‘So? You think he’s standing around somewhere with a big cigarette lighter? Come on, we’ve had enough for one day.’
Slibulsky started the engine of the car and turned it. I didn’t protest. We really had had enough.
After we’d gone round two corners the glow of the fire disappeared behind buildings and neon ads. As we crossed the bridge to Sachsenhausen the sky in the east turned blue. I thought of Romario’s one-room flat in the Nordend district. Photographic wallpaper showing a palm-fringed Brazilian beach, plus a bed with a sagging mattress and dirty grey sheets. Slibulsky was on the wrong track if he thought Romario could have paid six thousand marks just like that. He had put all his money into the Saudade, his one true love. But apart from farmers and folk from small towns who wanted to round off a weekend visit to the red-light district of Frankfurt with an exotic supper, scroungers like me and a handful of Brazilian transvestites, hardly anyone had wanted to be witness to his love. From Monday to Thursday the place was empty. If Romario had a special soup pan for festive occasions the size of a rainwater butt, and had objected to its use as a receptacle for corpses, he’d only been putting on a desperate act. There were never any festive occasions at the Saudade, let alone enough customers to put back as much soup as the pan held. And anyway the characters who got lost and found their way to the Saudade were not the kind to waste their capacity for liquid intake on soup. I wondered who would break down the door to Romario’s flat, and hoped he’d changed the sheets recently.
After we had pushed a number of ice-cream carts in need of repairs out of Slibulsky’s garage and into the yard, and got the BMW under cover, we went up to his flat. Slibulsky took the crate of beer out of the fridge, and we sat down by the living-room window with it. Neither of us felt like food any more, let alone the cheese – a yellow stinker which, if you had enough imagination, looked like a clump of calloused skin collected from mortuaries, kept moist and stored in gumboots for years. Outside it was getting light. We drank beer and watched the first rays of the sun falling on the rooftops. We were too exhausted to talk and too churned up inside to sleep. Only when the sun was shining in our faces and school-kids were shouting out in the street did Slibulsky rise to his feet, put a blanket on the sofa for me, and wish me a sceptical, ‘Good-night.’ I waited for another beer to take effect, then levered myself up from my chair too, staggered across the room and fell on the sofa. I was still wondering what Gina would think if she found me here with my shoes on her sofa cushions with their linen covers when my eyes closed, and it was about five seconds before I fell asleep. And about ten seconds before an alarm clock made my head burst. Tinkle tinkle, tinkle tinkle, tinkle tinkle. Another ten seconds before I realized that the racketeer’s mobile was ringing in my breast pocket. I pressed buttons at random, hoped the right one was among them, and cleared my throat. The right one was among them, and I heard a voice. At the same moment everything I’d tried to work out about the origin of the blackmailers over the last few hours was turned on its head by the Frankfurt accent.
‘Hey, where’s you lot, then? Here’s me sitting around like a fool, can’t come off duty, time I went to bed. You in the disco or what? If the boss hears … where are you? Can’t hear a thing …’
I tried clearing my throat again.
‘You being funny? Tell me where you are, I’ll tell you how long it’ll take to get home. And if you don’t I’m shutting up shop and going to bed, get it?’
‘Yup.’
‘Whaddya mean, “yup”?’
‘Yup, I get it.’
I waited for him to go on grousing and with luck give me some idea where it was that his mates were supposed to come home to. But something about my answer must have sounded wrong, because all I heard was a sudden sharp intake of breath and then he ended the call. I stared at the mobile. A Hessian Mafia! No wonder the blackmailers had preferred not to talk. Who’d have taken them seriously?
I put the mobile back in my breast pocket and looked up at the ceiling. The night was actually ending on a note of relief. No language I didn’t understand, no bosses I’d have to look for far afield. Just a cosy little connection probably thought up in the back room of a bar where they were putting back the local cider, the boss a meat importer or used-car dealer or the owner of some fairground booth, the rest of them unemployed scaffolders and drunks who took the tickets in porn cinemas. ‘Hey, how’s about a little Mafia op?’ And I imagined myself marching into the office with its rubber tree and chrome furniture and Pirelli calendar and saying: ‘No, I don’t want to buy a piece of old junk sprayed metallic silver, I’ve come to take you in. You got me into shooting a man, and you barbecued someone I know. Now we’ll see if your place burns as well as his!’ And then I’d unscrew the petrol can, and the fatso in the double-breasted suit would beg for mercy, and I’d go ping, and I’d go zack, and I’d … well before I could wonder what I’d actually do in the end I’d fallen asleep again. And even the fact that the caller, who was obviously some kind of caretaker on the phone switchboard for the gang, had known nothing about either the dead men or the fire didn’t get through to me that morning.
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 e
yes. 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?’
Kismet Page 4
