Self’s Murder

1 Too late

Why couldn’t things stay as they were? Light, cheerful, and breezy, with a little sadness and a little mourning-mourning for Stephanie Welker, Adolf Schuler, and Gregor Samarin. Yes, for Gregor Samarin, too, destructive as his life had been. And sadness, because Brigitte and I only now discovered the lightness with which our feet found the right steps as we moved in harmony and enjoyed each other. Why couldn’t we dance like this through the whole year, this year, next year, the one after, and as many years as we would have?

I saw the same happiness I felt on the faces of the others. The Nägelsbachs smiled as if they were sharing a precious secret; Philipp’s face no longer showed his peevishness at growing old; and Füruzan’s face no longer showed the weariness of her long path from Anatolia to Germany and all the many nights during which she earned the money that she sent back home. Brigitte was beaming, as if finally everything were fine. Welker wasn’t dancing. He was leaning with folded arms against the door frame watching us with a friendly smile, as if waiting for us to leave. We left when it started getting late for the children.

A few days after the party Brigitte and I went to Sardinia. Manu’s school was on vacation, and to everyone’s surprise Manu’s father announced that he was taking Manu skiing. Brigitte, who hadn’t anticipated her ex-husband’s plan, hadn’t scheduled any appointments at her massage practice so she wouldn’t be working during Manu’s break. She said to me: “It’s now or never.” That’s how far things had come-her calendar would dictate what we would or wouldn’t do; mine didn’t count.

Ten days in Sardinia. We’d never spent so much time together. Our hotel was past its heyday; in the lobby the dark red leather of the armchairs and sofas was frayed, the candelabras in the dining room were no longer lit, and the brass fittings in the bathroom spewed out rusty water when we first turned on the faucets. But we were attentively served and looked after. The hotel stood among the trees of an overgrown garden on a small pebble-beach bay, and whether we decided to linger in the garden or by the water, the staff was quick to bring us two loungers, a table, and a beach umbrella if needed, and they were eager to serve us espresso, water, Campari, or Sardinian white wine.

The first days we did nothing but lounge about, blinking through the leaves at the sun and gazing dreamily over the sea to the horizon. Then we rented a car and drove along the coast and up into the mountains over narrow, winding roads to small villages with churches and market squares and vistas of valleys that at times stretched all the way to the sea. Old men sat in the squares, and I would have liked to sit with them and hear their tales of what dangerous brigands they used to be, tell them what a capable detective I had once been, and parade Brigitte before them. In Cagliari we climbed interminable steps up to the terrace of the Bastione and looked down at the harbor and the motley rooftops. In a small harbor town there was a feast with a procession and a chorus and orchestra that played and sang so heartrendingly that Brigitte’s eyes welled with tears. The last days we again spent lying on the beach under the trees.

It was in Sardinia that I fell in love with Brigitte. I know it sounds foolish; we’d been together for years, and what tied me to her if not love? But it was in Sardinia that my eyes were opened. How beautiful Brigitte was when she wasn’t stressed out and didn’t have to worry. How gracefully she walked-light of foot but also with a certain determined step. What a wonderful mother she was to Manu, and what trust she had in him in spite of her many worries. How witty she could be. How charmingly she linked her arm in mine. How lovingly she handled my ways and peculiarities. How she massaged my back when it hurt. How she brought brightness and cheer into my life.

I tried to recall the longings she had sometimes talked of and strove to fulfill them. To say something nice from time to time for no particular reason, to give her flowers, to read something to her, to come up with something fun that we hadn’t done yet, to surprise her with a bottle of wine she had enjoyed in a restaurant, or to buy her a handbag that had caught her eye in the window of a boutique. They were all minor things, and I was ashamed that like an old cheapskate I had withheld them from her for so long.

The days flew by. I had taken some books with me, but didn’t finish any of them. As I lay on the lounger I preferred to watch Brigitte reading instead of reading myself. Or I watched her sleep and wake up. Sometimes she didn’t know right away where she was. She saw the blue sky and the blue sea and was a little confused until she remembered, and then she smiled at me sleepily and happily.

I happily smiled back. But I was also sad. Again I had been too slow-something that shouldn’t have taken more than a few weeks or months had taken me years. And because I have always realized that I’ve been too slow at a point when I’ve irrevocably missed a chance or lost something through my slowness, now, too, I had the feeling that it was too late for our happiness.

2 Matthew 25: 14-30

Manu returned from his ski trip with a deep tan and delighted Brigitte by saying, “But it’s great to be back again.” He surprised me by announcing that he wanted to go to church the following morning. During the ski trip his father had taken him to mass, as he also used to do in Brazil. His mother had never taken him to church here.

So on Sunday I went with him to the Christuskirche. The sun was shining, and around the water tower narcissus and tulips “bloomed in greater splendor than all the silks of Solomon can render.” The golden angel with the golden trumpet greeted us from the top of the church cupola. I was struck by what the priest had said about the parable in which the servant buries the money that has been entrusted to him instead of putting it to work, thus dodging his responsibility. What was I intending to do with the money I had buried under the potted palm? Drop it in the collection box? It had slipped my mind.

Manu, too, had been listening attentively to the sermon. Over lunch he told Brigitte and me that his friend had a brother who was a few years older and who was increasing his money by buying and selling stocks on the Internet. Manu gleaned from that and from Matthew 25: 14-30, that either his mother or his father ought to get him a computer. Then he looked at me. “Or will you?”

That afternoon we went to Schwetzingen and visited the palace gardens, which I had so often seen from a distance while I was working on my case. We walked down the avenue that looked so new with its young chestnut trees, past the orangerie and to the Roman aqueduct, over the Chinese bridge, and along the lake to the Temple of Mercury. Brigitte showed us where her parents had hidden Easter eggs for her and her brothers and sisters. At the mosque Manu declared, “Allah leads to the light whom He wills!”-which he’d learned at school when the class had an assignment on Islam. Then we sat down in the sun on the Schlossplatz and had some coffee and cake. I recognized the waitress, but she didn’t recognize me. I looked across the way to Weller & Welker.

Locals and tourists were strolling over the Schlossplatz, which was bustling with life. A dark Saab slowly and patiently made its way through the throng. It stopped in front of the bank. The gate swung open and the car drove in.

That was all. A car stops in front of the gate, the gate swings open and stays open for a moment, the car enters, and the gate closes again. This was not the image that had stayed in my mind from the afternoon when I had watched the bank for the first time. Back then the square had been empty, while today it was full. Back then the cars that entered and exited the bank gate were not to be overlooked, while today the dark Saab was almost swallowed up in the hustle and bustle of the square.

But it struck me like an electric shock. You insert the key into the lock of your car or turn on the radio, or you step out onto the balcony, perhaps in your pajamas and dressing gown, to check the temperature and take a look at the sky, and you lean on the metal railing. The static shock barely hurts. What strikes you is not the pain, but the sudden realization that the car, the radio, the railing-everything we are so familiar with and rely on-also has an unreliable, malignant side to it. That things are not as reliable as we suppose them to be. The car entering and the opening and closing of the gate! Just like back then, I had the feeling that something was not quite right in what was happening before my eyes.

A client on a Sunday? I couldn’t rule that out for a small bank and an important client. But the one business that would not rest on a weekend or holiday was money laundering.

When the gate opened again half an hour later, letting the dark Saab out and then closed, I was standing nearby. The car had a Frankfurt license plate. The windows were tinted. A fifty-mark bill that had fallen out during the delivery was peeking out from the edge of the trunk.

When I told Brigitte that evening in bed that I would be out of town for a few days, she asked wryly: “So, the lone cowboy is riding silently into the setting sun?”

“The cowboy is riding to Cottbus, and into the rising sun, not the setting sun. And he isn’t riding silently, either.” I told her about the money laundering at the Sorbian Cooperative Bank and that I wanted to find out if it was still going on. I told her about Vera Soboda. I told her about Schuler and his money. “The money came from the East and has to go back to the East. Perhaps I can find a priest or some institution that can put it to good use. And perhaps I will find something that will help throw some light on Schuler’s death.”

Brigitte rested her head on her hands and looked up at the ceiling. “I could put the money to good use. What I’d like to do instead of my massage practice, what I would need to expand my practice, things Manu would like-I could definitely put it to good use.”

“It’s drug money, and money from prostitution and blackmail. It’s dirty money. I’ll be happy when it’s gone.”

“Money doesn’t stink-weren’t you taught that?”

I propped myself on my elbow and looked at Brigitte. After a while she turned her eyes from the ceiling and looked at me.

I didn’t like her expression. “Come on, Brigitte…” I didn’t know what to say.

“Maybe that’s why you are what you are. A lonely, difficult old man. You don’t see happiness when it comes your way, so how are you supposed to grab it if you can’t even see it? Here it’s served to you on a silver platter, but you let it slip away. Just like you’ve let our happiness slip away.” She looked back up at the ceiling.

“I don’t want our happiness to-”

“I know you don’t want to, Gerhard, but you do it anyway.”

I couldn’t let that go. I wasn’t ready to roll over and turn my back to her, lonely, difficult, and old. Not after our days in Sardinia.

“Brigitte?”

“Yes?”

“What would you rather do instead of your massage practice?”

She was silent for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to say anything more. Then she wept a few tears. “I would have liked to have had children with you. I had Manu despite my sterilization. I didn’t have any with you, though I didn’t take any precautions. We would have had to try it in vitro.”

“You and me in a test tube?”

“You think the doctor will shake us up in a test tube like a barman with a cocktail shaker? He would lay your sperm and my egg on a glass slide and then let them do what people in love do in bed.”

I liked the idea of the two cells on a glass. It was a pleasant image.

“Now it’s too late,” Brigitte said.

“I’m sorry. I just told you about Schuler. He would still be alive if I hadn’t been too slow. I’ve always been too slow, and not just since I’ve grown older. I should have asked you after our first night together whether you wanted to marry me.”

I reached out my hand, and after a slight hesitation Brigitte raised her head and I slid my arm under it.

“It’s not too late for that.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.” She nestled up to me and nodded.

“First I have to finish this case. It’ll be my last case.”

3 Stealing tractors

This time I avoided Berlin. I went by car, got off the autobahn at Weimar and meandered over back roads. There was a park before Cottbus that had been created by Count Pückler, with a pyramid for himself and his wife, one for his favorite horse, and one for his favorite dog. The count’s Egyptian girlfriend had to make do with a grave in the cemetery. She had been young, beautiful, and dark, but her delicate Middle Eastern lungs couldn’t bear the Sorbian climate. I understood her. I hadn’t been able to stand up to the Sorbian climate on my last visit, either.

I had called Vera Soboda at her home in the morning and she’d invited me to dinner. She made a local potato dish with curd and offered me some Lausitzer Urquell, a beer from the region that has a sharp tang of hops but is easy on the palate.

“What brings you to Cottbus?” she asked.

“The Sorbian bank. Do you know how I can get at the data you told me about last time?”

“I don’t work there anymore. I was fired.” She laughed. “Don’t look so surprised. I wasn’t actually the bank manager. I just ran everything because someone had to do it, and the position had never been filled. Two weeks ago some idiot who knows nothing about banking was made manager. On his third day he fired me. It was all over in a flash. He came up to my desk and said: ‘Frau Soboda, you are fired. You have half an hour to remove any personal items from your desk and to leave the premises.’ He stood beside me and watched me, as if I might take the hole-puncher, the paper clips, or a pen. Then he walked me to the door and said: ‘You will receive seven months’ pay. Fair is fair.’”

“Did you see a lawyer?”

