She was looking absentmindedly at the floor. The cigarette end dropped from her hand, but she didn’t seem to notice. Suddenly she raised her head and asked, impatiently, ‘So now what?’
‘So now what?’
‘What are you suggesting?’ Her voice was harsh and stern, but she was being stern with herself, not me.
‘You mean what should you ask me to do?’
‘I want you to bring my daughter back!’
‘Yes, I know that, Frau de Chavannes. But suppose you were to try Erdem or Evren first …’
‘Erden! Erden Abakay. He lives over the café I mentioned on the corner of Schifferstrasse and Brückenstrasse. He’s quite well known there, you’d find him easily.’
‘And then?’
‘Then you’d get my daughter out of there!’
‘Without telling her I was doing it for you?’
‘Of course.’
‘And preferably I’d beat up Abakay and threaten him — if he ever comes near Marieke again, and so on?’
She didn’t reply to that.
‘Frau de Chavannes, I’m a private detective, not a bunch of heavies. Once again: suppose you call Abakay first and try to speak to your daughter?’
She shook her head. ‘Out of the question.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m afraid of saying something wrong, something to drive her even further into that bastard’s arms. At the moment it doesn’t take much to make my daughter feel I’ve said something wrong.’
‘Suppose your husband were to call?’
‘My husband?’ She looked at me as if this were a remarkably idiotic question. ‘I definitely don’t want to drag him into this.’ She turned away and went back to the bookshelf for another cigarette. ‘Anyway, he’s away. He’s guest professor at the Academy of Art in The Hague. He won’t be home for another two weeks.’ She lit her cigarette, turned to me, and said firmly, ‘I want to get this whole thing out of the way by then!’
‘Okay, but then please tell me more or less how the story goes. If I come across Abakay I don’t want to hear any startling new discoveries. “Frau de Chavannes is my sister’s best friend,” that kind of thing.’
‘Nonsense. It was more or less as you thought. He approached me in the café, and I was a bit curious. A man speaking to a woman alone in a café, where do you find that these days? And I was probably rather bored that morning. We talked, and he was actually amusing — well, amusing in a nightlife, gambling, who-cares-about-tomorrow kind of way. Then he claimed he was a photographer and had taken a series called Frankfurt in the Shadow of the Banking Towers. Portraits of low-life crooks, characters, prostitutes, hip-hoppers …’
She cast me a glance. ‘I know, not very original, but …’
She was searching for the right words.
I said, ‘But together with the nightlife, gambling scene, the who-cares-about-tomorrow attitude, the immigrant background …’
She examined me for a moment as if, once again, she had grave doubts about letting a man like me take a look at her life. Then she drew on her cigarette, blew out the smoke vigorously as if to dispel those doubts, and went on, ‘Could be so. I was thinking mainly of my husband.’
‘Of course.’
‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘What should I have said?’
‘Listen: I didn’t tell you the truth at first. I hoped to solve the situation just like that. I’m well known in this city, my husband is well known all over the world, while to me at least you are an entirely unknown quantity. And you’re a private detective. What do I know about private detectives? If I didn’t need help so urgently … Do you understand? Why should I trust you? I’m sure there are tabloids that would pay a few euros for a Hasselbaink mother-and-daughter story about mysterious underground photographers.’
‘Maybe there are, but no private detective is going to risk his reputation for a few euros. Our good reputation, so to speak, is our business model — the only one we have.’
While she thought about that, her plucked eyebrows drew closer together, and two small lines appeared on her forehead. I liked the fact that she didn’t resort to Botox. Maybe those lips were the genuine article. I’d once kissed a pair of Botoxed lips, and it felt like shaking a prosthetic hand.
She went back to the bookshelf and ground out her cigarette in an ashtray. ‘So I can trust you?’
‘I won’t sell your story to a tabloid, if that’s what you mean. Apart from that, I think you rather overestimate the importance of the story.’
‘Are you familiar with the art world?’
