Kismet

by Jakob Arjouni

  At the words ‘extorting protection money’ he jumped, and I saw him checking up on opportunities for escape out of the corner of his eyes. I stood a little more foursquare in front of him and shook my head. ‘Don’t even think of it. If you help me we’ll never see each other again, and no one will know that you talked to me. If you don’t, I’ll tell your uncle that you phoned me and tried to sell me information.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ It burst out of him before he turned his eyes away and stared at the ground, lips compressed. I waited. Standing there in front of me now without a kitchen apron on, he looked like a youth from another period. He wore pointed shoes with leopard-skin trim, a pair of suit trousers much too large for him, a white shirt with a starched collar, and he had a crew cut. Perhaps his favourite band was The Who, and either that was usual in Offenbach or he had a good chance of leading a revival in three or four years’ time.

  ‘I … look, I’m going to university in the autumn, I wanted to work through the summer so as not to have to take a job during my first year. I never specially liked my uncle – why am I saying specially? Not at all. But I couldn’t find anything better … I had no idea what I was getting into. Imagine it, you just want to earn some cash, and suddenly you’re right in a …’

  He stopped and stared ahead of him again. I lit myself a cigarette and registered the adrenalin closing down for the night in my body, while pain took over again. After a while he raised his eyes and pointed cautiously to my jacket pocket with one finger.

  ‘They took the bullets out, didn’t they?’

  ‘I had a spare magazine in the car.’

  ‘Oh.’ He made a face as if thinking of something really disgusting to eat. ‘… Would you have shot me?’

  ‘Let’s say at least I wouldn’t have let you get away.’

  He thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. ‘They really took you apart.’

  ‘Yes, and it hurts, and I want to go to bed. Tell me about the protection money gang.’

  ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘But you’ll have to …’

  ‘I won’t have to do anything,’ I snorted. Only just now he’d been close to shitting himself, and now he was a little too inclined to have a cosy chat for my liking. ‘You either trust me or you don’t. I’ll wait another five minutes. If I haven’t heard anything that interests me by then, I shall get your uncle out of bed this very night, and you can start thinking of some place to go and study abroad.’

  It took him a little more swallowing, marking time on the spot and looking at the ground, but finally, head bowed, he talked. He turned out to be a bright, inquisitive lad, and half an hour later he’d answered a great many more questions than I had meant to ask.

  The Adria Grill functioned as a meeting place for Croatian nationalists who liked to have a drink together, and also for German Nazi and Ustasha fans who were seeking salvation as mercenaries in the Bosnian war. True, the war was officially over, but there were still paramilitary bands of all political colours as fond as ever of murdering each other in the name of a Greater Croatia, Greater Bosnia or Greater Serbia – for a good fat fee. Checking up on the mercenaries and dispatching them was organised by a tall, thin man who was always very smartly dressed, but whose name was never mentioned. He turned up in a Mercedes three times a week and held audience for one or two hours in the back room of the Adria Grill. He hadn’t turned up this evening, and Zvonko – that was the boy’s name – had seen his uncle go to the phone several times after I was flung out to call this man, but without success.

  ‘Was he there last Thursday?’

  ‘Thursday … yes, of course, that was the evening when the palefaces didn’t turn up. That’s what I call them to myself. Their faces are powdered and they wear blond wigs. They first turned up two weeks ago, and at the start I thought they were cranks of some kind, a cult or something. How would I know? Suppose Jesus is blond and loves Croatia. You wouldn’t believe what weird characters come into that place. Sometimes I think Yugoslavia and the war was like winning the lottery for all the weirdoes who have some kind of obsession going that won’t get them anywhere here. I heard one of the interviews. The man kept saying how he couldn’t stand his wife any more, that was all he talked about. And he went off there, and the first thing he did was probably to shoot ten Bosnian women between thirty and forty. And then he said Croatia was a wonderful country because of its literature and music. I mean, sometimes it’s quite funny.’

  ‘What happened next with the palefaces?’