“The lawyer only shook his head and said my chances were up in the air. It seems I might have spoken my mind a little too clearly to the new manager. So I let it be. We have no experience here in taking employers to court. Were I to lose, who’d pay for it all?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“There’s enough to do around here. The problem is that what we need in these parts doesn’t generate money, and what generates money, we more often than not don’t need. But everything will fall into place. Our Lord in Heaven will not abandon a good Communist, as my former boss who took me under her wing always used to say.”

I was certain she would make it. She again looked like a tractor driver with whom one would gladly set out to steal tractors. She furrowed her brow. “What kind of data are you looking for?”

“I’d like to know if money’s still being laundered.”

“But you wrote me that-”

“I know. It’s just that I’m not sure if what I wrote you was right. I have a feeling that-”

“Do you know your way around computers?”

“No.”

She got up, placed her hands on her hips, and looked me up and down. “Do you expect me to go prowling with you through the night, break into the Sorbian bank, turn on the computer, and sift through it for data, just because you have ‘a feeling’? You expect me to risk my neck for this feeling of yours? Do you think I’ll get so much as a cleaning job in a bank if I’m caught at the Sorbian? Are you out of your mind?” She stood there scolding me in a way that I hadn’t been scolded since the days my mother used to tell me off. If I’d stood up I’d have towered over her by a head, ruining the magic. So I remained seated and stared at her enthusiastically until she stopped, sat down, and burst out laughing.

“Did I say anything about breaking in?”

“No,” she replied, still laughing. “I said it. And I’d like nothing more than to do it and give those programs and databases a good whirl. But I can’t. Not even with you, who didn’t say anything about breaking in, but thought about it.”

“How about without you? Could I get inside without you and turn the computer on and look for the data?”

“Didn’t you just say you don’t know anything about computers?”

“Can’t you lay out for me what you did back then? Step by step? I-”

“You want to become a hacker in a single day? Forget it.”

“I-”

“It’s almost eleven, and we Sorbians go to bed early. Let’s have another beer, and then I’ll fix you up on the sofa.”

4 In the broom closet

“Theoretically speaking,” I said to Vera Soboda over breakfast, “is there a way of getting into the Sorbian bank under cover of darkness?”

She answered so quickly that she, too, must have given this some thought overnight.

“Under cover of darkness is not the time to break in. What you would have to do is unlock the door to the kitchen area with a skeleton key in the afternoon and hide in the broom closet until everyone’s gone. Then you would have the bank to yourself. Getting in isn’t hard-it’s getting out. At seven in the morning, when the cleaning ladies show up, you would have to hide again until the bank opened, when you could mingle with the customers. But you couldn’t hide in the closet, because that’s where the detergents and mops are kept, and the ladies will be cleaning the toilets, the room with the copiers, behind the tellers’ counters, and under the desks. And you can’t get into the room that has the deposit boxes and the safe.”

“How do the cleaning ladies get into the bank?”

“They have a key for the side entrance.”

“Could I tear past them when they unlock the door?”

She gave the idea some thought. We were having eggs and bacon with potatoes, along with bread and jam and coffee. She ate as if she hadn’t eaten in ages and wouldn’t eat again in ages. When I gave up at my second egg, she ate what was left on my plate, too.

“Eat breakfast like a bishop, lunch like a priest, dinner like a mendicant,” she said. “The cleaning ladies would get the fright of their lives and call the police. But why not?”

She wiped both plates clean with a piece of bread.

“Shall we continue theorizing a little?” I asked.

She laughed. “No harm in that, I suppose.”

“If you were in the bank, sitting at the computer, and couldn’t figure out the programs and the data but happened to have a cell phone handy with which you could call someone who knew what was what, wouldn’t you then-”

She laughed again, her belly shaking as she steadied herself on the table as if she would fall off her chair if she didn’t. I waited for her to calm down.

“Frau Soboda, can you show me on your computer what I would have to do tonight? And would you help me if I got stuck and called you on a cell phone? I know there isn’t much chance I’ll find anything, but I won’t rest if I don’t at least give it a try.”

She looked at the clock. “In six hours,” she said. “Do you have a cell phone?”

She directed me to a store where I could get one. When I returned, she sat down with me at her computer. She showed and explained; I asked and practiced. Turning the computer on. Entering the password. What could the right password be? How did one switch from the system to the tracking program? How would I locate the accounts in the system and the tracking program? What routes might lead to the money laundering? How would I describe on the cell phone what was happening on the screen? By three o’clock I no longer knew up from down.

“You still have a few hours to think the whole procedure through again. The new manager tends to stay late, and I wouldn’t recommend your coming out of the broom closet before eight.” She explained how I should smuggle myself into the bank’s kitchen area and said, “Good luck!”

I parked my car on a side street and went into the Sorbian bank. I was to walk past the tellers and the cashier and enter a short hallway at the beginning of which were the restrooms and the kitchen area. It was quite straightforward. Nobody noticed me as I slowly made my way past the busy tellers and, in the hallway, quickly unlocked the door to the kitchen area with my skeleton key and pulled it shut behind me.

The closet was full. I had to rearrange the brooms, mops, buckets, and detergents so that I’d have enough space. It was uncomfortable; I had to stand at attention with the fuse box pressing into my back, my feet locked together, and my hands at my sides. There was a powerful smell of detergent-not the aroma of fresh lemons but a mixture of soap, ammonia, and rotting fruit. At first I left the closet door ajar, certain I would hear anyone approaching the kitchen. But when someone did come in, I noticed him only once he was already in the room, and if he had looked in my direction that would have been the end of me. So I shut the door. When the bank closed at four, the kitchen area livened up. The employees who had worked at the tellers’ counters and now had to tally their accounts all took a coffee break. I heard the coffeemaker hissing and gurgling, cups and spoons clattering, comments about customers, and gossip about colleagues. I felt quite uneasy in the closet. But time flew.

Otherwise it dragged on slowly. At first I went through what I had learned about the computer. But soon I could think of nothing but how to inch my legs into a different position and move my arms so they’d hurt less. I admired the soldiers who stood guard at Buckingham Palace or the Élysée. I also envied them for their spacious sentry boxes. From time to time I heard a sound, but I couldn’t tell if it was coming from the banking hall or the street, if a chair had banged against a desk or a car had rear-ended another or a plank had fallen off some scaffolding. Most of the time I heard only the rustling of my blood in my ears and a low, delicate piping noise that didn’t come from outside but was also in my ears. I decided that at eight I would climb out of the closet, open the kitchen door, and see if I could hear anything in the banking hall.

But at quarter to eight it was all over. I again heard a sound. While I was still trying to figure out where it was coming from and what it might mean, the kitchen door was abruptly opened. For a moment there was silence. The man who had entered stood still, as if he were running his eyes over the sink, the stove, the refrigerator, the table and chairs, the cabinets above the sink, and the broom closet next to the stove. Then he quickly strode toward the closet and tore open the door.

5 In a dark suit and vest

I was blinded by the light and could see only that someone was standing in front of me. I shut my eyes tightly, opened them wide, and blinked. Then I recognized him. Ulbrich was standing in front of me.

Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, in a dark suit and vest, a pink shirt and red tie, and silver-rimmed spectacles, over which he looked at me with eyes that were doing their best to seem resolute and menacing. “Herr Self.”

I laughed. I laughed, because the tension of the last minute and from having stood for so long was dissolving. I laughed at Ulbrich’s getup, and at the glare. I laughed at being caught in the broom closet as if I were the lover of the Sorbian bank and Ulbrich her jealous husband.

“Herr Self.” He didn’t sound resolute and menacing. How could I have forgotten what a sensitive little fellow Ulbrich was? I tried to cap off my laughing in such a way that he might interpret it as me laughing with him, not at him. But it was too late, and he looked at me as if I had hurt his feelings again.

“Herr Self, I wouldn’t be laughing if I were you. You have entered these premises illegally.”

I nodded. “Yes, Herr Ulbrich. It’s me. How did you find me?”

“I saw your car parked on a side street. Where else would you be, if not here?”

“Who’d have thought that someone in Cottbus would recognize my car! But perhaps I ought to have figured out that Welker would send you here as his new bank manager.”

“Are you hinting that… are you hinting that I… Herr Self, your insinuation that I might have blackmailed Herr Welker is an outrage! I protest most vigorously! Director Welker saw my merits, something you cannot claim to have done, and was delighted to put them to good use! Mark my words, he was delighted!”

I got out of the closet, my numb legs knocking over detergent bottles, buckets, and mops. Ulbrich looked at me reproachfully. Why was it that with him I always ended up sooner or later having a bad conscience? I wasn’t his father; I could not have let him down as his father. I wasn’t his uncle, cousin, or brother, either.

“I understand,” I said to him. “You are not blackmailing him. He is delighted that you are working for him. I want to go now.”

“You have illegally-”

“You’ve said that already. Welker doesn’t want any fuss in his bank. The police and I would amount to a considerable fuss. I imagine he doesn’t even want to know that I spent a few hours in his bank in the company of brooms and buckets. Forget my illegal entry. Forget it and let me go.”

He shook his head but then turned around and left the kitchen area. I followed him to the side entrance. He unlocked the door and let me out. I looked up and down the street and heard the door shut behind me and the key turn twice.

The side street was empty. I intended to head over to the old market square, but I went the wrong way and came to a wide street I didn’t know. Here, too, there was nobody about. It was a mild evening, perfect for a stroll, for sitting outside, for a chat over wine or beer, for flirting, but the people of Cottbus didn’t seem to be in the mood for any of this. I found a little Turkish restaurant with a table and two chairs out on the sidewalk. I ordered a beer and stuffed vine leaves and sat down.

Across the street two boys were messing around with their motorbikes, making the engines roar from time to time. After a while they sped off, riding around the block once, and then again and again. They finally pulled up across the street, their engines running, again making them roar from time to time, and after a while set off around the block once again. This went on and on. They looked like good kids, and what they were yelling to each other was harmless enough. Still, the roar of their bikes ripped violently through the air, like the sound of a dentist’s drill. Before you feel it in the tooth, you feel it in the brain.

“You’re not from these parts,” the owner of the restaurant said, putting the plate, glass, and bottle down in front of me.

I nodded. “How’s life here?”

“You can hear for yourself. Never a dull moment.”

Before I could ask him any further questions he went inside. There was no knife or fork, so I ate the stuffed vine leaves with my fingers. Then I poured myself a glass.

I didn’t think Ulbrich was blackmailing Welker. It was more likely that after I’d warned Welker he had given Ulbrich a call, invited him over, and then hired him. It wasn’t hard to see that Ulbrich valued a good position far more than anything he might be able to gain through blackmail.

Did Welker not care that a clueless Karl-Heinz Ulbrich was taking over from the very efficient Vera Soboda? Was that what Welker wanted? Did she know too much about what was going on? But how could he know how much she knew? Had the tracking device recorded her escapades in the system? If he knew this and had intentionally replaced her with the clueless Ulbrich so he could continue laundering money, then what did this tell me about Schuler’s death?

6 Dirty work

Vera Soboda had barely greeted me when the doorbell rang.

“You thought you’d scared me off!” Karl-Heinz Ulbrich said to me triumphantly. “You thought that’s why I let you go, right? I just wanted to see who was helping you.” He looked at Vera. “You’ll regret this. If you think that the Sorbian bank will give you your severance pay while you double-cross us, you’ve got another thing coming.”

She glared at him as if she were about to grab him by the neck. If I had thrown myself between them, not much would be left of either him or me. Her eyes pinned on him, she asked me: “Did you find out anything?”

