In August I was back in Mannheim.
I always enjoy going on vacation and the weeks in the Aegean were spent in a glow of brilliant blue. But now that I’m older I enjoy coming home more, as well. After Klara’s death I redecorated the apartment. During our marriage I hadn’t managed to assert myself against her taste and so, at fifty-six, I caught up on the pleasures of decorating that other people delight in when they’re young. I do like my two chunky leather sofas that cost a fortune and also hold their own with the tomcat, the old apothecary shelves where I keep my books and records, and the bunk-bed in my study I had built into the niche. Coming home I also always look forward to Turbo, whom I know is looked after well by the next-door neighbour but who does, in his quiet manner, suffer in my absence.
I’d put down my suitcases and opened the door when, with Turbo clinging to my trouser leg, I beheld a colossal gift hamper that had been placed on the floor of the hallway.
The door to the next-door apartment opened and Frau Weiland greeted me. ‘How nice that you’re back, Herr Self. My, you’re tanned. Your cat has missed you very much, haven’t you, puss wuss wuss wuss? Have you seen the hamper yet? It came three weeks ago with a chauffeur from the RCW. Shame about the beautiful flowers. I did consider putting them in a vase, but they’d be dead now anyway. The mail is on your desk as always.’
I thanked her and sought refuge behind the apartment door from her torrent of words.
From pâté de foie gras to Malossol caviar it contained every delicacy I like and dislike. Luckily Turbo likes caviar. The attached card, with an artistic rendition of the firm logo, was signed by Firner. The RCW thanked me for my invaluable service. They’d paid, too.
In the mail were account statements, postcards from Eberhard and Willy, and the inevitable bills. I’d forgotten to cancel my subscription to the Mannheimer Morgen; Frau Wieland had stacked the papers neatly on the kitchen table. I leafed through them before putting them in the trash, and sampled the musty taste of old political excitement.
I unpacked and threw a load in the washing machine. Then I did my shopping, had the baker’s wife, the head butcher, and the people in the grocer’s shop comment admiringly on my rested appearance, and I enquired after news as though all sorts must have happened in my absence.
It was the summer holidays. The shops and the streets were emptier, my driver’s eyes picked out parking spaces in the most unlikely of places, and a stillness infused the town. I’d returned from my break with that lightness of spirit that allows you to experience familiar surroundings as new and different. It all gave me a floating sensation that I wanted to savour. I put off my trip to the office until the afternoon. Fearfully, I made my way to the Kleinen Rosengarten: would it have shut down for the holiday? But from a distance I could see Giovanni standing in the garden gate, napkin over his arm.
‘You come-a back from the Greek? Greek not good. Come on-a, I make you the gorgonzola spaghetti.’
‘Si, old Roman, great.’ We played our German-converses-with-guest-worker game.
Giovanni brought me the Frascati and told me about a new film. ‘That would be a role for you, a killer who could just as easily be a private detective.’
After the spaghetti gorgonzola, coffee, and sambuca, after an hour with the Süddeutsche by the Wasserturm, after an ice-cream and another coffee at Gmeiner I gave myself up to the office. It wasn’t as bad as all that. My answering machine had announced my absence until today and not recorded any messages. In amongst the newsletters from the Federal Association of German Detectives, a tax notice, advertisements, and an invitation to subscribe to the Evangelical State Encyclopedia I found two letters. Thomas was offering me a teaching appointment on the security studies course at the technical college of Mannheim. And Heidelberg Union Insurance asked me to get in touch as soon as I returned from my holiday.
I dusted a little, flicked through the newspapers, got out the bottle of sambuca, the jar with the coffee beans, and poured myself a measure. While I reject the cliché of whisky in the desk of a private detective, there’s got to be some sort of bottle. Then I recorded my new message, made an appointment with Heidelberg Union Insurance, put off replying to Thomas’s offer, and went home. The afternoon and evening were spent on the balcony, seeing to this and that. The account statements got me calculating and I realized that with the jobs so far I’d almost fulfilled my annual target. And coming after the holiday, too. Most reassuring.
I managed to hold on to my sense of floating into the following week. The insurance fraud case I’d taken on I worked through without getting involved. Sergej Mencke, a mediocre ballet dancer at Mannheim National Theatre, had taken out a high insurance policy on his legs and promptly suffered a complicated break. He’d never dance again. A million was the sum in question and the insurance company wanted to be sure all was above board. The notion that a person could break their own leg repelled me. When I was a small boy, as an example of male willpower, my mother told me how Ignatius of Loyola re-broke his leg himself with a hammer when it healed crookedly. I’ve always abhorred self-mutilators, the young Spartan who let his belly be mauled by a fox, Mucius Scaevola, and Ignatius of Loyola. But so far as I was concerned, they could all have had a million if it meant them disappearing from the pages of our schoolbooks. My ballet dancer claimed the break occurred when shutting the heavy door of his Volvo; on the evening in question he was running a high fever, had to get through a performance nonetheless, and afterwards wasn’t himself. That’s why he’d slammed the door although his leg was still hanging out. I sat in my car for a long time trying to imagine whether such a thing was possible. There wasn’t much more I could do with the summer break that had scattered his theatre colleagues and friends in every direction.
Sometimes I thought about Frau Buchendorff and about Mischkey. I hadn’t found anything about his case in the papers. Once I happened to walk along Rathenaustrasse and the second-floor shutters were closed.
It was pure coincidence that I got her message in time one afternoon in September. Normally I don’t pick up messages in the afternoon. Frau Buchendorff had called in the afternoon and asked if she could talk to me after work. I’d forgotten my umbrella so had to go back to the office, saw the signal on the answering machine, and called back. We agreed to meet at five o’clock. Her voice was subdued.
Shortly before five I was in my office. I made coffee, rinsed the cups, tidied the papers on my desk, loosened my tie, undid my top button, pushed my tie up again, and moved the chairs in front of my desk back and forth. Finally they stood where they always stand. Frau Buchendorff was punctual.
‘I really don’t know if I should have come. Maybe I’m only imagining things.’
She stood, out of breath, next to the potted palm. She smiled uncertainly, was pale, and had shadows beneath her eyes. As I helped her out of her coat her movements were nervous.
‘Take a seat. Would you like a coffee?’
‘For days I’ve done nothing but drink coffee. But, yes, please do give me a cup.’
‘Milk and sugar?’
Her thoughts were elsewhere and she didn’t reply. Then she fixed me with a look of determination that hid her uncertainty.
‘Do you know anything about murder?’
Carefully I put the cups down and sat myself behind the desk.
‘I’ve worked on murder cases. Why do you ask?’
‘Peter is dead, Peter Mischkey. It was an accident, they say, but I simply can’t believe it.’
‘Oh, my God!’ I got up, paced back and forth behind my desk. I felt queasy. In the summer on the tennis court I’d destroyed a part of Mischkey’s vitality, and now he was dead.
Hadn’t I ruined something for her, too, then? Why had she come to me anyway?
‘You met him just that one time playing tennis, and he did play pretty wildly, and it’s true, he was also a wild driver, but he never had an accident and drove so confidently with such concentration – what happened doesn’t fit.’
So she knew nothing about my meeting with Mischkey in Heidelberg. Nor would she refer to the tennis match that way if she knew I’d turned Mischkey in. It seemed he’d told her nothing, nor had she, in her role as Firner’s personal assistant, discovered anything. I didn’t know what to make of that.
‘I liked Mischkey and I’m terribly sorry, Frau Buchendorff, to learn of his death. But we both know that not even the best of drivers is immune to road accidents. Why don’t you believe it was an accident?’
‘You know the railway bridge between Eppelheim and Wieblingen? That’s where it happened, two weeks ago. According to the police report, Peter skidded out of control on the bridge, broke through the railings, and crashed down onto the tracks. He had his seatbelt on, but the car buried him beneath it. His cervical vertebra was broken and he was killed on the spot.’ She sobbed convulsively, brought out a handkerchief, and blew her nose. ‘Sorry. He drove that route every Thursday; after his sauna at the Eppelheim baths he rehearsed with his band in Wieblingen. He was musical, you know, played the piano really well. The section over the bridge is straight as an arrow, the roads were dry, and visibility was good. Sometimes it’s foggy but not that evening.’
‘Are there any witnesses?’
‘The police didn’t trace any. And it was late, around eleven p.m.’
‘Did they check the car?’
‘The police say everything was fine with the car.’
I didn’t have to enquire about Mischkey. He’d have been taken to the forensic medicine department, and if any alcohol or heart failure or any other failure had been ascertained the police would have told Frau Buchendorff. For a moment a vision of Mischkey on the stone dissection table came to me. As a young attorney I often had to be present at autopsies. I had a sudden image of his abdominal cavity being stuffed with wood shavings and sewn up with large stitches at the end.
‘The funeral was the day before yesterday.’
I considered. ‘Tell me, Frau Buchendorff, apart from the details of the event, do you have any reason to doubt that it was an accident?’
‘In recent weeks I often barely recognized him. He was morose, dismissive, turned in on himself, sat at home a lot, hardly wanted to join me on anything at all. Once he even threw me out, just like that. And he evaded all my questions. Sometimes I thought he had someone else, but then again he’d cling to me with a kind of intensity he hadn’t shown before. I was at a complete loss. Once, when I was especially jealous… You’ll think, perhaps, I’m not coping with my grief and am being hysterical. But what happened that afternoon…’
I topped up her cup and looked at her encouragingly.
‘It was on a Wednesday that we’d both taken off to spend more time together. The day started badly and it wasn’t the case that we wanted to spend more time with one another; actually I wanted him to have more time for me. After lunch he suddenly said that he had to go to the Regional Computing Centre for a couple of hours. I knew very well that wasn’t the truth and was disappointed and furious and could feel his frostiness and imagined him with someone else and did something that I think is actually pretty lousy.’ She bit her lip. ‘I followed him. He didn’t drive to the RCC, but into Rohrbacher Strasse and up the hill on Steigerweg. It was easy to follow him. He drove to the War Cemetery. I’d been careful to keep an appropriate distance. When I reached the cemetery he’d parked his car and was striding up the broad path in the middle. You know the War Cemetery, don’t you, with that path that seems to lead straight to heaven? At the end of it there’s a man-size, chiselled block of sandstone that looks like a sarcophagus. He went up to it. None of this made any sense to me and I hid in the trees. When he’d almost reached the block two men stepped out from behind it, suddenly and quietly, as if they’d come out of nothingness. Peter looked from one to the other; he seemed to want to turn to one of them, but didn’t know which.
‘Then everything went like lightning. Peter turned to his right, the man to his left took two steps, grabbed him from behind, and held him tightly. The guy on the right punched him in the stomach, over and over. It was quite unreal. The men seemed detached somehow, and Peter made no attempt to defend himself. Perhaps he was just as paralysed as I was. And it was over in a flash. As I started to run, the one who’d punched Peter took his glasses from his nose with an almost careful gesture, dropped them, and crunched them beneath his heel. Then just as silently and suddenly, they left Peter and disappeared again behind the sandstone block. I heard them running away through the woods.
‘When I reached Peter he had collapsed and was lying awkwardly on his side. I… but that doesn’t matter. He never told me why he had gone to the cemetery and been beaten up. Nor did he ever ask me why I’d followed him.’
We were both silent. What she’d recounted sounded like the work of professionals and I could understand why she doubted Peter’s death was an accident.
‘No, I don’t think you’re being hysterical. Is there anything else that seemed odd to you?’
‘Little things. For example, he started smoking again. And let his flowers die. He was apparently strange with his friend Pablo as well. I met him once during that time because I didn’t know what else I could do and he was worried, too. I’m glad you believe me. When I tried to tell the police about the thing in the War Cemetery they weren’t in the least bit interested.’
‘And that’s what you want me to do, to carry out the investigations the police neglected?’
‘Yes. I can imagine you’re not cheap. I can give you ten thousand marks and in exchange I’d like clarity about Peter’s death. Do you need an advance?’
‘No, Frau Buchendorff. I don’t need any advance, nor can I tell you now whether I’ll be taking on the case. What I can do is conduct a kind of pre-investigation: I have to ask the obvious questions, check the evidence, and only then will I decide whether to take the case. Do you agree?’
‘Good, let’s do it that way, Herr Self.’
I noted down some names, addresses, and dates, and promised to keep her informed. I took her to the door. Outside the rain was still falling.
My old friend in the Heidelberg police force is Chief Detective Nägelsbach. He’s just waiting for retirement; since starting as a messenger at the age of fifteen at the public prosecutor’s office in Heidelberg he may have constructed Cologne Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, Lomonossov University, and Neuschwanstein Castle from matches, but the reconstruction of the Vatican, his real dream, is simply too much alongside his police work, and has been postponed for his retirement. I’m curious. I’ve followed my friend’s artistic development with interest. In his earlier works the matches are somewhat shorter. Back then his wife and he removed the sulphur heads with a razor blade; he hadn’t known that match factories also distribute headless matches. With the longer matches the later models took on a gothic, towering quality. Since his wife no longer needed to help with the matches she began reading to him as he worked. She started with the first book of Moses and is currently on Karl Kraus’s The Torch. Chief Detective Nägelsbach is an erudite man.
I’d called him in the morning and when I met him at ten o’clock in police headquarters he made me a photocopy of the police report.
‘Ever since data protection came on the scene no one here knows what he’s allowed to give out. I’ve decided not to know what I’m not allowed to give out,’ he said, handing me the report. It was only a few pages long.
‘Do you know who oversaw the accident protocol?’
‘It was Hesseler. I thought you’d want to talk with him. You’re in luck, he’s here until noon and I’ve let him know you’ll be coming by.’
Hesseler was sitting at a typewriter, pecking away laboriously. I’ll never understand why policemen are not taught to type properly. Unless it’s supposed to be a form of torture for the suspects and witnesses to watch a typing policeman. It is torture; the policeman pokes away at the typewriter helplessly and aggressively, looking unhappy and extremely determined – an explosive and fearful mixture. And if you’re not induced to make a statement then at least you’re deterred from altering the statement once it has been written and completed by the policeman, regardless of how unfamiliar he’s rendered it.
‘Someone who’d driven over the bridge after the accident called us. His name’s in the report. When we arrived the doctor had just turned up and clambered down to the accident vehicle. He saw immediately that nothing could be done. We closed the road and secured the evidence. There wasn’t much to secure. There was the skid mark showing that the driver simultaneously braked and swung the steering wheel to the left. As to why he did that there’s no indication. Nothing points to the fact that another vehicle was involved, no shattered glass, no trace of body paint, no further skid mark, nothing. A strange accident all right but the driver lost control of his vehicle, that’s all.’
‘Where is the vehicle?’
‘At Beisel’s scrapyard, behind the Zweifarbenhaus, the brothel behind the railway station. The professionals examined it. I think Beisel will scrap it soon. The storage fees are already higher than the scrap price.’
I thanked him. I looked in on Nägelsbach to say goodbye.
‘Do you know Hedda Gabler?’ he asked me.
‘Why?’
‘It cropped up yesterday in Karl Kraus and I didn’t understand whether she drowned or shot herself or neither of the above, and whether she did it in the sea or in a vine arbour. Karl Kraus is pretty complicated at times.’
‘All I know is that she’s one of Ibsen’s heroines. Why not read the play next? Karl Kraus can easily be interrupted.’
‘I’ll have to talk to my wife. It would be the first time we interrupted something.’
Then I drove to Beisel. He wasn’t there. One of his workers showed me the shell.
‘Do you know what’s going to happen with the car? Are you family?’
‘I think it’ll get scrapped.’
Looking at it from the rear right you’d have thought it was almost unscathed. The top had been down when the accident occurred and closed by the towing company, or by the expert, due to the rain; it was in one piece. On the left-hand side the car was completely crushed at the front and gashed open at the side. The axle and the engine block were twisted to the right, the hood was folded into a V, the windshield and the headrests lay on the back seat.
‘Ah, scrapped. You can see, yourself, that there’s not much to the car now.’ He peered at the stereo with such obvious furtiveness that it caught my attention. It was completely intact.
‘I won’t take the stereo from you. But could I look at the car now, alone?’ I slipped him a ten-mark note and he left me in peace.
