Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,41
marriage to talk to each other and to ask them to give me their paper. But I couldn't work up the courage. All the same, I could see that Leo's picture wasn't on the front page.
It was on page four. By the time I rang the doorbell in Som-merberg at a quarter to nine, I had bought the newspaper and was holding it under my arm. The children were making a great racket inside. Leo opened the door.
I had recently caught only a glimpse of her, and even then she had remained for me the girl in the first photograph, the girl with the mouth that liked to laugh, with the question and the reproach in her eyes, the girl who was leaning on the little stone lion on my desk. I had not really come to terms with the young woman whose picture I had been given at the Klausenpfad residence hall. Now she was standing in front of me, another year or two older. Her chin and cheekbones showed determination. I read in her eyes: “What does this old man want? Is he selling something? Some kind of door-to-door salesman? Or has he come to read the electric and gas meters?” She was again wearing jeans and a man's checked shirt.
“What can I do for you?” Her accent was as thick as the peanut butter on the sandwiches Manu makes for himself.
“Good morning, Frau Salger.”
She took a step back. I was almost happy about the distrust in her eyes. Better a dangerous old man than a tiresome one.
“Excuse me?”
I handed her the newspaper, opened to page four. “I'd like to have a word with you.”
She looked at her picture with a mixture of curiosity and resignation: That's supposed to be me? Who cares, it's all over anyway.
I imagined that the picture was from the police files, when she had been taken in for fingerprinting during the student protests. Sometimes there is talk about criminalization by the police, meaning that law enforcement creates breaches of law as much as it fights them. These are unacceptable generalizations. It is only police photographers who are capable of “criminalizing” a person. And they are masters of their trade. Send them the most innocent and law-abiding individual you can find, and before you know it they will give him the mug of a criminal. Leo shrugged her shoulders and handed me back the newspaper. “Could you please wait a moment?” Her accent was gone.
I stood outside the door and heard snippets of Leo telling the children to put on their shoes, take along their jackets, and put their sandwiches in their schoolbags. Then she ran down the stairs and I heard her opening and shutting room and closet doors. When she came out of the house with the children, she was carrying a coat over her arm and a packed bag over her shoulder.
“Do you mind if I drive on ahead with the kids? I want to drop them off at the kindergarten and at the school and then leave the car outside Dr. Hopfen's office.” She unlocked the Land Rover and helped the children get in.
I followed in my car, and saw the little girl go into the kindergarten and the boys into the school. Then Leo parked the Rover, dropped the keys into Dr. Hopfen's mailbox, and came over to my car with her bag and coat. “Let's go.”
Did she think I was a policeman? Well, that could be cleared up later. When I turned into the road leading to Eber-bach she looked at me with surprise but didn't say anything. We were silent all the way to Ernsttal. I parked the car under some trees. “Come along, let's have a cup of coffee.”
She got out of the car. “And where are we going after that?”
“I don't know. Bonn? Heidelberg? Where would you like to go?”
We sat on the terrace and ordered coffee. “You're not a policeman—so who are you and what do you want?” She took tobacco and cigarette papers out of her bag, nimbly rolled herself a cigarette, and asked me for a light. She smoked and waited for my answer, looking at me not distrustfully but carefully.
“Wendt is dead, and everything points to this man being the murderer.” I showed her one of the pictures from her album, in which the fake Herr Salger stood next to her with his arm around her shoulder. “You know him.”
“What of it?” The caution in her eyes turned to defense. She