Kismet

Chapter 8

‘Oh no!’

Romario jumped up from the armchair, took my arm and helped me to lie down on the sofa.

‘What… what happened?’

‘Found the Army of Reason.’ My voice sounded as if I were talking underwater. ‘Get me a bottle of vodka and call the emergency doctor.’

When the doctor closed his bag about an hour later, he said, ‘That needs to be X-rayed. You’d better go straight to the hospital. I can call you a cab if you like.’

‘Anything broken?’

He shrugged. ‘Can’t tell because of the swelling. How did you come by that?’

‘Sheer stupidity.’

‘Looks as though someone hit you in the face by mistake with his garden hoe or something.’

‘With a knuckleduster, and not by mistake.’

‘Ah.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Well, if you want to rest for a while before you go to the hospital, put some ice on it.’

The doctor left, and I sent Romario to the supermarket round the corner for supplies of alcohol and an Ahrens packet soup. Then I went to sleep. When I woke up two hours later, Romario was sitting beside me holding a tea-towel full of ice to my cheek.

‘How’s it feel?’ he asked.

I was going to say something, but I couldn’t get anything out, and made a so-so gesture with my hand.

‘Soon as you feel strong enough to stand up I’ll call a taxi and we’ll go to the hospital. By the way, they didn’t have your soup. But maybe you shouldn’t eat anything just now anyway. Wait and see what the X-ray shows. In case they have to operate, I mean.’

I watched him trying, with an expression of concern, to hold the tea towel full of ice so that it cooled my face but didn’t press against it. After a while I fell asleep again.

It was just after ten when we came back from the hospital. Nothing broken but a good deal of damage done, whatever the doctor meant by that. They’d bandaged my head, injected a painkiller, and I was to spend the next few days in bed. While I settled down on the sofa with the remote control and a mineral water, Romario went into the kitchen and cooked up some stuff he’d bought at an all-night convenience store on our way back. Fumes of burnt butter floated out of the kitchen door. I leaned back and switched the TV on.

After we’d eaten, and after I’d wondered yet again why Romario had ever chosen the profession of chef, I told him about my morning visit to Dr Ahrens. He sat in front of me the way I imagine one of my unknown grannies would have sat in front of me in such a situation: hands clamped between his knees, nodding vigorously at the exciting moments of my tale, and for all his sympathy constantly casting critical glances at my plate, which was still half full.

‘Which means,’ I concluded, ‘that you’ll have to stay awake tonight.’

Romario hesitated. Now that it had all been told and cleared up he seemed to be thinking of his usual daily life again, and regular sleep at civilised times played a not unimportant part in it. ‘Why?’

‘Because Ahrens could find out who I am, and then he’ll be marching in here.’

‘Hm,’ said Romario sceptically. ‘So then what? Do I march out to meet him?’

‘Then you wake me up. I have my shotgun and pistols, and before they even get in here half the neighbourhood will have called the police.’

He began stacking the dishes with his one good hand. ‘How did you know Ahrens had anything to do with it?’

‘I didn’t know. I went off there to poke around a bit, and suddenly it all came clear, just like that.’

He took the dishes into the kitchen and clattered around there for a while. Then he came back with two dishes of ice cream, gave me one of them, sat down in the armchair again and began slowly spooning up the other.

‘OK, Romario, I get the idea. You want to say something, so go ahead and say it.’

‘Well, look at it like this… when it all started up last week I thought, this is just a normal protection-money racket, same as usual. And I’m not a coward, you can believe me there. Out of eight goes at extortion since the Schmitzes left, I’ve dealt with five…’

As far as I knew Romario was not in fact a coward, which always surprised me slightly. I’d seen him deal with two thugs who were trying to take him apart in front of his assembled customers. He had reminded me of those well-brought-up young ladies who, setting out in a mood of mingled adventurousness, naivete and arrogance to explore the world beyond places with guest loos and country houses with underfloor heating, find themselves in very tricky situations without being aware of it, so that perhaps for that very reason almost nothing bad ever happens to them. Anyway, Romario treated the thugs like idiots who’d do better to stop and think how, if they kept getting in his way while the restaurant was at its busiest, he was ever going to make the money they were demanding from him. After half an hour, and when Romario had wrecked their digestive systems with two free Lambruscos, they went away with their nerves in shreds.

‘… So I figured, with a pistol and some shooting lessons, I could handle whatever came. You can get rid of most of them, but if someone won’t be got rid of and if you can afford it, well, you pay up. I mean, it was just the enormous amount this weird Army was asking made me ask you for help. But now I’m thinking — always assuming the insurance people don’t make difficulties — it’d be better if I do pay. And then you can give them the car back, and we’ll forget the whole thing.’

‘Oh yes? And do I give the dead bodies back too?’

‘You just explain to this Ahrens how it happened — self-defence. They understand such things in those circles.’

‘But I don’t move in those circles. And you’re forgetting about my face. How about that?’