I walked round the car once more. Strange, on the right headlight Mischkey had stuck black sticky tape in the shape of a cross. Again I was fascinated that the right side seemed almost intact. When I took a close look I discovered the blotches. They weren’t easily visible against the bottle-green paintwork, nor were there many. But they looked like blood and I wondered how it had got there. Had Mischkey been pulled out of the car on his side? Had Mischkey bled at all? Had someone hurt themselves during the recovery? Perhaps it was unimportant but whether it was blood or not now interested me so much that I scraped off some shavings of paintwork where the stains were into an empty film canister with my Swiss penknife. Philipp would get the sample tested.
I pushed back the top and looked inside. I saw no blood on the driver’s seat. The side pockets of the doors were empty. A silver St Christopher was attached to the dashboard. I picked it up; maybe Frau Buchendorff would like to have it even though it had let Mischkey down. The radio and cassette player reminded me of the Saturday I’d followed Mischkey from Heidelberg to Mannheim. There was still a cassette inside that I took out and pocketed.
I don’t have much of a clue about the inner workings of cars. So I refrained from staring blankly at the motor or crawling under the wreck. What I’d seen was plenty to give me a picture of the car’s collision with the railings and the descent onto the tracks. I retrieved my small automatic camera from my coat pocket and took a couple of pictures. Along with the report Nägelsbach had given me were some photos but they were scarcely recognizable on the Xerox.
Back in Mannheim, the first thing I did was drive to the city hospital. I located Philipp’s room, knocked, and went in. He was in the process of hiding his ashtray, complete with smouldering cigarette, in the drawer of his desk. ‘Ah, it’s you.’ He was relieved. ‘I promised the senior nurse I’d stop smoking. What brings you round my way?’
‘I’ve a favour to ask you.’
‘Ask me over a coffee, let’s go to the canteen.’ As he strode ahead, white coat billowing, a cheeky one-liner for every pretty nurse, he looked like a lecherous Marcus Welby, MD. In the canteen he whispered something at me about the blonde nurse three tables away. She shot him a look, the look of a blue-eyed barracuda. I’m fond of Philipp but if he’s gobbled up one day by a barracuda like that he’ll deserve it.
I fetched the film canister from my pocket and placed it in front of him.
‘Sure, I can get your film developed in the X-ray lab. But now you’re shooting pictures you’re not comfortable taking to the photo shop? Well, Gerd, that’s a shocker.’
Philipp really did have one thing on the brain. Was it the same with me when I was in my late fifties? I thought back. Following the stale years of marriage to Klara I’d experienced those first years as a widower like a second springtime. But a second spring full of romance – Philipp’s pose as the gay Lothario was alien to me.
‘Wrong, Philipp. There are some grains of paint in the film canister with something on them and I need to know whether it’s blood, if possible which blood group. And it doesn’t come from a deflowering on the hood of my car, as you’re doubtless thinking, but from a case I’m working on.’
‘The one doesn’t necessarily contradict the other. But, whatever, I’ll see to it. Is it urgent? Do you want to wait?’
‘No, I’ll give you a call tomorrow. How are things, by the way? Shall we drink a glass of wine sometime?’
We decided to meet on Sunday evening in the Badische Weinstuben. As we were leaving the canteen together he suddenly shot off. An Asian nurse’s aid was stepping into the elevator. He made it just before the doors closed.
Back in the office I did what I should have done a long time ago. I called Firner’s office, exchanged a few words with Frau Buchendorff, and was put through to Firner.
‘Greetings, Herr Self. What’s up?’
‘I’d like to thank you very much for the hamper that was waiting for me when I got back from holiday.’
‘Ah. You were on holiday. Where did it take you?’
I told him about the Aegean, about the yacht, and that I’d seen a ship full of RCW containers in Piraeus. He’d gone walking in the Peloponnese as a student and now had business every so often in Greece. ‘We’re protecting the Acropolis from erosion, a Unesco project.’
‘Tell me, Herr Firner, how did my case proceed?’
‘We took your advice and severed our system from the emission data site. We did so immediately after your report and since then haven’t had any further annoyances.’
‘And what did you do with Mischkey?’
‘A few weeks ago we had him here with us for a full day and he had a great deal to say about the system connections, points of entry, and possible security measurements. A capable man.’
‘You didn’t get the police involved?’
‘That didn’t strike us as particularly opportune. From the police it gets into the press – we don’t like that sort of publicity.’
‘And the damages?’
‘We considered that, too. If it interests you: some of our people found it unbearable simply to let Mischkey go after calculating the damage he caused at five million. But at the end of the day, fortunately, economic sense triumphed over the legal aspect. Also over the legal reflections of Oelmüller and Ostenteich, who wanted Mischkey’s case to be brought before the Federal Court. It wasn’t a bad idea: before the Federal Court the Mischkey case would have demonstrated the dangers to which businesses are prey under the new emissions law. But it would have brought undesirable publicity. Besides, we’re hearing, via the Economics Ministry, about rumblings from Karlsruhe that would make any further arguments on our part unnecessary.’
‘So, all’s well that ends well.’
‘That would have a somewhat cynical ring to it, I think, in the knowledge that Mischkey went on to die in a car crash. But you’re right, for the Works the matter had a happy ending, all things considered. Will we be seeing you here again? I had no idea that the general and yourself were such old friends. He told me about it when my wife and I spent an evening at his home recently. You know his house in Ludolf-Krehl-Strasse?’
I knew Korten’s house in Heidelberg, one of the first to be built in the late fifties from the perspective of personal security. I can still remember Korten one evening proudly demonstrating the cable car to me that connects the house, situated high up on the steep cliff above the street, with the entrance gate. ‘If there’s a power cut, it runs on my emergency power supply.’
Firner and I said our goodbyes with a few niceties. It was four o’clock, too late to make up for the missed lunch, too early to eat dinner. I went to the Herschel baths.
The sauna was empty. I sweated alone, swam alone beneath the high cupola with its Byzantine mosaics, found myself alone in the Irish-Roman steam bath and on the roof terrace. Shrouded in a large, white sheet, I dozed off on my deck chair in the rest room. Philipp was roller-skating through the hospital corridors. The columns he passed were shapely female legs. Sometimes they moved. Philipp avoided them, laughing. I laughed back at him. Then I suddenly saw that it was a scream that gashed his face. I woke up and thought of Mischkey.
The proprietor of Café O had expressed his personality in an interior design that summarized everything that was fashionable at the end of the seventies, from the imitation fin-de-siècle lamps and the hand-operated orange juice squeezer to the little bistro tables with the marble tops. I wouldn’t want to know him.
Frau Mügler, the dancer, I recognized by the severe black hair pulled back into a little ponytail, her angular femininity, and her look of sincere engagement. She’d gone as far as she could to look like Pina Bausch. She was sitting at the window, drinking a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
‘Self. We spoke on the phone yesterday.’ She looked at me with raised eyebrows and nodded almost imperceptibly. I joined her. ‘Nice of you to take the time. My insurance firm still has some questions regarding Herr Mencke’s accident that his colleague may be able to answer.’
‘How did you hit on me in particular? I don’t know Sergej especially well, haven’t been here in Mannheim for long.’
‘You’re simply the first one back from vacation. Tell me, did Herr Mencke strike you as particularly exhausted and nervous in the last few weeks before the accident? We’re looking for an explanation for its strange nature.’ I ordered a coffee; she took another orange juice.
‘Like I said, I don’t know him well.’
‘Did anything attract your attention?’
‘He seemed very quiet, oppressed at times, but what do you mean by “attract attention”? Perhaps he’s always like that, I’ve only been here six months.’
‘Who from the Mannheim National Theatre knows him particularly well?’
‘Hanne was closer to him at some point, so far as I know. And he hangs out with Joschka a lot, I think. Maybe they can help you.’
‘Was Herr Mencke a good dancer?’
‘Hmm, well, what do you mean by good? Wasn’t exactly Nureyev, but then I’m no Bausch. Are you good?’
I’m no Pinkerton, I could have replied, but that wouldn’t have been appropriate for my role.
‘You won’t find another insurance investigator like me. Could you give me the last names of Hanne and Joschka?’
I could have saved my breath. She hadn’t been there long; don’t forget, ‘and in the theatre we’re all on a first-name-terms basis. What’s your first name?’
‘Hieronymus. My friends call me Ronnie.’
‘I didn’t want to know what your friends call you. I think first names have something to do with one’s personality.’
I’d love to have run out screaming. Instead I thanked her, paid at the counter, and left quietly.
The next morning I called Frau Buchendorff. ‘I’d like to take a look at Mischkey’s apartment and things. Could you arrange for me to get in?’
‘Let’s drive over together after office hours. Shall I pick you up at three-thirty?’
Frau Buchendorff and I took the back roads to Heidelberg. It was Friday, people were home early from work and getting their homes, yards, gardens, cars, and even the pavements ready for the weekend ahead. Autumn was in the air. I could feel my rheumatism coming on and would have preferred to have the top up, but I didn’t want to appear old and kept quiet. In Wieblingen I thought about the railway bridge on the way to Eppelheim. I’d go there in the next few days. Now, with Frau Buchendorff, the detour hardly seemed appropriate.
‘That’s the way to Eppelheim,’ she said, pointing past the small church to the right. ‘I have the feeling I should take a look at the spot, but I can’t do it yet.’
She left the car in the parking lot at Kornmarkt. ‘I called ahead. Peter shared the apartment with a friend who works at Darmstadt Technical University. I do have a key but didn’t want just to turn up.’
She didn’t notice I knew the way to Mischkey’s apartment. I didn’t try to play dumb. No one answered our ring and Frau Buchendorff opened the front door. The lobby contained cool air from the cellar: ‘The cellar goes down two levels into the hillside.’ The floor was made of heavy slabs of sandstone. Bicycles were propped against the wall decorated with Delft tiles. The letterboxes had all been broken into at some point. Only a faint light trickled through the stained-glass windows onto the worn stairs.
‘How old is the house?’ I asked as we climbed to the third floor.
‘A couple of hundred years. Peter loved it. He had lived here since he was a student.’
Mischkey’s part of the apartment consisted of two large interlinking rooms. ‘You needn’t stay here, Frau Buchendorff, while I’m looking around. We can meet afterwards in a café.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll manage. Do you know what you’re looking for?’
‘Hmm.’ I was getting my bearings. The front room was the study with a large table at the window, a piano and shelves against the remaining walls. In the shelves files and stacks of computer printouts. Through the window I could see the rooftops of the old town and Heiligenberg. In the second room was a bed with a patchwork quilt, three armchairs from the era of the kidney-shaped table, one of the aforementioned tables, a wardrobe, television, and a stereo system. From the window I looked left up to the castle and right to the advertising column I’d stood behind weeks ago.
‘He didn’t have a computer?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘No. He had all sorts of private stuff on the RCC system.’
I turned to the shelves. The books were about mathematics, computing, electronics, and artificial intelligence, films and music. Next to them an absolutely beautiful edition of Green Henry and stacks of science fiction. The spines of the files indicated bills and taxes, product registration forms and instruction manuals, references and documents, travel, the public census, and computer stuff I barely understood. I reached for the folder of bills and leafed through it. In the references file I discovered that Mischkey had won a prize in his third year of high school. On his desk was a pile of papers that I looked through. Along with private mail, unpaid bills, programming notes, and sheet music, I came across a newspaper cutting.
RCW honoured the oldest fisherman on the Rhine. While he was out fishing yesterday on the river, Rudi Basler, who had turned ninety-five years old, was surprised by a delegation from the RCW headed by General Director Dr H. C. Korten: ‘I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity of congratulating the grand old man of Rhine-fishing personally. Ninety-five years old and still as fresh as a fish in the Rhine.’ Our photo captures the moment in which General Director H. C. Korten shares the happiness of the celebrated man and presents him with a gift hamper…
The picture had a clear shot of the gift hamper in the foreground; it was the same one I’d received. Then I found a copy of a short newspaper article from May 1970.
Scientists as forced labourers in the RCW? The Institute for Contemporary History has picked up a hot potato. The most recent monograph from the Quarterly of Contemporary History deals with the forced labour of Jewish scientists in German industry from 1940 to 1945. According to this, renowned Jewish chemists among others worked in degrading conditions on the development of chemical war materials. The press officer of the RCW pointed to a planned commemorative publication for their 1972 centenary in which one contribution will deal with the firm’s history under National Socialism, including the ‘tragic incidents’.
Why had this been of interest to Mischkey?
‘Could you come here for a moment?’ I asked Frau Buchendorff, who was sitting in the armchair in the other room, staring out of the window. I showed her the newspaper article and asked her what she made of it.
‘Yes, recently Peter had started asking for information on this or that about the RCW. He never had before. Regarding the matter of the Jewish scientists I even had to copy the article from our commemorative publication.’
‘And where this interest stemmed from he didn’t say?’
‘No, nor did I push him to tell me anything because talking was often so difficult towards the end.’
I found the copy of the commemorative publication in the file entitled ‘Reference Chart Webs’. It was next to the computer printouts. The R, the C, and the W had caught my eye as I was casting a resigned farewell glance at the shelves. The file was full of newspaper and other articles, some correspondence, a few brochures and computer printouts. So far as I could see, all the material was linked to the RCW. ‘I can take the file with me, can’t I?’
Frau Buchendorff nodded. We left the apartment.
On the homeward journey on the motorway the roof was closed. I sat with the file on my knees and felt like a schoolboy.
Suddenly Frau Buchendorff asked me, ‘You were a public prosecutor, Herr Self, weren’t you? Why did you actually stop?’
I took a cigarette from the packet and lit it. When the pause grew too long I said, ‘I’ll answer your question, I just need a moment.’ We overtook a truck with a yellow tarpaulin, ‘Fairwell’ on it in red letters. A great name for a removal firm. A motorbike droned past us.
‘At the end of the war I was no longer wanted. I’d been a convinced National Socialist, an active party member, and a tough prosecutor who’d also argued for, and won, the death penalty. There were some spectacular trials. I had faith in the cause and saw myself as a soldier on the legal front. I could no longer be utilized on the other front following my wound at the start of the war.’ The worst was over. Why hadn’t I simply told Frau Buchendorff the sanitized version? ‘After nineteen fortyfive I first worked on my in-laws’ farm, then in a coal merchant’s, and then slowly started doing private investigations. For me, my work as a public prosecutor didn’t have a future. I could only see myself as the National Socialist I’d been, and certainly couldn’t be again. I’d lost my faith. You probably can’t imagine how anyone could believe at all in National Socialism. But you’ve grown up with knowledge that we, after nineteen forty-five, only got piece by piece. It was bad with my wife, who was a beautiful blonde Nazi and stayed that way till she became a nice, round Economic Miracle German.’ I didn’t want to say any more about my marriage. ‘Around the time of the Monetary Reform they started to draft incriminated colleagues back in. I could have returned to the judiciary then, too. But I saw what the efforts to get reinstated, and the reinstatement itself, did to my colleagues. Instead of feeling guilt they only had a sense that they’d been done an injustice when they were expelled and that this reinstatement was a kind of reparation. That disgusted me.’
‘That sounds closer to aesthetics than morality.’
‘It’s hard to tell the difference any more.’
‘Can’t you imagine anything beautiful that’s immoral?’
‘I see what you mean, Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will and so on. But since I’ve grown older I just don’t find the choreography of the masses, the bombastic architecture of Speer and his epigones, and the atomic blast brighter than a thousand suns beautiful any more.’
We had stopped by my door and it was approaching seven. I’d have liked to invite Frau Buchendorff to the Kleiner Rosengarten. But I didn’t dare.
‘Frau Buchendorff, would you care to dine with me in the Kleiner Rosengarten?’
‘That’s nice of you, many thanks, but I won’t.’
Quite against my principles I’d taken the file with me to dinner.
‘Working and eating izza no good. The stomach is ruined.’
Giovanni pretended to seize the file. I clung to it tightly. ‘We always work, we Germans. Not the dolce vita.’
I ordered calamari with rice. I abstained from spaghetti because I didn’t want to get any sauce stains on Mischkey’s file. Instead I spilled some Barbera on Mischkey’s letter to the Mannheimer Morgen with which he’d enclosed an advertisement.
Historian at the University of Hamburg looking for oral evidence from workers and employees of the RCW from the years before 1948 for a study of social and economic history. Discretion and reimbursement of expenses. Replies to box number 379628.
I found eleven responses, some in spidery handwriting, some laboriously typed, that answered the ad with not much more than name, address, and phone number. One response came from San Francisco.
