Even though her anger and the feeling of humiliation that his infidelity had caused momentarily disappeared, the distance between them remained. He seemed like a stranger to her.
Renate and Josef greeted their son. He kissed his mother dutifully on both cheeks and held out his hand to his father with a strained smile. Before Emma could even exchange a few words with her husband, Renate took her by the arm and started introducing her to all the guests. Emma smiled politely and shook hands, matching names to faces, although she immediately forgot them. She kept looking around for Florian. He was talking to all sorts of people, but she could see from his body language how ill at ease he felt.
Deferring to her condition, Emma declined to toast with champagne. Finally, she managed to shake off her mother-in-law and go over to Florian, who had fled to a cocktail table at the edge of the garden. Louisa was playing tag with a couple of other kids.
“Great party,” he remarked.
“Yes, it is,” she replied. She felt his uneasiness like an echo of her own. “I wish it were over.”
“Me, too. What happened to our little girl?”
Emma told him about it, also mentioning the hand puppet Louisa had cut up, and the fact that she’d said she was afraid of the bad wolf.
“She said
what
?” Florian’s voice suddenly sounded brittle, and their eyes met for the first time. Emma was startled when she saw the intense emotion in his eyes, which he tried to hide behind a stoic expression. His hand was gripping the stem of the champagne glass so hard that his knuckles were white.
“Florian, I … I’m sorry, but … but I—” Emma broke off.
“I know,” he said in a strained voice. “You thought that I did something to Louisa. That I
abused
her.…”
He made a sound and shook his head hard, as if he wanted to drive off a thought, an unwelcome memory.
“What is it?” she asked cautiously.
“She’s afraid of the bad wolf,” he muttered gloomily. “I simply don’t believe it.”
Emma couldn’t make heads or tails of his odd behavior. Her eyes scanned the area, looking for Louisa among the laughing and happily celebrating crowd. She saw Corinna, who was pacing back and forth at the rear of the garden, by the woods. She was talking on her cell. Ralf stood nearby with his hands in his pockets, looking just as tense and angry as his wife. How rude of those two to make a blatant display of their lack of interest.
The mayor and the district executive had already arrived, and finally the prime minister of the state of Hessen appeared. So now the list of dignitaries was complete.
“All my father’s old pals have paraded in. Or more precisely, they’ve rolled in,” said Florian with barely concealed contempt. “I’m sure my mother introduced you to all of them, didn’t she?”
“She introduced me to nearly five thousand people,” replied Emma. “I can’t remember a single name.”
“The old bald guy standing next to my mother is my godfather,” Florian explained. “Hartmut Matern, the big guru of German commercial television. Next to him is Dr. Richard Mehring, former chief justice of the federal constitutional court. And the little fat guy with the bow tie was once the president of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Professor Ernst Haslinger. Oh yeah, and the tall man with the silver mane I’m sure you know from TV: Peter Weissbecker. Officially, he’s been fifty-four for the past twenty years.”
Emma was surprised at Florian’s sarcasm.
“And there’s Nicky,” he noted bitterly. “It would have broken my father’s heart if he hadn’t come.”
“I thought Nicky was your friend,” said Emma, astounded.
“Sure, all of them are my very best friends,” said Florian with a mocking laugh. “All the children from neglected asocial families, the orphans, the disadvantaged, all the kids who were suddenly my sisters and brothers and took up my parents’ attention.”
Emma saw how Nicky was looking around, as if searching for someone. Corinna had finished her phone call and hurried over to him, with Ralf following. She didn’t seem to hold a grudge against her brother because he’d slapped her. The three were discussing something; then Nicky straightened his tie, put on a smile, and went over to Josef and Renate. Corinna and Ralf followed him, also smiling as if everything was just fine.
“They always told me that I should show some consideration, because the poor children needed love and warmth and security, which I already had,” Florian went on. “How often I wished I were an orphan with drug-addicted alcoholic parents. How I wanted to act lazy, difficult, and impudent, or do poorly in school, but I could never permit myself to do that.”
