Pierre Frei - Berlin - A Novel

'Yes, that's me.'

'Police Superintendent Kuhlmann. It's about your client Paul Belzig. He's hanged himself in remand custody. We need you as a witness. Someone from the public prosecutor's office is on his way already. Purely a matter of form, doctor.'

'Oh, how dreadful,' Jutta exclaimed.

A small-time burglar,' said Jordan. 'Offended for the sixth time. According to the new guidelines that makes him what they call a danger to national morale, and after serving his sentence he was likely to be sent to a camp for preventive detention. These days that means for life. A life that he's now cut short.' She sensed his anger. He controlled himself. 'I'm really sorry our evening has to end like this.'

'Not your fault.' She gave him her hand. 'Goodnight.' The rear lights of the car disappeared around the corner, and with them the answer to an unspoken question.

It was too late to go home now. She had keys to the bookshop. In the back room, she got out the folding bed that Frau Gerold sometimes used for her siesta. Is Isabel sleeping with him? she wondered, surprised to find how she could ask herself that question with such objectivity.

On Saturdays the shops closed at one. Anja Schmitt came to collect Diana Gerold. Anja was a graceful, ash-blonde woman with cropped hair. Today she wore a tennis dress. The two women were going to play in a match at the club. It had taken some time for it to dawn on Jutta that they lived together as a couple.

'Doing anything interesting this weekend, Fraulein Reimann?' Anja asked politely.

'Weeding the garden in Kopenick. My parents don't have time for it, with all the customers they get in their bar these days. And my fiance is busy studying for his exam, so he doesn't want me hanging around.'

The emblematic bird of Brandenburg shone in the sun over the door. Jutta's great-grandparents had opened the Red Eagle in 1871. At the time, the little town of Kopenick was not yet part of Berlin, and the cobbler Wilhelm Voigt had knocked back his beer there long before he became world famous as the impostor Captain of Kopenick.

Vati was carefully drawing off beer into glass jugs behind the counter. His face showed contentment. He nodded to his daughter without stopping what he was doing, and jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen. Her mother was frying dozens of meatballs in a huge, black, cast-iron pan. 'Drain those eggs, would you?' she told Jutta by way of greeting. Jutta took the pan off the stove and carried it over to the sink. Steam rose as she poured the boiling water away. She turned the brass tap on and ran cold water over the eggs before shelling them one by one, twenty in all. They joined the meatballs under a protective mesh cover on the counter of the bar.

She spent all afternoon weeding the vegetable beds and tipping the weeds off the wheelbarrow on to the compost heap by the fence. She couldn't help thinking about Jochen Weber, Rainer Jordan, and the inevitable Isabel Severin. She had to talk to someone.

Professor Georg Raab was a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and professor of art history at the university. He and his wife lived in a large, comfortable villa dating from the 1870s in the Wendenschloss district. Now and then he came into the Red Eagle for a couple of glasses of wine. Jutta had known him since childhood.

Roses were wafting their soft scent in the front garden. On the slate slabs of the path leading from the wrought-iron gate to the villa, a long-haired, slender Borzoi leaped to meet her. All right. Igor, stop that.' she said, fending him off, and climbed the steps to the front door.

It was opened by Professor Raab's wife Mascha, a beautiful woman of forty with slender hands and dark, velvety eyes. 'Jutta, how nice. My husband will be so pleased. He's in the studio, just go down.'

She had been the same way countless times. Through the spacious hall, past the massive refectory table which always had fresh flowers glowing on it, straight to the dark oak panelling at the side of the steps, from which a door led down.

The bright basement room was both workshop and studio. In the middle of it there was a printing press with a huge spindle. Shelves filled with dozens of different kinds of paper rose along the walls. The sturdy workbench, bearing the traces of decades of work. stood at one of the two barred windows through which you saw the garden at eye level. There was a charcoal sketch of Igor on the easel beside it.

The professor was bending over a block of wood, carving fine shavings from its smooth surface with a tiny knife. 'This one's going to be a Diirer woodcut. Still life with cabbage and potatoes, supposed to be a previously unknown work by the master. I shall print it off on paper of the period. I've bet Max Liebermann that the new curator of the national gallery here will fall for it twice over. First he'll miss the fact that it's a forgery at all, second he'll fail to notice that potatoes didn't reach Germany until a hundred years after Diirer. So far the good curator has put his limited knowledge of his subject to hunting for "degenerate art". Liebermann's masterpieces, which all the world admires, fall into that category.' The professor chuckled like a naughty schoolboy. 'Know what the curator said? "1 can't eat as much of it as I'd like to throw up again."' He went on working with the knife. 'I expect to be thrown out of the academy any day and fired from the university. All of a sudden we Jews aren't German enough. Well, Mascha's looking forward to my early retirement. She hopes she'll have more of me to herself. And how are you, Jutta, my dear?'

'Very well, professor.'

'But not as well as you'd like to be.' The stout little man with the wreath of grey hair put his knife down. 'You're prettier than ever, and you've grown up since our last sitting. There must be more than one man interested in you, and that's why you're here.'

'I don't know what I should do. I'm engaged to Jochen. But this girl Isabel keeps coming between us, and now I've met an interesting young lawyer. I think he likes me.'

'You mean you like him. As much as your Jochen? Better? Or as an instrument of sweet revenge?'

She hadn't seen it as clearly as that. 'I think because of the revenge.' She pouted. 'But not entirely.'

Raab sat down on the stool by the window and propped a large sketchpad on his knee. 'Will you get undressed?'

'Of course.' Unselfconsciously, she stripped.

'Last time you were sixteen, and before that fourteen.' The professor began working with a soft pencil. 'Do you remember our very first sitting?'

Mascha appeared with a tray of lemonade. 'She was five then. You insisted that her mother must come too. How is she?'

'Thank you for asking. Mutti has the house and kitchen well in hand.'

'You were seven when you came alone for the first time. Do you remember, Mascha darling — the child absolutely didn't want to get undressed. Why not is a mystery to me to this day.'

Jutta laughed. 'Because I had a brand-new dress on, red with big white spots. I thought I looked truly beautiful in it. How often have you drawn me. Professor?'

There were fourteen nude drawings. Raab took them out of their folder after the sitting and looked at them, pleased. 'From little girl to pretty young woman. All of them good. They'll be yours after my death. Will you go on modelling for me?'

As long as you like.'

'Unless we have to go away,' Mascha said, with an anxious look.

'Nonsense, dear heart, no one will actually harm us. They'll remove me from my position, that's all. A kind of early retirement. We can live with that.'

'Time for your insulin, Georg.'

And I must go and help Mutti in the kitchen.' Jutta said goodbye.

The professor showed her out. 'Make yourself desirable for your Jochen.' He smiled slyly. And introduce Isabel to the lawyer.'