Self’s Murder

1 In the end

In the end I did head back there.

I didn’t have Nurse Beatrix sign me out. She wouldn’t even let me tackle the short, easy paths leading from the Speyerer Hof Clinic to the big Ehrenfriedhof Cemetery and the Bierhelder Hof, let alone the long steep path that leads up to the Kohlhof. In vain I told her how years ago my wife and I used to go skiing on the Kohlhof: in the morning we’d head up the slope, the bus filled with people, skis, ski poles, and toboggans. Until sundown hundreds would swarm over the rutted slope, more brown than white, with its dilapidated ski jump. At lunchtime pea soup was served at the Kohlhof Restaurant. Klara had better skis than I, was a better skier, and laughed whenever I fell. I would tug at the leather straps of the bindings and grit my teeth; Amundsen had conquered the South Pole with skis that were even more antiquated. In the evening we were tired and happy.

“Let me head over to the Kohlhof, Nurse Beatrix. I’ll take it easy. I want to see it again and remember old times.”

“You’re doing a good enough job remembering right here, Herr Self. Would you be telling me about it otherwise?”

The only thing Nurse Beatrix will allow me to do after a two-week stay at the Speyerer Hof Clinic is to walk a few steps to the elevator, ride down to the lobby, walk a few steps to the terrace, cross it, and go down some stairs to the lawn around the fountain. Nurse Beatrix is generous only when it comes to the view.

“Look at that! What a beautiful view!”

She’s right. I’m sharing a room with a tax inspector who’s suffering from a stomach ailment, and the view from the window is indeed panoramic and beautiful: over the trees and valleys to the Haardt Mountains. I look through the window and think how this region, where I landed by accident during the war, had grown on me and become my home. But was I to think about that all day?

So I waited until the tax inspector fell asleep after lunch, then swiftly and silently took my suit out of the closet, slipped into it, and managed to make my way to the gate without bumping into a single nurse or doctor I knew. The guard didn’t care whether I was an escaping patient or a departing visitor, so I had him call me a cab.

We drove down into the valley, first between meadows and fruit trees, then through tall woods, the sun casting bright spots through the treetops onto the road and the underbrush. We drove past a wooden shack. In the old days the town had been quite a distance away, and hikers would make a last rest stop at this shack before returning home. Nowadays the first houses lie off to the right after just two bends in the road, and a little farther, on the left, is the Bergfriedhof Cemetery. At the foot of the mountain we waited for the light to change, near an old kiosk that I always liked: a Greek temple, its forecourt built on a small terrace and its canopy supported by two Doric columns.

The road to Schwetzingen was open and straight, and we made quick progress. The driver told me all about his bees. From this I concluded that he must be a smoker, and asked him for a cigarette. I didn’t like the taste. Then we arrived and the driver dropped me off with a promise to pick me up again in an hour to take me back.

I stood on the Schlossplatz. The building had been renovated. It was still covered in scaffolding, but the windows had been replaced and the sandstone frames of the door and window casings cleaned up. The only thing missing was a final coat of paint to make it just as spruced-up as the other buildings around the square, all three-storied and neat, with flowerboxes in the windows. There was no indication what the building would be-a restaurant, a café, a law firm, a doctor’s office, a software company-and, peeking through a window, I saw only floor tarps and painters’ ladders, paint cans, and rollers.

The Schlossplatz was empty except for the chestnut trees and the statue of the anonymous market wife selling asparagus. I remembered the streetcar whose rails used to end in a loop on the square. I looked over at the castle.

What did I expect? That the building’s gate would open and they would all come out, stand in a row, bow, and laugh as they scattered in all directions?

A cloud covered the sun and a cold wind blew over the square. I felt a chill. Autumn hung in the air.

2 In a ditch

It all began one Sunday in February. I was heading back home to Mannheim from Beerfelden with my girlfriend, Brigitte, and her son, Manuel. Brigitte had a friend who had moved to Beerfelden from Viernheim and had invited us for a coffee-and-cake housewarming. Their children got on well together and the women talked and talked. By the time we got into the car it was already dark.

We had barely set out when it began to snow-large, heavy, wet flakes. The narrow road uphill through the woods was desolate. There was no car in front or behind, nor any coming in our direction. The snowflakes got thicker. The car swerved in the curves, the wheels skidded where the road was steep, and visibility was just enough for me to keep the car on the road. Manu, who had been chattering away, fell silent, and Brigitte kept her hands folded in her lap. Only her dog, Nonni, was asleep as if nothing was going on. The heater hadn’t really kicked in, but my forehead was covered in pearls of sweat.

“Shouldn’t we stop and wait for the-”

“It could snow for hours, Brigitte. And once we get snowed in, we’ll be stuck.”

I saw the car in the ditch only because the driver had left his headlights on, and they shone across the road like a barrier. I stopped.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Brigitte asked.

“I’ll deal with it.”

I got out, pulled up the collar of my jacket, and trudged through the snow. A Mercedes had strayed onto a side road and in attempting to get back onto the main road had gotten stuck in a ditch. I heard music-piano and orchestra-and through the fogged-over windows saw two men in the lighted interior, one in the driver’s seat, the other diagonally behind him in the backseat. Like a steamship run aground, I thought, or an airplane after an emergency landing: the music plays on as if nothing has happened, but the journey has come to an end. I tapped on the driver’s window and he lowered it a chink.

“Need help?”

Before the driver could answer the other man leaned over and opened the back door. “Thank God! Get in,” he said, leaning back and motioning with his hand. Heat streamed from the interior, along with the aroma of leather and smoke. The music was so loud that the man had to raise his voice. He turned to the driver: “Turn it down, please!”

I got in. The driver took his time. He slowly reached over to the radio, fumbled for the knob, and turned it, and the music grew softer. His boss waited with a frown until it fell silent.

“We can’t get out of here, and the phone isn’t working. I have a feeling this is the back of beyond.” He laughed bitterly, as if getting stuck were not only a mishap but some personal slight.

“Can we give you a lift?”

“Could you help push the car? If we can manage to get out of this ditch we’ll be all right. There’s nothing wrong with the car.”

I looked at the driver, expecting him to say something. After all, he was responsible for this mess. But he didn’t say anything. In the rearview mirror I could see his eyes fixed on me.

The boss saw my questioning look. “Why don’t I get in the driver’s seat, and you and Gregor push? What we need…”

“No.” The driver turned around. A mature face and a low, hoarse voice. “I’ll stay here, and you do the pushing.” I heard an accent, but I couldn’t quite place it.

The boss was the younger of the two, but looking at his delicate hands and slender build, I couldn’t make rhyme or reason of the driver’s suggestion. However, the boss did not contradict him. We got out. The driver stepped on the gas and we pushed against the car, the spinning wheels whirring and flinging out snow, pine needles, leaves, and mud. We went on pushing, it went on snowing, and our hair got wet, our hands and ears numb. Brigitte and Manu came over. I had them sit on the car’s trunk, and when I got on it, too, the wheels made contact and the car lurched out of the ditch with a jolt.

“Get home safely!” I called out after them, and we headed back to our car.

“Wait a minute!” The boss came running after us. “Who should I thank for rescuing us?”

I found a card in my jacket pocket and handed it to him. “‘Gerhard Self.’”

He blew the flakes off the card and read aloud: “‘Private investigator.’ You are… You are a detective? Then I have a job for you. Can you drop by my office?” He rummaged around in his pockets for a card but didn’t find one. “My name is Welker, and it’s the bank at the Schlossplatz in Schwetzingen. Will you remember that?”

3 A job’s a job

I didn’t go to Schwetzingen the following day, nor the day after. In fact, I had no intention of going. Our encounter that stormy night on the Hirschhorner Höhe, and his invitation, reminded me of the promises one makes with holiday acquaintances. They never work out.

But a job’s a job, and a case is a case. I had spent last fall investigating the sick-leave claims of salesladies at the Tengelmann department store chain, and had managed to catch one or two who were feigning illness. That was about as rewarding as being a train conductor on the lookout for fare dodgers. In the winter no cases came my way. It’s just the way of the world: one doesn’t hire a private detective who is over seventy as a bodyguard, or send him around the world to chase down stolen jewels. Even a department store chain that wants to spy on its sales staff will be more impressed by a younger fellow with a cell phone and a BMW who’s a former cop turned private investigator than by an old guy driving an old Opel.

Not that I didn’t manage to keep myself busy all winter without cases. I cleaned my office at the Augustaanlage, waxed and polished the wooden floors, and washed the window. It is a big window; the office used to be a tobacconist’s store, and the window was for display. I cleaned my apartment, around the corner in the Richard-Wagner-Strasse, and put my cat, Turbo, who’s getting too fat, on a diet. I showed Manu The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in the Kunsthalle museum, and the Suebenheim burial mounds at the Reiss Museum. In the Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit I showed him the electrified chairs and beds that were used in the nineteenth century in attempts to drive tapeworms out of people’s intestines. I took Manu to the Sultan Selim mosque and to the synagogue. On TV we watched Bill Clinton being sworn into office. In the Luisenpark we went to see the storks, which had not flown to Africa this winter, and walked all the way down the bank of the Rhine to the Strandbad-its closed restaurant white, unapproachable, and dignified, like an English seaside casino in winter. I tried to convince myself that I was relishing the opportunity to do everything I’d always wanted to but couldn’t find time for.

Until Brigitte asked me: “Why are you always going shopping? And why don’t you go during the day, when the stores are empty, instead of in the evening, when they’re packed? That’s the kind of thing old people do.” Her questions went on. “And is that why you eat lunch at the Nordsee and the Kaufhof? When you had time on your hands, you always used to do your own cooking.”

A few days before Christmas I couldn’t make it up the stairs to my apartment. I felt as if my chest were clamped in iron, my left arm hurt, and my head was, in a strange way, both clear and befuddled. I sat down on the first landing until Herr and Frau Weiland came and helped me up to the top floor, where our apartments are across from each other. I lay down on my bed and fell asleep, slept through the whole of the following day, the day after that, and Christmas Eve. When Brigitte came looking for me on Christmas Day, first irritated and then worried, I did get up, and had some of her roast beef along with a glass of red wine. But for weeks afterward I was tired and could not exert myself without breaking out in a sweat and getting out of breath.

“You had a heart attack, Gerhard, and not a small one at that-I’d say a medium one. You should’ve been in intensive care,” said my friend Philipp, a surgeon at the Mannheim municipal hospital, shaking his head when I told him later about it. “There’s no messing with the old ticker. If you aggravate it you’ll end up biting the dust.”

He sent me to his internist colleague, who wanted to push a tube from my groin into my heart. A tube from my groin into my heart! I told him thanks, but no thanks.

4 Silent partner

The lady I do all my banking with at the Badische Beamtenbank knew the name Welker, and the bank on the Schlossplatz in Schwetzingen. “Weller and Welker. It’s the oldest private bank in the whole Palatinate area. Back in the seventies and eighties it was struggling to survive, but it’s pulled through. I hope you aren’t thinking of leaving us.”

I called and was put through to Welker’s office. “Ah, Herr Self. I’m so glad you called. Today or tomorrow’s fine, though I’d much rather…” His words became muffled for a few seconds as he covered the mouthpiece. Then: “Could you come over today at two?”

The road was dry. The snow at the sides had turned grimy. It had dripped from the trees and dried in the furrows of the fields. Beneath a gray, low-hanging sky the traffic signs, guardrails, houses, and fences were waiting for spring, and a spring cleaning.

The bank Weller & Welker was marked only by a small tarnished brass plate. I rang the bell and a door within a large gate swung open. The entry was vaulted and paved. Three steps on the left led to another door, which opened as the first one closed. I climbed the stairs and felt as if I had stepped into another era. The bank counters were carved of dark wood and had wooden bars. The panels next to them were inlaid with blond wood: a cogwheel, two crossed hammers, a wheel with wings, a mortar and pestle, and the barrel of a cannon. The bench at the far end of the room was of the same dark wood and had dark green velvet cushions. The walls were covered in shimmering dark green fabric, and the ornate ceiling was also of dark wood.

The room was silent. There was no rustle of bills, no clinking of coins, no hushed voices. I didn’t see behind the lattice any men with mustaches, hair plastered on scalps, pencils behind ears, leather sleeve patches, or rubber-banded upper arms, which would have been appropriate here, nor did I see their modern counterparts. I stepped closer to the counter, saw the dust on the bars of the lattice, and was about to peer through when suddenly the door across from the entrance opened.

The driver was standing in the doorway. “Herr Self, I-”

He didn’t manage to finish the sentence. Welker came rushing past him toward me. “I’m so glad you were able to come. My last client’s just left. Let’s go upstairs.”

Behind the door there was a steep narrow staircase. I followed Welker up and the driver followed me. The stairs opened into a large office with partitions, desks, computers, phones, a number of young men sporting dark suits and serious faces, and an occasional young woman or two. Welker and the driver swiftly escorted me through to the executive office, which had a view of the Schlossplatz. I was ushered to a leather sofa while Welker settled into one chair and the driver the other.

Welker waved his hand with a broad welcoming gesture. “Gregor Samarin is one of the family. You see, he likes to drive, and he’s better at it than I am…” Welker saw my surprise. “No, he does like driving and is good at it, which is why he was at the wheel the other day when we met. But that’s not his job. His job is to see to all practical matters.” Welker looked over at Samarin as if to check whether he agreed.

Samarin nodded slowly. He must have been in his early fifties. He had a large head, a receding hairline, and protruding light blue eyes. His colorless hair was cut short. He sat confidently, with his legs apart.

Welker didn’t continue right away. At first I thought he might be weighing what he wanted to say, but then I wondered if there wasn’t a message in his silence. But what message? Or did he want to give me an opportunity to take everything in: the atmosphere, Gregor Samarin, himself? He had been particularly attentive and polite when he greeted me and walked me to his office. I could see him as a suave host, or at a diplomatic or academic affair. Was his silence a question of style, old-school good breeding? He struck me as a man of breeding: clear, sensitive, intelligent features; good posture; measured movements. At the same time he struck me as sad, and though a certain cheerfulness flitted over his face when he greeted me or smiled, a shadow would quickly darken it once more. It was not just a shadow of sadness. I noticed something sullen and sulking about his mouth, a disappointment, as if fate had cheated him out of some promised indulgence.

