Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

‘This beggar’s a lucky beggar too,’ he said, and couldn’t refrain from letting me feel once more how quickly my larynx would be crushed if he wanted. Finally he took his foot away.

It was some time before I could get to my feet and follow him to the bar. As if the last ten minutes hadn’t happened, he was standing there casually watching the chef’s assistant draw him a beer.

‘My pistol, please.’

He slowly turned his head and looked surprised. ‘What pistol?’ And to his mate, standing next to him, ‘Imagining things, ain’t he? Potheads, all these guys.’

‘They ain’t allowed no beer, see? Knifing folk, screwing bints, all that shitty drugs stuff, they can have that. But there ain’t nothing for Allah in a beer.’

They looked at me with relish.

I leaned both arms on a bar stool to take the weight off my knees and looked down at the floor, exhausted. While that foot had been on my throat, there’d been no room left for pain. Now it was quickly taking over all the parts of me that had been abused over the last ten minutes. I sighed. ‘The gun’s registered. If I lose it I have to report the loss and say where and when it happened. A lie risks me my job, and I’m not telling any lies for you. So either you finish me off now after all, or you give me my pistol, or this place will be full of cops tomorrow.’

I looked at the floor again, fumbled for a cigarette in my pocket, lit it, and waited for whatever they decided. By now everything was hurting so much that I felt almost indifferent to it. Only I didn’t want to look at them any more. Except when I shot them.

‘Take the magazine out, give him his gun, then maybe he’ll go.’

Soon after that something fell into my jacket pocket. Without even turning round again, I staggered out of the door.

I was sitting in the car on the other side of the road from the Adria Grill waiting — smoking, listening to the radio, dozing. My face throbbed, my shoulders were burning, and when I moved my knees something in them seemed on the point of breaking. I dropped off to sleep from time to time, waking with a start from fevered dreams a moment later. Mostly the dreams were about fighting. Once companies of men dressed in costume with bright plumes and golden shirts of mail like something out of a historical film were clashing, stabbing and hacking each other to pieces with spears and swords. There was blood everywhere, and severed heads lying about, and techno music boomed out from the surrounding forest. Two eyes were blazing in the middle of this bloodbath and wouldn’t stop looking at me, although the body they belonged to was dead. I was the only one who had a gun, but it wouldn’t do what I wanted. When I put the safety catch on it fired wildly all over the place, and when I took the safety catch off and pressed the trigger there was just a click. Then the techno music got louder and louder, changed to a deafening rattle, and I woke up. The rattle came from the radio. The tuning of the channel had slipped.

Just before one in the morning the light behind the crochet drapes finally went out. I rubbed my forehead, lit a cigarette, and checked yet again that I’d loaded the pistol with the spare magazine.

Ten minutes later the landlord and his two employees came out into the street. The landlord locked up, nodded to the others, and they all set off in different directions. I forgot my knees and my shoulders, got out of the car, closed its door quietly, and followed the chef’s assistant. I got him in a dark side alley. I quietly made my way to within ten metres and then ran at him. At about the same moment as he spun round in alarm the muzzle of my pistol pressed against his chest.

‘Don’t make a sound!’

I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him into the entrance of the nearest building. His slight body was trembling like an animal’s. Only now did I realise how young he must be. Twenty at the most.

‘Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to you.’

‘Please…’ he begged, gasping for breath. ‘Please… I’m not one of them!’

‘I know. Take it easy.’ I patted him on the shoulder. ‘I only want you to explain a few things to me.’

‘But I don’t know anything. I’m only his nephew. I’m working there to earn money. I don’t have anything to do with that lot.’

He was talking so fast that I could barely understand him. He never took his eyes off the pistol, but at the same time turned his head as far away from it as possible.

‘Listen: I’ll put it away if you promise not to try anything silly.’

‘What?’ He wasn’t listening to me.

‘The pistol. Look…’ I put it in my jacket pocket. ‘Better now?’

He stared at the opening of the pocket for a moment longer before looking hesitantly at my face, as if expecting to see a monster. ‘What… what do you want?’

‘I want you to tell me what you’ve heard at work, or from your uncle, about the Army of Reason.’

‘Army of Reason?’

‘Could be you’ve never heard the name mentioned. It’s a gang that started extorting protection money in Frankfurt about two weeks ago. I assume the Adria Grill is the place where they meet, if only for a beer.’

At the words ‘extorting protection money’ he jumped, and I saw him checking up on opportunities for escape out of the corner of his eyes. I stood a little more foursquare in front of him and shook my head. ‘Don’t even think of it. If you help me we’ll never see each other again, and no one will know that you talked to me. If you don’t, I’ll tell your uncle that you phoned me and tried to sell me information.’

‘Are you crazy?’ It burst out of him before he turned his eyes away and stared at the ground, lips compressed. I waited. Standing there in front of me now without a kitchen apron on, he looked like a youth from another period. He wore pointed shoes with leopard-skin trim, a pair of suit trousers much too large for him, a white shirt with a starched collar, and he had a crew cut. Perhaps his favourite band was The Who, and either that was usual in Offenbach or he had a good chance of leading a revival in three or four years’ time.

‘I… look, I’m going to university in the autumn, I wanted to work through the summer so as not to have to take a job during my first year. I never specially liked my uncle — why am I saying specially? Not at all. But I couldn’t find anything better… I had no idea what I was getting into. Imagine it, you just want to earn some cash, and suddenly you’re right in a…’

He stopped and stared ahead of him again. I lit myself a cigarette and registered the adrenalin closing down for the night in my body, while pain took over again. After a while he raised his eyes and pointed cautiously to my jacket pocket with one finger.

‘They took the bullets out, didn’t they?’

‘I had a spare magazine in the car.’

‘Oh.’ He made a face as if thinking of something really disgusting to eat. ‘… Would you have shot me?’

‘Let’s say at least I wouldn’t have let you get away.’

He thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. ‘They really took you apart.’

‘Yes, and it hurts, and I want to go to bed. Tell me about the protection money gang.’

‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘But you’ll have to…’

‘I won’t have to do anything,’ I snorted. Only just now he’d been close to shitting himself, and now he was a little too inclined to have a cosy chat for my liking. ‘You either trust me or you don’t. I’ll wait another five minutes. If I haven’t heard anything that interests me by then, I shall get your uncle out of bed this very night, and you can start thinking of some place to go and study abroad.’