Self's Deception

1 A passport photo

She reminded me of the daughter I've sometimes wished for. Lively eyes, a mouth prone to laughter, high cheekbones, and rich, brown curls hanging down to her shoulders. The photograph didn't indicate whether she was tall or short, fat or thin, slouching or poised. It was only a passport photo.

Her father, Under-Secretary Salger from Bonn, had called me. For months he and his family had not heard from Leonore. At first they had simply waited, then they put in calls to friends and acquaintances, and finally notified the police. No luck.

“Leo is an independent sort of girl who likes to go her own way. But she's always stayed in touch, visiting, calling us. We were still hoping she might turn up for the beginning of the semester. She's studying French and English at the Heidelberg Institute for Translation and Interpretation. Well, the semester started two weeks ago.”

“Your daughter didn't sign up for her courses?”

His voice sounded irritated: “Herr Self, the reason I'm resorting to a private investigator is because I'm hoping he might be the one who will do the investigating-not I. I have no idea whether she signed up or not.”

I patiently explained that every year thousands of people were reported missing in Germany, but that most of them disappeared and then reappeared of their own free will. They simply wanted to get away for a time from anxious parents, husbands, or loved ones. As long as you don't actually hear anything there's no reason to worry. When something bad does happen-an accident or a crime-that's when you hear.

Salger was aware of this. The police had already gone over it. “I respect Leo's independence. She's twenty-five and not a child anymore. I also understand that she might need some space. In the past few years there has been tension between us. But I have to know how she is, what she's up to, if she's OK. I don't suppose you have a daughter, do you?”

I didn't see that this was any of his business and didn't answer.

“It's not only me who's worrying, Herr Self. I can't tell you what my wife's been through these past few weeks…So I want quick results. I'm not asking you to confront Leo or embarrass her. I do not want her or any of her friends to know that there's a search on for her. I'm afraid she would take that very, very badly indeed.”

This didn't sound good. You can tail a person in secret once the person has been located, and you can look for a person overtly if you don't know where that person is. But not to know where a person is and to look for that person without her or her friends catching on is difficult, to say the least.

Salger was growing impatient. “Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to start right away and report back as soon as possible. My number is…”

“Thank you, Herr Salger, but I must decline. Have a nice day.” I hung up. I don't really care whether my clients' manners are good or bad. I've been a private investigator for almost forty years and have come across all types, those with proper upbringing and those without, timid types and audacious types, poseurs and cowards, poor devils and big shots. There were also the clients I had dealt with back in the days when I was a public prosecutor, clients who would have preferred not to be clients. But indifferent as I was, I had no wish to dance to the tune of the imperious under-secretary.

The following morning when I arrived at my office in the Augusta-Anlage, I found a yellow post-office notice hanging from the flap of the letterbox in my door: “Urgent. Express Mail. Please check your letterbox.” They needn't have left the notice, as all the letters pushed through the slot fall onto the floor of the former tobacconist's store where I have my desk with my chair behind it and two chairs in front, a filing cabinet, and a potted palm. I hate potted palms.

The express letter was heavy. A bundle of hundred-mark bills lay inside a folded sheet of paper covered with writing.

Dear Herr Self,

I hope you will forgive my abruptness on the phone. My wife and I have been under great strain over the past few weeks. I do not, however, imagine that the tone of our conversation could have led to your refusal to help us, so allow me to offer the enclosed five thousand marks as a deposit. Please stay in touch with me by phone. Over the next few weeks you can reach me only on my answering machine; I must take my wife out of this hell of uncertainty. But I will be picking up my messages regularly and can call you back any time.

Sincerely,

Salger

I opened my desk drawer and took out a box of coffee beans, a bottle of sambuca, and a glass, and filled it. Then I sat down in my chair, cracked the beans between my teeth, and let the clear, oily sambuca roll over my tongue and down my throat. It burned, and the smoke of my first cigarette stung my chest. I looked out of the former storefront. It was raining in dense gray streams. In the murmuring traffic the hissing of the tires on the wet streets was louder than the droning of the engines.

After my second glass I counted the fifty hundred-mark bills. I looked at the envelope on both sides. Like the letter, it didn't have Salger's address. I called the telephone number in Bonn he'd given me.

“You have reached 41-17-88. Please leave a message at the sound of the tone. All messages will be answered within twenty-four hours.”

I also called Information and wasn't surprised to hear that there was no number listed for a Salger in Bonn. Presumably his address wouldn't be in the phone book either. That was as it should be-the man was safeguarding his privacy. But why did he have to safeguard his privacy from his own private investigator? And why couldn't he have at least cooperated to the extent of letting me know his daughter's address in Heidelberg? Besides, five thousand marks was far too much.

Then I saw that there was something else in the envelope. Leo's picture. I took it out and leaned it against the small stone lion I had brought back years ago from Venice and which stands guard over the telephone, the answering machine, the fountain pen, the pencils and notepads, the cigarettes and lighter. An overexposed photo-booth picture on cheap paper. It must have been about four or five years old. Leo looked at me as if she'd just decided to grow up, to no longer be a girl but a woman. There was something more in her eyes: a question, an expectation, a reproach, a defiance. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it moved me.

2 Young Translators

When a person is reported missing and relatives want an investigation, the police go through a routine. They draw up a report in a number of copies, request photographs, staple them to the report and the copies, and send the whole dossier to the local criminal bureau, which files it and waits. Nowadays the information is often entered into a computer. But either way the file remains closed until something happens, something is found, or something is reported. Only in juvenile cases or when the police suspect foul play do they go public. An adult who hasn't committed a crime can pitch his tent when and where he likes without the police getting involved. That would be all we need!

When I'm hired in a missing person's case, the idea is for me to go farther out on a limb than the police ever would. I called the registrar's office at Heidelberg University and was told that Leonore Salger was no longer enrolled. She'd registered for the winter semester, but not for the spring semester. “Not that that means anything. Sometimes students simply forget to register, and only think of it when it comes to work or exams. I'm sorry, I can't give you her address. She's no longer in our system.”

Work-that gave me the idea of calling the university chancellor's office. I could talk to the human resources department and see if Leonore Salger was on the books in some part-time position at the university.

“Who is making this request? According to our regulations, all personal information is confidential…” Her tone was as strict as her chirping little voice could manage.

But I didn't give confidentiality a chance. “Good Morning, this is Gerhard Self from the Federal Credit Union. I have Leonore Salger's file in front of me, and I see that the employee savings bonus has not been entered. You must take care of this right away! Frankly, I can't understand why…”

“What did you say her name was?” The chirping voice had become shrill with indignation. All confidentiality was swept aside, Leonore Salger's file was opened, and I was triumphantly informed that Frau Salger had not worked at the university since February.

“How so?”

“That's what it says here.” Now she sounded snippy. “Professor Leider didn't send in a request for an extension, and in March the position was reassigned.”

I got into my old Opel, drove up the autobahn to Heidelberg, and parked the car near the Plöck, where I found the Institute for Translation and Interpretation. Professor Leider's office was on the first floor.

“How may I help you?”

“Gerhard Self from the Ministry of Education and Science. I have an appointment with the professor.”

The secretary looked at the appointment calendar, at me, and back at the calendar. “One moment, please.” She disappeared next door.

“Herr Self?” Professors too are getting younger by the day. This one cut quite a stylish figure. He was sporting a dark moiré silk suit, a pastel linen shirt, and an ironic smile on his tanned face. He invited me into his office and offered me a chair. “Well, what brings you to us?”

“After our successful initiatives Young Scientists and Young Musicians, the minister of education and science has set up other youth programs over the past few years. Last year he initiated Young Translators. You might recall the information we sent you last year?”

He shook his head.

“Ah, you don't remember-I'm afraid Young Translators simply hasn't received the kind of publicity it needed over the last year in schools or universities. But this year I have taken the initiative, and I'm particularly interested in reaching out to universities. One of last year's participants recommended you to me, and also one of your assistants, a Frau Salger. What I have in mind is-”

The ironic smile had not left his face. “Young Translators. What's that all about?”

“It seemed a natural enough progression after Young Scientists, Young Musicians, Young Architects, and Young Doctors, to name just a few of our programs. In the meantime, I would say that for 1993 Young Translators will play a particularly important role. Our Young Pastors program has received the blessing of the divinity schools, and Young Lawyers has been approved by law schools. As for translation departments, or I should say institutes, unfortunately things haven't really taken off yet. But I envision an advisory committee-a few professors, one or two students, someone from the language department of the European community. I was thinking of asking you to participate, Professor Leider, and perhaps also your assistant, Frau Salger.”

“If you only knew… But I see you don't.” He launched into a lecture about how he was a scholar and a linguist, and that he didn't think much of translation and interpreting. “One day we will figure out how language actually works, and then there'll be no need for translators and interpreters. As a scholar it's not my job to find a way of muddling through till then. My job is to figure out a way to end the muddle.”

A professor of translation who doesn't believe in translation! How perfectly ironic. I thanked him for his openness, extolled critical, creative variety, and told him that I would like to stay in touch about the committee. “And what would you think of my asking Frau Salger to be the student representative on the committee?”

“I must tell you that she is no longer working for me. She has…you could say that she has in a sense left me in the lurch. After the winter break she simply didn't show up again-no explanation, no apology. I did ask colleagues and lecturers if they knew where she was. But she was no longer on campus. I even thought of calling the police.” He looked concerned, and for the first time his ironic smile disappeared. Then it returned. “Perhaps she simply had had enough of studying, and enough of the university and the institute. I can't say that I'd be surprised. I guess I felt a bit hurt.”

“Do you think she would make a good candidate for Young Translators?”

“She was my assistant, but she was never affected by my bleak view of translation. She's a hands-on girl, a good interpreter with the kind of quick tongue that is a must in this job, and was well liked as a tutor by first-year students. No, absolutely! If you find her, you should definitely bring her onboard. And please give her my regards.”

We stood up and he walked me to the door. I asked the secretary for Frau Salger's address. She wrote it on a piece of paper: 5 Häusserstrasse, 6900 Heidelberg.

3 Catastrophic thought

I had come to Heidelberg in 1942 as a young public prosecutor and moved into an apartment on the Bahnhofstrasse with my wife, Klara. In those days it wasn't a good neighborhood, but I liked the view of the train station, the arriving and departing trains, the locomotives puffing steam, the whistle and rumble of the nocturnal shunting of freight cars. Today the station has been moved since the Bahnhofstrasse now runs past office blocks and court buildings with their smooth, gray functionality. If the law reflects the architecture in which it is proclaimed, then law in Heidelberg is in a bad state. If on the other hand the law is in any way reflected in the rolls, bread, and cakes that the court staff can buy around the corner, then one need have no fear. The Häusserstrasse branches off from the Bahnhofstrasse, and right past the first corner was the small bakery where over forty years ago Klara and I used to buy gray bread, a bakery that has now turned into an elegant and enticing bread and pastry shop.

Right next to it, at 5 Häusserstrasse, I put on my reading glasses to see the buzzers. And there was her name, next to the top one. I rang, the door clicked open, and I climbed the gloomy, musty stairwell. At sixty-nine, I am not as nimble as I used to be. On the third floor I had to stop and catch my breath.

“Yes?” came an impatient voice from above-either a high-pitched man's or a low-pitched woman's voice.

“I'll be right there.”

The last flight of stairs led to the attic. A young man was standing in the doorway, through which I could see an apartment with dormer windows and slanted walls. He seemed to be in his late twenties, had black slicked-back hair, and was wearing black corduroys and a black sweater. He peered at me.

“I'm looking for a Frau Leonore Salger. Is she at home?”

“No.”

“When will she be back?”

“Don't know.”

“This is her place, isn't it?”

“Yep.”

I simply can't keep up with the ways of the young. Is this modern tongue-tiedness? Modern introversion? Verbal anorexia?

I tried again. “I'm Gerhard Self. I run a small translation and interpreting agency in Mannheim, and Frau Salger has been recommended as someone who could work for me on short notice. I have a job that is quite urgent. Do you know how I can reach her? And can I come in and sit down for a few minutes? I'm out of breath, my knees are shaking, and my neck is getting stiff from having to stare up at you.” There was no landing, and the young man was standing on the top step while I stood some five steps below him.

“OK.” He moved out of the doorway and motioned me into a room with bookshelves, a tabletop resting on two wooden stools, and a chair. I sat down. He leaned against the windowsill. The tabletop was covered with books and papers. I saw French names, none of which rang a bell. I waited, but he showed no imminent signs of conversation.

“Are you French?”

“No.”

“We used to play a game when I was a boy. One player had to think something up, while the others had to figure out what it was by asking all kinds of questions, to which he could only answer 'yes' or 'no.' The first one to guess what he was thinking was the winner. When there are a number of people playing, the game can be quite amusing. But when there are only two players it's no fun at all. So how about speaking in full sentences?”

The young man straightened up with a jolt, as if he'd been dreaming and had suddenly woken up. “Full sentences? I've been working on my dissertation for two years now, and for the past six months I've been writing nothing but full sentences, and I'm getting more and more lost. You seem to think that-”

“How long have you been living here?”

He was visibly disappointed by my prosaic question. But I found out that he'd been living in the apartment before Leo had moved in and had sublet it to her. The landlady lived on the floor below and had called him in February to say she was worried that there had been no sign of life from Leo-or her rent money-since the beginning of January. He was now staying in this apartment for the time being, as he couldn't get any work done at his new place because of his noisy roommates. “And then when Leo comes back she'll still have the apartment.”

“Where is she?”

“I've no idea. I'm sure she knows what she's doing.”

“Hasn't anyone come looking for her?”

The young man ran his hand over his smooth hair, pressing it down even flatter, and hesitated for a moment. “You mean for a job? You mean if someone like you…no, nobody's been here.”

“What do you think-could she handle a job interpreting for a small technological conference, twelve participants, from German to English and English to German? Would she be up to it?”

But the student didn't let himself be drawn into a conversation about Leo. “You see?” he said. “Full sentences are of little if any use. Here I am, telling you in full sentences that she isn't here, and you ask me if she can handle a small conference. She's gone…disappeared…flown off…” He flapped his arms. “OK? If she happens to show up I'll let her know you came by.”

I handed him my card-not the one from my office, but the one with my home address. I found out that he was working on a dissertation in philosophy on catastrophic thought, and that he'd met Leo at a university residence hall. Leo had given him French lessons. I had already started down the stairs when he again warned me against full sentences. “You mustn't think you're too old to grasp the idea.”

4 Her dear old uncle-how sweet!

Back at the office, I gave Salger a call. His answering machine recorded my request that he call me back. I wanted to know the name of the residence hall in which Leo had lived so I could look into who her friends were and where she might be-not a hot trail, but I didn't have many options.

Salger called me back that evening just as I stopped by my office on my way home from the Kleiner Rosengarten restaurant. I had gone there too early. There was hardly anyone there, my usual waiter Giovanni was on vacation in Italy, and the spaghetti gorgonzola was too heavy. My girlfriend, Brigitte, could have made me a better meal. But the previous weekend she'd seemed a little too hopeful that I might learn to let her spoil me: “Will you be my cuddly old tomcat?” I don't want to become some old tomcat.

This time Salger was exquisitely polite. He expressed his deepest gratitude that I was taking on the case. His wife was grateful, too. Would it be all right if he gave me a further payment next week? Would I inform him the moment I found Leo? His wife begged that I…

“Could you tell me Leo's address before the Häusser-strasse, Herr Salger?”

“Excuse me?”

“Where did Leo live before she moved to the Häusser-strasse?”

“I'm afraid I can't tell you that offhand.”

“Could you take a look, or ask your wife? I need her old address. It was a university residence hall.”

“Oh yes, the residence hall.” Salger fell silent. “Liebigstrasse? Eichendorffweg? Schnepfengewann? I can't think of it right now, Herr Self; the names of all kinds of streets are going through my head. I'll talk to my wife and take a look at my old address book-we might still have it somewhere. I'll let you know. Or I should say, if you don't find a message from me on your answering machine tomorrow morning, that means we couldn't find it. Would that be all? In that case, I wish you a good night.”

I couldn't say I was warming up to Salger. Leo was leaning on the small stone lion, looking at me, pretty, alert, with a determination in her eyes that I felt I understood, and a question or a spark of defiance that I could not interpret. To have such a daughter and not know her address-shame on you, Herr Salger!

I don't know why Klara and I never had any children. She never told me she'd gone to see a gynecologist, nor had she ever asked me to take a fertility test. We were not very happy together; but no clear links have ever been drawn between marital unhappiness and childlessness, or marital happiness and an abundance of children. I'd have liked to have been a widower with a daughter, but that is a disrespectful wish, and I've only admitted it to myself in my old age, when I no longer keep any secrets from myself.

I spent a whole morning on the phone till I finally located Leo's residence hall. It was on Klausenpfad, not far from the public swimming pool and the zoo. She'd lived in room 408, and after crossing some grungy stairwells and hallways I found three students drinking tea in the communal kitchen on the fourth floor-two girls and a boy.

“Excuse me, I'm looking for Leonore Salger.”

“There's no Leonore here.” The young man was sitting with his back to me and spoke over his shoulder.

“I'm Leo's uncle. I'm passing through Heidelberg, and this is the address I've got for her. Could you-”

“A dear old uncle visiting his dear young niece-how sweet! Hey, what d'you say to that, Andrea?”

Andrea turned around, the young man turned around, and all three of them eyed me with interest.

Philipp, an old friend of mine who's a surgeon at the Mannheim Municipal Hospital, works a lot with young interns and tells me how well behaved the students of the nineties are. My ex-girlfriend Babs has a son who's studying to be a lawyer, and he's polite and serious, too. His girlfriend, a nice girl studying theology, whom I always addressed as “Frau,” as the women's movement has taught me to do, corrected me gently, telling me that she is a “Fräulein.”

These three students seemed to have missed this trend- were they sociologists? I sat down on the fourth chair.

“When did Leo move out?”

“Who says she ever-”

“It was before your time,” Andrea cut in. “Leo moved out about a year ago, to somewhere on the west side, I think.” She turned toward me. “I don't have her new address. But they must have it over at the registrar's office. I'm going there-want to come along?”

She led the way down the stairs, her black ponytail swinging, her skirt swaying. She was a robust girl, but quite pleasing to the eye. The office had already closed, as it was almost four. We stood irresolutely in front of the locked door.

“Do you happen to have a recent picture of her?” I went on to tell her that Leo's father, my brother-in-law, had a birthday coming up, and that we were going to have a party on the Drachenfels, and that all her aunts, uncles, and cousins would be coming from Dresden. “One of the reasons I want to see Leo is because I'm putting together a photo album of family and friends.”

