The Stronger Sex (5 page)

After a brief pause he added, “That woman had something the matter with her back too.” He smiled. “Probably another case of lumbar vertebral syndrome.”

“OK, I'll take a good look at everything.”

He nodded. “Keep me in the loop. And something else.” He sat up straight in his armchair and looked intently at me. “Do everything necessary in this case, won't you? And everything possible.” He stroked his chin. After a little hesitation he said, “Whatever happens, I'd like to avoid the impression that I… or rather we… let the case fail when it could have been won. For which I would ultimately be responsible.” Another pause, and he added, “It would look as if I'd wanted him to lose. To get my own back on him.”

“I'll do my best.” I stood up, nodded to him, took Klofft's folder and went to the door. As I was going out, he said, “Wait, Alexander – wait a moment longer.”

I stopped and turned back. He was sitting there in his chair, hands on its arms, rubbing his forehead. “What did you say the woman was called… Frau Fuchs?”

I said, “Yes, that's right. Frau Fuchs.”

“Not by any chance Katharina?”

“Katharina Fuchs, yes. A qualified engineer.”

He groaned, “Oh no!” and looked away. “That puts the lid on it!”

“What?” I asked.

He beckoned me back. “Come here, please. And close the door.”

When I was finally sitting in front of him again, he cleared his throat, leaned over the desk and said, “He's had a relationship with this Frau Fuchs for years. I don't know exactly since when, but I think it began as soon as he'd given her the job.”

“But that was eleven years ago!” I said. “And he'd have been sixty-seven at the time, surely?”

“Yes, he was. But you needn't think it was some kind of last-minute panic. The randiness of old age, or whatever you like to call it. He'd always slept around. Good old Herbert, never missed a chance. And when there wasn't a chance, he
went looking for one. Usually found it, too.” He looked out of the window again, and then at me. “But this was different, this relationship with Frau Fuchs. I think he even bought her an apartment. Bought it and made a present of it to her, if I'm not mistaken.”

After a little while, when he seemed to be thinking, he said, “He didn't talk about this liaison, unlike his other conquests. He did drop a word to me now and then, though. Maybe to make me envious.” He smiled. “Or because he couldn't help it. Remarks about his Käthchen, as he called her. Käthchen, who was so capable at work. Who cast all the men into the shade but was still so feminine. A dream woman.” He smiled, and fell silent, looking at his hands, which he had clasped on top of his desk.

After a little while I said, “But the relationship seems to have foundered now.”

He looked at me as if he didn't understand. Then he said quickly, “Yes. Yes, that does seem to be so.”

I said, “And when I think of the terms in which he spoke of her, I do very much doubt whether he ever really… really felt any deep affection for her.”

He looked at me. “In what terms does he speak of her?”

“Well… well, he doesn't know me from Adam. But he literally talked about her bum, and that's not all, he talked about her – er, sweet little arse. That doesn't exactly sound as if he respects her.”

“Yes, well.” He rubbed his chin. I could hardly believe my eyes, but he was actually smiling, and he obviously had a lot of trouble in suppressing that smile. In the end, he said, “Well, you see, Alexander, maybe you don't quite understand that. As he sees it, such expressions are a compliment. Her – the part of her body he described so coarsely…” – he shrugged his shoulders and smiled – “he loves her the way she is, in his own way. His Käthchen. And that part of the body is an important asset of hers. As he sees it.”

I looked at him in silence for a while, and then said, “OK. If you say so.”

He nodded, smiling. I asked, “So when you said that put the lid on it, you were talking about her?”

He sighed. “Yes.” Then he leaned forward. “Of course I'm also assuming that she's dumped him. He himself,” he added, shaking his head, “wouldn't have parted from her of his own accord. Wouldn't have thrown her out of her job. But maybe she's found someone younger. Someone who suits her better. And I can well imagine that firing her may have meant nothing but his personal reaction to that. Over the top and out of control.” He slumped back in his chair. “And if I'm right there, you will certainly have problems with this case. He'll lie through his teeth, not just to you but to any and every tribunal. He'll even forge evidence if he has to, just to get his own back on the woman.”

