“No, really. It’s not necessary,” she hastened to assure him. “You’re tired too.”
“Not that tired,” he said, spreading out the towel in a way that brooked no argument. There was no doubt that he wanted to help and would keep on at her until she let him do what he had resolved to do. She recalled the bottles of massage oil in the next room. Presumably it was a matter of course for him: Nadia’s back was all tensed up so he gave Nadia a massage. And inside her head she could hear Nadia saying, “You can stop him getting suspicious. You just have to behave as I normally do.”
She could feel a flush start to creep over her face again as she sat up in the water. He held the outspread towel to her chest and wrapped it round her back. Then he finally went out. She quickly dried herself and wedged the towel under her armpits so that it covered her back, breasts, stomach and thighs. She tried to tuck the end in over her chest. It wouldn’t stick. But if she clamped it tight under her armpit and didn’t make any too hasty movements, it stayed in place. To be on the safe side, she quickly took the tampons out of the cupboard, placed them in a visible position on the edge of the wash basin and followed him into the adjoining room.
He had spread another towel over the couch and with a sweep of the hand invited her to lie on it. A bottle of massage oil was open ready on the cupboard. All the cushions were on the floor. Two seconds later the damp towel had joined them as he whipped it off and she hurriedly lay face down on the couch. Hardly had she stretched out than he was on top of her and sitting astride her thighs. She pressed her face into the towel and found breathing difficult. Not because of his weight. She could feel it on her thighs and the sensation was not unpleasant.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw his arm reach out over her head for the bottle. He poured some oil out into the palm of his hand. Then he started - with her shoulders. With practised hands he gave her tense muscles a thorough massage, then stroked the back of her neck up to her hair with the tips of his fingers and down the side of her spine to her hips. Twice he asked, “Is that good?”
“Mhm,” she replied.
It really was very pleasant and for a while it was almost like being at the masseur’s. True, he hadn’t sat on her thighs and she’d worn panties, but otherwise the difference wasn’t all that great. It was obvious it wasn’t the first time Michael Trenkler had given a massage. Gradually she relaxed as she felt a pleasant warmth spread over her back. Eight fingertips pressed against her hairline while two thumbs firmly kneaded the back of her neck. She took a deep breath and felt four fingers and one thumb run down the right-hand side of her spine. She enjoyed it and didn’t wonder for one second what the other hand was doing.
He shifted his weight and slid back to her lower legs. His hand worked its way up her spine and slowly back down again. Something briefly brushed against her thigh, too briefly for her to register that it was the end of an undone belt. She only realized that when she heard the noise of a zip being pulled down and immediately after felt his fingers touch a spot that Nadia had not subjected to comparison. Because he was not supposed to see it from close to and certainly not touch it.
She should have taken the tampons out of the cupboard in the afternoon or the evening. If he saw them now he would know they were only an excuse. “No,” she protested, “don’t.”
He did in fact remove his fingers, but only to take off his shirt, as she saw to her horror when she twisted her head to one side. It fluttered down to join the cushions and towel on the floor.
“No,” she repeated, more vigorously this time, and tried to shake him off her legs. “Stop it. I really do have a headache.”
He leaned over her, kissed her on the neck and whispered, “Of course. So have I. Come on, don’t be a prick tease.” He put his hand under her chin, lifted up her head and turned it more to the side. His face came nearer.
“Leave me alone! I don’t want to!” she said, before her mouth was firmly closed.
It was a long kiss - and her first for a long, long time. Initially it was new and strange, then tender, if not particularly comfortable with her head turned to the side. Later it became urgent, rousing and more comfortable. He slid off her and down from the couch, then took off his trousers, underpants and socks. She closed her eyes, like a child imagining it won’t be seen if it can’t see anything itself. Yet despite the darkness, her senses, sharpened by panic, perceived every movement. She had no idea how to stop what was coming, nor was she sure that she wanted to stop it. In time with her accelerating heartbeat, her mind was hammering against her skull: No! No! No! Her body, on the other hand, simply responded.
He turned her over, continuing to kiss and caress her. At one point something did seem to give him pause for thought. She peeked through her half-open lashes and saw him looking thoughtfully at her breasts. Immediately she felt a rush of fear. He had discovered the deception! He was bound to realize! No. He bent over her again and slid his lips over the very feature that had briefly disconcerted him.
With unremitting tenderness he continued to arouse her. And there came the point where she rolled over on top of him and returned everything in full. The cause wasn’t simply her long period of abstinence and her craving for love, it was more his occasional puzzlement. Several times he paused as he was about to do something. When she opened her eyes she could see his half veiled, half questioning look. He must have sensed that something was different, completely different. But he didn’t understand, couldn’t understand what it was because ultimately it was just too monstrous. Her growing arousal was matched by a surge of fear that he would realize at the very last second that he was being palmed off with a copy. Eventually there was nothing for it but to accept what he was offering and to hope that Nadia responded in a similar way.
Afterwards, lying with his arms round her on the couch, he checked out the points that had made him wonder and looked for rational explanations. Placing his hand on her breast, he said “You’ve put on a few ounces, haven’t you? Don’t even think of going on a diet. It feels good like that.” Then he ran the tip of his finger round her navel. The bath had washed off the concealer. “Since when have you had that?”
