‘Okay, but then please tell me more or less how the story goes. If I come across Abakay I don’t want to hear any startling new discoveries. “Frau de Chavannes is my sister’s best friend,” that kind of thing.’
‘Nonsense. It was more or less as you thought. He approached me in the café, and I was a bit curious. A man speaking to a woman alone in a café, where do you find that these days? And I was probably rather bored that morning. We talked, and he was actually amusing — well, amusing in a nightlife, gambling, who-cares-about-tomorrow kind of way. Then he claimed he was a photographer and had taken a series called Frankfurt in the Shadow of the Banking Towers. Portraits of low-life crooks, characters, prostitutes, hip-hoppers …’
She cast me a glance. ‘I know, not very original, but …’
She was searching for the right words.
I said, ‘But together with the nightlife, gambling scene, the who-cares-about-tomorrow attitude, the immigrant background …’
She examined me for a moment as if, once again, she had grave doubts about letting a man like me take a look at her life. Then she drew on her cigarette, blew out the smoke vigorously as if to dispel those doubts, and went on, ‘Could be so. I was thinking mainly of my husband.’
‘Of course.’
‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘What should I have said?’
‘Listen: I didn’t tell you the truth at first. I hoped to solve the situation just like that. I’m well known in this city, my husband is well known all over the world, while to me at least you are an entirely unknown quantity. And you’re a private detective. What do I know about private detectives? If I didn’t need help so urgently … Do you understand? Why should I trust you? I’m sure there are tabloids that would pay a few euros for a Hasselbaink mother-and-daughter story about mysterious underground photographers.’
‘Maybe there are, but no private detective is going to risk his reputation for a few euros. Our good reputation, so to speak, is our business model — the only one we have.’
While she thought about that, her plucked eyebrows drew closer together, and two small lines appeared on her forehead. I liked the fact that she didn’t resort to Botox. Maybe those lips were the genuine article. I’d once kissed a pair of Botoxed lips, and it felt like shaking a prosthetic hand.
She went back to the bookshelf and ground out her cigarette in an ashtray. ‘So I can trust you?’
‘I won’t sell your story to a tabloid, if that’s what you mean. Apart from that, I think you rather overestimate the importance of the story.’
‘Are you familiar with the art world?’
‘I know your husband is a big deal there. Eyeless faces, am I right?’
‘That’s one of his famous series, yes. The Blind Men of Babylon.’
‘I’ve Googled your husband. International prizes and so on. All the same, the kind of tabloids you have in mind don’t set out to entertain their readers with people who paint series entitled The Blind Men of Babylon. Please tell me what you meant when you said you were thinking mainly of your husband.’
‘Will you believe what I tell you from now on?’
‘That depends what you tell me.’ I grinned cheerfully. ‘Come on, spit it out. Or would you rather think again about hiring me?’
‘I want to …’ She hesitated, and for a moment it looked as if she was suppressing tears. She looked at the floor and folded her bare arms, shivering. As she did so the yellow T-shirt moved even further up her taut stomach, and I thought that in spite of the fifteen metres between us, I saw the head of the snake. I’d have liked to know at what point in her life she had decided: Right, now I’m off to the tattoo parlour to have a snake tattooed crawling between my legs. And I’d have loved to know what her parents, Monsieur and Madame de Chavannes, aristocrats from Lyon, thought of it. (I was assuming that you’d be more likely to get a snake tattoo at an age when your parents’ opinion still counted for something.) According to Google, since Georges de Chavannes had retired from his position with Magnon amp; Koch, a private asset management bank, they had been living in a small château in the Loire Valley making their own wine. I wondered whether they sometimes sat over a bottle of it on the terrace looking at the sunset, thinking their own thoughts, and at some point Bernadette de Chavannes asked, in the peaceful atmosphere where the only sounds were twittering birds, chirping crickets and clinking glasses, ‘Do you think Valerie still has that terrible …?’
‘Oh, please, chérie! Let’s enjoy the evening.’
