Kismet

Chapter 3

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the smell. A mixture of skin cream and lubricating oil and something chemical like sprayed grapefruit, but without any grapefruit aroma. Then a hand shook my shoulder, and I opened my eyes. Blinking, I saw a head with a furry animal sitting on it. When the picture cleared the animal turned into a complicated hairstyle piled high and held in place with a dozen clasps. Only then did I recognise Gina. Her lips were bright blood-red, and she was wearing a blue pinstriped suit and a blouse with buttons that looked as each of them would pay a few months’ worth of my rent, cash down. I think this was the first time since her university days I’d seen Gina in her war paint, not dressed in an overall or a man’s shirt in order to scrape away at ancient potsherds.

At the time, over ten years ago when Slibulsky first met Gina, she was working as a teacher in a school of dance and etiquette to finance her archaeological studies. With the knowledge she’d had to acquire in childhood, as the daughter of a tax inspector’s wife who liked to make herself out Madame Monte Carlo rather than plain Frau Scheppes from Bornheim, Gina herself was now teaching the sprogs of Frankfurt proprietors of delicatessen shops and ladies’ fashion boutiques how to waltz and drop a curtsey. She’d had to dress to suit the part. After that job ended, leaving Gina free to be much more casual about her appearance, I sometimes wondered whether the short grey skirts and bright red high-heeled shoes of those days had perhaps not been the least important consideration when Slibulsky plied her with several litres of champagne one evening.

Her Punch-and-Judy face with its pointed chin and long, aquiline nose was beaming at me. She looked outrageously healthy and wide awake. ‘Hi, good morning. Had a heavy night of it?’

I wiped my mouth, cleared my throat, and accustomed myself to the fact that even now Gina could look very unlike a woman who organized pottery courses. ‘Fairly heavy. What’s the time?’

‘Twelve-thirty. Slibulsky’s been gone quite some time. Had a meeting with his salesmen.’

She’d done something or other to her eyes too, or around them. They weren’t really that big and that dark. Or had I just never noticed because her hair was usually hanging over her face?

‘He says to tell you you’d better leave the car in the garage for now, and you should look at the sweets.’

‘What sweets?’

‘You’re asking me that? What car?’

Oh yes, I remembered, the evening’s compensation: tell Kayankaya to leave the car in our garage, and you don’t need to know it belongs to a bunch of brutal gangsters, my love, let’s just pray you don’t take it into your head to drive that upmarket set of wheels round town.

‘Anyway,’ Gina went on, ‘the cleaning lady comes in half an hour’s time and I have a date at the museum. If you don’t mind a hoover zooming round you, stay put, otherwise I can take you into town with me.’

I looked down at myself: jacket, trousers, shoes, disgusting stains everywhere. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll be with you.’

‘I need another ten minutes. There’s coffee in the kitchen if you’d like some.’

While Gina disappeared into the next room I heaved myself up from the sofa, staggered into the kitchen, washed my face over the sink, got myself a cup of coffee and sat down with it by the open window, which was next to a chestnut tree. The window looked out on the yard, and silence reigned apart from the chirping of some sparrows hopping about in the branches and the sound of Gina’s distant footsteps as she walked over the wooden floors. I drank some coffee, put the cup down, and pushed it away from me. I sat there for a while, slumped like a sack of flour, just staring ahead of me. So this was how it felt when you’d shot someone the night before, and a fairly close acquaintance had burned to death: you looked for a comfortable place to sit and wonder why people who can afford a cleaning lady would drink horrible filter coffee kept lukewarm for hours in a coffee machine. I made myself think of the moment when we’d come rushing out of that cupboard and fired. But everything that had happened yesterday seemed to me as improbable as a story babbled by some drunk in a bar the night before, and as if I, also drunk, had been trying very hard to believe his story. Perhaps that would change when I read about Romario’s charred body in the evening papers. Or when the first thugs turned up in my office because the gang had been asking questions, and had found out who had been going in and out of the Saudade unusually often over the last few days. No one’s movements went unobserved in the station district, certainly not if you were known to be something like a cop. Or would they simply blow my office up just like that? I mean, what was there to talk about?

