Kismet

by Jakob Arjouni

  ‘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.

  Chapter 9

  I spent the next two days in bed. No one disturbed my orgy of television, baked beans and chocolate ice cream. Outside it was drizzling, and according to the weather forecast it was going to stay that way for the rest of the week. The cool, damp weather was just right for someone with a swollen face. I got a fright only once, when the racketeer’s mobile alarmed me. A text message said the mobile was going out of circulation at once.

  On Tuesday afternoon I felt reasonably all right again, and called the Albanian. We’d met at a billiards tournament five months before, and then drank a couple of aniseed schnapps together. Soon after that I discovered by chance that his two daughters went to the same expensive boarding school as the son of Slibulsky’s tax adviser. From what the tax adviser said, the Albanian’s daughters weren’t having a great time there. Their class teacher obviously thought it educationally valuable to connect their poor school work with their ethnic origin, doing so at regular intervals and in front of the other pupils. Apart from the fact that they had both been born in Frankfurt, and spent more holidays in Florida than Albania, you might have expected that for school fees of two thousand marks a month each, plus extras, you could at least expect teachers who don’t trumpet their own backwoods prejudices. Normally I wouldn’t have thought anything of it – injustice in institutions for the rich elite was not among the things that bothered me. In this case, however, I had an opportunity to improve my relationship with the Albanian. After I’d been through interrogations first by a bodyguard and then by a private secretary about the reason for my call, their boss finally came to the phone. I told him about his daughters’ problems, and judging by what he said this was the first time he’d heard about them. The girls were presumably embarrassed to tell him. As so often when such things happen, it’s the wrong people who feel ashamed. I took care to give the impression that I would continue to keep him up to date with his children’s school lives, and finally he thanked me warmly and actually gave me the number of his mobile. That number could be worth gold in my job. I never knew exactly what happened to the class teacher who also taught the girls German and sports, but a little later he had to give up teaching sports.

  I exchanged a few remarks with the Albanian about his daughters, whose marks had improved to a remarkable degree over the last couple of months. Then I told him in rough outline, without mentioning names and places, what I knew about the Army. Not only could he keep his mouth shut surprisingly often for a gangster boss, he could certainly never be called talkative in general either. If he wasn’t discussing his daughters, phoning him was rather like playing tennis up against a wall. His tone of voice changed too. Warm and melodious a moment ago, it now sounded like a warped wooden door being moved back and forth by a slight wind.

  ‘I need a few more days to find out what its structure is like, who does what where and how much longer this outfit is expected to operate, but then we could strike.’

  ‘Pick the time and we will.’

  ‘It’s a small factory. We’d need about forty men to surround it.’

  ‘Forty.’

  ‘But we don’t want a bloodbath. You’ll get my information only if you can promise me your people will keep a grip on themselves. We want to stop the Army operating, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all, then.’

  ‘And the boss is my affair.’

  ‘And the boss is your affair.’

  ‘OK, then, I’ll be in touch within the next few days.’

  ‘Within the next few days,’ he replied, but as I was about to ring off I sensed him suddenly hesitating, as if he had to venture into unknown terrain. I kept the receiver to my ear until he finally asked, ‘Who are you working for?’

  ‘Myself.’

  ‘Unpaid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The Army made me do something I didn’t like at all, and I can’t leave it at that.’

  ‘Hm,’ he said, and after a pause, ‘If you try taking me for any kind of ride, I’m finished with you. Is that clear?’

  ‘That’s clear.’

  ‘Well then, good luck.’

  I rang off and remembered how I’d lost to him in the semi-finals of the tournament. A fair opponent, no fooling about, no tricks. The problem was his retinue of henchmen who always had their hands on either their guns or their pricks in their trouser pockets, and were constantly on the point of taking out one or the other to let fly with it. But he’d promised they would do no more than I wanted, and a boss l
ike the Albanian really couldn’t afford to break his promises. That kind of thing got around, and it was bad for business. Or so I hoped, anyway.

  I looked at the time. One-thirty, a good time to have had an accident at work and come off my first shift of the day, trudging round dogs’ homes.

  ‘Hello, Frau Beierle.’

  ‘Herr Kayankaya – dear me, you sound as if you have a bad cold!’

