Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

The corridor of the former youth hostel ran all the way through the building. It was seventy or eighty metres long, and it ended in a blank wall. The last possible way out was the door of the secretarial office. Our lads didn’t know where the corridor came to an end, and because of the poor lighting they couldn’t see it in time. When they realised what was waiting for them, it was too late for the secretarial office door. There were about ten metres of empty space left before they literally started climbing the walls. They dug their fingernails into the plaster and hopped up and down. After I’d passed the office door myself, I trod on the brake and managed to get the front bumper to a distance of about 0.0 millimetres from their legs. I just had time to see them failing to free themselves from the trap before a cloud of plaster dust fell on us. I took the key out of the ignition, leaned back in the driver’s seat and kicked the windscreen out. A moment later, when I was standing on the bonnet of the car and the dust was settling, I saw the horrified Frau Schmidtbauer looking out over what had once been the wall of her office, but was now lying in the corridor.

‘Hi!’ I called wittily, and waved to her. ‘I did tell you not to summon reinforcements.’

She looked at me, shook her head as if to dispel a hallucination, and disappeared behind the heap of rubble. The sound of cries and running footsteps came from the stairwell. I turned to the lads. Covered with white dust, shoulders stooped, faces distorted by fear, they looked up at me as if I were some barbarian king famous for cutting off his prisoners’ ears.

‘Well, lads? Good show, eh?’

They didn’t reply. Only now did I notice that it probably wasn’t just fear distorting their faces. A distance of 0.0 millimetres between the bumper and their legs had been a fair estimate, but in fact it was a few centimetres less. Those legs had an unusual bend in them, and they were standing so still that every movement must be extremely painful. My friend who liked counting his victims seemed to be in a particularly bad way. Though that could also have been because one of the Evangelical posters had caught on his jacket, and with the declaration I’m all for multi-ethnicity! all over his chest he looked as if a few kids from a Rudolf Steiner school had been playing a Nazi practical joke on him.

I threw them the car key. ‘Park it somewhere else. I don’t think this is a great place for it.’ I winked at them. ‘Fun and games with Krap.’ Then I tapped my forehead by way of goodbye, turned, climbed over the roof of the car and jumped down on the floor. Gregor was sitting on a chair in the secretary’s office, legs up on the desk and a puddle of blood under him, and behind him Frau Schmidtbauer was phoning. He was very pale in the face, but otherwise looked in pretty good shape, considering. It was probably because of my muddy, dusty appearance that, as I passed, we looked at each other like two people trying to work out where they’d met before. A few metres further on, the first baffled hostel inmates came towards me, looking curiously around them. They were soon followed by a man in a suit, sweating heavily, gasping hysterically and now and then exclaiming things like, ‘No!’ ‘Heavens!’ ‘Catastrophic!’ Probably the hostel manager. When he grabbed my sleeve and asked, panting for breath, what all this was about, I shrugged. ‘No idea. I’m the electrician, but to be honest the openings in the walls are a bit too big now for me to do any rewiring.’

‘Openings in the walls…?’

‘Mmph. If you want the wiring to go under the plaster, that is. I’d rather have rewired over the plaster anyway. A bit of paint on it and hardly anyone would notice. Would have come a lot cheaper too.’

‘Cheaper!’ he uttered, with his eyes popping. Then he let go of my arm and hurried on.

Leila was waiting where the swing door had once been. She was wearing an expensive-looking dark brown fur jacket, green wool tights and walking boots. Two leather suitcases stood on the floor beside her.

‘What happen?’ she asked, half anxious, half reproachful as her eyes moved over my dirty figure.

‘We found it hard to say goodbye.’ I picked up her cases and nodded at the forecourt. ‘Let’s get out of here. And pick those pistols up.’ Then we splashed through the mud and puddles to my Opel, and she contented herself with looking back two or three times at the entrance. Perhaps, apart from one of the cases in which it seemed possible that she might be carrying lead piping, she wasn’t such a bad client after all.

We were sitting in the car on the way to the Ostend district and my office. As my private address and my private phone number weren’t in any public directory, or available online either, I assumed that if Ahrens had wanted to send me any warnings, threats or offers I’d find them at the office. After our meeting and my performance at the Adria Grill, which would certainly have been reported to him, I thought it was out of the question that he’d simply let me carry on in the same way. Now at the very latest, after extensive phone conversations with Frau Schmidtbauer, he must react somehow. I suspected he’d try bribing me and thus get his chance to finish me off.

‘… my father is Croat, my mother is Srbkinja. I am born in Bosnia. My father is worker in engineering works, is not soldier. And when the war begin he is against it. He talks big: better dead than leave mother Serbia. Always talks big. So he imprisoned in Croatia or Bosnia, somewhere. My mother says, always say you Bosanka, never Srbkinja. Bosanka is like hostel manager’s poor old dachshund. All people say: aah, that poor old dachshund. Srbkinja is like hostel manager’s wife.’

‘Hm. How long has your mother been working for Ahrens?’

‘Three weeks.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Make money.’

‘Yes, fine, but how does she make it?’

‘Just how don’t know. My mother not say because of my father. Fat Ahrens has finger in pie all way to Croatia.’

‘And when did your mother disappear?’

‘Last Sunday. That why I in Schmidtbauer office. She know where my mother is. But she don’t say. Only say, coming back soon, coming back soon.’

‘Did Gregor leave those bruises on your arms?’

‘Yes. For shouting and so on. Since my mother gone, I sleep badly.’

‘Hm.’

I wondered what Ahrens was planning to do when his lightning takeover of the protection money racket in Frankfurt came to an end. When the entire wobbly structure, maintained only by means of enormous pressure and large amounts of violence, crashed to the ground. He probably had his dated ticket to God knows what beach resort in his wallet already. And if he actually got there he’d be leaving part of the city demolished for years to come — in retrospect, the departure of the Schmitz brothers would look like any everyday business crisis by comparison. As a result of the Army’s activities, all normal protection money rackets would be scandalous, and every serious extortionist would have to go about in a tank if he wanted to keep his extortion undercover. And they would go about in tanks, too. The business would get even more secret, even more brutal, even more excessive. Bar and restaurant owners would think back nostalgically to the days when they could relatively easily balance their protection money against their income on the black economy. And their guests would long for those boozy nights when they didn’t have to fear that some idiot might come marching into the bar any time, shooting one of them down just to show that he was to be taken as seriously as the now legendary Army of Reason.

I lit a cigarette, and Leila asked if she could have one too.