Brother Kemal

Chapter 6

I sat down in the café on the Bockenheimer Warte, ordered a double espresso and called an acquaintance in the Frankfurt Police.

Octavian Tartarescu, despite his name and his Romanian origin, looked like a typical German country boy. Or, rather, exactly as anyone would imagine a German policeman. Tall, strong, short fair hair, a pronounced, angular chin that looked made for the straps of a helmet to be buckled under it, blue eyes with a serious and rather pitiless expression, his mouth a narrow line suitable for barking out orders, and his cheeks white and plump from eating potatoes every day. Instinctively and without meaning it as a compliment, total strangers called him ‘cop’ during any bust-up in the streets, even if he was neither in uniform nor driving a police car. It was simply the first term of abuse to occur to anyone looking at Octavian. Nonetheless, his superior officers liked to send him on undercover missions, on the assumption that no criminal would expect the police to be so stupid as to infiltrate the underworld with someone who looked as if Himmler himself had had him bred to maintain public order. Still less did they think that criminals would believe them clever enough to do that very thing.

It was as an undercover cop that I had first come to know him twelve years ago. At the time Deborah was still a prostitute. I had helped her to get rid of her pimp the year before, found her a place in Mister Happy, and since then, so to speak, I’d been her favourite customer. Octavian was tracking down a ring of sex traffickers who smuggled Belarusian girls into Germany. In the role of a slightly simpleminded punter, he was combing the brothels of Frankfurt, and so one evening he came to the small establishment on the banks of the river Main. Mister Happy was probably the last place in Frankfurt’s red light district that would have illegal, under-aged, forced sex workers. At the time I’d known Tugba, who ran the place, for years. She was a women’s — or more a prostitute’s — rights activist. She’d worked as a prostitute herself, and become famous all over the country because she had drawn a pistol and forced her pimp and a hated customer, whom her pimp had repeatedly forced on her, to fuck each other. To emphasise her point she shot both of them in the legs several times and then called the police. The press was full of the case for weeks. Tugba, who came from a Turkish family from Darmstadt, hired a good lawyer and got off with a suspended sentence on the grounds of self-defence. With the help of an investor and the money she had made from interviews and her own TV documentary show — Horizontal with My Head Held High — she had bought the old boathouse on the Deutschherrnufer not far from Offenbach. She had it well renovated, uncovered the original timber framing of the façade, furnished bright and friendly rooms with views of the river and put in a sauna, several small fountains with mosaic tiling and a comfortable bar on the ground floor with leather chairs and a silver counter. Over the terrace she stretched wires and planted roses to climb them, and to its left and right she placed two old streetlights specially delivered from Hungary. When the weather was warm enough, the girls could lean against them for the delectation of the customers. A picturesque wooden landing stage went out over the river, with fragrant lilacs and willow trees trailing their branches in the water in spring. The background music from the bar was exclusively piano: Keith Jarrett, Ahmad Jamal, Mendelssohn, Mozart. Tugba was very particular about that. She had a passion for the piano, played the instrument herself and probably had not entirely given up her dream of a career as a concert pianist. All things considered, if the Michelin Guide gave stars to brothels, Mister Happy would have had three of them.

That evening, Octavian saw me sitting on a bench on the landing stage reading the newspaper, and said to himself that no punter would spend his time in a brothel that way. He came down from the terrace, said good evening, asked if he could join me and I thought: This guy looks like a cop.

He asked me this and that as one punter to another, what the place was like, the service, the girls — he really did say girls, in English — and I thought: A cop from the countryside — before asking whether I worked in Mister Happy.

‘You mean do they provide guys here as well as girls?’

‘No, no …’ As far as I could see in the evening light, Octavian’s potato cheeks went red, and I thought: A gay cop from the countryside — well, best of luck in Frankfurt!

‘I heard …’ he went on. ‘Well, between you and me, I like girls really young, specially Russian chicks, so I thought if you work here, as a manager or for security … see what I mean? Well, I thought maybe you’d know whether there was anything of that nature to be … well, to be had here. It’s my first visit to this place.’

Now I did take a closer look at him. He was playing the embarrassed country bumpkin pretty well. Maybe not a policeman after all? But I was no criminal, and I had known a lot of clever policemen.

I put my paper down. ‘Show me your badge first, and then we’ll see what I can do for you.’

‘My badge?’

‘Well, or your ID — anything to convince me that my information will end up in the hands of the law and not some wretched little guy who fucks children and is trying to pretend he’s an undercover cop.’

‘Eh?’ Octavian, annoyed, made a face. The country bumpkin act abruptly disappeared. ‘What sort of crazy act are you putting on?’

I later learned that he’d had a long day — spent in dirty, stinking brothels full of teeny bopper entertainment and striptease, and had planned just to look in quickly on Mister Happy, which he knew to be a well-run establishment, and then finally have a beer in a place where he wasn’t forced to look at bare breasts the whole time. Some smart-ass like me was the last thing he needed.

In a bad temper, he asked, ‘Are you one of us, or what is this crap?’

‘Kemal Kayankaya, private detective. A friend of mine works here, but I’m not her pimp. No pimps allowed in Mister Happy.’

