you’re finished.’
She watched me head to the door.
‘Tell me …’
I turned. ‘Yes?’
‘Will my parents hear about this?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think you’ll be needed as a witness. Nothing really happened to you – forgive me for putting it like that, but I have to say so from the legal point of view – and there’ll be plenty of other women to give evidence.’
‘You mean there were other girls before me?’ she asked, and I had the disagreeable impression that she’d have liked to be the only one.
‘Frau de Chavannes, in case this isn’t clear to you yet: Abakay is a pimp. And if girls didn’t want to go along with him he pumped them full of heroin. You can forget about art and romantic films. You happened to be lucky.’
And with that little lecture I left her alone. Abakay, Abakay, I thought on my way along the corridor, you really have a knack for it: a little social kitsch, cheap drinks, terrible films, and great big gold rings on your fingers, and the girls come running! I wondered whether Valerie de Chavannes herselfhad landed in those white satin sheets after a couple of glasses of Aperol.
When I reached the front hall of the apartment Abakay’s mouth was open, he was groaning, and he was clearly about to come back to his senses. I hit him on the head again with the pistol, and then I searched his pockets. In his trouser pocket I found one thousand two hundred euros in hundred and two-hundred-euro notes, along with some fives and tens. Presumably there had been exactly one thousand five hundred there an hour ago. Maybe Abakay had made out that Marieke was a virgin; that would have explained the high price. Then Marieke had been difficult, and to calm her down Abakay had gone to buy heroin with some of the money he had obtained in advance from fat Volker. One thousand two hundred and a few squashed notes were left.
I took the bigger bills and stuffed them into the pocket of fat Volker’s jeans.
Then I went into the kitchen and searched the drawers for a sharp knife. The shower was running in the background. I hoped Marieke would never tell her mother that she had slept with Abakay.
I returned to the entrance hall of the apartment with a butcher’s knife about thirty centimetres long, knelt down beside Abakay, and cut and stabbed him lightly in the chest and the stomach. Not deep wounds; I just wanted it to look as if there had been a fight, and I wanted Abakay’s blood on the blade. Abakay groaned again and twitched, but he didn’t come round. I crawled over to fat Volker, wiped the handle of the knife on my T-shirt, and closed his cold hand round it. The small wound, level with his heart, had stopped bleeding.
I took a roll of parcel tape from the office, a teacloth from the kitchen, gagged Abakay and bound his legs together.
After that I went back into the office, turned on the computer, and typed ‘Marieke’ into the window of the search engine. The name appeared on a list of various girls’ nameswith pseudonyms after them. The pseudonym Laetitia, in brackets, followed Marieke’s name, and then it came up in a kind of catalogue. The file was entitled ‘Autumn Flowers 2011’. The photographs were simple snapshots of fully clothed teenagers in the street or cafés, usually laughing. Laetitia was described as:
Clever, demanding upper-class girl, political interests, likes conversations, will go to great lengths in her search for adventure if the tone is right, ready for almost anything, exotic, milk-coffee colour, very well developed, still fourteen for several months
.
Fourteen; that accounted for the price.
Another girl with the pseudonym of Melanie was described as:
Happy, natural suburban girl, loves horses, likes to have fun – laughter above all. More for the conventional ride than delicate games, blonde, fresh, youthful type. Sixteen
.
Probably eighteen.
And then there was Lilly:
Super special! Sweet little mouse in knee-length socks, still plays with
Leen Elle
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