Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

‘You’ll find this hard to believe, but at the moment…’

‘I know, I know: the Army and your conscience and no spare time and so on and so forth. Look, if you’re reasonably presentable next Friday and you don’t drop in, we have a real problem. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Heard anything of Tango Man?’

‘You could certainly say so. A performance of No Fairer Land under the shower this morning, and at the moment he’s polishing my kitchen to a high gloss.’

‘Still not joking?’

‘No. He’s alive. And how.’

‘Well, tell me about it some other time. I have to go back to my vendors. We’re having a little party — three years of Gelati Slibulsky, who’d have thought it?’

‘Congratulations. By the way, I think you were right about those sweets. There’s something funny about them.’

‘Aha,’ he said, satisfied, and we said goodbye until next Friday at the latest.

In the kitchen Romario was busy scouring lime marks off my sink with a sponge pad. He had taken off his shoes and socks and unbuttoned his shirt. Another day or so and he’d probably be running about my place naked — singing, cleaning, shedding pubic hair.

He smiled at me over his shoulder and said, ‘Just making myself a bit useful.’

‘But only a very little bit. Listen, Romario: I’m carrying on with this case, and I don’t want anyone around here who isn’t happy with that.’

He turned, shoulders drooping, scouring pad in his hand. ‘I was only making a suggestion. And I did it mainly for your sake because they beat you up. What was it the doctor said? “You were lucky”. Well, if that’s luck…’

Water was dripping from the sponge pad on to his bare feet. Didn’t he notice? Or was he just pretending not to notice so as to show how upset he was? When Romario presented a picture of misery I was never quite sure where the picture stopped and the misery began.

I took what cash I had out of my trouser pockets, two hundred-mark notes and a few tens, put it on the kitchen table, and said, ‘Find yourself a hotel for tonight, and let me know tomorrow where you’re going to be for the next few days. Sorry, but that’s how it is.’

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Reproaches, climb-downs, offers, a couple of new bids for sympathy, and any number of variations on the familiar subject of his poor hand, but finally he had to see that there was no negotiating with me this evening. When he closed the door behind him a little later with elaborate care — see what a quiet, harmless creature you’re turning out into the street so heartlessly — I even thought for a moment I could breathe through my swollen nose again. Then I took a few precautions: I put some empty bottles just inside the door as an alarm system, laid out all my weapons beside the bed, got my bulletproof vest out of the wardrobe and hung it on the window catch. Then I took the TV set into the bedroom, swallowed painkillers, and lay down to watch a French film in which a man being attacked pleaded with the thief, ‘It’s not my money.’ To which the thief impatiently replied, ‘I’m not stealing it for myself either.’ As the final credits were rolling I turned off the TV and the light. It was Saturday evening. A song by Heino was coming up from the greengrocer’s flat: ‘Come into my wigwam, wigwam…’ Did he think it was good music to go with sex? I heard his entire programme: dog-like panting, corks popping, the disc from the beginning again, singing along to it, more panting. Around two the front door of the building closed, and finally it was quiet.

I spent the next two days in bed. No one disturbed my orgy of television, baked beans and chocolate ice cream. Outside it was drizzling, and according to the weather forecast it was going to stay that way for the rest of the week. The cool, damp weather was just right for someone with a swollen face. I got a fright only once, when the racketeer’s mobile alarmed me. A text message said the mobile was going out of circulation at once.

On Tuesday afternoon I felt reasonably all right again, and called the Albanian. We’d met at a billiards tournament five months before, and then drank a couple of aniseed schnapps together. Soon after that I discovered by chance that his two daughters went to the same expensive boarding school as the son of Slibulsky’s tax adviser. From what the tax adviser said, the Albanian’s daughters weren’t having a great time there. Their class teacher obviously thought it educationally valuable to connect their poor school work with their ethnic origin, doing so at regular intervals and in front of the other pupils. Apart from the fact that they had both been born in Frankfurt, and spent more holidays in Florida than Albania, you might have expected that for school fees of two thousand marks a month each, plus extras, you could at least expect teachers who don’t trumpet their own backwoods prejudices. Normally I wouldn’t have thought anything of it — injustice in institutions for the rich elite was not among the things that bothered me. In this case, however, I had an opportunity to improve my relationship with the Albanian. After I’d been through interrogations first by a bodyguard and then by a private secretary about the reason for my call, their boss finally came to the phone. I told him about his daughters’ problems, and judging by what he said this was the first time he’d heard about them. The girls were presumably embarrassed to tell him. As so often when such things happen, it’s the wrong people who feel ashamed. I took care to give the impression that I would continue to keep him up to date with his children’s school lives, and finally he thanked me warmly and actually gave me the number of his mobile. That number could be worth gold in my job. I never knew exactly what happened to the class teacher who also taught the girls German and sports, but a little later he had to give up teaching sports.

I exchanged a few remarks with the Albanian about his daughters, whose marks had improved to a remarkable degree over the last couple of months. Then I told him in rough outline, without mentioning names and places, what I knew about the Army. Not only could he keep his mouth shut surprisingly often for a gangster boss, he could certainly never be called talkative in general either. If he wasn’t discussing his daughters, phoning him was rather like playing tennis up against a wall. His tone of voice changed too. Warm and melodious a moment ago, it now sounded like a warped wooden door being moved back and forth by a slight wind.

‘I need a few more days to find out what its structure is like, who does what where and how much longer this outfit is expected to operate, but then we could strike.’

‘Pick the time and we will.’

‘It’s a small factory. We’d need about forty men to surround it.’

‘Forty.’

‘But we don’t want a bloodbath. You’ll get my information only if you can promise me your people will keep a grip on themselves. We want to stop the Army operating, that’s all.’

‘That’s all, then.’

‘And the boss is my affair.’

‘And the boss is your affair.’

‘OK, then, I’ll be in touch within the next few days.’

‘Within the next few days,’ he replied, but as I was about to ring off I sensed him suddenly hesitating, as if he had to venture into unknown terrain. I kept the receiver to my ear until he finally asked, ‘Who are you working for?’

‘Myself.’

‘Unpaid?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘The Army made me do something I didn’t like at all, and I can’t leave it at that.’

‘Hm,’ he said, and after a pause, ‘If you try taking me for any kind of ride, I’m finished with you. Is that clear?’