‘Wait before speaking to your publisher. I didn’t get the impression that the kidnappers were after money. They’re probably more interested in setting an example: see how we can scare you in the middle of your own country. A demonstration of power, if you see what I mean? Or to satisfy their vanity – with terrorists that’s usually the main motive. Maybe it can be settled with a simple press release giving the name of the group.’
‘I hope with all my heart that you’re right. But what am I to do now?’
‘As I said, announce that Rashid is sick and say no more. I’ll call you the moment I have any news.’
‘Do you know what? It’s those supposed men of God! I’ll pray for Rashid!’
‘That’s a good idea, Frau Lipschitz. You can’t do anything better. See you soon.’
Chapter 14
Abakay was released from custody on Wednesday. On Thursday I had a phone call from someone who worked for Sheikh Hakim.
‘Do you know the café in the little tower up in the Grüneburg Park, opposite the Korean Garden?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can pick up your man there this evening at ten.’
At nine thirty I was going along the path to the tower, among trees and shrubs. There was no one about in the light drizzle in the Grüneburg Park at this time of day. Once I smelled cigarette smoke, probably from someone sleeping rough under the bushes somewhere.
The little tower was dark, and dim light came only from the narrow street about fifteen metres away. Where there were café tables and chairs on the gravel during the day, only a solitary garbage bin covered with advertising for Langnese ice cream now stood in the gloomy night. I had two pistols with me: my official one, registered and in a back holster, and an unofficial, unregistered one – at least, not registered in my name – that I had picked up a couple of years before while searching the apartment of a crack-dealing banker.
I leaned against the little tower for a while, watching the forecourt in front of it, the bushes round it, the street and the entrance to the Korean Garden. Nothing was moving, and after a while I went over to the garbage bin and put the loaded gun that wasn’t registered in my name down under it. Just in case, and supposing God wasn’t with me after all.
For a moment I had thought of asking Slibulsky to come with me to cover my back if necessary. But for one thing I didn’t want to hear Lara bitching about it, and for another I didn’t think Sheikh Hakim would cheat on the deal. After all, so far as I could judge, he was not a cleric but a professional gangster. There was really only one possibility that worried me: that of Abakay bent on revenge.
‘… Kemal, you motherfucker! Come on out, you tramp! You bloody little sod! Come and get your shitty poet … Hey there!’
I assumed it was the same white delivery van that had been standing outside the wine bar on Saturday evening. Barely two minutes ago, Abakay had driven it with verve over the pavement and into the gravel forecourt. Now he was striding up and down with large, angry, slightly unsteady footsteps, hectically smoking a cigarette held in his left hand and shouting into the night. His right hand was in the side pocket of his leather jacket, and he was taking no trouble to conceal the fact that he was holding a pistol; the shape of the barrel stood out clearly.
‘… Where are you, Kemal? Got no balls, you cowardly bastard? Don’t you want your crybaby writer back anymore?’
I waited to see if anyone else got out of the van, but apparently Abakay wanted to settle accounts with me on his own. Rashid, I assumed, was tied and gagged in the back of the van.
Presumably he’d snorted a good amount of cocaine to get him into this belligerent mood. In a football match you’d have described him as over-motivated.
Finally I came out from the shadow of the little tower. My own right hand was also on the pistol in my jacket pocket.
‘Hello, Abakay. Those elegant expressions … anyone could tell at once that we have a fine, socially committed mind here. How’s the photography going?’
He stopped short, then with his jaw wide open and a dismissive gesture of his hand, exclaimed, ‘There you are, you pisser!’
‘Where’s Rashid?’
‘Where do you think? In the back of the van. So scared he’s shitting himself. What a stench!’
We were standing about ten metres apart. Abakay tossed his cigarette end into the gravel, swaying as he did so, and shouted, ‘Totally disgusting!’ and sniffed noisily. He seemed to be in a bad way; he had probably had a lot to drink with the coke, and I made the mistake of thinking I was both mentally and physically superior to him just because I was sober. Not even the pistol in his jacket really scared me. The barrel was pointing all over the place, but not at me. Abakay looked as if he might collapse at any moment.
