‘What do you mean, oh yes? I told you Abakay would still be dangerous even in prison!’
‘Well, then you must decide: either you want him in prison or you don’t.’
‘You know exactly where I want him!’
She spoke from the heart, furious, resentful, implying: I told you that you ought to kill him!
‘Take it slowly. We’re talking on the phone, there could be someone listening in. And after all, I’m a witness in a murder case – so don’t say anything that might be misunderstood. Of course I know that you want to see him in prison …’
A pause, more heavy breathing.
I didn’t really think that the police were listening in on me or Valerie de Chavannes, but the thought of a bugged phone – you know exactly where I want him! – made me feel queasy for a moment.
After a while, regaining some measure of control over herself, she said, ‘And now what? What do we do?’
‘Well, Frau de Chavannes, we don’t do anything. Remember? You hired me to bring your daughter home.’
‘Oh, and now you’re wriggling out of it like a coward!’
‘You’re welcome to ask me to take on another job for you – protecting your daughter, or you, or both of you. But I’m convinced that the best and also the cheapest thing I can do for you at the moment is not to show myself near you.’
‘That’s what you said last time!’
‘Because it was true last time. I suggest the following. You tell Marieke’s school that she’ll be absent, sick, for another week, and you stay at home with her. If Methat rings again, or the police, or anyone else, don’t let them persuade you to do anything. No one but you and I know about our connection. Even Marieke knows only a police officer called Magelli. If someone rings the doorbell, don’t open the door, and if that someone doesn’t go away, then call me. If you’re still being pestered in a week’s time, I’ll deal with it.’
Once again she drew a huge breath, as if a sack of plaster lay on her chest, before she cautiously asked, ‘Is that a promise?’
‘It is.’
‘Please, Herr Kayankaya … I really am so frightened, and I’m all on my own …’
‘I said I’ll deal with it. But you have to hold out for that week. I’m sure that at the moment Abakay’s people are just poking about at random. Presumably Abakay has drawn up a list of people to whom he’s done wrong in some way or another, and who he correctly assumes could have hired a private detective to kick his legs from under him. You were probably just one name among many. So again: deny ever having heard of me and I bet that in a couple of days’ time they’ll leave you alone.’
She sighed. ‘My God, Herr Kayankaya, what a mess I’ve got myself into.’ And after a pause, ‘I’m sorry, I’m being a nuisance to you, aren’t I?’
‘Oh, never mind that.’
She stopped for a moment and then laughed quietly, in a familiar way, as if we were friends of many years’ standing and she was glad that I was still the same old roughneck I used to be.
‘May I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you think …’ She hesitated. Or she pretended to be hesitating. Or both. Probably Valerie de Chavannes herself no longer knew what she did unintentionally and what was calculation or a trick. Anyway, her hesitation gave the question the clarity of which she then tried to deprive it – or made out she was trying to deprive it – by adopting a tone as objective as possible and slightly pert, adding a barely perceptible pinch of girlish flirtatiousness. ‘Do you think we’d ever have met without all this?’
This time I was the one to hesitate.
‘Before I answer that question, may I just tell you the name of the friend who will collect my fee from you in the next few days? He’s Ernst Slibulsky. You can open the door to him, please.’
‘Ernst Slibulsky, okay.’
‘Maybe we have in fact met before,’ I went on, pausing again and thinking that I sensed her holding her breath at the other end of the line. It was a shot in the dark, but since our first meeting I couldn’t shake off that thought. Not that I thought we had really got to know each other, but maybe we had been around in the same place at the same time.
‘You left home when you were sixteen, and there aren’t many places in Frankfurt where a young girl who’s run away like that can get by somehow or other. How old are you now?’
She didn’t reply. But probably not because she wanted to conceal her age from me, more likely because she scented danger.
‘Come on – you look as if you are in your mid-thirties, but you’re not. Mid-forties?’
For a moment I thought she’d put down the receiver, but then I heard her breathing.