Whether anything had come of the contacts wasn’t revealed by the file. It contained no notes by Mischkey at all, no clue as to why he’d put this collection together, and what his intentions were. I found the contribution to the commemorative publication photocopied by Frau Buchendorff, and further on the small brochure of an anti-chemical-industry action group – ‘100 Years RCW – 100 Years Are Enough’ – with essays on work accidents, suppression of strikes, the entanglement of capital and politics, forced labour, union persecution, and party contributions. There was even an essay about the RCW and the church with a picture of the Reich Bishop Müller in front of a large Erlenmeyer retort. It struck me that during my Berlin student days I’d got to know a Fräulein Erlenmeyer. She was very rich and Korten said she came from the family of the aforementioned retort. I’d believed him, the similarity was undeniable. What had become of Reich Bishop Müller? I wondered.
The newspaper articles in the file dated back to 1947. They all bore reference to the RCW but otherwise appeared to be ordered randomly. The pictures, sometimes blurred in the copies, showed Korten first as a simple director, then as general director, showed his forerunner General Director Weismüller, who had retired shortly after 1945, and General Director Tyberg whom Korten had replaced in 1967. The photograph of the hundred-year anniversary had captured Korten receiving Chancellor Kohl’s congratulations and next to him he seemed small, delicate, and distinguished. The articles were full of news about finance, careers, and production, and now and again about accidents and slip-ups.
Giovanni cleared my plate away and placed a sambuca in front of me without a word. I ordered a coffee to go with it. At the neighbouring table a woman of around forty was sitting, reading Brigitte. From the cover I saw its lead article was ‘STERILIZED – AND NOW WHAT?’ I gathered my courage.
‘Yes, indeed, now what?’
‘I’m sorry?’ She looked at me in confusion and ordered an amaretto. I asked her if she came here often.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘After work I always come here to eat.’
‘Are you sterilized?’
‘Believe it or not, I am sterilized. And after my sterilization I had a child, the sweetest little boy.’ She laid down Brigitte.
‘Incredible,’ I said. ‘And does Brigitte approve of that?’
‘The case doesn’t crop up. It’s more about unhappy women and men who realize they want children after they’ve been sterilized.’ She nipped at her amaretto.
I crunched a coffee bean. ‘Doesn’t your son like Italian food? What does he do in the evenings?’
‘Would you mind if I joined you rather than screeching the answer through the entire restaurant?’
I stood up, pulled back a chair invitingly, and said I’d be delighted if she – well, the usual things you say. She brought a glass with her and lit a cigarette. I looked at her more closely, the somewhat tired eyes, the stubborn mouth, and the tiny wrinkles, the lacklustre ash-blonde hair, the ring in one ear and the Band-Aid on the other. If I didn’t watch out I’d be in bed with this woman within three hours. Did I want to watch out?
‘To come back to your question – my son is in Rio with his father.’
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘Manuel is eight years old now and goes to school in Rio. His father studied in Mannheim. I almost married him, because of the residence permit. When the child arrived he had to return to Brazil and we agreed he’d take him with him.’ I frowned at her. ‘Now you consider me a raven mother. But I didn’t get sterilized for the fun of it.’
A raven mother, indeed. Or at least an irritating one. According to German fairy tales, raven mothers and fathers push their fledglings from the nest. I never found out whether this does justice to real ravens, but it seemed to apply to her and I didn’t have any particular desire to keep flirting. When I remained silent, she asked, ‘Why the interest in the sterilization thing anyway?’
‘First something clicked in my mind, because of the cover of Brigitte. Then you interested me, how composed you were as you dealt with the question. Now it feels too composed, the way you talk about your son. Perhaps I’m too old-fashioned for this kind of composure.’
‘Composure can’t be imparted. A shame that prejudices are always confirmed.’ She took her glass and wanted to leave.
‘Could you just say first what RCW brings to mind?’ She gave me a frosty look. ‘I know, it’s a stupid-sounding question. But the RCW has been in my mind all day and I can’t see the forest for the trees.’
She responded earnestly. ‘A whole lot comes to mind. And I’ll tell you, because there’s something about you that I like. RCW to me stands for the Rhine Chemical Works, contraception pills, poisoned air and poisoned water, power, Korten-’
‘Why Korten?’
‘I massaged him. I give massages as it happens.’
‘So you are a masseuse?’
‘Masseuses are our impure sisters. Korten came for six months with back problems and he spoke a bit about himself and his work during the sessions. Sometimes we got into proper discussions. One time he said, “It’s not reprehensible to use people, it’s just tactless to let them notice.” That stayed in my mind for a long time.’
‘Korten was my friend.’
‘Why “was”? He’s still alive.’
Yes, why ‘was’? Had our friendship been buried in the meantime? ‘Self, you sweetheart’ – again and again the words had gone through my head in the Aegean and sent a shudder down my spine. Submerged memories had resurfaced, blended with fantasy, and forced their way into my sleep. With a cry, I’d awoken from the dream bathed in sweat: Korten and I hiking through the Black Forest – I knew very well that it was the Black Forest in spite of the high cliffs and deep gullies. There were three of us, a classmate was with us, Kimski or Podel. The sky was deep blue, the air heavy and yet surreally clear. Suddenly stones crumbled and bounced away silently down the slope, and we were hanging from a rope that was fraying. Above us was Korten and he looked at me and I knew what he expected of me. Still more of the cliff tumbled silently into the valley; I tried to claw my way up, to secure the rope and pull up the third man. I couldn’t do it and tears of helplessness and despair came to my eyes. I got out my penknife and started to cut through the rope beneath me. I have to do it, I have to, I thought, and cut. Kimski or Podel fell into the ravine. I could see it all at once, flailing arms, getting smaller and smaller in the distance, gentle mockery in Korten’s eyes, as though it were all a game. Now he could pull me up and when he almost had me at the top, sobbing and bleeding, ‘Self, you sweetheart’ came once again, and the rope broke…
‘What’s wrong? What’s your name, by the way? I’m Brigitte Lauterbach.’
‘Gerhard Self. If you didn’t come in your own car – may I after this bumpy evening offer you a lift home in my jolting Opel?’
‘Yes, please. I’d have taken a taxi otherwise.’
Brigitte lived in Max-Joseph-Strasse. The goodbye peck on the cheek turned into a long embrace.
‘Would you like to come up, stupid? With a sterilized and raven mother?’
While she fetched wine from the fridge I stood there in her living room with all the awkwardness of the first time. You’re still wary about what might not grate: a canary in a cage, a Peanuts poster on the wall, Yevtushenko in the bookshelves, Barry Manilow on the turntable. Brigitte was guilty of none of the above. Yet the wariness was there – perhaps it’s always in one’s self?
‘Can I make a phone call?’ I called through to the kitchen.
‘Go right ahead. The phone’s in the top drawer of the bureau.’
I opened the drawer and dialled Philipp’s number. It rang eight times before he picked up.
‘Hello?’ His voice sounded oily.
‘Philipp, Gerd here. I hope I’m disturbing you.’
‘You bet, you crazy dick. Yes, it was blood, blood type O, rhesus negative. An everyday sort of blood, so to speak, age of the sample between two and three weeks. Anything else? Sorry, but I’m tied up here. You saw her yesterday, remember, the little Indonesian in the elevator. She brought her friend along. It’s all action.’
Brigitte had come into the room with a bottle and two glasses, poured it, and brought a glass over to me. I’d handed her the extension, and Brigitte looked at me in amusement at Philipp’s last sentences.
‘Do you know anyone at forensics in Heidelberg, Philipp?’
‘No, she doesn’t work at forensics. At McDonald’s at the Planken, that’s where she works. Why?’
‘It’s not Big Mac’s blood type I’m after, but Peter Mischkey’s – he was examined by forensics at Heidelberg. And I’d like to know if you can find out. That’s why.’
‘But it doesn’t have to be right now. Come round instead, let’s talk about it over breakfast. Bring someone with you though. I’m not slogging my guts out so you can come along and lick the cream.’
‘Does she have to be Asian?’
Brigitte laughed. I put my arm round her and she snuggled into me demurely.
‘No, my home is like a Mombasa brothel, all races, all classes, all colours, all lines of business. And if you’re really coming, bring a bottle.’
He hung up. I put my other arm around Brigitte too. She leant back into my arms and looked at me. ‘And now?’
‘Now we take the bottle and the glasses and the cigarettes and the music over to the bedroom and lie down in bed.’
She gave me a little kiss and said in a bashful voice: ‘You go ahead, I’ll be right there.’
She went into the bathroom. Amongst her records I found one by George Winston, put it on, left the bedroom door open, switched on the bedside lamp, undressed, and got into her bed. I felt a little embarrassed. The bed was wide and smelled fresh. If we didn’t sleep well tonight, the fault would be all ours.
Brigitte came into the bedroom, naked, with only the earring in her right ear and the plaster on her left earlobe. She whistled along to the George Winston. She was heavy round the hips, had breasts which were large and couldn’t help but sag a little, broad shoulders, and a protruding collarbone which gave her an air of vulnerability. She slipped beneath the covers and into the crook of my arm.
‘What happened to your ear?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ she laughed in embarrassment, ‘combing my hair, I kind of combed the ring out of my ear. It didn’t hurt, I just bled like a pig. The day after tomorrow I have an appointment with a surgeon. He’ll make a clean wound of the tear and patch it together again.’
‘Would you mind me removing your other earring? Otherwise I’ll be afraid of tearing it out, too.’
‘You’re such a passionate guy?’ She took it out herself. ‘Come on, Gerhard, let me take off your watch.’ It was nice to have her bending over me like that, fumbling with my arm. I pulled her down to me. Her skin was smooth and fragrant. ‘I’m tired,’ she said in a sleepy voice. ‘Will you tell me a bedtime story?’
I felt relaxed. ‘Once upon a time there was a little raven. Like all ravens he had a mother.’ She pinched my side. ‘The mother was black and beautiful. She was so black that all the other ravens appeared grey next to her, and she was so beautiful that all the other ravens appeared ugly next to her. She herself didn’t realize it. Her son, the little raven, could see and knew it very well. He knew much more besides: that black and beautiful is better than grey and ugly, that raven fathers are as good and as bad as raven mothers, that you can be wrong in the right place and right in the wrong place. One day after school the little raven flew away and got lost. He told himself that nothing could happen to him: in one direction he’d be sure to encounter his father, and in the other his mother. Nonetheless he was afraid. Beneath him he could see a land stretching far and wide with small villages and large, gleaming lakes. It was pretty to look at, but frighteningly unfamiliar to him. He flew and flew and flew…’ Brigitte’s breathing had grown regular. She snuggled comfortably into my arms again and started to snore softly, her mouth slightly open. I carefully withdrew my arm from under her head and put out the light. She turned onto her side. So did I and we lay there like spoons in the cutlery case.
When I woke up it was just after seven and she was still asleep. I crept out of the bedroom, shut the door behind me, looked for and found the coffee machine, got it going, pulled on my shirt and trousers, took Brigitte’s set of keys from the bureau, and bought croissants in Lange Rötterstrasse. I was back at her bedside with the tray and coffee and croissants before she woke up.
It was a lovely breakfast. And lovely afterwards together again beneath the covers. Then she had to leave to take care of her Saturday morning patients. I wanted to drop her off at her massage practice in the Collini Centre, but she preferred to walk. We didn’t arrange another meeting. But when we embraced at her front door we could hardly pull ourselves apart.
It was a long time since I’d spent a night with a woman. Afterwards, returning home is like coming back to your own town after a holiday. A short period of limbo before normality kicks in again.
I prepared a special rheumatism tea, purely prophylactic, and lost myself in Mischkey’s file once again. On the top was the photocopied newspaper article that had been lying on Mischkey’s desk and that I’d shoved in the file. I read the connected commemorative piece entitled ‘Twelve Dark Yards’. It touched only briefly on the forced labour of Jewish chemists. Yes, these had existed, but the RCW had also suffered with the Jewish chemists in this oppressive situation. In contrast with other big German businesses, RCW had generously compensated forced labourers immediately after the war. Using South Africa as an example, the author portrayed how alien any kind of mandatory employment situation was to the character of the modern industrial enterprise. Moreover, employment in the plant had lowered the rate of suffering in the concentration camps; the survival rate of the RCW forced labourers was proven to be higher than that of the average concentration camp population. The author dealt extensively with the RCW’s participation in the resistance, remembered the condemned communist workers, and depicted in detail the trial of the general director-to-be Tyberg, and his erstwhile colleague Dohmke.
Memories of the trial came back to me. I’d led the inquiry then, while my boss, Södelknecht, the senior public prosecutor, had led the prosecution. The two RCW chemists were sentenced to death for sabotage and for some violation of the Race Laws, which I didn’t recall. Tyberg managed to escape; Dohmke was hanged. The whole affair must have been at the end of 1943, beginning of 1944. At the start of the fifties Tyberg returned from the USA after succeeding very quickly there with a chemical company of his own, came back to RCW, and soon thereafter was made general director.
A large part of the newspaper article was devoted to the fire of March 1978. The press had estimated the damages at 40 million marks, no deaths or injuries were reported, and statements from the RCW were printed, according to which the poison released from the burnt pesticides posed absolutely no danger to the human body. I’m fascinated by such findings of the chemical industry: the same poison that annihilates the cockroach, which is supposed to be able to survive a nuclear holocaust, is no more harmful to humans than a barbecue on a charcoal grill. In the Stadstreicher magazine I found documentation by the group The Chlorine Greens that the Seveso poisons TCDD, hexachloroethane, and trichloroethylene had been released by the fire. Numerous injured employees were swept off in hush-hush fashion to the company’s own treatment clinic in the South of France. Then there was a collection of copies and cuttings about the capital stakes of the RCW and about an inquiry by the Federal Antitrust Office, which dealt with the role of the plant within the pharmaceutical market and which went nowhere.
I sat for hours in front of the computer printouts, clueless. I found data, names, figures, curves, and incomprehensible acronyms such as BAS, BOE, and HST. Were these printouts of the files Mischkey had managed privately at RCC? I needed to talk to Grimm.
At eleven I started to call the numbers on the responses to Mischkey’s ad. I was Professor Selk of Hamburg University, wanting to pick up the contacts initiated by his colleague for the social and economic history research project. The people on the other end were dumbfounded; my colleague had told them that their oral testimony wasn’t of any use to the research project. I was puzzled; one phone call after the other with the same empty result. From some of them I gathered at least that Mischkey hadn’t attached any value to their statements because they’d only started work at the RCW after 1945. They were annoyed because if my colleague had put out an ad that referred to the end of the war they could have saved themselves the trouble of responding. ‘Reimbursements of expenses, it said, are we going to get our money from you now?’
I’d just put down the receiver when the phone rang.
‘It’s impossible to get through to you. What woman have you been talking to all this time?’ Babs wanted to make sure I hadn’t forgotten we were going to a concert that evening. ‘I’m bringing Röschen and Georg. They enjoyed Diva so much they don’t want to miss Wilhemenia Fernandez.’
Of course I had forgotten. And while I’d been perusing the file, some little coil in my brain had disconnected so that it could play with the possibility of an evening arrangement incorporating Brigitte. Were there any tickets left?
‘Quarter to eight at the Kleiner Rosengarten? I might be bringing someone with me.’
‘So it was a lady on the phone. Is she pretty?’
‘I like her.’
It was only to be thorough that I wrote to Vera Müller in San Francisco. There was nothing specific I could ask her. Perhaps Mischkey had asked her specific questions, my letter attempted to find out just that. I picked it up and walked to the main post office on Parade-Platz. On the way home I bought five dozen snails for after the concert. I also got fresh liver for Turbo; I felt guilty about leaving him alone the night before.
Back home I was about to make a sandwich with sardines, onions, and olives. Frau Buchendorff prevented me. She’d had to type something for Firner that morning at the plant, was on her way home through Zollhofstrasse passing the Traber-Pilsstuben, and was quite certain she recognized one of the men from the War Cemetery.
‘I’m in a phone-box. He hasn’t emerged, I don’t think. Could you come over straight away? If he drives off, I’ll follow him. Head back home if I’m not here and I’ll call you later, when I can.’ Her voice cracked.
‘My God, girl, don’t do anything stupid. It’s enough to jot down his license plate number. I’m on my way.’
