If I am now going to be accused of possibly being at fault in the early death of a writer who would have restored the global role of German postwar literature à la Böll and Grass, despite the fact that no one else but INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS—i.e., in this case me, Heinz Wohlfahrt—ever had need of his artistic talents, I can only respond coolly that it’s quite possible that Aristides—at the time utterly unknown and financially dependent on my advance, having pumped all other wells dry so that even his friends Scherping and von Rönnekamp (as he regretfully admits himself) wouldn’t advance him another red cent—caused the accident intentionally to cover up the fact that he had not met his obligations to me. From my personal examination of skid marks at the accident site, I can affirm that the facts are otherwise. The results of the police investigation at the scene, where I was personally present a few hours later, as well as the unimpeachable statements of credible eyewitnesses unambiguously show that the trailer of a truck had begun to skid on the icy curve, forcing Aristides’s car, approaching from the opposite direction and, as usual, traveling much too fast, into a dangerous maneuver, and Aristides himself at the wheel tried everything he could to regain control of his vehicle before it crashed into the concrete mast of an overhead power line that crosses the road at that point.

Which leads me to this conclusion: not only did I have absolutely nothing to do with the accidental death of Aristides in a traffic accident; instead, he violated my trust, which gives me the right to regard myself as the sole legal owner of the only known copy of the recovered manuscript of “The Lost Daughter”—as has also been determined in an injunction of the state court in Hamburg—with all the customary rights to translation and publication in other languages, distribution in film versions, radio and television broadcasts, as well as in all future media of the same or similar kind. Fees resulting from any of the above will serve solely to compensate me for damages suffered through Aristides’s breach of trust.