Brother Kemal

by Jakob Arjouni

  ‘Well, maybe your job doesn’t allow you much experience with people whose approach to life doesn’t conform to the usual standards.’

  ‘Could be, Frau de Chavannes. But I’ve met a few fathers who flew off the handle because their adolescent daughters started going around with other men. Among people whose approach to life does conform to the usual standards, that kind of thing is called jealousy.’

  We looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and maybe she wanted to hit me.

  Finally she looked away and said, ‘Right, fine, Herr Kayankaya, obviously you’re very articulate, and that’s just as well. But it’s not really relevant at the moment. Will you get Marieke out of this without letting her know who asked you to do it?’

  ‘I’ll try. As I said, your daughter has a right to hang out with Abakay. I can’t simply carry her off.’

  ‘But you strike me as a man with imagination. Think up some kind of pretext. Lure Abakay out of town or …’

  ‘Beat him up, yes, I know. But that won’t get us anywhere, Frau de Chavannes. And thanks for the bit about the man with imagination. Pay me a day’s fee in advance, and I’ll see what I can do.’

  I took one of my standard contracts out of my jacket pocket and handed it to her across the glass-topped table. Four hundred euros a day plus expenses, two days’ fee as a bonus for success. Normally my daily fee was two hundred and fifty euros a day, but normally my clients don’t live in Zeppelinallee. In fact I wasn’t all that bothered about the money. I’d had plenty of work recently, and Deborah’s wine bar was doing well and becoming a must-visit place in Frankfurt. But as with most relatively cultivated rich people – and I had automatically put the daughter of a French banker and vintner and wife of a highly regarded Dutch artist into that category – it was like this: they pleased themselves and others by supposing that special quality called for a special price, that you had to consider value for money rather than the price itself, that price plus wear and tear of cheap stuff ultimately costs you more than expensive stuff, and so on. It wouldn’t even occur to someone with that much money that such an attitude is itself cheap, because attitudes don’t cost anything. At any rate, I didn’t want to stir up any more doubts in Valerie de Chavannes’s mind as to whether she was putting herself into the right hands now that she had swallowed my office address in Gutleutstrasse. I was all the more surprised when she looked up from the document, frowning, and said, ‘Four hundred euros a day? Your website said fee by arrangement.’

  ‘If a case seems particularly difficult. In your case I’ll stick to my usual conditions.’

  ‘Four hundred euros a day – good heavens.’

  She really did seem to be concerned about the amount. It made me feel uncomfortable. On the other hand … I took a look around the living room.

  ‘Do the furnishings belong to your parents as well?’

  ‘Most of them, yes.’

  It brought me up short. ‘And the paintings?’

  They were almost all large-format, modern-looking arrangements of blocks of colour, oil on canvas, in heavy, gilded, antique-style frames. Sometimes cubes of assorted colours, sometimes blobs or stripes, a rainbow of merging colours, a red square in a yellow square in a green square, and so on, a purple blotch like a storm cloud. When I looked more closely for the first time, I realised that they could hardly be by the artist who had painted The Blind Men of Babylon.

  ‘Edgar would tell you that those aren’t paintings, they’re interior decoration.’

  ‘Pretty.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  We looked at each other, and no one had to say so, but it was clear that her parents were forcing her and her artist husband to leave the pictures hanging on the walls. Maybe they came from the same firm that had furnished the waiting room, the conference room and the lavatory of the Frankfurt branch of Magnon & Koch. Perhaps her parents wanted to tell their son-in-law, as if shouting it through a megaphone, what kind of paintings did not ‘stop selling so well’ at some point in time. Or perhaps they just wanted to inflict a little torture on their tattooed daughter who had left home at sixteen.

  So Valerie de Chavannes was living in furnished accommodation, and four hundred euros was not just chicken feed to her.

  ‘As I assume that I can do the job in a day or so without too much expense, I can offer to halve the bonus for success.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and it came from the heart.

