Tretjak Read Online Free PDF Page A

what this message could mean.’
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    The big church bell on the St-Anna-Platz tolled half past three when Inspector Maler left the house. Two chimes, as always, every half hour. Maler had had a great teacher in the police, his long-time boss, who had taught him a lot. One lesson was: try to avoid, as far as possible, judging people who you are investigating. Don’t evaluate, hang everything in the balance, don’t decide whether you like them or not, whether you find them credible or not. Because every judgement narrows the perspective, limits the observation. A good policeman hasn’t got any drawers for thoughts like that, his boss used to say.
    Maler climbed into his car, a beige BMW, and for once listened to that inner voice: don’t jump the gun about Tretjak. Only one observation registered in his memory: normally people who are given such dramatic news ask questions. How did the man die? How was he discovered? Are there any leads the police are following? These kind of things interest people. With Tretjak it was different. He listened and responded. Nothing else.
    When Maler turned into the Mittlerer Ring he could not help passing one tiny little judgement. It concerned the slim blonde tax inspector whose hand he had shaken in Tretjak’s flat. He remembered his roommate in the cardiac clinic who had shared his two-bed room for weeks. They had thought up a little game. With every woman who entered the room or who they met in the clinic they connected profession or nationality with looks. Clichés like ‘nurses are prettier than cleaners’ were predictable, but nevertheless interesting, but more fun were remarks such as ‘for an English girl she is pretty, but not for a physiotherapist.’ Maler was certain that his roommate and he would have agreed about the lady from the Inland Revenue: for a tax inspector, she was damn good looking.
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    St-Anna-Platz, Munich, 5pm
    There is only one thing the human brain cannot do, and that is not to learn. That’s what he had always said. That had been the standard opening line to Kerkhoff’s famous lectures. Tretjak looked at the picture on the screen. Harry Kerkhoff smiled his arrogant, flashing smile; it was an old photograph, at least ten years old, taken at some festivity or another, at a late hour. Kerkhoff in dinner jacket, Tretjak as well. He was standing next to him in that picture. Kerkhoff still had a full head of hair back then. Later, when he started to lose it, he had immediately had his head shaved. Now he had more of a patch which he needed to shave each morning, he had joked, when Tretjak almost did not recognise him – one shouldn’t delay good-byes too long. Tretjak moved the mouse and clicked through a few more old pictures of Harry Kerkhoff, which Google had found – until a newer one turned up. Tretjak picked up the phone and dialled the number of Kerkhoff’s son in Rotterdam. But nobody answered.
    The room Tretjak was in was originally meant to have been a living room. It measured almost 60 square metres. It had two bay windows and a door leading to a balcony. Tretjak did not need a living room and had therefore had it redesigned. He had had the parquet floor sanded and oiled but not sealed. In front of the windows and the pale balcony door blinds came down to the floor in aluminium strips. Most of the time they were closed, just like now. There was not one single picture on the white walls. Even the steel girders holding up the ceiling where walls had once stood were painted white. When entering the room one noticed two areas, like small islands in the middle of this sea of white. To the right stood a table by the Danish designer Hein van Eek, made up of tiny pastel-coloured wooden pieces, glued together and thickly coated with varnish, 3 metres 20 centimetres long and 1 metre 40 centimetres wide. There were no chairs, only a bench in front of it without a backrest. The whole surface of the