Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

‘Hey, baby, what happened to you?’

Whatever had happened to me, at least it was no reason for her to spread a bit more mustard on her sandwich and take a hearty bite. She added, with her mouth full, ‘You don’t look too good.’

Deborah a.k.a. Helga was a small, plump twenty-year-old from a village in north Germany. She had an ‘Italian style’ perm, nail lacquer in Malibu, Cherry Red and Flamingo, tracksuits with as many zip fasteners as possible, and when she went out she wore a cap saying Foxy Kitten. From what she said she didn’t mind her job, and sometimes even enjoyed it. All the same, she was saving hard to open an espresso and sandwich bar in her home village a couple of years from now. What she definitely enjoyed, all the time, was eating. And I really liked her for that. She ate like a cow: slowly, with relish, never letting anything disturb her. Watching her eat had an effect on me like doing yoga.

‘I’m OK,’ I said, as she fished a gherkin out of a jar and waved it about to dry it. ‘Do you have anything else to do?’

‘Huh, there’s been nothing going on here for hours. I’m just having a bite to eat and then I’m turning in. You can go upstairs if you like.’

‘I could do with a dunking in your whirlpool bath.’

‘Ha!’ She stabbed the air with the gherkin. ‘That comes extra!’ And laughing, she nudged her colleague in the ribs. The colleague, a tough dimwit, grinned derisively.

I had once helped Deborah out of a rather sticky situation with her pimp, we had come closer to each other with Willy DeVille’s Heaven Stood Still, and since then we’d had a tacit agreement: I could have her spoil me once a week, and in return I’d be available for any further fix she might be in. The point was that there hadn’t been one, and there wasn’t going to be one for the foreseeable future. The Mister Happy was as civilised and homely as a village bakery in a French film. I should know; I’d been acquainted with the madam for years, and had found Deborah the job here. Signs that she herself was seeing less and less point in our arrangement had been increasing recently, and although she laughed now, I was sure that at the back of her mind a fierce little calculating devil was registering another two hundred marks unearned.

‘Come on, baby, just joking. Of course you can go in the pool. But you’ll have to rinse it out first. No one cleaned it after the last guy, and he was all hairy.’

‘Oh. Hm.’

‘See you.’ She threw me an airy kiss. ‘And I’ll see that you feel as good as new tomorrow.’

She did, too. When Deborah was well-fed and in a good mood there were few who could tell her anything about how to do that. For an evening’s good screw to make up for things, I reflected, I wasn’t as badly off as Slibulsky thought.

Perhaps I didn’t feel exactly new, but after a night of extensive massage and breakfast in bed in the morning I was in surprisingly good form except for the variegated colours of my face. Deborah kissed me goodbye, and as I went out to my car and removed the parking ticket from under the windscreen wiper I thought almost lovingly of how, before I’d even had a chance to look at the breakfast tray, she’d asked if I didn’t want my egg.

I drove home, showered, put on clean clothes and went round the corner to drink coffee and read the newspaper in a cafe. I’d really intended to drive out to Ahrens’s factory next and wait until my rescuer from the switchboard knocked off work. Presumably she knew when the bosses would be meeting. But the newspaper spared me the trouble. In the local section I found a headline saying Frankfurt Expects Visit From Croatian Interior Minister Plus Economic Delegation. Along with all kinds of guff about the traditional friendship between Croats and Germans, and a welcome given by German credit institutions to the ‘rising young country’, the article went into detail about cooperation between Croatian and German firms. Ahrens won praise for his packet-soup outfit as one of the first Frankfurt companies to have been active in Croatia after the war.

I put the paper down and thought about Slibulsky’s sweets. Probably they were exactly the kind of thing that Ahrens’s activities consisted of. So there actually was work being done in his factory. In addition, the article seemed to me to answer the question of why the racketeers had to disguise themselves and mustn’t utter a word betraying any accent: the revelation that a Croatian-led Mafia was chopping fingers off German bar-owners would hardly have had a favourable effect on the granting of credit. Which meant that the bosses of the Army of Reason were far enough up in the Croatian power structure for their personal interests to coincide to some extent with the national interest.

That is, if part of the credit didn’t find its way straight into their pockets. As far as I knew, the Croatian president didn’t exactly have a reputation as a staunch opponent of corruption and the Mafiosi. He probably didn’t care about having such a reputation either. I’d once seen a picture of his yacht. Along with his uniform in the photo yesterday evening, it gave an impression rather as if the mayor of Frankfurt’s wife went about her daily business in a swimming pool filled with champagne.

The Interior Minister’s visit was going to be next Saturday. That left me three more days. I paid my bill and went home. From there I called an acquaintance who knew his way around the refugee hostels. He gave me the name of one where most of the inmates came from Bosnia.

It had begun raining again, and the square outside the place, which had once been a youth hostel, was full of mud and puddles. I wove my way past them to the entrance, found myself in a dark corridor smelling of food and disinfectant, read a series of notices hanging from the ceiling — Dining-Room, Showers, Sick-Bay — and followed the arrow on the one that said Secretarial Office. On the walls to left and right hung posters produced by the Evangelical church showing young people, black and white, moving down streets and stairways and through meadows together, under brightly coloured slogans saying things like Wow, man, loving your neighbour is great! and I’m all for multi-ethnicity! In between, dingy notes were pinned up telling you not to smoke in the corridors, not to make a noise, and not to assemble, eat or drink there. As far as I could see these instructions were being obeyed to the letter. No one came to meet me, and only the distant sound of children’s voices and the clatter of crockery indicated that the place was inhabited at all.

The door of the secretarial office was at the end of the corridor, which was getting darker and darker. I knocked, and thought I heard a couple of harsh, commanding sounds through the wood before a cheerful, ‘Yoo-hoo!’ rang out. When I opened the door bright light shone in my face. Before I could make anything out someone called, ‘Come in, do just come along in!’ as if I’d arrived intending to see somebody turning cartwheels.

I closed the door behind me and blinked at a row of neon lights. As my eyes got used to the dazzle I saw the usual shabby grey-green office furnishings paid for decades ago out of the public purse, the usual private touches consisting of holiday postcards pinned to the wall and amusing newspaper cuttings, and the usual photographic landscape calendar. Behind the desk sat someone not quite so usual in this setting, a woman of about forty-five, with a girl of around fourteen on a chair in front of her.

The woman was tanned deep brown, in ultra-fit condition without a trace of extra fat, and judging by the way she was smiling at me with two incredibly white, immaculate rows of teeth, apparently in the best of good humour. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse in a jungle-animal print that showed off her muscular arms, earrings with little heads of Charlie Chaplin dangling from them, a necklace with a small Buddha pendant, and her hair was in a long, thick, blonde braid that she had flirtatiously brought round over her shoulder to hang in front of her. Presumably she felt that the last word about what she’d do with her life hadn’t yet been spoken. She fitted into the grey-green secretarial office of this refugee hostel about as well as into a bowling alley.