Kismet

by Jakob Arjouni

  ‘But I’m telling you the truth! Her mother’s a tart! I could tell you stuff to make your hair stand on end …’

  Suddenly I guessed something. I’d only ever heard anyone crack up as furiously as this when there was jealousy involved, and the more furious Frau Schmidtbauer grew, the further she leaned towards me and the more garishly did the colours of the jungle-animal print of her blouse hit me in the eye. I thought of Gregor’s watch, and how there might be reasons other than a few marks of hush money why someone like Frau Schmidtbauer, who said things like, ‘I could tell you stuff to make your hair stand on end’, would let herself act as general dogsbody to a Mafia gang.

  ‘… a filthy creature, a …’

  ‘Tell me, how about Dr Ahrens – does he just have animal skins lying on his floor or does he fuck like an animal too?’

  For the second time during our short acquaintance I managed to get her making that foolish face, lower jaw dropping and eyelids twitching.

  ‘What … what are you talking about? I don’t know what …’

  I smiled magnanimously. ‘That’s OK. Why not? He’s a smart guy, is Ahrens – smart office, smart car … all the same, in your place I wouldn’t shoot my mouth off quite so loud about tarts and depravity.’

  ‘What on earth are you thinking of?’

  ‘Not a lot at this moment. I’m going out with Leila for a little while, and meanwhile you can see to the monster there. It’s probably in all our interests not to kick up a big fuss about this. Call Ahrens and ask him for a doctor who’ll take the bullets out without asking too many questions. I’m sure he knows one. And then I want a private conversation with you later. If you disappear, or summon reinforcements, or do anything else to stop us having that conversation you’ll be in jail this evening. The same applies if you bring Ahrens or Gregor into it against Leila. She was here today only by chance and she has nothing to do with it – whether her mother’s what you say she is or not.’

  She briefly opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, nodded slightly, looked at the phone and picked up the receiver. When I closed the door behind Leila and myself I could hear her clearing her throat, and then fluting again, as if restored to her old self, ‘Oh, my dear, I’m glad to catch you. I have to speak to Dr Ahrens. It’s urgent …’

  Apparently she took my threat seriously. I briefly imagined Höttges’s face if I’d actually thought of asking him to have a woman with absolutely nothing against her arrested. I’d have had to think up something special to persuade him. Perhaps a projection of the film featuring him on the façade of police headquarters, for instance. Or a Zeppelin circling above Frankfurt by night, with a huge monitor hanging from it showing details of his little rendezvous all the way to Offenbach.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere we can be alone and keep an eye on the square outside this building.’

  ‘Keep an eye there?’

  ‘Go somewhere we can see it.’

  Leila pointed down the dark corridor. ‘Visitors’ room.’

  If the place where we found ourselves a little later was really meant to be a visitors’ room, they seemed to think here that ‘visitors’ was just a synonym for a robber band. And one that must have mastered the trick of finding a market somewhere in the world for the sale of rusty metal chairs with their foam rubber upholstery spilling out, and tables that were obviously used mainly for stubbing out cigarettes, knife-throwing, and inscriptions in thick felt pen saying ‘Fuck the cunt’. All the furniture – which besides the tables and chairs consisted of a standard lamp without a bulb in it and an empty bookshelf – was screwed to the floor with strong angle-irons. There was nothing you could have moved in any way at all. When I tried opening a window to get rid of the stink of disinfectant, Leila waved my attempt aside.

  ‘No try.’

  ‘No try?’

  ‘Hostel manager say.’

  ‘No try what? Getting a breath of fresh air?’

  Leila shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Steal windows?’

  ‘Steal windows,’ I repeated, and looked at the cracked, battered plastic frame, which was painted a bilious yellow.