“No. And yet I see why Welker would have replaced you with him. You know what’s going on, he doesn’t. And yet that still doesn’t prove a thing.”

“What is it that I don’t know?” Ulbrich asked.

“Ignorant idiot!” she said, full of disgust. “I’d get off my high horse if I were you! Why do you think Welker made you the new bank manager, when you know as much about banking as I know about ostrich farming? Do you think it’s because you’re able to run the bank? Nonsense! The only reason you’ve been hired is because there’s no way you’ll ever find out that money is being laundered at the bank. Though that isn’t the only reason you were hired: it was also because of the way you handle the employees, and the fact that you wouldn’t shrink back from any sort of nastiness.”

“How dare you! It’s not as if banking is some hocus-pocus. And whatever I need to know, I find out right away. Would I have caught the two of you otherwise? I used to be at the Head Office 18, National Security, where they hired only the best. The best! Money laundering! Don’t make me laugh.”

“You were with the Stasi?” Vera said, looking at him first in astonishment and then as if she hadn’t seen him in a long time and now was recognizing him feature by feature. “Of course. Once in the shit, always in the shit. If no longer for our side, then for the other side. Whoever happens to need you guys and will pay you.”

“Shit? This man entered the bank illegally, and you are making terrible and unsubstantiated allegations. That’s shit! And what do you mean, I’m not working for our side but the other side? How could I work for our side? You’re talking as if I had betrayed our side-I haven’t heard such nonsense in years! Our side no longer exists! The only thing that exists now is the other side!”

He was still trying to present himself in a superior way, but he sounded exhausted and desperate. As if he had believed in East Germany and the Stasi and loved his job and was lost without it. As if he were orphaned.

But Vera Soboda did not let go: in the old days he’d been with the Stasi, and now he was with a shady West German bank, ignorant when it came to banking, nasty to the bank employees, being saddled on her and then replacing her-she was too furious to notice his exhaustion and desperation and to take pity on him. Perhaps that was also too much to ask. “I know our side no longer exists, and I’m not accusing you of betrayal,” she went on, “but what you did in the past was dirty work, and it’s dirty work you’re doing now. You’re already preparing the firings, aren’t you? Everyone knows that. Do you know what they’re calling you at the bank? The angel of death! And don’t get on your high horse just because everyone’s afraid of you. One can also be frightened of a little toad if it’s poisonous and disgusting enough.”

“Frau Soboda,” I intervened in an attempt to calm her down. But now Ulbrich could no longer hold back.

“You need to get off your high horse! If money was being laundered in the bank, it wasn’t going on just in the past few weeks, but all the time you were there, with your knowledge, under your very nose! Did you do anything about it? Did you go to the police?” He looked triumphant again. “Shit? You were standing in it with both feet, and if you had your way, you’d be happy to still be standing in it. If anyone here is ready for any kind of nastiness, it’s you!”

Now Vera Soboda looked exhausted. She shrugged her shoulders, raised her arms and then lowered them, and went from the hall where we were standing into the living room and sat down.

Ulbrich followed her, saying, “You’re not getting out of this so easily. The least I expect is an apology.” Then Ulbrich didn’t know what else to say.

I went to the kitchen, got three beers from the refrigerator, opened them, and took them to the living room. I put one on the table in front of Vera Soboda, and one in front of an empty chair, and I sat down with one of the beers on the sofa. Ulbrich went over to the empty chair, stood next to it for a moment, and sat down carefully on its edge. He took the beer and slowly rolled it between his palms. It was so quiet that I could hear the computer humming lightly in the covered veranda.

“Cheers,” Ulbrich said. He raised his bottle and drank. Vera looked at him and at me as if it had slipped her mind that we were there. Ulbrich cleared his throat. “I am sorry I fired you. It was nothing personal. I wasn’t given a reason; I was just ordered to-there was nothing I could do. I’m also fully aware that I know nothing about banking. But perhaps the job doesn’t require someone who knows the business. Per haps all it needs is someone who can use the phone. I make a call when there’s something I don’t know and am told what to do.” He cleared his throat again. “And as for what you said about doing dirty work for the other side, we don’t have any say anymore-you don’t and I don’t-and whoever has nothing to say has to accept the job he’s given. Nothing personal there, either.” He took a long sip, burped quietly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and got up. “Thank you very much for the beer. Good night.”

7 Fried potatoes

“Has he gone?” Vera asked.

Ulbrich had pulled the door shut behind him so quietly, and gone down the stairs so softly, that no sound disturbed the silence.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I behaved rather badly. And when I got a chance to make up for it, I ruined that, too. He was right, and he even tried to be nice. I was so angry I didn’t even manage to say good night.”

“Angry at him?”

“At him, at me, at his being so disgusting.”

“He isn’t disgusting.”

“I know. I’m angry about that, too. In fact, I owe him an apology.”

“Are the cold cuts in the refrigerator for us?”

“Yes. I was thinking of making some fried potatoes, too.”

“I’ll see to dinner,” I said.

I found some boiled potatoes, onions, bacon, and oil. The chopping, the hissing in the pan, and the aroma did me good after the argument between Vera and Ulbrich. I have come to believe that setbacks don’t make you a better person, just a smaller one. The setbacks in my life didn’t make me better, and Vera Soboda and Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, too, had become smaller through the setbacks that came with Germany ’s unification and postunification. Setbacks don’t cost you only what you have invested-every time, they cut away a piece of your belief that you will survive the next trial, the next battle, that you will manage to tackle your life.

I served the food and we ate. Vera wanted to know what had happened at the Sorbian bank, and I told her. I explained where I knew Ulbrich from and why I was certain he knew nothing of former or present money laundering at the bank. “He suspected that something crooked was going on at Weller and Welker, had talked about the Russian or Chechen Mafia, and might have been thinking of money laundering. But as for anything specific-he himself can’t have found out anything, and I’m certain Welker wouldn’t have clued him in. That is, if there’s still anything to be clued into.”

“I… I see I was quick to jump to conclusions,” Vera said.

“Yes, you might have been.”

“In that case,” she said, “Ulbrich might be right in saying that the bank doesn’t need a manager who knows anything about banking. Perhaps the Sorbian bank needs to economize because no more money is being laundered, and firings are called for, and they took the first step with me. Perhaps they wanted to get rid of me so I wouldn’t make trouble with the other firings.” She looked at me with a sad smile and shook her head. “That’s just a fantasy; I wouldn’t have made any trouble about the other firings.”

I got up and took the trash bag with Schuler’s money out of my suitcase. I told her how I’d gotten the money and how Schuler had probably stumbled upon it.

“There’s a whole lot that needs to be done around here,” I said. “Take the money and get it all done.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. I’m not saying you can do everything that needs doing. Just some of it.”

“I… this is… This is quite a surprise. I don’t know if I can… I mean, I do have some ideas. But you’ve seen how angry I can get, and when I get angry I really do foolish things. Wouldn’t you want to approach someone who… well, someone who’s better? How about you yourself?”

The following morning I found her in her nightgown in the kitchen. She had apportioned most of the money into little bundles on the table and was counting the rest with unparalleled dexterity.

“We were made to practice counting money the old way,” she said with a laugh, “and whoever counted fastest was made supervisor.”

“So you are taking up my offer?” I asked.

“There are almost a hundred thousand marks here. I’ll account for every penny.”

She handed me a little gray booklet. “I found it among the bills.”

It was a passport from the Third Reich. I opened it and found a picture and the name Ursula Sara Brock, born October 10, 1911. A cursive J was stamped over it. It was clear that when it came to the money Schuler had left me a bequest. But why had he left me this passport? I leafed through it, turning it this way and that, and put it in my pocket.

8 Keep an eye out!

On the way back I took the autobahn. I wanted to float along in the stream of cars without distractions, without having to pay too much attention to the road. I wanted to think.

Who was Ursula Brock? If she were still alive she would be an old lady and could hardly have frightened Schuler to death. Would Samarin or his people have frightened him to death? Among the many unanswered questions was why they wouldn’t have taken the money from him right away. Would Welker, who only later laundered money, if he was laundering money at all… No, even if I could prove that Welker was laundering money now, it wouldn’t make sense that he would have frightened Schuler to death. Unless, that is, he already knew he was going to inherit Samarin’s money-laundering enterprise and was afraid of Schuler’s insatiable inquisitiveness.

I drove in the right lane, among trucks, elderly couples in old Fords and Opels, Poles in rattling, smoking wrecks, and diehard communists in Trabants. When an exhaust pipe in front of me stank too much I switched to the left lane and drove past the trucks, Poles, and communists until I found an elderly couple behind whom I pulled in again. In one car a plastic dog was enthroned in the back window, shaking his head from side to side and up and down with insight and sorrow.

What did I have to go on? A dark Saab on the Schlossplatz in Schwetzingen and Vera Soboda’s replacement by Karl-Heinz Ulbrich-at the end of the day, this was so little that I asked myself if I really had any proof against Welker. Was I envious of his wealth, his bank, his house, his children? The ease with which he had achieved everything? The ease with which he sauntered through life? The ability to remain untouched by both the evil that befell him and the evil he wrought? Was it a case of age envying youth, the war and postwar generation envying the generation of the economic miracle, the guilty envying the innocent? Was I being gnawed at by his having shot Samarin and having put Nägelsbach in danger without batting an eye? Was it that I didn’t feel so innocent and uninvolved?

I spent the night in Nuremberg. The following morning I set out early and was in Schwetzingen by eleven. Until seven I sat around in various cafés, keeping my eye on the bank. A few cars, a few clients on foot, a few employees who sat down on a bench on the square at lunchtime and who at six said their good-byes in front of the gate-that was all.

As I sat in my office that evening, Brigitte called and asked if my trip had been a success. Then she asked: “Does this mean your case has come to an end?”

“Almost.”

While I was jotting down what I knew and didn’t know, what still had to be done and still might be done, there was a knock at the door. It was Georg.

“I happened to be walking by and saw you at your desk,” he said. “Do you have a moment?”

He had been riding his bike and now cleaned his glasses. Then he sat down opposite me in the cone of the desk lamp. He eyed the half-empty wine bottle. “You’re drinking too much, Uncle Gerhard.”

I poured myself another glass and made him some tea.

“There must be a file at the Restitution Office,” he said. “The nephew’s son who emigrated to London and died there in the 1950s must have put in a claim after the war for the restitution of the family fortune. The Nazis wrecked and ravaged his home so completely that his parents killed themselves. Maybe the son knew something and mentioned it.”

I needed a few moments to see where he was heading. “You’re talking about the silent partnership? Nobody here’s interested in that anymore. Nobody was ever really interested in it; my client wasn’t, and I wasn’t. It was just that it took me a long time to realize what it was a pretext for.”

But Georg was on a roll. “I looked further into the matter. In the fifties, restitutions were a big thing, and there was one case after another. Lots of minor cases, but also really major ones. Jews who’d been forced to sell factories, department stores, or land for next to nothing, who either wanted their property back or compensation. Don’t you remember all that?”

Of course I remembered. Particularly the expropriations of Jews. There had been a naive Jew who didn’t want to sell, and when his business partner extorted him he turned to the public prosecutor’s office. When I started as a public prosecutor in 1942, this incident already lay some time back but still made for a good joke.

“Aren’t you interested in what happened?” Georg asked.

“Why would I be?”

“Why would you be? I want to know,” Georg said, staring at me obstinately. “I’ve tracked down the silent partner. I know what kind of guy he was. He was conservative and liked to listen to music, drink wine, and smoke Havanas. He’d been awarded a pile of medals, made a fortune providing expert legal advice to the nobility, and was a modest man who invested all his money for his niece and nephew. As far as I’m concerned he’s alive and kicking.”

