Brother Kemal (2 page)

Of course it was the other way around: she turned me on, and what I called her I-only-ever-think-of-one-thing look was presumably more an I-can’t-believe-I’m-letting-such-a-Turkish-asshole-sit-here-in-my-elegant-armchair-from-the-Art-Cologne-Fair expression. For some reason she seemed to think she was dependent on me.

‘Well … I told you on the phone that Marieke has recently been in touch with an older man – that’s to say, older than Marieke, around thirty. He’s a photographer, or so he claimed anyway. He said he wanted to take fashion photos of her – the usual chat-up line. His studio or office, or maybe just his
apartment, is somewhere in Sachsenhausen. She mentioned Brückenstrasse and Schifferstrasse a couple of times. There’s a little tree-lined square. At supper, Marieke talked about a corner café there …’

She cast me an inquiring glance. Did I know the café? The square? Sachsenhausen? Or was Gutleutstrasse all I knew of Frankfurt? Was I exactly what she’d been afraid of finding when she turned to the Internet in search of a private detective: a drunken, crude man from a sketchy neighbourhood who had failed at all the professions he’d tried before? Trouble with your ex-wife? Ex-husband? An overdue bill for drugs? Poorly treated by the pizza delivery guy? Kemal Kayankaya, private investigator and personal protection, your man in the outer city centre of Frankfurt!

I sipped the green tea, which tasted like liquid fish skin – or the way that I imagined liquid fish skin would taste – and asked, ‘Why did she mention it to you?’

‘Mention what?’

‘The café.’

For the first time she seemed annoyed. ‘What do you mean, why?’

‘Well, you say the relationship between you isn’t entirely easy at the moment. So why does she tell you about a café where she goes to meet a man who, her mother thinks, is bad company for her? Do you know him yourself?’ I gave Valerie de Chavannes a friendly smile.

‘I, er, no …’ She leaned forward and put her teacup down on the low, cloud-shaped table between us. ‘Well, I saw him once by chance when he was bringing Marieke home in his car. We shook hands briefly.’

‘What kind of car does he drive?’

‘What kind of car …?’

Once again she hesitated. Maybe it was a matter of form, maybe she simply wasn’t used to being asked questions by someone she was paying. Or maybe she didn’t need a
detective at all – at least, not one who found anything out.

‘No idea, I don’t know much about cars. Something flashy, showy, a jeep or an SUV or whatever they’re called, black, tinted windows – maybe it was a BMW. Yes, I think it was a BMW.’

‘You did well for someone who doesn’t know much about cars. Perhaps you don’t know much about number plates either?’

She stopped short, slightly parting her full glossed lips into a moist, narrow-slit smile, looking as if I had asked whether I could invite her sometime to a delicious frozen meal and women’s all-in-wrestling on TV. I decided to make her stop short like that as often as I could.

Smiling, I raised a hand. ‘A little joke, Frau de Chavannes, just a little joke. Tell me what the man looks like, please: size, hair colour and so on.’

This time her hatred of him brought me a prompt answer. ‘Medium height, what do I know, neither really short nor particularly tall. Lean build, fit, long curly black hair, in that greasy combed-back style, dark eyes, three-day stubble – good-looking if you like that type.’

‘And that type is …?’

‘Well, someone looking to pick up girls in a disco, that sort of character.’

‘You mean the slimy sort with the carnal stare, heels a little too high and an immigrant background?’

I smiled at her encouragingly.

‘If … if that’s how you’d describe it …’ For a moment she didn’t know where to look or what to do with her hands. Then she glanced up and looked at me, sceptical and curious at the same time. ‘Just so there’s no misunderstanding: no, I don’t think so.’

‘Of course not. It was only to get things clear: now I know what type you mean. And furthermore, that’s why you called me, isn’t it?’

‘
That’s why I called you …?
’

‘That’s why you called Kayankaya, not Müller or Meier. Because you thought a Kayankaya ought to know how to deal with an immigrant background. What’s the man’s name?’

She briefly wondered whether to refute what I’d said, and then replied, ‘I don’t know exactly. Erdem, Evren – Marieke mentioned it only once or twice.’