She took me up to her room. We sat down on the couch, and she pulled out of a shoebox a student's life of carnivals and end-of-term parties, vacations and field trips, a demonstration here and there, a weekend work study, and pictures of her boyfriend, who liked to pose on his motorbike.

“Here's one of her at a wedding.” She handed me Leo on a chair, dark blue skirt and salmon-pink blouse, a cigarette in her right hand and her left hand resting pensively on her cheek, her face concentrating as if she were listening to or watching someone. There was nothing girlish about her anymore. This was a somewhat tense, assertive young woman. “In this one she's coming out of the city hall-she was one of the marriage witnesses-and in this one we're all on our way to the Neckar River. The wedding party was on a boat.” I figured her to be about five foot six. She was slim without being thin, and had a nice, straight back.

“Where was this one taken?” Leo was coming out of a door in jeans and a dark sweater, her bag over her shoulder and her coat slung over her arm. She had dark rings under her eyes, her right eye squeezed shut, her left eyebrow raised. Her hair was tousled and her mouth a thin, angry line. I recognized the door and the building, but couldn't place them.

“That was after the demonstration we had back in June. The cops had arrested her and taken her in for fingerprinting.”

I couldn't remember there being any demonstrations in June, but now I saw that Leo was coming out of the Heidelberg police headquarters.

“Can I have these two?”

“You want this one, too?” Andrea shook her head. “I thought you were planning a nice surprise for Leo's father, not trying to get her into trouble or something. You'd better leave this awful photo and take the nice one-the one where she's sitting, that's a good one.” She gave me the picture of Leo on the chair and put the other pictures back in the box. “If you're not in a hurry, you could drop by the Drugstore Bar. She used to hang out there every evening, and I ran into her there this past winter.”

I asked her the way there and thanked her. When I found the bar in the Kettengasse, it all came back to me. I had been shadowing someone once who had had a cup of coffee and played chess here. He's no longer alive.

I ordered an Aviateur, but the bar was out of grapefruit juice and champagne, and so I just had a Campari straight up. I struck up a conversation with the bored guy behind the bar and showed him Leo sitting in her chair. “When did you last see her?”

“Well, how about that, it's Leo! Nice picture. What do you want with her? Hey, Klaus, come here.” He waved over a short stocky man with red hair, rimless glasses, and sharp, intelligent eyes. The spitting image of what I imagined an intellectual Irish whiskey drinker would look like. The two men talked in hushed tones, falling silent under my interested gaze. So I turned away and pricked up my ears. I could tell I wasn't the first one who'd come to the Drugstore Bar looking for Leo. Somebody had been here back in February. Klaus also asked me why I was looking for her.

I told him I was her uncle, that I'd been at the residence hall on Klausenpfad, and that Andrea had sent me over here. The two men were still suspicious. They told me they hadn't seen Leo since January. That was all I got out of them. They eyed me as I finished my second Campari, paid, left, and looked through the window one more time.

5 Turbo on my lap

My next move was to scour the hospitals, even though I knew in cases where they have patients who are unable to speak they contact relatives. They also notify the police when a patient's identity is unclear. But it's rare for a doctor to authorize that relatives be contacted against a patient's will. A person being sought by relatives could be lying in a hospital only a few streets away. Perhaps the patient doesn't care that his loved ones are crying their eyes out not knowing where he is. Perhaps that's just what he wants.

But neither of these possibilities fit the impression I had of Leo. Even if her relationship with her parents was more strained than her father had admitted, why would she want to keep her hospital stay a secret from Professor Leider or the catastrophe philosopher? But the devil works in mysterious ways, so I made my way through the Heidelberg university clinic, the Mannheim Municipal Hospital, the district hospitals, and the hospitals of the diocese. Here I didn't run the risk of ruffling any of her circle of friends. I didn't have to adopt any of my character roles but could be Private Investigator Self, hired by an anxious father seeking his missing daughter. I didn't rely on the phone, though it's a pretty dependable way of determining whether a person is in a certain hospital. But if you want to know whether someone was a patient somewhere a few weeks or months ago, then it is better to go there in person. I spent two whole days going from place to place. There was no sign of Leo.

The weekend came. The rain that until now had been accompanying April stopped, and the sun was shining as I went on my Sunday walk through the Luisenpark. I had taken along a little bag of stale bread and was feeding the ducks. I had also brought along a copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, intending to settle into one of the chairs there. But the April sun wasn't yet warm enough. Or my bones don't warm up as fast as they used to. I was quite glad, back home, when Turbo, my tomcat, curled up on my lap. He purred and blissfully stretched out his little paws.

I knew where Leo had lived, studied, and hung out, and that she wasn't in some hospital in or around Heidelberg, nor had she been. She'd been missing since January, and in February someone had been looking for her. In July of last year she'd been arrested and fingerprinted. Her professor had good things to say about her, as did her roommates. Her contact with her parents left a little to be desired. She smoked. I also knew where to find Leo's friends and acquaintances, colleagues, and teachers. I could make inquiries at the translation institute, at the Drugstore Bar, and in neighborhood stores. But I wouldn't be able to manage that without disturbing any of her friends. So I had to give Salger the option of either giving up the case or allowing the possibility that Leo might get wise to the search. This was the second point that I made a note of for Monday.

The first point ought to have been on my to-do list of the previous week: the State Psychiatric Hospital outside Heidelberg. It had not been an oversight on my part-I'd just kept putting it off. Eberhard had spent a year and a half there; I had visited him quite often, and those visits always took it out of me. Eberhard is a friend of mine, a quiet person who lives off his modest fortune. He is a chess grand master, and in 1965 came back completely bewildered from a tournament in Dubrovnik. Philipp and I set him up with a string of housekeepers, none of whom could deal with him. So he ended up in the psychiatric hospital. The patients were crammed into large rooms, slept in double-decker beds, and didn't even have their own closets or lockers-not that they needed any, as all their personal belongings, even wristwatches and wedding rings, had to be handed in. For me the worst was the sweetish smell of food, cleansing agents, disinfectants, urine, sweat, and fear. How Eberhard managed to get well again in these circumstances is a mystery to me. But he made it, and is even playing chess again, against the advice of his doctor, who had read Stefan Zweig's Royal Game. From time to time Eberhard and I play a game or two. He always wins. Out of friendship he sometimes leads me to believe that I play a tough game.

6 Well, what do you think?

The State Psychiatric Hospital lies out where the mountains begin. I was in no hurry and took the long way through the villages. The nice weather was holding, the morning was bright, and there was an explosion of fresh green and bright blossoms. I opened the sunroof and put on my cassette of The Magic Flute. It was great to be alive.

The old building is the core of the hospital complex. It had originally been constructed in the shape of a large U toward the end of the nineteenth century and used as barracks for a Baden bicycle regiment. In World War I it served as a military hospital, then later as a homeless shelter, and finally in the late 1920s as a sanatorium. World War II turned the large U into a large L. The walls that had closed off the old building into an elongated rectangle disappeared, and the courtyard now extends into the hilly terrain where many new clinic buildings have sprung up. I parked my car, closed the sunroof, and turned off the music. The columns around the entrance of the old building, as well as the whole edifice, were covered in scaffolding, and unpainted brickwork glowed around the windows. Apparently thermoglass windows had just been installed, and painters were busy applying a new coat of delicate yellow. One of them had picked up on the Queen of the Night aria and kept whistling it as I walked over the gravel toward the entrance.

The doorman told me the offices were on the second floor, to the right. I climbed the wide, worn, sandstone steps. By the door to room 107 was a sign, ADMINISTRATION/RECEPTION. I knocked and was told to enter.

The receptionist drew a blank at the name Leonore Salger, and returned to her medical records. Passport photos were stapled to some of them, which gave me the idea of showing her Leo's picture. She took it, studied it carefully, asked me to wait for a moment, locked her filing cabinet, and left the room. I looked out the window at the park. The magnolia trees and forsythia bushes were in full bloom, and the lawn was being mowed. Some patients in everyday clothes were sauntering along the paths; others were sitting on benches that had been painted white. How everything had changed! Back in the days when I used to visit Eberhard, there were no lawns beneath the trees, just trodden earth. In those days patients had also been let out for fresh air, but in gray institutional overalls, walking one after another in a circle at a certain hour every day for twenty minutes, like the yard exercise of prison inmates.

The receptionist didn't come back alone.

“I am Dr. Wendt. Who are you, and what is she to you?” He held Leo's picture in his hand and looked at me coldly.

I handed him my card and told him of my search.

“I am sorry, Herr Self, but we can only provide patient information to authorized individuals.”

“So she is-”

“That is all I am prepared to say. Who was it who commissioned you to undertake this search?”

I had brought along Salger's letter and handed it to him. Wendt read it with a frown. He didn't look up, although he most certainly had finished reading it. Finally he got a grip on himself. “Please follow me.”

A few doors down he showed me into a conference room with a round table. This room also faced the park. The workers had not finished renovating here. The old frames and glass had been removed from the windows, which were now sealed with a temporary transparent plastic sheet. A fine layer of white dust covered the table, shelves, and filing cabinets.

“Yes, Frau Salger was a patient here. She came about three months ago. Somebody brought her here; he had picked her up…hitchhiking. We have no idea what happened before or during that car ride. The man just told us he'd picked her up and taken her along.” The doctor fell silent and looked pensive. He was still young, wore corduroys and a checked shirt beneath his open white gown, and looked athletic. He had a healthy complexion and his hair was artfully tousled. His eyes were too close-set.

I waited. “You were saying, Dr. Wendt?”

“As they were driving, she had begun to cry and simply wouldn't stop. That went on for over an hour. The man didn't know what to do, and finally decided to bring her to us. Here she continued crying till we gave her a Valium injection and she fell asleep.” Again he stared pensively.

“And what then?”

“Well, what do you think? I initiated her therapy.”

“No, I mean where is Leonore Salger now? How come you didn't contact anyone?”

Again he took his time. “We didn't have…well, it's only now that I find out from you what her real name is. If our receptionist”-he waved his hand in the direction of room 107-”hadn't happened to deal with her a couple of times…she doesn't usually get to see our patients at all. And then you come with a passport photo…” He shook his head.

“Did you notify the police?”

“The police?” He fished a crumpled pack of Roth-Händle cigarettes out of the pocket of his pants and offered me one. I preferred to smoke my own, and took out my pack of Sweet Aftons. Wendt shook his head again. “No, I don't like the idea of having the police here at our hospital, and in this case having her questioned by the police would have been utterly inappropriate from a therapeutic standpoint. And then she got better soon enough. She was here voluntarily and was free to leave any time she wanted. It's not like she was a minor.”

“Where is she now?”

He cleared his throat a couple of times. “I should inform you…I have to…um…Frau Salger is dead. She…” He avoided my eyes. “I am not exactly sure what happened. A tragic accident. Please extend my sincerest condolences to her father.”

“But Dr. Wendt, I can't just call her father and tell him that his daughter died in some tragic accident.”

“True…true. Well, as you see”-he pointed at the window-”we're installing new windows. Last Tuesday, she…On the fourth floor we have these large windows along the hallway from the floor to the ceiling, and she fell though the plastic cover down into the courtyard. She died instantly.”

“So if I hadn't happened to come to see you now you'd have authorized her burial without informing her parents? What kind of a crazy story is this, Dr. Wendt?”

“Of course her parents have been informed. I'm not certain of the exact procedure our office followed, but her parents were most definitely informed.”

“How could your office have informed them if you only found out her name from me?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“And what about the burial?”

He stared at his hands as if they could tell him where Leo was to be buried. “I suppose that is waiting on the parents' response.” He got up. “I've got to go back to my station. You can't imagine the commotion this has created: Her fall, the ambulance sirens, our patients have been very shaken up. May I show you out?”

I tried to take leave outside room 107 but he pulled me away. “No, our offices are now closed. Let me say how pleased I am that you came. I would be grateful if you would speak to her father at your earliest convenience. That was a point you had there-perhaps our office didn't manage to reach her parents.” We stood by the main entrance. “Goodbye, Herr Self.”

7 Scratch a Swabian and you'll find a small Hegel

I didn't drive far. I stopped at the pond by Sankt Ilgen, got out of the car, and walked over to the water. I threw a couple of stones, trying to make them skip over the water. Even as a boy on Lake Wannsee I'd never got the knack. It's too late to learn now.

All the same, I wasn't about to let some young kid in a white gown pull the wool over my eyes. Wendt's story stunk. Why hadn't the police been called in? A woman who's been in a psychiatric hospital for three months falls out of an unsecured fourth-floor window, and it doesn't cross anybody's mind that negligent homicide or worse might be at play and that the police should be called? OK, Wendt hadn't exactly said that the police hadn't come and investigated. But he'd only mentioned ambulances, no police cars. And if the police had been brought in on Tuesday, Salger would have been informed by Thursday at the latest, regardless of what name Leo might have registered under. The police wouldn't have taken long to figure out that Frau so-and-so didn't exist but that Leonore Salger was missing, and that consequently Frau so-and-so was none other than Leonore Salger. And if Herr Salger had been contacted on Thursday, he'd surely have called me by now.

I had lunch in Sandhausen. It's no culinary Mecca. After lunch I got into my old Opel, which I'd parked on the market square in the sun, and the heat inside was stifling. Summer was just around the corner.

At half past two I was back at the hospital. It was cat-and-mouse. The receptionist in room 107-a different receptionist from the one in the morning-had Dr. Wendt paged but couldn't find him. Finally she showed me the way to his station through long, high-ceilinged corridors in which footsteps echoed. The nurse was sorry, but Dr. Wendt was definitely not to be disturbed. And I'd have to wait in the reception area; waiting at the station was against regulations.

Back in reception, I managed to barge all the way through to the office of Professor Eberlein, the director of the hospital, and explained to the secretary that Eberlein would doubtless rather see me than the police. By now I was fuming. The secretary looked at me uncomprehendingly. Could I please go to room 107?

When I got back out into the corridor, a nearby door opened. “Herr Self? I am Professor Eberlein. I hear you are kicking up quite a fuss.”

He was in his late fifties, small and fat, dragging his left foot and leaning on a cane with a silver knob. He studied me with deep-set eyes that peered out from beneath thinning black hair and bushy black eyebrows. His lachrymal glands and cheeks hung limply. In nasal Swabian he asked me to accompany him in his leisurely limping gait. As we walked, his cane tapped out a syncopated beat.

“Every institution is an organism. It has its circulation, breathes, ingests and eliminates, has infections and infarctions, develops defense and healing mechanisms.” He laughed. “What kind of an infection are you?”

We descended the stairs and went out into the park. The heat of the day had turned muggy. I didn't say anything. He, too, had only puffed and wheezed as he slowly negotiated the stairs.

“Say something, Herr Self, say something! You'd rather listen? Audiatur et altera pars-You're on the side of justice. You are something like justice, aren't you?” He laughed again, a smug laugh.

The flagstones came to an end and gravel crackled beneath our feet. The wind rustled through the trees of the park. There were benches along the paths and chairs on the lawn, and there were many patients outside, alone or in small groups, with or without white-gowned hospital staff. An idyll, except for the twitching, hopping gait of some of the patients, and the empty gazes and open mouths of others. It was noisy. Shouts and laughter echoed against the wall of the old building like the impenetrable confusion of voices in an indoor swimming pool. Eberlein periodically nodded to or greeted this or that person.

I tried this approach: “Are there two sides to this matter, Dr. Eberlein? Either an accident or something else? And what might that something else be? Involuntary manslaughter? Or did somebody murder your patient? Or was it suicide? Are we dealing with a cover-up? I'd like some answers, but all my questions fall on deaf ears. And you come along and start talking about infections and infarctions. What are you trying to tell me?”

“I see what you mean. Murder most foul, or at least suicide. You like dramatic effect? You like imagining things? We have a lot of people here who like imagining things.” He drew a wide arc with his cane.

That was impudent. I didn't quite manage to swallow my anger. “Only patients, or doctors, too? But you're quite right: When the tales I'm being told have holes in them, I start imagining what might fit into these holes. The story your young colleague fed me had neither rhyme nor reason. What do you, as director of this institution, have to say about a young patient falling out a window?”

“I'm no longer a young man, and wouldn't be one even if I still had my left leg. And you”-he looked me up and down with an affable expression-”aren't either. Were you ever married? Marriage is also a kind of organism where bacteria and viruses work, and sick cells grow and proliferate. 'Lay a brick, lay a brick, and your house will be built,' as we Swabians say, and let me tell you, bacteria and viruses are real Swabians.” Again the smug laugh.

I thought about my marriage. Klärchen had died thirteen years ago, and my grief about our marriage long before that. Eberlein's image left me cold.

“So what's festering inside the organism of this psychiatric hospital?” I asked.

Eberlein stopped in his tracks. “It was a pleasure to meet you. Look me up whenever you have any questions. I've got into the habit of philosophizing a little. Scratch a Swabian and you'll find a small Hegel. You're a man of action, with clear sight and sober reasoning, but at your age you should be careful about your circulation in this weather.”

He left without saying good-bye. I followed him with my eyes. His walk, his tense shoulders, the short jolting of his whole body as he swung his left leg forward around its axis, the hard thumping of the cane with the silver knob-there was nothing soft or limp about this man. He was a bundle of strength. If he was out to confuse me, he had done so.

8 Davai, Davai

The first drops fell, and the park emptied. The patients ran to the buildings. The loud chirping of agitated birds hung in the air. I took refuge under an old, half-open bike shelter, between slanting rusty racks that had not seen a bicycle for a long time. There were lightning and thunder, and the pelting rain hammered on the corrugated iron roof. I heard a blackbird sing, leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the bird, and pulled my head back completely wet. The bird was sitting under the regimental coat of arms up in the corner of the old building. The first blackbird of summer. Then I saw two figures coming slowly toward me through the pouring rain. An attendant in a white gown was calmly talking to a patient in an oversized gray suit and gently pushing him along. The attendant was holding the patient's hand behind his back in a police grip that wasn't painful, but could quickly force one into submission. As they approached, I could understand the attendant's words, appeasing nonsense, along with an occasional sharp, “Davai, Davai!” Both men's clothes were sticking to their bodies.

Even as they were standing next to me under the corrugated roof the attendant didn't let go of his patient. He nodded to me. “New here? Administration?” He didn't wait for my reply. “You guys up there have it easy while we here have to do all the dirty work. Nothing personal, I don't even know you.” He was broad and heavy and towered over me. He had a massive, rough nose. The patient was shivering and looking out into the rain. His mouth formed words I didn't understand.

“Is your patient dangerous?”

“You mean because I've got a tight grip on him? Don't worry. What do you do up there?”