  ‘After that they turned up almost every evening. Like the tall man. A week ago I saw them giving him money for the first time. After that I looked out for them, and they always bring something. If the tall man isn’t there they give it to my uncle. But only for safe keeping. He’s not a big wheel. He makes himself out important, but …’

  I let him whinge on about his uncle for a bit, and then I asked if he knew where the money came from. He did, and that wasn’t all. Most of the ‘palefaces’ were Bosnian refugees blackmailed into working for the gang. If they objected, they were threatened with the deaths of friends or relations who had stayed behind in Bosnia. The job would be done, as Zvonko put it, by ‘German lovers of Croatian literature’. He’d once overheard the tall man explaining to a tearful paleface that after his wilful behaviour they’d be obliged to do something about it.

  ‘… My Croatian isn’t perfect, but that’s roughly what he said. And suppose it was only your brother but you still have a wife and children there? I expect you’d be a hundred per cent in favour of working for them then.’

  I thought of the brutality with which the racketeers went to work, and realised that if someone like Romario didn’t pay up, the gang would be more or less literally holding a gun to their families’ heads.

  ‘And what specially amuses the tall man and the others when they’re sitting over a schnapps later is that of course the palefaces are from all the so-called ethnic groups: Serbs, Muslims, Croatians, gypsies. One of their favourite sayings is, “We’re sending all Yugoslavia out on the streets for us.” ’

  ‘How can they know for certain which refugee has family where?’

  ‘They have lists, no idea where they get them. Anyway, you can bet the tall man is only quite small fry in the organisation. The bosses will be in Croatia, and then there’s a kind of German who talks big. He came twice, acting the way my Granny said German tourists used to.’

  ‘A man with uncomfortable blue eyes?’

  ‘That’s right. Always looks as if he didn’t know whether he wants to screw someone or kill them. The day before yesterday he came in and bawled out the tall man in front of everyone as if he was the last one hiring out the deckchairs. I don’t know exactly what it was about, I was in the kitchen. But I think there’s going to be some kind of important meeting in the next few days.’

  ‘Of the bosses?’

  He shrugged. ‘My uncle ordered about a ton of fillet steak for the weekend. That won’t be for the few regulars who drink at his place.’

  I thought of the Albanian. It was only in my fury with Ahrens’s Hessian who broke my nose that I’d dragged him into this too hastily. I couldn’t possibly hand him people who’d been blackmailed into being gangsters and would probably be very glad to stop at once. But I had to give him something. I couldn’t offer the Albanian a deal and then say a couple of days later: sorry, I made a mistake. At least, not if I wanted to go on earning money as a private detective in the same town in the future. A meeting of Croatian bosses would be just the thing. If it took place. And if I could find out when.

  ‘Do you know why they powder their faces and wear wigs and never say a word when they’re extorting money?’

  ‘Orders from the top. But I can’t see why either. I only once heard one of them who’d taken off his wig because of the heat being bawled out in the back room. That get-up must matter a lot to the bosses.’

  Finally I asked him about the two palefaces who hadn’t turned up last Thursday, but he cou
ldn’t tell me any more except that no one had mentioned them since. Then we’d both obviously had enough for one night. I offered him a cigarette, and we sat smoking, exhausted.

  After a while he asked, ‘I don’t have to worry about you landing me in trouble, do I?’

  ‘Not in the least. But all the same, you’d do better to look for a different job. It could get pretty hot there soon.’

  ‘You must be joking. How many jobs do you think there are around here for me?’

  I took a pen and a scrap of paper out of my pocket and wrote down Slibulsky’s name and business phone number for him. ‘Ice-cream vendor. As far as I know it pays very well. Call this number first thing tomorrow and say you were sent by me, Kayankaya.’

  I gave him the note. He glanced at it, and hesitantly put it in his pocket. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s for me to thank you. And if your uncle or his friends make trouble for you, call me. The faster you get out of there the better.’ I shook hands with him. ‘See you at Slibulsky’s.’