‘Let’s say around forty. Marieke is sixteen, and you weren’t silly enough to get pregnant too young. In your late twenties, I’d assume, when your wild days were gradually coming to an end. Work it out like that, and about twenty-five years ago you were standing with a travelling bag or a rucksack at the end of Zeppelinallee on the Bockenheimer Warte. Maybe you then spent a few weeks with friends, or on holiday in the south of France or somewhere like that, but in the course of time your friends went back to school and you’d come to the end of your money. Of course you’d sooner have cut off an arm than ask your parents for financial support, or even go back home. Well, at the time I was out and about in the railway station district on both professional and private business –’
She cut the connection. Maybe she thought my assumptions were simply insulting; or alternatively I’d hit the bull’s-eye. You had to have – like Deborah did – a certain kind of North German composure and toughness that comes of living in that bleak, flat countryside to be proud of having survived the sex clubs and striptease bars of the station area. For a banker’s daughter and wife of an artist, a part of her life spent in the best known and (at that time) the deepest gutter in Frankfurt was probably not a subject on which she wanted to dwell.
And suddenly an uncomfortable thought came to me. How old, in fact, was Abakay? Mid-thirties, I assumed, but then it didn’t compute. But at least symbolically he could have conjured up ghosts of Valerie de Chavannes’s past in the station area, if there had been any. And perhaps she hadn’t minded that at first. Now over forty, married with a child, living in a villa, weekends spent at health spas, sushi suppers, Woody Allen films – you liked remembering your own youth, however bizarre it was. But then suppose memory became the present, the pimp comes into your own house, gets to know your sixteen-year-old daughter …
I wanted to get back, quickly, to the wine bar and my unsentimental Jewish Frisian girlfriend. Deborah took life as a learning curve, or rather a learning staircase. Once she was up one step she climbed the next, and she never went back. Why learn something twice? She would have spotted a pimp at first sight, never mind his disguise as a photographer and a man out to improve the world, and would have chased him off with her broom. Valerie de Chavannes’s neediness made me nervous.
‘Oh, there you are. Could you please bring a couple of cartons up from the cellar, twelve bottles of Foulards Rouges in each?’
Deborah was kneeling behind the bar in her short blue denim skirt, checking on the provisions in the fridge. It was just before five, and the wine bar would soon be filling up.
I inspected her bare legs. ‘Are we going to empty one of those bottles ourselves?’
She looked up, shot me a quick glance to see if I was drunk, then smiled her clever, mischievous smile, which said clearly: Listen, you, I’m at work! And she added, for fun, ‘Your place or mine?’
‘Yours, dear heart. You know what my wife is like …’
‘Sure, she’d get on anyone’s nerves. Coming home in the middle of the night, wanting to tell you what her day in the bar was like, dropping off to sleep at once on the sofa or in an armchair, and then she has to be undressed and put to bed. I can tell you, my old man is quite a handful too. He’s been going to bed earlier and earlier since he stopped smoking. And when we want
to cuddle or at least see the nightly news on TV, he’s snoring fit to burst our eardrums.’
I shook my head. ‘What rotten luck. Well, nothing to be done about it. All the same,’ I added, jerking my chin at her legs, ‘nice skirt.’
‘Thanks. Will you pick me up later?’
‘I’ll set the alarm.’
‘And I’ll have a double espresso last thing.’
She winked at me and turned back to the fridge. On my way through the backyard and down a damp flight of brick steps to the cellar, I thought about those ghosts of the past conjured up for me by Valerie de Chavannes. And how seductive such ghosts could be. I wasn’t Deborah, I knew I could go down those steps again at any time, all the way to the very bottom, and then, at the age of fifty-three, start all over again: spirits, cigarettes, sleepless nights, anger, the light on the horizon.
I decided not to keep my promise. I wasn’t going to deal with anything or anyone for Valerie de Chavannes next week, not even if Sheikh Hakim’s entire congregation were to come up Zeppelinallee on their knees. And the danger of being suspected of a contract killing in the true sense of the term? Well, I thought I now knew who had killed Rönnthaler. I didn’t have the evidence yet, but I’d soon find it. And then Valerie de Chavannes could tell the police anything she liked.