Still dazed by what should never have happened and by the response it had released inside her, she looked down at her stomach. “Since yesterday. It’s just a spot.”
“That’s not what it looks like to me,” he declared. “But we’ll leave the diagnosis to a specialist. You’ll go and see Reusch about it. And no more sunbed until that’s been sorted out.”
She just said, “Yes.”
He stood up and pulled her up off the couch. “Let’s get to bed. I really am tired now. How’s the back?”
“Fine. My headache’s gone too.”
“I should hope so,” he said with a smile. “I couldn’t offer you a second course of treatment today.”
She went to the bathroom, used the toilet and put the tampons back in the cupboard before Michael saw them. In the bedroom she started to shiver. It wasn’t the temperature; it was warm in the room. He hadn’t bothered to put his trousers on again and was standing by the double bed throwing back the covers. Then he went into the dressing room. She couldn’t get into bed because she didn’t know which side Nadia slept on, so she scurried back into the bathroom.
A couple of minutes later he followed her in with clean clothes over his arm and a little alarm clock in his hand, which he put on the basketwork shelf. She went back into the bedroom together with him. He lay down on the left-hand side and patted the sheet. “Get in, I’ll hold you tight, at least until twelve. By then you’ll have stuck it out for almost a whole day.”
She cuddled up to him, he put his arm round her and almost immediately fell asleep. She lay there, awake, not daring to move. The bed was too different, the pillow too firm, the sheet too cool, his skin warm against her back. She could feel his breath on her ear and neck. And she couldn’t understand how Nadia could be unfaithful to him. He was perfect! At least that’s what he’d been for her
in the last hour, and in comparison with Dieter Lasko.
The doors out onto the landing and to the bathroom were open. She listened to the silence in the house, thought she could hear a faint ticking somewhere. His alarm clock in the bathroom or just the pulse throbbing in her ears. The buzzing, thrumming noise rose and fell. What a day! And what a night! Panic, excitement, release, triumph and the certain knowledge that she could stand in for Nadia as a wife in absolutely every respect.
At some point or other she fell asleep, perhaps at three, perhaps not until four. Since there was no clock in the bedroom, she had no way of telling. Contrary to expectation, her sleep was calm and dreamless. When she woke up, she was alone in the bed. The room was flooded with daylight and she’d neither heard the shutters going back up nor noticed him getting out of bed.
It was depressing. Friday the thirteenth, she thought briefly. But that wasn’t it. It was just the return to normality: waking up and being alone. No, it was worse than usual because she’d known what it was like to go to sleep with a satisfied husband. She’d thought she’d wake up beside him, have a few minutes with him, the time to make it clear to him that the previous night was nothing special, that it wasn’t worth talking about.
What if he asked Nadia that evening, “Did you see the doctor?” What if he said, “You were so different yesterday.” What if he made any comment that gave the game away? There were a thousand ways he could let out that she hadn’t played the sulky wife, but simply his wife. There was no way of preventing it. And she had to, she really had to.
The memory of the night was still fresh in her mind. And the desire for a reprise correspondingly strong. But what if Nadia found out? She instinctively knew now why Nadia had given her advice on how to keep Michael at arm’s length. After the previous night’s experience, her tips no longer seemed designed not to make things easier for her stand-in. A fling with a little laboratory mouse might be forgivable, but a woman who was a mirror image of herself was much more of a danger.
In order to force herself to snap out of the wretched feeling that, while she’d supplied the clearest possible proof that the deception had been successful, she’d still failed, she got up quickly, smoothed out the sheets, put the bedspread over them and went to the bathroom. The alarm clock had gone from the shelf. A glance at Nadia’s watch showed that it was a quarter past nine.
In the shower she tried to think up some arguments. If she went about it in the right way, she might even manage to make it seem an advantage. “I took the tampons out and kept saying no, but he just ignored it. When I realized I couldn’t stop him without arousing his suspicions, I did what I could to make sure he didn’t notice. And he didn’t notice.” Then she’d just have to wait and see how important her extramural pleasures were to Nadia if it meant supplying her husband with a replacement for bed and board.
She had a long shower, rubbed Nadia’s cream over herself from head to toe, used Nadia’s make-up and took a skirt and blouse of Nadia’s from the dressing room to save the grey suit. Then she went to tidy up the television room but couldn’t bring herself to go in. The towel was still on the couch, the cushions, his clothes and the other towel on the floor. It brought everything so vividly back to mind that she had to close the door quickly to stop herself bursting into tears.
At ten she was sitting in the kitchen having breakfast. When she came down there’d been two letters, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the local paper on the table. The letters were addressed to Nadia. One had the address of a hotel in Nassau on the envelope, the other came from a Swiss bank in Zurich. She put them on one side, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well, and leafed apathetically through the local paper.
At eleven she was sitting at Nadia’s desk. With no great enthusiasm, she started up the word-processing package in order to delete her invitation from Behringer and Partners. With the night still coursing though her veins, it was the action of a woman who didn’t know what to do, filling in time. She called up the menu. For simplicity’s sake she’d named the file Lasko. It was at the top of a list of nine. The other eight all had the same name and were numbered consecutively: Alin 1, 2, 3 and so on.
