Kismet

Chapter 12

Perhaps I didn’t feel exactly new, but after a night of extensive massage and breakfast in bed in the morning I was in surprisingly good form except for the variegated colours of my face. Deborah kissed me goodbye, and as I went out to my car and removed the parking ticket from under the windscreen wiper I thought almost lovingly of how, before I’d even had a chance to look at the breakfast tray, she’d asked if I didn’t want my egg.

I drove home, showered, put on clean clothes and went round the corner to drink coffee and read the newspaper in a cafe. I’d really intended to drive out to Ahrens’s factory next and wait until my rescuer from the switchboard knocked off work. Presumably she knew when the bosses would be meeting. But the newspaper spared me the trouble. In the local section I found a headline saying Frankfurt Expects Visit From Croatian Interior Minister Plus Economic Delegation. Along with all kinds of guff about the traditional friendship between Croats and Germans, and a welcome given by German credit institutions to the ‘rising young country’, the article went into detail about cooperation between Croatian and German firms. Ahrens won praise for his packet-soup outfit as one of the first Frankfurt companies to have been active in Croatia after the war.

I put the paper down and thought about Slibulsky’s sweets. Probably they were exactly the kind of thing that Ahrens’s activities consisted of. So there actually was work being done in his factory. In addition, the article seemed to me to answer the question of why the racketeers had to disguise themselves and mustn’t utter a word betraying any accent: the revelation that a Croatian-led Mafia was chopping fingers off German bar-owners would hardly have had a favourable effect on the granting of credit. Which meant that the bosses of the Army of Reason were far enough up in the Croatian power structure for their personal interests to coincide to some extent with the national interest.

That is, if part of the credit didn’t find its way straight into their pockets. As far as I knew, the Croatian president didn’t exactly have a reputation as a staunch opponent of corruption and the Mafiosi. He probably didn’t care about having such a reputation either. I’d once seen a picture of his yacht. Along with his uniform in the photo yesterday evening, it gave an impression rather as if the mayor of Frankfurt’s wife went about her daily business in a swimming pool filled with champagne.

The Interior Minister’s visit was going to be next Saturday. That left me three more days. I paid my bill and went home. From there I called an acquaintance who knew his way around the refugee hostels. He gave me the name of one where most of the inmates came from Bosnia.

It had begun raining again, and the square outside the place, which had once been a youth hostel, was full of mud and puddles. I wove my way past them to the entrance, found myself in a dark corridor smelling of food and disinfectant, read a series of notices hanging from the ceiling — Dining-Room, Showers, Sick-Bay — and followed the arrow on the one that said Secretarial Office. On the walls to left and right hung posters produced by the Evangelical church showing young people, black and white, moving down streets and stairways and through meadows together, under brightly coloured slogans saying things like Wow, man, loving your neighbour is great! and I’m all for multi-ethnicity! In between, dingy notes were pinned up telling you not to smoke in the corridors, not to make a noise, and not to assemble, eat or drink there. As far as I could see these instructions were being obeyed to the letter. No one came to meet me, and only the distant sound of children’s voices and the clatter of crockery indicated that the place was inhabited at all.

The door of the secretarial office was at the end of the corridor, which was getting darker and darker. I knocked, and thought I heard a couple of harsh, commanding sounds through the wood before a cheerful, ‘Yoo-hoo!’ rang out. When I opened the door bright light shone in my face. Before I could make anything out someone called, ‘Come in, do just come along in!’ as if I’d arrived intending to see somebody turning cartwheels.

I closed the door behind me and blinked at a row of neon lights. As my eyes got used to the dazzle I saw the usual shabby grey-green office furnishings paid for decades ago out of the public purse, the usual private touches consisting of holiday postcards pinned to the wall and amusing newspaper cuttings, and the usual photographic landscape calendar. Behind the desk sat someone not quite so usual in this setting, a woman of about forty-five, with a girl of around fourteen on a chair in front of her.

The woman was tanned deep brown, in ultra-fit condition without a trace of extra fat, and judging by the way she was smiling at me with two incredibly white, immaculate rows of teeth, apparently in the best of good humour. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse in a jungle-animal print that showed off her muscular arms, earrings with little heads of Charlie Chaplin dangling from them, a necklace with a small Buddha pendant, and her hair was in a long, thick, blonde braid that she had flirtatiously brought round over her shoulder to hang in front of her. Presumably she felt that the last word about what she’d do with her life hadn’t yet been spoken. She fitted into the grey-green secretarial office of this refugee hostel about as well as into a bowling alley.

The girl, on the other hand, could have come straight out of an ad appealing for donations to the Red Cross. A thin, emaciated body in worn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, arms covered with scratches and bruises, and a chin with a thick, blood-encrusted scab on it. She was looking sceptically at me from dark eyes which, for her age, were impressively ringed with dark circles. Her gaze seemed to be asking whether she was the reason why I was here, and if so, whether I intended to do something just bad or very bad indeed to her. Perhaps she was older than fourteen; it was hard to say in her condition. But anyway I had thrown nearly everyone from sexual maturity up to the age of twenty five into the same pot. Sometimes the pot was labelled Child, at other times something else.

