Kismet (18 page)

‘Hm. How long has your mother been working for Ahrens?’

‘Three weeks.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Make money.’

‘Yes, fine, but how does she make it?’

‘Just how don’t know. My mother not say because of my father. Fat Ahrens has finger in pie all way to Croatia.’

‘And when did your mother disappear?’

‘Last Sunday. That why I in Schmidtbauer office. She know where my mother is. But she don’t say. Only say, coming back soon, coming back soon.’

‘Did Gregor leave those bruises on your arms?’

‘Yes. For shouting and so on. Since my mother gone, I sleep badly.’

‘Hm.’

I wondered what Ahrens was planning to do when his lightning takeover of the protection money racket in Frankfurt came to an end. When the entire wobbly structure, maintained only by means of enormous pressure and large amounts of violence, crashed to the ground. He probably had his dated ticket to God knows what beach resort in his wallet already. And if he actually got there he’d be leaving part of the city demolished for years to come – in retrospect, the departure of the Schmitz brothers would look like any everyday business crisis by comparison. As a result of the Army’s activities, all normal protection money rackets would be scandalous, and every serious extortionist would have to go about in a tank if he wanted to keep his extortion undercover. And they
would
go about in tanks, too. The business would get even more secret, even more brutal, even more excessive. Bar and restaurant owners would think back nostalgically to the days when they could relatively easily balance their protection money against their income on the black economy. And their guests would long for those boozy nights when they didn’t have to fear that some idiot might
come marching into the bar any time, shooting one of them down just to show that he was to be taken as seriously as the now legendary Army of Reason.

I lit a cigarette, and Leila asked if she could have one too.

‘How old are you?’

‘Next month fifteen.’

‘Smoking’s bad for you.’

I thought I could feel the airflow as her head whipped round. ‘You my mother or what?’

‘You wanted to come with me, and I decide who smokes in my car and who doesn’t. Fourteen-year-old girls don’t.’

‘Huh! But fourteen-year-old girls have to breathe old detective’s smoke!’

‘Listen, sweetheart: call me old again and you can go back to Gregor by yourself, on foot.’

It wasn’t a laugh or even a giggle, but a sound that did have something to do with amusement – derisive, deploring, almost pitying. After a pause she said, ‘Like Schmidtbauer. Don’t like her age either – two old cunts.’

Hit the nail on the head again. In a game of ‘Who has the last word?’ I’d have staked all my money on her. In a game of ‘Who’s good at dealing with fourteen-year-olds?’ I probably wouldn’t even have made the first selection stage.

Finally I handed her my cigarettes and lighter, and after we’d been smoking in silence for a while I asked, ‘How many do you smoke a day?’

‘Sometimes more, sometimes less. Depends how day is. Sometimes cigarette is like last bit of fun.’

‘Hm, yes, same with me. Doesn’t your mother object?’

‘Sometimes more, sometimes less.’

‘OK, let’s come to an agreement.’

‘Agreement? Come to where?’

‘Let’s do a deal.’

‘OK.’

‘When I’m not around you can do as you like. But in my presence you don’t smoke more cigarettes than I do.’

‘Presence …?’

‘When we’re together.’

‘You smoke many?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘Good. Is deal.’

At the next kiosk I stopped and bought a packet of chewing gum.

‘Swindle, right?’ said Leila as I got back into the car. ‘Now you not smoke in presence.’

‘A deal is a deal.’

‘And swindle is swindle.’

‘Hm.’ I nodded. ‘And dumb is dumb.’

‘OK. Chewing gum, please.’

I hated everything about it: the taste, the sticky sound of chewing, the picture of me and Leila chewing the stuff in competition, so to speak, because of a dubious agreement. I’d just managed to shake off three killers, I was covered in mud and dust from head to foot, I had
the
criminal outfit in present-day Frankfurt after me, and I went and did a stupid thing like this. But instead of simply spitting out the unfamiliar, minty clump of gum and lighting a cigarette, I thought about ways I might extend our bargain. How may scoops of ice cream was a cigarette worth, for instance?

There wasn’t much time left for such meditations. As I
was still imagining Leila making pitying noises again and explaining that if she happened to want an ice, she could buy hundreds for herself, we passed the first fire engine. Next moment I saw half my office desk lying behind a roadblock in the street.