  She signed the contract, and while she went out to fetch the four hundred euros I put my jacket on and went over to an A4-sized drawing that was fixed to the wall with a drawing pin between two large paintings, a two-by-two-metres rainbow and a three-metres-long row of red and green horizontal stripes. A quick, smudged pencil sketch showing a man with an Afro hairstyle and his mouth wide open, kneeling on the floor between two huge pictures of a rainbow and some horizontal stripes with a mound of vomit that reached to his chest and threatened to smother him.

  When Valerie de Chavannes came back she saw me standing in front of the picture.

  ‘This one is funny,’ I said, and I meant it.

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘it isn’t. Here you are.’ She came towards me and gave me four hundred-euro notes. ‘I’ll be at home all day. Please call me as soon as you have any news about Marieke.’

  At her daughter’s name the strength suddenly drained out of her. She was breathing heavily, her chin began to quiver and she pressed her lips together.

  ‘Please bring me my daughter back! And forget about halving the bonus, that’s so stupid, it was only …’ She fought off her tears. ‘We really don’t have a lot of money right now, and it was only out of a horrible habit that I thought of it, of course I’ll pay anything you like, just get Marieke back for me.’

  She came a step closer to me, wringing her hands in front of her stomach and looking pleadingly at me. It was just about impossible not to put my arms round her. Her head fell on my shoulder, she gave way to tears and her trembling body pressed close to mine. She had taken off the cardigan when she went to find the money, and I was holding her bare muscular arms. The sleeves of her T-shirt slipped up, and my fingertips touched her damp armpits. When I began to feel her breasts through my lightweight corduroy jacket, it was time to leave.

  I carefully pushed her away from me. Her face was wet with tears.

  ‘Don’t worry, Frau de Chavannes. I’ll find Marieke for you. That’s a promise.’

  She looked at me despairingly. ‘If he does anything to her …’

  ‘He won’t.’ The things we say. I pointed to the glass-topped table with the photographs. ‘Your daughter is a strong, self-confident young woman. And girls her age do gad about. I’m sure the two of them are doing nothing but sitting in a café and talking about underground photography or our antisocial society. Maybe they’ll go into the park and smoke a bit of weed now and then. She’ll be back this evening, and you can lecture her about the extremely proper things you did at sixteen. I assume there’ll be a lot about skipping ropes, poetry albums and classical piano music …’

  She had to smile a little.

  ‘See you this evening, Frau de Chavannes. And no, don’t stay at home. Go for a walk, or shopping, or to the gym – move about, do something to take your mind off it. But don’t forget to take your mobile. I’ll call you, okay?’

  She nodded, sniffing, and then she said, ‘So that’s your picture of me, is it? Shopping and the gym, hmm?’

  I looked at her for a moment. ‘Don’t worry about how I see you. Everything is fine there.’

  We shook hands, and the next moment I was in the hall. I wiped the sweat from my brow with my sleeve.

  The gentleman’s racing bike that must have cost five or six thousand euros was leaning against the wall. I’d come to know a few things about bikes since I gave up smoking four years ago. Every time I felt a craving for nicotine that I could hardly withstand I got on my bike and fought the just-half-a-cigarette devil by riding uphill and downhill between Bad Sod
en and Bad Nauheim, whatever the time of day or night.

  Perhaps the racing bike came from financially better times. Or it was one of the things that were meant to give Edgar Hasselbaink the idea that Frankfurt could be fun, and the family scrimped and saved to afford it. Or Valerie de Chavannes, a credit to her financial wizard of a father, had put on a performance for me aiming, just on principle, to lower costs in any situation, however inappropriate.

  Just before I reached the hefty, iron-clad front door, a forbidding sight from both outside and inside, the housekeeper came up the cellar steps with a basket of laundry under her arm.

  She stopped in surprise. ‘You’re still here?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks for the tea. Next time I’d like to try your fish soup, on the reverse principle …’

  She gave me a puzzled look.

  ‘Just one question: how long have you been working for the de Chavannes family?’

  She didn’t like my asking, and if I was not much mistaken she didn’t like me either.