‘Got a hangover?’ asked Gina as she came through the door. And with her came that strange, penetrating aroma.

‘Don’t know yet,’ I replied, watching her go over to the coffee machine and pour herself a cup. She leaned against the fridge, cup in hand, and examined me in a friendly manner.

‘Apart from that, are you doing all right?’ We hadn’t seen each other for over a month.

‘Hm… not as well as you, I guess. You’re looking great.’

She smiled at me. ‘Thanks.’ Then she suddenly looked at her coffee, drank some, and kept her eyes down. A brief answer. So brief that there was a silence after it. Other archaeologists might have said: yes, I’m feeling great because I’ve been appointed curator of the museum, or because I’ve found Genghis Khan’s toothglass. She just said thanks, and it was as if she’d slammed a door in my face.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I went on, when the silence threatened to become awkward, ‘if this date at the museum’s an important one, I’d better tell you your clothes smell, and not just of anti-moth spray. It’s like you’d sprayed them against rats, wolves and burglars too.’

‘Anti-moth spray?’ She looked at me in astonishment. Then she lowered her cup and looked down at herself, as if to make sure she was still wearing what she’d put on earlier. ‘But I bought this only last week.’

‘Ah. Well, they must have treated it with something when they were making it. Sorry, but it smells horrible.’

She lowered her head and hauled part of her collar up to her nose. ‘I can’t smell anything… only my perfume.’

‘Perfume?’

‘Yes, perfume! Issey Miyake, if you really want to know!’

‘I don’t believe it.’ And I really didn’t. Some old archaeological joke, maybe: What’s that stink in your lab? — Oh, it’s what Cleopatra smelled like when she’d been rubbing in fermented goat shit for her spots!

Gina shook her head. ‘Good heavens, Kayankaya! Get yourself a girlfriend! Next you’ll be asking what those two bumps swelling out in front of me are.’

I opened my mouth — and shut it again. Well, well. Slibulsky didn’t think it necessary to tell his partner about the gangsters’ car worth a hundred thousand marks in the garage, but he was obviously happy to discuss my private life with her. I imagined them discussing my solo existence anxiously in the evening over stinking cheese and open sandwiches: poor thing, all alone in his flat — Pass the butter, please, darling — It’s really depressing — Well, he can’t be the easiest person to live with — Leave it, dear, I’ll wash the dishes — Oh, Gina…

As we were driving towards the city centre in Gina’s Fiat a little later, she said, ‘And if we’re talking about smells…’

‘Yes, I know.’ I dismissed this comment. Even as I got into the small, cramped car I’d realised that I was the last person who ought to bring the subject up this afternoon.

Gina dropped me off at my flat, kissed me on the cheek and invited me to come to dinner some time soon. When the Fiat had disappeared round the corner, I looked up at my windows on the first floor. One of them was open, and I wondered if I’d left it that way.

There was a greengrocer’s shop on the ground floor of the dirty white sixties block. Its owner was also caretaker of the flats. He had stood for election to the council as a Republican a few years ago, and for a while he was mad keen on getting me out of the building. I had only to flush the loo at four in the morning to have him complain that I was disturbing the other tenants. But then German reunification came, and after a euphoria lasting just under two months and consisting mostly of his getting drunk and bawling out the national anthem every other evening, meanwhile complaining of me more than ever, his ideas of the enemy suddenly underwent a change. All at once the Ossies were the enemy. Not that the greengrocer ever saw Ossies anywhere but on TV, but for some reason he began hating them like poison all the same. I’d never forget the morning when he came rushing out of his shop towards me with a half-rotten apple in his hand, shouting, ‘Look at that, will you? Just arrived! Imported from the east! Huh! Living it up on my solidarity tax!’ Staggered to find that for the first time I wasn’t the object of his displeasure, I looked at the apple and said, as if in a trance, ‘Well, fancy that!’ Whereupon he lost no time in putting our relationship on a new footing, leaned towards me with a conspiratorial nod, and warned me, ‘We’re going to get some surprises, you bet your life. Oh yes, we’re going to get some surprises.’

