The girl, on the other hand, could have come straight out of an ad appealing for donations to the Red Cross. A thin, emaciated body in worn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, arms covered with scratches and bruises, and a chin with a thick, blood-encrusted scab on it. She was looking sceptically at me from dark eyes which, for her age, were impressively ringed with dark circles. Her gaze seemed to be asking whether she was the reason why I was here, and if so, whether I intended to do something just bad or very bad indeed to her. Perhaps she was older than fourteen; it was hard to say in her condition. But anyway I had thrown nearly everyone from sexual maturity up to the age of twenty five into the same pot. Sometimes the pot was labelled Child, at other times something else.
‘Hello-o-o,’ fluted the woman, turning as emphatically and exclusively in my direction as if she’d like to turn the girl into a flowerpot or something else that wouldn’t attract my attention. Perhaps she was ashamed of this dirty heap of misery in her office, or of her astral body beside the skeleton. Or perhaps it was simply her normal behaviour when a man and a girl were in the same room with her.
‘Hello to you too,’ I replied. ‘Kayankaya, private detective.’
She gave a slight start, and her eyes narrowed as if I had blown air into her face. ‘Private detective,’ she repeated, trying to maintain her cheery tone. ‘So … er, how can I help you?’
I really wanted to ask her to send the girl out of the room for a little while, but decided not to. It would only have warned her that I was here about something worse than stolen bicycles.
‘I’d like to talk to you about a gang extorting protection money who are probably forcing inmates of this hostel to work for them.’
On the way here I’d been prepared for one of those difficult and usually fruitless afternoons when large numbers of people kept suggesting more or less clearly how great it would be if I finally stopped asking questions and went away. I was all the more surprised to find I’d obviously scored a direct hit in double-quick time. Her lower jaw dropped foolishly, her eyelids began to twitch, and the heads of Charlie Chaplin shook like a have-a-go-free notice on an ancient pinball machine. I watched her struggling to regain her composure. The she suddenly broke into hearty laughter.
‘And there was I thinking I was dealing with a madman! Private detective! Whoever heard of such a thing these days?’ She laughed again. ‘You were only joking, right? Well, you certainly took me in. You must be the electrician, aren’t you? It’s the lighting in the corridor. Wait a moment and I’ll show you. Leila.’ As she waved towards the door, she turned to the girl. ‘Go upstairs, please, dear. We’ll go on talking later.’
Either she had realised pretty quickly how little she wanted someone listening in on any conversation with me, or I had hit even harder than I’d guessed. Perhaps my mere appearance in the secretarial office at this moment was a direct hit in itself.
But however that might be, her little performance wasn’t running too badly so far – and if the girl had got up and gone out she could have carried on with it, acting slightly stupid, talking about corridor lighting, claiming not to know anything, believe me or not as you like, goodbye.
However, the girl didn’t get up and didn’t look as if she could be easily persuaded to do so. Hands clutching the arms of her chair, she thrust her lips out defiantly and stared, unmoved, at the woman behind the desk.
‘Leila!’ The mouth was still smiling, but the voice had taken on a barracking tone. That didn’t seem to bother Leila. To make it perfectly clear that she was not going to obey, she slipped off her plastic flip-flops and stuck her feet behind the chair-legs. Apart from that she didn’t move.
The woman tried hard to indicate, by rolling her eyes with amusement, how widespread and really rather sweet such teenage obstinacy was, but how trying too. Of course there was no reason for it at all, we grown-ups were of the same mind there.
‘Leila, if you don’t go I’ll have to call Gregor, and he’ll take you to your room, chair and all.’ She leaned forward and smiled at the girl, closing her eyes so much that I couldn’t see them. ‘Do you really want to deprive me of my chair? I have to discuss the corridor lighting with this man, and I’d like to ask him to sit down. I’m sure you can understand that.’
Leila slowly opened her mouth, wiggled the tip of her tongue between her teeth a bit, and looked at the woman as if she were a conjuror whose tricks have all failed, but who’s still passing round the hat. Then she said calmly, ‘I heard, old cunt,’ and pointed her finger to her ear. ‘Private detective. Corridor lighting shit!’
