Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

‘Right, lads, see you Saturday. Work in the morning first, pleasure in the evening!’

By now I was back at the corner of the wall, and I saw Ahrens laughing. Two huge hulks in suits stood beside him.

‘Don’t worry, boss, the faggots will get what faggots always hope for — they’ll die in their sleep.’

At that moment the passenger door opened, and at first I was simply amazed — the way you’re amazed when something turns out almost exactly as you imagined it. Black hair loosely braided at the back of the neck, slim body, economical movements. I saw her only from behind, in a light-coloured coat, but it had to be her, no doubt about it. Hesitantly, like a woman facing something disagreeable but inevitable, she approached the front door.

‘Wait a minute, pet!’ Ahrens waved to the two hulks, turned and followed her. As the doors of the BMW closed, Ahrens came up to the woman from behind and put his Michelin man arms around her waist. Then the BMW drove out of the entrance, I had to retreat into the shadows, and when I next looked round the corner the door was just closing behind them.

I stood there for a while motionless, as if my head had been swept empty. Finally I lit a cigarette and paced up and down for a bit. I couldn’t make it out. Leila’s mother might not have looked happy, but she certainly hadn’t looked as if he were mistreating her either. And what did I know about her — about her relationship with Ahrens, any deal she might have made to get her husband out of jail, or her chance of getting hold of a great deal of money? Certainly not enough for me to shoot my way in through the door here and now, and get her out of there. The one thing I was sure of was that, although she was obviously relatively free to move about, she hadn’t sent Leila any news of herself since Sunday. And if she could find the time to screw around with Ahrens, you’d have thought a quick call to the refugee hostel wasn’t too much to ask. With Ahrens, too! Even if it was a case of getting hold of large sums of money, or for all I knew freeing the most wonderful man in the world from jail — surely no human being with the faintest aesthetic sense could do that.

I stood there in the entrance, looking up with revulsion at Ahrens’s desert domain, now bathed in warm yellow light. Was he telling her something about the constellations on the ceiling? Or the wonderful world of the children of Nature? No, she’d know all that off by heart. It would be romantic hits on the CD player, and rumpy-pumpy among the coconut and banana cushions!

I turned away, striding fast, picked up my bag and marched down the street to my car. She could wait till Saturday. Which might even suit her. And after all, I had something more important to do. I was in the business of chasing a Mafia gang out of the city, I couldn’t waste time bothering with a woman who had, perhaps, looked hesitant, but had gone straight from the car to the front door of the building. And that was the whole point: do you go to the front door of a building or don’t you? There are always reasons. Reasons are the most tedious things in the world.

I roared the engine, put the car into gear, and stepped on the gas.

‘Saturday evening, I’m just about certain.’

‘Just about…’ repeated the Albanian. But it didn’t, like his usual repetition of a word, sound like a sign that he was paying relative attention, or like a way of unsettling whoever he was talking to; it sounded distrustful. I was standing near the toilets in the Owl, holding the telephone receiver and a glass of cider, and I wanted to get this conversation over with as quickly as possible. Phoning the Albanian, but not really caring in the least what he thought and thus possibly striking the wrong note, wasn’t the kind of thing you really wanted to try in this town.

‘Well, you can’t be absolutely sure until you’re there watching the lads eat their dinner.’

‘Ah, I see. So you can’t. Tell me, is this case proving a little too much for you?’

‘Too much for me? How do you mean?’

‘Well, you sound so… oh, I don’t know… agitated, nervous. Not a good state to be in for pulling off something like this.’

‘That’s nothing to do with it. Private business.’

‘Fine. I’m relying on you…’

That, in his mouth, wasn’t reassuring. I cleared my throat. ‘So if nothing else happens, I’ll meet you in the New York on Saturday morning.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to tell me where this Army of Reason will be meeting? You have my word that everything will go as you want. But suppose something happens to you…’

‘Nothing’s going to happen to me.’

‘I lost two more of my men last night, and a woman who sells sausages over in Sachsenhausen died.’

The bit about the sausage seller was a lie. They had said on the radio that a snack bar had been blown up, but the proprietress got out alive. And if his boys couldn’t get their guns out of their trouser pockets fast enough, that wasn’t my problem.

‘Sorry to hear that.’

He audibly breathed in and out. ‘I just want to make sure that if we have to wait until the day after tomorrow to get after this gang, we’ll really be able to strike hard then.’

‘Look, I’ll have to go. My small change is running out.’

‘Small change…?’ he asked, as if I had told him I was planning to fight with a bow and arrows on Saturday. ‘Don’t you have a…’

I pressed the rest of the phone down. Another discussion of mobiles and I might actually have forgotten my respect for him, just for a moment. Wiser to break off in mid-conversation.

I bought another glass of cider and called Slibulsky.

‘How’s it going? Where are you?’

‘In a phone box.’ The Owl was one of the bars we patronised. It more or less stood for relaxation after work, silly jokes, cheerful boozing. To say I was here would have been a lie.

‘In a phone box? Since when do you hear loos being flushed from a phone box?’

‘Since when did I have to tell you exactly where I’m calling from?’

‘Oh, what a great mood you’re in. Was there anything else, or shall we ring off?’

‘How’s Leila?’

‘Lying in front of the TV. Like you said, she’s all strung up but OK otherwise. Have you found her mother?’

‘More or less. I’ll tell you tomorrow. And how are the two of you getting on with Leila?’

‘I’m on my own. Gina’s at the museum. But we’re not having any problems. She says what she doesn’t want, and I can guess the rest. You’re right, she’s delightful in her way. She even watched half an hour of table tennis with me just now. If she keeps this up she’ll be someone’s dream woman in a few years’ time.’

‘Bring her to the phone, would you?’

A moment later a breathless ‘She there?’ came down the line, and I couldn’t help smiling. It was good to hear her voice.

‘No, sorry, but I know where she is. Now, listen carefully…’

I told her that at the moment her mother was moving heaven and earth to get her father out of jail. That meant she was negotiating with Ahrens and some powerful Croatians, she was going to meet people in other cities, of course she was under severe pressure the whole time and hardly had a minute to herself. All the same, as I had found out by devious means, she kept leaving phone messages in the refugee hostel, but Frau Schmidtbauer obviously wasn’t passing them on — silly old cunt that she was.

Leila listened to all this without putting in a word, and when I’d finished there was a pause. Then she asked gravely, ‘Why Schmidtbauer not tell me my mother call?’

‘Well, I strongly suspect she’s jealous. Don’t you remember the way she went on about your mother in her office? Schmidtbauer is in love with Ahrens and thinks your mother wants to pinch him from her. But that’s just nonsense. All your mother’s interested in is getting your father out of jail.’