‘You have a certain amount of trouble with the names of your daughter’s boyfriends, don’t you?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Jack or Jeff, Erdem or Evren …’

‘What do you mean?’ She looked puzzled, then sat up straight in her chair and snapped at me, ‘What are you getting at, anyway? Why are you talking to me like that!’ All at once she got to her feet and walked quickly to a bookshelf at the other end of the living room. It was roughly fifteen metres away. I noticed her swaying her hips attractively in spite of her rage. From the back, she could easily have passed for a woman in her mid-twenties. With a rounded, taut behind like that, either she spent a lot of time in the gym or Edgar Hasselbaink had struck lucky with her genes.

‘I called you to get me my daughter back! I’m just about dead with worry, and you sit here grinning and asking me nonsensical questions!’

She reached into the bookshelf and brought out a pack of cigarettes.

‘Well, questions about the name of the man with whom your daughter is presumably involved, what kind of car he drives and where he lives aren’t as nonsensical as all that.’

‘You know exactly what I mean!’ She snapped her lighter, held the flame to her cigarette, inhaled the smoke and angrily blew it out again. ‘Have I heard of number plates! Insinuating that I don’t remember the names of my daughter’s boyfriends! Your manner as a whole …’

She took another drag. ‘All that silly sarcasm! And you’re
probably just looking at my tits the whole time!’ She walked halfway across the room towards me, stopped abruptly and jabbed the fingers holding her cigarette in my direction. ‘Either you’ll work for me and do as I ask, or I’ll look for someone else!’

I let her tantrum blow itself out, watching her breasts, as if she had shown me an interesting detail in the living room furnishings. I thought it was rather funny. She took it sportingly well, shaking her head and laughing dryly as much to express ‘I don’t believe it!’ as ‘You’ve got some nerve!’

‘To be honest, I was just taking a look at your snake now and then. At least, I assume it’s a snake, but unfortunately the head is out of sight – oh, sorry, I mean the head is out of sight.’

She switched to looking at me as if I were an amiable madman: a friendly, sympathetic and slightly repelled look. She drew on her cigarette. ‘You don’t say so,’ and in her thoughts she was probably running through the list of private detectives in Frankfurt to decide which of them to call next.

‘Right.’ I put my cup of fish-skin broth down on the glass table and leaned back in my chair. ‘So you want me to do as you ask. I’d be happy to do that, Frau de Chavannes, although I’m not sure that you know exactly what you want me to do.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Look, this is how I see it, roughly: you met this man – Erdem or Evren – somewhere or other, in the gym, or at a private viewing, something of that nature. He made up to you, and you felt a little curious, maybe along these lines: immigrant background, gold chain, oily hair – you don’t meet that kind of person every day, you thought you’d like to hear what he had to say. And when it wasn’t just the stupid showing off that you expected – let’s suppose he was witty, charming, a little bold, and anyway he could tell stories that you don’t often hear at the upper end of Zeppelinallee – anyway, you thought something like: Let’s invite him to a party, won’t Frau von What’s-It and Consul Thingummy be
surprised! See who Frau de Chavannes has come up with this time! And so all went well, Erdem or Evren was the original party sensation you hoped he’d be, he flirted with Frau von What’s-It, he let Consul Thingummy tell him about something of no interest to anyone else, and told crazy stories about his friends, women, cars, the wide world, a touch of the suggestive, a touch of the Oriental, until …’

I stopped for a moment. Nothing of Valerie de Chavannes was moving except the ash falling from her cigarette to the floor, but her eyes rested on me like the eyes of the fish whose skin I had just been drinking.

‘… your daughter came home. At her age, parties given by your parents are a good reason to go to bed early for once and conserve your strength for your own parties over the next few days. But then your daughter saw Erdem or Evren, and that was a refreshing change from one of those usually boring occasions with the What’s-Its and the Thingummies and Papa’s tipsy painter friends – and so on. I may not have the details right, but the general drift of where your problems are coming from must be something of that nature? Of course that’s the harmless version. There’s another possibility, no party, no husband …’

‘Shut up!’

Her cigarette had burnt down to the filter and gone out. All the same, she still held the butt as if she were smoking it.

‘I assume that’s the reason you don’t want me to talk to Marieke’s friends? I’d find out that Marieke was going around with one of her mother’s acquaintances. Marieke is sixteen, she has a right to do that, and if she’s enjoying the situation … she wouldn’t be the first daughter in the throes of puberty who wanted to show her mother a thing or two.’

