When the flames reached the fourth floor Slibulsky turned his head. ‘Now what?’ he asked.
I think I meant to shrug my shoulders, but I only succeeded in hunching them even further. Five hours ago we had set out, we’d had a quick drink in a bar, squeezed into Romario’s cupboard, and all things considered we’d been in a pretty relaxed mood. A stupid job, yes, but not one you couldn’t get done with the help of a spot of bad temper and a few moderately funny jokes. I mean, what were two racketeers come for their protection money who never opened their mouths.? Come on, Slibulsky, we can do this standing on our heads, we just have to puff air in their faces and they’ll leave Romario in peace…
‘… Do you think he got out?’
Slibulsky raised his eyebrows. ‘Drunk as he was?’
I lit myself a cigarette. My hands were trembling. ‘I don’t think I feel well.’
‘I told you, they don’t do things by halves.’
‘How could they find out what had happened so quickly?’
‘Maybe there was a third man in the car.’
My mouth dropped open, and I goggled at Slibulsky as if he’d just conjured up a whole flock of pigeons or something. Of course! Why hadn’t we thought of that before? And how come I myself hadn’t worked it out?
‘What do you think, have we been acting like idiots?’
‘Look, we had a couple of dead bodies on our hands! And if there was a third man it wouldn’t have made any difference.’
‘But we could have taken Romario with us.’
‘We ought to have got that tall bastard to pay them the six grand.’
That had been Slibulsky’s view all along. Protection money to the Mafia was just taxation, he thought, only you got a better return for your money. He knew what it was all about. In his time as a bouncer for that brothel he’d also been responsible for getting the whores to pay up the few hundred marks they owed for round-the-clock guard and their mouldy rooms. He didn’t like to talk about that, and the methods he sometimes had to use.
‘But he didn’t,’ Slibulsky went on, ‘and then this happened. He knew what tangling with characters like that could mean. Well, nothing we can do here now, and I guess we’d better go home.’
‘But whoever started the fire is still around. He’s not going to miss the show…’
‘So? You think he’s standing around somewhere with a big cigarette lighter? Come on, we’ve had enough for one day.’
Slibulsky started the engine of the car and turned it. I didn’t protest. We really had had enough.
After we’d gone round two corners the glow of the fire disappeared behind buildings and neon ads. As we crossed the bridge to Sachsenhausen the sky in the east turned blue. I thought of Romario’s one-room flat in the Nordend district. Photographic wallpaper showing a palm-fringed Brazilian beach, plus a bed with a sagging mattress and dirty grey sheets. Slibulsky was on the wrong track if he thought Romario could have paid six thousand marks just like that. He had put all his money into the Saudade, his one true love. But apart from farmers and folk from small towns who wanted to round off a weekend visit to the red-light district of Frankfurt with an exotic supper, scroungers like me and a handful of Brazilian transvestites, hardly anyone had wanted to be witness to his love. From Monday to Thursday the place was empty. If Romario had a special soup pan for festive occasions the size of a rainwater butt, and had objected to its use as a receptacle for corpses, he’d only been putting on a desperate act. There were never any festive occasions at the Saudade, let alone enough customers to put back as much soup as the pan held. And anyway the characters who got lost and found their way to the Saudade were not the kind to waste their capacity for liquid intake on soup. I wondered who would break down the door to Romario’s flat, and hoped he’d changed the sheets recently.
After we had pushed a number of ice-cream carts in need of repairs out of Slibulsky’s garage and into the yard, and got the BMW under cover, we went up to his flat. Slibulsky took the crate of beer out of the fridge, and we sat down by the living-room window with it. Neither of us felt like food any more, let alone the cheese — a yellow stinker which, if you had enough imagination, looked like a clump of calloused skin collected from mortuaries, kept moist and stored in gumboots for years. Outside it was getting light. We drank beer and watched the first rays of the sun falling on the rooftops. We were too exhausted to talk and too churned up inside to sleep. Only when the sun was shining in our faces and school-kids were shouting out in the street did Slibulsky rise to his feet, put a blanket on the sofa for me, and wish me a sceptical, ‘Good-night.’ I waited for another beer to take effect, then levered myself up from my chair too, staggered across the room and fell on the sofa. I was still wondering what Gina would think if she found me here with my shoes on her sofa cushions with their linen covers when my eyes closed, and it was about five seconds before I fell asleep. And about ten seconds before an alarm clock made my head burst. Tinkle tinkle, tinkle tinkle, tinkle tinkle. Another ten seconds before I realized that the racketeer’s mobile was ringing in my breast pocket. I pressed buttons at random, hoped the right one was among them, and cleared my throat. The right one was among them, and I heard a voice. At the same moment everything I’d tried to work out about the origin of the blackmailers over the last few hours was turned on its head by the Frankfurt accent.
‘Hey, where’s you lot, then? Here’s me sitting around like a fool, can’t come off duty, time I went to bed. You in the disco or what? If the boss hears… where are you? Can’t hear a thing…’
I tried clearing my throat again.
‘You being funny? Tell me where you are, I’ll tell you how long it’ll take to get home. And if you don’t I’m shutting up shop and going to bed, get it?’
‘Yup.’
‘Whaddya mean, “yup”?’
‘Yup, I get it.’
I waited for him to go on grousing and with luck give me some idea where it was that his mates were supposed to come home to. But something about my answer must have sounded wrong, because all I heard was a sudden sharp intake of breath and then he ended the call. I stared at the mobile. A Hessian Mafia! No wonder the blackmailers had preferred not to talk. Who’d have taken them seriously?
I put the mobile back in my breast pocket and looked up at the ceiling. The night was actually ending on a note of relief. No language I didn’t understand, no bosses I’d have to look for far afield. Just a cosy little connection probably thought up in the back room of a bar where they were putting back the local cider, the boss a meat importer or used-car dealer or the owner of some fairground booth, the rest of them unemployed scaffolders and drunks who took the tickets in porn cinemas. ‘Hey, how’s about a little Mafia op?’ And I imagined myself marching into the office with its rubber tree and chrome furniture and Pirelli calendar and saying: ‘No, I don’t want to buy a piece of old junk sprayed metallic silver, I’ve come to take you in. You got me into shooting a man, and you barbecued someone I know. Now we’ll see if your place burns as well as his!’ And then I’d unscrew the petrol can, and the fatso in the double-breasted suit would beg for mercy, and I’d go ping, and I’d go zack, and I’d… well before I could wonder what I’d actually do in the end I’d fallen asleep again. And even the fact that the caller, who was obviously some kind of caretaker on the phone switchboard for the gang, had known nothing about either the dead men or the fire didn’t get through to me that morning.