‘Hello-o-o,’ fluted the woman, turning as emphatically and exclusively in my direction as if she’d like to turn the girl into a flowerpot or something else that wouldn’t attract my attention. Perhaps she was ashamed of this dirty heap of misery in her office, or of her astral body beside the skeleton. Or perhaps it was simply her normal behaviour when a man and a girl were in the same room with her.

‘Hello to you too,’ I replied. ‘Kayankaya, private detective.’

She gave a slight start, and her eyes narrowed as if I had blown air into her face. ‘Private detective,’ she repeated, trying to maintain her cheery tone. ‘So… er, how can I help you?’

I really wanted to ask her to send the girl out of the room for a little while, but decided not to. It would only have warned her that I was here about something worse than stolen bicycles.

‘I’d like to talk to you about a gang extorting protection money who are probably forcing inmates of this hostel to work for them.’

On the way here I’d been prepared for one of those difficult and usually fruitless afternoons when large numbers of people kept suggesting more or less clearly how great it would be if I finally stopped asking questions and went away. I was all the more surprised to find I’d obviously scored a direct hit in double-quick time. Her lower jaw dropped foolishly, her eyelids began to twitch, and the heads of Charlie Chaplin shook like a have-a-go-free notice on an ancient pinball machine. I watched her struggling to regain her composure. The she suddenly broke into hearty laughter.

‘And there was I thinking I was dealing with a madman! Private detective! Whoever heard of such a thing these days?’ She laughed again. ‘You were only joking, right? Well, you certainly took me in. You must be the electrician, aren’t you? It’s the lighting in the corridor. Wait a moment and I’ll show you. Leila.’ As she waved towards the door, she turned to the girl. ‘Go upstairs, please, dear. We’ll go on talking later.’

Either she had realised pretty quickly how little she wanted someone listening in on any conversation with me, or I had hit even harder than I’d guessed. Perhaps my mere appearance in the secretarial office at this moment was a direct hit in itself.

But however that might be, her little performance wasn’t running too badly so far — and if the girl had got up and gone out she could have carried on with it, acting slightly stupid, talking about corridor lighting, claiming not to know anything, believe me or not as you like, goodbye.

However, the girl didn’t get up and didn’t look as if she could be easily persuaded to do so. Hands clutching the arms of her chair, she thrust her lips out defiantly and stared, unmoved, at the woman behind the desk.

‘Leila!’ The mouth was still smiling, but the voice had taken on a barracking tone. That didn’t seem to bother Leila. To make it perfectly clear that she was not going to obey, she slipped off her plastic flip-flops and stuck her feet behind the chair-legs. Apart from that she didn’t move.

The woman tried hard to indicate, by rolling her eyes with amusement, how widespread and really rather sweet such teenage obstinacy was, but how trying too. Of course there was no reason for it at all, we grown-ups were of the same mind there.

‘Leila, if you don’t go I’ll have to call Gregor, and he’ll take you to your room, chair and all.’ She leaned forward and smiled at the girl, closing her eyes so much that I couldn’t see them. ‘Do you really want to deprive me of my chair? I have to discuss the corridor lighting with this man, and I’d like to ask him to sit down. I’m sure you can understand that.’

Leila slowly opened her mouth, wiggled the tip of her tongue between her teeth a bit, and looked at the woman as if she were a conjuror whose tricks have all failed, but who’s still passing round the hat. Then she said calmly, ‘I heard, old cunt,’ and pointed her finger to her ear. ‘Private detective. Corridor lighting shit!’

You could have charged entrance money for the ensuing pause. While it was as much as the woman could to do keep her facial muscles under control, Leila scratched her head and looked straight in front of her, frowning, as if wondering whether she was sitting here with an old cunt for any good reason.

‘Would you believe it?’ the woman finally managed to say. ‘Here we are, caring for them day and night, and what thanks do we get?’

‘Does caring for them day and night mean talking such garbage?’

‘… I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard. Why were you suddenly so keen to have the girl out of the way once I mentioned extortionists and protection money?’

‘It’s no such thing! I.’ She pursed her lips and looked across her desktop as if an answer might be lying around somewhere there. ‘I don’t like discussing such things in front of children. I’m sure you can understand that. Quite apart from the fact that your suspicion is, of course, wildly far-fetched.’

‘Fetch far?’ asked Leila, who was following our conversation with interest.

Before I could reply to her the woman interrupted. ‘That’s enough of that! Go away, Leila, or I’m calling Gregor!’

‘Gre-gor!’ Leila imitated her, but the the next moment she shut her mouth and looked like she was scared by her own words. It was to be assumed that Gregor’s name put a lid on audacity.

‘Just as you like!’

As the woman reached for the phone, tapped in a number and waited, face averted, for someone to answer, I tried to think what I was going to do if Gregor did drag Leila off, chair and all. And I wondered how ruthless I wanted to be. By now I was convinced that either Leila knew something I wasn’t supposed to find out, or I knew something that she wasn’t supposed to find out. Either way, I couldn’t ask her about it in front of this woman. The mere fact that I was here, seeing the woman try to get Leila away from me almost without bothering to pretend about it, could get her into all sorts of trouble. Depending on how high one assessed the chances that I saw her as a source of information or a witness. For the girl’s sake, I thought, it would be best if I left.

