Jakob Arjouni - Brother Kemal

At one twenty I delivered Rashid by taxi to the Hotel Harmonia. Ten minutes later Deborah got in, dropped her handbag on the floor and laid her head on my shoulder.

‘Read anything good?’ she murmured.

‘Read what?’

‘Well, isn’t there a Book Fair going on?’

Even the taxi driver laughed quietly. As he did so, I noticed a pair of headlights following us in the rearview mirror. On the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, I asked the taxi driver to shake off the car for a twenty-euro tip.

‘What’s going on?’ Deborah was alert at once, lifting her head from my shoulder as we suddenly turned full speed into Mendelssohnstrasse.

‘Someone’s following us.’

Luckily she was too tired to worry.

We raced round two more corners and jumped a set of red lights, and then we were rid of the car following us.

At home Deborah fell asleep at once on the sofa, while I called Slibulsky.

‘Hey, any idea what time it is?’ he whispered.

‘I’m sorry, but I need your help tomorrow. Urgently.’

‘It’s not a good time. I have our monthly meeting with the branch managers of my firm at midday tomorrow, and Lara wanted to go to a reading with me tomorrow evening. Don’t you know the Book Fair is on?’

‘Yes, I know. The Book Fair.’

‘Or something like that. Anyway, someone’s going to read a bit of his book to us, what’s its name, wait a minute … Yes, everything’s okay, sweetheart, go back to sleep. It’s Kemal calling.’ I heard a kiss and some murmuring. Lara didn’t particularly like me because I didn’t make any effort to take her religious quirks seriously. Slibulsky didn’t take them seriously either, but he tried not to show it.

‘I’ll just go into the kitchen … Right,’ he went on, at a normal volume, ‘so like I said, he’s going to read us a bit of his book. Something philosophical, but straightforward and humorous, Lara says. He looks the way Monty Python would have done a French pop star. Kind of long soft hair, and a blasé face like an ad for aftershave.’

‘Lara really seems to like him.’

‘She thinks he’s super cute and wildly intelligent, and the sight of him makes me feel sick.’

‘Well, I don’t want to spoil your evening. I’ll find someone else.’

‘Very funny. I just don’t know how I’m going to tell Lara. And if she goes on her own you can bet the philosopher will try to get his claws into her.’

Lara was twenty years younger than Slibulsky, looked like Christina Ricci, and always dressed so that her pretty breasts and behind would show to advantage. I could understand that. What I couldn’t understand was why Slibulsky, although she had been living with him for more than four years and as a freelance jewellery designer was more or less living on his money, still seemed to be afraid of losing her at any time and thus missing out on the chance of his lifetime. Although as I saw it, Lara loved him very much, if in her own bitchy way, but that’s how she was.

‘Maybe Deborah can explain it to her.’

Lara had been in awe of Deborah ever since finding out about Deborah’s Jewish grandmother. Once she had turned up at our apartment on a Friday evening with a plaited loaf and candles, intending to celebrate the Sabbath. With the words, ‘You go on watching the sports programme, I’m sure this isn’t your sort of thing,’ she left me sitting on the sofa. It wasn’t Deborah’s sort of thing either, but for once she went along with Lara’s more or less correct ritual just to be friendly, although she said afterwards that from the next week she had to go to a sommelier course on Friday evenings. It was almost true; the course was on Thursdays.

‘Explain what to her?’ asked Slibulsky.

‘That I need you to be with Deborah tomorrow. Someone is out to get me, and I’m afraid he’ll try to do it through her.’

‘And where will you be?’

‘I’m on a bodyguard job all day. Can you have the branch managers meeting at the wine bar?’

‘No problem.’

‘Okay, then Deborah will call Lara tomorrow morning. And as for the reading, I know an author who’ll be reading at the House of Literature next week. His novel is called: An Occitanian Love , south of France, lavender fields, older man, young girl, “very movingly told, with a humorous slant, light, without avoiding the big questions in life …” ’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘Just quoting from the ad. I’m working at the Book Fair for a publishing house, and the author, Hans Peter Stullberg, is one of their stars. I’ll be meeting him tomorrow, and I’ll try to get a personal invitation for you and Lara. I’m sure Lara would like the occasion. It’s chic.’

‘Older man, young girl … I’m not so sure.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! What’s the matter now?’

‘Lara’s ex was here the day before yesterday. He’s the same age as her, up and coming rock star — you know the kind of thing, clever texts, all that shit — and I felt like my own granny. Hey, don’t ash on the carpet, please, and: Assam or Darjeeling tea? Enough to make you sick.’

‘Hmm.’

Luckily I heard Lara calling to him at that moment. She didn’t like Slibulsky to talk to me for too long.

‘Well, fine, then. I’ll go back to bed. So Deborah will be calling tomorrow morning?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and, ‘Sleep well,’ and we hung up. I recalled how in the old days Slibulsky had been a drug dealer, a bouncer, and even for a while a debt collector and henchman for one of the biggest pimps in Frankfurt. Life was a wonderful thing.

Then I undressed Deborah, put a nightdress on her and carried her to bed.

In the morning Deborah phoned Slibulsky and Lara, and they agreed that Slibulsky would fetch her from home at ten, go with her to the butcher’s and the fishmonger’s, then take her to the wine bar and spend the rest of the day there with her. Lara was going to join them in the afternoon when the branch manager meeting was over.

‘You can choose any dish you like to make up for missing the reading, kitten,’ said Deborah. A little later she said goodbye and hung up.

‘What did she ask for?’

‘Chicken breast and salad.’

‘Wow.’

‘Well, it’s light, and we don’t often get asked for something really light.’

‘How about us?’

‘I thought you had to work all day?’

‘I’ll try to drop by later with Rashid. After two days at the Book Fair I need something sensible to eat.’

‘Shall I buy ox tongue?’

‘I love you!’

When Slibulsky arrived I quickly gave him Valerie de Chavannes’s address and phone number, and asked him to call in for the rest of my fee if he was near there in the next few days.

Then the first thing I did was to drive to my office. As I had expected, the door had been broken down, but otherwise everything seemed more or less in the right place. A minibook edition of the Koran lay in the middle of my desk, probably some kind of Best of the Koran . Inside was a handwritten inscription in German: For my sadly missed brother. It is never too late for the wisdom of the Prophet .

I put the little book on the bookshelf, called a joiner to repair the door and then drove to the Harmonia Hotel.

My second day at the Book Fair went more or less like the first. Rashid gave interviews and signed books, I sat behind him in the aromas from the hospitality room — this time there was cold ham and rocket pizza, sausage spread and Camembert rolls — and we went off to the toilets roughly every hour and a half. Rashid’s diarrhoea had cleared up, but he drank at least a litre of water per interview. In the evening Herr Thys, the lean, good-looking head of Maier Verlag, aged about fifty-five, gave a dinner in the restaurant of the Frankfurter Hof for authors and the upper echelons of the firm. Thys sat in the middle of the table, with Hans Peter Stullberg on his right, Mercedes García on his left and Rashid at the end of the table between the sales director and Thys’s cousin. I sat on my own at the next table, chewing the surprisingly dry saddle of venison in mango and bilberry sauce that the firm had ordered for all the guests.