The Lie (13 page)

Susanne hadn't seen a telephone there, but Nadia insisted there was one, by the bed, all she had to do was look, though actually she'd had no business to be in the bedroom. Nadia couldn't entirely conceal her anger, but apart from that comment, it was mainly directed at Michael.

“He seems to think the car runs on air. You can't imagine how often we've had arguments about it. Only four weeks ago I had an important engagement and was just leaving when he rang. He'd run out of petrol halfway to the lab and expected me to go and drive him there.”

Nadia got worked up then calmed down. She was partly to blame herself, she said. Four weeks ago she'd told Michael to be so good as to check the fuel gauge next time before he set off. And if he'd forgotten to fill up he should find some other means of transport. Of course, by that she'd meant a taxi, not the Alfa. Her final assessment of the
debriefing was, “Well, it seems to me it hasn't gone badly at all. Not as planned, but the things that went wrong weren't your fault. And I can guarantee that the next time Michael won't touch the Alfa and the door'll be working.”

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. An outburst of rage and vituperation for her stupidity she could have understood. But for someone to accept that kind of damage with a shrug of the shoulders - just to be able to spend an undisturbed weekend with her lover? It was inconceivable. And experience had taught her that others had considerably fewer inhibitions than she had. A million on death.

“No,” she said. “There won't be a next time. I've seen the insurance policy. My voice sounds different from yours, but when you're dead you can't speak. Find someone else for your little game.”

 

Nadia gave her a blank stare. Then, after a few seconds she started to laugh out loud. “You think I was going to kill you just to collect a million?” It sounded as if a million was little more than petty cash.

Nadia shook her head, still laughing. “There's just one reason I need you, Susanne, and one reason alone: the one I told you. Our voices are as identical as all the rest. The only difference is in your own ears, it's the body's resonance that causes it.”

At this Nadia took a small Dictaphone out of her computer bag, switched it on and said, “Say something.”

“What should I say?”

Nadia shrugged her shoulders and picked up her handbag. “Did you take your money?”

“No. It was only for a few hours.”

Nadia counted out five hundred euros and placed them on the table. “But they count as triple time with all the trouble you had.”

The Dictaphone was still running. Nadia switched it off, rewound it and let her hear that there was no difference between their voices. “Does that reassure you? Now show me your fingers.”

Hesitantly she stretched out her hand. Nadia took off the makeshift bandage, looked at the cuts and said they didn't need sewing. “They'll leave some scars,” she said. “Have you got a sharp knife?”

Without waiting for an answer, Nadia went into the kitchen and fetched a small knife from the drawer. After examining Susanne's cuts
carefully, she drew the knife twice over her own fingers. It made a soft hissing noise.

Susanne felt sick when she saw the blood trickling down Nadia's hand. It spilled onto the floor and soaked into the old carpet. “Are you out of your mind?” she stammered.

“Only at the full moon,” said Nadia. When she went on it was in an insistent tone. “We've got this far, Susanne, you can't let me down now. In fortnight's time I'm going for a weekend away with my friend. It's already agreed. I know it's not easy, the alarm system's a bit awkward. But it's not the alarm you have to cope with, it's Michael. That worked. And the next time there won't be any other difficulties, I swear. I'll change the codes so there's no problem.”

She couldn't take her eyes of Nadia's bleeding fingers. And every drop soaking into the carpet was another reason to say no. She really could have done with the money, but the idea that Nadia might cut herself and she would have to take a knife to herself to restore the likeness… Shaking her head firmly, she took off the rings and pulled the studs out of her ears, which by now were throbbing fiercely. She put the jewellery on the table beside the money and took off the watch. “No,” she said.

Nadia must have realized she was deadly serious. With a look of frustration on her face, she wrapped a handkerchief round her bleeding fingers, gathered up the jewellery, put the laptop and Dictaphone in the computer bag, tucked the document case under her arm and went to the door. There she stopped.

“I'll pay you a thousand for each weekend. You won't have to take any more of your mother's money, you'll even be able to pay back everything you stole from her.”