He actually said we! And until now he’d used all forms of the pronouns we and you to me in a way that made it perfectly clear this wasn’t just a case of a caretaker arguing with a tenant, it was a clash between nations if not whole races, it was cultural warfare of worldwide significance over disturbing the neighbours after ten in the evening. And now the two of us were shoulder to shoulder in the little lifeboat of civilisation, so to speak, surrounded by hordes of Ossies! OK, so in his view he was the only one paying solidarity tax. Perhaps he thought I paid my taxes in Istanbul.

Anyway, since that morning we’d exchanged the time of day, and when his wife died a little later and he began taking Russian tarts to his flat in the evenings, his attitude to me became almost warm. Mainly, no doubt, out of shame because in this modern building I could regularly follow the course of his Deutschmark romances through the thin ceiling of his flat. In addition, I thought, his simple view of the world and the existence of a common border between Turkey and Georgia — which still meant Russia to us children of the Cold War — gave him a vague feeling that he had, so to speak, married into my family.

Anyway this afternoon, I entered the greengrocer’s shop calling out a cheerful, ‘Hi!’

‘Oh… hi.’

He quickly put his newspaper down. He’d probably been studying the tarts’ ads. It was Friday, he’d be getting one tomorrow. These days I took care not to come home too early on a Saturday evening. I usually went to see Deborah.

He came out from behind his counter, a weedy little man, patted his thin yellow hair into place and approached me with his now usual expression of inspecting something about me or behind me with interest. Whatever else had changed since that morning with the imported fruit from the east, we never looked in each other’s eyes. Like it or not they were, so to speak, the display windows of our armouries, which were still stuffed full of insults, wariness and mutual distrust. And because we knew or guessed that but didn’t want to think about it, because it really was much pleasanter to exchange a word or so on the stairs than snap at each other, we’d discovered a whole series of attitudes, little habits and manoeuvres that allowed our eyes to keep from meeting.

‘… Everyone already in short sleeves for weeks! And it’s only May!’ said the greengrocer, as he looked at my arms and then glanced over my shoulder and straight at the door, crying, ‘But look at that, there’s a storm coming up! A bit of rain will be good for us!’

So I turned and looked at the doorway too, and we’d done it: we were standing side by side, and there was scarcely anything in the brief conversation that followed to make us look away from the view of parked cars and a pile of empty fruit crates. When it was raining the greengrocer would use his wet shoes as an excuse to look first down and then anywhere else, in late summer he never took his eyes of the wasps zooming around his fruit, and in the morning he had to see precisely how the sugar dissolved in his coffee. All I could usually think of was scratching my lowered head; apart from that, I went along with whatever scenario he set up.

After I’d briefly given him my views on the weather I asked if he’d heard noises of any kind coming from my flat towards dawn.

‘Ho, living it up last night, eh?’ He waved it away. ‘That’s no problem. I was awake anyway.’

‘What makes you think I was living it up?’

‘Well…’ He coughed, amused. ‘If a person can’t get his own key in the lock of his own door, he’s usually been having a good time for the last few hours, right? I mean, it’s obvious. Well, you’d want to be living it up here and now. It’s your kind of climate out there, right?’

‘Hm, yes. Did I manage to get the door open?’

For a moment it seemed he was about to turn his head and look at me in surprise. But then, looking at the fruit crates, he asked, ‘Well, did you wake up in the stairwell?’

‘I woke up with friends. And I’ve been at their place until now.’

‘Really? Well, that’s certainly odd. I’m sure I heard someone at your door around six this morning.’

‘Did you hear whoever it was in the flat too?’

‘Well, now you mention it… that’s right, no footsteps, though normally…’

Of course he was longing to know what it was all about, but he didn’t like to ask. Since he’d taken to bringing tarts home he thought highly of the principle of privacy.

