Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

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.’

As a surprise it wasn’t a thunderclap, but it did at least get some reaction out of him at last. He frowned and folded his arms, and his biceps, steely from the weights room at the gym, began twitching in a quiet, unpleasant rhythm.

‘And incidentally,’ I went on, ‘it occurs to me to wonder on what occasion the BMW was really stolen? Even more interesting, when and how did the thief get hold of your keys? I’m assuming that even someone as comfortably off as you are doesn’t leave a brand new car worth umpteen thousand marks outside a bar with its engine running.’

No doubt about it, something was going on underneath his blow-dried hairdo. I leaned back comfortably in the chair, looked at him in a friendly way and let him take his time. When the silence began to put him at a clear disadvantage, he said, ‘I get it,’ and suddenly a nasty little smile came to his lips. ‘You stole the car and you want to sell it back to me.’