On the way back I said, ‘He’s Brazilian. The tango comes from Argentina.’
‘So what? You knew who I meant, right?’
He was correct there too.
Tango Man was sitting on a chair, feet up on the table, and seemed to have put back several glasses of liquor to calm his nerves while we were outside. ‘Tango Man’ fitted him perfectly: a long, tough-looking face with small, quick-moving eyes, a sharp nose and a cleft in his chin; mid-length hair, black and shining like lacquer, brushed well back and moving when he moved as if it grew from a single root; a body that was big and broad anyway, but looked even bigger and broader in a T-shirt and trousers that might once have fitted him in a school yard in Rio; and his obvious conviction that no one’s ever too tall to wear shoes with five-centimetre heels.
Those eyes, not so quick-moving now, stared at us. We could see how he had to strain his lips to bring out any sound at all. Had he perhaps been putting back not glasses but whole bottles of liquor to calm his nerves? What and how much did you have to drink in just under twenty minutes to reach a state where you couldn’t articulate? There was an empty glass beside him. I looked behind the bar, where I found an empty bottle. He hadn’t eaten anything that evening, what with all the agitation, and normally he stuck to fruit juice.
‘Hey, Romario, this is all a bit much for you, right?’ I went over and put my hand on his shoulder. He looked up at me and gave me a long glance which, I suspected, was meant to express pain, but was only glazed and blurred. Then he silently raised his bandaged arm, looked at it and nodded at it, as if to say: what the pair of us go through together! He looked up at me again, reproachfully this time, until his face suddenly twitched and tears ran down his cheeks. As he wept a kind of whinny escaped him. I kneaded his shoulder, said something like, ‘It’ll all work out,’ and looked around for Slibulsky to come to my aid. But he only shrugged and set about fitting the second corpse into the pan. The whinny finally became sobs, the sobs turned to gulps, the tears abated, I gave Romario a handkerchief and he blew his nose.
‘I… the restaurant’s like a girlfriend to me, see… and the way you’d give a girl jewellery and clothes, I bought it wood and tiles and tablecloths. To make it look pretty, see?’
‘Yes, sure,’ I said, wondering what kinds of presents, judging by the chipboard, fake marble tiles and check polyester tablecloths in this place, he gave his girlfriends.
‘I promise you’ll soon be able to come back here.’ As I said that, the pushing and shoving behind me stopped for a moment, and I sensed Slibulsky’s eyes on my back. Of course, it was more realistic to expect that the Saudade would be blown up some time in the next few weeks, and Romario would have to start all over again with kebabs and canned beer somewhere far away.
‘Sorry about just now,’ said Romario. ‘You’re right, how could you have known they’d start shooting straight away? But I was in shock…’ He looked at me out of eyes that were still moist, and I nodded understandingly. It was just after one, according to my watch. ‘So if you really could fix it, Kemal, I’d be eternally grateful!’ He tried a smile. ‘And you’d have free meals for life!’
Now it was my turn to try a smile. ‘Well, great, Romario. Thanks a lot. But,’ I said, this time glancing at my watch as ostentatiously as possible, ‘we ought to get a move on. By tomorrow this place must be as clean as if nothing had happened.’ I pointed to the bullet-holes in the wooden panelling. ‘You’ll have to fill those in with something and paint them over. Better make yourself a coffee and then see how far you can get with one arm.’
I didn’t want him to stop and think about his chances of getting safely out of this business. I wanted him to work until his other thumb was practically falling off too, and first thing tomorrow I’d put him on a plane with a bottle of schnapps. Once he’d left, it would be difficult for him to convince the police that he’d been a mere spectator. Particularly if I said otherwise, giving my word as a private detective, which I did think weighed just a little more than Slibulsky thought. I was in my mid-thirties and rather too old for snap judgements to the effect that I wasn’t either popular or taken seriously in my profession — even if we were only talking about the police.
‘Okay,’ said Romario. ‘I’ll do my best.’ Then he stood up, and he was on his way to the kitchen when he turned back again, pressed my arm with his sound hand and looked at me in a funny way. ‘Thanks very much, Kemal. You’re a real pal.’
Fortunately he was decent or drunk enough not to wait for an answer. He turned on his heel and staggered off with a few final sniffs. I watched him go, wondering if he believed what he said, or if he believed I believed what he said, or whether he simply thought that an extremely large amount of soft soap was advisable in an extremely tricky situation. You had to remember that Romario’s moods swung back and forth wildly, and it was far from certain how long he would do his best. The sooner he was on that plane the better.
‘Hey, real pal,’ said a voice behind me. ‘How about helping me pot up that other character now?’
Chapter 2
Ten years ago Slibulsky had been a small-time drugs dealer plying his trade between the station district and the smart set in the Westend quarter. He smuggled, cut, and sold whatever he could lay hands on that didn’t mean instant death to his customers. Himself, he stuck to beer. On the side he was open to any kind of deal that in the worst-case scenario wouldn’t get him more than five years in jail. We met in the course of one such deal. He helped me to break into Frankfurt police headquarters. A little later he was picked up with coke on him and served a year behind bars. I sent him parcels of World Cup football videos and beef sausage, and he thanked me with a box of clothes pegs he’d made himself. To this day that box stands in my kitchen, and I think every week or so how nice it would be to have a garden or a yard with a washing line in it.
Once he was out on parole, Slibulsky went to work as a bouncer for a brothel, then as a DJ in assorted discos on the outskirts of town, and finally as a bodyguard to a local politician. This man had nothing to fear from anyone, but he was campaigning on the slogan of No Daily Violence On Our Streets — I’ll Be the Enforcer, and dragged Slibulsky around with him to election meetings as some kind of reverse evidence of the state of affairs he deplored. In the part of the city for which he was standing, criminality reached its height in the form of chewing-gum wrappers dropped on the pavement, and the worst violence seen on the streets was done by barking poodles and grumpy senior citizens. The election was won and Slibulsky was fired. He went back to drug-dealing for a while, until three years ago he had an idea and started an ice-cream business. It used those little carts, mostly drawn by a bicycle and usually adorned with pennants in the colours of the Italian flag, that were familiar to us all as part of our childhood Sundays, going around ringing their bells — or at least that’s how we remember it today. No idea if I ever ate ice cream from a cart like that as a boy, or even saw one, but now, when one of them came down the street or stopped outside the swimming pool, for a moment I was eight years old again. And because I wasn’t the only one to feel like that, and because almost everyone who remembered or thought they remembered the carts was now able to afford the super-size seven-scoops cornet without making too much of a hole in his pocket-money budget, Slibulsky’s business was a great success. Children bought his ices too, but he really made a killing from people who’d pay ten marks to bring back the summers of the past. He had nine employees who worked for him seven days a week on commission, while he sat in an office with cable TV, counted the money and watched Formula One racing. A few repairs now and then, the occasional employee who made off with the day’s takings, twice reported to the police for food poisoning — the rest of the time raking in a thousand marks, two thousand marks, Schumacher in pole position. By now he had earned enough for him and his girlfriend Gina to start looking for a house of their own with a warehouse and workshop, and then he’d be able to run the business more or less from the bedroom.