A firefighter waved me to the side, I stopped the car and leaned across the steering wheel. On the third floor of the box-like fifties building where I’d had my office for the last six years there was a large, gaping hole measuring about four square metres. The back wall was still intact, and I noticed the round kitchen clock which one of my clients had once said was about as trendy in a detective’s office as a piece of knitting.

‘What that?’ Leila was leaning forward too, pressing her nose against the windscreen.

‘No idea.’ It seemed to me she must have exhausted her capacity to absorb scenes of violence for today. At the moment she seemed quite brave, but at her age, I assumed, that could change quickly. And a hysterical girl of fourteen was the last thing I needed. ‘Probably a gas explosion. I was actually going to move my office here next month.’ I lit a cigarette and tossed the packet into her lap. ‘I’ll just go and take a look. You stay here, OK?’

‘OK,’ she replied, but she didn’t sound really convinced. She probably wasn’t going to be outmanoeuvred another time as easily as over the cigarette deal.

I got out and walked around a bit. There wasn’t much to see. Firefighters, a few onlookers rubber necking, and a number of tenants of the building all talking excitedly. No one recognised me under my coating of mud and plaster dust.

Naturally the loss of my office together with a phone
and fax machine, a computer, a first-class coffee machine and a crate of schnapps wasn’t good news, but it didn’t particularly rile me. I’d never much liked the place, twenty square metres in size, badly heated, with woodchip wallpaper, and acoustically filled with Sting, George Michael, and umpteen rehashes of cute soul pieces played by the TV production outfit that had moved in next door. Perhaps this way I’d even get around having to pay the overdue rent. What did bother me was the way that over the last few days the Army of Reason had turned my life into something increasingly like a military confrontation. I already knew about threatening letters, home-made bombs, squads of thugs, answering machines filled up with torrents of abuse, and I’d once been sent a dead sheep slit open and wearing a Turkish fez, a very imaginative touch. But this was the first time I’d ever had my office blown up in the middle of Frankfurt in broad daylight, just to stop me pursuing a case. Of course, there was always the possibility that unknown to me, there were genuine faulty gas connections in the building. Or that the ladies of the TV Larger Than Life production company had planned a firework display in line with the company name, to celebrate the opening of a new series about dentists’ daughters having problems with architects’ sons, and they just happened to have put their twenty boxes of rockets down outside my door for a moment. But I didn’t think I’d bet on it.

I took a last look at my kitchen clock and then went back to the car. Just before I reached it I spoke to a man who was leaning against a barrier, staring up at the wall of the building, and looked as if he’d been there for some time.

‘’Scuse me, can you tell me what happened up there?’

‘Huh! You may well ask!’ he exploded with surprising fury, but somehow with a kind of satisfaction too, and without taking his eyes off the building. He had bad teeth, bad skin, hardly any hair, a pot belly, alcohol on his breath, stained nylon clothing that didn’t fit him and a gold ring in his ear. ‘God knows what that bastard did in there!’

‘Er … what bastard?’

‘Some wog detective.’

‘Wog detective?’

‘Yes, well, a wog’s what I’d call him. He’s a Turk, he is – or was. Could be it blew him to bits. Think of it.’ He cast me a brief sideways glance. ‘Fellow like that. All we need now is wogs in the police … and then goodbye the Ostend!’

Slap a little plaster dust on now and then, and you got to know what the neighbours really thought of you.

‘When, roughly, did it blow that bastard to bits?’

‘Half an hour ago or thereabouts. I was over in Heidi’s place. But I reckon blown to bits is just wishful thinking. I mean, can’t see anything, can you? Blood or body parts or that.’

Heidi’s Sausage Heaven was the culinary high spot of the street. Strictly speaking, if you didn’t count a hamburger bar and a bakery selling sandwiches, it was the only culinary spot in the street. Hunger had driven me to Heidi’s greasy plastic tables now and then, forcing me to swallow stuff that no dog would have looked at.

I acted as if I had to search around to locate the place bearing Heidi’s name.
Heidi’s Sausage Heaven
, I read aloud from the sign over the door. ‘You’d have a good view of this place from there. Did you happen to see anyone go in
before the explosion? Someone who might have set it off. Someone who doesn’t belong here. Doesn’t necessarily have to have been a wog.’

