Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,6

her there this past winter.”

I asked her the way there and thanked her. When I found the bar in the Kettengasse, it all came back to me. I had been shadowing someone once who had had a cup of coffee and played chess here. He's no longer alive.

I ordered an Aviateur, but the bar was out of grapefruit juice and champagne, and so I just had a Campari straight up. I struck up a conversation with the bored guy behind the bar and showed him Leo sitting in her chair. “When did you last see her?”

“Well, how about that, it's Leo! Nice picture. What do you want with her? Hey, Klaus, come here.” He waved over a short stocky man with red hair, rimless glasses, and sharp, intelligent eyes. The spitting image of what I imagined an intellectual Irish whiskey drinker would look like. The two men talked in hushed tones, falling silent under my interested gaze. So I turned away and pricked up my ears. I could tell I wasn't the first one who'd come to the Drugstore Bar looking for Leo. Somebody had been here back in February. Klaus also asked me why I was looking for her.

I told him I was her uncle, that I'd been at the residence hall on Klausenpfad, and that Andrea had sent me over here. The two men were still suspicious. They told me they hadn't seen Leo since January. That was all I got out of them. They eyed me as I finished my second Campari, paid, left, and looked through the window one more time.

5

Turbo on my lap

My next move was to scour the hospitals, even though I knew in cases where they have patients who are unable to speak they contact relatives. They also notify the police when a patient's identity is unclear. But it's rare for a doctor to authorize that relatives be contacted against a patient's will. A person being sought by relatives could be lying in a hospital only a few streets away. Perhaps the patient doesn't care that his loved ones are crying their eyes out not knowing where he is. Perhaps that's just what he wants.

But neither of these possibilities fit the impression I had of Leo. Even if her relationship with her parents was more strained than her father had admitted, why would she want to keep her hospital stay a secret from Professor Leider or the catastrophe philosopher? But the devil works in mysterious ways, so I made my way through the Heidelberg university clinic, the Mannheim Municipal Hospital, the district hospitals, and the hospitals of the diocese. Here I didn't run the risk of ruffling any of her circle of friends. I didn't have to adopt any of my character roles but could be Private Investigator Self, hired by an anxious father seeking his missing daughter. I didn't rely on the phone, though it's a pretty dependable way of determining whether a person is in a certain hospital. But if you want to know whether someone was a patient somewhere a few weeks or months ago, then it is better to go there in person. I spent two whole days going from place to place. There was no sign of Leo.

The weekend came. The rain that until now had been accompanying April stopped, and the sun was shining as I went on my Sunday walk through the Luisenpark. I had taken along a little bag of stale bread and was feeding the ducks. I had also brought along a copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, intending to settle into one of the chairs there. But the April sun wasn't yet warm enough. Or my bones don't warm up as fast as they used to. I was quite glad, back home, when Turbo, my tomcat, curled up on my lap. He purred and blissfully stretched out his little paws.

I knew where Leo had lived, studied, and hung out, and that she wasn't in some hospital in or around Heidelberg, nor had she been. She'd been missing since January, and in February someone had been looking for her. In July of last year she'd been arrested and fingerprinted. Her professor had good things to say about her, as did her roommates. Her contact with her parents left a little to be desired. She smoked. I also knew where to find Leo's friends and acquaintances, colleagues, and teachers. I could make inquiries at the translation institute, at the Drugstore Bar, and in neighborhood stores. But