supposed to do the interview?’

‘Yes. I heard all that in the toilets as well. The publishing house said it was a “health issue”.’

‘Well if the story’s right, that’s what it is, too.’

Just before we reached the Maier Verlag stand, Katja Lipschitz’s assistant came towards us. ‘Malik! We’ve been looking for you everywhere. The lady from Radio Norderstedt has been waiting for ten minutes.’

Rashid, still pale from the activity of his intestines, switched in no time at all back to his ‘A good thing there are guys like me around’ advertising campaign. The colour returned to his face, and his shoulders went back.

‘We just went out for a breath of fresh air. Ready in a moment.’

An attractive young redhead with big green eyes, red lips, a short skirt, bare legs and high-heeled boots was waiting at his table. Her lips twitched nervously at regular intervals, making her look vulnerable. You could see Rashid rubbing his hands with glee.

And then the lady from Radio Norderstedt said, after preliminary greetings, ‘I’m from the Other Way Around programme, and may I tell you how glad I am to have a self-confessed gay Muslim on the programme at last.’

On the way to the House of Literature for the panel discussion with Dr. Breitel, I called Deborah from the taxi.

‘Everything all right?’

‘A full house, I’m busy. Keep it short.’

‘Will you wait for me when you close down, please? I’ll collect you from the wine bar.’

‘Fine. Has something happened?’

‘Someone broke into my office, and I don’t want you to go home to the apartment by yourself.’

‘And there was I thinking it was something romantic.’

‘I’ll steal you a rose on the way home. See you later.’

The rest of the evening in the House of Literature and the bar of the Frankfurter Hof went, with a few exceptions, that now almost familiar uneventful course that seemed to be the basic tone of the Book Fair. People talked a lot and drank a lot, but what with all the friends, colleagues and acquaintances they were talking to and drinking with, they almost never had time to finish talking to one person on a subject or sometimes even to finish a sentence. As if the room were full of turning circles that only briefly collided with each other, changing direction, bumping into the next circles, and so on and so on.

Unusual event number one: Dr. Breitel, who, with his grey flannel plus-fours, leather braces, a bright red-and-blue striped shirt and a yellow bow tie, looked like a cross between a fat Hitler Youth boy and Lady Gaga, talked the usual stuff about ‘the threat of an Islamised Europe’, yet somehow was taken seriously by almost everyone present as if Kant in person in a grey three-piece suit were speaking on the stage.

Unusual event number two: Gretchen Love entered the main hall of the Frankfurter Hof bar at about eleven, in a close-fitting nun’s habit and bright blond Pippi Longstocking braids, and at a rough estimate caused seven hundred male jaws to drop.

Unusual event number three: an intoxicated young colleague of Rashid’s, who obviously wanted to make up to Katja Lipschitz, entertained our company for a while with good-humoured gossip about other colleagues and the staff of other publishing firms. As so often that evening, the conversation turned to Lukas Lewandowski, among other things, and the Wochenecho interview that had been postponed for the time being. Rashid and Katja Lipschitz agreed for what felt like the hundredth time, with downcast expressions, that this interview might have been/probably would have been/was one hundred per cent certain to have been the starting shot in an unexpected rise in sales of Journey to the End of Days and would even have guaranteed the book a place on the best-seller list. The drunken author ruined his chances with Katja Lipschitz with a joke that, for a change, I at least half understood. Rashid, he said, should be glad: Lewandowski’s chatter, low in meaningful content but always eloquent, was ultimately a danger to authors. Because his nonsensical sentences sounded so good, many listeners who should have known better let themselves be drawn into one of his cocaine-inspired ideas. As he saw it, Lewandowski was the Cristiano Ronaldo of the German culture pages: incredibly talented ‘but not very bright. Well, I ask you: a vision of the Virgin Mary!’

Maybe it was because Katja Lipschitz didn’t understand the half of that joke that I did understand, namely the bit about the footballer Ronaldo. Or because she wouldn’t allow herself any doubts about her professional world at midnight and at an increasingly boisterous party — or so it seemed to strangers to that world like me — and Lewandowski was clearly one of the power centres of the book trade. Anyway, she closed ranks with him surprisingly sharply. ‘That’s stupid. Lukas Lewandowski is one of our most important promoters of literature. I don’t like to hear him run down.’ A little later the noticeably less inebriated young author left the party. However when Rashid and I left the bar of the Frankfurter Hof, I spotted him in the crowd around Gretchen Love and, judging by his gestures and the laughing faces around him, he seemed to be back in form as an entertaining if malicious humorist.

Apart from that, the circles turned with impressive regularity. ‘Hey, you! It’s ages since we met … Absolutely delighted … I love your interview/dress/contribution to the debate in the Berliner Nachrichten … Oh, there’s So-and-So, I must just have a word with him … back in a minute.’

There was nothing for me to do but smile and shake hands now and then. Although alcohol during a job as a bodyguard was strictly taboo on principle, several times that evening I toyed with the idea of indulging in a small beer. The danger of an assassination attempt seemed to me as slight as the likelihood of Rashid’s novel reaching the best-seller list without the headline ‘Author Stabbed by Religious Fanatic in the Frankfurter Hof’.