It had been way too long since I’d been in a cheap dive. Every second brawl in a bar followed the same pattern: the guy who was falling-about drunk almost toppled off his bar stool, someone said, ‘Come on, old boy, you’ve had enough.’ And then suddenly the drunk could do things with that bar stool … hit the nearest man over the head with it, for instance, or fling it into the shelf of bottles behind the bar. And then four or five men would throw themselves at him all at once, only to find that they couldn’t control the drunk in his unbounded rage.
That was exactly what happened to me. I had forgotten that quantities of coke and alcohol didn’t make a man incapable of such an explosion. And Abakay exploded! All of a sudden he came at me with wild, long strides, screaming. He suddenly snatched the pistol from his jacket and fired it into the air, and before I could even move my own gun in his direction the butt of his smashed into the middle of my face. I fell backwards, feeling the blood spurt from my nose. At the same moment Abakay first kicked the pistol out of my hand with his black cowboy boots, and then, with two neat dance steps, took a run-up and kicked me twice in the belly with all his might. I threw up.
‘Hey there, Kayankaya, you fuck-face! Not as fast as you used to be, right? Know what I’m going to do now? Work you over the way you worked me over – that’s fair, right? No more and no less. Know what my chest looks like? Like some shitty geometrical drawing!’
I lay writhing in the gravel, and could look up just far enough to see the knife that he drew out of his boot.
‘No!’ I wanted to scream, but it was only a gurgle.
‘No? What do you mean no, you wanker?’ This time he kicked me lower down, and I simultaneously screamed and pissed myself.
‘Well, well, well, didn’t you know? Always better to go to the toilet before you leave the house. And that’s nothing yet – do you know my balls are still swollen? The hospital doctor fears there’ll be permanent damage … hear that? Permanent damage! And your doctor will say so too – you can piss your pants full again to that!’
‘Abakay … let it …’
‘Well, if you say so. Right, I’ll just go home …’
He laughed. Then he bent down and held his knife in front of my nose. ‘My geometrical pen …’
This time I intended to gurgle and sound as pitiable as I could. ‘No, please … stop it …’
At the same time I was crawling away from Abakay. It was meant to look like an act of pure despair. I hadn’t the faintest chance of getting away. As soon as Abakay liked he could simply plant his boot on my neck, or shoot me in the legs, or anything else. And confident in that sense of absolute power he looked at me, grinning, as I neared the garbage bin on all fours, with vomit dripping from my chin.
‘Very brave! Know what I’m thinking of as I see you screw up like that? Which would leave more permanent damage, a kick in the ass from behind with the toe of my boot drawn up, or from in front with my heel going right into your soft parts …?’
‘Abakay, let it alone … believe me, you don’t have a chance …’
‘What was that?’
I crawled on, on and on.
‘Go home, that’s best …’
‘You’re an odd one, eh? Shall I tell you something? Sure,
I’ll go home – just as soon as your balls are kicked to mush. Right, that’s enough talk …’
I was still about half a metre from the garbage bin when he kicked me in the stomach again. Another gush of vomit, and then everything went black before my eyes.
When I came back to my senses, Abakay was sitting astride me, cutting open my shirt and T-shirt.
‘Ah, good morning … Here we go. I thought we’d start with building blocks, go on to circles and end with some nice straight lines – they’re sure to look pretty …’
‘Let it go …’ I whispered. ‘Please …’ And at that moment I was asking as much for my own sake as his. But of course he didn’t understand that.
He mimicked me. ‘Please, please, please! Dear Erden, I treated you like dirt, but please, please don’t hurt me now!’
He was holding my arms down on the ground with his knees, the way children do fighting in the school yard. My right hand was still about half a metre from the garbage bin.
