Rain Girl (20 page)

“No,” Cosima said. “Not strange. Crazy! Stupid! What a bunch of shit! Would you want to be called
Cosima
?”

Franza shrugged. “
Franza
’s not exactly the greatest.”

Cosima ignored the comment. “She was an anti-Semite, Cosima Wagner, she was in cahoots with Hitler. Did you know that?”

Franza nodded.

“And yet he named me after her. I can’t forgive him for that. But it doesn’t matter, there’s so much I can’t forgive him for.”

She looked out the window again, and then after what seemed an eternity said, “Is Pooh still here? Have you found him?”

Franza’s heart beat faster. “Pooh?”

Cosima became impatient. “Yes, Pooh! Don’t be so slow! It belonged to Ben—you must know that! Or are you just as ignorant as the rest of them?”

“Ben? What do you know about Ben?”

Cosima’s gaze was unfathomable. “Jenny’s going to kill me,” she said with a sigh. “But I guess I’ll survive.”

She grinned, but then her serious expression returned immediately. “She doesn’t trust you. She doesn’t trust anyone. I do, though. I know how he used to talk about you.”

“Who? About whom?”

Cosima shook her head and looked at Franza with contempt. “You really aren’t very bright, are you? Ben, of course! About you—his mother! You’re his mother!”

Franza was speechless. What else did this girl know?

“How . . . ?”

“How do I know this?”

She flicked an invisible speck of dust off her sleeve. “He brought photos from time to time. Marie was crazy about photos—family photos, if you know what I mean. Christmas, Easter, birthdays, just happy families. We’re all crazy about them.”

She gave a mournful laugh. “So Ben brought them along and told us what it was like in a so-called happy family at Christmas and Easter. Then Marie would cry her eyes out, and he’d have to hold her. She was awesome, our Marie. Really a great chick, but sometimes she was just nuts.”

She fell silent again and looked out the window, trembling slightly. She shook it off. “Sometimes we got to look at the pictures, too, Jenny and me. He told us lots, Ben. That you’re a cop, for example, and that you have a boyfriend, an actor, who’s younger than you.”

Franza blushed as Cosima’s eyes examined her from head to toe, stopping at her hips, which were too wide and too . . .

“But who gives a shit. Your husband cheated on you, too, and probably still is.” Cosima raised an eyebrow indifferently and paused for a moment. “We know about the whole family—even the little half sister in Sweden.”

Her voice had become mocking and her eyes sharp. Franza felt she was being tested again. Eventually Cosima shook her head. “That’s all really ordinary stuff, you know. Don’t think Ben’s a gossip just giving away all your family secrets.” She laughed. “Although I guess that’s what he did. But only to cheer us up, to show us that happy families aren’t always happy, either. But we already knew that.”

Franza felt bad. “So he’s unhappy?”

Cosima was surprised. “No,” she said, “of course not! Don’t you know that?”

“I hoped so. But I . . . I didn’t realize he knew everything. That his father and I . . .” She shook her head, the look in Cosima’s eyes silencing her.

This wasn’t about her and her life, which, apart from a few minor hiccups had gone relatively well so far. No one had beaten her up as a teenager or raped her or threatened her or put her out on the street. Apart from a few floods, she’d grown up peacefully and had had time to prepare for life. So who did she think she was, complaining about her petty problems?

And Ben? What had he been doing here?

Ben, who’d grown up so fast she hadn’t even noticed. How withdrawn he’d become. And how he was living his own life, taking responsibility, being in love—deeply and truly it seemed.

And now?

Marie was dead and Ben was God-knows-where.

She felt a stinging pain deep inside her. How could she have thought even for one second that Ben . . .

It had taken this girl to dissipate the last of her doubts.

That’s how little she knew him. How little she knew
of
him.

“What’s the matter?” Cosima came right up to her and looked her in the face. “You all right?”

Franza nodded. “Where did you meet? Here?”

“Here?” Cosima laughed. “Don’t be silly. No, Ben never came here. She would never have brought him here.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “When you love something, you keep it to yourself. Then no one can take it from you.”

