Maravan paused.
‘If someone else rings and wants, you know, sex dinners. As far as I’m concerned you can say yes.’
‘Oh that. All right, I’ll take that on board. Anything else?’
‘Nothing.’
As soon as Maravan had hung up, she looked for the number of the caller who had asked about the sex dinners. She had noted it down, just in case.
December 2008
27
The apartment in Falkengässchen was on the fourth floor, right in the middle of the old town in a lavishly restored seventeenth-century house, if the inscription above the door was to be believed. A new, silent lift had brought her up here. The sitting room and kitchen took up the entire floor. The sloping roof went right up into the gable and opened out onto a roof terrace, from where you could look out over the tiled roofs and church towers of the old town.
A door in the wall led to the adjacent building. Behind it were two large bedrooms, each with a suite of furniture, and a luxurious bathroom. Everything was new and expensive, but kitted out in bad taste. Plenty of marble and gold-plated fittings, deep-pile carpets, dubious antiques and chrome-steel furniture, bowls with dried, perfumed petals.
The apartment reminded Andrea of a hotel suite. It did not look as if anybody lived there.
When she rang the man who had asked about ‘sex dinners’ that time, he answered with a brusque ‘Yes?’ His name was Rohrer and he came to the point immediately. They – he did not reveal who ‘they’ were – occasionally organized private dinners for relaxation. The guests were people for whom discretion was crucial. If she thought she might be able to offer something in this line, he would arrange a test dinner. Depending on the result, this might lead to further dinners.
Andrea met Rohrer the very next day to look around the premises. A man in his late thirties with short-cropped hair, he scrutinized her with a professional gaze. She was a head taller than him, and in the cramped lift up to the apartment she could smell a mixture of sweat and Paco Rabanne.
She told him that the apartment was suitable and that the suggested date in four days’ time – she looked awkwardly in her diary – was possible.
The dinner was served in the bedroom. The suite had been removed and Andrea had made the usual table with cloths and cushions – including brass fingerbowls, as now diners would be eating with their hands again.
For the first time Maravan worked with a tall chef’s hat. Andrea had insisted on it, and at the moment he did not feel like putting up a fight.
The dinner was planned for a woman and a man. Rohrer would leave the moment the guests arrived. But Andrea and Maravan should stay after the last course, until they were called.
He cooked his standard menu. With the usual care, but without the usual passion, Andrea thought.
The man was Rohrer’s boss. He was in his early fifties, somewhat overly groomed, wearing a blazer with golden buttons, grey gabardine trousers and a blue-and-white striped shirt, the white high collar of which was fastened by a gold pin. It made a bridge below the knot of his yellow tie.
He had green eyes and reddish, slightly longish hair, styled back with gel. Andrea noticed his fingernails. They were carefully manicured and polished.
He glanced into the kitchen, said hello to Andrea and Maravan, and introduced himself as Kull. René Kull.
They did not see his companion until they brought out the champagne. She was sitting at the dressing table, her narrow back in a low-cut dress facing Andrea. Her hair was shaven to within millimetres and went down in a wedge shape to the bottom of her neck. Her skin was a deep ebony colour, which shone in the light of Andrea’s sea of candles.
When she turned round, Andrea saw a roundish forehead of the sort that women from Ethiopia or Sudan have. Her full lips were painted red and now puckered into a surprised, interested smile.
Andrea beamed back. She had not seen such a beautiful woman for a long time. Her name was Makeda. Makeda set about the dinner with such pleasure and gusto that Andrea wondered whether she might not be a prostitute. Kull, on the other hand, kept his composure, not even unbuttoning that collar which had already seemed as if it might choke him when he arrived.
When they had not heard the temple bell for a while after the confectionery, Andrea listened anxiously to the noises coming out of the room. Then Kull strode into the kitchen.
‘Of course, the main reason for the effect this dinner has is the knowledge that you’re eating an erotic menu – and all the other stuff, the candles, eating with your hands. But do you actually put something else in the food?’ Kull’s cheeks were slightly red, but his top button was still done up.
‘I don’t put anything else in the food,’ Maravan explained. ‘It’s what’s in there already that creates the effect.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Herr Kull,’ Andrea interjected, ‘I’m sure you’ll understand that that’s our professional secret.’
Kull nodded. ‘Are you just as discreet in other ways?’ he asked after a while.
28
From that point onwards Love Food cooked regularly for Kull. The venue was always the apartment in Falkengässchen. Only the guests changed. Especially the men.
René Kull ran an escort service for a very upmarket, mostly international clientele. Men whose business brought them to the financial centre or the headquarters of the International Football Federation, or those who were simply making a stop on their way to a family holiday in the mountains. They set great store by discretion and were not infrequently accompanied by hefty, taciturn men who would munch on sandwiches they had brought with them in the sitting room.
Kull did not quibble about the price Andrea had tentatively asked for: 2,000 plus drinks.
Andrea had never come into contact with this world before, and she was fascinated. She was quick to strike up conversation with the women, who usually arrived before their clients and would have a drink and a few cigarettes in the sitting room while waiting. They were beautiful, wore off-the-peg clothes and expensive jewellery, and treated her as if she were one of their own. She enjoyed chatting to them. They were funny and talked about their work with an ironic distance which made Andrea laugh.
The women loved these evenings because of the food. And because – as a Brazilian girl confessed – it even made what came afterwards quite fun.
Andrea had little to do with the men. They usually turned up accompanied by Rohrer, Kull’s dogsbody, who would bring them straight into the prepared room, then disappear immediately. When Andrea served up the dishes, she would focus her attention on their female companions.
On one occasion she was banished to the kitchen with Maravan. There was a huge commotion in Falkengässchen before the guest arrived. A number of bodyguards searched the apartment, one making a recce of the kitchen, and after the mystery person had been smuggled past the closed kitchen door, yet another bodyguard came in and announced that he would be doing the waiting. All Andrea had to do was explain to him what each dish was. Each time he had served one, he practised the presentation of the following one with her until the temple bell rang again.
‘I’d love to know who that was,’ Andrea said as she and Maravan were going down in the lift.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Maravan replied.
It was not the shady side of his work that bothered Maravan, it was his role in it. When the diners had been for couples in therapy, he had been treated with the respect afforded to a doctor or specialist who is in a position to help people. And when they had done normal catering assignments he had been feted like a star.
Here he was ignored totally. It didn’t matter how tall his chef’s hat was, he was invisible. He hardly ever came face to face with the guests, and Andrea never had any compliments to relay back to him when she brought in the dirty crockery.