Ingrid Haller

Ingrid Haller is 58 and has spent thirty of those years cataloguing coins at Berlin's numismaticnumismatic Relating to the study and collecting of coins, medals and banknotes. museum. She was born in Lübeck, in the north, the daughter of a stamp dealer and an accountant, and learned to read dates on coins before she learned to read books. She studied numismatics in Munich, wrote her thesis on Baltic ducats and arrived in Berlin with two boxes of books and a scholarship that became a career. Today she is the curator of the coin cabinet.

She spends most of the day in the museum library, one floor above the display cases: oak shelves up to the ceiling, reading tables lined with green felt and an articulated-arm lamp under which she examines each piece with a numismatist's loupe, a gift from her father. There, everything has its place and its inventory, each coin with its little box and its tweezers. She says a coin out of place is a coin lost, even if it is only a hand's breadth away.

She has short gray hair, always neatly combed, fair skin and discreet dark circles. She wears a charcoal blazer over a black turtleneck blouse, reading glasses hanging from a cord around her neck and white cotton gloves poking out of her pocket, ready for any piece. She is precise and formal, corrects the detective's words without asking leave and speaks of the Hundred-Kilo Sun as of a patient who died on her table.

About the coin, her account is that of someone who knew it closely: a hundred kilos of pure gold, fifty-three centimeters in diameter, a sun struck on its face, lent by a collector for ten years and lost in twenty-five minutes. She says the display case alarm went off at 3:45 a.m., when the glass finally gave way, and that the patrol car arrived seven minutes later, with the coin already on the other side of the tracks. If anyone asks about the display case key, she reminds them that armored glass has no key. With the museum next to the viaduct and the small hours empty, no one can say for certain where each person was at that hour.

Ingrid knows that whoever knows the cabinet by heart is, on a night of robbery, the first name anyone writes down. When the detective asks if she handed the coin to the thieves, formality turns to ice: she recalls her thirty years cataloguing coins and says she does not accept the question from someone who cannot tell a ducatducat Gold coin used in Europe from the Middle Ages, long a standard of value in trade. from a bottle cap. It may be the wounded pride of a specialist who lost the heaviest piece of her career. It may be someone hiding behind erudition so as not to have to explain something else. The detective will have to decide which.