What logic,
Franza thought and had to smile.
Young girl’s logic. Secret logic
.

“But it didn’t work,” Cosima said quietly. “Nothing ever does.”

She cleared her throat. “We met in bars. Or down along the Danube, in the meadows. It’s nice there.”

Silence again. Franza waited. Marie’s secret life. They must be getting close to Marie’s secret life. Time was running out.

“Cosima,” she said. “You wanted to tell me something.”

Cosima looked up, returning from wherever she had been in her thoughts, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “No more. Jenny’s going to kill me.”

She walked to the door, looking small and lost.
I screwed up,
Franza thought,
oh shit, I really screwed up
.

“Cosima,” she said, trying to keep her from leaving. “You can trust me! Please, trust me! Tell me what you know.”

Cosima stopped. “Ask Ben,” she said. “I don’t know anything.”

“I can’t ask Ben,” Franza said. “He’s gone, and I don’t know where he is.”

Cosima hesitated for a brief moment, began to waver, but then she shook her head almost imperceptibly.

“Sorry!” she said. “Too bad. I’ve got to go.” She opened the door, and there, sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, was Jenny.

“Just give it to her,” Jenny said. “You’re probably right. She’ll know what she’s doing—she’s Ben’s mother, after all. So tell her.”

Franza held her breath and time seemed to stand still. Finally Cosima turned around, pulled something from the pocket of her jeans, weighed it in her hands for a moment as if thinking it over carefully one more time, and handed it to Franza.

“Here,” she said. “We found it in one of her desk drawers. We thought we should check her room after we saw her in the newspaper. We felt we owed her that much. We thought we could . . . we didn’t know yet that you . . .”

“What is it?” Franza asked. She felt her heart racing and her breathing becoming faster.

Cosima lifted her eyebrows haughtily. “Well, look at it! Or can’t you even read?”

Then she left the apartment with Jenny right behind her.

Franza stared at the little package in her hand. It was wrapped in blue tissue and tied with a piece of string. Then she started running down the stairs toward the front door. Felix was sitting at the bottom of the stairs looking at her expectantly. The girls were walking down the road at a leisurely pace, their hands in their pockets.

“Thanks!” Franza called out waving the package in the air. “Thanks!”

The girls both lifted a hand at the same time without turning around. Then they turned a corner and were gone.

Franza and Felix went back to Marie’s room, sat down at her desk, and carefully untied the parcel. It contained a page from a newspaper folded several times—a carefully cut-out article. The paper was old and torn in places. It was almost illegible along the folds. Someone had written a date from more than twenty years ago at the top. The package also contained a photo showing a group of young people sitting around a campfire. Two heads had been circled—those of a young man and a young woman.

They knew immediately this was their breakthrough.

50

Felix’s cell phone rang. It was Arthur. He was angry because he wasn’t getting anywhere. Neither he nor Robert had found a thing. There were more restaurants that served the cuisine they were looking for than either of them had realized. From the prices, he also was beginning to realize how little money he earned.

“Well,” Felix said, unmoved, “I can’t help you there. You just need to keep looking. Make sure you check them all today. We’re at a critical point, which means longer hours—but you know that.”

Arthur hung up with a sigh. Working late yet again. He checked his watch and felt his stomach rumble at the same time. The next restaurant on his list was a seafood restaurant with a French name: Au Bord de la Mer. Very fancy, very expensive—not his cup of tea. And he didn’t have an expense account regardless. He headed for the nearest fast-food place.

He wolfed down two hamburgers with fries and a Coke. He could just imagine how his meticulous, muesli-eating mother would throw up her hands in horror at this monstrosity dripping with fat. But weren’t mothers there to be emancipated from?

Yielding to an urge, he treated himself to a strawberry shake with extra ice cream and whipped cream and a muffin. Life wasn’t so bad after all. In the morning he’d do a couple of extra laps in the park, and everything would be fine.

Full and satisfied, he got back in the car and only swore a little out of habit when he took a wrong turn. For the thousandth time he thought of the hot-blooded Karolina, which dampened his mood again. He finally parked in front of the exclusive restaurant, finding it impossible to imagine Marie eating here. It was the type of posh place where you only went if you had plenty of cash or masochistic inclinations.

