The Ears of a Cat by Roderick Hart

Author:Roderick Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

33

Peace is much sought after but seldom achieved. Dieter Klein came closest to it in his own apartment, where double glazing excluded the clamour of the world outside. Though he owned both a television and a radio, he seldom used either. The only obstacle to the tranquillity he craved was the extractor fan in his bathroom. This device activated automatically when he switched on the light, an irritation he worked round with a motion-sensing battery-operated light attached to the wall with adhesive pads.

Yet all of these measures taken together, successful as they were, did nothing to protect him from the noise generated between his ears by the incessant mental activity which he could not turn off even in his sleep. And the demands of his work interfered more and more with the effort required by his music, their respective modes of thought so opposed that each inhibited the other. The drudgery of studying the stream of official reports crossing his desk did not sit well with the soaring flights of fancy which overtook him as he composed. Something would have to give, and that would be his job at the BND. After all, anyone could read a report, but it was given only to a few to enrich the world with music.

The case was simple enough. He was too young to retire but couldn’t afford simply to resign. Here on the Kreuzbergstraße, his rent was high and he had no intention of moving somewhere cheaper. Slumming was not in his nature, besides which down-market locations were invariably noisy: heated arguments through one wall, the animal noises of sexual congress through another, children’s feet thundering on the floor above. When you came right down to it, people were disgusting. The only solution was retirement on health grounds. But since there was nothing wrong with his body, those grounds would have to be mental, and there he was in with a shout if he could convince Barbara Grenzenlos that he was losing it. But Grenzenlos was a professional. He couldn’t hope to get one past her just by sitting in her office juggling loose screws. Evidence of his problem should come to her from elsewhere. To which end he had a plan.

He knew that Pearson and Lang were feeding him ludicrous leads they hoped would make him look foolish when he followed them up. And it came to him in his sleep that he could use this to his advantage, hence the report he had submitted to his superiors; a work of fiction to rival, albeit on a smaller scale, the works of Thomas Mann. However, since he was hoping to deceive a professional, Klein was more anxious than usual on his second visit to Barbara Grenzenlos. He was aware of that and worried she’d pick up on it; if a shrink didn’t, who would? And she did, though she’d already marked his card as uptight by nature.

Grenzenlos affected an impression of equality between analyst and client, for example, by not having

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