Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,55

disturb Herr or Frau Wendt. If you are hired, you would report to me. What do you say?”

I nodded. She sat with her legs neatly and symmetrically together, like a model in a fashion magazine. Her hands were clasped quietly, only to start up sometimes unexpectedly in a brisk gesture. This gave her an air of competence and authority. I decided to try that myself at the earliest opportunity.

She rose. “Thank you for dropping by. You will hear from us.”

3

A bit flat

By that evening I had the case.

This time I didn't have to worry about ruffling anybody's circle of friends and could go at it no holds barred: Wendt's friends and girlfriends, his colleagues, his acquaintances, his landlady, his sports club, his local bar, his garage. I tracked down the young woman I'd seen him with at the Sole d'Oro, the friend from university with whom he'd traveled to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and his card-playing pals: an unemployed teacher, a tomato-fetishizing artist, and a violinist from the Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra. I also dropped in at the Eppelheim Squash Courts, where he was a regular. Everyone expressed their dismay at Wendt's death. But the dismay was not so much about Wendt's having died as the fact that somebody they knew had been murdered. Murder was something that only existed in papers and on TV! Rolf, of all people! He got on so well with everyone, he was so well-regarded!

The violinist was the third person who told me that.

“Well-regarded? Why 'well-regarded' and not 'liked'?”

eyed her strong hands with their short nails. “We were together for a while, but somehow there wasn't much of a spark. You know what I mean?”

According to the young woman from the Sole d'Oro, there hadn't been much of a spark with her either. She worked at the Deutsche Bank where Wendt had an account. He'd approached her and asked her out. “He was utterly dependable, as dependable with his account as with our dates.”

“That sounds a bit flat.”

“What can I say? We never really hit it off. At first I thought he was a bit standoffish and didn't want me to get too close, because he went to university and had a doctorate, and me with my banking traineeship. But that wasn't it. He just couldn't break out of himself. I waited and waited, but nothing happened. Maybe there wasn't anything there. You'd think that there'd be more there when someone's a shrink, but I guess why should there be? I mean, I'm in banking and it's not like I've got any money.”

I'd caught her on her lunch break, and she stood in front of me in her business outfit with her perfect hairdo and discreet makeup. Very appropriate for a young employee in a big German bank. But there was more to her than money and percentages. Rolf Wendt, who couldn't break out of himself, whom one is seriously interested in for a while, with whom one wonders at first if one did something wrong, and then if something's wrong with him—the others had not seen him or defined him as clearly as she did. And it wasn't a matter of his being reserved with women. His squash instructor said more or less the same thing: “He was a doctor? See, I didn't even know that. A good player, though, and I wanted to get him into sets with others. We've got a good club thing going with our squash courts, even though they're new.” He eyed me. “You could do with some exercise. Anyway, Wendt always kept to himself. He was a nice guy, but he always kept to himself.”

Frau Kleinschmidt didn't hold it against me that I wasn't Herr Wendt. “So you're a detective? Like Hercule Parrot?” She asked me in and put the kettle on. We sat in her kitchen, which had a corner bench, a cupboard, and a linoleum floor. The washing machine and the stove were brand-new. The drapes, the curtains in the glass doors of the cupboard, the oilcloth on the table, and the decals on the refrigerator all had Delft tile patterns.

“Are you in any way connected with Holland?” I asked.

“You saw the tulips in the garden and put two and two together!” She beamed at me with admiration. “My first husband was from there. Willem. He was a driver, a trucker, and when he had the Rotterdam route he always brought back the bulbs. Because he knew I liked flowers. He had connections, you see, and didn't