Kismet

by Jakob Arjouni

  ‘I woke up with friends. And I’ve been at their place until now.’

  ‘Really? Well, that’s certainly odd. I’m sure I heard someone at your door around six this morning.’

  ‘Did you hear whoever it was in the flat too?’

  ‘Well, now you mention it … that’s right, no footsteps, though normally …’

  Of course he was longing to know what it was all about, but he didn’t like to ask. Since he’d taken to bringing tarts home he thought highly of the principle of privacy.

  ‘I’ll just go and take a look,’ I decided, and before he could reply I’d said goodbye, looking vaguely in the direction of the vegetable display, and I was out of the door.

  The lock looked perfectly normal. Whoever had tried breaking into my flat had gone about it without using violence. I put the key in it. Turned the key twice to unlock the door, as usual. I pushed the door open and looked at the small, square entrance hall, with its coat-rack and empty bottles. I stood there for a while in the doorway, listening. Finally I went in, examined the whole place, two rooms, kitchen and bathroom, and remembered leaving the window open because of a smell of sewage coming up through the sink plughole in the kitchen. Would gangsters planning to get into my flat try a couple of keys just in case they happened to fit, and then give up and go away again?

  I closed the door, made coffee, and sat down with a cup by the phone. First I tried reaching Slibulsky. For one thing to find out how he was feeling, for another to ask why I was supposed to look at some kind of sweets. But the phone in his office was answered by one of the ice-cream vendors, who said Slibulsky was out stocking up on cardboard beakers. Then I rang the number of Romario’s flat. Perhaps he had a girlfriend, or a visitor from Brazil, or someone else he’d been keeping a secret from us and who was now waiting unsuspectingly at the window, staring at the firewall opposite and starting to get angry. Or who was just being questioned by the police, had no idea what they were talking about, and needed help. Or who knew just what they were talking about and needed help all the more. But no one picked up the phone. I smoked, and wondered who I knew who was so close to Romario that he or she ought to be told about yesterday’s events. I could only think of the cleaning lady who flicked a duster round the restaurant twice a week. A sprightly old Portuguese woman whose name and address I didn’t know.

  After a second cup of coffee I took the racketeer’s phone out of my breast pocket and looked first for stored numbers, which it didn’t have, and then for the redial button. Who would the gang members have called last? My Hessian friend of last night? Some boss or other? The lady who ran courses for mutes on how to use the phone? If speaking had really been impossible for them, of course the Hessian would have suspected something straight away. Perhaps he’d been trained to expect whistling or tapping. On the other hand he’d asked where they were, and it seemed to me that conveying an address by whistling was a trick it would be almost impossible to learn.

  I tried to concentrate and pressed the button. A six-digit number beginning with an eight came up on the display. An Offenbach number. When it began ringing I quickly thought up a couple of things to say: whoever answered had won a car in the new phone-number lottery, for instance, and where could we meet to deal with the formalities? But no one did answer, and after the phone had rung twenty times I switched the thing off. I’d find the address that the number belonged to on the computer in my office. Until then I must content myself with the redial button.

  I picked up my own phone again and called a cop who could hardly refuse my request. He was head of the Frankfurt immigration police squad, he had a family, and he’d once been filmed on video playing around with underage boys. I knew about the pictures.

  ‘Höttges here.’

  ‘Good day, Herr Höttges. Kayankaya speaking.’

  Silence at the other end … a long, indrawn breath … footsteps … a door closing, then a voice hissing in my ear. ‘We agreed you wouldn’t call me at the office!’

  ‘But if I call you at home it’s usually your fourteen-year-old son who picks up the phone, and that always sets off certain associations in my mind.’

  Another deep breath, another silence. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I need the name of someone who owns a BMW.’ I gave him the registration number. ‘And I also want all the information there is about new Mafia-style gangs in the station district.’

  He hesitated. ‘I’d have to ask around. As you know, it’s the immigration police I’m with.’

  ‘Then ask around. And don’t try to fob me off with rubbish. I want the names of the gang bosses, their addresses, roughly the number of members and so on – by tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘But I can’t get hold of the information just like that, most of it’s secret.’

