The Lie (23 page)

The planned revenge was followed by a shock as, after the second ring, Nadia's “Trenkler” rattled her eardrum. Her finger shot out and broke the connection. Half-past twelve! She refused to believe Nadia had met the caller with the harsh-sounding voice in the morning. She waited half an hour. Then she tried a second time. Again it was Nadia who replied and again she hung up without a word. The sensible thing to do would have been to go back to her own flat and wait until three or four before trying once more. But she couldn't bring herself to do that. Instead she watered Jasmin's plants and did a little dusting. She stuck it out until two, then tried for the third time.

Again it was Nadia who replied. By this time she was sounding nervous. “Hello? Hello? Who is that calling? Say something.”

She was about to hang up again, when she heard his voice in the background. “Is it that joker again, darling?”

“I don't know,” Nadia said.

“Give it to me,” he said. And then he was speaking to her. “You have exactly two seconds left to say what you want. Then I'm going to hang up and after that no one will lift the receiver again. A hundred and one, a hundred and two - that's it.”

Before she could even clear her throat, the line went dead. “Darling” went round and round in her head, like a cruel echo. Well, there were other ways. She could write to him at the lab. She managed to get back to her flat unseen and spent the rest of the day drafting a letter. The
writing pad she kept for job applications was getting thinner and thinner. No words were good enough for him. After all, there were things you could only say to someone face to face. Finally she thought of directory enquiries. It was dark on the stairs but she didn't switch on the light, just left her door open. When, a little later, she closed the door to Jasmin Toppler's flat again, she was reasonably content.

 

She didn't get much sleep that Tuesday night, she kept waking with a start from terrible dreams. Finally an early train brought her back to the dreariness of the real world. She looked at the alarm clock. Six o'clock. Michael would be getting up, going to the shower. He didn't bother with breakfast. She cuddled up under the blankets and followed him in her mind's eye through the splendour of white to the garage. After a good hour she decided he'd be in the lab, so she got up, had a shower, dressed and crept to her neighbour's door once more.

Like Heller's, Jasmin's flat looked out onto the street. The telephone was on a little table right next to the living-room window. From the third floor the street could only be seen by leaning out of the window, but the street corner, round which the telephone box was, could be seen from beside the table.

She dialled the number she'd obtained from directory enquiries the previous evening. A porter at the switchboard answered, listened to her request and said, “I'm putting you through.” Music came from the receiver, interrupted now and then by a soft female voice: “Thank you for your patience. Please hold the line.”

Her patience quickly grew thin. The muzak got on her nerves. Her eye wandered along the buildings across the road to the street corner. Once more the woman's voice thanked her for her patience, but before it could ask her to hold the line it was interrupted by the matter-of-fact voice of the porter asking her again what she wanted. Again she asked to be put through to Michael Trenkler, pointing out that she'd already been waiting on hold for some time.

The porter simply said, “I'm putting you through,” and the little tune came back. A fat man of medium height appeared at the street corner and stood there. She paid no attention to him but drummed her fingers impatiently on the little table. She was starting to get worried about Jasmin Toppler's telephone bill. It might be a good idea to anticipate her
surprise with a few euros and an explanation. “I needed to telephone urgently and the box had been vandalized again.”

While she was thinking about that, her gaze automatically went back to the street corner. Now the fat man wasn't alone any more, he was talking to a woman in a sand-coloured trouser suit who was wearing a headscarf and large sunglasses. Before she could get a closer look, the woman went round the corner. The man started to walk, came closer, then crossed over the street and thus disappeared from view. And for the third time the porter asked her what she wanted. In an irritated tone she told him, “You've already tried to put me through twice. I've been waiting for ages.”

“Not everyone's in their office yet,” the porter said. “Perhaps you could try again later.”

“No, now,” she insisted. “I don't want to speak to someone in an office. I need to speak to Michael Trenkler. Please put me through to his lab.”

The porter remained a model of porterly detachment. “Which department, please?”

“I don't know exactly, but he works with a Herr Kemmerling. Please, it really is very urgent.”

She heard the porter asking, “Hey, Heinz, Trenkler and Kemmerling, have you any idea which lab they're in?”

“Thirty-eight,” a voice replied. “If no one answers, try seventy-four. They had a computer crash last week, it could be that they've…”

She stopped listening to the discussion coming from the receiver. Something was happening down in the street. Now the woman was back at the corner and looking towards the building. The wind was tugging at her headscarf. And those large, dark glasses - on such a dull day.

“I'm putting you through,” the porter said. And a door nearby was closed. Her door! Two seconds later the woman at the street corner took a mobile out of her jacket pocket.

There was no reply from extension thirty-eight. She wouldn't have dared to speak anyway. Someone was in her flat and talking to Nadia on the phone. The walls were thin. She'd heard Jasmin often enough. At first the voice from her flat just came as a murmur, but suddenly it grew louder. “I'm not blind and the place isn't that large. Why didn't you keep your big mouth shut, you stupid bitch? Couldn't you let her have her little moment of pleasure? After all, you're getting your money's worth too.”

The man in her flat must be Philip Hardenberg. She might have recognized him sooner, but not at that distance, especially as she'd only seen him once before, and that when she'd been running a temperature. He was urging Nadia to leave. “Off you go. Get on with it!” The last thing she heard him say was, “Don't worry, I'll see to that. I think I can manage a convincing heart attack.”

Without being aware it, she whispered “Shit” half a dozen times in Jasmin's living room. She only realized she'd spoken out loud when she heard steps going down the stairs. She didn't dare look out of the window, they might see her. Despite Hardenberg's command, Nadia was still at the corner. After a couple of minutes he reappeared down in the street. Then they both left.

