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Frauke is content. Frauke thanks the saleswoman with a hint of a bow and marches to the register with Tamara. The Vietnamese man behind the register is about as nice as the kind of uncle you might imagine trying to grope you under your skirt. Frauke tells him he can stop grinning. His mouth becomes a straight line. Frauke and Tamara hurry out of the shop.
    “Plan B,” says Frauke, dragging Tamara over to one of the phone booths. Plan B can mean anything with Frauke, but in lots of cases it just means that no Plan A exists.
    As Frauke is making her call, Tamara studies the people outside the Tchibo coffee shop. Even though it’s overcast they’re crowding around the tables under the umbrellas, shopping bags crammed between their legs. Grandmas with cigarette in one hand and a coffee cup in the other; grandpas silently guarding the tables, as if someone has forced them to leave their flat. Among them are two laborers bent over their tables eating as if they aren’t allowed to leave crumbs on the pavement. Caffè lattes and apple tarts are on sale. Tamara imagines herself standing there with Frauke in thirty years’ time. Fresh from the hairdresser’s in their beige orthopedic footwear, their plastic bags full of booty, lipstick crusted in the corners of their mouths.
    “It’s been months,” Frauke says into the receiver. “I can’t even remember what you look like. And anyway my kitchen’s too small. I hate cooking in it, is that something you can possibly imagine?”
    Frauke looks at Tamara and holds up her thumb.
    “What? What do you mean, when?” she says again into the phone. “Now, of course.”
    Tamara presses her ear to the receiver as well and hears Kris saying he thinks it’s nice of them to call but he has no time right now, his head’s in the oven and they should try again later.
    “Later’s not good,” Frauke says, unimpressed. “Do you
really
not fancy stir-fried vegetables?”
    Kris admits that he isn’t in the slightest interested in stir-fried vegetables. He promises to call again later.
    “After the autopsy,” he says and hangs up.
    “What does he mean by autopsy?” Tamara asks.
    “For God’s sake, Tamara,” says Frauke and pushes her out of the phone booth.
    Whenever Tamara thinks about Kris, she thinks of a fish that she saw once in the aquarium. It was her twentieth birthday. Frauke had bought some grass from a friend, and the plan had been to get completely stoned and look at the fish in the aquarium.
    “You can’t beat it,” she had said. “You suddenly understand what a fish is really like.”
    They strolled giggling from one room to the next, got terrible munchies for Mars bars and stocked up on them at a newsstand before entering a room with a big pool. A handful of tourists had assembled, students sat yawning on the benches. Tamara’s mouth was full of chocolate when she stepped forward and saw the fish.
    The fish wasn’t swimming. It floated among all the other fish in the water and stared at the visitors, some of whom pulled faces or knocked on the glass, making the fish jerk backward and swim away. But the one fish remained still. Its eyes were fixed, and it looked through the visitors as if no one were there. Tamara thought,
No one can hurt him
. And Kris is just like that. No one can hurt him.
    At the time they all belonged to the same clique. Kris and Tamara and Frauke. There was Gero and Ina too, and Thorsten, Lena and Mike and whatever all their names were. They sailed through the nineties like an armada of hormone-drenched seafarers with only one goal in mind: one day to reach the sacred shore of high school graduation, and never to have to take to the sea ever again. After school they lost touch. Years later they bumped into each other by chance and were amazed at how much time had just slipped through their fingers. They were seafarers no more, neither were they shipwrecked; they were more like the people who walked along the beach picking up flotsam and