The Stronger Sex (21 page)

I nodded. “Good work, I must say. And very… circumspect.”

He tilted his head slightly again, smiled and spread his hands to the side, rather like a performance artiste selfdeprecatingly acknowledging an ovation, half-apologizing for being so extremely good.

“Only, my dear Herr Manderscheidt, you see… I'm not sure what the judge in an employment tribunal will think of it if I try to prove that Dr Wehling was deceiving his wife. I mean, I assume that he's married.”

“Yes, of course he is! But that has nothing to do with it! It's not the point at all.”

“I see what you mean, yes. You mean the point is that Dr Wehling could be bribed with sexual services.”

“Of course I do. What else?”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry, Herr Manderscheidt.” I looked at him. “Even if Dr Wehling had been making love to Frau Fuchs seven times a week… which incidentally we couldn't prove, we could only insinuate… even then we would not have evidence in black and white and beyond all possible doubt that, as a GP, he made out a certificate wrongly for his patient. Because we were not present to witness either the diagnosis of her preceding minor ailments, or the rewards she gave him in bed.”

He stared darkly at me, but did not protest.

“And just by the way, Herr Manderscheidt… the employment tribunals do not like it at all if the parties in such cases start washing dirty linen in public.”

He stared in silence for a little longer, then collected his photos, put them away and closed the briefcase. Then he got to his feet. “Well, I've done what Herr Klofft asked me to do. What you do with it is up to you.”

“Just a moment,” I said. “I hadn't finished! Sit down again, please.”

He hesitated for a moment, but then slowly sat down.

I thought briefly, and then said, “Maybe we only have to find another point from which to set out…”

He opened his lips, but said nothing, just looked at me. Gaping open-mouthed like that, he looked almost a little simple-minded. Well, very simple-minded.

I said, “I saw in your report that Frau Fuchs flew to Geneva economy class.”

He closed his lips, smiled, shook his head. “You mean that if she really had that lumbago thing she wouldn't have felt comfortable there? Maybe not, and on that airline the seats in economy are so close you can hardly get into one. But even before the plane was in the air, a stewardess came along and upgraded her to business class. I assume there was a free seat there. I'll bet you Herr Schmickler fixed it. He's in the travel profession. He probably provides the airlines with plenty of bookings.”

I was disappointed, but there was no reason yet to give up. “OK, so that won't work. But about Herr Schmickler… did he perhaps also book their rooms at the Beauté du Lac? Two rooms at such short notice in a hotel like that – it can't have been easy. After all, it was the height of the season.”

He nodded. “I had a lot of trouble getting a room for myself.”

“Well, you see, then,” I went on. “And in that connection something else could be very important. Something that you don't mention in your report. Just when were the rooms booked by Herr Schmickler, or whoever made the arrangements?”

Once again he reacted even before I had explained my question. And as before he allowed himself to smile, a smile that broadened to a grin. “Not bad, Dr Zabel,” he said. “I must say you're cleverer than I thought.”

I refrained from responding to that. He went on. “Herr Schmickler called Frau Fuchs on Saturday morning, quite by chance, wasn't it? And she told him about her lumbago. And he told her about the hotel with its miracle-working doctors. And then she said OK, and he booked the rooms. There was no reason to do that earlier, because she hadn't ricked her back until the Friday evening.”

He paused briefly for effect, then narrowed his eyes, still grinning. He said, “But suppose, all the same, he had already booked the rooms? Maybe at the beginning of the week? Or even earlier? Wouldn't that show that she got lumbago on purpose after she'd been told no, she couldn't take a holiday? The holiday she had meant to spend with her Herr Schmickler in the Beauté du Lac hotel anyway?”

I said, “Yes, exactly.” Herr Manderscheidt was by no means as simple-minded as I had been thinking after all. Maybe he acted the part of the obsequious, shabbily dressed little fellow just to lull people into a sense of security.

He said, “I'll check that at once. I'm sorry I didn't think of it myself.” He gave me an appreciative nod. “Definitely clever of you, Dr Zabel.”

“Of course,” I said, “there's no way I can ask you to do something like that. We'll have to ask Herr Klofft.”

He shook his head. “That's no problem. I'll tell him I thought up that notion all by myself.”

22

In my letterbox at home I found, as well as the usual stuff, a large envelope with a handwritten address, sender's name given as
C. Klofft
. I took it all into my apartment and opened the large envelope first.

It contained two pages with newspaper cuttings, one from the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, the other from the
Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Both bore pictures of women, one showing, in black-and-white newsprint, the painting of a seated woman looking at her face in a hand mirror; the other, in colour, was of the actress Tippi Hedren, once a great success as a Hitchcock star, now seventy-seven years old.

With them was a handwritten letter to me from Cilly Klofft. But even before I read it, I could guess why she had sent me those two cuttings.

The first was an article in which a woman writer whose name I vaguely knew assessed the painting of the seated woman. It was entitled, as I discovered from reading the piece,
Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida
, and it was by the American painter Ivan Albright.

With my lay understanding of art, I'd have described the picture as a realistic painting. Ida – if that was the subject's name – was shown as a woman no longer young, her figure rather full, in a short two-piece low-cut dress which left her legs bare from halfway down her thighs. She had crossed her plump legs, and they, like her face, showed the slight swellings and little hollows, in short the irregularities left on the body by age, marks that you see on older women in the swimming pool and of course the sauna.

Now and then such marks had even, secretly, aroused me a little, I suppose because they made female physicality so clear. But generally I had looked away.

