Maybe we ought to have left through the front door after all, I thought. Volker’s corpse and the gagged body of Abakay would presumably have been impressive enough to keep Marieke away from the apartment for some time.
‘How are your lips?’
She kept her eyes on the ground.
‘I expect Abakay might not have hit you so hard but for those rings …’
‘Stop it! It was a scuffle! Don’t you understand? An accident! And we were all a bit drunk.’
‘If you carry on in that vein you’ll end up in court as a witness after all, but for the defence.’
‘Do you know what he needed the money for?’
‘No idea. Golden ornaments for his prick?’
‘You’re just disgusting! For a Roma family in Praunheim. He wants to film a photo-documentary about their daily life. Dreadfully poor people, no social support, not even health insurance, nothing at all, with five children — and people are always complaining about beggars, but what else can they do? And do you know the worst of it? The grandparents were murdered in a concentration camp. This is Germany! I know what I’m talking about … My family’s relatively prosperous, but look at the colour of my skin, my father is black, so for the people around here I’m like a Gypsy, a foreigner! And that’s what Erden wants to achieve with his photo-documentaries: he wants all the foreigners, people of other colours, from other places, of other faiths, all the outcasts to get together and form a movement and later a political party. The Foreigners’ Party! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I mean you’re an Italian or something. Magelli, wasn’t that it?’
‘What’s the name of this family?’
‘What?’
‘The name of the Roma family in Praunheim. A family with five kids and no medical insurance — well, of course that won’t do. I’ll call social services and make sure they get insurance as quickly as possible.’
There was a pause, and Marieke stared at me, taken aback.
‘Is that meant to be another joke? Are you laughing at them?’
‘Not in the least. But to help them I’ll need their name or their address.’
‘I suppose you think they haven’t tried everything already?’
‘Then some social worker may have committed an indictable offence by refusing them insurance. Medical insurance is obligatory in Germany. In the interests of and for the protection of the community as a whole. Imagine if the children are incubating some dangerous infectious disease and not getting treatment. Or the family is living here illegally — in that case I’d get in touch with an organisation that helps refugees and knows all about such cases.’
Marieke was still looking at me as if I wanted to stamp the Roma family’s papers as ‘to be deported’.
‘Or maybe this family doesn’t exist at all? Could it be just a symbol? The Roma family in Praunheim with forebears murdered in a concentration camp, shunned today as they always have been? I can easily imagine that as a photo-novella.’
‘Do you know something?’ said Marieke, suddenly very calm and determined. ‘I really, really don’t like you. Now please take me home.’
We spent the next five minutes standing side by side in silence. Marieke was looking straight ahead, deliberately unmoved, while I looked up and down the street in search of a taxi. As I did so, my eyes fell on the blackboard outside Café Klaudia, with the dish of the day written in white chalk: shashlik on a skewer with rice and red peppers.
A shashlik skewer, I thought, would leave a thin, narrow wound behind.
I wanted to ask Marieke to wait a minute so that I could ask the waiter whether there had been a skewer missing when he cleared the plates away in the morning, and if so whether he could remember the guest who had taken it, but just then a taxi came round the corner. I put off questioning the waiter until I came back for my bike, and flagged down the cabby.
‘Where do you live?’ I asked.
‘At the far end of Zeppelinallee,’ replied Marieke, looking at me for the first time in five minutes. If I was not much mistaken, there was a touch of triumph in her eyes.
‘Well, that’s a terrific district. Maybe a little too noisy and exciting, isn’t it? It wouldn’t do for me.’
She rolled her eyes. I laughed, and held the door of the cab open for her.
Chapter 5
‘Marieke!’
Valerie de Chavannes ran through the front garden, swept her daughter into her arms and fell with her to her knees, hugged and kissed her, with tears running down her face.
‘Marieke, my darling! My dearest darling!’
‘Hello, Mama,’ said Marieke. She returned the hug, but apart from that let her mother’s greeting wash over her.
I stood at the garden gate, watching the scene and trying to smile like a friendly police officer.
After a while Valerie de Chavannes cast me an inquiring glance over her daughter’s shoulder with her happy, reddened eyes.
I tapped my forehead. ‘Magelli, Frankfurt Police.’
‘Oh.’ Valerie de Chavannes acted surprised. ‘Police?’ she asked, without letting her daughter out of her arms.
‘Mama, I — ’
‘Nothing bad happened,’ I said, interrupting Marieke. ‘In the course of our investigations into a drug dealer we met your daughter in the apartment of one of the dealer’s customers. According to your daughter, he’s an acquaintance of hers. As we had to take the customer to the police station with us as a witness, we thought it would be best to bring your daughter home.’
Marieke turned her head to me, looking surprised, and then almost grateful.
Her mother said, ‘Drugs?’ And to her daughter, whom she was still hugging, ‘Darling, you haven’t been taking drugs, have you?’
‘Oh, Mama, at this moment that’s …’ Sighing, Marieke broke off what she had been about to say.
I said, ‘There are no signs at all that your daughter has been consuming any drugs. She probably went to see her acquaintance about a photo project. Frankfurt by Night, something like that.’
Once again Marieke turned her head in my direction, but this time to look at me as if she couldn’t quite grasp what a primitive asshole I was. Frankfurt by night! If the Foreigners’ Party was ever really founded, I probably wasn’t going to get an invitation from Marieke to become a member.
She freed herself from her mother’s arms, got up from the garden path and reached for her leather bag. ‘I’m going in now, I’m rather tired. I’ll tell you all about it later. Is Papa back?’
‘But darling, Papa won’t be back until next week.’
‘Oh no, so he won’t. Did you …’ Marieke cast me a quick sideways glance.
‘No, I didn’t tell him anything.’
‘Okay. Then I’ll go in.’ But she turned to me once more, looked at me and finally said, surprisingly seriously and from the heart, ‘Thank you, Herr Magelli. For the taxi, and everything else.’
I nodded. ‘You’re welcome.’
Valerie de Chavannes and I watched Marieke as she disappeared through the open front door into the hall of the villa. Then Valerie de Chavannes stood up too, brushed the dust off her white silk trousers, and looked anxiously into my eyes.
I raised a hand in a soothing gesture and said softly, ‘It’s all okay. As far as I can judge, they really were just talking about photographs. As I suspected: a little dream to change the world, a little creativity, a little tea drinking. And as for Abakay’ — I lowered my voice a little more — ‘I think you’ll be rid of him for a time. Probably a very long time.’
Valerie de Chavannes closed her eyes in relief, and ran her hand over her face, rubbing it. ‘Oh God! Thank you — thank you very, very much!’