I thought about this for a while. Then I said, “Do you think it's possible that he invented that order from a foreign customer? To give him a reason to say she couldn't have time off? I mean the order that never materialized later because apparently…”

He interrupted me. “Yes, of course! Don't underestimate him. He doesn't need a legal adviser to know that he really couldn't have forbidden her to take time off without some good reason.”

I stayed where I was sitting. I didn't feel too good about this.

Finally he said, “I'm sorry, Alexander, but… you have to see this through! I know it's a difficult case. And I'll give you all the assistance I can. But this business is, well, very unpleasant for me. A very delicate matter.” He fell silent for a moment and then said, “I need your help. Do you understand?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I do.”

5

I didn't get round to a thorough study of Klofft's file that afternoon. Gebhard Witzigmann, one of Hochkeppel's partners, had asked me to join him in interviewing a rather overwrought female client. She was planning to take legal proceedings in an equally overwrought disagreement about an inheritance and, as she reacted less prudishly to younger men, I was supposed to help Witzigmann with the therapy session, and write him an account of it afterwards for the record. He wanted to take it home with him that evening.

The discussion went on for a good two hours, and while I was dictating my notes of it to Simone Berger, Frauke called. She was still at her editorial offices and couldn't come to my place afterwards, as we'd agreed; she had to go to a private viewing of an art exhibition quite close to her apartment and write a piece about it. I realized that I felt relieved, and of course that made me feel guilty straight away. I said, oh, what a pity, and how about tomorrow evening?

Frauke asked, “What do you mean, tomorrow evening? I was thinking you might come to the art gallery
with
me. You might meet some interesting people there. And then we could go back to my place afterwards.”

I said I was afraid I couldn't very well do that. I still had to make my way through a file that I'd received only today.

“Oh no!” snapped Frauke. “Was that your idea of how we'd spend the evening? You studying your file, me sitting beside you? Maybe massaging your back?”

I said, “No, of course not.”

“How else?”

Simone Berger was looking at her screen with a deliberately calm, slightly bored expression that showed how hard she was trying to guess Frauke's part in this dialogue.

I said, “I'm sorry, Frauke, but I'm in the middle of a dictation. And I don't think this is something we can really discuss over the phone.”

“Oh, is that what you think? Fine. Have a nice evening!”

“Frauke?” I said. “Frauke!”

She didn't reply, but I hadn't heard her hanging up. I said, “Are you still there, Frauke?”

“Yes. What is it now?”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“Where's what?”

“This exhibition of yours, what did you think I meant?”

“How should I know what you mean?” She paused, but before my patience snapped she said, “At the Gallery Novotna. Bismarck, corner of Baumschulstrasse.”

“And when?”

“Seven-thirty.”

I looked at my watch. “I don't know that I'll make it in time.”

“Sorry, but that's
your
problem. See you.” And she rang off.

I arrived outside the display window of the gallery at five to eight. Inside, the place was crowded with people who were all looking in another direction. A young man in a dark suit opened the glass door to me and, before letting me in, put a finger to his lips. A man's voice could be heard in the background; he was delivering a kind of lecture in a conversational tone, ironically using the question, “What do we learn from this?” and similarly hoary old clichés. His audience laughed when he made another joke, which I didn't catch. I made my way slowly forward along the wall, taking care not to touch any of the pictures. Their glaring colours seemed to me to be laid on a little too thickly.

The speaker was standing at the far end of the room beside a delicate desk with an inlaid top and curved legs. He wore a green blazer with black buttons and emphasized the
high points of his lecture by leaning the thigh of the leg on which he was putting his weight against the desk, crossing his other leg over it and tapping the toe of his shoe on the floor. Behind the desk stood a tall, black-haired woman who wore a finely worked silver brooch at her neckline and looked as if she must be Frau Novotna.

