Kismet (12 page)

On the way home I bought all the newspapers with local Frankfurt sections, and thought of the deserted corridors and offices in Ahrens’s admin building. Obviously the place was closed, and not just on Saturdays. But then why did it employ a receptionist? In addition one who thought so little of the way the wind was blowing there that she’d help an enemy of her boss to get away?

At home I leafed through the local sections, and found the reports I had been more or less expecting.

If the Army went on like this, even an authoritarian like the Albanian wouldn’t be able to keep his men from taking a proper revenge for long.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading the sports sections and having a nap. Around seven I dressed and undid the bandage. The swelling around my nose had gone down, leaving a blue and yellow bruise behind. It wasn’t pretty, but wouldn’t make people turn and run. I put a pistol in my pocket and set off in my Opel for Offenbach.

If Marilyn Monroe had gone through life in the company of a small, thin, spotty sister who wore braces on her teeth, you could have said Offenbach beside Frankfurt looked like the Monroe sisters side by side. Although there were hardly five kilometres between their boundaries, up to now I’d been there at most four or five times, and after my first visit I’d always needed extremely compelling inducements to go again. Unless you knew better, you drove into the town, down a street a hundred metres wide and lined by grey office blocks, until you were right out of it again, and glad to see a few faces appear on the advertisement hoardings on both sides of the road from time to time. I’ve no idea what the people of Offenbach did with themselves all day, but at least they carefully avoided their drive-through main road with its resemblance to an airport runway. The only evidence of any human life outside the eight-hour working day was the existence of the snack bars that had sprung up here and there in front of office façades, and the logos winking from dark corners and pointing the way to fitness centres and gambling salons. You felt this was the way a main thoroughfare would look after a deadly epidemic.

If you knew your way around a bit, there came a point where you turned off right to the town centre and came to a square about the size of a football field, its most impressive building apparently inspired by the need to
give the bunker architecture of World War Two a chance in civil life. It was a huge, higgledy-piggledy, unplastered pile of concrete forcing its way up like a grey monster amidst the silvery department stores and brightly coloured shopping malls. Although signs promised you that the monster contained a pizzeria, ice cream parlour and supermarket, and in spite of the trouble taken to provide for something like an inviting atmosphere with outdoor flights of steps, airy passageways and terraces, you couldn’t shake off the feeling that the moment you set foot in the place you’d be arrested, shot, and processed into something. Or anyway, I couldn’t shake off the feeling. The typical citizen of Offenbach, at least if he liked doing drugs, hanging about aimlessly and supplying his environment with boom-boom music from a portable cassette recorders, just loved to linger outside and inside the building. And the citizen of Offenbach who was so tight that he pissed and threw up against the nearest wall instead of looking for a public toilet liked the building too. But the one who, of course, thought particularly highly of it was the citizen of Offenbach who had just failed his final school exams and was now in a hurry to become an established part of the great wide world of hanging about and throwing up.

The problem with the town, for anyone who didn’t know it, was that there was almost no means of finding your way anywhere except down the plague-stricken avenue and past the monster building. Once you’d done that Offenbach turned out not much uglier than Darmstadt or Hanau. The usual pedestrian zone, the usual box-like sixties buildings, the usual crimes freely and publicly committed in the name of municipal architecture. But the
first impression stuck, affecting everything else. I had once found myself in Offenbach standing outside a perfectly normal little department store and thinking: good heavens, this has to be the ugliest little department store in the world.

So I drove past the monster, left the square behind, stopped by the side of the road and, opening my window, asked a young man who looked local for the street where the Adria Grill stood. He plucked his sparse moustache for a while and frowned all over his retreating forehead before he began to tell me. He took his time about it, and managed to make turning right twice and left once sound a very complicated business, but finally we had it. I thanked him and followed the route he had described.

Ten minutes later I parked the car in a quiet side street. Blocks of flats, bars, a garage, a gay sex shop. I walked a little way until I was outside the glass door with the words
Adria Grill
on it. The doorway and window were draped inside with crochet wall-hangings. The menu was up in a glass case by the door. It was Yugoslavian and International Specialities cuisine as found chiefly in Germany, so far as I knew: fifteen meat dishes with chips, five salads, two desserts and fifteen varieties of schnapps. The fact that this cuisine was now very seldom called after Yugoslavia, but after one of the tracts of land that had seceded from Yugoslavia over the past few years with strong support from the German Foreign Ministry, was indicated by the cocktail menu with little Croatian and German flags stuck on it: for five marks ninety-five you could drink a Genscher Sunrise.

As I entered the restaurant about fifteen men fell silent and turned their heads my way. They were sitting and
standing more or less separately at tables and the bar, but they were all one party taking up the whole room. Most of them were around fifty and looked as if they always had been, as if they’d always been hanging around in bars and only went out now and then to get cheap suits and haircuts. The exceptions were two young men in their mid-twenties sitting in the darkest and most remote corner, with shaved heads and wearing flashy sports jackets. They all had beer glasses in front of them, and as I went up to the bar and wished the landlord ‘Good evening’, they all remained silent. Perhaps the swelling on my face was more impressive than it had seemed to me in the mirror at home. I hoped they’d decide to regard me as someone who’d had bad luck, not a thug.

‘Evening. What’ll it be?’ The landlord, a massive man with a round, comfortable face, looked at me in a free and easy but friendly way.

‘A beer, please.’

He turned to the beer tap, and I looked around the room with an innocent expression, as if I noticed neither the silence nor the glances bent on me.

