When Valerie de Chavannes came back she saw me standing in front of the picture.
‘This one is funny,’ I said, and I meant it.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘it isn’t. Here you are.’ She came towards me and gave me four hundred-euro notes. ‘I’ll be at home all day. Please call me as soon as you have any news about Marieke.’
At her daughter’s name the strength suddenly drained out of her. She was breathing heavily, her chin began to quiver and she pressed her lips together.
‘Please bring me my daughter back! And forget about halving the bonus, that’s so stupid, it was only …’ She fought off her tears. ‘We really don’t have a lot of money right now, and it was only out of a horrible habit that I thought of it, of course I’ll pay anything you like, just get Marieke back for me.’
She came a step closer to me, wringing her hands in front of her stomach and looking pleadingly at me. It was just about impossible not to put my arms round her. Her head fell on my shoulder, she gave way to tears and her trembling body pressed close to mine. She had taken off the cardigan when she went to find the money, and I was holding her bare muscular arms. The sleeves of her T-shirt slipped up, and my fingertips touched her damp armpits. When I began to feel her breasts through my lightweight corduroy jacket, it was time to leave.
I carefully pushed her away from me. Her face was wet with tears.
‘Don’t worry, Frau de Chavannes. I’ll find Marieke for you. That’s a promise.’
She looked at me despairingly. ‘If he does anything to her …’
‘He won’t.’ The things we say. I pointed to the glass-topped table with the photographs. ‘Your daughter is a strong, self-confident young woman. And girls her age do gad about. I’m sure the two of them are doing nothing but sitting in a café and talking about underground photography or our antisocial society. Maybe they’ll go into the park and smoke a bit of weed now and then. She’ll be back this evening, and you can lecture her about the extremely proper things you did at sixteen. I assume there’ll be a lot about skipping ropes, poetry albums and classical piano music …’
She had to smile a little.
‘See you this evening, Frau de Chavannes. And no, don’t stay at home. Go for a walk, or shopping, or to the gym — move about, do something to take your mind off it. But don’t forget to take your mobile. I’ll call you, okay?’
She nodded, sniffing, and then she said, ‘So that’s your picture of me, is it? Shopping and the gym, hmm?’
I looked at her for a moment. ‘Don’t worry about how I see you. Everything is fine there.’
We shook hands, and the next moment I was in the hall. I wiped the sweat from my brow with my sleeve.
The gentleman’s racing bike that must have cost five or six thousand euros was leaning against the wall. I’d come to know a few things about bikes since I gave up smoking four years ago. Every time I felt a craving for nicotine that I could hardly withstand I got on my bike and fought the just-half-a-cigarette devil by riding uphill and downhill between Bad Soden and Bad Nauheim, whatever the time of day or night.
Perhaps the racing bike came from financially better times. Or it was one of the things that were meant to give Edgar Hasselbaink the idea that Frankfurt could be fun, and the family scrimped and saved to afford it. Or Valerie de Chavannes, a credit to her financial wizard of a father, had put on a performance for me aiming, just on principle, to lower costs in any situation, however inappropriate.
Just before I reached the hefty, iron-clad front door, a forbidding sight from both outside and inside, the housekeeper came up the cellar steps with a basket of laundry under her arm.
She stopped in surprise. ‘You’re still here?’
‘Yes. Thanks for the tea. Next time I’d like to try your fish soup, on the reverse principle …’
She gave me a puzzled look.
‘Just one question: how long have you been working for the de Chavannes family?’
She didn’t like my asking, and if I was not much mistaken she didn’t like me either.
‘Over twenty years. Why?’
‘Only wondering, sheer curiosity. Goodbye, then. Have a nice day.’
She murmured something that I couldn’t make out. Was she going to report my visit to Georges and Bernadette de Chavannes? There was another of them here today …
When the door latched behind me, I stood in the front garden for a moment breathing in the clear autumn air. Apart from an elderly couple slowly approaching down the pavement, Zeppelinallee was deserted. Not a car driving along, no noisy children, no clinking of crockery, no lawn mowers. You heard the sounds of the city very quietly, as if from far away, although you were almost in its centre.