At that moment, Emma understood her husband’s real problem. He had suffered throughout his whole childhood and youth because other children got more attention from his parents than he did. Florian took another glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter and drank it straight down, while his parents’ foster children stood in a semicircle and sang “Happy Birthday” to Josef. The old man was beaming, and Renate dabbed away tears of emotion from her cheeks.
“Oh, Emmi,” Florian said, heaving a deep sigh. “I’m so sorry about what happened these past few weeks. Let’s go look for a house and get out of here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about all this before?” Emma was fighting back tears. “Why did you let it go so far?”
“Because—” he broke off, looked at her, searching for the right words. “I thought I could hold out until the baby was born. But suddenly … I don’t know … you were so happy here all of a sudden. And so I thought you wanted to stay here.”
“But … but … why did you…” Emma couldn’t finish and say “cheat on me.” What he’d done would always be between them, and she wasn’t sure if she could ever forgive him.
“There is no other woman, and I’m not having an affair. I … I was…” He took a deep breath and then forced himself to go on. “I was in Frankfurt in the … red-light district for the first and last time in my life. I … I didn’t want to go there. It was … I … was standing waiting for the light to change, and all of a sudden this woman was standing next to me. I know it was unforgivable, what I did. I can’t tell you how much I regret hurting you like this. There’s no excuse for it. I can only hope that one day you’ll forgive me.”
Emma saw tears shining in his eyes. She took his hand and squeezed it without saying a word. Maybe everything would be all right after all.
* * *
Thanks to Miriam’s grandmother, Pia had some experience when it came to social occasions like this birthday reception, but she still didn’t feel good among these dolled-up strangers who all seemed to know one another: ladies of a more sedate age, marinated in perfume and sporting dark crocodile tans that betrayed decades on golf courses and yachts, women who preferred to wear hats and liberated their expensive jewelry from the bank vault for the sole purpose of showing it off. Shrill cries of greeting were mixed with cackling like in a henhouse. Pia pushed through the crowd, looking for Emma and asking herself what she was actually doing here. She was up to her neck in work, worried sick about Lilly, and yet here she was, wasting her time because she’d made a foolish promise in a sentimental moment to an old classmate she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. Actually, Pia was hoping she’d have a chance to talk to Emma about the appointment with the therapist at the Frankfurt Girls House that she’d set up for her. Pia had never been the maternal type, but she’d changed a bit because of Lilly. Ever since Emma had mentioned her fear that her little daughter might have been abused, Pia kept thinking that the Mermaid from the river may have been the victim of the same thing as a child. Was it really a coincidence that Kilian Rothemund, the convicted child molester, lived only a mile or so from where the girl’s body had been found? Was Prinzler possibly covering up for his former lawyer out of a misplaced sense of solidarity? Or was he even in cahoots with Rothemund? Prinzler had been unable to reach his wife or his lawyer and was still not talking, although they had allowed him the phone call he had requested.
A kid bumped into her.
“Scuse me,” he said, and ran on, followed by three other kids.
“No worries.” Pia had already noticed that there was an unusually large number of children at this reception, until she recalled that it was not only the eightieth birthday of Emma’s father-in-law, Josef Finkbeiner, but also the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Sonnenkinder Association for single mothers.
Pia kept looking around as she occasionally checked her cell phone, which she had put on vibrate. She’d told her boss that she wanted to be informed and was reachable at any time in case Prinzler finally decided to talk. She hoped that he would, so that she’d have an excuse to get out of here.
At a cocktail table near the entrance stood the prime minister’s bodyguards, four men in black suits with sunglasses and earpieces. They were munching on wasabi peanuts and pretzel sticks and looking bored. Their boss was just congratulating the guest of honor, who was receiving birthday wishes and gifts up on the big terrace with his wife. Pia recognized Chief State Attorney Markus Maria Frey, who was standing next to Josef. She was surprised to see him there until she recalled what Christian Kröger had told her: that Frey had been a foster son of the Finkbeiners, and he’d studied law under a scholarship from his foster father’s foundation.
A woman stepped up to the microphone at the lectern, which had been set up next to a stage in front of the impressive backdrop of almost faded rhododendrons. She asked everyone present to take a seat. Obediently, all the guests headed for the rows of chairs, and Pia spied Emma and a dark-haired man with a child in his arms who sat down in the second row. Should she go up and say hello? No, better not. Emma might offer her a seat, and then she wouldn’t be able to get away unnoticed.
