She looked at me in silence, nodded thoughtfully. Then she said, “Did Hochkeppel tell you that?”
“No need for Dr Hochkeppel to tell me. You learn it studying law. If your own instincts don’t tell you.”
I wasn’t feeling too good about the way this was working out. I was not sure that I was right. I could hardly ask Hochkeppel. Maybe I ought to look at a few legal books again.
She nodded again, this time briefly and firmly. “Right. Loyalty it is. I suggest we file the modelling question away.” She smiled. “And anyway that’s not why I asked you here.”
“No, so you didn’t.” Suddenly I felt relieved. “You had something to tell me about the dismissal of Frau Fuchs, didn’t you?”
“Absolutely accurate. But right at this moment I could do with a drink.” She stood up. “What would you like?”
I raised a hand, declining the offer. “Not for me, thanks.”
She smiled at me. “Afraid I’ll get you drunk?”
“No, no.”
“Glad to hear it.”
She turned away and went to the door next to the bathroom. I watched her go. The jeans were a perfect fit over her small, rounded behind. She had dark-brown moccasins on her feet.
If she’d tinted her thick grey hair, maybe blonde, that clear blonde you sometimes saw… or coloured it a little more soberly, chestnut brown, a brown with auburn highlights – well, you could have thought her a woman of thirty. I felt sure of that.
I heard her opening and closing kitchen cupboards. Glasses clinked.
Was I out of my mind? I’d more or less clearly implied that she wanted to sleep with me. And I’d responded in terms suggesting that she had made me an indecent and repellent offer.
I must have insulted her – I must have wounded her profoundly. It was a wonder that she hadn’t thrown me out on the spot.
15
She came back with two mini-bottles of champagne and two champagne glasses. I was wondering apprehensively whether she was going to sit down next to me and touch my knee again, but this time she chose an armchair to the left of the sofa. She opened the first of the little bottles, filled one of the glasses and put it down in front of me.
I raised my hand. “No, thank you. Not now.”
She smiled. “All right.”
This was all getting too much for me. I wasn’t going to take her merciless mockery in silence any more, but before I could say anything, she asked, “Can I get you anything else? A cup of tea? Some fruit juice?”
“No, thank you, nothing at all at the moment.”
“OK.” She took the glass back, sipped from it herself and sighed pleasurably. Then she said, “Well then, the dismissal of Frau Fuchs. Without notice, wasn’t it? And one reason was that she had taken time off when he hadn’t given her permission. And why didn’t he give her permission? He had no alternative. Because he was expecting a really urgent, really important order. An order from abroad. That’s what he told her. And that’s what it says in his written notice of dismissal to her, am I right?”
I looked at her. She returned my glance as if she were very well aware that something had intrigued me, but she had no idea what it was. I left it at that exchange of glances for a moment. Then I asked, “How do you know all this?”
For a few seconds she maintained her innocent expression. Then she clapped her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh!” And she added, “Loyalty, you mean?” She nodded. “I mustn’t tell you how I know all this. And so I don’t have to tell you what it is I know either. That’s to say, I can tell you but you can’t listen to me, right? It would conflict with the loyalty you owe your client.”
She was paying me back. I had hurt her, but she wasn’t caving in. She was firing a broadside at me in return. The arguments I’d meant to use to deter her were suddenly blowing up in my face.
For a moment she looked at me with a smile that I might have thought regretful, if I hadn’t been sure by now that it concealed pure derision. Then she asked, “That’s so, isn’t it? Or do I misunderstand you? Surely you can’t listen to any information I happen to have picked up behind my husband’s back?”
It was no use, I had to come out of cover. I didn’t want to throw away my case unthinkingly. And I certainly didn’t want to end up as the butt of this woman’s mockery.
“Well,” I said, “it’s… it’s not quite as simple as that, you see. I don’t have to refuse to listen to information that would help me to represent my client properly.” I cleared my throat. “Strictly speaking I can’t… I ought not to reject it without any idea what it is.”
She widened her eyes as if greatly surprised but also relieved by the turn our conversation had taken. “Oh!” She nodded. “Yes… I see. Well, I do think that what I’ve found out will help you to… to represent my husband properly. Or let’s say to do him justice.”
She fell silent, and I looked at her. After a moment she said, “He invented that order from abroad.”
For a moment I was baffled. Then I asked, “How do you know?”
“I read the notice of dismissal. The one he keeps in the file.” She hesitated, and then went on, “On Friday at midday he left the file lying on his desk. When he went to have his afternoon nap. I found the file and looked through it.”
“But,” I said, “there’s no indication of what you claim in the file.”
She smiled. “Not in your copy, of course not. But he made some marginal notes here and there on his copy of the documents. In pencil. So that he can erase them if he thinks it necessary. And there was one of those notes in the margin of the notice of dismissal. A certain word. He wrote it next to the passage where he cites the order from abroad. The order that he said he was expecting.”
She obviously planned to enjoy this revelation. I said, with some reluctance, “What word?”