  ‘Well, let’s keep this short.’ I looked at Leila. She was leaning against the wall a few metres away from me, her arms folded, and once again looking as unmoved as before the appearance of Gregor. Yet she seemed to know as little as I did what we were really doing here. I had got her out of the secretary’s office so that I could go back on my own and deal with Frau Schmidtbauer, and she had probably come with me only to make sure I wasn’t going to call the police after all. After Frau Schmidtbauer’s outburst I thought I knew enough about Leila’s part in the affair. A short conversation to persuade her to trust me, and then I hoped she’d finally disappear.

  ‘Your mother works for Ahrens and that’s why you don’t want me to call the police, right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And she doesn’t really want to work for Ahrens at all, but he blackmails her into it, the way he blackmails other people here in the hostel.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘OK, then there’s no problem. I was never really going to call the police, I just meant it as a threat.’

  I waited for some sign that she understood and now we could go our separate ways. Instead she dug her hands into her trouser pockets and began walking slowly up and down the room. As she did so she kept casting brief, appraising glances at me, as if I’d made her some offer that wasn’t entirely on the level. In fact it was now that I finally realised how little she could still be called a child. In the secretarial office I had noticed only the rings round her eyes, the scab, the shoulder-length, greasy mop of hair and her loud mouth. Now I looked at her properly for the first time. Her face reminded me of one of those little bistro tables when you are having lunch for two there. Eyes, nose and mouth all seemed to be pushing each other over the edge. Not that her face itself was particularly thin, but everything else was so particularly large and pronounced, like a series of slightly outsized features of classical beauty. Dark, huge, almost protuberant eyes, a slightly aquiline, strong nose, and lips like pink air cushions. In addition she moved like those long-legged girls of whom you can never be sure whether they know what they can do to a man just by taking a short, meaningless walk across the room.

  All things considered, it was suddenly clear to me that possibly I wasn’t the first old fogy to have helped her out of a tricky situation or done her some other favour, and perhaps other men had then insisted on being shown gratitude in a room as remote as this one.

  ‘Hey, Leila, what’s the matter?’ I asked, overdoing the loud voice. ‘Stop marching around like that! We’ve discussed everything we have to discuss. Go to your room and wait for your mother to come back. I promise, she won’t have to work for Ahrens any more after next week.

  She stopped. ‘Private detective?’

  ‘Me? Yes, you know that.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘How much what?’

  ‘How much you cost?’

  ‘How much do I cost …?’ What was all this? You couldn’t say Leila had no talent for dragging things out at length.

  ‘Yes … How much the day? You look for my mother. I can pay.’

  As I was still wondering whether I really had to take this pocket-money fantasy seriously, doors slammed somewhere. I turned to the window. The first thing that occurred to me was Leila’s warning about not trying to ‘steal’ the windows; in this instance it meant I was slow to hear cars coming. The black Mercedes was right in front of the hostel entrance. At the same moment I lost any hope that it could be a doctor sent by Ahrens, or someone else parking his car as if God had created that vehicle on the first day and then created everything else for it to park in. The two figures moving weightily from the Mercedes to the door and nodding at each other, as if anticipating something particularly tasty to eat, were my two charmers from Berlin: the knee expert and his mate who was so proud of the number of people he’d done in.

  I
leaped back from the window, grabbed Leila’s arm and pulled her to the door in a single fluid movement. ‘Get out of here at once!’ I hissed at her. ‘There are some guys coming who …’

  ‘Can’t stay.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can’t stay here. Gregor know we …’ she flapped her hand back and forth between us. ‘He know we talked. I …’ and her hand fluttered in the direction of the ceiling. ‘He kill me.’

  ‘Now listen, Leila …’

  ‘No now listen! You look for my mother! With me! You private detective! I can pay!’

  For a moment we stared at each other as furiously as if, for two pins, we’d have got in ahead of Knee Expert and his corpse-counting friend, who were presumably here to silence us as far as possible, by doing ourselves in instead. Then I heard those long, confident everybody-listen strides that Berliners have coming down the corridor, pulled Leila away from the door and signed to her to keep quiet.

  When the steps moved on I whispered, ‘OK, I’ll take you with me – for now, anyway. We’ll go out to my car, very calmly. We won’t run, and we …’

  ‘My money! I can pay!’