“We’re about to celebrate our two-hundredth anniversary, a major event for which my father wants a history of our establishment. I’ve been working on it for some time, whenever I can get away from business, and as grandfather had done some research and left some notes, my task isn’t difficult, except in one matter.”

He hesitated, brushed a few strands of hair from his forehead, leaned back, and glanced at Samarin, who was sitting motionless. “In 1873, the stock exchanges in both Vienna and Berlin collapsed. The depression lasted until 1880-long enough for the days of the private banker to become numbered. The era of the big stock banks and savings banks had begun, and some private bankers who survived the depression turned their enterprises into joint stock corporations. Others merged; others simply gave up. Our bank prevailed.”

Again he hesitated. I no longer get irritated; in earlier days I would have. I hate it when people beat about the bush.

“Our bank prevailed not only because my great grandfather and great-great-grandfather were good businessmen, and the old Wellers, were, too. Since the 1870s, we had had a silent partner, who by the time of the First World War had brought in around half a million. That might not sound like a lot to you, but let me tell you, it was a significant amount. The long and short of it is that I can’t write a history of our bank without also focusing on this silent partner. However”-this time he paused for dramatic effect-“I don’t know who this partner was. My father doesn’t know the partner’s name, my grandfather doesn’t mention him in his notes, and I haven’t found it in any of the documents.”

“A very silent partner indeed.”

He laughed, and for a moment had a youthful, rascally look about him. “I’d be grateful if you could make him speak.”

“You want me to-”

“I’d like you to find out who this silent partner was. His name, his birth and death dates, what he did for a living, who his family was. Did he have children? Is one of his great-grandsons going to come knocking at my door, asking for his share?”

“Wasn’t this silent partnership terminated?”

He shook his head. “After 1918, my grandfather’s notes don’t mention anything about it anymore. No mention of the partnership, nor of any more money being brought in, nor anything about settling accounts or buying anyone out. Somehow the partnership came to an end. Now I can’t really imagine any great-grandsons suddenly turning up. Anyone who had a large pile of money stashed away with us would have had ample reason in all these years to come claim it.”

“Why don’t you hire a historian? I bet there are hundreds of them who get degrees every year and can’t find a job-they’d jump at the chance to go looking for lost partners.”

“I’ve tried my luck with history students and retired professors. It was a disaster. I ended up knowing less than when I started. No”-he shook his head-“I’ve chosen you for a reason. One could argue that your job and theirs is the same: historians and detectives both go after truths that are buried and forgotten, and yet the methods are quite different. Maybe your approach will get better results than those history fellows.’ Take a few days, cast about a bit, follow different leads. If nothing comes up, then nothing comes up-I’ll get over it.” He picked up a checkbook and a fountain pen from the table and placed them on his knees. “How much should I give you as an advance?”

I’d do some casting about for a few days-if he wanted to pay me for that, then why not?

“Two thousand. My fee’s a hundred an hour, plus expenses. I’ll provide you with a detailed breakdown once I’m done.”

He wrote out the check, handed it to me, and got up. “I hope you’ll get back to me soon. I’ll be here at the office, so if you prefer dropping by to calling, I’d be delighted.”

Samarin walked me down the stairs and past the tellers. When we reached the door he took me by the arm. “Herr Welker’s wife died last year, and he’s been working day and night ever since. He shouldn’t have taken on the history of the bank on top of everything else. I’d be grateful if you would call me should you come up with something or if you need anything. I want to lighten his load any way I can.” Samarin peered at me expectantly.

“How do the names Welker, Weller, and Samarin go together?”

“What you mean is, how does Samarin fit in with Weller and Welker. It doesn’t. My mother was Russian and worked as an interpreter during the war. She died when she gave birth to me. The Welkers were my foster parents.”

He was still peering at me expectantly. Was he waiting for confirmation that I’d come to him and not to Welker?

I said good-bye. The door didn’t have a handle, but next to it was a button. I pressed it and the door opened, then fell shut behind me with a loud snap. I gazed over the empty square and was pleased with the job and the check in my pocket.

5 The Gotthard Tunnel and the Andes Railway

At the University of Mannheim library I located a history of German banking: three fat volumes filled with text, numbers, and graphs. I managed to check them out and take them with me. Back at my office I sat down and began to read. The traffic hummed outside, then came twilight and darkness. The Turk from next door, who sells newspapers, cigarettes, and bric-a-brac of every kind, closed his shop, and when he saw me by the lamp at my desk he knocked at the door and wished me a pleasant evening. I didn’t go home until my eyes began to hurt, and was once again poring over the books when the Turk opened his shop in the morning and the children who were always his first customers were buying their chewing gum and Gummi Bears. By afternoon I had finished.

I’ve never had much interest in banking-and why should I? Whatever I earn ends up in my checking account, and what I need on a daily basis gets drawn from there, as do payments for health insurance, social security, and life insurance. There are times when more money accumulates in my account than gets withdrawn, and what I do then is buy a few shares of Rhineland Chemical Works stock and put the certificates in my safe. They lie there untouched as the market rises and falls.

And yet banking and its history is anything but dull. In those three volumes I found quite a few references to the Weller & Welker Bank. It was founded toward the end of the eighteenth century when Herr Weller, a Swabian who was a sales and freight expeditor in Stuttgart, and Herr Welker from Baden, who had been banker to one of the prince elector’s cousins, formed a partnership. They began with currency transactions and bills of exchange but soon moved on to government loans and securities. Their bank was too small to assume a leading role in any important ventures, but it was such a reliable and reputable establishment that larger banks were happy to involve them in projects, such as the founding of the Rhineland Chemical Works, the launching of the Mannheim Municipal Loan in 1868 that funded the construction of the Mannheim-Karlsruhe railroad, and the financing of the Gotthard Tunnel. Weller & Welker had a particularly lucky hand in Latin American ventures, ranging from Brazilian and Colombian government loans to involvement in the Vera Cruz and Mexico railroad and the Andes line.

Theirs is a history that can hold its own alongside that of other private banks that not only have a history but have made history: the Bethmanns, Oppenheims, and Rothschilds. The author regretted that he was not able to write more about private banks; they kept their archives under lock and key, and if they did open them it was only to scholars they commissioned to do research for jubilees and commemorative tributes. Private banks gave their archival records to public archives only in cases of liquidation, or of foundations being established.

I took out a pack of Sweet Aftons from the filing cabinet where I lock up my cigarettes so that when I want a smoke I don’t just open a pack but have to get up, go over to the filing cabinet, and unlock it. Brigitte hopes this will make me smoke less. I lit a cigarette. Welker had mentioned only his own documents, not the bank’s archives. Had the bank Weller & Welker dissolved its archives and disposed of their contents? I put a call through to the state archives in Karlsruhe, and the official responsible for industry and banking was still in the office. No, the archives of Weller & Welker were not on deposit with them. No, they were not on deposit at any other public archive, either. No, he could not say with certainty if the bank had an archive. Private archives are only randomly collected and preserved. But hell would freeze over before a private bank would-

“And we’re not talking about any old bank,” I cut in. “Weller and Welker was founded almost two centuries ago. The bank cofinanced the Gotthard Tunnel and the Andes Railroad.” I was boasting a little with my newly acquired knowledge. And they say boasting gets you nowhere.

“Ah, that bank! Didn’t they also finance the Michelstadt-Eberbach Railroad? Could you hold on for a second?”

I heard him put down the receiver, push back a chair, and open and shut a drawer. “In Schwetzingen there’s a certain Herr Schuler who is involved with the archives of that bank. He’s researching the history of the Baden railways and kept us quite busy with his questions.”

“Do you happen to have Schuler’s address?”

“Not at hand. It must be in the file with our correspondence. I’m not certain, though, if I can… I mean, it’s personal information, isn’t it? And it would be confidential, wouldn’t it? May I ask why you want his address?”

But I had already taken out the white pages, opened them to Schwetzingen, and found the teacher Adolf Schuler, retired. I thanked the official and hung up.

6 No fool

The retired teacher Adolf Schuler lived behind the palace gardens in a tiny house that wasn’t much bigger than the nearby garden sheds. I looked in vain for a bell and knocked on the door, then walked through the slushy snow of the garden to the back of the house, where I found the kitchen door open. He was sitting by the stove, eating out of a pot while reading a book. Heaped on the table, the floor, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the sideboard, and the cupboards were books, files, dirty dishes, empty and full cans and bottles, moldy bread, rotting fruit, and dirty laundry. There was a sour, musty smell in the air. Schuler himself stank. His breath reeked and his spattered tracksuit gave off a haze of old sweat. He wore a sweat-rimmed cap the way Americans do, and wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose, and so many age spots covered his wrinkled face that his skin had acquired a dark complexion.

He did not protest at my suddenly appearing in his kitchen. I introduced myself as a retired official from Mannheim who now has all the time in the world to occupy himself with the history of railroads, for which he’s always had a passion. At first Schuler was grumpy, but he warmed up when he saw my pleasure at the wealth of knowledge he displayed. He led me through the burrows of his house, which was chock-full of books and papers, from one cavern to the next, from one hallway to the next, picking up a book here, pulling out a file there to show me. After a while he did not seem to notice or care that I was no longer asking questions about the involvement of Weller & Welker in the building of the Baden railways.

He told me about Estefania Cardozo, a Brazilian woman who had been a lady-in-waiting at the court of Pedro II, whom old Herr Weller had married in 1834 during a journey through Central and South America. They had a son who as a youth had absconded to Brazil and set up a business there, and returned to Schwetzingen with his Brazilian wife after the death of old Herr Weller. There he ran the bank with young Welker. Schuler told me of the centenary celebration in the palace gardens, which had been attended by the grand duke. There a lieutenant from Baden, one of the Welker clan, and a lieutenant from the grand duke’s entourage got into an argument. This resulted in a duel the following morning, at which, to Schuler’s great pride as a man from Baden, the Prussian lieutenant fell. He also told me of a sixteen-year-old Welker who in the summer of 1914 had fallen in love with Weller’s fifteen-year-old daughter, and because he could not get permission to marry her enlisted right at the outbreak of the war, seeking and finding death in the bravura of a foolish cavalry charge.

“At sixteen?”

“What is sixteen too young for? For death? For war? For love? The Weller girl had inherited Portuguese and Indian blood from her mother and grandmother, so by fifteen she was already a woman who could turn men’s heads and make their senses reel.”

He took me to a wall covered with photographs and showed me a young woman with large dark eyes, full lips, a rich cascade of curls, and a pained, haughty expression. She was spectacularly beautiful, and had still been so as an old woman, as the picture hanging next to the first one testified.

“But their parents considered them too young for marriage,” I said.

“It wasn’t a question of age. Both families had agreed not to allow their children to marry. They did not want the two partners to end up as brothers-in-law or cousins, adding family quarrels to potential business conflicts. Well, the children could have eloped and faced being disinherited, but they weren’t strong enough. With the last Welker, though, it wasn’t a problem anymore. Bertram was an only child, as was Stephanie, and their parents were happy enough that the money would remain in the family. There’s not much left anymore.”

“She died?”

“She fell to her death last year when the two of them were on a mountain hike. Her body was never found.” Schuler was silent, and I didn’t say anything, either. He knew what I was thinking. “There was a police investigation,” he continued. “There always is in such cases, but he was cleared. They had spent the night in a hut. He was still asleep in the morning when she went out onto a glacier that he hadn’t wanted to hike on. Didn’t you read about it? It was all over the papers.”

“Did they have any kids?”

He nodded. “Two-a boy and a girl. They’re now at a boarding school in Switzerland.”

I nodded, too. Yes, yes, life’s tough. He sighed, and I made a few commiserating sounds. He shuffled into the kitchen, took a can of beer out of the refrigerator, picked up a dirty glass from the table, wiped at it with the sleeve of his track-suit, struggled to open the can with his gouty fingers, and poured half the contents into the glass. With his left hand he held out the glass to me, but I took the can out of his right hand and said, “Cheers!”

“Here’s to you!”

We drank.

“Are you the archivist of Weller and Welker?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The official at the state archives talks of you as if you are colleagues.”

“Well…” He burped. “I wouldn’t say I was a colleague, exactly, nor could you call this a real archive. Old Herr Welker was interested in the history of his bank and asked me to put all the old files in order. We knew each other from school, old Herr Welker and I, and were like friends. He sold me this house for next to nothing, and I tutored his son and his grandchildren, and whenever we could help each other out we did so. His cellar was full of old things, as was his attic. No one had the slightest idea what was there or knew where anything was. Nobody ended up doing anything with it.”

“What about you?”

“What about me? When Old Herr Welker had the storage area renovated, he had lights, ventilation, and heating installed in the cellar. So here are all the old things, and I’m still busy sorting it all out. Well-perhaps you could say that I’m the bank’s archivist.”

“And every year you acquire more old files. It sounds like a Sisyphean task.”

“That it is.” He headed back to the refrigerator, took out two beers, and gave me one. Then he looked me in the eye. “I used to be a teacher, and all my life had to listen to my pupils’ clever or silly lies, their excuses, their explanations, their little dodges. This place is a mess. My niece keeps telling me that, and I know it myself. I can’t smell a thing: no good smells, no bad smells, no flowers, no perfumes. I can’t tell if the food is burning on the stove or the clothes on the ironing board. I can’t even tell if I stink. And yet”-he took the cap off his head and ran his fingers over his bald pate-“I’m no fool. Are you going to tell me who you really are and what it is you really want?”

7 C, L, or Z

Once a teacher always a teacher, and for a good teacher we all remain pupils, no matter how old we might be. I told him who I was and what I was looking for. Perhaps I did this because of our age; the older I get, the readier I am to assume that people as old as I am will be on my side. And I did want to know what he might have to say.

“The silent partner… That’s an old story. Bertram’s right,” he told me. “His silent share was about half a million, about as large as that of both families, and stopped the bank from having to declare bankruptcy. We don’t know his name, and the Welkers and Wellers I’ve known in my time and who are now dead didn’t know, either. I’m not saying we knew nothing about him. He sent letters from Strasbourg and so must have lived there. He was in the legal profession, perhaps a company attorney or a lawyer, or maybe even a professor. When the syndicates came up in the 1880s Weller and Welker took an interest in them, and he clarified for them how to set one up legally, and what the legal aspects would be. In 1887, he thought about moving to Heidelberg; there’s a letter in which he seeks information concerning a house or apartment. But in lieu of a legible signature, we have only an initial-a C, L, or Z-and it’s unclear whether it stood for a first name or a surname, because though he seemed to be on the friendliest terms with both Weller and Welker, in those days one could be the best of friends with someone and still address him by his surname.”

