Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

She nodded again.

‘OK, then there’s no problem. I was never really going to call the police, I just meant it as a threat.’

I waited for some sign that she understood and now we could go our separate ways. Instead she dug her hands into her trouser pockets and began walking slowly up and down the room. As she did so she kept casting brief, appraising glances at me, as if I’d made her some offer that wasn’t entirely on the level. In fact it was now that I finally realised how little she could still be called a child. In the secretarial office I had noticed only the rings round her eyes, the scab, the shoulder-length, greasy mop of hair and her loud mouth. Now I looked at her properly for the first time. Her face reminded me of one of those little bistro tables when you are having lunch for two there. Eyes, nose and mouth all seemed to be pushing each other over the edge. Not that her face itself was particularly thin, but everything else was so particularly large and pronounced, like a series of slightly outsized features of classical beauty. Dark, huge, almost protuberant eyes, a slightly aquiline, strong nose, and lips like pink air cushions. In addition she moved like those long-legged girls of whom you can never be sure whether they know what they can do to a man just by taking a short, meaningless walk across the room.

All things considered, it was suddenly clear to me that possibly I wasn’t the first old fogy to have helped her out of a tricky situation or done her some other favour, and perhaps other men had then insisted on being shown gratitude in a room as remote as this one.

‘Hey, Leila, what’s the matter?’ I asked, overdoing the loud voice. ‘Stop marching around like that! We’ve discussed everything we have to discuss. Go to your room and wait for your mother to come back. I promise, she won’t have to work for Ahrens any more after next week.

She stopped. ‘Private detective?’

‘Me? Yes, you know that.’

‘How much?’

‘How much what?’

‘How much you cost?’

‘How much do I cost…?’ What was all this? You couldn’t say Leila had no talent for dragging things out at length.

‘Yes… How much the day? You look for my mother. I can pay.’

As I was still wondering whether I really had to take this pocket-money fantasy seriously, doors slammed somewhere. I turned to the window. The first thing that occurred to me was Leila’s warning about not trying to ‘steal’ the windows; in this instance it meant I was slow to hear cars coming. The black Mercedes was right in front of the hostel entrance. At the same moment I lost any hope that it could be a doctor sent by Ahrens, or someone else parking his car as if God had created that vehicle on the first day and then created everything else for it to park in. The two figures moving weightily from the Mercedes to the door and nodding at each other, as if anticipating something particularly tasty to eat, were my two charmers from Berlin: the knee expert and his mate who was so proud of the number of people he’d done in.

I leaped back from the window, grabbed Leila’s arm and pulled her to the door in a single fluid movement. ‘Get out of here at once!’ I hissed at her. ‘There are some guys coming who…’

‘Can’t stay.’

‘What?’

‘Can’t stay here. Gregor know we…’ she flapped her hand back and forth between us. ‘He know we talked. I…’ and her hand fluttered in the direction of the ceiling. ‘He kill me.’

‘Now listen, Leila…’

‘No now listen! You look for my mother! With me! You private detective! I can pay!’

For a moment we stared at each other as furiously as if, for two pins, we’d have got in ahead of Knee Expert and his corpse-counting friend, who were presumably here to silence us as far as possible, by doing ourselves in instead. Then I heard those long, confident everybody-listen strides that Berliners have coming down the corridor, pulled Leila away from the door and signed to her to keep quiet.

When the steps moved on I whispered, ‘OK, I’ll take you with me — for now, anyway. We’ll go out to my car, very calmly. We won’t run, and we…’

‘My money! I can pay!’

‘Oh, God, I’ve heard you say you can pay quite often enough!’ I snapped, hoping to make a few things painfully clear when I added, ‘But you can’t pay me! Forget it! I cost more than a few lollipops or collectable stickers!’

‘Collectable? Stickers…?’

There was a rather foolish pause. Of course, I could have said to myself, from her broken German, that she didn’t know what collectable stickers were. But something in her eyes told me that at least she could guess the probable nature of collectable stickers, and her astonishment was solely to do with the likely fact that while a girl her age might collect all sorts of things, stickers were not among them.

‘I…’ she said, pointing at her chest, ‘can…’ she added, aware that she was repeating herself and enjoying it, ‘. pay! I have money. Much money! And I.’ here she pointed to her chest again, and I was beginning to feel as if I were standing in a corner with the Albanian or some Mediterranean gangster boss, ‘… want you find my mother.’

The boss was waiting for a nod, so I nodded. ‘OK,’ I sighed. ‘Where’s the money?’

‘In my room. I get it. Videos too.’

‘Videos?’

‘So you know what my mother look like,’ she explained impatiently. ‘You private detective or…’

Or what? I thought I heard a half-swallowed A and R, and perhaps even the hiss of an S. Before long I’d be entirely in agreement with Gregor’s way of dealing with this girl.

‘Hurry up, then! I’ll wait exactly five minutes and then I’m going whether you’re back or not!’

‘What you mean, whether back or not?’ she asked, her hands fluttering back and forth as usual. ‘I talking to Schmidtbauer about my mother! Then you break into office, make trouble with Gregor. Now you say: whether back or not! Am I stupid fucking sow or what?’

Fucking sow.? For God’s sake, who taught them German around here? I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just put up with the look she gave me as she left the room: you got me into this, you can get me out again or you’ll be sorry — and then, finally, she was outside.

I lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke. My new client. We’d see if she was going to let me help her with the investigations now and then.

Next moment what I’d been fearing for some time happened. Doors began slamming, footsteps echoed down the corridor, I heard shouting. ‘Can’t be far away!’ ‘I’ll do that bastard!’ ‘Hey, Krap, here we come!’

And they were indeed coming right towards me. I couldn’t get out into the corridor now, and there was no other way I could leave the visitors’ room. Or no quiet and reasonably elegant way. After I had briefly and unsuccessfully tried wrenching one of the chairs from its angle-irons to throw it through the window, and myself after it, I jettisoned the chair idea. The window sill was about a metre from the muddy forecourt of the hostel. I put my jacket over my head, with ends of its sleeves covering my hands, listened once more for a moment to the steps that were still approaching, took a run and jumped through the glass, one shoulder hitting it first.

About three seconds, an enormous crashing and clattering, and one belly-flop landing later I raised my face from the mud, heard a shout of, ‘Hey, there he goes!’ in the building, and worked my way round on my front to shelter behind the boot of the Mercedes.

‘Look at that, then!’

‘Krap’s James Bond, who’d’ve guessed?’

‘James Bond don’t leave no tracks like a baby crawling. Hey, Krap! Don’t get our car all dirty!’