There was a flash of lightning. The rain was still streaming down, drumming on the corrugated roof and splashing up from the gravel onto our legs. Rivulets poured over the shelter's concrete floor, and a smell of wet dust hung in the air.

“I'm from outside. I'm looking into the accident of that female patient last Tuesday.”

“You're from the police?”

The thunder came roaring over us. I flinched, which the attendant might well have taken for a nod, and me for a policeman.

“What accident?”

“Over in the old building-a fatal fall from the fourth floor.”

The attendant looked at me blankly. “What are you talking about? That's the first I've heard about a fall last Tuesday. And when I don't know a thing, it never happened. Who's supposed to have fallen?”

I handed him Leo's picture.

“That girl? Who told you such bullshit?”

“Dr. Wendt.”

He gave me back the picture. “In that case, I didn't say anything. If Dr. Wendt… if the director's golden boy said so”-he shrugged his shoulders-”then I guess we had an accident. A fatal fall from the fourth floor of the old building.”

I put off acknowledging what the attendant had retracted. “And your patient here?”

“He's one of our Russians. He gets into a crazy mood now and then. But he needs his fresh air, too, and I've got a good grip on him. Right, Ivan?”

The patient became agitated. “Anatol, Anatol, Anatol…” He was shouting the name. The attendant tightened his grip and the shouting stopped. “There, there, calm down, Ivan, nothing will happen to you, it's just thunder and lightning, there, there, what will this nice policeman think?” He spoke in the kind of crooning voice with which one reassures children.

I took my pack of Sweet Aftons out of my pocket and the attendant took one. I offered the patient one, too. “Anatol?” He cringed, looked at me, clicked his heels together, bowed, and, turning his head away, fished a cigarette out of the pack.

“Is his name Anatol?”

“How am I supposed to know? You can't get anything out of these guys.”

“And who are 'these guys'?”

“We've got all kinds here. They're left over from the war. They were workers in the Third Reich, or foreign volunteer helpers, or fought for some Russian general. Then we've got those from the concentration camps, both inmates and guards. When they're crazy, they're all the same.”

The rain grew weaker. A young attendant, his coat billowing, ran past us, jumping over puddles. “Hey, hurry up,” he called. “It's almost time to clock out.”

“I guess we ought to go.” The attendant next to me let his cigarette fall, and it went out on the wet ground. “Come on, Ivan. Time to grab some grub.”

The patient had also let his cigarette fall, trod it out, and with his foot carefully buried it in the gravel. Again he clicked his heels together and bowed. I watched the two men slowly make their way to the new building at the other end of the park. The thunder rumbled in the distance, and the rain rustled with gentle monotony. Figures appeared in the doors, and from time to time a doctor or attendant with an umbrella crossed the park with quick steps. The blackbird was still singing.

I remembered the senior public prosecutor's note that had crossed my desk in 1943 or 1944 at the Heidelberg Public Prosecutor's Office, which had decreed that any Russian or Polish workers not meeting their quotas were to be sent to forced labor in a concentration camp. How many had I sent? I stared into the rain. I shuddered. The air after the storm was clear and fresh. After a while I only heard the drops falling from the leaves of the trees. The rain had passed. The sky split open in the west, and pearls of water sparkled in the sun.

I returned to the main building, crossed the stairwell, passed the main entrance, and went out through the columns of the portal. It was five o'clock, change of shift, and employees were streaming out. I waited, keeping a lookout for Wendt, but he didn't appear. The attendant from before was one of the last to come out, and I asked him if he wanted me to drop him off somewhere. In the car on our way to Kirch-heim he reiterated that he hadn't said anything.

9 It was only later

It was only later that the shock of Leo's death kicked in, and then, even later, relief that the information could not be right. If the attendant didn't know something, it never happened. I believed him. Also Eberlein would have reacted differently had the fatal fall from the window really taken place. Was he merely trying to provoke me in order to probe me? Be that as it may, in our exchange he'd found out more about me than I had found out about him. I was angry that I hadn't realized this, too, until later.

When I got back home I called Philipp. Sometimes it's a small world-perhaps Philipp, as a surgeon at the Mannheim Municipal Hospital, might know something about the State Psychiatric Hospital and its doctors. He was on his way to a house call and promised to get back to me. But an hour later the doorbell rang and there he was. “I thought I'd better drop by. We don't see enough of each other.”

We sat on the leather couches in my living room, which also served as my study, the door to the balcony open. I uncorked a bottle of wine and told Philipp about my investigation at the psychiatric hospital. “I can't make heads or tails of it. Wendt with his silly lies, sinister old Eberlein, and the attendant's hints about Wendt being the director's golden boy-do you see rhyme or reason in any of this?”

Philipp downed the glass of good Alsatian riesling in one gulp and held it out to me. “We're having our spring festival at the yacht club on Friday. I'll take you along and you can have a nice chat with Eberlein.”

“Eberlein's got a yacht?”

“The Psyche. A Halberg-Rassy 352, sails like a three-quarter-ton vessel, top of the line.” Philipp's glass was empty again. “You call Eberlein sinister,” he said. “All I know is that people see him as an energetic, unconventional boss. The psychiatric hospital had taken a nosedive, and he put it back on track again. He is seen as a traditionalist in the field, but I don't think that a reformer could have gone a different route and done a better job. Wendt being his protégé doesn't fit the picture, though. Then again, one wouldn't expect him to esteem all doctors the same way-perhaps he likes Wendt particularly. But if Wendt, whom I've never heard of, is behind the mess you're describing, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.”

“And what about your shoes?” I asked. Philipp had knocked back the third glass, too, and rolled the stem between his fingers and looked unhappy.

“Füruzan has moved in with me.”

“Just like that?”

He smiled sourly. “It's just like in that building and loan commercial. The bell rings, and there she is at my front door with all her earthly belongings, along with some furniture mover, to move her things into my apartment.”

I was impressed. Ever since I'd known him he hit on women, took them out a few times, got them into bed, and that was that. Nurses and hospitals are exactly the same, was his motto: Either you get out quickly, or you're a hopeless case. So he was always particularly careful with nurses. Also because of the working atmosphere. And Füruzan, the proud, voluptuous Turkish nurse, brought everything tumbling down with the flick of a wrist.

“When did this happen?”

“Two weeks ago. I had to slam the door in her face. And then turn the key. It wasn't fair of her. I just couldn't handle it.”

Turbo crossed the roof and came into the room from the balcony.

Philipp said, “Here kitty, kitty,” and held out his hand. The cat marched straight past him. “See how things are with me? He can sense that I'm a castrated man and turns his back on me.”

I sensed something else. Philipp hadn't just dropped by because we don't see enough of each other. As I brought out another bottle from the kitchen, he spilled the beans. “Thanks, just one more sip, I'll have to get going. And if Füruzan should call here and ask for me…I don't know if she'd do that, but if she does…could you…I mean, as a private investigator, you know how to handle these things. Could you tell her, for instance, that I had trouble with my car and that I had to take it to some mechanic you recommended who could only take a look at it this evening…I'm hanging around there, and he doesn't have a phone. How's that?”

“Who's the other one?”

He shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands. “You don't know her. She's a student nurse from Frankenthal, but she's got a figure…breasts, I swear, she's got breasts like ripe mangoes and a bottom like…like…”

I suggested pumpkins.

“That's it, pumpkins. Or perhaps melons, not the yellow ones, the green ones with the red flesh. Or perhaps…” It was on the tip of his tongue.

“Do me a favor and tell Füruzan that you and I went out,” I said to him, “and I won't pick up the phone tonight if it rings.”

He left, and I sat there looking into the twilight thinking about my case and my friend Philipp. Füruzan didn't call. At ten o'clock Brigitte came over. My curiosity had been piqued: Before she slipped into her nightgown I took a quick, meticulous look. A pumpkin? No, and not a melon either, nor a muskmelon or a watermelon. A Belgian tomato.

10 Scott at the South Pole

Chief Inspector Nägelsbach is always restrained and polite. He was that way when we met during the war at the Heidelberg Public Prosecutor's Office, and this was how he remained toward me when we became friends. We're both well past the age when friendships thrive on emotional outpourings.

When I visited him the following morning at the Heidelberg police headquarters, I could tell right away that something wasn't quite right. He remained sitting at his desk and only shook my outstretched hand when I was about to withdraw it.

“Please be seated.” He waved me to a chair by the filing cabinets, quite a distance from his desk. He frowned when I picked up the chair and brought it closer to his desk, as if I were invading his space.

I came straight to the point. “A case has taken me to the State Psychiatric Hospital. There's something fishy going on there. Can you tell me if the police have been there recently?”

“I am not in a position to provide you with such information. That would be against regulations.”

We have never kept to the regulations, but made each other's work and life easier. He knows I can be trusted with the confidential information he gives me, just as I know I can trust him with the information I provide him. I couldn't figure out what was going on. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.” He peered at me hostilely through the small round lenses of his glasses. I was about to say something curt, then I realized that his expression was not one of hostility, but unhappiness. He had lowered his eyes and was looking at the newspaper. I got up and came to his side.

“Cork Monuments of Italy.” It was a newspaper article about an exhibition in Kassel of cork models of ancient buildings, from the Pantheon to the Colosseum, that had been made in Rome by Antonio Chichi between 1777 and 1782. “Read the last bit!”

I quickly ran an eye down the column. The article ended with a quote from a Leipzig art dealer who, in 1786, had proclaimed that these masterful cork models were the best possible medium for conveying a precise and sublime impression of the original monuments. In fact I would have mistaken the picture of the model in the paper for the real thing if it had had the right background.

“I feel like Scott when he reached the South Pole, only to find the tent Amundsen had pitched. Reni wants us to drive over to Kassel this weekend. She says I could see for myself that it's comparing apples and oranges. But I don't know.”

I didn't know either. When he was fifteen, Nägelsbach had begun building models of major monuments out of match-sticks. From time to time he would attempt to build something else, like Dürer's Praying Hands or the golden helmet of Rembrandt's Man in a Golden Helmet, but his mission in life, to which he was going to devote his retirement, was to build a model of the Vatican. I know and value Nägelsbach's works, but to be honest they did not achieve the kind of illusion of reality that those cork models did. What could I tell him? That art was more a matter of creation than an attempt to portray reality? That in life the goal wasn't as important as the journey? That today the world remembered Scott, not Amundsen?

“What are you working on right now?” I asked him.

“On the Pantheon, of all things. For four weeks now. Why didn't I go for the Brooklyn Bridge?” His shoulders drooped.

I waited for a bit. “Can I drop by again tomorrow?”

“It's the State Psychiatric Hospital, right? I'll call you when I have the information.”

I drove back to Mannheim with a deep feeling of futility. My old Opel purred over the asphalt. Sometimes the tires thumped over the yellow bumps marking the shifting of lanes where road work was being done. Failure late in life is no easier to bear than failure when one is young. It might not be the first time one is knocked down, but it might well be the last.

Back at my office, Salger's strained voice sounded from the answering machine. He was most anxious for news and wanted me to leave a message on his machine with an update on my investigation. He was sending another payment. His wife was also anxious for news. He didn't want to keep pestering me, but he did until my answering machine cut him off after two minutes.

11 Pictures from an exhibition

Nägelsbach didn't keep me waiting. He told me he had put his ear to the ground but hadn't found out much. “I can tell you the long and the short of it on the phone.” But I wanted to meet with him instead. “This evening? No, I can't. But I'll be back in the office tomorrow morning.”

It was to be a drive I shall never forget. It was almost the end of everything. At some construction near Friedrichsfeld, where neither a center planting nor barriers separate the lanes of the autobahn, a large furniture truck skidded, crossed my lane toward the embankment, and rolled over. I froze. The truck slid across my lane; my car was headed toward it as if to ram it, and the truck grew bigger, came nearer, and towered above me. I didn't brake or swerve my car to the left. I simply froze.

Within a fraction of a second everything was over. The truck had rolled over with a loud crash: Brakes screeched, horns blared, and a car that had careened out of its lane side-swiped another car that had come to a standstill. I stopped on the shoulder of the autobahn and got out but couldn't walk a step. I began shivering; I had to tense my muscles and grit my teeth. I stood there and saw the line of cars grow longer, the driver of the truck climb out of his cabin, a crowd of onlookers cluster around the rear door that had burst open, and the arrival of a police car and also an ambulance that immediately drove off again. My teeth kept chattering.

A man got out of the car that had come to a stop behind my car and walked up to me. “Do you need a doctor?” I shook my head. He took hold of my arms, shook me, made me sit down on the embankment, and lit a cigarette. “Would you like one, too?”

All I could think of was that you're not supposed to sit on the bare ground in any months that have an “r” in them, and it was April. I wanted to get up, worried about my bladder and prostate, but the man held me down.

After the cigarette, I pretty much came around again. The man was talking up a storm-after a few sentences I had already lost the thread. When he left, I didn't even remember what he looked like. But now I was capable of making a statement to the police without trembling.

Car by car, the traffic was waved past the capsized truck, its back door wide open. Its contents had fallen onto the autobahn, pictures from an exhibition in Mannheim. They were to be recovered and placed under the charge of the curator of the Mannheim Kunsthalle. I drove to Heidelberg along an almost empty autobahn.

The information Nägelsbach had found came from the file of a colleague of his who was on sick leave. “His reports are in quite a bad state. It seems he's not been well for some time. But one thing's clear, there's been trouble off and on at the psychiatric hospital over the last few years.”

“Trouble? What do you mean? Trouble, as in a patient falling out a window and breaking his neck?”

“Good God, no. I'm talking about small slipups and glitches. I guess 'trouble' isn't even the right word. It's things like a failure in the hot-water supply, food that's gone bad, workers finding windows they had stacked in the courtyard smashed, a patient being released a few days too late, an attendant falling from a ladder-I don't know if any of this is even significant. And the reports were never made by the management, but always by patients, their families, or anonymously. If only one didn't have to be so goddamn careful nowadays in wards and institutions…”

“Do the problems go beyond what happens in any large institution?”

Nägelsbach got up. “Follow me.” We went out into the corridor, turned around the corner, and looked out the window into the courtyard of the police headquarters. “What do you see, Herr Self?”

On the left, three police cars were parked, and on the right the ground was dug up and pipes were being laid. Some of the windows looking out on the yard were open, some closed. Nägelsbach looked up at the blue sky, across which a fresh wind was blowing little white clouds. “Wait a few more minutes,” he said. And then, as a cloud covered the sun, the blinds suddenly closed in all the windows. The cloud moved on, but the blinds remained closed.

“Of the three cars down there, two are almost always here because they need repairs, the sewer pipes have already been dug up once this year and then covered up again, and every summer the blinds come up with some new prank. Would you say that all this is within the bounds of what can happen in any large institution? Or is this the work of terrorists, liberationists, anarchists, or skinheads?” Nägelsbach looked at me blankly.

We went back to his office. “Do you have anything on a Dr.Wendt?”Iasked.

“One moment. The computer terminal is in another office.” He came back with a blank expression on his face. “There's nothing in the computer. But the name rings a bell. I don't know if that's for any specific reason. I'll have to look through the paper files that we'll be shredding for security reasons, which can't be pulled up on the computer. I'll try to do it as fast as I can, but it might take a while. When do you need this?”

I said “yesterday” and meant it. But what I had to do was clear even without a file on Wendt. Wendt was my lead, regardless of whether the lead was hot, warm, or cold. I had to dig up what sort of man he was, who his friends were, if he'd had dealings with Leo. Leo and her friends were not supposed to get wind of my investigation. But with Wendt I didn't have to mind my p's and q's.

12 In vain

I followed Wendt when he came out of the psychiatric hospital at about seven. He got into his car and drove off in the direction of Heidelberg. I'd been waiting for two hours and thrown my butts out the window because the ashtray was full. Sweet Aftons have no filter and are environmentally friendly cigarettes that burn out completely.

Route 3 is a smooth ride, and Wendt hit a good speed in his little Renault. From time to time I lost him, but caught up with him again at traffic lights, followed him down the Rohrbacher Strasse and through the Gaisberg tunnel, around Karlstor and up Hauptstraße. My Opel rattled over the cobblestones. We both parked in a garage beneath the Karlsplatz. Wendt pulled into a handicapped parking space, I into a well-lit parking space for women. Wendt got out of his car quickly, rushed up the stairs, and ran across the square, up Hauptstraße, past the Kornmarkt and the Heilig-Geist church. I couldn't keep up with him. His silhouette in the billowing beige raincoat grew smaller. I stopped at the corner of the city hall, pressing my hand to my side and trying to ease the pounding and stinging.

After the Florin-Gasse he hurried into a doorway over which hung a sign with a golden sun. I waited for the pounding in my side to grow weaker. The marketplace and the main street were quiet. It was too late for people to be shopping, and too early for strolling. On the houses around the marketplace a tax-advantaged historic renovation spree had left its mark. I noticed that in the niche at the corner of the city hall the stone statue of a prisoner of war was missing. He had stood there waiting for decades in a long coat, with hollow cheeks and emaciated hands. I wondered who might have taken him back home.

Beneath the sign of the golden sun was the Ristorante Sole d'Oro. I peeked inside. Wendt and a young woman were being given menus. Across the street, in the Café Bistro Villa, I found a table by the window where I could keep my eye on the restaurant's entrance. Long after the cassata, while I was on my second espresso and second sambuca, Wendt and his companion came out onto the street. They sauntered past a few houses to the Gloria movie theater. I watched the movie from three rows behind them. What I remember of the movie is the desperation of a woman who is becoming schizophrenic, and images of grand old facades, of a table festively decked on a terrace overlooking the sea, and of the sun hanging large and red in a hazy evening sky. As I came out of the theater I was dazed by the images and let my attention slip. Wendt and his companion were gone. A thick stream of students was moving down the main street, some with bright caps and headbands, along with American, Dutch, and Japanese tourists and loud young people from the provinces.

In the garage I waited for Wendt a long time. When he finally turned up, he was alone. He drove slowly: Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage, Kurfürstenanlage, along the Neckar River as far as Wieblingen. There he parked at the end of the Schuster-gasse. I couldn't make out the house number but saw him opening the garden gate and then closing it, walking around the house, and then disappearing down some stairs. Then the windows of the basement apartment lit up.

I drove home through the villages. The full moon cast its white light on fields and roofs. That night the moon kept me awake for a long time, and then I dreamed about it. It shone onto a terrace with a festively decked table, and I waited in vain for guests I had not invited.

13 Yes and no

One of the advantages of advancing years is that people believe everything you tell them. A man my age is simply too weary to try his hand as a con artist or a marriage swindler- what would he need the money for, anyway?