“Georg-”

“He’s dead, I know. It’s just a way of putting it. But I find Laban interesting enough to want to know everything. What are you paying me, by the way, for the research I’ve done up to now?”

“I was thinking a thousand plus expenses. Speaking of which…” I wrote him a check for two thousand marks.

“Thanks. That’ll be enough for me to get to Berlin and dig through the files. I’ve still got a few days until my job begins. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

“Georg?”

“Yes?”

I looked at his slim face, his serious, alert eyes, his lips that were usually lightly parted as if he were surprised.

“Keep an eye out for those skinheads.”

He laughed. “I will, Uncle Gerhard.”

“Don’t laugh. And keep an eye out for those other guys, too!”

“I will.”

He got up, still laughing, and left.

9 Blackouts

On Monday I called Philipp, but he didn’t want to phone Dr. Armbrust on the doctor’s first day back from vacation.

“You can’t imagine how hectic things are here,” he told me. “Give me till tomorrow, or better, Wednesday.”

On Wednesday he dropped by my office.

“As I don’t have much to report,” he said, “the least I could do was come and tell you in person. This Doctor Armbrust is a very nice fellow. It turns out he’s referred several patients to me over the years.”

“Well?”

“I asked him if Schuler had asthma or any allergies. The answer was no. The only things wrong with Schuler were his high blood pressure and heart problems. He was taking Ximovan for insomnia, which doesn’t make you drowsy the next day. He was taking an ACE inhibitor, Zentramin for his heart, and a diuretic. He was on Catapresan for blood pressure, a great medication as long as you don’t stop taking it abruptly-if you do, you run the risk of blackouts.”

I recognized the medications. They were among those I’d taken from Schuler’s bathroom so Philipp could tell me about Schuler’s possible condition. I had even started reading the package inserts. “Blackouts?”

“While driving, talking, doing anything that involves concentration,” Philip said. “That’s why we don’t prescribe it to people who are scatterbrained, confused, or forgetful. Armbrust described Schuler as a somewhat odorous but exceptionally alert elderly gentleman.”

“That was my impression, too.”

“That’s not to say that he might not have forgotten to take his pills. On the first day you stop, things are still fine. On the second day, too. But on the third day, significant blackouts can occur. Think of it in these terms: on day one and day two he wouldn’t have felt all that well, thinking it might be the weather or the extra glass of beer he’d had the night before, or just that he was having a bad day, the way one sometimes does. On the third day, he wouldn’t have been in a state to think a lot.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“What?”

“That someone who takes a medication year after year might suddenly forget to take it.”

Philipp threw up his hands. “If there’s anything you learn as a doctor, it’s that patients come in all shapes and sizes. Perhaps Schuler had had enough of his medications, or he’d been feeling so well taking them all that time that he felt he didn’t need them anymore, or he took the wrong pills by mistake.”

“Or none of the above.”

“Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Maybe Schuler took his pills day in and day out and simply drank too much beer in the evening. Don’t start going after false leads, Gerhard! And take care of your heart!”

10 Old poop

10 Old poop

Then Georg came back from Berlin. He had managed to keep out of the way of the skinheads, and of the others, too. And he had found the restitution file of Laban’s nephew.

“Putting in a claim for restitution was almost as painful as losing the things one was putting in for,” Georg said. “Two silver candelabras, twelve silver knives, forks, soup and dessert spoons, twelve soup plates and twelve dinner plates, a sideboard, a leather sofa and armchairs; estimated value, date of purchase, length of use, receipts or other documents of proof of ownership, witness statements, explanations as to why the estimates are being furnished in this manner, why the property was relinquished, are there witnesses that the apartment was ransacked during Kristallnacht, were the losses reported to the police, to the insurance company-perhaps there was no other way, but this was terrible. And yet Laban’s nephew seemed to have done rather well in London. He had a place in Hampstead and a gallery that still exists and has a good name.”

We were again sitting in my office, across from each other. Georg’s face was beaming with enthusiasm. He was proud of what he had discovered and wanted to stay the course, find out more, find out everything.

“What more can there be to know?” I said.

He looked at me as if I had asked a foolish question. “Things like where he got the money to live in London in style, what happened to his sister, what happened to his great-uncle’s estate? There was once a bust of Laban at the university in Strasbourg, which a professor I spoke with there is also trying to locate-imagine if I should come across it in a junk store in Strasbourg or somewhere in Alsace. One thing’s for sure: I know where I’m going for my next vacation.”

I, too, knew where I had to go. It was raining as I drove to Emmertsgrund, but by the time I got there the wind had swept the clouds from the sky and the sun was shining. The view to the west was very clear, and I spotted the nuclear power plant in Philippsburg, the towers of the Speyer Cathedral, the telecommunications tower in the Luisenpark, and the Collini-Center-everything looking as if it had been painted with a fine brush. While I was gazing at the landscape the clouds were piling up over the mountains of the Haardt, preparing the next rain.

Old Herr Weller sat in the same chair by the same window, as if he hadn’t moved an inch since my last visit. When I sat down he leaned forward until his nose was close to mine, his weak eyes scrutinizing my face. “You’re not a young man. You’re an old poop like me.”

“The term is old pop.”

“What did you really want when you came by last time?”

I laid the fifty marks that he had given me for the war grave on the table.

“Your son-in-law hired me to ascertain the identity of the silent partner who brought half a million to your bank around the turn of the century.”

“You didn’t ask me about that.”

“Would you have told me?”

He didn’t shake his head, nor did he nod. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

I could hardly tell him that by that time my investigations had been not for but against his son-in-law. “It was enough for me to find out if your generation of Weller and Welker could really have simply forgotten a silent partner.”

“And?”

“I never met Welker’s father.”

He laughed, bleating like a goat. “You can bet your life he never forgot anything!”

“Nor have you, Herr Weller. Why did you keep it a secret?”

“Secret, secret… Did you finish my son-in-law’s case?”

“It was Paul Laban, a professor in Strasbourg, the most famous and sought-after specialist of his day, childless, but solicitous for his niece and nephew and their children. It doesn’t look as if any of them enjoyed the legacy of his silent partnership.” I waited, but he waited, too. “Furthermore, it wasn’t the right time for Jews to enjoy their wealth in Germany.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Sometimes it was better to get a little something and make it abroad than to lose everything,” I added.

“Why are we old poops beating about the bush?” Herr Weller said. “The nephew’s son emigrated to England and wasn’t able to take anything out of Germany, so we saw to it that our London connections made sure he didn’t have to start up there empty-handed.”

“That must have cost the nephew a pretty penny.”

“The only thing that’s free is death.”

I nodded. “So in your archives there must be a document from 1937 or 1938 in which the nephew relinquishes all rights and claims to the silent partnership. I can understand your preferring to keep that under wraps.”

“I’m sure an old poop like you can understand. But today everyone likes dragging things like that out into the light and making a big song and dance about it. Because they don’t understand how things were back then.”

“Not that it’s easy to understand.”

He grew increasingly animated. “Not easy to understand? It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t pleasant! But what is so hard to understand about the old game, one side having what the other side wants? It’s the game of games. It’s what keeps finance, the economy, and politics going.”

“But-”

“But me no buts!” He banged his hand down on the arm rest. “See to your business and let others see to theirs. A bank has to keep its money together.”

“Did the nephew’s son get in touch after the war?”

“With us?”

I didn’t answer, but waited.

“He stayed in London after the war.”

I continued to wait.

“He refused to set foot on German soil ever again.”

I continued waiting, and he laughed.

“What a hardheaded old poop you are!” he said.

I’d had enough of him. “The expression isn’t old poop, it’s old pop!”

“Ha!” Again he banged his hand down on the armrest. “Wouldn’t you love it if things were still popping for you? But they’re not! You should at least be happy you can still poop.” He laughed his bleating goat’s laugh.

“And?”

“His lawyer made it clear to him that he wouldn’t get anything out of us. The inflation after World War I, Black Friday, the currency reform after World War II-even the biggest pile can be reduced to a few mouse droppings. And it’s not as if he hadn’t been well provided for. Not to mention the danger we exposed ourselves to; we could have ended up in a concentration camp.”

“Was that his German lawyer?”

He nodded and said casually, “Yes, back then we Germans still held together.”

11 Remorse?

Yes, that’s how they were. For them the Third Reich, war, defeat, rebuilding, and the economic miracle were simply different circumstances under which they could conduct the same business: multiplying the money they owned or managed. It was true when they said that they hadn’t been Nazis, that they had nothing against Jews, that they had stood firmly on constitutional ground. Everything for them was ground on which they stood and which made their enterprises bigger, richer, and more powerful. And yet they did this with the feeling that nothing else mattered. What good were governments, systems, ideas, people’s happiness or pain if the economy wasn’t flourishing? When there was no work and no bread?

Korten had been like that. Korten, my friend, brother-in-law, and enemy. That was how he had devoted himself to the Rhineland Chemical Works during the war and how after the war he had turned it into what it is today. For Korten, as for so many others, power and the success of the enterprise had become synonymous with his own power and success. What he took out of the enterprise for himself, he took with the certainty that he was serving what was vital: the Rhineland Chemical Works, the economy, the people. Until he fell from a cliff in Trefeuntec. Until I pushed him off that cliff.

I never regretted it. There have been times when I thought I ought to, because it was neither legally nor morally correct. But remorse never set in. Perhaps the other, older, harder morals that existed before those of today still prevail in our hearts.

It is only in one’s dreams that an unmastered, unmasterable remnant remains. That night I dreamed that Korten and I were having an elegant meal at a table beneath a large old tree with overhanging branches. I don’t remember what we talked about. It was a casual, friendly conversation. I enjoyed it because I knew we couldn’t really expect to chat so warmly and easily after what had happened at Trefeuntec. Then I noticed how gloomy it was. At first I thought it was the dense foliage, but then I saw that the sky was stormy and dark, and I heard the wind rustling through the leaves. We talked as if everything was fine until the wind started tearing at us, rip ping away the tablecloth along with the plates and glasses, finally carrying off Korten on the chair on which he was sit ting: a mighty, enthroned Korten, his deep laughter echoing. I ran after him, trying to catch him, ran with outstretched arms, ran without the slightest hope of grabbing hold of him or his chair, ran so fast that my feet barely touched the ground. As I ran, Korten went on laughing. I knew he was laughing at me, but I didn’t know why, until I noticed that I had run beyond the edge of the cliff on which we had been sitting beneath the tree, that I was running on air, the sea far below me. My running came to an end, and I fell.

12 Summer

Suddenly summer was here: not just the odd warm day or mild evening, but a heat as oppressive in the shade as in the sun, a heat that didn’t let me sleep at night but made me count the hours struck by the bell of the Heilig-Geist church. I was relieved when it grew light, though I knew that the morning was not fresh and the new day would turn out as hot as the day before. I got up and had some of the tea I’d made the night before and put in the refrigerator. Sometimes the scrapes and wounds that Turbo brought back from his nightly adventures were so bad that I had to tend them with iodine. He, too, is growing old. I wonder, does he still win his battles?

It was so hot that everything was less important, less pressing. As if it were not really true, just possible. As if one first had to find out what it was all about, and for that it was too hot.