Meanwhile Leila was acting the defiant child again. She went on wiggling her tongue between her teeth, stretched out a dirty foot now and then, circled it in the air and examined it critically. All the same, you could sense that the increasingly probable arrival of Gregor scared her. She looked briefly at me a few times. Perhaps she was hoping I’d stay.

‘Gregor?… Please would you come down quickly… Yes, a little problem… Leila… Uh-huh, see you in a minute.’

After she had put the receiver down she sat deep in thought for a few seconds, and then looked up with a fleeting smile as if to say: sorry about that interruption, now, where were we? She did not in fact say anything, just kept on smiling. Obviously that was how she meant to occupy the time until Gregor arrived.

‘Frau… er?’

‘Schmidtbauer.’

‘Well, Frau Schmidtbauer, you have now done all you can to make it clear that there’s something shady going on here. Either you talk to me about it, or I stay in this place and rummage around until I’ve found out about it. The difference is that if you talk to me, I can turn a blind eye. If you don’t, and if you have a skeleton in the cupboard and I discover it, I’ll inform on you.’

Her smile became a little more fleeting, but nothing else happened.

‘Think about it. It doesn’t look to me as if you’re much more than the receptionist here. You know what goes on, and presumably there’s a few marks left on your desk now and then to induce you to keep your mouth shut. How much is the money worth? A new blouse, a good meal in a smart restaurant? I’ll bet it’s not enough for you to travel somewhere you’ll be safe from the police. If what I suspect is right, there’ll be charges of organised crime, blackmail, and possibly aiding and abetting murder. And even if you’re convicted only of knowing about the crime, you’ll get a long enough sentence to remove you from circulation for the part of your life that matters. There’ll be nothing left later but a little sport for senior citizens, and reincarnation if you’re lucky.’

No reaction. She smiled and went on holding out. But the hunted look in her eyes told me that she’d soften up once we were alone. So I dismissed all my theories of the last ten minutes and just hoped Leila was only a girl sitting in the wrong room at the wrong time, and Gregor was a nice lad with frizzy hair and comfortable shoes doing civilian service instead of the draft, who’d behaved perfectly in persuading Leila to go with him.

These hopes lasted just a few seconds. Then the door was flung open and Popeye on coke burst in. Muscular in a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms, trainers like small, brightly coloured cruise missiles, shaved head, a chin fit to knock doors down, and eyes with their pupils moving as if they had to register the tempo of three hundred herds of white elephants charging his way. He measured something above two metres, and to see from one end of his shoulders to the other I had to turn my head back and forth slightly, as if watching tennis. Then I recognised the showy sports watch. Perhaps it was chance, but Ahrens wore the same model.

Without taking any notice of me or Frau Schmidtbauer, he made for Leila, snarling, ‘You lousy little beast! What’s the idea this time? Didn’t I tell you…’

Whatever he had told her, it was drowned out by Leila’s shrill scream as he closed his great paws round her arms and pulled her out of the chair. Leila’s legs flailed in the air as she tried to kick him. At the same time she never stopped screaming, and the small secretarial office became an acoustic torture chamber. Popeye was bellowing, ‘You shut up!’ Frau Schmidtbauer was crying, ‘Don’t grab her so hard!’ And I drew my pistol.

‘Hey, you!’ I shouted, trying to drown out the others. ‘Gregor!’

He turned, with the girl wedged under his arm. It took him a moment to realise what it was gleaming in my hand, and then he looked incredulous. Leila struggled and screamed a little longer, until she too looked at me and immediately fell silent.

‘Put the child down again,’ I said, waving the pistol.

Gregor looked even more incredulous. In the process the pupils of his eyes grew ever larger and ever emptier, and I had the feeling I was facing a horror dummy. The kind of thing that could be used at cinema entrances to advertise films like The Massacre Man or The Devil’s Dinner.

He turned his head to the desk. ‘Who’s this arsehole?’

Frau Schmidtbauer bit her lower lip, looked at my pistol, and didn’t seem to think Gregor’s choice of words very sensible. ‘Er,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.

I said, ‘This arsehole is the character who’ll shoot holes in your knees if you don’t let go of the child.’

It was as if something inside him exploded. His head whipped round, and with his teeth bared and his eyes popping he clamped Leila to his chest and held her out in my direction. ‘Oh, so that’s your idea? You think you’ll shoot holes in me?’ he roared, chin jutting. ‘Go on, then! But you’ll have to shoot through the girl first. Didn’t think of that, eh? Shoot holes in me! I could kill you with one hand.’

‘With your little toe for all I care. But we’re not here for a fight, and I don’t want to shoot you in the chest either. Just in the kneecaps. You’d need to be holding a wall in front of you to stop me doing that.’

‘Please, Gregor!’ begged Frau Schmidtbauer, and at the same moment she started crying.

Gregor was now snorting like a horse. He began twitching and sweating, looking around him as if his good friend coke had left him in mid-flight, and now he was sailing alone through some kind of cosmos that was a total mystery to him.

‘The child,’ I said, trying again, but he wasn’t listening any more. He looked at the floor, froze for a moment as if hypnotising himself, his snorting and twitching died down, and whereas he had just been gleaming with sweat it now looked as if he had a layer of grey dust on his skin. Nothing indicated the presence of a brain any more. It was pure reflex when he assumed a close-combat position. Then he bent his knees, braced his shoulders back like someone putting the shot, and tensed his biceps. A slippery film formed between the pistol and my hand.

