Jakob Arjouni - Brother Kemal

Once again she drew a huge breath, as if a sack of plaster lay on her chest, before she cautiously asked, ‘Is that a promise?’

‘It is.’

‘Please, Herr Kayankaya … I really am so frightened, and I’m all on my own …’

‘I said I’ll deal with it. But you have to hold out for that week. I’m sure that at the moment Abakay’s people are just poking about at random. Presumably Abakay has drawn up a list of people to whom he’s done wrong in some way or another, and who he correctly assumes could have hired a private detective to kick his legs from under him. You were probably just one name among many. So again: deny ever having heard of me and I bet that in a couple of days’ time they’ll leave you alone.’

She sighed. ‘My God, Herr Kayankaya, what a mess I’ve got myself into.’ And after a pause, ‘I’m sorry, I’m being a nuisance to you, aren’t I?’

‘Oh, never mind that.’

She stopped for a moment and then laughed quietly, in a familiar way, as if we were friends of many years’ standing and she was glad that I was still the same old roughneck I used to be.

‘May I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Do you think …’ She hesitated. Or she pretended to be hesitating. Or both. Probably Valerie de Chavannes herself no longer knew what she did unintentionally and what was calculation or a trick. Anyway, her hesitation gave the question the clarity of which she then tried to deprive it — or made out she was trying to deprive it — by adopting a tone as objective as possible and slightly pert, adding a barely perceptible pinch of girlish flirtatiousness. ‘Do you think we’d ever have met without all this?’

This time I was the one to hesitate.

‘Before I answer that question, may I just tell you the name of the friend who will collect my fee from you in the next few days? He’s Ernst Slibulsky. You can open the door to him, please.’

‘Ernst Slibulsky, okay.’

‘Maybe we have in fact met before,’ I went on, pausing again and thinking that I sensed her holding her breath at the other end of the line. It was a shot in the dark, but since our first meeting I couldn’t shake off that thought. Not that I thought we had really got to know each other, but maybe we had been around in the same place at the same time.

‘You left home when you were sixteen, and there aren’t many places in Frankfurt where a young girl who’s run away like that can get by somehow or other. How old are you now?’

She didn’t reply. But probably not because she wanted to conceal her age from me, more likely because she scented danger.

‘Come on — you look as if you are in your mid-thirties, but you’re not. Mid-forties?’

For a moment I thought she’d put down the receiver, but then I heard her breathing.

‘Let’s say around forty. Marieke is sixteen, and you weren’t silly enough to get pregnant too young. In your late twenties, I’d assume, when your wild days were gradually coming to an end. Work it out like that, and about twenty-five years ago you were standing with a travelling bag or a rucksack at the end of Zeppelinallee on the Bockenheimer Warte. Maybe you then spent a few weeks with friends, or on holiday in the south of France or somewhere like that, but in the course of time your friends went back to school and you’d come to the end of your money. Of course you’d sooner have cut off an arm than ask your parents for financial support, or even go back home. Well, at the time I was out and about in the railway station district on both professional and private business — ’

She cut the connection. Maybe she thought my assumptions were simply insulting; or alternatively I’d hit the bull’s-eye. You had to have — like Deborah did — a certain kind of North German composure and toughness that comes of living in that bleak, flat countryside to be proud of having survived the sex clubs and striptease bars of the station area. For a banker’s daughter and wife of an artist, a part of her life spent in the best known and (at that time) the deepest gutter in Frankfurt was probably not a subject on which she wanted to dwell.

And suddenly an uncomfortable thought came to me. How old, in fact, was Abakay? Mid-thirties, I assumed, but then it didn’t compute. But at least symbolically he could have conjured up ghosts of Valerie de Chavannes’s past in the station area, if there had been any. And perhaps she hadn’t minded that at first. Now over forty, married with a child, living in a villa, weekends spent at health spas, sushi suppers, Woody Allen films — you liked remembering your own youth, however bizarre it was. But then suppose memory became the present, the pimp comes into your own house, gets to know your sixteen-year-old daughter …

I wanted to get back, quickly, to the wine bar and my unsentimental Jewish Frisian girlfriend. Deborah took life as a learning curve, or rather a learning staircase. Once she was up one step she climbed the next, and she never went back. Why learn something twice? She would have spotted a pimp at first sight, never mind his disguise as a photographer and a man out to improve the world, and would have chased him off with her broom. Valerie de Chavannes’s neediness made me nervous.

‘Oh, there you are. Could you please bring a couple of cartons up from the cellar, twelve bottles of Foulards Rouges in each?’

Deborah was kneeling behind the bar in her short blue denim skirt, checking on the provisions in the fridge. It was just before five, and the wine bar would soon be filling up.

I inspected her bare legs. ‘Are we going to empty one of those bottles ourselves?’

She looked up, shot me a quick glance to see if I was drunk, then smiled her clever, mischievous smile, which said clearly: Listen, you, I’m at work! And she added, for fun, ‘Your place or mine?’

‘Yours, dear heart. You know what my wife is like …’

‘Sure, she’d get on anyone’s nerves. Coming home in the middle of the night, wanting to tell you what her day in the bar was like, dropping off to sleep at once on the sofa or in an armchair, and then she has to be undressed and put to bed. I can tell you, my old man is quite a handful too. He’s been going to bed earlier and earlier since he stopped smoking. And when we want to cuddle or at least see the nightly news on TV, he’s snoring fit to burst our eardrums.’

I shook my head. ‘What rotten luck. Well, nothing to be done about it. All the same,’ I added, jerking my chin at her legs, ‘nice skirt.’

‘Thanks. Will you pick me up later?’

‘I’ll set the alarm.’

‘And I’ll have a double espresso last thing.’

She winked at me and turned back to the fridge. On my way through the backyard and down a damp flight of brick steps to the cellar, I thought about those ghosts of the past conjured up for me by Valerie de Chavannes. And how seductive such ghosts could be. I wasn’t Deborah, I knew I could go down those steps again at any time, all the way to the very bottom, and then, at the age of fifty-three, start all over again: spirits, cigarettes, sleepless nights, anger, the light on the horizon.

I decided not to keep my promise. I wasn’t going to deal with anything or anyone for Valerie de Chavannes next week, not even if Sheikh Hakim’s entire congregation were to come up Zeppelinallee on their knees. And the danger of being suspected of a contract killing in the true sense of the term? Well, I thought I now knew who had killed Rönnthaler. I didn’t have the evidence yet, but I’d soon find it. And then Valerie de Chavannes could tell the police anything she liked.

I wanted to think not about her but about Deborah and our Christmas holidays. Over Christmas the wine bar would be closed for a full week, and Slibulsky had told me about a good spa hotel in Alsace.