The Deceiver Read Online Free PDF Page B

undergo a positive vetting at the office because of Ute’s politics), and was living in a squat in Düsseldorf with various guitar-strumming hippies—Bruno could never work out with which. His son Lutz was still at home, slumped forever in front of the television set. A pimply youth who had flunked every exam he had ever taken, he now resented education and the world that set store by it, preferring to adopt a punk hairstyle and clothes as his personal protest against society but stopping well short of actually accepting any job that society might be prepared to offer him.
    Bruno had tried; well, he reckoned he had tried. He had done his best, such as it was. Worked hard, paid his taxes, kept his family as best he could, and had little enough fun in life. In three years—just thirty-six-months—they would pension him off. There would be a small party in the office, Aust would make a speech, they would clink glasses of sparkling wine, and he would be gone. To what? He would have his pension and the savings from his “other work” that he had carefully hoarded in a variety of medium-to-small accounts around Germany under a variety of pseudonyms. There would be enough there, more than anyone thought or suspected; enough to buy a retirement home and do what he really wanted. …
    Behind his amiable facade, Bruno Morenz was also a very secretive man. He had never told Aust or anyone else in the Service about his “other work”—in any case, it was strictly forbidden and would have led to instant dismissal. He had never told Irmtraut about any ofhis work, or his secret savings. But that was not his real problem—as he saw it.
    His real problem was that he wanted to be free. He wanted to start again, and as if on cue he could see how. For Bruno Morenz, well into middle age, had fallen in love. Head over heels, deeply in love. And the good part was that Renate, the stunning, lovely, youthful Renate, was as much in love with him as he was with her.
    There, in that café on that summer afternoon, Bruno finally made up his mind. He would do it; he would tell her. He would tell her he intended to leave Irmtraut well provided for, take early retirement, quit the job, and take her away to a new life with him in the dream home they would have up in his native north by the coast.
    Bruno Morenz’s real problem, as he did not see it, was that he was not heading for, but was well into, a truly massive midlife crisis. Because he did not see it and because he was a professional dissimulator, no one else saw it, either.
    Renate Heimendorf was twenty-six, at five feet seven inches a tall and handsomely proportioned brunette. At the age of eighteen she had become the mistress and plaything of a wealthy businessman three times her age, a relationship that had lasted five years. When the man dropped dead of a heart attack, probably brought on by a surfeit of food, drink, cigars, and Renate, he had inconsiderately failed to make provision for her in his will, something his vengeful widow was not about to rectify.
    The girl had managed to pillage their expensively furnished love-nest of its contents, which, together with the jewelry and trinkets he had given her over the years, fetched at sale a tidy sum.
    But not enough to retire on; not enough to permit her to continue the life-style to which she had become accustomed and had no intention of quitting for a secretarial job and a tiny salary. She decided to go into business. Skilled at coaxing a form of arousal from overweight, out-of-condition, middle-aged men, there was really only one business into which she could go.
    She bought a long lease on an apartment in quiet and respectable Hahnwald, a leafy and staid suburb of Cologne. The houses there were of good solid brick or stone construction, in some cases converted into apartments, like the one in which she lived and worked. It was a four-story stone building with one apartment on each floor. Hers was on the second. After moving in, she