She stopped in surprise. ‘You’re still here?’
‘Yes. Thanks for the tea. Next time I’d like to try your fish soup, on the reverse principle …’
She gave me a puzzled look.
‘Just one question: how long have you been working for the de Chavannes family?’
She didn’t like my asking, and if I was not much mistaken she didn’t like me either.
‘Over twenty years. Why?’
‘Only wondering, sheer curiosity. Goodbye, then. Have a nice day.’
She murmured something that I couldn’t make out. Was she going to report my visit to Georges and Bernadette de Chavannes? There was another of them here today …
When the door latched behind me, I stood in the front garden for a moment breathing in the clear autumn air. Apart from an elderly couple slowly approaching down the pavement, Zeppelinallee was deserted. Not a car driving along, no noisy children, no clinking of crockery, no lawn mowers. You heard the sounds of the city very quietly, as if from far away, although you were almost in its centre.
Both the man and the woman wore Hunter green felt hats, the woman had a fur round her neck, the man carried a walking stick with a gleaming golden knob shaped like an animal’s head. The click-clack of the walking stick sounded through the silence of the diplomatic quarter.
Let’s try it, I thought, and waved to the couple, smiling. ‘Good morning!’
As they went on they looked at me as if I were a talking tree or something, and as if talking trees and indeed anything like them were extremely crude.
I took my bicycle, pushed it out of the front garden and rode away in the direction of the Bockenheimer Landstrasse. As I passed the elderly couple I called out, ‘You poorly educated pigs!’ And once again they looked, without moving a muscle. A talking tree on a bicycle — what on earth is the world coming to?
I pushed down on the pedals, with the mild October sun in my face, convinced that I had an easy, pleasant job ahead of me. At least, so long as I kept my distance from my client. Valerie de Chavannes was an attractive woman, no denying it, and if I was not much mistaken she wouldn’t turn down a little comforting if it was offered in the right way. But there were plenty of attractive women around. I was living with one of them. And anyway, Valerie de Chavannes’s I-only-ever-think-of-one-thing look struck me as coinciding exactly with the range of possible feelings about her — and who wanted the hell bit at my age? I was in my early fifties, I did my work, I paid my bills, I had made my way. I’d managed to stop smoking, all I drank were two or three beers in the evening or my share of a couple of bottles of wine with friends, and Deborah and I were planning our future. This morning I had stepped out of my front door generally pleased with life, and I had mounted my bike with an apple in my hand. Not quite heaven, maybe, but not so far from it.
And then I went and did it all the same. I held the fingertips that had just touched Valerie de Chavannes’s armpits close to my nose, and caught a faintly lavender-scented smell of sweat, and for a moment I felt as if the October sun were burning down on my head like its sister in August.
Chapter 2
My office was on the second floor of a run-down sixties apartment building — or perhaps it had never run very far up — at the beginning of Gutleutstrasse near Frankfurt Central Station. Pinkish brown plaster was crumbling away from the façade, the bare brick wall showed through in many places, a number of windows had sheets hung over them, others had furniture blocking them, chains of Christmas lights winked on and off all year round on the third floor and on the fourth floor a Frankfurt Hooligan decal covered one pane. On the ground floor there was a second-hand clothes shop where you could buy used moon boots, polyester shirts and cracked leather belts. My friend Slibulsky called it the Third Armpit, on account of the smell that wafted out of the shop when the door was open. The front door at the entrance to the building had once been ribbed glass, until a drunk kicked it in three years ago and the owner had replaced the glass with a wooden board.
The stairwell, which was painted greyish yellow, smelled of cats and cleaning fluid. If you found the half-broken-off light switch and pressed it, a candle-shaped naked energy-saving bulb gave just enough dim light to show you the stairs. Some joker kept smearing some kind of sticky substance on the banisters: jam, honey, UHU glue. I was sure the perpetrator was the twelve-year-old son of a single father on the fourth floor, but I couldn’t prove it. I once cornered him on the subject, and his answer had been, ‘Something sticky? Are you sure it was on the bannisters? Did you wash your hands first?’ Little bastard.
A Croatian Mafia, trying to keep me from investigating their shady business, had blown up my previous office thirteen years before. The two-room apartment in Gutleutstrasse had been a quick, cheap, and — I thought at the time — temporary substitute. My fears that, with such an address, and the state of the building, the only clients I’d get would be people with a list of previous convictions or bad drug problems proved to be exaggerated. It’s true that with the passing trade that made its way up the gloomy stairs to the second floor merely because of the nameplate saying Kemal Kayankaya — Investigations and Personal Protection, I could hardly have earned the rent in those first years. But I had a pretty good reputation as a detective in the city, the word-of-mouth publicity worked well, and business was good. My wish for a classier office space faded. I got used to the area, the chestnut tree outside the window and the little Café Rosig on the corner, until the success of the Internet and computer technology made the location of my office superfluous. My clients got in touch by email or phone, my paper files would fit into a shoe box and I held business meetings in the Café Rosig. I could have given my private apartment as my business address. But then Deborah found an apartment in the West End district of the city — four rooms, kitchen and bathroom — and asked if I’d like to move in with her. We’d been at first an occasional, then more and more of an established, couple for more than six years, and I was happy to accept the offer. That meant I needed an office away from my home. If anyone else had designs on me with explosives or anything else, I didn’t want Deborah to be affected.
Since my website had gone online, exactly two people had come to Gutleutstrasse unannounced: a woman neighbour who wanted me to get her brother to confess over an inheritance dispute — ‘He’s a cowardly, soft little worm, you’d only have to squeeze him a bit’, and a sad man who had fallen for an anonymous girl in a porn film and wanted me to find her for him. When I explained how much such a search could cost him, and how high my advance was, he went away even sadder than before.
So on the morning when I came back from Valerie de Chavannes’s house to my office, I hardly took any notice of the woman leaning against a sunny bit of the wall, talking busily on an iPhone. She wore a blue, expensive-looking trouser suit, and had a short, modern hairstyle. In front of her stood a large leather handbag crammed with papers. An estate agent, I thought. There were constant rumours that the building was being sold to make way for another hotel or parking garage near the station.
I had just put my key into the front door lock and was about to shoulder my bike when I heard her calling behind me. ‘Excuse me …! Herr Kayankaya …?’
I lowered the bike and turned round. ‘Yes?’
She came towards me smiling, on high heels and with her full and obviously heavy handbag in one hand and her iPhone in the other. She had a broad, friendly face, and the closer she came the more clear it became how tall she was. She was almost a head taller than me; she’d still be half that extra height without her shoes on, and I’m not a short man. I liked to see such a tall woman wearing high heels — she obviously wasn’t setting out to do the short people of the world any favours. She let her bag drop to the ground, threw the iPhone into it and held out her hand to me. Her hand was large, too.