“There can’t have been that many men in the legal profession in Strasbourg. A hundred? Two hundred? What do you think?” I cut in.

“Let’s say there were six hundred in all during the period in question. With those initials I’d say there’d be at most a hundred, half of whom can be eliminated since they did not live there the entire time. To follow up on the remaining fifty would be a lot of work, but it’s doable. Old Herr Welker didn’t think it was worth pursuing, which was my view, too. As for Bertram not being able to write the history of the bank without the silent partner’s name, that’s nonsense. One thing I’d like to know is why he didn’t come to me with his request, but to you?” Schuler was working himself into a rage. “In fact, why doesn’t anyone ever come to me? I sit in my cellar and nobody comes to me. Am I a mole, a rat, a wood louse?”

“You’re a badger. Look at your burrow: caves, tunnels, entries and exits buried in a mountain of files.”

“A badger!” He slapped his thighs. “A badger! Follow me; I’ll show you my other burrow.”

He hurried out into the garden, waving dismissively when I pointed out that he had left the kitchen door ajar. He pulled the garden gate open and started his car. It was a BMW-Isetta, a model from the 1950s in which the front wheels are farther apart than the back wheels, and the front of the car is also the door, which claps open with the steering wheel-the kind of vehicle for which you need a driver’s license not for a car, but for a motorbike. I sat down next to him and we went chugging off.

The old warehouse was not far from the Schlossplatz. It was an elongated three-story building with offices and apartments whose former function was no longer evident. In the eighteenth century the Wellers, when they were still sales and freight expeditors, had had their Palatine center here, with a countinghouse, stables, lofts, and a two-level cellar. Schuler had stored the boxes with the unexamined material in the lower cellar, while in the upper cellar the material he had already been through lined the shelves on the walls. There was again that sour, musty smell. At the same time the aroma of the glue Schuler used for his scrapbooks hung pleasantly in the air. There was bright daylight in the upper cellar. The lawn outside was so low-lying that there was space for a large window. This was where Schuler worked, and he had me sit at the table. I saw the abundance of files as an irredeemable jumble, but Schuler knew exactly what was where, reached for everything with ease, untied one bundle of files after another, and spread out his finds before me.

“Herr Schuler!”

“Here, for instance, we have-”

“Herr Schuler!”

He put the files down.

“You don’t have to prove to me that what you said was true. I believe you.”

“Then why doesn’t he believe me? Why didn’t he tell me anything, why didn’t he ask me?” Schuler was again talking himself into a rage, waving his hands and arms about and sending out waves of the odor of sweat.

I tried to calm him down. “The bank is going through a crisis. Welker’s lost his wife and has had to send his children away-you can’t expect him to be thinking files and archives. He only sent me looking for the silent partner because he happened to meet me.”

“You really think so?” He sounded doubting and hopeful.

I nodded. “I bet all of this is very difficult for him. He doesn’t strike me as particularly hardy.”

Schuler thought it over. “It’s true-late children are the delicate ones, and because they come along late in life they get fussed over all the more. When Bertram was born in 1958, his parents were over forty. He was a sweet boy, talented, somewhat dreamy, and quite spoiled. A child of Germany ’s boom years, if you know what I mean. But you’re right: it can’t be easy for him without Stephanie and the children-and it was only a few years back that his parents died in a car crash.” He shook his head. “Here you have a man who had everything you could wish for in life, and then…”

8 Women!

That evening I cooked some polenta with pork medallions and an olive-anchovy sauce for Brigitte and Manu. We sat at the large table in my kitchen.

“A man has a wife and two children, and together with his wife a whole lot of money. One day husband and wife go hiking in the mountains. He comes back alone.”

“He killed her,” Manu said, flicking his index finger across his neck. He’s always been outspoken, and even more so since his voice broke. This worries Brigitte and, single mother that she is, she expects me to stand by her and be a sensitive and steadfast male role model for her son.

She eyed us severely. “Perhaps it was a tragic accident. Why are you both always jumping to-”

“How come you didn’t cook spaghetti?” Manu cut in. “I don’t like this yellow stuff.”

“It might well have been an accident. But let’s suppose that he did in fact murder her. Would it have been for the money?”

“Might he have had a paramour?” Manu proposed.

“What?” We had underestimated the range of Manu’s vocabulary.

“Well, a woman he was screwing.”

“Nowadays one doesn’t have to murder one’s wife because of a paramour. You can divorce your wife and marry the paramour,” Brigitte said.

“But then there goes half the money. Gerhard just told us that they had a lot of money together. And why marry a paramour?”

“I really like the polenta,” Brigitte said, “and the meat and the sauce, too-and you cooked for us and got the merlot I like. You’re such a sweetheart.” She raised her glass. “But you men are fools. He came back alone, you said?”

I nodded. “That’s right. And her body was never found.”

“There you go!” Brigitte said. “She’s not dead. She had a lover and went off with him. And as for the husband who never cared for her, serves him right.”

“Nice try, Mom,” Manu chimed in. “But it doesn’t pan out. If everyone thinks she’s dead, how does she get at the money?”

It was my turn. “That’s the last thing on her mind. Even if her lover is only a golf or tennis pro, he’s the love of her life, and love is worth more than all the money in the world.”

Brigitte looked at me pityingly, as if among foolish men I were a particular fool. “It wasn’t just the money the husband and the wife had together; they also ran the business together. And the wife-I’m sorry to have to put it this way-happens to be the cleverer: she siphons off money behind his back and opens an account in Costa Rica. That’s where she’s living with her lover, a young painter. And because she can’t sit still, she’s back in business and has made a fortune supplying the Costa Rican market with chocolate marshmallows.”

“Why Costa Rica?”

“Astrid and Dirk went there and loved it. Why don’t we ever go to such places on vacation? Both Manu and I speak Portuguese, and the only thing down there that got on Astrid’s and Dirk’s nerves was that they had to speak English and everyone took them for gringos.”

“Mom?”

“Yes, Manu?”

“What about the children? If the wife goes to Costa Rica with her lover, does she just forget her children?”

Manu had been raised for many years by his father in Brazil. Brigitte has never discussed with him why she allowed his father to take him there, nor has Manu brought up how he felt about it, then or now. He peered at her with his dark eyes.

She peered back at him, and then at her plate. When her tears dropped onto the polenta she said, “Oh, damn!” and picked up the napkin from her lap, put it beside her plate, pushed her chair back, got up, and left the room. Manu’s eyes followed her. After a few moments he got up, too, and went to the door. He looked back at me, shrugged his shoulders, and grinned. “Women!” Later, when Manu and Turbo had fallen asleep in front of the TV, we tucked Manu in and went off to bed, where we lay next to each other, lost in thought. Why had Welker hired me? Because he had murdered his wife on account of the money, and was now worried that a descendant of the silent partner might demand his share? Was he more worried about this than he had admitted? But why hadn’t he sent Schuler in search of the silent partner? For that matter, why hadn’t he sent me to Schuler? I could not imagine that Schuler and the archive had just slipped his mind, nor could I imagine that all this had to do with his writing the history of the bank. But it didn’t really make sense, either, that he’d have killed his wife. Does one murder one’s wife and then hire a private investigator, someone who’s notoriously inquisitive and wary, a regular snoop? Then I thought about the conversation we’d had at dinner and laughed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“You’re a wonderful woman.”

“Are you about to propose?”

“An old fool like me?”

“Come here, you old fool.”

She turned toward me and in her arms I felt as if I were being washed over by big waves, then soft ones, and then a calm sea.

I felt her tears as she nestled up to me to go to sleep.

“Things will work out just fine with Manu,” I whispered. “You’ll see.”

“I know,” she whispered back. “And you? Your case?”

I decided not to go to my old friend, Chief Inspector Nägelsbach, nor to look into Frau Welker’s death, nor to go looking for the father Welker had mentioned-and who, since Welker’s father was dead, would have to be old Herr Weller. I decided not to look into how the bank had recovered financially and what its current situation was. I would leave all that and, following the correct procedure for a fair-and-square private investigator, inform my client of the progress of my investigation and ask if he wanted me to follow the Strasbourg lead.

“My case? I think I can handle it.”

But she was already asleep.

9 An ongoing process

At first the fact that I couldn’t reach Welker didn’t get on my nerves. I was invariably told, pleasantly enough, that he was in conference. Would I not like to speak to Herr Samarin instead? The following morning the friendly woman’s voice informed me that Herr Welker would be out of the office all day, but that I was welcome to try him again tomorrow-though she could put me through to Herr Samarin, if I liked. She renewed the offer the following day, and informed me regretfully that Herr Welker was still out of the office and wouldn’t be back till later.

“When?”

“I couldn’t say. But Herr Samarin might know. One moment, please.”

“Hello, Herr Self? How’s your investigation coming along?”

Though his accent came across stronger on the phone, I still could not place it.

“It’s coming along fine. When’s your boss due back?”

“We were expecting him yesterday and think he’ll be in today. Not that I can guarantee it; he might not be in till tomorrow. I suggest you call back next week. Unless I can be of service?”

Later I got a call from Schuler, who was irate and fuming. “What did you tell Bertram Welker about me?”

“Not a word. I didn’t even get to-”

“Then may I ask why Gregor Samarin, his damn lackey, wouldn’t let me see him? I was Gregor’s teacher, too, and he was my pupil, even if quite a stubborn one. How dare he tell me in that tone that he knows everything and that he doesn’t need me, and Bertram doesn’t need me, either?”

“Herr Welker has been out of the office for the past few days. Why-”

“Balderdash! I saw Bertram and Gregor pulling up in their car when I got there. I don’t know if Bertram recognized me. I don’t think he did, otherwise he’d never have left me standing there.”

“When was this?”

“Just now.”

I put another call through to the bank, but was again told that Herr Welker was away. Now my curiosity was piqued, and I drove over to Schwetzingen. The sun was shining, the snow was gone, and little snowdrops were blossoming in the gardens. Spring was in the air. On the Schlossplatz in Schwetzingen the first strollers were out and about; young men casually draped their sweaters over their shoulders, and the girls’ short blouses revealed their navels. The cafés had put out a few tables where people with warm coats could sit.

I sat outside until the sun disappeared and it grew colder. I smoked and drank tea, Earl Grey, which goes well with my Sweet Afton cigarettes. I could see everyone who entered or left the bank, and all the bustling about in the large office area on the second floor: the back-and-forth, people getting up and sitting down. In Welker’s office the metallic chain curtains were drawn shut, revealing nothing. But as I got up to go inside the café to sit by the window, the curtains parted and Welker opened the window, leaned on the sill, and looked out over the square. I darted into the café, from where I could see him gazing into the distance. He shook his head, and after a while closed the window. The curtain was drawn shut again and the lights went on.

There weren’t many pedestrians in the streets. The bank’s few customers mostly pulled up in their cars; they drove up to the gate, which swung open to let them in, and about half an hour later let them out again. At five o’clock, four young women left the bank, and at seven, three young men. In Welker’s office the lights remained on till nine thirty. I worried that I might not make it to my car fast enough to be able to tail him. But I stood on the square waiting in vain for the gate to swing open and for him to drive out or to emerge from the door within the gate. The bank lay in darkness. After a while I sauntered across the square and around the block. I didn’t find another entrance to the bank, but from a neighboring yard that was accessible from the street I got a rear view of the bank’s roof. It had been built out, and the windows and balcony door were brightly lit. I could make out paintings on some of the walls, and I could tell that the curtains were made of fabric. These weren’t more offices; this was an apartment.

I didn’t head back home right away. I called Babs, an old girlfriend, a German-and French-language teacher. She never went to bed before midnight.

“Sure, come by,” she said.

She was grading papers, sitting over a second bottle of red wine and a full ashtray. I told her all about my case and asked her to contact a detective agency in Strasbourg for me and have them look into lawyers bearing the initials C, L, or Z who had lived in Strasbourg between 1885 and 1918. I don’t know any French.

“What’s the name of the detective agency?”

“I’ll let you know tomorrow morning. I once worked with them on a case back in the early fifties. I hope they’re still there.”

“How did you manage to get by without knowing French?”

“The guy I was working with knew German. But he was already of a certain age, so he can’t possibly still be with us. A young man from Baden-Baden had gotten involved with the Foreign Legion-he’d been abducted, by all accounts-and we managed to find out his whereabouts. It wasn’t us, though, who got him out. Heaven and earth had to be set in motion, ambassadors and bishops. We did, however, give thought to how we might give it a try. Can you imagine a German-French commando going out on a mission just a few years after the war?”

She laughed. “You miss the old times? When you were young and strong and on a roll?”

“On a roll? Even during the war I wasn’t on a roll, let alone afterward. Or do you mean I’m preoccupied with growing old? In the past I used to think that one day one starts aging, and that a few years later one’s done and is old. But it’s nothing like that. Aging’s an ongoing process; you’re never done.”

“I’m looking forward to my pension. I don’t like teaching anymore. The kids do their thing. They plod through school, and then through job training, and don’t let anything get to them: no book, no idea, no feelings of love. I no longer like them.”

“What about your own kids?”

“Them I love. You can’t believe how pleased I was when Röschen finally let her hair grow out and stopped coloring it green. You know she finished high school with honors and got a grant from the German National Academic Foundation? And after only two semesters of business administration she spent a year at the London School of Economics. Even as a student she’s already earning more than I am as a veteran teacher.”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“She’s set up a small and successful fund-raising firm. She’s built up and is expanding a mammoth database with the help of some students whom she pays minimum wage, because in fund-raising everything depends on whose birthday falls on what day, when a company is celebrating its anniversary, the personal interests of possible donors, and what kinds of lives their ancestors lived. The other day she said to me, ‘Mom, do you think it’s a good idea for me to rope in some Eastern European students who’re studying German? I could cut my labor costs in half.’”

“So what did you tell her?”

“‘Good idea,’ I said, and told her she might want to set up those students with computers instead of paying them wages, and let them pay off the computers with their work for her. Needless to say, old computers that are being phased out here-over in Eastern Europe they’ve no need for modern computers.”

