Arjouni Brother Kemal

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-84243-966-1
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 192 Seiten

Reihe: Kemal Kayankaya Series

Fifth mystery featuring Kemal Kayankaya Valerie de Chavannes, a financier's daughter, summons private investigator Kemal Kayankaya to her villa in Frankfurt's diplomatic quarter and commissions him to find her missing sixteen-year-old daughter Marieke. She is alleged to be with an older man who is posing as an artist. To Kayankaya, it seems like a simple case: an upper class girl with a thirst for adventure. Then another case turns up: The Maier Publishing House believes it needs to protect author Malik Rashid from attacks by religious fanatics at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Rashid has written a novel about, amongst other things, attitudes towards homosexuality in an Arabic country. Kayankaya is hired to be Rashid's bodyguard for three days. The two cases seem to be straightforward, but together they lead to murder, rape and abduction, and even Kayankaya comes under suspicion of being a contract killer for hire.

Jakob Arjouni is the author of the celebrated Kayankaya novels featuring a Turkish detective in Frankfurt. Titles include Happy Birthday Turk, More Beer, One Man One Murder and Kismet. Magic Hoffmann, a standalone novel was shortlisted for the IMPAC Award. His last novel, Brother Kemal, was published by No Exit Press in August 2013.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Arjouni, Jakob

Weitere Mitwirkende

Bell, Anthea

Leseproben

Chapter 2

My office was on the second floor of a run-down sixties apartment building – or perhaps it had never run very far up – at the beginning of Gutleutstrasse near Frankfurt Central Station. Pinkish brown plaster was crumbling away from the façade, the bare brick wall showed through in many places, a number of windows had sheets hung over them, others had furniture blocking them, chains of Christmas lights winked on and off all year round on the third floor and on the fourth floor a Frankfurt Hooligan decal covered one pane. On the ground floor there was a second-hand clothes shop where you could buy used moon boots, polyester shirts and cracked leather belts. My friend Slibulsky called it the Third Armpit, on account of the smell that wafted out of the shop when the door was open. The front door at the entrance to the building had once been ribbed glass, until a drunk kicked it in three years ago and the owner had replaced the glass with a wooden board.

The stairwell, which was painted greyish yellow, smelled of cats and cleaning fluid. If you found the half-broken-off light switch and pressed it, a candle-shaped naked energy-saving bulb gave just enough dim light to show you the stairs. Some joker kept smearing some kind of sticky substance on the banisters: jam, honey, UHU glue. I was sure the perpetrator was the twelve-year-old son of a single father on the fourth floor, but I couldn’t prove it. I once cornered him on the subject, and his answer had been, ‘Something sticky? Are you sure it was on the bannisters? Did you wash your hands first?’ Little bastard.

A Croatian Mafia, trying to keep me from investigating their shady business, had blown up my previous office thirteen years before. The two-room apartment in Gutleutstrasse had been a quick, cheap, and – I thought at the time – temporary substitute. My fears that, with such an address, and the state of the building, the only clients I’d get would be people with a list of previous convictions or bad drug problems proved to be exaggerated. It’s true that with the passing trade that made its way up the gloomy stairs to the second floor merely because of the nameplate saying Kemal Kayankaya – Investigations and Personal Protection, I could hardly have earned the rent in those first years. But I had a pretty good reputation as a detective in the city, the word-of-mouth publicity worked well, and business was good. My wish for a classier office space faded. I got used to the area, the chestnut tree outside the window and the little Café Rosig on the corner, until the success of the internet and computer technology made the location of my office superfluous. My clients got in touch by email or phone, my paper files would fit into a shoe box and I held business meetings in the Café Rosig. I could have given my private apartment as my business address. But then Deborah found an apartment in the West End district of the city – four rooms, kitchen and bathroom – and asked if I’d like to move in with her. We’d been at first an occasional, then more and more of an established, couple for more than six years, and I was happy to accept the offer. That meant I needed an office away from my home. If anyone else had designs on me with explosives or anything else, I didn’t want Deborah to be affected.

Since my website had gone online, exactly two people had come to Gutleutstrasse unannounced: a woman neighbour who wanted me to get her brother to confess over an inheritance dispute – ‘He’s a cowardly, soft little worm, you’d only have to squeeze him a bit’, and a sad man who had fallen for an anonymous girl in a porn film and wanted me to find her for him. When I explained how much such a search could cost him, and how high my advance was, he went away even sadder than before.

So on the morning when I came back from Valerie de Chavannes’s house to my office, I hardly took any notice of the woman leaning against a sunny bit of the wall, talking busily on an iPhone. She wore a blue, expensive-looking trouser suit, and had a short, modern hairstyle. In front of her stood a large leather handbag crammed with papers. An estate agent, I thought. There were constant rumours that the building was being sold to make way for another hotel or parking garage near the station.