  ‘Well, I had a little accident. Just now, in Oberursel, I thought I’d found Susi at last, and I went into the pen. But it was a different dog, one that likes jumping at people’s faces. And well, it broke my nose.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  ‘It’s not too bad, but I have to go to the doctor now, and maybe I can get back to searching for Susi at the end of the week.’

  ‘Of course, of course! You must look after yourself. Take your time. Injuries to the head should never be taken lightly.’

  ‘I’m just sorry for Susi. Now she’ll have to be shut up longer in one of those awful pens.’

  ‘Oh, Susi will be all right. It’s really amazing how many animal rescue centres there are around Frankfurt.’

  ‘Yes, amazing.’

  ‘Because people are so cruel, specially in this town. Or that’s my opinion, anyway.’

  ‘An interesting opinion. Although after today’s incident I have to say,’ I added, chuckling hard, ‘the animals in this town can be quite cruel too.’

  ‘Of course, you poor thing! I mustn’t keep you here talking. You go off to the doctor, and then go to bed.’

  ‘Thank you for being so understanding, Frau Beierle.’

  ‘Oh, never mind that. And if you need anything, just call me.’

  We said goodbye, and I wondered when the day would come on which she realised that her bow-wow was probably never going to come back with my assistance. And I also wondered how much longer I wanted to play the pop-eyed Turk for her benefit. Because of course the Islamic scholar had picked me from the yellow pages on account of my name, and of course when we first met she had explained to me at length what the Turks were like, myself included. Industrious, proud, strong on family values, keeping up old traditions, the secret rulers of Asia – in short, I was a whole great nation in myself. Not for the first time, I was fascinated to discover what having a good education and a university degree did not mean. But as I’d been out of a job for weeks, and as my normal daily retainer fee had automatically doubled the moment I set foot in her villa with its large garden, I didn’t shake her belief that she had practically invented the Ottomans. Only when she played me some appalling music, and I could see from her face that she was obviously expecting me to drum along with it or do a little dance, did I suggest that even in a people who appeared to be of one and the same origin, individual tastes might differ. Whereupon she said I didn’t really know what I liked any more, Western values and the Western lifestyle had distorted my true identity. To keep her sweet, I did her a small favour when we came to the business part of the deal: I tripled my retainer, just like that, and let her haggle until she beat me down to double the retainer, as if I usually did that kind of thing. Her small, knowing smile as she wrote me her cheque seemed to be saying: you see, that’s how the Orientals live. Once I had the Army business behind me and set out looking for Susi again, supposing I actually found her I’d have to find out how the Orientals felt about rewards. Perhaps there was some nice fifteenth-century proverb: find my watchdog and I will shower you with gold.

  I made fresh coffee, drank a cup, dressed, cleared away the bottles from inside the door, and went to the supermarket. The manager there told me that the Ahrens company had stopped delivering three months ago for unknown reasons. When I asked whether Ahrens Soups had sold well, he said, ‘No worse than other products of the same kind.’

  On the way home I bought all the newspapers with local Frankfurt sections, and thought of the deserted corridors and offices in Ahrens’s admin building. Obviously the place was closed, and not just on Saturdays. But then why did it employ a receptionist? In addition one who thought so little of the way the wind was blowing there that she’d help an enemy of her boss to get away?

  At home I leafed through the local sections, and found the reports I had been more or less expecting.

  Serious accident in Kaiserstrasse. In circumstances that are still not clear, a car burned out on Saturday night near the station. Both male passengers died in the fire … Shoot-out in the station district. Four shots woke residents of Windmühlstrasse on Sunday at four in the morning … and so on … one dead … hit and run accident, driver failed to stop. Not far from the station a grey Mercedes rammed a car parked by the roadside on Sunday evening, and then drove off, according to eyewitness accounts, in the direction of Sachsenhausen. Those in the car got off with only a scare.

  If the Army went on like this, even an authoritarian like the Albanian wouldn’t be able to keep his men from taking a proper revenge for long.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon reading the sports sections and having a nap. Around seven I dressed and undid the bandage. The swelling around my nose had gone down, leaving a blue and yellow bruise behind. It wasn’t pretty, but wouldn’t make people turn and run. I put a pistol in my pocket and set off in my Opel for Offenbach.

