Kismet

Chapter 4

FIRE NEAR RAILWAY STATION Around five in the morning fire broke out in an old four-storey building near Frankfurt Central Station. The building, which consisted of a restaurant and offices, burned down to its foundations. The fire-fighters succeeded in keeping the blaze away from the nearby blocks of flats. Normally there was no one in the building at night, and so far there seem to have been no victims. However, it will take days from the arrival of the fire service on the scene to clear the rubble and make sure that the only damage was to property. No information about the cause of the fire is yet available…

I put the damp evening paper into the litter bin and got on the tram going towards Slibulsky’s flat. I’d been walking around the station district for four hours, my feet were sore, my shoulders were wet, and a mixture of tea, coffee, beer and cider was glugging about inside me. I had been in countless bars and restaurants and visited several stalls selling snacks, asking the owners, waiters and vendors whether they had ever heard of the Army of Reason. About a third of them seemed genuinely surprised, and usually wanted to know if this was some damnfool antiliquor campaign. Another third clammed up, left me sitting or standing where I was, and didn’t even come back for me to settle my bill. The rest had relieved me of about five hundred marks with variants on the question of how much the information was worth. What I had discovered was as follows: the Army of Reason had been in the protection money racket for about two weeks, operating with a brutality uncompromising even by the standards of the station district. They always turned up two at a time, they didn’t say a word, their faces were powdered or heavily made up, they communicated by means of scribbled notes couched in high-flown language, and at the slightest sign of resistance they drew pistols or knives. A kebab vendor and a waiter, both of them among those who immediately turned away from me when I mentioned the Army, had obviously shown such resistance. Like Romario, they had their right hands bandaged.

Of those who did talk to me none of them had the faintest idea who the Army were, where they came from, or who was behind them. It was as if they’d dropped from another planet into the station district and wanted to rake in as much as they could, as quickly as they could, of the stuff that the local inhabitants called money, because obviously you could never have enough of it. The Army seemed to have none of the usual interest of protection racketeers in keeping their sources going. They asked every victim for a sum which they obviously thought could be raised in cash very quickly, never mind whether that made the business go broke or not. They demanded thirty thousand from a restaurant with a wine list and white tablecloths, four thousand from a sausage stall. So although the Army had announced that the contributions would be made monthly, they were probably one-off payments. The most obvious reason for that seemed to be a desire to avoid warfare with the gangs who really ruled the quarter. Get in fast and get out fast, before the local gangland bosses could react.

For about a year the streets and businesses of the station district had been neatly divided up between a German boss, an Albanian boss and a Turkish boss, and everyone in the vicinity, not least the police, was happy with this carefully negotiated settlement. Life was almost as peaceful as it had been nine years ago when the Schmitz brothers were undisputed kings of the station district, and a bent Christian Democrat city council had left the brothers to their own devices. At the time the brothers allowed or banned just about everything that made money in the area, from registered brothels to illegal underground casinos. They made sure that business ran reasonably smoothly, sometimes with diplomatic skill, sometimes with troops of heavies, and took their cut of every mark earned, a percentage precisely calculated to keep those who paid them from ever seriously thinking of questioning the system. They had even succeeded in banishing the drugs trade and drugs consumption that had been getting increasingly nasty since the seventies to places on the outskirts of the district. That way respectable fathers of families and business travellers could look for their pleasures without being constantly reminded, by the delirious walking dead, that the glittering night-life of champagne, lucky breaks and ladies in suspender belts was largely based on veins covered in needle marks. On the whole, then, everything ran as well under the Schmitz brothers as it can in a red-light district: the police knew where to turn after a shoot-out, bar owners and brothel managers knew they could tell anyone but the Schmitz brothers to go take a running jump, the fixers knew where to slip away to, and people like me knew where to get a beer at three in the morning. But then the good folk of Frankfurt elected a Social Democrat council, the regular flow of money from the brothers into the Town Hall came to light, and that was the end of their little kingdom. The brothers disappeared first from the city and then from the country, leaving behind seven streets among the high-rise banking buildings and the Central Station that were soon, like a mountain of gold with no one to guard it, beaming out their radiance to the most remote corners of Europe. Before a month was up the first gangs invaded, killed a few bar owners to earn themselves respect, and thought they could rule the district with an iron hand. But that took more than spreading fear. The brothers had managed to give their subjects a sense of mutual profit, they were seen as guarantors of peace and a regular income, and they were relatively reliable. Those who kicked up a fuss got slapped down, the industrious got an extra thousand in their bank accounts. In addition, the brothers bought their suits off the peg and knew practically everyone in the district by his first name. The new masters with their made-to-measure suits and diamond rings just about knew the name of the city they were in, took percentages when and how they liked, and if they were in a bad mood disposed of the first handy victim to come along. Agreements were worth nothing, and all you could rely on was trouble. The gangs who moved in behind them sometimes had it easier. Once upon a time, if gangsters of some kind had appeared in the district intending a takeover, the Schmitz brothers knew about it within hours and could count on a large body of supporters. Now no one warned the gangland bosses, let alone helped them. Far from it: everyone was happy to see them chucked out. And so it went on for seven years. More and more often, increasingly isolated bosses had to vacate the place faster and faster. They came from Germany, Austria, Italy, Albania, Romania, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Russia, Belarus, and a handful of South American countries. You had the feeling that a kind of criminal Olympic Games was going on in the Frankfurt station district. Taking part was what mattered. Some of them stayed in charge for such a short time that they hardly covered their travel expenses. It was said that one grocer, uninformed about the latest coup, had called ‘Adios’, with friendly intent, after a group of hardboiled thugs, only to have his shop wrecked by the insulted Latvians.