When I introduced myself as Wendt's father, his landlady didn't doubt my word for a minute.

“Ah, so you are Dr. Wendt's father!”

Frau Kleinschmidt eyed me inquisitively. Her flowery smock enclosed a good three hundred pounds, which protruded in small bulges between the buttons. The lower buttons had got in the way of her bending down and so were open, and her blue and pink petticoat peeked out. Frau Kleinschmidt had been busy with her strawberry beds when I had gone down the stairs to Wendt's basement apartment, rung the bell, and knocked on the door in vain. When I came back up the stairs, she had called me over.

I looked at my watch, and shook my head: “My son said he'd be home by five today. It's already a quarter past, and he's still not here.”

“He's usually never back before a quarter to seven.”

I sincerely hoped that today would be no exception. Twenty minutes earlier his car had still been parked outside the psychiatric hospital. I had taken up my post at four thirty, got fed up with waiting, and remembered the trustworthiness of the elderly. “I know he usually works till six or even later, but he told me he'd get away earlier today. I'm in Heidelberg on business and have to leave this evening. May I sit down on the bench for a moment?”

“I'll be happy to let you into your son's apartment. One moment; I'll go get the keys.”

She came back with the keys and a plate of marble cake. “I was intending to leave this on his doorstep.” She pressed the plate into my hands and unlocked the door. “Perhaps you'd like to try a piece. What did you say you were doing in Heidelberg?”

“I'm with the Union Bank of Baden.” As a matter of fact I do have an account there, and the old gray suit I was wearing fitted the image of a Baden official who had erred into banking. Frau Kleinschmidt found me sufficiently reputable and kept nodding her head respectfully. Her chin doubled, tripled, and quadrupled.

It was cool in Wendt's apartment. There were four doors in the hallway. The bathroom was to the left, the living room and the bedroom, which also served as his study, to the right, and the broom closet straight ahead. The kitchen lay beyond the living room. I hurried, as I wanted to be out of there by six. I looked for the telephone, to no avail. Wendt didn't have one. So there wasn't going to be one of those little books with names, addresses, and phone numbers lying next to a phone. In the chest of drawers I found only shirts and linen, in the closet only pants, jackets, and sweaters. In the wooden cabinets that Wendt used as supports for his writing desk there were ring binders, technical books, and a dictionary that was still in its shrink-wrap. Also loose letters, and letters in bundles, bills, reminders, traffic tickets, and thick reams of writing paper, as if he were planning to write a big book and had wanted to make sure that he wouldn't run out of supplies. Pinned on the cork board above the desk were a movie schedule from the Gloria Theater, a brochure for a water pick, a postcard from Istanbul and another from Amorbach, a key, a shopping list, and a cartoon showing two men. “Do you find it hard to make a decision?” one man was asking the other. “Yes and no.”

I took down the postcards. A thankful former patient and his wife had sent greetings from Istanbul, while Gabi, Klaus, Katrin, Henner, and Lea sent greetings from Amorbach, with the message that Amorbach was beautiful in the spring, that the children and Lea were getting on well together, that the renovation of the mill was almost finished, and that Wendt should come visit them soon. Gabi had been the one who wrote the postcard, Klaus had signed with a flourish, Katrin and Henner had scrawled something in childish letters, and from Lea came: “Hi, Lea.” I looked carefully, but Lea remained Lea, not Leo.

In the ring binders I found the notes and drafts of Wendt's doctoral dissertation. The letters that were bundled together were ten or more years old; in the loose letters his sister described her life in Lübeck, his mother her vacation, and a friend wrote on professional matters. I rummaged through the pile of books, newspapers, patient files, and papers and found a bank savings book, a checkbook, a passport, travel brochures of Canada, a draft for a job application to a hospital in Toronto, a Wieblingen parish newsletter, a note with three phone numbers on it, and the beginning of a poem.

I would have liked an optimistic continuation for that “you and I.” My father, an official with the German railways, with tracks in mind, had answered the question of whether parallel lines meet in infinity with a “no.”

I jotted down the three phone numbers. On the bookshelf I found a photo album documenting Wendt's childhood and youth. In the bathroom there was a picture of a naked girl stuck to the mirror. Under the mirror was a packet of condoms.

I gave up. Whatever Wendt might be hiding, his apartment didn't reveal it. I stood a few more minutes with Frau Klein-schmidt by her strawberry patch. I showed her Leo's picture and told her how happy my wife and I were that our son had met this nice young woman. She had never seen Leo before.

14 Twenty Smurfs

Back at my office I found an envelope with Salger's next payment. Again, fifty hundred-mark bills. I called Salger's answering machine, confirmed that I had received his payment, and informed him that Leo had been a patient at the State Psychiatric Hospital, had checked out again, and that for the time being that was all I knew.

Then I called the numbers that Wendt had jotted down: a number in Munich, one in Mannheim, and one that Information identified as an Amorbach number. Nobody answered in Munich, in Mannheim the Institute for Mental Health replied, and in Amorbach a woman with a heavy American accent.

“Hello, Dr. Hopfen's residence.” Children were making a racket in the background.

I tried a simple ruse: “Could I speak to Dr. Hopfen? We worked on the insulation at the mill, and this is a follow-up call to see if everything is fine.”

“I can barely hear you.” The children had come closer and were making even more noise. “Who is this?”

“My name is Self, insulation services. The cellar in the mill was damp, and we…”

“One moment, please.” She held her hand over the receiver, but I could hear every word of the children's shouting match, and her reply: Henner had given Katrin twenty-three Smurfs- No, Katrin had only gotten twenty-one, and he'd only gotten eighteen back-No, she'd given him back nineteen. “Eighteen!” “Nineteen!” “Seventeen!” Lea established the facts. “One, two, three…twenty. You have twenty Smurfs, which is more than you counted. That's more than enough!” Twenty- that threw the kids for a loop and shut them up for a while. “You want to speak to Dr. Hopfen, because you're wanting to go in the mill?” She asked in a thick German accent, slipping up on nouns and verbs. “The painters are there, you can go inside the cellar with no problems. Now they're off work, but tomorrow morning the painters will be working again.”

“Thank you very much. Are you English?”

“I'm from America, the Hopfens' au pair.”

For a moment we both waited, in case she or I might say something more. Then she hung up without a word. I watered my potted palm. Something had caught my attention, but I couldn't pin it down.

Philipp called. “Gerhard, don't forget the spring festival tomorrow evening at the yacht club. It'll start at around seven, but most people will turn up between eight and nine. Eight would be a good time, otherwise you might lose Eber-lein in the crowd. And bring Brigitte.”

I spent the following day at the municipal library, reading up on psychiatry. I thought that if I picked up a few pointers I might get more information out of Eberlein about the State Psychiatric Hospital, and about what Wendt had done there for or against Leo and what he might be hiding. I learned that the psychiatric hospital in Trieste had been closed down and that the State Psychiatric Hospital in Wunstorf was being restructured, which made me realize that the changes I had noticed at Eberlein's hospital were part of a major development in psychiatry from incarceration to healing. I found mental health defined as the ability to play the social game well. Someone is mentally ill when we no longer take him seriously because he does not play along or does not play along well. A chill ran down my spine.

15 Smashed china

Yacht clubs, rowing clubs, riding clubs, and tennis clubs may all be lavish to a greater or lesser degree, but they look like they've sprung from one and the same unimaginative clan of architects. On the ground floor are the equipment rooms, shower rooms, and changing rooms; on the first floor the lounge with the bar for social events, one or two adjoining rooms, and a terrace, which looked out over the Rhine and Friesenheimer Island.

On my way through the lounge I lost Brigitte. We'd had another of our spats in the car, because she wants us to get married and I don't. Or at least not yet. Then she tells me that at sixty-nine I'm not getting any younger-I tell her that one never gets any younger-and she tells me I'm talking nonsense. When she's right, there are no two ways about it. So I shut my mouth and dug in my heels. We parked among the many Mercedeses, BMWs, and even two Jaguars and a Rolls-Royce, but by the time I had walked to the other side of the car to open the door for her she had gotten out, cool and haughty.

Philipp, Füruzan, and Eberlein, who had a young woman on his arm, were standing by the railing of the terrace.

“Gerhard!” Füruzan gave me a kiss on each cheek, and Philipp squeezed my arm.

Eberlein introduced me to his wife and then grabbed the bull by the horns. “Why don't you young people leave us alone for a while? We elderly gentlemen have a thing or two we need to confer about.”

He steered me to a table. “You're obviously here to talk to me, so why keep you on tenterhooks? You came to our hospital inquiring about a young lady, but all you managed to find out was that she was a patient. Wendt fobbed you off with some story, and I started philosophizing. Now you've come to sound me out on neutral territory. Fair enough, fair enough.” He laughed his smug laugh and exuded harmlessness. He accepted a cigarette, refused a light, and twirled the cigarette between the tips of his thumb and middle finger while I smoked. His fat fingers executed the movement tenderly.

“I've come to sound you out? As far as I'm concerned, we can call it that. A young doctor in your institution tells me that a patient, whose father commissioned me to find her, fell out a window and died. Nobody else knows anything about this. An employee at your institution tells me that someone's pulling my leg, but when I inform him where I got my information from, he suddenly retracts what he said. Then I hear about small slipups and glitches at your hospital, while you spin a yarn about infections and infarctions, viruses and bacteria. Yes, I would be grateful for an explanation.”

“What do you know about psychiatry?”

“I've read this and that. Years ago a friend of mine was a patient at your hospital, and I've seen firsthand how things were done back then and how much things have changed.”

“And what do you know about the responsibility and burden of psychiatric work? Of the worries a psychiatrist can't leave behind in his locker along with his white gown, worries that follow him home, pursue him in his sleep, and are waiting for him the next morning when he wakes up? What do you know about that? You with your jokes about viruses, bacteria, infections, and infarctions…”

“But it was you who…” I couldn't figure out where he was coming from. Or is it with psychiatrists as it is with the kind of firemen who are covert arsonists and policemen who are covert criminals? I looked at him, bewildered.

He laughed and cheerfully tapped the floor several times with his cane. “Can a man with a face that is so easily readable be a private investigator? But don't worry, I'm just confusing you a little so that you can better understand the confusion about which you are asking me.” He leaned back and took his time. “Don't be too hard on young Wendt. He isn't having an easy time of it. All things considered, he might well be a good doctor some day.”

What I needed now was time before I could continue. “You're saying I shouldn't be too hard on him. Well, before I do anything, I want to give him one last chance.” I didn't have a clear concept of what I was talking about. Needless to say, it had gone through my mind to tell Nägelsbach about Wendt's behavior, or someone from the medical association or the appropriate board of physicians. But I couldn't see what I would gain by doing that. That would get Wendt into trouble, so I could perhaps try to put pressure on him by threatening such an action. But there was also the problem that Leo wasn't supposed to realize that I was looking for her, and were I to carry out my threat, I didn't know if that could be avoided.

“Of course it was foolish of Wendt to invent a fatal accident,” Eberlein said. “But imagine that you are a dedicated therapist, conscious that the relationship between your client and her father is the core issue, are working on it, have successes, setbacks, and finally a breakthrough that will bring your client back on the right track. And then suddenly a private investigator appears, and through that private investigator the father raises his fist-Wendt simply reached for the first lie he could think of to shake you off and shield his client.”

“So where is she?”

“I have no idea, Herr Self. I also do not know if things happened as I told you. The reason for my telling you this is so you can understand what might drive a doctor like Wendt to invent a foolish story like that.”

“So it could have been altogether different?”

He ignored my question. “I liked that girl-a cheerful spirit beneath a depressive veneer, not to mention her good pedigree. I hope she'll make it.” He thought a while. “Be that as it may, I have neglected my wife long enough. Let's go back.”

He got up and I followed him. The band had begun to play, and couples were whirling over the floor. We didn't have to force or edge our way through the crowd-standing and dancing couples spontaneously parted before Eberlein. We found the others. I danced with Frau Eberlein after he tapped his cane against his wooden leg and gave me a prompting glance, and then with Füruzan, and with a woman who approached me during ladies' choice and towered a head above me. By eleven thirty the crowd became too much for me, the room too small, the music too loud.

I found Brigitte on the terrace. She was flirting with a nobody in a turquoise suit and with an oily slick of hair.

“I'm leaving. Are you coming along?” I asked her.

She stayed. I drove home. At six thirty in the morning the doorbell rang, and there was Brigitte with a packet of fresh rolls. I didn't ask her where she'd just come from. Over breakfast I was going to propose to her, but as she got up to get the eggs from the stove she stepped on Turbo's tail.

16 Wider, straighter, faster

After lunch things suddenly fell into place. I'd swum a few laps at the Herschelbad on account of my back, and then, returning from the market, saw Giovanni standing outside the door of the Kleiner Rosengarten restaurant.

I greeted him. “You back? No more Mama-mia and Sole-mio?” But he wasn't in a mood to play our German-con verses-with-immigrant-worker game today. He had a lot to tell me about things back home in Radda, and found it easier to do so in his fluent German than in our bumbling pidgin. Then he brought out my food, which finally was again the way I liked it. He himself had gone shopping in the morning to the market and the slaughterhouse. The veal cutlet was juicy and the sauce had been pureed from fresh tomatoes and seasoned with sage. He brought me espresso and sambuca without my having to ask.

“Do you count in Italian?” I asked him. Giovanni was standing next to my table with his pad, adding up my order.

“You mean, even though I speak good German? I think when people count, they fall back into their mother tongue. Even though numbers aren't really that difficult.”

I thought of the Hopfen family's au pair. One, two, three…she had counted twenty Smurfs. In German, despite her thick accent and her slipping up on nouns and verbs. Brigitte's son, Manu, who had lived for a long time in Brazil with his father but by now speaks good Mannheim German, still counts in Portuguese, even when I'm helping him with his homework and math problems. On the other hand, Lea might have been counting in German just to settle the children's argument.

I wanted to see her. Only I couldn't remember where I'd parked my car. At the Herschelbad? The market square? At home? It's sad when you have to use your detective's nose to make up for the shortcomings of age. The price tag on the shampoo bottle gave me a clue. It came from a drugstore in Neckarstadt. I remembered that I had driven Brigitte to her place in the Max-Joseph-Strasse after breakfast, had bought the shampoo there, and then had crossed the Kurpfalz Bridge and walked over to the swimming pool.

I found my car, took the autobahn to Heidelberg, and drove along the Neckar to Eberbach. I hadn't known that all of Route 37 was under construction, that it was being made wider, straighter, and faster, and that it even tunneled under the mountain at Hirschhorn. Will it one day turn into an autobahn? Will one day a monorail line run through forest and meadow, mountain and valley, replacing the dignified sandstone viaducts over which the Grand Duke sent the first trains across the gorges of the Odenwald? Will a Club Med one day take over the enchanted complex of old guesthouse, hunting lodge, and disused factory in Ernsttal? There, on the road from Kailbach to Ottorfszell, the trees are at their greenest and the sandstone at its reddest, and on the shaded terrace beer tastes like ambrosia. Why does it always have to be coffee and cake in the afternoon? I had a schnitzel with my beer, and a salad with a dressing that didn't come out of a bottle, and blinked in the sunlight that breached the leafy canopy.

In Amorbach I found Dr. Hopfen's office on the market square, and one of his patients told me the way to his home. “Head past the train station, over the tracks, and up toward the Hotel Frankenberg. Keep following the signs for Sommer-berg. The doctor's house is the last one on the left before you get to the driveway of the hotel.”

After I negotiated the steep and narrow lane and made a U-turn in the hotel's driveway, a little girl opened the gate in front of the Hopfen residence, and a Land Rover pulled out. The girl closed the gate again and got into the car. Two other children were romping around in the backseat. A woman was at the wheel. The engine died a few times, and I looked around: I gazed at the fruit trees on the slope, the building supplies warehouse in the valley, and the church of Amorbach with its two onion domes beyond the railway tracks. I followed the Rover back into town. The throng of tourist cars in front of the abbey left only two parking spaces-one for the Rover and one for my old Opel.

I followed the woman and the three children on foot to the market square. I still wasn't certain. But then they went into Hopfen's office, and when they came out again I had the young woman in full view, and there was no doubt. She was Leo. Leo in pink sunglasses, a peroxide blond mop of curls, and a man's checked shirt over her jeans. She had done her best to look like an au-pair girl from the American Midwest.

I followed Leo and the children. They shopped at the butcher's and at the cheese store, and while the children were having their hair cut at the salon, Leo browsed the shelves of the bookstore across the street. Before they got back in the car and drove home, they stopped at the church with the onion domes. I followed them inside and drank in the bright, spacious interior and the sounds of the organ, on which an organist happened to be practicing. In the nave, Saint Sebastian was being shot with arrows and nursed by Saint Irene. Leo and the children were kneeling in the back row. The little girl was looking around the church and the two boys were popping their bubble gum. Leo leaned her elbows on the back of the pew in front of her, rested her head on her hands, and stared into the emptiness.

17 In response to an official request

I was back in Mannheim at four thirty. On my way there I had still not figured out what to make of all this. I wanted to talk to Salger, but not on the phone and definitely not by way of his answering machine. It was clear that he knew more than he had led me to believe.

I drove straight over to the Max-Joseph-Strasse. Brigitte greeted me as if our spat had never taken place. We embraced. She felt good, warm, and soft, and I only let go of her when Manu tugged at us jealously.

“Why don't the two of you take Nonni out?” she suggested. “And come back around seven thirty. I'll finish my tax returns and cook something-the sauerbraten should be ready by seven thirty.”

Nonni is Manu's dog, a tiny creature, a fluffy toy. Manu put him on a leash and we made a grand tour of the town: the Neckar embankment, the Luisenpark, the Oststadt, and the Water Tower. We made slow progress. In general I have my doubts when it comes to evolution and progress, but the fact that erotic attraction between humans doesn't involve sniffing tree trunks and corners is without doubt a clear sign of evolutionary progress.

I called Salger from Brigitte's place. The answering machine wasn't on. Was Salger back in Bonn? The phone rang futilely. I tried again at nine and at ten, but still nobody picked up.

On Sunday, too, and even Monday morning at eight my attempts were futile. At nine I took Manu to school and Brigitte to her massage practice at the Collini Center, and then drove on to the main post office to look through the regional phone books. If Salger was back in Bonn, he had to be back at work, too. I found Bonn in phone book number 53, and under Federal Government found the number of the chancellor and seventeen federal ministries. I started with the Federal Chancellery and the Press and Public Relations Office. They didn't have an Under-Secretary Salger. There was no Salger at the Federal Ministry for Work and Social Services, nor at any of the other ministries listed. At the Federal Ministry for Justice nobody picked up until ten fifteen, at which point the lady on the phone, though sounding rested and exceptionally friendly, had never heard of an Under-Secretary Salger. I turned to phone book number 39 and called the various departments at the state government in Düsseldorf. It didn't seem too farfetched that Salger might be living in Bonn but working in Düsseldorf. But no regional minister of Nordrhein-Westfalen had an under-secretary by the name of Salger.

