‘Has it changed so much?’ asked Susanne. ‘This is something that interests me. I am a psychologist.’
‘Beauty and intelligence. Now that has been universally attractive throughout the human experience. But to answer your question, yes, it really has undergone radical variations. What is particularly interesting is that our ideal of female beauty has changed more rapidly over the last century than at any time in human history. There is no doubt that mass media has played a key part. All you have to do is to compare the screen sirens of the forties and fifties with the stick-thin fashion models of today. What I find particularly amazing is the way that, within a given time, one will find different ideals of beauty running concurrently within the same culture.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Susanne.
‘No man finds the stick-thin catwalk model attractive. It is a woman’s definition of female beauty. This imperative to be thin is a strange tyranny exerted on women by women. It is what differentiates us as genders that make us attractive to each other. Men like curves, women like angles.’
‘But that contradicts what you said before,’ said Fabel. A joke was a joke, but he was beginning to get fed up with the small man’s preoccupation with Susanne. ‘You said that the “ideal” of feminine beauty has changed throughout the centuries.’
‘True, but within set parameters. If you look at the classical ideal of beauty as set out in Greek or Roman sculpture, it is pretty consistent with, say, the nineteen-fifties ideal. Then came a preoccupation with a large bust. However, if you look at Renaissance art, breasts were always small and firm. In those days, the big bust was associated with the wet-nurse: the lower-class woman who nursed babies for wealthier mothers determined to maintain their figures. There have been radical swings in fashion, the most extreme being the near-obese Titian model. But, generally speaking, there have been limits.’
Fabel thought about the murdered women in Cologne. About how they seemed to have fuller hips and bottoms.
‘What about bottoms?’ he asked. ‘Have there been fashions in bums?’
‘Obviously in the eighteen-hundreds there was a real fixation with them. The bustle exaggerated the bottom to an extreme and physically impossible degree. But generally the function of the hips and bottom has been to accentuate the narrowness of the waist. And that certainly was the intention with the bustle. It isn’t a single body part that is important: it is its relationship with other parts. All fat women have full bottoms but obesity is unattractive. Men who are attracted to larger bottoms tend to look for the contrast with a narrow waist. It’s part of our most primitive psychology. We assess the figure of another to judge their fitness and suitability as a sexual partner.’
After they left the event Fabel and Susanne took a taxi back to her apartment.
‘I rather think he fancied me,’ she said laughingly.
‘Mmm.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Susanne looped her arm through Fabel’s. ‘You jealous? He really wasn’t my type…’
Fabel smiled. But his mind was still elsewhere, putting together an image of a woman in his mind. He knew exactly the type. The type the Cologne cannibal would target next, unless Scholz was able to get to him first.
3.
The couple in the corner kept distracting Andrea from her calculations. Every time she totalled the takings for the previous month a raised male voice would make her lose her place. Last month had not been as good as she had hoped. The cafe did good but simple food and she had put on a basic Christmas menu of traditional favourites and had decorated the place, but the cafe was just that little bit too far out from the city centre to attract the masses of tourists that came for Cologne’s Christmas Market. Even the bank of flat-monitored computers that she had installed along the high counter at the back of the cafe had failed to pay for themselves. She was struggling to break even and it annoyed her that she needed her ‘extra’ income to supplement what she made from the cafe.
Andrea gave up on her calculations and checked her cellphone. There was a text message from the agency: two bookings. The one for tomorrow night was annoying because of the ridiculously short notice, but it was the second booking that froze Andrea’s attention. A special date. Weiberfastnacht. Why would someone want to book Women’s Karneval Night? Why did it have to be that date of all dates? She texted back to the agency saying she could make the booking tonight if they sent her details. The other one… The other one she would have to think about.
The sound of raised voices snapped her attention back to the cafe.
The couple had been building up to it. Or rather the man had been building up to it. They had only ordered coffee and the scene had all the hallmarks of them having sought out the cafe as nothing more than a place for them to sit and carry on the one-sided argument they had clearly been having outside. Andrea studied them: he was a loathsome little toad; she was surprisingly pretty to be with the likes of him. But soft. Andrea had begun by occasionally glancing in their direction; listening to the odd exchange as she had worked the tables. But as their argument became louder, it became impossible to ignore. And it was beginning to disturb the other customers. With a sigh, Andrea closed her accounts and crossed the cafe.
‘Is there a problem?’ Resting her red-fingernailed hands on the table, Andrea leaned in close and spoke in a calm, quiet tone. The couple had been so engrossed in their heated exchange that they had not noticed Andrea approach. The young man turned his acne towards her. His eyes traced the contours of her body. Andrea was wearing a tight black T-shirt with the cafe’s logo on it. Her biceps bulged beneath the short sleeves, and her breasts were pulled into small, tight buns on her wide, taut pectoral muscles. There was a trace of a smirk on the man’s lips.
‘What’s it to you?’ The smirk ripened into a sneer.
‘You’re beginning to disturb the other customers.’ Andrea kept her voice calm and low. ‘That’s what it is to me. I think you should leave. Now.’
‘What about our coffees?’ asked the man. The girl had her head down, letting her hair fall like a curtain to hide her face from the other customers in the cafe.
‘You’ve drunk most of them,’ said Andrea. ‘Leave the rest. It’s on the house.’
‘Just what the fuck are you?’ The young man with the acne now seemed aware he had an audience. He leaned back as if appraising her: the mane of platinum hair tied back in a ponytail, the heavy make-up, the deep red lipstick, the power-lifter shoulders. ‘I mean, we were just trying to work that out – what you were born as. Male or female. Fuck knows I can’t tell now. You a shemale?’
Andrea straightened up. ‘Leave. Now.’
‘What makes you think you can work here among normal people? I mean, they sell food in here, for fuck’s sake. People eat here. You’re enough to turn anyone’s stomach.’
Still his female partner sat still and silent behind her curtain of hair.
‘You’ve got two seconds to leave,’ said Andrea, her calm tone belying the furnace of hate and anger that burned in her belly. ‘Or I’ll call the cops.’
The man got up and tugged at the girl’s sleeve. She rose quickly, slid out from behind the table and slipped swiftly out of the cafe without making eye contact with anyone. The ugly young man eyed Andrea hatefully. He tried to push her out of the way but Andrea’s body wouldn’t yield.
‘Fucking freak…’ He laughed derisively as he was forced to squeeze past her sideways. Andrea watched them as they left the cafe and walked past the window, the man laughing through the glass at her, his companion still trying to be unnoticed. When they were out of sight Andrea took a deep breath and turned to the other customers with a broad smile of red lips and strong white teeth.