It was moral blackmail. When she showed no reaction, Nadia said, “Think about it, Susanne. A thousand for each weekend, that's two thousand a month. When did you last earn that much? We'll meet on Thursday. In the multi-storey again.” After that command, Nadia closed the door behind her.

Susanne stared at the patches of blood on the old carpet, while in her mind's eye she saw herself strolling round the white mansion. She heard the asthmatic wheezing of her second-hand fridge, saw her threadbare couch, her whole shabby flat and the money on the table. A thousand, after the mess she'd made of it! A lie about her mother falling ill would
have been decidedly cheaper. But perhaps Nadia's mother was dead, or Michael got on very well with her. Whatever, the business must be damned important to Nadia.

Immersed in thought, she went into the bedroom, took off the bloodstained clothes and put on some of her old things. Then she scrubbed at the expensive dress for a while. The blood would wash out of the clothes. She didn't bother with the carpet, it merged in with the lurid pattern and the grime of years.

About a quarter of an hour later there was a knock at the door. She assumed it would be Nadia, coming back to try and persuade her again. But on the landing were Jasmin Toppler and Heller. Jasmin, in her leathers and with her helmet under her arm, was at the door, Heller a little further back. As she opened the door, she heard him say, “…left half an hour ago, in a new Jaguar.” Jasmin tapped her forehead and said, “He's been seeing things.”

Heller flushed with rage. “But I did see her,” he objected. “She was wearin' diff'rent things, that expensive clobber again. I hate to think what she's been up to of late. I think I saw her before, in a white Porsche. 'S a while ago now. It wasn't parked outside. I was—”

Jasmin cut him short. “Pissed as a newt as usual. You don't need to tell us that.” Then Jasmin turned to Susanne and asked if she had a minute. She asked Jasmin in, so as not to have to argue with Heller.

He was drunk, but not so drunk that he could be persuaded he'd been seeing things. His window looked out on the street. If he'd seen Nadia come out of the building and drive off, even his addled brain would tell him that there must be two women. Which was the case, of course. As she closed the door, she heard him mutter, “So that's it. There's two of 'em. Very handy. You could get up to all sorts of tricks and always have an alibi.” He giggled and went down to his flat, still muttering to himself.

Jasmin was standing in the living room. The money was still on the table next to the blood-smeared knife and the saucer full of cigarette ends. She was looking at them with a thoughtful expression on her face. Susanne quickly went past her, picked up the money and put it in the cupboard.

As she closed the cupboard door, Jasmin said, “Er, tomorrow I'm flying off on holiday for four weeks,” and told Susanne that the friend who'd
promised to water her plants had broken her leg and was in hospital. “So I thought you might be good enough to do it, if it's no trouble and I gave you the key?”

She hadn't been listening properly, she still felt dazed by Nadia's increased offer and just nodded. Jasmin gave a grateful smile, went up to her flat and came back with some Elastoplast, with which she bandaged her cuts. Again her eyes were drawn to the knife and the saucer. But she asked no questions and, to judge by her leather suit, she hadn't been at home during the last few hours.

When she was alone once more, Susanne took the things into the kitchen, washed the knife and tipped the cigarette ends into the rubbish bin. Only then did she see the tiny scraps of paper in the bin. She fished them all out, blew off the cigarette ash and took them into the living room.

There was no particular reason why she did it, not even curiosity. At first it was just something to occupy her. With a great deal of patience, she managed to put the sheet of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle. At the top was an imposing letterhead: “Alfo Investment”. She'd seen that somewhere before, but couldn't remember where. At the very bottom was a row of figures in small writing: telephone number, fax, bank account details. The tears in the paper meant she couldn't decipher them all, but they stuck in her mind. In the middle of the sheet were more numbers, written by hand in relatively large letters.

There were nine in total, all of them seven-figure numbers, each preceded by a name. The figures were listed in descending order. The smallest, the one at the bottom, was 1,300,000. At the top, alongside the name Zurkeulen, was 5,730,000. The total came to a little over twenty million, a sum of money that was beyond her imagining, if it was euros. “A million on death” briefly came to mind. After that she had no idea what to think.