I drove over to the Municipal Hospital. It was time to find out a few things. I wanted to pin down my client: the mysterious under-secretary without a department, the owner of a phone number that was listed nowhere, the sender of letters containing five thousand marks without a return address. I had his telephone number, but Information will only disclose a subscriber's name and address in response to an official request or in a case of an emergency. A doctor who finds nothing but a telephone number in the pockets of an unconscious patient and needs to know his name and address can call Information and put in his request, and he will be called back. Philipp had to help me make this request official.

Philipp was still in the operating theater, and the head nurse showed me into his office. I had intended to ask him to put the call through to Information, but then I decided to save him the trouble and do my own lying.

“Hello, this is Dr. Self, Mannheim Municipal Hospital. We have an accident patient without ID. All we have is a number in Bonn: 41-17-88. Can you please provide me with the name and address for this number?”

I was put on hold twice. Then they promised to check and call me back. I gave them Philipp's number. Five minutes later the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Dr. Self?”

“Speaking.”

“41-17-88 belongs to a Helmut Lehmann…”

“Lehmann?”

“Ludwig, Emil, Heinrich, Marta, Anton, Nordpol, Nordpol. The address is Niebuhrstrasse 46a in Bonn, District 1.”

I made a cross-check, calling Information in Bonn and asking for the number of Helmut Lehmann, Niebuhrstrasse 46a, and was given 41-17-88.

It was twenty past twelve. I checked the train schedule: There was an intercity train from Mannheim to Bonn at 12:45.I didn't wait for Philipp.

By 12:40 I was standing in the long line in front of the only open ticket window. By 12:44 the bored clerk and his boring computer had served four passengers, and I could see that I wasn't going to get to my ticket before 12:48. I rushed out onto the platform. No train came at 12:45, 12:46, 12:47, 12:48, or 12:49. At 12:50 there was an announcement that intercity train 714 was running five minutes late, and it pulled into the station at 12:54. I get worked up, even though I know that this is how things are nowadays with the train system, and that getting worked up isn't good for me. I remember the railways in the old days, punctual and treating passengers with sober, firm, Prussian respect.

I won't waste any words on the lunch in the restaurant car. The ride along the Rhine is always beautiful. I like seeing the railway bridge from Mainz to Wiesbaden, the Niederwald Memorial, the Kaub Castle on the island, the Loreley, and Castle Ehrenbreitstein. At 2:55 I was in Bonn.

I won't waste any words on Bonn either. A taxi took me to Niebuhrstrasse 46a. The narrow house was, like most houses on that street, a product of the mid-nineteenth century Gröünderzeit period with columns, capitals, and friezes. On the ground floor, next to the entrance, was a tiny shop in which nothing was on display or being sold anymore. The pale black lettering on the gray frosted glass above the door announced HABERDASHERY. I ran my eye over the names on the buzzers: There was no Lehmann.

I didn't find a Lehmann on the buzzers of Niebuhrstrasse 46 or 48 either. I read the buzzers of number 46a once more but found no further information. I was on the point of giving up, but then I hesitated, perhaps because I had glimpsed something from the corner of my eye that had been picked up by my subconscious. The tiny plaque by the door of the shop read HELMUT LEHMANN. Helmut Lehmann-nothing more. The door was locked. Inside the shop there were a counter, two chairs, and an empty display stand for pantyhose.

On the counter stood a telephone and an answering machine.

18 A demigod in gray

I knocked, but nobody emerged from a hidden trapdoor or stepped out of a secret panel. The shop remained empty.

Then I rang the second-floor apartment and found the landlord. He told me that the old widow who had run the haberdashery had died a year or so ago and that her grandson had been paying the rent ever since. “When might I be likely to find young Herr Lehmann?” The landlord eyed me with his piggish little eyes and spoke in a whiny Rhineland tremolo. “I have no idea. He told me that he and his friends want to turn the shop into a gallery. Sometimes one of them is here, sometimes another, and then for days on end I don't see or hear anyone.” When I delicately tried to ascertain if he was certain about the identity of the grandson, Lehmann, the landlord's whininess turned to outrage. “Who are you? What is it you want?” His tone smacked of bad conscience, as if he had let his doubts be bought off by a high rent.

I went back to the station. There wasn't a train until 5:11 in the afternoon, so I sat down in a café across the street. I sipped some hot chocolate and went over what I knew and didn't know.

I knew that Lea was Leo. I could also imagine why Leo had altered her name to Lea. I, too, always chose aliases close to my real name. In one of my past assignments I had used the alias Hendrik Willamowitz to infiltrate a gang that traded in American cigarettes and stolen German antiquities. There was something I liked about the name. But on two occasions I didn't react fast enough when someone called me Willamowitz, and that was that as far as the gang boss was concerned. Ever since, I have been Gerhard Sell, or Selk, or Selt, or Selln whenever I needed an alias, and these are the names I also have on my fake business cards.

But what did Leo need a fake name for? She'd turned up at the psychiatric hospital under a fake name and was registered under that name-the receptionist there had no information on a Leonore Salger, and Dr. Wendt, too, had said that he'd only learned her real name from me. A patient at the State Psychiatric Hospital and an American au-pair girl in a remoter part of the Odenwald-a good move if one wanted or needed to go underground. But why would Leo want or need to hide? It was crystal clear that she was not hiding within the guise of therapy from a threatening father, but from the phony Herr Salger, the phony or real Herr Lehmann, or myself-his informant or client. Did Wendt know more about this? Everything undeniably pointed to Wendt's having arranged the au-pair position for Leo in Amorbach. Even Eberlein seemed to assume that Wendt had something to do with Leo's disappearance. Maybe he had even helped her hide out in the psychiatric hospital in the first place.

I ordered another cup of hot chocolate and a chocolate meringue. Who was the mysterious Herr Salger? He had played the role of under-secretary from Bonn quite convincingly on the phone. He knew that Leo had studied French and English at the Heidelberg Institute for Translation and Interpretation. He had a photograph of Leo that came from her. Had she given it to him?

As I nibbled at my meringue I sketched out a love story. Leo, wearing a crumpled yellow blouse, is cutting class. She is sitting on the bank of the Rhine. A young attaché from the Foreign Ministry comes sauntering by. “Hello young lady, may I…” They go for a walk. More walks follow. The banks of the Rhine are not the only place where they kiss. Then the attaché is posted to Abu Dhabi and she stays behind, and while he only sees veiled women who remind him of Leo, she meets a handsome young man or two. The attaché returns from Abu Dhabi-there is jealousy, arguments, stalking-she moves from Bonn to Heidelberg-he follows her, threatens her. A foolish story. But what made it compelling was the locality. Salger/Lehmann had to have a reason why he would choose to play the role of the father from Bonn, and the most obvious reason was that Leo was from Bonn.

I finished my chocolate, asked the waitress the way to the main post office, paid, and left. It was only a few steps. I already knew that I would not find the name Salger in phone book number 53 under Bonn. But perhaps the widow of an under-secretary, whom I could picture as Leo's mother, might be living out in the suburbs. I could see the private home bought with a state subvention, small and white, in a pretty, colorful garden with a lodger's apartment and a rustic fence. I didn't find the name Salger in Bad Honnef, Bornheim, Eitorf, Hennef, Königswinter, or Lohmar. I did find a landscape designer by the name of Günter Salgert in Meckenheim, and a management consultant called Philipp Salsger. Encouraged, I worked my way through Much, Neunkirchen-Seelscheid, Niederkassel, Rheinbach, and Ruppichteroth to St. Augustin. There I found an E. Salger, and that was that. Siegburg, Swisttal, Troisdorf, and Windeck only offered up an M. Sallert who specialized in renovating frame houses, and a nurse by the name of Anna Salga. I wrote down the address and phone number of E. Salger and went into a phone booth.

“Yes, hello?” It was the shaky voice of a woman who had been struck by congestive heart failure, had had a stroke, or was an alcoholic.

“Good afternoon, Frau Salger. My name is Self. Your daughter Leonore will have told you about my son. My wife and I are so pleased about the two of them and think it is high time that we met you. You see, I happen to be in Bonn today and I thought-”

“My daughter isn't here. Who is this please?”

“My name is Self. I am the father of her friend…”

“Ah, you are the TV repairman. I was expecting you yesterday.”

I could rule out congestive heart failure. It had to be a stroke or alcoholism. “Will you be home around six?” I asked her.

“I couldn't see my TV movie yesterday. And now I can't even see the movies I have on video.” The voice shook once more and broke. “When will you come?”

“I'll be over in half an hour.” I bought a small black-and-white TV set at Hertie for 129 marks, and a screwdriver for 9.99, and gray overalls for 29.90 at a sale. Then I was ready to make my appearance as a demigod in gray at Frau Salger's sickbed.

19 Why don't you go, too?

The taxi driver in front of the train station was pleased. The trip to the Drachenfelsstrasse in Hangelar is one of the good longer fares. But when I struggled into my gray overalls on the backseat, he peered at me, frowning, through the rearview mirror, and when I walked through the garden gate carrying the TV set, his wary eyes followed me. He waited with the engine running; I have no idea why. I rang twice. There was no answer, but I didn't go back to the taxi. He finally drove off. Once I could no longer hear him, there was total silence. Sometimes a bird chirped. I rang a third time, the doorbell echoing and dying away like a weary sigh.

The house was big, and there were tall old trees in the garden. Only the fence was as I had imagined it. I made a wide detour over the lawn and reached the terrace at the back. She was sitting on a wicker lounger under an awning with green and white stripes. She was asleep. I sat down across from her on a cane chair and waited. From a distance, she could have been Leo's sister. Close up, her face was deeply furrowed, her shoulder-length ash blond hair had gray strands, and her freckles had lost their mirth. I tried to immerse my own face in those furrows and gauge the inner state that would correspond to them. I felt the harsh wrinkles over my own nose and the sharp lines in the corners of my eyes as I defensively strained to narrow them.

She woke up, and her gaze, blinking carefully, flitted over me, to the bottle on the table, and back to me again. “What time is it?” She burped, and a haze of alcohol wafted over to me. I ruled out a stroke, too.

“A quarter past six. You have-”

“Don't think you can hoodwink me like that. You haven't been here since six!” She burped again. “So I won't let you charge me from six. You can go fix my TV now. It's over there on the left.” Her hand pointed to the terrace, seized the bottle on the way back, and poured a glass.

I remained seated.

“What're you waiting for?” She downed the glass.

“Your TV can't be repaired. Here, I've brought you a new one.”

“But mine is…” Her voice became whiny.

“OK then, I'll take your set back to the shop with me. I'll leave you this one here anyway.”

“I don't want that thing.” She pointed at the 129-mark television as if it had a disease.

“Then give it to your daughter.”

Surprise livened her glance for an instant. She asked me in a normal voice to bring her a bottle from the refrigerator. Then she sighed and closed her eyes. “My daughter…”

I went to the kitchen to get the gin. When I came back onto the terrace, she was asleep again. I took a tour of the house and found a room on the second floor that I guessed had once been Leo's. On the corkboard above the desk were several photos of her. But the closet, the bureau, the desk drawers, and the bookshelves revealed as good as nothing about the room's former occupant. She had played with stuffed animals, had worn Betty-Barclay clothes, and read Hermann Hesse. If the drawings on the wall that were signed L. S. were hers, she definitely had a knack for sketching. She had been a fan of an Italian pop star who was smiling from a poster on the wall and whose records stood on the shelf. I was at a loss. I sat down at her desk and studied the photos more carefully. With the opening at knee height, the desk had been built as if each minute a young girl spent sitting there was a minute wasted. As if the idea was to keep girls from learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I have my doubts: Is this really the way to solve the issue of women's emancipation?

I took along Leo's photo album, a thick volume with a linen cover that documented her life from the cradle to her first day at school, the school dances, class excursions, her matriculation party, all the way to university. Why are girls so eager to keep photo albums? They also like showing them, and therein lies a hidden mystery, a matriarchal magic. When I was a young man I always viewed the invitation “Would you like to see my pictures?” as a signal to flee. With my wife, Klara, I either didn't pick up this signal or felt that I couldn't keep fleeing forever and had to stand my ground.

I descended the winding staircase without aim or plan, sauntered through the large living room, and stopped in front of a shelf unit filled with videos. Frau Salger was snoring outside on the terrace. For a moment I was tempted to steal The Wild Bunch, a Peckinpah movie I love that can't be found anywhere on video. It was six thirty and it began to rain.

I went out onto the terrace, rolled up the awning, and sat down across from Frau Salger again. The rain was light. It gathered in the hollows of her eyes and ran down her cheeks like tears. Waving her right hand erratically, she tried to shoo away the drops. It didn't work, and she opened her eyes. “What's going on?” Her look was vacant, reeled, and then fled back behind her closed lids. “Why am I wet? It's not supposed to rain over here.”

“Frau Salger, when did you last see your daughter?”

“My daughter?” Her voice became whiny again. “I don't have a daughter anymore.”

“Since when don't you have a daughter?”

“Go ask her father that.”

“Where can I find your husband?”

She looked at me slyly through narrowed eyes. “You're trying to con me, aren't you? I don't have a husband anymore either.”

I made a new attempt. “Would you like to have your daughter back?” When she didn't answer I became more generous. “Would you like to have your daughter and your husband back?”

She looked at me and for an instant her eyes were awake and clear before they became rigid and stared through me. “My husband's dead.”

“But your daughter is alive, Frau Salger, and needs help. Doesn't that interest you?”

“It's been ages since my daughter needed any help. What she needed was a good spanking. But my prick of a husband…my limp prick of a husband…my…”

“How long has it been since you've heard from Leo?”

“Leave me alone. Everyone's left me all alone. First he went, then she did. Why don't you go, too?”

The rain had become heavy, and our hair stuck to our heads. I tried again.

“When did she go?”

“Right after he went. And that's just what the other guy had been waiting for. I guess she wanted to…”

“What?”

She didn't answer. She'd fallen asleep in midsentence. I gave up, rolled the awning back down, and listened for a while to her snoring and the rain rustling on the sailcloth. I left her the TV set.

20 Stopping up holes

“If you want some insider information about the comings and goings of the Bonn political scene, then go talk to Breuer. He's your age, has been living in Bonn since 1948, writes for various small newspapers, and used to do Interfactional, a TV show with politicians about the first to cross party lines. He brought together backbenchers from all the parties and talked politics with them as if they were interested in politics or knew anything about it. We all had a good laugh, but the party leaders saw to it that the show was canceled. Breuer's a clever and funny guy.” I got this lead from Tietzke, an old Mannheim friend who used to write for the Heidelberger Tageblatt and was now at the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. I gave Breuer a call. He agreed to meet me early in the morning the following day.

So I stayed over in Bonn. I found a quiet hotel behind the trees and the pond around Poppelsdorf Castle. From there it wasn't too far to Breuer's office. Before going to bed I called Brigitte. The strange sounds of a strange city, the strange room, the strange bed-I did feel homesick.

The following morning Breuer greeted me with bubbling loquacity. “The name's Self, right? You're from Mannheim? An old friend of Tietzke's? Who'd have thought the Heidel-berger Tageblatt would have folded, just like that! With every passing day I find myself thinking more and more…Ah, well, it's the same old story. Come in, come in!”

The walls of his office were lined with books, the view through the large window was of backyards with old trees and beyond them two tall smokestacks. His desk by the window was covered in papers, a small green triangle was blinking insistently on the screen of a word processor, and water was hissing in the coffeemaker. Breuer offered me an armchair, sat on the swivel chair at his desk, reached under the seat and pulled a lever, and he and the seat went down with a clang. Now we sat facing each other at the same height.

“Shoot! Tietzke says I've got to help you any way I can. I'm ready and willing. The ball's in your court. Are you a detective?”

“Yes, and I'm working on a case that involves a young woman by the name of Salger, whose deceased father must have been a big shot here in Bonn. That's if being the undersecretary in one of the ministries means being a big shot. Does the name Salger mean anything to you?”

He'd been watching me attentively, but now was looking out the window, lost in thought. He massaged his left earlobe with his left hand.

“When I look out the window…Do you know why I like those two smokestacks over there? They're harbingers from another world. Perhaps not a better one, but a world that's more complete, where, unlike here in Bonn, you don't just have officials, politicians, journalists, lobbyists, professors, and students, but people who work, who build something- machines, cars, ships, whatever-who establish, run, and ruin banks and companies, who paint pictures and make movies, who're poor, panhandle, commit crimes. Can you imagine a crime of passion being committed here in Bonn? Passion for a woman, for money, even for becoming the next chancellor? No, you can't imagine that, and believe you me, neither can I.”

I waited. Does it speak for a journalist if he asks questions and then answers them himself? Does it speak against him? Breuer massaged his earlobe again. A high forehead, sharp eyes, a weak chin-he looked intelligent. And I liked listening to him; there was a pleasant twang in his voice, and what he said about Bonn sounded appealing. Yet at the same time I felt that I was privy to a routine performance. He had probably expounded on the smokestacks and Bonn a thousand times.

“Salger…yes, I remember him. I'd have thought you'd have remembered him, too. What newspapers do you read?”

“Nowadays the Süddeutsche, but I used to read all kinds, the Frankfurter-”

“Maybe the Süddeutsche didn't write much about Salger. Less than the other ones. He made headlines in some of them.”

I looked at him, puzzled. He enjoyed toying with my curiosity. But I was glad to humor him. If people give me what I want, I don't care what detours and diversions there are.

“Some coffee?”

“Please.”

He poured me a cup. “Salger was, as you yourself said, an under-secretary. He was in acquisitions at the Ministry of Defense, the way anyone who was anybody was back then. Remember the fifties and sixties? Life, politics-everything was about acquisitions.” He took a slurping sip from his cup. “Remember the König scandal?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “In the late sixties?”

“That's right. König was an under-secretary and the president of a fund that could be used to bypass the federal budget to finance large public construction projects of the armed forces. It was a peculiar setup, what with the under-secretary also being president of the fund. But that's how it was, and Salger was an under-secretary and also a board member of the fund. Is it all coming back to you?”

Nothing was coming back to me, but I had got one guess right and tried my luck again. “Embezzlement?” How else could the president of a fund and a board member cause a scandal?