‘I know your husband is a big deal there. Eyeless faces, am I right?’
‘That’s one of his famous series, yes. The Blind Men of Babylon.’
‘I’ve Googled your husband. International prizes and so on. All the same, the kind of tabloids you have in mind don’t set out to entertain their readers with people who paint series entitled The Blind Men of Babylon. Please tell me what you meant when you said you were thinking mainly of your husband.’
‘Will you believe what I tell you from now on?’
‘That depends what you tell me.’ I grinned cheerfully. ‘Come on, spit it out. Or would you rather think again about hiring me?’
‘I want to …’ She hesitated, and for a moment it looked as if she was suppressing tears. She looked at the floor and folded her bare arms, shivering. As she did so the yellow T-shirt moved even further up her taut stomach, and I thought that in spite of the fifteen metres between us, I saw the head of the snake. I’d have liked to know at what point in her life she had decided: Right, now I’m off to the tattoo parlour to have a snake tattooed crawling between my legs. And I’d have loved to know what her parents, Monsieur and Madame de Chavannes, aristocrats from Lyon, thought of it. (I was assuming that you’d be more likely to get a snake tattoo at an age when your parents’ opinion still counted for something.) According to Google, since Georges de Chavannes had retired from his position with Magnon amp; Koch, a private asset management bank, they had been living in a small château in the Loire Valley making their own wine. I wondered whether they sometimes sat over a bottle of it on the terrace looking at the sunset, thinking their own thoughts, and at some point Bernadette de Chavannes asked, in the peaceful atmosphere where the only sounds were twittering birds, chirping crickets and clinking glasses, ‘Do you think Valerie still has that terrible …?’
‘Oh, please, chérie! Let’s enjoy the evening.’
And what did Edgar Hasselbaink think about the snake? Or had he perhaps designed it himself? How about Marieke? I wondered how it went down in the school playground. Hey, Marieke, I’ve got a snake down there too. I’d like to introduce him to your mama’s snake!
‘My husband has always found Frankfurt horrible: boring, provincial, uncultivated. Sausages, stocks and shares, brash young bankers, and according to Edgar the locals’ favourite drink is a laxative. We came here from Paris ten years ago. By then living in Paris was too expensive for us, and anyway we wanted to go somewhere with fewer exhaust fumes and more greenery for Marieke’s sake. Then my parents offered us this house. My father was head of the Frankfurt branch of Magnon and Koch for more than twenty years. When he retired, my parents wanted to go back to France.’
‘Forgive me, but if you sell the house you can live almost anywhere in the world with the money you’d get for it.’
‘When I said my parents offered me the house, I didn’t mean they gave it to me. In fact we pay rent, although it’s a relatively low rate — that mattered to my parents, as a symbol.’
She paused, went over to a grey corduroy-covered sofa about the size of my guest room, and took a white cardigan off the back of it. As she put the cardigan round her shoulders, she said, ‘My parents and I haven’t always got on well together.’
‘Did you grow up in this house?’
‘Yes. I was seven when my parents moved to Frankfurt, and I lived here until I was sixteen. Anyway: we thought it was only for an interim period until we’d decided where we wanted to live. But then … my husband’s pictures stopped selling so well, and at the same time we got used to the comfort and size of the house, Marieke was making Frankfurt her home, and so on — many reasons, some of them good, why we’re still here. However, my husband has never changed his opinion of Frankfurt and particularly this part of it. You see, he grew up in Amsterdam, he’s lived in New York, Barcelona, Paris — in the shabby districts of those cities, I wouldn’t want you to think he’s missing a life of glamour. When he was studying medicine in Amsterdam, he lived in a student hostel, later often in unheated attics, and in Paris we had a four-roomed basement apartment in Belleville. What he misses here is life with all its surprises. The only surprise you may get in the streets of Frankfurt is when one of the ladies in fur coats walking her permed dogs greets you in a friendly tone of voice.’