You could have charged entrance money for the ensuing pause. While it was as much as the woman could to do keep her facial muscles under control, Leila scratched her head and looked straight in front of her, frowning, as if wondering whether she was sitting here with an old cunt for any good reason.
‘Would you believe it?’ the woman finally managed to say. ‘Here we are, caring for them day and night, and what thanks do we get?’
‘Does caring for them day and night mean talking such garbage?’
‘… I beg your pardon?’
‘You heard. Why were you suddenly so keen to have the girl out of the way once I mentioned extortionists and protection money?’
‘It’s no such thing! I.’ She pursed her lips and looked across her desktop as if an answer might be lying around somewhere there. ‘I don’t like discussing such things in front of children. I’m sure you can understand that. Quite apart from the fact that your suspicion is, of course, wildly far-fetched.’
‘Fetch far?’ asked Leila, who was following our conversation with interest.
Before I could reply to her the woman interrupted. ‘That’s enough of that! Go away, Leila, or I’m calling Gregor!’
‘Gre-gor!’ Leila imitated her, but the the next moment she shut her mouth and looked like she was scared by her own words. It was to be assumed that Gregor’s name put a lid on audacity.
‘Just as you like!’
As the woman reached for the phone, tapped in a number and waited, face averted, for someone to answer, I tried to think what I was going to do if Gregor did drag Leila off, chair and all. And I wondered how ruthless I wanted to be. By now I was convinced that either Leila knew something I wasn’t supposed to find out, or I knew something that she wasn’t supposed to find out. Either way, I couldn’t ask her about it in front of this woman. The mere fact that I was here, seeing the woman try to get Leila away from me almost without bothering to pretend about it, could get her into all sorts of trouble. Depending on how high one assessed the chances that I saw her as a source of information or a witness. For the girl’s sake, I thought, it would be best if I left.
Meanwhile Leila was acting the defiant child again. She went on wiggling her tongue between her teeth, stretched out a dirty foot now and then, circled it in the air and examined it critically. All the same, you could sense that the increasingly probable arrival of Gregor scared her. She looked briefly at me a few times. Perhaps she was hoping I’d stay.
‘Gregor? … Please would you come down quickly … Yes, a little problem … Leila … Uh-huh, see you in a minute.’
After she had put the receiver down she sat deep in thought for a few seconds, and then looked up with a fleeting smile as if to say: sorry about that interruption, now, where were we? She did not in fact say anything, just kept on smiling. Obviously that was how she meant to occupy the time until Gregor arrived.
‘Frau … er?’
‘Schmidtbauer.’
‘Well, Frau Schmidtbauer, you have now done all you can to make it clear that there’s something shady going on here. Either you talk to me about it, or I stay in this place and rummage around until I’ve found out about it. The difference is that if you talk to me, I can turn a blind eye. If you don’t, and if you have a skeleton in the cupboard and I discover it, I’ll inform on you.’
Her smile became a little more fleeting, but nothing else happened.
‘Think about
it. It doesn’t look to me as if you’re much more than the receptionist here. You know what goes on, and presumably there’s a few marks left on your desk now and then to induce you to keep your mouth shut. How much is the money worth? A new blouse, a good meal in a smart restaurant? I’ll bet it’s not enough for you to travel somewhere you’ll be safe from the police. If what I suspect is right, there’ll be charges of organised crime, blackmail, and possibly aiding and abetting murder. And even if you’re convicted only of knowing about the crime, you’ll get a long enough sentence to remove you from circulation for the part of your life that matters. There’ll be nothing left later but a little sport for senior citizens, and reincarnation if you’re lucky.’
No reaction. She smiled and went on holding out. But the hunted look in her eyes told me that she’d soften up once we were alone. So I dismissed all my theories of the last ten minutes and just hoped Leila was only a girl sitting in the wrong room at the wrong time, and Gregor was a nice lad with frizzy hair and comfortable shoes doing civilian service instead of the draft, who’d behaved perfectly in persuading Leila to go with him.