Both the man and the woman wore Hunter green felt hats, the woman had a fur round her neck, the man carried a walking stick with a gleaming golden knob shaped like an animal’s head. The click-clack of the walking stick sounded through the silence of the diplomatic quarter.
Let’s try it, I thought, and waved to the couple, smiling. ‘Good morning!’
As they went on they looked at me as if I were a talking tree or something, and as if talking trees and indeed anything like them were extremely crude.
I took my bicycle, pushed it out of the front garden and rode away in the direction of the Bockenheimer Landstrasse. As I passed the elderly couple I called out, ‘You poorly educated pigs!’ And once again they looked, without moving a muscle. A talking tree on a bicycle — what on earth is the world coming to?
I pushed down on the pedals, with the mild October sun in my face, convinced that I had an easy, pleasant job ahead of me. At least, so long as I kept my distance from my client. Valerie de Chavannes was an attractive woman, no denying it, and if I was not much mistaken she wouldn’t turn down a little comforting if it was offered in the right way. But there were plenty of attractive women around. I was living with one of them. And anyway, Valerie de Chavannes’s I-only-ever-think-of-one-thing look struck me as coinciding exactly with the range of possible feelings about her — and who wanted the hell bit at my age? I was in my early fifties, I did my work, I paid my bills, I had made my way. I’d managed to stop smoking, all I drank were two or three beers in the evening or my share of a couple of bottles of wine with friends, and Deborah and I were planning our future. This morning I had stepped out of my front door generally pleased with life, and I had mounted my bike with an apple in my hand. Not quite heaven, maybe, but not so far from it.
And then I went and did it all the same. I held the fingertips that had just touched Valerie de Chavannes’s armpits close to my nose, and caught a faintly lavender-scented smell of sweat, and for a moment I felt as if the October sun were burning down on my head like its sister in August.
Chapter 2
My office was on the second floor of a run-down sixties apartment building — or perhaps it had never run very far up — at the beginning of Gutleutstrasse near Frankfurt Central Station. Pinkish brown plaster was crumbling away from the façade, the bare brick wall showed through in many places, a number of windows had sheets hung over them, others had furniture blocking them, chains of Christmas lights winked on and off all year round on the third floor and on the fourth floor a Frankfurt Hooligan decal covered one pane. On the ground floor there was a second-hand clothes shop where you could buy used moon boots, polyester shirts and cracked leather belts. My friend Slibulsky called it the Third Armpit, on account of the smell that wafted out of the shop when the door was open. The front door at the entrance to the building had once been ribbed glass, until a drunk kicked it in three years ago and the owner had replaced the glass with a wooden board.
The stairwell, which was painted greyish yellow, smelled of cats and cleaning fluid. If you found the half-broken-off light switch and pressed it, a candle-shaped naked energy-saving bulb gave just enough dim light to show you the stairs. Some joker kept smearing some kind of sticky substance on the banisters: jam, honey, UHU glue. I was sure the perpetrator was t
he twelve-year-old son of a single father on the fourth floor, but I couldn’t prove it. I once cornered him on the subject, and his answer had been, ‘Something sticky? Are you sure it was on the bannisters? Did you wash your hands first?’ Little bastard.
A Croatian Mafia, trying to keep me from investigating their shady business, had blown up my previous office thirteen years before. The two-room apartment in Gutleutstrasse had been a quick, cheap, and — I thought at the time — temporary substitute. My fears that, with such an address, and the state of the building, the only clients I’d get would be people with a list of previous convictions or bad drug problems proved to be exaggerated. It’s true that with the passing trade that made its way up the gloomy stairs to the second floor merely because of the nameplate saying Kemal Kayankaya — Investigations and Personal Protection, I could hardly have earned the rent in those first years. But I had a pretty good reputation as a detective in the city, the word-of-mouth publicity worked well, and business was good. My wish for a classier office space faded. I got used to the area, the chestnut tree outside the window and the little Café Rosig on the corner, until the success of the Internet and computer technology made the location of my office superfluous. My clients got in touch by email or phone, my paper files would fit into a shoe box and I held business meetings in the Café Rosig. I could have given my private apartment as my business address. But then Deborah found an apartment in the West End district of the city — four rooms, kitchen and bathroom — and asked if I’d like to move in with her. We’d been at first an occasional, then more and more of an established, couple for more than six years, and I was happy to accept the offer. That meant I needed an office away from my home. If anyone else had designs on me with explosives or anything else, I didn’t want Deborah to be affected.
