Either she had realised pretty quickly how little she wanted someone listening in on any conversation with me, or I had hit even harder than I’d guessed. Perhaps my mere appearance in the secretarial office at this moment was a direct hit in itself.
But however that might be, her little performance wasn’t running too badly so far — and if the girl had got up and gone out she could have carried on with it, acting slightly stupid, talking about corridor lighting, claiming not to know anything, believe me or not as you like, goodbye.
However, the girl didn’t get up and didn’t look as if she could be easily persuaded to do so. Hands clutching the arms of her chair, she thrust her lips out defiantly and stared, unmoved, at the woman behind the desk.
‘Leila!’ The mouth was still smiling, but the voice had taken on a barracking tone. That didn’t seem to bother Leila. To make it perfectly clear that she was not going to obey, she slipped off her plastic flip-flops and stuck her feet behind the chair-legs. Apart from that she didn’t move.
The woman tried hard to indicate, by rolling her eyes with amusement, how widespread and really rather sweet such teenage obstinacy was, but how trying too. Of course there was no reason for it at all, we grown-ups were of the same mind there.
‘Leila, if you don’t go I’ll have to call Gregor, and he’ll take you to your room, chair and all.’ She leaned forward and smiled at the girl, closing her eyes so much that I couldn’t see them. ‘Do you really want to deprive me of my chair? I have to discuss the corridor lighting with this man, and I’d like to ask him to sit down. I’m sure you can understand that.’
Leila slowly opened her mouth, wiggled the tip of her tongue between her teeth a bit, and looked at the woman as if she were a conjuror whose tricks have all failed, but who’s still passing round the hat. Then she said calmly, ‘I heard, old cunt,’ and pointed her finger to her ear. ‘Private detective. Corridor lighting shit!’
You could have charged entrance money for the ensuing pause. While it was as much as the woman could to do keep her facial muscles under control, Leila scratched her head and looked straight in front of her, frowning, as if wondering whether she was sitting here with an old cunt for any good reason.
‘Would you believe it?’ the woman finally managed to say. ‘Here we are, caring for them day and night, and what thanks do we get?’
‘Does caring for them day and night mean talking such garbage?’
‘… I beg your pardon?’
‘You heard. Why were you suddenly so keen to have the girl out of the way once I mentioned extortionists and protection money?’
‘It’s no such thing! I.’ She pursed her lips and looked across her desktop as if an answer might be lying around somewhere there. ‘I don’t like discussing such things in front of children. I’m sure you can understand that. Quite apart from the fact that your suspicion is, of course, wildly far-fetched.’
‘Fetch far?’ asked Leila, who was following our conversation with interest.
Before I could reply to her the woman interrupted. ‘That’s enough of that! Go away, Leila, or I’m calling Gregor!’
‘Gre-gor!’ Leila imitated her, but the the next moment she shut her mouth and looked like she was scared by her own words. It was to be assumed that Gregor’s name put a lid on audacity.
‘Just as you like!’
As the woman reached for the phone, tapped in a number and waited, face averted, for someone to answer, I tried to think what I was going to do if Gregor did drag Leila off, chair and all. And I wondered how ruthless I wanted to be. By now I was convinced that either Leila knew something I wasn’t supposed to find out, or I knew something that she wasn’t supposed to find out. Either way, I couldn’t ask her about it in front of this woman. The mere fact that I was here, seeing the woman try to get Leila away from me almost without bothering to pretend about it, could get her into all sorts of trouble. Depending on how high one assessed the chances that I saw her as a source of information or a witness. For the girl’s sake, I thought, it would be best if I left.
Meanwhile Leila was acting the defiant child again. She went on wiggling her tongue between her teeth, stretched out a dirty foot now and then, circled it in the air and examined it critically. All the same, you could sense that the increasingly probable arrival of Gregor scared her. She looked briefly at me a few times. Perhaps she was hoping I’d stay.
‘Gregor?… Please would you come down quickly… Yes, a little problem… Leila… Uh-huh, see you in a minute.’
After she had put the receiver down she sat deep in thought for a few seconds, and then looked up with a fleeting smile as if to say: sorry about that interruption, now, where were we? She did not in fact say anything, just kept on smiling. Obviously that was how she meant to occupy the time until Gregor arrived.
‘Frau… er?’
‘Schmidtbauer.’
‘Well, Frau Schmidtbauer, you have now done all you can to make it clear that there’s something shady going on here. Either you talk to me about it, or I stay in this place and rummage around until I’ve found out about it. The difference is that if you talk to me, I can turn a blind eye. If you don’t, and if you have a skeleton in the cupboard and I discover it, I’ll inform on you.’
Her smile became a little more fleeting, but nothing else happened.
‘Think about it. It doesn’t look to me as if you’re much more than the receptionist here. You know what goes on, and presumably there’s a few marks left on your desk now and then to induce you to keep your mouth shut. How much is the money worth? A new blouse, a good meal in a smart restaurant? I’ll bet it’s not enough for you to travel somewhere you’ll be safe from the police. If what I suspect is right, there’ll be charges of organised crime, blackmail, and possibly aiding and abetting murder. And even if you’re convicted only of knowing about the crime, you’ll get a long enough sentence to remove you from circulation for the part of your life that matters. There’ll be nothing left later but a little sport for senior citizens, and reincarnation if you’re lucky.’
No reaction. She smiled and went on holding out. But the hunted look in her eyes told me that she’d soften up once we were alone. So I dismissed all my theories of the last ten minutes and just hoped Leila was only a girl sitting in the wrong room at the wrong time, and Gregor was a nice lad with frizzy hair and comfortable shoes doing civilian service instead of the draft, who’d behaved perfectly in persuading Leila to go with him.
These hopes lasted just a few seconds. Then the door was flung open and Popeye on coke burst in. Muscular in a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms, trainers like small, brightly coloured cruise missiles, shaved head, a chin fit to knock doors down, and eyes with their pupils moving as if they had to register the tempo of three hundred herds of white elephants charging his way. He measured something above two metres, and to see from one end of his shoulders to the other I had to turn my head back and forth slightly, as if watching tennis. Then I recognised the showy sports watch. Perhaps it was chance, but Ahrens wore the same model.
Without taking any notice of me or Frau Schmidtbauer, he made for Leila, snarling, ‘You lousy little beast! What’s the idea this time? Didn’t I tell you…’
Whatever he had told her, it was drowned out by Leila’s shrill scream as he closed his great paws round her arms and pulled her out of the chair. Leila’s legs flailed in the air as she tried to kick him. At the same time she never stopped screaming, and the small secretarial office became an acoustic torture chamber. Popeye was bellowing, ‘You shut up!’ Frau Schmidtbauer was crying, ‘Don’t grab her so hard!’ And I drew my pistol.
‘Hey, you!’ I shouted, trying to drown out the others. ‘Gregor!’
He turned, with the girl wedged under his arm. It took him a moment to realise what it was gleaming in my hand, and then he looked incredulous. Leila struggled and screamed a little longer, until she too looked at me and immediately fell silent.