  ‘Over twenty years. Why?’

  ‘Only wondering, sheer curiosity. Goodbye, then. Have a nice day.’

  She murmured something that I couldn’t make out. Was she going to report my visit to Georges and Bernadette de Chavannes? There was another of them here today …

  When the door latched behind me, I stood in the front garden for a moment breathing in the clear autumn air. Apart from an elderly couple slowly approaching down the pavement, Zeppelinallee was deserted. Not a car driving along, no noisy children, no clinking of crockery, no lawn mowers. You heard the sounds of the city very quietly, as if from far away, although you were almost in its centre.

  Both the man and the woman wore Hunter green felt hats, the woman had a fur round her neck, the man carried a walking stick with a gleaming golden knob shaped like an animal’s head. The click-clack of the walking stick sounded through the silence of the diplomatic quarter.

  Let’s try it, I thought, and waved to the couple, smiling. ‘Good morning!’

  As they went on they looked at me as if I were a talking tree or something, and as if talking trees and indeed anything like them were extremely crude.

  I took my bicycle, pushed it out of the front garden and rode away in the direction of the Bockenheimer Landstrasse. As I passed the elderly couple I called out, ‘You poorly educated pigs!’ And once again they looked, without moving a muscle. A talking tree on a bicycle – what on earth is the world coming to?

  I pushed down on the pedals, with the mild October sun in my face, convinced that I had an easy, pleasant job ahead of me. At least, so long as I kept my distance from my client. Valerie de Chavannes was an attractive woman, no denying it, and if I was not much mistaken she wouldn’t turn down a little comforting if it was offered in the right way. But there were plenty of attractive women around. I was living with one of them. And anyway, Valerie de Chavannes’s I-only-ever-think-of-one-thing look struck me as coinciding exactly with the range of possible feelings about her – and who wanted the hell bit at my age? I was in my early fifties, I did my work, I paid my bills, I had made my way. I’d managed to stop smoking, all I drank were two or three beers in the evening or my share of a couple of bottles of wine with friends, and Deborah and I were planning our future. This morning I had stepped out of my front door generally pleased with life, and I had mounted my bike with an apple in my hand. Not quite heaven, maybe, but not so far from it.

  And then I went and did it all the same. I held the fingertips that had just touched Valerie de Chavannes’s armpits close to my nose, and caught a faintly lavender-scented smell of sweat, and for a moment I felt as if the October sun were burning down on my head like its sister in August.

  Chapter 2

  My office was on the second floor of a run-down sixties apartment building – or perhaps it had never run very far up – at the beginning of Gutleutstrasse near Frankfurt Central Station. Pinkish brown plaster was crumbling away from the façade, the bare brick wall showed through in many places, a number of windows had sheets hung over them, others had furniture blocking them, chains of Christmas lights winked on and off all year round on the third floor and on the fourth floor a Frankfurt Hooligan decal covered one pane. On the ground floor there was a second-hand clothes shop where you could buy used moon boots, polyester shirts and cracked leather belts. My friend Slibulsky called it the Third Armpit, on account of the smell that wafted out of the shop when the door was open. The front door at the entrance to the building had once been ribbed glass, until a drunk kicked it in three years ago and the owner had replaced the glass with a wooden board.

  The stairwell, which was painted greyish yellow, smelled of cats and cleaning fluid. If you found the half-broken-off light switch and pressed it, a candle-shaped naked energy-saving bulb gave just enough dim light to show you the stairs. Some joker kept smearing some kind of sticky substance on the banisters: jam, honey, UHU glue. I was sure the perpetrator was the twelve-year-old son of a single father on the fourth floor, but I couldn’t prove it. I once cornered him on the subject, and his answer had been, ‘Something sticky? Are you sure it was on the bannisters? Did you wash your hands first?’ Little bastard.