In the stairwell I almost flattened Frau Weiland. Driving off, I nearly took Herr Weiland with me. I drove via the railway station and the Konrad Adenauer Bridge, past blanching pedestrians and reddening traffic lights. When I drew up five minutes later in front of the Traber-Pilsstuben, Frau Buchendorff ’s car was still facing it in the No Stopping zone. No sign of her, though. I got out and went into the pub. One bar, two or three tables, a jukebox and pinball, maybe ten guests and the poprietress. Frau Buchendorff had a glass of Pils in one hand and a meat patty in the other. I placed myself next to her at the bar. ‘Hello there, Judith. You’re back in the neighbourhood, are you?’
‘Hello, Gerhard. Join us for a beer?’
I ordered two meat patties to go with the beer.
The guy on her other side said in a thick Austrian accent, ‘It’s the boss’s mother who makes these meat things.’
Judith introduced him to me. ‘This is Fred. A real Viennese gent. He’s got something to celebrate, he was saying. Fred, this is Gerhard.’
He’d already celebrated thoroughly. Lurching and weaving cautiously like all drunks, he took himself off to the jukebox, propped himself up to select records as though there were nothing amiss, came back and sat down between Judith and myself. ‘The boss, our Silvia, is from Austria too. That’s why I like celebrating my birthday at her pub. And take a look, I’ve got my birthday present.’ He patted Judith’s bottom with the flat of his hand.
‘What do you do for a living, Fred?’
‘Marble and red wine, import and export. And yourself?’
‘I’m in the security business, property and personal security, bouncers, bodyguards, dog trainers, and what-not. I could use a strong guy like you. You’d have to go easy on the alcohol, though.’
‘Well, well, security.’ He set down his glass. ‘There’s nothing more secure than a firm ass. Right, sweetheart?’ He now used the hand that had been holding the glass to grope Frau Buchendorff ’s posterior. Judith’s butt.
She turned round and slapped down hard on Fred’s fingers, looking at him impishly. It hurt and he withdrew his hands, but he wasn’t mad at her.
‘And what are you doing here with your security?’
‘I’m looking for people for a job. There’s money in it, for me, for the people I find, and for the contractor I’m on the lookout for.’
Fred’s face registered interest. Maybe because his hands weren’t permitted to do anything with Judith’s butt for the moment, he tapped my chest with a fleshy index finger. ‘Isn’t that a bit too big for you, gramps?’
I seized his hand, forced it down, twisting his finger in the process, and looking at him innocently all the while. ‘How old are you today, Fred? You’re not the man I’m looking for? Never mind, come on, I’ll get you a drink.’
Fred’s face was contorted with pain. I let go and he hesitated for a moment. Should he lay into me, or drink a beer with me? Then his eyes went to Judith and I knew what was coming.
His ‘Fine, a beer’ was an overture for the punch that caught me on the left side of my ribcage. But I’d already rammed my knee between his legs. He doubled up, cradling his testicles. When he straightened up, my right fist hit him in the middle of his nose. His hands flew up to shield his face, then he lowered them again and stared incredulously at the blood. I reached for his glass and emptied it over his head. ‘Cheers, Fred.’
Judith had stepped to the side, the other clients kept their distance. Only the proprietress joined the battle on the front lines. ‘Clear out, if it’s trouble you want, clear out,’ she said, already jostling me towards the exit.
‘But sweetheart, can’t you see, we’re just having a bit of fun? We’re getting on just fine, isn’t that right, Fred?’
Fred wiped the blood from his lips. He nodded and looked around for Judith.
A quick survey of her pub convinced the proprietress that peace and order had been restored. ‘Well, then, have a schnapps on the house,’ she said soothingly. Her establishment was under control.
While she was pouring them, and Fred had slunk off to the toilet, Judith came over to me. She looked at me in concern. ‘He was one of the ones at the War Cemetery. Is everything all right?’ She spoke softly.
‘He may have smashed my ribs, but if you’ll call me Gerd, I’ll get over it,’ I replied. ‘Then I’d simply call you Judith.’
She smiled. ‘I think you’re exploiting the situation, but I don’t want to quibble. I was just picturing you in a trench coat.’
‘And?’
‘You don’t need one,’ she said.
Fred came back from the toilet. He’d put on a hang-dog expression in front of the mirror and even apologized.
‘Not bad shape for your age. Sorry I got out of order. You know, basically it’s not easy to grow old without a family and around my birthday I really feel it.’
Beneath Fred’s friendly veneer, malice and the crooked charm of a Viennese pimp shone through.
‘Sometimes something wild takes over, Fred. The thing with the beer wasn’t necessary, but I can’t undo it.’ His hair was still damp and sticky. ‘Don’t hold it against me. I only get mad when women are involved.’
‘What shall we do now?’ asked Judith with an innocent blink of the eyes.
‘First we’ll take Fred home, then I’ll take you home,’ I ordained.
The proprietress jumped on the bandwagon. ‘Right, Fred, you’ll be taken home. You can collect your car tomorrow. Come in a taxi.’
We bundled Fred into my car. Judith followed us.
Fred claimed to live in Jungbusch, ‘in Werftstrasse, just next to the old police station, you know’, and wanted to be dropped off at the corner.
I couldn’t care less where he didn’t live. We drove over the bridge.
‘That big story of yours, is there anything in it for me? I’ve done some security stuff before, for a big company round here too,’ he said.
‘We can talk about it. If you’re looking for some action I’d be glad to have you. Just give me a call.’
I fished out a business card from my jacket pocket, a real one, and gave it to him. At the corner I let him out and he headed with a swaying gait towards the next pub. I still had Judith’s car in the rear-view mirror. I drove via the Ring and turned round the Wasserturm into the Augusta-Anlage. I’d expected a farewell flash of her lights beyond the National Theatre and then to see nothing more of her. She followed me to Richard-Wagner-Strasse outside my front door and waited, motor running, as I parked.
I got out, locked up, and walked over to her. It was only seven strides but I gave them everything about superior manliness that I’d picked up in my second youth. I leant down to her window, no rheumatic expense spared, and pointed to the next parking space with my left hand.
‘You will come up for a cup of tea, won’t you?’
While I was making the tea, Judith paced the kitchen, smoking. She was still extremely worked up. ‘What a twerp,’ she said, ‘what a twerp. And he put the fear of God in me at the War Cemetery.’
‘He wasn’t alone that time. And do you know, if I’d let him get going, I’d have been more frightened myself. He’s beaten up quite a few people in his time.’
We took our tea into the sitting room. I thought back to breakfast with Brigitte and was glad that the dishes weren’t lying in my kitchen now.
‘I still don’t know whether I can take on your case. But you should consider whether I really ought to take it on. I’ve investigated Peter Mischkey’s affairs before. I turned him in for breaking into the RCW computer system, as a matter of fact.’ I told her everything. She didn’t interrupt. Her eyes were full of hurt and reproach. ‘I can’t accept the way you’re looking at me. I did my job, and that sometimes means using people, exposing them, turning them in, even if they’re likeable.’
‘So what? Why the great confession then? Somehow you’re seeking absolution from me.’
I spoke into her wounded, cold face. ‘You are my client, and I like things to be straight between my clients and me. Why I didn’t tell you the story right away, you might ask. I-’
‘I might well ask. But actually I really don’t want to listen to the slick, cowardly falsehoods you might care to tell me. Thanks for the tea.’ She grabbed her handbag and stood up. ‘What do I owe you for your trouble? Send me a bill.’
I stood up, too. As she was about to open the door in the hallway, I pulled her hand away from the door handle. ‘You mean a lot to me. And your interest in clearing up what happened to Mischkey isn’t satisfied. Don’t leave like this.’
While I’d been talking, she’d left her hand in mine. Now she withdrew it and left without a word.
I shut the door to the apartment. I took the olives out of the fridge and sat on the balcony. The sun was shining, and Turbo, who’d been roaming the rooftops, curled up purring on my lap. It was only because of the olives. I gave him a few. From the street I could hear Judith turning on the ignition of her Alfa. The motor roared, then petered out. Was she coming back? A few seconds later the motor was running again and she drove off.
I succeeded in not thinking about whether I had behaved correctly, and enjoyed every single olive. They were the black Greek ones that taste of musk, smoke, and rich earth.
After an hour on the balcony I went into the kitchen and prepared the herb butter for the snails we’d eat after the concert. It was five o’clock. I called Brigitte and let the phone ring ten times. As I did the ironing I listened to La Wally and looked forward to Wilhelmenia Fernandez. From the cellar I fetched a couple of bottles of Alsace Riesling and put them in the fridge.
The concert was in the Mozartsaal. Our seats were in the sixth row, off to the left, so that our view of the singer wasn’t obscured by the conductor. Sitting down, I cast a glance around. A pleasantly mixed audience, from elderly ladies and gentlemen right down to kids you could easily picture at a rock concert. Babs, Röschen, and Georg arrived in a silly mood; mother and daughter sticking their heads together and giggling, Georg sticking out his chest and preening. I sat between Babs and Röschen, patting the right knee of one and the left knee of the other.
‘I thought you were bringing a woman of your own to pet, Uncle Gerd.’ Röschen picked up my hand with the tips of her fingers and let it drop next to her knee. She was wearing a black lace glove that left the fingers free. The gesture was crushing.
‘Oh, Röschen, Röschen, when you were a little girl and I rescued you from the Indians, you on my left arm, my Colt in my right hand, you never spoke to me like that.’
‘There aren’t any Indians any more, Uncle Gerd.’
What had become of my sweet girl? I took a sideways look at her, the postmodern angular haircut, and, hanging down from her ear, the clenched silver fist with the expressive thumb between the index and middle finger, the flattish face she’d inherited from her mother, and the somewhat too small, still childlike mouth.
The conductor was a slimy Mafioso, as short as he was fat. He bowed his permed head to us and drove the orchestra into a medley from Gianni Schicchi. The man was good. With the barest movements of his delicate baton he coaxed the most tender tones from the mighty orchestra. I also had to concede it was to his credit he’d placed an exquisite little female timpanist behind the kettledrums, in tails and dress trousers. Could I wait for her by the orchestra exit after the concert and offer my assistance in carrying her kettledrums home?
Then Wilhelmenia came on stage. She’d grown plumper since Diva, but looked enchanting in a glittering sequined evening gown. Best of all was La Wally. With her the concert ended, with her the diva conquered the audience. It was nice to see young and old united in applause. After two hard-fought-for encores, during which the small timpanist brilliantly made my heart turn somersaults again, we stepped lightly into the night.
‘Shall we go on somewhere?’ asked Georg.
‘Back to my place, if you’d like. I’ve prepared snails and the Riesling is chilling.’
Babs glowed, Röschen moaned, ‘Do we have to walk there?’ and Georg said, ‘I’ll walk with Uncle Gerd, you can take the car.’
Georg is a serious young man. On the way he told me about his law studies where he was embarking upon his fifth term, about the grades he was getting and the criminal case he was working on at the moment. Environmental criminal law – that sounded interesting but it was just the usual camouflage for questions of perpetrating, instigating, and abetting that I could have been asked forty years ago. Is it lawyers that have so little imagination, or reality?
Babs and Röschen were waiting by the front door. When I’d unlocked, it turned out that the lighting in the stairwell wasn’t working. We felt our way up, with frequent stumbles and much laughter. Röschen was a bit afraid of the dark and pleasantly mute.
It turned into a nice evening. The snails were good and so was the wine. My performance was a complete success. When I took the cassette player with its small microphone that made pretty good recordings out of my inside pocket, opened it, and slipped the cassette into the tape deck on my stereo, Röschen recognized the reference immediately and clapped her hands. Georg got it when Wally started to sing. Babs looked at us questioningly. ‘Mum, you’ll have to check out Diva next time it’s playing.’
We played Hare and Tortoise, the fashionable board game, and at half past midnight it was at a decisive stage and the wine all gone. I took my torch and went down to the cellar. I don’t recall ever going down the main stairway without light before. But my legs had grown so used to the way over the long years that I felt quite secure. Until the second to last flight of stairs. Here the architect, perhaps to make the belle étage more impressive, and with higher ceilings, had built fourteen steps instead of the customary twelve. I’d never noticed, nor had my legs taken heed of this detail of the stairway, and after the twelfth step I took a large step out instead of a small step down. My legs buckled, I managed to hold on to the banister, but pain shot up my back. I straightened up, took a tentative next step, and turned on the torch. I got a terrible shock. The wall on the second to last section of stair has a mirror with a stucco frame, and in it I saw a man facing me, shining a beam of light right at me. It took just a fraction of a second for me to recognize myself. But the pain and the fright were enough to send me into the cellar with a hammering heart and unsteady step.
We played until two-thirty. When the taxi collected them and I’d mastered the dark stairs once more and cleaned up the dishes in the kitchen, I stood for the duration of a cigarette by the telephone. I felt an urge to call Brigitte. But the old school won.
I frittered the morning away. In bed I leafed through Mischkey’s file and thought again about why he had put it together, sipped at my coffee, and nibbled the pastries I’d bought yesterday in anticipation of Sunday. Then in Die Zeit I read a pastoral Op-Ed piece, a melodramatic political summary, the statesmanlike commentary from our ex-chancellor with the worldwide reputation, and the usual stuff from the owner. Once again I knew the lie of the land and so didn’t feel the need to expose my mind to the food editor’s review of a book on how to cook in a hot-air balloon. Then I smooched with Turbo. Brigitte still wasn’t picking up. At half past ten Röschen rang the bell. She’d come to collect the car. I threw my dressing gown on over my nightshirt and offered her a sherry. Her brush-cut was in rack and ruin this morning.
At last I was weary of my pottering and drove over to the bridge between Eppelheim and Wieblingen where Mischkey had met his death. It was a sunny early autumn day; I drove through the villages, the mist was hanging over the Neckar, and although it was a Sunday, potatoes were being harvested, the first leaves were turning, and smoke rose from the inns’ chimneys.
The bridge itself didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know from the police report. I looked down at the tracks that lay some five metres beneath me, and thought of the turned-over Citroën. A local train went by in the direction of Edingen. When I walked across the car lanes and looked down on the other side I saw the old railway station. A beautiful sandstone building from the turn of the century with three floors, rounded bow windows on the second floor, and a little tower. The station café was apparently still open. I went in.
The room was gloomy, of the ten tables three were occupied, on the right-hand side was a jukebox, pinball, and two video games, on the counter, restored in the old German style, a stunted potted palm and in its shadow the landlady. I sat down at the free table at the window, with a view onto the platform and the railroad embankment, got a menu with Wiener, Jäger and Zigeuner-schnitzel, all served with fries, and asked the landlady what their special was, their plat du jour, to use Ostenteich’s terms. She could offer Sauerbraten with dumplings and red cabbage, and broth with beef marrow. ‘First rate,’ I said, and ordered a wine from Wiesloch to go with it.
A young girl brought me the wine. She was around sixteen, with a lascivious voluptuousness that was more than the combination of too tight jeans, too tight a blouse, and too red lips. She’d have chatted up any man under fifty. Not me. ‘Enjoy,’ she said, bored.
When her mother brought me the soup I asked about the accident in September. ‘Did you hear it at all?’
‘I’d have to ask my husband about that.’
‘And what would he say?’
‘Well, we were already in bed, and then suddenly there was this smash. And shortly afterwards another. I said to my husband, “Something must have happened out there.” He got up straight away and took the tear-gas gun with him, because our game machines are always being broken into. But this time it had nothing to do with the games machines, but with the bridge. Are you from the press?’
‘I’m from insurance. Did your husband call the police?’
‘My husband didn’t know anything at that point. When he found nothing in the dining room he came back up and pulled some clothes on. Then he went out to the platform but he could already hear the ambulance siren. Who else could he have called?’
Her ample, blonde daughter brought the beef and listened attentively. Her mother sent her away to the kitchen.
‘Your daughter didn’t realize what was happening?’ It was obvious they had a problem.
‘She doesn’t notice anything. Just stares at everything in trousers, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t like that at her age.’ Now it was too late for her. Her eyes were filled with hungry futility. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Just like home,’ I said.
The bell in the kitchen rang, and she removed her willing flesh from my table. I wolfed down the Sauerbraten and the Wieslocher.
On the way to the car I heard quick steps behind me. ‘Hey, you!’ The kid from the station café was running after me breathlessly. ‘You wanted to hear something about the accident. Is there a hundred in it for me?’
‘Depends what you’ve got to say.’ She was a hard-boiled little slut.