But I don’t want to blame the heat. I didn’t know what else I could still do to shed light on Schuler’s death. Perhaps there wasn’t anything to shed light on and never had been. Had I taken a wrong turn? In a sense, this idea had its good side. If he had been attacked, it wasn’t as if I’d have been any less responsible than I first thought. Just the opposite, in fact. Only if Schuler’s bad condition had been triggered by someone else on that fatal day, would his life have been in my hands. In fact, if he only had a hangover, or had been affected by the weather, his accident could have occurred at any time.

The hot weeks ended with a series of days in which the heat exploded in powerful evening storms. By five o’clock the sky would cloud over, and by six it was as dark as if nighttime had come. The wind rose and whipped the dust through the streets, ripping from the trees branches that the heat had turned dry and brittle. With the first storms the children remained outside, yelping beneath the raindrops, overjoyed when the rain started pouring down like a waterfall, wetting them through and through. But this soon bored them. I sat by the door of my office and watched the water washing in waves over the empty sidewalk, gurgling in a pool over the gutter because the drain couldn’t handle it fast enough. When the storm was over I was the first to go outside, breathing in the fresh air on my way home or to Brigitte’s. During the storm the sun had set. But the sky was clear again, a pale blue glowing violet in the twilight before it turned a darker violet, dark blue, dark gray, black.

I savored the summer. I savored the heat and the law of lassitude with which it blanketed everything and beneath which I felt free and at ease. I savored the storms, and also the moderate temperatures of the following weeks. Brigitte and I were looking for an apartment, and when I insisted on one with a view of the Rhine or the Neckar she knew that I wasn’t out to sabotage our search. I always would have liked to have a house by the sea, or if not by the sea then by a lake. But Mannheim isn’t by the sea or by a lake. The Rhine and Neckar flow through it.

“We’ll find a really good apartment, Gerhard.”

Everything was fine but not fine. The stories life writes demand endings, and as long as a story doesn’t have an ending, it keeps everyone who participates in it in check. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending. The good don’t have to be rewarded and the bad punished. But the threads of fate cannot be left dangling: they have to be woven into the story’s tapestry. Only when that is done can we leave the story behind us. Only then are we free to begin something new.

No, the story that had started at the beginning of the year in the snow was not yet over. Even if I’d have liked to make peace with Schuler, who’d maybe had one glass too many or been affected by the weather. I didn’t know all the threads that were still waiting to be woven into the carpet, and I knew even less what the carpet’s pattern was or how I could find out. But all I had to do was wait. Stories strive toward their ends, and don’t leave you alone until they reach them.

13 Laban’s children

When the leaves began to turn I got a letter from Georg. He sent me a manuscript that was scheduled to be published in a law journal. “Laban’s children”-Georg had turned his research on Laban’s heirs into an article. Did I have any suggestions?

He made it clear from the start of the article that Laban did not in fact have any children. No natural children, and no disciples, either. While other professors guard their circle of students like mother hens, Laban saw to it that his students would stand on their own feet as soon as possible and follow their own paths. Georg suspected that an early passion for a colleague’s wife, one that was perhaps reciprocated but that remained unfulfilled, had marked him in a way that kept him from close bonds with students and from deep relationships with women.

But he did have children. He was as close to his sister’s two children as he might have been had they been his own. He particularly favored his nephew, Walter Brock, who had also become a lawyer and judge.

Walter Brock. Georg described his path from Breslau to Leipzig, his career from district court judge to judge of the regional high court, the insults, the humiliations, and finally the firing with which his career came to an end in 1933. He described his marriage; his children, Heinrich and Ursula; his and his wife’s suicides after their apartment was ransacked during Kristallnacht. He described how Heinrich had escaped to London at the eleventh hour, and how Ursula hadn’t managed to get out in time and so had gone into hiding when the deportations began. She had disappeared. Laban, who died in 1918, had tenderly loved little Ursula, who was born in 1911.

There was no need for me to double-check, but I took Ursula Brock’s passport out of my filing cabinet and saw that her date of birth was October 10, 1911. Then I studied her passport photograph. She had had bobbed dark hair and a dimple in her left cheek, and she looked at me attentively with happy, somewhat startled eyes.

I found Georg at the courthouse. “I’ve got Ursula Brock’s passport.”

“You’ve got what?”

“Ursula Brock, Laban’s great-niece. I’ve got her passport. I just read your article, and-”

“I’ve got a case at two. Can I drop by afterward?”

“Sure, I’ll be at the office.”

He came by and wouldn’t take coffee, tea, or mineral water.

“Where is it?”

He studied the initial pages with the photograph and the entries and leafed through the rest of the pages slowly and carefully, as if he might be able to elicit hidden information from them.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

I told him about Adolf Schuler, his archive, and his visit. “He gave me an attaché case that had… that had this passport in it-after which he got into his car, drove off, crashed into a tree, and died.”

“This means that after she went into hiding she sought help in Schwetzingen. Did she find help? Did Weller and Welker get her a new passport? Did they keep this old one for after the war?” He shook his head slowly and sadly. “But she didn’t make it.”

“In your article you wrote that as a Jew she was expelled from the university in 1936. Do you know what she studied?”

“All kinds of things. Her parents were very indulgent and didn’t push her. In the end it was Slavonic studies.” He looked at me entreatingly. “Do you need the passport? Can I have it? I’ve got a picture of Walter Brock and his wife with the small children, and one of Heinrich in London, but I haven’t got a picture of Ursula as an adult.”

He took an envelope out of his briefcase and laid out a series of photographs on my desk. A married couple standing in front of a carefully pruned hedge, the man wearing a suit with a stiff collar beneath his chin and a walking stick in his left hand, the woman in a long dress down to the ground, with a strap in her right hand that harnessed Heinrich around shoulders and chest, like a horse’s bridle. Heinrich was wearing a sailor suit and cap, and Ursula, bigger than her brother and not in a harness, was standing next to her father. She was wearing a summer dress and a wide sun hat. “Don’t move,” the photographer had just called out, and they all were standing still, unblinking. Another picture showed a young man in front of the Tower Bridge, which had just been raised to let a ship pass through.

“Heinrich in London?” I asked.

Georg nodded.

“And this is the house in Breslau in which Laban was born, this is his villa in Strasbourg, this is a postcard of the main building of the Wilhelm University under construction, and-”

“Who’s that?” I asked, pulling out a photograph from beneath the postcards. I recognized the large head, the receding hairline, the large ears, and the protruding eyes. I had seen him the first time through a foggy windshield on the Hirschhorner Höhe and for the last time quite close up when we drove from the hospital to the Luisenpark. I had also seen him when we got out of the car and walked into the park. But Samarin’s head had never made as much of an impression on me as when we sat next to each other on the backseat; he looking stoically before him while I peered at him from the side.

“That’s Laban. Haven’t you seen him before?”

14 Zentramin

So I drove yet again to the retirement home in Emmertsgrund. The first yellow and red leaves were glowing in the green of the mountains. In some of the fields fires were burning, and at one point the fire stretched all the way to the autobahn. I opened the window to see if it still smelled the way it used to, but only wind came roaring through the open window.

The door to old Herr Weller’s apartment stood open, and the place had been emptied. I went inside and looked out the window at the cement factory from the spot where he and I had sat across from each other and talked. Two cleaning ladies came in and began to mop the floor without paying any attention to me. I wondered why the walls weren’t being painted first. When I asked them what had happened to Weller, they didn’t understand.

In the main office I was told that he had died of a stroke the week before. I’ve never been interested in medicine, nor will I ever be. I imagined old Herr Weller’s brain at work, driven, sly, evil, propelled by bleating laughter like a stuttering engine. Until the engine suddenly stalled. I was told when and where he would be buried. I could still make it if I hurried. I suddenly remembered Adolf Schuler’s funeral. It had slipped my mind, and again I felt as if I’d failed to hold on to him and stop him from getting into the car and driving into a tree.

Old Herr Weller had enjoyed talking to me and would have wanted to talk more-to explain how things were during the war, that the great-niece of his silent partner would have died if he and old Herr Welker hadn’t taken her in and given her a new identity; that she’d been insane to have a damn brat on top of everything, as he’d have put it. That he and Welker had done more than enough, raising the brat after she died. The brat’s real identity? What use would that have been to Gregor Samarin if they’d informed him of his real identity? That would just have given him big ideas. Furthermore, the Brocks lived in Leipzig. Wouldn’t the brat have had a better time of it as Gregor Samarin in the West than he would growing up in a Communist orphanage?

Yes, that’s how old Herr Weller would have spoken to me, one old poop to another. I could picture it clearly. Had I asked him whether a Gregor Brock wouldn’t have a right to claims that a Gregor Samarin couldn’t make because he didn’t know anything about them, old Herr Weller would have waved me away. Claims? What claims? After the inflation, the Great Depression, and the currency reform? Claims, when he himself and old Herr Welker could have been sent to a concentration camp for all they had done for Ursula Brock?

I could also picture a conversation that would have taken place in the spring between Adolf Schuler and Bertram Welker. Schuler would have been waiting for Welker to fill him in about Samarin, about his identity and his dealings. Schuler had found the money in the cellar, and in his search for documents concerning the silent partner had found the passport: the passport of Ursula Brock, whom he had known only as Frau Samarin. Perhaps he felt obliged to inform Samarin as well. But his foremost loyalty was to the Welkers, so he intended to go to Bertram Welker first with the information. But Welker had come with Samarin, and Schuler couldn’t talk with Welker as openly as he would have liked. Schuler had been secretive, Welker had said, and probably he really had aired a few secrets, not so much about the money as about Gregor Brock. Also, perhaps it wasn’t Welker but Samarin who had diarrhea and kept having to go to the bathroom. Perhaps Schuler was lucky and managed to tell Welker everything he wanted to tell him.

Or had that been Schuler’s undoing?

I drove to my office and took out the medicines I had taken with me from Schuler’s bathroom. I took the little bottle of Catapresan pills to the Kopernikus pharmacy, where the four friendly pharmacists have been so helpful and forthcoming over the years that I’ve almost never needed a doctor. I gave the bottle to the head pharmacist. She told me she wasn’t sure when she’d have an answer for me. But when I dropped by my office that evening after a meal at the Kleiner Rosengarten, she had tested the contents and left the results on my answering machine. The pills were not Catapresan, but Zentramin, a benign magnesium-calcium-potassium concoction used for calming the vegetative nervous system and stabilizing the cardiac nerves during arrhythmia. I knew this medication. Zentramin was also among the medications that Dr. Armbrust had prescribed for Schuler, and which I had found in his bathroom. Zentramin pills look remarkably similar to Catapresan pills.

15 Not to mention the language!

I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to consider a plan of action. I was standing in my doorway getting the key out of my bag when I heard “Herr Self!” and Karl-Heinz Ulbrich stepped out of the shadows into the light of the door lamp. He was again wearing his three-piece suit, but his vest was unbuttoned, his collar undone, and his tie crooked. He had stopped trying to play the banker.

“What are you doing here?”

“Can I come in?” he asked. When I hesitated a moment, he smiled. “As I’ve told you once before, the lock on your door’s a joke.”

We climbed the stairs in silence. I unlocked the door and had him sit on one of the sofas, as he had before, while I sat on the other. I felt I was being petty. I got up and brought out a bottle of Sancerre, along with two glasses.

“Would you like some wine?”

He nodded. Turbo came over and again rubbed against his feet.

“The mistakes we make,” he suddenly began. “All the things we don’t know! Of course one can always learn, but for us East Germans to have to learn at the age of fifty what you West Germans learned at twenty is difficult, and a mistake that doesn’t affect a person at twenty can be very painful at fifty. Tax returns, insurance, bank accounts, the contracts you people keep signing about every single thing-we had no idea about any of that. Not to mention the language! I still can’t tell when you people mean something or don’t. It’s not just when you’re lying, but words have a whole other meaning when you present yourselves or are pitching or selling something.”