Her brain was awhirl with questions and answers. What had Hardenberg been looking for in her flat? Immediately Nadia's threat came to mind: she'd snapped her fingers. How had he got in? With a duplicate of the key she'd forgotten to take out of her handbag last Thursday. And it wasn't only the man at the airport Nadia had an intimate relationship with. Nadia surely wouldn't have allowed Hardenberg to call her a stupid bitch if they were no more than just business partners.

She didn't bother with the call to extension seventy-four. Either Nadia had drawn the correct conclusion from her silent phone calls the previous day or - and she would have bet the whole of her mother's nest egg on it - she'd been informed about her visit to Behringer and Partners. Nadia probably even knew the favour nice Herr Reincke had done her. And to stop anything going any further, she'd snapped her fingers. A heart attack! The words sent a tingle of ice through her veins. If she'd been in her flat - or gone to the callbox: that was the direction the two of them had come from.

She stayed in Jasmin's flat for another hour, spending the first ten minutes looking through the classified directory then calling a locksmith. Only when she heard the bell ring next door and had checked that there was a van with the firm's name on it down in the street, did she go out. The door to her flat was open. It hadn't been forced open, as the locksmith quickly established.

It cost a small fortune to have a new lock installed and a chain fitted. Once the locksmith had left, she gave the new key a double turn and put the chain on, then checked every corner. There was no sign that Philip Hardenberg had been doing anything other than looking for her.

It was about midday before she noticed that the three letters from Nadia were no longer in the cupboard. The envelope with the Alfo Investment document she'd pieced together and the notes she'd made for her own safety had also disappeared, as had the pile of photos of Nadia's house and surroundings. But Nadia's faithful servant had ignored the fat envelope containing all the printouts with “Postage to be paid by addressee” on the front and “From: Dieter Lasko” on the back. He'd probably assumed it contained documents connected with her divorce. The fragmentary letter to
Jacques, mon chéri
, the note of his mobile number and the copy of the tape were still in it.

She spent the afternoon and the whole of Thursday, Friday and Saturday sitting in her room with the door locked and the chain on. On the Sunday she didn't go down until Johannes Herzog stopped in the middle of the street and started blasting his horn.

Her mind was elsewhere during the whole of her visit to her mother. She must have heard her ask, “Is something wrong, Susanne?” twenty times, and twenty times she replied, “Just a headache.” And every time she said the word she felt a lump in her throat as she imagined she could feel Michael's hand clasping the back of her neck.

On the way back she asked Johannes if she could borrow his BMW on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. She claimed she wanted to visit a friend. The concern in her mother's voice had made her see that she must do something. Take the bull by the horns and call on Michael in the lab then go with him to see Nadia. To have him at her side when she came face to face with Nadia would be the best proof of what she had to tell him. And Nadia could scarcely take steps against her once Michael knew. By that time there'd be no point, anyway.

Johannes did not greet her request with any great enthusiasm. “Which friend,” he asked. “One like Heller?”

He had been treated to Heller's abuse often enough. “It's none of my business, what stories you tell your mother,” he said. “But she tells my grandmother and she tells me. I thought there was something wrong with my ears when she said you were thinking of buying a piano from Heller. He doesn't even know how to spell piano.”

“What do you want me to tell my mother? That the guy's a drunkard, is always hurling abuse at me, has a criminal record and hasn't got a job?”

“Nor have you,” Johannes declared. “Or if you have, there's something funny about it. Firms just don't send their secretaries out as couriers. We've known each other for quite a while now, Frau Lasko, and suddenly you look like a different person. It makes you think.”

“I really do just want to go and see a friend,” she said. Johannes nodded. “Then tell me when and I'll drive you there. But I'm not letting my car be used for something that might be a bit shady.”

“Forget it,” she said. She hoped Nadia would do the same.

 

Nothing special happened during the days that followed. Long periods of lethargy alternated with brief moments of undirected energy. Sometimes she read the reports in which Nadia went on at great length, and always in very positive terms, about the future prospects of foreign companies. Sometimes she wondered about getting a bus out to the pharmaceutical firm, but most of the time she just sat there, seeing herself in her mind's eye lying on the floor in the TV room next to Michael. She heard the mobile ring in the study and then herself, saying, “That's Nadia. She said she'd phone when she got back from the trip with her lover.”

Jasmin Toppler returned late on Friday evening, collected her key and thanked her for looking after her plants. She confessed to having used the telephone. Jasmin waved the offered payment away and gave her a searching look. “Are you unwell?”

“Just tired,” she said.

Jasmin invited her in for a coffee. There was a tot of genuine Jamaica rum to go with it and she heard how wonderful the holiday had been. She also heard someone knocking at her door, heard Nadia's urgent voice: “Open up, Susanne.”

Jasmin heard it too. “You've got a visitor.”

When she didn't move, Jasmin asked, “Aren't you going to go?”

She just shook her head so that Nadia wouldn't hear her voice. For three minutes Nadia went on begging her, then all was silent outside.

Strangely enough, this roused her from her lethargy. On Saturday she got up early and bought a newspaper with a vacancies section. When she got back, she also checked her letter box, which she hadn't done for some time. There was a letter in it. It had no sender's name on the back, but the familiar block capitals immediately caught her eye. To go by the postmark, it must have been delivered on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Nadia apologized for her outburst in the woods, swore it would never happen again, begged her to put her anger behind her, begged her even more to stand in for her during the coming week, for two days, and finally suggested they meet in the multi-storey. Friday, three o'clock. That explained why Nadia had turned up at her door.

She tore the letter up. Then she read the adverts and found two office jobs for which it was worth using up the last two pages of her pad. As she was writing her applications, Jasmin appeared with a box of chocolates as a thank-you present. Naturally Jasmin saw what she was writing and asked, “Would you do something other than office work?”