These hopes lasted just a few seconds. Then the door was flung open and Popeye on coke burst in. Muscular in a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms, trainers like small, brightly coloured cruise missiles, shaved head, a chin fit to knock doors down, and eyes with their pupils moving as if they had to register the tempo of three hundred herds of white elephants charging his way. He measured something above two metres, and to see from one end of his shoulders to the other I had to turn my head back and forth slightly, as if watching tennis. Then I recognised the showy sports watch. Perhaps it was chance, but Ahrens wore the same model.
Without taking any notice of me or Frau Schmidtbauer, he made for Leila, snarling, ‘You lousy little beast! What’s the idea this time? Didn’t I tell you …’
Whatever he had told her, it was drowned out by Leila’s shrill scream as he closed his great paws round her arms and pulled her out of the chair. Leila’s legs flailed in the air as she tried to kick him. At the same time she never stopped screaming, and the small secretarial office became an acoustic torture chamber. Popeye was bellowing, ‘You shut up!’ Frau Schmidtbauer was crying, ‘Don’t grab her so hard!’ And I drew my pistol.
‘Hey, you!’ I shouted, trying to drown out the others. ‘Gregor!’
He turned, with the girl wedged under his arm. It took him a moment to realise what it was gleaming in my hand, and then he looked incredulous. Leila struggled and screamed a little longer, until she too looked at me and immediately fell silent.
‘Put the child down again,’ I said, waving the pistol.
Gregor looked even more incredulous. In the process the pupils of his eyes grew ever larger and ever emptier, and I had the feeling I was facing a horror dummy. The kind of thing that could be used at cinema entrances to advertise films like The Massacre Man or The Devil’s Dinner.
He turned his head to the desk. ‘Who’s this arsehole?’
Frau Schmidtbauer bit her lower lip, looked at my pistol, and didn’t seem to think Gregor’s choice of words very sensible. ‘Er,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.
I said, ‘This arsehole is the character who’ll shoot holes in your knees if you don’t let go of the child.’
It was as if something inside him exploded. His head whipped round, and with his teeth bared and his eyes popping he clamped Leila to his chest and held her out in my direction. ‘Oh, so that’s your idea? You think you’ll shoot holes in me?’ he roared, chin jutting. ‘Go on, then! But you’ll have to shoot through the girl first. Didn’t think of that, eh? Shoot holes in me! I could kill you with one hand.’
‘With your little toe for all I care. But we’re not here for a fight, and I don’t want to shoot you in the chest either. Just in the kneecaps. You’d need to be holding a wall in front of you to stop me doing that.’
‘Please, Gregor!’ begged Frau Schmidtbauer, and at the same moment she started crying.
Gregor was now snorting like a horse. He began twitching and sweating, looking around him as if his good friend coke had left him in mid-flight, and now he was sailing alone through some kind of cosmos that was a total mystery to him.
‘The child,’ I said, trying again, but he wasn’t listening any more. He looked at the floor, froze for a moment as if hypnotising himself, his snorting and twitching died down, and whereas he had just been gleaming with sweat it now looked as if he had a layer of grey dust on his skin. Nothing indicated the presence of a brain any more. It was pure reflex when he assumed a close-combat position. Then he bent his knees, braced his shoulders back like someone putting the shot, and tensed his biceps. A slippery film formed between the pistol and my hand.
When Leila came flying towards me, I shoved her to my left and under the desk, threw myself to the right, saw two metres of cokehead above me, and fired my pistol. Gregor, hit in the legs, bellowed, froze briefly in a kind of jazz-dance distortion, grabbed his thighs and collapsed. At the same moment Frau Schmidtbauer started screaming.
I lay gasping for air and trying to steady my trembling arm. Gregor’s body, barely three metres away from me, wasn’t moving any more. He had obviously fainted. Dark patches were spreading over his tracksuit bottoms. I’d emptied my entire magazine into his legs and the wall behind them. Even sober, Gregor probably wouldn’t have allowed me to keep cool. Pumped full of drugs he’d looked to me, for a moment, like the last person I would ever meet on earth. Still, I hadn’t aimed any higher.
