The Stronger Sex (26 page)

And that whippersnapper, that clever snotty-nosed young fellow who had undertaken to represent his interests was also involved in the deception. Instead of enjoying himself with girls of his own age he was letting an old woman arouse him, taking the first opportunity to follow when she lured him into a quiet corner. There was a word for such conduct, rather old-fashioned, but it fitted. Unseemly. People didn't know what was seemly any more. Not young people, and not old women.

But nothing, neither indignation nor grief at the double betrayal would help the old man, nothing. There he was alone in his fine, silent villa among the green treetops. Olga would come at lunchtime to serve him soup. Until then he would have to stay alone, stranded in his chair, feeling time run by slowly, very slowly, but inexorably.

And again the same torture in the afternoon, after Olga left, lasting until sunset. Alone with the burning pain in his chest, fading slightly now and then, but always coming back, sharp as lightning, making his muscles cramp.

At some point I managed to shake off these painful thoughts. I tried to remember whether, in the course of our conversation, the detective had been able to find any reason for telling me his randy dog story. Could he have called me purely in order to tell me about it?

No, he had mentioned a reason for his call. “Herr Schmickler is here.” Of course that could have been a pretext. For I still couldn't see how the Swiss who was an expert in the travel industry could have endangered my case. Through doing research of some kind? What would he – a foreigner and probably unfamiliar with our city – have been able to find out that was any danger?

And yet I could not rid myself of one uncomfortable feeling. I could well believe that Herr Manderscheidt, with his trained nose, could scent trouble ahead.

27

My self-therapy in the Klofft case was simple, but I couldn't think of anything better. I called Frauke that afternoon. She was cool, as I had expected after neglecting her for the last few days, but finally let me invite her to an open-air concert by the river that evening. As well as the music there was to be an ox roasted on the spit, cool beer from the cask and finally a firework display. Simone had tipped me off about it.

Down there in the evening sunlight we also met Simone herself in the crowd, with her boyfriend of the time, a student of German literature in his eleventh university term, thin as a rake, working on the side as a copy-writer with an advertising agency. He ate two large plates of roast beef with
several heaped spoonfuls of potato salad, and turned out to tell good jokes. He annoyed Simone by making fun of the first band on stage, thus also winning Frauke's approval.

In his place I'd have shown more consideration for Simone. She had been sensible enough not to wear her red stilettos for this expedition to the water-meadows, and instead had on brown sandals with a broad heel. They came up to her ankles, but suited her just as well as the stilettos. Frauke said later, when the conversation turned to footwear, that they “had a slimming effect on her legs”. Meanwhile Simone, who did not rise to this back-handed compliment, found a piece of cardboard in a waste bin, crouched down, picked up my foot and scraped off the mud that was sticking to the soles of my shoes.

The evening ended harmoniously, all the same, apart maybe from the fact that after the last drink of the evening, at a stand-up bar, Simone sent her literature student home, a situation that he accepted without too much fuss, at the most with slight surprise. On our way back to Frauke's apartment she and I dropped Simone off at her front door, and I took a look – unobserved, I thought – at her retreating legs and thought that luckily for her they were curvaceous, even in those sandals.

Frauke said, “Are you going to tell me you
like
those sandals of hers?”

I muttered, “Why not?”

“Oh, I ask you!” said Frauke. “Simone can't wear shoes like that, not with her fat legs.”

I thought that this entirely undeserved criticism deserved an answer, but I let it go, so as not to endanger our truce. And the night passed very pleasantly. Frauke seemed to need to make up for lost time, which among other things gave me the pleasing certitude that during the days when I'd been so short of time she had not fallen for some other man.

Just in case the previous evening had left a trace of annoyance behind, I got up early, while Frauke was still asleep with the sheet over her face, I laid the breakfast table and even went out to the baker's to buy fresh rolls and two chocolate doughnuts.