‘Fifty upfront, and before that I don’t even start talking.’
I wanted to know and pulled out two fifty notes from my wallet. One of them I gave to her, the other I rolled into a ball.
‘So it was like this. That Thursday Struppi drove me home. When we came over the bridge, the delivery van was there. I wondered what it was doing on the bridge. Then Struppi and I, we, well, you know. And when the smash came I told Struppi to leave, as I was pretty sure my father would come any minute. My parents have something against Struppi because he’s as good as married. But I love him. So what. Anyhow, I saw the delivery van drive off.’
I gave her the scrunched-up ball. ‘What did the delivery van look like?’
‘Strange, somehow. You don’t see them round our way usually. But I can’t tell any more. Its lights weren’t on either.’
Her mother was peering out of the café doorway. ‘Get over here, Dina. Leave the man in peace!’
‘Okay, I’m coming.’ Dina walked back at a provocatively slow pace.
Sympathy and curiosity prompted me to meet the man who’d been saddled with this wife and daughter. In the kitchen I came across a thin, sweating little guy juggling pots and pans and casseroles. He’d probably already made several attempts to kill himself with the tear-gas gun.
‘Don’t do it. The two of them aren’t worth it.’
On the drive home I kept an eye open for delivery vans that aren’t usually found round here. But I didn’t see a thing, it was Sunday after all. If what Dina had told me was correct, there was, God knows, more to Mischkey’s death than was contained in the police report.
When we met up in the evening at the Badische Weinstuben Philipp knew that Mischkey’s blood group was AB. So it wasn’t his blood I’d scraped off the side. What conclusions could be drawn?
Philipp ate his black pudding with relish. He told me about gingerbread hearts, heart transplants, and his new girlfriend, who shaved her pubic hair in the shape of a heart.
I’d spent half the Sunday with a case I didn’t have a commission for any more. Private detectives don’t do that, on principle.
I looked through the smoked glass out onto the Augusta-Anlage. Decided to decide at the tenth car how to proceed. The tenth car was a Beetle. I crawled behind my desk to write a closing report to Judith Buchendorff. Every end must have its form.
I took a writing pad and a pencil, and jotted down key points. What spoke against it being an accident? There was what Judith had told me, there were the two bangs that Dina’s mother had heard, and above all there was Dina’s observation. If I were continuing with the case, it was explosive enough to send me on an urgent hunt for the delivery van and its driver. Did the RCW have something to do with my case? Mischkey had done extensive research on it, with whatever intention, and it must be the large plant Fred had worked for once. Had Fred rained down punches that day in the War Cemetery on their behalf? Then I also had the traces of blood on the right side of Mischkey’s convertible. And finally there was the feeling that something wasn’t right, and various shreds of thought from the previous days. Judith, Mischkey, and a jealous, spurned rival? A different computer-hacking venture of Mischkey’s, this time with deadly retaliation? An accident involving the delivery van, the driver of which committed a hit-and-run? I thought of the two bangs – an accident in which a third vehicle was also involved? Suicide? Had it all got too much for Mischkey?
It took me a long time to compose these half-baked things into a conclusive report. And I sat almost as long wondering whether I should write Judith an invoice and what should be in it. I rounded it off to a thousand marks and slapped on sales tax. When I’d typed the envelope, and stamped it and put in the letter and invoice and licked down the envelope, pulled on my coat and was ready to go and post it, I sat down again and poured myself a sambuca with three coffee beans.
It had all got fucked up. I’d miss the case, which had taken a stronger hold on me than work usually did. I’d miss Judith. Why not admit it?
When the letter was in the post box I turned to the case of Sergej Mencke. I called the National Theatre and made an appointment with the ballet director. I wrote to the Heidelberg Union Insurance asking if they’d be willing to foot the bill for a trip to the US. The two best friends and colleagues of the self-mutilated ballet dancer, Joschka and Hanne, had both accepted engagements in Pittsburgh for the new season and had already left, and I’d never been to the States. I discovered that Sergej Mencke’s parents lived in Tauberbischofsheim. The father was an army captain there. The mother said on the telephone I could look in at lunchtime. Captain Mencke ate lunch at home. I called Philipp and asked him whether in the annals of leg-breaks, self-induced breaks and breaks caused by a slammed car door were recorded at all. He offered to present his student with the problem as a dissertation theme. ‘Three weeks okay for the results?’ It was.
Then I set off for Tauberbischofsheim. I still had enough time to drive slowly through the Neckar valley and to stop for coffee in Amorbach. In front of the castle a school class was making a racket waiting for a guided tour. Can one really imbue children with a sense of the beautiful?
Herr Mencke was a bold man. He’d built himself a house, even though he might get relocated. He opened the door in uniform. ‘Step right in, Herr Self. I don’t have much time, I’ve got to head back in a minute.’ We sat down in the living room. Jägermeister schnapps was offered, but no one drank.
Sergej was actually called Siegfried and had left his parents’ house at the age of sixteen, much to his mother’s distress. Father and son had broken ties with one another. The sporty son still wasn’t forgiven for having evaded army service with a bogus spinal-chord injury. The path leading to ballet had also met with disapproval. ‘Perhaps it’s also got a good side, his not being able to dance any more,’ his mother mused. ‘When I visited him in hospital, he was just like my Sigi again.’
I asked how Siegfried had coped financially since then. There were apparently always some friends, or girlfriends, who supported him. Herr Mencke poured himself a Jägermeister after all.
‘I’d have liked to give him something from Granny’s inheritance. But you didn’t want that.’ She turned reproachful eyes on her husband. ‘You’ve just driven him deeper into everything.’
‘Leave it, Ella. That isn’t of interest to the insurance man. I must be getting back. Come along, Herr Self, I’ll see you out.’ He stood in the doorway and watched me until I’d driven off.
On the journey home I stopped in at Adelsheim. The inn was full; a few business people, teachers from the boarding school, and at one table three gentlemen who gave me the feeling they were a judge, a prosecutor, and a defence lawyer from the Adelsheim local court, negotiating in peace and quiet without the bothersome presence of the accused. I remembered my days at court.
In Mannheim I met the rush-hour traffic and needed twenty minutes for the five hundred metres through the Augusta-Anlage. I opened the door to the office.
‘Gerd,’ someone called, and as I turned I saw Judith coming from the other side of the street through the parked cars. ‘Can we talk for a moment?’
I locked the door again. ‘Let’s stretch our legs.’
We walked up Mollstrasse and along Richard-Wagner-Strasse. It took a while before she said anything. ‘I overreacted on Saturday. I still don’t think it’s good you didn’t tell me straight away on Wednesday about Peter and you. But somehow I can understand how you felt, and the way I acted as though you’re not to be trusted, I’m sorry about that. I can get pretty hysterical since Peter’s death.’
I needed a while, too. ‘This morning I wrote you a final report. You’ll find it along with an invoice in your mail, today or tomorrow. It was sad. It felt as though I was having to tear something out of my heart: you, Peter Mischkey, some better understanding of myself that I was getting from the case.’
‘Then, you’ll agree to continue? Just tell me what’s in your report.’
We’d reached the art museum; a few drops were falling. We went in and, wandering through the nineteenth-century painting galleries, I told her what I’d discovered, my theories, and what I was pondering. In front of Feuerbach’s painting of Iphigenia on Aulis she stopped. ‘This is a beautiful painting. Do you know the story behind it?’
‘I think Agamemnon, her father, has just deposited her as a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis so that a wind will start to blow again and the Greek fleet can set sail for Troy. I love the painting.’
‘I’d like to know who that lady was.’
‘The model, you mean? Feuerbach loved her very much. Nanna, the wife of a cobbler from Rome. He quit smoking for her sake. Then she ran away from him and her husband with an Englishman.’
We walked to the exit and saw it was still raining. ‘What do you plan to do next?’ Judith asked.
‘Tomorrow I want to talk to Grimm, Peter Mischkey’s colleague in the Regional Computer Centre, and with a few people from RCW again.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘If something comes to mind, I’ll let you know. Does Firner actually know about you and Mischkey, and that you’ve hired me?’
‘I haven’t said anything to him. But why did he never actually tell me about Peter’s involvement in our computer story? To begin with he always kept me up to date.’
‘So you never realized that I’d tied up the case?’
‘Well yes, a report from you crossed my desk. It was all very technical.’
‘You only got the first part. Why, I would like to know. Do you think you can find out?’
She’d try. The rain had stopped, it had grown dark, and the first lights were coming on. The rain had brought the stench from the RCW with it. On the way to her car we didn’t talk. There was weariness in Judith’s step. As I said goodbye I could also see the deep tiredness in her eyes. She felt my eyes on her. ‘I’m not looking good at the moment, right?’
‘No, you should go away somewhere.’
‘In recent years I’ve always gone on holiday with Peter. We met each other at Club Med, you know. We should be in Sicily now, we always travelled south in the late autumn.’ She started to cry.
I put my arm round her shoulders. I didn’t know what to say. She kept crying.
Grimm was barely recognizable. The safari suit had been exchanged for woollen flannel trousers and a leather jacket, his hair was cut short, his upper lip sported, resplendent, a carefully sculpted pencil moustache, and along with the new look there was a new confidence on display.
‘Hello, Herr Self. Or should I say Selk? What brings you here?’
What was I to make of this? Mischkey wouldn’t have told him about me. Who else then? Someone from the RCW. A coincidence? ‘Good that you know. That makes my job simpler. I need to look at the files Mischkey worked on here. Would you show them to me, please?’
‘What? I don’t understand. There aren’t any files of Peter’s here any more.’ He looked puzzled, and a shade mistrustful. ‘Under whose mandate are you here, actually?’
‘Two guesses. So you’ve deleted the files? Perhaps that’s for the best. Tell me what you think of this.’ I took the computer printout from my briefcase, the one I’d found in Mischkey’s file.
He spread it in front of him on the table and leafed through it for quite a while. ‘Where did you get this from? It’s five weeks old, was printed here in the building, but has nothing to do with our stock.’ He shook his head thoughtfully. ‘I’d like to keep this here.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I must be off to the meeting now.’
‘I’ll gladly bring you the printout again. I have to take it with me now.’
Grimm gave it to me, but it felt as though I were wrenching it from him. I put the obviously explosive contraband into my briefcase. ‘Who took over Mischkey’s responsibilities?’
Grimm looked at me in sheer alarm. He stood up. ‘I don’t understand, Herr Self… Let’s continue our discussion another time. I really must get to this meeting.’ He escorted me to the door.
I stepped out of the building, saw a phone-box on Ebert-platz, and called Hemmelskopf immediately. ‘Do you have anything at all at the credit bureau on a Jörg Grimm?’
‘Grimm… Grimm… If we have something on him, it’ll come up on the screen in a second. Just a moment… There he is, Grimm, Jörg, born nineteenth November nineteen forty-eight, married, two children, resident of Heidelberg, in Furtwänglerstrasse, drives a red Escort, HD-S 735. He had debts once, seems to have made something of himself, though. Just around two weeks ago he paid back the loan at the Cooperative Bank. That was around 40,000 marks.’
I thanked him. That wasn’t sufficient for Hemmelskopf, though. ‘My wife is still waiting for that ficus tree you promised her in spring. When can you come by?’
I added Grimm to the list of suspects. Two people are involved with one another. One dies, the other gets rich, and the one who gets rich also knows too much – I didn’t have a theory, but it seemed fishy.
The RCW had never asked me to return my entry pass. With it I had no problem finding a parking space. The guard still knew me and saluted. I went to the computer centre and sought out Tausendmilch without falling into the hands of Oelmüller. I’d have found it unpleasant having to explain to him what I was doing here. Tausendmilch was alert, keen, and quick on the uptake as ever. He whistled through his teeth.
‘These are our data. A curious mixture. And the printout isn’t from here. I thought everything was quiet again. Should I try to trace the printout?’
‘Leave it. But could you tell me what these data are?’ Tausendmilch sat down at a computer and said, ‘I’ll have to flip through a bit.’
I waited patiently.
‘Here we have a list of people on sick leave from spring and summer nineteen seventy-eight, then registers of our inventions and inventors’ royalties, way back to before nineteen forty-five, and here’s… I can’t open it but the abbreviations might also stand for other chemical companies.’ He turned the machine off. ‘I wanted to thank you very much. Firner called me in and said you’d praised me in your report and that he had plans for me.’
I left a happy person behind. For a moment I could picture Tausendmilch, on whose right hand I’d spotted a wedding ring, coming home after work that day and telling his elegant wife, who had a martini ready for him and in her way was contributing to his rise, about his success today.
At security I sought out Thomas. On the wall of his office hung a half-finished plan of the course for security studies. ‘I had something to do in the plant and wanted to discuss your kind offer of a teaching appointment. To what do I owe the honour?’
‘I was impressed by how you solved our data-security problem. You taught us some things here, Oelmüller in particular. And it would be indispensable for the curriculum to have a freelancer involved.’
‘What would be the subject?’
‘The detective’s work: from the practical to the ethical. With seminars and a final exam if that’s not too much trouble. The whole thing should start in the winter term.’
‘I see a problem there, Herr Thomas. According to your concept, and it also seems sensible to me, I can only teach the students by using my experience with real cases. But think of the business here at the Works we were just discussing. Even if I didn’t mention any names and I went to lengths to disguise the whole thing a bit, it would be a case of the king’s birthday suit.’
Thomas didn’t get it. ‘Do you mean Herr King in export coordination? But he doesn’t have a birthday suit. And besides-’
‘You still had some trouble with the case, Firner told me.’
‘Yes, things were a bit tough with Mischkey.’
‘Should I have been harsher?’
‘He was rather uncooperative when you left him with us.’
‘After everything I heard from Firner he was given the kid-glove treatment. No talk of police and court and prison – that would only encourage a lack of cooperation.’
‘But Herr Self, we didn’t tell him that. The problem lay elsewhere. He virtually tried to blackmail us. We never found out whether he really had something up his sleeve, but he made some noise.’
‘With the same old stories?’
‘Yes, with the same old stories. Threatening to go to the press, to the competition, to the union, to the plant authorities, to the Federal Antitrust Office. You know, it’s tough to say this, and I’m sorry about Mischkey’s death, but at the same time I’m happy not to be burdened with this problem any more.’
Danckelmann came in without knocking. ‘Ah, Herr Self, you’ve been the topic of conversation today already. Why are you still involved in this Mischkey business? The case is long since closed. Don’t go rattling cages.’
Just as I had been when talking to Thomas, I was on thin ice with Danckelmann. Questions that were too direct could make it crack. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. ‘Did Grimm call you?’
Danckelmann ignored my question. ‘Seriously, Herr Self, keep your nose out of this story. We don’t appreciate it.’
‘For me, cases are only over when I know everything. Did you know, for example, that Mischkey took another stroll around your system?’
Thomas pricked up his ears and looked disconcerted. He was already regretting his offer of a teaching appointment.
Danckelmann controlled himself and his voice was tight. ‘Curious notion you have of a job. It’s over when the client says it’s over. And Herr Mischkey isn’t strolling anywhere any more. So please…’
I’d heard more than I’d dreamed possible and had no interest in a further escalation. Just one more wrong word and Danckelmann would remember my special ID. ‘You’re absolutely right, Herr Danckelmann. On the other hand, you certainly agree that when security is involved, things can’t always be contained within the narrow limits of a job. And don’t worry, being a freelancer, I can’t afford to invest too much without a fee.’
Danckelmann left the room only partially appeased. Thomas was waiting impatiently for me to be gone. But I still had a treat for him. ‘To return to what you were saying, Herr Thomas, I’m happy to accept the teaching appointment. I’ll draw up a curriculum.’
‘Thank you for your interest, Herr Self. We’re around.’
I left security and found myself back in the courtyard with Aristotle, Schwarz, Mendeleyev, and Kekulé. On the north side of the yard a sleepy autumn sun was shining. I sat down on the top step of a small staircase leading to a walled-up door. I had more than enough to think about.
More and more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were fitting together. Yet they still didn’t add up to a plausible picture. I now understood what Mischkey’s file was: a collection of everything he could muster against the RCW. A wretched collection. He must have been playing high-stakes poker to impress Danckelmann and Thomas as much as he obviously had. But what did he want to achieve or prevent by this? The RCW hadn’t told him to his face that they had no intention of instituting proceedings against him with the police, court, and prison. Why had they wanted to exert pressure? What were their intentions towards Mischkey, and what was he arming himself against with his feeble insinuations and threats?