And what did Edgar Hasselbaink think about the snake? Or had he perhaps designed it himself? How about Marieke? I wondered how it went down in the school playground. Hey, Marieke, I’ve got a snake down there too. I’d like to introduce him to your mama’s snake!
‘My husband has always found Frankfurt horrible: boring, provincial, uncultivated. Sausages, stocks and shares, brash young bankers, and according to Edgar the locals’ favourite drink is a laxative. We came here from Paris ten years ago. By then living in Paris was too expensive for us, and anyway we wanted to go somewhere with fewer exhaust fumes and more greenery for Marieke’s sake. Then my parents offered us this house. My father was head of the Frankfurt branch of Magnon and Koch for more than twenty years. When he retired, my parents wanted to go back to France.’
‘Forgive me, but if you sell the house you can live almost anywhere in the world with the money you’d get for it.’
‘When I said my parents offered me the house, I didn’t mean they gave it to me. In fact we pay rent, although it’s a relatively low rate — that mattered to my parents, as a symbol.’
She paused, went over to a grey corduroy-covered sofa about the size of my guest room, and took a white cardigan off the back of it. As she put the cardigan round her shoulders, she said, ‘My parents and I haven’t always got on well together.’
‘Did you grow up in this house?’
‘Yes. I was seven when my parents moved to Frankfurt, and I lived here until I was sixteen. Anyway: we thought it was only for an interim period until we’d decided where we wanted to live. But then … my husband’s pictures stopped selling so well, and at the same time we got used to the comfort and size of the house, Marieke was making Frankfurt her home, and so on — many reasons, some of them good, why we’re still here. However, my husband has never changed his opinion of Frankfurt and particularly this part of it. You see, he grew up in Amsterdam, he’s lived in New York, Barcelona, Paris — in the shabby districts of those cities, I wouldn’t want you to think he’s missing a life of glamour. When he was studying medicine in Amsterdam, he lived in a student hostel, later often in unheated attics, and in Paris we had a four-roomed basement apartment in Belleville. What he misses here is life with all its surprises. The only surprise you may get in the streets of Frankfurt is when one of the ladies in fur coats walking her permed dogs greets you in a friendly tone of voice.’
Valerie de Chavannes sat back in the Art Cologne armchair opposite me, and I wondered how many fur coats she had hanging in her own wardrobe. Or did the fact that she paid her parents rent mean that no financial support at all came her way from the château on the Loire? But who paid for the housekeeper, the deluxe furniture, the sparkling clean racing bike in the hall?
‘So you tried to bring a little of the life he missed into this place in the person of Abakay?’
‘He wasn’t the first. Whenever I meet someone who I think might interest Edgar, I bring that person home. Do you understand? I do so wish that Frankfurt could be more fun for Edgar. And I thought, Well, at least Abakay isn’t just sausages and stocks and shares. So I invited him to supper, and it all went terribly wrong. Edgar thought he was a puffed-up windbag, and Marieke took Abakay’s side in a pointless discussion about the freedom of art. Only to annoy us, of course …’
Suddenly something unpleasant seemed to occur to her. Or rather, something that was unseemly in the circumstances; something to do with me. For a moment, she looked at me as
if she had just that moment noticed that I looked like some bastard out of her past — a teacher with bad breath who felt her up while giving her extra tutoring, or an ex-boyfriend who’d made off with her jewellery, something along those lines.
She lowered her eyes and began massaging her hands. ‘Now you know what I meant when I said I was thinking mainly of my husband.’
‘Hmm. A discussion about the freedom of art? What was that about?’
She hesitated, looked up briefly, then back at her hands again. She massaged them calmly and regularly. She was good at putting on a show of calm regularity, sometimes of anger and contempt as well. It was only now and then that the mask slipped — and behind it, or so it seemed to me, Valerie de Chavannes was shaking with fear.
‘About those stupid caricatures.’
I guessed what she meant, but I said, ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Well, the caricatures of Muhammad. All the fuss about them back then — how long ago is it? Three or four years? You must have heard about it.’