Since my website had gone online, exactly two people had come to Gutleutstrasse unannounced: a woman neighbour who wanted me to get her brother to confess over an inheritance dispute — ‘He’s a cowardly, soft little worm, you’d only have to squeeze him a bit’, and a sad man who had fallen for an anonymous girl in a porn film and wanted me to find her for him. When I explained how much such a search could cost him, and how high my advance was, he went away even sadder than before.
So on the morning when I came back from Valerie de Chavannes’s house to my office, I hardly took any notice of the woman leaning against a sunny bit of the wall, talking busily on an iPhone. She wore a blue, expensive-looking trouser suit, and had a short, modern hairstyle. In front of her stood a large leather handbag crammed with papers. An estate agent, I thought. There were constant rumours that the building was being sold to make way for another hotel or parking garage near the station.
I had just put my key into the front door lock and was about to shoulder my bike when I heard her calling behind me. ‘Excuse me …! Herr Kayankaya …?’
I lowered the bike and turned round. ‘Yes?’
She came towards me smiling, on high heels and with her full and obviously heavy handbag in one hand and her iPhone in the other. She had a broad, friendly face, and the closer she came the more clear it became how tall she was. She was almost a head taller than me; she’d still be half that extra height without her shoes on, and I’m not a short man. I liked to see such a tall woman wearing high heels — she obviously wasn’t setting out to do the short people of the world any favours. She let her bag drop to the ground, threw the iPhone into it and held out her hand to me. Her hand was large, too.
‘Katja Lipschitz, chief press officer of Maier Verlag.’
‘Kemal Kayankaya, but you know that already.’
‘I know you from a photo on the Internet, that’s how I recognised you. The man who saved Gregory …’
She was smiling again, perhaps a little too professionally, and there was a look of speculation behind the smile. Did the name Gregory shake me? Gregory’s real name was Gregor Dachstein, and years ago he had won a Big Brother TV show, followed by a CD of songs like ‘Here comes Santa with his prick, chasing every pretty chick’ and ‘She’s an old Cu-Cu-Custard Pie Baker.’ Since then he’d played the clubs in the discothèque world between Little You-Know-Who and Nether Whatsit. Gregory’s manager had hired me as his bodyguard for an appearance at the Hell discothèque in Dietzenbach, and the outcome was that I had to take Gregory to Accident and Emergency in Offenbach at four in the morning with about thirty vodka Red Bulls inside him. A yellow press reporter was waiting there with a camera, and for some time after I asked myself whether the manager had arranged with the reporter to be there before the concert, and had organised his protégé’s consumption of Red Bull accordingly, or whether the idea of offering a tabloid an exclusive story had occurred to him only when Gregory collapsed onstage. Anyway, two days later a photograph of me with Gregory and my jacket covered with his vomit was published, with a caption saying: Poison attack? Gregory in the arms of his bodyguard on the way to hospital. It was an appearance I could have done without.
I responded to Katja Lipschitz’s professional smile by asking, ‘Would you like an autograph?’
‘Later, maybe — as your signature to a contract. As to the reason for my visit to you here …’ — she cast a brief, disparaging look round the place: backyard, wood-boarded entrance, all the traffic on Gutleutstrasse — ‘would you like to hear it outside?’
