Brother Kemal

Chapter 4

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.