Magic Hoffmann Read online

  Fred, Nickel and Annette share a dream: to escape to Canada, away from the crushing boredom of provincial Germany. Canada where you can live free, rent a house on the lake, go fishing, become a famous photographer... but such dreams cost money... and money comes from... banks.

  The great bank robbery goes horribly wrong and Fred is arrested but as in all good movies he doesn't grass up his friends.

  Four years later, Fred is out and heads for Berlin, a city in flux after the dismantling of the Wall. He is pursuing his money, his friends and still, his Canadian dream. But for Annette and Nickel life has moved on... Magic Hoffmann is a superb novel about contemporary Germany and one man’s refusal to be brought down by his country and his “friends”.

  Jakob Arjouni was only 20 when his first bestselling crime novel was published in Germany and was such a literary prodigy that he had managed to create a substantial and durable body of work by the time of his death in January 2013 at the age of 48. This output includes the five pioneering novels featuring Kemal Kayankaya, a Turkish-German private eye, which began with Happy Birthday, Turk! in 1985. An immediate success, it was filmed by the director Doris Dörrie in 1992 and subsequently published by No Exit in 1995.

  The final Kayankaya novel, Brother Kemal, which Arjouni wrote against the terrible knowledge of a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, will be published this summer by No Exit alongside reissues of the earlier books in the series.

  Arjouni’s fascination with detective fiction was shaped by external influences. Two of his literary heroes were Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon. From the American, he took the figure of the private eye as a flawed but honest outsider; from the Belgian, he learned the importance of psychological characterisation.

  But while these mentors clearly informed the creation of Kayankaya, with the detective’s status as the son of Turkish immigrants giving a fresh twist to the tradition of the investigator as an odd one out, Arjouni brought to the form an eye for social and historical detail that was entirely his own. Kismet (2001) deals with the consequences in Europe of the Balkan wars, while One Man, One Murder (1992), which won the German Crime Fiction prize, has a background of sex trafficking. Characteristically, the final Kayankaya book explores the limits of free speech and religious tolerance as the private eye protects an author under death threat from Islamists at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

  Born in Frankfurt as Jakob Michelsen (Arjouni was a pseudonym), he had an early literary role model: his father, Hans Günter Michelsen, was a successful dramatist and Jakob wrote a number of early plays before settling on the novel as his preferred form. His father gave him inadvertent but invaluable research for his future crime stories because of a fondness for taking his family to restaurants in an area of the city that was in the process of transition from red-light district to international quarter. Pungently seedy details of the rougher parts of Frankfurt are a particular feature of the Kayankaya books.

  While the Kayankaya novels were the basis of his initial reputation and income, they appeared at very wide intervals. Arjouni was prolific between them. Magic Hoffmann (1996) was a story of bohemians in Berlin planning a bank robbery. Chez Max (2009) was generally considered one of the most original and thoughtful fictional responses to 9/11: it was set in a dystopian Europe in 2064, where a fenced-off community hides from terrorism and unrest. The powerful English translation was by his regular interpreter in the UK, Anthea Bell.

  Modest, blazingly intelligent and thoughtful, his work both inside the crime genre and beyond it makes Jakob Arjouni a formidable figure in modern German literature.

  Mark Lawson

  noexit.co.uk/jakobarjouni/

  Jakob Arjouni: 1964-2013

  Praise for Jakob Arjouni

  ‘It takes an outsider to be a great detective, and Kemal Kayankaya is just that’ – Independent

  ‘A worthy grandson of Marlowe and Spade’ – Stern

  ‘Jakob Arjouni writes the best urban thrillers since Raymond Chandler’- Tempo

  ‘There is hardly another German-speaking writer who is as sure of his milieu as Arjouni is. He draws incredibly vivid pictures of people and their fates in just a few words. He is a master of the sketch – and the caricature – who operates with the most economic of means’ – Die Welt, Berlin

  ‘Kemal Kayankaya is the ultimate outsider among hard-boiled private eyes’ – Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

  ‘Arjouni is a master of authentic background descriptions and an original story teller’ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

  ‘Arjouni tells real-life stories, and they virtually never have a happy ending. He tells them so well, with such flexible dialogue and cleverly maintained tension, that it is impossible to put his books down’ – El País, Madrid

  ‘His virtuosity, humour and feeling for tension are a ray of hope in literature on the other side of the Rhine’ – Actuel, Paris

  ‘Jakob Arjouni is good at virtually everything: gripping stories, situational comedy, loving character sketches and apparently coincidental polemic commentary’ – Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

  ‘A genuine storyteller who beguiles his readers without the need of tricks’ – L’Unità, Milan

  Magic Hoffmann

  Jakob Arjouni

  Translated from the German

  by Geoffrey Mulligan

  noexit.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Copyright

  1

  The thousand mark notes fluttered like swallows, turning circles against the setting sun. When Fred whistled through his fingers, they flocked down and slipped back into his trouser pocket.

  ‘It’s nonsense,’ said Nickel and tore Fred from his dreams.

