The Stronger Sex by Hans Werner Kettenbach

would have liked to ask Frauke
if she could stand my company only when Frau Klofft was around. And after Frauke some other guests came over. None of whom wanted to talk to me, only to Cilly Klofft.
    I was still standing about aimlessly when I suddenly saw Karl in his grey uniform. He stood near the doorway, cap in his left hand. I raised a hand to greet him; he smiled and nodded. When Frau Klofft had seen him as well, he turned away and left the gallery. A little later Frau Klofft said goodbye to the people she was talking to. She told me she hoped we’d see each other again soon, exchanged a few words with Willy Ferber and Frau Novotna, and left.
    Had that despot allowed her out only for a limited time? I didn’t like to think she would let him restrict her freedom so much. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to keep the chauffeur from going home to his wife and family any longer?
    Hochkeppel didn’t come back until well after lunch. I found a reasonably plausible pretext for going to see him, a case of debt assumption in which he had acted some time ago, as I knew from Hochkeppel himself, and which had some slight similarity to my own latest case. I was aware of the risk that he would start endlessly chatting not just about the matters involved in the case but also about the client, the judge, the other party’s lawyer, for all I knew his wife and daughter too, in short about everyone who had or did not have any connection to the case, but one way or another was an interesting character.
    To my surprise, however, he kept it short. And even before I could steer the discussion along a path leading reasonably smoothly to my real subject, he asked, “By the way, is there anything else about Klofft?”
    â€œNo, not yet.” I cleared my throat and then said, “But I met his wife yesterday evening.”
    â€œYou did?” He looked at me through his tinted glasses. “Where was that?”

    â€œAt an art gallery, a private showing. The Gallery Novotna.”
    â€œHow did you come to be there?” He obviously didn’t expect me to have been in such company of my own accord.
    â€œWell, Frauke Leisner took me with her. She was writing something about it for her paper. About Willy Ferber, I mean.” He nodded. I asked, “Do you know him?”
    â€œYes, of course. Not a bad painter. I bought two of his pictures myself.”
    â€œAh.” After a moment’s pause I added, “Frau Klofft paints too, doesn’t she?”
    â€œYes.” I thought that was all he was going to say, but he suddenly went on, “She’s not a bad painter either.” He looked past me into space, then back at me again. After a moment he said firmly, “She might even have been a great one.”
    It was clear to me that I was on thin ice here, but I wasn’t going to leave the question unasked. I said, “Might have been? I mean, what stopped her? Or who?”
    â€œWho do you suppose?” He blew air out scornfully through his lips. “That monster of a husband, who else?”
    He fell silent, looked out of the window at the tops of the trees in the yard. I deliberately didn’t ask anything else, and after a while, sure enough, he opened up of his own accord.
    He spoke hesitantly, and in several of the pauses that he seemed to be forcing himself to make I once again sensed the anger that had so surprisingly come to the fore when we were talking about Klofft’s illness. And once again it took some time, but in the end I discovered that he had met Cilly Klofft before she married. As a young lawyer he had successfully represented her father Frank Gehrke, a foods wholesaler, in a claim for damages.
    â€œHis speciality was gherkins. Gehrke’s Gherkins.” When he saw that it meant nothing to me, he smiled. “Well, of
course that’s quite some time ago. I don’t think you find them on the supermarket shelves these days. But they were well known