Kismet

Chapter 2

Ten years ago Slibulsky had been a small-time drugs dealer plying his trade between the station district and the smart set in the Westend quarter. He smuggled, cut, and sold whatever he could lay hands on that didn’t mean instant death to his customers. Himself, he stuck to beer. On the side he was open to any kind of deal that in the worst-case scenario wouldn’t get him more than five years in jail. We met in the course of one such deal. He helped me to break into Frankfurt police headquarters. A little later he was picked up with coke on him and served a year behind bars. I sent him parcels of World Cup football videos and beef sausage, and he thanked me with a box of clothes pegs he’d made himself. To this day that box stands in my kitchen, and I think every week or so how nice it would be to have a garden or a yard with a washing line in it.

Once he was out on parole, Slibulsky went to work as a bouncer for a brothel, then as a DJ in assorted discos on the outskirts of town, and finally as a bodyguard to a local politician. This man had nothing to fear from anyone, but he was campaigning on the slogan of No Daily Violence On Our Streets — I’ll Be the Enforcer, and dragged Slibulsky around with him to election meetings as some kind of reverse evidence of the state of affairs he deplored. In the part of the city for which he was standing, criminality reached its height in the form of chewing-gum wrappers dropped on the pavement, and the worst violence seen on the streets was done by barking poodles and grumpy senior citizens. The election was won and Slibulsky was fired. He went back to drug-dealing for a while, until three years ago he had an idea and started an ice-cream business. It used those little carts, mostly drawn by a bicycle and usually adorned with pennants in the colours of the Italian flag, that were familiar to us all as part of our childhood Sundays, going around ringing their bells — or at least that’s how we remember it today. No idea if I ever ate ice cream from a cart like that as a boy, or even saw one, but now, when one of them came down the street or stopped outside the swimming pool, for a moment I was eight years old again. And because I wasn’t the only one to feel like that, and because almost everyone who remembered or thought they remembered the carts was now able to afford the super-size seven-scoops cornet without making too much of a hole in his pocket-money budget, Slibulsky’s business was a great success. Children bought his ices too, but he really made a killing from people who’d pay ten marks to bring back the summers of the past. He had nine employees who worked for him seven days a week on commission, while he sat in an office with cable TV, counted the money and watched Formula One racing. A few repairs now and then, the occasional employee who made off with the day’s takings, twice reported to the police for food poisoning — the rest of the time raking in a thousand marks, two thousand marks, Schumacher in pole position. By now he had earned enough for him and his girlfriend Gina to start looking for a house of their own with a warehouse and workshop, and then he’d be able to run the business more or less from the bedroom.

The fact that Slibulsky was helping me tonight, risking everything he’d built up in the last three years, and I don’t mean just financially, was… well, it was very impressive.

‘Not that way!’ He waved a hand. ‘There’s a disco there, a hundred metres further on they do regular breathalyser checks at night.’

We were on our way to the Taunus to bury the bodies somewhere in the forest. The mere thought of coming up against a police road block and being asked for our papers brought me out in a sweat. Even if the Frankfurt police had awarded me their big Friendship Prize, even if the name ‘Kayankaya’ had been proverbial as the shorthand for an honest man who could always be believed, I’d have had all kinds of difficulties in explaining where the car came from, the contents of its boot, and the two spades from Slibulsky’s garage on the back seat.

‘Turn right up ahead there,’ Slibulsky told me. ‘And don’t crawl along like that.’

‘I’m driving at fifty. That’s the speed limit.’

‘Nobody sticks to the speed limit in a car that can do two hundred, not at two in the morning.’

I didn’t reply to that, but I went on at the same speed. I’d rather end up in jail through stupidity than arrogance.

‘And you could shake off any flashing blue light in this car.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Slibulsky!’

‘Well, what is it?’

Yes, I was impressed by the way he was helping me, and the fact that he was doing it at all. But for him I’d never have got through the night intact, let alone been able to fix things so that Romario had half a chance of getting off safe and sound — but I wished I was on my own just now. Over the years Slibulsky had become kind of like family to me. Sometimes a big brother who could give me advice and make me see reason, who backed me up or shielded me, depending on circumstances, and I had no secrets from him. But now and then he was a little brother driving me crazy with his quarrelsome obstinacy, getting in my way, and I wouldn’t even want to give him the time of day for fear it might offer him a chance to poke his nose into my business.

‘Let’s bury these characters, clear up the bar and take Romario to the airport, OK? If we’re in luck we may even get a bit of sleep afterwards. We can discuss everything else in the morning, right? Like how to drive a car.’

