Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,91

the old man and the young girl. I hadn't ever told him anything about her. Had he got that from Lemke? It also struck me now that he had turned up at Brigitte's place, even though I'd never mentioned her. Had he been spying on me? Had our first meeting on the autobahn not been a coincidence, but set up by him? Had he been spying on me at that very moment?

Everything became even more confused. That Peschkalek might have heard about me and Leo from Lemke, but had come to me wanting to dig up the facts about the attack Lemke had launched, didn't pan out. Had he heard about Leo and me and the case I was investigating from the police, and not from Lemke? Let's say he'd read the article in the Viernheimer Tage-blatt, his curiosity was aroused, he started investigating, found out from a police source that I, too, was investigating, and fastened onto me… And then, as coincidence would have it, his old comrade Lemke turned out to be behind everything? There was a little too much coincidence in all of this for my liking.

When in the evening, after a long drive, I reached Mannheim, I had a backache but no answers. All I knew was where I wanted to search for those answers. The phone book listed Peschkalek's apartment and studio in the Bäckstrasse. I called Brigitte, told her I was still on the road and would be at her place by eight, and asked her to invite Peschkalek for dinner at eight, too. Then I parked my car in good time outside his place in the Bäckstrasse. Shortly before eight he came out, got into his VW Golf, and drove off. He didn't look right or left. I read the names on the buzzers and went inside.

The hallway was narrow and gloomy. After a few steps it widened out on the left into a stairwell. Straight ahead it led to a backyard. Peschkalek's buzzer was on a board with six others. When I got used to the dark, I could make out a sign with his name on it and an arrow pointing to the back.

In the yard were an old elm tree and a two-story wooden shack leaning on the firewall of the building next door. Next to the outside staircase that led to the second floor was another sign, ATELIER PESCHKALEK. I climbed the stairs following the arrow. The landing was wide enough for Peschkalek to put a table and two recliners on it and use it as a balcony. The door had only a peephole, and the window that looked out onto the landing was secured with a grille. I reached into my bag, snapped open the large key ring that had a good hundred different keys on it, and tried them one by one. It was quiet in the yard. The wind rustled in the elm tree.

It took a long time for me to find the key that released the pin tumblers and turned the lock. The door opened into a large room. The back wall showed the unplastered firewall of the neighboring building. To the right were three doors, leading into a tiny bedroom, a kitchen that was no larger than a closet, and a bathroom that also served as a darkroom, in which the necessities of personal hygiene had surrendered to the developing of film. On the left I could look out into the neighbor's yard through two large windows. A gap in the buildings of the Hafenstrasse even offered a narrow vista of the warehouses and cranes of the harbor and the red strip that the setting sun had left behind on the pale sky.

Dusk was setting in, and I had to hurry. His place was filled with lamps that could have made the interior bright as day, and there were also black blinds on the windows—but one of the blinds was stuck. So I had to look things over as best as I could and take as close a look as possible at anything interesting in the windowless bathroom.

Despite the tangle of lamps, curtains, and folding screens, the Venetian chair, piano stool, grandfather clock, Styrofoam column, and fake jukebox, I soon realized that Peschkalek had an eye for order. In one desk drawer he kept stationery with a letterhead, in another stationery without, in the second drawer envelopes arranged by size, and in the last drawer supplies ranging from punchers to scissors. His unanswered mail