Upon closer inspection, however, various inconsistencies and even contradictions began to emerge. According to Aristides, Schwab’s secretary Fräulein Schmidschelm turned the folder over to him after Schwab’s death, yet it contains passages in Schwab’s hand that were obviously written after his body had been cremated at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg in 1964, as described in The Death of My Brother Abel. Fräulein Schmidschelm—a secretary in the editorial offices of Scherping Publishers and known to everyone affectionately as “Schelmie”—had unfortunately also passed away in the meantime, so that she could not be asked to clear up the discrepancy. To increase the confusion even further, moreover, Wohlfahrt, formerly a movie producer and subsequently a publisher, declares in his presumptuous preface that he regards himself as the legitimate owner of the folder from Aristides’s literary remains, namely, as compensation for a prepayment he claims to have made for a film script entitled “The Lost Daughter,” which was still undelivered when Aristides lost his life in an automobile accident in late 1969. I do not intend to get into how grotesque it is that Wohlfahrt exploited this supposedly “legitimate literary possession” to switch from movie producer to publisher. It is highly implausible in any case that he could ever have expected to find a script for the movie “The Lost Daughter” in Folder C. A review of the evidence has revealed that that was an intentional misdirection—unsurprisingly, given the bankrupt Wohlfahrt’s customary business practices. Fragments of a treatment for the script in question have turned up among the papers of his French coproducer, but that does nothing to explain the contradictions in Aristides’s manuscript, to say nothing of the fact that all the names in Aristides’s writings—presumably including his own—have been replaced by made-up ones. Not all the personages who appear there are identical to actual people living today or alive at the time of writing; the same goes for the events depicted vis-à-vis historically documented occurrences. Incidentally, to insist they be identical would mean forbidding the novelist an imagination.

In this case, however, investigations were able to be conducted on the basis of reliable information. Dr. Engelhardt purchased the house on the Tegernsee where the folder was discovered from the producer Wohlfahrt (or rather, from the actual person who bears that name)—fully furnished and containing surprisingly complete files of commercial documents dating back to 1959—shortly before the producer (undoubtedly identical to the “supreme movie piglet” in Aristides’s Death of My Brother Abel) fled the country under multiple indictments for fraud and tax evasion. (Dr. Engelhardt surmises his current domicile to be somewhere in the Caribbean.) Full as they are of crackpot (if not intentionally fraudulent from the get-go) movie projects, the files clearly include not a single film with the faintest similarity to the one in Wohlfahrt’s preface, also described by Aristides in Abel, namely, the one entitled “The Lost Daughter.” In fact, both Wohlfahrt and Aristides make many implausible assertions about production details, especially that Nadine Carrier would play the lead role. But perhaps we can attribute that to an attempt at obfuscation by Aristides, which Wohlfahrt was all too happy to seize upon in order to substantiate his grotesque claim to the manuscript. In any event, as was to be expected, attempts to make inquiries of Madame Carrier were fruitless. The very number of individuals who had intimate relations with her over the years made a precise sifting of the evidence out of the question. The diva could not be cajoled into reading and commenting on the relevant passages in Abel (“There’s been so much written about me . . .”). So how did Wohlfahrt get his hands on Folder C? One thing the files from Wohlfahrt’s house on the Tegernsee prove beyond a doubt is his connection to the long-serving editor at Scherping Publishers, Johannes S.