‘Right,’ he cried finally, when my chest lay bare before him and I was breathing heavily, and he swung his knife in the air like a magic wand. ‘Watch out, or it may go into your eye!’
He was still laughing when I reared up strongly and threw him over to one side. He landed in the gravel, knife raised, and went on laughing. ‘A bit of action at last!’ He could still easily have stabbed me. He watched me turn and crawl on.
‘So where do you think you’re going?’ With an amused expression, he propped his elbow in the gravel and leaned his head on his hand. ‘Throwing yourself away in the garbage?’
I managed to grasp the pistol hidden in the shadows. I’d have liked to go on lying there. Every fibre of my body longed to sleep for a moment in the soft, warm, comfortable gravel.
‘And now, asshole?’
‘Now no more geometry,’ I whispered as I turned round and shot him first in the face and then, to make quite sure, in the chest.
It took me about twenty minutes to get to my feet. I put my pistol away, staggered over to the little tower, picked up the second pistol and stood there breathing heavily. For a while I looked at the gloomy scene: Abakay, the drizzling rain, the garbage bin, the Langnese advertising cardboard. I’d had no choice. In his mood just now, Abakay wouldn’t have stopped short at slitting my chest open and kicking me between the legs. One way or another, he’d have crippled me.
Finally I pulled myself together and staggered over to the delivery van.
The key was in the ignition. I could hear Rashid kicking the bodywork of the van from inside. I started the engine, and Rashid howled. They must have promised him his freedom and now he thought something had gone wrong.
Cautiously, I drove down the street and through the West End, then past the old opera house and to the Frankfurter Hof. I parked the delivery van in a nearby side street, wiped my fingerprints off the steering wheel and the knob of the gear lever, got out and opened the door to the boot. In fact, Rashid stank even worse than I did. He was wrapped in sticky tape like a mummy, with only his nostrils free. With the help of my pocketknife I removed the tape from his ears first.
‘Don’t worry. It’s me, Kayankaya. You’re safe now.’
He tried to say something. With a jerk, I tore the tape off his mouth. Bits of skin and stubble came off with it, and blood seeped through his cheeks in several places. He groaned with pain and began shedding tears.
‘Thank you …’
‘I’m sorry, I must leave your eyes taped up for a moment. For your own safety. You don’t need to see the car we came here in. It’s the kidnappers’ vehicle, and the less you know the better.’
The better for me too.
Then I began unwrapping his body. At first he could move his arms and legs only with difficulty. After that I led him down the street to a driveway, where I carefully removed the tape from his eyes.
He blinked. ‘Oh, my God!’ and looked round in confusion. Then a smile spread over his face, suddenly he laughed out loud, flung his arms round me, kissed me on both cheeks and cried, ‘Thank you, many, many thanks! It was hell! Those bastards!’
He hugged me. When he let me go, he was still smiling, but he also looked slightly unsure of himself. ‘Excuse me, but – do you stink like that or is it me?’
‘I think we both need a shower. One of the kidnappers kicked me in the belly a couple of times for fun.’
‘And hit you in the face – it looks all swollen.’
‘Hmm-hmm. How did they treat you?’
‘Oh …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, they didn’t mistreat me, at least not physically. Except for hitting me over the head outside your wife’s restaurant. I had enough to eat and drink, a bed, a TV set. However … their faces were covered up, and when they said anything it was in Turkish, and however often I told them I didn’t understand their bloody lang – oh, sorry!’
‘No problem.’
‘And then the prayers. They kept coming into my room to pray, and made me pray too. Once, when I refused, at pistol point – oh, it was horrible! However … well, I never felt it was really about religion. Do you understand? I mean, about some kind of religious re-education. Of course that was my first thought, because of the novel. But then … in all those five days no one talked to me about my work. Or not in any language I could understand. But I suppose that’s why they kidnapped me …’ He seemed to be thinking, and then he shook his head and said, in a loud and contemptuous voice, ‘Such assholes!’
