Kismet

by Jakob Arjouni

  ‘Get out? Where to?’

  ‘How should I know? Mallorca? Call me and give me a number where I can reach you. In two or three weeks’ time I ought to have found out who’s running this racket and whether they’re after you.’

  ‘Tell me one reason why they wouldn’t be after me.’

  ‘Well, they’re certainly extorting money from other people too, so they ought to be suspecting all their victims for a time.’ Oh yes, a long time; about one or two days, I should think. By then at the latest they’d have tracked Romario down, and they’d beat everything they wanted to know out of him – Slibulsky’s name and mine included.

  I saw Romario’s outline as he turned away, while his unbandaged arm gestured dismissively in my direction. I guessed what he was thinking: a pity he hadn’t asked someone else for help, someone who worked for money and got a bonus if he succeeded, and for that reason alone would have fixed things to the satisfaction of all, no dead bodies, no need for Romario to close down his business. The problem with friends doing you a favour, is that if they fail then the fact that they came on the cheap just proves how incapable they were anyway.

  Apart from that, if Romario was thinking what I thought he was thinking, he wasn’t far wrong. Yes, sure, I’d gone out and got bulletproof vests, I’d persuaded Slibulsky to join us, I’d discussed the showdown in advance with both of them. But really I’d been annoyed all along for feeling that unwritten laws obliged me to help Romario, and for agreeing to meet him at all four days ago instead of making some excuse, say flu. In other words, at this moment, with one body to my left, another to my right and my feet in a pool of blood, I realised that I didn’t like Romario. I didn’t like him at all. He let other people suffocate in the dry air of his central heating because he couldn’t cope with having been born at some time in some place in another part of the world, he was a terrible cook, he thought he was helping me out by inviting me to eat the leftovers now and then – which was true, and that made it all the worse. But it was about ten minutes too late to do anything about this realisation of mine. I was involved now. Even if Romario ran for it, never to be seen again, there were plenty of people in town who’d wonder about his sudden disappearance, and sooner or later it would get around that I’d been seen with him rather often these last few days. Maybe these Mafia characters couldn’t talk, but they could hear and they could probably do their sums too, and if they put two and two together they weren’t likely to think I’d come here for a game of dice. And Mafia outfits aren’t exactly famous for letting you kill their men with impunity.

  All things considered, then, our operation had been a total fiasco. In addition, now I had a guilty conscience. Not only did I not like Romario, I really had done him out of his job, his home and his city in one fell swoop. And that when he’d lost his thumb only five days before.

  ‘Er, Romario …’

  ‘What?’ a voice barked behind me. Next moment neon tubes flared on, and cold light from the kitchen fell into the dining-room. Sticky patches of red were spreading over the floor and walls around the corpses, which had now stopped bleeding. The red patches were scattered about like exploded paint-bombs. Slibulsky was sitting on a table, cradling his shotgun in his arm like a baby, dangling his legs and staring ahead of him, nauseated.

  I turned to the kitchen door. ‘How could I have known they’d shoot straight away?’

  Romario’s head briefly appeared in the doorway. ‘It’s your job to know these things! Whether you can do your job is another question!’

  Oh, for God’s sake! A couple of smart remarks, that was all we needed! Apart from the fact that it wouldn’t have been entirely inappropriate for him to ask if Slibulsky and I were all right. After all, it was a miracle we’d got out of this intact. Not to mention any feelings we might have about the dead men and how upset we were. I mean, they weren’t just a burst water pipe, and not simply because they did much more damage.

  I reached behind the bar, picked up a bottle of schnapps and took a large gulp. Then I bent over the corpses and searched their suits. A silver lighter, a small bottle of mouthwash, two phone cards, half a packet of Dunhills, a nail file, five hundred and seventy marks plus a few coins, three condoms, car keys and two pairs of sunglasses. No ID or driving licences, nothing to give me a clue. I pocketed it all and was about to see what make their clothes were when I found a mobile phone on one of the corpses, tucked into his belt. It was as small and almost as flat as half a postcard. You flipped it open, three fine grooves above and below indicated the receiving and speaking areas, and you keyed in the numbers on a glowing blue touch-pad. I found out how to switch to receive if the mobile rang and put it in my breast pocket.

  Romario brought in a stack of folded grey bin liners and a roll of sticky tape. Slibulsky and I packed the corpses into them. Both of us in silence, both trying not to feel anything much. The central heating was still full on, and our hands, damp with sweat, kept slipping off the plastic sacks and the dead men’s limbs.

