The Stronger Sex Read online

  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.

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nbsp; 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?”

  “Yes, of course. That’s how you’re acting, anyway.”

  “Well, really!” She straightened up and looked at me with a searching smile. “I’d think you capable of a good deal, my dear, but so far I really never would have imagined you losing your head over venerable antiquities.”

  I felt the blood rise to my face. “What does that tasteless remark mean? Frau Klofft may be a lot of things but she’s certainly not a… a Roman ruin.”

  “Interesting! You seem to have looked at her very closely!” She appeared to be wondering whether to add some other cutting expression, but perhaps she couldn’t think of one on the spot, or perhaps she simply decided against it. Anyway, she said briefly, “Excuse me, please,” turned away and went over to the people clustering round Willy Ferber. The circle took her in, and Ferber shook hands with her.

  I was furious and taken aback at the same time. Was she seriously suggesting I’d been sleeping with Cilly Klofft? And if so, what for Heaven’s sake had put that way-out idea into her head? Why, moreover, if she thought such a thing possible, did she make such an unpleasant remark about Cilly Klofft’s age?

  I was already thinking of leaving this occasion, where I really had no business anyway, as soon as possible. I pushed up the sleeve of my jacket and looked at my watch. Just after eight-thirty. When I looked up, I met Cilly Klofft’s eye; she was standing with Frau Novotna, who was still speaking to her over in the corner, gesticulating with both hands, and when I looked at her she raised her brows and moved her forefinger back and forth. The gesture was unmistakable; she didn’t want me to go yet.

  Oh well. She wouldn’t have any further instructions to give me, so she could only have meant it as a joke, but why shouldn’t I stay a little longer and talk to her when Frau Novotna let her out of her clutches?

  I took a Pils from the tray that a little blonde offered me, and when a thin black-haired girl appeared behind the blonde with a plate of cocktail sausages, I helped myself. I put two straight into my mouth, and as the brunette was about to move on I said, “Just a moment, please!” and speared another on one of the cocktail sticks. I could presumably write off any idea of dinner with Frauke. And I didn’t feel in the least like munching my way through a cold cutlet in a bar or heating up a can of soup at home.

  I was in luck. Frau Novotna’s young ladies came back with hot meatballs and sharply seasoned canapés. With the last canapé and afresh Pils, I withdrew from the main thoroughfare of the room to a quieter corner where a large and brightly coloured painting hung. As I ate and drank I tried to decipher the picture, but apart from a large number of irregular rectangles of different colours, stacked together by the artist and interlocking, I could make nothing of it. Going first closer to the picture and then away from it again was no help.

  I glanced sideways, suddenly afraid that some art freak had been watching me and pointing me out to all his clan, who were now standing together, grinning, as they watched my hopeless attempts to make sense of Willy Ferber’s work. No, no one was taking any notice of me. I did see, however, that Frau Novotna and Cilly Klofft were in a farewell embrace. Cilly Klofft moved my way, but was held up again by the green blazer, who barred her way with hands raised. I turned back to Ferber’s rectangles.

  What did a woman like Cilly Klofft have to do with these eccentric figures? Was she one of those rich people who set up as collectors or patrons, trying to buy their way into a world of which they understand little or nothing, although they like to bask in its atmosphere?

  “Does it interest you?”
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  I jumped when I suddenly found Frau Novotna behind me. “Oh, I… I’m just getting to know it.”

  She nodded. “Not a difficult work, though. Or do you think so?”

  “No, no, not that! But…”

  I immediately cursed myself, because I knew I couldn’t follow up that “but” with anything reasonably intelligent, let alone well-phrased. I smiled, swayed slightly back and forth, as if polishing up what I had to say. But suddenly she said, “And so you’re acting for Herr Klofft in a legal case?”

  What was this about?

  “A legal case? Well, no, we haven’t got that far yet. It’s not certain.”

  She nodded with a forbearing smile, as if to suggest that she knew more than I might think. I asked, “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, you know… Cilly Klofft and I have been friends for a very long time. Too long for me to tell a charming young man just how long.” She laughed.

  I felt I ought to contradict her gallantly, but before any idea of what to say occurred to me, she went on, “She’s very taken with you!”

  I had even less idea what to say in answer to this revelation, but finally I said, “Ah, yes, and how… how did you meet?”

  “Well, how do you think?” She shook her head, laughing. “A gallery owner in this city who didn’t know Cilly Klofft would be in the wrong profession, don’t you think?”

  So that was it – she bought paintings. But maybe she pursued this idle hobby not of her own free will, maybe he sent her off to spend his superfluous money and get him the social status that his valves could never supply. I said, “I see. Then she’s a collector.”

  “No, no!” She raised her eyebrows and looked at me almost indignantly. “She’s a painter! Didn’t you know that?”

  6

  Next morning I spent two hours in court, and when I came back to the office, Hochkeppel was out. I was disappointed because since last night I had been wondering what kind of a painter Cilly Klofft was, whether she was well thought of, and why, if she really was an artist to be taken seriously, she had married that uncouth oaf of a husband.