Jakob Arjouni - Brother Kemal

‘You don’t know my husband. He’s not the jealous type.’

‘In my experience, that’s only ever what other people say. And the only man I know who said it about himself became addicted to pills after his girlfriend cheated on him with one of his colleagues.’

‘Well, maybe your job doesn’t allow you much experience with people whose approach to life doesn’t conform to the usual standards.’

‘Could be, Frau de Chavannes. But I’ve met a few fathers who flew off the handle because their adolescent daughters started going around with other men. Among people whose approach to life does conform to the usual standards, that kind of thing is called jealousy.’

We looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and maybe she wanted to hit me.

Finally she looked away and said, ‘Right, fine, Herr Kayankaya, obviously you’re very articulate, and that’s just as well. But it’s not really relevant at the moment. Will you get Marieke out of this without letting her know who asked you to do it?’

‘I’ll try. As I said, your daughter has a right to hang out with Abakay. I can’t simply carry her off.’

‘But you strike me as a man with imagination. Think up some kind of pretext. Lure Abakay out of town or …’

‘Beat him up, yes, I know. But that won’t get us anywhere, Frau de Chavannes. And thanks for the bit about the man with imagination. Pay me a day’s fee in advance, and I’ll see what I can do.’

I took one of my standard contracts out of my jacket pocket and handed it to her across the glass-topped table. Four hundred euros a day plus expenses, two days’ fee as a bonus for success. Normally my daily fee was two hundred and fifty euros a day, but normally my clients don’t live in Zeppelinallee. In fact I wasn’t all that bothered about the money. I’d had plenty of work recently, and Deborah’s wine bar was doing well and becoming a must-visit place in Frankfurt. But as with most relatively cultivated rich people — and I had automatically put the daughter of a French banker and vintner and wife of a highly regarded Dutch artist into that category — it was like this: they pleased themselves and others by supposing that special quality called for a special price, that you had to consider value for money rather than the price itself, that price plus wear and tear of cheap stuff ultimately costs you more than expensive stuff, and so on. It wouldn’t even occur to someone with that much money that such an attitude is itself cheap, because attitudes don’t cost anything. At any rate, I didn’t want to stir up any more doubts in Valerie de Chavannes’s mind as to whether she was putting herself into the right hands now that she had swallowed my office address in Gutleutstrasse. I was all the more surprised when she looked up from the document, frowning, and said, ‘Four hundred euros a day? Your website said fee by arrangement.’

‘If a case seems particularly difficult. In your case I’ll stick to my usual conditions.’

‘Four hundred euros a day — good heavens.’

She really did seem to be concerned about the amount. It made me feel uncomfortable. On the other hand … I took a look around the living room.

‘Do the furnishings belong to your parents as well?’

‘Most of them, yes.’

It brought me up short. ‘And the paintings?’

They were almost all large-format, modern-looking arrangements of blocks of colour, oil on canvas, in heavy, gilded, antique-style frames. Sometimes cubes of assorted colours, sometimes blobs or stripes, a rainbow of merging colours, a red square in a yellow square in a green square, and so on, a purple blotch like a storm cloud. When I looked more closely for the first time, I realised that they could hardly be by the artist who had painted The Blind Men of Babylon .

‘Edgar would tell you that those aren’t paintings, they’re interior decoration.’

‘Pretty.’

‘Exactly.’

We looked at each other, and no one had to say so, but it was clear that her parents were forcing her and her artist husband to leave the pictures hanging on the walls. Maybe they came from the same firm that had furnished the waiting room, the conference room and the lavatory of the Frankfurt branch of Magnon amp; Koch. Perhaps her parents wanted to tell their son-in-law, as if shouting it through a megaphone, what kind of paintings did not ‘stop selling so well’ at some point in time. Or perhaps they just wanted to inflict a little torture on their tattooed daughter who had left home at sixteen.

So Valerie de Chavannes was living in furnished accommodation, and four hundred euros was not just chicken feed to her.

‘As I assume that I can do the job in a day or so without too much expense, I can offer to halve the bonus for success.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and it came from the heart.

She signed the contract, and while she went out to fetch the four hundred euros I put my jacket on and went over to an A4-sized drawing that was fixed to the wall with a drawing pin between two large paintings, a two-by-two-metres rainbow and a three-metres-long row of red and green horizontal stripes. A quick, smudged pencil sketch showing a man with an Afro hairstyle and his mouth wide open, kneeling on the floor between two huge pictures of a rainbow and some horizontal stripes with a mound of vomit that reached to his chest and threatened to smother him.

When Valerie de Chavannes came back she saw me standing in front of the picture.

‘This one is funny,’ I said, and I meant it.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘it isn’t. Here you are.’ She came towards me and gave me four hundred-euro notes. ‘I’ll be at home all day. Please call me as soon as you have any news about Marieke.’

At her daughter’s name the strength suddenly drained out of her. She was breathing heavily, her chin began to quiver and she pressed her lips together.

‘Please bring me my daughter back! And forget about halving the bonus, that’s so stupid, it was only …’ She fought off her tears. ‘We really don’t have a lot of money right now, and it was only out of a horrible habit that I thought of it, of course I’ll pay anything you like, just get Marieke back for me.’

She came a step closer to me, wringing her hands in front of her stomach and looking pleadingly at me. It was just about impossible not to put my arms round her. Her head fell on my shoulder, she gave way to tears and her trembling body pressed close to mine. She had taken off the cardigan when she went to find the money, and I was holding her bare muscular arms. The sleeves of her T-shirt slipped up, and my fingertips touched her damp armpits. When I began to feel her breasts through my lightweight corduroy jacket, it was time to leave.

I carefully pushed her away from me. Her face was wet with tears.

‘Don’t worry, Frau de Chavannes. I’ll find Marieke for you. That’s a promise.’

She looked at me despairingly. ‘If he does anything to her …’

‘He won’t.’ The things we say. I pointed to the glass-topped table with the photographs. ‘Your daughter is a strong, self-confident young woman. And girls her age do gad about. I’m sure the two of them are doing nothing but sitting in a café and talking about underground photography or our antisocial society. Maybe they’ll go into the park and smoke a bit of weed now and then. She’ll be back this evening, and you can lecture her about the extremely proper things you did at sixteen. I assume there’ll be a lot about skipping ropes, poetry albums and classical piano music …’

She had to smile a little.

‘See you this evening, Frau de Chavannes. And no, don’t stay at home. Go for a walk, or shopping, or to the gym — move about, do something to take your mind off it. But don’t forget to take your mobile. I’ll call you, okay?’