The next few days went very well too. Now and then Frauke seemed surprised when I buried my hand lovingly in her hair or devoted myself with great intensity to exploring her skin with my nose, bit by bit, stroking and kissing it. She let me do as I wanted. In return I didn't reject any of her ideas for leisure activities.

I accompanied her to a concert given by a young Australian string quartet that had already had considerable success on its present European tour, its first, although its sound struck me as a little penetrating, not to say shrill. I went to another private showing of an art exhibition, at which, however, Cilly did not appear, and we attended the farewell performance in the city of a tenor who was to appear at Bayreuth and then had an engagement at the Met in New York. He was a fat little man with an incipient paunch and a throat like a road roller, and his hefty voice got increasingly on my nerves over the course of three hours.

On Friday evening we came back to my place after the opera. In the night I suddenly woke. I thought I had heard the telephone while I was half asleep. Frauke was lying beside me sleeping peacefully on her stomach, holding the pillow in both arms and occasionally making a little lip-smacking sound. I looked at the clock. It was quarter to four.

Cilly? Not likely. For a while I listened, but the phone didn't ring. I heard the far-away sound of a train crossing the railway bridge; it seemed to have a great many carriages. Long-distance, probably. Maybe en route for Istanbul. Istanbul Sirkeci. To Vienna by way of Passau, then down through the Balkans by way of Sofia. Our Turkish
countrymen visiting their native land, with cases and baskets and pillowcases stuffed full. They would get out at Istanbul Sirkeci, the old central station where the Orient Express once terminated.

How long would the journey take them? I thought I had read somewhere that the train ride to Istanbul lasted two days and two nights. But if so would the train set out in the middle of the night? And perhaps arrive in the middle of the night? No, it would probably start in the morning and arrive in the morning two days later. The train I'd heard must be going somewhere else.

I spent some time thinking of possible destinations to which my train might have been bound. I though of Kiev, where the train could have gone on a southerly route by way of Cracow and Lemberg, and pictured the great gate and the golden domes. Then I conjured up Vilnius, and suddenly, on a dusty unmade road between wooden fences, front gardens and low-built houses, I came face to face with Cilly. She was walking slowly toward me, but she didn't see me, she was looking at the front gardens to right and left of her where the heads of the flowers were drooping.

But maybe there were no trains going direct to Kiev or Vilnius.

I listened for the phone again, but it didn't ring.

That Saturday morning, while Frauke was singing in the bathroom, I suddenly thought of Cilly yet again. I had sent her back the newspaper cuttings with the two articles, as I'd promised, after copying them for myself, but I ought to have called after that to ask when she would have time to discuss the articles with me. As I made coffee and laid the table for breakfast, I felt heat suddenly rise to my head – I was blushing.

It was also an omission on my part that I hadn't been in touch with Klofft since last Monday. Of course, if he wanted another game of chess, he could have called me, and if I'd
been able to fit it in, I would have gone out there, but that struck me as a feeble excuse. Maybe he hadn't wanted to pester me.

How often had he been alone in his house this week, brooding on his situation? How often had he sat there looking at the view of the green garden, of the world now closed to him for ever, wondering whether to call me? Whether to ask for my company in his isolation?

I put the coffee into the pot, placed the pot on the table and stood there for a moment. Call Klofft? Or call Cilly first? Or before that try preparing Frauke for the fact that I must put my mind to the Klofft case again this weekend? It would have been rather embarrassing to be on the phone to one of the Kloffts if Frauke suddenly came out of the bathroom.

Suddenly it struck me that I might not be able to reach Cilly. Perhaps she had gone to her studio again, as she had the Saturday before. I didn't know her phone number there. And she hadn't given me the number of her mobile. I hadn't asked for it. That would have reinforced my sense that I'd reluctantly entered into a conspiracy.

Well, there it was.

