Brother Kemal

by Jakob Arjouni

‘Okay, Kemal.’

  ‘But if you’d rather believe Abakay! Why, for God’s sake, would I cut his chest to pieces?’

  ‘Well, for instance if you wanted it to look as if there’s been a fight between Rönnthaler and Abakay.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘I told you before: because you wanted to protect a suspect.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. When I entered the apartment Abakay already had his injuries, and all I did was tie him up and gag him.’

  ‘And kick him brutally in the balls?’

  ‘What else? Did I by any chance wreck his childhood too?’

  ‘I’m only preparing you for what Abakay will accuse you of. So do I tell my colleagues that we have the man who handed Abakay over to us?’

  ‘You have the witness, Octavian! You have the man who can prove that Abakay is a violent pimp who pumps underage girls full of heroin and sends them out on the streets.’

  ‘Without giving the name of your client and her daughter?’

  ‘At least I’ll try to keep them both out of it as long as possible.’

  ‘In case eventually that isn’t possible, you should tell them about Sheikh Hakim. I know a great many people who prefer to save their own skin over the punishment of a criminal.’

  ‘A good comment coming from a policeman.’

  Octavian sighed. ‘Oh, fuck you, Kemal. I’ll be in touch.’ And he ended the call.

  I held the receiver for a while longer, and wondered if I had behaved particularly cleverly just now. In order to be able get myself out of this if the need arose, it was time to find Rönnthaler’s murderer. So far I had no idea of his identity.

  Then I searched the Internet for Sheikh Hakim.

  I found out nothing new. Crazy character, as Octavian had said. Although I found any degree of religious conviction crazy. Or as Slibulsky, who ran a chain of ice cream parlours and had recently shacked up with a woman twenty years younger than he was, and who was inspired equally by both Jesus and the Kabbala, put it, ‘It’s as if she goes into a shop made of thin air, orders seven scoops of vanilla ice cream, also consisting of thin air – seven because it’s a lucky number – and smiles at the ice cream salesman who explains grimly that she’ll get the scoops of ice cream later, when her pretty body has rotted in the ground. But the five euros she pays for the ice cream and the salesman’s wallet into which they go are not just thin air.’

  You couldn’t tell from the Internet sites whether Hakim was really as dangerous as Octavian had claimed. In photos the sheikh looked like an old man who bought his clothes in the secondhand shop on the ground floor of my office building, and spent a lot of time standing around in the street smoking with other old men. As far as I could tell from what I read, his views were nothing unusual for someone from his background. In an interview with the online newspaper Euro Islam he was asked all kinds of questions about everything under the sun, and he shared his thoughts on terrorism, suicide bombings, the Holy War, Islamism and so on with the usual, ‘Terrible, but …’ You had to look at the circumstances, said Sheikh Hakim, the historical background, the decades during which the West supported criminal despots, the sense of humiliation now turning into rage, particularly among the young, and of course Israel. In most studies of the Middle East, Israel was responsible for just about everything.

  I had once suggested to Deborah, while we were watching a news item on the subject, that we could create our own Israel of sorts. We had quarrelled that afternoon. It began with the chaotic state of the apartment, or one of her girlfriends who got on my nerves, or Deborah’s passion for work – even at the time I couldn’t remember which – and ended as so often with ‘antisocial Kayankaya’ and ‘ambitious Deborah who always has to show everyone what she can do’ (i.e. that she had made it from Henningbostel and Mister Happy to the West End and Deborah’s Natural Wine Bar, and would go much further yet). Anyway, I said, ‘Now, if we had an Israel, when we felt a quarrel coming on we could always say: Hey, that damn Israel, that’s why I never got around to tidying the place up. Or: It’s only because of the bad influence of Israel that your friend Alexa is such a hysterical know-it-all. And even if we were simply tired, or the milk boiled over – it would be great to always have something to blame, and we’d see only each other’s advantages and good points.’

  Deborah looked at me as if I had something wrong with my upper storey.