“The word Thionville.”
“Thionville?” I looked at her blankly. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
She drank a little champagne. Then she said, “Thionville is a town in Lorraine. In France, the Moselle département. Diederhofen is its name in German. It’s not far from the Saarland border. And Luxembourg. Not far from the coal and steel industry of Lorraine either. The coal and steel industry used to be very important, but it’s not profitable now, there or anywhere else.”
I said, “Forgive me, please – but what has that got to do with the dismissal of Frau Fuchs?”
She smiled. “We’ll get to that in a minute! We used to have – my husband used to have, I mean – a very good customer in Thionville. A supplier to the iron and steel works. His name is Gaston Weber, he’s a little younger than my husband. He was such a good customer that they quite soon made friends. Well, so far as my husband is capable of friendship.”
I wondered whether any feeling for her husband, other than hatred, had survived in her.
She said, “Gaston Weber used to invite him to hunting parties, and my husband responded with similar invitations. Sometimes to go hunting. In summer to join him on a yacht he hired. Your boss used to join the party in those days, by the way, and other friends. The wives never went.” She smiled. “But I did go with my husband to Thionville now and then. I spent my time drawing and painting while he and Gaston were hunting.”
She fell silent. After a while I said cautiously, “I still don’t quite understand what you…”
She looked at me. “I was only saying that I know Gaston Weber well myself. We were friends. We still are.” She took a deep breath. “And when I saw Thionville written in that file, I was suspicious. I haven’t heard from Weber for some time. If he had been phoning my husband, he’d have wanted to speak to me as well, I was sure of that. Or at least he would have sent his regards.”
She crossed her arms. “So I called Weber. I asked how he was. A long time since we’d been in touch, and so on. And then I said that recently I’d heard his name mentioned in connection with an order he was going to give my husband. Was business looking up again, I asked?”
“And he said he knew nothing about any such order.”
She nodded. “Yes, he said that unfortunately the good times were over. Most of the iron and steel works he used to supply had gone out of business now. That branch of industry couldn’t compete any more. Exactly the same in Germany. He had to go in search of other customers, he said, had to readjust the supplies he made. So the idea of the large order must be a mistake, and maybe I’d misunderstood something.”
She stopped. I thought about it. I sensed that she was watching me. After a while I asked, “Your husband obviously hadn’t spoken to Weber yet?”
“No. Not by yesterday afternoon when I called Weber, anyway.”
I nodded. Then I said, “The fact that Weber didn’t know anything about the… the order is not, of course, conclusive evidence. Do you understand? I mean, it doesn’t prove that the order was pure invention on your husband’s part.”
She frowned. Then she said, “You mean some other customer from abroad might have discussed such an order with him?”
“Exactly. I suppose he has a whole series of foreign customers?”
“A whole series would be something of an exaggeration.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Well… it’s possible, of course, that he meant someone else. Or an entirely new customer.” She looked at me. “But then why would he write ‘Thionville’ in the file?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
She picked up her glass and drank. Then she looked at me again. “Maybe because he was planning to appeal to him if he had to. I mean, if Frau Fuchs were to enquire into the order that suddenly dissolved into thin air. I don’t know whether she can… but perhaps something of the kind might be possible?”
“I don’t know that either.”
I wasn’t being entirely straightforward with her. I did in fact fear that Frau Fuchs might well be able to do that very thing. Presumably she knew about the firm’s customers abroad. And here she could at least call a witness in the form of Pauly the business manager, whom Klofft would have had to inform of her dismissal without delay after his conversation with her. And when it came to the crunch, even the tribunal would want conclusive evidence from us that the order really had been in prospect, but then against all expectations failed to materialize.
I asked, “Do you think that Weber would help your husband out? I mean that he’d confirm – would confirm, contrary to the truth – that he proposed to give him the order?”
The answer came without delay. “No. Most definitely not. Not after he’d told me he knew nothing about such an order.” She shook her head. “He wouldn’t want me thinking of him as a liar.”
I nodded. After a while she said, “So my… my research is no use to you? I may even have spoilt a chance for you, have I?”
“No, no!” I laughed. Then I said, “At least I now know a little more about the vulnerable spots I must defend.”
She sighed, and this time there was no derision in it. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. But I tell you what.” I indicated her champagne glass. “I wouldn’t mind a little of that after all. It’s supposed to cheer you up.”
She laughed. “I’ll get you a chilled one.”
She went to the kitchen, and I had a good view of the perfect fit of those jeans again, but I instantly called myself to order.
Had Gaston Weber ever visited this studio? Presumably he had. And he’d have bought one or two of her pictures. A large one, maybe a view of his hunting lodge in a wide, green valley, and now it hung in his office at work opposite his desk. He’d wanted to hang it in the living room at home, but his wife had said that if he did she was moving out.
She came back with a mini-bottle of champagne, opened it and poured it for me, then picked up her own glass and raised it. “Here’s to cheering you up.”
