Kismet

Chapter 7

Dr Michael Ahrens was the owner of a packet-soup and instant-pudding factory. The factory consisted of a huge metal shed, a four-storey brick building, and a hoarding measuring eight by eight metres from which the doctor, showing me all his teeth, announced: My Good Name Guarantees Good Food — Ahrens Soups, Pleasure On Your Plate. He had thick grey hair, blow-dried a little too stylishly, a suntanned face and a white shirt unbuttoned to just above his chest hair. However, his eyes looked at me over the top of a plain, narrow pair of glasses as gravely as if he were delivering the Eleventh Commandment. When he had that picture taken the good doctor had obviously been unable to decide whether he’d rather sell a lot of soup or screw a lot of women.

I turned away from the hoarding and walked to the brick building through the rain, which had been falling since morning. Just behind the front door there was a reception desk and switchboard behind glass. A young woman sat in front of a console with several receivers and any number of switches and little lights, chewing gum and reading the paper. I knocked on the pane between us, which was closed, and she reluctantly looked up.

‘Yes, what is it?’ she said. The pane stayed shut.

‘Is that your style at Ahrens Soups? Shouting at your best customers through the glass?’

At first she looked even more reluctant, but then she seemed to think better of it, plastered a smile on her lips and rose to her feet. As she pushed the pane aside, she explained, ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch what you said. It’s difficult to hear through the glass…’

Interesting tactics, I thought, and replied, ‘I said don’t bother, just stay put, I don’t mind shouting.’

‘Hm.’ She said nothing, looked me challengingly in the eye, and for a moment her smile seemed genuine. ‘So how can I help you?’

‘Orhan Yaprak, import-export. I have an appointment with Dr Ahrens.’

‘You do?’ She looked at an engagements notepad beside her. ‘I don’t have that down. Did you speak to Dr Ahrens personally?’

‘My secretary did.’

‘Your secretary…’ She looked at the notepad again. ‘Well, there must have been some kind of mix-up.’

‘Why don’t you just call Dr Ahrens and ask if he has a few minutes to spare? It’s very urgent business, and if his firm isn’t in a position to deliver two million packet soups within a very short time there won’t be a deal anyway.’

Her mouth dropped open. Then she repeated, ‘Two million packet soups?’

‘That’s right. Earthquake in Kazakhstan yesterday evening. Humanitarian aid. The German government will be paying, of course.’

‘Yesterday evening…’ She narrowed her eyes slightly and examined me again as if I’d only just come through the door. ‘So just when did your secretary call?’

‘I’ll give you one guess.’

‘I’m no good at guessing, but I’ve sitting here since eight taking all calls, and there wasn’t one from any secretary with Thingummyjig Import-Export.’

‘Thingummyjig Import-Export! You certainly go to endless trouble to please your customers here. What’s the matter, sweetheart? Is this the Federal Chancellery? Or is the doctor just blow-drying his hair? I didn’t eavesdrop on my secretary while she was phoning, but it could be she didn’t get through at once and said to herself, like some others I could mention: well, then I can just go on chewing my gum in peace for a while and finish reading my horoscope.’

As I delivered this speech she had formed her lips into a pout and begun to inspect her turquoise fingernails, looking bored. Perhaps I wasn’t the first to complain of customer relations at Ahrens Soups, or perhaps she’d given in her notice to leave at the end of the month. Or then again, perhaps she was just an easy going girl.

After a pause she asked, with a sigh, ‘Finished?’ and looked up from her nails. ‘Then I can call Dr Ahrens, but you’d better tell him all that stuff about the earthquake yourself.’ With these words she turned away, picked up one of the receivers and pressed a button.

‘Dr Ahrens? There’s someone here who wants to speak to you… no idea, he wants to tell you personally… says it won’t take long… yes, I’ll tell him.’

She put the receiver down and gave me a sweet smile. ‘You can go up to see him in ten minutes’ time. While you’re waiting, why not think up some fairy tale to tell the boss? In the Federal Chancellery?’

I nodded. ‘Must have been the poster outside. I thought someone who has his own photo blown up to twenty square metres and hangs it in front of my nose must be suffering from something that prevents him from talking to anyone but the real bigwigs.’

‘Hm,’ she said evidently agreeing. ‘But…’ and she looked me appraisingly in the eye, ‘… but that doesn’t make him stupid.’

I nodded again. ‘That’s what I thought. In personnel matters, all the same, I can see he’s just fantastic.’

This time the smile came very slowly. First she moved her lower jaw sceptically to both sides, then tiny lines formed around her eyes, her lips opened and her eyes began to flicker. Either that or my own eyes were beginning to flicker.