  ‘Oh, God, I’ve heard you say you can pay quite often enough!’ I snapped, hoping to make a few things painfully clear when I added, ‘But you can’t pay me! Forget it! I cost more than a few lollipops or collectable stickers!’

  ‘Collectable? Stickers …?’

  There was a rather foolish pause. Of course, I could have said to myself, from her broken German, that she didn’t know what collectable stickers were. But something in her eyes told me that at least she could guess the probable nature of collectable stickers, and her astonishment was solely to do with the likely fact that while a girl her age might collect all sorts of things, stickers were not among them.

  ‘I …’ she said, pointing at her chest, ‘can …’ she added, aware that she was repeating herself and enjoying it, ‘.pay! I have money. Much money! And I.’ here she pointed to her chest again, and I was beginning to feel as if I were standing in a corner with the Albanian or some Mediterranean gangster boss, ‘… want you find my mother.’

  The boss was waiting for a nod, so I nodded. ‘OK,’ I sighed. ‘Where’s the money?’

  ‘In my room. I get it. Videos too.’

  ‘Videos?’

  ‘So you know what my mother look like,’ she explained impatiently. ‘You private detective or …’

  Or what? I thought I heard a half-swallowed A and R, and perhaps even the hiss of an S. Before long I’d be entirely in agreement with Gregor’s way of dealing with this girl.

  ‘Hurry up, then! I’ll wait exactly five minutes and then I’m going whether you’re back or not!’

  ‘What you mean, whether back or not?’ she asked, her hands fluttering back and forth as usual. ‘I talking to Schmidtbauer about my mother! Then you break into office, make trouble with Gregor. Now you say: whether back or not! Am I stupid fucking sow or what?’

  Fucking sow.? For God’s sake, who taught them German around here? I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just put up with the look she gave me as she left the room: you got me into this, you can get me out again or you’ll be sorry – and then, finally, she was outside.

  I lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke. My new client. We’d see if she was going to let me help her with the investigations now and then.

  Next moment what I’d been fearing for some time happened. Doors began slamming, footsteps echoed down the corridor, I heard shouting. ‘Can’t be far away!’ ‘I’ll do that bastard!’ ‘Hey, Krap, here we come!’

  And they were indeed coming right towards me. I couldn’t get out into the corridor now, and there was no other way I could leave the visitors’ room. Or no quiet and reasonably elegant way. After I had briefly and unsuccessfully tried wrenching one of the chairs from its angle-irons to throw it through the window, and myself after it, I jettisoned the chair idea. The window sill was about a metre from the muddy forecourt of the hostel. I put my jacket over my head, with ends of its sleeves covering my hands, listened once more for a moment to the steps that were still approaching, took a run and jumped through the glass, one shoulder hitting it first.

  About three seconds, an enormous crashing and clattering, and one belly-flop landing later I raised my face from the mud, heard a shout of, ‘Hey, there he goes!’ in the building, and worked my way round on my front to shelter behind the boot of the Mercedes.

  ‘Look at that, then!’

  ‘Krap’s James Bond, who’d’ve guessed?’

  ‘James Bond don’t leave no tracks like a baby crawling. Hey, Krap! Don’t get our car all dirty!’

  ‘Come on out, let’s talk sensibly!’

  I peered round one tyre and saw the two of them looking my way through the empty window frame, which was rimmed with jagged shards of glass. Their right hands, and what they were holding in them, stayed below the level of the sill.

  I had to find out if a peaceful settlement was at all possible. Perhaps Ahrens really had sent them with instructions to negotiate or to bribe me. Perhaps he was finally getting sick and tired of shoot-outs. So I took off my muddy jacket, now spiked with splintered glass, and held it briefly out from behind the tyre. A peaceful settlement was not possible. Next moment what had recently been a garment on my back was a pile of rags riddled with holes lying in front of me in the mud, graphic evidence of what our lads understood by ‘talking sensibly’.