After we had put our glasses down again, I said, “Since we’re on the subject… of your researches, I mean…”
She looked at me. “Yes? What do you want to know?”
This was conspiracy, what else? I was involving myself more and more in activities that might simply be a campaign of vengeance mounted against her husband.
I drank another sip, and then another. Then I said, “When we were talking in your studio at home… do you remember?”
She nodded. I went on, “I asked you then whether Frau Fuchs had threatened your husband. In their conversation about the time she wanted off. You didn’t answer the question… or not entirely, anyway, because your husband came bursting in, remember?”
“Of course.” She looked at me. “Yes, she did threaten him. But I can only say…”
I held up a hand. “Yes, I know. You said you could understand Frau Fuchs very well there. But I’m concerned about something else.”
Her brows drew together.
I said, “I’d like to know what she threatened him with.”
She shook her head, clearly annoyed. “Listen, you’re poking about in a… a garbage heap of unpleasantness and obscenities, I assure you! The whole thing is a rather repellent story, and I don’t want to discuss it now! Please understand!”
What was this? I could see that I’d be well advised to drop the matter for now. But I was not happy about it. I said, “Just one question, please: did she threaten to get a medical certificate saying she was sick if he didn’t give her time off?”
She looked at me reluctantly. Obviously she thought the question entirely insignificant. But then she said, “Yes, she said that or something like it.”
I breathed again. My suspicion that the nature of her threat did provide adequate grounds to fire her without notice was confirmed.
“Thank you,” I said. “That was it. Many thanks!” I picked up my glass and drank to her. She raised hers, and her forehead smoothed out.
I asked, “Do you have one of the pictures you painted in Thionville here?”
She looked at me a little thoughtfully. “You’d be interested to see it?”
“Yes. I have no idea what the place is like, or its surroundings. Or of what you’d make of such subjects.”
She smiled. Then she rose to her feet. “I have a portfolio here with sketches and a few watercolours. And two or three larger pictures.” She pointed to the steps up to the gallery. “But I’d have to get the bigger ones down from there.”
“No, no, I don’t want to put you to any trouble. The sketches and watercolours would be fine… I just want to get some impression of the place.”
She opened a large cupboard under the structure of the gallery, pulled out a drawer about halfway up and began searching it. She had turned her back to me, bending forward, and I watched her.
The idea that I was not behaving well didn’t bother me this time. My mind was on a different problem.
What had she meant by a garbage heap? Full of “unpleasantness and obscenities”? Did she mean the sex he had demanded from his employee? The sex that she might actually have given him that morning with his wife listening?
No, it couldn’t have been like that, or he would have had to give Katharina Fuchs the time off that she wanted. In return, so to speak. Or were my ideas of the deal he had wanted to do with her right off target?
She came back with two large portfolios, put them on her chair and untied the first. After she had moved the glasses and little bottles aside, she put a cardboard base on the table and a handful of sheets of paper on it.
The charcoal sketch on top was a street scene, realistic and yet oddly improbable, a square in a small town, with flower beds to right and left and young trees, not very tall, and in the background two corner buildings with a narrow street opening up between them. The view at the end of this street was cut off by four-storey apartment houses in a street crossing it. The two rectangular wings of the left-hand corner house were linked by a round turret, its lower floors built out into an oriel. The turret had a little dome level with the attic windows to right and left of it; the dome rose above the roof ridges of the two wi
ngs and had two round windows like bull’s-eyes set into its base.
I leaned over the sketch. “Anything particular that interests you?” she asked.
“It reminds me of something.”
“Of what?”
I said, “That turret with the dome…”
She leaned over me as I pointed to the corner house in the sketch, and went on, “I think it reminds me of Parisian buildings. I’ve only been to Paris once, but I think I saw buildings with little turrets like that there – larger, of course, in the city centre, but with the bull’s-eyes at the top and the attic windows in the top storey of the rest of the house framing them. And lower down oriels with balconies.”
She nodded, smiling. “I know what you mean. Of course we have buildings like that here too, or we did, before the war. In Berlin, for instance. But in Paris they’re still standing, yes.” She sat down beside me on the sofa. “They were built around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Thionville was part of the German Reich at the time, and had gone back to being Diederhofen. But the architects there will have been paying tribute to their former capital – summoning up a memory of Paris.” She smiled. “Like you?”
She was sitting quite close, so I could distinctly smell her perfume. But this time I wasn’t going to fall victim to the ridiculous confusion that had come over me whenever I was too close to her before. I started talking away.
“Well, it couldn’t really be called a memory. Nothing happened, I just saw those turrets, almost like little onion domes, and the domes interested me, that’s all. And the rooms behind the bull’s-eye windows, attic rooms like the rooms on the top floors of the house on either side of them, I imagined them – circular, the rafter structures under the tiles must have been unusual. The smell of timber. I imagine the rafters exposed, and the laths with the tiles fixed to them. And I wonder, I mean I wondered how you’d feel in a room like that. At sunset, for instance.”
The Stronger Sex Page 11