Jakob Arjouni - Brother Kemal

I knew about ten minutes of the film, and after that I’d gone to sleep on the sofa beside Deborah. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘It’s such a romantic love story! Imagine — and then this!’

‘You said you were friends until now.’

She hesitated, suspicion in her eyes.

‘Yes?’

‘Were you a couple?’

There was a pause. She looked at the sheet in front of her. After a while she said, ‘I’d like to shower now.’

‘Okay, then I’ll leave you alone. You know where everything is. Meanwhile I’ll go and see how my colleagues are getting on with the fat man and Abakay.’

She looked up. ‘I don’t want to see him now.’

‘Of course not. Don’t worry, my colleagues have probably taken him away.’ I nodded to her. ‘Call me when you’re finished.’

She watched me head to the door.

‘Tell me …’

I turned. ‘Yes?’

‘Will my parents hear about this?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think you’ll be needed as a witness. Nothing really happened to you — forgive me for putting it like that, but I have to say so from the legal point of view — and there’ll be plenty of other women to give evidence.’

‘You mean there were other girls before me?’ she asked, and I had the disagreeable impression that she’d have liked to be the only one.

‘Frau de Chavannes, in case this isn’t clear to you yet: Abakay is a pimp. And if girls didn’t want to go along with him he pumped them full of heroin. You can forget about art and romantic films. You happened to be lucky.’

And with that little lecture I left her alone. Abakay, Abakay, I thought on my way along the corridor, you really have a knack for it: a little social kitsch, cheap drinks, terrible films, and great big gold rings on your fingers, and the girls come running! I wondered whether Valerie de Chavannes herself had landed in those white satin sheets after a couple of glasses of Aperol.

When I reached the front hall of the apartment Abakay’s mouth was open, he was groaning, and he was clearly about to come back to his senses. I hit him on the head again with the pistol, and then I searched his pockets. In his trouser pocket I found one thousand two hundred euros in hundred and two-hundred-euro notes, along with some fives and tens. Presumably there had been exactly one thousand five hundred there an hour ago. Maybe Abakay had made out that Marieke was a virgin; that would have explained the high price. Then Marieke had been difficult, and to calm her down Abakay had gone to buy heroin with some of the money he had obtained in advance from fat Volker. One thousand two hundred and a few squashed notes were left.

I took the bigger bills and stuffed them into the pocket of fat Volker’s jeans.

Then I went into the kitchen and searched the drawers for a sharp knife. The shower was running in the background. I hoped Marieke would never tell her mother that she had slept with Abakay.

I returned to the entrance hall of the apartment with a butcher’s knife about thirty centimetres long, knelt down beside Abakay, and cut and stabbed him lightly in the chest and the stomach. Not deep wounds; I just wanted it to look as if there had been a fight, and I wanted Abakay’s blood on the blade. Abakay groaned again and twitched, but he didn’t come round. I crawled over to fat Volker, wiped the handle of the knife on my T-shirt, and closed his cold hand round it. The small wound, level with his heart, had stopped bleeding.

I took a roll of parcel tape from the office, a teacloth from the kitchen, gagged Abakay and bound his legs together.

After that I went back into the office, turned on the computer, and typed ‘Marieke’ into the window of the search engine. The name appeared on a list of various girls’ names with pseudonyms after them. The pseudonym Laetitia, in brackets, followed Marieke’s name, and then it came up in a kind of catalogue. The file was entitled ‘Autumn Flowers 2011’. The photographs were simple snapshots of fully clothed teenagers in the street or cafés, usually laughing. Laetitia was described as: Clever, demanding upper-class girl, political interests, likes conversations, will go to great lengths in her search for adventure if the tone is right, ready for almost anything, exotic, milk-coffee colour, very well developed, still fourteen for several months .

Fourteen; that accounted for the price.

Another girl with the pseudonym of Melanie was described as: Happy, natural suburban girl, loves horses, likes to have fun — laughter above all. More for the conventional ride than delicate games, blonde, fresh, youthful type. Sixteen .

Probably eighteen.

And then there was Lilly: Super special! Sweet little mouse in knee-length socks, still plays with dolls, virgin, to highest bidder .

I deleted all the data about Marieke, typed de Chavannes into the search engine, brought up Valerie de Chavannes’s address and a few photos of her taken secretly in the café. I deleted those as well. In the bookshelf I found a carton of photographs labelled Frankfurt in the Shadow of the Bank Towers . With the carton under my arm I went into the front hall and kicked Abakay as hard as I could between the legs. In spite of the gag he grunted out loud, fluid ran from his nose, and he doubled up before falling on his side unconscious again.

‘That’s from Lilly.’

As I waited in the kitchen for Marieke, I leafed through the photographs. Most of them were black-and-white photographs of devastated, wrinkled, old or prematurely aged faces against the background of the high-rise bank buildings of Frankfurt. An old Roma woman with a toothless grin and a cigarette end in the corner of her mouth, a dark-skinned youth with an Elvis quiff, a child’s guitar and only one eye, a junkie whore with an entirely vacant expression and an I Love Frankfurt button on her blouse, and so on. Not so bad, but not so new either. I felt as if I’d seen these photos many times before.

I put the carton aside and wondered what weapon, or what tool, could make such a narrow but deadly wound.

We reached the inner courtyard by way of the back stairs, and went through the gateway to the street. The aroma of grilled meat wafted out of the kitchen windows of Café Klaudia. It was lunchtime, and I felt hungry.

‘We must find a taxi. My colleagues used our car to take Abakay away.’

‘How about Volker?’

‘There’s a doctor with him in the stairwell.’

‘Why didn’t you want us to go out the front?’

‘So that he wouldn’t see you again. There are cases where the customer, or rapist or whatever you like to call someone buying underage girls for sex — anyway, there are cases where the man tries making advances to his victim later, especially when it went wrong the first time. Naturally we want to avoid that. I don’t want him to get a chance to imprint your face on his mind.’

‘I don’t think he’s feeling very well.’

‘He’ll soon be better.’

We were standing on the pavement, and I was looking out for a taxi. My bike was gleaming in the sun twenty metres away.

‘Won’t he have to go to prison?’

‘What for?’

I looked at her. After her shower, the blonde Rasta braids tied behind her head with a blue velvet bow, in jeans and a white blouse, the square-framed designer glasses on her nose, she looked just like the stern and slightly condescending girl in the photos on Valerie de Chavannes’s glass-topped table. She’d been in shock half an hour ago, but it was clearly wearing off.

‘Attempted rape?’

‘It’s always rather difficult to prove that kind of thing. Particularly when the alleged victim has previously had a voluntary relationship with the pimp involved.’