Read Online Magic Hoffmann by Jakob Arjouni - Free Book Online Page B

that could be pretty vain. Fred backed off. ‘You can barely see it. From behind not at all. I mean, if I were to comb back my hair...’
    Something in their faces caused him to shut up. He stood hesitantly in the middle of the room, fingering the seam of his trousers. One cowboy tutted, then he said: ‘Do it then. Go to the bathroom, comb your hair back, and in four to five hours you can show us how you look. Okay?’ Then he smiled in what Fred took to be friendly fashion.
    â€˜Okay,’ Fred answered and smiled back, ‘if you fellows get a kick out of it.’ He waved at them and went to the hall.
    Nice guys, he thought as he closed the door behind him and weaved his way down the bowling alleys. And funny. Berliners had a different sense of humour, more internal. And by and large he got on with them just fine. You had to approach things right. Annette would be amazed: after four years in the nick, there he would be with a load of super crazy, enormously gay cowboys in shades, draining bottles of vodka, cracking one joke after another - he’d have become Prince of Berlin within a few hours. Yeah, the Prince of Berlin, the Prince of Canada, the world was his oyster!
    The first step in this direction was the search for more vodka. The next step along the hallway caused his head to smash against the wall.
    As he staggered into the kitchen, six pairs of eyes looked up from a table laden with papers. Grinning, Fred raised his index finger, ‘Hi!’ and was greeted with general murmuring.
    Over the table hung a large white piece of cardboard, on which was written in felt tip pen ‘WAGNER MILK’; there were arrows and little boxes containing text underneath.
    As Fred opened the fridge and withdrew a bottle of vodka from the freezer compartment, one of the women said: ‘I think the decisive moment is when the bus driver starts to whistle something from Tristan and Isolde .’
    They were discussing a film script: a Berlin theatre group flies to Africa in order to collect experiences and sense impressions for a modern performance of Wagner. The group gets lost in the desert and they are attacked by a gang of Bedouins, but they repulse them with tricks and stage magic and take a Bedouin boy prisoner. Some are of the opinion that he should be killed: he represented a danger, besides which it was the only way of not starving to death. Others were uncomfortable with the thought that they could be held guilty for such behaviour at a later date. And anyway, two young assistant directors find the boy quite cute. While they are arguing, the bus driver-cum-writer starts to look for a knife inside the car. As he does so, he is whistling a tune from a Wagner opera. The theatre ensemble are amazed when the Bedouin boy joins in whistling the melody, and it turns out that his mother is a wardrobe mistress and his father a technician at the Berlin opera and the boy was kidnapped many years ago by a slave trader during the summer holidays. The boy shows the group the way to a nearby oasis, and back in Berlin, his parents are given tickets for the premiere.
    â€˜Birth is truth, and nothing is more cynical than the truth,’ said one of the men at the table, as he looked round in a true and cynical manner.
    Fred leaned on the windowsill, sipped at the vodka and observed how these people with their casual gestures talked about things of which he knew nothing. The Prince of Berlin...but how to conquer the kingdom? It would be better if he could see Annette first - prince or not. In any case he hadn’t eaten anything since the bean soup in the dining carriage, and he would have liked to go with her to one of those crazy restaurants he had noticed on the way over here: pink walls, plaster statues, waiters in leather shirts, painted underpants behind glass - in Dieburg just one of these would have been grounds for a citizen’s action committee.
    Till then all he had was vodka. ‘Empty