The Lie

by Petra Hammesfahr

  Herr Schrag stared at the masked man and opened his mouth, but all that came out was a groan as he clasped his hands to the left side of his chest. Not for one second did she think of the envelope in his jacket pocket, only of her father’s sudden death. Ignoring the gun, which she assumed was as harmless as the previous one, she placed herself in front of Herr Schrag and pushed him backwards to the exit. The masked man waved his gun around wildly. “For God’s sake, Frau Lasko,” the manager cried, “don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Don’t worry,” she shouted back, “it’s not a real one. I’ve been here before.”

  The manager believed her and hit the masked man’s outstretched arm. Then everything seemed to happen at once. She heard a bang, saw a red stain appear on the manager’s shirt and rapidly spread, heard a piercing cry from the cashier and saw the look of disbelief on the manager’s face as he grasped his wounded shoulder. Then the gun was pointing at her. Herr Schrag was uninjured because she fell on top of him when the masked man—

  “Don’t tell me he shot at you,” Nadia broke in, breathless and horrified.

  “No.” He’d tried, but after the first shot the pistol must have jammed. The masked man had knocked her to the ground with a punch, dragged her along with him, shoved her into a car, drove her to a disused factory, aimed and pressed the trigger twice, to no effect, then in his fury hit her again and again with the butt of the gun, hissing, “If you move, you’re dead.”

  Of course she moved - after he’d gone. For a long time - it was two whole days - she crawled round among rubble and debris with a fractured skull and a raging headache, unable to find a way out. Eventually there was someone bending over her. She thought it was the masked man who’d returned. But it was only a dosser who’d come to spend the night in the disused factory and happened to trip over her. Since then she was incapable of working as a bank clerk; just the thought of having to go into a bank set off palpitations…

  What happened next she recounted only reluctantly. It didn’t reflect very well on her. She passed over her job with the insurance firm, which she’d messed up because of her lack of IT expertise. It had only lasted three weeks anyway. She went straight on to the two years she’d spent working for Herr Schrag.

  The old man felt he owed her something and, on closer inspection, his business turned out to be flourishing. So far his wife had done the office work, but now she had fallen ill and he needed someone he could trust to replace her; the only requirement was the ability to use a typewriter. He didn’t give her a contract, they just shook hands on it. There were five others Herr Schrag employed on the same basis; the only ones in regular employment were two electricians.

  She got two thousand marks a month, net, cash in hand. When the new currency came in, it was converted exactly into euros. She could survive on that - without health insurance, that would have swallowed up half her income. But apart from a headache following physical exertion she’d felt she was generally in good health and preferred to put something aside for a rainy day.

  Given the ailing state of government finances, Herr Schrag felt it made more sense for each individual to take personal responsibility in providing for their old age. Private clients - as most of Herr Schrag’s were - could pay in cash and enjoy a discount to the value of the VAT. It was from these cash payments that Susanne and the five other freelancers were paid. What was left disappeared into one of the envelopes for which she had risked her neck.

  Herr Schrag had a courier who took each instalment of his retirement fund out of the country. And his trust in her was absolute until the courier turned up in January of that year. His name was Röhrler. How often this Röhrler had appeared at Schrag’s on a Thursday evening to pick up an envelope she had no idea. In January he didn’t arrive until Friday lunchtime, because his car had broken down.

  He gaped when he saw her. “What are you doing here?” he asked, astonished, then a grin spread over his face. “You’ve come down in the world and no mistake. But that’s what happens when you get caught with your fingers in the till. It’s the beginning of a slippery slope.”

  It had never occurred to her that Röhrler could be mistaking her for someone else. It didn’t even now, when she told Nadia about it, because she’d got it into her head that he must have read about her in the paper. After the second hold-up, while she was still crawling round in the disused factory, a very unfavourable, almost libellous report about her had appeared in the newspaper - together with a photo. The two times there’d been a deficit in her till were mentioned, together with speculation that she might have been in cahoots with the robber in order to conceal the fact that she had embezzled money. Later they had had to print an apology but probably no one had noticed it. She wanted to explain this to him, but before she had the chance Herr Schrag appeared. And Röhrler told him she’d lined her own pockets while working for the bank.