  Chapter 10

  If Marilyn Monroe had gone through life in the company of a small, thin, spotty sister who wore braces on her teeth, you could have said Offenbach beside Frankfurt looked like the Monroe sisters side by side. Although there were hardly five kilometres between their boundaries, up to now I’d been there at most four or five times, and after my first visit I’d always needed extremely compelling inducements to go again. Unless you knew better, you drove into the town, down a street a hundred metres wide and lined by grey office blocks, until you were right out of it again, and glad to see a few faces appear on the advertisement hoardings on both sides of the road from time to time. I’ve no idea what the people of Offenbach did with themselves all day, but at least they carefully avoided their drive-through main road with its resemblance to an airport runway. The only evidence of any human life outside the eight-hour working day was the existence of the snack bars that had sprung up here and there in front of office façades, and the logos winking from dark corners and pointing the way to fitness centres and gambling salons. You felt this was the way a main thoroughfare would look after a deadly epidemic.

  If you knew your way around a bit, there came a point where you turned off right to the town centre and came to a square about the size of a football field, its most impressive building apparently inspired by the need to give the bunker architecture of World War Two a chance in civil life. It was a huge, higgledy-piggledy, unplastered pile of concrete forcing its way up like a grey monster amidst the silvery department stores and brightly coloured shopping malls. Although signs promised you that the monster contained a pizzeria, ice cream parlour and supermarket, and in spite of the trouble taken to provide for something like an inviting atmosphere with outdoor flights of steps, airy passageways and terraces, you couldn’t shake off the feeling that the moment you set foot in the place you’d be arrested, shot, and processed into something. Or anyway, I couldn’t shake off the feeling. The typical citizen of Offenbach, at least if he liked doing drugs, hanging about aimlessly and supplying his environment with boom-boom music from a portable cassette recorders, just loved to linger outside and inside the building. And the citizen of Offenbach who was so tight that he pissed and threw up against the nearest wall instead of looking for a public toilet liked the building too. But the one who, of course, thought particularly highly of it was the citizen of Offenbach who had just failed his final school exams and was now in a hurry to become an established part of the great wide world of hanging about and throwing up.

  The problem with the town, for anyone who didn’t know it, was that there was almost no means of finding your way anywhere except down the plague-stricken avenue and past the monster building. Once you’d done that Offe
nbach turned out not much uglier than Darmstadt or Hanau. The usual pedestrian zone, the usual box-like sixties buildings, the usual crimes freely and publicly committed in the name of municipal architecture. But the first impression stuck, affecting everything else. I had once found myself in Offenbach standing outside a perfectly normal little department store and thinking: good heavens, this has to be the ugliest little department store in the world.

  So I drove past the monster, left the square behind, stopped by the side of the road and, opening my window, asked a young man who looked local for the street where the Adria Grill stood. He plucked his sparse moustache for a while and frowned all over his retreating forehead before he began to tell me. He took his time about it, and managed to make turning right twice and left once sound a very complicated business, but finally we had it. I thanked him and followed the route he had described.

  Ten minutes later I parked the car in a quiet side street. Blocks of flats, bars, a garage, a gay sex shop. I walked a little way until I was outside the glass door with the words Adria Grill on it. The doorway and window were draped inside with crochet wall-hangings. The menu was up in a glass case by the door. It was Yugoslavian and International Specialities cuisine as found chiefly in Germany, so far as I knew: fifteen meat dishes with chips, five salads, two desserts and fifteen varieties of schnapps. The fact that this cuisine was now very seldom called after Yugoslavia, but after one of the tracts of land that had seceded from Yugoslavia over the past few years with strong support from the German Foreign Ministry, was indicated by the cocktail menu with little Croatian and German flags stuck on it: for five marks ninety-five you could drink a Genscher Sunrise.

  As I entered the restaurant about fifteen men fell silent and turned their heads my way. They were sitting and standing more or less separately at tables and the bar, but they were all one party taking up the whole room. Most of them were around fifty and looked as if they always had been, as if they’d always been hanging around in bars and only went out now and then to get cheap suits and haircuts. The exceptions were two young men in their mid-twenties sitting in the darkest and most remote corner, with shaved heads and wearing flashy sports jackets. They all had beer glasses in front of them, and as I went up to the bar and wished the landlord ‘Good evening’, they all remained silent. Perhaps the swelling on my face was more impressive than it had seemed to me in the mirror at home. I hoped they’d decide to regard me as someone who’d had bad luck, not a thug.