Kismet

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Slibulsky and I were crammed into the china cupboard, emptied for the purpose, of a small Brazilian restaurant on the outskirts of the Frankfurt railway station district, waiting for a couple of racketeers to show up demanding protection money.

The cupboard was about one metre twenty wide and seventy centimetres deep. Neither Slibulsky nor I would be giving the clothing industry cause for concern about the sales of their XL sizes. Furthermore, we were wearing bulletproof vests, and when it came to the crunch we hoped at least to get a pistol and a shotgun into position where we wouldn’t shoot ourselves in the foot or blast our own heads off. I could just imagine the racketeers entering the restaurant, hearing pitiful cries in the corner after a while, and opening the cupboard door to find two total idiots squashed inside, arms and legs flailing helplessly. And I pictured Romario’s face at this sight. Romario was the owner and manager of the Saudade, and he had appealed to me for help.

I’d known Romario since his first gastronomic venture running a snack bar in Sachsenhausen. Until now he’d only been an acquaintance. I was glad to know him when I was skint and he stood me dinner. I wasn’t so glad when I was in funds and met him in a bar and he came to sit at the same table, and we had to talk about something or other just because we knew each other. So if this evening’s
operation came into the category of a favour done for a friend, then it was mainly because Romario hadn’t offered me any payment and I couldn’t really ask for any either.

Just after midnight. We’d stationed ourselves here half an hour ago, and for about the last twenty minutes my legs had been going to sleep. It was unusually warm for early May. Daytime temperatures were up to twenty-seven degrees, and by night they didn’t fall below fifteen. Which did not keep Romario from turning his central heating up to maximum – from force of habit and because complaining about the German weather was, in a way, one of his last links with Brazil. He’d lived in Frankfurt for the last twenty years, he went to the Côte d’Azur on holiday, and I didn’t know if overcooked sweet-and-sour chicken and tough pork chops with canned peas were typical specialities of Brazil, but you couldn’t really wish them on his native land. Anyway, the whole city might be going around in T-shirts, his customers might be dying of heatstroke, but Romario insisted that it was always cold in Germany and the sun always shone in Brazil – whether he was in a generally bad or a generally good mood.

So I wasn’t going to make any money out of this, I couldn’t feel my legs any more, the temperature inside the cupboard was approaching jungle heat, and from time to time I heard this barely audible hissing.

‘Slibulsky?’

‘Hm?’ Brief, unemotional. The sweet he was sucking clicked against his teeth.

‘What did you have for supper?’

‘Supper? What do you mean? Can’t remember.’

‘You don’t remember what was on the plate in front of you a few hours ago?’

He cleared his throat, the way other people might give a little whistle or roll their eyes, indicating that they’ll try to answer your question in friendly tones, but naturally it doesn’t for a moment interest them.

‘Let’s see … oh yes, I know. Cheese.
Handkäse
. That was it. Gina went shopping this morning and …’

‘
Handkäse
with onions.’ And you can’t get much smellier than
Handkäse
anyway.

‘Of course with onions. You don’t eat cheese with strawberries, do you?’

I put a good deal of effort into giving him as contemptuous a glance as I could in the dim light of the cupboard.

‘Didn’t I tell you we’d be spending some time together in this hole?’

‘Yup, I believe you did mention it. Although I remembered the cupboard as kind of larger.’

‘Oh yes? Like how large? I mean, how big does a cupboard have to be for two people, one of whom has just been stuffing himself with onions, to breathe easily inside it?’

In what little light filtered through the keyhole and some cracks in the sides of the cupboard, I saw Slibulsky make a face. ‘I thought we were here to scare off some sort of Mafia characters? With our guns and bulletproof vests, like the good guys we are. But maybe Miss Kayankaya fancies running a hairdressing salon instead of a detective agency?’

What did I say to that? Best ignore it. I told him, ‘I’ve got sweat running down my face and into my mouth, I have a feeling your stink is condensing, and I don’t reckon the good guys have to put up with other people farting.’

Slibulsky chuckled.

Cursing quietly, I bent to look through the keyhole. I could see Romario’s bandaged arm the other side of it. He was sitting at the bar doing something with a calculator and a notepad, as if cashing up for the evening after closing the restaurant. In fact he was too nervous to add up so much as the price of a couple of beers. They’d paid him their first visit a week ago: two strikingly well-dressed young men not much older than twenty-five, waving pistols and a note saying:
This is a polite request for your monthly donation of 6,000 DM to the Army of Reason, payable on the first of each month. Thanking you in advance
. They didn’t say a word, they just smiled – at least until Romario had read the note, handed it back, and believing, not least in view of the sheer size of the sum, that he was dealing with a couple of novices said, ‘Sorry, I don’t see how I can go along with your request.’

Whereupon they stopped smiling, shoved the barrels of their pistols into his belly, crumpled up the note, stuffed it into Romario’s mouth and forced him to chew and swallow it. Then they wrote
Back the day after tomorrow
on the bar in black felt pen, and went away.

In spite of this little demonstration, Romario didn’t really take the matter seriously. He’d been running his place here near the railway station too long to panic the first time a couple of young tearaways tried extortion. As everyone knows, the big protection rackets, the ones you have to take seriously, have a whole crowd of small-time con men following in their wake, thinking they might as well give it a try. Like when you’re sixteen you say hey, why not just take a look and see if that bike over there is padlocked.

Romario threw up the note he’d swallowed, knocked two nails into the side of the bar and hung his pistol on them. When they came back they’d see how a real man dealt with such outrageous demands. But they didn’t come in the evening, as he had expected, and Romario wasn’t behind the bar. It was morning, and he was in the kitchen putting meat in a marinade with oil and seasonings when they suddenly turned up. Still smiling, and with another note.
Your monthly donation to the Army of Reason is now due. Many thanks for your commitment to this good cause
.

When Romario, with the pistols pointing at him and his hands in the marinade, said he didn’t have six thousand marks, just how much profit a month did they think a little place like this made, he might as well close down right away if he paid up, they twisted his arms behind his back, tied him to the radiator, and nipped his thumb off with a pair of pliers. The cleaning lady found Romario lying unconscious in a pool of blood. His thumb was on the bar, with the words
Back on Thursday
written beside it.

This was Thursday, and the bandage round Romario’s arm looked bright white against the wood-panelled wall. They’d sewn his thumb back on at the hospital. The doctor hadn’t been able to say whether he was likely to keep it, and how much use it would still be if he did. Romario’s explanation that he’d done it chopping onions was received with scepticism, but it had stopped the hospital reporting the incident to the police. Now and then Romario glanced at the china cupboard as if to make sure that we hadn’t disappeared through some crack in it. Whenever he did that I knocked my Beretta quietly against the door to reassure him. Cutting off his thumb
was a brutal business and I was sorry about it, no question. I didn’t want to stop and work out whether I was particularly sorry because, but for that injury, a flat-rate payment plus expenses might at least not have been beyond the bounds of possibility.

The hissing sound came again.

‘Slibulsky, you’re an arsehole!’

‘And you’re a fucking queen.’

I sighed. ‘If I was, I expect I’d have hired this cupboard on purpose to be shut up with you and your fragrant aroma.’