Unintentionally she let the cursor slip onto the second line and clicked on it, bringing Alin 1 onto the screen. The imposing letterhead of Alfo Investment immediately caught her eye. She registered the name Markus Zurkeulen with an address in Frankfurt. She had already seen the name on the torn-up sheet of paper with the large numbers that she’d taken out of her waste bin and put together like a jigsaw puzzle.
The text of the letter didn’t tell her very much: “We are sure we have a range of products that will meet your aspirations. My colleague will contact you in the next few days and she will give you any information you require.” It closed with the usual best wishes and the name of the writer - Philip Hardenberg.
Now she remembered where she’d heard the name Philip before. She saw herself walking across the reception area at Behringer’s, she saw Frau Luici cover the mouthpiece of the telephone with one hand, she heard her whisper, “Hardenberg”. And the six-foot giant with the receding hair grabbed the receiver and said, “Hi, Philip.”
A call from the man Nadia was working for as a favour at precisely the moment when she was coming out of nice Herr Reincke’s office, filled with the justified hope that she had finally found the job she so desperately needed. But only two days later the letter of rejection arrived! And now she was stuck here because Nadia needed a stand-in sulky wife in order to enjoy a couple of carefree days with her lover.
Coincidence? She didn’t think so. What if Nadia had already been wondering about being able to spend a worry-free night with her lover when she got into the lift on that Thursday at the end of July? What if the only reason Nadia couldn’t seriously consider such a night was that it might endanger her marriage? What if Nadia had had a revelation when the lift stopped and she found herself face to face with herself? In that case - bloody hell, Nadia had certainly been quick out of the blocks to take advantage of the chance meeting! Without giving a thought to the needs of the woman in the green suit, she’d set Philip Hardenberg on Behringer to make sure someone else got the job.
That suddenly made everything seem so mean, so despicable. So far there wasn’t a scrap of proof. But the way the six-foot giant had behaved supported her suspicion. She could still hear him saying, “May I know why you’re so interested in this property?”
Property, she thought bitterly. And then he’d talked about water damage. Hardenberg had arranged some insurance for him and now Behringer wanted a juicy pay-out for the favour.
She called up the other files in the folder. They all had the same content and the same date: 02/08, the Friday when she’d met Nadia in the Opera Café for the first time. The addressees were different - the names she knew from the torn-up Alfo Investment sheet. One was missing. Presumably it had been replaced in the folder by her Lasko file.
She switched on the laser printer. It spewed out the letters one after the other. She had no idea what use she could make of them. She wasn’t important enough for Philip Hardenberg or for Behringer to get them to admit to collusion. And a minor insurance fraud would be impossible to prove. There was no point in fantasizing about going to Behringer with the letters and getting confirmation of the truth. And if that was what had happened, if Nadia had done her out of the job, then she owed her more than the truth, much more than a thousand euros for standing in for her once a fortnight.
A woman who lacked for nothing, who had everything others could only dream about. A woman who hadn’t the remotest idea what it was like to have to steal from your mother just to cover your supply of noodles for the next thirty days and the rent for a filthy hole beside the railway track, where she was constantly pestered by an alcoholic with a criminal record. This woman had had the cheek to exploit a little hole in her mother’s nest egg in order to put moral pressure on her - and that after she was the one who’d made it impossible for her to fil
l the hole by honest means. If that was what had happened, then Nadia had robbed her of a future reasonably free from financial worries and the prospect of a secure old age.
For a few minutes she felt a mixture of impotence and raging fury, which swept away all thoughts of the night and the emotions Nadia’s husband had aroused in her. After a while, fury came to dominate the mixture. Two alternatives. Either: “From now on you’ll pay me…” Or? There was nothing in “or” for her personally, but she liked it better. If preserving her marriage and keeping her husband in the dark were really so important to Nadia: a phone call to the lab and a frank discussion with Michael.
His contract only had the address of the pharmaceutical firm, no telephone number. And she didn’t think he would be back home before she had to leave. If the technician had turned up on time and repaired Olaf, there would surely be a lot to keep him occupied.
She started her search for an address book or list of telephone numbers in the desk drawers. There she came across the Dictaphone Nadia had used to allay her fear their voices might sound different. It didn’t appear to have been used since then - when she switched it on, the first thing she heard was Nadia speaking the brief text of the letters and then herself asking, “What should I say?” After that Nadia spoke again. And even if there wasn’t any difference in the voices, the question whether she’d taken the money and her answer must make it clear to anyone that there were two women speaking.
With the Dictaphone in her hand, she went to the next room. This time the towel on the couch and the bottle of massage oil caused her no inhibitions, she simply ignored the objects that bore witness to her night with Michael. She spent more than fifteen minutes looking for a way of making a copy of the tape. It couldn’t be done on the stereo system. In one of the drawers of the cupboard where the massage oil was kept she did find several tiny cassettes, but they wouldn’t fit into the Dictaphone, so that ruled out taking the original tape.
The Lie Page 14
