Brother Kemal

Chapter 9

The advance payment came into my account at the end of the week, and by post I received the signed contract, Rashid’s schedule for his visit to Frankfurt, and a pass to the Book Fair. No threatening letters. Those were either a pure invention or a ridiculous insult, but in any case nothing that Katja Lipschitz could show me or wanted to show me. And fundamentally it made no difference. Rashid was getting a bodyguard for promotional purposes. A Gregory job. As long as Maier Verlag was paying.

On the Monday I visited the Harmonia Hotel. A typical middle-class dump with worn fitted carpets; cheap and brightly coloured sofas; little halogen lamps; a bar with beer, spirits and cheese crackers; and a collection of signed postcards on the wall from B-list celebrities who had once stayed at the Harmonia. I bought a bad espresso and got the waiter to show me the back door and the emergency exits. ‘Because of my father. He might be staying a couple of days here next month, and he’s terrified of fire.’

On Tuesday I made my official statement on the Abakay case to the police.

On Wednesday I had a call at the office from a man called Methat who said he was Sheikh Hakim’s secretary. He began by speaking Turkish, until he gave me a moment to explain that I’d never learnt the language. After an incredulous pause, a Turkish curse — at least, it sounded Turkish — and a few contemptuous lip-smacking sounds, he finally went on in German with a strong Hessian accent, and I had to ask three times before I got his drift, which was that His Magnificence wanted to see me.

‘Who wants to see me?’

‘Is Nificence.’

‘Munificence?’

‘No, no! Nificence!’

‘Sorry, try again.’

‘Is Nificence! Like nificent view!’

‘Ah, I get it. His Magnificence.’

‘Don’t pretend you …!’

‘Er … who is His Magnificence?’

‘I ave said I am secretary of Sheisch Hakim!’

‘Okay. Then please tell Sheisch Hakim that if he wants to see me he’d better make an appointment by phone or email. He’ll find my address in the Yellow Pages. I’m travelling a lot just now and I’m only occasionally in my office.’

‘You must be crazshy!’

He was getting on my nerves. ‘I assure you I’m not,’ I said, in as heavy a Hessian dialect as I could manage. ‘But I’m bizshy! So tell him to make an appointment, saying what it’s about. As I said, I’m busy at the moment and I have to hang up.’

I cut the connection before he could call me any more names.

So it was only one day before Sheikh Hakim heard of my statement to the police. I decided that when I got the chance I would tell Octavian that not only did he ‘know a great many people who prefer to save their own skin over the punishment of a criminal’, he also had at least one officer at police HQ who preferred a small fortune in cash, a bag of heroin, a free visit to a brothel or some other inducement within Hakim’s or Abakay’s reach to the punishment of the said criminals. I firmly believed that Octavian did not know who it was, or who they were, but someone was keeping Sheikh Hakim up to date. I didn’t believe quite so firmly that he would do anything to unmask the person or persons concerned. It probably depended on what height he or they had reached in the pyramid of police power. When Octavian took me to the door after I’d made my statement the day before, his quiet words of farewell had been, ‘You’re doing this at your own risk, I hope you realise that. When all this is over, we can see each other again, but until then I guess we’d better not. My promotion will be decided in the next few weeks.’

‘I tell you what, Octavian, maybe we’d better not see each other again, full stop.’

‘Oh, don’t come over like that! I’d get another thousand a month, and I have family to support in Romania.’

‘Don’t we all?’ I said.

‘You don’t,’ he said coolly.

‘I’ve seen the girls in Abakay’s catalogue. They’re my Romanian family.’

‘Don’t turn sentimental.’

‘Is it sentimental to feel ill when I think of thirteen-year-olds on sale for fucking? Is it sentimental to want to nail the man who’s offering them? You’ve been in the Vice Squad too long, Octavian, it’s bad for your morals.’ And with that we left each other without further goodbyes and went our separate ways.

On Thursday Valerie de Chavannes tried to reach me on my mobile. I was sitting in the wine bar with Deborah, eating tripe sausage, drinking red wine and reading the sports pages, and the first time the phone rang I ignored the call, the second time too. Then she sent a text message: Please call back as soon as you can! Urgent! Danger! I finished my sausage, emptied my glass, went into the little courtyard behind the wine bar and called back.

Valerie de Chavannes answered at once.

‘Herr Kayankaya! At last!’ Her voice was shaking, and sounded nasal, as if she’d been shedding tears. Now and then I heard her breathing heavily again as she struggled for air.

‘What’s the matter, Frau de Chavannes?’

‘A man called Methat rang just now! Had I set a private detective on Abakay?’