He hesitated for a moment and then replied, ‘Octavian Tartarescu, vice squad. Is there a beer to be had here at anything like a normal price?’

‘If I get it for us. Jever, Tegernsee Spezial — or one of those Belgian beers with champagne corks, but they’re expensive.’

‘Do they play golf here too, by any chance?’

I fetched us two Tegernsee Spezials, and then another two and then four, and so on. It turned into a really good evening. The sun sank into the river Main, the glowing sunset sky was reflected in the mirror-glass of the high-rise façades opposite, water splashed from the fountains around us, slow jazz piano music with a double bass came from the bar, and we talked about Frankfurt and the lives that had brought us here. One of us Romanian, the other Turkish — we fell into a kind of homeland euphoria for the city. The prettiest park, the best restaurants, the best Frankfurter green sauce, the lousiest but funniest beer kiosks, the best tramline for looking out the windows, the best high-rise building and so on, until after a while we came to the best place on the banks of the Main, and after about eight beers each that was, of course, where we were at that moment. Presumably we would have agreed on the Mister Happy landing stage even without the beer, but probably not so exuberantly.

And when a while later we were speaking and fondly mocking the Hessian dialect, both for fun and to prove how at home we were in Frankfurt, the thought briefly crossed my mind that the Turk and the Romanian might not really be as sure that they belonged here as they had thought. At least, I knew no Hans-Jörg from Frankfurt who would have celebrated his city so euphorically and with such childish pride — the city where, since the day he was born, he had never had to struggle with the registration office, hear himself slammed at the regulars table or wince at the slogans of election campaigns.

‘Octavian?’

‘Kemal. What’s it about?’ Cool, professional, chop, chop. Even though we hadn’t spoken to each other for months. When Octavian didn’t have a number of beers under his belt, his manner suited his appearance. That was probably why we were more acquaintances than close friends.

‘I’ve got something for you: pimping, child abuse, rape, drugs, murder …’

‘Hold on a minute, I’ll get a pen and paper.’

At the word murder I thought of Valerie de Chavannes. How had she been planning to pay me for the job? Or had her talk of being short of money been only a tall story to beat down my fee? Or had she thought that a more passionate embrace or a canvas in The Blind Men of Babylon series would do the trick? Had she already checked out how much a contract killing would cost?

‘Okay, carry on.’

‘The pimp and his customer are lying in an apartment in Schifferstrasse in Sachsenhausen. Café Klaudia is on the corner, the apartment is on the third floor above it. The customer is dead, murdered; the pimp is tied up and chained to a radiator.’

‘Tied up by you?’

‘Yes. His name is Abakay. He trafficks in underage girls; you’ll find all the details on his computer. Look for a file called ‘Autumn Flowers’. I got one of the girls out of there. She’s my client’s daughter, and I hope I’ve deleted all references to her from the computer. She’s not available as a witness, but you’ll find plenty of other girls.’

‘Who’s the murderer?’

I hesitated for a moment. ‘When I got into the apartment the customer was dead, a narrow stab wound to the heart, and Abakay was standing over him bleeding from the chest. The dead man was still holding a kitchen knife. I assume it was a quarrel about money. Anyway, I didn’t find a murder weapon.’

‘How about the knife?’

‘Too broad. You’ll see, it’s as if he’d been stabbed with a knitting needle.’

‘Are you available as a witness?’

‘If I don’t have to give my client’s name.’

Octavian paused — it was a pause that he meant me to notice. Then he said, ‘A knitting needle. That’s the kind of thing you might expect to be a girl’s weapon. I hope you’re not shielding a murderess.’

‘Nonsense,’ I replied, but at the same moment I thought: Interesting. But Marieke could hardly be as cold-blooded as that; hearing me coming upstairs, hurrying into the bedroom, finger down her throat … All the same, I’d have liked to pay a quick visit to Abakay’s apartment to look for a needle or a shashlik skewer under the bed, just to be on the safe side.

‘Right. Then I’ll go straight there.’

‘The heroin is in the kitchen under a stack of frying pans.’

‘You must have really turned the apartment upside down.’

‘That’s exactly what I did. See you soon, Octavian. Call me if you have any questions.’

I closed my mobile, drank my espresso and looked at the time. Just after two. It would take the police several hours to search Abakay’s apartment, and I didn’t want to be seen around there until they were through with it. Although I’d told Octavian I’d be available as a witness I wasn’t sure about that. In all probability, Abakay knew people who could make life very uncomfortable for hostile witnesses, and I wasn’t up for that sort of thing anymore. In fact, ever since my office was blown up I’d been more cautious in general, and now I was sharing a four-room apartment in the West End with a woman who wanted to have my child. I had a great deal to lose, and that mattered to me more than whether Abakay got two or five years in jail.

That was why I wanted to avoid being seen with Octavian and his officers for now. I could still simply deny playing any part in the case.

I decided to leave questioning the waiter about the shashlik skewer and fetching my bike until the evening. Instead, I went to my office through the West End and the rail station area in the autumn sunlight, got into my new old Opel Astra, and drove to the Brentanobad stadium. There was going to be an under-fifteen girls’ football club game there at four o’clock, and Deborah’s niece Hanna was playing in defence.