  He nodded, and then he suddenly seemed to have to pull himself together so as not to laugh out loud. He was probably only now beginning to believe that this man with the bashed-up face and the pistol in his jacket pocket really wasn’t going to do anything more to him tonight.

  Ten minutes later I was racing away from Marilyn Monroe’s sister at full speed, and if my shoulders hadn’t been in such a bad way I might have stuck two fingers out of the side window by way of goodbye.

  I left the car in the no-parking zone and dragged myself into the Mister Happy. It was just after three, and generally only the video recorder was working at that time. While the inmates dozed on plushy pink sofas, or sat over coffee and crossword puzzles hoping for a last customer, the troops were slogging it out on a large screen, naked, against scenery like a furniture warehouse. Soft, continuous moaning mingled with equally soft piano music.

  I crossed the room, greeting girls to left and right, and found Deborah in the kitchen, as I’d expected. She was eating ham sandwiches and leafing through mail-order catalogues with a colleague.

  ‘Hey, baby, what happened to you?’

  Whatever had happened to me, at least it was no reason for her to spread a bit more mustard on her sandwich and take a hearty bite. She added, with her mouth full, ‘You don’t look too good.’

  Deborah a.k.a. Helga was a small, plump twenty-year-old from a village in north Germany. She had an ‘Italian style’ perm, nail lacquer in Malibu, Cherry Red and Flamingo, tracksuits with as many zip fasteners as possible, and when she went out she wore a cap saying Foxy Kitten. From what she said she didn’t mind her job, and sometimes even enjoyed it. All the same, she was saving hard to open an espresso and sandwich bar in her home village a couple of years from now. What she definitely enjoyed, all the time, was eating. And I really liked her for that. She ate like a cow: slowly, with relish, never letting anything disturb her. Watching her eat had an effect on me like doing yoga.

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said, as she fished a gherkin out of a jar and waved it about to dry it. ‘Do you have anything else to do?’

  ‘Huh, there’s been nothing going on here for hours. I’m just having a bite to eat and then I’m turning in. You can go upstairs if you like.’

  ‘I could do with a dunking in your whirlpool bath.’

  ‘Ha!’ She stabbed the air with the gherkin. ‘That comes extra!’ And laughing, she nudged her colleague in the ribs. The colleague, a tough dimwit, grinned derisively.

  I had once helped Deborah out of a rather sticky situation with her pimp, we had come closer to each other with Willy DeVille’s Heaven Stood Still, and since then we’d had a tacit agreement: I could have her spoil me once a week, and in return I’d be available for any further fix she might be in. The point was that there hadn’t been one, and there wasn’t going to be one for the foreseeable future. The Mister Happy was as civilised and homely as a village bakery in a French film. I should know; I’d been acquainted with the madam for years, and had found Deborah the job here. Signs that she herself was seeing less and less point in our arrangement had been increasing recently, and although she laughed now, I was sure that at the back of her mind a fierce little calculating devil was registering another two hundred marks unearned.

  ‘Come on, baby, just joking. Of course you can go in the pool. But you’ll have to rinse it out first. No one cleaned it after the last guy, and he was all hairy.’

  ‘Oh. Hm.’

  ‘See you.’ She threw me an airy kiss. ‘And I’ll see that you feel as good as new tomorrow.’

  She did, too. When Deborah was well-fed and in a good mood there were few who could tell her anything about how to do that. For an evening’s good screw to make up for things, I reflected, I wasn’t as badly off as Slibulsky thought.

  Chapter 12

  Perhaps I didn’t feel exactly new, but after a night of extensive massage and breakfast in bed in the morning I was in surprisingly good form except for the variegated colours of my face. Deborah kissed me goodbye, and as I went out to my car and removed the parking ticket from under the windscreen wiper I thought almost lovingly of how, before I’d even had a chance to look at the breakfast tray, she’d asked if I didn’t want my egg.