For a while she just sat there, staring at the scraps of paper. Her cuts were throbbing unpleasantly. Everything went through her mind again, like a film being played backwards. Until it came to Michael Trenkler. He was leaning back against the front door, looking at her with that expression of fear and suspicion in his eyes. “I'm not going through all that again,” he said, expressing exactly what was going through her mind. On the other hand, could she afford to pass up the chance of
two thousand euros a month simply because she had some - possibly completely absurd - misgivings? And she could do something to counter those misgivings.

She took the pad she used for her applications and started: “On 25/7 I met Nadia Trenkler in Gerler House.” Then she wrote down everything that had happened since then, even Heller's crazy claim that the opinion pollster had been a snooper. She concluded with the disparities: blood group, birthmark and fractured skull, and put the sheets in a large envelope, adding the scraps of paper with the names and figures.

Then she wondered where she could deposit it. To hand it to her mother saying, “If I stop coming to visit, get someone to read this to you and take it over to the police,” would give Agnes Runge a heart attack. She didn't know a lawyer she could ask to look after this “life-insurance policy”. Her divorce lawyer had been a scrawny little bastard, always in a hurry and only interested in his fee. Basically there was only one person who would make proper use of her notes, if the worst should come to the worst, despite the way she still felt about him: Dieter Lasko. But it would be a mistake to send him the envelope. He'd just tap his forehead and tell Ramie, “I suppose Susanne's spending all her spare time reading crime novels now.” She had to think of another way. And another way did occur to her.

 

On Monday Jasmin Toppler gave her the key to her flat then got into a taxi, together with a large suitcase. Five minutes later she was hiding her envelope underneath Jasmin's bedlinen. She'd stuck it down and written her husband's name and address on it, as well as a message to Jasmin, asking her to hand it over to Dieter if she should suddenly give up her flat and forget to ask for it back. It might sound ridiculous and Jasmin's reaction might be the same as Dieter's. But it reassured her.

After she'd done that, she turned her attention to another aspect. If she was going to stand in for Nadia for any length of time, she simply had to be better prepared. In the days that followed she wrote down everything that occurred to her that seemed important: what she absolutely had to know, what she ought to know on top of that and what it would do no harm to know.

As requested, she met Nadia in the multi-storey on Thursday. When, to be on the safe side, she mentioned her notes, Nadia simply gave an
amused smile. Her questionnaire, on the other hand, she found a prudent precaution. With relief she said, “So you're going to do it,” confessing that she'd felt she couldn't ask her to learn masses of dates and events off by heart on top of everything else. Since she was only going to show Michael the cold shoulder, it had seemed superfluous. But, of course, it would do no harm if she was prepared for possible emergencies.

They took a drive in the country in the Porsche. Nadia told her a few anecdotes that occasionally cropped up in conversations with Jo and Lilo or Wolfgang and Ilona. If some topic cropped up where she had nothing to say, it should be enough to put them off with a “Don't remind me of that.”

She wouldn't come into contact with other people, Nadia said, since she herself didn't have a lot to do with the people in the two houses opposite. One belonged to Niedenhoff, a pianist who'd only moved in at the beginning of the year and who was mostly away on concert tours. An actress lived in the other. They hardly ever saw her, she was a bit eccentric, grotesquely attached to her dog; she lavished twice much attention on it as on her son. Her real name was Eleanor Ravatzky, though she had a different stage name.

Celebrities everywhere, Susanne thought, at least on the other side of the road. A pianist and an actress. That would explain why she'd felt she'd seen the flustered-looking woman somewhere before.

Nadia gave her a few details about herself. She'd been born and had her early schooling in Düsseldorf, where she'd also lived and worked for some time later on. Her parents had moved to Geneva years ago. That was where her mother came from. Her father was completely occupied with his work, he didn't even have time for a short telephone conversation. Her mother was very much involved in cultural life and she never got round to ringing up to ask how her daughter was either. There should be no surprises from that side.