When Leila came flying towards me, I shoved her to my left and under the desk, threw myself to the right, saw two metres of cokehead above me, and fired my pistol. Gregor, hit in the legs, bellowed, froze briefly in a kind of jazz-dance distortion, grabbed his thighs and collapsed. At the same moment Frau Schmidtbauer started screaming.

I lay gasping for air and trying to steady my trembling arm. Gregor’s body, barely three metres away from me, wasn’t moving any more. He had obviously fainted. Dark patches were spreading over his tracksuit bottoms. I’d emptied my entire magazine into his legs and the wall behind them. Even sober, Gregor probably wouldn’t have allowed me to keep cool. Pumped full of drugs he’d looked to me, for a moment, like the last person I would ever meet on earth. Still, I hadn’t aimed any higher.

Frau Schmidtbauer kept on and on screaming. Finally I struggled to my feet, went over to her and slapped her face until she covered it with her hands and began whimpering quietly. Then I bent to look under the desk. Arms around her knees, T-shirt torn, feet bare, Leila was cowering in the furthest corner with her eyes and mouth tight closed, and tears running down her cheeks.

I straightened up and looked for the cigarettes in my jacket pocket. The girl was beginning to get on my nerves now too. Why didn’t she run away? Why, whatever she was threatened with and whatever happened, did she stick around in the secretarial office, a horrible place in every respect? Whether Leila knew anything or not, I was beginning to think I’d have had a really successful afternoon without her: half an hour at the most to crack Frau Schmidtbauer, about another twenty minutes for her to spill all the details of the link between this hostel and the Army, and last, with a little luck, information about two brief lives which for one reason or another were unpleasant enough for no one to mourn their end much. Even now I had a chance. A little poking about in Gregor’s wounds, and Frau Schmidtbauer would probably have given me all she knew in writing. But this way. I could neither haul Leila out from under the desk and put her outside the door, nor use the methods of a military junta in front of her. The question was, what could I do instead? I smoked, and thought about it.

‘… oh, baby, your life’s up the spout, you just don’t know it yet,’ came a grating voice from the floor. Gregor seemed to be coming round. ‘I’ll finish you, you bastard… I’ll smash you up but I won’t let you die… I’ll crush your balls until you’re throwing up your own shit… and you’ll bleed so much you’ll wish so much you’d never put your bloody wog face out of your bloody wog mother…’

He went on like this until I went over and kicked him in the head. He gurgled something else, and then we had peace and quiet again.

‘Right,’ I said, turning to Frau Schmidtbauer, ‘now tell me how we get out of here.’

But Frau Schmidtbauer didn’t want to tell me anything. She wanted to weep and wail and call me names in a stifled voice. ‘You murderer! You’ve killed him! You’re a murderer!’

‘Nonsense. He can take it. The question is how much you can take. I am now going to call the police and tell them the story of a crazed cokehead — if you’ll back me up. If not I’ll have to try the truth on them: how your hostel is pretty well under the command of a German-Croatian Mafia, and you and Gregor here are more or less running it for them.’

‘… you murderer!’

‘Oh, do stop that. He’ll be beating someone up again in three weeks’ time. At the latest. Unless you go on howling like that much longer, and then maybe there’s a chance he’ll bleed to death.’

‘You… you…’

‘If you’re going to say “murderer” again I’ll murder you.’

‘You… you’re brutal, cruel…’

‘OK, let’s tell them the truth.’

I went over to the phone, raised the receiver and dialled. Before it began to ring a thin arm shot past me and a small hand, with bitten nails painted pink, came down on the cradle. ‘No!’

I turned and looked into Leila’s tearful face.

‘Please!’ Her eyes, which had little burst veins in them, looked pleadingly at me.

‘You don’t want me to call the police?’

She shook her head.

‘Why not?’

Before she could open her mouth someone who had apparently just come into the secretarial office snapped, ‘Because her tart of a mother’s involved! That’s why, you great child-lover!’

I turned and looked at Frau Schmidtbauer, astonished. In spite of everything that had happened I could hardly believe the voice that had greeted me so merrily, barely half an hour ago, came from the same human being as the one that now sounded as if hatred was its principal register.

With a triumphant grin, she defiantly pushed her face, now visibly flushed in spite of the sun tan, towards me. ‘Didn’t think of that one, did you? Her mother’s the worst of the lot! And this little witch is just as depraved! See how she’s wrapped you round her little finger!’

Worst of the lot? Depraved little witch? Was she simply making up some kind of fantasy, just so long as she thought it sounded tough and might induce me to leave?

I shook my head slightly. ‘What is it you people here have about mothers? Are we in some kind of ghetto movie, or in Italy, or what?’

‘But I’m telling you the truth! Her mother’s a tart! I could tell you stuff to make your hair stand on end…’

Suddenly I guessed something. I’d only ever heard anyone crack up as furiously as this when there was jealousy involved, and the more furious Frau Schmidtbauer grew, the further she leaned towards me and the more garishly did the colours of the jungle-animal print of her blouse hit me in the eye. I thought of Gregor’s watch, and how there might be reasons other than a few marks of hush money why someone like Frau Schmidtbauer, who said things like, ‘I could tell you stuff to make your hair stand on end’, would let herself act as general dogsbody to a Mafia gang.