  ‘You might as well just say the Jews, only I suppose you don’t dare.’

  ‘I would dare, because it’s a joke, darling. See what I mean? Not meant seriously. I was poking fun at the non-Jewish middle easterners. Only these days no one says it’s the Jews’ fault anymore. No anti-Semite in the world would say that now. He’d say: It’s Israel’s fault. So considering the technique of good jokes – if you believe, like me, that a joke is spicier the closer it comes to the truth – then in that case …’

  ‘But I don’t think that’s at all funny.’

  ‘Well, imagine we’re watching news from the Middle East, and I said: Hey, how about we get ourselves a Jew, then we’ll have someone to blame next time the milk boils over? You’d have thought that much less funny.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s our day.’

  Hmm, I thought, but if only we had an Israel …

  ‘You know perfectly well that my granny …’

  ‘Good heavens, what’s she got to do with it?’

  Deborah’s granny – the real Deborah – had very probably been Jewish. Her grandfather had found her in 1945, starving, sick and ragged in the woods near Henningbostel, took her home with him, nursed her back to health and finally married her. She had never said anything about her origins or what had happened to her before 1945, but she had dropped a few hints, and there were certain questions that met with either an eloquent silence or a surprisingly harsh retort. When Deborah first told me about her granny ten years ago, I’d still been sceptical. What German girl, I thought, didn’t have a Jewish granny these days? But then, in photographs of her, I saw a pale dark-haired beauty who wasn’t typical of the North German countryside. It was from her that my Deborah had inherited her thick eyebrows, dark ringlets and full lips.

  ‘Well, for me it does have something to do with it. I like jokes, but not on that subject, however funny they might be – and I said might be, get it? There’s always something about them, you’re supposed to think, Oh, how original, a forbidden subject but all the same, anyway. And they’re not casual and effortless. And I think the more casual a joke, the funnier it is. For me, spiciness belongs in the soup. What’s more – do I know how you really tick, deep down inside? Have we ever talked about that? You always say: Religion, no thanks – but I suppose your parents were Muslims, and you lived with your father until you were four, there must be some of that left …’

  Oops! For a moment I must have looked taken aback. Having grown up in Frankfurt, never set foot in a mosque, never belonged to a union or a political party, never believed in anything but my own abilities, private detective, drinker, Mönchengladbach fan, and now, at the age of fifty-three, I hear the woman I’ve been having a relationship with for the last ten years come out with a remark like I suppose your parents were Muslims, all on account of my origins and a joke that she didn’t understand.

  My mother died in Turkey when I was born and my father took me with him to Germany, where he was run over by a post van four years later. I was put in a home, and two months later adopted by the Holzheims, a schoolmaster and a nursery school teacher. I have a few memories of my birth father. Mostly of the two of us sitting in a café, where he smoked and I drank apple juice. He treated me like an adult, not a small child. A lot of what he said I didn’t understand, but I did realise that he respected me and wanted to be my best friend. Not my teacher. One thing he told me was: I can only teach you how to eat with a knife and fork, and you can teach me to know again whether the food really tastes good or just looks as if it does. That was the general gist of it anyway. My father spoke Turkish wi
th me, a language that I soon forgot while living with the Holzheims. If my father had any religious feelings then they were about me. There were diary entries he had written that I later had translated, describing me as his ‘great little miracle.’ If Deborah was sensitive about her granny, then I was at least as sensitive about my father. It got on my nerves that she classed him with the Muslims you saw on the TV news who hated all Jews.

  ‘Well, now that you mention it … I’ve been thinking of asking if you can imagine wearing … well, not a veil all over your face, but up to your nose so that no man can see your wickedly tempting lips …’

  And it might keep your mouth shut now and then.

  Deborah looked at me, and then she suddenly said, in quite a friendly tone, ‘Oh, come on, let’s have a drink!’ and went to the kitchen to get a bottle of wine. Alcohol standing in for the UN blue helmets. But after that we didn’t quite trust ourselves to broach the subject again.

