Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

‘How old are you?’

‘Next month fifteen.’

‘Smoking’s bad for you.’

I thought I could feel the airflow as her head whipped round. ‘You my mother or what?’

‘You wanted to come with me, and I decide who smokes in my car and who doesn’t. Fourteen-year-old girls don’t.’

‘Huh! But fourteen-year-old girls have to breathe old detective’s smoke!’

‘Listen, sweetheart: call me old again and you can go back to Gregor by yourself, on foot.’

It wasn’t a laugh or even a giggle, but a sound that did have something to do with amusement — derisive, deploring, almost pitying. After a pause she said, ‘Like Schmidtbauer. Don’t like her age either — two old cunts.’

Hit the nail on the head again. In a game of ‘Who has the last word?’ I’d have staked all my money on her. In a game of ‘Who’s good at dealing with fourteen-year-olds?’ I probably wouldn’t even have made the first selection stage.

Finally I handed her my cigarettes and lighter, and after we’d been smoking in silence for a while I asked, ‘How many do you smoke a day?’

‘Sometimes more, sometimes less. Depends how day is. Sometimes cigarette is like last bit of fun.’

‘Hm, yes, same with me. Doesn’t your mother object?’

‘Sometimes more, sometimes less.’

‘OK, let’s come to an agreement.’

‘Agreement? Come to where?’

‘Let’s do a deal.’

‘OK.’

‘When I’m not around you can do as you like. But in my presence you don’t smoke more cigarettes than I do.’

‘Presence…?’

‘When we’re together.’

‘You smoke many?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘Good. Is deal.’

At the next kiosk I stopped and bought a packet of chewing gum.

‘Swindle, right?’ said Leila as I got back into the car. ‘Now you not smoke in presence.’

‘A deal is a deal.’

‘And swindle is swindle.’

‘Hm.’ I nodded. ‘And dumb is dumb.’

‘OK. Chewing gum, please.’

I hated everything about it: the taste, the sticky sound of chewing, the picture of me and Leila chewing the stuff in competition, so to speak, because of a dubious agreement. I’d just managed to shake off three killers, I was covered in mud and dust from head to foot, I had the criminal outfit in present-day Frankfurt after me, and I went and did a stupid thing like this. But instead of simply spitting out the unfamiliar, minty clump of gum and lighting a cigarette, I thought about ways I might extend our bargain. How may scoops of ice cream was a cigarette worth, for instance?

There wasn’t much time left for such meditations. As I was still imagining Leila making pitying noises again and explaining that if she happened to want an ice, she could buy hundreds for herself, we passed the first fire engine. Next moment I saw half my office desk lying behind a roadblock in the street.

A firefighter waved me to the side, I stopped the car and leaned across the steering wheel. On the third floor of the box-like fifties building where I’d had my office for the last six years there was a large, gaping hole measuring about four square metres. The back wall was still intact, and I noticed the round kitchen clock which one of my clients had once said was about as trendy in a detective’s office as a piece of knitting.

‘What that?’ Leila was leaning forward too, pressing her nose against the windscreen.

‘No idea.’ It seemed to me she must have exhausted her capacity to absorb scenes of violence for today. At the moment she seemed quite brave, but at her age, I assumed, that could change quickly. And a hysterical girl of fourteen was the last thing I needed. ‘Probably a gas explosion. I was actually going to move my office here next month.’ I lit a cigarette and tossed the packet into her lap. ‘I’ll just go and take a look. You stay here, OK?’

‘OK,’ she replied, but she didn’t sound really convinced. She probably wasn’t going to be outmanoeuvred another time as easily as over the cigarette deal.

I got out and walked around a bit. There wasn’t much to see. Firefighters, a few onlookers rubber necking, and a number of tenants of the building all talking excitedly. No one recognised me under my coating of mud and plaster dust.

Naturally the loss of my office together with a phone and fax machine, a computer, a first-class coffee machine and a crate of schnapps wasn’t good news, but it didn’t particularly rile me. I’d never much liked the place, twenty square metres in size, badly heated, with woodchip wallpaper, and acoustically filled with Sting, George Michael, and umpteen rehashes of cute soul pieces played by the TV production outfit that had moved in next door. Perhaps this way I’d even get around having to pay the overdue rent. What did bother me was the way that over the last few days the Army of Reason had turned my life into something increasingly like a military confrontation. I already knew about threatening letters, home-made bombs, squads of thugs, answering machines filled up with torrents of abuse, and I’d once been sent a dead sheep slit open and wearing a Turkish fez, a very imaginative touch. But this was the first time I’d ever had my office blown up in the middle of Frankfurt in broad daylight, just to stop me pursuing a case. Of course, there was always the possibility that unknown to me, there were genuine faulty gas connections in the building. Or that the ladies of the TV Larger Than Life production company had planned a firework display in line with the company name, to celebrate the opening of a new series about dentists’ daughters having problems with architects’ sons, and they just happened to have put their twenty boxes of rockets down outside my door for a moment. But I didn’t think I’d bet on it.

I took a last look at my kitchen clock and then went back to the car. Just before I reached it I spoke to a man who was leaning against a barrier, staring up at the wall of the building, and looked as if he’d been there for some time.

‘’Scuse me, can you tell me what happened up there?’

‘Huh! You may well ask!’ he exploded with surprising fury, but somehow with a kind of satisfaction too, and without taking his eyes off the building. He had bad teeth, bad skin, hardly any hair, a pot belly, alcohol on his breath, stained nylon clothing that didn’t fit him and a gold ring in his ear. ‘God knows what that bastard did in there!’

‘Er… what bastard?’

‘Some wog detective.’

‘Wog detective?’

‘Yes, well, a wog’s what I’d call him. He’s a Turk, he is — or was. Could be it blew him to bits. Think of it.’ He cast me a brief sideways glance. ‘Fellow like that. All we need now is wogs in the police… and then goodbye the Ostend!’

Slap a little plaster dust on now and then, and you got to know what the neighbours really thought of you.

‘When, roughly, did it blow that bastard to bits?’

‘Half an hour ago or thereabouts. I was over in Heidi’s place. But I reckon blown to bits is just wishful thinking. I mean, can’t see anything, can you? Blood or body parts or that.’

Heidi’s Sausage Heaven was the culinary high spot of the street. Strictly speaking, if you didn’t count a hamburger bar and a bakery selling sandwiches, it was the only culinary spot in the street. Hunger had driven me to Heidi’s greasy plastic tables now and then, forcing me to swallow stuff that no dog would have looked at.

I acted as if I had to search around to locate the place bearing Heidi’s name. Heidi’s Sausage Heaven, I read aloud from the sign over the door. ‘You’d have a good view of this place from there. Did you happen to see anyone go in before the explosion? Someone who might have set it off. Someone who doesn’t belong here. Doesn’t necessarily have to have been a wog.’