‘… a filthy creature, a…’

‘Tell me, how about Dr Ahrens — does he just have animal skins lying on his floor or does he fuck like an animal too?’

For the second time during our short acquaintance I managed to get her making that foolish face, lower jaw dropping and eyelids twitching.

‘What… what are you talking about? I don’t know what…’

I smiled magnanimously. ‘That’s OK. Why not? He’s a smart guy, is Ahrens — smart office, smart car… all the same, in your place I wouldn’t shoot my mouth off quite so loud about tarts and depravity.’

‘What on earth are you thinking of?’

‘Not a lot at this moment. I’m going out with Leila for a little while, and meanwhile you can see to the monster there. It’s probably in all our interests not to kick up a big fuss about this. Call Ahrens and ask him for a doctor who’ll take the bullets out without asking too many questions. I’m sure he knows one. And then I want a private conversation with you later. If you disappear, or summon reinforcements, or do anything else to stop us having that conversation you’ll be in jail this evening. The same applies if you bring Ahrens or Gregor into it against Leila. She was here today only by chance and she has nothing to do with it — whether her mother’s what you say she is or not.’

She briefly opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, nodded slightly, looked at the phone and picked up the receiver. When I closed the door behind Leila and myself I could hear her clearing her throat, and then fluting again, as if restored to her old self, ‘Oh, my dear, I’m glad to catch you. I have to speak to Dr Ahrens. It’s urgent…’

Apparently she took my threat seriously. I briefly imagined Hottges’s face if I’d actually thought of asking him to have a woman with absolutely nothing against her arrested. I’d have had to think up something special to persuade him. Perhaps a projection of the film featuring him on the facade of police headquarters, for instance. Or a Zeppelin circling above Frankfurt by night, with a huge monitor hanging from it showing details of his little rendezvous all the way to Offenbach.

‘Let’s go somewhere we can be alone and keep an eye on the square outside this building.’

‘Keep an eye there?’

‘Go somewhere we can see it.’

Leila pointed down the dark corridor. ‘Visitors’ room.’

If the place where we found ourselves a little later was really meant to be a visitors’ room, they seemed to think here that ‘visitors’ was just a synonym for a robber band. And one that must have mastered the trick of finding a market somewhere in the world for the sale of rusty metal chairs with their foam rubber upholstery spilling out, and tables that were obviously used mainly for stubbing out cigarettes, knife-throwing, and inscriptions in thick felt pen saying ‘Fuck the cunt’. All the furniture — which besides the tables and chairs consisted of a standard lamp without a bulb in it and an empty bookshelf — was screwed to the floor with strong angle-irons. There was nothing you could have moved in any way at all. When I tried opening a window to get rid of the stink of disinfectant, Leila waved my attempt aside.

‘No try.’

‘No try?’

‘Hostel manager say.’

‘No try what? Getting a breath of fresh air?’

Leila shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Steal windows?’

‘Steal windows,’ I repeated, and looked at the cracked, battered plastic frame, which was painted a bilious yellow.

‘Well, let’s keep this short.’ I looked at Leila. She was leaning against the wall a few metres away from me, her arms folded, and once again looking as unmoved as before the appearance of Gregor. Yet she seemed to know as little as I did what we were really doing here. I had got her out of the secretary’s office so that I could go back on my own and deal with Frau Schmidtbauer, and she had probably come with me only to make sure I wasn’t going to call the police after all. After Frau Schmidtbauer’s outburst I thought I knew enough about Leila’s part in the affair. A short conversation to persuade her to trust me, and then I hoped she’d finally disappear.

‘Your mother works for Ahrens and that’s why you don’t want me to call the police, right?’

She nodded.

‘And she doesn’t really want to work for Ahrens at all, but he blackmails her into it, the way he blackmails other people here in the hostel.’

She nodded again.

‘OK, then there’s no problem. I was never really going to call the police, I just meant it as a threat.’

I waited for some sign that she understood and now we could go our separate ways. Instead she dug her hands into her trouser pockets and began walking slowly up and down the room. As she did so she kept casting brief, appraising glances at me, as if I’d made her some offer that wasn’t entirely on the level. In fact it was now that I finally realised how little she could still be called a child. In the secretarial office I had noticed only the rings round her eyes, the scab, the shoulder-length, greasy mop of hair and her loud mouth. Now I looked at her properly for the first time. Her face reminded me of one of those little bistro tables when you are having lunch for two there. Eyes, nose and mouth all seemed to be pushing each other over the edge. Not that her face itself was particularly thin, but everything else was so particularly large and pronounced, like a series of slightly outsized features of classical beauty. Dark, huge, almost protuberant eyes, a slightly aquiline, strong nose, and lips like pink air cushions. In addition she moved like those long-legged girls of whom you can never be sure whether they know what they can do to a man just by taking a short, meaningless walk across the room.

All things considered, it was suddenly clear to me that possibly I wasn’t the first old fogy to have helped her out of a tricky situation or done her some other favour, and perhaps other men had then insisted on being shown gratitude in a room as remote as this one.