‘I’ll just go and take a look,’ I decided, and before he could reply I’d said goodbye, looking vaguely in the direction of the vegetable display, and I was out of the door.

The lock looked perfectly normal. Whoever had tried breaking into my flat had gone about it without using violence. I put the key in it. Turned the key twice to unlock the door, as usual. I pushed the door open and looked at the small, square entrance hall, with its coat-rack and empty bottles. I stood there for a while in the doorway, listening. Finally I went in, examined the whole place, two rooms, kitchen and bathroom, and remembered leaving the window open because of a smell of sewage coming up through the sink plughole in the kitchen. Would gangsters planning to get into my flat try a couple of keys just in case they happened to fit, and then give up and go away again?

I closed the door, made coffee, and sat down with a cup by the phone. First I tried reaching Slibulsky. For one thing to find out how he was feeling, for another to ask why I was supposed to look at some kind of sweets. But the phone in his office was answered by one of the ice-cream vendors, who said Slibulsky was out stocking up on cardboard beakers. Then I rang the number of Romario’s flat. Perhaps he had a girlfriend, or a visitor from Brazil, or someone else he’d been keeping a secret from us and who was now waiting unsuspectingly at the window, staring at the firewall opposite and starting to get angry. Or who was just being questioned by the police, had no idea what they were talking about, and needed help. Or who knew just what they were talking about and needed help all the more. But no one picked up the phone. I smoked, and wondered who I knew who was so close to Romario that he or she ought to be told about yesterday’s events. I could only think of the cleaning lady who flicked a duster round the restaurant twice a week. A sprightly old Portuguese woman whose name and address I didn’t know.

After a second cup of coffee I took the racketeer’s phone out of my breast pocket and looked first for stored numbers, which it didn’t have, and then for the redial button. Who would the gang members have called last? My Hessian friend of last night? Some boss or other? The lady who ran courses for mutes on how to use the phone? If speaking had really been impossible for them, of course the Hessian would have suspected something straight away. Perhaps he’d been trained to expect whistling or tapping. On the other hand he’d asked where they were, and it seemed to me that conveying an address by whistling was a trick it would be almost impossible to learn.

I tried to concentrate and pressed the button. A six-digit number beginning with an eight came up on the display. An Offenbach number. When it began ringing I quickly thought up a couple of things to say: whoever answered had won a car in the new phone-number lottery, for instance, and where could we meet to deal with the formalities? But no one did answer, and after the phone had rung twenty times I switched the thing off. I’d find the address that the number belonged to on the computer in my office. Until then I must content myself with the redial button.

I picked up my own phone again and called a cop who could hardly refuse my request. He was head of the Frankfurt immigration police squad, he had a family, and he’d once been filmed on video playing around with underage boys. I knew about the pictures.

‘Hottges here.’

‘Good day, Herr Hottges. Kayankaya speaking.’

Silence at the other end… a long, indrawn breath… footsteps… a door closing, then a voice hissing in my ear. ‘We agreed you wouldn’t call me at the office!’

‘But if I call you at home it’s usually your fourteen-year-old son who picks up the phone, and that always sets off certain associations in my mind.’

Another deep breath, another silence. ‘What do you want?’

‘I need the name of someone who owns a BMW.’ I gave him the registration number. ‘And I also want all the information there is about new Mafia-style gangs in the station district.’

He hesitated. ‘I’d have to ask around. As you know, it’s the immigration police I’m with.’

‘Then ask around. And don’t try to fob me off with rubbish. I want the names of the gang bosses, their addresses, roughly the number of members and so on — by tomorrow afternoon.’

‘But I can’t get hold of the information just like that, most of it’s secret.’

