Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

‘That’s clear.’

‘Well then, good luck.’

I rang off and remembered how I’d lost to him in the semi-finals of the tournament. A fair opponent, no fooling about, no tricks. The problem was his retinue of henchmen who always had their hands on either their guns or their pricks in their trouser pockets, and were constantly on the point of taking out one or the other to let fly with it. But he’d promised they would do no more than I wanted, and a boss like the Albanian really couldn’t afford to break his promises. That kind of thing got around, and it was bad for business. Or so I hoped, anyway.

I looked at the time. One-thirty, a good time to have had an accident at work and come off my first shift of the day, trudging round dogs’ homes.

‘Hello, Frau Beierle.’

‘Herr Kayankaya — dear me, you sound as if you have a bad cold!’

‘Well, I had a little accident. Just now, in Oberursel, I thought I’d found Susi at last, and I went into the pen. But it was a different dog, one that likes jumping at people’s faces. And well, it broke my nose.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘It’s not too bad, but I have to go to the doctor now, and maybe I can get back to searching for Susi at the end of the week.’

‘Of course, of course! You must look after yourself. Take your time. Injuries to the head should never be taken lightly.’

‘I’m just sorry for Susi. Now she’ll have to be shut up longer in one of those awful pens.’

‘Oh, Susi will be all right. It’s really amazing how many animal rescue centres there are around Frankfurt.’

‘Yes, amazing.’

‘Because people are so cruel, specially in this town. Or that’s my opinion, anyway.’

‘An interesting opinion. Although after today’s incident I have to say,’ I added, chuckling hard, ‘the animals in this town can be quite cruel too.’

‘Of course, you poor thing! I mustn’t keep you here talking. You go off to the doctor, and then go to bed.’

‘Thank you for being so understanding, Frau Beierle.’

‘Oh, never mind that. And if you need anything, just call me.’

We said goodbye, and I wondered when the day would come on which she realised that her bow-wow was probably never going to come back with my assistance. And I also wondered how much longer I wanted to play the pop-eyed Turk for her benefit. Because of course the Islamic scholar had picked me from the yellow pages on account of my name, and of course when we first met she had explained to me at length what the Turks were like, myself included. Industrious, proud, strong on family values, keeping up old traditions, the secret rulers of Asia — in short, I was a whole great nation in myself. Not for the first time, I was fascinated to discover what having a good education and a university degree did not mean. But as I’d been out of a job for weeks, and as my normal daily retainer fee had automatically doubled the moment I set foot in her villa with its large garden, I didn’t shake her belief that she had practically invented the Ottomans. Only when she played me some appalling music, and I could see from her face that she was obviously expecting me to drum along with it or do a little dance, did I suggest that even in a people who appeared to be of one and the same origin, individual tastes might differ. Whereupon she said I didn’t really know what I liked any more, Western values and the Western lifestyle had distorted my true identity. To keep her sweet, I did her a small favour when we came to the business part of the deal: I tripled my retainer, just like that, and let her haggle until she beat me down to double the retainer, as if I usually did that kind of thing. Her small, knowing smile as she wrote me her cheque seemed to be saying: you see, that’s how the Orientals live. Once I had the Army business behind me and set out looking for Susi again, supposing I actually found her I’d have to find out how the Orientals felt about rewards. Perhaps there was some nice fifteenth-century proverb: find my watchdog and I will shower you with gold.

I made fresh coffee, drank a cup, dressed, cleared away the bottles from inside the door, and went to the supermarket. The manager there told me that the Ahrens company had stopped delivering three months ago for unknown reasons. When I asked whether Ahrens Soups had sold well, he said, ‘No worse than other products of the same kind.’

On the way home I bought all the newspapers with local Frankfurt sections, and thought of the deserted corridors and offices in Ahrens’s admin building. Obviously the place was closed, and not just on Saturdays. But then why did it employ a receptionist? In addition one who thought so little of the way the wind was blowing there that she’d help an enemy of her boss to get away?

At home I leafed through the local sections, and found the reports I had been more or less expecting. Serious accident in Kaiserstrasse. In circumstances that are still not clear, a car burned out on Saturday night near the station. Both male passengers died in the fire… Shoot-out in the station district. Four shots woke residents of Windmuhlstrasse on Sunday at four in the morning… and so on… one dead… hit and run accident, driver failed to stop. Not far from the station a grey Mercedes rammed a car parked by the roadside on Sunday evening, and then drove off, according to eyewitness accounts, in the direction of Sachsenhausen. Those in the car got off with only a scare.

If the Army went on like this, even an authoritarian like the Albanian wouldn’t be able to keep his men from taking a proper revenge for long.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading the sports sections and having a nap. Around seven I dressed and undid the bandage. The swelling around my nose had gone down, leaving a blue and yellow bruise behind. It wasn’t pretty, but wouldn’t make people turn and run. I put a pistol in my pocket and set off in my Opel for Offenbach.

If Marilyn Monroe had gone through life in the company of a small, thin, spotty sister who wore braces on her teeth, you could have said Offenbach beside Frankfurt looked like the Monroe sisters side by side. Although there were hardly five kilometres between their boundaries, up to now I’d been there at most four or five times, and after my first visit I’d always needed extremely compelling inducements to go again. Unless you knew better, you drove into the town, down a street a hundred metres wide and lined by grey office blocks, until you were right out of it again, and glad to see a few faces appear on the advertisement hoardings on both sides of the road from time to time. I’ve no idea what the people of Offenbach did with themselves all day, but at least they carefully avoided their drive-through main road with its resemblance to an airport runway. The only evidence of any human life outside the eight-hour working day was the existence of the snack bars that had sprung up here and there in front of office facades, and the logos winking from dark corners and pointing the way to fitness centres and gambling salons. You felt this was the way a main thoroughfare would look after a deadly epidemic.

If you knew your way around a bit, there came a point where you turned off right to the town centre and came to a square about the size of a football field, its most impressive building apparently inspired by the need to give the bunker architecture of World War Two a chance in civil life. It was a huge, higgledy-piggledy, unplastered pile of concrete forcing its way up like a grey monster amidst the silvery department stores and brightly coloured shopping malls. Although signs promised you that the monster contained a pizzeria, ice cream parlour and supermarket, and in spite of the trouble taken to provide for something like an inviting atmosphere with outdoor flights of steps, airy passageways and terraces, you couldn’t shake off the feeling that the moment you set foot in the place you’d be arrested, shot, and processed into something. Or anyway, I couldn’t shake off the feeling. The typical citizen of Offenbach, at least if he liked doing drugs, hanging about aimlessly and supplying his environment with boom-boom music from a portable cassette recorders, just loved to linger outside and inside the building. And the citizen of Offenbach who was so tight that he pissed and threw up against the nearest wall instead of looking for a public toilet liked the building too. But the one who, of course, thought particularly highly of it was the citizen of Offenbach who had just failed his final school exams and was now in a hurry to become an established part of the great wide world of hanging about and throwing up.