Frau Schmidtbauer kept on and on screaming. Finally I struggled to my feet, went over to her and slapped her face until she covered it with her hands and began whimpering quietly. Then I bent to look under the desk. Arms around her knees, T-shirt torn, feet bare, Leila was cowering in the furthest corner with her eyes and mouth tight closed, and tears running down her cheeks.
I straightened up and looked for the cigarettes in my jacket pocket. The girl was beginning to get on my nerves now too. Why didn’t she run away? Why, whatever she was threatened with and whatever happened, did she stick around in the secretarial office, a horrible place in every respect? Whether Leila knew anything or not, I was beginning to think I’d have had a really successful afternoon without her: half an hour at the most to crack Frau Schmidtbauer, about another twenty minutes for her to spill all the details of the link between this hostel and the Army, and last, with a little luck, information about two brief lives which for one reason or another were unpleasant enough for no one to mourn their end much. Even now I had a chance. A little poking about in Gregor’s wounds, and Frau Schmidtbauer would probably have given me all she knew in writing. But this way. I could neither haul Leila out from under the desk and put her outside the door, nor use the methods of a military junta in front of her. The question was, what could I do instead? I smoked, and thought about it.
‘… oh, baby, your life’s up the spout, you just don’t know it yet,’ came a grating voice from the floor. Gregor seemed to be coming round. ‘I’ll finish you, you bastard … I’ll smash you up but I won’t let you die … I’ll crush your balls until you’re throwing up your own shit … and you’ll bleed so much you’ll wish so much you’d never put your bloody wog face out of your bloody wog mother …’
He went on like this until I went over and kicked him in the head. He gurgled something else, and then we had peace and quiet again.
‘Right,’ I said, turning to Frau Schmidtbauer, ‘now tell me how we get out of here.’
But Frau Schmidtbauer didn’t want to tell me anything. She wanted to weep and wail and call me names in a stifled voice. ‘You murderer! You’ve killed him! You’re a murderer!’
‘Nonsense. He can take it. The question is how much you can take. I am now going to call the police and tell them the story of a crazed cokehead – if you’ll back me up. If not I’ll have to try the truth on them: how your hostel is pretty well under the command of a German-Croatian Mafia, and you and Gregor here are more or less run
ning it for them.’
‘… you murderer!’
‘Oh, do stop that. He’ll be beating someone up again in three weeks’ time. At the latest. Unless you go on howling like that much longer, and then maybe there’s a chance he’ll bleed to death.’
‘You … you …’
‘If you’re going to say “murderer” again I’ll murder you.’
‘You … you’re brutal, cruel …’
‘OK, let’s tell them the truth.’
I went over to the phone, raised the receiver and dialled. Before it began to ring a thin arm shot past me and a small hand, with bitten nails painted pink, came down on the cradle. ‘No!’
I turned and looked into Leila’s tearful face.
‘Please!’ Her eyes, which had little burst veins in them, looked pleadingly at me.
‘You don’t want me to call the police?’
She shook her head.
‘Why not?’
Before she could open her mouth someone who had apparently just come into the secretarial office snapped, ‘Because her tart of a mother’s involved! That’s why, you great child-lover!’
I turned and looked at Frau Schmidtbauer, astonished. In spite of everything that had happened I could hardly believe the voice that had greeted me so merrily, barely half an hour ago, came from the same human being as the one that now sounded as if hatred was its principal register.
With a triumphant grin, she defiantly pushed her face, now visibly flushed in spite of the sun tan, towards me. ‘Didn’t think of that one, did you? Her mother’s the worst of the lot! And this little witch is just as depraved! See how she’s wrapped you round her little finger!’
Worst of the lot? Depraved little witch? Was she simply making up some kind of fantasy, just so long as she thought it sounded tough and might induce me to leave?
I shook my head slightly. ‘What is it you people here have about mothers? Are we in some kind of ghetto movie, or in Italy, or what?’
Kismet Page 12