She pointed down the corridor. ‘There’s a lift over there. Fourth floor, you’ll find his door. You can’t miss it.’

I thanked her and went on looking at her for a little longer, and her eyes flickered again.

At the end of the usual grotty neon-lit office corridor, floor covered with plastic and doors with the paint flaking off them, was something that at first sight looked like a piece of scenery for a tale from the Arabian Nights. A dark brown double door four metres wide, with a pattern of gold and silver suns, moons and stars adorning its frame. The handle was a recumbent angel, and more angels were playing ring-a-ring-a-roses as they danced around Dr Ahrens’s nameplate. Two white marble columns flanked the door, a red rug in front of it bore the design of a mermaid embroidered in silver, and lamps imitating burning torches hung on the walls to left and right.

As far as I could tell the gold, silver and marble were genuine. At my second knock there was a curt, ‘Come!’ I pressed the angel down and went in.

My initial surprise shouldn’t really have been a surprise at all. But at the back of my mind, obviously, I had been thinking up some kind of explanation for the design of that door. It was left over from a birthday party, perhaps the man’s wife had esoteric tastes and it was a present from her, or a sample of some crazy interior designer’s work. In fact the door was only the relatively modest entrance to Sheikh Soup’s domain. A fantasy desert measuring about two hundred square metres opened up before me: bright golden-yellow walls sprinkled with every imaginable shade of red, ceiling covered with undulating sky-blue velvet, sand-coloured fitted carpet with imitation zebra and tiger skins lying on it. The walls on the exterior of the building were all glazed: windows with the glass held in place at five-metre intervals by flat black metal structures cut to the shape of palms and cacti, their fronds, stems and spines apparently growing into the panes. In one corner fur-covered seats were placed around a shallow, leather-clad drum. In another was a huge cinnamon-red bed with a pile of cushions in the shapes and colours of outsize coconuts and bananas. And above it all an arrangement of lights showing all the signs of the Zodiac hovered below the sky-blue velvet, spanning the entire ceiling.

I suppose I hadn’t moved from the spot for quite some time when a voice from the middle of this vast hall asked, ‘Yes, what is it?’

I closed the door behind me and set out on my way to a desk adorned with carved lions’ heads.

The second surprise was Dr Ahrens. His hair wasn’t grey but black, he didn’t wear glasses, and he looked at least twenty years younger than on the hoarding. They’d really worked hard on him to make him reasonably like someone who might be supposed to be in the packet-soup business. The way he looked sitting in front of me now, he could have made ads for steroids. Everything he wore was a tight fit: black stretch T-shirt over his bouncer’s torso, gold chain around his bull neck, even the strap of his enormous sports watch seemed about to break apart. Either some of his muscle had been airbrushed out of the photo, or they’d put his head on top of someone else’s body.

The third surprise was that a man who furnished his pad as if he liked nothing better than listening to flute music all day long, while murmuring prayers to the sun and nibbling dried fruit, had the kind of aura that made you wish you were wearing a warm jacket in his presence.

‘What’s this all about?’ he asked, and his hard blue eyes stared keenly at me. He was jiggling a pen up and down impatiently in his hand.

‘Hello, Dr Ahrens, nice of you to see me.’

He didn’t say anything to that, just pushed his lips out expectantly — indeed, as expectantly as if he were giving me exactly two seconds.

I made an airy gesture. ‘Pretty place you have here.’

No reaction. He went on staring at me. Obviously this was his usual approach: look at his interlocutor like a beast of prey and wait for him to make the first move. So I made it.

‘Tell me, is this some kind of nature therapy or do you have a touch of schizophrenia?’ I winked at him cheerfully. ‘You’re really a big game hunter, or Moses, or something like that?’

The pen in his hand stopped moving up and down, and his gaze became if possible keener still.

‘Well, never mind that. The main thing is, you feel good in here, and it doesn’t bother you if people tap their foreheads behind your back. I’m just wondering how it goes down with your business contacts. Do they insist on having a medical doctor present when they’re signing contracts?’ And without waiting for him to answer, I pointed to a bamboo chair. ‘May I sit down? It was a long way to your desk.’

I’d cornered him now. He really had to do something: either go for my throat, or call for the works security men, or give a couple of explanations. Sitting there listening to me saying what a nutcase he was wouldn’t do, anyway.

The longer the silence lasted, the more physical violence seemed to be ruled out. Perhaps he thought it beneath his dignity. And he seemed to me vain enough to be actually interested in my opinion of him. Sure enough, he finally said in a tone suggesting that it was all the same to him, but he didn’t mind a quick explanation, ‘All this stuff is for the women. They like that kind of thing, and I like women. OK?’

