'I'm sure my boss won't object. Have a nice siesta.'
She bought cherries from Frowein's fruit and vegetable shop, plump, red and yellow fruit grown in Werder, and ate them with Frau Gerold in the back room of the bookshop. 'He has a bed behind a partition with the spines of books glued to it, and a gramophone in another room instead of a typist,' she told her boss. 'Didn't you mention that you sometimes need a lawyer?'
'Not at the moment, though.' The bookseller put an arm round Jutta's shoulders. 'You like him, don't you? Watch out, things might get complicated.'
Brumm's was right opposite the U-Bahn station. In the bar on the left, the clerks and minor civil servants of the quarter drank beer and played skat. In the middle was the bakery and cake shop. On the right was the caferestaurant. The young lime trees in the front garden glowed gold in the evening sun.
Rainer Jordan was there already. He pulled a chair out for her. 'How about a Mosel? It would go well with fresh zander from the Havel. The plumber called in this afternoon — his customer knuckled under when he got my letter, and I've been paid my fee.'
'Which is no reason for throwing money around.' In her mind, she totted up her ready cash. It would just about stretch. And in the last resort she could turn to her father. 'I'm going Dutch.'
'You're very generous.'
'Just practical.'
Annie!' He waved to the waitress, a pretty blonde with blue eyes. 'We'll have the zander and a bottle of Mosel.'
'Two zanders, one Mosel. At once, doctor.'
'So you've made friends around here already?'
'Only as a paying customer. But it's a fact that some men come just because of Annie. You know Kalkfurth Sausages? The owner's son sits over there for hours every Sunday, ordering endless portions of coffee and cake.' He grinned. 'The boy should try his luck with a few of the family products as a sign of his devotion. Waitresses like good hearty fare.'
'Speaking from practical experience, doctor?' she teased him.
'Modesty forbids me to say more. How definitely are you going steady?'
'Why are you interested?'
'Because I like you a lot.' He skilfully dissected his fish.
It was beginning to get dark. The gas lamps along the street flared on. A Line-T bus puffed diesel vapour out from the nearby bus stop. Some of the passengers got out to hurry home or change to the U-Bahn. 'What about you, Dr Jordan?'
'Bachelor with a bit of a past. Marion was very chic, very spoilt. A manufacturer's daughter. She liked to keep a poverty-stricken student as a lapdog. When he took her to expensive restaurants she'd hand him her purse under the table. A point came when she tired of him and said goodbye with a pair of sinfully expensive cufflinks. He sold them to finance the rest of his studies. Since then, well, it's been a couple of fleeting relationships, if you really want to know.'
She watched him as he spoke. She liked his frank face; when he raised his eyebrows he reminded her of a clumsy puppy. She felt that tingling below the navel again, and relished it without shame.
'Unattached, then. Shall we have an ice for dessert?'
'Two ices, please, Annie.'
And the bill,' she added. 'Half and half, remember.'
'My uncle is going to find me a job at the UfA studios. He's a movie director. Theodor Alberti. Maybe you've heard of him?'
'I'm afraid not.'
'Never mind. Uncle Theo thinks I should try the legal department of a big film studio. After one or two years I could set up on my own with a lucrative clientele from the movie world and earn a lot of money. I'll invite you out properly then. Shall I take you to the bus stop or the U-Bahn?'
Jutta spooned up her ice. Isabel and Jochen would be sitting bent over great fat books, quite close together, of course. How far would they go? And how far would she go?
'Coffee?' she suggested.
He raised his hand. Annie!'
'I meant at your place.'
She enjoyed his surprise, and was equally surprised herself.
'Coffee at my place then. With pleasure, but I'm afraid I don't have any milk and sugar.'
'The pleasure will do.' She was enjoying this more and more. She was just going to take things as they came — there'd be time for remorse later. At least. if there was anything to feel remorseful about, she told herself.
A car with dipped headlights was waiting by the pavement outside Number 47 Wilskistrasse. A uniformed man got out. 'Dr Jordan?'
'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.