But Frauke had the studio phone number. She had phoned it to ask whether and when Cilly was going to the Documenta. Although really, of course, to find out whether I was having a tête-à-tête with Cilly at that discreet place. Or so I thought, anyway. I went to the bathroom door and listened. Frauke had gone over to soul music and was singing with a heavy tremolo. I quickly went back to the bedroom, turned once more to fetch my notebook from the desk, listened to the sounds in the bathroom again, returned to the bedroom and looked around.

Yes, there was Frauke's bag. I glanced over my shoulder, picked up the bag and opened it. Frauke's organizer was in a side pocket. I took it out and tapped in
Klofft
. It was ridiculous, but my fingers were trembling.

The display flickered, but then it said
No entry
. How could that be possible? Cilly had told me that Frauke had called her at the studio.

Had Frauke stored the number under a password? But why would she have done that? She knew Cilly; it wasn't something she had to hush up.

I was going to put the organizer back, feeling hot under the collar at my breach of Frauke's confidence, when I had another idea. Maybe Frauke knew Cilly as a painter under her maiden name. Had she stuck to it professionally because she was proud of what she had already achieved before her marriage?

I went to the bedroom door and listened to the sounds in the bathroom again. Frauke seemed to have stopped singing. Was that the hair dryer I could hear?

Damn it – what had Cilly's maiden name been?

The alliteration gave it to me:
Gherkin Gehrke.
I tapped in
Gehrke
, and the display showed
Gehrke, Cilly
, and a landline number that I knew. It was the number of the Klofft household. There was also a mobile number beside it. I wrote the mobile number in my notebook, switched off the organizer, stuffed it back into the side pocket of Frauke's bag, took a quick look to reassure myself that the inside of the bag looked the same as before, and put it down in the place beside the bed where I had found it.

I had just reached my desk to put the notebook down when I heard the bathroom door open. Frauke called, “Alex?”

“Yes?”

“There's a little red cosmetics case in my bag. Could you bring it over here?”

“Of course.”

“The bag's on the floor beside the bed.”

“Yes, madam!”

A curiously good feeling came over me. If Frauke would
ask me to look for something in her bag, she trusted me. I felt almost as if, by asking for her cosmetics case, she was sanctioning what I had just done.

An odd sort of morality, fitting itself so accommodatingly to the facts. Was that something peculiar to my own conscience, or were other people made that way as well?

After breakfast Frauke asked, “Do you have anything planned for today?”

I said no, though I wanted to look at a few files, old files that interested me. Earlier cases of Hochkeppel's that he had recommended me to study. I pointed to the desk on which the stack of files lay. I was fairly sure she wouldn't look inside them.

These gems regularly got left by the wayside during the week, I said, because I usually didn't want to read dusty old cases in the evenings.

Frauke laughed. She asked whether I couldn't just tell Hochkeppel some time that I'd read it all with great interest and learnt something from it, and then I'd be rid of all that stuff.

I said yes, it might well come to that in the long run. Although this weekend I thought it was possible Klofft would call me again. It was Saturday; maybe he felt like another game of chess.

Frauke contented herself with an indifferent murmur. She didn't ask again whether I had nothing better to do on a Saturday than play chess, nor did she ask what was so special about the case that I had to visit that old fogey even at the weekend.

I took Frauke home. As we parted, she said we could call each other later and see if there was anything we felt like doing together.

Had the last few days – nearly four of them now – when we'd spent our free time with each other seemed a little too much for her?

I was thinking about that as I turned the corner and drew up by the kerb. But after a moment I took out my notebook after all and rang Cilly's mobile.

She sounded slightly surprised when she answered. I said, “Hello, Alex here. Good morning.”

“Oh.” She audibly drew breath.

“I hope I'm not disturbing you at work?”

“No, no! I… haven't really begun yet.” She hesitated for a moment and then asked, “How did you know I'm here? At the studio?”

“I worked it out.”

She laughed. “And where did you get the phone number?” After a little pause she added, “Frauke Leisner won't have given it to you. Or so I assume.”