I drove home, showered, put on clean clothes and went round the corner to drink coffee and read the newspaper in a cafe. I’d really intended to drive out to Ahrens’s factory next and wait until my rescuer from the switchboard knocked off work. Presumably she knew when the bosses would be meeting. But the newspaper spared me the trouble. In the local section I found a headline saying Frankfurt Expects Visit From Croatian Interior Minister Plus Economic Delegation. Along with all kinds of guff about the traditional friendship between Croats and Germans, and a welcome given by German credit institutions to the ‘rising young country’, the article went into detail about cooperation between Croatian and German firms. Ahrens won praise for his packet-soup outfit as one of the first Frankfurt companies to have been active in Croatia after the war.
I put the paper down and thought about Slibulsky’s sweets. Probably they were exactly the kind of thing that Ahrens’s activities consisted of. So there actually was work being done in his factory. In addition, the article seemed to me to answer the question of why the racketeers had to disguise themselves and mustn’t utter a word betraying any accent: the revelation that a Croatian-led Mafia was chopping fingers off German bar-owners would hardly have had a favourable effect on the granting of credit. Which meant that the bosses of the Army of Reason were far enough up in the Croatian power structure for their personal interests to coincide to some extent with the national interest.
That is, if part of the credit didn’t find its way straight into their pockets. As far as I knew, the Croatian president didn’t exactly have a reputation as a staunch opponent of corruption and the Mafiosi. He probably didn’t care about having such a reputation either. I’d once seen a picture of his yacht. Along with his uniform in the photo yesterday evening, it gave an impression rather as if the mayor of Frankfurt’s wife went about her daily business in a swimming pool filled with champagne.
The Interior Minister’s visit was going to be next Saturday. That left me three more days. I paid my bill and went home. From there I called an acquaintance who knew his way around the refugee hostels. He gave me the name of one where most of the inmates came from Bosnia.
It had begun raining again, and the square outside the place, which had once been a youth hostel, was full of mud and puddles. I wove my way past them to the entrance, found myself in a dark corridor smelling of food and disinfectant, read a series of notices hanging from the ceiling — Dining-Room, Showers, Sick-Bay — and followed the arrow on the one that said Secretarial Office. On the walls to left and right hung posters produced by the Evangelical church showing young people, black and white, moving down streets and stairways and through meadows together, under brightly coloured slogans saying things like Wow, man, loving your neighbour is great! and I’m all for multi-ethnicity! In between, dingy notes were pinned up telling you not to smoke in the corridors, not to make a noise, and not to assemble, eat or drink there. As far as I could see these instructions were being obeyed to the letter. No one came to meet me, and only the distant sound of children’s voices and the clatter of crockery indicated that the place was inhabited at all.
The door of the secretarial office was at the end of the corridor, which was getting darker and darker. I knocked, and thought I heard a couple of harsh, commanding sounds through the wood before a cheerful, ‘Yoo-hoo!’ rang out. When I opened the door bright light shone in my face. Before I could make anything out someone called, ‘Come in, do just come along in!’ as if I’d arrived intending to see somebody turning cartwheels.
I closed the door behind me and blinked at a row of neon lights. As my eyes got used to the dazzle I saw the usual shabby grey-green office furnishings paid for decades ago out of the public purse, the usual private touches consisting of holiday postcards pinned to the wall and amusing newspaper cuttings, and the usual photographic landscape calendar. Behind the desk sat someone not quite so usual in this setting, a woman of about forty-five, with a girl of around fourteen on a chair in front of her.
The woman was tanned deep brown, in ultra-fit condition without a trace of extra fat, and judging by the way she was smiling at me with two incredibly white, immaculate rows of teeth, apparently in the best of good humour. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse in a jungle-animal print that showed off her muscular arms, earrings with little heads of Charlie Chaplin dangling from them, a necklace with a small Buddha pendant, and her hair was in a long, thick, blonde braid that she had flirtatiously brought round over her shoulder to hang in front of her. Presumably she felt that the last word about what she’d do with her life hadn’t yet been spoken. She fitted into the grey-green secretarial office of this refugee hostel about as well as into a bowling alley.
The girl, on the other hand, could have come straight out of an ad appealing for donations to the Red Cross. A thin, emaciated body in worn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, arms covered with scratches and bruises, and a chin with a thick, blood-encrusted scab on it. She was looking sceptically at me from dark eyes which, for her age, were impressively ringed with dark circles. Her gaze seemed to be asking whether she was the reason why I was here, and if so, whether I intended to do something just bad or very bad indeed to her. Perhaps she was older than fourteen; it was hard to say in her condition. But anyway I had thrown nearly everyone from sexual maturity up to the age of twenty five into the same pot. Sometimes the pot was labelled Child, at other times something else.
‘Hello-o-o,’ fluted the woman, turning as emphatically and exclusively in my direction as if she’d like to turn the girl into a flowerpot or something else that wouldn’t attract my attention. Perhaps she was ashamed of this dirty heap of misery in her office, or of her astral body beside the skeleton. Or perhaps it was simply her normal behaviour when a man and a girl were in the same room with her.
‘Hello to you too,’ I replied. ‘Kayankaya, private detective.’
She gave a slight start, and her eyes narrowed as if I had blown air into her face. ‘Private detective,’ she repeated, trying to maintain her cheery tone. ‘So… er, how can I help you?’
I really wanted to ask her to send the girl out of the room for a little while, but decided not to. It would only have warned her that I was here about something worse than stolen bicycles.
‘I’d like to talk to you about a gang extorting protection money who are probably forcing inmates of this hostel to work for them.’
On the way here I’d been prepared for one of those difficult and usually fruitless afternoons when large numbers of people kept suggesting more or less clearly how great it would be if I finally stopped asking questions and went away. I was all the more surprised to find I’d obviously scored a direct hit in double-quick time. Her lower jaw dropped foolishly, her eyelids began to twitch, and the heads of Charlie Chaplin shook like a have-a-go-free notice on an ancient pinball machine. I watched her struggling to regain her composure. The she suddenly broke into hearty laughter.
‘And there was I thinking I was dealing with a madman! Private detective! Whoever heard of such a thing these days?’ She laughed again. ‘You were only joking, right? Well, you certainly took me in. You must be the electrician, aren’t you? It’s the lighting in the corridor. Wait a moment and I’ll show you. Leila.’ As she waved towards the door, she turned to the girl. ‘Go upstairs, please, dear. We’ll go on talking later.’