‘Elegant ladies, you said.’
‘Well, what you’d take for elegant ladies among museum curators. A little education wouldn’t do you any harm. Anyway, we were talking about something quite different. What was the title of the film? You can tell me that at least.’
‘Can’t remember. Some kind of erotic thriller. Deborah had a small part.’
‘You’re having me on, right?’
‘Oh, shut up.’ I stood up. ‘What is there to eat? Garlic bread?’
Slibulsky sighed. ‘Go and make that sort of joke out there. A lot of them are only just out of college. Someone may laugh.’
‘Why would they? They would be glad to get French cuisine.’
On the way to the living room Gina ran into me. Like last time, she was dressed up to the nines and her eyes were shining, as if she still had a lot to do today.
‘Sorry I haven’t had time to say hello properly yet.’ She kissed my cheek, stepped back and examined my face. ‘Everything all right again?’
‘Keep taking plenty of fluids, the doctor said, and I’ve stuck to his advice. You’re looking wonderful. Like always… recently. What is it — in love?’
I meant it facetiously, but when Gina suddenly froze and blushed red the question instantly assumed uncomfortable weight.
‘Er… I didn’t mean anything. What would I mean?’
‘What indeed?’ she replied in a slightly husky voice. ‘I expect I’m a little nervous about the meal. I haven’t known these people very long.’
‘Hm. And how’s it all going at the museum?’
‘Oh, great. Really fun. That’s why recently I may have been so… oh, well.’
‘You get on all right with the boss?’
‘To be honest, I don’t have all that much to do with him. I look after my own department, and now and then we discuss things. Sometimes we have a coffee together, or we.’
‘That’s all right,’ I interrupted her. ‘I didn’t want to know all the details of how little you have to do with each other.’
She stared at me, and a trace of anger came into her eyes.
‘Not exactly a nice guy, is he? Well, what the hell, between you and me he’s a world-class arsehole. Best to avoid him as far as possible, I’m sure.’
She stood motionless for a moment until her mouth twisted into a grim smile. ‘Thanks for the advice, but luckily I’m grown up. I can decide for myself who I’ll avoid and who I won’t.’ With which she left me standing there.
It’s a funny thing how some women always make a really big deal of their independence just when they’re about to mess things up. Or what I’d call mess things up.
There was little I could do but go back into the living room and mingle. In the process I took plenty of fluids and let a small, crisp woman in glasses deliver me a lecture on sexual stimulants in classical antiquity. Interesting the way she did it in a tone of voice as if she were reading aloud the instructions for using an electric iron. Then there was supper, and I found myself sitting at one end of the table between Four-Eyes and a man who kept saying ‘Tasty, tasty’. Now and then I cast a surreptitious glance at Gina. She was sitting at the other end of the table beside her boss talking exuberantly. But occasionally she fell silent for a moment, and I thought I sensed her looking at me. Slibulsky was between a young man with rings on his fingers and a shaved, spotty neck, and a woman who kept putting her head on one side as she listened, smiling as if she were talking to a set of soft, pink stuffed toys. They were conversing with each other across Slibulsky, discussing who would be appointed to a post about to fall vacant. Slibulsky stoically put forkful after forkful in his mouth and didn’t look as if he planned to follow any conversation for as much as two sentences together. He must have been envying Leila, who had retreated to watch TV in the bedroom.
Iris, the bespectacled woman, seemed intent on having a serious conversation with me during the meal. She didn’t seem to mind what the subject was. In her instructions-for-use tone, which did not change in spite of her increasing tipsiness, she moved from the digital future of archaeology to the destructive effects of popular tourism, and from the subject of what I did in my holidays to the relationship between the sexes in general.
‘Do you agree that the crucial mistakes, the mistakes that will lead to a rift some time later, are made at the very beginning, perhaps even at the first meeting?’
‘Hm, er… I don’t know. Perhaps sometimes.’
‘Aha.’
‘Why aha?’
‘Interesting: perhaps sometimes. Conversely, that would mean: perhaps sometimes not.’
In one respect she was phenomenal. So tight by now that she was practically squinting and her remarks were really sheer nonsense, she kept on uttering them in the same slightly slurred, entirely unemotional way, without any intonation at all, as if talking was her job, and a badly paid one at that.
When we left the table and sat down on sofas and chairs I took my chance to slip away from Four-Eyes, and went into the bedroom to say goodbye to Leila.
‘As soon as there’s any news tomorrow I’ll call you.’
‘OK. Went well?’
‘Of course.’ I stroked her head.
‘That in the kitchen, just joke, you know?’
‘I know. Try to sleep a bit.’
She nodded, and we smiled at each other.
‘See you tomorrow.’
As before, I found Slibulsky in the kitchen. He was sitting at the table drinking schnapps.
‘I have to go. There’s a lot to do tomorrow.’
‘You’re telling me,’ he muttered to himself, sounding sozzled.
‘Is it just those people annoying you, or is there something else?’
‘Aren’t they enough to annoy anyone?’
‘Yes, sure. Well… look after Leila.’
‘Don’t worry.’
As I left I waved to Gina, received a cool nod in return, and then I was on the stairs at last. Although it wasn’t very friendly of me, as soon as the front door of the building closed behind me I’d forgotten Slibulsky and Gina.
Chapter 19
At ten in the morning on the dot I got into the car and drove off to the station district. The sun was shining, and it had turned warm again overnight. In the streets people were strolling about, talking, doing their Saturday shopping or having the first drink of the weekend outside cafes. I had wound the window down. Laughter, children’s shouts, and fresh air smelling of flowers wafted in. Frankfurt this morning felt like a mixture between a meadow by an open-air swimming pool and a busy village square.
But when I turned into Kaiserstrasse the atmosphere changed. At first it was simply quieter, although it was usually noisier in the red-light and gambling district than anywhere else in town. Especially on Saturdays, even in the morning. After all, the weekend customers from Little Whatsit and Lower Thingummy wanted value for their petrol money. They rose with the lark and were up and down the corridors of the brothels from nine in the morning onwards.
The closer I came to the Albanian’s headquarters, the New York, the emptier the pavements became, until there was almost no one around at all any more. Here and there a druggie who’d been kicked aside, or a few travellers with their bags on the way to or from the station. They too sensed the curious atmosphere and were looking around nervously. Only when you looked closely could you see all the heads crowding together behind the dark windows of bars and half-open striptease club doors, looking down the street. Suddenly a siren broke the silence, and next moment an ambulance raced past me. The siren faded into the distance, and it seemed even quieter than before. Then I saw at least twenty blue lights flashing outside the corner building of the side street where the New York stood. I drove slowly up, stopped at the police barrier, and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. Instead of the New York — a three-storey disco with a restaurant and billiards room, adorned outside with a profusion of neon tubing — I saw blue sky. The building opposite which had been the German boss’s residence lay in ruins too, and there wasn’t much left of two of its bars apart from the last wisps of smoke. But there were any number of charred bodies. They were being carried out of the ruins by firefighters and doctors with protective face masks, and laid in a row on the pavement. I couldn’t see the end of the row.