“Biafra.” Breuer reached for his earlobe again, as if he wanted to milk from it the continuation of the story, and looked at me meaningfully. “König had speculated with loans to Biafra. If Biafra had managed to secede from Nigeria, he would have made millions. But as we know, Ojukwu lost, and so did König. I don't know if he embezzled the money from the fund in the legal sense of the term, or misappropriated the money, or what. He hanged himself before the verdict was announced.”

“And Salger?”

Breuer shook his head. “That was one crazy guy. I guess you don't remember. Suspicion first fell on him. He was interrogated and arrested, but kept his mouth shut. The way he saw it, there was nothing that he could be reproached for. He got in a huff and saw the whole thing as a personal insult. When it finally came out that König…”

“How?”

“König was drowning in debt, and when the Biafra money he was counting on didn't materialize, he tried to stop up the holes in other ways, with more and more building grants and credits from the fund, and the whole thing blew up on him.”

“How long was Salger in prison?”

“About six months.” He stretched out his arms. “That's a long time. And all his colleagues, superiors, and political buddies turned their backs on him. They were sure he was the culprit. When it became clear that he wasn't, they tried to pin dereliction of duty as a board member on him. But that didn't stick either. A report surfaced showing that he had drawn attention to all the irregularities. So he was rehabilitated. There was even a promotion in the works. But he couldn't deal with the fact that the same people who had suspected and already convicted him were now patting him on the back and acting as if nothing had happened. He dropped everything and broke off contact with everyone: with his colleagues, superiors, and political buddies. He was barely fifty and had ended up retired and totally isolated. It's a crazy world.” He shook his head.

“Does the story go on?”

Breuer poured us another cup of coffee and reached for a pack of Marlboros on his desk. “My first one today. Would you like one, too?” I fished my yellow pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and offered him one, and he took it with great aplomb. A smoker of filter cigarettes who at the sight of a Sweet Afton doesn't say “Oh, but those don't have a filter!” and takes one with interest. I like that.

“There's more. Salger joined the Free Democratic Party, put himself up as a candidate for parliament, and mounted a futile campaign with a fervor that he would have done well to invest in a better cause. He wrote a book into which he poured all his experiences, a book that nobody wanted to publish and nobody wanted to read. He got sick, cancer, was in and out of hospitals, you know. He died a few years ago.”

“What did he live on?”

Breuer milked his earlobe. “He had a private fortune, quite a large one. That just goes to show-money doesn't guarantee happiness.”

21 Very clear indeed

On my trip back home the train was diverted through Darmstadt and along the Bergstrasse route. It was the first time I noticed the many quarries at the edge of the Odenwald Range. They made the mountains look like red Jell-O covered in green mint sauce, of which God had taken a few bites with a spoon.

In Bonn I had again dialed 41-17-88 and let it ring a long time in vain. The answering machine remained silent. But I'd barely set foot in my office when the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Herr Self, Salger here. Have you tried reaching me over the past few days?”

So he, too, had noticed that his answering machine wasn't reacting. Had one of his friends turned the machine off by mistake?

“I'm glad you called, Herr Salger. I have a lot of information for you and would like to give it to you in person. I'd be happy to come see you in Bonn, but perhaps you will be passing through Mannheim one of these days? I take it you're back in Bonn, you see, your answering machine…”

“It must be broken, or the maid turned it off by mistake. But no, we're not back in Bonn, and as I can't arrange a meeting in the foreseeable future, I must ask you to give me the information over the phone. Have you found Leonore?”

“I'd rather not discuss the whereabouts of Leonore on the phone, since-”

“Herr Self, you took on this case and are obliged to report your findings. You accepted the case from me over the phone, and you must also make your report over the phone. Have I made myself clear?”

“Very clear, Herr Salger, very clear indeed. But I will not make my report over the phone, only in person. Furthermore, you did not commission me over the phone, but by letter. I am quite happy to make a report, but it will have to be in person.”

We continued haggling back and forth. He had no reason to refuse to meet me, and I had no reason to insist on it. He argued that his wife was close to a nervous breakdown, that she needed him constantly at her side, him and him alone. “She cannot bear the presence of strangers.”

I wedged the receiver between my chin and shoulder, got out my bottle of sambuca and poured myself a glass, lit a Sweet Afton, and explained to Salger in no uncertain terms that first, I always made my reports in writing or in person, and second, I always made a point of meeting my clients. “That is how I have always worked.”

He changed his tactics. “In that case, how about providing me with a written report? In the next few days I shall be taking my wife to see a doctor in Zurich, and we could pick up your report at the Baur au Lac when we get there.”

It had been a long day. I was tired and had had enough of this absurd conversation. I'd had enough of the Salger case. On my way home on the train I had admitted to myself that right from the start the case had stunk to heaven. Why had I even taken it on? Because of the hefty fee? Because of Leo? And, as if I felt that I wanted to close this case just as unpro-fessionally as I had undertaken it, I heard myself say: “I could also send my report to Niebuhrstrasse 46a in Bonn, care of Helmut Lehmann.”

For a moment there was silence on the line. Then Salger slammed down the receiver. Resounding in my ear was the hoarse tak-tak-tak with which sound waves mark time when they have nothing to transmit.

22 Pain, irony, or heartburn

For two days nothing happened. Salger didn't call me, and I didn't call him. I didn't give the case much thought. I opened a special account at the Badische Beamtenbank in order to deposit Salger's ten thousand marks, which I had initially locked up in my desk drawer. To these ten thousand marks I added the interest that would have gathered had I deposited it right away.

One afternoon, as I was repotting my palm, I had a visitor.

“Don't you remember me? Well, I guess you were quite shaken up at the time. My name's Peschkalek. We met on the autobahn.”

This was the man, in a green loden coat-midforties, bald, with a thick mustache and a pleasant, wry smile-who had walked me over to the embankment and given me a cigarette after the furniture truck had crashed. I thanked him.

“You're welcome, you're welcome. We should thank our lucky stars that the accident wasn't serious. The paintings also seem to have come out of it unscathed-do you want to come along to the Mannheimmer Kunsthalle to see the exhibition that nearly cost us our lives?”

He turned out to be a photographer, a photojournalist, and had quite a few clever things to say about the composition of the photo-realistic pictures on show. I noticed details on the pictures that had eluded him. “Aha, quite a detective!” he said. It was a pleasant afternoon, and we said good-bye and hoped we would soon meet again.

There have been times when I've had the feeling of calm before the storm. But I've never known how to make provision for the storm. Furthermore, feelings can be misleading, just as thoughts can be.

On the third day, I was in the mood to go out for breakfast. Since the Café Gmeiner has been replaced by a restaurant serving foie gras in Jurançon gelée and monkfish slices in mustard seed and similar fripperies, I go instead to the Café Fieberg in the Seckenheimer Strasse. The waitress there is a boisterous but kind soul who has taken me under her wing and has made sure the kitchen knows how I like my eggs- fried eggs flipped over just before being served.

She brought pepper and nutmeg. “Another pot of coffee?”

“I'd like one, too, please.” He pulled up a chair and sat down opposite me. I recognized his voice even before he introduced himself as Salger. I only nodded and looked at him. A full face, high forehead, heavy frame, an aura of bourgeois ponderousness. I could imagine him in the gray flannel of a teacher, the dark blue pinstripes of a banker, or even the robes of a judge or pastor. Now he was wearing a leather jacket, flannel pants, and a sweater. He must have been in his midforties. If I had been able to see his eyes, I could have decided if the expression around his mouth indicated pain, irony, or heartburn. But his eyes remained hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.

“I owe you an explanation, Herr Self. I knew you were a good detective, and I should have known that you'd be able to see through my little game of hide-and-seek. I hope you won't hold it against me. It would be terrible if you took all this as a lack of confidence in your competence and integrity. It was more a matter of…” He shook his head. “No, let me put it differently…” The waitress brought two pots of coffee, and he asked her to bring him some honey. He silently added cream and honey to the coffee, stirred it, and sipped it with delight.

“You see, I've known Leonore Salger for many, many years. I can't really say that we grew up together, because of the difference in our ages. It was a kind of big-brother and baby-sister thing, far apart in age but inwardly close-you know the connection I mean? A bitter father, a drunken mother,” he shook his head again. “That made Leo look for the kind of stability in an older brother that one would usually look for in one's parents. Do you know what I mean?”

I didn't say anything. I could take a look in Leo's album later on. If his story was true, I would find pictures of him.

“You could say that I didn't lie to you about my paternal concern for her. I felt, and still feel, the way you experienced me on the phone. Leo disappeared at the beginning of the year, and I'm worried that she has ended up in bad company and a bad situation. I think she needs help, even though she perhaps doesn't know it. I'm really, really worried that-”

“Is it your help she needs?”

Salger demonstrated a penchant for dramatic effect. He leaned back in his chair, slowly raised his right hand, took off his sunglasses, and looked at me calmly. Pain, irony, or heartburn? The look beneath his heavy eyelids didn't tell me more than the expression about his mouth.

“My help, Herr Self, my help. I know Leo, and I also know”-he hesitated-”the situation she might have gotten herself into.”

“What situation?”

“Some of it you know, some of it you might suspect-that is enough. I haven't come here to give information but to get information. Where is Leo?”

“I still don't understand what you want from her. You have also not clarified why you lied to me. You haven't even introduced yourself. Herr Salger? No, that you are not Herr Salger we already know. Herr Lehmann? The grandson who wants to open a gallery where his grandmother barely had enough space to lay out her buttons and threads? And what am I supposed to know or suspect about Leo's dangerous situation? I've had enough of your tactics and lies. I am not demanding when it comes to the extent of the trust between my clients and myself. I don't expect all-out openness. But you will either lay the facts on the table or we will go to the Badische Beamtenbank where you can take back your ten thousand marks and we can say good-bye.”

First he closed his eyes tightly. Then he raised his eyebrows, sighed, smiled, and said: “But Herr Self.” His hand slipped into the pocket of his jacket and reappeared with a business card that he placed before me on the table. Helmut Lehmann, investment consultant, Beethovenstrasse 42, 6000 Frankfurt am Main 1. “I want to speak to Leo. I want to ask her if I can help her, and how I can help her. Is that so difficult to understand? And why the high horse?” His eyes had narrowed again, and his voice was low and sharp. “You accepted my assignment and my money without too many questions. A lot of money. I'm willing to offer you a bonus for the successful completion of the assignment, let's say another five thousand. That's all I can offer. Where is Leo?”

I knew exactly how much fried eggs and two pots of coffee cost at Café Fieberg. I didn't wait for the waitress, laid the money on the table, got up, and left.

23 The boy who lops the thistle's heads

That evening I went to see Nägelsbach in his workshop, a converted shed in an old building in the Pfaffengrunder settlement from the 1920s. He had given me a call. “I've got some information on Wendt.”

It was still light outside, but a fluorescent fixture was already on over his workbench. “What you're doing isn't going to be the Pantheon, right?” I said. From what I could see, the gnarled structure on his workbench could evolve into a clenched fist, a tree stump, or a rock, but not a domed structure.

“You said it, Herr Self. I've been doing some thinking. I see now that I shouldn't have just launched into my models, but done some thinking first. Doing buildings was the wrong way to go: the Cologne Cathedral, the Empire State Building, Lomonosov University, all built to scale with matchsticks. That was just childish nonsense. I was like the boy in that Goethe poem 'who lops the thistle's heads.'“ He shook his head despondently. “What I worry about is that I'm all burned out.”

“What should you have done instead?”

He took off his glasses and put them back on again. “Do you remember my efforts with the praying hands and the golden helmet? In principle, that was the right path for me, but what I'd done wrong was that I'd taken the paintings as my models. A matchstick sculptor needs to find his models in sculptures of wood, stone, or bronze. Are you familiar with Rodin's Kiss?”

On the wall were some twenty photographs of two kissing figures taken from every perspective. They were seated next to each other, she with her arm around his neck, he with his hand on her hip. “I've also ordered a cast that has a patina of bronze, of course an altogether different model than these photos.” He looked at me as if waiting for approbation. I dodged into a question about his wife. Whenever I came to his workshop, she had always been sitting in a chair with a book. For years she had read to him as he worked. Instead of answering my question, he rang a bell. After a short, uncomfortable wait, Frau Nägelsbach appeared. She greeted me warmly, but self-consciously. It was evident that Nägelsbach's creative crisis had spilled over into a marriage crisis. Frau Nägelsbach's plumpness had lost its cheerful ruddiness.

“Why don't we all go outside?”

He picked up three folding chairs, and we sat down beneath a pear tree. I asked him about Wendt.

“What I know lies a long time back. Ages ago, Wendt had been a member of the leftist terrorist group SPK, the Socialist Patient Collective. We don't know whether he belonged to the small circle surrounding the notorious Dr. Huber or to those who were members more out of curiosity than anything else. He was driving a stolen vehicle without a driver's license and had an accident, and the woman who was in the car with him-she was also in the SPK-soon afterward went underground and joined the Red Army Faction. He was only seventeen. His parents and teachers stood behind him all the way, so his past didn't really cause him any trouble until two years ago, when he was hired by the State Psychiatric Hospital. Word got around that he'd been a terrorist, and the old story was dug up again.”

I remembered. In 1970 and 1971, the papers were full of reports on Dr. Huber, who had been fired from the Heidelberg University Neuropsychiatry Clinic and had then gone on to round up his patients and create the SPK. He had commandeered rooms at the university and prepared for revolution. Revolution as therapy. By 1971 all was over, Dr. Huber and his wife had been arrested, and the patients were scattered in all directions-except for a few who went over to the Red Army Faction. “Nothing has come up about Wendt since then?” I asked.

“Nothing. How come he interests you?”

I told him about my search for Leo in Heidelberg, in Mannheim, and finally at the State Psychiatric Hospital; of Wendt's foolish lies; and of my mysterious client.

“What is the young woman's last name?”

“Salger.”

“Leonore Salger from Bonn?”

I hadn't even mentioned Bonn. “How come-”

“And you know where Frau Salger is right now?” His tone became official and inquisitorial.

“What's going on? Why are you asking?”

“We're looking for Frau Salger. I cannot disclose the reason, but you can believe me, it's no trifle. Where is she?”

In the many years of our friendship we had always been aware that he was a policeman and I a private investigator. In a sense, our friendship lived off the fact that we were acting out different roles in the same play. He never treated me like a witness, and I never used the kind of tricks on him with which I find out from people things they don't want to disclose. Was that only because the cases had never been all that important, while this one was? There was a sharp retort on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed my words. “No, I don't know where Frau Salger is right now.”

He wasn't satisfied. He continued digging, and I continued dodging. The tone became increasingly tense, and Frau Nägelsbach looked at the two of us with mounting alarm. She repeatedly tried to pacify us. Then she got up, went into the house, and came back with a bottle of wine and some glasses. “I don't want to hear another word about this case or this woman,” she cut in. “Not another word. If you won't stop,” she turned to her husband, “then I'll tell Herr Self what's what. And if you won't stop”-now she turned to me-”I will tell my husband, perhaps not everything-because I don't have all the facts-but everything that you have said without intending to, and what my husband hasn't heard because he's become too furious to listen.”

We both fell silent. Then we slowly started chatting again, about Brigitte and Manu, vacations, old age, retirement. But our hearts were not in it any longer.

24 Marble breaks and iron bends

Driving back home, I brooded over why I'd been so intent on keeping Leo's whereabouts to myself. Was she worth it? Did it help her in any way? By all accounts she'd been unlucky in her father, and I doubted that the counterfeit Salger had brought her much luck either, though he often appeared in her photo album, with her as a little brat on his knee, him pushing her swing, or with his arm around the growing girl. How was I to reconcile Salger the paternal friend with Salger the wannabe father? I didn't know who she was, what she'd done, why she was hiding. It was high time I had a word with her.

It was only ten thirty when I arrived in Mannheim, and the mild night beckoned me out for a walk. I went to the Kleiner Rosengarten restaurant and had a bottle of Soave with my vermicelli alla puttanesca, a dish that is not on the menu but which the chef makes for me if I ask him nicely and he happens to be in the mood. After my meal I was slightly tipsy.

In the old days, when I climbed the stairs up to my attic apartment, I only needed to stop once for a breather. Then it became twice, and now, on a bad day, I have to stop on every landing. Today was a bad day. I stopped, steadied myself on the banister, and could hear my heart pounding and my breath whistling. I looked up and saw that the landing in front of my apartment was dark. Was the lightbulb out?

Then I attacked the last flight of stairs. We Prussians have fought the battles of Düppeler Schanzen, Gravelotte, and Langemarck and stormed greater heights. When I got to the last few stairs I took the key out of my pocket. There are three doors on my landing. One is to my apartment, the second to that of the Weilands, and the third up to the attic-I have my back to that one when I unlock my door.

He had been standing in the doorway to the attic waiting for me. When I unlocked my door he came up behind me, laid his left hand on my shoulder, and with his right poked a gun into my side. “Don't try anything foolish!”

I was too taken aback, and also too exhausted and drunk, to be able to dodge him or throw a punch. Maybe I'm also too old. I'd never been threatened with a weapon before. During the war I was in the tank division, but in a tank you're not threatened, you're simply hit. Our tank had been hit one beautiful day, the sky blue, the sun warm, little white clouds-bang.

He remained behind me as I reached for the light switch in my front hall. It was gloomy out on the landing, and my win-dowless hall would be completely dark if the door closed before I turned on the light. An opportunity? I hesitated and waited for the door to fall shut. But he kicked me in the hollow of the knees and as I went down he closed the door and turned on the light. I staggered back to my feet, and he shoved the gun into my side again. “Keep walking!” In the living room he not only kicked me, but I also banged my shin against the coffee table. That really hurt. I sat down on one of my two leather couches and massaged my leg. “Get up!” he shouted, but I refused. So he fired. The thick leather of my couch comes from the broad nape of Argentinean buffalo and has stood its ground against my shoes, the embers of my cigarettes, and Turbo's claws. Faced with the projectile, it surrendered. I didn't. I remained seated, continued to massage my leg, and looked at my guest.

The shot had only made a popping sound, but the gun with its silencer looked vicious. He was wearing his mirrored sunglasses again and had turned up the collar of his coat. He looked at the gun, then at me, and then at the gun again. Suddenly he burst out laughing and let himself fall on the couch opposite me.