Slibulsky looked askance at me, and I could sense the retorts passing through his head. But then he just growled something to himself, put another sweet in his mouth and leaned over to the music system. When he pressed the on button it began shining and winking in umpteen different colours like a little fairground. He pushed the only CD lying around into it. Some kind of techno gabba delivered in a poofter sing-song tone. Slibulsky let it play. At full volume. I couldn’t make him out.

‘Switch that crap off, Slibulsky!’

Head nodding forward and back, he shouted through the din, ‘Wait a moment! Listen to this! It’s not so bad!’

But I wasn’t waiting. And since I was under fire from four bass loudspeakers, and what with images of exploding faces in the back of my mind and two bodies in the boot, and the flashing lights of the music system in front of me, I felt for a moment that I was racing straight to hell, I didn’t press the off button but took my foot off the accelerator and kicked the fairground to pieces.

‘… Are you crazy?’

‘You’re the one who’s crazy! “Listen to this!” I think I’m going nuts!’

For a while there was no sound but the quiet purring of the engine.

Finally Slibulsky cleared his throat and said coolly, ‘It wasn’t my idea to shoot a couple of guys down and bury their bodies. But that’s what’s happened, we have it all there in our heads, and it won’t go away just because we stick to the Highway Code. You don’t want to talk about technical questions, like for instance how no cop with his VW banger could ever overtake us in this car, and you don’t want a little music, however horrible, to give you something else to think about — but maybe I do. So for all I care you’re a super-killer who shoots a man and then settles down for a nice little nap — speaking for myself, after all that death I’d like something a little livelier!’

I didn’t react. I stared straight ahead, gritting my teeth, and meticulously stuck to my fifty kph as if I could prove something that way. It was a fact that driving at such a slow speed on an empty, straight, well-surfaced road was a real strain on the nerves. I carefully stepped on the gas. When we were driving at eighty I’d reached the point where I could mutter, ‘Sorry.’

Slibulsky shook his head. ‘Oh, what the hell!’ And after a pause, ‘You know what would be a good idea now?’

‘No, what?’

‘A good screw.’

‘What…?’

‘To take your mind off things,’ said Slibulsky. ‘As I always say. What you need is a steady girlfriend. And don’t go saying, “Oh, Slibulsky,” again. I bet if you had someone waiting for you at home you wouldn’t be so… so edgy.’

‘Edgy? When we have a shoot-out behind us and two dead bodies in the boot!’

‘Like I said, you need something to take your mind off it. And there’s going to be more evenings when you need that too.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘I mean it, seriously.’

‘Slibulsky! If you ask me, we’ve got plenty of other things to think about tonight, we can leave my private life out of it.’

Slibulsky looked at me and scratched his ear. ‘You always do.’

‘I always do what?’

‘Leave your private life out of it.’

I briefly turned my head and caught his challenging look.

I wondered what Gina thought of being described as a good screw to take his mind off things in the evening. If Slibulsky said things like that in front of her. And if she was listening. Gina didn’t often listen when Slibulsky was talking. There had to be some reason why two people with such different routines had stuck together for over ten years, and still seemed relatively happy. Gina was an archaeologist, and paid almost no attention to anything that wasn’t to do with ancient potsherds. Whether Slibulsky was in jail or making millions with his ice-cream carts, she was always flying off to assorted desert countries, digging in the sand and discussing the results at congresses all over the world. She sat over her microscopes and dust samples at home, and when Slibulsky had visits from thugs whose bosses claimed there were old drug-dealing accounts still outstanding, Gina shut her door. Perhaps she actually didn’t mind just being something to take his mind off things. Perhaps she saw Slibulsky in the same light. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet would have come to some such arrangement if they’d survived.

‘In case you’re really interested, I still have Deborah.’

‘Deborah? Don’t you mean Helga?’

‘She calls herself Deborah, so I call her Deborah too.’

‘But she’s a tart!’

‘So what?’

‘I meant something else.’

‘You said “a screw”.’

‘All the same, there’s a difference.’

‘Between a tart and a good screw to make up for things? Not much of one, if you ask me.’

‘Don’t start going on about true love.’

‘I wasn’t going to.’

‘Good.’

A little later we reached the spruce wood where we were planning to dispose of the bodies. I looked in the rear-view mirror to make sure there was no car behind us and no one could see us, turned off the road onto an unmade path, and drove on the sidelights. The path came to an end after about a hundred metres and branches slapped against the windscreen. When we got out we were surrounded by the smell of resin and earth. The ground was covered with a thick layer of spruce needles. No sign of forestry workers or people going for walks.

While Slibulsky took the spades off the back seat, he asked, ‘What are you going to do with the car?’

