That corpse-like noise again.
‘No, no. You just call me, and I’ll be down at once. I know how to deal with these people, don’t you worry.’
He stammered a bit more about how he couldn’t make all this out, I told him to make a large pot of strong coffee for the night ahead of him, then we rang off, and it looked as if Leila and I could sleep easy.
A little later the front door bell rang. Once I’d convinced myself by looking out of the window that I wouldn’t be letting in any thick-lipped Hessian or a killer with his face powdered white, I pressed the door opener. Soon after that I was taking delivery of a bag the size of a laundry basket, full of polystyrene boxes and aluminium foil containers. I laid the sofa table, found a bottle of mineral water for Leila, poured myself more vodka, and tried working out a plan for the next few days.
The Croatian economic delegation was arriving on Saturday, and if Zvonko had been telling me the truth the Croatian head of the Army of Reason was among them. By then I had to find out where the fillet-steak banquet cooked up by Zvonko’s uncle would take place. A nice cosy evening with all leading members of the Army — there could hardly be a better moment to embark on final hostilities, along with the Albanian and his chain-wearing followers. The question was, what was I going to do for my new client until Saturday? If I wasn’t to endanger the bosses’ meeting, I must go underground for the next few days. I wanted Ahrens to believe that the attack on my office had sent me running from the field of battle. Which incidentally also decreased the danger of my being blackmailed into a swap: detective exchanged for detective’s client’s mother. For the moment, then, there was only one thing I could do for Leila: find out on the quiet whether her mother really was with Ahrens. Either of her own free will because, as Frau Schmidtbauer said, she was ‘the worst of them all’ and a tart who’d seized her chance to get her hands on some of Ahrens’s takings, or alternatively under duress. Presumably she didn’t look too different from her daughter, and perhaps Ahrens was keeping her in some cellar as his safari partner.
I drank some vodka and lit a cigarette. The idea that Leila’s mother had been Ahrens’s sex slave since Sunday, for some reason, appealed to me even less than such very unappealing ideas normally do. Of course she could just have been picked up by the police while travelling on public transport without a ticket. An eager-beaver cop, and as a refugee she’d have landed in jail. But suppose Ahrens really was keeping her prisoner? Was I to leave that state of affairs alone until Saturday? Because of two guys who were now worm fodder?
The bathroom door opened, and out came — what the hell was going on here? — a belly dancer. She wore a white blouse printed with glittery flowers, low-slung baggy golden-silk trousers, a kind of belt with gold coins hanging from it, and brightly embroidered slippers. The coin belt sat loosely around her bare hips, hanging down in front like a letter V. When Leila moved, it jingled, and the point of the V swung against the spot between her legs like a gentle tip-off.
What was the idea? A local history and folklore show? Carnival time? Seduction? She came into the room a little gingerly and looked expectantly at me.
‘Good heavens.’ I gave her a friendly smile. ‘Anything planned for this evening?’
‘Planned?’
‘I mean, are you going out dancing, or to the funfair or something?’
She stopped and looked at me in astonishment. The way you’d look in astonishment at the feeble-minded. Then she suddenly appeared to be gazing right through me, let her shoulders droop, shuffled over to the sofa, sighed, ‘Supper?’ and sank into the cushions, jingling.
‘Yes, that’s right, supper.’ Had she expected applause? Did she want to put on some sort of performance? Or did she perhaps think, on account of experiences she might have had with proselytising workers in the hostel, that you had only to wear some kind of folk costume in the land where people drove Mercedes for the natives to fall about in ecstasies at the idea of cultural exchange? It must be something like this, I imagined, when your own kids came home from school with the nutcrackers or candlesticks they’d made in handicraft lessons. Or was there something I didn’t quite get here?
‘Well, I for one haven’t eaten since this morning, and as far as I know you haven’t eaten since midday either. And after a day like this…’ I nodded at her, filled our plates, and ignoring her elaborate lack of interest told her to tuck in.
Perhaps she simply wasn’t hungry, or she didn’t like the casserole, or girls of her age nourished themselves on lettuce leaves — oh, not too many, for goodness’ sake — but anyway, eating supper turned out to be a one-sided and thus oppressive business.
‘No appetite?’ I asked after I’d shovelled the first few spoonfuls down myself.
Leila leaned back on the sofa, kicking off the embroidered slippers and bracing her bare feet against the table, and twirled a little green stalk of something in her fingers. Without looking up, she murmured, ‘No appetite?’
‘Aren’t you hungry? Don’t you want to eat?’
‘Smell like home cooking.’
‘Then you have pretty good cooking at home,’ I heard myself saying, like one of those adults I sometimes saw on kids’ TV programmes on mornings when I had a hangover, and who always made me wonder whether there was a soul in the world over three years old who didn’t take an instant dislike to that stupidly affable tone.
Eyebrows raised pityingly, Leila gave me a brief sideways glance, then looked back at her little green stalk and audibly breathed out.
‘OK, then tell me what you’d rather smell. After all, you must eat something in the next few days.’
‘Why must?’
Why must…? My spoon stopped suspended in the air, halfway between plate and mouth. Defiant, cheeky, outrageous — yes, all very well, but certainly there wasn’t ever a minute in my life reserved for this.
‘Because people have to eat if they’re not going to die of starvation,’ I grunted, putting the spoon in my mouth.
‘I look nice?’
‘Look nice? Yes, you do look nice. You’re beautiful,’ I told her, hoping to make her forget my botched reaction to her big entrance as a belly dancer. ‘But if you carry on like this you’ll soon be nothing but a beautiful skeleton.’
‘You like better fat slut, hm?’
‘Fat slut… look, who gives you lot German lessons in that hostel?’
‘I self.’
‘You yourself? What from? Off the walls of public toilets?’
‘Porn.’
‘What?’
‘Boys in hostel have films and book. I have book too, The Sperm Huntresses.’
‘Oh…’ I tried to assume as down-to-earth an expression as possible. At the same time I registered that the spoon in my hand was stirring the casserole in a slightly manic way, as if of its own volition. ‘Um… all that’s kind of a specialised vocabulary. What about if you just want to go and buy rolls or something?’
Very slowly, she turned her head, looked at me from under drooping eyelids, and suddenly began to laugh. Loud, hearty, engaging laughter. No doubt about it, there was something here I didn’t get.
When she’d finished laughing, she asked, ‘We watch films?’
‘Er… what kind of films?’
‘Films with my mother, of course, moron.’
Moron. Was that out of the porn book too? Fuck me, moron?
Relieved by the change of subject, I pointed my spoon across the room. ‘The video recorder’s over there.’
At school I regularly got such bad marks in foreign languages that they were a joke — would I have paid more attention if the languages had been taught in porn? Maybe I’d be working with the United Nations now.
Laden up to her chin, Leila came back from the bedroom, made her way past me balancing about fifteen video cassettes and knelt down in front of the VCR.
‘Hey, I only want to know what she looks like. I’m not planning to write a doctoral thesis on her.’