I wanted to think not about her but about Deborah and our Christmas holidays. Over Christmas the wine bar would be closed for a full week, and Slibulsky had told me about a good spa hotel in Alsace.
Here we go, I thought, picking up the two cases. Twenty-four bottles of Foulards Rouges, Frida – my favourite wine, and not just mine; it was excellent. I had learnt a lot from Deborah about wine, and other things too. But I also still knew: beer with a chaser of spirits and Whitney Houston on the jukebox could be a lot of fun.
Chapter 10
On Friday I met Malik Rashid and Katja Lipschitz in the midst of a dreary dance of colour. The lounge of the Harmonia Hotel had yellow and pink chessboard pattern carpeting, Rashid was sitting on a lime-green sofa, and Katja Lipschitz in a faded blue wing chair. In front of them stood a table with a black top and a metal frame, and on it were orange half-litre mugs with milky white foam rising from them.
Katja Lipschitz, legs crossed and arms folded, sat leaning back, with her head almost horizontally to one side, as if to disguise the difference in size between herself and Rashid like that. Or maybe she was just dozing off.
Rashid, upright, legs apart, was talking to her and gesticulating wildly. He was wearing bright white trainers, jeans and a beige T-shirt bearing the legend The old words are the best, and short words are the best of all. He had a thin face with fine features, lively eyes always moving around and an amused expression, as if to say: Yes, my dear, what a crazy, confused world, what luck there are fellows like me around to keep on top of it.
Rashid didn’t look up until I stopped a couple of metres in front of him, and his expression of amusement instantly turned to a certain reluctance. Perhaps he thought I was a member of the hotel staff.
‘Yes?’
‘Hello, my name is Kayankaya.’
‘Oh,’ said Katja Lipschitz, raising her head. Now she clearly towered above Rashid. ‘I didn’t see you coming.’
And Rashid cried, ‘Aha!’ and switched instantly to an expression of radiance. He rose from the sofa, spreading his arms wide in a theatrical manner. ‘My protector! Greetings!’
Katja Lipschitz didn’t seem to know whether to stand up too. On the one hand there was civility to me, on the other she was probably thinking of Rashid’s feelings. I noticed at once that she was wearing flat-heeled shoes, but if she stood right beside him Rashid was still going to look like a gnome. Or she was going to look like a giant – perhaps it was that more than anything that she wanted to avoid.
‘Don’t get up,’ I said to Katja Lipschitz, offering Rashid my hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Herr Rashid.’
‘Oh!’ He lowered his arms and ironically mimed disappointment. ‘So formal, my friend! How are we to spend three days cheek by jowl like that?’
I glanced at Katja Lipschitz, who was smiling as if her boss had just put a farting cushion on her chair.
I left my hand in midair. ‘Cheek by jowl.’
‘Or bristle by bristle.’ He grinned, glad of his little coup. ‘Because, aren’t we all little pigs somewhere deep down inside? Or sometimes big pigs. Maybe that’s why we don’t eat them, it would be a kind of cannibalism.’ He grinned a little more cheerfully, before turning apologetically to Katja Lipschitz. ‘Excuse me, Katja, by we I meant us Orientals. I’ve no objection to eating pork, but I don’t eat it. And that’s nothing to do with religion. The Jews – and Jews are Orientals too, right? A fraternal people. And what are the bloodiest wars?’ He pointed his index finger questioningly at me. I withdrew my proffered hand and put it in my trouser pocket.
‘Wars between brothers! Anyway – the Jews don’t eat pork either. Nor do Christians in the Orient – and many of my best friends are Christians,’ he added, laughing. ‘At least, they’ve never served me ham hock!’
Katja Lipschitz joined in his laughter, whether out of professionalism or because she really thought it funny I couldn’t tell.
I said, ‘Herr Rashid, I am to be your bodyguard for three days. We shall probably be sitting in the same restaurant several times, maybe at the same table. Please let me know whether it will bother you if I order sausage.’
For a moment his eyes rested on me as if he were wondering whether it had really been a good idea to pick me as his bodyguard.