My thoughts turned to Grimm. He’d come into money, he’d had a strange reaction that morning, and I was fairly certain he had talked to Danckelmann. Was Grimm the RCW’s man in the RCC? Had the RCW initially assigned this role to Mischkey? We won’t go to the police, and you’ll ensure our emissions data are always squeaky clean? Such a man would be valuable indeed. The monitoring system would be rendered obsolete and wouldn’t interfere with production.
But none of this necessarily made the murder of Mischkey plausible. Grimm as the murderer, wanting to do business with the RCW and to have Mischkey out of the way? Or did Mischkey’s material contain some other dynamite that had eluded me thus far, that had provoked the deadly reaction of the RCW? But then Danckelmann and Thomas could scarcely have overlooked such an act, and they wouldn’t have spoken so openly to me about the conflict with Mischkey. And while Grimm might make a better impression than in his safari suit, even with his pencil moustache I couldn’t picture him as a murderer. Was I looking in completely the wrong direction? Fred might have beaten up Mischkey under contract from the RCW, but also from any other employer, and he could have killed him for them. What did I know about all the ways Mischkey could have entangled himself through his confidence tricks? I’d have to talk to Fred again.
I took my leave of Aristotle. The courtyards of the old factory worked their magic again. I walked through the archway into the next courtyard, its walls glowing in the autumnal red of the Virginia creeper. No Richard playing with his ball. I rang the bell of the Schmalzes’ work apartment. The elderly woman, whom I recognized by sight, opened the door. She was dressed in black.
‘Frau Schmalz? Hello, the name is Self.’
‘Hello, Herr Self. You’re joining us for the funeral? The children will be collecting me any minute.’
Half an hour later I found myself in the crematorium of Ludwigshafen Cemetery. The family had included me in the mourning for Schmalz senior as though it were perfectly natural, and I didn’t like to say that I’d stumbled upon the funeral preparations just by chance. Along with Frau Schmalz, the young married Schmalz couple, and their son Richard, I was driven to the cemetery, glad to be wearing my dark-blue raincoat and the muted suit. During the drive I learned that Schmalz senior had died of a heart attack four days ago.
‘He looked so sprightly when I saw him a few weeks ago.’
The widow sobbed. My lisping friend told me about the circumstances that had led to his death. ‘Dad kept on tinkering with old vans and trucks after retiring. He had a part of the old hangar by the Rhine where he could work. Lately he didn’t take care. The cut in his hand didn’t go that deep but according to the doctor he had heavy bleeding in the brain, too. After that Dad felt a tingling in the left part of the body all the time, he felt terribly unwell, and he didn’t want to get out of bed. Then the heart attack.’
The RCW was well represented at the cemetery. Danckelmann gave a speech. ‘His life was the Works’ security and the Works’ security was his life.’ In the course of his speech he read out a personal farewell letter from Korten. The chairman of the RCW chess club, where Schmalz senior had played third board on the second team, asked Caissa’s blessing on the deceased. The RCW orchestra played ‘I Had a Comrade’. Schmalz was so moved, he forgot himself and lisped at me, ‘Dad’s dearest wish.’ Then the flower-wreathed coffin glided into the furnace.
I couldn’t get out of the funeral tea. I did manage, however, to avoid sitting next to Danckelmann or Thomas, although Schmalz junior had intended this seat of honour for me. I sat next to the chairman of the RCW chess club and we chatted to each other about the world championship. Over cognac we started a game in our heads. By the thirty-second move I lost my overview. We came round to the subject of the deceased.
‘He was a decent player, Schmalz. Although he was a late starter. And you could depend on him in the club. He never missed a practice or a tournament.’
‘How often do you practise?’
‘Every Thursday. Three weeks ago was the first time Schmalz didn’t come. The family said he’d over-exerted himself in the workshop. But you know, I believe the bleeding in the brain happened before then. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been in the workshop, he’d have been at practice. He must already have been off-balance then.’
It was like any other funeral meal. It starts with the soft voices, the studied grief on the faces, and the stiff dignity in the bodies, lots of awkwardness, some embarrassment, and a general desire to get it over with as quickly as possible. And one hour later it’s only the clothing that distinguishes mourners from any other gathering, not the appetite, nor the noise, nor, with a few exceptions, the expressions and gestures. I did grow a little thoughtful though. What would it be like at my own funeral? In the first row of the cemetery chapel, five or six figures, among them Eberhard, Philipp and Willy, Babs, perhaps Röschen and Georg. But it was possible no one at all would learn of my death and, apart from the priest and the four coffin-bearers, not a soul would accompany me to the grave. I could picture Turbo trotting behind the coffin, a mouse in his mouth. It had a bow tied round it: ‘To my dear Gerd from his Turbo.’
At five I was back in the office, slightly tipsy and in a bad mood.
Fred called. ‘Hello there, Gerhard, do you remember me? I wanted to ask you again about the job. Do you already have someone?’
‘I’ve a couple of candidates. But nothing’s finalized yet. I can take another look at you. It would have to be straight away, though.’
‘That suits me.’
I asked him to the office. Dusk was falling, I switched on the light and let the blinds down.
Fred came cheerfully and trustingly. It was underhanded, but I got the first punch in immediately. At my age I can’t afford a clean fight in such situations. I caught him in the stomach and didn’t waste time removing his sunglasses before hitting his face. His hands flew up and I delivered another punch to his underbelly. When he ventured a half-hearted counterpunch with his right hand, I twisted his arm round behind his back, kicked the hollow of his knees and he sank to the ground. I kept my hold on him.
‘Who contracted you to beat up a guy in the War Cemetery in August?’
‘Hey, stop. You’re hurting me. What’s all this about? I don’t know exactly, the boss doesn’t tell me anything. I… aagh… let up…’
Bit by bit out it came. Fred worked for Hans who got the jobs and made the arrangements, didn’t name any names to Fred, just described the person, place, and time. Sometimes Fred had caught wind of something. ‘I did some stuff for the wine king, and once for the union, and for the chemical guys… stop it, yes maybe that was it at the War Cemetery… stop it!’
‘And for the chemical guys you killed him a few weeks later.’
‘You’re crazy. I never killed anyone. We messed him up a bit, nothing more. Stop, you’re pulling my arm off, I swear.’
I didn’t manage to hurt him so much that he’d prefer the consequences of an admission of murder to riding out the pain. Besides I found him credible. I let him go.
‘Sorry I had to manhandle you, Fred. I can’t afford to take anyone on who’s mixed up in a murder. He’s dead, the guy you took care of back then.’
Fred scrambled to his feet. I showed him the sink and poured him a sambuca. He gulped it down and was in a hurry to leave.
‘That’s fine,’ he mumbled. ‘But I’ve had enough, I’m out of here.’ Maybe he found my behaviour acceptable from a professional point of view. But we’d never be best friends.
Another piece to fit in, but the picture was no less blurry. So the confrontation between the RCW and Mischkey had reached the stage of professional thugs. But from the warning beaten into him at the War Cemetery to murder was a huge step.
I sat down at my desk. The Sweet Afton had smoked itself and left nothing but its body of ash. The traffic raced by in the Augusta-Anlage. From the backyard I could hear the shrieks of playing children. There are days in autumn where there’s a whiff of Christmas in the air. I wondered what I should decorate my tree with this year. Klärchen loved the traditional way and decked the tree year in, year out with shiny silver baubles and tinsel. Since then I’ve tried everything from matchbox cars to cigarette packs. I’ve got a bit of a reputation for it among my friends, but I’ve also set standards I’m stuck with now. The universe doesn’t have an endless supply of little objects that can be used as Christmas tree decorations. Cans of sardines, for example, would be ornamental, but are very heavy.
Philipp called and demanded I come and admire his new cabin cruiser. Brigitte asked what I was planning that evening. I invited her round to dinner, ran out and bought a fillet of pork, boiled ham, and endives.
We had braised pork, Italian style. Afterwards I put on The Man Who Loved Women. I knew the film already and was curious to see how Brigitte would react to it. When the womanizer, chasing after beautiful women’s legs, ran in front of a car, she thought it served him right. She didn’t particularly like the film. But when it was over she couldn’t resist posing in front of the floor lamp, as if by accident, showing her legs off to advantage against the light.
I dropped Brigitte off at work at the Collini Centre and drank my second coffee at the Gmeiner. I didn’t have a smoking gun in the Mischkey case. Naturally I could keep on looking for my stupid little jigsaw pieces, trying them helplessly this way and that, and combining them to make some picture or other. I was fed up with it. I felt young and dynamic after the night with Brigitte.
At the sales counter the boss was fighting with her son. ‘The way you’re carrying on makes me wonder if you really want to become a pastry cook.’ Did I really want to follow my leads the way I was carrying on? I was timid about those that led to the RCW. Why? Was I afraid of discovering I had delivered Mischkey to his death? Had I messed up the trails deliberately out of consideration for myself and Korten and our friendship?
I drove to Heidelberg and the RCC. Grimm wanted to deal with me quickly, on his feet. I sat down and fetched Mischkey’s computer printout from my briefcase.
‘You wanted to take another look, Herr Grimm. I can leave it with you now. Mischkey really was a helluva guy, broke into the RCW system again although the connection was already cut. I suspect via telephone, or what do you think?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He was a bad liar.
‘You’re a bad liar, Herr Grimm. But that doesn’t matter. For what I’ve got to tell you it’s not important whether you’re a good one or a bad one.’
‘What?’
He was still standing, looking at me helplessly. I made an inviting gesture. ‘Wouldn’t you care to take a seat?’
He shook his head.
‘I don’t have to tell you who the red Ford Escort HD-S 735 sitting in the parking lot down there belongs to. Exactly three weeks ago to the day on the bridge over the railroad between Eppelheim and Wieblingen, Mischkey plummeted in his car onto the tracks after being hit by a red Ford Escort. The witness I managed to unearth even saw that the number plate of the red Escort started with HD and ended with 735.’
‘And why are you telling me this? You should go to the police.’
‘Quite right, Herr Grimm. The witness should have gone to the police, too. I had to explain to him first that a jealous wife is no reason to cover up a murder. In the meantime he’s ready to go to the police with me.’
‘Yes, well then?’ He folded his arms over his chest in a superior manner.
‘The chances of finding another red Escort from Heidelberg with a number plate that fits the description are perhaps… Ah, work it out yourself. The damage to the red Escort appears to have been minimal and easy to repair. Tell me, Herr Grimm, was your car stolen three weeks ago, or did you lend it to someone?’
‘No, of course not, what a lot of rubbish you talk.’
‘I would have been surprised anyway. You’ll certainly know that when a murder occurs you always ask, who benefits? What do you think, Herr Grimm? Who benefits from Mischkey’s death?’
He snorted contemptuously.
‘Then allow me to tell you a little story. No, no, don’t get impatient, it’s an interesting little story. You still won’t sit down? Well, once upon a time there was a large chemical plant and a Regional Computing Centre that was supposed to keep an eye on the chemical plant. It was in the chemical plant’s interest that they didn’t keep too careful an eye on it. Two people in the Regional Computer Centre were crucial for monitoring the chemical plant. An awful lot of money was at stake. If only they could buy off one of these supervisors! What wouldn’t they give for that! But they would only buy off one because they only needed one. They sound out both. A little later one is dead and the other pays off his loan. Do you want to know how high the loan was?’
Now he did sit down. To compensate for this mistake he acted outraged. ‘It’s appalling what you’re ascribing not only to me but to our most respected and venerable chemical enterprise. I’d best pass this on to them; they can defend themselves better than a minor employee like me.’
‘I can well believe that what you’d most like to do is run to the RCW. But at the moment the story concerns only you, the police, myself, and my witness. The police will be interested in knowing your whereabouts at the time, and like most people, you too, three weeks post festum, won’t be able to provide a solid alibi.’
If there’d been a visit with his poor wife and his doubtless disgusting children at his parents-in-laws’ Grimm would have come out with that. Instead he said, ‘There can’t be a witness who saw me, because I wasn’t there.’
I had him where I wanted him. I didn’t feel any fairer than I had yesterday with Fred, but just as good. ‘Right, Herr Grimm, nor is there a witness who saw you there. But I have someone who will say he saw you there. And what do you think will happen then? The police have a corpse, a crime, a culprit, a witness, and a motive. It may be that the witness finally cracks during the trial, but long before that you’re finished. I don’t know what they give you for taking bribes these days, but along with it comes detention awaiting trial for murder, suspension from work, disgrace for your wife and children, the contempt of society.’
Grimm had turned pale. ‘What is this? What are you doing to me? What have I done to you?’
‘I don’t like the way you let yourself be bought. I can’t stand you. Moreover there’s something I want you to tell me. And if you don’t want me to ruin you, you’d better play along.’
‘What do you want?’
‘When did the RCW contact you for the first time? Who recruited you, and who is, so to speak, the person who runs you? How much have you received from the RCW?’
He recounted the whole thing, from the initial contact Thomas had opened with him after Mischkey’s death, to the negotiations over performance and pay, to the programmes, some of which were still only ideas and some of which he’d already written. And he told me about the suitcase with the crisp new notes.
‘Stupidly, instead of paying back my loan bit by bit so as not to raise suspicion, I went to the bank straight away. I wanted to save on interest.’ He took out a handkerchief and mopped away the sweat, and I asked him what he knew about Mischkey’s death.
‘So far as I could gather, they wanted to put him under pressure after you had turned him in. They wanted to have the cooperation they’re now paying me for, but they wanted it for nothing, in exchange for keeping quiet about his hacking into the system. When he died they were somewhat disgruntled because then they had to pay. Me.’
He could have gone on talking for ever, probably wanted to justify himself, too. I’d heard enough.
‘Thank you, that’s plenty for now, Herr Grimm. In your place I’d keep our discussion confidential. If the RCW get wind of the fact that I know, you’ll be useless to them. Should anything more about Mischkey’s death come to mind, call me.’ I gave him my card.
‘Yes, but – don’t you care about what’s going on with the emissions control. Or are you going to go to the police anyway?’
I thought about the stink that so often caused me to shut the window. And about what was there, even though we couldn’t smell it. Nonetheless it left me indifferent for the time being. I packed away Mischkey’s printouts that were lying on Grimm’s desk. When I turned to leave, Grimm stretched out his hand towards me. I didn’t take it.
In the afternoon I should have had my appointment with the ballet director. But I didn’t feel like it and cancelled. At home I went to bed and didn’t wake up until five. I almost never have a siesta. Because of my low blood pressure I find it difficult afterwards to get going again. I took a hot shower and made a strong coffee.
When I called Philipp at the station the nurse said, ‘The doctor is already off to his new boat.’ I drove through Neckarstadt to Luzenberg and parked in Gerwigstrasse. In the harbour I passed a lot of boats before finding Philipp’s. I recognized it by the name. It was called Faun 69.
I know next to nothing about sailing. Philipp explained to me that he could sail to London in this boat or to Rome via France, just not venturing too far from the coast. There was water enough for ten showers, space enough in the fridge for forty bottles, and room enough in the bed for one Philipp and two women. After he’d shown me around he switched the stereo on, put on Hans Albers, and uncorked a bottle of Bordeaux.
‘Do I get a test-drive, too?’
‘Slowly does it, Gerd. Let’s empty this little bottle first, and then we’ll raise the anchor. I have radar and can set sail any time day or night.’
One bottle turned into two. First of all Philipp told me about his women. ‘And what about you, Gerd, how’s your love life?’
‘Ah, what can I say?’
‘Nothing on the go with smart traffic wardens or attractive secretaries, or whatever else you are involved in?’
‘On a case I did get to know a woman recently who’d appeal to me, but it’s difficult because her boyfriend isn’t alive any more.’
‘I beg your pardon, but where’s the difficulty in that?’
‘Oh, well, I can’t flirt with a grieving widow, can I? Especially as I’m supposed to be finding out who murdered the boyfriend.’
‘Why can’t you? Is it your public prosecutor’s code of honour, or are you simply afraid she’ll turn you down?’ He was laughing at me.
‘No, no, you couldn’t put it like that. And then there’s somebody else – Brigitte. I like her too. I don’t know what to do with two women.’
Philipp burst out laughing, loudly. ‘You’re a real philanderer. And what’s stopping you from getting closer to Brigitte?’