  ‘You’ll find it. After all, not everything can stay secret: videotapes, Mafia organisations – it all has to come out sometime …’

  Even as I spoke he rang off. But I knew he’d work his socks off to get me the information I wanted by tomorrow. This had been going on for over eight years. In fact I’d deduced the existence of the videotapes only incidentally, during a case of forged passports and refugees, and they’d probably been binned long ago. But for one thing, Höttges didn’t know that, and for another the whole business wasn’t just obscene, these things always are, it was obscene with metaphorical knobs on, you might say. A mere rumour, carefully dropped into the ear of certain newspaper and TV editors, would probably have been enough to get the head of the Frankfurt immigration police hunted first out of his job, then out of his family, and finally, when his photo had been in the press, out of town. Höttges, who as regional dogsbody was responsible to the Minister of the Interior for letting practically no one who lived outside the area that could receive Radio Luxembourg into the city, and throwing out as many as possible of those who had made their way in all the same – unless they had an income of over a few thousand net, of course – Höttges had been messing around with Arab boys of fifteen at the time. You could just imagine the headlines. Head of deportation fits rent boys in’, or Gay Commissioner responsible for residence permits – kids had to line up for him. The fact that the boys and their pimp had of course set the whole thing up and had fleeced Höttges mercilessly themselves wouldn’t be any excuse for him in the eyes of either the public or his family. On the contrary, to the public he would look not just a pervert but also a fool. To me, Höttges was a real stroke of luck. As a source of information and a direct means of leverage in police HQ, he must have helped me to earn one-third of my fees over the last few years.

  I pressed the redial button on the mobile again, counted up to the twentieth ring tone once more, undressed and got under the shower. When I was in my dressing-gown, sitting in front of some crispbread and a can of sardines, the first thunder rolled over the city. Soon after that Slibulsky rang. We told each other how we were, and he said that apart from the fact that he’d had hardly three hours’ sleep, and he’d been racing around town since ten in the morning after stuff of some kind, he wasn’t too bad. It was only when he shook hands with one of his ice-cream vendors, and the man’s hand was wet with sweat, that he’d felt sick for a moment at the thought of packing those bodies up, he said.

  ‘I’m eating sardines out of the can at this moment and feeling glad they don’t have their heads on,’ I said, contributing my mite to the conversation. ‘Normally I prefer them whole.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Slibulsky. ‘Looks like we’ll survive it. Do you still want to find out who that couple were?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did Gina tell you to take a look at the sweets?’

  ‘She did. But she didn’t know what sweets, or where they were.’

  ‘The sweets in the BMW, of course.’

  ‘What’s so special about the sweets?’

  ‘They’re not a brand I know.’

  ‘Fancy that.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Kayankaya, you know I started sucking sweets when I
stopped smoking. And I’ve tried every brand and every variety in Germany – but I don’t know these. So when you find out where the sweets come from … get the idea?’

  ‘I get it. Doesn’t it happen to say where they’re from on the packet?’

  ‘That’s the funny thing. It says they’re made in Germany.’

  ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  ‘Because they’re not from here. Or maybe for export only, but I don’t believe that either. I think it’s like with my Italian ice cream that doesn’t come from Italy. But who wants ice cream from Ginnheim?’

  ‘Germany, home from home for confectionery?’

  ‘Makes no difference. If you want to sell something in a place where Germany has a good reputation, even if it’s bananas you’re selling, you stick a label on your stuff saying it comes from the German provinces.’

  ‘Bananas grown in the German provinces – OK. But where would Germany have this wonderful reputation?’

  ‘How do I know? Maybe Paraguay? You’re the detective. If you want to take a look at them, I’ll be home from eight onwards.’

  We rang off, and I went on eating sardines. The storm was beginning outside, thunder rolling and lightning flashing, the first drops were falling, and soon there was a waterfall cascading down outside my windows. When the storm moved away an hour later it left a grey, dripping dishcloth above the city.

  Around five I rang the only client I had at the time. A woman academic, an expert on Islam, whose German shepherd dog had gone missing. I told her I’d spent all day visiting animal rescue centres in Kelkheim and Hattersheim, no luck, but I’d go on searching tomorrow, and I was sure I’d soon be bringing Susi home. I’d been telling her that for a week, and so far there’d been cheques and no complaints. That was the way I liked my clients, very rich and very crazy.

  Then I put on a raincoat for the first time in weeks and set off for the station.

  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 c
hucked 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.