‘You’ll find it. After all, not everything can stay secret: videotapes, Mafia organisations — it all has to come out sometime…’

Even as I spoke he rang off. But I knew he’d work his socks off to get me the information I wanted by tomorrow. This had been going on for over eight years. In fact I’d deduced the existence of the videotapes only incidentally, during a case of forged passports and refugees, and they’d probably been binned long ago. But for one thing, Hottges didn’t know that, and for another the whole business wasn’t just obscene, these things always are, it was obscene with metaphorical knobs on, you might say. A mere rumour, carefully dropped into the ear of certain newspaper and TV editors, would probably have been enough to get the head of the Frankfurt immigration police hunted first out of his job, then out of his family, and finally, when his photo had been in the press, out of town. Hottges, who as regional dogsbody was responsible to the Minister of the Interior for letting practically no one who lived outside the area that could receive Radio Luxembourg into the city, and throwing out as many as possible of those who had made their way in all the same — unless they had an income of over a few thousand net, of course — Hottges had been messing around with Arab boys of fifteen at the time. You could just imagine the headlines. Head of deportation fits rent boys in’, or Gay Commissioner responsible for residence permits — kids had to line up for him. The fact that the boys and their pimp had of course set the whole thing up and had fleeced Hottges mercilessly themselves wouldn’t be any excuse for him in the eyes of either the public or his family. On the contrary, to the public he would look not just a pervert but also a fool. To me, Hottges was a real stroke of luck. As a source of information and a direct means of leverage in police HQ, he must have helped me to earn one-third of my fees over the last few years.

I pressed the redial button on the mobile again, counted up to the twentieth ring tone once more, undressed and got under the shower. When I was in my dressing-gown, sitting in front of some crispbread and a can of sardines, the first thunder rolled over the city. Soon after that Slibulsky rang. We told each other how we were, and he said that apart from the fact that he’d had hardly three hours’ sleep, and he’d been racing around town since ten in the morning after stuff of some kind, he wasn’t too bad. It was only when he shook hands with one of his ice-cream vendors, and the man’s hand was wet with sweat, that he’d felt sick for a moment at the thought of packing those bodies up, he said.

‘I’m eating sardines out of the can at this moment and feeling glad they don’t have their heads on,’ I said, contributing my mite to the conversation. ‘Normally I prefer them whole.’

‘Hm,’ said Slibulsky. ‘Looks like we’ll survive it. Do you still want to find out who that couple were?’

‘Of course.’

‘Did Gina tell you to take a look at the sweets?’

‘She did. But she didn’t know what sweets, or where they were.’

‘The sweets in the BMW, of course.’

‘What’s so special about the sweets?’

‘They’re not a brand I know.’

‘Fancy that.’

‘Oh, come on, Kayankaya, you know I started sucking sweets when I stopped smoking. And I’ve tried every brand and every variety in Germany — but I don’t know these. So when you find out where the sweets come from… get the idea?’

‘I get it. Doesn’t it happen to say where they’re from on the packet?’

‘That’s the funny thing. It says they’re made in Germany.’

‘What’s so funny about that?’

‘Because they’re not from here. Or maybe for export only, but I don’t believe that either. I think it’s like with my Italian ice cream that doesn’t come from Italy. But who wants ice cream from Ginnheim?’

‘Germany, home from home for confectionery?’

‘Makes no difference. If you want to sell something in a place where Germany has a good reputation, even if it’s bananas you’re selling, you stick a label on your stuff saying it comes from the German provinces.’

‘Bananas grown in the German provinces — OK. But where would Germany have this wonderful reputation?’

‘How do I know? Maybe Paraguay? You’re the detective. If you want to take a look at them, I’ll be home from eight onwards.’

We rang off, and I went on eating sardines. The storm was beginning outside, thunder rolling and lightning flashing, the first drops were falling, and soon there was a waterfall cascading down outside my windows. When the storm moved away an hour later it left a grey, dripping dishcloth above the city.

Around five I rang the only client I had at the time. A woman academic, an expert on Islam, whose German shepherd dog had gone missing. I told her I’d spent all day visiting animal rescue centres in Kelkheim and Hattersheim, no luck, but I’d go on searching tomorrow, and I was sure I’d soon be bringing Susi home. I’d been telling her that for a week, and so far there’d been cheques and no complaints. That was the way I liked my clients, very rich and very crazy.

Then I put on a raincoat for the first time in weeks and set off for the station.