  They lay in the grass with a case of apple wine between them. The sun was shining.

  Fred muttered with his eyes closed: ‘We could pay our debts and go to Canada - that’s what you’re always wanting to do.’ He opened his eyes and blinked against the blue sky. ‘All for just half an hour’s ... work.’

  Nickel lay propped up on one elbow gazing over fields and meadows at the village below. Thirty metres away Annette was standing by the fence, stroking a calf and pouring apple wine down its throat. The calf seemed to like it. The other cows were watching the proceedings curiously.

  ‘You could buy that thingamajig,’ said Fred, ‘that camera thing ... you know ...’

  ‘The lens.’

  ‘Exactly. And a whole lot of other stuff. A complete kit. You could take fabulous photos of Canadian forests and ice hockey players and whatever else they’ve got over here. You’ll be famous, and in twenty years no one will ask if you once robbed a bank in Oberroden.’

  ‘Fabulous photos ... of prison maybe.’

  Nickel finished the bottle, put the empty back in the case and fished out the next one. His movements were as clear and precise as ever, as if he wanted to demonstrate once and for all the replacing and removing of apple wine bottles.

  ‘We’re hardly going to get to Canada by hanging around and doing waiting jobs at the weekend.’

  Fred grabbed a bottle as well. The calf had downed the first bottle, and A
nnette was raising a second to its lips.

  ‘And you,’ asked Nickel, ‘what do you want with the money?’

  ‘Presumably eating and drinking costs a few pfennigs in Canada as well.’

  ‘Two hundred thousand marks is a lot of pfennigs.’

  Fred shrugged. ‘For me it’s enough just to have the money.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Nothing then.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘In interviews with rich celebrities you always hear how money isn’t important to them, but they’d use it to live on. With me it’s the opposite: I don’t need much to live on, but I like having it. In the cupboard or under the bed. I like touching it, counting it, looking at the date...’ he took a slug, ‘and apart from that we need living expenses, a Jeep, bear traps, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Bear traps!’

  Nickel laughed. But at the same time a shiver of longing ran through him as he imagined the three of them in Canada. Vancouver, a house on the sea, endless forests, photos published in international magazines.

  Annette returned with the empties under her arm. She was wearing a red summer dress with yellow spots. Against the background of the green field she looked like a large flower. A gently swaying flower. She threw the bottles onto the grass and herself down beside them. ‘Well?’ she asked, looking from one to the other.

  ‘I’d like to know,’ mumbled Nickel, ‘why you of all people reckon to have just discovered the perfect bank robbery, in Dieburg of all places. People have been trying it for centuries.’

  ‘If Einstein had thought like that he would have ended up a peasant,’ said Annette sniffily, and she closed her eyes and turned her face luxuriously towards the sun. ‘As soon as I can speak English properly I’m going to drama school in Canada.’

  They drank apple wine and forged plans. The plans became vaster and more colourful, the bank robbery smaller and simpler, the case of apple wine emptier. They laughed as they watched the calf staggering round the field, mooing ever more exuberantly, and Nickel suddenly became convinced: the world belonged to them, and the bank belonged to the world.

  When Fred returned home that evening and sat down to dinner, Grandma Ranunkel said, as she was dishing up the stuffed cabbage and potatoes: ‘You look just like your father did when he was up to no good.’ She was wearing her green and yellow striped dress, a dark apron and the brown cardigan which had been mended a hundred times. Her grey hair was, as usual, severely combed back and piled into a bun.

  ‘I’ve found work , Grandma.’

  ‘Well?’ Not very convinced.

  Fred nodded, ‘And it’s a skilled job.’

  Grandma Ranunkel lowered her spoon and eyed him sceptically from behind thick glasses.

  ‘Skilled? At what?’

  ‘At…well, there’s no real word for it. I’d call it…’ he reflected, ‘winning the lottery, but without the lottery.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Well…’ he contemplated the steaming cabbage, ‘…someone dreams of becoming a rock star or travelling round the world. For example Nickel would like to go to Canada and become a photographer, but secretly he believes that he’ll never really do it, and then I come along.’

  Grandma Ranunkel frowned. ‘And?’

  ‘I develop strategies for people so that they can at least try,’ and he added casually, ‘for payment of course.’

  Grandma Ranunkel’s face assumed an expression of pity.

  ‘Who would pay for such a thing?’

  ‘You’ll see. Next Friday is my first consultation, and with the fee we can both go…’

  ‘But,’ she interrupted, ‘who has employed you and where?’

  ‘It works by advertisements; I’ll explain later.’

  Shaking her head Grandma Ranunkel sat down opposite him at the table. ‘What kind of nonsense is this, child?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Grandma , it’s a job with a future…’

  Four years later Fred was released from Dieburg juvenile prison.

  2

  White ankle-high gym shoes with black stripes. Did people still wear such things these days? Fred pulled the laces tight and made a knot. Outside the others were going to the workshop. A few of them knocked on the door.