He let the question hang in the air for a moment before wrinkling his nose busily and nodding a couple of times in a very matter-of-fact way. Here at last was someone who knew who really mattered in the Ostend district. Wog offices flying through the air were all very well, but the important point, without a doubt, was that no stranger could pass his lookout post at Heidi’s place without his noticing that stranger and identifying him as such.

‘Hm, now you ask, yes, there was someone made me think, hey, what’s he doing here? I know everyone around this place, see – by sight anyway. I mean, you noticed yourself – it’s my knowledge of human nature, eh?’ He looked me straight in the face for the first time, and while the rest of his demeanour still signalled a large amount of new-found liking for me, an expression of some doubt entered his eyes.

‘What happened to you, then? You look almost like you.’

‘The name’s Borchardt. Explosives expert.’ I offered him my hand, and he automatically shook it. ‘I came straight from another bombing raid. A lot of dust there, as you can see. So how about this guy you noticed before the explosion?’

But he wasn’t to be fobbed off so easily. He looked me suspiciously up and down, let his eyes dwell on my hand holding the car key, connected the Opel logo on its tag with the old wreck behind me, let go of the barrier, bent down a little way and was asking, ‘Your car? Don’t I know it from.?’ when he caught sight of Leila.

‘There’s still a surprising number of these old things still on the road. Not my private car, of course. But as you see, in our work we explosive experts don’t have it all neat and tidy, so the city gives us these old transport fleet rejects. It’s no fun for anyone driving them, I can tell you.’

‘You’re an explosives expert? Police?’

‘Uh-huh. Frankfurt CID.’

He straightened up, stared at me unimpressed, and jerked his thumb at the car window. ‘So who’s that? Frankfurt CID too?’

‘She’s … er … well.’ I put my mouth close to his ear and lowered my voice. ‘The raid I mentioned just now was on a refugee hostel – know what I mean? And that’s one of the witnesses, a …’ I showed him a dirty grin. ‘Well, you can see her hair colour and her … er … complexion.’

He reacted as if a twenty-mark note was suddenly looking at him from a pile of dog shit in the street. First his eyes lit up and he ran his tongue over his lips, then his expression suddenly froze and darkened, until he suddenly took a step back and explained, shaking his head, ‘I didn’t mean it that way! You can’t pin anything on me. All I said was that the guy the office up there belonged to is a show-off arsehole and definitely didn’t have blue eyes, and you’re still allowed to say that, right?’

‘And how! Don’t worry, we in the police weren’t born yesterday either. We know the time of day, and we’d always rather have an honest opinion than all that do-gooding Benetton stuff. I mean …’ and once again I approached his ear, ‘I mean, where do Nobel prize-winners come from? That’s what I always say. They don’t come from Africa, do they?’

His scepticism lasted a moment longer, then he slowly
raised the corners of his mouth, and a conspiratorial gleam came into his eyes. ‘You put that very nicely.’

‘Well,’ I said, dismissing the subject, ‘a man can’t help thinking. But could I ask you, all the same, to describe the person you saw from Heidi’s place?’

What he described was a small, fat, white man with thick lips – Ahrens’s Hessian, the one who had smashed my nose in.

I thanked my new Klu-Klux-Klan mate, gave a wave and went to the car.

As I started the engine, Leila asked, ‘What did that old queen with the earring say?’

Maybe I ought to have introduced them to each other. Maybe, once a few prejudices were out of the way, they’d have got on like a house on fire.

‘As I thought. A gas explosion.’

‘You talk long time for as-I-thought.’

‘He was a nice guy. Told me a bit about the area. After all, I’m going to be here every day after next month.’

I drove the Opel past ambulances and groups of people deep in discussion – ‘Fucking bastard’, ‘Wog detective?’ – and filtered into the rush-hour traffic.

‘I don’t think.’

‘Hm?’

‘Gas explosion, I don’t think.’

‘Oh, don’t you?’ I said in an offhand way, and gave her a smile saying: you can think anything you like, I’m not going to lose my temper. Unfortunately she didn’t mind in the least how or if I smiled at her.

‘First Gregor and whole hostel smashed up, then you drive off look at new office?’

‘It was on my way. Why not?’