Instead, Pia found a seat in the last row on the left side of the center aisle and sat down as the children’s choir opened the official portion of the celebration with a moving rendition of “How Lovely That You Were Born.” Around fifty little girls and boys in pink and bright blue T-shirts sang at the top of their lungs, producing smiles on the faces of all the guests. Pia caught herself grinning, too, but then she thought of Lilly and the weird threat she’d received. She began fidgeting. Her subconscious had been trying to tell her something for quite a while, but she’d been so busy that it couldn’t find a free synapse. Thunderous applause rewarded the children, who now marched two by two down the center aisle. And at that moment, something went
click
in Pia’s brain. Like a flash flood after a heavy thunderstorm, the information suddenly flowed through her brain. Everything fell into place of its own accord and made perfect sense. Her heart did a somersault. The pink scraps of fabric from the Mermaid’s stomach! The letters that she had deciphered from the photos: S-O-N-I-D.
“Wait a second, please!” she said to two little girls, and took her cell phone out of her pocket. “May I take a picture of you?”
The two beamed and nodded. Pia clicked a photo of the two of them from the front, a second from the back, and sent the pictures straight off to Kai, Christian, and Bodenstein. SONnenkInDer. Damn, that was it. That’s exactly what it was!
* * *
The truck stopped at a red light.
“Thanks,” said Kilian to the driver, who had taken a big detour just for him. Instead of driving straight on the A3 to the airport, he had turned off the autobahn at Niedernhausen to drive through Fischbach and Kelkheim to Bad Soden. He told Kilian he had plenty of time and could just as well take the A66 via Frankfurter Kreuz. Kilian was deeply grateful for this unexpected helpfulness. People he thought he knew had turned away from him in the past few years, betrayed him, and left him in the lurch, humiliated—but this stranger, who at the request of the man who’d saved him had offered him a ride toward Frankfurt, offered to help him, no questions asked.
“You’re welcome,” said the driver with a grin, but then he turned serious. “But get yourself to a doctor, pal. You look terrible.”
“I will,” Kilian assured him. “Thanks again.”
He climbed down the steps and closed the door. The truck rolled off, put on its blinker, and joined the line of traffic heading toward Frankfurt. Kilian took a deep breath and looked both ways before he crossed the street. It was nine years ago that he’d last set foot in Bad Soden. He’d never been here without a car, so he’d underestimated what a long uphill climb it was up Alleestrasse to the Dachberg. His throat was parched, and each step was causing him hellish pain. Only now that his adrenaline level had gradually dropped did he feel the results of the punches and kicks, plus the fall from the car. They had really beaten the shit out of him, and he had sung like a nightingale, out of fear for his daughter. But despite the pain and the fear of death, he’d retained enough presence of mind not to tell them where he had actually sent the package with the recordings and transcripts of his conversations with the two men from Amsterdam. He hoped they would be waiting patiently in front of Hanna’s house for the mail until they turned blue in the face.
It took him forty-five minutes to reach the house on Oranienstrasse that had once been his. He stood silently across the street from it. How high the boxwood hedge had grown! Even the cherry laurel and the rhododendron next to the front door had grown huge. A feeling of nostalgia tore at his heart, and he asked himself how he had managed to survive these past years. He had been a man who needed order in his life, rituals, fixed anchor points. They had robbed him of everything; nothing was left except life itself, and that hadn’t been worth much anymore. Resolutely, he crossed the street, opened the gate, and climbed up the steps to the front door. He rang the doorbell, noting the unfamiliar name on the doorplate. After their lightning divorce, Britta had immediately looked for a new breadwinner; he knew that from Chiara, who despised her stepfather with all her heart. What a feeling it must be for a man to slip so easily into the life of his predecessor.
Footsteps were approaching on the other side of the door, and Kilian prepared himself for the confrontation. And then Britta stood before him for the first time since that day when he’d been taken away by the police. She looked old. Old and bitter. The new husband was not making her happy.