This time she was looking straight at me, and her expression was somewhere between worry and discontent. Was she treading on the toes of a guy called Kemal Kayankaya, or was the private detective, who in the course of this conversation had finally seemed to her like a reasonably civilised person, just an uneducated idiot after all?
‘I understand. Yes, I heard about all that. What attitude did Abakay adopt?’
‘Well … it wasn’t so much about himself — Abakay is certainly not particularly devout — it was about respect for religions in general. Some relation of his — an uncle, I think — is an imam in a Frankfurt mosque.’
‘Is Marieke susceptible to that sort of stuff?’ I looked on the glass-topped table at the photographs of the stern-faced girl.
‘You mean religion?’
I nodded. ‘Maybe she’s not gone off with Abakay after all but with the Lord God Almighty?’
‘Oh no, she …’ Valerie de Chavannes shook her head, looked despairingly at the ceiling of the room, where her glance lingered briefly as if it showed her pictures of the disastrous evening. ‘It was just because of us, or maybe just because of my husband. You see, we’re modern, enlightened people, religion has never been important to us or Marieke. And that evening, well, she simply sensed she could make her father go ballistic. If the subject comes up Edgar is an outspoken atheist. He hates any form of religion. And then his daughter suddenly starts defending the veil as a cultural inheritance, an Oriental fashion accessory, a way for a woman to protect herself from men’s eyes, and I don’t know what else. Even Abakay contradicted her — he could have been privately smiling to himself, I don’t know. As I said, it was all pointless. Edgar loves Marieke more than anything, and at the moment she’s trying to shake off that love.’ Valerie de Chavannes paused, and it was obvious that she was wondering whether to tell me something in confidence. ‘You said just now that I didn’t seem to know the names of my daughter’s friends very well, and by comparison with Edgar you’re certainly right. He can probably list the first names and surnames of all Marieke’s friends from primary school on. Do you have any children?’
The question came as a surprise, and I thought of Deborah two days ago as we had our aperitif (a term introduced by Deborah; I’d have stuck with, ‘I drink a couple of beets before supper’) bringing up for the first time her desire to have children.
‘No.’
‘Love for your children can sometimes become almost monstrous. I hope you realise how important it is for Edgar to never on any account find out that Marieke has been with Abakay. He’d never forgive her.’
‘Don’t you mean he’d never forgive you?’
Valerie de Chavannes stared straight at me. Her mouth slowly closed, and that I-only-ever-think-of-one-thing expression came back. In fact it was simply a way of looking down on men who, she supposed, only ever thought of one thing when they looked at her.
After a pause, she said, ‘You’d have liked it to be a bit more usual, a bit shabbier, right? Or can’t you imagine that a woman like me — snake tattoo and so on — doesn’t jump into bed with every half-attractive man? Go ahead, as far as I’m concerned — but if you think I’d be idiotic enough to then invite the man to my house for supper, I take that as a real insult. Incidentally, in case you’re interested, my husband and I are happily married.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, Frau de Chavannes.’ I nodded to her with my head bent, the way I suppose servants anxious to keep their jobs do. ‘Particularly for your husband’s sake. And I can easily understand that you do not jump straight into bed with every half-attractive man. However, what I don’t entirely understand is that with a wife like you — snake tattoo and so on — there isn’t something in the air when a young curly-haired underground photographer turns up for supper at your invitation. At least so far as the photographer’s concerned, and I’d bet that one or another thought went through your husband’s mind.’
‘You don’t know my husband. He’s not the jealous type.’
‘In my experience, that’s only ever what other people say. And the only man I know who said it about himself became addicted to pills after his girlfriend cheated on him with one of his colleagues.’
‘Well, maybe your job doesn’t allow you much experience with people whose approach to life doesn’t conform to the usual standards.’
‘Could be, Frau de Chavannes. But I’ve met a few fathers who flew off the handle because their adolescent daughters started going around with other men. Among people whose approach to life does conform to the usual standards, that kind of thing is called jealousy.’
We looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and maybe she wanted to hit me.
Finally she looked away and said, ‘Right, fine, Herr Kayankaya, obviously you’re very articulate, and that’s just as well. But it’s not really relevant at the moment. Will you get Marieke out of this without letting her know who asked you to do it?’
‘I’ll try. As I said, your daughter has a right to hang out with Abakay. I can’t simply carry her off.’
‘But you strike me as a man with imagination. Think up some kind of pretext. Lure Abakay out of town or …’
‘Beat him up, yes, I know. But that won’t get us anywhere, Frau de Chavannes. And thanks for the bit about the man with imagination. Pay me a day’s fee in advance, and I’ll see what I can do.’
I took one of my standard contracts out of my jacket pocket and handed it to her across the glass-topped table. Four hundred euros a day plus expenses, two days’ fee as a bonus for success. Normally my daily fee was two hundred and fifty euros a day, but normally my clients don’t live in Zeppelinallee. In fact I wasn’t all that bothered about the money. I’d had plenty of work recently, and Deborah’s wine bar was doing well and becoming a must-visit place in Frankfurt. But as with most relatively cultivated rich people — and I had automatically put the daughter of a French banker and vintner and wife of a highly regarded Dutch artist into that category — it was like this: they pleased themselves and others by supposing that special quality called for a special price, that you had to consider value for money rather than the price itself, that price plus wear and tear of cheap stuff ultimately costs you more than expensive stuff, and so on. It wouldn’t even occur to someone with that much money that such an attitude is itself cheap, because attitudes don’t cost anything. At any rate, I didn’t want to stir up any more doubts in Valerie de Chavannes’s mind as to whether she was putting herself into the right hands now that she had swallowed my office address in Gutleutstrasse. I was all the more surprised when she looked up from the document, frowning, and said, ‘Four hundred euros a day? Your website said fee by arrangement.’
‘If a case seems particularly difficult. In your case I’ll stick to my usual conditions.’
‘Four hundred euros a day — good heavens.’
She really did seem to be concerned about the amount. It made me feel uncomfortable. On the ot
her hand … I took a look around the living room.
‘Do the furnishings belong to your parents as well?’
‘Most of them, yes.’
It brought me up short. ‘And the paintings?’
They were almost all large-format, modern-looking arrangements of blocks of colour, oil on canvas, in heavy, gilded, antique-style frames. Sometimes cubes of assorted colours, sometimes blobs or stripes, a rainbow of merging colours, a red square in a yellow square in a green square, and so on, a purple blotch like a storm cloud. When I looked more closely for the first time, I realised that they could hardly be by the artist who had painted The Blind Men of Babylon.
‘Edgar would tell you that those aren’t paintings, they’re interior decoration.’
‘Pretty.’
‘Exactly.’
We looked at each other, and no one had to say so, but it was clear that her parents were forcing her and her artist husband to leave the pictures hanging on the walls. Maybe they came from the same firm that had furnished the waiting room, the conference room and the lavatory of the Frankfurt branch of Magnon amp; Koch. Perhaps her parents wanted to tell their son-in-law, as if shouting it through a megaphone, what kind of paintings did not ‘stop selling so well’ at some point in time. Or perhaps they just wanted to inflict a little torture on their tattooed daughter who had left home at sixteen.
So Valerie de Chavannes was living in furnished accommodation, and four hundred euros was not just chicken feed to her.
‘As I assume that I can do the job in a day or so without too much expense, I can offer to halve the bonus for success.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and it came from the heart.
She signed the contract, and while she went out to fetch the four hundred euros I put my jacket on and went over to an A4-sized drawing that was fixed to the wall with a drawing pin between two large paintings, a two-by-two-metres rainbow and a three-metres-long row of red and green horizontal stripes. A quick, smudged pencil sketch showing a man with an Afro hairstyle and his mouth wide open, kneeling on the floor between two huge pictures of a rainbow and some horizontal stripes with a mound of vomit that reached to his chest and threatened to smother him.
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