Romario shrugged slightly and hummed and hawed. Perhaps he thought a smashed-in face didn’t alter my appearance too drastically. I also suspected that it was just because of my face he was trying to persuade me to drop the whole thing. Up to now his plan had been to get the insurance money, go underground for a while, and try his luck again somewhere else once the situation had calmed down. The fact that I wasn’t letting it go, and he was in it with me whether he liked it or not, meant that his plan was in danger, and so, not least, was his own face. In particular his own face. A reverse projection of that kind was the only way I could account for the touching and apparently completely unselfish nursing care he had lavished on me all afternoon.

At that moment the phone rang. Grateful for the interruption, Romario jumped up and brought it over to me. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. I took the receiver off and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Hey, Kayankaya,’ an obviously elated Slibulsky shouted in my ear, ‘you sound as if you’d found those bloody Army characters and they’d chucked a concrete bar in your face by way of hello.’ He laughed cheerfully, and after my rather stuffy evening in the company of Granny Romario it was like a breath of fresh air. ‘What’s up? Been screwing Deborah under a ventilator and caught a cold?’

‘I did find those bloody Army characters, and they did indeed chuck a concrete bar in my face by way of hello.’

‘What? No joking?’

I told him briefly what had happened, and how I was beginning to feel a bit better after the injection. ‘Your face is bandaged up?’

‘That’s right.’

‘When does the bandage come off?’

‘No idea.’

‘Are you fairly recognisable all the same?’

‘What are you getting at? Is this a confession that you feel deprived if you don’t get to see my face every few days?’

‘Gina’s giving a dinner party next Friday, the whole works, candles and tablecloth and all. She’s been appointed head of a department at the museum. So a lot of her women friends and colleagues are coming. Very elegant ladies, some of them. But if all they can see is your pot belly, those aren’t exactly the best conditions for a first meeting.’

‘You’ll find this hard to believe, but at the moment…’

‘I know, I know: the Army and your conscience and no spare time and so on and so forth. Look, if you’re reasonably presentable next Friday and you don’t drop in, we have a real problem. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Heard anything of Tango Man?’

‘You could certainly say so. A performance of No Fairer Land under the shower this morning, and at the moment he’s polishing my kitchen to a high gloss.’

‘Still not joking?’

‘No. He’s alive. And how.’

‘Well, tell me about it some other time. I have to go back to my vendors. We’re having a little party — three years of Gelati Slibulsky, who’d have thought it?’

‘Congratulations. By the way, I think you were right about those sweets. There’s something funny about them.’

‘Aha,’ he said, satisfied, and we said goodbye until next Friday at the latest.

In the kitchen Romario was busy scouring lime marks off my sink with a sponge pad. He had taken off his shoes and socks and unbuttoned his shirt. Another day or so and he’d probably be running about my place naked — singing, cleaning, shedding pubic hair.

He smiled at me over his shoulder and said, ‘Just making myself a bit useful.’

‘But only a very little bit. Listen, Romario: I’m carrying on with this case, and I don’t want anyone around here who isn’t happy with that.’

He turned, shoulders drooping, scouring pad in his hand. ‘I was only making a suggestion. And I did it mainly for your sake because they beat you up. What was it the doctor said? “You were lucky”. Well, if that’s luck…’

Water was dripping from the sponge pad on to his bare feet. Didn’t he notice? Or was he just pretending not to notice so as to show how upset he was? When Romario presented a picture of misery I was never quite sure where the picture stopped and the misery began.

I took what cash I had out of my trouser pockets, two hundred-mark notes and a few tens, put it on the kitchen table, and said, ‘Find yourself a hotel for tonight, and let me know tomorrow where you’re going to be for the next few days. Sorry, but that’s how it is.’

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Reproaches, climb-downs, offers, a couple of new bids for sympathy, and any number of variations on the familiar subject of his poor hand, but finally he had to see that there was no negotiating with me this evening. When he closed the door behind him a little later with elaborate care — see what a quiet, harmless creature you’re turning out into the street so heartlessly — I even thought for a moment I could breathe through my swollen nose again. Then I took a few precautions: I put some empty bottles just inside the door as an alarm system, laid out all my weapons beside the bed, got my bulletproof vest out of the wardrobe and hung it on the window catch. Then I took the TV set into the bedroom, swallowed painkillers, and lay down to watch a French film in which a man being attacked pleaded with the thief, ‘It’s not my money.’ To which the thief impatiently replied, ‘I’m not stealing it for myself either.’ As the final credits were rolling I turned off the TV and the light. It was Saturday evening. A song by Heino was coming up from the greengrocer’s flat: ‘Come into my wigwam, wigwam…’ Did he think it was good music to go with sex? I heard his entire programme: dog-like panting, corks popping, the disc from the beginning again, singing along to it, more panting. Around two the front door of the building closed, and finally it was quiet.