  I turned my head and saw what I already knew: I couldn’t get away from the shelter of the car. They could see the whole forecourt from the window, there was no cover except for the Mercedes, and after my panic-stricken burst of fire at Gregor’s legs I had no ammunition left to shoot back with. Although they didn’t know that yet, and they obviously hesitated to harm the gleaming, brand-new metal of their vehicle

  I crawled round to the side of the car facing away from their window, and saw that the driver’s door was half open. They’d been in such a hurry and they liked to put on such airs that I hoped the key might be in the ignition. As I crawled on I called, ‘I thought you wanted to talk? Doesn’t look like talking to me! Apart from the fact that that was my favourite jacket – and always assuming you know what a jacket is.’

  ‘Oh wow, man, is Krap ever witty!’

  I reached the open driver’s door and saw the picture of the Croatian president welded into a key tag hanging from the driving column.

  The car was about three metres from the entrance to the hostel. The swing door and thus the corridor beyond it looked to me a little wider than the bonnet of the car.

  ‘Seemed like it was just some old rag!’

  There were barely ten metres between the visitors’ room and the swing door. That would take them three or four seconds, less if they ran. Or they might jump out of the window – in which case all I could do was throw mud at them.

  ‘Hey, lads, what next?’

  ‘I said we talk sensibly, OK?’

  ‘What about?’ I peered cautiously across the driver’s seat. The car was an automatic. ‘About what’s next.’

  I thought I heard a suppressed splutter of laughter. They thought themselves such a superior force, and indeed they were. If I’d suddenly begun weeping or praying, they’d only have seen it as further confirmation of their superiority. That was my chance.

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘Sure we do.’

  ‘I’d like to talk sensibly to Ahrens.’

  ‘Ahrens? Why not? We can drive you there.’

  That suppressed splutter again.

  ‘But we have to agree on something first.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What?’

  ‘Everything’s nice and peaceful from now on.’

  ‘Why, sure. Word of honour.’

  ‘OK … then I suggest we meet here outside the entrance, unarmed.’

  A pause, one of them cleared his throat, then my partner in the negotiations spoke up again. ‘Why not just come out from behind the
car? Like we said, it’ll all be peaceful now.’

  ‘Well, let’s say as evidence of your goodwill. Down here we’ll be on the same level, and I can see if you’ve really put your pistols away.’ I stopped for a moment, and then went on in an increasingly defensive tone, making it sound as if I was making a great effort to stay cool. ‘I mean, boys, believe me, I’m sick to the teeth with all this violence! Normally I just go looking for dogs and husbands and so on. Honest, I’d like to be well out of this. So what I think is, it’d be best for us to look each other in the face here, and then sit down around a table with Ahrens like grown-ups and discuss the rest of it. I could have one or two other things to tell you that I’m sure would interest Ahrens. About the Albanian and what the police are planning. We Turks have a proverb: if you soil a stranger’s carpet, you must shear your own sheep for him. Understand?’

  ‘Sure. Sounds real good. How about your gun?’

  ‘But I said I want to negotiate.’

  ‘Sure, shear your carpet and all that, but.’

  ‘If you agree to my proposition, I’ll throw my pistol down outside the front door – call it the first step in negotiations. Then I could only run away from you. How’s that for an offer?’

  ‘Not bad! Go on, then!’

  There was such outrageous amusement in his voice that it wasn’t hard to imagine them splitting their sides with laughter. Just so long as they didn’t jump out of the window …

  ‘OK!’ I raised my hand with the pistol in it above the roof of the car, and still it wasn’t shot away at once. ‘I trust you!’

  ‘Sure thing, Krap! Trust means a whole lot!’

  I straightened up, levelling the empty pistol, and we looked into each other’s eyes across the car and a few metres of muddy forecourt. They were both making the grim faces of people who are trying not to fall about laughing at a funeral.

  I pointed my pistol at the swing door and smiled with restraint. ‘See you, then. Nice and peaceful, right?’

  They nodded, and their eyes looked down at me, sparkling with anticipation of a wonderful bloodbath. If only they came to the door …