  Nadia stared impassively at the path in front as Susanne repeated Röhrler’s words. “It was a simple error,” she assured her. “I wouldn’t have risked my job for a few thousand marks.”

  “That’s OK,” said Nadia soothingly. “You don’t have to justify yourself to me. How did Schrag react?”

  “He threw me out.”

  Nadia shook her head, uncomprehending. “And you let him do that to you? In your place I’d have said, ‘OK, Herr Schrag, I’m not going to insist on continuing to work for you. From now on I’ll get three thousand a month and if you pay up punctually, you’ll see how good I am at keeping secrets.’ ”

  Susanne said nothing. The idea of blackmail had never occurred to her. Nadia gave her a thoughtful sidelong glance. “And what have you lived on since then?”

  She came close to admitting the truth, but she couldn’t bring herself to say, “By stealing from my mother.” Instead she said, “I had some money saved up.”

  Nadia looked up at the treetops. Above them the sky was still a rich, deep blue. “Let’s go back,” she suggested. She had not said a word about what she could do for Susanne.

  Nadia offered to drive her home. Instead, Susanne asked to be taken to a cinema, on the pretext that she wanted to see the late showing. It would have been too embarrassing to have had to ask her, when they reached Kettlerstrasse, “Would you like to come up for a while?”

  She got out at the cinema and said, in a voice tinged with disappointment, “It was a nice afternoon.”

  Nadia was leaning over the passenger seat to see her on the pavement. “Yes, I thought so too.” She said nothing about their having to do it again. No “See you soon”, just a “Cheerio, then.”

  Susanne slammed the door shut. The engine roared and the white sports car overtook two others then disappeared from view, as if Nadia couldn’t wait to put as much distance as possible between her and her poverty-stricken double. Suddenly she felt ashamed of the openness with which she’d told her life story, of the ravenous way she’d eaten the fruit flan, horribly ashamed of the whole afternoon and her wild hopes.

  She took her time going home. It was after midnight when she reached the shabby tenement, which she would have so loved to say goodbye to for good. As usual the main door wasn’t locked. Heart-rending groans came from Heller’s flat, accompanied by the crack of a whip and coarse male laughter. She shivered as she went past. She hurried up the last few stairs, locked the door behind her, headed straight for the shower, spent minutes cleaning her teeth and climbed into bed wondering if Nadia was also home by now and what her home looked like.

  While still awake, she dreamed up a snow-white villa on some coast or other. But the house with the yacht anchored offshore was only her holiday home. For a while she lay on the deck in the sun and got the blond man to rub oil over her, then dived into the sea to cool off. The fact that she couldn’t swim was irrelevant as far as her dream-self was concerned.

  When she finally got to sleep, she dreamed of her father. They were sitting at the coffee table having a cosy chat. In the middle of a sentence he clasped his chest and the
bewildered look appeared in his eyes. Then he fell forward, dead, dead at just fifty-seven. And she screamed and screamed, unable to stop herself.

  At once she was wide awake. She heard the old fridge chuntering to itself, the early train rattling past and, inside her head, Nadia’s voice. It hurt terribly because it looked as if all Nadia Trenkler had wanted from her had been to amuse herself for a few hours, then perhaps go home to have a good laugh with her husband at the tricks Nature could play.

  But she was wrong. Only a few days later a further letter from Nadia arrived. This time she wrote: Dear Susanne,

  I have some things lying around that I don’t really need. Please don’t get me wrong, it’s not jumble. The things are fine, it’s just that I don’t wear them any more. They should fit you. I don’t want to force anything on you and I don’t want you to feel you’re receiving charity. If you don’t want them, all you have to do is say no. Let’s meet at the Opera Café again, Friday, 3 o’clock.

