And Schwab’s respectable, serially unfaithful former spouse Carlotta at his side was a widow transcending all conventions in so comradely a fashion that no one would have dreamed of asking how many years ago she had left the deceased because there wasn’t even the smallest spot left on his head for another horn.

And Witte too, the Nestor of her countless lovers—and patron, laundry detergent king, and culture-fertilizer manufacturer—sat near her; in his lap, the same civic-association-representative black hat that is always sported in Hamburg to show economic prosperity in a dignified way despite a never denied (and certainly never doubted) lower-class background. Whereas Scherping’s hat would, when donned, slide down over both ears, Witte usually pushed his own smartly off his forehead: Stadtluft macht frei.

Witte sat next to the legendary aunt who, in far-off days of youth, when bearing the name Wiebke, with its sound like the evening song of a plover, had been his betrothed for a time, and for whom he had nurtured tender feelings ever since. He sat sturdily at her side as if ever ready to support her should the need arise—

not only out of devotion but also in the full weatherproof awareness that here—and here more than anywhere else—it befitted him to bear the club banner. His apoplectic skull shone like the cocarde of a champion sharpshooter: blue in the red-framed core, surrounded by the blazing white of his silvery lion’s mane.

The aunt had slipped her nicotine-tanned paw into the arm of Schwab’s niece Uschi (who so far seemed ready to let any man bed her); and next to Uschi, his thick eyebrows somberly spiraling into the bridge of the nose, sat her new fiancé, Klaus, in stiff, sap-fermenting young manhood, which Herr von Rönnekamp in turn kept jealous watch over, raising his master-detective profile with derisive pride. In short: the more or less immediately affected mourners in this Middle Kingdom were also intertwined by a busily spun sperm thread, which also pulled in more remote people.

In the second row, wedged between the production managers of Scherping Publishers (black hats) and the sales directors (black hats), sat the loyal secretary Elisabeth Schmidschelm (called Schelmchen or Schelmie or even Ellie the Alkie), who had once seen better days, before she had been gently nudged into retirement at Lücke’s Bar after Schwab’s departure.

And over her shoulder (heightened hump-like by a brand-new Persian lamb coat collar—Scherping with his usual generosity had been forced to pay her off too) peered—oh, graceful folly!—the enchanted eyes of Lovely Heli (it is with such timid curiosity that the unicorn sticks its head out between the oak trunks in the forest to see if its knight is coming). I looked out to see if Gisela was coming. There was no reason why she too should not make an appearance and say farewell to someone who had offered up his soul to her like a youth his manhood on the altar of Astarte. But I couldn’t find her. Presumably, she took her profession too seriously. It was a Saturday afternoon, a time when the regular clients (as she had reported) turn up at the brothel (Scherping’s bad reputation in respectable Hamburg circles was largely due to his occasional midweek outings there, to devote himself to his dark quest for salvation).