“I can imagine that that’s-”

“No, you can’t. But it’s kind of you to say so.” He picked up a glass and drank. “When Welker offered me the job, I thought at first that you had warned him about me and that he was trying to buy me off. Then I thought: But why? Why do I always think along those lines? Welker and I had a good conversation. It didn’t bother him that I had specialized in financial crimes or that I’d been with the Stasi or that I was from the East. He said he needed someone like me. I told myself that I wanted to believe what he was saying, that I also wanted to believe in myself, that banking wasn’t just some hocus-pocus. I began reading the financial news, even if it’s far from an easy read, and ordered some books about management and bookkeeping. You know, it’s not as if you people here in the West don’t breathe the same air we do. And you don’t even know the local people, while I know the Sorbians like the back of my hand.”

I don’t know what was wrong with me. I remembered the text and melody of a hit by Peter Alexander from the 1960s: “I know your sorrows like the back of my hand.”

“I really tried hard,” he continued, staring in front of him. “But once again I didn’t understand the language. What Welker had in fact said-a thing you would have understood in a flash-was: ‘I need an idiot who doesn’t know what’s going on here. And Karl-Heinz Ulbrich is just such an idiot.’”

“When did you realize this?”

“Oh, weeks ago. Quite by chance. We’ve got a lot of small branches in the area, and I thought I ought to get to know them, so I went to visit them-each time a different one. One day I turned up at one, in the back of beyond, just five little houses, all boarded up as if nobody lived there, on a road to nowhere. The bank itself was in no better shape, and I wondered what it was doing there. Well, what could it be doing there? It was a place to accommodate money. It didn’t take me long to find that out. When I want to know something, I-”

“I know, when it comes to shadowing you’re an absolute ace.”

“I didn’t just shadow. I also sniffed around. Welker isn’t Mafia. His men are Russians and he works for Russians, that’s all. Before his men started working for him, they worked for that other fellow, the one he shot. And he doesn’t only work for Russians. He’s independent, makes a profit of four to six percent, which isn’t a lot, but then again that’s all that laundering brings in. Where you make money is when you launder large amounts. Then you really take it in. And what Vera Soboda and I realized is that laundering cash is only an extra. The actual business is the laundering of money on the books.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“No. If it all comes to light it will be the end of the Sorbian bank, and all my employees will be out on the street. I didn’t have to read too much in my financial textbooks to see that we have far too many employees. The only reason Welker doesn’t rock the boat is because he doesn’t want to make waves. And do you know what else I tell myself? In the old days, we never had anything like that happen. You fellows brought all this with you. So it’s your police who should be dealing with it.”

“I can assure you that we in Schwetzingen had as little money laundering in the old days as you did in Cottbus. Wasn’t it you who said that Chechens, Georgians, and Azerbaijanis-”

“Back in the East German days, the Chechens stayed in Chechnya and the Georgians in Georgia. It’s you people who mixed everything up.”

He had a fixed idea in his mind and would not let anyone shake it. There was a determined look on his face, even if his determination was one of inflexibility.

“So what now? Why are you here? From what I see, you’ve reconciled yourself to the fact that-”

“Reconciled myself?” He looked at me in disbelief. “You think that because I haven’t gone to the police I have bowed my head to all the derision, insults, humiliations, degradations…” He groped for other fitting expressions but couldn’t find any. “I intend to do something!”

“How long have you been in town?”

“A week. I took a leave of absence. I’ll do something that Welker won’t forget.”

“Oh, Herr Ulbrich. I don’t know what you have in mind, but won’t the Sorbian bank be ruined that way, too, with your employees all ending up on the street? Welker wasn’t out to deride or humiliate you, or any of the other things you just said. What he did was use you, just as he uses everyone else, regardless of whether they’re from East or West Germany. It’s nothing personal.”

“He said to me-”

“But he doesn’t speak your language. You yourself just said that you and we don’t speak the same language.”

He looked at me sadly, and with a shock I realized it was the same helpless, somewhat foolish look that Klara sometimes had. I also recognized Klara’s inflexible determination in his face.

“Don’t do anything, Herr Ulbrich. Go back and earn some money at the Sorbian bank for as long as you can-it isn’t going to last forever. Earn enough so you can open an office, in Cottbus or Dresden or Leipzig: Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, Private Investigator. And if you’re ever swamped with work, give me a call and I’ll come help you out.”

He smiled-a small, crooked smile despite his inflexible determination.

“Welker used you,” I continued. “So now use him. Use him to lay a foundation for what you want to do. Don’t get tangled up in settling scores where if you win, you’ll end up the loser.”

He was silent. Then he emptied his glass in a single draft. “That’s a good wine.” He leaned forward and sat there as if he didn’t know whether to remain sitting or get up.

“Why don’t we finish this bottle?” I asked.

“I think…” He got up. “I think I’d better go. Thank you for everything.”

16 A little joke

I finished the bottle on my own. So, Ulbrich wanted to do something that Welker wouldn’t forget. If he had designs on Welker’s life, he would have expressed himself differently. But what did he have in mind? And what could it be that Welker would never forget? Welker, who had such a knack for keeping the good things clear in his mind and forgetting the bad?

I thought about Schuler and Samarin. If Welker hadn’t forgotten them yet, he would soon enough. What had happened to them, what he had done to them, was bad. What would Ulbrich do that Welker wouldn’t forget? Kill him? The dead never forget.

I didn’t sleep well. I dreamed of Korten falling off the cliff, his coat fluttering. I dreamed of our final conversation, of my saying, “I have come to kill you.” And his mocking words: “To bring them back to life?” I dreamed of Schuler staggering toward me, and of Samarin in his straitjacket. Then everything got confused; Welker fell from the cliff, and Schuler said mockingly: “To bring me back to life?”

The following morning I called Welker. I had to talk to him.

“Are you planning an investment?” he asked cheerfully.

“I’m planning a deposit, an investment, a withdrawal-it depends on how you look at it.”

Two new batteries, and my old voice recorder was working again. You can get smaller ones today that record better and longer and that look more elegant. But my old recorder did the job. My old corduroy jacket did the job, too. It has a hole behind the lapel and one in the breast of the jacket so that the wire, hidden from view, can pass from the recorder in the inside pocket to the microphone in the lapel. Whenever I take my handkerchief out of my inside pocket to wipe the sweat off my forehead or blow my nose, I can turn the recorder on or off.

At ten o’clock I was sitting in Welker’s office.

“As you see,” he said, his hand sweeping through the air, “nothing has changed since your last visit. I wanted to renovate the place, refurbish everything and make it all more attractive. But I just can’t get to it.”

I looked around. It was true that nothing had changed. Only the leaves of the chestnut trees I could see through the window had begun to turn.

“As you know,” I said, “Herr Schuler came to see me before his Isetta crashed into the tree and he died. It wasn’t only the money he brought me. He also brought me what he had found out about Laban and Samarin.”

Welker didn’t say anything.

“He told you what he had found the evening you and Samarin went to see him, when Samarin happened to step out for a moment.”

Again Welker didn’t say anything. He who says nothing says nothing wrong.

“Later, when you were outside, you saw that Schuler was taking a blood-pressure medication that one mustn’t stop taking abruptly. You know a thing or two about such matters. Then you looked through Schuler’s arsenal of medicines to find some pills that looked similar to his blood-pressure medication, and you found some. You switched the pills, just like that. Perhaps it would kill Schuler-which would be great. Perhaps it would only confuse him, indefinitely, for a long time, or perhaps just for a short period-not bad, either. Perhaps he would notice. But even then you wouldn’t be taking a risk by switching the pills: Schuler would have blamed himself or his niece, but he never would have thought of suspecting you.”

“Indeed,” Welker said. He spoke the way one might when someone else is talking, and one wishes to indicate one is listening carefully and paying attention. He looked at me compassionately with his intelligent, sensitive, melancholic eyes, as if I had a problem and had come to him for help.

“I knew that you are also a doctor. But as long as I didn’t understand your motive, I didn’t make the connection between this fact and what I knew about the side effects of the blood-pressure medication and Schuler’s condition before his accident. It was only then that I had the pills in the bottle checked.”

“I see,” he said. He didn’t ask me: “What motive? What was my motive supposed to have been? Where do you see a motive?” All he said was “I see,” and he continued sitting there quite at ease, looking at me compassionately.

“That was murder, Herr Welker, even if you weren’t certain that switching the medicines would kill Schuler. Murder out of greed. Samarin’s grandfather might have renounced all his rights and claims to the silent partnership in 1937 or 1938, but the action back then of a Jew in favor of an Aryan business partner isn’t worth much. Samarin’s claims would have become uncomfortable for you.”

Welker smiled. “That would be quite ironic, wouldn’t it, if the silent partnership, which was my pretext for bringing you into this affair, now posed a threat to me?”

“I don’t think that’s funny. I don’t think your murder of Samarin is funny, either, a murder you committed with cold premeditation and which you presented to us as the act of a desperate man. I don’t think it’s funny that you’re continuing Samarin’s practices. No, I don’t see anything comic in any of this.”

“I said ‘ironic’, I didn’t say ‘comic.’”

“Ironic, comic-either way, I don’t see anything I could laugh about. And when I weigh the fact that Samarin, who didn’t murder Schuler, probably also didn’t murder your wife-about which you always spoke with such emotion-then I stop laughing entirely. What happened to your wife? Did you find that she, having had a fatal accident, could be of some use as a murder victim? Or wasn’t it an accident at all? Did you kill your wife?” I was furious.

I thought he would jump to his own defense. He had to. He couldn’t allow me to get away with what I’d just said. But he uncrossed his legs, leaned his elbows on his knees, pursed his lips, sullen and sulking, and slowly shook his head. “Herr Self, Herr Self…”

I waited.

After a while he sat up in his chair and looked me straight in the eye. “It is a fact that Gregor, wearing a straitjacket, was shot in the Luisenpark. If you have something to say about how he came to be there, why he was in a straitjacket, and why he was killed, I suggest you go to the police. It is also a fact that Schuler had high blood pressure and that he drove into a tree in front of your office and died. If he came by to bring you something, if you were with him before the incident and saw that he was in a bad way, then why did you let him get into his car? From what I can see, there are one or two inconsistencies, if not more. Perhaps there are also one or two inconsistencies in the matter of my wife’s death, where naturally the police suspected me first but ended up counting me out. We all have to learn to live with inconsistencies. We can’t just start leveling unsubstantiated accusations…” He shook his head again.

I wanted to intervene, but he wouldn’t let me.

