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manuscript, to say nothing of the fact that all the names in Aristides’s writings—presumably including his own—have been replaced by made-up ones.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.