Kismet (9 page)

‘Every day from six in the evening, except Mondays. But like I said: no more recruitment until next Tuesday.’

‘I see. Tell me, what kind of thing can I apply to do if I join?’

‘Depends on your abilities. We’ve had trained tank drivers and even pilots, but normally you’d be assigned to one of the ground troops.’

‘Aha. Sounds good.’

‘Yes, great stuff. And so important.’

‘So reasonable, too.’

‘You said it.’

‘Right, see you next Tuesday, then.’

‘We’ll be glad to meet you.’

I thanked him and flipped the mobile shut. Obviously the term Army didn’t just arise from megalomania.

There followed half an hour when Romario kept coming into the kitchen, asking in short order for shaving gear, aftershave, and clean underclothes. I handed all that over in the hope that then he’d feel spruce and well enough to go out into the wide world and find himself another place to sleep.

‘Do you know a restaurant in Offenbach called the Adria Grill?’

The bathroom door was open. I’ve no idea what he was doing in front of the mirror, but when he answered his voice sounded kind of squeezed.

‘Yup, I know it.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Yugoslavian – or whatever that’s called now. Anyway, it used to have a sign saying
Yugoslavian and International Specialities
. I think then it was Croatian and International Specialities for a while, and when I last drove by it just said
International Specialities
. It depended on how the war was going and where people’s sympathies were.’

‘What takes you to Offenbach so often?’

‘A girlfriend of mine lives two blocks past the restaurant.’

‘Ah. Does she have a large flat?’

He didn’t answer at once. Only when he came into the kitchen, his face plastered with scraps of loo paper drenched in blood, did he say, ‘She’s married. I can only get to see her for an hour or so in the afternoon sometimes.’ And when he saw my expression of slight distaste, he remarked, ‘I’ve nothing against your razor blades, but I
might as well try shaving with a chisel.’

‘Hm. Sorry about that.’ I smiled at him. ‘But luckily all this will soon be over. From tomorrow you’ll have the best razor blades you could wish for, you’ll be able to sing under the shower as loud as you like and get yourself some breakfast.’ I shrugged apologetically. ‘Afraid I don’t even have any more coffee today. I’ve already drunk the last of it.’

He stopped, his mouth opened, and for a moment I was afraid something awkward was coming. But then he just nodded, turned, and went into the living room.

I heard him tidy up the sofa, folding his bedclothes – with one hand, as he did not forget to remind me by dint of theatrical groaning and the whispered words, clearly audible in the kitchen, ‘Damn thumbs!’. The hell with him.

Ten minutes later I gave him the spare key to my flat, and said that if he really couldn’t find anywhere else to stay he could stay another night – if it was a real emergency. Looking injured, he replied that he didn’t want to accept my offer, but next moment, and with a much less injured look, he was enumerating circumstances that might force him to accept it after all. The hell with me! I picked up my jacket and left the flat.

Dr Michael Ahrens was the owner of a packet-soup and instant-pudding factory. The factory consisted of a huge metal shed, a four-storey brick building, and a hoarding measuring eight by eight metres from which the doctor, showing me all his teeth, announced:
My Good Name Guarantees Good Food – Ahrens Soups, Pleasure On Your Plate
. He had thick grey hair, blow-dried a little too stylishly, a suntanned face and a white shirt unbuttoned to just above his chest hair. However, his eyes looked at me over the top of a plain, narrow pair of glasses as gravely as if he were delivering the Eleventh Commandment. When he had that picture taken the good doctor had obviously been unable to decide whether he’d rather sell a lot of soup or screw a lot of women.

I turned away from the hoarding and walked to the brick building through the rain, which had been falling since morning. Just behind the front door there was a reception desk and switchboard behind glass. A young woman sat in front of a console with several receivers and any number of switches and little lights, chewing gum and reading the paper. I knocked on the pane between us, which was closed, and she reluctantly looked up.

‘Yes, what is it?’ she said. The pane stayed shut.

‘Is that your style at Ahrens Soups? Shouting at your best customers through the glass?’

At first she looked even more reluctant, but then she seemed to think better of it, plastered a smile on her lips and rose to her feet. As she pushed the pane aside, she explained, ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch what you said. It’s difficult to hear through the glass …’

Interesting tactics, I thought, and replied, ‘I said don’t bother, just stay put, I don’t mind shouting.’

‘Hm.’ She said nothing, looked me challengingly in the eye, and for a moment her smile seemed genuine. ‘So how can I help you?’