‘And what did you say?’

‘What you told me to say — I said I didn’t know what he was talking about.’

‘Did he believe you?’

‘No idea. He threatened me!’ She struggled for air. ‘He said if I’d hired you then I must get you to withdraw your evidence against Abakay as quickly as possible or my daughter’s life would be in danger!’

Maybe it was because I imagined that sentence coming from Methat in his heavy Hessian dialect — life in danscher — but anyway, I didn’t take the threat as seriously as I probably should have done when talking to Valerie de Chavannes. I said, ‘Oh yes?’

‘What do you mean, oh yes? I told you Abakay would still be dangerous even in prison!’

‘Well, then you must decide: either you want him in prison or you don’t.’

‘You know exactly where I want him!’

She spoke from the heart, furious, resentful, implying: I told you that you ought to kill him!

‘Take it slowly. We’re talking on the phone, there could be someone listening in. And after all, I’m a witness in a murder case — so don’t say anything that might be misunderstood. Of course I know that you want to see him in prison …’

A pause, more heavy breathing.

I didn’t really think that the police were listening in on me or Valerie de Chavannes, but the thought of a bugged phone — you know exactly where I want him! — made me feel queasy for a moment.

After a while, regaining some measure of control over herself, she said, ‘And now what? What do we do?’

‘Well, Frau de Chavannes, we don’t do anything. Remember? You hired me to bring your daughter home.’

‘Oh, and now you’re wriggling out of it like a coward!’

‘You’re welcome to ask me to take on another job for you — protecting your daughter, or you, or both of you. But I’m convinced that the best and also the cheapest thing I can do for you at the moment is not to show myself near you.’

‘That’s what you said last time!’

‘Because it was true last time. I suggest the following. You tell Marieke’s school that she’ll be absent, sick, for another week, and you stay at home with her. If Methat rings again, or the police, or anyone else, don’t let them persuade you to do anything. No one but you and I know about our connection. Even Marieke knows only a police officer called Magelli. If someone rings the doorbell, don’t open the door, and if that someone doesn’t go away, then call me. If you’re still being pestered in a week’s time, I’ll deal with it.’

Once again she drew a huge breath, as if a sack of plaster lay on her chest, before she cautiously asked, ‘Is that a promise?’

‘It is.’

‘Please, Herr Kayankaya … I really am so frightened, and I’m all on my own …’

‘I said I’ll deal with it. But you have to hold out for that week. I’m sure that at the moment Abakay’s people are just poking about at random. Presumably Abakay has drawn up a list of people to whom he’s done wrong in some way or another, and who he correctly assumes could have hired a private detective to kick his legs from under him. You were probably just one name among many. So again: deny ever having heard of me and I bet that in a couple of days’ time they’ll leave you alone.’

She sighed. ‘My God, Herr Kayankaya, what a mess I’ve got myself into.’ And after a pause, ‘I’m sorry, I’m being a nuisance to you, aren’t I?’

‘Oh, never mind that.’

She stopped for a moment and then laughed quietly, in a familiar way, as if we were friends of many years’ standing and she was glad that I was still the same old roughneck I used to be.

‘May I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Do you think …’ She hesitated. Or she pretended to be hesitating. Or both. Probably Valerie de Chavannes herself no longer knew what she did unintentionally and what was calculation or a trick. Anyway, her hesitation gave the question the clarity of which she then tried to deprive it — or made out she was trying to deprive it — by adopting a tone as objective as possible and slightly pert, adding a barely perceptible pinch of girlish flirtatiousness. ‘Do you think we’d ever have met without all this?’

This time I was the one to hesitate.

‘Before I answer that question, may I just tell you the name of the friend who will collect my fee from you in the next few days? He’s Ernst Slibulsky. You can open the door to him, please.’

‘Ernst Slibulsky, okay.’

‘Maybe we have in fact met before,’ I went on, pausing again and thinking that I sensed her holding her breath at the other end of the line. It was a shot in the dark, but since our first meeting I couldn’t shake off that thought. Not that I thought we had really got to know each other, but maybe we had been around in the same place at the same time.

‘You left home when you were sixteen, and there aren’t many places in Frankfurt where a young girl who’s run away like that can get by somehow or other. How old are you now?’

She didn’t reply. But probably not because she wanted to conceal her age from me, more likely because she scented danger.

‘Come on — you look as if you are in your mid-thirties, but you’re not. Mid-forties?’

For a moment I thought she’d put down the receiver, but then I heard her breathing.