“So?”

“She thought my suggestion was great. But come to think of it, why don’t you send my eldest to Strasbourg? It’s not really a detective job-it’s more like historical research-and now that he’s spent three semesters in Dijon, his French is better than mine. He passed his exams but has time on his hands, as he’s not starting his job at the industrial tribunal till May.”

“Does he still live in Jungbusch?”

“Yes. Give him a call.”

10 So funny you could split your sides

The following day I didn’t even try to get in touch with Welker. Instead I turned my attention to the police investigation into his wife’s murder.

“Of course we have a file on him. The Swiss sent us their final report, not to mention that we did our own bit of investigating. Just a minute.” Chief Inspector Nägelsbach would usually have hesitated a little longer before letting me peek into a file. “By the way, have you noticed any changes here?” he asked after he returned with the file.

I looked at him and then glanced around the room. There was a pile of sealed boxes beneath the window. “Are you moving?”

“I’m heading home. I’m gathering everything that belongs to me that I’ll be taking along. I’m retiring.”

I shook my head in disbelief.

He laughed. “I am. I’ll be sixty-two this April. When the government came up with the pension-at-sixty-two plan my wife made me promise I’d stop working then. Starting next week I’ll be taking all the vacation days I have coming. There you go.” He pushed the folder across the desk toward me.

I began to read. Bertram and Stephanie Welker were seen together for the last time the morning they climbed up to the hut above the Roseg Glacier. On the afternoon of the following day Welker turned up alone at the Coaz chalet below the glacier. That morning he had found a note from his wife saying she was out hiking on the glacier and would meet up with him at eleven o’clock, halfway up the path he intended to take around the glacier. He had set out right away, at first waited for her at the halfway mark, and then ventured out onto the glacier, where he started looking for her. Finally he made his way as fast as he could down to the chalet and called the rescue service. The search went on for a number of weeks.

“How can one not find a body on a glacier?” I asked Nägelsbach.

“On a glacier? You mean in a glacier. She must have fallen into one of the countless crevasses, and since no one knew exactly where she’d been hiking, they couldn’t look for her in a specific area, as they would have in other cases.”

“What a gruesome idea: the woman lies buried in the ice, her youth and beauty preserved, and when they find her someday in the distant future, her aged husband is called in to identify her.”

“My wife said that, too. She says something like that happens in some novel. But who’s to say it will happen? Think of the Stone Age mummy from the Ötztal Alps, or Hannibal ’s soldiers, or those of the German emperors, or General Souvarov. Think of the Bernadine monks and all the early British mountain climbers. They were lost in the glaciers a lot longer than Frau Welker and have yet to be found.”

I’d never seen my old friend like this. I must have stared at him in surprise.

“What you want to know is whether I think he murdered her. The fact that he had her note means nothing. There was no date on it, so it could be old. That he was at his wit’s end when he turned up at the chalet doesn’t mean anything, either. One would have to be quite a monster not to be a nervous wreck after killing one’s own wife. What’s in his favor is that one can’t be sure a glacier near Saint Moritz would be free of hikers, even early in the morning. Pushing one’s wife into a crevasse in the glacier is about as discreet as pushing her off a bridge onto an autobahn.”

“If there’s enough money at stake-”

“One takes bigger risks, I know. But then both had made more than enough money since their takeover of the Sorbian Cooperative Bank.”

“Since what?”

“After the Berlin Wall fell, the Weller and Welker bank took over the Sorbian Cooperative Bank, a former East German institution based in Cottbus, with local branches nearby. The takeover was a success, not to mention that every investment people make now is supported by more grants than you can mention, all the way from Berlin to Brussels.”

“But a man might also be ready to take a bigger risk when love or hatred-”

“No, there was no sign at all that he might have had a mistress, or she a lover. The two of them had been in love since they were children, and they were happily married. Have you seen pictures of her? A dark beauty, with eyes full of fire and spirit. It’s true that beautiful women-and especially beautiful women-get murdered. But not by happy, loving husbands.”

“Brigitte thinks she might have run away.”

“My wife suggested that, too.” He laughed. “What we have here is a touch of feminine instinct. Yes, she could have run away.”

I waited to hear how the police followed up that lead and what they’d found, what his view of the likelihood of such a possibility was. When he said nothing, I asked him outright.

“She could be God knows where. It might not be the most charming way to leave a man, but then, no way of leaving someone is charming.”

I’d known Nägelsbach since he had started working as a bailiff at the Heidelberg public prosecutor’s office. He is a quiet, serious, thoughtful police officer. His hobby is building matchstick sculptures, models ranging from the Cologne Cathedral and Neuschwanstein Castle to the Bruchsal prison. He is often in a good mood and likes a good joke. Dark humor, satire, and sarcasm are foreign to him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He avoided my eyes and looked out the window. The trees were still bare, but their buds were on the verge of bursting open. He raised his hands and let them fall again. “I’m up for the Federal Cross of Merit.”

“Well, congratulations!”

“Congratulations? It’s true I was delighted at first. But…” He took a deep breath. “We’ve got this new chief. One of those energetic, efficient young men. Needless to say, he doesn’t know us like the old chief did. But he’s not particularly interested in us, either. So he walks up to me and says: ‘Herr Nägelsbach, you’ll be getting a Federal Cross of Merit when you leave. I’ll be needing a few pages on you.’ ‘What for?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know anything about you, but I’m sure you know all there is to know. I want you to write down for me why you deserve the ribbon in your buttonhole.’ Can you imagine?”

“That’s what new young bosses are like nowadays.”

“I told him there was no way I’d do that, to which he replied that it was an official order.”

“And?”

“He just laughed and went on his way.”

“The ‘official order’ bit is just a silly joke.”

“The whole thing’s a silly joke. Federal Crosses of Merit, official orders, the years I sat here, the cases I worked on: so funny, you could split your sides. I realized that much too late. If I had realized it earlier I could have had a lot more fun.”

“Haven’t we always known that?”

“Known what?” He was hurt and defensive.

“That we could have had more fun in life.”

“But…” He didn’t go on. He looked out at the trees again, then at his desk, then at me. The hint of a smile flitted over his mouth. “Yes, perhaps I have always known it.” He pushed his chair back and got up. “I’ve got to head out. Did you jot down old Herr Weller’s address? The Augustinum retirement home in Emmertsgrund. The other parents are dead. By the way, he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. He just some times acts like he does when you ask him a question he doesn’t like.”

11 Quick cash

Emmertsgrund, Heidelberg ’s newest residential development, lies on a slope above Leimen. The attractive apartments of the Augustinum retirement home face westward and have a view of the Rhine plain, just as the beautiful hospital rooms of the Speyerer Hof Clinic do. A cement factory lies at the foot of the hill, emitting pale, fine dust.

Old Herr Weller and I sat by the window. The two rooms of his apartment were filled with his own furniture, and before we sat down he told me the story of every piece. He also told me about his neighbors, with whom he didn’t get along; the food there, which he didn’t like; and the roster of social activities from folk dancing to silk painting, in which he wasn’t interested. His failing eyesight prevented him from driving, so he was stuck in the Augustinum and felt lonely. I don’t think he really believed that I was collecting donations for the German War Graves Commission, but he was lonely enough not to care who I was. What’s more, we’d been both wounded in action in the Poland Campaign back in the war.

I invented a son, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson, and he told me about his family, and about the death of his daughter.

“Don’t your son-in-law and grandchildren come to see you?” I asked him.

“He hasn’t come since Stephanie died. I don’t hold it against him, but he does have a bad conscience. As for my grandkids, they’re off at school in Switzerland.”

“Why should he have a bad conscience?”

“He should have looked after her. And he shouldn’t have gone in for all that nonsense with that former East German bank.”

While old Herr Weller had been complaining about his living conditions, there was a hint of whining in his voice. Now he spoke resolutely, and I felt the authority he must have once commanded.

“I thought it was all milk and honey with those banks in our new eastern states,” I said.

“Let me tell you something, young man”-he was my age, but to my amazement actually addressed me as “young man”-“you don’t have a background in banking, so I don’t expect you to know any of this. The reason our bank survived was because it downsized, not because it expanded. We man age fortunes, advise investors, supervise funds, and do all that on a high international level. The few local people in Schwetzingen who still have accounts with us don’t really fit the profile anymore. We serve them for old times’ sake. And the clients of the Sorbian Cooperative Bank don’t fit the profile, either, even if there are a lot of them; even if little and often fills the purse.”

“Your son-in-law doesn’t see eye-to-eye with you on this?”

“Him?” he bleated, laughing abruptly and contemptuously. “I’ve no idea what he can see, or if he can see at all, for that matter. He’s a talented boy, but the bank’s not his thing and never has been. He studied medicine, and old Welker ought to have let him become a doctor instead of forcing him into banking because of family tradition-as if things as they now stand still have anything to do with family tradition! It’s all about fast money, new friends, new employees-I’ve no idea if the investment and funds business still exists the way Welker and I set it up. That’s how far things have come: I have no idea what’s going on.”

Before I left he showed me a picture of his daughter. She was not the opulent beauty I’d imagined from seeing the photograph of her grandaunt at Schuler’s place, or from Nägelsbach’s description. She had a slender face, straight dark hair, and stern lips, and though her eyes had fire and soul, they also had an alert intelligence. “She was a banker and had studied law. She inherited the sixth sense for finances that our family developed over the centuries. If she were still alive the bank wouldn’t be in the state it’s in.” He took his out wallet and gave me fifty marks. “For the war graves.”

I drove home by way of Schwetzingen. The waitress at the café greeted me as an old regular. It was three thirty: time for a hot chocolate and a marble cake, and the end of a Friday workday at the Weller & Welker bank. At four o’clock the four young women emerged from the bank. They stood there for a moment and said good-bye to one another, and then two went off along the old moat, the other two in the direction of the train station. At four thirty the three young men appeared and went along the moat in the opposite direction. I left a twenty-mark bill on the table, waved to the waitress, and followed them. They walked quite a distance, past Messplatz and under the railroad tracks to an area where there was a car wash, a home-improvement outlet, and a liquor store. They went into an eight-story hotel and I could see them being given room keys at the front desk.

Back at the office, the light on my answering machine was blinking. Babs’s son, Georg, had found my message and wanted to drop by: Would Sunday or Monday be better for me? Brigitte wanted us to go to the movies Saturday evening. The third call was from Schuler. “I’m sorry if I was a bit abrupt on the phone. I’ve had a chat with Bertram and Gregor, and I know now that you didn’t say anything bad about me. It turns out Bertram has had a little too much on his plate of late, but he’ll be dropping by later. Come and see me again: Perhaps next week? Maybe Monday?” He laughed, but it was not a joyful laugh. “There’s life in the old badger yet. He’s caught himself a fat goose.”

12 Chock-full

That weekend spring assured us it meant business, that it had come to stay and would not be chased away by any more ice or snow. In the Luisenpark the deck chairs were out on the lawns, and I was dozing away, wrapped in a blanket as if all was well with the world and my heart was sound. Later, when Brigitte and I came out of the movie theater, the full moon lit up the streets and squares. Some punks were playing soccer with a beer can in the pedestrian zone, some bums were passing a bottle of wine around in front of the town hall, and couples were making out under the arbors of the Rosengarten.

“I’m looking forward to summer,” Brigitte said, putting her arm around me.

On Sunday I had lunch with Georg in the Kleiner Rosengarten. He said he was willing to go to Strasbourg to search for the silent partner in old registries and telephone directories, the records of legal and notary chambers, and lecture schedules. He was ready to leave on Monday. I appointed him assistant detective and ordered champagne, but he wanted to stick to alcohol-free beer.

“You drink too much, Uncle Gerhard.”

That evening I was back in my office poring over the history of banking. The Sorbian Cooperative Bank also had a paragraph dedicated to it. It was a rarity. Cooperative banks had actually come about as self-help establishments set up by occupational groups. Schulze-Delitzsch had set out to make artisans into members of a cooperative through cooperative banks, while Raiffeisen strove to do the same with farmers. Hans Kleiner from Cottbus, who founded the Sorbian Cooperative Bank in 1868, wanted to inspire cooperative ideas in the Sorbian Slavic minority. His mother was Sorbian, wore Sorbian dress, told little Hans Sorbian fairy tales and taught him Sorbian songs, with the result that he made Sorbian affairs his life’s work. During his lifetime the bank had only Sorbian members, but after his death it opened its doors to others, expanded, flourished, and survived the great inflation and the worldwide depression. Then came a great blow. The Nazis wanted nothing to do with the Sorbians and turned the bank into a regular cooperative bank.

When and how the Sorbian Cooperative Bank was to recover from this blow would have to wait till tomorrow. Weller & Welker had taken the bank over, so it must have recovered and had a happy ending. On my way home that night I found the cooperative idea so sensible that the usual hankering of banks and bankers for more and more money suddenly struck me as strange. Why heap money upon money? Because a child’s compulsion to collect things can in adult years no longer be satisfied by collecting marbles, beer coasters, and stamps, and so must turn to money?

The following morning I was sitting once more at the desk in my office before the children of the neighborhood were heading to school. The bakery a few doors down was already open, and a steaming cup of coffee and a croissant stood before me. There wasn’t much more to the story of the Sorbian Cooperative Bank. While other such banks were closed down by the Soviets, those in and around Cottbus continued to be run under the name of Sorbian Cooperative Bank. The bank was completely absorbed into the system of a state-owned savings bank. Yet it did keep its name; respect for the Sorbian Slavic people, brothers of the victorious Soviet people, forbade its abolition. Along with its name it also kept sufficient autonomy for the Treuhand Agency, formed after the reunification of Germany to privatize East German enterprises, to put the Sorbian Cooperative Bank on the market, ultimately selling it to Weller & Welker.

It was nine o’clock and the morning traffic on the Augustaanlage had quieted down. I heard children, who for some reason or other didn’t have to get to school till later. Then I heard a car pull up by the sidewalk, where it stopped with its engine running. The rattling and chugging began to get on my nerves after a while. Why didn’t they turn the engine off? I got up and looked out the window.

It was Schuler’s green Isetta. Its door was clapped open, but the car was empty. I went out onto the sidewalk. Schuler was standing in the entrance next door, reading the names beside the buzzers.