‘Orhan Yaprak, import-export. I have an appointment with Dr Ahrens.’

‘You do?’ She looked at an engagements notepad beside her. ‘I don’t have that down. Did you speak to Dr Ahrens personally?’

‘My secretary did.’

‘Your secretary …’ She looked at the notepad again. ‘Well, there must have been some kind of mix-up.’

‘Why don’t you just call Dr Ahrens and ask if he has a few minutes to spare? It’s very urgent business, and if his firm isn’t in a position to deliver two million packet soups within a very short time there won’t be a deal anyway.’

Her mouth dropped open. Then she repeated, ‘Two million packet soups?’

‘That’s right. Earthquake in Kazakhstan yesterday evening. Humanitarian aid. The German government will be paying, of course.’

‘Yesterday evening …’ She narrowed her eyes slightly and examined me again as if I’d only just come through the door. ‘So just when did your secretary call?’

‘I’ll give you one guess.’

‘I’m no good at guessing, but I’ve sitting here since
eight taking all calls, and there wasn’t one from any secretary with Thingummyjig Import-Export.’

‘Thingummyjig Import-Export! You certainly go to endless trouble to please your customers here. What’s the matter, sweetheart? Is this the Federal Chancellery? Or is the doctor just blow-drying his hair? I didn’t eavesdrop on my secretary while she was phoning, but it could be she didn’t get through at once and said to herself, like some others I could mention: well, then I can just go on chewing my gum in peace for a while and finish reading my horoscope.’

As I delivered this speech she had formed her lips into a pout and begun to inspect her turquoise fingernails, looking bored. Perhaps I wasn’t the first to complain of customer relations at Ahrens Soups, or perhaps she’d given in her notice to leave at the end of the month. Or then again, perhaps she was just an easy going girl.

After a pause she asked, with a sigh, ‘Finished?’ and looked up from her nails. ‘Then I can call Dr Ahrens, but you’d better tell him all that stuff about the earthquake yourself.’ With these words she turned away, picked up one of the receivers and pressed a button.

‘Dr Ahrens? There’s someone here who wants to speak to you … no idea, he wants to tell you personally … says it won’t take long … yes, I’ll tell him.’

She put the receiver down and gave me a sweet smile. ‘You can go up to see him in ten minutes’ time. While you’re waiting, why not think up some fairy tale to tell the boss? In the Federal Chancellery?’

I nodded. ‘Must have been the poster outside. I thought someone who has his own photo blown up to twenty square metres and hangs it in front of my nose must be
suffering from something that prevents him from talking to anyone but the real bigwigs.’

‘Hm,’ she said evidently agreeing. ‘But …’ and she looked me appraisingly in the eye, ‘… but that doesn’t make him stupid.’

I nodded again. ‘That’s what I thought. In personnel matters, all the same, I can see he’s just fantastic.’

This time the smile came very slowly. First she moved her lower jaw sceptically to both sides, then tiny lines formed around her eyes, her lips opened and her eyes began to flicker. Either that or my own eyes were beginning to flicker.

She pointed down the corridor. ‘There’s a lift over there. Fourth floor, you’ll find his door. You can’t miss it.’

I thanked her and went on looking at her for a little longer, and her eyes flickered again.

At the end of the usual grotty neon-lit office corridor, floor covered with plastic and doors with the paint flaking off them, was something that at first sight looked like a piece of scenery for a tale from the
Arabian Nights
. A dark brown double door four metres wide, with a pattern of gold and silver suns, moons and stars adorning its frame. The handle was a recumbent angel, and more angels were playing ring-a-ring-a-roses as they danced around Dr Ahrens’s nameplate. Two white marble columns flanked the door, a red rug in front of it bore the design of a mermaid embroidered in silver, and lamps imitating burning torches hung on the walls to left and right.

As far as I could tell the gold, silver and marble were genuine. At my second knock there was a curt, ‘Come!’ I pressed the angel down and went in.