I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Well, you made it. I told Frau Lipschitz this morning that if all went well, you’d be free this evening. She’s booked you a room in the Frankfurter Hof, and she’s waiting for us there with your publisher. It’s just round the corner. Shall we go?’
He looked a bit surprised. ‘That’s nice of them.’
On the way I said, ‘And in the hotel we’ll have to discuss the text being released to the press.’
‘What text?’
‘It was the condition for freeing you. The group that kidnapped you wants, first and foremost, for the world to know that they exist. They call themselves the Ten Plagues.’
‘What? Like Breitel?’
‘Yes, well.’
‘Imagine that! And I was sure he’d just made the whole thing up!’ He thought about it. ‘But now I’m free … I mean, why would we go along with what the kidnappers want?’
‘Think about it.’
He did, and we walked on side by side in silence.
Just before the entrance to the Frankfurter Hof, he said, ‘You know what I don’t understand? The girl, the decoy – how does a strictly religious group come by a super-Lolita like that?’
‘Well, they probably hired her.’
‘You mean she was a whore?’
I nodded.
‘A whore! Damn it all … I write about that milieu but, to be honest, I just hate …’
‘Careful,’ I interrupted him. ‘No need to insult my wife.’
‘What? How do you …’
We reached the steps up to the entrance. Two uniformed pageboys inspected us, horrified: two men with filthy trousers, stinking of vomit, one with cheeks torn and bleeding, the other with a swollen nose.
‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘We’re expected. Maier Verlag, Emanuel Thys.’
Chapter 15
I spent the following week waiting. For the police, for Hakim’s people, for anyone who put two and two together and thought: if Abakay found himself in jail because of a false statement made by Kayankaya, then presumably he wanted revenge, and presumably Kayankaya would defend himself – so let’s ask him where he was on Thursday evening. But obviously no one wanted to put two and two together. The police were glad that arresting Abakay did not, in retrospect, seem such an unfounded notion – the newspapers and the local TV soon agreed that he had died in the course of a drug deal. And Hakim was rid of a troublesome accomplice and blackmailer – family or not.
In the end, I suppose too many people profited by Abakay’s
death for there to be any serious investigations. And where the police were concerned, that also seemed to close the Rönnthaler case for the time being. By now, at police headquarters, they were probably laying the blame on Abakay after all. If only for a better rate of cases solved.
On Saturday several newspapers printed the press release from Maier Verlag, along with comments and leading articles: Malik Rashid, author of the novel Journey to the End of Days, has been released unharmed after his five-day abduction by a group calling itself the Ten Plagues. The group justified its actions by charging that Rashid’s novel insulted people of the Muslim faith. The Ten Plagues wanted to send out a signal. The author’s abduction ended, without bloodshed, on Thursday evening.
One comment pointed out: However, there is food for thought in the name of the group. Is it just a coincidental prank, or was there a clever mind behind it? Are we dealing with a Muslim combat group whose members read the works of Dr. Breitel? That would explain why the abduction went comparatively smoothly: it involved intellectual young men, devout Muslims, probably students, who wanted to distinguish themselves from the image of the primitive bin Laden disciples who murder indiscriminately. Are we facing a cross between guerrilla warfare for fun and serious discourse?
And so on. The Ten Plagues were initially featured in the news sections of the papers, then the comments, and almost all the papers published interviews with Rashid.
On Monday Slibulsky dropped in and brought me the money from Valerie de Chavannes.
‘Wow, what a lady!’
‘Hmm-hmm.’
‘I’m to tell you that she very much wants to see you.’
‘Is her husband back?’
‘No idea. Kind of a big black man?’
‘Big, I don’t know.’
‘He passed me in the hall, but we weren’t introduced.’
‘Thanks, Slibulsky.’
‘Tell me’, he said, looking at me curiously, ‘is there something going on between you two?’
Brother Kemal Page 16