  Nadia

  It was Thursday already, not much time to think it over. Just one night to sleep on it. Did she want Nadia’s discarded clothes? No. She wanted Nadia’s job, Nadia’s car, Nadia’s money. Nadia’s life.

  She spent the afternoon running a scenario though her mind. It started with a walk in the woods and continued with a heavy stick or a stone, a hastily dug grave in the undergrowth followed by an accident with the Porsche. Then she could tell Nadia’s husband she was suffering from total amnesia and apply for a divorce soon afterwards. That would kill two birds with one stone: she wouldn’t have to spend her life arguing with a husband who didn’t want children and she’d have got rid of a car she wasn’t happy with. She hadn’t been at the wheel of a car for years and a Porsche wasn’t the best model to start on.

  She was a little late on Friday because Heller intercepted her on the stairs. He stood on the first-floor landing, blocking her way, and asked with a lewd grin on his face whether she didn’t fancy a real man after her two toy boys. He insisted on assuming Johannes Herzog was her lover. Watching from his window, he’d often seen her get into his BMW on Sunday afternoons.

  She tried to get past. He grabbed her arm, tight, and brought his face close up to hers. As usual he stank of sweat and beer, and hissed his usual obscenities, spraying her cheek with drops of spittle that made her feel sick.

  She insisted he let go of her, telling him she had an appointment and was in a hurry. Furious, he told her she was one of those women who went round with their noses in the air, as if they didn’t leave the same kind of crap in the shithouse as other people. “I’ll have you some day, don’t you worry,” he said.

  After that threat he let go of her arm, jerked his thumb in the direction of the main door and told her to get on her way, the boy had already been waiting a while. “I only came out to congratulate you. Unlike the midget with the clapped-out BMW, the one out there really is something to write home about. But don’t let your hopes run away with you. The boy knows you’ve got two irons in the fire.”

  She’d no idea which boy he was talking about and told him so. Heller thought for a moment and said it was Friday that he’d seen the young man at her door. She realized he was assuming the man from the opinion poll was her lover. When she explained his mistake he tapped his forehead.

  “You can’t fool me. Opinion poll my arse! He didn’t poll any opinions from me. You were the only one he went to see, and I bet it wasn’t the only time. I saw him on Sunday as well. You’d just left with the other guy in the BMW and that’s what I told him. Since then the MG’s been driving round and round the area all the time.”

  Before she could reply, a door opened on the third floor and Jasmin Toppler came down the stairs. Heller stepped to one side to let her past and she grasped the opportunity to follow her next-door neighbour to the ground floor.

  Heller’s claims had disturbed her a little. As casually as she could, she asked Jasmin what an MG looked like and whether she’d also been visited by an opinion pollster. She knew Jasmin had been out on the Friday at the end of July, but if it was an important poll the young man would presumably have come again on the Sunday in order to interview occupants of the tenement who were in employment.

  Jasmin explained that she always went out on Sundays and that pollsters didn’t come at the weekend. At the door Jasmin stopped. “If you’re worried about it, ask around in the building.”

  She wasn’t worried, she said. And it would look ridiculous to go round knocking at the doors of people she didn’t know just because of what Heller had said. It would give the impression she had a persecution complex, but for the life of her she couldn’t think who might be persecuting her, unless it was Heller himself. With a laugh, Jasmin agreed. There was only one way of dealing with Heller, she said, and that was a quick knee in the groin. With that she went to her motorbike.

  She stayed by the front door for a moment and looked along the cars parked on either side of the street. There were quite a lot, most of them fairly old. What an MG would look like she couldn’t say, Jasmin hadn’t answered that question. But she couldn’t see anyone in any of the cars and none started as she set off.