“Herr Schuler!” I called, and he turned and waved. He waved as if he were shooing me away from the sidewalk-as if he wanted me to get back into my office. I didn’t understand, and though he seemed to be calling out something to me I couldn’t hear him. He came staggering toward me, his right hand still waving, his left hand pressed to his stomach. I could see that his left hand was holding the handle of a black attaché case that was knocking against his legs. I took a few steps toward him and he bumped into me. I got a whiff of his bad smell and heard him whisper “Take this!” and “Go!” He shoved the case toward me and I took it. He steadied himself on me with the hand that had just given me the case and righted himself. He hurried over to his car, got in, closed the door, and drove off.

He swerved in a crooked line from the sidewalk to the right lane, and then from the right lane into the left. He steered toward the steel bollards bordering the traffic island in the middle of the Augustaanlage, scraped one, scraped the next, scraped the traffic light at Mollstrasse, and picked up speed without paying any attention to the light, which had turned red, to the cars that had just started entering from Mollstrasse, or to the children who had begun crossing the Augustaanlage. At first it looked as if he would crash into the lights or the tree at the edge of the island on the other side of Mollstrasse. But he rolled over the curb, missed the lights, and grazed the tree lightly, and yet the curb and the tree tilted the Isetta enough to capsize it, sending it sliding on its side over the grass until it crashed into another tree.

It was a loud crash, and at the same moment, in the opposite lane, into which the Isetta had almost careened, brakes screeched and drivers he had cut off blew their horns. A child over whose feet he’d almost skidded began to bawl. All hell broke loose. My Turkish neighbor came hurrying out of his store, took the attaché case from me, and said: “Go see if he’s all right. I’ll call the police and an ambulance.” I hurried over, but I’m not as quick as I used to be, and by the time I got to the Isetta a crowd of onlookers had already gathered. I pushed my way forward. The tree had crushed the door and was lodged between the roof and floor of the car. I looked down through the side window: the car was full of glass and blood, the crushed door had pinned Schuler back into the seat, and the wheel was jammed into his chest. He was dead.

The police and ambulance arrived and, as they could not pry the Isetta loose from the tree, the fire department was brought in. The police made no sign of taking a statement from me, and I did not come forward to present myself as a witness. I headed back to my office, the front door of which I’d left open. From a distance I saw someone leave my office. I couldn’t imagine what he’d be doing there, or what he might be looking for. Nothing was missing.

My Turkish neighbor’s store experienced a mini-boom. The onlookers were watching the goings-on surrounding the Isetta, offering expert commentary, and buying candy, chocolate, and granola bars.

It was only when everything was over and things had calmed down that I remembered Schuler’s attaché case. I picked it up from the Turk, placed it on my desk, and eyed it. Black matte faux leather, a gold-colored combination lock-an ugly, run-of-the-mill attaché case. From my desk I took out the bottle of Sambuca and the box of coffee beans I kept there, poured myself a drink, and dropped three beans into the glass. I found a package of Sweet Aftons in the filing cabinet and lit both-the Sambuca and the cigarette-and watched the blue flames and blue smoke.

I thought of Schuler. I’d have liked to hear him once again tell his tales: why Lieutenant Welker and the Prussian had gotten into an argument, what had been the fate of the young Weller girl after her beloved had met his death, much like Romeo-except that in this case the families were not hostile to each other, but too friendly. I would have liked to have known when Bertram and Stephanie had fallen in love. I blew out the flame and drank. I wished Schuler could have recovered his sense of taste and smell before he died.

Then I opened the attaché case. It was chock-full of money, used fifty-and hundred-mark bills.

13 Shadowed

No, I didn’t consider stuffing the bills into a suitcase along with a few shirts and pants, sweaters, underwear, toothbrush, and razor, heading to the Frankfurt airport, and getting on the first plane to Buenos Aires. Or the Maldives, the Azores, or the Hebrides. My life here in Mannheim is complicated enough. How would it be someplace else, where I don’t even speak the language?

I didn’t look for a hiding place for the money, either. As it is, I would surely tell all under torture. I lowered the rolltop of my filing cabinet, squeezed the few old files into one of its compartments, and slid out the bottoms of the other compartments, making enough space for the attaché case. Then I pulled the rolltop shut.

I didn’t count the money. There was a lot of it. Enough to give someone reason to put the fear of God into a man. Thinking of my final meeting with Schuler on the sidewalk-the way he staggered toward me waving his arms, his grimacing, his hoarse whisper-I felt that someone must have frightened him to death.

Nägelsbach sounded no happier on the phone than he’d been when I had seen him.

“What was it, an accident or a murder?” he asked me. “As you know, each has its own department.”

“All I want to know is when Schuler’s body will be sent over to Forensics.”

“Yes, I know, so you can call your friend at the Mannheim municipal hospital, who’ll then put in a quick call to Forensics. By the way, what are you doing… I mean, on Tuesday… my wife… you see… tomorrow’s my last day, and we would be delighted if you and your girlfriend would come by. Are you free?”

He sounded worried that nobody would come to his party. He and his wife struck me as never really needing friends, as if they were quite self-sufficient, and there were times when I envied that. They’d sit in his workshop, he working on a matchstick model of the Munich Palace of Justice, she reading aloud to him from Kafka’s The Trial, and before bed they’d have a glass of wine together. Does marital harmony last only till retirement?

As I drove to Schwetzingen I was shadowed. Even as I walked to my car, just around the corner from my office, I had the feeling that someone was following me. But whenever I turned around nobody was there, and such feelings can be wrong, even if Brigitte believes that feelings always tell the truth and that only thoughts tell lies. There wasn’t much traffic on the autobahn. The beige Fiesta I noticed in my rearview mirror after the Mannheim intersection passed me when I pulled over on the shoulder near Pfingstberg, drove on, and disappeared from view around the next bend. But when I drove on and then passed a truck and looked into my rearview mirror, there it was again. I repeated my little maneuver a few hundred yards from the Schwetzingen exit. When he passed me I tailed him until he took the exit. I drove on and then, a few kilometers beyond Brühl, pulled over the shoulder onto a bumpy dirt road.

I was not surprised to find a police car outside Schuler’s place. No one was parked outside the old warehouse. I rang and managed to get in, but I couldn’t open the door to the archives. When I drove off, I once again saw the Fiesta in my rearview mirror.

I felt tired-tired of a world in which a harmless, malodorous old archivist could at the drop of a hat be frightened to death. A world in which there were too many used fifty-and hundred-mark bills. In which someone could snoop about in my office and shadow me in a beige Fiesta without my knowing who he was and what he wanted. I felt tired of being at odds with my case. It didn’t interest me and couldn’t interest my client, either. What interested me instead was my client himself, and the death of his wife and his archivist. And that I was interested in this was, needless to say, of no interest to my client. But what was his interest? And why had he hired me for a case that surely could not be of interest to him?

The message on my answering machine sounded as if Welker had read my mind. “Hello, Herr Self. Can you drop by tomorrow? I haven’t heard from you in a while and would like an update. As things stand, time’s not on our side, and…” He covered the mouthpiece and there was a sound on the line like in the shell from the Timmendorf beach in which my mother had me listen to the sea when I was a little boy. In between I heard mumbled words that I couldn’t make out. Then Samarin came on the line: “We know that Herr Schuler came to see you, and that he left some money with you. You must help us see to it that his reputation isn’t ruined by this one foolish act. The money belongs back in the bank. Come by tomorrow at three.”

I was tired of the game Welker and Samarin were playing. I didn’t call either of them. I decided to call Georg the following day in Strasbourg to see what he’d come up with. I also decided to call Nägelsbach on his last day at police headquarters. I had forgotten that I had been shadowed by a Fiesta.

14 Not empty-handed

But the driver of the Fiesta had not forgotten me. At eight thirty the following morning he was at my front door, ringing the bell. He rang many times. Later he explained to me that he had been quite considerate; he had kept ringing even though he could have easily gotten the door open. The lock was a joke.

When I opened, he stood there skulking like a salesman, his face both defiant and dispirited. He looked to be about fifty, not too tall and not too short, not fat and not thin, his cheeks covered in spider veins and his hair sparse. He was wearing pants of some dark synthetic fabric, light gray loafers, a light blue shirt with dark blue edging on the pocket, and an open parka. His parka was the same beige color as his car.

“So it was you,” I said.

“Me?”

“Who was shadowing me yesterday.”

He nodded. “That maneuver of yours near Schwetzingen wasn’t bad, but I knew where you were heading. You went off the autobahn just like that? Over the shoulder and onto a dirt road?” He spoke with magnanimous amiability. “What about the blue Mercedes? Did it follow you onto the dirt road?”

I didn’t want to let on that I had no idea what he was talking about, but he saw that right away.

“Are you telling me you didn’t notice him? As for me, you only noticed yesterday.”

“I’d be happy enough not to notice you today, either. What do you want?”

He looked hurt. “Why are you talking to me like that? I didn’t do anything to you. I just wanted-”

“Well?”

“You are… I am…”

I waited.

“You are my father.”

I’m not the fastest person and never have been, and with the passing years I haven’t gotten any faster. More often than not my emotions are slow to react, and I might notice only at noon that someone had offended me in the morning, or I might realize in the evening that someone had said something nice to me at lunch that would have pleased me. I don’t have a son. And yet I didn’t burst out laughing or slam the door in his face, but invited him into my living room and had him sit on one sofa while I sat on the other.

“You don’t believe me?” he said, and then nodded. “I see you don’t believe me. We don’t even exist for you.”

“We? How many more children do I have?”

“There’s no need to make fun of me.” He told me that he had seen his file after the fall of the Berlin Wall and had discovered that he had been adopted, and that his real mother was Klara Self from Berlin.

“What file was this?”

“My cadre file.”

“Cadre…?”

“I worked for the Stasi-the East German secret services-and am proud of it. I investigated serious crimes, and I’ll have you know that our total of solved cases was higher than you here in the West could ever hope for. Things weren’t all bad in East Germany, and I won’t have it or me painted black.”

I motioned to him to calm down. “When were you born?”

“March ninth, 1942. Your fascist Wehrmacht was attacking the Soviet Union.”

I did my arithmetic. March 9, 1942, I was living at the hotel in Heidelberg, behind me the Poland Campaign, getting wounded in action, and the field hospital. I had finished my law degree and begun working at the public prosecutor’s office. I had not yet found an apartment, so Klara was staying with her parents in Berlin. Or was she traveling with her girlfriend Gigi through Italy? Or was she somewhere in hiding so she could give birth to a child? I would have liked to have had children. But not a child born on March 9, 1942. From May to August 1941, I was in Warthegau and had been with Klara only a single night.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but-”

“I knew it. I knew you’d shake your head and say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.’ You could talk about us as brothers and sisters. That you could do, but you could never act like we were. There you shake your head and raise your hands.” He shook his head and raised his hands, the way he imagined us doing. He was trying to sound derisive but in fact sounded despondent.

I shouldn’t have told him that I was sorry. I was not sorry that I wasn’t his father. Furthermore, my apology provoked more accusations, which again triggered my apology reflex. I was on the point of apologizing for all the rigors the West did and did not unleash upon the East.

“I’m not coming empty-handed. You didn’t notice the blue Mercedes when you were driving to Schwetzingen, and I imagine you didn’t notice it this morning, either.” He saw the interest in my face. “You want to know more. Well, I’ll tell you more. The Mercedes came after the old man gave you the attaché case and got into his car. It pulled up, and during the brouhaha the man sitting next to the driver got out and went snooping, first around your office and then around the old man’s car. I needn’t tell you what he was looking for.”

“Do you know who these men were?”

“All I know is that the Mercedes’s number plates were from Berlin. But I’ll find out. As it is, you and I are in the same line of business, and soon you’ll be… soon enough you’ll be…” He fell silent.

He actually was thinking of taking over my business, from father to son. Not right away, but after a period of transition in which we would operate as “Detective Agency: Gerhard Self & Son.” I did not propose “Gerhard Self & Klara Self’s Son.” I didn’t explain to him that he might possibly be the son of my deceased wife, but that he was most definitely no son of mine. I didn’t want to confide in him, talking about my marriage, opening up about myself, compromising Klara. In later years our marriage had been empty. But in those early days, when I had started at the Heidelberg public prosecutor’s office and Klara was soon to follow me to Heidelberg, our marriage was young and, I thought, full of magic, promising lasting happiness. It did affect me that there might have been someone else with whom Klara had had a relationship and a child, someone who didn’t even love her enough to insist she divorce me and marry him. Or did he die on the battlefield? I recalled an officer she knew, about whom she initially spoke a lot but then stopped mentioning, an officer who fell outside Moscow. I searched the face of the man before me for that officer’s features but found no trace of them.

“What is your name?”

“Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, with a hyphen. The Ulbrich without a T.”

“Where do you live?”

“At the Kolpinghaus. Its address is R 7-isn’t that crazy? That sounds like… like a cigarette brand name, not a street.” He shook his head in disbelief.

I forbore explaining the Mannheim street system. I also didn’t ask him whether he wasn’t ashamed as an old Communist to be staying at the Kolpinghaus.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, Turbo returned from one of his forays over the rooftops, jumped from the windowsill onto the sofa, and rubbed against Karl-Heinz Ulbrich’s legs on his way to the kitchen. Karl-Heinz said “puss-puss,” his eyes following Turbo with satisfaction. He looked at me triumphantly, as if he’d always known that animals in the West were friendlier than people and that this had now been proven. Luckily he didn’t say this out loud.

He got up. “I guess I’d better go. But I’ll be back.”

Without waiting for a good-bye, he walked through the hall to the door, opened it, and from outside carefully closed it again.

15 Without confession there is no absolution

I called Strasbourg. I couldn’t get hold of Georg-though after he’d been there just a day he wouldn’t have had much to report. So I had to make do with what Schuler had told me.

The silent partner from Strasbourg whose first or last name bore the initial C, L, or Z seemed to spark little interest in Welker or Samarin. As I sat opposite them making my report, Samarin looked visibly bored, while Welker seemed to be trying to suppress his impatience.

I’d said all I had to say. “I’ve picked up the Strasbourg lead and can either follow it or drop it. I do get the impression, however, that you’ve lost interest in the silent partner.”

Welker assured me that the silent partner was as important to him as ever. “Let me write you another check. Strasbourg won’t be a cheap venture.”