In her analysis of Ida, however, the writer of the article went far beyond such a reaction, a shrinking from the sight of distinct signs of ageing. She had seen Ida's face as “dented and crumpled”, as “flesh rich in variation caught by the crushing grasp of time”, and also mentioned her “naked, devastated thighs”. The blue light in which she said the painter had shown his model, although you didn't see that in the black-and-white newsprint, even made the author of the article wonder whether Ida was phosphorescent, “like an organism in the process of decay”.

Looking the writer of the article up on the Internet, I remembered that I had once looked at a book by this author, the winner of many awards, when Frauke recommended it to me. It began with a woman who has been looking at a pair of men's briefs in a display window in a shopping mall, stumbling as she moves on and falling to her knees; a man helps her up and impresses her at once.

The account of her fall and the revelations following it seemed to me so painstaking and so contrived that I put the book down and never opened it again, in spite of the enthusiastic opinions of it that Frauke delivered to improve my literary education.

What made me suspicious of the article on Albright and his Ida by this writer, however, was not so much stylistic problems (although I noticed them again here, and I was irritated by them again) as the fear that every line seemed to express – the terror felt by a woman facing old age that would rob her of her smooth skin. An objective analysis of the painting, which one might expect in such an article, seemed to me to have given way here to a subjective cry of dismay.

But maybe it was all very well for me to talk. As I could work out after looking at her dates on the Internet, I was almost forty years younger than the writer. So far I had hardly ever been in touch with the fears – no, the torments and terrors – of old age as the end approaches. Until I had met Herbert Klofft and heard about his nightmares.

Yes, and until I had become friendly with Cilly, right?

Really? Or had that friendship not yet been affected at all by Cilly's age? Had it really been untouched by that, in spite of my headlong flight from the studio?

The photograph of seventy-seven-year-old Tippi Hedren showed a radiant woman – the blue of her eyes, the gold of her hair, her plain jewellery, the beige shade of her sweater and jacket, the discreet red of her lipstick. I'd seen several Hitchcock films, and I remembered Tippi Hedren's immaculate beauty in
The Birds
making itself felt in the middle of the fluttering, cackling, croaking turmoil of the evil-minded birds of the title. Also her chilly, reserved performance as the frigid kleptomaniac in
Marnie
.

According to the interview she gave the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, and as I could see from the photograph, for which of course she will have had the services of a make-up artiste,
Tippi Hedren, who is still director of the American Roar Foundation for the protection of beasts of prey, is as lively as ever, in spite of the many little lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, and the deeper lines around her mouth. But – as with Cilly – they don't make her look old, they make her look… knowledgeable, yes, and possessed of ironic self-confidence.

Only when I was wondering whether to write that in replying to Cilly did I realize that I had not yet actually read her letter. I picked up the sheet of notepaper and read:

 

I felt rather bewildered. To give myself something to hold on to, I reread the article about the portrait of Ida.

Right at the beginning of it, the author had given information which I may not have taken in properly before: Ida Rogers, who modelled for the portrait, had been a pretty married woman, a mother – and only twenty years old when it was painted.

Maybe I had misjudged the author of the article. Maybe she had described the painting accurately and appropriately. Perhaps it wasn't her own panic-stricken fear of the end of life and its attendant horrors that dominated the article so much, but the fear felt by the painter himself. If he thought he saw the decay of all living flesh even in a young woman, and had tried to present that, then the idea must have been like a spell throttling him. It must have obsessed and tormented him.

I took a sheet of notepaper out of the drawer and tried to write a letter to Cilly. As I was still wondering whether to begin with “Dear Cilly”, or “Dear Frau Klofft”, or in some other way, I saw the light on my answering machine was blinking. I turned it on, and heard the voice of Herbert Klofft's detective on the tape.

“Leo Manderscheidt here,” he said. “Bingo, Dr Zabel! Our friend Herr Schmickler did indeed book the two single rooms on Saturday. But,” and after a short pause he went on triumphantly, “but the previous Tuesday he had already reserved a double room. And then on the Saturday he changed the booking to the two single rooms! You see what that means? On the Tuesday he'd thought he could arrive with Frau Fuchs like any other couple. But on Saturday he knew that would make them conspicuous. Because she was supposed to be going to the hotel only for medical treatment.”

Another little pause, and then he laughed. “But who am I telling? You know better than I do what that change of booking from one to two rooms means. Well, goodbye for now. And if you get another bright idea like that, let me know! You'll always find me a grateful recipient. See you!”

23

On Tuesday morning I had only one date in court, and after that I drove straight out to see Klofft. I had called first, but no one answered the phone, and I had to leave a message that I was coming on the answering machine. Of course I was uneasy. I wondered whether I would be seeing Cilly, and whether I could strike the right note in my reply to her letter. I'd been thinking about it, but I hadn't written it yet.

Olga opened the door. She didn't let me in, but pointed up to the first floor. “He know?”

“I think so. I called and left a message on the answering machine, understand?”

She inspected me undecidedly for a moment, then let me in. However, as I made for the stairs, she put out an arm to bar my way. “Wait here!”

She climbed the stairs in her slippers, and I heard a door open and close.

I was disappointed. Where was Cilly?

A little later Olga appeared again at the top of the stairs, giving me a friendly wave. “Can come up!”

Klofft was sitting at his laptop with his back to me, but he was just turning it off. He gestured to me over his shoulder. “Come closer!” he said. As I went over to his table, he swivelled his chair round and looked at me.

It struck me that he was holding his right shoulder at a slightly awkward forward angle. He had to turn his head my way to look at me. His smile was friendly enough, but it seemed almost frozen.

“Would you like a coffee?” he asked.