“We had trouble communicating earlier today, Herr Self, so I brought along an assistant, a therapist, so to speak.” He looked at his gun again. Turbo came into the living room, jumped up on the couch next to me, arched his back, stretched his paws, and began grooming himself. “I've also brought a lot of time with me. Perhaps our morning conversation simply suffered from a lack of time. You were in such a terrible hurry. Did you have an important appointment, or are you just obstinate as a mule? Do we have a pleasant or a difficult evening ahead of us? Whatever is obstinate and will not bend, ultimately breaks. How does Drafi Deutscher's song go? 'Marble breaks and iron bends…' I can assure you that there is a general rule behind that.” He raised his gun. I couldn't see where he was aiming-at me, over me, next to me-I could only see myself in the reflection of his sunglasses. He fired. Behind me, on the old pharmacy shelf where I keep my books and records, a bust of Dante's Beatrice, the work of an early-twentieth-century Munich artist, shattered. “See? That's how it is with marble,” he said. “And it isn't any different with everything that lives and breathes. Only there are no shards.” He raised the gun again.

I didn't try to figure out if he was aiming at Turbo or if it only looked that way. I staggered to my feet and slapped his arm out of the way. He immediately struck me back, hit me across the face with the gun, and pushed me back onto the couch. Turbo caterwauled and ran off.

“Just try something like that again!” he hissed angrily. Then he laughed once more and shook his head. “What an old fool you are!”

I tasted blood on my lip.

“Well, let's have it! Where's Leo?”

“I don't know. I've got a couple of leads, but that's all, just a couple of leads. I don't know where Leo is.”

“It's been three days since we spoke on the phone. Have her whereabouts slipped your mind since then?” He sounded surprised and ironic.

“It was a fishing expedition. It's not that I've forgotten her whereabouts, I just never knew them. Just a fishing expedition, know what I mean? I didn't like it that I could never get to see you.”

“Do you think I'm stupid or something?” he shouted, his voice breaking. But he immediately calmed down again, smiled, and shook his head. He got up, stepped in front of me, and waited for me to look up at him. Then he hit me again with the butt of his gun, just like that. Pain tore across my cheek and chin.

He didn't lose control when he shouted. He shouted with a cool head. I was frightened. I had no idea what…

The doorbell rang. We both held our breath. The doorbell rang a second and then a third time. There was a knock. “Gerhard, open up! Open up! What's going on in there?” Brigitte could see a glimmer of light under the door.

My guest shrugged his shoulders. “I guess we'll catch up some other time.” He left the room. I heard him open the front door, say “Good evening,” and descend the stairs with quick steps.

“Gerhard!” Brigitte kneeled next to me on the couch and took me in her arms. When she let go of me her blouse was stained with blood. I tried to wipe the blood away, but couldn't. The more desperately I ran my hands over her blouse, the worse the bloody scrawl became. I gave up.

25 Don't forget the kitty litter!

After Brigitte washed my face and cleaned up the cuts, she put me to bed. My face was on fire, but otherwise I felt cold. My teeth kept chattering. Drinking was difficult: My swollen lip couldn't hold the liquid in. During the night I was feverish.

I dreamt of Leo and Dr. Eberlein. The two were going for a walk, and I handed them an official document forbidding them to go on walks together as father and daughter. Eberlein laughed his smug laugh and put his arm around Leo. She snuggled up to him and threw me a shameless, disdainful glance. I was about to specify that not only were they to refrain from acting as father and daughter, but also as…when Eberlein suddenly whistled, and Anatol or Ivan hurled himself at me. He had been cowering at Eberlein's feet, waiting for his whistle.

When I fell asleep again, Chief Inspector Nägelsbach was walking me through a town. The buildings were of wood, as were the streets and sidewalks. There wasn't a soul about, and whenever I managed to peek into a house it turned out to be an empty shell without rooms or stories. Nägelsbach was walking so fast that I couldn't keep up with him. He turned around, waved, and called to me, but I couldn't hear him anymore. Then he was gone, and it dawned on me that I would never be able to find my way out of this maze of empty streets and houses. I realized I was in a Nägelsbachian matchstick town. I was tiny, no bigger than a watch hand or a jelly bean. No wonder I feel so cold, I thought, tiny as I am.

Brigitte brought me a hot water bottle and heaped blankets on the bed. In the morning I was bathed in sweat, but the fever had gone down.

Shaving was out of the question. And yet the scabby welts on my cheeks, lips, and chin did not split open when I brushed my teeth. I looked quite rakish, and decided against wearing a tie. Out on the balcony the sun was shining, and I unfolded my lounger and lay down on it.

What was next? Salger was a clever man. He had a repertoire of faces, vocal registers, patterns of expression, and behavior. There was something playful about how he made use of them, and our encounters brought to mind face-offs on a chessboard. Not the kind of chess evenings I had with Eber-hard, whom I could never hope to beat or even think of beating, where I just enjoyed the beauty of his moves and our being together, but chess games of the kind I used to play in the past, determined to beat my opponent. Chess games that were like sword fights, where the aim was to destroy your opponent-that is, not him, but his self-confidence.

I remembered how I had once battled a whole evening with my future father-in-law, who initially had treated me dismis-sively. His son and I had been schoolmates and later fellow students. “Well, well, I see you're trying your hand at chess,” he said to me ironically when he found us over a chessboard. Klara was standing right there, and I could barely hide my shivering agitation. To be insulted like this in front of her. “Do you play, too?” I asked with as much coolness as I could muster. Old Herr Korten was assured by his son that I played a passable game, and challenged me to a round the following Saturday. He offered a bottle of champagne as a prize, and I had to promise that I would clean and oil his gun collection if I lost. All that week I lived and breathed chess, worked my way through openings, went over the moves of games, found out when and where Berlin chess clubs got together. In the first and second games old Herr Korten still had a chance. But he lost, even though I allowed him to retract the moves he called his “foolish little slipups.” By then I knew how he played, and I toyed with him. That was the last time he challenged me to a game. And the last time he treated me dismis-sively.

So Salger wanted to play with me? Let him try.

Turbo looked at me obliquely. He was sitting in the flower box, steadying himself with his front paws, his head tilted to the side.

“I know, I know, Turbo, no need to look at me like that. That was just hot air.” He listened attentively. When I didn't continue, he turned away and began grooming himself. I suddenly remembered how Turbo had sat on the couch next to me last night, while Salger was facing us with his gun. What if Salger were to take aim and fire faster the next time he showed up? I got up and walked over to the phone. Eberhard? No, he's allergic to cats. Brigitte? Nonni and Turbo fight like cats and dogs. Philipp? I didn't manage to reach him or Füruzan, and was told at the clinic that he was at a conference in Siena. Babs? She was home. She was having a late-afternoon cup of coffee with her two grown-up children, and invited me over right away. “You want to put Turbo up here? No problem, bring him along, and don't forget the kitty litter.”

Turbo always has a fit in the car. I've tried baskets, I've tried collars, I've tried nothing at all. The sound and vibration of the engine, the quickly changing images, and the speed are all too much for my cat. His world is the rooftops between the Richard-Wagner-Strasse, the Augusta-Anlage, the Moll-strasse, and the Werderstrasse, the few balconies and windows he can reach over the rooftops, the few neighbors and cats living behind those balconies and windows, the pigeons and the mice. Whenever I need to take him to the vet, I carry him under my coat, and he peeks out between the buttons the way I would out of a space shuttle. That was how we made the long trip to the Dürerstrasse.

Babs lives in a large apartment with Röschen and Georg, who, if you ask me, are old enough to stand on their own two feet. And yet they prefer to keep their feet firmly planted on mummy's hearth rug. Georg is studying law in Heidelberg, and Röschen can't ever decide whether she wants to study, get some kind of vocational training or a job, or which of her admirers to choose between. She had kept them dangling so long that they finally gave up, and now she was absolutely miserable.

“Were they so great?”

She had either been crying or had a cold. “No,” she sniffled, “but…”

“No buts. If they weren't that great, then you should be glad you got rid of them.”

She sniffled. “Do you know anyone I can date?”

“I'll get back to you on that one. Do you think you can look after Turbo in the meantime? Think of it as practice. Men and tomcats are one and the same thing.”

She smiled. She is a punk rocker with violet and yellow hair, alligator clips in her earlobes, and a computer chip in the side of her nose. But she smiled in a nice, old-fashioned way. “Jonas has-”

“Is that one of the two beaus?”

She nodded. “Jonas has a rat called Rudi. He never goes anywhere without him. I could invite him over for dinner- he did say we should remain friends-and while he eats his spaghetti, Turbo can eat Rudi.” Her eyes misted over. “What do you say to that, Uncle Gerhard?”

26 You're stubborn, just plain stubborn

Back home I lay down again. Brigitte came over, sat on the edge of my bed, and asked me what actually had happened yesterday. I told her.

“Why didn't you want to let Inspector Nägelsbach know where that girl is? And why not tell the man who hired you? You don't owe her anything.”

“I don't know why the police and Salger are looking for her. I need to know that first. She didn't do anything to me, and I don't want to hand her over just to get them off my back and pocket ten thousand marks.”

Brigitte got up and poured herself an amaretto and a sam-buca for me. She sat down again and said, “May I ask you something?”

“Sure.” I smiled encouragingly, though I knew it wasn't going to be a question but a reproach.

“I don't want to tell you how to do your job. When you didn't have a case over the past few months, I thought to myself: Fine, that's his business, not mine. Sometimes I would ask myself if it could work out, us getting married I mean, and having kids, if it would work out financially. But that's not the issue. It's the way you're handling this case. And not just this case. I get the feeling that you'll only be satisfied when you've quarreled with everyone and are at loggerheads with all the different parties. Not that it seems to be giving you any satisfaction. Does it have to be this way? Is it…”

“Old age? Are you asking if I'm becoming stubborn and bad tempered in my old age?”

“You're becoming more and more of an outsider. That's what I mean.”

She fixed me with her sad gaze, and I could not escape into anger. I tried to explain to her that the only way one can see clearly is from the outside. “So of course I'm an outsider; it's part of my job description. Maybe I stumble around a bit more as I get older, but do I have any choice? And you mustn't forget that it's natural for an outsider sometimes to be at loggerheads with the different parties. You wouldn't want to side with every party either, would you?”

Brigitte looked at me skeptically. “You're stubborn, just plain stubborn.”

27 My cards weren't all that bad

The men from the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency turned up the following morning just after eight. Bleckmeier, gaunt and sour in his gray suit and beige coat, and Rawitz in a suede jacket over a polo shirt and linen pants, playing the nice little fat guy. His affability was as put on as a clown's nose. “Dr. Self?”

This form of address was bad news. As a public prosecutor I had been proud of my title, but as a private investigator I found it absurd. There's no “Dr.” on the door to my office or my apartment, and no “Dr.” in the phone book or on my letterhead. Whoever approaches me with “Dr.” knows things about me that are none of his business. I showed the two men into my living room.

“What brings you here?” I asked.

Bleckmeier spoke up. “We hear that while working on a case you have, so to speak, stumbled over a certain Leonore Salger. We are looking for her. If you-”

“Why are you looking for Frau Salger?”

“That is, so to speak, a delicate matter. I would-”

“Why is it delicate?” Rawitz interrupted Bleckmeier, looking at him reprovingly and then at me apologetically. “The Federal Criminal Investigation Agency targets criminals who work internationally, or at least beyond a specific region. We are the coordinating body for all the regional agencies and for Interpol. We also take on police duties in matters of law enforcement, particularly in cases when the chief federal prosecutor issues an order. Needless to say, we then immediately inform the appropriate regional agency.”

“Needless to say,” I replied.

Bleckmeier took over again. “We're looking for Frau Sal-ger, so to speak, in an official capacity. We know that she was in the State Psychiatric Hospital, that she was in Dr. Rolf Wendt's care, and that she disappeared a few weeks ago. Do you know where she is?”

“Have you spoken to Dr. Wendt?”

“He invoked doctor-patient confidentiality and is refusing to cooperate in any way,” Bleckmeier said. “Not that we're surprised. Dr. Wendt is not entirely unknown to us, so to speak.”

“Did you inform him why you are investigating Frau Salger?”

“Dr. Self.” Rawitz again took over. “I am sure we all want to keep things nice and simple. As a former public prosecutor you're an old pro. You can't expect us to go around disclosing that kind of information. We can only tell you what we can tell you, and if you're prepared to tell us what you know, then things will stay nice and easy.” He was sitting across from me, and as he said “nice and easy” he actually leaned forward and patted me on the knee.

“Are we right in our surmise that you have been commissioned to locate Frau Salger by an individual who is, so to speak, passing himself off as her father? Are you still in contact with this individual?”

“You are confusing Dr. Self by asking him all those questions at once,” Rawitz said to Bleckmeier in a mildly admonishing tone. I didn't know if this was their own version of the good-cop-bad-cop act, or whether Rawitz was the one with the higher rank and say. Bleckmeier was clearly the older of the two, but in the world of government bureaucracies, politics sends the strangest characters floating to the top. “If you ask a question and then immediately go on to the next question without insisting on an answer to the first question,” Rawitz said to Bleckmeier, “then the person you are questioning gets the impression that you're not serious about the question you asked. Not serious, so to speak, as you yourself would put it. And yet we are quite serious about finding Frau Salger.” Bleckmeier, his face bright red, nodded quickly. Then both men looked at me expectantly.

I shook my head. “First I want to know what this is all about.”

“Dr. Self,” Rawitz said, enunciating my name with painstaking clarity, “whether we're dealing with narcotics, counterfeit money, terrorism, or an attempt on the life of the German president, you have no right to hamper our inquiries. You have no right, neither as a private investigator nor as a former public prosecutor, and if you, of all people, a former Nazi, are intent on supporting the work of terrorists, then you can hardly expect much sympathy from us.”

“I don't think your sympathy is particularly important to me. If we're talking terrorism, then why not go ahead and name names?”

“He doesn't think our sympathy is particularly important to him,” Rawitz said scornfully, and slapped his startled colleague on the thigh. “I've already told you more than I have to, Dr. Self. But if you don't want to listen”-he peered at me over the tip of his index finger-”you'll have to bear the consequences. You have no choice but to give us a statement.”

“You know as well as I do that I don't have to give you a statement.”

“I'll have you dragged before the public prosecutor. Then you'll have to talk.”

“But only if he tells me what it is he is investigating.”

“What?”

“If I do not know who or what he is investigating and the reason for this investigation, I cannot assess if I am incriminating myself through my statement.”

Rawitz turned to Bleckmeier. “Did you hear that? He doesn't want to incriminate himself. There are incriminating circumstances, but he doesn't want to incriminate himself. Is anything he's saying of interest to us? No. Incriminating things do not interest us in the least, do they? There's only one thing we want to know, and that is the current address of Frau Leonore Salger, which is exactly what the public prosecutor will tell you, too, Dr. Self. All I want to know, the public prosecutor will say, is the current address of Frau Salger. There can be no question of incrimination. 'Spit it out!' is what the public prosecutor will say.” Rawitz looked me in the eye and raised his voice. “Spit it out! Or are you in any way involved with Frau Salger? Is she your fiancée? Your cousin twice removed? Your mother-in-law's niece? What game are you playing here?”

I took a deep breath. “I'm not playing any game. You are right, my case did put me on the trail of Frau Salger. But you're going to have to leave to me what I feel I can disclose concerning an ongoing case of mine.”

“You're talking like you're her pastor or her doctor-or her lawyer. All you are is a nasty little private snoop with a shady scar on his face. Where'd you get that?”

I wanted to ask him where he had picked up his ridiculous interrogation techniques. The police academy? But Bleck-meier jumped in before I could open my mouth.

“All we have to do is snap our fingers, Dr. Self, and you'll be before the public prosecutor, even the judge. Your cards aren't all that good.”

But the way I saw it, my cards weren't all that bad either. Perhaps my claim that I had to know what they were investigating in order not to incriminate myself had hit the mark with them. If not, they could slap me with a fine or arrest me for contempt, but even if they wanted to, they couldn't be that fast on the trigger. I also got the impression that the Criminal Investigation Agency and the chief federal prosecutor were not that eager to create a ruckus, and where a trigger is pulled there's noise.

“We'll be seeing you again.” Rawitz stood up and Bleck-meier followed suit. I showed them out and wished them a nice day. So to speak.

28 A trick that psychotherapists use

I put in a call to the psychiatric hospital. I couldn't get Wendt on the phone, but I did find out that he was on duty. So I headed over. The April wind chased gray clouds across the blue sky. From time to time some gathered into sudden downpours. Then the wet asphalt shone in the sun again.

Wendt was in a hurry. “Oh, you again? I've got to go over to the other unit.”

“Have they been here?”

“Who?” He found my presence irritating, but at the same time he was curious. He stood strangely twisted, his legs ready to walk away, his head turned toward me, his hand on the doorknob.

“The men from the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency and Leo's big brother.”

“Leo's father, Leo's big brother? What other relatives are you going to pull out of the hat?” His tone was superior, but did not sound convincing.

“He isn't Leo's big brother. He just feels he is. He's looking for her.”

He opened the door. “I really have to head over to the other unit.”

“The guys from the Agency have bad manners. But Leo's brotherly friend has a gun with a silencer. And a strong fist. If he'd had more time with me, he would perhaps have beaten Leo's whereabouts out of me.”

Wendt let go of the doorknob and turned to me. His eyes studied my face, as if they could read what he wanted to know from my forehead, nose, or chin. He seemed at a loss. “Have you…Do you know…”

“No, I didn't tell him Leo's whereabouts. And I didn't tell the guys from the Agency either. But you and I have to talk. What has Leo done? Why are they looking for her?”

He cleared his throat a few times, opening his mouth then closing it again. Then he got a grip on himself. “I'm on duty till noon. Let's meet at one o'clock at the restaurant on the main street.” He walked off down the corridor with quick steps.

Shortly before one I was sitting at a table with an oilcloth cover in the restaurant garden. I kept my eye on the door that led into the restaurant and the door that led out into the street, but the waiter didn't come out of the former door, nor Wendt out of the latter. I was the only customer. I studied the oilcloth, counting the squares and watching the drops from the last downpour drying.

At one thirty a dozen or so young women appeared. They parked their bicycles, sat down at the long table next to mine, and boisterously placed their order with the shuffling waiter, who also sullenly took my order. They grew even more lively once their beers and sodas arrived. “Are we going bowling today?” “Sure, but without the guys.” Of course they all were different, but they all looked the same. A little fashionable, a little athletic, a little professional, a little bit of hausfrau, a little bit of mother. I imagined them in their marriages. They stay faithful to their husbands the way one stays faithful to one's car. They're resourceful and cheerful with their children. Occasionally there's a touch of alarm in their shrill laughter. The way we Germans conduct our marriages, it's no wonder we've never had a revolution.

By two I had finished the cold cuts and drunk my apple spritzer. There was no sign of Wendt. I drove back to the hospital and was told he had left around one. I knocked on Eber-lein's door.

“Come in!” He was standing by the window in his white gown. He had been looking out into the park and turned to me.