  Sheikh Hakim’s answer in his interview to the question of how, as an imam, he felt about alcohol and drugs was interesting: ‘Well, that isn’t really my field. But of course I know that all parts of the world have developed methods of relaxing after work at the end of the day. In South America they chew coca leaves, in Europe and my native land of Turkey they drink alcohol – but why are the means of relaxation used in other parts of the world criminalised here? First and foremost of course hashish, a relatively harmless herb. But smoking opium is a normal way to relax in many places. As a practising Muslim I do not drink alcohol or take any other drugs, but I am not blind. Alcoholism in Europe – just look at Russia – and the USA is an enormous problem. But have you ever heard of smoking hashish in the countries of North Africa or Asia leading to high mortality, a drop in the birth rate, and the devastation of large sections of the population? Do you know what I think? I think it’s in the interests of the producers of alcohol not to allow any other legal alternative on the market, and as alcohol is mainly produced in the West one must, in my opinion, describe this state of affairs as extremely imperialistic.’

  At least, it was interesting if Sheikh Hakim really was in the heroin trade. What a cheeky son of a bitch.

  However, maybe Octavian and the police were wrong, and Hakim went to the expense of bodyguards and CCTV cameras just to impress his disciples. Anyway, the Internet didn’t seem to show that he was in any particular danger. On the contrary: Hakim appeared to be a rather conservative preacher, and not a genuinely deranged one. I could hardly imagine that he would protect a nephew gone bad who sent underage girls out on the streets. But then again: virgins, they had something with virgins, right? And unbelieving virgins – what about them? Could they be sent out on the streets maybe, as many of them as you liked? Maybe they even ought to be sent out on the streets? That was often the difficulty with religious people: ninety-nine per cent of the time religious people behaved relatively normally, but madness might lurk in the remaining one per cent. I don’t mean like the pope, for instance, appearing in his pink paedo-slippers before the world, overpopulated as it is, to condemn condoms – the madness in that was out in the open. But take Hakim: decades of Western support for criminal despots, fair enough; feelings of humiliation now turning to rage, okay; legalise hashish, why not? But would he go so far as: maybe unbelieving virgins are the last scum of the earth for a righteous God!

  I wondered how much of the news to pass on to Valerie de Chavannes. I had to warn her about Sheikh Hakim. And I had to warn her about the police. In both cases, moreover, I had to do so in my own interest. Unfortunately, Octavian was right: a mother who hires a private detective to free her daughter from the clutches of a dubious character, and then the dubious character accuses the private detective of first killing his friend who happened to be there and then beating him up – well, it didn’t look good.

  It’s not out of the question that some colleague of mine might hit on the idea that you agreed to do some dirty work for the girl’s parents.

  And Valerie de Chavannes herself, three days earlier: I’m wondering how far you would go …? For payment corresponding to the job, of course.

  I couldn’t really count on her to maintain a persistent and convincing lie to the effect that she had never made the offer. Far from it. I was convinced that interrogation of any length by the police, or a nastier interrogation by Hakim’s men, and she would throw them the morsel they wanted to get herself out of it as unscathed as possible. ‘Okay, we did talk about it. Abakay … well, you know him. But of course I didn’t mean it seriously. It was just a kind of fantasy, a game. But maybe Herr Kayankaya … I hardly know him, but he was very committed, and I think he also liked me a lot …’

  Yes, I could probably count more on something of that nature.

  So I had to convince Valerie de Chavannes to deny any connection whatsoever with me to whoever might ask, and do it without frightening her. I didn’t want her turning in panic to the police. And I wanted to leave her believing that the evidence against Abakay was still rock-solid. No excitement, everything was going just fine, Kayankaya held the reins firmly in hand.

  I tapped Valerie de Chavannes’s number into my phone. As it rang, I caught myself thinking of her slender feet in those silver sandals.

  ‘De Chavannes.’

  ‘Hello, Kayankaya here. Everything okay with you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but nothing has happened, if that’s what you mean.’