On the other side of the green blazer, not far away but in the second row, I saw Frauke with a notepad in her left hand, apparently making notes of what the speaker was saying. I listened to his pleasantries for a while, but then gave up because he was boring me, and anyway I didn't understand most of his many allusions. I looked at the people I could see from where I was standing.

The tall, thin man holding a champagne glass, standing in the middle of the front row opposite the speaker, must be the artist whose work was the subject of this exhibition. He wore an open-necked shirt, white with grey stripes, and black trousers with sandals on his bare feet. However, contrary to my expectations he wasn't long-haired and bearded, but clean-shaven and with his hair cut short. I liked the look of the man at once, because the fixed expression with which he listened to the speaker was unmistakably a forced smile. I studied his face for a while. Suddenly I seemed to feel that I was being observed in my own turn.

I looked away from the artist and round the room. On the opposite side of it and facing me stood Cilly Klofft, wearing a plain black short-sleeved dress. She smiled at me and raised her glass. I showed her my two empty hands, smiled and shrugged. She moved her lips, but I couldn't read what she was saying from them, so I nodded and turned away. But a few seconds later I felt compelled to look back at her. She was still watching me, and smiled again.

When people began clapping, she symbolically joined in the applause by tapping the fingers of her free hand on the hand holding her glass, and then came straight over to
me. She arrived in front of me at almost the same time as Frauke. Frauke looked a little surprised when Cilly Klofft put out her hand. When Frau Klofft had greeted her too, Frauke asked, “You know Herr Zabel already?”

“Oh yes,” said Frau Klofft, smiling. “We know each other well.” For a moment she seemed to be enjoying Frauke's obvious astonishment. Then she explained, “Alex Zabel is representing my husband in a legal dispute.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yes, really!” She smiled at Frauke, then at me, then at Frauke again. “And how do you know Herr Zabel?”

Frauke opened her mouth, but then she closed it again. I had a vision of the two of them falling on each other in the next moment tooth and claw. I said, “We… we've been friends for some time.”

Frauke smiled sweetly. “You could call it that, yes.”

This was turning out to be a difficult conversation. To relax the tension I asked who the speaker had been. Cilly Klofft said that it was Dr Guido Albers, deputy head of the municipal department of culture. I said that judging by the rhetorical flights in which he had indulged that wasn't an elevated enough job for him. Frau Klofft smiled. Frauke asked me what that was supposed to mean, and said she thought he had spoken well. Willy Ferber, she added, was a rather complicated subject.

I asked, “Is that the artist? Willy Ferber, I mean.”

Frauke looked away from me, looked at the ceiling above Cilly Klofft and rolled her eyes, sighing heavily. Frau Klofft smiled. “Yes, he's the artist,” she said.

I was on the point of asking Frauke why on earth I should be supposed to know who Willy Ferber was when Frau Novotna came over to us. Frauke seemed to have no intention of introducing me, but Cilly Klofft instantly filled the gap, giving the gallery owner my full name, my title of doctor and my profession.

Frau Novotna examined me with the winning smile of a businesswoman, then turned to Frau Klofft and asked if she could have a word with her later. Frau Klofft said yes, of course, and why not now – unless Dr Zabel, and she smiled at me as she spoke, had to leave very soon? I said no, no, I could stay a little longer.

When the two of them had gone off into a corner together, Frauke said, “As you're going to stay a little longer, I expect I can go and talk to Willy Ferber. I assume you won't be interested in meeting him yourself?”

I said, “I wouldn't want to disturb your professional conversation. Look, can you tell me what's got into you?”

Widening her eyes, she glanced sideways as if to make sure I had meant her, and was not addressing someone else. “Me? What do you mean, what's got into me?”

“Are you by any chance jealous of Frau Klofft?”

After a kind of moment of shock, which she clearly expressed by letting her mouth drop open, she uttered rather a loud laugh. A few people standing near us glanced our way. She leaned slightly toward me and asked, with emphasis, “Cilly Klofft? Are you serious?”