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"No."

And after a long
interval he added: sometimes yes, sometimes no.

"Did you know
the person?" whispered Ingeborg.

"Who?"
asked Reiter as if he were waking up.

"The person you
killed."

"Yes,"
said Reiter, "you could say that. For many nights we slept side by side
and there was plenty of talk."

"Was it a
woman?" whispered Ingeborg.

"No, it wasn't
a woman," said Reiter, and he laughed, "it was a man."

Ingeborg laughed too. Then she
began to talk about the way some women were attracted to men who killed women.
About the high regard in which woman-killers were held by whores, for example,
or by women who chose to love without reservations. In Reiter's opinion these
women were hysterics. But Ingeborg, who claimed to know women of the sort,
believed they were just gamblers, like cardplayers, more or less, who end up
killing themselves late at night, or like the habitues of racetracks who commit
suicide in cheap rented rooms or hotels tucked away on back-streets frequented
by gangsters or Chinamen.

"Sometimes," said Ingeborg, "when we're making love
and you grab me by the neck, I've thought you might be a woman-killer."

"I've
never killed a woman," said Reiter. "Such a thing never even occurred
to me."

That
was the last they talked about the matter until the following week.

Reiter
told her it was possible that the American police and the German police, too,
were looking for him, or that his name was on a list of suspects. The man he
had done away with, he said, was called Sammer and he was a killer of Jews.
Then you've committed no crime, she tried to say, but Reiter wouldn't let her.

"All
of this happened in a prisoner-of-war camp," said Reiter. "I don't
know who Sammer thought I was, but he kept telling me things. He was nervous
because the American police were going to interrogate him. As a precaution, he
had changed his name. He called himself Zeller. But I don't think the American
police were looking for Sammer. They weren't looking for Zeller either. As far
as the Americans were concerned, Zeller and Sammer were two German citizens
above any suspicion. The Americans were looking for war criminals of a certain
prestige, people from the death camps, SS officials, party bigwigs. Sammer was
just a civil servant of no consequence. They questioned me. They asked what I
knew about him, whether he had talked to me about enemies among the other
prisoners. I said I didn't know anything, that Sammer had talked only about his
son who died in
Kursk
and his wife's migraines. They looked at my hands. They were young policemen
and they didn't have time to waste in a prisoner-of-war camp. But they weren't
convinced. They wrote down my name and questioned me again. They asked whether
I'd been a member of the National Socialist Party, whether I knew many Nazis,
what my family did and where I lived. I tried to be truthful and I gave honest
answers. I asked them to help me find my parents. Then the camp began to empty
as new groups arrived. But I wasn't released. A comrade told me the guards were
only for show. The black soldiers had other things on their minds and they
didn't pay us much attention. One morning, during a transfer of prisoners, I
slipped out and got away as easy as that.

"I spent a
while wandering from city to city. I was in
Koblenz
. I worked at the mines that were
beginning to reopen. There wasn't enough to eat. I felt as if Sammer's ghost
was clinging to my heels. I thought about changing my name, too. Finally I got
to
Cologne
and
it struck me that everything that could possibly happen to me had already
happened and it was pointless to let myself be hunted by Sammer's filthy ghost.
Once I was arrested. It was after a scuffle at the bar. The MP came and brought
a few of us to the station. They looked for my name in their files, but they
didn't find anything and they let me go.

"Around
that time I got to know an old woman who sold cigarettes and flowers at the
bar. Sometimes I would buy a cigarette or two and I always let her in. The old
woman told me that during the war she'd been a fortune-teller. One night she
asked me to walk her home. She lived on the Reginastrasse, in a big flat so
full of things you could hardly move. One of the rooms looked like the back
room of a clothing shop. I'll explain in a minute. When we arrived she poured
two glasses of brandy and sat at the table and brought out a pack of cards. I'm
going to tell your fortune, she said. There were some boxes full of books. I
remember I picked out the complete works of Novalis and Friedrich Hebbel's
Judith
and as I leafed through them the old woman told me that I had killed a man,
et cetera. Same story.