‘I am already… with her, I’ve even…’
‘And now she’s expecting a child by you?’ Philipp could hardly contain his mirth. Then he noticed that I wasn’t at all inclined to laugh, and enquired seriously about my situation. I told him.
‘That’s no reason to look so sad. You just need to be aware of what you want. If you’re looking for someone to marry, then stay with Brigitte. They’re not bad, these women around forty. They’ve seen everything, experienced everything, they’re as sensual as a succubus if you know how to arouse them. And a masseuse, what’s more, and you with your rheumatism. The other one sounds like stress. Is that what you want? Amour fou? A heaven of passion, then a hell of despair?’
‘But I don’t know what I want. Probably I want both, the security and the thrill. At any rate sometimes I want one, sometimes the other.’
He could understand that. We identified with each other there. I’d worked out in the meantime where the Bordeaux was stored and fetched the third bottle. The smoke was thick in the cabin.
‘Hey, landlubber, get to that galley and throw the fish from the fridge on the grill!’ In the fridge was potato and sausage salad from Kaufhof and next to it deep-frozen fillets of fish. They just had to be popped into the microwave. Two minutes later I was able to return to the cabin with dinner. Philipp had set the table and put on Zarah Leander.
After eating we went up to the bridge, as Philipp called it. ‘And where do you hoist the sail?’ Philipp knew my silly jokes and didn’t react. He also took my question as to whether he could still navigate as a bad joke. We were pretty tight by then.
We sailed under the bridge over the Altrhein and when we’d reached the Rhine we turned upstream. The river was black and silent. On the RCW premises many buildings were lit up, bright flames were shooting out of tall pipes, streetlamps cast a garish light. The motor chugged softly, the water slapped against the boat’s side, and from the Works came an almighty, thunderous hissing. We glided past the RCW loading dock, past barges, piers, and container cranes, past railroad lines and warehouses. It was growing foggy and there was a chill in the air. In front of us I could make out the Kurt Schumacher Bridge. The RCW premises grew murky, beyond the tracks loomed old buildings, sparsely lit in the night sky.
Inspiration struck. ‘Drive over to the right,’ I said to Philipp.
‘Do you mean I should dock? Now, there, next to the RCW? Whatever for?’
‘I’d like to take a look at something. Can you park for half an hour and wait for me?’
‘It’s not called parking, it’s dropping the anchor, we’re on a boat. Are you aware that it’s half past ten? I was thinking we’d turn by the castle, chug back, and then drink the fourth bottle in the Waldhof Basin.’
‘I’ll explain it all to you later over the fourth bottle. But now I have to go in. It has something to do with the case I mentioned earlier. And I’m not the least bit tipsy any more.’
Philipp gave me a searching look. ‘I guess you know what you’re doing.’ He steered the boat to the right and sailed on with a serene concentration I wouldn’t have thought him capable of at that point, moving slowly along the quay wall until he came to a ladder attached to it. ‘Hang the fenders out.’ He pointed to three white plastic, sausage-like objects. I threw them overboard, fortunately they were attached, and he tied the boat firmly to the ladder.
‘I’d like to have you with me. But I’d rather know you’re here, ready to start. Do you have a flashlight I can use?’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
I clambered up the ladder. I was shivering. The knitted jumper, some American label, I was wearing beneath the old leather jacket to match my new jeans didn’t warm me. I peered over the quay wall.
In front of me, parallel to the banks of the Rhine, was a narrow road, behind it tracks with railway carriages. The buildings were in the brick style I was familiar with from the Security building and the Schmalzes’ flat. The old plant was in front of me. Somewhere here was Schmalz’s hangar.
I turned to the right where the old brick buildings were lower. I tried to walk with both caution and the necessary authority. I stuck to the shadows of the railway carriages.
They came without the Alsatian making a sound. One of them shone a torch in my face, the other asked me for my badge. I fetched the special pass from my wallet. ‘Herr Self? What part of your special job brings you here?’
‘I wouldn’t require a special pass if I had to tell you that.’
But that neither calmed them nor intimidated them. They were two young lads, the sort you find these days in the riot police. In the old days you found them in the Waffen SS. That’s certainly an impermissible comparison because these days we’re dealing with a free democratic order, yet the mixture of zeal, earnestness, uncertainness, and servility in the faces is the same. They were wearing a kind of paramilitary uniform with the benzene ring on their collar patch.
‘Hey, guys,’ I said, ‘let me finish my job, and you do yours. What are your names? I want to tell Danckelmann tomorrow that you can be relied on. Continue the good work!’
I don’t remember their names; they were along the lines of Energy and Stamina. I didn’t manage to get them clicking their heels. But one of them returned my pass and the other switched off his torch. The Alsatian had spent the whole time off to one side, indifferent.
When I couldn’t see them any more and their steps had died away I went on. The low-slung buildings I’d seen seemed ramshackle. Some of the windows were smashed, some doors hung crooked from their hinges, here and there a roof was missing. The area was obviously earmarked for demolition. But one building had been rescued from decay. It, too, was a onefloor brick building, with Romanesque windows and barrel vaulting made of corrugated iron. If Schmalz’s workshop was anywhere round here, then it had to be in this building.
My flashlight found the small service door in the large sliding gate. Both were locked, and the big one could only be opened from the inside. At first I didn’t want to try the bank-card trick, but then I thought that on the evening in question, three weeks ago today, Schmalz might no longer have had the strength or the wit to think of details like padlocks. And indeed, using my special pass, I entered the hangar. Next second, I had to close the door. Energy and Stamina were coming round the corner.
I leaned against the cold iron door and took a deep breath. Now I was really sober. And still I knew it was a good idea to have come looking in the RCW grounds. The fact that on the day Mischkey had had his accident Schmalz had hurt his hand, had had a brain haemorrhage, and forgotten to play chess wasn’t much in itself. And the fact that he tinkered with delivery vans and the girl at the station had seen a strange delivery van was hardly a hot lead. But I wanted to know.
Not much light shone through the windows. I could make out the outlines of three panel trucks. I turned on the flashlight and recognized an old Opel, an old Mercedes, and a Citroën. You certainly don’t see many of those driving about round here. At the back of the hangar was a large workbench. I groped my way over. Amongst the tools were a set of keys, a cap, and a pack of cigarettes. I pocketed the keys.
Only the Citroën was roadworthy. On the Opel the windshield was missing, the Mercedes was up on blocks. I sat down in the Citroën and tried out the keys. One fitted and as I turned it the lights went on. There was old blood on the steering wheel and the cloth on the passenger’s seat was bloodstained, too. I took it. As I was about to turn off the ignition, I touched a switch on the dashboard. Behind me I could hear the humming of an electric motor, and in the side-mirror I could see the loading doors open. I got out and went to the back.
This time I didn’t get such a fright. But the effect was still impressive. Now I knew what had happened on the bridge. Both inside surfaces of the rear doors of the delivery van, and the rear opening itself, had been covered with reflective foil. A deadly triptych. The foil was spread smooth, without creases or warps, and I could see myself in it like on Saturday in the mirror that hung in my stairwell. When Mischkey had driven onto the bridge, the delivery van had been parked there with its back doors open. Mischkey, confronted suddenly with the apparent headlights on his side of the road, had swerved to the left and then lost control of his vehicle. Now I recalled the cross on the right headlight on Mischkey’s car. It wasn’t Mischkey who’d stuck it on, it was old Schmalz, who’d thus been able to know, in the darkness, that he had to open the doors because his victim was coming.
I heard thumps on the door of the hangar. ‘Open up, security!’ Energy and Stamina must have noticed the beam from my flashlight. Apparently the hangar had been so much Schmalz’s sole preserve that not even security had a key. I was glad that my two young colleagues didn’t know the bank-card trick. Nonetheless I was sitting in a trap.
I took note of the number on the licence plate and saw that the plates themselves were tied on in a makeshift fashion with wire. I started the engine. Outside the door was being pounded with ever-increasing energy and stamina. I parked the vehicle just a metre from the door, its mirrored rear opened. Then I grabbed a long, heavy spanner from the table. One of my pursuers hurled himself against the door.
I pressed myself against the wall. Now what I needed was a lot of luck. When I estimated the next assault on the door would come, I pushed down the handle.
The door burst open, and the first security guard fell through it, landing on the ground. The second one stormed in after him with raised pistol and raked to a halt in fright in front of his own mirror image. The Alsatian had been trained to attack whoever was threatening his master with a raised weapon and leapt through the tearing foil. I could hear him howling in pain in the cargo area. The first security man lay dazed on the ground, the second hadn’t cottoned on yet. I took advantage of the confusion, zipped out of the gate, and raced in the direction of the boat. I’d made it over the tracks and cleared maybe twenty metres down the road, when I heard Energy and Stamina in renewed pursuit: ‘Stop or I’ll shoot.’ Their heavy boots beat out a fast rhythm on the cobblestones, the panting of the dog was getting closer and closer, and I had no desire to grow acquainted with the application of the regulations on usage of firearms on the plant’s premises. The Rhine looked cold. But I had no choice, and jumped.
The dive from a headlong run had enough momentum to let me bob to the surface a good distance away. I turned my head and saw Energy and Stamina standing on the quay wall with the Alsatian, directing their flashlight at the water. My clothes were heavy, and the current of the Rhine is strong, and I could only make headway with difficulty.
‘Gerd, Gerd!’ Philipp let his boat drift downstream in the shadow of the quayside and called to me in a whisper.
‘Here I am,’ I whispered back. Then the boat was next to me. Philipp hoisted me up. At that moment Energy and Stamina saw us. I don’t know what they planned to do. Fire at us? Philipp started the motor and with a spraying bow wave made for the middle of the Rhine. Exhausted and shivering with cold, I sat on the deck. I pulled the bloodstained cloth from my pocket. ‘Could you do me another favour and test the blood group on this? I think I know, blood group O rhesus negative, but better safe than sorry.’
Philipp grinned. ‘All that excitement over this damp cloth? But first things first. Go below, take a hot shower, and put on my bathrobe. As soon as we’ve made it past the water police I’ll make you a grog.’
When I came out of the shower we’d reached safety. Neither the RCW nor the police had sent a gunboat after us and Philipp was just in the process of manoeuvring the boat back into the Altrhein channel by Sandhofen. Although the shower had warmed me, I was still shivering. It was all a bit much at my age. Philipp docked at the old mooring and entered the cabin. ‘Jeezus,’ he said. ‘That was quite a fright you gave me. When I heard the guys hammering against the metal I thought something had gone wrong. I didn’t know what to do. Then I saw you jump. Hats off to you.’
‘Oh, you know, when you have a killer dog on your tail you don’t stop to consider whether the water might be a little on the cold side. Much more important was that you did exactly the right thing at the right time. Without you I’d probably have drowned, with or without a bullet in my head. You saved my life. Boy, am I glad you’re not just a silly womanizer.’
Embarrassed, Philipp clattered about in the galley. ‘Maybe you want to tell me now what you’d lost at the RCW.’
‘Nothing lost, but found some things. Apart from this disgusting wet cloth I found the murder weapon, probably the murderer, too. Which explains the wet cloth.’ Over the steaming grog I told Philipp about the corrugated van and its surprising refit.
‘But if it was as simple as that to chase your Mischkey off the bridge, what about the injuries to the veteran who was the Works’ security guy?’ Philipp asked when I was finished with my report.
‘You should have become a private detective. You’re quick on the uptake. I don’t have any answers, unless…’ I remembered what the owner’s wife had told me at the railway restaurant. ‘The woman at the old station heard two bangs, one right after the other. Now it’s getting clear. Mischkey’s car was hanging from the railings on the bridge, Schmalz senior, with a great deal of effort, managed to dislodge it, injuring himself in the process. And the effort killed him two weeks later. Yes, that’s how it must have been.’
‘One bang as it broke through the railings, the next as it crashed down on to the railroad bank. It all fits together medically, too. When old people strain themselves too much, it can easily cause a haemorrhage in the brain. It goes unnoticed until the heart gives out.’
I was very tired all of a sudden. ‘Still, there’s a lot I’m hazy about. Schmalz senior himself didn’t come up with the idea to kill Mischkey. And I still can’t see a motive. Please take me home, Philipp. We’ll have the Bordeaux some other time. I hope you won’t get into any trouble on account of my escapades.’
As we turned from Gerwigstrasse into Sandhofenstrasse a patrol car complete with flashing light but without siren went tearing past us towards the harbour basin. I didn’t even turn round.
After a feverish night I called Brigitte. She came immediately, brought quinine for my temperature and nose drops, massaged my neck, hung up my clothes to dry that I’d dropped in the hallway the previous evening, prepared something in the kitchen that I was to heat up for lunch, set off, bought orange juice, glucose, and cigarettes, and fed Turbo. She was professional, industrious, and worried. When I wanted her to sit for a little on the edge of the bed, she had to leave.
I slept almost the whole day. Philipp called and confirmed the blood group, O, and the rhesus negative factor. Through the window a rumble of traffic from the Augusta-Anlage and the shouts of playing children drifted into the twilight of my room. I remembered sick days as a child, the desire to be outside playing with the other children, and simultaneously the pleasure in my own weakness and all the maternal pampering. In a feverish semi-sleep I kept running from the panting dog and Energy and Stamina. I was making up for the fear I hadn’t felt yesterday where everything had happened too quickly. I had wild thoughts about Mischkey’s murder and why Schmalz had done it.
Towards evening I was feeling better. My temperature had gone down and I was weak, but I felt like eating the beef broth with pasta and vegetables that Brigitte had prepared, and smoking a Sweet Afton afterwards. How should work on the case proceed? Murder belonged in police hands, and even if the RCW, as I could well imagine, pulled a veil of oblivion over yesterday’s incident I’d never find out anything more from anyone in the Works. I called Nägelsbach. He and his wife had finished dinner and were in the studio.
‘Of course you can come by. You can listen to Hedda Gabler, too, we’re in the third act just now.’
I stuck a note on the front door, to reassure Brigitte in case she came to check on me again. The drive to Heidelberg was bad. My own slowness and the quickness of the car made uneasy companions.
The Nägelsbachs live in one of the Pfaffengrunder settlement houses of the twenties. Nägelsbach had turned the shed, originally meant for chickens and rabbits, into a studio with a large window and bright lamps. The evening was cool and the Swedish wood-burning stove held a few crackling logs. Nägelsbach was sitting on his high stool, at the big table on which Dürer’s Praying Hands were taking shape in matchstick form. His wife was reading aloud in the armchair by the stove. It was a perfect idyll that met my eyes when I came through the garden gate straight to the studio and looked through the window before knocking.
‘My word, what a sight you are!’ Frau Nägelsbach vacated the armchair for me and took another stool for herself.
‘You must really have something on your mind to come here in this state,’ was Nägelsbach’s greeting. ‘Do you mind if my wife stays? I tell her everything, work-wise, too. The rules of confidentiality don’t apply to childless couples who only have one another.’
As I recounted my tale, Nägelsbach worked on. He didn’t interrupt me. At the end of my narration he was silent for a little while, then he switched off the lamp above his workplace, turned his high stool toward us, and said to his wife: ‘Tell him.’
‘With what you’ve just told us, maybe the police will get a search warrant for the old hangar. Maybe they’ll find the Citroën still there. But there’ll be nothing remarkable or suspicious about it. No reflective foil, no deadly triptych. That was pretty, by the way, how you described that. Right, and then the police can interrogate a few of the security people and the widow Schmalz and whoever else you named, but what is it going to achieve?’
‘That’s it, and of course I could prime Herzog in particular about the case, and he can try to use his contacts with security, only it won’t change a thing. But you know all that yourself, Herr Self.’
‘Yes, that’s where my thinking has brought me too. Nonetheless I thought you might have an idea of something the police could do, that… oh, I don’t know what I thought. I haven’t been able to resign myself to the case ending like this.’
‘Do you have any idea of a motive?’ Frau Nägelsbach turned to her husband. ‘Couldn’t we get further that way?’
‘I can only imagine from what I know thus far that something went wrong. Just like that story you read to me recently. The RCW is having trouble with Mischkey, and it’s getting more and more bothersome, and then someone in control says, “That’s enough,” and his subordinate gets a fright and in his turn passes the baton: “See to it Mischkey is quietened down, exert yourself,” and the person this is said to wants to show his dedication and prods and encourages his own subordinate to think of something, and it can be unusual, and at the end of this long chain someone believes he’s supposed to knock off Mischkey.’