“This is one of the things I wanted to tell you. The other is-how shall I put it?-I’m not interested in history: the Third Reich, the war, the Jews, silent partners, dead heirs, old claims! All that is water under the bridge. It has nothing to do with me, and I won’t be drawn into it. It bores me. I also have no interest in East Germany. I’d be happiest if everyone in the East would just stay where they are. But when the East comes over here, strikes root, starts meddling and trying to take over my business, then I have to show them that that’s not the name of the game. Samarin and his Russians came here to usurp me-don’t forget that. The past, the past! I’ve had enough of it. Our parents bored us with all those tales of their suffering during the war, their deeds in rebuilding Germany, and their part in the economic miracle, the young teachers with their myths of 1968. Do you, too, have a tale to offer? Enough! My job is to keep Weller and Welker above water. We’re an anachronism. On the great ocean of the world economy we’re just a little barge among the oil tankers, container ships, destroyers, and aircraft carriers-a barge that gets tossed about in the rough seas through which all those other ships can sail smoothly. I don’t know how long we can hold out. Perhaps my children won’t be interested in continuing. Perhaps I myself will lose interest one day. As it is, I don’t belong here. I’d have done better to become a doctor and collect art on the side or even to have picked up a brush myself. I’m old-fashioned, you know. Not in the sense that I’m in any way interested in the past. But I would have liked a quiet, old-fashioned kind of life. Old-fashioned-it’s old-fashioned, too, that I followed family tradition and am now running the family bank. But the only way of doing this is all or nothing, and as long as I’m running this bank, as long as we Welkers still exist, nobody will take us for a sleigh ride.” He repeated emphatically: “Nobody!” Then he smiled again. “I’m surprised you let me get away with that mixed metaphor. A barge can hardly be used for a sleigh ride.”

He got up, and so did I. I’d had enough of his words-his well-considered, well-crafted lies, truths, and half-truths.

On the stairs he said: “It’s amazing how old habits can come back to haunt one.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Schuler hadn’t made a habit of storing his Catapresan pills in those bottles, nobody could have replaced them.”

“He didn’t do it out of habit. His niece did it because with his arthritic fingers he couldn’t get the pills out of the foil.”

Then I remembered that though I had told him about a blood-pressure medication, I hadn’t mentioned Catapresan. Had he just betrayed himself? I stopped.

He also stopped, turned to me, and looked at me pleasantly. “The medication was Catapresan, wasn’t it?”

“I never…” But there was no point of capturing on tape: “I never mentioned the name of the medication.” It wouldn’t prove a thing. There was no point, either, in saying that to Welker. He knew it well enough. He had permitted himself a little joke.

17 Presumption of innocence

I went home and sat outside on the balcony. I smoked a cigarette, then another. The third tasted once again the way cigarettes used to when I smoked as many as I wanted.

I was furious. Furious at Welker, at his sense of superiority, his composure, his impudence. At how he’d gotten away with two murders, with the theft of the silent partnership, with money laundering. At how he’d let me know that he had done these things, all the while making it clear that I shouldn’t presume to match myself against him. I shouldn’t presume to match myself against him? He shouldn’t presume he’d get away with this!

I called my friends and insisted they come over that evening. The Nägelsbachs, Philipp, and Füruzan promised to be over by eight. “What are we celebrating?” “What’s for dinner?” “Spaghetti carbonara, if you’re hungry.” Brigitte said she couldn’t come till later.

They weren’t hungry. They didn’t know what to make of the sudden invitation and sat around expectantly, nursing their wine. All I told them was that I had spoken with Welker and had recorded the conversation. I played them the tape. When it ended, they looked at me questioningly.

“If you remember, Welker hired me to find the silent partner, just to bring me into the game without Samarin suspecting anything. Banks and family stories, stories of yesterday and the distant past-it all sounded innocent enough. Welker wanted me in the game so I’d be there when he got the opportunity to move against Samarin. The matter of the silent partner didn’t interest him at all. But then the silent partner did become interesting. He took on a face-and not in a figurative sense, but a literal one. A face with a receding hairline, large ears, and protruding eyes. You’ll recognize this face.” I handed them Laban’s picture.

“Well I’ll be damned!” Philipp said.

“Old Herr Weller and Herr Welker had acted correctly enough: they helped the silent partner’s great-nephew establish himself financially in London and saw to it that the great-niece, who hadn’t managed to leave Germany in time, got new papers under the name Samarin. When she died, they looked after her child. Though as the boy was born with the name Gregor Samarin, they also raised him as such. The great-nephew died in London, and the great-niece had disappeared as ‘Ursula Brock.’ The silent partner’s share was to go unclaimed for good.”

“How big was this share?”

“I’m not exactly sure. When Laban brought his money into the bank, it was as much as the bank itself had. The bank had been on the brink of bankruptcy. I have no idea how from a bookkeeping standpoint his share might be valued up or down over the years.”

“What part did Schuler play in all of this?”

“Schuler had been Welker’s and Samarin’s teacher, and later the bank’s archivist. When I mentioned to him that Welker was interested in the silent partner and that I was to shed light on his identity, Schuler was gripped by jealousy. He wanted to prove that he was more capable than I, that he could look into all of that without me. He burrowed through the bank’s archives until he got lucky. This is the passport of Laban’s great-niece.”

Frau Nägelsbach turned it this way and that.

“How did Schuler know that Ursula Brock was Laban’s great-niece?” she asked. “And how did he conclude that she was Samarin’s mother?”

“He had known her as Frau Samarin and Gregor’s mother, and any documents concerning the Brocks could only have been in the silent partner’s file. Along with this passport he might also well have found some other documents that he didn’t give me. Not to mention that he found something else that he did bring me: money that was to be laundered at the bank. That money made me miss finding the passport for quite a while. What I initially thought was that Schuler had threatened Samarin with exposing his money-laundering racket and had consequently signed his own death warrant. But all the while, he had signed his death warrant by revealing to Welker that he knew Samarin’s true identity. What Welker did then was to switch Schuler’s pills. That wasn’t a fail-safe way of killing him, but it was worth a try. If it succeeded, it would get Schuler out of the way; if it didn’t, there was always time for a second attempt. Welker wasn’t in a hurry. He knew how loyal Schuler was and that he wouldn’t immediately go to Samarin with what he had found out. But it worked. Schuler was in a bad way, became disoriented, and drove into a tree. And yet Schuler was alarmed by fact that he was feeling worse and worse, so he quickly brought me what he had found: the money and the passport.”

“Blood-pressure medication?” Herr Nägelsbach said. “I admit to being a hypochondriac, Reni is one, too, and I’m interested in medicine. But I had no idea you could kill a person with blood-pressure medication.”

“You can’t actually kill anyone with it,” Philipp explained, “but if you’re on Catapresan and suddenly stop taking it, you run the risk of blackouts. The only question is how Welker could have known…”

“He studied medicine,” I said. “After he finished his studies, he sacrificed his medical career to the bank.”

“What happened then?”

“You mean after Schuler’s death? As you know, Welker shot Samarin, leading us to believe that he had been overwhelmed by pain, sorrow, and anger. But the truth is that he shot him with a cool hand and in cold blood. He wanted to get rid of Samarin, the silent partner’s heir, the lackey who all of a sudden wanted a say in the bank, the man with dangerous connections who was blackmailing him, the man with the lucrative connections who was standing in his way.”

They sat there in silence for a while.

“Why are you telling us all this?” Philipp asked.

“Don’t you find it interesting?”

“It is interesting. But to be perfectly honest, it’s the kind of thing I’d have preferred not to know,” Philipp said. I must have looked at him as if he were mad. “Don’t get me wrong, Gerhard. I’m a practical man. I’m interested in things you can do something about: operating on a heart, fixing my boat, cultivating my flowers, making Füruzan happy.” He laid his hand on hers and looked at her so devotedly that everyone laughed. “But we simply can’t not do anything!” Philipp continued. “We got involved, we helped Welker, we… Well, if it hadn’t been for us, Samarin would still be alive!” I understood Philipp less and less. “Didn’t you say that the world we thought was Samarin’s world and which we now know to be Welker’s, isn’t your world and that you don’t want to give up your world without a fight? Isn’t any of that true anymore?”

“That was different,” I replied. “Back then we thought Welker was in danger and wanted to help him. Who do you want to help now? Who’s in danger? Nobody. And as for the world no longer being… Perhaps I went a little overboard. What I meant was about danger and helping.”

Frau Nägelsbach eyed me quizzically. “Only a few weeks ago you were against-”

“No, I wasn’t against informing the police. I only felt that your husband and Philipp both had to agree what they would do. The possible consequences were more serious for them than they’d have been for me.”

Philipp shook his head. “My contract with the private hospital is as good as sealed. But what would happen if there were a scandal?”

“I’m afraid, Herr Self, that we missed the right moment, if there ever was one,” Nägelsbach said. “Back then the lead was fresh and we were good witnesses. Today we’re bad witnesses. Why did we keep silent for so long? Why are we speaking up now? Furthermore, it was dark, we didn’t see Welker shoot Samarin, there were no prints on the murder weapon, and Welker will deny everything. As for Schuler’s murder, things look even bleaker. A public prosecutor might make a case against Welker for money laundering, but it wouldn’t be easy.”

Nobody said anything, and in the silence I felt as if everyone was waiting for me to officially drop the subject, to leave them alone. But I couldn’t. “We know Welker has two murders on his conscience. Doesn’t that interest us? Don’t we have some kind of obligation?”

Nägelsbach shook his head. “Haven’t you heard of the presumption of innocence? If Welker can’t be convicted, he can’t be convicted. It’s as simple as that.”

“But we-”

“Us? We should have gone to the police right away. We didn’t, and now it’s too late. Do you remember what I told you when this happened? How can you think I would ever agree to our taking justice into our own hands?”

The silence in the room was oppressive until Philipp could no longer bear it. “Herr Nägelsbach-Rudi, if I’m not mistaken? Rudi, if I may call you that. Would you like to join Gerhard, me, and an old friend of ours in a game of Doppelkopf every two weeks, or perhaps even once a week?”

Nägelsbach was uncomfortable. He is a man of old-fashioned, formal politeness. He tends to recoil at over-familiarity. Being addressed by his first name took him aback, and he was put out by the abrupt change of subject. But he made an effort. “Thank you, Philipp. That is very kind of you, and I would be delighted. But I do insist that when any of us holds the two aces of hearts-”

“That they will be the piglets.” Philipp laughed.

“Gerhard?” Füruzan said, so solemnly that Philipp stopped laughing and the others sat up.

“Yes, Füruzan.”

“I’ll come with you. Perhaps I can lend a hand when you bump off Welker or set fire to his bank. As long as you don’t do anything to his children, okay?”

18 Not God

Brigitte came at eleven. “Where are your friends? You didn’t have a fight, did you?” She sat down on the arm of my chair and laid her hand on my shoulder.

“Yes and no.”

We had parted amicably enough, but our conviviality had suffered a bump, and we had all been a little awkward when saying our good-byes. I told Brigitte what I had reported to my friends, what I had hoped for, and how they had reacted.

“Oh, Gerhard. I see their point and I also see yours, but they… Why don’t you go to the police and at least get Welker on money laundering?”

“He’s got two lives on his conscience.”

“What about his wife?”

“We’ll never know that for sure. Everything points to the fact that she really had an accident and that he wasn’t the one who-”

“That’s not what I meant. I’m quite aware that he ought to be convicted for murder. But there’s not enough to convict him on. It’s not as if he’s the only criminal running around free when he ought to be in prison. Do you want to hunt them all down?”

“They’re nothing to me, but Welker-”

“What’s Welker to you? Tell me. Your paths crossed, and that was that. I’d understand if there’d at least been a personal connection between you.”

“Quite the opposite: if there was something personal, then I really wouldn’t have the right to…” I fell silent. Years ago, in Trefeuntec, I’d taken justice into my own hands. Was I now trying to prove to myself that I had done that on principle, and that I was not out to settle a personal score, either then or now?

Brigitte shook her head. “You’re not God.”

“No, Brigitte, I’m not God. I just can’t come to terms with the fact that Welker killed Schuler and Samarin, that he’s wealthy and content, and that’s all there is to it.”

She looked at me sadly, concerned. She took my head in her hands and kissed me on the lips. She held my head and said, “Manu is waiting for me; I’ve got to go. Forget Welker.”