I had just put my key into the front door lock and was about to shoulder my bike when I heard her calling behind me. ‘Excuse me…! Herr Kayankaya…?’

I lowered the bike and turned round. ‘Yes?’

She came towards me smiling, on high heels and with her full and obviously heavy handbag in one hand and her iPhone in the other. She had a broad, friendly face, and the closer she came the more clear it became how tall she was. She was almost a head taller than me; she’d still be half that extra height without her shoes on, and I’m not a short man. I liked to see such a tall woman wearing high heels – she obviously wasn’t setting out to do the short people of the world any favours. She let her bag drop to the ground, threw the iPhone into it and held out her hand to me. Her hand was large, too.

‘Katja Lipschitz, chief press officer of Maier Verlag.’

‘Kemal Kayankaya, but you know that already.’

‘I know you from a photo on the internet, that’s how I recognised you. The man who saved Gregory…’

She was smiling again, perhaps a little too professionally, and there was a look of speculation behind the smile. Did the name Gregory shake me? Gregory’s real name was Gregor Dachstein, and years ago he had won a Big Brother TV show, followed by a CD of songs like ‘Here comes Santa with his prick, chasing every pretty chick’ and ‘She’s an old Cu-Cu-Custard Pie Baker.’ Since then he’d played the clubs in the discothèque world between Little You-Know-Who and Nether Whatsit. Gregory’s manager had hired me as his bodyguard for an appearance at the Hell discothèque in Dietzenbach, and the outcome was that I had to take Gregory to Accident and Emergency in Offenbach at four in the morning with about thirty vodka Red Bulls inside him. A yellow press reporter was waiting there with a camera, and for some time after I asked myself whether the manager had arranged with the reporter to be there before the concert, and had organised his protégé’s consumption of Red Bull accordingly, or whether the idea of offering a tabloid an exclusive story had occurred to him only when Gregory collapsed onstage. Anyway, two days later a photograph of me with Gregory and my jacket covered with his vomit was published, with a caption saying: Poison attack? Gregory in the arms of his bodyguard on the way to hospital. It was an appearance I could have done without.

I responded to Katja Lipschitz’s professional smile by asking, ‘Would you like an autograph?’

‘Later, maybe – as your signature to a contract. As to the reason for my visit to you here…’ – she cast a brief, disparaging look round the place: backyard, wood-boarded entrance, all the traffic on Gutleutstrasse – ‘would you like to hear it outside?’

‘That depends. Does Maier Verlag sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door? Your trouser suit doesn’t look as if a door-to-door salesman could afford it, but maybe that’s just because it suits you so well…’

She was brought up short, apparently baffled at least momentarily by the term door-to-door salesman. Perhaps she was a neighbour of Deborah and me; you didn’t meet door-to-door salesmen in the elegant West End. By way of contrast, three shabby, pale-faced guys had been haunting Gutleutstrasse in the last year alone: ‘Want a great deal? Gala, Bunte, Wochenecho? Lots of good reading there. Or hey, just give me ten euros anyway, I haven’t eaten for days.’ It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a poor bastard to scrounge the few euros he needs to survive from a rich man.

She shook her head and said, amused, ‘No, no, don’t worry. We’re a highly regarded literary publishing house. Haven’t you ever heard of us? Mercedes García is on our list, and so are Hans Peter Stullberg, Renzo Kochmeister, and Daniela Mita…’

She was looking at me so expectantly that the possibility of my being unacquainted with her authors would have marked me out as a total idiot.

I knew the sixty-something Stullberg from newspaper interviews in which he called for young people to devote themselves to the old values. Reading his words, I thought how writers like to express themselves in metaphors: he was the old values, and the young person devoted to him wore close-fitting jeans and had nicely curved breasts. I’d once seen photos of Daniela Mita in Deborah’s Brigitte magazine, and it could be that the idea of the young person turning to old values had occurred to Stullberg at the sight of his colleague on the Maier Verlag list. I hadn’t read anything by either of them.

‘Sorry, of the two of us my wife is the one who reads books,’ I said, and couldn’t suppress a grin when I saw Katja Lipschitz’s slightly forced smile.

I looked at her with a twinkle in my eye and nodded towards the entrance to the building. ‘Come on up and I’ll make coffee. While I’m doing that you can look through my annotated edition of Proust.’

A quarter of an hour later Katja Lipschitz, now relaxed, was sitting in my wine-red velvet armchair stretching her long legs, sipping coffee and looking round her. There wasn’t much to see: an empty desk with only a laptop on it, a bookshelf full of reference works on criminal law, full and empty wine bottles, and a plastic Zinedine Zidane Tipp-Kick figurine from a table football game that Slibulsky had given me. Several...