Your Perfect Year(65)

No sooner was he out of bed than this small, intangible worry vanished. A glance at the Filofax reminded him of the decision he had made only a few hours ago: he would invite Leopold to stay with him for a while.

In a cheerful mood, Jonathan marched into the bathroom, took a long shower, and got dressed. Not in his sports gear—that would be ridiculous after a shower—but in pants and a turtleneck sweater. He could catch up on his daily jog later. Or—a reckless notion—even miss it altogether for one day. He simply didn’t feel like it, and Leopold’s advice to live life more on a what-makes-you-happy basis seemed to make at least as much sense as avoiding carbs after six in the evening. At least as much.

He went downstairs, approached Tina’s room, and knocked.

As he opened the door, Jonathan took a step back so as not to embarrass his guest, who might not yet be dressed.

“Leopold!” he called through the door. “Good morning! It’s me, Jonathan!” While waiting for a reply, he smiled at himself for announcing his name. Who else would it be? Silence reigned in the room, so Jonathan knocked again. “Leopold? Are you awake? Come on, rise and shine!” No reply. Jonathan knocked again, then entered.

Tina’s room was empty. The door to the bathroom was open; Jonathan saw no one there either. The bedclothes were rumpled with the flowery bathrobe and a used towel on top. But these clues aside, there was nothing to indicate the presence of another person.

Puzzled, Jonathan went out into the hallway. Where had Leopold gone? He looked over to the coat stand—the army coat had vanished, as had his new friend’s boots.

Jonathan felt a sudden apprehension. Was he really such an idiot? Had he thrown all his reservations to the wind, only to discover that he’d been taken in by a trickster, a swindler? A man who had used his hospitality and had taken off with as much as he could carry? Jonathan hadn’t even locked the important rooms like the study or the dining room (the fine family silver!)—he had simply stumbled into bed in a wine-fueled haze.

Was he really such a—how had Leopold put it?—such a dunce?

Apparently so.

Jonathan could hear his father laughing at him, loudly and with schadenfreude, on seeing that his “feckless son” had once again proved his inability to cope with life. Intuition? Ha, what intuition?

No. Jonathan N. Grief squared his shoulders. It could have happened to anyone. Anyone who, like he did, still believed in morality and respectability, who . . .

Oh, why stand here talking to himself? He would be better advised to figure out as quickly as he could which valuables Leopold had made off with, and then inform the police. Let the officers have a good laugh at his expense; the main thing was that they did their work and caught the thief. Leopold wouldn’t get far in his worn-out old boots.

Half an hour later, Jonathan had turned the house upside down.

Nothing.

Nothing at all was missing. Not the silver, not the money he kept in a cash box on his desk, not a single cuff link, not even the empty bottles in the plastic bin on the terrace, which could have been returned for cash. It was all still there. Everything except Leopold.

Somewhat bewildered, Jonathan went into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. That was when he noticed his wine rack. There was something missing: the gap was enough to hold three, maybe four bottles. Jonathan spun around and ran into the dining room to check his liquor cabinet. He immediately saw that bottles were missing there too. Jonathan moved closer and saw that the whiskey and gin were missing. The expensive grappa he had once bought for visitors and hadn’t yet opened was still there. Except that the bottle was almost empty.

Jonathan sighed deeply. Then he noticed the note beneath the grappa bottle. He picked it up, sat down at the dining table, and began to decipher the practically illegible scrawl.

My dear friend,

It looks as though I ran into the guy with the hip flask on my desert island. I’m sorry, the temptation was too much in the night. I thank you most sincerely for a lovely evening and for your hospitality—and I’m ashamed to have disappointed you like this.

Yours,

Leo

P.S. If I were you, though I’m sincerely glad I’m not (I’m sure you’ll take this little sideswipe in the right spirit, my friend) I’d open up that diary and get to work on the contents. You don’t get a gift like that every day. I wish I’d received something like that myself.

Jonathan read the note twice more. Then he took a pencil from the case on the sideboard next to the table and added the comma that was missing after the parentheses. Without giving it a further thought, he went into the kitchen and threw the pencil and the note into the trash.





30

Hannah

The same day:

Thursday, January 4, 10:53 a.m.

Three days. Three days like three years. Like ten years, like fifty, one hundred. Like Sleeping Beauty’s thousand-year slumber. In a dark, gloomy sleep behind a yards-tall hedge of nothing but thorns, without a single rose. But no one came to wake Hannah from this nightmare. No one came to kiss her.

First, they came to pacify. Uniformed police officers, talking to Hannah in soothing tones, assuring her that they would find her boyfriend soon. Telling her insistently that suicides announced beforehand only rarely came to pass. And yes, of course, they would do all they could to find Simon. They would put out a search for him; every patrol would be on the lookout, although they drew the line at the dog team and the divers in the Alster and Elbe that Hannah had asked for, saying they would be neither useful nor feasible given the size of the city. On the second day came appeals to local radio listeners. On the third, a notification in the papers, along with requests from the police that Hannah should go home; there was nothing she could do.