"'I was a
soldier,' I said.

'"It's
written here that during the war you were almost killed many times, but you
didn't kill anyone, which is worth something,' said the old woman.

"Is
it so obvious? I wondered. Is it just as obvious that I'm a murderer? Of
course, I didn't feel like a murderer.

'"I
suggest you change your name,' said the old woman, 'and you should listen to
me. I was the fortune-teller for many of the big SS bosses and I know what I'm
talking about. Don't make the classic English whodunit mistake.'

'"What are you
talking about?' I asked.

"Tm talking about English
whodunits,' said the old woman, 'those addictive English whodunits that
infected the American whodunits first and then the French and German and
Swiss.'
 

"'And what
mistake is that?' I asked.

"'An
article of faith,' said the old woman, 'an assumption you can sum up in one
word: the killer always returns to the scene of the crime.'

"I laughed.

'"Don't laugh,' said the old woman. 'Listen to me, because
I'm one of the few people in
Cologne
who really care about you.'

"I stopped laughing. I asked her to sell me
Judith
and
the works of Novalis.

'"You can keep them,' she said. 'Every time you come to see
me you can take two books, but now pay attention to something much more
important than literature. You must change your name. You must never return to
the scene of the crime. You must break the chain. Do you understand?'

'"A little,' I said, although all I'd really understood, with
great pleasure, was the offer of the books.

"Then the old woman told me that my mother was alive and
every night she thought about me, and my sister was alive and every morning and
afternoon and night she dreamed about me, and that my strides, a giant's
strides, echoed in my sister's head. She didn't mention my father.

"And then the
sun began to come up and the old woman said:

"'I heard the
call of a nightingale.'

"And then she asked me to come with her to a room, the one
full of clothes, like a ragpicker's room, and she dug in the mountains of
clothes until she reemerged, victorious, with a black leather coat and she
said:

'"This
coat is for you, it's been waiting for you all this time, since its previous
owner died.'

"And I took the coat and tried it on and in fact it fit as if
it had been made for me."

Later
Reiter asked the old woman who the former owner of the coat had been, but on
this point the old woman's answers were contradictory and vague.

Once
she told him it had belonged to a Gestapo agent and another time she said it
had belonged to a lover of hers, a Communist who died in a concentration camp,
and once she even told him that the previous owner was an English spy, the
first (and only) English spy to parachute down near Cologne in 1941 to
reconnoiter for a future uprising of the citizens of Cologne, a prospect
greeted with incredulity by the actual citizens of Cologne who happened to talk
to him, since in their judgment and that of all Europeans at the time, England
was lost, and although this spy, according to the old woman, was Scottish, not
English, no one took him seriously, especially when the few who met him saw him
drink (he drank like a Cossack although he could hold his liquor admirably: his
eyes got misty and he cast sidelong glances at women's legs but he maintained a
certain verbal coherence and a kind of chilly elegance that the honorable
anti-Fascist citizens of Cologne with whom he had dealings thought were the
marks of a bold and dashing character, qualities that only added to his charm),
and anyway, in 1941 the time wasn't ripe. Only twice did the old fortune-teller
see this English spy, or so she told Reiter. The first time she put him up at
her house and read his fortune. Luck was on his side. The second and last time,
she supplied him with clothes and papers, because the Englishman (or Scotsman)
was returning to
England
.
It was then that the spy left her his leather coat. Other times, however, the
old woman wouldn't hear a word about the spy. Dreams, she said, fantasies,
foolish visions, the imaginings of a desperate old woman. And then she repeated
that the leather coat had belonged to a Gestapo agent, one of the men who at
the end of '44 and the beginning of '45 had tracked down and crushed the
deserters who were gathering strength (so to speak) in the noble city of
Cologne
.