My initial surprise shouldn’t really have been a surprise at all. But at the back of my mind, obviously, I had been thinking up some kind of explanation for the design of that door. It was left over from a birthday party, perhaps the man’s wife had esoteric tastes and it was a present from her, or a sample of some crazy interior designer’s work. In fact the door was only the relatively modest entrance to Sheikh Soup’s domain. A fantasy desert measuring about two hundred square metres opened up before me: bright golden-yellow walls sprinkled with every imaginable shade of red, ceiling covered with undulating sky-blue velvet, sand-coloured fitted carpet with imitation zebra and tiger skins lying on it. The walls on the exterior of the building were all glazed: windows with the glass held in place at five-metre intervals by flat black metal structures cut to the shape of palms and cacti, their fronds, stems and spines apparently growing into the panes. In one corner fur-covered seats were placed around a shallow, leather-clad drum. In another was a huge cinnamon-red bed with a pile of cushions in the shapes and colours of outsize coconuts and bananas. And above it all an arrangement of lights showing all the signs of the Zodiac hovered below the sky-blue velvet, spanning the entire ceiling.

I suppose I hadn’t moved from the spot for quite some time when a voice from the middle of this vast hall asked, ‘Yes, what is it?’

I closed the door behind me and set out on my way to a desk adorned with carved lions’ heads.

The second surprise was Dr Ahrens. His hair wasn’t grey but black, he didn’t wear glasses, and he looked at least twenty years younger than on the hoarding. They’d really worked hard on him to make him reasonably like
someone who might be supposed to be in the packet-soup business. The way he looked sitting in front of me now, he could have made ads for steroids. Everything he wore was a tight fit: black stretch T-shirt over his bouncer’s torso, gold chain around his bull neck, even the strap of his enormous sports watch seemed about to break apart. Either some of his muscle had been airbrushed out of the photo, or they’d put his head on top of someone else’s body.

The third surprise was that a man who furnished his pad as if he liked nothing better than listening to flute music all day long, while murmuring prayers to the sun and nibbling dried fruit, had the kind of aura that made you wish you were wearing a warm jacket in his presence.

‘What’s this all about?’ he asked, and his hard blue eyes stared keenly at me. He was jiggling a pen up and down impatiently in his hand.

‘Hello, Dr Ahrens, nice of you to see me.’

He didn’t say anything to that, just pushed his lips out expectantly – indeed, as expectantly as if he were giving me exactly two seconds.

I made an airy gesture. ‘Pretty place you have here.’

No reaction. He went on staring at me. Obviously this was his usual approach: look at his interlocutor like a beast of prey and wait for him to make the first move. So I made it.

‘Tell me, is this some kind of nature therapy or do you have a touch of schizophrenia?’ I winked at him cheerfully. ‘You’re really a big game hunter, or Moses, or something like that?’

The pen in his hand stopped moving up and down, and his gaze became if possible keener still.

‘Well, never mind that. The main thing is, you feel good in here, and it doesn’t bother you if people tap their foreheads behind your back. I’m just wondering how it goes down with your business contacts. Do they insist on having a medical doctor present when they’re signing contracts?’ And without waiting for him to answer, I pointed to a bamboo chair. ‘May I sit down? It was a long way to your desk.’

I’d cornered him now. He really had to do something: either go for my throat, or call for the works security men, or give a couple of explanations. Sitting there listening to me saying what a nutcase he was wouldn’t do, anyway.

The longer the silence lasted, the more physical violence seemed to be ruled out. Perhaps he thought it beneath his dignity. And he seemed to me vain enough to be actually interested in my opinion of him. Sure enough, he finally said in a tone suggesting that it was all the same to him, but he didn’t mind a quick explanation, ‘All this stuff is for the women. They like that kind of thing, and I like women. OK?’

‘Fancy that. And it works?’

He made a casual gesture at the room.

‘Star signs, exotic countries, arts and crafts stuff, all looking as if it cost a lot – what do
you
think works with women? Sharing a pizza?’ He waited a moment to see if I had anything to say about that before leaning over the desk, his large brown hand stretched in my direction, moving his fingers up and down like a cop wanting to see your ID. ‘So now hurry up and tell me what you’re doing here.’

‘How about if I sit down?’

He seemed to consider this idea briefly, and then jerked
his chin in the direction of the bamboo chair. I strolled the few metres over to it, moved the chair slightly, sat down carefully as if to test the sturdiness of its thin struts, crossed my legs, looked around the vast hall again, and finally said in casual tones, ‘I kind of wonder why someone who takes such trouble furnishing his office doesn’t even have a little tiger stuck to the dashboard of his car. Or one of those humorous coconut cushions on the back seat. Do you never take the ladies home afterwards? Must be quite a contrast for them, out of here and into a BMW that looks like it just rolled off the production line. Maybe there’s one of them you’d like to see again, she’d notice the moment she got in that car how phoney this pad of yours is.’