A few dusty fishing nets and two faded posters of Dubrovnik hung on the walls by way of decoration. Otherwise the place had bare wooden tables, stained beige linoleum on the floor, a jukebox flashing only faintly under layers of dirt, and pale green fabric lampshades in which bulbs too strong for them had burnt an irregular pattern of small, black-rimmed holes. The only relatively new and well-cared-for item was a large photograph in a frame with a removable back; it was enthroned behind the bar on top of the shelves of schnapps bottles. The photo showed a grey-haired man in a white admiral’s uniform
with plenty of gold buttons and coloured braid, kissing another man on the cheek. All that could be seen of the other man was the back of his head.

The landlord brought me the beer. ‘Cheers.’

After I had smoked two cigarettes, ordered another beer, and looked ahead of me with determined naiveté, the guests got talking again one by one. Five minutes later loud, confused voices filled the room. Some of the men were speaking Croatian, many German, mostly in Hessian dialect. Their subjects of conversation were prices, the weather, sport, women. One of them fed some coins into the jukebox, and soon Bonnie Tyler was drowning them all out with
Total Eclipse of the Heart
.

I drank my second beer and ordered a third. When the landlord pushed the glass over to me, I beckoned him closer. He propped his round elbows on the bar and turned his ear my way.

‘If you don’t mind a direct question …’

He nodded and winked encouragingly at me. He probably thought, after my looking-like-a-sheep act, I wanted to ask the way to the toilet or something equally delicate.

‘… have you ever heard of the Army of Reason?’

For a moment his eyes seemed to stop looking at me but without actually closing, the way hands can suddenly stop in mid-gesticulation. Then he turned away in a leisurely fashion, as if at the end of a fairly long conversation between two guests about the meaning of life, went back to the tap and continued serving drinks. If he looked my way I was just a piece of furniture. If I’d left without paying he probably wouldn’t even have glanced up.

I stood around for a while, thinking. The first guests began ordering food, and I watched as the landlord leaned
through an open hatch beside the bar, passed on orders and received plates. As far as I could see, there were two men working in the kitchen. The chef and a young assistant. I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote, on a beer mat: Two members of the Army of Reason rang this place on Thursday. I want to know who they were. I’m not leaving until I do.

Next time the landlord, loaded down with plates, tried pushing his way past me I got in his way and put the beer mat in his shirt pocket.

‘I’m waiting five minutes. If you still haven’t spoken to me then, you’ll be doing lousy business here this evening.’

He walked on without reacting. But soon after that the chef’s assistant appeared in the room, took over at the tap, and the landlord beckoned me over to the end of the bar.

‘I got no idea what yer talking about. I’m running a bar, I am, not a war.’

‘But you made off fast enough when I mentioned the Army.’

‘Hey, look at you! If a man what got a mug like that talks garbage, am I a shrink?’

I looked at his round face. Nothing about it indicated that he was lying. He was the image of a fat, comfortable man who didn’t like trouble in his life. And he managed to run this scruffy place so that a lot of people felt happy here and the takings were probably in tune. If one of his guests was the member of a gang extorting protection money, he wouldn’t want to know. However, he would take messages on the phone, pass them on, and keep his thoughts to himself. And he would act the simple clown for someone like me trying to worm those thoughts out of him.

I pointed to the framed photograph. ‘Who’s that?’

His gaze followed the direction of my finger, and when he looked at me again I saw something unpleasant in his eyes for the first time. Irritated, he said, ‘’S’our president, innit?’

‘Mine too? Never saw him look like that.’

‘S’posing you ain’t noticed, this here’s a Croatian restaurant. Thass my homeland, is Croatia, thass where my heart beats.’

‘Ah.’

‘So whass your line, eh? Asking questions, like?’ The amiable fat man was increasingly coming to resemble a fat slob with a fanatical light in his eyes.

‘Private eye,’ I said, and went on, without letting him get a word in, ‘You said you’re running a bar here, not a war. And you said your heart beats in Croatia. What’s that funny uniform your President’s wearing?’

First he said nothing, then he raised his voice. ‘Funny?’ And as there had been no music playing for some time now, the babble of voices died down too.

‘Whassa big idea? Funny!’

I looked from the presidential photo to the now red-faced landlord and back again. I myself didn’t know exactly what my idea was. But after more than a week I was at last beginning to get some idea of what kind of outfit the Army of Reason, with its silly name, might be. ‘Reason’ had come of the tosh Dr Ahrens talked, I felt sure of that. He had liked that word too much, whether because he linked it to some deeper meaning, or because he just thought it sounded interesting. But ‘Army’, I thought, was from somewhere else. For instance a place where war was thought a matter of honour and uniforms
were smart. The word Army might be intended to make people think that instead of an average gang this bunch were something higher, something pure, serving a good cause. And perhaps they even were in a way serving what they called a good cause. They wouldn’t be the first gang to try sanitising their obscene business by using zero point such and such a percentage of the takings to throw a few crusts to the poor.

‘OK, not funny. But a uniform. Does he like that sort of costume stuff, or is it the official dress of a Croatian president?’

By now there were no more clattering forks or clinking bottles to be heard, and the landlord and I were centre stage. I wondered how long, if the argument became more animated, our audience would confine themselves to watching and listening. And I estimated how many seconds it would take me to get out of the door.

After the landlord had stared at me for some time as if I wanted to steal his President’s gold buttons and use them as bog fittings, he pulled himself together and said, as calmly as he could. ‘Reckon we done enough talking. The beer’s on me. Push off.’

I shook my head. As I did so it seemed to me as if something was moving in the darkest part of the back of the room. I took a few steps back towards the door until I had a view of all the customers. There were no more real clues for me to pick up here; I had only to look into those stony faces to see that. Whether they’d understood what I was riling the landlord about or not – this was their landlord, their drinking-hole, and I was in the way. But perhaps I could kick up enough fuss for one or other of them to let something slip by mistake.