Then he shook himself, his mouth stretched in a smile, and all at once he was my new best friend again, beaming radiantly. ‘I’ve already heard that you have your own opinions and’ – he nodded approvingly – ‘defend them in your own original way.’
Once again I glanced at Katja Lipschitz. This time she was smiling as if her boss had put a board studded with nails on her chair.
‘Well, Herr Rashid, if eating sausage is an opinion – yes, I have opinions. Shall we discuss the rest of your day? I assume you’ll have to turn up at the Fair to meet your fans and carry out your engagements.’
He laughed ironically, clearing his throat. ‘Ah, my fans! I’m only a little scribbler. Now Hans Peter Stullberg has fans – so does Mercedes García …’ And in a tone of casual interest, glancing at Katja Lipschitz across the multicoloured seating and the chessboard pattern of the carpet, ‘I wonder, what hotel are they staying in?’
For a moment Katja Lipschitz seemed to be in danger of blushing. She caught herself just in time, assumed a kindly smile and explained, ‘Her Spanish publisher is looking after Mercedes García. I believe she’s staying in a guestroom at the Instituto Cervantes. And luckily we were able to get a room at the Frankfurter Hof at the last moment for Hans Peter Stullberg. Rohlauf Verlag kindly let us have one of their quota. On account of his age and his back trouble, Hans Peter Stullberg can’t walk long distances these days.’
‘Oh, the poor man.’ Rashid twisted his face into an expression of sympathy.
‘Yes, he really doesn’t have an easy time. In addition,’ Katja went on, with what I thought was a tiny, cunning flash in her eyes, ‘the Frankfurter Hof would have been out of the question for you, for reasons of security. Thousands of people are going in and out of the hotel every evening and every night during the Book Fair.’ And she explained, for my benefit, ‘The bar of the Frankfurter Hof could be described as the unofficial centre of the air after ten in the evening. Everyone meets there: authors, publishers, journalists, agents, editors.’
‘Apart from which,’ said Rashid, also turning to me, ‘the Frankfurter Hof is, of course, greatly overestimated as a hotel. Last time I stayed there during the Book Fair –’ He suddenly stopped. Perhaps he sensed Katja Lipschitz suddenly looking at the floor, rather exhausted. ‘Well, never mind. Average food, unfriendly service – that’s what you usually get at the so-called best hotels in the city. They don’t need to go to any trouble. Why
don’t we sit down, my friend?’
‘Let’s do that,’ I agreed.
‘Would you like something to drink?’ asked Katja Lipschitz.
‘Mineral water, please.’
As she signalled to the barman, Rashid returned to his subject. ‘Of course there are exceptions. At the Literature Festival in New York last year –’
‘Herr Rashid,’ I interrupted him, ‘it’s twelve thirty, and at one thirty, according to your schedule, you have your first engagement at the Fair. I’d like to discuss a couple of details with you first.’
‘I understand.’ He laughed. ‘My good German Kemal – work is work, and schnapps is schnapps!’ He laughed again. In fact, he seemed glad that I’d stopped him talking about hotels.
I said, ‘First and foremost it’s about the technicalities when we’re together. For instance, when we’re moving through the halls of the Fair, I’d like to decide, depending on the situation and the number of people present, whether I go behind you or ahead of you. If there are cameras turned on you, of course I’ll keep in the background.’
Perhaps it was the idea of clicking cameras, perhaps the memory that I had not been hired by the publishing house for my social skills but to protect him from any deranged fanatics – anyway, his facial expression suddenly turned positively solicitous. He nodded, and said, ‘Of course, you must do everything that you think right.’
Katja Lipschitz backed this up. ‘Herr Kayankaya is our security chief for the next three days, and we all ought to follow his instructions.’
Rashid nodded again. He liked the sound of that: security chief. I was convinced, however, that Katja Lipschitz did not think any greater dangers lay in wait for Rashid than a destitute colleague who might be infuriated by the sight of what went on in luxury hotels to the point of throwing a glass of beer in Rashid’s face, or a lady sitting beside him at dinner who struck his hand away from her thigh.
All the same, Maier Verlag should get an author to be taken seriously for the money it was laying out.
Brother Kemal Page 11
