Free The Chef by Martin Suter

days.
    When he finally got through to Nangay, she sounded weak and exhausted.
    ‘Are you taking your medicine,
mami
?’ he asked. He used the traditional polite form of the second person and called her
mami
: aunt.
    ‘Yes, yes. Is that why you’re calling?’
    ‘Partly.’
    ‘Why else?’
    Maravan did not really know where to begin. She pre-empted him.
    ‘If it doesn’t work the first time, that’s perfectly normal. Sometimes it takes weeks, months. Tell them they have to be patient.’
    ‘It did work the first time.’
    For a while she said nothing. Then, ‘That happens if both people believe strongly enough.’
    ‘But the woman didn’t believe. She didn’t even know.’
    ‘Then she loves the man.’
    Maravan did not answer.
    ‘Are you still there, Maravan?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Nangay asked quietly, ‘Is she a Shudra, at least?’
    ‘Yes,
mami
.’ The lie was excusable, he thought. Shudra was the servant caste. And Andrea was an employee in the service industry, after all.
    When his sister came on again, he asked, ‘Is she really taking her medicine?’
    ‘How can she?’ She sounded annoyed. ‘We haven’t even got enough money for rice and sugar.’
    After the conversation Maravan sat in front of the screen for a good while. He was now convinced that the rapid effect of the food must be down to his molecular cooking.

June 2008
9
    It had been so sunny on Sunday morning that Dalmann had taken breakfast on the terrace. But no sooner had Lourdes brought out the scrambled eggs and bacon than the wind blew a
large cloud across the sun.
    Dalmann got stuck into his breakfast nonetheless, and reached for the top newspaper on the pile of four laid out by the housekeeper. Now he began to feel gloomier. The hysteria surrounding the
destruction of the documents by the Bundesrat had thrown up a lot of dirt, unnecessarily. A section of the Federal News Service’s report about the nuclear smuggling affair had fallen into the
hands of a journalist, and now they were talking about the Iranian connection as well as the Pakistani one. It would not be long before the name Palucron appeared in the newspaper.
    Palucron was a company – now no longer trading – with its headquarters in a lawyer’s office in the city centre. At the time it had channelled payments from Iran to various
firms, all of them rock-solid enterprises with impeccable reputations, who certainly had no idea that they were implicated in the development of a nuclear programme.
    Of course this was also true of Palucron, officially. At least it was for its director, Eric Dalmann, who had only taken up the position at the request of a business acquaintance to whom he owed
a favour.
    At all events, it would be extremely inconvenient for him to be mentioned in the same breath as this story, especially at a time when business was taking a knock due to the financial crisis.
    Dalmann looked up at the sky. A whole bank of cloud was obscuring the sun. He was wearing casual summer clothes – a green polo shirt and light, tartan golf slacks – and an
unpleasantly cold wind chilled him to the bone.
    ‘Lourdes!’ he called. ‘We’re going inside.’ He stood, picked up his coffee cup, and went through the veranda door into the living room. He sat in an armchair,
staring morosely, until the housekeeper had cleared the breakfast from the terrace and laid the table in the dining room.
    He had scarcely sat down and started on a new plate of scrambled eggs and bacon – the first, only half eaten, had gone cold during the change of tables – before the doorbell rang.
Schaeffer, as ever, was a little too punctual.
    Schaeffer was Dalmann’s colleague. Dalmann could not think of another word for him. He was not exactly a secretary or an assistant, and right-hand man did not describe him accurately
either. So Dalmann had stuck with ‘colleague’. They had been colleagues for nearly ten years now and had dispensed with formalities early on. Schaeffer called