‘Hey, Leila, what’s the matter?’ I asked, overdoing the loud voice. ‘Stop marching around like that! We’ve discussed everything we have to discuss. Go to your room and wait for your mother to come back. I promise, she won’t have to work for Ahrens any more after next week.

She stopped. ‘Private detective?’

‘Me? Yes, you know that.’

‘How much?’

‘How much what?’

‘How much you cost?’

‘How much do I cost…?’ What was all this? You couldn’t say Leila had no talent for dragging things out at length.

‘Yes… How much the day? You look for my mother. I can pay.’

As I was still wondering whether I really had to take this pocket-money fantasy seriously, doors slammed somewhere. I turned to the window. The first thing that occurred to me was Leila’s warning about not trying to ‘steal’ the windows; in this instance it meant I was slow to hear cars coming. The black Mercedes was right in front of the hostel entrance. At the same moment I lost any hope that it could be a doctor sent by Ahrens, or someone else parking his car as if God had created that vehicle on the first day and then created everything else for it to park in. The two figures moving weightily from the Mercedes to the door and nodding at each other, as if anticipating something particularly tasty to eat, were my two charmers from Berlin: the knee expert and his mate who was so proud of the number of people he’d done in.

I leaped back from the window, grabbed Leila’s arm and pulled her to the door in a single fluid movement. ‘Get out of here at once!’ I hissed at her. ‘There are some guys coming who…’

‘Can’t stay.’

‘What?’

‘Can’t stay here. Gregor know we…’ she flapped her hand back and forth between us. ‘He know we talked. I…’ and her hand fluttered in the direction of the ceiling. ‘He kill me.’

‘Now listen, Leila…’

‘No now listen! You look for my mother! With me! You private detective! I can pay!’

For a moment we stared at each other as furiously as if, for two pins, we’d have got in ahead of Knee Expert and his corpse-counting friend, who were presumably here to silence us as far as possible, by doing ourselves in instead. Then I heard those long, confident everybody-listen strides that Berliners have coming down the corridor, pulled Leila away from the door and signed to her to keep quiet.

When the steps moved on I whispered, ‘OK, I’ll take you with me — for now, anyway. We’ll go out to my car, very calmly. We won’t run, and we…’

‘My money! I can pay!’

‘Oh, God, I’ve heard you say you can pay quite often enough!’ I snapped, hoping to make a few things painfully clear when I added, ‘But you can’t pay me! Forget it! I cost more than a few lollipops or collectable stickers!’

‘Collectable? Stickers…?’

There was a rather foolish pause. Of course, I could have said to myself, from her broken German, that she didn’t know what collectable stickers were. But something in her eyes told me that at least she could guess the probable nature of collectable stickers, and her astonishment was solely to do with the likely fact that while a girl her age might collect all sorts of things, stickers were not among them.

‘I…’ she said, pointing at her chest, ‘can…’ she added, aware that she was repeating herself and enjoying it, ‘. pay! I have money. Much money! And I.’ here she pointed to her chest again, and I was beginning to feel as if I were standing in a corner with the Albanian or some Mediterranean gangster boss, ‘… want you find my mother.’

The boss was waiting for a nod, so I nodded. ‘OK,’ I sighed. ‘Where’s the money?’

‘In my room. I get it. Videos too.’

‘Videos?’

‘So you know what my mother look like,’ she explained impatiently. ‘You private detective or…’

Or what? I thought I heard a half-swallowed A and R, and perhaps even the hiss of an S. Before long I’d be entirely in agreement with Gregor’s way of dealing with this girl.

‘Hurry up, then! I’ll wait exactly five minutes and then I’m going whether you’re back or not!’

‘What you mean, whether back or not?’ she asked, her hands fluttering back and forth as usual. ‘I talking to Schmidtbauer about my mother! Then you break into office, make trouble with Gregor. Now you say: whether back or not! Am I stupid fucking sow or what?’

Fucking sow.? For God’s sake, who taught them German around here? I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just put up with the look she gave me as she left the room: you got me into this, you can get me out again or you’ll be sorry — and then, finally, she was outside.

I lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke. My new client. We’d see if she was going to let me help her with the investigations now and then.

Next moment what I’d been fearing for some time happened. Doors began slamming, footsteps echoed down the corridor, I heard shouting. ‘Can’t be far away!’ ‘I’ll do that bastard!’ ‘Hey, Krap, here we come!’

And they were indeed coming right towards me. I couldn’t get out into the corridor now, and there was no other way I could leave the visitors’ room. Or no quiet and reasonably elegant way. After I had briefly and unsuccessfully tried wrenching one of the chairs from its angle-irons to throw it through the window, and myself after it, I jettisoned the chair idea. The window sill was about a metre from the muddy forecourt of the hostel. I put my jacket over my head, with ends of its sleeves covering my hands, listened once more for a moment to the steps that were still approaching, took a run and jumped through the glass, one shoulder hitting it first.

About three seconds, an enormous crashing and clattering, and one belly-flop landing later I raised my face from the mud, heard a shout of, ‘Hey, there he goes!’ in the building, and worked my way round on my front to shelter behind the boot of the Mercedes.

‘Look at that, then!’

‘Krap’s James Bond, who’d’ve guessed?’

‘James Bond don’t leave no tracks like a baby crawling. Hey, Krap! Don’t get our car all dirty!’

‘Come on out, let’s talk sensibly!’

