‘Katja Lipschitz, chief press officer of Maier Verlag.’
‘Kemal Kayankaya, but you know that already.’
‘I know you from a photo on the Internet, that’s how I recognised you. The man who saved Gregory …’
She was smiling again, perhaps a little too professionally, and there was a look of speculation behind the smile. Did the name Gregory shake me? Gregory’s real name was Gregor Dachstein, and years ago he had won a Big Brother TV show, followed by a CD of songs like ‘Here comes Santa with his prick, chasing every pretty chick’ and ‘She’s an old Cu-Cu-Custard Pie Baker.’ Since then he’d played the clubs in the discothèque world between Little You-Know-Who and Nether Whatsit. Gregory’s manager had hired me as his bodyguard for an appearance at the Hell discothèque in Dietzenbach, and the outcome was that I had to take Gregory to Accident and Emergency in Offenbach at four in the morning with about thirty vodka Red Bulls inside him. A yellow press reporter was waiting there with a camera, and for some time after I asked myself whether the manager had arranged with the reporter to be there before the concert, and had organised his protégé’s consumption of Red Bull accordingly, or whether the idea of offering a tabloid an exclusive story had occurred to him only when Gregory collapsed onstage. Anyway, two days later a photograph of me with Gregory and my jacket covered with his vomit was published, with a caption saying: Poison attack? Gregory in the arms of his bodyguard on the way to hospital. It was an appearance I could have done without.
I responded to Katja Lipschitz’s professional smile by asking, ‘Would you like an autograph?’
‘Later, maybe — as your signature to a contract. As to the reason for my visit to you here …’ — she cast a brief, disparaging look round the place: backyard, wood-boarded entrance, all the traffic on Gutleutstrasse — ‘would you like to hear it outside?’
‘That depends. Does Maier Verlag sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door? Your trouser suit doesn’t look as if a door-to-door salesman could afford it, but maybe that’s just because it suits you so well …’
She was brought up short, apparently baffled at least momentarily by the term door-to-door salesman. Perhaps she was a neighbour of Deborah and me; you didn’t meet door-to-door salesmen in the elegant West End. By way of contrast, three shabby, pale-faced guys had been haunting Gutleutstrasse in the last year alone: ‘Want a great deal? Gala, Bunte, Wochenecho? Lots of good reading there. Or hey, just give me ten euros anyway, I haven’t eaten for days.’ It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a poor bastard to scrounge the few euros he needs to survive from a rich man.
She shook her head and said, amused, ‘No, no, don’t worry. We’re a highly regarded literary publishing house. Haven’t you ever heard of us? Mercedes García is on our list, and so are Hans Peter Stullberg, Renzo Kochmeister, and Daniela Mita …’
She was looking at me so expectantly that the possibility of my being unacquainted with her authors would have marked me out as a total idiot.
I knew the sixty-something Stullberg from newspaper interviews in which he called for young people to devote themselves to the old values. Reading his words, I thought how writers like to express themselves in metaphors: he was the old values, and the young person devoted to him wore close-fitting jeans and had nicely curved breasts. I’d once seen photos of Daniela Mita in Deborah’s Brigitte magazine, and it could be that the idea of the young person turning to old values had occurred to Stullberg at the sight of his colleague on the Maier Verlag list. I hadn’t read anything by either of them.
‘Sorry, of the two of us my wife is the one who reads books,’ I said, and couldn’t suppress a grin when I saw Katja Lipschitz’s slightly forced smile.
I looked at her with a twinkle in my eye and nodded towards the entrance to the building. ‘Come on up and I’ll make coffee. While I’m doing that you can look through my annotated edition of Proust.’
A quarter of an hour later Katja Lipschitz, now relaxed, was sitting in my wine-red velvet armchair stretching her long legs, sipping coffee and looking round her. There wasn’t much to see: an empty desk with only a laptop on it, a bookshelf full of reference works on criminal law, full and empty wine bottles, and a plastic Zinedine Zidane Tipp-Kick figurine from a table football game that Slibulsky had given me. Several watercolours painted by Deborah’s niece Hanna, who was now fourteen, hung on the walls, along with a large station clock with my little armoury hidden behind it. Two pistols, handcuffs, knock-out drops, pepper spray.
‘Do you have children?’ asked Katja Lipschitz, pointing to the watercolours.
‘A niece.’ I sat down with her in the other red-velvet guest armchair. The chairs were left over from Deborah’s past. She had worked for a couple of years at Mister Happy, a small, chic brothel on the banks of the Main run on fair lines by a former tart. When Deborah stopped working there ten years ago, she had been given the chairs as a leaving present.
‘Well, what can I do for you?’
Katja Lipschitz looked at me gravely and with a touch of concern. ‘My request is in strict confidence. If we don’t come to an agreement on it …’
‘Anything we discuss will be between us,’ I ended the sentence, guessing what was on her mind. ‘Forget Gregory. I’m not bothered about him. Gregory’s career is over; his manager just wanted to attract attention by hiring a bodyguard. They took me for a ride with that photo.’
‘I see.’ The words took me for a ride were obviously going through her head. The character I want to hire for a delicate job was taken for a ride by a third-class (at most) manager and a roughly twenty-second-class beer hall porno pop singer …
‘I had no idea who Gregory was,’ I said, trying to dispel her doubts. ‘The agreement came by fax, and it seemed like easy money.’
‘Right.’ She put her cup down, looked at one of Hanna’s pictures again and pulled herself together. ‘It’s about one of our authors. He’s Moroccan, and he’s written a book that’s created quite a stir in the Arab world. He’ll be coming to Frankfurt for the Book Fair, and he needs protection.’ She paused for a moment. ‘He’s in serious danger. There have been several assassination threats from various Islamic organisations, and even intellectuals are attacking the book and its author harshly.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘Our publisher is taking quite a risk himself by bringing it out.’
‘What’s the book about?’
‘It’s a novel. It takes place in a police station in a fictional Arab setting, although it’s obviously modelled on one of the Maghreb countries. Well …’ Katja Lipschitz looked me in the eyes, as if hoping to read something there. Her look reminded me slightly of Valerie de Chavannes before she told me that the quarrel in which Abakay and Marieke got involved that evening had been about the caricatures of Muhammad.
I nodded encouragingly. ‘Yes?’
‘Well, during an investigation in the red light district the central character, a police detective, discovers that he has homosexual tendencies. He falls in love with a boy and they begin an affair, endangering his marriage and his job, in the end even his life. At the same time, of course, the book is really studying the relationship between Muslim society and homosexuality. There are passages in which the police detective — until then a devout Muslim — thinks about the Koran, God and love between people of the same sex, and in his despair and anger turns against his religion. Meanwhile the book also describes an abyss of drugs, sex, poverty and criminality — fundamentally afar from sacred society. Religion is only there to conceal the widespread misery and keep the people calm — do you understand?’