‘Great-aunt. As well as can be expected, thank you,’ Maravan had replied.
In the kitchen he had carefully studied the information leaflet, broken up one tablet and crushed it in his finest mortar. He had dabbed his moistened little finger into a few grains of the powder and tasted it. It was bitter.
He dissolved the powder in a shot glass of water. It turned milky, but soon went clear again. He sniffed it, put it back down in front of him again and started thinking.
Suddenly he stood up, went off to the grocer’s in the street nearby and returned with a bottle of Campari.
He ground another pill in the mortar and dissolved it in Campari in the same shot glass. With the same result: milky at first, then clear.
Maravan filled a second glass with Campari, took a drop of each with a pipette, and tasted. Both bitter.
After that he pulverized ten times that amount and dissolved it in 150 millilitres of Campari. As soon as the liquid was clear again, he stirred in one and a half grams of alginate.
He drew up the Campari mixture into a caviar syringe and squeezed out uniform drops into a calcium chloride solution. He fished the tiny balls out of the solution, assessed, sniffed, but abstained from tasting them.
He pressed the juice of a deep-frozen orange into a fluted glass, decorated the glass with wafer-thin orange peel and let the little red balls swim in the liquid.
Maravan’s Campari orange Minirin.
He took a sniff of the drink and then threw it down the sink. Again he ground tablets in the mortar. This time for the following day. Enough for three Camparis. He had heard that Dalmann was a thirsty man.
The doorbell took Maravan by surprise. If it was Makeda, she was half an hour early. But shortly afterwards Andrea came into the kitchen to give the all-clear. It was just the inevitable Schaeffer, as Andrea described him.
The doorbell rang again a good half hour later. ‘There she is,’ Andrea announced darkly.
Maravan prepared the aperitifs.
‘Campari orange for the gentleman. And, of course, Makeda will stick to champagne.’
In truth, Dalmann would have preferred a normal Campari orange. Or, even better, a Campari soda. But he was not a spoilsport, never had been.
So he took the cocktail glass from the tray held by the pretty waitress and let her explain to him what the drink was. ‘Campari caviar in chilled orange juice with glazed navel orange peel. Cheers.’
Dalmann waited until she had left the room, then raised his glass and toasted Makeda who, as ever, was drinking champagne. She eyed him over the rim of her glass and smiled away all his anger at the bumbling by the federal prosecutor’s office.
The bedroom – or master bedroom as he called it, using the English expression – was scarcely recognizable. All the furniture had been taken out, apart from the bed and bedside table. A low, round table had been set and decorated exotically; the seating consisted of pillows and cushions.
‘Oh, I see. It means you’re lying down already,’ he joked when they entered the room and his eyes adjusted to the candles, which provided the only lighting.
The drink tasted – funny. It was not particularly easy to drink, the swimming carpet of tiny Campari balls was slippery, either you had to slurp the things down or catch them with pursed lips. Makeda let out her infectious laugh and, to amuse her, Dalmann rather exaggerated his efforts.
Playing this game he had soon emptied his glass, and he asked, ‘Do you think one might get a supplément of this?’
Makeda did not understand this word, and so he explained, ‘Do you think I could have another one?’
She rang the temple bell.
Maravan was in the middle of preparing the amuse-bouches. When he opened the bottle with the curry leaf, cinnamon and coconut oil essence and drizzled a few drops onto the tiny rice-flour chapattis, the aroma of his childhood filled his nostrils once again. And Ulagu’s childhood, which had ended so soon.
He did something he had never done before. He put one of the chapattis in his mouth, closed his eyes and abandoned himself to the flavour unfolding between tongue and palate.
Andrea, who was scowling by the door, waiting for the bell to ring, was watching him. ‘I thought you’d made exactly the right number.’
Maravan opened his eyes, chewed, swallowed and replied, ‘There’ll be enough.’
The bell rang out from the first floor. Andrea grabbed the plate of chapattis and took them up the stairs.
She returned to the kitchen with a tray carrying the empty cocktail glass. ‘He wants another one of those.’
Maravan mixed a second.
Dalmann enjoyed the two consistencies of urad lentil ribbons, as well as the frozen saffron and almond foam and its textures. Then Makeda came running down the stairs, ringing the temple bell loudly all the while.
‘He’s dying,’ she said and ran back up. Maravan and Andrea followed her.
Dalmann was lying on the Indian cushions and cloths. His right hand was clutching at his chest. In the candlelight his white face had a wet sheen. His eyes were wide open in terror and he was gasping for air.
Makeda, Andrea and Maravan watched the scene from a distance. Nobody made a move to go any closer; each of them was deep in their thoughts.
Dalmann seemed to want to say something, but his struggle for air and life prevented him from doing so. At times it looked as if he was giving up; he closed his eyes and hardly breathed at all. But then he would rear up again and struggle on.
‘We should call somebody,’ Andrea said.
‘Yes, we should,’ Makeda agreed.
‘144,’ Maravan added.
But not one of them moved.
When the emergency services arrived, Andrea and Maravan had already gone, taking with them everything that could be linked to Love Food. Makeda had rung 144 and waited for the ambulance.
All the emergency doctor could do was confirm the patient was dead. The autopsy revealed that the stent, which had been inserted eight months previously, following his first heart attack, had become blocked, despite the fact he had been taking Aspirin Cardio and Plavix. In the doctor’s opinion this unfortunate development was a result of the deceased’s reckless lifestyle.
This was corroborated by the statement given by the Ethiopian-British national Makeda F., who had cooked for the deceased that evening. And also by the level of alcohol in his blood.
Hermann Schaeffer organized a suitable funeral for Eric Dalmann, which fewer mourners attended than expected. And he made sure there was a nice obituary in Freitag.
The other papers settled for a short announcement. Nonetheless, the name Palucron and Dalmann’s connection to this firm had not yet cropped up.
On the Scilly Isles the daffodils are already in bloom in November. And now, in April, they were still in small clumps in the grass, which looked like an English lawn.
Andrea and Makeda had booked into a bed and breakfast for a fortnight. Every day they went walking on a narrow path along the coast, beside which the cliffs wallowed in the surf like sluggish, primeval creatures.
‘Do you want to know why I didn’t help Dalmann?’ Andrea asked out of the blue. Until now they had avoided the subject.
‘You wanted him to die.’
Andrea nodded. ‘I was so jealous.’
Makeda put an arm around her shoulder and pulled Andrea towards her.
They continued walking for a while like this, until the path became too narrow and they had to let go of each other. Andrea went in front.
Suddenly she heard Makeda’s voice behind her: ‘He was supposed to have fucked himself to death.’
Andrea stopped and turned around. ‘I thought he wasn’t able to any more.’
‘I’d planned on slipping him an erection pill.’