  I drove home, showered, put on clean clothes and went round the corner to drink coffee and read the newspaper in a café. I’d really intended to drive out to Ahrens’s factory next and wait until my rescuer from the switchboard knocked off work. Presumably she knew when the bosses would be meeting. But the newspaper spared me the trouble. In the local section I found a headline saying Frankfurt Expects Visit From Croatian Interior Minister Plus Economic Delegation. Along with all kinds of guff about the traditional friendship between Croats and Germans, and a welcome given by German credit institutions to the ‘rising young country’, the article went into detail about cooperation between Croatian and German firms. Ahrens won praise for his packet-soup outfit as one of the first Frankfurt companies to have been active in Croatia after the war.

  I put the paper down and thought about Slibulsky’s sweets. Probably they were exactly the kind of thing that Ahrens’s activities consisted of. So there actually was work being done in his factory. In addition, the article seemed to me to answer the question of why the racketeers had to disguise themselves and mustn’t utter a word betraying any accent: the revelation that a Croatian-led Mafia was chopping fingers off German bar-owners would hardly have had a favourable effect on the granting of credit. Which meant that the bosses of the Army of Reason were far enough up in the Croatian power structure for their personal interests to coincide to some extent with the national interest.

  That is, if part of the credit didn’t find its way straight into their pockets. As far as I knew, the Croatian president didn’t exactly have a reputation as a staunch opponent of corruption and the Mafiosi. He probably didn’t care about having such a reputation either. I’d once seen a picture of his yacht. Along with his uniform in the photo yesterday evening, it gave an impression rather as if the mayor of Frankfurt’s wife went about her daily business in a swimming pool filled with champagne.

  The Interior Minister’s visit was going to be next Saturday. That left me three more days. I paid my bill and went home. From there I called an acquaintance who knew his way around the refugee hostels. He gave me the name of one where most of the inmates came from Bosnia.

  It had begun raining again, and the square outside the place, which had once been a youth hostel, was full of mud and puddles. I wove my way past them to the entrance, found myself in a dark corridor smelling of food and disinfectant, read a series of notices hanging from the ceiling – Dining-Room, Showers, Sick-Bay – and followed the arrow on the one that said Secretarial Office. On the walls to left and right hung posters produced by the Evangelical church showing young people, black and white, moving down streets and stairways and through meadows together, under brightly coloured slogans saying things like Wow, man, loving your neighbour is great! and I�
��m all for multi-ethnicity! In between, dingy notes were pinned up telling you not to smoke in the corridors, not to make a noise, and not to assemble, eat or drink there. As far as I could see these instructions were being obeyed to the letter. No one came to meet me, and only the distant sound of children’s voices and the clatter of crockery indicated that the place was inhabited at all.

  The door of the secretarial office was at the end of the corridor, which was getting darker and darker. I knocked, and thought I heard a couple of harsh, commanding sounds through the wood before a cheerful, ‘Yoo-hoo!’ rang out. When I opened the door bright light shone in my face. Before I could make anything out someone called, ‘Come in, do just come along in!’ as if I’d arrived intending to see somebody turning cartwheels.

  I closed the door behind me and blinked at a row of neon lights. As my eyes got used to the dazzle I saw the usual shabby grey-green office furnishings paid for decades ago out of the public purse, the usual private touches consisting of holiday postcards pinned to the wall and amusing newspaper cuttings, and the usual photographic landscape calendar. Behind the desk sat someone not quite so usual in this setting, a woman of about forty-five, with a girl of around fourteen on a chair in front of her.

  The woman was tanned deep brown, in ultra-fit condition without a trace of extra fat, and judging by the way she was smiling at me with two incredibly white, immaculate rows of teeth, apparently in the best of good humour. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse in a jungle-animal print that showed off her muscular arms, earrings with little heads of Charlie Chaplin dangling from them, a necklace with a small Buddha pendant, and her hair was in a long, thick, blonde braid that she had flirtatiously brought round over her shoulder to hang in front of her. Presumably she felt that the last word about what she’d do with her life hadn’t yet been spoken. She fitted into the grey-green secretarial office of this refugee hostel about as well as into a bowling alley.