I ducked down under some branches, shining a flashlight as I looked for a suitable place to dig. ‘Leave it somewhere near the rail station, as bait. The thing’s worth so much, even a successful gangster would be glad to have it back. And perhaps someone will get behind the wheel and be idiot enough to lead me to his boss.’

‘Well, just in case you change your mind, we’d get a year’s earnings for that car.’

‘A year of whose earnings, yours or mine?’

‘Mine, of course. With yours you could just about buy the music system,’ he said, opening the boot. ‘In its present condition.’

‘Very funny,’ I muttered. Then I found a place. A large root stuck up above ground and could be pushed aside.

We spent the next forty minutes digging. Our faces were dripping with sweat, and blisters formed and broke on our hands. When the hole was wide and deep enough we pushed the bodies into it. We shovelled the earth back, trod it down, covered it with spruce needles, and finally I put the root back in place.

While Slibulsky reversed the car out of the wood, I tried covering up the tyre tracks as best I could. Back on the paved road, Slibulsky asked, ‘How exactly did you see that, about using the car as bait? Are you going to stand beside it the whole time?’

‘I’ll get Max to build in a transmitter with a signal that I can follow by radio.’

‘And then what?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What will you do then? March in, say: “Hey, I shot a couple of your gorillas, but if you let my mate go on running his bar we’ll say no more about it?” ’

‘What are you talking about? Do you tell people: “Hey, buy my ice cream, there’s nothing in it but sugar and milk powder and sometimes a couple of salmonella bugs, but give me ten marks for a cornet and I’ll turn a blind eye?” ’

Slibulsky made a face as if I were slow on the uptake. I lit a cigarette.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘you’ll be cleverer than that, but however clever you are this is a team that drives BMWs, wears Italian suits, and asks six thousand a month from the manager of a miserable little place serving warmed-up beans — about as much as all the furnishings are worth, if that. What I mean is, these guys don’t do things by halves. Maybe they’ll go crazy and overreach themselves, and then their outfit won’t last long, but while it does last there’s no compromising with them, no negotiating, nothing. Either you get rid of the rest of them or they’ll get rid of you.’

‘So what do you think I should do?’

‘Tell Tango Man to clear off and forget the whole thing. He’ll be up and running again soon. We don’t have to worry about a character who’s worried about his aluminium pan, not in the kind of situation we were in just now. And you’d better close your office for a few weeks and go to the country. Anywhere this bunch can’t find you and you’ll get a little colour in your cheeks.’

Before I could say anything, Slibulsky made a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s all right. About how much?’

I hesitated, knowing that I wasn’t going to accept what Slibulsky was offering, but I did the sums all the same. ‘Well… I’m two months behind with the office rent, I haven’t paid the phone bill yet, and I owe someone three thousand marks.’

The someone was Slibulsky.

‘Right, I’ll give you seven thousand for the rent and the phone, you can have a holiday with what’s left. And just forget the three thousand…’ Slibulsky paused, and then grinned broadly. ‘The guy you owe it to has enough anyway.’

To please Slibulsky I grinned too. My thoughts were somewhere else entirely. Refusing his money had nothing to do with pride or a sense of honour. I’d have taken twenty thousand without bothering too much, because there was no doubt about it, Slibulsky did have enough, or anyway as much as we both thought was enough. But I’d been fool enough to accept a job from Romario, and I’d mucked it up, and a lot of blood had been spilt and energy wasted for no good reason. If two men die and everything’s still the same as before, or worse, then something’s wrong. I had to make sense of it all, even if only by making sure that Romario could carry on acting the typical Brazilian at the Saudade in peace, complaining about the German weather and wearing an apron with parrots printed on it.

Or I could have put it to myself more simply: I wished I hadn’t shot anyone.

‘Thanks, Slibulsky, but as I see it Romario may be an idiot — well, he is an idiot — but it all turned out this way on his account, and I think someone ought to get something out of it. And I have to know who those two were. I can’t just shoot a man like that. I won’t forget it.’

Slibulsky looked straight ahead, driving the car gently along. I couldn’t see his expression in the faint orange light of the dashboard. We drove on to the next village in silence.

‘Look,’ he said at last, ‘It’s not a complete disaster because just once you really mucked up.’ They didn’t exactly leave us much room to manoeuvre. But do it if you must. Three things: keep my name to yourself, pay your rent with my money, and when we’ve taken Tango Man to the airport let’s go back to my place. We’ll have a bite to eat and you can sleep on the sofa.’

‘Stinking cheese?’

Slibulsky nodded. ‘And there’s a crate of beer in the fridge.’

