Free The Stronger Sex by Hans Werner Kettenbach

Fuchs had good reasons for going to that hotel, in order to have medical treatment there for her condition.”
    â€œThat’s all garbage! Anyone would think you lived on another planet! Good heavens, don’t you know what those advertising people are like? These places promise people ‘wellness’ – wellness, I ask you – before we know it they’ll be offering eternal life, and guests go and munch their carrots and their radishes and sit with their arses in a mud bath or a whirlpool bath and pay through the nose for it. It’s got nothing to do with medical treatment! What time do you think you’re living in?”
    I looked at him in silence. In the end there was nothing he could do but go on searching. It didn’t take him much
longer. After a few seconds he came up with a colour leaflet printed in a narrow, upright format, glanced at it and threw it to me.
    It was not just a scrap of paper but a small brochure. I opened it and saw five names of qualified doctors on the third page, one of them also a professor, physicians whose services were available to guests at the hotel. It was probably the detective who had stuck a strip of paper with holes punched in it to one edge, overlapping the side of the leaflet so that it could be fitted into a ring binder and read there.
    I opened the folder and put the brochure in where it belonged, taking my time about it. He watched me in silence.
    I said, “It was a mistake to take this brochure out of the file, Herr Klofft. If I distrusted you, it might make me think you wanted to leave me in the dark about what a shaky case this is, for myself and my legal practice. And if you did that, it would be a very bad mistake, because it would do neither you nor me any good. You can be quite sure that Frau Fuchs’s lawyer will back up the medical qualities of that hotel with all the expert opinions he can scrape up. And you can be equally sure that we will then look pretty silly in court.”
    He said, “Don’t you think the tone you are taking is outrageous?”
    I said, “No, as a mater of fact I don’t.” I put the folder in my briefcase and stood up. “I’ll let you know when there’s any news. And please let me know as soon as you hear from the lawyer representing Frau Fuchs. Goodbye, Herr Klofft.”
    He was still staring at me darkly, but he said nothing. I had only just closed the door when his bell rang, twice. I went to the stairs, expecting to be met by his wife on my way or on the ground floor. But unexpectedly a door opposite Klofft’s room opened. Cilly Klofft appeared.

    She was still wearing her painter’s smock. She smiled at me, stepped aside and held the door open.

8
    It was an embarrassing realization, but there was no getting around it: I was a stupid, insensitive philistine. The pictures I saw in this light and quite large room, her temporary studio, all bore the same unmistakable handwriting. They were painted in strong colours applied with sweeping, often broad brushstrokes. There were portraits, a nude, still lifes of everyday items, a view of a landscape lying fallow, its horizon consisting of the distant rooftops of a row of five-storey apartment houses built of some speckled material.
    I realized that the portrait of an elderly woman hanging in Hochkeppel’s office on the wall opposite his desk was probably by the same hand. He had been looking past me and therefore straight at it when he said that Cilly Klofft might have been a great painter if she hadn’t got involved with that man. I had been in his office day after day without ever once asking who had painted the picture. I had noticed it as little as the group of comfortable chairs under it upholstered in dark leather. Calfskin, lamb? No idea.
    After appearing opposite Klofft’s door, she had let me into the studio, saying, “Just a minute, please,” and had gone over to her husband’s room