I peered round one tyre and saw the two of them looking my way through the empty window frame, which was rimmed with jagged shards of glass. Their right hands, and what they were holding in them, stayed below the level of the sill.

I had to find out if a peaceful settlement was at all possible. Perhaps Ahrens really had sent them with instructions to negotiate or to bribe me. Perhaps he was finally getting sick and tired of shoot-outs. So I took off my muddy jacket, now spiked with splintered glass, and held it briefly out from behind the tyre. A peaceful settlement was not possible. Next moment what had recently been a garment on my back was a pile of rags riddled with holes lying in front of me in the mud, graphic evidence of what our lads understood by ‘talking sensibly’.

I turned my head and saw what I already knew: I couldn’t get away from the shelter of the car. They could see the whole forecourt from the window, there was no cover except for the Mercedes, and after my panic-stricken burst of fire at Gregor’s legs I had no ammunition left to shoot back with. Although they didn’t know that yet, and they obviously hesitated to harm the gleaming, brand-new metal of their vehicle

I crawled round to the side of the car facing away from their window, and saw that the driver’s door was half open. They’d been in such a hurry and they liked to put on such airs that I hoped the key might be in the ignition. As I crawled on I called, ‘I thought you wanted to talk? Doesn’t look like talking to me! Apart from the fact that that was my favourite jacket — and always assuming you know what a jacket is.’

‘Oh wow, man, is Krap ever witty!’

I reached the open driver’s door and saw the picture of the Croatian president welded into a key tag hanging from the driving column.

The car was about three metres from the entrance to the hostel. The swing door and thus the corridor beyond it looked to me a little wider than the bonnet of the car.

‘Seemed like it was just some old rag!’

There were barely ten metres between the visitors’ room and the swing door. That would take them three or four seconds, less if they ran. Or they might jump out of the window — in which case all I could do was throw mud at them.

‘Hey, lads, what next?’

‘I said we talk sensibly, OK?’

‘What about?’ I peered cautiously across the driver’s seat. The car was an automatic. ‘About what’s next.’

I thought I heard a suppressed splutter of laughter. They thought themselves such a superior force, and indeed they were. If I’d suddenly begun weeping or praying, they’d only have seen it as further confirmation of their superiority. That was my chance.

‘You mean that?’

‘Sure we do.’

‘I’d like to talk sensibly to Ahrens.’

‘Ahrens? Why not? We can drive you there.’

That suppressed splutter again.

‘But we have to agree on something first.’

‘Oh yeah? What?’

‘Everything’s nice and peaceful from now on.’

‘Why, sure. Word of honour.’

‘OK… then I suggest we meet here outside the entrance, unarmed.’

A pause, one of them cleared his throat, then my partner in the negotiations spoke up again. ‘Why not just come out from behind the car? Like we said, it’ll all be peaceful now.’

‘Well, let’s say as evidence of your goodwill. Down here we’ll be on the same level, and I can see if you’ve really put your pistols away.’ I stopped for a moment, and then went on in an increasingly defensive tone, making it sound as if I was making a great effort to stay cool. ‘I mean, boys, believe me, I’m sick to the teeth with all this violence! Normally I just go looking for dogs and husbands and so on. Honest, I’d like to be well out of this. So what I think is, it’d be best for us to look each other in the face here, and then sit down around a table with Ahrens like grown-ups and discuss the rest of it. I could have one or two other things to tell you that I’m sure would interest Ahrens. About the Albanian and what the police are planning. We Turks have a proverb: if you soil a stranger’s carpet, you must shear your own sheep for him. Understand?’

‘Sure. Sounds real good. How about your gun?’

‘But I said I want to negotiate.’

‘Sure, shear your carpet and all that, but.’

‘If you agree to my proposition, I’ll throw my pistol down outside the front door — call it the first step in negotiations. Then I could only run away from you. How’s that for an offer?’

‘Not bad! Go on, then!’

There was such outrageous amusement in his voice that it wasn’t hard to imagine them splitting their sides with laughter. Just so long as they didn’t jump out of the window…

‘OK!’ I raised my hand with the pistol in it above the roof of the car, and still it wasn’t shot away at once. ‘I trust you!’

‘Sure thing, Krap! Trust means a whole lot!’

I straightened up, levelling the empty pistol, and we looked into each other’s eyes across the car and a few metres of muddy forecourt. They were both making the grim faces of people who are trying not to fall about laughing at a funeral.

I pointed my pistol at the swing door and smiled with restraint. ‘See you, then. Nice and peaceful, right?’

They nodded, and their eyes looked down at me, sparkling with anticipation of a wonderful bloodbath. If only they came to the door…

I swung my arm back a little way and threw the pistol down on the mud between the Mercedes and the entrance. Then I looked back at the window, and my blood was roaring in my ears. They were still there, looking back. For a moment I thought it was all over. They were young, fast and strong, and presumably had enough ammunition to turn me into something like my jacket ten times over. I felt old and fat, and I had nothing.

We stood there like that for two or three seconds, and if they’d simply climbed out on the window sill and jumped down, I probably wouldn’t even have tried to run for it. The attempt would have been plain ridiculous. But suddenly, as if years later, one of the two made a brief gesture in my direction, grinned again as if he couldn’t understand such stupidity, and next moment they had both disappeared from the window frame.