‘Let’s say around forty. Marieke is sixteen, and you weren’t silly enough to get pregnant too young. In your late twenties, I’d assume, when your wild days were gradually coming to an end. Work it out like that, and about twenty-five years ago you were standing with a travelling bag or a rucksack at the end of Zeppelinallee on the Bockenheimer Warte. Maybe you then spent a few weeks with friends, or on holiday in the south of France or somewhere like that, but in the course of time your friends went back to school and you’d come to the end of your money. Of course you’d sooner have cut off an arm than ask your parents for financial support, or even go back home. Well, at the time I was out and about in the railway station district on both professional and private business — ’

She cut the connection. Maybe she thought my assumptions were simply insulting; or alternatively I’d hit the bull’s-eye. You had to have — like Deborah did — a certain kind of North German composure and toughness that comes of living in that bleak, flat countryside to be proud of having survived the sex clubs and striptease bars of the station area. For a banker’s daughter and wife of an artist, a part of her life spent in the best known and (at that time) the deepest gutter in Frankfurt was probably not a subject on which she wanted to dwell.

And suddenly an uncomfortable thought came to me. How old, in fact, was Abakay? Mid-thirties, I assumed, but then it didn’t compute. But at least symbolically he could have conjured up ghosts of Valerie de Chavannes’s past in the station area, if there had been any. And perhaps she hadn’t minded that at first. Now over forty, married with a child, living in a villa, weekends spent at health spas, sushi suppers, Woody Allen films — you liked remembering your own youth, however bizarre it was. But then suppose memory became the present, the pimp comes into your own house, gets to know your sixteen-year-old daughter …

I wanted to get back, quickly, to the wine bar and my unsentimental Jewish Frisian girlfriend. Deborah took life as a learning curve, or rather a learning staircase. Once she was up one step she climbed the next, and she never went back. Why learn something twice? She would have spotted a pimp at first sight, never mind his disguise as a photographer and a man out to improve the world, and would have chased him off with her broom. Valerie de Chavannes’s neediness made me nervous.

‘Oh, there you are. Could you please bring a couple of cartons up from the cellar, twelve bottles of Foulards Rouges in each?’

Deborah was kneeling behind the bar in her short blue denim skirt, checking on the provisions in the fridge. It was just before five, and the wine bar would soon be filling up.

I inspected her bare legs. ‘Are we going to empty one of those bottles ourselves?’

She looked up, shot me a quick glance to see if I was drunk, then smiled her clever, mischievous smile, which said clearly: Listen, you, I’m at work! And she added, for fun, ‘Your place or mine?’

‘Yours, dear heart. You know what my wife is like …’

‘Sure, she’d get on anyone’s nerves. Coming home in the middle of the night, wanting to tell you what her day in the bar was like, dropping off to sleep at once on the sofa or in an armchair, and then she has to be undressed and put to bed. I can tell you, my old man is quite a handful too. He’s been going to bed earlier and earlier since he stopped smoking. And when we want to cuddle or at least see the nightly news on TV, he’s snoring fit to burst our eardrums.’

I shook my head. ‘What rotten luck. Well, nothing to be done about it. All the same,’ I added, jerking my chin at her legs, ‘nice skirt.’

‘Thanks. Will you pick me up later?’

‘I’ll set the alarm.’

‘And I’ll have a double espresso last thing.’

She winked at me and turned back to the fridge. On my way through the backyard and down a damp flight of brick steps to the cellar, I thought about those ghosts of the past conjured up for me by Valerie de Chavannes. And how seductive such ghosts could be. I wasn’t Deborah, I knew I could go down those steps again at any time, all the way to the very bottom, and then, at the age of fifty-three, start all over again: spirits, cigarettes, sleepless nights, anger, the light on the horizon.

I decided not to keep my promise. I wasn’t going to deal with anything or anyone for Valerie de Chavannes next week, not even if Sheikh Hakim’s entire congregation were to come up Zeppelinallee on their knees. And the danger of being suspected of a contract killing in the true sense of the term? Well, I thought I now knew who had killed Rönnthaler. I didn’t have the evidence yet, but I’d soon find it. And then Valerie de Chavannes could tell the police anything she liked.

I wanted to think not about her but about Deborah and our Christmas holidays. Over Christmas the wine bar would be closed for a full week, and Slibulsky had told me about a good spa hotel in Alsace.

Here we go, I thought, picking up the two cases. Twenty-four bottles of Foulards Rouges, Frida — my favourite wine, and not just mine; it was excellent. I had learnt a lot from Deborah about wine, and other things too. But I also still knew: beer with a chaser of spirits and Whitney Houston on the jukebox could be a lot of fun.