‘Fancy that. And it works?’

He made a casual gesture at the room.

‘Star signs, exotic countries, arts and crafts stuff, all looking as if it cost a lot — what do you think works with women? Sharing a pizza?’ He waited a moment to see if I had anything to say about that before leaning over the desk, his large brown hand stretched in my direction, moving his fingers up and down like a cop wanting to see your ID. ‘So now hurry up and tell me what you’re doing here.’

‘How about if I sit down?’

He seemed to consider this idea briefly, and then jerked his chin in the direction of the bamboo chair. I strolled the few metres over to it, moved the chair slightly, sat down carefully as if to test the sturdiness of its thin struts, crossed my legs, looked around the vast hall again, and finally said in casual tones, ‘I kind of wonder why someone who takes such trouble furnishing his office doesn’t even have a little tiger stuck to the dashboard of his car. Or one of those humorous coconut cushions on the back seat. Do you never take the ladies home afterwards? Must be quite a contrast for them, out of here and into a BMW that looks like it just rolled off the production line. Maybe there’s one of them you’d like to see again, she’d notice the moment she got in that car how phoney this pad of yours is.’

As a surprise it wasn’t a thunderclap, but it did at least get some reaction out of him at last. He frowned and folded his arms, and his biceps, steely from the weights room at the gym, began twitching in a quiet, unpleasant rhythm.

‘And incidentally,’ I went on, ‘it occurs to me to wonder on what occasion the BMW was really stolen? Even more interesting, when and how did the thief get hold of your keys? I’m assuming that even someone as comfortably off as you are doesn’t leave a brand new car worth umpteen thousand marks outside a bar with its engine running.’

No doubt about it, something was going on underneath his blow-dried hairdo. I leaned back comfortably in the chair, looked at him in a friendly way and let him take his time. When the silence began to put him at a clear disadvantage, he said, ‘I get it,’ and suddenly a nasty little smile came to his lips. ‘You stole the car and you want to sell it back to me.’

For a split second I wondered if I was on entirely the wrong track, but I knew that now I couldn’t back out anyway. I sighed and said, sounding bored, ‘Come on, Ahrens, don’t try that old trick on me. Why not tell me where you were for those four days when the BMW went missing?’

It really had been just a trick. The anger that now spread over his face couldn’t possibly be because I was taking the mickey out of him. I’d been doing that for the last ten minutes, and so far he hadn’t been particularly impressed. But he had just come down to my level, so to speak, and instead of simply throwing me out he’d looked for what he thought was a way out of the situation I’d set up. For a moment he had been the one sitting in front of the desk, and I’d been behind it, and that moment was now pumping the blood into his face.

‘Who are you?’ he asked as his body tensed in a way that told me I wasn’t going to spend much more time in his office today.

‘That doesn’t matter.’

‘And who are you working for?’

‘Only myself at the moment.’

‘Ha,’ he said, and it sounded like the maximum penalty imposed by the law. As he spoke, he pushed himself away from the table, chair and all, and rested his hands on the arms of the chair. ‘And what’s a wanker like you doing, making his way in here and telling me some kind of crap about my car?’

‘I know where it is, and I thought you might be interested to know how it got there.’ I stopped, adjusted my shirt slightly, and looked out through the wall of windows at industrial yards and heavy goods vehicles. A staring match to see who would look away first was not my kind of thing, but I could do well in a who-keeps-his-mouth-shut-longest competition.

‘So how did it get there?’

‘A bunch calling themselves the Army of Reason was driving around in it extorting protection money. But two of the extortionists had to leave the car the day before yesterday. And now I have it.’

‘Ah.’ He opened his mouth in the grimace of a teenage lout and jutted his chin in my direction. ‘So why don’t I have it? It’s my car! It was stolen from the yard out there. What do I have to do with this Army of whatever it was?’

‘Reason. Perfectly simple, just Reason.’

‘Interesting name.’

‘Oh, not all that interesting.’

‘Why not?’ he asked, and for a moment he looked genuinely curious. My God, like something out of the psychology supplement to a magazine. And good heavens, how quickly I’d got where I wanted. Or so I thought, anyway.

‘You know, what I don’t understand.’ I leaned forward. ‘It was all so elaborately done. The disguise, the powder, the mute trick, the name — how could you be stupid enough not to change the car number plates?’

He was in the act of getting out of his chair to do who knew what — probably come round from behind his desk and squash me flat between two fingers. But suddenly he stopped, his shoulders dropped back into place, and his face assumed an expression as if a very attractive idea had just dawned on him.