Ten metres, three to four seconds. Less if they ran. I flung myself behind the wheel of the car, turned the key in the ignition, and shifted the automatic gear-change to Drive. When the engine came on so did the stereo system, with Janet Jackson belting a song out from six or eight loudspeakers. Once I saw the shaved heads appear in the corridor behind the glass of the swing doors, I stepped on the gas. The car leaped, and our lads opened their mouths wide. Of course they hadn’t put their pistols away, but before they could raise them to the right height the Mercedes was crashing through the door. All they could do was retreat, fast. So far everything was going smoothly. Only the walls of the corridor appeared to be a problem for a split second. About three metres beyond the swing door they narrowed, and the car wouldn’t really fit between them any more. But the walls were plaster, the Mercedes was a Mercedes, and I had no choice anyway. As I drove the car down the corridor with a grating sound, chasing our lads before me, plaster panels and polystyrene linings were scraped off to left and right. Meanwhile Janet Jackson was singing, ‘Whoops now’, and as far as I was concerned we could have gone on like this indefinitely. Once or twice the pair of them swerved towards doors on both sides of the corridor, but in the kind of hostel where the dilapidated chairs were screwed to the floor of course nothing was left unlocked. As a bonus, they dropped their pistols when they grabbed at the door handles.

The corridor of the former youth hostel ran all the way through the building. It was seventy or eighty metres long, and it ended in a blank wall. The last possible way out was the door of the secretarial office. Our lads didn’t know where the corridor came to an end, and because of the poor lighting they couldn’t see it in time. When they realised what was waiting for them, it was too late for the secretarial office door. There were about ten metres of empty space left before they literally started climbing the walls. They dug their fingernails into the plaster and hopped up and down. After I’d passed the office door myself, I trod on the brake and managed to get the front bumper to a distance of about 0.0 millimetres from their legs. I just had time to see them failing to free themselves from the trap before a cloud of plaster dust fell on us. I took the key out of the ignition, leaned back in the driver’s seat and kicked the windscreen out. A moment later, when I was standing on the bonnet of the car and the dust was settling, I saw the horrified Frau Schmidtbauer looking out over what had once been the wall of her office, but was now lying in the corridor.

‘Hi!’ I called wittily, and waved to her. ‘I did tell you not to summon reinforcements.’

She looked at me, shook her head as if to dispel a hallucination, and disappeared behind the heap of rubble. The sound of cries and running footsteps came from the stairwell. I turned to the lads. Covered with white dust, shoulders stooped, faces distorted by fear, they looked up at me as if I were some barbarian king famous for cutting off his prisoners’ ears.

‘Well, lads? Good show, eh?’

They didn’t reply. Only now did I notice that it probably wasn’t just fear distorting their faces. A distance of 0.0 millimetres between the bumper and their legs had been a fair estimate, but in fact it was a few centimetres less. Those legs had an unusual bend in them, and they were standing so still that every movement must be extremely painful. My friend who liked counting his victims seemed to be in a particularly bad way. Though that could also have been because one of the Evangelical posters had caught on his jacket, and with the declaration I’m all for multi-ethnicity! all over his chest he looked as if a few kids from a Rudolf Steiner school had been playing a Nazi practical joke on him.

I threw them the car key. ‘Park it somewhere else. I don’t think this is a great place for it.’ I winked at them. ‘Fun and games with Krap.’ Then I tapped my forehead by way of goodbye, turned, climbed over the roof of the car and jumped down on the floor. Gregor was sitting on a chair in the secretary’s office, legs up on the desk and a puddle of blood under him, and behind him Frau Schmidtbauer was phoning. He was very pale in the face, but otherwise looked in pretty good shape, considering. It was probably because of my muddy, dusty appearance that, as I passed, we looked at each other like two people trying to work out where they’d met before. A few metres further on, the first baffled hostel inmates came towards me, looking curiously around them. They were soon followed by a man in a suit, sweating heavily, gasping hysterically and now and then exclaiming things like, ‘No!’ ‘Heavens!’ ‘Catastrophic!’ Probably the hostel manager. When he grabbed my sleeve and asked, panting for breath, what all this was about, I shrugged. ‘No idea. I’m the electrician, but to be honest the openings in the walls are a bit too big now for me to do any rewiring.’

‘Openings in the walls…?’

‘Mmph. If you want the wiring to go under the plaster, that is. I’d rather have rewired over the plaster anyway. A bit of paint on it and hardly anyone would notice. Would have come a lot cheaper too.’

‘Cheaper!’ he uttered, with his eyes popping. Then he let go of my arm and hurried on.

Leila was waiting where the swing door had once been. She was wearing an expensive-looking dark brown fur jacket, green wool tights and walking boots. Two leather suitcases stood on the floor beside her.

‘What happen?’ she asked, half anxious, half reproachful as her eyes moved over my dirty figure.

‘We found it hard to say goodbye.’ I picked up her cases and nodded at the forecourt. ‘Let’s get out of here. And pick those pistols up.’ Then we splashed through the mud and puddles to my Opel, and she contented herself with looking back two or three times at the entrance. Perhaps, apart from one of the cases in which it seemed possible that she might be carrying lead piping, she wasn’t such a bad client after all.