‘But old Schmalz was a pensioner and not even part of the chain any more,’ his wife offered.
‘Hard to say. How many policemen do I know who still feel like policemen after retirement?’
‘Dear God,’ she interrupted him, ‘you’re not going to-’
‘No, I won’t. Perhaps Schmalz senior was one of those who still thought of himself as being in service. What I mean is there needn’t be a motive for murder in the classical sense here. The murderer is simply the instrument without a motive, and whoever had the motive wasn’t necessarily thinking about murder. That’s the effect, and indeed the purpose, of commanding hierarchies. We know that in the police, too, and in the army.’
‘Do you think more could be done if old Schmalz were still alive?’
‘Well, to begin with, Herr Self wouldn’t have got as far. He wouldn’t have found out at all about Schmalz’s injury, wouldn’t have looked in the hangar, and certainly wouldn’t have found the murder vehicle. All traces would have been removed long before. But, all right, let’s imagine we’d come by this knowledge in a different way. No, I don’t think we’d have got anything out of old Schmalz. He must have been a tough old nut.’
‘I can’t just accept this, Rudolf. Listening to you, the only person you can get in this chain of command is the last link. And the others are all supposedly innocent?’
‘Whether they’re innocent is one question and whether you can get them is another. Look, Reni, I don’t know of course whether something really went wrong, or whether it’s not the case that the chain was so well-oiled that everyone knew what was meant without it being spoken out loud. But if it was oiled like that, it certainly can’t be proved.’
‘Should Herr Self be advised to talk to one of the big cheeses at the RCW? To get a sense of how that person conducts himself?’
‘So far as prosecution goes, that won’t help either. But you’re right, it’s the only remaining thing he can do.’
It was good to watch the pair of them, in this question-and-answer game, making sense of what I was too groggy to work out for myself. So what was left for me was a talk with Korten.
Frau Nägelsbach made some verbena tea and we talked about art. Nägelsbach told me what appealed to him in his reproduction of Praying Hands. He found the usual sculpture reproductions no less sickly sweet than I. And that very fact made him want to achieve the sublime sobriety of Dürer’s original through the rigorous simplicity of the matches.
As I left he promised to check up on the licence plate of Schmalz’s Citroën.
The note for Brigitte was still hanging on the door. When I was lying in bed she called. ‘Are you feeling better? Sorry I couldn’t come round to see you again. I just didn’t manage it. How’s your weekend looking? Do you think you’ll feel up to coming to dinner tomorrow?’ Something wasn’t right. Her cheerfulness sounded forced.
On Saturday morning I found one message from Nägelsbach on the answering machine and one from Korten. The number on the licence plate on old Schmalz’s Citroën had been allotted to a Heidelberg postal worker for his VW Beetle five years ago. Presumably the licence plate I saw originated from this scrapped predecessor. Korten asked whether I wouldn’t like to visit them in Ludolf-Krehl-Strasse. I should call him back.
‘My dear Self, good to hear you. This afternoon, tea in the loggia? You whipped up quite a storm for us, I hear. And you sound as though you have a cold. It doesn’t surprise me, ha ha. Your level of fitness, I’m full of respect.’
At four o’clock I was in Ludolf-Krehl-Strasse. For Inge, if it was still Inge, I had brought an autumn bouquet. I marvelled at the entrance gate, the video camera, and the intercom system. It consisted of a telephone receiver on a long cable that the chauffeur could pick up and pass on to the good ladies and gentlemen in the rear. Just as I wanted to sit back in my car with the receiver I heard Korten with the tortured patience you use for a naughty child. ‘Don’t be silly, Self! The cable car is on its way for you.’
On the ride up I had a view from Neuenheim over the Rhine plain to the Palatinate Forest. It was a clear day and I could make out the chimneys of the RCW. Their white smoke merged innocently with the blue sky.
Korten, in cords, checked shirt, and a casual cardigan, greeted me heartily. Two dachshunds were leaping around him. ‘I’ve had a table set in the loggia, it won’t be too cold for you, will it? You can always have one of my cardigans, Helga knits me one after the other.’
We stood enjoying the view. ‘Is that your church down there?’
‘The Johanneskirche? No, we belong to the Friedenskirche parish in Handschuhsheim. I’ve become an Elder. Nice job.’
Helga came with a coffee pot and I unloaded my flowers. I’d only known Inge fleetingly and didn’t know whether she’d died, divorced, or simply left. Helga, new wife or new lover, resembled her. The same cheerfulness, the same false modesty, the same delight over my bouquet. She stayed to have a first slice of apple cake with us. Then: ‘You men certainly want to talk among yourselves.’ As was right and proper we contradicted her. And as was right and proper she went anyway.
‘May I have another slice of apple cake? It’s delicious.’
Korten leant back in his armchair. ‘I am sure you had good reason for frightening security on Thursday evening. If you don’t mind I’d like to know what it was. I was the one who recently introduced you to the Works, if you like, and I’m the one to get all the puzzled looks when your escapades became known.’
‘How well did you know Schmalz senior? A personal message from you was read out at his funeral.’
‘You weren’t looking for the answer to that question in the shed. But fine, I knew him better and liked him better than all the other men in security. Back in the dark years we grew close to some of the simple employees in a way that is no longer possible today.’
‘He killed Mischkey. And in the hangar I found proof, the thing that killed him.’
‘Old Schmalz? He wouldn’t hurt a fly. What are you talking yourself into, my dear Self.’
Without mentioning Judith or going into detail, I reported what had happened. ‘And if you ask me what any of this has to do with me then I’ll remind you of our last talk. I ask you to go gently on Mischkey and shortly afterwards he’s dead.’
‘And where do you see a reason, a motive, for such action on the part of old Schmalz?’
‘We can come back to that in a minute. First I’d like to know if you have any questions about the order of events.’
Korten got up and prowled back and forth heavily. ‘Why didn’t you call me first thing yesterday morning? Then we might still have discovered something more about what went on in Schmalz’s hangar. Now it’s too late. It was planned for weeks – yesterday the building complex, along with the old hangar, was demolished. That was also the reason I spoke to old Schmalz myself four weeks ago. We had a little schnapps and I tried to break the news to him that we, unfortunately, couldn’t keep the old hangar, nor his apartment.’
‘You were round at Schmalz senior’s?’
‘No, I asked him to come and see me. Naturally I don’t usually deliver such messages. But he’s always reminded me of the old days. And you know how sentimental I am deep down.’
‘And what happened to the delivery van?’
‘No idea. The son will have taken care of it. But once again, where do you see a motive?’
‘I actually thought you’d be able to tell me.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Korten’s steps slowed. He stood still, turned, and scrutinized me.
‘That Schmalz senior personally had no reason to kill Mischkey is clear. But the plant did have some trouble with him, put him under pressure, even had him beaten up; and he did show resistance. And he could have blown your deal with Grimm. You’re not going to tell me you knew nothing about all this?’
No, Korten wasn’t. He had been aware of the trouble and also of the deal with Grimm. But that was surely not the stuff of murder. ‘Unless…’ he removed his glasses, ‘unless old Schmalz misinterpreted something. You know, he was the sort of man who still imagined himself in service, and if his son or another security man told him about the trouble with Mischkey, he might have seen himself as obliged to act as saviour of the Works.’
‘What could Schmalz senior have misunderstood with such serious repercussions?’
‘I don’t know what his son or anyone else might have told him. Or if anyone just plain incited him? I’ll get to the bottom of it. It’s unbearable to think that my good old Schmalz ended up being exploited like this. And what a tragic end. His great love for the Works and a silly little misunderstanding led him to take a life senselessly and unnecessarily, and also to sacrifice his own.’
‘What’s the matter with you? Giving life, taking life, tragedy, exploitation – I’m thinking: “It’s not reprehensible to use people, it’s just tactless to let them notice” ’
‘You’re right, let’s get back to the matter at hand. Should we bring in the police?’
That was it? An over-eager veteran of security had killed Mischkey, and Korten didn’t even turn a hair. Could the prospect of having the police in the Works frighten him? I tried it out.
Korten weighed up the pros and cons. ‘It’s not only the fact that it’s always unpleasant to have the police in the Works. I feel sorry for the Schmalz family. To lose a husband and father and then to discover he had made a lethal mistake – can we take on the responsibility for that? There’s nothing left to atone, he paid with his life. But I’m thinking about reparation. Do you know whether Mischkey had parents he looked after, or other obligations, or whether he has a decent gravestone? Did he leave anyone behind we could do something for? Would you be willing to take care of it?’
I assumed that Judith wouldn’t particularly care to have anything of the sort done for her.
‘I’ve investigated plenty in Mischkey’s case. If you’re serious, Frau Schlemihl can find out what you need to know with a couple of phone calls.’
‘You’re always so sensitive. You did wonderful work on Mischkey’s case. I’m also grateful that you kept going with the second part of the investigation. I need to be aware of such things. May I extend my original contract belatedly and ask you to send a bill?’
He was welcome to the bill.
‘Ah, and another thing,’ said Korten, ‘while we’re talking business. You forgot to enclose your special pass with your report last time. Please do pop it in the envelope with the bill this time.’
I took the pass out of my wallet. ‘You can have it right now. And I’ll be on my way.’
Helga came onto the loggia as though she’d been eavesdropping behind the door, and had picked up the signal for saying goodbye. ‘The flowers are truly delightful, would you like to see where I’ve put them, Herr Self?’
‘Ah, children, drop the formalities. Self is my oldest friend.’ Korten put an arm round both our shoulders.
I wanted out. Instead, I followed the two of them into the sitting room, admired my bouquet on the grand piano, listened to the popping of the champagne cork, and clinked glasses with Helga, over the dropping of formalities.
‘Why haven’t we seen you here more often?’ she asked in all innocence.
‘Yes, we must change that,’ said Korten, before I could respond at all. ‘What are your plans for New Year’s Eve?’
I thought about Brigitte. ‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘That’s wonderful, my dear Self. Then we’ll be in touch with each other again soon.’
Brigitte had prepared beef stroganoff with fresh mushrooms and rice. It tasted delicious, the wine was at a perfect temperature, and the table was lovingly set. Brigitte was chattering. I’d brought her Elton John’s Greatest Hits and he was singing of love and suffering, hope and separation.
She held forth on reflexology, acupressure, and Rolfing. She told me about patients, health insurers, and colleagues. She didn’t care in the least whether it interested me, or how I was.
‘What’s going on today? This afternoon I scarcely recognize Korten, and now I’m sitting here with you and the only thing you have in common with the Brigitte I like is the scar on your earlobe.’
She laid down her fork, put her elbows on the table, rested her head on her hands, and began to weep. I went round the table to her, she nuzzled her head into my belly, and just cried all the more.
‘What’s wrong?’ I stroked her hair.
‘I… oh… I, it’s enough to drive me to tears. I’m going away tomorrow.’
‘Why the tears about that?’
‘It’s for so terribly long. And so far.’ She raised her face.
‘How long, then, and how far?’
‘Oh… I…’ She pulled herself together. ‘Do you have a tissue? I’m going to Brazil for six months. To see my son.’
I sat down. Now I felt ready to weep, too. At the same time I felt angry. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I didn’t know things would turn out so nice between us.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She took my hand. ‘Juan and I had intended to take the six months to see whether we couldn’t be together after all. Manuel misses his mother all the time. And with you I thought it would just be a short episode and over anyway by the time I left for Brazil.’
‘What do you mean, you thought it would be over anyway when you left for Brazil? Postcards from Sugar Loaf Mountain won’t change a thing.’ I was quite bleak with sadness. She said nothing and stared into space. After a while I withdrew my hand from hers and got up. ‘I’d better go now.’ She nodded mutely.
In the hallway she leaned against me for one last moment. ‘You see, I can’t go on being the raven mother that you never liked anyway.’
The night was dreamless. I woke up at six o’clock, knew I had to talk to Judith today and thought about what I should tell her. Everything? How would she be able to continue working at RCW and hold on to her old life? But that was a problem I couldn’t solve for her.
At nine o’clock I phoned her. ‘I’ve wrapped up the case, Judith. Shall we take a walk by the harbour and I’ll fill you in?’
‘You don’t sound good. What have you found out?’
‘I’ll pick you up at ten.’
I put coffee on, took the butter out of the fridge, and the eggs and smoked ham, chopped onions and chives, warmed up milk for Turbo, squeezed three oranges for juice, set the table, and made myself two fried eggs on ham and lightly sweated onions. When the eggs were just right I sprinkled them with chives. The coffee was ready.
I sat for a long time over my breakfast without touching it. Just before ten I took a couple of gulps of coffee. I set down the eggs for Turbo and left.
When I rang the bell, Judith came down straight away. She looked pretty in her loden coat with its collar turned up, as pretty as only an unhappy person can be.
We parked the car by the harbour office and walked between the rail tracks and the old warehouses along Rheinkaistrasse. Beneath the grey September sky it all had the peacefulness of a Sunday. The John Deere tractors were parked as though they were waiting for a field chaplain to begin the service.
‘Will you please finally start to tell me?’
‘Didn’t Firner mention my run-in with plant security on Thursday night?’
‘No. I think he’d gathered I was with Peter.’
I started with the talk I’d had with Korten yesterday, lingered over the question of whether old Schmalz was the last link of a well-functioning chain of command, had crazily set himself up as the saviour of the plant, or had been used, nor did I spare the details of the murder on the bridge. I made it clear that what I knew, and what could be proved, were leagues apart.
Judith strode along firmly beside me. She’d hunched her shoulders and was holding the collar of her coat closed with her left hand against the north wind. She hadn’t interrupted me. But now she said with a small laugh that cut me even further to the quick than her tears would have done: ‘Do you know, Gerhard, it’s so absurd. When I took you on to find out the truth I thought it would help me. But now I feel more at a loss than ever.’
I envied Judith the purity of her grief. My sadness was pervaded by a sense of weakness, of guilt, because I’d delivered Mischkey to the dogs, albeit unwittingly, a feeling that I’d been used, and a strange pride at having come so far. It also saddened me that the case had initially connected Judith and myself then entangled us so much with one another that we’d never be able to grow closer without a sense of awkwardness.
‘You’ll send me the bill?’
She hadn’t understood that Korten wanted to pay for my investigation. As I explained this to her, she retreated even further into herself and said: ‘That fits perfectly. It would also fit if I were to be promoted to Korten’s personal assistant. It’s all so repulsive.’
Between warehouse number seventeen and number nineteen we turned left and came to the Rhine. Opposite lay the RCW skyscraper. The Rhine flowed past, wide and tranquil.
‘What do I do now?’
I had no answers. If she managed tomorrow to lay the folder of letters in front of Firner to sign, as though nothing had happened, she’d come to terms with it.
‘And the terrible thing is that Peter is already so far away, inside. I’ve cleared out everything at home that reminded me of him, because it hurt so much. But now my loneliness feels tidied away, too, and I’m getting cold.’
We walked along the Rhine, following it downstream. Suddenly she turned to me, seized me by the coat, shook me and said: ‘We can’t just let them get away with it!’ With her right arm she made a sweeping gesture encapsulating the Works opposite. ‘They shouldn’t be let off the hook.’
‘No, they shouldn’t be, but they will be. Since the beginning of time, people with power have got away with it. And here perhaps it wasn’t even the people with power, it was a lunatic, Schmalz.’
‘But that’s exactly what power is, not having to act yourself, but getting some lunatic to do it. That can’t excuse them.’
I tried to explain to her that I didn’t want to excuse anyone, but that I simply couldn’t pursue the investigation.
‘Then you’re just one of the somebodies who does the dirty work for those people with power. Leave me alone now, I’ll find my own way back.’
I suppressed the impulse to leave her there, and said instead: ‘That’s mad, the secretary of the director of the RCW reproaching the detective who carried out a contract for the RCW, for working for the RCW. That’s rich.’
We walked on. After a while she put an arm through mine. ‘In the old days, if something bad happened, I always had the feeling it would all be okay again. Life, I mean. Even after my divorce. Now I know nothing will ever be the same again. Do you recognize that?’
I nodded.
‘Listen, it really would be best if I go on walking here on my own for a bit. You needn’t look so worried, I won’t do anything silly.’
From Rheinkaistrasse I looked back. She hadn’t moved. She was looking over to the RCW at the levelled ground of the old factory. The wind blew an empty cement sack over the street.