The Stronger Sex (17 page)

“Chess?” asked Hochkeppel, as if he could make no sense of what I said.

“Yes, chess. The board game.” When he didn't react, I said, “I thought you'd have known he was a pretty good tournament player in his younger days.”

“Yes. Yes, I know that.”

“And I think I once told you I used to play with a chess club myself.”

He nodded emphatically. “Yes, indeed.” After a brief pause he said, “So that's how you came to be visiting him.”

I did not reply, although he seemed to be expecting express confirmation. Finally he said, “Then you've developed a kind of personal relationship with your client already.”

What was that supposed to mean?

I said, “I wouldn't exactly call it that.”

“Then what?” he shot straight back.

I was beginning to lose my temper. Was this going to turn into an inquisition? I said, “I got to know him a little better. Yes, you could put it like that.”

He nodded. After a pause I added, “And since then I've realized that… well, that in his way he's to be pitied. Sorry.” He was looking fixedly at me. I said, “He's absolutely impossible, that's true. No self-control. Overbearing, uses other people as if they were, well, pieces on a chessboard.”

When I did not go on at once, he asked, “But?”

“Yes, that's it, but! And I think there is a but.” I realized that I was provoking him to contradict me, and I tried to choose words that wouldn't annoy him too much. “But there's another side to him. He's not as hard as he makes out. He does have feelings. In some ways he even strikes me as over-sensitive. He has fears as well. The kind of fears a child has, you might say.”

“Yes, yes, that may be true. Now that he's coming to the end.” He snorted dismissively. “But as long as he was doing well, as long as he felt strong, he worked on other people's fears. Tried to intimidate those around him, the people
who had dealings with him. So that he could get what he wanted. Don't forget that, my dear Alexander.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I can't be any judge, of course. By comparison with you I hardly know him. But… maybe it was his business that made him like that. Maybe you need those unattractive qualities to build up a company like his.”

He nodded grimly. “True. Not forgetting his father-in-law's money either.”

“Oh yes?” He had caught me out there. “I didn't know that.”

“There's a lot you don't know.” He raised his hands in a sudden movement. “Sorry, that wasn't fair.”

“Don't worry.”

He bit his lower lip. Then he said, “No, back then… six or nine months after Cilly had moved into her studio or thereabouts… back then old Berger, that was his boss in the fitters' workshop, the old man wanted to give up working. He'd had enough of the rat-race, scrapping for orders and so on, and he had no heir, so he decided to sell his business. And our friend Klofft was first in line for it, of course. Only he didn't have the money. Didn't have any money – where would he have found it?” He smiled grimly. “But he did have Cilly. Gherkin Gehrke's daughter Cilly. Our good-looking friend had managed to get hold of her in those few months. And she in her turn got her father to agree not just to their engagement but to give her fiancé a loan. A hundred thousand marks; he bought the fitters' workshop and all his equipment with it. All except the storeroom that is now Cilly's studio in the yard.”

“She really must have been able to wind people round her little finger,” I said.

“God knows she could!” He nodded. “And this time she had the strong part of the family on her side, her mother.” He smiled, again with a rather grim expression. “I assume
that good lady had fallen for the handsome suitor just a little herself.” After a pause he said, “Gherkin Gehrke was rather short and stout.”

He laid the fingers of his right hand on the file he had been reading when I arrived, and pushed it back and forth. After a while he said, “And by the way, that hundred thousand for the business wasn't too much to pay. You could call it dirt cheap compared to what Klofft did with it. He turned the works upside down. Took his patents out of the drawer and used the premises to build his valves. And very soon he was doing business. Brilliantly profitable business.”

He glanced out of the window. “Then a time came, about ten or twelve years ago, I don't remember exactly, when he left the old building behind and moved into new premises out on the industrial estate. Dazzling white, shining glass and light metal,
Klofft Valves
up on top in red, slanting letters, very modernist.”

He fell silent. After a while I asked, “But she was never financially dependent on him, was she? Frau Klofft, I mean?”

“What on earth are you thinking of? Her father had been a good businessman himself, you know; he could, if you'll pardon the expression, make money out of shit. And he knew how to keep it all together. He insisted, incidentally, on a prenuptial contract for the young couple agreeing on the separation of their property. He'd presumably written off the hundred thousand marks, but he didn't intend his charming son-in-law to sponge off him for any more. He hadn't foreseen that the fellow would be so successful. No one did.”

He sighed. “Well, at least old Gherkin Gehrke provided lavishly for his daughter. And when he died, a year after his wife, Cilly inherited all the rest of what he left. I don't know just how much, but a lot, anyway.” He shook his head. “No, indeed, she was never dependent on Klofft.”

Silence fell. One question was preying on my mind more and more, a question I didn't want to ask him because it was clear to me that it would touch him on the raw and hurt him. But he obviously sensed what I wanted to know and came out with it of his own accord.

He looked at me, smiling. “Yes. Why did she stay with him? Assuming that what I have told you about… about the way he treated her is right. The way he treated her for years, for decades… and you've seen it for yourself, or at least you have some inkling of it, don't you?”

What was
this
? How did he know what I'd seen in the Klofft household? I hadn't told him about it.

He said, “If that is so, and if it's correct that she was, is, well off herself… why, you wonder, didn't she leave him long ago?”

After a brief pause he said, “I don't know myself.” For a moment he seemed to be listening to the sounds out in the yard through the open window. But the blackbird wasn't singing. He said, “His attractions for the ladies must have worn off some time ago. One would think. A long time ago. Or does that kind of thing last for ever?”