Arthur, in any case, had neither. He really didn’t feel like spending all night hopping from one eatery to another and was convinced that he wouldn’t find anything of use anyway. He got out of the car and sighed.

Shit,
he thought,
shit! Another night completely wasted!

On the other hand, if he was honest, he had nothing better to do. Which he viewed as a medium-sized catastrophe. Karolina had put his hormone production in overdrive without providing the necessary release, which felt disastrous at his relatively young age. He’d heard hormonal congestion could be quite damaging. Furthermore, it didn’t look like anything would change anytime soon. Absolutely nothing for three weeks. Not a single woman had cast a benevolent eye on him, not to mention anything beyond that. But was that really surprising? Overworked as he was, he had bags under his eyes and looked slightly insane.

He sighed again and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. Yes, he realized with a shock, he looked terrible and desperate.

I’ll grow old without even noticing it,
he thought with frustration, his mood plummeting further.
I’ll have had no private life but will solve ten thousand murders. And I won’t even have any grandchildren to tell the stories to. At the end of my life I’ll be a lone wolf returning to the forests of the north. Better than nothing.

Nicely expressed,
he thought contentedly,
but I shouldn’t have eaten so much. I’m going to get a potbelly!
He entered the restaurant and was immediately struck by the decadence of the atmosphere. He stopped at the door, unsure how to proceed. A man in his fifties dressed in a black suit with an elegant tie—the maître d’, Arthur assumed—quickly approached him.

“How can I help you?” he asked, running his eyes disapprovingly down Arthur’s suede jacket and jeans. His gaze stopped at the tiny squirt of ketchup that was almost completely soaked up by the suede.

“Police, Homicide Division,” Arthur said and presented his ID, amused as always at the effect of this statement. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

The distinguished man gave a subdued cough.

“May I ask you to take a seat here for a moment?” he said, and led Arthur to a small table off to the side, in a niche by the window. “This way we won’t attract attention. So how can I help?”

Arthur pulled the photo from his jacket pocket. “I’d like to know if this young woman dined here last Monday night between ten at night and one in the morning.”

The maître d’
gasped with shock when he looked at the photo. “But that’s . . . that’s . . . the girl from the newspaper.”

Arthur nodded.

“And you think she . . . ? Here in our restaurant . . . ?”

Arthur didn’t reply.

The maître d’
shook his head. “No, I’ve never seen her before. However . . . Monday was my day off. I’ll show the photo to my colleagues if you’ll allow me.”

He paused for a moment, folded his hands, and put them up to his pursed lips. “Although I really can’t imagine her . . .”

He cleared his throat and gestured around the room. “I mean, you can see for yourself, our restaurant is . . .”

“Not suited for the lower classes?” Arthur finished the sentence, causing the maître d’
to break out in a fit of coughing.

When he’d recovered, the maître d’ made one last attempt. “Why is this so important anyway?”

Arthur sighed. “We’re trying to get a picture of her last few hours alive, and any small detail might be of importance. So could you please ask your colleagues? Otherwise I’ll have to, and I probably won’t be as discreet as you.”

The man coughed slightly again, took the photo between his thumb and index finger as if it were poisonous, smiled unhappily, and disappeared.

Poor bastard,
Arthur thought.

When he returned he was accompanied by a Marilyn Monroe–like buxom blonde. She was easy on the eyes in her tight skirt and fitted blouse, which showed off her curves.

“My colleague,” the maître d’
said in a surprised tone of voice, “does indeed have some information for you.”

Arthur stood up politely, and the woman smiled into his eyes and nodded as he presented his ID. When she continued to smile, ignoring the ID, he started to feel a little stupid, wondering if her deep smile wasn’t directed at him at all. Then they sat down.

51

“I’m going to Berlin,” she’d said. “We can’t meet anymore. You’ll have to find someone else. Or you could try monogamy for a change.”

She giggled but quickly turned serious again. “Your wife’s lovely—why do you cheat on her?”

“Don’t be stupid!” he said. “She’s nothing.”