Kismet

Chapter 11

I was sitting in the car on the other side of the road from the Adria Grill waiting — smoking, listening to the radio, dozing. My face throbbed, my shoulders were burning, and when I moved my knees something in them seemed on the point of breaking. I dropped off to sleep from time to time, waking with a start from fevered dreams a moment later. Mostly the dreams were about fighting. Once companies of men dressed in costume with bright plumes and golden shirts of mail like something out of a historical film were clashing, stabbing and hacking each other to pieces with spears and swords. There was blood everywhere, and severed heads lying about, and techno music boomed out from the surrounding forest. Two eyes were blazing in the middle of this bloodbath and wouldn’t stop looking at me, although the body they belonged to was dead. I was the only one who had a gun, but it wouldn’t do what I wanted. When I put the safety catch on it fired wildly all over the place, and when I took the safety catch off and pressed the trigger there was just a click. Then the techno music got louder and louder, changed to a deafening rattle, and I woke up. The rattle came from the radio. The tuning of the channel had slipped.

Just before one in the morning the light behind the crochet drapes finally went out. I rubbed my forehead, lit a cigarette, and checked yet again that I’d loaded the pistol with the spare magazine.

Ten minutes later the landlord and his two employees came out into the street. The landlord locked up, nodded to the others, and they all set off in different directions. I forgot my knees and my shoulders, got out of the car, closed its door quietly, and followed the chef’s assistant. I got him in a dark side alley. I quietly made my way to within ten metres and then ran at him. At about the same moment as he spun round in alarm the muzzle of my pistol pressed against his chest.

‘Don’t make a sound!’

I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him into the entrance of the nearest building. His slight body was trembling like an animal’s. Only now did I realise how young he must be. Twenty at the most.

‘Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to you.’

‘Please…’ he begged, gasping for breath. ‘Please… I’m not one of them!’

‘I know. Take it easy.’ I patted him on the shoulder. ‘I only want you to explain a few things to me.’

‘But I don’t know anything. I’m only his nephew. I’m working there to earn money. I don’t have anything to do with that lot.’

He was talking so fast that I could barely understand him. He never took his eyes off the pistol, but at the same time turned his head as far away from it as possible.

‘Listen: I’ll put it away if you promise not to try anything silly.’

‘What?’ He wasn’t listening to me.

‘The pistol. Look…’ I put it in my jacket pocket. ‘Better now?’

He stared at the opening of the pocket for a moment longer before looking hesitantly at my face, as if expecting to see a monster. ‘What… what do you want?’

‘I want you to tell me what you’ve heard at work, or from your uncle, about the Army of Reason.’

‘Army of Reason?’

‘Could be you’ve never heard the name mentioned. It’s a gang that started extorting protection money in Frankfurt about two weeks ago. I assume the Adria Grill is the place where they meet, if only for a beer.’

At the words ‘extorting protection money’ he jumped, and I saw him checking up on opportunities for escape out of the corner of his eyes. I stood a little more foursquare in front of him and shook my head. ‘Don’t even think of it. If you help me we’ll never see each other again, and no one will know that you talked to me. If you don’t, I’ll tell your uncle that you phoned me and tried to sell me information.’

‘Are you crazy?’ It burst out of him before he turned his eyes away and stared at the ground, lips compressed. I waited. Standing there in front of me now without a kitchen apron on, he looked like a youth from another period. He wore pointed shoes with leopard-skin trim, a pair of suit trousers much too large for him, a white shirt with a starched collar, and he had a crew cut. Perhaps his favourite band was The Who, and either that was usual in Offenbach or he had a good chance of leading a revival in three or four years’ time.

‘I… look, I’m going to university in the autumn, I wanted to work through the summer so as not to have to take a job during my first year. I never specially liked my uncle — why am I saying specially? Not at all. But I couldn’t find anything better… I had no idea what I was getting into. Imagine it, you just want to earn some cash, and suddenly you’re right in a…’

He stopped and stared ahead of him again. I lit myself a cigarette and registered the adrenalin closing down for the night in my body, while pain took over again. After a while he raised his eyes and pointed cautiously to my jacket pocket with one finger.

‘They took the bullets out, didn’t they?’

‘I had a spare magazine in the car.’

‘Oh.’ He made a face as if thinking of something really disgusting to eat. ‘… Would you have shot me?’

‘Let’s say at least I wouldn’t have let you get away.’

He thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. ‘They really took you apart.’

‘Yes, and it hurts, and I want to go to bed. Tell me about the protection money gang.’

‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘But you’ll have to…’

‘I won’t have to do anything,’ I snorted. Only just now he’d been close to shitting himself, and now he was a little too inclined to have a cosy chat for my liking. ‘You either trust me or you don’t. I’ll wait another five minutes. If I haven’t heard anything that interests me by then, I shall get your uncle out of bed this very night, and you can start thinking of some place to go and study abroad.’

It took him a little more swallowing, marking time on the spot and looking at the ground, but finally, head bowed, he talked. He turned out to be a bright, inquisitive lad, and half an hour later he’d answered a great many more questions than I had meant to ask.

The Adria Grill functioned as a meeting place for Croatian nationalists who liked to have a drink together, and also for German Nazi and Ustasha fans who were seeking salvation as mercenaries in the Bosnian war. True, the war was officially over, but there were still paramilitary bands of all political colours as fond as ever of murdering each other in the name of a Greater Croatia, Greater Bosnia or Greater Serbia — for a good fat fee. Checking up on the mercenaries and dispatching them was organised by a tall, thin man who was always very smartly dressed, but whose name was never mentioned. He turned up in a Mercedes three times a week and held audience for one or two hours in the back room of the Adria Grill. He hadn’t turned up this evening, and Zvonko — that was the boy’s name — had seen his uncle go to the phone several times after I was flung out to call this man, but without success.

‘Was he there last Thursday?’

‘Thursday… yes, of course, that was the evening when the palefaces didn’t turn up. That’s what I call them to myself. Their faces are powdered and they wear blond wigs. They first turned up two weeks ago, and at the start I thought they were cranks of some kind, a cult or something. How would I know? Suppose Jesus is blond and loves Croatia. You wouldn’t believe what weird characters come into that place. Sometimes I think Yugoslavia and the war was like winning the lottery for all the weirdoes who have some kind of obsession going that won’t get them anywhere here. I heard one of the interviews. The man kept saying how he couldn’t stand his wife any more, that was all he talked about. And he went off there, and the first thing he did was probably to shoot ten Bosnian women between thirty and forty. And then he said Croatia was a wonderful country because of its literature and music. I mean, sometimes it’s quite funny.’

‘What happened next with the palefaces?’

‘After that they turned up almost every evening. Like the tall man. A week ago I saw them giving him money for the first time. After that I looked out for them, and they always bring something. If the tall man isn’t there they give it to my uncle. But only for safe keeping. He’s not a big wheel. He makes himself out important, but…’

I let him whinge on about his uncle for a bit, and then I asked if he knew where the money came from. He did, and that wasn’t all. Most of the ‘palefaces’ were Bosnian refugees blackmailed into working for the gang. If they objected, they were threatened with the deaths of friends or relations who had stayed behind in Bosnia. The job would be done, as Zvonko put it, by ‘German lovers of Croatian literature’. He’d once overheard the tall man explaining to a tearful paleface that after his wilful behaviour they’d be obliged to do something about it.

‘… My Croatian isn’t perfect, but that’s roughly what he said. And suppose it was only your brother but you still have a wife and children there? I expect you’d be a hundred per cent in favour of working for them then.’

I thought of the brutality with which the racketeers went to work, and realised that if someone like Romario didn’t pay up, the gang would be more or less literally holding a gun to their families’ heads.

‘And what specially amuses the tall man and the others when they’re sitting over a schnapps later is that of course the palefaces are from all the so-called ethnic groups: Serbs, Muslims, Croatians, gypsies. One of their favourite sayings is, “We’re sending all Yugoslavia out on the streets for us.” ’

‘How can they know for certain which refugee has family where?’

‘They have lists, no idea where they get them. Anyway, you can bet the tall man is only quite small fry in the organisation. The bosses will be in Croatia, and then there’s a kind of German who talks big. He came twice, acting the way my Granny said German tourists used to.’

‘A man with uncomfortable blue eyes?’

‘That’s right. Always looks as if he didn’t know whether he wants to screw someone or kill them. The day before yesterday he came in and bawled out the tall man in front of everyone as if he was the last one hiring out the deckchairs. I don’t know exactly what it was about, I was in the kitchen. But I think there’s going to be some kind of important meeting in the next few days.’

‘Of the bosses?’

He shrugged. ‘My uncle ordered about a ton of fillet steak for the weekend. That won’t be for the few regulars who drink at his place.’

I thought of the Albanian. It was only in my fury with Ahrens’s Hessian who broke my nose that I’d dragged him into this too hastily. I couldn’t possibly hand him people who’d been blackmailed into being gangsters and would probably be very glad to stop at once. But I had to give him something. I couldn’t offer the Albanian a deal and then say a couple of days later: sorry, I made a mistake. At least, not if I wanted to go on earning money as a private detective in the same town in the future. A meeting of Croatian bosses would be just the thing. If it took place. And if I could find out when.

