Brother Kemal Read Free

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’reprobably 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 besurprised! 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