He stopped, but obviously couldn't refrain from making his next remark. “And she had bitter enough experience in what to think of that!” He shook his head, and then said, “Or is the man nothing to her but… but a memory that she won't give up? The memory of a great, overwhelming feeling? A passion that she once felt, once and never again?” He shrugged his shoulders. “A memory of her youth, something you never get back.”

I felt like saying I didn't believe it, but discovered that I lacked the courage. And I didn't want to interrupt him.

He said, “Maybe the child played a part in it.”

I was astonished. But as he was apparently sinking into his own thoughts, and I wanted to know more, I asked, “What child? Did the Kloffts have one? I didn't know anything about that.”

“The successor he wanted,” said Hochkeppel. “The heir. The child they never had. He was expecting her to have a baby. It seemed to him pretty much like the natural course of events. And she did want a baby herself, I think. But nothing came of it.”

After a while I asked, “Was that to do with her? I mean, was she…”

“I really don't know. I don't even know whether they had medical tests.” He hesitated, and then said, “But if it
had
been because of her, he'd probably have got a divorce. And married another woman.” He let out air through his nostrils. “Assuming the other woman could prove that she was fertile. Although I think the whole idea – divorce and a new marriage, but no ultimate guarantee of a child – probably just seemed too risky to him. And too expensive.”

I was disturbed by the disparaging tone of this argument. It went decidedly against the grain with me. “But maybe he didn't
want
to get divorced from his wife,” I said. “He could have had a child without getting divorced – with one of his lovers, I mean, if he'd provided for her well enough. Frau Fuchs, for instance. It seems she was his dream woman, she must have had what it took. She was all woman, you said.”

“Oh yes. And he'd have dumped his wife on the spot for her. But our Käthchen presumably dumped him herself.”

He wasn't prepared to credit his friend with doing or refraining from doing even
one
thing that could have been seen in a reasonably positive light. I said, “Right. But maybe it wasn't her fault. I mean that they didn't have a child. Maybe it was his.”

He nodded. “That's exactly what I mean.”

I looked at him blankly.

He said, “If it had been to do with him, then she had an understandable reason for staying with him, never mind
his repellent qualities, all his harassment and bad conduct. Don't you understand?”

“No, I'm sorry, I don't.”

He smiled. “It's something that only someone who really knows her would understand.” He leaned a little way forward. “She stayed with him because he would have been finished if she'd left him. Left him because he wasn't capable of giving her a child! Superman in person, you see! Can you imagine how that would have made him feel? It would have been the end for him, it would have left him devastated. Broken to pieces. It would have reduced him to nothing. And you may believe me when I tell you that Cilly Klofft would never have been capable of such… such a cruel execution. Never in her life.”

After a while I said, “But maybe you see her in rather… rather too rosy a light.”

I was shocked to hear myself make this unkind, indeed venomous remark. But it was out now and I couldn't take it back.

He stared at me. Then he took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, put his glasses back on again. After a glance out of the window, he turned to me. He said, “Did you talk to
Frau
Klofft as well over the weekend? Or maybe you even saw her? On your visit to the house, for instance, when you were playing chess with him?”

I felt hot under the collar. In my attempt to make it clear to Hochkeppel that Cilly Klofft might not be quite the innocent but admirable victim he thought her, at the same time asking for a little sympathy for Klofft himself, I had entirely forgotten that while he was relaxing in the forest, I had come by a few new and not insignificant items of information relevant to our case.

It was true that part of that information arose from the fact that Cilly Klofft had invited me to her studio on Sunday morning, in fact had invited me to breakfast. Anyway, to a
rendezvous of which our client knew nothing and was not to know anything, and that I had accepted her invitation at once. And I wasn't sure what he would think of that.

18

I said Cilly Klofft had called me on Saturday evening and said she had something important to tell me. Something relevant to the dismissal without notice of Frau Fuchs. So I'd gone to see her on Sunday, and she had told me that the all-important order which her husband had given as the reason for not letting Frau Fuchs have time off had been pure invention. He had made it up, and in reality there had never been any such order.

He looked at me for a while and then asked, “How did she say she knew that?”

“She looked at his papers.”

“His papers? Does he just leave that kind of thing lying around?”

“I don't know.” I hesitated briefly but then said, “No, I don't really think so. But she looked, anyway. Wherever. And she found his written notice of dismissal of Frau Fuchs, with a handwritten note in the margin of his copy.”

He didn't ask what the note said. He looked at me in silence. I began to suspect that he had heard all this from Cilly already and just wanted to find out what I was going to tell him about my meeting with her. He could have called her from the forest when he was out for a walk, while his wife was busy in the log cabin.

And now he was waiting with interest for me to tell him about our meeting. Had he called her at the weekend even before she had let me into the privacy of her studio? Or only after I'd left her sitting there on the sofa and made my escape?

I said, “He wrote the word
Thionville
in the margin.”

Still he didn't react, but gazed at me through his tinted glasses and kept silent. Not that that need mean anything, because it could be assumed that he knew Thionville, and not just Thionville but also Gaston Weber, possibly one of those in competition with him for Cilly's favours, and that he also knew all about the good business that Klofft had done with Weber. They might well have been together in a hunting party in the woods of Lorraine, or he could have met Gaston on one of Klofft's yachting trips.

He listened without moving a muscle to the rest of the story – how Cilly had called her friend Gaston and bluffed him, and found out that he was no longer in any position to give Klofft a profitable order. When I'd finished, he still said nothing for a moment, and then remarked, “Of course that doesn't prove that no such order existed.”

“I know. It could have been some other customer who held out the prospect of the large order and then pulled out.”

He nodded, and said, “But you're afraid that Frau Fuchs has done her research and will come up with this story. And then we'll have to find evidence that someone or other really did intend to give an order.”