Jakob Arjouni: Kismet

All things considered, then, our operation had been a total fiasco. In addition, now I had a guilty conscience. Not only did I not like Romario, I really had done him out of his job, his home and his city in one fell swoop. And that when he’d lost his thumb only five days before.

‘Er, Romario…’

‘What?’ a voice barked behind me. Next moment neon tubes flared on, and cold light from the kitchen fell into the dining-room. Sticky patches of red were spreading over the floor and walls around the corpses, which had now stopped bleeding. The red patches were scattered about like exploded paint-bombs. Slibulsky was sitting on a table, cradling his shotgun in his arm like a baby, dangling his legs and staring ahead of him, nauseated.

I turned to the kitchen door. ‘How could I have known they’d shoot straight away?’

Romario’s head briefly appeared in the doorway. ‘It’s your job to know these things! Whether you can do your job is another question!’

Oh, for God’s sake! A couple of smart remarks, that was all we needed! Apart from the fact that it wouldn’t have been entirely inappropriate for him to ask if Slibulsky and I were all right. After all, it was a miracle we’d got out of this intact. Not to mention any feelings we might have about the dead men and how upset we were. I mean, they weren’t just a burst water pipe, and not simply because they did much more damage.

I reached behind the bar, picked up a bottle of schnapps and took a large gulp. Then I bent over the corpses and searched their suits. A silver lighter, a small bottle of mouthwash, two phone cards, half a packet of Dunhills, a nail file, five hundred and seventy marks plus a few coins, three condoms, car keys and two pairs of sunglasses. No ID or driving licences, nothing to give me a clue. I pocketed it all and was about to see what make their clothes were when I found a mobile phone on one of the corpses, tucked into his belt. It was as small and almost as flat as half a postcard. You flipped it open, three fine grooves above and below indicated the receiving and speaking areas, and you keyed in the numbers on a glowing blue touch-pad. I found out how to switch to receive if the mobile rang and put it in my breast pocket.

Romario brought in a stack of folded grey bin liners and a roll of sticky tape. Slibulsky and I packed the corpses into them. Both of us in silence, both trying not to feel anything much. The central heating was still full on, and our hands, damp with sweat, kept slipping off the plastic sacks and the dead men’s limbs.

When we’d finished I went out and looked around for the BMW that went with the car keys. It was black and new and had a Frankfurt registration. I got into it, felt under the seats, opened the glove compartment, looked behind the sun visors, but apart from empty energy-drink bottles, some blackcurrant-flavour sweets, tissues and a big box of powder the car was empty. I noted the registration number, opened the boot and went back into the Saudade.

By now Romario and Slibulsky were scrubbing the floor and walls. Romario glanced up at me, and judging by the look in his eyes he wouldn’t have minded if the blood he was scrubbing away had been mine.

I went into the kitchen and looked for something to help us carry the bodies to the car as unobtrusively as possible. I found a huge double-handled aluminium pan. It was over a metre in diameter and about the same depth. You could cook a whole pig in it, or several hundredweight of vegetables, or anything else that would feed a medium-sized village for a day.

‘What are you doing with that?’ asked Romario as I dragged this monster into the dining-room.

‘It’s never a good idea to load sacks two metres long into a car boot at one in the morning. A pan full of potatoes, on the other hand…’

‘Are you crazy? I’ll never find another pan like that!’

‘You’ll get it back.’

‘You don’t think I can ever make soup in it again after this, do you?’

‘You think the customers will be able to taste them?’

His eyes widened, and for a moment it looked as if he was going to throw his floorcloths in my face.

‘Yes, I do! I’ll be able to taste them! Every time I use the pan I’ll be thinking…’

‘Hey, hang on!’ Slibulsky looked up from his bucket and broke his silence for the first time since the gunfight. ‘What’s all this about your pan?’

Romario turned to him, and his expression softened. I’d been noticing for some time that he was trying to make Slibulsky his ally against me.

‘Yes, exactly! What is all this? It’s my special soup pan for festive occasions!’ he exclaimed, obviously in the belief that for a civilised man like Slibulsky that would close the subject.

‘Oh yes? And what festive occasion do you want to keep it clean for? Your funeral?’ asked Slibulsky.

‘Or your arrest?’ I suggested, leaving the pan beside the grey plastic sausage shapes. Taking no more notice of Romario, we squeezed up the first of the bodies — they were still warm — and rammed it into the aluminium pan, treading it down.

‘Did you notice their faces? They were powdered white,’ said Slibulsky.

I nodded. ‘As if they’d been rehearsing how to be dead.’

After we had looked to make sure the street was empty, we dragged the pan, which now weighed about eighty kilos, to the BMW. We heaved it up and tipped it over the open boot, but nothing happened. The man was stuck. We held the pan in the air with one hand and one shoulder each, tugging at the plastic with our other hands. The bin liner tore, and something slimy trickled over my hand.

‘I’m going to throw up any moment,’ gasped Slibulsky.

I heard a crack. Slibulsky had broken something in the corpse, and it finally gave way. It landed in the boot with a dull thud. We looked at each other’s red, sweating faces and gasped for air. I wiped my hand on my trousers.

When our breathing had calmed down a little I said, ‘Sorry. I really thought we’d only have to put on a tough guy act.’

Slibulsky flicked a damp bit of something off his T-shirt. ‘I only hope Tango Man doesn’t try pinning it all on us.’

‘Pinning it on…?’

‘Well, in theory he could go to the police and say gangsters started shooting his place up. He knows you slightly as a guest, he could say, but he had no idea of your Mafia connections.’

‘Slibulsky, I’m a private detective!’

He stopped, looked incredulous, then uttered a sound between a laugh and a cough. ‘Have your neighbours said a friendly hi to you very often recently? You have a Turkish name, Turkish parents, and since starting this job you’ve infuriated every second cop in town. You don’t think a silly little nameplate on your door will stop them for a second if they have a chance of arresting you as an Anatolian terrorist baron, do you?’

‘It’s not just a plate on the door. I’ve got a licence too.’

This was weak, admittedly, and Slibulsky didn’t even take the trouble to answer it. In fact he was pointing out a possibility that hadn’t for a moment crossed my mind before.

On the way back I said, ‘He’s Brazilian. The tango comes from Argentina.’

‘So what? You knew who I meant, right?’

He was correct there too.

Tango Man was sitting on a chair, feet up on the table, and seemed to have put back several glasses of liquor to calm his nerves while we were outside. ‘Tango Man’ fitted him perfectly: a long, tough-looking face with small, quick-moving eyes, a sharp nose and a cleft in his chin; mid-length hair, black and shining like lacquer, brushed well back and moving when he moved as if it grew from a single root; a body that was big and broad anyway, but looked even bigger and broader in a T-shirt and trousers that might once have fitted him in a school yard in Rio; and his obvious conviction that no one’s ever too tall to wear shoes with five-centimetre heels.