  She hurried off to get to the Opera Café on time. Nadia was already there, but had only been waiting for ten minutes to go by the single cigarette end in the ashtray. This time she was wearing a dark-grey ensemble, which gave the impression she’d just come out of a meeting where a company’s turnover at least as high as the defence budget had been discussed. She was clasping her document case and handbag in her lap.

  Scarcely had Susanne arrived than Nadia stood up. “Do you mind if we go straight to the car? I haven’t much time anyway, and I left my laptop in the boot. Breaking it open’s a piece of cake and the data’s irreplaceable.”

  She shook her head and followed Nadia. The Porsche was in a nearby multi-storey car park. There was a suitcase on the passenger seat. Nadia opened it and showed her the things she didn’t need any more. The light-grey pinstripe suit wasn’t among them, but they were good clothes, expensive clothes in very good condition. Skirts, trousers, blouses, two blazers. All in shades of blue or grey, except one white blouse. If she had Nadia’s money, she’d dress quite differently. On the other hand, they were precisely the kind of things a successful businesswoman would wear. She hadn’t worn brightly coloured dresses when she’d worked in the bank either. She didn’t bother trying them on in the car park, just slipped her feet into the two pairs of shoes Nadia picked up from the floor of the car. They fitted as if they were made to measure. “Thanks,” she said, “I’m pleased to have them.”

  “You don’t exactly look pleased,” Nadia commented, leaning back against the car and surveying her thoughtfully. “But I can understand that. I’ve been asking myself what I would feel like in your situation. I almost got kicked out myself after Michael’s career took off.”

  So it was Michael. Susanne glanced at the photo on the dashboard. The photo of the blond man was still there.

  Nadia rummaged round in her handbag for her cigarette case. After she’d lighted the cigarette, she went on, hesitantly, as if she wasn’t sure whether Susanne wanted to hear more about her life or not. They had a lot more in common than face and figure, Nadia said. “What you told me could have been the story of my life.”

  Nadia had also trained in banking and until two years ago had worked for a private bank in Düsseldorf. She didn’t have a mother-in-law who needed looking after, just a husband who was earning nothing during the first years of their marriage.

  “Michael was still a student when we got married,” she said. “When he finally graduated, he didn’t find the right job immediately. And when he did, I was still earning three times as much as him. Until…”

  When Nadia broke off, Susanne completed the sentence for her: “Until there was a hold-up at the bank.”

  Nadia gave a pained smile. “Nothing so dramatic. I just thought I’d been on the treadmill for long enough. Michael’s career was going places and I wante
d to take more time for myself and for him. And with more time I quickly found out that he was sleeping with one of his little laboratory mice.”

  For a brief moment Susanne wondered whether to ask about Nadia’s further career. She must have found another job by now - the document case and what she had told her about the laptop with its irreplaceable data indicated that. But she was shocked by what Nadia had said about her husband. She would never have associated the nice holiday face with infidelity.

  “But he didn’t want to marry her and have a child?” she asked, forcing herself to make a joke of it.

  Nadia gave a brief and decidedly unamused laugh. “No idea. If he did want to do that, I managed to talk him out of it. Since then we’ve been behaving as if I’m the only one he loves, and I’m too busy to get bored in the evenings.”

  “You think he’s still cheating on you?”

  Nadia gave another laugh, a mocking laugh this time. “What’s this? Suddenly we are interested after all?” She pouted. “But it’s not worth talking about. I’ve stopped letting it bother me. He’s not the only attractive man around.”

  “You’re unfaithful to him as well?”

  Nadia’s shrug of the shoulders said everything. “I’m really short of time today, Susanne. We’ll talk another day, OK? Can you manage with the suitcase?”

  She nodded. Her thoughts were still on the mutual adultery and the question of why Nadia had not left her unfaithful husband, if she’d found a replacement. Nadia put the clothes, including the shoes, back in the suitcase, and put it down in front of her. She thanked her again.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Nadia. “All you need now is a chic hairstyle. How do you like mine?”