‘He told me that you want to see me, and I advised him to fix a time. I’m not often in my office.’
‘So I see.’
‘You see what?’
‘Well, I am sitting in your office at this moment and it really doesn’t look as if you spend much time here.’
I took a great deal of trouble to go on in a calm voice. ‘Really? Did I forget to lock up?’
That laugh again. It was as mechanical and empty of feeling as his German, and had nothing to do with any kind of amusement.
‘Do you know what’s interesting?’ he asked, without answering my question.
‘A great many things in the world, Herr Hakim. But I assume you mean something that I won’t think of at once.’
‘As far as I can see there’s nowhere for you to sleep in your office. Forgive me, but I’ve never had a chance to see a real private detective’s workplace before, and it could have been like the films: that you earn just enough for schnapps and a folding bed behind the desk. And so, at least, I take it that you have a private apartment somewhere. The curious thing is that Methat has searched your office, has looked through all the drawers and files with meticulous care, and he found no address anywhere to confirm my supposition. Do you understand? As if you had calculated on a situation like this and were intent on leaving no traces in your office leading to your private life. Maybe because there is a woman you love in your private life, maybe even children?’
‘Herr Hakim, I know that you are active in the field of heavy hints and impenetrable remarks, but I am probably not wrong in assuming that you’re not concerned with religion at the moment. If you want to talk about your deplorable nephew, go ahead. If you just want to beat about the bush I’m hanging up. Oh, and kindly get out of my office at once.’
That coughing laugh. Rashid emerged from the toilets beside me, pale-faced. I signalled to him to wait.
‘I’d like to put it more plainly but we’d better not do that on the phone.’
‘Why not? I have nothing to hide — or, as you would say, I have a clear conscience. How’s your conscience, Herr Hakim?’
‘Where are you now? I can come to you at once.’
‘Sorry, but I’m working. I have no free time until Monday afternoon.’
‘I can’t wait as long as that.’
I thought of his threat to find out where Deborah and I lived. ‘Okay, if Methat tidies up after him and replaces the lock on the door, if it suffered when you broke in, then we can meet late tomorrow evening for a little while in some public place.’
‘How about in my mosque?’
‘As I understand it, Sheikh, a mosque is more of an intimate place where you talk to the Lord God. I suggest Herbert’s Ham Hock at the railway station. If you’re hungry they serve salad too.’
He said nothing. I thought I could sense him shaking his head.
Finally he said, suddenly with an icy tone to his voice, ‘Don’t go too far, Kemal Kayankaya. Very well, tomorrow evening, Herbert’s Ham Hock — around eleven?’
‘Right at the back of the dining room there’s a nook on the left where we can talk undisturbed. I’ll have it reserved for us. See you tomorrow evening, then.’
I broke the connection and turned to Rashid. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting. How are you?’
‘Ah, well …’ He sighed. ‘I must have caught some bug. Or maybe there was something wrong with the egg salad yesterday evening.’
‘If I were you I’d lay off the coffee at the Maier Verlag stand. And the coconut and banana cake, too.’
‘I only had a small piece. I mean, a colleague’s home-baked cake — you have to try it at least once to be polite.’
‘Even if Hans Peter Stullberg had baked it?’
Rashid raised his slightly clouded, sickly eyes from the floor and looked at me. ‘He’d have been more likely to heat up some sangria and then do us a dance. Unfortunately his back doesn’t allow it.’
I grinned, and we set off back to the Maier Verlag stand.
‘Come to think of it,’ Rashid said, ‘I’m glad that I don’t have to take your tone earlier today personally.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, when you were phoning your client just now you sounded just as grumpy.’
‘Hmm. Tell me something: the Wochenecho, is Lukas Lewandowski supposed to do the interview?’
‘Yes. I heard all that in the toilets as well. The publishing house said it was a “health issue”.’
‘Well if the story’s right, that’s what it is, too.’
Just before we reached the Maier Verlag stand, Katja Lipschitz’s assistant came towards us. ‘Malik! We’ve been looking for you everywhere. The lady from Radio Norderstedt has been waiting for ten minutes.’
Rashid, still pale from the activity of his intestines, switched in no time at all back to his ‘A good thing there are guys like me around’ advertising campaign. The colour returned to his face, and his shoulders went back.
‘We just went out for a breath of fresh air. Ready in a moment.’
An attractive young redhead with big green eyes, red lips, a short skirt, bare legs and high-heeled boots was waiting at his table. Her lips twitched nervously at regular intervals, making her look vulnerable. You could see Rashid rubbing his hands with glee.
And then the lady from Radio Norderstedt said, after preliminary greetings, ‘I’m from the Other Way Around programme, and may I tell you how glad I am to have a self-confessed gay Muslim on the programme at last.’
On the way to the House of Literature for the panel discussion with Dr. Breitel, I called Deborah from the taxi.
‘Everything all right?’
‘A full house, I’m busy. Keep it short.’
‘Will you wait for me when you close down, please? I’ll collect you from the wine bar.’
‘Fine. Has something happened?’
‘Someone broke into my office, and I don’t want you to go home to the apartment by yourself.’
‘And there was I thinking it was something romantic.’
‘I’ll steal you a rose on the way home. See you later.’
The rest of the evening in the House of Literature and the bar of the Frankfurter Hof went, with a few exceptions, that now almost familiar uneventful course that seemed to be the basic tone of the Book Fair. People talked a lot and drank a lot, but what with all the friends, colleagues and acquaintances they were talking to and drinking with, they almost never had time to finish talking to one person on a subject or sometimes even to finish a sentence. As if the room were full of turning circles that only briefly collided with each other, changing direction, bumping into the next circles, and so on and so on.
Unusual event number one: Dr. Breitel, who, with his grey flannel plus-fours, leather braces, a bright red-and-blue striped shirt and a yellow bow tie, looked like a cross between a fat Hitler Youth boy and Lady Gaga, talked the usual stuff about ‘the threat of an Islamised Europe’, yet somehow was taken seriously by almost everyone present as if Kant in person in a grey three-piece suit were speaking on the stage.
Unusual event number two: Gretchen Love entered the main hall of the Frankfurter Hof bar at about eleven, in a close-fitting nun’s habit and bright blond Pippi Longstocking braids, and at a rough estimate caused seven hundred male jaws to drop.
Unusual event number three: an intoxicated young colleague of Rashid’s, who obviously wanted to make up to Katja Lipschitz, entertained our company for a while with good-humoured gossip about other colleagues and the staff of other publishing firms. As so often that evening, the conversation turned to Lukas Lewandowski, among other things, and the Wochenecho interview that had been postponed for the time being. Rashid and Katja Lipschitz agreed for what felt like the hundredth time, with downcast expressions, that this interview might have been/probably would have been/was one hundred per cent certain to have been the starting shot in an unexpected rise in sales of Journey to the End of Days and would even have guaranteed the book a place on the best-seller list. The drunken author ruined his chances with Katja Lipschitz with a joke that, for a change, I at least half understood. Rashid, he said, should be glad: Lewandowski’s chatter, low in meaningful content but always eloquent, was ultimately a danger to authors. Because his nonsensical sentences sounded so good, many listeners who should have known better let themselves be drawn into one of his cocaine-inspired ideas. As he saw it, Lewandowski was the Cristiano Ronaldo of the German culture pages: incredibly talented ‘but not very bright. Well, I ask you: a vision of the Virgin Mary!’