  A Croatian Mafia, trying to keep me from investigating their shady business, had blown up my previous office thirteen years before. The two-room apartment in Gutleutstrasse had been a quick, cheap, and – I thought at the time – temporary substitute. My fears that, with such an address, and the state of the building, the only clients I’d get would be people with a list of previous convictions or bad drug problems proved to be exaggerated. It’s true that with the passing trade that made its way up the gloomy stairs to the second floor merely because of the nameplate saying Kemal Kayankaya – Investigations and Personal Protection, I could hardly have earned the rent in those first years. But I had a pretty good reputation as a detective in the city, the word-of-mouth publicity worked well, and business was good. My wish for a classier office space faded. I got used to the area, the chestnut tree outside the window and the little Café Rosig on the corner, until the success of the Internet and computer technology made the location of my office superfluous. My clients got in touch by email or phone, my paper files would fit into a shoe box and I held business meetings in the Café Rosig. I could have given my private apartment as my business address. But then Deborah found an apartment in the West End district of the city – four rooms, kitchen and bathroom – and asked if I’d like to move in with her. We’d been at first an occasional, then more and more of an established, couple for more than six years, and I was happy to accept the offer. That meant I needed an office away from my home. If anyone else had designs on me with explosives or anything else, I didn’t want Deborah to be affected.

  Since my website had gone online, exactly two people had come to Gutleutstrasse unannounced: a woman neighbour who wanted me to get her brother to confess over an inheritance dispute – ‘He’s a cowardly, soft little worm, you’d only have to squeeze him a bit’, and a sad man who had fallen for an anonymous girl in a porn film and wanted me to find her for him. When I explained how much such a search could cost him, and how high my advance was, he went away even sadder than before.

  So on the morning when I came back from Valerie de Chavannes’s house to my office, I hardly took any notice of the woman leaning against a sunny bit of the wall, talking busily on an iPhone. She wore a blue, expensive-looking trouser suit, and had a short, modern hairstyle. In front of her stood a large leather handbag crammed with papers. An estate agent, I thought. There were constant rumours that the building was being sold to make way for another hotel or parking garage near the station.

  I had just put my key into the front door lock and was about to shoulder my bike when I heard her calling behind me. ‘Excuse me …! Herr Kayankaya …?’

  I lowered the bike and turned round. ‘Yes?’

  She came towards me smiling, on high heels and with her full and obviously heavy handbag in one hand and her iPhone in t
he other. She had a broad, friendly face, and the closer she came the more clear it became how tall she was. She was almost a head taller than me; she’d still be half that extra height without her shoes on, and I’m not a short man. I liked to see such a tall woman wearing high heels – she obviously wasn’t setting out to do the short people of the world any favours. She let her bag drop to the ground, threw the iPhone into it and held out her hand to me. Her hand was large, too.

  ‘Katja Lipschitz, chief press officer of Maier Verlag.’

  ‘Kemal Kayankaya, but you know that already.’

  ‘I know you from a photo on the Internet, that’s how I recognised you. The man who saved Gregory …’

  She was smiling again, perhaps a little too professionally, and there was a look of speculation behind the smile. Did the name Gregory shake me? Gregory’s real name was Gregor Dachstein, and years ago he had won a Big Brother TV show, followed by a CD of songs like ‘Here comes Santa with his prick, chasing every pretty chick’ and ‘She’s an old Cu-Cu-Custard Pie Baker.’ Since then he’d played the clubs in the discothèque world between Little You-Know-Who and Nether Whatsit. Gregory’s manager had hired me as his bodyguard for an appearance at the Hell discothèque in Dietzenbach, and the outcome was that I had to take Gregory to Accident and Emergency in Offenbach at four in the morning with about thirty vodka Red Bulls inside him. A yellow press reporter was waiting there with a camera, and for some time after I asked myself whether the manager had arranged with the reporter to be there before the concert, and had organised his protégé’s consumption of Red Bull accordingly, or whether the idea of offering a tabloid an exclusive story had occurred to him only when Gregory collapsed onstage. Anyway, two days later a photograph of me with Gregory and my jacket covered with his vomit was published, with a caption saying: Poison attack? Gregory in the arms of his bodyguard on the way to hospital. It was an appearance I could have done without.