She was looking absentmindedly at the floor. The cigarette end dropped from her hand, but she didn’t seem to notice. Suddenly she raised her head and asked, impatiently, ‘So now what?’

‘So now what?’

‘What are you suggesting?’ Her voice was harsh and stern, but she was being stern with herself, not me.

‘You mean what should you ask me to do?’

‘I want you to bring my daughter back!’

‘Yes, I know that, Frau de Chavannes. But suppose you were to try Erdem or Evren first …’

‘Erden! Erden Abakay. He lives over the café I mentioned on the corner of Schifferstrasse and Brückenstrasse. He’s quite well known there, you’d find him easily.’

‘And then?’

‘Then you’d get my daughter out of there!’

‘Without telling her I was doing it for you?’

‘Of course.’

‘And preferably I’d beat up Abakay and threaten him – if he ever comes near Marieke again, and so on?’

She didn’t reply to that.

‘Frau de Chavannes, I’m a private detective, not a bunch of heavies. Once again: suppose you call Abakay first and try to speak to your daughter?’

She shook her head. ‘Out of the question.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m afraid of saying something wrong, something to drive her even further into that bastard’s arms. At the moment it doesn’t take much to make my daughter feel I’ve said something wrong.’

‘Suppose your husband were to call?’

‘My husband?’ She looked at me as if this were a remarkably idiotic question. ‘I definitely don’t want to drag him into this.’ She turned away and went back to the bookshelf for another cigarette. ‘Anyway, he’s away. He’s guest professor at the Academy of Art in The Hague. He won’t be home for another two weeks.’ She lit her cigarette, turned to me, and said firmly, ‘I want to get this whole thing out of the way by then!’

‘Okay, but then please tell me more or less how the story goes. If I come across Abakay I don’t want to hear any startling new discoveries. “Frau de Chavannes is my sister’s best friend,” that kind of thing.’

‘Nonsense. It was more or less as you thought. He approached me in the café, and I was a bit curious. A man speaking to a woman alone in a café, where do you find that these days? And I was probably rather bored that morning. We talked, and he was actually amusing – well, amusing in a nightlife, gambling, who-cares-about-tomorrow kind of way. Then he claimed he was a photographer and had taken a series called
Frankfurt in the Shadow of the Banking Towers
. Portraits of low-life crooks, characters, prostitutes, hip-hoppers …’

She cast me a glance. ‘I know, not very original, but …’

She was searching for the right words.

I said, ‘But together with the nightlife, gambling scene, the who-cares-about-tomorrow attitude, the immigrant background …’

She examined me for a moment as if, once again, she had grave doubts about letting a man like me take a look at her life. Then she drew on her cigarette, blew out the smoke vigorously as if to dispel those doubts, and went on, ‘Could be so. I was thinking mainly of my husband.’

‘Of course.’

‘I knew you were going to say that.’

‘What should I have said?’

‘Listen: I didn’t tell you the truth at first. I hoped to solve the situation just like that. I’m well known in this city, my husband is well known all over the world, while to me at least you are an entirely unknown quantity. And you’re a private detective. What do I know about private detectives? If I didn’t need help so urgently … Do you understand? Why should I trust you? I’m sure there are tabloids that would pay a few euros for a Hasselbaink mother-and-daughter story about
mysterious underground photographers.’

‘Maybe there are, but no private detective is going to risk his reputation for a few euros. Our good reputation, so to speak, is our business model – the only one we have.’

While she thought about that, her plucked eyebrows drew closer together, and two small lines appeared on her forehead. I liked the fact that she didn’t resort to Botox. Maybe those lips were the genuine article. I’d once kissed a pair of Botoxed lips, and it felt like shaking a prosthetic hand.

She went back to the bookshelf and ground out her cigarette in an ashtray. ‘So I can trust you?’

‘I won’t sell your story to a tabloid, if that’s what you mean. Apart from that, I think you rather overestimate the importance of the story.’

‘Are you familiar with the art world?’

‘I know your husband is a big deal there. Eyeless faces, am I right?’

‘That’s one of his famous series, yes.
The Blind Men of Babylon
.’

‘I’ve Googled your husband. International prizes and so on. All the same, the kind of tabloids you have in mind don’t set out to entertain their readers with people who paint series entitled
The Blind Men of Babylon
. Please tell me what you meant when you said you were thinking mainly of your husband.’