  Her tone was cool – as cool as a tone could be without sounding openly hostile. Did she bear me a grudge for giving her the brush-off when she wanted to hire me to commit murder? Or was it simply the usual de Chavannes tone? I remembered that she’d sounded like that at the start, when we first met.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I meant. How is Marieke?’

  ‘I don’t know. She seems really upset, as if she were in shock. She won’t talk to me. Sits in her room all day listening to Jack Johnson.’

  ‘Well, that would upset me as well.’

  When Hanna did odd jobs for Deborah in the wine bar she always brought Jack Johnson music with her. She thought it was the sort of music that was also bound to appeal to adults who drink red wine.

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘I’m trying. I had the feeling that Marieke is a strong character, the sort who doesn’t go under so easily.’

  ‘And she doesn’t. But if she does then she really goes under.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘But that’s not why you called.’

  ‘No. I wanted to tell you that the police – that is, well, the officer responsible for the Abakay case – has named me as a witness in his records, although I got him to promise to keep my name out of it. Well, he knows me and he doesn’t particularly like me, so he took his opportunity to do me a bad turn.’

  ‘Why would he do you a bad turn that way?’

  ‘Because, of course, sooner or later the question of who I was working for will come up. The court will want to know what I was doing in Abakay’s apartment, and Abakay’s lawyers will do their best to make me look like an unreliable witness – they’ll say my client paid me to smear Abakay’s reputation, and so I thought something up. Well, not many clients want to be named in a criminal case – I assume you’re not among the few exceptions – and no private detective likes it to be known that he can’t protect his clients’ names. So I’d like to ask you, if anyone comes to see you in connection with Abakay, to deny having any contact with me. If you’ve made a note of my name anywhere, or my business card is lying about the house, get rid of it.’

  ‘You mean someone might break into our house?’ Her tone was still cool. Maybe too cool. As if, after all that had happened, a mere burglary held no terrors for her. Perhaps it really didn’t. All the better.

  ‘No, but a halfway tricky private detective who knows his business could pretend to be someone from the municipality and sniff about your house, or he could invite your housekeeper for a coffee and get her to tell him everything about recent v
isitors. So it would be a good thing if your housekeeper doesn’t come upon my name when she was clearing your wastepaper baskets.’

  ‘I see … okay.’

  She paused, and suddenly it seemed to me as if I were on a different line. I heard her breathing: a heavy, hasty, slightly tremulous struggle for breath. I had never heard anything like it except in people suffering a panic attack or before a very unpleasant and very important encounter. Like de Chavannes always sounded …

  ‘Ought I to worry about Marieke?’

  ‘No more than I suppose you’re worrying anyway, after what happened. Abakay’s lawyers will try to find witnesses to let him off the hook, and if all Marieke and Abakay really talked about was photography and social injustice, then of course she’d be perfect.’

  ‘If,’ repeated Valerie de Chavannes, pausing again. And once again I heard her breathing. But I didn’t think she was breathing so heavily because of our phone call. I had thought, once before, that underneath the various masks worn by Valerie de Chavannes there was nothing but a constant state of fear. The arrogant upper-class cow, angry and scornful, the little woman in need of help, the yearning, melting tattooed minx de Chavannes, and now the Agent 007 Mama preserving a cool head in difficult times and keeping the show on the road – all of them camouflage and attempts to stay largely unscathed. And that had nothing to do with Abakay; it had always been like that, I thought – or, anyway, for a long time.

  ‘You still haven’t told me what exactly the crime was that Abakay committed. Did you mean it about murder, or was that just to scare me?’

  ‘Both. Whether he committed the murder himself isn’t certain, but he’s certainly involved in it. However, that’s nothing to do with Marieke. Abakay is a little street mongrel who will try to pick up a few euros where and when he can. Of course drugs play a part, and probably stolen cars, weapons, forged papers, God knows what. And here we come very close to a capital crime. All the same, he did take those photos on the side, and that’s what linked him to Marieke.’