When the skyscrapers of Frankfurt appeared ahead of us I slipped lower down in the passenger seat and enjoyed the sight of the lights of the management offices on the top floors shining next to the moon. Whatever I’m feeling like, every time I drive into Frankfurt my heart lifts for a moment at the look of the skyline. In the normal way it’s probably just the image of such a concentrated, powerful place with those densely crowded tower buildings you can see miles away, giving a man who has his own little room somewhere among them a momentary illusion of being concentrated and powerful too. But this time those concrete pillars gave off another aura. As we drove past the Trade Fair Tower and I looked up at the facade that seemed to go on up and up into the sky, I felt a little calmer for the first time since the shoot-out. Was it my stupid subconscious whispering: a small-time character like you can’t really do anything too terrible? Or was it just the sight of such a mighty building making me feel that the world has seen and survived worse things than two dead thugs who were extorting protection money? Anyway, it was something to do with the fact that the building belonged to my home town, and I had a friend in that home town with a place where I could spend the night and eat, and if some Mafia outfit from somewhere else got a bloody nose from us, it was their own fault!

So far, so locally patriotic. A few cops I knew would have been surprised. They might even have spoken to me politely for a change.

But it wasn’t just the management floors lighting Frankfurt up tonight. As we drove past the station and I turned my head to ask Slibulsky if he knew whether there were any flights to the south at this time of night, I saw a red glow in the sky. Roughly in the direction of the Saudade. People sometimes like to say, after the event, that they knew something at a certain moment, although they really just mean they were afraid of it. All the same, I did know. And I felt I had only to reach out my arm and point a finger for Slibulsky to know too. Anyway, he opened his mouth and left it open for the rest of the drive, his gaze becoming more and more fixed. The closer we came to the Saudade the stronger the smell of burning was. When we finally turned into the road where the Brazilian flag had hung on one street corner for the last seven years, flakes of soot flew to meet us, and the blue lights of police cars were circling the place. The street was sealed off, curious onlookers were standing to right and left, and the Saudade was blazing fiercely.

We stopped the car at the road block and watched the fire-fighters running back and forth among ladders, hoses and pumps. Several jets of water were directed on the flames. The building, an old one with wooden floors and window frames, had four storeys, and the fire had reached the third. Meanwhile the blocks of flats to left and right had been cleared, and a bunch of sleepy children wrapped in blankets, unkempt men in dressing-gowns, and women with handbags and carrier bags were spilling out into the street. A tart was arguing with her client about payment for their unfinished business, and a drunk was offering the fire-fighters hurrying past him cans of beer out of a carrier as if he were in charge of a refreshment stop for marathon runners.

When the flames reached the fourth floor Slibulsky turned his head. ‘Now what?’ he asked.

I think I meant to shrug my shoulders, but I only succeeded in hunching them even further. Five hours ago we had set out, we’d had a quick drink in a bar, squeezed into Romario’s cupboard, and all things considered we’d been in a pretty relaxed mood. A stupid job, yes, but not one you couldn’t get done with the help of a spot of bad temper and a few moderately funny jokes. I mean, what were two racketeers come for their protection money who never opened their mouths.? Come on, Slibulsky, we can do this standing on our heads, we just have to puff air in their faces and they’ll leave Romario in peace…

‘… Do you think he got out?’

Slibulsky raised his eyebrows. ‘Drunk as he was?’

I lit myself a cigarette. My hands were trembling. ‘I don’t think I feel well.’

‘I told you, they don’t do things by halves.’

‘How could they find out what had happened so quickly?’

‘Maybe there was a third man in the car.’

My mouth dropped open, and I goggled at Slibulsky as if he’d just conjured up a whole flock of pigeons or something. Of course! Why hadn’t we thought of that before? And how come I myself hadn’t worked it out?

‘What do you think, have we been acting like idiots?’

‘Look, we had a couple of dead bodies on our hands! And if there was a third man it wouldn’t have made any difference.’

‘But we could have taken Romario with us.’

‘We ought to have got that tall bastard to pay them the six grand.’

That had been Slibulsky’s view all along. Protection money to the Mafia was just taxation, he thought, only you got a better return for your money. He knew what it was all about. In his time as a bouncer for that brothel he’d also been responsible for getting the whores to pay up the few hundred marks they owed for round-the-clock guard and their mouldy rooms. He didn’t like to talk about that, and the methods he sometimes had to use.

‘But he didn’t,’ Slibulsky went on, ‘and then this happened. He knew what tangling with characters like that could mean. Well, nothing we can do here now, and I guess we’d better go home.’

‘But whoever started the fire is still around. He’s not going to miss the show…’

‘So? You think he’s standing around somewhere with a big cigarette lighter? Come on, we’ve had enough for one day.’