At one twenty I delivered Rashid by taxi to the Hotel Harmonia. Ten minutes later Deborah got in, dropped her handbag on the floor and laid her head on my shoulder.

‘Read anything good?’ she murmured.

‘Read what?’

‘Well, isn’t there a Book Fair going on?’

Even the taxi driver laughed quietly. As he did so, I noticed a pair of headlights following us in the rearview mirror. On the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, I asked the taxi driver to shake off the car for a twenty-euro tip.

‘What’s going on?’ Deborah was alert at once, lifting her head from my shoulder as we suddenly turned full speed into Mendelssohnstrasse.

‘Someone’s following us.’

Luckily she was too tired to worry.

We raced round two more corners and jumped a set of red lights, and then we were rid of the car following us.

At home Deborah fell asleep at once on the sofa, while I called Slibulsky.

‘Hey, any idea what time it is?’ he whispered.

‘I’m sorry, but I need your help tomorrow. Urgently.’

‘It’s not a good time. I have our monthly meeting with the branch managers of my firm at midday tomorrow, and Lara wanted to go to a reading with me tomorrow evening. Don’t you know the Book Fair is on?’

‘Yes, I know. The Book Fair.’

‘Or something like that. Anyway, someone’s going to read a bit of his book to us, what’s its name, wait a minute … Yes, everything’s okay, sweetheart, go back to sleep. It’s Kemal calling.’ I heard a kiss and some murmuring. Lara didn’t particularly like me because I didn’t make any effort to take her religious quirks seriously. Slibulsky didn’t take them seriously either, but he tried not to show it.

‘I’ll just go into the kitchen … Right,’ he went on, at a normal volume, ‘so like I said, he’s going to read us a bit of his book. Something philosophical, but straightforward and humorous, Lara says. He looks the way Monty Python would have done a French pop star. Kind of long soft hair, and a blasé face like an ad for aftershave.’

‘Lara really seems to like him.’

‘She thinks he’s super cute and wildly intelligent, and the sight of him makes me feel sick.’

‘Well, I don’t want to spoil your evening. I’ll find someone else.’

‘Very funny. I just don’t know how I’m going to tell Lara. And if she goes on her own you can bet the philosopher will try to get his claws into her.’

Lara was twenty years younger than Slibulsky, looked like Christina Ricci, and always dressed so that her pretty breasts and behind would show to advantage. I could understand that. What I couldn’t understand was why Slibulsky, although she had been living with him for more than four years and as a freelance jewellery designer was more or less living on his money, still seemed to be afraid of losing her at any time and thus missing out on the chance of his lifetime. Although as I saw it, Lara loved him very much, if in her own bitchy way, but that’s how she was.

‘Maybe Deborah can explain it to her.’

Lara had been in awe of Deborah ever since finding out about Deborah’s Jewish grandmother. Once she had turned up at our apartment on a Friday evening with a plaited loaf and candles, intending to celebrate the Sabbath. With the words, ‘You go on watching the sports programme, I’m sure this isn’t your sort of thing,’ she left me sitting on the sofa. It wasn’t Deborah’s sort of thing either, but for once she went along with Lara’s more or less correct ritual just to be friendly, although she said afterwards that from the next week she had to go to a sommelier course on Friday evenings. It was almost true; the course was on Thursdays.

‘Explain what to her?’ asked Slibulsky.

‘That I need you to be with Deborah tomorrow. Someone is out to get me, and I’m afraid he’ll try to do it through her.’

‘And where will you be?’

‘I’m on a bodyguard job all day. Can you have the branch managers meeting at the wine bar?’

‘No problem.’

‘Okay, then Deborah will call Lara tomorrow morning. And as for the reading, I know an author who’ll be reading at the House of Literature next week. His novel is called: An Occitanian Love, south of France, lavender fields, older man, young girl, “very movingly told, with a humorous slant, light, without avoiding the big questions in life …” ’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘Just quoting from the ad. I’m working at the Book Fair for a publishing house, and the author, Hans Peter Stullberg, is one of their stars. I’ll be meeting him tomorrow, and I’ll try to get a personal invitation for you and Lara. I’m sure Lara would like the occasion. It’s chic.’

‘Older man, young girl … I’m not so sure.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! What’s the matter now?’

‘Lara’s ex was here the day before yesterday. He’s the same age as her, up and coming rock star — you know the kind of thing, clever texts, all that shit — and I felt like my own granny. Hey, don’t ash on the carpet, please, and: Assam or Darjeeling tea? Enough to make you sick.’

‘Hmm.’

Luckily I heard Lara calling to him at that moment. She didn’t like Slibulsky to talk to me for too long.

‘Well, fine, then. I’ll go back to bed. So Deborah will be calling tomorrow morning?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and, ‘Sleep well,’ and we hung up. I recalled how in the old days Slibulsky had been a drug dealer, a bouncer, and even for a while a debt collector and henchman for one of the biggest pimps in Frankfurt. Life was a wonderful thing.

Then I undressed Deborah, put a nightdress on her and carried her to bed.