Chapter 13
We were sitting in the car on the way to the Ostend district and my office. As my private address and my private phone number weren’t in any public directory, or available online either, I assumed that if Ahrens had wanted to send me any warnings, threats or offers I’d find them at the office. After our meeting and my performance at the Adria Grill, which would certainly have been reported to him, I thought it was out of the question that he’d simply let me carry on in the same way. Now at the very latest, after extensive phone conversations with Frau Schmidtbauer, he must react somehow. I suspected he’d try bribing me and thus get his chance to finish me off.
‘… my father is Croat, my mother is Srbkinja. I am born in Bosnia. My father is worker in engineering works, is not soldier. And when the war begin he is against it. He talks big: better dead than leave mother Serbia. Always talks big. So he imprisoned in Croatia or Bosnia, somewhere. My mother says, always say you Bosanka, never Srbkinja. Bosanka is like hostel manager’s poor old dachshund. All people say: aah, that poor old dachshund. Srbkinja is like hostel manager’s wife.’
‘Hm. How long has your mother been working for Ahrens?’
‘Three weeks.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Make money.’
‘Yes, fine, but how does she make it?’
‘Just how don’t know. My mother not say because of my father. Fat Ahrens has finger in pie all way to Croatia.’
‘And when did your mother disappear?’
‘Last Sunday. That why I in Schmidtbauer office. She know where my mother is. But she don’t say. Only say, coming back soon, coming back soon.’
‘Did Gregor leave those bruises on your arms?’
‘Yes. For shouting and so on. Since my mother gone, I sleep badly.’
‘Hm.’
I wondered what Ahrens was planning to do when his lightning takeover of the protection money racket in Frankfurt came to an end. When the entire wobbly structure, maintained only by means of enormous pressure and large amounts of violence, crashed to the ground. He probably had his dated ticket to God knows what beach resort in his wallet already. And if he actually got there he’d be leaving part of the city demolished for years to come — in retrospect, the departure of the Schmitz brothers would look like any everyday business crisis by comparison. As a result of the Army’s activities, all normal protection money rackets would be scandalous, and every serious extortionist would have to go about in a tank if he wanted to keep his extortion undercover. And they would go about in tanks, too. The business would get even more secret, even more brutal, even more excessive. Bar and restaurant owners would think back nostalgically to the days when they could relatively easily balance their protection money against their income on the black economy. And their guests would long for those boozy nights when they didn’t have to fear that some idiot might come marching into the bar any time, shooting one of them down just to show that he was to be taken as seriously as the now legendary Army of Reason.
I lit a cigarette, and Leila asked if she could have one too.
‘How old are you?’
‘Next month fifteen.’
‘Smoking’s bad for you.’
I thought I could feel the airflow as her head whipped round. ‘You my mother or what?’
‘You wanted to come with me, and I decide who smokes in my car and who doesn’t. Fourteen-year-old girls don’t.’
‘Huh! But fourteen-year-old girls have to breathe old detective’s smoke!’
‘Listen, sweetheart: call me old again and you can go back to Gregor by yourself, on foot.’
It wasn’t a laugh or even a giggle, but a sound that did have something to do with amusement — derisive, deploring, almost pitying. After a pause she said, ‘Like Schmidtbauer. Don’t like her age either — two old cunts.’
Hit the nail on the head again. In a game of ‘Who has the last word?’ I’d have staked all my money on her. In a game of ‘Who’s good at dealing with fourteen-year-olds?’ I probably wouldn’t even have made the first selection stage.
Finally I handed her my cigarettes and lighter, and after we’d been smoking in silence for a while I asked, ‘How many do you smoke a day?’
‘Sometimes more, sometimes less. Depends how day is. Sometimes cigarette is like last bit of fun.’
‘Hm, yes, same with me. Doesn’t your mother object?’
‘Sometimes more, sometimes less.’
‘OK, let’s come to an agreement.’
‘Agreement? Come to where?’
‘Let’s do a deal.’
‘OK.’
‘When I’m not around you can do as you like. But in my presence you don’t smoke more cigarettes than I do.’
‘Presence…?’
‘When we’re together.’
‘You smoke many?’
‘Quite a lot.’
‘Good. Is deal.’
At the next kiosk I stopped and bought a packet of chewing gum.
‘Swindle, right?’ said Leila as I got back into the car. ‘Now you not smoke in presence.’
‘A deal is a deal.’
‘And swindle is swindle.’
‘Hm.’ I nodded. ‘And dumb is dumb.’
‘OK. Chewing gum, please.’
I hated everything about it: the taste, the sticky sound of chewing, the picture of me and Leila chewing the stuff in competition, so to speak, because of a dubious agreement. I’d just managed to shake off three killers, I was covered in mud and dust from head to foot, I had the criminal outfit in present-day Frankfurt after me, and I went and did a stupid thing like this. But instead of simply spitting out the unfamiliar, minty clump of gum and lighting a cigarette, I thought about ways I might extend our bargain. How may scoops of ice cream was a cigarette worth, for instance?
There wasn’t much time left for such meditations. As I was still imagining Leila making pitying noises again and explaining that if she happened to want an ice, she could buy hundreds for herself, we passed the first fire engine. Next moment I saw half my office desk lying behind a roadblock in the street.
A firefighter waved me to the side, I stopped the car and leaned across the steering wheel. On the third floor of the box-like fifties building where I’d had my office for the last six years there was a large, gaping hole measuring about four square metres. The back wall was still intact, and I noticed the round kitchen clock which one of my clients had once said was about as trendy in a detective’s office as a piece of knitting.
‘What that?’ Leila was leaning forward too, pressing her nose against the windscreen.
‘No idea.’ It seemed to me she must have exhausted her capacity to absorb scenes of violence for today. At the moment she seemed quite brave, but at her age, I assumed, that could change quickly. And a hysterical girl of fourteen was the last thing I needed. ‘Probably a gas explosion. I was actually going to move my office here next month.’ I lit a cigarette and tossed the packet into her lap. ‘I’ll just go and take a look. You stay here, OK?’
‘OK,’ she replied, but she didn’t sound really convinced. She probably wasn’t going to be outmanoeuvred another time as easily as over the cigarette deal.
I got out and walked around a bit. There wasn’t much to see. Firefighters, a few onlookers rubber necking, and a number of tenants of the building all talking excitedly. No one recognised me under my coating of mud and plaster dust.
Naturally the loss of my office together with a phone and fax machine, a computer, a first-class coffee machine and a crate of schnapps wasn’t good news, but it didn’t particularly rile me. I’d never much liked the place, twenty square metres in size, badly heated, with woodchip wallpaper, and acoustically filled with Sting, George Michael, and umpteen rehashes of cute soul pieces played by the TV production outfit that had moved in next door. Perhaps this way I’d even get around having to pay the overdue rent. What did bother me was the way that over the last few days the Army of Reason had turned my life into something increasingly like a military confrontation. I already knew about threatening letters, home-made bombs, squads of thugs, answering machines filled up with torrents of abuse, and I’d once been sent a dead sheep slit open and wearing a Turkish fez, a very imaginative touch. But this was the first time I’d ever had my office blown up in the middle of Frankfurt in broad daylight, just to stop me pursuing a case. Of course, there was always the possibility that unknown to me, there were genuine faulty gas connections in the building. Or that the ladies of the TV Larger Than Life production company had planned a firework display in line with the company name, to celebrate the opening of a new series about dentists’ daughters having problems with architects’ sons, and they just happened to have put their twenty boxes of rockets down outside my door for a moment. But I didn’t think I’d bet on it.