He took his checkbook and a fountain pen out of his jacket and wrote me a check.

“Herr Self,” Samarin said, leaning forward and looking me in the eye. “It seems that Schuler had access to the bank and withdrew some money. He left that money with you, and-”

“He brought me an attaché case, which I have placed in the care of a third party. I’m not sure whether I should hand it over to his heirs or the police. I don’t even know who his heirs are, or the exact circumstances of Schuler’s death.”

“He died in a car crash.”

“Somebody frightened him to death,” I countered.

Samarin shook his head-slowly, ponderously-and as he did so he rocked his upper body back and forth. “Herr Self.” He squeezed out the words. “When someone takes something that doesn’t belong to him, it doesn’t do that person any good.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Welker said soothingly, glancing at Samarin and me with some irritation as he handed me the check. “You must understand that decades ago Herr Schuler was our teacher, a good teacher, and we don’t forget it. His death was a blow to us, and the suspicion about the money, too. I must say that I cannot believe-”

Samarin exploded. “You will believe what-”

“What you tell me?” Welker looked at Samarin and me triumphantly for a few seconds.

Samarin was so furious that he almost tipped the heavy chair over as he got up. But he managed to get a grip on himself. Slowly and menacingly he said, “You will be hearing from me, Herr Self.”

I walked along the palace gardens to Schuler’s house. I couldn’t figure out what Welker’s moment of triumph was all about. Or why the money that had disappeared seemed to worry him less than it worried Samarin. If there was something fishy about the used fifty-and hundred-mark bills, whether Schuler had taken them or not, then this ought to worry the boss more than his assistant, even if his assistant is responsible for practical matters and has a tendency to be overbearing and is quick to flare up. Or were they playing some version of the good-cop, bad-cop routine with me? But if that were the case, Samarin could have exploded instead of getting a grip on himself.

I looked around but nobody was following me, neither my counterfeit son nor a blue Mercedes. The woman who opened the door at Schuler’s house was his niece. She had been crying and again burst into tears the moment she began to speak. “He smelled and grouched and nagged. But he was such a good person, such a good person. Everyone knew it, and his students liked him and came to see him, and he helped them every way he could.”

She herself had been a student of his, as had her husband. They met when both happened to drop by one day to see Schuler.

We sat in the kitchen, which she had tidied up a little. She had made some tea and offered me a cup. “There’s no sugar. When it came to sugar, I managed to talk some sense into him. As for alcohol, he wouldn’t listen.” The thought of this brought more tears to her eyes. “He wasn’t long for this world, but that doesn’t make it any better. Do you know what I mean? It doesn’t make it any better.”

“What do the police say?”

“The police?”

I told her that her uncle’s accident had happened right outside my door. “I came to Schwetzingen right away to inform you, but the police were already here.”

“Yes, the precinct in Mannheim called our local station, and they came by. It was a coincidence that I happened to be here. I don’t come every day. He wants… I mean, he wanted…” Again she began to cry.

“Did the police say anything, or ask you anything?”

“No.”

“Your uncle was in a terrible state when he came to see me right before his accident. It was as if he’d suffered a shock, as if something had really frightened him.”

“Why did you let him drive?” She looked at me reproachfully through her tears.

“It all happened much too fast. Your uncle… He was here one minute, gone the next.”

“But surely you could have held him back, I mean you could have…” She pulled out a handkerchief and blew her nose. “I’m sorry. I know how difficult he could be once he’d gotten something into his head. And here I am, practically accusing you. I didn’t mean to.” She looked at me sadly, but I reproached myself with everything she wasn’t reproaching me with. She was right: Why hadn’t I held him back? Why didn’t I at least try? This time it wasn’t only my emotions that had been too slow.

“I…” But I didn’t know what to say. I looked at her as she sat bent forward, her hands weakly clasping the handker-chief, her face warm, innocent. She hadn’t asked me who I was, but had simply taken me for a friend of her uncle’s, a companion in grief. I felt as if I’d not only let Schuler down, but her as well, and I sought absolution in her face. But I could find none. Without confession there is no absolution.

16 No class

When Brigitte and I arrived at the retirement party the Nägelsbachs were throwing at their place in the Pfaffengrund settlement, Nägelsbach was already tipsy and morosely cheerful.

“Well, Herr Self? At first my colleagues didn’t want to hand your friend over to Forensics, but I had a word with them and they finally sent him over. Speaking of which, from now on you’ll have to make do on your own. I won’t be able to help you anymore.”

His wife took Brigitte and me aside. “His boss asked me what kind of present he might like,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s thinking of turning up here uninvited. If he does come, can you intercept him? I don’t want him suddenly coming face-to-face with my husband.”

She was wearing a long black gown-I couldn’t tell if it was for mourning at the end of her husband’s career, or because it was beautiful and suited her, or if she wanted to portray somebody: Virginia Woolf, Juliette Gréco, or Charlotte Corday on her way to the scaffold. She does things like that.

The guests were crowded into the dining area and living room, which were connected by an open sliding door. I greeted this and that police officer I recognized from the Heidelberg headquarters. Brigitte whispered to me: “Forensics? Did he just mention forensics? Do you have anything to do with forensics?”

Frau Nägelsbach brought us two glasses of apricot punch.

The doorbell kept ringing, and guests kept arriving. The hall door stood open and I heard a voice I recognized. “No, I’m not a guest. I’m with Herr Self and need to speak to him.” It was Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, wearing a beige anorak over a white nylon shirt and a flowery tie. He came straight over to me, took me by the arm, and steered me through the hall into the empty kitchen.

“It’s the Russians,” he whispered, as if they were standing right next to him and might overhear.

“Who?”

“The men in the bank and the blue Mercedes. Russians, or Chechens, or Georgians, or Azerbaijanis.” He looked at me meaningfully and expectantly.

“And?”

“You really don’t know?” he asked, shaking his head. “They’re not to be trifled with. The Russian Mafia’s nothing like what you’ve got here in the West-nothing like the Italians or Turks. The Russians are brutal.”

“You’re saying this as if you were proud.”

“You must take precautions. When they want something, they get it. Whatever’s in that attaché case, it’s not worth crossing them.”

Was he puffing himself up? Or was he one of them, whoever they might be? Were they the rough guys, while he was sent to soften me up, all in an attempt to get back the attaché case?

“What’s in the attaché case?” I asked him.

He stared at me despondently. “How are we to work together if you don’t trust me? Not to mention, how do you expect to get through this if we don’t work together?”

Brigitte came into the kitchen. “His boss has arrived, and Frau Nägelsbach…”

But it was already too late. We heard Nägelsbach greeting his boss with exaggerated civility. Would he like a glass of punch? Or perhaps two or three? Some situations are bearable only with alcohol. Some people, too.

Brigitte and I went into the living room, though Ulbrich still kept after me. As a good-bye present Nägelsbach’s boss had brought him a photograph of the Heidelberg police head quarters, as if it were the Grand Hotel, and he was doing his best to be pleasant, unaware of the emotions he was triggering. I started chatting with him about the police in different parts of the country and the secret services, and judging by the things he said, he knew a thing or two. I asked him about the Russian Mafia but he shrugged his shoulders. “Do you know what someone from RTL Television said to me the other day? All the private stations are scouring material for T V, but one thing you can’t offer the public is the Russian Mafia. Not because it doesn’t exist. The thing is, it has no class, no style, no tradition, no religion-none of the things one likes about the Italians. All the Russian Mafia has is brutality.” He shook his head in disappointment. “In this case, too, Communism has steamrolled over culture.”

By the time Brigitte and I headed back home, Ulbrich had disappeared. I hoped it was the headlights of his Fiesta that I saw in my rearview mirror. If not, they now knew about Brigitte.

17 The black attaché case

I lay awake that night. Should I give Samarin the black attaché case? Or should I give it to the police, making certain that the men in the blue Mercedes followed me to the station and saw what I did? Or should I put it by the lamppost outside my office while they were parked a few cars away and wait for them to get out, pick it up, and drive off-out of my life?

When I called Nägelsbach in the morning, he was hungover. It wasn’t easy to explain to him what I intended to do. When he finally understood, he was appalled. “You want to do that at the Heidelberg police headquarters? Where all my life I-” He hung up. Half an hour later he called back. “Okay, we can do that at the headquarters in Mannheim. They know me, and there’ll be no problem with me parking there for a while. Did you say at five?”

“Yes, and could you please thank your wife for me?”

He laughed. “She put in a good word for you.”

I packed only a few things. It all had to fit in the black attaché case. I didn’t need a lot; it wouldn’t take more than a couple of days.

Turbo sensed that I was going away. The neighbors would look after him, but he pouted and disappeared, as children do when they realize that Mom and Dad are about to go on a trip.

I took my things and dropped in at Brigitte’s massage practice at the Collini-Center. I had to wait, so I read an article in an old magazine about a movie set in East Germany before reunification: a young couple set out on heists in Bonnie-and-Clyde fashion, robbing the old-style, vulnerable banks of the new currency that had just been introduced. Until they got too wild and began robbing banks in Berlin and got shot.

Brigitte saw her patient off and sat down next to me. “I’m expecting the next client any minute, and thank God for that, because the health-care reform has cost me a third of my old patients, and finding new ones who’ll come in even though their insurance won’t reimburse them isn’t easy.”

I nodded.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ll be away for a few days. My case has ground to a halt. I might be able to get it going again someplace else. Not to mention that I feel a bit spooky around here. If anyone asks for me, you can tell them that.”

She got up with a hurt look. “I know the script well enough: ‘What’s going on?’ she asks him. ‘Nothing,’ he replies, looking out the window into the twilight with a stony glare. Then he turns and looks deep into her eyes. ‘It’s better this way, honey. The less you know, the better. I don’t want the guys to get on your case, too.’”

“Come on, Brigitte. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Believe me, I don’t want to hide anything from you. But right now it’s better if you don’t know what’s going on. Believe me.”

“‘Trust me, my darling,’ he tells her, looking at her intently. ‘I’ve got to think for the two of us right now.’” The bell rang and Brigitte got up to open the door. “Well, take care of yourself!”

I found a place to park on the Augustaanlage, not far from my office. When I got out of the car I didn’t see the blue Mercedes anywhere. Back at my office, I took out the black attaché case and emptied the bills into a trash bag. There was a large plant pot under my desk and a bag of soil that I had bought quite a while ago to replant my potted palm. I put the trash bag inside the new pot beneath the palm tree; the plant didn’t get quite as much soil under its roots as I’d initially planned, but if it didn’t like it, it could go to hell. I never liked that plant.

I put my overnight bag into the attaché case. When I left my office with it, the blue Mercedes was waiting on the other side of the street. The man beside the driver opened the door, got out, and came running toward me. By the time he made it across the street through the evening traffic I was already in my Opel, driving off. He waved to the Mercedes, which honked its horn and cut into traffic and made a U-turn to my side of the street at Werderstrasse, despite a red light. There it picked up the other man and tailed me through the Schwetzingerstadt district.

Mollstrasse, Seckenheimer Strasse, Heinrich-Lanz-Strasse-the streets were filled with cars and bicycles, the stores were open, the sidewalks were bustling, and children were playing in front of the Heilig-Geist Church. This was my safe everyday world. What could happen to me here? Yet the Mercedes was tailing me so closely that I couldn’t see its grille in my rearview mirror but could clearly make out the humorless, set faces of the driver and the man beside him. In the Heinrich-Lanz Strasse he tapped me-a gentle meeting of his bumper with mine-and fear crept up my spine. When the light turned red at the Reichskanzler-Müller-Strasse and we stopped, the man got out of his car and walked up to my locked door, and I don’t know what he would have done if a patrol car hadn’t gone by and the light turned green.

In front of police headquarters I drove half up onto the sidewalk and, clutching the attaché case, was out of the car, up the stairs, and through the door before the man could even get out of the Mercedes. I leaned against the wall, hugging the attaché case to my chest and panting as if I’d run all the way from the Augustaanlage.

Nägelsbach was waiting in his Audi inside the yard of the police station. I gave him the attaché case and he put it on the floor by the front seat. Then he helped me climb into the trunk. “My wife’s put a blanket in there-do you think you’ll manage?”

When he let me out at the airport parking lot at Neuostheim, he was certain nobody had followed him. He was also certain that nobody had seen me climb out of the trunk.

“Do you want me to come along with you?”

“Are you already at loose ends at home, with all that free time on your hands?”

“Not at all. I’ve been conscripted into cleaning up after yesterday’s party.” But he stood there, hesitant and somewhat despondent. “Well, then.”

A little later I was in the air, looking down at Mannheim, keeping my eyes peeled for beige Fiestas and blue Mercedes.

18 Fear of flying

The woman next to me was afraid of flying. She asked me to hold her hand, and I did. As we were taking off, I reassured her with the information that most airplane accidents occur not during takeoff but during landing. An hour and a half later, when our plane began to descend, I confessed that I had not been all that honest with her. The truth is that most airplane accidents do in fact occur during takeoff, not when the plane is landing. We had taken off quite a while ago, so she could sit back and relax. But she didn’t, and at Berlin Tempelhof she rushed off without so much as a good-bye.

I hadn’t been in Berlin since 1942, and I wouldn’t have been tempted to come if the fastest route to Cottbus hadn’t been by plane via Berlin. I knew that the five-story house in which I had grown up had been destroyed in 1945, along with all the neighboring houses, and replaced in the fifties by a six-story apartment block. My parents had died in the attack. Klara’s parents had moved out of their villa near Wannsee to a villa on Lake Starnberg shortly before the end of the war. The friends of my childhood and youth had dispersed in all directions. In the seventies we had a class reunion. I didn’t go. I don’t want to remember.

I found a cheap hotel at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. As I stood by the window, looking down at the traffic, I got the urge to go out and take a look around and perhaps find a restaurant where the food tastes like it used to, like it did at home. I went to the Brandenburg Gate, saw the buildings rising on the Pariser Platz, the cranes towering into the skies. On the Potsdamer Platz they had sawed open the city’s torso and were conducting open heart surgery: floodlights, excavations, cranes, scaffolding, and building skeletons, sometimes already floor after floor with finished masonry, balconies, and windows. I walked on and recognized the Ministry of Aviation and the remains of the Anhalter train station, and on Tempelhofer Ufer the building where I had worked as a junior clerk for a lawyer. I avoided the street where I had been a child.