And now, after a year of relative peace, it looked like trouble again. I knew from the restaurant managers and waiters who had spoken to me that all the gangland bosses of the district had been informed about the Army’s venture into extortion, and were planning to join forces against them. For the last two days a watch had been kept round the clock on all the major street corners. So far, however, the Army members had turned up and disappeared again at such speed that the guards posted hardly had time to flip their mobiles open. So from tomorrow there was always to be cars with drivers ready to block each of the main streets leading out of the district. Within a few minutes a kind of roving commando troop was then to storm in and dispose of the silent wearers of those sharp suits.

Or that was the idea, anyway. In view of last night and the lightning speed with which the Army people had reached for their pistols, I was pretty sure that a calculation involving several minutes’ leeway was a miscalculation. I knew the boss of the Albanian gang in the station district, and I had his secret phone number. I could have called him and told him how much notice the Army of Reason, in my experience, took of cars blocking their way. Either they’d simply break through or there’d be a bloodbath. But I also knew the Albanian’s employees, and while I rather liked the man himself, because for a gangland boss he could keep his mouth shut and use his brain surprisingly often, I had no wish at all to tangle with his thugs. Not yet, anyway. First I had to find out who or what this Army was — and who it was I’d shot last night.

It was just before nine when Slibulsky opened the door to me in his dressing gown. Muttering that he was totally done in after last night and then a day of chasing around, he dragged himself back to the bedroom and got into bed. All around him were piles of open biscuit packets, chocolate bars and bags of jelly babies. There was basketball on TV. ‘The sweets are in the kitchen.’

I fetched the opened bag of sweets, sat down on the bed beside him and unwrapped one. Orchard Fruits from Germany, Blackcurrant Flavour, green wording on a black, red and gold background.

‘Looks like an ad for the German armed forces. Maybe you’d have felt embarrassed to go to the cash desk with them?’

Slibulsky gave me a glazed look, stuffed a biscuit in his mouth and said, munching, ‘If they’re good I don’t mind if it says Christian Democrats on them. And I’d certainly have noticed sweets that I’d feel embarrassed to take to the cash desk.’

‘Maybe they’re new?’

‘Look at the bag. Does it give the manufacturer’s name?’

I looked at both sides of the bag. It was clear plastic, nothing printed on it.

‘You think this kind of thing can be sold in Germany like planks of wood? It has to say what’s in it, where it comes from and all that.’

‘Hm.’

Of course I was glad that Slibulsky was trying to help me, even though he thought I’d better keep out of the whole business. And possibly there really was a chance that these sweets might help me to find out about the origin of the Army. Perhaps they were just the kind of clue that seems small and uninteresting at first but leads to results in the end. Although however much further the sweets might get me, just now running around town holding them under everyone’s nose in the hope that some time someone would say, ‘Sure, I know those!’ wasn’t the way I envisaged my plans to combat the Army of Reason over the next few days. I wanted to kick up a mighty fuss: blackmail Hottges, throw my money around in the station district, and later maybe get in touch with the Albanian. Yes, I wanted to know who it was I’d killed, but I wanted to know soon, so that I could soon forget about it again too.

I put a handful of the sweets in my jacket pocket and stood up.

‘I’ll show them around. Let’s be in touch by phone tomorrow.’

‘Any news of Tango Man?’

‘They’re still clearing away the rubble.’

‘Mmm,’ said Slibulsky. ‘Look after yourself.’

Out in the street I wondered for a moment whether to go back to the station district with the vague idea of finding something out today. But then my feet protested, and so did my still-glugging stomach, and I decided to call it a day. I went for a meal and then fell into a taxi.