She saw in my eyes how my powerlessness was tormenting me.

“Is it so bad? Is it so bad because you think you’re old if you don’t do anything?” I didn’t reply. She searched my eyes for an answer. “Forget Welker. Only if… only if it’ll kill you if you don’t do anything. But in that case be careful, do you hear? I don’t give a damn about Welker, whether he’s alive or dead, doing well or badly. But I do give a damn about you.”

She left and I went out on the balcony and smoked, looking into the night. Yes, Brigitte was right. My powerlessness was tormenting me because my age made me feel it. It seared my memory how often I had realized after the fact that I’d been too slow. It seared my guilt at Schuler’s death into my mind. It forever sealed that neither as a public prosecutor nor as a private detective had I left behind anything I could be truly proud of. It consumed me like a rage, a fear, a pain, an insult. I had to do something if I didn’t want it to devour me entirely.

Before I went to bed I took from a drawer the revolver that had been there for years. I hadn’t had a weapon for many years, and hadn’t planned on having this one, either, but once I got this revolver I couldn’t throw it away. A client had given it to me to look after and failed to retrieve it. I put it on the kitchen table and eyed it: black, handy, deadly. I picked it up, weighed it in my hand, and put it back on the table. Should I put it under my pillow to get closer to it?

19 With siren and flashing blue lights

It was still dark when I woke up, and I knew something was wrong. Something in my chest wasn’t right and was filling the space in which I breathe and in which my heart expands when it beats. It wasn’t a pain, but it was present: restricting, persistent, dangerous.

All of a sudden my forehead and palms were covered in sweat. I was frightened-I felt as if whatever wasn’t right in my chest was fear, a tough, fluid, corroding mass of fear.

I got up, walked a few steps, opened the window and then the door to the balcony, and took a deep breath. But whatever wasn’t right in my chest didn’t go away. It grew. It turned into a pressure, and my fear turned into panic.

The pressure abated and I calmed down. Hadn’t my last heart attack sent a numbness along my left arm? I felt nothing in my left arm. At that moment I decided that in the future I would live a healthier life, not smoke anymore, not drink anymore, and get some exercise. If Philipp went for the gold, couldn’t I at least go for the bronze? I was immersed in pleasant and positive thoughts. Until the pressure returned and I again broke out in a sweat. I was gripped by panic when the pressure remained and increased, in a slow ebbing and flowing. I sat down on my bed, hugged my chest with both arms, rocked back and forth, and heard myself whimpering softly.

But the pressure had been only a forerunner of pain. It, too, came in waves, sometimes slow, sometimes fast: there was no regular rhythm I could count on. The first onslaught was like an electric shock that made my chest seize up. It electrified my brain, and with full clarity I realized I had to do something. If I didn’t I would die. It was just after five in the morning.

I called the emergency service and twenty minutes later two paramedics from the Red Cross arrived with a stretcher-twenty minutes in which the pain cut through me like waves. Like labor pains-at least what I imagined labor pains to be-and whenever the pain kicked in, I took a deep breath. The paramedics made a few soothing remarks, got me onto the stretcher, and hooked me up to a drip from which a blood thinner flowed. They carried me down the five floors and put me in the ambulance. They turned on the flashing blue lights; through the window I could see them flaring over the wall of the building. Then they turned on the siren and drove off. They didn’t drive fast. The drip and the plastic tube swung gently.

Was there also a tranquilizer in the drip? The pain didn’t subside, but in its peaks and valleys my impressions became blurred and my fear disappeared into a whimpering resignation.

In the emergency room a lady doctor put stronger medications into my drip. These were supposed to dissolve the clot in my heart. I choked on gall and wondered why my gallbladder didn’t like my thinning blood. The nurse didn’t wonder; she reached for a kidney-shaped pan and held it under my chin.

After a while I was sent to intensive care. Corridor ceilings, swinging doors, elevators, doctors in green, nurses in white, patients and visitors. In a daze I took it all in, as if I were rolling on a silent train through a perplexing and seething swarm. At one point we went through a long corridor that was empty except for a patient in pajamas and dressing gown who followed me with his eyes, bored and without curiosity or pity. At times I managed to gag into the kidney-shaped pan that lay next to my head, at times I missed. It stank repulsively.

The pain had settled into my chest as if it had sized me up when it had first arrived in rising and ebbing waves and now knew that it was the sole proprietor. The pain had become even, an even pulling, a pulling into and out of my chest. After a few hours in intensive care it subsided, as did the vomiting. I was only exhausted, so exhausted that I thought it possible simply to fade out.

20 Crimes for lost honor

Philipp showed up in the afternoon and patiently explained to me what happens during an angiogram. Hadn’t it already been explained to me once before? A catheter is inserted and pushed all the way up to the heart so that pictures can be taken: of your beating heart, of good arteries, constricted arteries, and blocked arteries. If luck isn’t on your side the catheter irritates the heart, with the result that it can no longer maintain its rhythm. Or the catheter pries loose a thrombosis, which wanders off and blocks an artery at a vital point.

“Do I have a choice?”

Philipp shook his head.

“Then you don’t need to explain all this.”

“I thought you might find it interesting.”

I nodded.

I also nodded when, after the angiogram, the surgeon informed me that two bypasses would be necessary. I didn’t want to know why, how, or where. I didn’t want to act to the doctors or nurses-and definitely not to myself-as if I had a say in any of this.

The surgeon told me of a colleague of his in Mosbach who’d had nine bypasses and then climbed the Katzenbuckel, the highest mountain of the Odenwald range. There was no need to worry; we’d just have to wait a few days until my heart had calmed down a little and was less vulnerable before we operated.

So I waited, and my exhaustion slowly began to fade. I was still tired. The fatigue allowed me to live down the loss of my autonomy, the tubes hooked to my wrist, the face that looked back at me in the mirror, and the fact that whenever I peed, half went astray. I dozed.

At times Brigitte sat by my bed, her hand resting on mine or on my forehead. She read to me but I got tired after a few pages. Or we would speak a few words, which I would often forget shortly afterward. I understood that Ulbrich was either still in Mannheim or that he had come back, and had been looking for me all over, and had finally found Brigitte; that he was agitated; that he wanted to talk to me at all costs, even if it meant here in the hospital. But the doctors wouldn’t let anyone see me except Brigitte or Philipp, and that was fine by me.

Then came the time for me to start walking again. I made my way up and down the corridor, out into the garden, and around the pond, but I was worried that a rash movement might loosen whatever was clogging my arteries and send it wandering to an even more dangerous place. I knew this fear was foolish. But it was there. I was also afraid that the pain would return, that my heart might start beating irregularly, that it would stop beating altogether. I was afraid of dying.

Needless to say, while I lay there waiting, images and scenes from my life came to my mind. My childhood in Berlin, my career as public prosecutor, my marriage to Klara, my work as private investigator, my years with Brigitte. I also mulled over my last case, which I hadn’t concluded the way I’d wanted to.

“I’m glad you didn’t do anything to Welker,” Brigitte said. “It rattled you, but it didn’t kill you. You’ll get back on your feet again.”

It was only later that I fully understood what Brigitte meant. I wasn’t reading the papers, nor watching or listening to the news. But one day I came across an old copy of the Mannheimer Morgen lying on a bench in the garden and the headline caught my eye: EXPLOSION IN SCHWETZINGEN. I read that a bomb had exploded in a bank in Schwetzingen. Nobody had been seriously injured, but there was extensive damage. The culprit, a recently fired employee, was detained on the scene with minor injuries by other employees and arrested by the police. The bomb seems to have gone off sooner than he expected. The lead article focused on the matter of the bomb: it was the wrong way to respond to a dismissal, regardless of whether the dismissal was justified or not. But the article pointed out that the culprit was from Cottbus, and that citizens from the former East Germany, after forty-five years of Communism, often found it difficult to come to terms with the open labor market and often regarded a dismissal as a stain on their honor. The article went on to make a few insightful remarks about crimes for lost honor.

I sat on the bench and thought about Karl-Heinz Ulbrich. I would ask Brigitte to go visit him in prison and take him a good book, a good Bordeaux, and some fresh fruit. I wanted her to take him a chess set, too, and my Spassky vs. Korchnoi. Chess was widely played in the East. I wanted her to ask Nägelsbach to put in a good word with his former colleagues. Crimes committed because of a loss of honor-the writer of that article didn’t know how right he was.

I had to return to my room, where the lady doctor handed me a release to sign absolving them of all responsibility. I thought that was all she wanted, but then she checked my heart, took my blood pressure, and examined my behind.

The following morning one of the nurses shaved my chest, stomach, pubic hair, and thighs, which had been already shaved for the angiogram. Brigitte had to leave the room, as if this ultimate nakedness might reveal something dreadful. When I sat up and looked down at myself, I was moved by my hairless, defenseless organ. I was so moved that I was on the brink of tears. I realized that they had put a sedative in my drip.

Brigitte walked next to me as far as the elevator, and the male nurse wheeled me in at an angle from which I could still see her until the doors closed. She blew me a kiss.

In the elevator I grew sleepy. I can still remember being wheeled out of the elevator through a corridor into the operating theater and being lifted onto the operating table. The last thing I remember is the harsh light of the lamp overhead and the doctors’ faces with masks and caps, with peering eyes whose expressions I couldn’t figure out. Perhaps there wasn’t anything to figure out. The doctors began their work.

21 In the end

In the end I did head back there.

Why? I knew all there was to know, and if I hadn’t, the Schlossplatz would not have told me anything. I already knew that Welker had fired half his staff and sold the Sorbian bank. That he had dissolved Weller & Welker. That his house in the Gustav-Kirchhoff Strasse is up for sale and that he’s moved away with his children-to Costa Rica, Brigitte says, and that his wife is still alive and waiting for him there.

I also knew that Ulbrich hadn’t breathed a word to the police or the public prosecutor. Not a word. Brigitte had asked me: “Weren’t you a public prosecutor once? Can’t you defend him?” I made inquiries and found that I could get licensed as a lawyer. The fact that Welker had left town would make the defense easier.

What was I looking for on Schwetzingen’s Schlossplatz? The end of this story? It had come to an end. None of the threads of fate had been left dangling. But though I knew at the end of a story justice didn’t always have to win out, I could not accept as an ending that Welker would get away with what he’d done while Ulbrich was in jail and Schuler and Samarin were dead and buried. Again I was tortured by the powerlessness of not being able to do anything anymore, not being able to fix things.

Until I realized that it was my decision whether I would interpret the ending as unjust and unsatisfactory and suffer because of it or decided that this, and only this, was the fitting ending. In either case it was my decision. Even Welker dead or Welker in prison, and a happy Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, and a Schuler who went on cultivating his files, and a Samarin who went on laundering money were not entirely just and satisfactory. I was the one who would have to decide. So I tried. I didn’t accept the end without question. But wasn’t there something fitting about Samarin, a warrior, being killed in action, and Schuler having died for the truth that lay hidden in his beloved archive? It could be arranged that Ulbrich wouldn’t have to stay in prison for too long. As for Welker? Brigitte and I could go to Costa Rica on vacation.

If the doctor allows it. He’s an old friend of Philipp’s and was a colleague of his in Mannheim before Philipp took over the department at the Speyerer Hof Clinic. The doctor shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders when I ask him about my condition and what I am to expect.

“What can I say, Herr Self? Your heart is worn out.”

Worn out. I’m quite aware that the operation wasn’t a success. Otherwise they would have told me. And I wouldn’t have been so tired. Sometimes I feel as if my tiredness is out to poison me.

I was happy when the taxi arrived.