‘That depends. Does Maier Verlag sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door? Your trouser suit doesn’t look as if a door-to-door salesman could afford it, but maybe that’s just because it suits you so well …’
She was brought up short, apparently baffled at least momentarily by the term door-to-door salesman. Perhaps she was a neighbour of Deborah and me; you didn’t meet door-to-door salesmen in the elegant West End. By way of contrast, three shabby, pale-faced guys had been haunting Gutleutstrasse in the last year alone: ‘Want a great deal? Gala, Bunte, Wochenecho? Lots of good reading there. Or hey, just give me ten euros anyway, I haven’t eaten for days.’ It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a poor bastard to scrounge the few euros he needs to survive from a rich man.
She shook her head and said, amused, ‘No, no, don’t worry. We’re a highly regarded literary publishing house. Haven’t you ever heard of us? Mercedes García is on our list, and so are Hans Peter Stullberg, Renzo Kochmeister, and Daniela Mita …’
She was looking at me so expectantly that the possibility of my being unacquainted with her authors would have marked me out as a total idiot.
I knew the sixty-something Stullberg from newspaper interviews in which he called for young people to devote themselves to the old values. Reading his words, I thought how writers like to express themselves in metaphors: he was the old values, and the young person devoted to him wore close-fitting jeans and had nicely curved breasts. I’d once seen photos of Daniela Mita in Deborah’s Brigitte magazine, and it could be that the idea of the young person turning to old values had occurred to Stullberg at the sight of his colleague on the Maier Verlag list. I hadn’t read anything by either of them.
‘Sorry, of the two of us my wife is the one who reads books,’ I said, and couldn’t suppress a grin when I saw Katja Lipschitz’s slightly forced smile.
I looked at her with a twinkle in my eye and nodded towards the entrance to the building. ‘Come on up and I’ll make coffee. While I’m doing that you can look through my annotated edition of Proust.’
A quarter of an hour later Katja Lipschitz, now relaxed, was sitting in my wine-red velvet armchair stretching her long legs, sipping coffee and looking round her. There wasn’t much to see: an empty desk with only a laptop on it, a bookshelf full of reference works on criminal law, full and empty wine bottles, and a plastic Zinedine Zidane Tipp-Kick figurine from a table football game that Slibulsky had given me. Several watercolours painted by Deborah’s niece Hanna, who was now fourteen, hung on the walls, along with a large station clock with my little armoury hidden behind it. Two pistols, handcuffs, knock-out drops, pepper spray
.
‘Do you have children?’ asked Katja Lipschitz, pointing to the watercolours.
‘A niece.’ I sat down with her in the other red-velvet guest armchair. The chairs were left over from Deborah’s past. She had worked for a couple of years at Mister Happy, a small, chic brothel on the banks of the Main run on fair lines by a former tart. When Deborah stopped working there ten years ago, she had been given the chairs as a leaving present.
‘Well, what can I do for you?’
Katja Lipschitz looked at me gravely and with a touch of concern. ‘My request is in strict confidence. If we don’t come to an agreement on it …’
‘Anything we discuss will be between us,’ I ended the sentence, guessing what was on her mind. ‘Forget Gregory. I’m not bothered about him. Gregory’s career is over; his manager just wanted to attract attention by hiring a bodyguard. They took me for a ride with that photo.’
‘I see.’ The words took me for a ride were obviously going through her head. The character I want to hire for a delicate job was taken for a ride by a third-class (at most) manager and a roughly twenty-second-class beer hall porno pop singer …
‘I had no idea who Gregory was,’ I said, trying to dispel her doubts. ‘The agreement came by fax, and it seemed like easy money.’
‘Right.’ She put her cup down, looked at one of Hanna’s pictures again and pulled herself together. ‘It’s about one of our authors. He’s Moroccan, and he’s written a book that’s created quite a stir in the Arab world. He’ll be coming to Frankfurt for the Book Fair, and he needs protection.’ She paused for a moment. ‘He’s in serious danger. There have been several assassination threats from various Islamic organisations, and even intellectuals are attacking the book and its author harshly.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘Our publisher is taking quite a risk himself by bringing it out.’
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