  ‘Have a good one, Magic!’

  ‘Depend on it.’

  Fred hadn’t slept a wink all night. Overtired and euphoric as he was, life on this particular morning seemed dead simple to him. Four years ripped out of your life, pack your bags, sunrise. Nobody could touch him now. And if the shoes were out of fashion, he would bring them back into fashion. It wouldn’t be the first time. Earlier in Dance 2000…

  He shut the zip of his blue overalls and looked at himself in the mirror. The broad, angular chin, which seemed so reluctant to grow a proper beard, the bulging, slightly puzzled eyes, the protruding ears and the medium-length dirty-blond hair, which he had cut himself since he was fourteen; he piled it up in his fist at the top of his head and snipped the overspill. He hadn’t changed, no question. And he was proud of it. They hadn’t ground him down. Neither attempts at rehabilitation by the authorities, nor invitations to criminal scams from other inmates had got through to him. The prison had just been a waiting room in which he sat most of the time with his eyes and ears closed.

  The initial admiration of his fellow prisoners for the slick bank robbery , and for Fred’s refusal to grass on his mates in court, rapidly gave way to indifference in the face of someone who kept out of everything and seemed interested in nothing, other than fishing and log cabin construction. Some felt he was dumb, others a loudmouth; quite a few thought he was both. In fact Fred was both dumb and clever. Extraordinary foolishness alternated with staggering cunning. Thus he grasped extremely quickly which warders he had to win over in order to be left alone, but it took him a very long time to realise why his peaceable cell neighbour kept challenging him to wrestling matches in the gym, even though Fred was much stronger. Once Fred had allowed him to win for fun and, lying beneath him for the first time, had felt something hard pressing down on his navel. When Fred wasn’t interested in something, he didn’t grasp it, and then he became a loudmouth. His failure to understand was not quiet and discreet, but loud and arrogant, all guns blazing. He explained to the guys in the prison woodwork shop, who were all more skilled than him, that filling your head with dovetail joints and veneering was a mug’s game. It wasn’t without good reason that his contact with his fellow prisoners became rapidly limited to table football and the exchange of porno mags. Besides, Fred found the misery and rage of the others distasteful - wrong to mope around in jail, he thought. Free, rich and healthy you could afford to moan. But captive, tyrannised by screws, without women, and unhappy with it…?

  Fred ran a hand through his hair. At last he was through with the porno mags! He wasn’t handsome. Nevertheless, with his more or less deliberate, moronic charm and his easygoing manner he had had plenty of success with women. Why should that have changed? The moment he was released he would get to see blouses, dresses, asses and legs; life would begin again - just like it was before only with two hundred thousand marks instead of loose change in his pocket.

  Fred closed the suitcase, sat up on the edge of the bed and smoked a last cigarette.

  Shortly afterwards the warder fetched him and brought him to the gate. The warder informed the guard through the intercom: ‘Fred Hoffmann for release.’

  The first layer of steel moved aside and they entered the gate lock. The guard eyed them searchingly through the bullet-proof glass, then he pressed a button and the second layer opened up.

  ‘Best of luck, Hoffmann.’

  ‘Thanks, but now I don’t need any.’

  ‘Now you need it more than ever.’

  Fred shook his head. ‘I have friends,’ he intoned in English. And money, he thought, but of course he couldn’t say that.

  The guard groaned. ‘Cut out the English crap. Otherwise they’ll all think you’re an imbeci
le and you’ll never get a job.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Fred, ‘where I’m going I’ll only find work if I can speak English - that is if I want to work.’

  They shook hands, and Fred stepped out into the empty, sun-drenched street. The gate closed behind him. It took a moment for him to get used to the light.

  Opposite was a kiosk behind which were bright apartments with open windows and colourful flower boxes. There was the scent of lilac in the air, and the trees lining the street were green. It was quiet apart from the rustling of leaves and the chirping of birds. Was this not spring, was this not a beginning, thought Fred; what a wonderful world!

  He put the suitcase down and took off his jacket. Apart from the man in the kiosk there was no one to be seen. On the postcards he had written: between ten and eleven. His watch showed shortly before eleven.

  He picked up his suitcase and strolled over to the kiosk. The attendant, a balding forty year old, was dozing over a newspaper.

  ‘Morning.’

  The attendant woke up with a start. ‘Oh! Morning.’

  Fred laughed. ‘Spring fatigue?’

  ‘Mhmhm. What can I get you?’

  ‘A bottle of fizz. Make it your best.’

  Since his arrest Fred had drunk no alcohol, apart from the aviation fuel secretly distilled in people’s cells. That was a long time for someone who enjoyed the stuff in every halfways enjoyable form.

  ‘My best?’ the attendant scratched his chin, ‘Faber?’

  ‘Is that your best?’

  ‘Sort of. It’s my only one.’

  While the attendant shuffled over to the freezer, Fred took another look down the road to right and left.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  The attendant placed the bottle down and looked at his watch.