Then Ingeborg's health took a
turn for the worse and an English doctor told Reiter that the girl, that
lovely, delightful girl, probably had no more than two or three months to live
and then he just looked at Reiter, who began to weep without a word, but the
English doctor wasn't really looking at Reiter, he was staring at his handsome
black leather coat, assessing it with the eye of a furrier or a leatherworker,
and finally, as Reiter continued to weep, he asked where he'd bought it, where
did I buy what? the coat, oh, in Berlin, lied Reiter, before the war, at a shop
called Hahn & Forster, he said, and then the doctor said that the furriers
Hahn and Forster or their heirs had probably been inspired by the leather coats
of Mason & Cooper, the Manchester coat makers, who also had a branch in
London, and who in 1938 had made a coat exactly like the one Reiter was
wearing, the same sleeves, the same collar, the same number of buttons, to
which Reiter responded with a shrug, drying the tears that ran down his cheeks
with his coat sleeve, and then the doctor was moved and he stepped forward and
put a hand on Reiter's shoulder and said that he too had a leather coat like
this, like Reiter's, except that his was from Mason & Cooper and Reiter's
was from Hahn & Forster, although by the feel, and Reiter could take his
word for it because he was a connoisseur, an aficionado of black leather coats,
they were identical, it was as if both had come from the same lot of leather
that Mason & Cooper had used in 1938 to make his coat, which was a true
work of art, and unreproducible, too, since even though the house of Mason
& Cooper was still in business, Mr. Mason, or so he'd heard, had died
during the war in a bombing raid, not killed by a bomb, he hastened to explain,
but because he had a weak heart, unable to withstand the dash to the shelter or
the alarm whistle, the sounds of destruction and the explosions, or perhaps the
wail of the sirens, who can say, but whatever the case Mr. Mason was overcome
by a heart attack and from that moment on the house of Mason & Cooper
experienced a slight drop not just in productivity but in quality too, although
perhaps that was an overstatement, since the quality of Mason & Cooper's
leather coats was and would continue to be beyond reproach, if not in the
detail then in the mood, if one could properly call it that, of the new models,
in the intangible something that made a leather coat a work of craftsmanship, a
piece of art that kept pace with history but also bucked the tide of history, I
don't know whether you follow me, said the doctor, and then Reiter took off the
coat and handed it to him, look at it as long as you want, he said as he sat
down in one of the two chairs in the office and continued to weep, and the
doctor was left with the coat hanging from his hands and only then did he seem
to wake from his dream of leather coats and manage to offer a few words of
encouragement or words that struggled to form an encouraging sentence, though
he knew that nothing could lessen Reiter's pain, and then he draped the coat
over Reiter's shoulders and again he thought that this coat, the coat of a
doorman at a bar in Cologne's red-light district, was exactly like his, and for
a moment he even imagined it was his, just a bit more worn, as if his own coat
had flown from its wardrobe on a London street and crossed the Channel and the
north of France with the sole intent of seeing him again, he, its owner, an
English military doctor who led a licentious life, a doctor who treated the
destitute for free, so long as the destitute were his friends, or at least the
friends of friends, and for a moment he even thought that the weeping young
German had lied to him, that he hadn't bought the coat at Hahn & Forster,
that it was an authentic Mason & Cooper, acquired in London, at the house
of Mason & Cooper, but ultimately, the doctor said to himself as he helped
the tearful Reiter back into his coat (so particular to the touch, so pleasing,
so familiar), life is a mystery.

For
the next three months Reiter managed to spend nearly all of his time with
Ingeborg. He bought fruit and vegetables on the black market. He found books
for her to read. He cooked and cleaned the garret they shared. He read medical
books and searched for remedies of every sort. One morning two of Ingeborg's
sisters and her mother appeared on the doorstep. Ingeborg's mother spoke little
and her manner was formal, but the sisters, one eighteen and the other sixteen,
cared only about going out and seeing the interesting parts of the city. One
day Reiter told them that the most interesting part of
Cologne
was the garret where they lived, and
Ingeborg's sisters laughed. Reiter, who laughed only when he was with Ingeborg,
laughed too. One night he took them to work with him. Hilde, the
eighteen-year-old, looked haughtily at the whores who frequented the bar, but
that night she went off with two young American lieutenants and didn't come back
until late the next day, to the alarm of her mother, who accused Reiter of
playing the pimp.