I didn’t find a restaurant whose food promised to taste the way it used to. But I found an Italian restaurant where the perch and the crème caramel were the way they ought to be, and the carafe of Sardinian white wine overshadowed all the Frascati, suave, or pinot grigios. I was content, asked where the nearest metro station was, and set out for my hotel.

I wanted to transfer at the Hallesches Tor, but as I got off the last car I came face-to-face with seven or eight young men with shaved heads, black jackets, and military boots, standing there as if they’d been waiting for me.

“Hey! Granddad!”

I wanted to keep going but they wouldn’t let me through, and when I tried to sidestep them they wouldn’t let me pass. They forced me back toward the outer edge of the platform. The metro line here crosses the Landwehr Canal like an elevated railway, and I could see the dark water beneath me.

“Where are you heading, Grandpa?”

On the opposite platform I saw some youths who were looking at us with interest. Otherwise the platforms were empty. “To my hotel and to bed.”

They laughed as if I’d just uttered the greatest one-liner. “To his hotel!” one of them hooted, leaning forward and slapping his thighs. “To bed!” Then he said: “You were there, right?”

“Where?”

“With the Führer, where else? Did you ever get to see him?”

I nodded.

“Give Grandpa some of your beer; he saw the Führer.” The leader of the pack nudged the young man next to him, and he offered me his can of beer.

“Thank you, but I’ve already drunk enough this evening.”

“Did you hear that? He got to see the Führer!” the leader announced to his pack; he also yelled it out to the youths on the opposite platform. Then he asked me: “And how did you greet him?”

“Come on, surely you know that.”

“Show me, Grandpa!”

“I don’t want to do that.”

“You don’t want to show us? Then do as I do!” He clicked his heels together, flung his right arm into the air, and yelled: “Heil Hitler!” The others didn’t utter a sound. He brought his arm down. “So?”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’d rather take a swim down there?”

“No, I just want to go-to my hotel, and to bed.”

This time nobody laughed. The leader came closer and I edged back until I felt the railing against my spine. He raised his hands and patted me down, as if he were searching for weapons. “You’re not wearing a life jacket, Grandpa. You might drown. If you get water in your nose-” With a jolt he jammed his index and middle fingers into my nostrils and pushed my head backward until I was at the point of losing my balance. “So?” He let go of me.

My nose was smarting. I was frightened. I couldn’t think fast enough: Should I play along? Would that be cleverer? Was that cowardly? Was it some sort of betrayal? Was this and what it symbolized worth getting hurt or getting pneumonia? They grabbed hold of me and I stuttered out a “Heil Hitler.” The leader of the pack told me to say it louder and I said it louder, and when he again said, “Louder!” and they let go of me, I stood on the platform and shouted as loud as I could: “Heil Hitler!”

Now they were laughing again and clapping. “Bravo, Granddad! Bravo!” But their leader shook his head silently until all the others fell silent and then said: “He didn’t raise his arm, though, did he? It doesn’t count without the arm.” They stared at him and then at me and then at him, and they understood before I did. They grabbed me by the arms and legs, hooted, and swung me back and forth-“one, two, three”-and as the metro came thundering into the station, they flung me over the railing into the canal. When I surfaced, I could still hear them hooting.

The stone embankment on the near side was too steep, but I made it to the other side and managed to climb onto the street across a wooden landing. Two taxis didn’t stop, but the third driver had plastic covers on his seats, so twenty minutes later I was back at my hotel and under a hot shower.

I hadn’t come to any great harm. The following morning, the side of my body that had hit the water was a single big bruise. I also had a runny nose and a slight fever. But my injury was elsewhere. I’d had a chance to make up for the wrongs I had done in the old days. And when does one ever get such a chance? But I’d done it wrong again.

19 Everything comes together

The Sorbian Cooperative Bank is on the old market square in Cottbus. I went inside and took a look around until I ran the risk of being noticed. Then I went to the teller and got 91.50 marks for the fifty-dollar bill I’d just purchased across the street at the Deutsche Bank for 99.50 marks.

It was like any other bank. The modern furnishings were of wood and steel, the walls covered with large abstract paintings. What was different was the life-sized wood relief of Hans Kleiner by the door, guarding the entrance. Also different was that Vera Soboda, the manager, had her desk right in the main hall, which was either a legacy of the Socialist past or state-of-the-art management and administration. If the woman sitting at the desk was Vera Soboda, then the Sorbian Cooperative Bank had a manager of middle years, somewhat plump, somewhat tough, more tractor driver on a Socialist farming cooperative than banker. But the staff going up to her from other desks interacted with her with such deference and speed that I concluded she must have given them the best of training.

In this bank, too, there was a gate on the side, but I didn’t see any cars driving in or out, even though I lingered all day, frozen to the bone, in various stores, at an Eduscho café, and in doorways. I didn’t see any young men in dark suits, either. The abundant bank clientele was made up of local people: modest savers, some in anoraks and gray loafers of the kind Karl-Heinz Ulbrich wore, some in bright and shiny tracksuits, some in pants and jackets that looked as if the blue of the East German Youth Movement shirts were vying for a second career in West European fashion.

The only remaining sign of East Germany was the people’s clothes. The stores belonged to the same chains as those in Mannheim and Heidelberg, Viernheim and Schwetzingen. I looked into side streets and saw more streets that had just been dug up, more houses that were being renovated, sometimes also a house in a state of utter ruin. On the other hand, there were fewer of the architectural sins of the sixties and seventies. The housing projects I had seen as the train headed toward the station were no worse than those in Waldhof or Boxberg. Everything was coming together.

It rained in the afternoon. My nose was running and I felt feverish, so I got myself some medicine from a drugstore that turned my mucus membranes to parchment. But the people were different here: it wasn’t only that they were wearing different, shabbier clothes. They also had different, wearier faces. They were slower, more hesitant and careful. There was none of that familiar cheeriness and resolve in their expressions and gestures. They reminded me of the old days. I saw my reflection in a storefront, shabby in my old, wet raincoat, my face tired, and any exertion seemed a strain. Was I more suited to the East than the West?

In the afternoon I managed to get hold of Georg in Strasbourg from a telephone booth outside the Sorbian Cooperative Bank. He had found a name: Paul Laban. The L was right, the dates were right, and as a professor at the University of Strasbourg and a renowned legal expert, Laban was a rich man. Furthermore, he had been offered a post at the University of Heidelberg at the very time at which the silent partner had requested information concerning a house or apartment in Heidelberg.

“Are there any heirs?”

“He didn’t have any children. I haven’t found out what became of his sister’s son and daughter, but I will.”

The bank closed at four. At five the employees left. At six the manager left, too. I followed her to the streetcar. It was empty and the two of us sat alone-she in the second row, and I behind her in the seventh. After a few stops she got up, and on her way out she stopped next to me and said, “You might as well come along.”

20 Like those men of ours

We walked in the rain through a residential area with old villas. Some of the houses had been restored to their former splendor. Plaques bore the names of the companies, law firms, and tax consultants that now occupied them. But in other villas the stucco was crumbling, the brickwork was exposed, windows and doors were rotting, and here and there a balcony or two were missing. Frau Soboda walked in silence, and I walked in silence beside her. I followed her into one of the shabby houses. The third floor had been divided into apartments. Frau Soboda unlocked the door to one and showed me into her living room.

“It’s still warm,” she said, pointing to a large green tiled stove. “The fire’s just died down a bit. But it’ll be warmer in here in a minute.” She put in some more coals and closed the fire hatch.

“I’m-”

“I know, you’re with the police.”

“How-”

“You look just like those men of ours used to. I mean the men from the Firm. The Stasi. The way you came into the bank and looked around. The way you didn’t let the bank out of your sight all day. So one wouldn’t notice right away, but if one did it didn’t matter, as the game was up, anyway.” She eyed me. “You are from the West, and are older than those men of ours used to be. And yet…”

We were still standing. “May I hang up my coat outside? I don’t want to get your rug wet.”

She laughed. “Give it to me. That’s something those former men of ours wouldn’t have asked.” When she returned she offered me a chair, and when we were seated she said: “But I’m glad it’s all over.”

I waited, but she was lost in thought. “Would you like to start from the beginning?” I asked.

She nodded. “I didn’t notice anything for a long time. I think that’s why they let me run the bank. I learned my trade in the old East German days. I had no idea about the way banking is done in the West, and had to work my way into it slowly, and with difficulty.” She patted down the cover on the little table that stood between her chair and mine. “I really thought this was the chance of a lifetime. Many of the other East German savings banks were shut down and many of my colleagues were let go, and those who were allowed to stay had to go stand at the back of the line. As for me, I went from being bank teller to bank manager. For a while I was worried that the only reason was that they wanted an old employee of the bank to fire everyone else, so that none of you guys would have to get your fingers dirty. I need not tell you that this was how things were done more often than not. And yet nobody at our Sorbian bank got fired. So I had pulled the winning ticket, and I worked my fingers to the bone, until… until… my marriage fell apart.” She shook her head. “Not that it was much of a marriage. It would have fallen apart anyway. But perhaps it wouldn’t have happened a year ago, when I was studying and reading like a maniac, when I could see that I was making it, that everything I’d read was coming together, everything I’d learned, seen, and done right. Even though it was mostly out of sheer luck. Now I’m sure I could easily run any bank of similar size in West Germany.” She looked at me with pride. “But I wouldn’t be given such a bank, especially not now.”

“If I had a bank, you’d be its manager,” I told her, to apologize for having thought when I first saw her that she looked like a tractor driver.

“But you don’t.” She smiled. While she was talking I noticed the cleverness in her tough face. Now I also saw a touch of charm.

“When did you notice what was going on?”

“About six months ago. At first I noticed only that something was wrong. It took me a while to realize what it was. I’d have been glad to go straight to the police, but the lawyer I cautiously consulted wasn’t sure if I was actually allowed to go to the authorities. By all accounts, industrial law provides for the firing of a whistle-blower, even if an employer has done something he ought not to have done and the employee was right to blow the whistle. It wasn’t only losing my job that I was frightened of. You see”-her eyes challenged me-“I have a knack for landing on my feet. But what about my colleagues at the bank? There are many of us, perhaps too many, and I don’t think the bank will stay above water if everything comes to light.”

The longer she talked the more I liked her. In the old days, I used to think that men were the realists and women the romantics. Nowadays I know it’s the other way around, and that pragmatic men and romantic women were just pretending, to themselves and to others. I also know that a pragmatic woman with a heart, and a romantic man with common sense, is a rare and wonderful thing. Vera Soboda was just such a woman.

“How did you find all this out?”

“Quite by chance, the way one does. It’s not as if one expects this sort of thing, or keeps an eye out for it. One of our customers insisted that she had deposited fifty marks a week earlier, on a day when she forgot to bring her savings book with her. Now she had brought her savings book in order to have her fifty-mark deposit entered, but our bank system had no record of it.”

“What did you do?”

“I’ve known Frau Sellmann forever. She’s an old lady who I’m sure scrimps and saves all she can, and she is conscientious to a fault. She had her deposit slip with her, and though it’s not impossible to forge one, Frau Sellmann is no forger. So I entered the fifty marks in her savings book, and then in the evening I initiated a search through our system to see where her deposit might have ended up. Tanya, the teller who had signed the receipt, is just as conscientious as Frau Sellmann. I just cannot imagine her forgetting to deposit the money.”

“Did you find the fifty marks?”

“We have a system we use and a program that tracks every step of every transaction. But we can’t access it because it’s there to monitor us, and the whole idea is that we shouldn’t be able to manipulate it. But I’m very good with computers, so I tried to get into the program.”

“And did you?”

She laughed. “You’re on pins and needles.”

I nodded. My fever was getting worse, and I had the feeling I couldn’t hold out much longer-just a little more, and during this time I’d have to find out all I could.

“I got into the tracking program, and in fact it had registered the deposit of those fifty marks. But at the same time there was a deposit of thirty-five thousand marks to her account, more than Frau Sellmann with all her scrimping could have ever scraped together. The tracking program had recorded that the thirty-five thousand marks had not gone into Frau Sellmann’s real account but into a false account that had been set up under her name. As both payments had taken place at the same time, both the fifty marks and the thirty-five thousand marks had somehow gotten into her false account. When I looked further, I found that Frau Sellmann’s false account had a balance of one hundred twenty thousand marks, a good hundred thousand more than in her real account. I also found all the other accounts in which my poor Sorbian compatriots were made out to be wealthy men and women, not to mention the accounts that show poor, dead Sorbians to be alive and wealthy.”

“The whole thing’s quite straightforward,” I said, hoping she would agree with me and elaborate further so that I might finally get some insight into all of this.

“When you own a bank,” she said, “it isn’t all that difficult to launder money-in this way, and I imagine in other ways, too. Once the money is in the bank, all the bank has to do is invest it in a manner so that it gets lost. They’ve invested most of it in Russia.”

“In their own enterprises.”

“I believe so.” She looked at me. “What’s the next step? What will the upshot be when you arrest Welker and Samarin? What will happen to the Sorbian bank?”

“I don’t know. In the old days I could have called and asked Nägelsbach, but he’s retired, and I’d be happy to transfer my money from the Badische Beamtenbank to the Sorbian Cooperative Bank, but it won’t be enough. It wouldn’t matter that I’m not part of the cooperative, would it? I’m also not an official. Schuler was a retired official, but he’s dead. Can you understand that? I still don’t understand why he’s dead.”

She looked at me in alarm.

I got up. “I’ve got to go. I don’t want to leave still owing you an explanation, but I’ve got to get to bed. I’m sick. I’m running a temperature. Some skinheads threw me into the Landwehr Canal yesterday, which in a way served me right, and today I stood outdoors all day in the rain and cold. The only reason my nose isn’t running is because I got some medicine, but now my head’s so heavy and numb that I’d rather not have a head at all. Not to mention that I feel cold.”

My teeth were chattering.

She got up. “Herr…”

“Self.”

“Herr Self, shall I call you a cab?”

“It would be best if I could lie down on your sofa and you’d lie down with me till I warmed up again.”

She didn’t lie down with me. But she set me up on her sofa, heaped all the comforters and woolen blankets she could find over me, gave me two aspirin, made me some grog, and placed her cool hand on my hot forehead till I fell asleep.