  When we’d finished I went out and looked around for the BMW that went with the car keys. It was black and new and had a Frankfurt registration. I got into it, felt under the seats, opened the glove compartment, looked behind the sun visors, but apart from empty energy-drink bottles, some blackcurrant-flavour sweets, tissues and a big box of powder the car was empty. I noted the registration number, opened the boot and went back into the Saudade.

  By now Romario and Slibulsky were scrubbing the floor and walls. Romario glanced up at me, and judging by the look in his eyes he wouldn’t have minded if the blood he was scrubbing away had been mine.

  I went into the kitchen and looked for something to help us carry the bodies to the car as unobtrusively as possible. I found a huge double-handled aluminium pan. It was over a metre in diameter and about the same depth. You could cook a whole pig in it, or several hundredweight of vegetables, or anything else that would feed a medium-sized village for a day.

  ‘What are you doing with that?’ asked Romario as I dragged this monster into the dining-room.

  ‘It’s never a good idea to load sacks two metres long into a car boot at one in the morning. A pan full of potatoes, on the other hand …’

  ‘Are you crazy? I’ll never find another pan like that!’

  ‘You’ll get it back.’

  ‘You don’t think I can ever make soup in it again after this, do you?’

  ‘You think the customers will be able to taste them?’

  His eyes widened, and for a moment it looked as if he was going to throw his floorcloths in my face.

  ‘Yes, I do! I’ll be able to taste them! Every time I use the pan I’ll be thinking …’

  ‘Hey, hang on!’ Slibulsky looked up from his bucket and broke his silence for the first time since the gunfight. ‘What’s all this about your pan?’

  Romario turned to him, and his expression softened. I’d been noticing for some time that he was trying to make Slibulsky his ally against me.

  ‘Yes, exactly! What is all this? It’s my special soup pan for festive occasions!’ he exclaimed, obviously in the belief that for a civilised man like Slibulsky that would close the subject.

  ‘Oh yes? And what festive occasion do you want to keep it clean for? Your funeral?’ asked Slibulsky.

  ‘Or your arrest?’ I suggested, leaving the pan beside the grey plastic sausage shapes. Taking no more notice of Romario, we squeezed up the first of the bodies – they were still warm – and rammed it into the aluminium pan, treading it down.

  ‘Did you notice their faces? They were powdered white,’ said Slibulsky.

  I nodded. ‘As if they’d been rehearsing how to be dead.’

  After we had looked to make sure the street was empty, we dragged the pan, which now weighed about eighty kilos, to the BMW. We heaved it up and tipped it over the open boot, but nothing happened. The man was stuck. We held the pan in the air with one hand and one shoulder each, tugging at the plastic with our other hands. The bin liner tore, and
something slimy trickled over my hand.

  ‘I’m going to throw up any moment,’ gasped Slibulsky.

  I heard a crack. Slibulsky had broken something in the corpse, and it finally gave way. It landed in the boot with a dull thud. We looked at each other’s red, sweating faces and gasped for air. I wiped my hand on my trousers.

  When our breathing had calmed down a little I said, ‘Sorry. I really thought we’d only have to put on a tough guy act.’

  Slibulsky flicked a damp bit of something off his T-shirt. ‘I only hope Tango Man doesn’t try pinning it all on us.’

  ‘Pinning it on …?’

  ‘Well, in theory he could go to the police and say gangsters started shooting his place up. He knows you slightly as a guest, he could say, but he had no idea of your Mafia connections.’

  ‘Slibulsky, I’m a private detective!’

  He stopped, looked incredulous, then uttered a sound between a laugh and a cough. ‘Have your neighbours said a friendly hi to you very often recently? You have a Turkish name, Turkish parents, and since starting this job you’ve infuriated every second cop in town. You don’t think a silly little nameplate on your door will stop them for a second if they have a chance of arresting you as an Anatolian terrorist baron, do you?’

  ‘It’s not just a plate on the door. I’ve got a licence too.’

  This was weak, admittedly, and Slibulsky didn’t even take the trouble to answer it. In fact he was pointing out a possibility that hadn’t for a moment crossed my mind before.

  On the way back I said, ‘He’s Brazilian. The tango comes from Argentina.’

  ‘So what? You knew who I meant, right?’

  He was correct there too.