‘Suppose there’s something in the nonsense you’re babbling,’ he said, and there was almost a smile on his lips, ‘then why don’t you go to the cops with it? Why come to me? What do you really want?’ And when I didn’t answer right away he thrust his head towards me, and a really hearty smile came over it. ‘You surely weren’t thinking of blackmailing me? Oh, wow, you have no idea at all!’ He smiled a little more, then leaned back in his chair and inspected me with satisfaction.

‘I want to know who the two men driving the car the night before last were.’

‘What?’

‘The two extortionists after that protection money. Where they came from, how they lived, what they were planning to do.’

The satisfaction left his face. ‘ Were planning to do?’

‘Were.’

For the first time I realised how quiet it was in his desert kingdom. The engines of the HGVs and forklift trucks in the yards outside must be making a lot of noise. But there was nothing to be heard except quiet clicking as Ahrens undid the metal strap of his watch and did it up again.

Finally he said, ‘Piss off.’

It was clear he wasn’t going to say it again, and I’d be lucky if I got away unscathed. I rose and set off for the door. Before I pressed the handle down I turned once more. ‘I mean it. I want to know who those two were. Perhaps that’ll be enough for me and then I’ll leave you alone. But not without knowing that.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘See you soon. And don’t think any of this set-up made any lasting impression on me.’

I slowly closed the door behind me, and then I moved fast. I raced past the lift door and went down the stairs as quietly as I could. No one came to meet me, and I heard no voices or other sounds on any of the office floors. I went the last few steps to the ground floor on tiptoe, peered around the corner, and saw to my relief that there was no one waiting for me outside the lift. Perhaps Ahrens was telling himself a little bastard like me couldn’t harm him. Or perhaps he simply had no one available just now to wait for me there.

I went down the corridor to the telephone switchboard and leaned against the narrow counter. Miss Chewing-Gum looked up from a swimwear magazine.

‘Your boss is really weird. Ever been on safari with him?’

She raised her eyebrows, not as if she were surprised, looked searchingly at me, and finally shook her head. ‘Wouldn’t be much of a safari. Nothing to be seen but a fat pig.’

I couldn’t help grinning, and for a brief, careless moment I enjoyed the sight of her thin, perky face with a layer of freshly applied, impossible turquoise lipstick echoing her fingernails. Too late, I saw the alarm in her eyes. When I followed the direction of her gaze and turned, a small, fat man was standing very close to me.

‘So how you doing, mate?’ he asked, pulling his thick lips into something that was probably supposed to be a smile. ‘I hear you found the boss’s car, right? I want the keys, so let’s have ’em, OK?’ he said, and I was just thinking, I know that voice, and wondering why he was holding his hand behind his back in such an odd way, when he made a movement that was remarkably fast for someone of his girth, and my face exploded.*

Someone was tugging at my shirt. At the same moment the pain in my head started up a rockers’ party with everyone dancing and stamping, beer bottles clashing, brain cells scrapping with each other. Something wet and sticky splashed over my face, I flinched back and opened my eyes. Through a red haze, I saw Miss Chewing-Gum bending over me with a bottle of Fanta.

‘Come on, get up!’ she whispered. ‘You have to get out of here!’

I held out my hand, and she pulled at it until I was more or less sitting up and could see all the blood around me.

‘Go on, hurry! He’s only gone to get someone to take you down to the cellar.’

To the cellar. I managed to concentrate for a moment and imagine what the fat man would do to me in some dark hole if he was prepared to hit me so hard in broad daylight and in the presence of a witness that I felt I was now minus practically everything you can see on a passport photo. With all the strength I could muster, and Miss Chewing-Gum’s assistance, I managed to get to my feet. My face was dripping like lettuce that’s just been washed.

‘Hit me!’

‘What?’

‘I’m supposed to be watching to make sure you don’t get away, and I can do without trouble, so go on, hit me!’

I tried to raise my arm, but the rockers instantly opened up a new dance floor in my shoulder, and it dropped back to my side.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she hissed, took my hand, raised it in the air, making me cry out again, and smashed it down on her turquoise mouth. No idea if it was my blood or hers, but anyway she stayed behind, smeared with red, as I staggered out of the door into the yard. The rain beat in my face, it was cold and windy, the twenty metres to the street seemed endless, and my head felt like one huge open wound. I felt like flinging myself down on the tarmac and howling. The last thing I saw when I reached the street and turned once more was Dr Ahrens smiling as he promised Pleasure On My Plate, and in return I promised him all the tortures in the world.