Jakob Arjouni: Kismet

I ducked down under some branches, shining a flashlight as I looked for a suitable place to dig. ‘Leave it somewhere near the rail station, as bait. The thing’s worth so much, even a successful gangster would be glad to have it back. And perhaps someone will get behind the wheel and be idiot enough to lead me to his boss.’

‘Well, just in case you change your mind, we’d get a year’s earnings for that car.’

‘A year of whose earnings, yours or mine?’

‘Mine, of course. With yours you could just about buy the music system,’ he said, opening the boot. ‘In its present condition.’

‘Very funny,’ I muttered. Then I found a place. A large root stuck up above ground and could be pushed aside.

We spent the next forty minutes digging. Our faces were dripping with sweat, and blisters formed and broke on our hands. When the hole was wide and deep enough we pushed the bodies into it. We shovelled the earth back, trod it down, covered it with spruce needles, and finally I put the root back in place.

While Slibulsky reversed the car out of the wood, I tried covering up the tyre tracks as best I could. Back on the paved road, Slibulsky asked, ‘How exactly did you see that, about using the car as bait? Are you going to stand beside it the whole time?’

‘I’ll get Max to build in a transmitter with a signal that I can follow by radio.’

‘And then what?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What will you do then? March in, say: “Hey, I shot a couple of your gorillas, but if you let my mate go on running his bar we’ll say no more about it?” ’

‘What are you talking about? Do you tell people: “Hey, buy my ice cream, there’s nothing in it but sugar and milk powder and sometimes a couple of salmonella bugs, but give me ten marks for a cornet and I’ll turn a blind eye?” ’

Slibulsky made a face as if I were slow on the uptake. I lit a cigarette.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘you’ll be cleverer than that, but however clever you are this is a team that drives BMWs, wears Italian suits, and asks six thousand a month from the manager of a miserable little place serving warmed-up beans — about as much as all the furnishings are worth, if that. What I mean is, these guys don’t do things by halves. Maybe they’ll go crazy and overreach themselves, and then their outfit won’t last long, but while it does last there’s no compromising with them, no negotiating, nothing. Either you get rid of the rest of them or they’ll get rid of you.’

‘So what do you think I should do?’

‘Tell Tango Man to clear off and forget the whole thing. He’ll be up and running again soon. We don’t have to worry about a character who’s worried about his aluminium pan, not in the kind of situation we were in just now. And you’d better close your office for a few weeks and go to the country. Anywhere this bunch can’t find you and you’ll get a little colour in your cheeks.’

Before I could say anything, Slibulsky made a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s all right. About how much?’

I hesitated, knowing that I wasn’t going to accept what Slibulsky was offering, but I did the sums all the same. ‘Well… I’m two months behind with the office rent, I haven’t paid the phone bill yet, and I owe someone three thousand marks.’

The someone was Slibulsky.

‘Right, I’ll give you seven thousand for the rent and the phone, you can have a holiday with what’s left. And just forget the three thousand…’ Slibulsky paused, and then grinned broadly. ‘The guy you owe it to has enough anyway.’

To please Slibulsky I grinned too. My thoughts were somewhere else entirely. Refusing his money had nothing to do with pride or a sense of honour. I’d have taken twenty thousand without bothering too much, because there was no doubt about it, Slibulsky did have enough, or anyway as much as we both thought was enough. But I’d been fool enough to accept a job from Romario, and I’d mucked it up, and a lot of blood had been spilt and energy wasted for no good reason. If two men die and everything’s still the same as before, or worse, then something’s wrong. I had to make sense of it all, even if only by making sure that Romario could carry on acting the typical Brazilian at the Saudade in peace, complaining about the German weather and wearing an apron with parrots printed on it.

Or I could have put it to myself more simply: I wished I hadn’t shot anyone.

‘Thanks, Slibulsky, but as I see it Romario may be an idiot — well, he is an idiot — but it all turned out this way on his account, and I think someone ought to get something out of it. And I have to know who those two were. I can’t just shoot a man like that. I won’t forget it.’

Slibulsky looked straight ahead, driving the car gently along. I couldn’t see his expression in the faint orange light of the dashboard. We drove on to the next village in silence.

‘Look,’ he said at last, ‘It’s not a complete disaster because just once you really mucked up.’ They didn’t exactly leave us much room to manoeuvre. But do it if you must. Three things: keep my name to yourself, pay your rent with my money, and when we’ve taken Tango Man to the airport let’s go back to my place. We’ll have a bite to eat and you can sleep on the sofa.’

‘Stinking cheese?’

Slibulsky nodded. ‘And there’s a crate of beer in the fridge.’

When the skyscrapers of Frankfurt appeared ahead of us I slipped lower down in the passenger seat and enjoyed the sight of the lights of the management offices on the top floors shining next to the moon. Whatever I’m feeling like, every time I drive into Frankfurt my heart lifts for a moment at the look of the skyline. In the normal way it’s probably just the image of such a concentrated, powerful place with those densely crowded tower buildings you can see miles away, giving a man who has his own little room somewhere among them a momentary illusion of being concentrated and powerful too. But this time those concrete pillars gave off another aura. As we drove past the Trade Fair Tower and I looked up at the facade that seemed to go on up and up into the sky, I felt a little calmer for the first time since the shoot-out. Was it my stupid subconscious whispering: a small-time character like you can’t really do anything too terrible? Or was it just the sight of such a mighty building making me feel that the world has seen and survived worse things than two dead thugs who were extorting protection money? Anyway, it was something to do with the fact that the building belonged to my home town, and I had a friend in that home town with a place where I could spend the night and eat, and if some Mafia outfit from somewhere else got a bloody nose from us, it was their own fault!

So far, so locally patriotic. A few cops I knew would have been surprised. They might even have spoken to me politely for a change.

But it wasn’t just the management floors lighting Frankfurt up tonight. As we drove past the station and I turned my head to ask Slibulsky if he knew whether there were any flights to the south at this time of night, I saw a red glow in the sky. Roughly in the direction of the Saudade. People sometimes like to say, after the event, that they knew something at a certain moment, although they really just mean they were afraid of it. All the same, I did know. And I felt I had only to reach out my arm and point a finger for Slibulsky to know too. Anyway, he opened his mouth and left it open for the rest of the drive, his gaze becoming more and more fixed. The closer we came to the Saudade the stronger the smell of burning was. When we finally turned into the road where the Brazilian flag had hung on one street corner for the last seven years, flakes of soot flew to meet us, and the blue lights of police cars were circling the place. The street was sealed off, curious onlookers were standing to right and left, and the Saudade was blazing fiercely.