Slibulsky started the engine of the car and turned it. I didn’t protest. We really had had enough.

After we’d gone round two corners the glow of the fire disappeared behind buildings and neon ads. As we crossed the bridge to Sachsenhausen the sky in the east turned blue. I thought of Romario’s one-room flat in the Nordend district. Photographic wallpaper showing a palm-fringed Brazilian beach, plus a bed with a sagging mattress and dirty grey sheets. Slibulsky was on the wrong track if he thought Romario could have paid six thousand marks just like that. He had put all his money into the Saudade, his one true love. But apart from farmers and folk from small towns who wanted to round off a weekend visit to the red-light district of Frankfurt with an exotic supper, scroungers like me and a handful of Brazilian transvestites, hardly anyone had wanted to be witness to his love. From Monday to Thursday the place was empty. If Romario had a special soup pan for festive occasions the size of a rainwater butt, and had objected to its use as a receptacle for corpses, he’d only been putting on a desperate act. There were never any festive occasions at the Saudade, let alone enough customers to put back as much soup as the pan held. And anyway the characters who got lost and found their way to the Saudade were not the kind to waste their capacity for liquid intake on soup. I wondered who would break down the door to Romario’s flat, and hoped he’d changed the sheets recently.

After we had pushed a number of ice-cream carts in need of repairs out of Slibulsky’s garage and into the yard, and got the BMW under cover, we went up to his flat. Slibulsky took the crate of beer out of the fridge, and we sat down by the living-room window with it. Neither of us felt like food any more, let alone the cheese — a yellow stinker which, if you had enough imagination, looked like a clump of calloused skin collected from mortuaries, kept moist and stored in gumboots for years. Outside it was getting light. We drank beer and watched the first rays of the sun falling on the rooftops. We were too exhausted to talk and too churned up inside to sleep. Only when the sun was shining in our faces and school-kids were shouting out in the street did Slibulsky rise to his feet, put a blanket on the sofa for me, and wish me a sceptical, ‘Good-night.’ I waited for another beer to take effect, then levered myself up from my chair too, staggered across the room and fell on the sofa. I was still wondering what Gina would think if she found me here with my shoes on her sofa cushions with their linen covers when my eyes closed, and it was about five seconds before I fell asleep. And about ten seconds before an alarm clock made my head burst. Tinkle tinkle, tinkle tinkle, tinkle tinkle. Another ten seconds before I realized that the racketeer’s mobile was ringing in my breast pocket. I pressed buttons at random, hoped the right one was among them, and cleared my throat. The right one was among them, and I heard a voice. At the same moment everything I’d tried to work out about the origin of the blackmailers over the last few hours was turned on its head by the Frankfurt accent.

‘Hey, where’s you lot, then? Here’s me sitting around like a fool, can’t come off duty, time I went to bed. You in the disco or what? If the boss hears… where are you? Can’t hear a thing…’

I tried clearing my throat again.

‘You being funny? Tell me where you are, I’ll tell you how long it’ll take to get home. And if you don’t I’m shutting up shop and going to bed, get it?’

‘Yup.’

‘Whaddya mean, “yup”?’

‘Yup, I get it.’

I waited for him to go on grousing and with luck give me some idea where it was that his mates were supposed to come home to. But something about my answer must have sounded wrong, because all I heard was a sudden sharp intake of breath and then he ended the call. I stared at the mobile. A Hessian Mafia! No wonder the blackmailers had preferred not to talk. Who’d have taken them seriously?

I put the mobile back in my breast pocket and looked up at the ceiling. The night was actually ending on a note of relief. No language I didn’t understand, no bosses I’d have to look for far afield. Just a cosy little connection probably thought up in the back room of a bar where they were putting back the local cider, the boss a meat importer or used-car dealer or the owner of some fairground booth, the rest of them unemployed scaffolders and drunks who took the tickets in porn cinemas. ‘Hey, how’s about a little Mafia op?’ And I imagined myself marching into the office with its rubber tree and chrome furniture and Pirelli calendar and saying: ‘No, I don’t want to buy a piece of old junk sprayed metallic silver, I’ve come to take you in. You got me into shooting a man, and you barbecued someone I know. Now we’ll see if your place burns as well as his!’ And then I’d unscrew the petrol can, and the fatso in the double-breasted suit would beg for mercy, and I’d go ping, and I’d go zack, and I’d… well before I could wonder what I’d actually do in the end I’d fallen asleep again. And even the fact that the caller, who was obviously some kind of caretaker on the phone switchboard for the gang, had known nothing about either the dead men or the fire didn’t get through to me that morning.