Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

‘Schmidtbauer.’

‘Well, Frau Schmidtbauer, you have now done all you can to make it clear that there’s something shady going on here. Either you talk to me about it, or I stay in this place and rummage around until I’ve found out about it. The difference is that if you talk to me, I can turn a blind eye. If you don’t, and if you have a skeleton in the cupboard and I discover it, I’ll inform on you.’

Her smile became a little more fleeting, but nothing else happened.

‘Think about it. It doesn’t look to me as if you’re much more than the receptionist here. You know what goes on, and presumably there’s a few marks left on your desk now and then to induce you to keep your mouth shut. How much is the money worth? A new blouse, a good meal in a smart restaurant? I’ll bet it’s not enough for you to travel somewhere you’ll be safe from the police. If what I suspect is right, there’ll be charges of organised crime, blackmail, and possibly aiding and abetting murder. And even if you’re convicted only of knowing about the crime, you’ll get a long enough sentence to remove you from circulation for the part of your life that matters. There’ll be nothing left later but a little sport for senior citizens, and reincarnation if you’re lucky.’

No reaction. She smiled and went on holding out. But the hunted look in her eyes told me that she’d soften up once we were alone. So I dismissed all my theories of the last ten minutes and just hoped Leila was only a girl sitting in the wrong room at the wrong time, and Gregor was a nice lad with frizzy hair and comfortable shoes doing civilian service instead of the draft, who’d behaved perfectly in persuading Leila to go with him.

These hopes lasted just a few seconds. Then the door was flung open and Popeye on coke burst in. Muscular in a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms, trainers like small, brightly coloured cruise missiles, shaved head, a chin fit to knock doors down, and eyes with their pupils moving as if they had to register the tempo of three hundred herds of white elephants charging his way. He measured something above two metres, and to see from one end of his shoulders to the other I had to turn my head back and forth slightly, as if watching tennis. Then I recognised the showy sports watch. Perhaps it was chance, but Ahrens wore the same model.

Without taking any notice of me or Frau Schmidtbauer, he made for Leila, snarling, ‘You lousy little beast! What’s the idea this time? Didn’t I tell you…’

Whatever he had told her, it was drowned out by Leila’s shrill scream as he closed his great paws round her arms and pulled her out of the chair. Leila’s legs flailed in the air as she tried to kick him. At the same time she never stopped screaming, and the small secretarial office became an acoustic torture chamber. Popeye was bellowing, ‘You shut up!’ Frau Schmidtbauer was crying, ‘Don’t grab her so hard!’ And I drew my pistol.

‘Hey, you!’ I shouted, trying to drown out the others. ‘Gregor!’

He turned, with the girl wedged under his arm. It took him a moment to realise what it was gleaming in my hand, and then he looked incredulous. Leila struggled and screamed a little longer, until she too looked at me and immediately fell silent.

‘Put the child down again,’ I said, waving the pistol.

Gregor looked even more incredulous. In the process the pupils of his eyes grew ever larger and ever emptier, and I had the feeling I was facing a horror dummy. The kind of thing that could be used at cinema entrances to advertise films like The Massacre Man or The Devil’s Dinner.

He turned his head to the desk. ‘Who’s this arsehole?’

Frau Schmidtbauer bit her lower lip, looked at my pistol, and didn’t seem to think Gregor’s choice of words very sensible. ‘Er,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.

I said, ‘This arsehole is the character who’ll shoot holes in your knees if you don’t let go of the child.’

It was as if something inside him exploded. His head whipped round, and with his teeth bared and his eyes popping he clamped Leila to his chest and held her out in my direction. ‘Oh, so that’s your idea? You think you’ll shoot holes in me?’ he roared, chin jutting. ‘Go on, then! But you’ll have to shoot through the girl first. Didn’t think of that, eh? Shoot holes in me! I could kill you with one hand.’

‘With your little toe for all I care. But we’re not here for a fight, and I don’t want to shoot you in the chest either. Just in the kneecaps. You’d need to be holding a wall in front of you to stop me doing that.’

‘Please, Gregor!’ begged Frau Schmidtbauer, and at the same moment she started crying.

Gregor was now snorting like a horse. He began twitching and sweating, looking around him as if his good friend coke had left him in mid-flight, and now he was sailing alone through some kind of cosmos that was a total mystery to him.

‘The child,’ I said, trying again, but he wasn’t listening any more. He looked at the floor, froze for a moment as if hypnotising himself, his snorting and twitching died down, and whereas he had just been gleaming with sweat it now looked as if he had a layer of grey dust on his skin. Nothing indicated the presence of a brain any more. It was pure reflex when he assumed a close-combat position. Then he bent his knees, braced his shoulders back like someone putting the shot, and tensed his biceps. A slippery film formed between the pistol and my hand.

When Leila came flying towards me, I shoved her to my left and under the desk, threw myself to the right, saw two metres of cokehead above me, and fired my pistol. Gregor, hit in the legs, bellowed, froze briefly in a kind of jazz-dance distortion, grabbed his thighs and collapsed. At the same moment Frau Schmidtbauer started screaming.

I lay gasping for air and trying to steady my trembling arm. Gregor’s body, barely three metres away from me, wasn’t moving any more. He had obviously fainted. Dark patches were spreading over his tracksuit bottoms. I’d emptied my entire magazine into his legs and the wall behind them. Even sober, Gregor probably wouldn’t have allowed me to keep cool. Pumped full of drugs he’d looked to me, for a moment, like the last person I would ever meet on earth. Still, I hadn’t aimed any higher.

Frau Schmidtbauer kept on and on screaming. Finally I struggled to my feet, went over to her and slapped her face until she covered it with her hands and began whimpering quietly. Then I bent to look under the desk. Arms around her knees, T-shirt torn, feet bare, Leila was cowering in the furthest corner with her eyes and mouth tight closed, and tears running down her cheeks.

I straightened up and looked for the cigarettes in my jacket pocket. The girl was beginning to get on my nerves now too. Why didn’t she run away? Why, whatever she was threatened with and whatever happened, did she stick around in the secretarial office, a horrible place in every respect? Whether Leila knew anything or not, I was beginning to think I’d have had a really successful afternoon without her: half an hour at the most to crack Frau Schmidtbauer, about another twenty minutes for her to spill all the details of the link between this hostel and the Army, and last, with a little luck, information about two brief lives which for one reason or another were unpleasant enough for no one to mourn their end much. Even now I had a chance. A little poking about in Gregor’s wounds, and Frau Schmidtbauer would probably have given me all she knew in writing. But this way. I could neither haul Leila out from under the desk and put her outside the door, nor use the methods of a military junta in front of her. The question was, what could I do instead? I smoked, and thought about it.

‘… oh, baby, your life’s up the spout, you just don’t know it yet,’ came a grating voice from the floor. Gregor seemed to be coming round. ‘I’ll finish you, you bastard… I’ll smash you up but I won’t let you die… I’ll crush your balls until you’re throwing up your own shit… and you’ll bleed so much you’ll wish so much you’d never put your bloody wog face out of your bloody wog mother…’