  Tango Man was sitting on a chair, feet up on the table, and seemed to have put back several glasses of liquor to calm his nerves while we were outside. ‘Tango Man’ fitted him perfectly: a long, tough-looking face with small, quick-moving eyes, a sharp nose and a cleft in his chin; mid-length hair, black and shining like lacquer, brushed well back and moving when he moved as if it grew from a single root; a body that was big and broad anyway, but looked even bigger and broader in a T-shirt and trousers that might once have fitted him in a school yard in Rio; and his obvious conviction that no one’s ever too tall to wear shoes with five-centimetre heels.

  Those eyes, not so quick-moving now, stared at us. We could see how he had to strain his lips to bring out any sound at all. Had he perhaps been putting back not glasses but whole bottles of liquor to calm his nerves? What and how much did you have to drink in just under twenty minutes to reach a state where you couldn’t articulate? There was an empty glass beside him. I looked behind the bar, where I found an empty bottle. He hadn’t eaten anything that evening, what with all the agitation, and normally he stuck to fruit juice.

  ‘Hey, Romario, this is all a bit much for you, right?’ I went over and put my hand on his shoulder. He looked up at me and gave me a long glance which, I suspected, was meant to express pain, but was only glazed and blurred. Then he silently raised his bandaged arm, looked at it and nodded at it, as if to say: what the pair of us go through together! He looked up at me again, reproachfully this time, until his face suddenly twitched and tears ran down his cheeks. As he wept a kind of whinny escaped him. I kneaded his shoulder, said something like, ‘It’ll all work out,’ and looked around for Slibulsky to come to my aid. But he only shrugged and set about fitting the second corpse into the pan. The whinny finally became sobs, the sobs turned to gulps, the tears abated, I gave Romario a handkerchief and he blew his nose.

  ‘I … the restaurant’s like a girlfriend to me, see … and the way you’d give a girl jewellery and clothes, I bought it wood and tiles and tablecloths. To make it look pretty, see?’

  ‘Yes, sure,’ I said, wondering what kinds of presents, judging by the chipboard, fake marble tiles and check polyester tablecloths in this place, he gave his girlfriends.

  ‘I promise you’ll soon be able to come back here.’ As I said that, the pushing and shoving behind me stopped for a moment, and I sensed Slibulsky’s eyes on my back. Of course, it was more realistic to expect that the Saudade would be blown up some time in the next few weeks, and Romario would have to start all over again with kebabs and canned beer somewhere far away.

  ‘Sorry about just now,’ said Romario. ‘You’re right, how could you have known they’d start shooting straight away? But I was in shock …’ He looked at me out of eyes that were still moist, and I nodded understandingly. It was just after one, according to my watch. ‘So if you really could fix it, Kemal, I’d be eternally grateful!’ He tried a smile. ‘And you’d have free meals for life!’

  Now it was my turn to try a smile. ‘Well, great, Romario. Thanks a lot. But,’ I said, this time glancing at my watch as ostentatiously as possible, ‘we ought to get a move on. By tomorrow this place must be as clean as if nothing had happened.’ I pointed to the bullet-holes in the wooden panelling. ‘You’ll have to fill those in with something and paint them over. Better make yourself a coffee and then see how far you can get with one arm.’

  I didn’t want him to stop and think about his chances of getting safely out of this business. I wanted him to work until his other thumb was practically falling off too, and first thing tomorrow I’d put him on a plane with a bottle of schnapps. Once he’d left, it would be difficult for him to convince the police that he’d been a mere spectator. Particularly if I said otherwise, giving my word as a private detective, which I did think weighed just a little more than Slibulsky thought. I was in my mid-thirties and rather too old for snap judgements to the effect that I wasn’t either popular or taken seriously in my profession – even if we were only talking about the police.

  ‘Okay,’ said Romario. ‘I’ll do my best.’ Then he stood up, and he was on his way to the kitchen when he turned back again, pressed my arm with his sound hand and looked at me in a funny way. ‘Thanks very much, Kemal. You’re a real pal.’

  Fortunately he was decent or drunk enough not to wait for an answer. He turned on his heel and staggered off with a few final sniffs. I watched him go, wondering if he believed what he said, or if he believed I believed what he said, or whether he simply thought that an extremely large amount of soft soap was advisable in an extremely tricky situation. You had to remember that Romario’s moods swung back and forth wildly, and it was far from certain how long he would do his best. The sooner he was on that plane the better.

  ‘Hey, real pal,’ said a voice behind me. ‘How about helping me pot up that other character now?’

  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 grum
py 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.