‘Is it sentimental to feel ill when I think of thirteen-year-olds on sale for fucking? Is it sentimental to want to nail the man who’s offering them? You’ve been in the Vice Squad too long, Octavian, it’s bad for your morals.’ And with that we left each other without further goodbyes and went our separate ways.
On Thursday Valerie de Chavannes tried to reach me on my mobile. I was sitting in the wine bar with Deborah, eating tripe sausage, drinking red wine and reading the sports pages, and the first time the phone rang I ignored the call, the second time too. Then she sent a text message: Please call back as soon as you can! Urgent! Danger! I finished my sausage, emptied my glass, went into the little courtyard behind the wine bar and called back.
Valerie de Chavannes answered at once.
‘Herr Kayankaya! At last!’ Her voice was shaking, and sounded nasal, as if she’d been shedding tears. Now and then I heard her breathing heavily again as she struggled for air.
‘What’s the matter, Frau de Chavannes?’
‘A man called Methat rang just now! Had I set a private detective on Abakay?’
‘And what did you say?’
‘What you told me to say — I said I didn’t know what he was talking about.’
‘Did he believe you?’
‘No idea. He threatened me!’ She struggled for air. ‘He said if I’d hired you then I must get you to withdraw your evidence against Abakay as quickly as possible or my daughter’s life would be in danger!’
Maybe it was because I imagined that sentence coming from Methat in his heavy Hessian dialect — life in danscher — but anyway, I didn’t take the threat as seriously as I probably should have done when talking to Valerie de Chavannes. I said, ‘Oh yes?’
‘What do you mean, oh yes? I told you Abakay would still be dangerous even in prison!’
‘Well, then you must decide: either you want him in prison or you don’t.’
‘You know exactly where I want him!’
She spoke from the heart, furious, resentful, implying: I told you that you ought to kill him!
‘Take it slowly. We’re talking on the phone, there could be someone listening in. And after all, I’m a witness in a murder case — so don’t say anything that might be misunderstood. Of course I know that you want to see him in prison …’
A pause, more heavy breathing.
I didn’t really think that the police were listening in on me or Valerie de Chavannes, but the thought of a bugged phone — you know exactly where I want him! — made me feel queasy for a moment.
After a while, regaining some measure of control over herself, she said, ‘And now what? What do we do?’
‘Well, Frau de Chavannes, we don’t do anything. Remember? You hired me to bring your daughter home.’
‘Oh, and now you’re wriggling out of it like a coward!’
‘You’re welcome to ask me to take on another job for you — protecting your daughter, or you, or both of you. But I’m convinced that the best and also the cheapest thing I can do for you at the moment is not to show myself near you.’
‘That’s what you said last time!’
‘Because it was true last time. I suggest the following. You tell Marieke’s school that she’ll be absent, sick, for another week, and you stay at home with her. If Methat rings again, or the police, or anyone else, don’t let them persuade you to do anything. No one but you and I know about our connection. Even Marieke knows only a police officer called Magelli. If someone rings the doorbell, don’t open the door, and if that someone doesn’t go away, then call me. If you’re still being pestered in a week’s time, I’ll deal with it.’
Once again she drew a huge breath, as if a sack of plaster lay on her chest, before she cautiously asked, ‘Is that a promise?’
‘It is.’
‘Please, Herr Kayankaya … I really am so frightened, and I’m all on my own …’
‘I said I’ll deal with it. But you have to hold out for that week. I’m sure that at the moment Abakay’s people are just poking about at random. Presumably Abakay has drawn up a list of people to whom he’s done wrong in some way or another, and who he correctly assumes could have hired a private detective to kick his legs from under him. You were probably just one name among many. So again: deny ever having heard of me and I bet that in a couple of days’ time they’ll leave you alone.’
She sighed. ‘My God, Herr Kayankaya, what a mess I’ve got myself into.’ And after a pause, ‘I’m sorry, I’m being a nuisance to you, aren’t I?’
‘Oh, never mind that.’
She stopped for a moment and then laughed quietly, in a familiar way, as if we were friends of many years’ standing and she was glad that I was still the same old roughneck I used to be.
‘May I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you think …’ She hesitated. Or she pretended to be hesitating. Or both. Probably Valerie de Chavannes herself no longer knew what she did unintentionally and what was calculation or a trick. Anyway, her hesitation gave the question the clarity of which she then tried to deprive it — or made out she was trying to deprive it — by adopting a tone as objective as possible and slightly pert, adding a barely perceptible pinch of girlish flirtatiousness. ‘Do you think we’d ever have met without all this?’
This time I was the one to hesitate.
‘Before I answer that question, may I just tell you the name of the friend who will collect my fee from you in the next few days? He’s Ernst Slibulsky. You can open the door to him, please.’
‘Ernst Slibulsky, okay.’
‘Maybe we have in fact met before,’ I went on, pausing again and thinking that I sensed her holding her breath at the other end of the line. It was a shot in the dark, but since our first meeting I couldn’t shake off that thought. Not that I thought we had really got to know each other, but maybe we had been around in the same place at the same time.
‘You left home when you were sixteen, and there aren’t many places in Frankfurt where a young girl who’s run away like that can get by somehow or other. How old are you now?’
She didn’t reply. But probably not because she wanted to conceal her age from me, more likely because she scented danger.
‘Come on — you look as if you are in your mid-thirties, but you’re not. Mid-forties?’
For a moment I thought she’d put down the receiver, but then I heard her breathing.
‘Let’s say around forty. Marieke is sixteen, and you weren’t silly enough to get pregnant too young. In your late twenties, I’d assume, when your wild days were gradually coming to an end. Work it out like that, and about twenty-five years ago you were standing with a travelling bag or a rucksack at the end of Zeppelinallee on the Bockenheimer Warte. Maybe you then spent a few weeks with friends, or on holiday in the south of France or somewhere like that, but in the course of time your friends went back to school and you’d come to the end of your money. Of course you’d sooner have cut off an arm than ask your parents for financial support, or even go back home. Well, at the time I was out and about in the railway station district on both professional and private business — ’
She cut the connection. Maybe she thought my assumptions were simply insulting; or alternatively I’d hit the bull’s-eye. You had to have — like Deborah did — a certain kind of North German composure and toughness that comes of living in that bleak, flat countryside to be proud of having survived the sex clubs and striptease bars of the station area. For a banker’s daughter and wife of an artist, a part of her life spent in the best known and (at that time) the deepest gutter in Frankfurt was probably not a subject on which she wanted to dwell.
And suddenly an uncomfortable thought came to me. How old, in fact, was Abakay? Mid-thirties, I assumed, but then it didn’t compute. But at least symbolically he could have conjured up ghosts of Valerie de Chavannes’s past in the station area, if there had been any. And perhaps she hadn’t minded that at first. Now over forty, married with a child, living in a villa, weekends spent at health spas, sushi suppers, Woody Allen films — you liked remembering your own youth, however bizarre it was. But then suppose memory became the present, the pimp comes into your own house, gets to know your sixteen-year-old daughter …