‘Do you know why they powder their faces and wear wigs and never say a word when they’re extorting money?’

‘Orders from the top. But I can’t see why either. I only once heard one of them who’d taken off his wig because of the heat being bawled out in the back room. That get-up must matter a lot to the bosses.’

Finally I asked him about the two palefaces who hadn’t turned up last Thursday, but he couldn’t tell me any more except that no one had mentioned them since. Then we’d both obviously had enough for one night. I offered him a cigarette, and we sat smoking, exhausted.

After a while he asked, ‘I don’t have to worry about you landing me in trouble, do I?’

‘Not in the least. But all the same, you’d do better to look for a different job. It could get pretty hot there soon.’

‘You must be joking. How many jobs do you think there are around here for me?’

I took a pen and a scrap of paper out of my pocket and wrote down Slibulsky’s name and business phone number for him. ‘Ice-cream vendor. As far as I know it pays very well. Call this number first thing tomorrow and say you were sent by me, Kayankaya.’

I gave him the note. He glanced at it, and hesitantly put it in his pocket. ‘Thanks.’

‘It’s for me to thank you. And if your uncle or his friends make trouble for you, call me. The faster you get out of there the better.’ I shook hands with him. ‘See you at Slibulsky’s.’

He nodded, and then he suddenly seemed to have to pull himself together so as not to laugh out loud. He was probably only now beginning to believe that this man with the bashed-up face and the pistol in his jacket pocket really wasn’t going to do anything more to him tonight.

Ten minutes later I was racing away from Marilyn Monroe’s sister at full speed, and if my shoulders hadn’t been in such a bad way I might have stuck two fingers out of the side window by way of goodbye.

I left the car in the no-parking zone and dragged myself into the Mister Happy. It was just after three, and generally only the video recorder was working at that time. While the inmates dozed on plushy pink sofas, or sat over coffee and crossword puzzles hoping for a last customer, the troops were slogging it out on a large screen, naked, against scenery like a furniture warehouse. Soft, continuous moaning mingled with equally soft piano music.

I crossed the room, greeting girls to left and right, and found Deborah in the kitchen, as I’d expected. She was eating ham sandwiches and leafing through mail-order catalogues with a colleague.

‘Hey, baby, what happened to you?’

Whatever had happened to me, at least it was no reason for her to spread a bit more mustard on her sandwich and take a hearty bite. She added, with her mouth full, ‘You don’t look too good.’

Deborah a.k.a. Helga was a small, plump twenty-year-old from a village in north Germany. She had an ‘Italian style’ perm, nail lacquer in Malibu, Cherry Red and Flamingo, tracksuits with as many zip fasteners as possible, and when she went out she wore a cap saying Foxy Kitten. From what she said she didn’t mind her job, and sometimes even enjoyed it. All the same, she was saving hard to open an espresso and sandwich bar in her home village a couple of years from now. What she definitely enjoyed, all the time, was eating. And I really liked her for that. She ate like a cow: slowly, with relish, never letting anything disturb her. Watching her eat had an effect on me like doing yoga.

‘I’m OK,’ I said, as she fished a gherkin out of a jar and waved it about to dry it. ‘Do you have anything else to do?’

‘Huh, there’s been nothing going on here for hours. I’m just having a bite to eat and then I’m turning in. You can go upstairs if you like.’

‘I could do with a dunking in your whirlpool bath.’

‘Ha!’ She stabbed the air with the gherkin. ‘That comes extra!’ And laughing, she nudged her colleague in the ribs. The colleague, a tough dimwit, grinned derisively.

I had once helped Deborah out of a rather sticky situation with her pimp, we had come closer to each other with Willy DeVille’s Heaven Stood Still, and since then we’d had a tacit agreement: I could have her spoil me once a week, and in return I’d be available for any further fix she might be in. The point was that there hadn’t been one, and there wasn’t going to be one for the foreseeable future. The Mister Happy was as civilised and homely as a village bakery in a French film. I should know; I’d been acquainted with the madam for years, and had found Deborah the job here. Signs that she herself was seeing less and less point in our arrangement had been increasing recently, and although she laughed now, I was sure that at the back of her mind a fierce little calculating devil was registering another two hundred marks unearned.

‘Come on, baby, just joking. Of course you can go in the pool. But you’ll have to rinse it out first. No one cleaned it after the last guy, and he was all hairy.’

‘Oh. Hm.’

‘See you.’ She threw me an airy kiss. ‘And I’ll see that you feel as good as new tomorrow.’

She did, too. When Deborah was well-fed and in a good mood there were few who could tell her anything about how to do that. For an evening’s good screw to make up for things, I reflected, I wasn’t as badly off as Slibulsky thought.