21 Childish faces

When I woke up it was bright daylight. My suit was draped neatly over a chair and there was a note on the table: “I’ll try to be back by four. Hope you feel better.” I made some tea in the kitchen, took the cup to the sofa, and lay down again.

I had regained all my senses. But my nose was runny, my throat was sore, and I felt so weak that I wanted nothing more than to doze all day and drowsily look out the window, watching the wind drive the gray clouds across the blue sky and rustle through the bare twigs of the plane tree. I wanted to listen to the rain and watch the raindrops running down the windowpanes. Not think about Schuler, whom I could have saved if I had not been too slow; not about the skinheads I’d let make a fool of me; and not about Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, whom I found touching even though I didn’t like him. But whenever I dozed off, it all came back: Ulbrich seeking my paternal acknowledgement and backing, the skinheads and my fear, Schuler staggering toward me with his attaché case. So I got up and sat by the tiled stove and thought about everything that Vera Soboda had told me. She was right; when you own a bank it’s not hard to launder money. The dirty money went into the false accounts of customers at the Sorbian Cooperative Bank, accounts that were run in a secret parallel system, and from there the money would be invested in companies that only showed losses and perhaps didn’t even exist. That way the customers were rid of money they didn’t even know they had, while the owners of the dirty money and the companies ended up with clean money. Frau Sellmann had a hundred thousand marks too much in her account; even if the idea wasn’t to deposit an extra hundred thousand marks in every illegitimate account, but simply three or four times the amount that people had in their legitimate accounts, with a few thousand clients, millions upon millions of marks could be laundered.

Schuler must have found out where dirty money was being kept. Why hadn’t he gone to the police? Why had he come to me? Because he didn’t want to destroy Welker, his former pupil and the son of his friend and patron?

It was noon. I looked around the apartment. The kitchen area had once been part of the bathroom, and the living room was also her bedroom, the sofa her bed, and she had spent the night in the covered veranda. She also had an office with a desk, a computer, and a hammock. As the manager of a bank she ought to be able to afford more. What did she do with her money? Next to the desk were photographs of her with and without her husband, with and without a child, a girl with a high forehead and blond hair, as dainty as Frau Soboda was robust. Might the girl not be a daughter but a niece? I took a sheet of paper from her desk.

Dear Frau Soboda,

Thank you for everything you have done for me. I enjoyed staying at your place, even though I admit I am somewhat shaken that I might look like a man from the Stasi. I slept a long time, my temperature is almost gone, and I’m glad that my head is back on my shoulders.

I’m not a policeman. I am a private investigator and, though it may be hard for you to believe, Herr Welker hired me: I am investigating a matter for him that I am quite certain is merely a pretext. But I do not know for what.

I wish I knew what it was. I also hope to know more before I go to the police with what I know. I’ll inform you when I get to that point.

Best regards,

Gerhard Self

I added my address and phone number. Then I called a taxi and headed for the train station. By late afternoon I was back in Berlin.

I don’t know what devil possessed me. Instead of rebooking my flight and leaving immediately or discarding the ticket and taking the next train home, I settled in again at the hotel on Unter den Linden, went strolling through Berlin again, and ended up once more at the Hallesches Tor metro station. What was I looking for? I had also gone to the street where I grew up. The hydrant where I pumped some water with a large lever, just for fun, might well have been the same one where I had pumped water as a child. I wasn’t quite sure.

It was the others who were at the Hallesches Tor this time. Black pants and jackets, and a few girls in grungy black outfits. I didn’t recognize them, but they recognized me. “That’s the old guy who was shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ the other day. You’re an old Nazi, right?”

I didn’t say anything. Hadn’t they seen that I’d been forced to play along, and that I’d ended up in the canal?

They crowded around me, forcing me back against the railing. What childish faces, I thought. What foolish, eager, childish faces. But I felt I had been punished sufficiently two days ago for the “Heil Hitlers.” Perhaps I merited more punishment for the many “Heil Hitlers” all those years ago and all the misery I had caused as public prosecutor. But not from these children.

“Please let me through.”

“We’re the Antifa!” They, too, had a leader of the pack, a tall thin fellow wearing glasses. When I tried to wriggle my way through, he pushed his hand against my chest. “We don’t want any fascists in our city.”

“Aren’t there enough young people you can teach that lesson to?”

“One thing at a time! First the older generation, then the young!” He was still pressing his hand against my chest.

I lost control of myself. I hit his hand away and gave his foolish face two slaps-one on the left cheek and one on the right. He threw himself at me and pressed me against the railing. This time there was no “One, two, three!”-the others helped him silently with set mouths until I hung head-down. I fell with a splash into the water.

I was standing once again on the sidewalk, taxis kept driving by, first slowing down when the driver saw me wave, then speeding away when the driver saw my wet clothes. A patrol car did the same. Finally a young woman had mercy on me, asked me into her car, and dropped me off in front of my hotel. The doorman who’d been on duty two days before was standing at his post again. He recognized me and laughed out loud. I didn’t think it was funny.

22 An old circus horse

I didn’t find saying good-bye to Berlin at all difficult. I looked down as the plane flew in a wide arc over the city on Saturday morning. A lot of water, a lot of green, straight and crooked streets, large and small houses, churches with towers, churches with cupolas-everything a city needs. One can’t deny that Berlin is a big city. That Berliners are unfriendly, their children unruly, their taxi drivers inhospitable, their policemen incompetent, and their doormen impolite-perhaps that is to be expected in a city that has been subsidized for decades. But I don’t like it.

I arrived in Mannheim feeling just as grim, chilled, and feverish as I had felt leaving Berlin. Nägelsbach had left a message on my machine that my car had been moved from outside the police station, where I had left it, to the Werderstrasse. He had seen to it that it wouldn’t be towed to the Friesenheimer Insel outside of town but parked near my place, and I wouldn’t have to pay a fine. Georg was back from Strasbourg and wanted to report to me. Brigitte had taken Manu to Beerfelden for the weekend. Welker was urging me to meet with him, by Sunday morning at the latest: he’d be in his office over the weekend and would be expecting my call and visit. Among the messages there was also a whining one from Karl-Heinz Ulbrich: This isn’t right, we need to talk. He’d gotten himself a cell phone and wanted me to call him. I erased his message without taking down the number.

The few steps from my office to my apartment were like wading through mud, and on the stairs I worried that again I wouldn’t make it, like before Christmas. I got into bed and called Philipp. He wasn’t on duty at the hospital and came over right away.

“I can’t tell you how relieved I am you’re here,” I told him. “Will you give me a quick checkup and get me a prescription? I have to be back on my feet by tomorrow.”

He took out his stethoscope. “Let’s see if this thing still works-I haven’t used it since I was an intern.”

I coughed, held my breath, breathed in and out. There was a rattling; I could hear it, too. His face looked grave, and he got up. “You’re going to have to take some antibiotics. I’ll go down to the drugstore and get some for you. As for your being up and about tomorrow, forget it.”

“I’ve got to get up.”

“When I get back you can explain why, and I’ll talk you out of it.”

He took my key and left. Or was he still standing at my bedside? No, he was back already with the medicine and had brought a glass of water from the kitchen.

“Take this.”

I’d fallen asleep.

He got a chair from the kitchen and sat down next to my bed. “It’s just a matter of time before you have your next heart attack, even though you smoke less. If you’re in a weakened condition, like you are now, and also exert yourself, the risks are especially high. I know you’ll do what you want, but the question is simple enough: Is whatever you’re intending to do tomorrow worth the risk? Aren’t there things that are worth more? More important cases, an adventure with Manu, a wild night with Brigitte?”

“There was a time when you’d have put a wild night with Brigitte at the top of the list, or you’d have prescribed me two rambunctious nurses,” I said.

He grinned. “When I think of all the suggestions I made! Just pearls before swine! You should thank your lucky stars that you’ve got Brigitte. Without her you’d be a sour old grouch.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’m glad I’ve got my little Furball. I think I’ll brace myself and give marrying her another go.”

I thought of the first time he’d given marrying Füruzan a “go.” I had waited for Philipp with Füruzan-a proud, beautiful Turkish nurse-her mother, and her brother. Then, right at the door of the town hall, Philipp, dead drunk, had announced that he couldn’t go through with the marriage, and Füruzan’s brother had attacked him with a knife. I thought how Philipp had lain in the hospital recuperating from his wounds and had gone off women.

“And you’ll never touch another woman?” I asked him now.

He raised his hands and slowly lowered them again. “When a woman looks at me, I look back. I’m like an old circus horse. When he hears all the commotion and fanfare, he goes trotting around the arena. But he’d much rather be in his stable, munching oats. And just as the public can tell that the circus horse is old, even though he goes trotting around the arena, women notice it in me, too, even though I look at them and flirt and know what they like to hear and how they like to be touched.” He stared into the distance.

“Did you see it coming?” I asked.

“I always thought that when the time comes all my memories would compensate me for what the present would be depriving me of. But remembering doesn’t work. I can tell myself what was, and how it was, and that it was great; I can conjure up pictures in my inner eye. But I can’t conjure up the feeling. I know that a woman’s breasts felt really good, or her bottom, or that she had a certain way of moving when she was on top of me that was just… or that she would… But I only know it, I don’t experience it. I don’t feel the feeling.”

“Well, that’s the way of the world. Memories are memories.”

“No!” he countered vehemently. “When I remember how furious I was when they remodeled our operating theater, I’m furious all over again. When I remember what pleasure I had when I bought my boat, I relive that pleasure. Only love eludes memory.” He got up. “You have to get some sleep. Don’t do anything foolish tomorrow.”

I lay there staring into the twilight. Did love elude memory? Or was it desire? Was my friend mixing up love and desire?

I decided I was not going to call Welker the following day. As it was, I hadn’t decided what to tell him or what to threaten him with or how to stop him. I would sleep and get some rest. I would give Turbo the can of mackerel I had brought him from Cottbus. I would read a book and play a game of chess with Keres or Euwe or Bobby Fisher. I would cook. I would drink red wine. Philipp hadn’t said anything about my antibiotic clashing with red wine or red wine clashing with my antibiotic. I’d postpone my heart attack to some other time.

23 Cat and mouse

But at nine o’clock I was awakened by a call from Welker.

“Where did you get my number?” My number has been unlisted for five years.

“I know it’s Sunday morning, but I must insist that you drop by my office. You can park inside the gate, that way it’ll be…” He broke off. I already knew the game well enough: Welker would start talking, the receiver would then be covered, and suddenly Samarin would be on the line. “We’ll be expecting you around noon. Twelve o’clock.”

“How do I get inside the gate?”

He hesitated. “Ring three times.”

So that was that as far as catching up on my sleep was concerned, or getting some rest, cooking, reading, or playing chess. I filled the tub, sprinkled some rosemary into the water, and got in. Turbo appeared, and I irritated him with a few well-aimed drops. Some water on the thumb, flicked off with the index finger: with a little training you can become quite a champion. And I have many years of training behind me.

Why did I hesitate about how to handle my client’s money laundering? I didn’t really have much of a choice. The TV channels might not be interested in the Russian Mafia-which has no class, no style, no tradition, no religion, and presumably no sense of humor-but the police most certainly would be, which was only right. Why didn’t I give them a call? Why hadn’t I called them yesterday? I realized that I just couldn’t bring myself to do that as long as Welker was still my client.

So the early call and the appointment at noon did have a good side: I could close my case. I brought the phone to the bathtub and called Georg, who told me the rest of the sad tale of the Laban family. Laban’s niece died of tuberculosis in the 1930s in Davos, and his nephew had killed himself and his wife during the Nazi rampages of the Kristallnacht. The nephew’s son and his wife had died childless in London, while his daughter had not managed to flee abroad in time. She had gone into hiding when the deportations to the concentration camps began and was never heard from again. There was nobody who could claim the inheritance.

I got out of the tub and dried myself. If you ask me, Dorian Gray exaggerated. As one grows older one needn’t want to look twenty year after year, and it was no surprise that he didn’t come to a good end. But why can’t I look sixty-six? By what right did my arms and legs become so thin? What right did their former mass have to leave its old home and find a new one under my belly button? Couldn’t my flesh have consulted me before going off and resettling someplace else?

I stopped grumbling and pulled in my stomach when I put on the corduroys I hadn’t worn in ages, a turtleneck, and a leather jacket, and before you knew it I could almost pass for sixty-six. Over breakfast I put on an old Udo Jürgens record. At quarter past twelve I was in Schwetzingen.

Samarin took me to the apartment in the upper story, and as we walked through the old banking hall and the new office area, he and I played cat and mouse.

“I hear you were at the Mannheim police station,” he said.

“I took your advice.”

“My advice?”

“Your advice not to keep what isn’t mine. I gave it to the police. That way whoever it belongs to can go get it.”

Welker was on edge. He barely listened to my report concerning the silent partner. He looked at his watch again and again, his head cocked as if he were waiting for something. When I finished my report, I expected some questions-if not about the silent partner, then at least about Schuler, the black attaché case, my going to the police, or my disappearance from Mannheim. Questions that were so pressing that they had to be answered on a Sunday morning. But no questions came. Welker sat there as if more important issues were at hand, issues he could barely wait to come up. But he didn’t say anything. He got up. I got up, too.

“So that’s that,” I said. “I’ll be sending you my bill.”

And yet this former client of mine might well be in jail by tomorrow morning and not get to see my bill for some years to come. Six? Eight? What does one get for organized crime?

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Samarin said.

Samarin walked ahead, I followed, and Welker walked behind me as we made our way through the offices and down the stairs. I took leave of the old counters with their wooden bars, the inlaid panels, and the benches with the green velvet cushions. It was a pity; I would have liked to sit on one of these benches for a while and muse over the currents and vicissitudes of life. By the gate I said good-bye to Welker. He was in a curious nervous state, his hands cold and sweaty, his face flushed, and his voice shaking. Did he suspect what I was going to do? But how could he?

Samarin did not respond to my good-bye. He pressed the lower of the two buttons near the gate and it swung open. I went to my car, got in, and fastened my seat belt. I glanced behind me. Welker’s face was so tense, so desperate, that I was taken aback, while Samarin looked burly and grim, but at the same time pleased. I was glad to get away.

I started the car and drove off.