“First your patients disappear, then your doctors,” I said, and told him about the appointment Wendt had missed. “Did two men from the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency visit you recently? And did someone else come, too: Tall, broad, midforties, could be anything from a banker to a pastor, perhaps wearing mirrored sunglasses? Asking about your former patient Leonore Salger, about Dr. Wendt, or about both?”

Again Eberlein took his time. I believe this is a trick that psychotherapists use, which is designed to make one nervous. But this time there was something else, too. He seemed worried. There was a sharp crease between his eyebrows that I hadn't seen before, and he kept tapping the floor impatiently and indignantly with his cane. “Who are you working for, Herr Self? Still for Leonore Salger's father?”

“She doesn't have a father. I imagine that's why Dr. Wendt told me that cock-and-bull story about her falling out a window. I guess he was sure that the man posing as her father wouldn't dare step forward and would have to accept that story. But the story was too flimsy, and as it turns out the fake father has no qualms about coming out of hiding, with or without his mirrored sunglasses. Who am I working for? I'm no longer working for him, and not for anyone else either. I don't have a client, just a problem child.”

“Is that usual for a private investigator?”

“No. It's always best if the problem child is also a client. Just like in your world, Dr. Eberlein. Private investigators and psychotherapists should not work without remuneration. In my field, too, if the clients don't feel their pain, there's no hope for a cure.”

He laughed. “I didn't know detectives were healers-I thought their job is to investigate.”

“It's just like in your field. If we don't find out what really happened, people can't rid themselves of old issues.”

“I see.”

That sounded so reflective that I wondered if the stuff I was rattling on about was worth taking seriously. But Eberlein's thoughts were elsewhere. “I wonder what's going on with Wendt?” he said. “Yesterday the two men from the Agency were here, and today I told him to come see me. But he didn't show up. He can't think he…” Eberlein didn't finish what Wendt couldn't think. “The man you described to me was also here. Lehmann from Frankfurt. He wanted to see Wendt, but Wendt wasn't here, so he came to see me. He introduced himself as an old friend of the Salgers, particularly of their daughter Leonore. He spoke of his paternal interest in her and his feelings of responsibility, and of the difficulties she's in. He wanted to know her current whereabouts. Not that I have any idea. Nor would I have told him if I knew. I just hope he won't find her.”

“So do I. But why would you hope such a thing?”

He opened the window and let some cool, damp air into the room. The rain was falling in vertical streams. “Perhaps you were wondering the other day why I have a yacht. Well, the fact is, I am interested in fish. There's a shark in the Indian Ocean that bears some resemblance to a dolphin. Sharks are loners, while dolphins are herd animals. But this particular shark can also display quite a bit of similarity to dolphins. He joins a herd of dolphins, swims with them, plays and hunts with them. That works well for a while. But then suddenly, we don't know why, he goes crazy and rips one of the dolphins to pieces. Sometimes the whole herd of dolphins will hurl itself at him, but usually they flee. Then he remains alone for weeks or months, until he goes and seeks out another herd.”

“Lehmann reminds you of this shark?” I had no reason to prize Lehmann particularly, but the parallel Eberlein was drawing seemed a bit strong.

He raised his hand appeasingly. “What is fascinating about this shark is that it seems to be playing a part among the dolphins. But animals don't play parts. They don't have the necessary self-awareness. So there have to be two programs in our shark's brain: a shark program and a dolphin program. At times the animal is entirely a dolphin, and at other times entirely a shark. That is why Lehmann reminded me of this shark. I was certain he was serving me a pack of lies, but I was just as certain that he felt that what he was saying was utterly true. Do you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Then you also know why I find the man dangerous. Perhaps he has never harmed a hair on anyone's head and never will. But if he feels he needs to, he will do it without hesitation and with the clearest conscience.”

29 In this weather?

I drove over to Wieblingen, to the Schusterstrasse. I rang Wendt's bell and knocked on his door in vain. As I returned to my car I saw Frau Kleinschmidt standing at her front door. She must have been watching me from behind her curtains.

“Herr Wendt!” she called over to me.

I hopped over two puddles, got drenched by a gush of water from the porch gutter, and joined Frau Kleinschmidt in her front hall. I wiped my glasses dry.

“Are you looking for your son again? He was here-see, there's his car-but a man drove up and then the two of them went for a walk.”

“In this weather?”

“Strange, isn't it? I think it's strange. And three-quarters of an hour later the other man came back alone, got in his car, and drove off. That's strange, too, isn't it?”

“You have sharp eyes. What did the man look like?”

“My husband's always saying that, too. 'Renate,' he tells me, 'Renate, you've got a good pair of eyes in that head of yours.' But I didn't get a good look at the other man. He'd parked back over there. See? There, where the Ford is standing. It was hard to get a good look at him in the rain. In the rain, all cats are wet. But I did see that he was driving a VW Golf,” she said brightly, like a child eager for praise.

“Which way did the two of them walk?”

“Down the street. It's the way to the river, you know, but you can't see that far from here, no matter how good your eyes are.”

I refused a cup of freshly brewed coffee and got back in my car. I slowly drove down the street that ran along the Neckar River. Houses, trees, and cars were shrouded in a veil of rain. It was just after four, but it looked like early twilight.

After a while the rain grew lighter, and finally my wiper blades scratched over the dry windshield. I got out. I followed the path that crosses the Neckar Meadows from Wieblingen to Edingen and then goes past the sewage plant and the composting plant and under the autobahn bridge. At one point I thought I saw a piece of clothing that might belong to Wendt, trudged through the wet grass to take a look, and came back with wet feet. I generally like being outside when the earth is aromatic after a rain and the air tingles on my face. But this time I only felt clammy.

I found him, his arms outstretched and his eyes fixed. Above us the traffic rumbled. The way he was lying there, he could have fallen from the autobahn bridge onto the slabs that had been put down when the bridge was built. But there was a small hole in his light raincoat where the bullet had pierced his chest. It was dark red, almost black. On his raincoat, around the hole, the red gleamed brightly. There wasn't much blood.

Next to him lay his briefcase, as if it had slipped out of his hand. I took some tissues out of my pocket and used them to pick up the briefcase and take it under the bridge, where it was dry. With the tissues wrapped around my fingers, I pulled out a newspaper, a large notebook, and a copy of a map. The notebook was Wendt's hospital appointment calendar, and had no entry for this afternoon. The map had no place names on it, and I didn't recognize the terrain it showed. There was no town, river, or colors that might indicate a forest or houses. Most of it was divided into small numbered squares. A double line vertically cut the map in half, and several double lines veered from it to the left and extended into another double line that led straight to the edge of the map. I committed a few of the numbers to memory. At the bottom there was 203. At the top, 537, 538, and 539. On the left side, 425, and on the right side, 113. Then I put the briefcase back exactly as I had found it.

Wendt's head was slightly raised, propped up by a stone jutting out from a slab, and it was as if his fractured gaze was reaching longingly into the distance. I would have liked to close his eyes. It would've been the proper thing to do. But the police would not like it. In Wieblingen I called from the nearest phone booth and asked to be put through to Chief Inspector Nägelsbach's office.

“I can't believe you sent me your colleagues from the Agency.” I had to get that off my chest first.

“I sent you who?” Nägelsbach asked.

“This morning I had a visit from Bleckmeier and Rawitz, from the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency. They wanted to know the whereabouts of Leonore Salger.”

“I had nothing to do with that. What you and I spoke about that evening…How can you think I would abuse your trust like that?” Nägelsbach's voice was shaking with indignation. I believed him. Should I be ashamed? Had he been more straightforward with me than I had been with him? “I apologize. I simply couldn't imagine that the Agency would otherwise think of questioning me.”

“Hmm.”

I told him I had found Wendt. Nägelsbach asked me to wait for him by the phone booth. Exactly five minutes later a patrol car and an ambulance appeared, along with Tietzke from the local paper, and three minutes after that Nägelsbach himself pulled up with a colleague. I got into their car and showed them the way to Wendt's corpse, and they set to work. I was free to go. “Let's talk tomorrow,” Nägelsbach said. “Can you come by my office in the morning?”

30 Spaghetti al pesto

The lightbulb on my landing was still out. I saw it as I stopped to catch my breath on the floor below and went back down again.

Brigitte wasn't home yet. Young Manu and I made my spaghetti carbonara-it's never too early for a child to be taught that cream is the body of a light pasta sauce, and vermouth the soul.

When Brigitte and I took the dog out for a walk late that evening, she wanted to know what was going on. “It's so great you're here and that the two of you cooked supper- and you even washed up-but I know you didn't come over just to please me.”

“How about to please me-wouldn't that be enough?”

She sensed that I wasn't telling her the whole truth, but she didn't want to push the matter. Back at her place we watched a movie and the late news. Before the weather report there was a bulletin in which the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency made a special public appeal for information. There hadn't been a bulletin earlier that evening when I'd watched the news with Manu. I didn't recognize the pictures they showed of the two nameless men. But the woman they showed was Leo, and they gave her name. The bulletin disclosed that there had been a terrorist attack on an American military installation and that there had been two casualties. Then a press officer from the Criminal Investigation Agency appeared on the screen and spoke of a new generation of part-time terrorists who lead normal lives during the day, and at night launch attacks with murder and fire. He asked the public to cooperate and to expect roadblocks and checkpoints over the next few days. He promised that any information that was provided would be handled in the strictest confidence and mentioned a substantial reward.

“Isn't that the girl whose picture is leaning on the small stone lion in your office?”

I nodded.

“I hope you don't think I'm thinking of the reward. What I'm thinking of is how I found you the other day. You told me you'd tell the police where she is when you know why they're looking for her. Now you know.”

“Do I really? There was a terrorist attack on an American base and there were two casualties; that's all I know. But how come I don't know when and where the attack took place? Leo went into hiding in January, now it's May. The way they're talking, you'd think the attack took place yesterday, and that she'd gone into hiding yesterday. No, Brigitte, I know next to nothing.”

As we lay in bed I made up my mind and set the alarm. I hoped that the people of Amorbach, and the Hopfen family in particular, hadn't seen the late-night news.

The following morning at six I was in my car, heading to Amorbach.

31 Like in the days of Baader and Meinhof

The streets were empty, and I was able to pick up speed. The sun rose as a pale red disk, but had soon steamed away the haze, blinding me in the many sharp curves between Eber-bach and Amorbach. The rainy days were over.

The Badischer Hof Restaurant had opened already, and the breakfast buffet was laid out. At the table next to mine sat a married couple who were outfitted in knickerbockers and red socks. They looked out of place, almost like aliens, but they were ready for their hike through the Odenwald, and were reading the local Bote vom Untermain paper over coffee and rolls. I was itching to tell them how important it was in a marriage to talk to each other and to ask them to give me their paper. But I couldn't work up the courage. All the same, I could see that Leo's picture wasn't on the front page.

It was on page four. By the time I rang the doorbell in Som-merberg at a quarter to nine, I had bought the newspaper and was holding it under my arm. The children were making a great racket inside. Leo opened the door.

I had recently caught only a glimpse of her, and even then she had remained for me the girl in the first photograph, the girl with the mouth that liked to laugh, with the question and the reproach in her eyes, the girl who was leaning on the little stone lion on my desk. I had not really come to terms with the young woman whose picture I had been given at the Klausenpfad residence hall. Now she was standing in front of me, another year or two older. Her chin and cheekbones showed determination. I read in her eyes: “What does this old man want? Is he selling something? Some kind of door-to-door salesman? Or has he come to read the electric and gas meters?” She was again wearing jeans and a man's checked shirt.

“What can I do for you?” Her accent was as thick as the peanut butter on the sandwiches Manu makes for himself.

“Good morning, Frau Salger.”

She took a step back. I was almost happy about the distrust in her eyes. Better a dangerous old man than a tiresome one.

“Excuse me?”

I handed her the newspaper, opened to page four. “I'd like to have a word with you.”

She looked at her picture with a mixture of curiosity and resignation: That's supposed to be me? Who cares, it's all over anyway.

I imagined that the picture was from the police files, when she had been taken in for fingerprinting during the student protests. Sometimes there is talk about criminalization by the police, meaning that law enforcement creates breaches of law as much as it fights them. These are unacceptable generalizations. It is only police photographers who are capable of “criminalizing” a person. And they are masters of their trade. Send them the most innocent and law-abiding individual you can find, and before you know it they will give him the mug of a criminal. Leo shrugged her shoulders and handed me back the newspaper. “Could you please wait a moment?” Her accent was gone.

I stood outside the door and heard snippets of Leo telling the children to put on their shoes, take along their jackets, and put their sandwiches in their schoolbags. Then she ran down the stairs and I heard her opening and shutting room and closet doors. When she came out of the house with the children, she was carrying a coat over her arm and a packed bag over her shoulder.

“Do you mind if I drive on ahead with the kids? I want to drop them off at the kindergarten and at the school and then leave the car outside Dr. Hopfen's office.” She unlocked the Land Rover and helped the children get in.

I followed in my car, and saw the little girl go into the kindergarten and the boys into the school. Then Leo parked the Rover, dropped the keys into Dr. Hopfen's mailbox, and came over to my car with her bag and coat. “Let's go.”

Did she think I was a policeman? Well, that could be cleared up later. When I turned into the road leading to Eber-bach she looked at me with surprise but didn't say anything. We were silent all the way to Ernsttal. I parked the car under some trees. “Come along, let's have a cup of coffee.”

She got out of the car. “And where are we going after that?”

“I don't know. Bonn? Heidelberg? Where would you like to go?”

We sat on the terrace and ordered coffee. “You're not a policeman-so who are you and what do you want?” She took tobacco and cigarette papers out of her bag, nimbly rolled herself a cigarette, and asked me for a light. She smoked and waited for my answer, looking at me not distrustfully but carefully.

“Wendt is dead, and everything points to this man being the murderer.” I showed her one of the pictures from her album, in which the fake Herr Salger stood next to her with his arm around her shoulder. “You know him.”

“What of it?” The caution in her eyes turned to defense. She had been sitting with her elbows propped on the table. Now she leaned back.

“What of it? Wendt helped you. First he hid you in the psychiatric hospital, then he got you the job as an au pair in Amorbach. I didn't know him well, but I admit that it troubles me that he might still be alive if I had told the police what they wanted to know, about you, about this guy”- I pointed at the picture-”and about Wendt. I am quite sure that he would still be alive if you had done one or two things differently.”

The café owner brought us our coffees. Leo got up. “I'll be right back.” Did she want to squeeze her way out the restroom window and head through the woods for Bavaria? I took the risk. The café owner began telling me that our forests have been dying since German boilers have been burning Russian natural gas. “They put something in it,” he whispered. “Those Russians don't need war and weapons anymore.”

Leo returned. Her eyes were swollen with tears. “Can you please tell me what you want from me?” She spoke in a natural voice, but not without effort.

I gave her a condensed version of the last couple of weeks.

“Who are you working for now?”

“For myself. I can do that from time to time, if it's not for too long.”

“And you want to know what I know just out of interest and curiosity?”

“Not only. I also want to know what I might have to expect from him.” I pointed again at the picture. “Incidentally, what's his name?”

“And when I've told you everything, what then?”

“You're asking me if I'll hand you over to the police?”

“That would be an option, wouldn't it? By the way, did you have a hard time recognizing me?”

“Not really. But recognizing people who don't want to be recognized is part of my job.”

“Will you take me away from here?”

I didn't understand what she was getting at.

“I mean, can you take me somewhere where these pictures won't… They'll be up in every post office and police station, like in the days of Baader and Meinhof, won't they? And on TV-do you think they'll show them on TV, too?”

“They already have, yesterday.”

“Do you have any ideas? If you do, I'll tell you what you want to know.”

I needed some time to think. Supporting a terrorist organization, facilitation, obstruction of justice-all the things that could happen to me went through my head. Could I claim at my age a diminished capacity, or was that only permissible in Nazi trials? Would they impound my old Opel as an instrument of crime? I postponed the moral question of whether I would keep my promise to Leo if she had committed the most dreadful atrocities.

I got up. “Fine. I'll take you to France, and on the way to the border you can tell me what you know.”

She remained seated. “And the official at the border will just wave us through with a smile?”

She was right. Even in a Europe of open borders, the police at border crossings take particular care during a hunt for terrorists. “I'll take you over a back road.”

32 Bananas in exhaust pipes

The TV bulletin had warned the public to expect roadblocks and checkpoints. So I took country roads with their tractors, agricultural machinery, and hay carts, which the police avoid as much as everyone else does. We drove through Kleiner Odenwald and Kraichgau, crossed the Rhine at Leopolds-haven, and entered the Palatinate Forest at Klingenmünster. By two o'clock we were in Nothweiler.

“There's not all that much to tell,” Leo had begun after Ernsttal, but then fell silent again. She sat brooding all the way to Neckarbischofsheim, rolling one cigarette after another and smoking it. “I don't get it. Rolf Wendt wasn't part of it at all. He didn't really participate. No one had any reason to kill him, no one. How was he murdered?”

“Why don't you tell me everything from the beginning?” “OK, I'll start with Helmut Lemke. That's not what he calls himself anymore, but whatever. As it is, with that photograph you have of him, you would've had no trouble finding out his real name. You could say he was something like an older brother to me. I wasn't even at school yet when Dad brought him home the first time. Helmut was already a young man, but was happy enough to play tag or hide-and-seek with me in the garden, and when I was older he taught me tennis. I guess he wanted a baby sister as much as I wanted a big brother.”

“Where did your father know him from?”

“Helmut was a student, and during summer recess he worked as an intern at the ministry. Somehow he caught my father's eye. In 1967, Helmut moved from Bonn to Heidelberg, which kind of loosened the bond a little bit. But he always came back to Bonn and visited us, and he and I always had lots of fun. When my father ended up in prison and nobody wanted anything to do with us, Helmut still kept coming to see us like nothing had happened. But then, about six years ago, he disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him up.”

“When did you see him again?”

“Last summer. Comme ça.” Leo snapped her fingers. He had appeared at her door one day and said “Hi,” just as if they had been together the day before. In the next few weeks they met almost every day. “For us it was…Well, we'd known each other forever, and yet we were now experiencing each other in a completely new way.” Did that mean that they had a relationship? At any rate, they did a lot together: tennis, hiking, theater, cooking. One day he told her of the six years he'd spent in prison. He had been sentenced for an attack on the army recruiting office in Heidelberg.

“He was sentenced to six years?” I asked. I didn't remember such an attack-and spectacular explosions in the Mannheim-Heidelberg area tend to stick in my mind.

“A night guard got the brunt of it. He was badly hurt. But Helmut had nothing to do with this attack. He was politically engaged and was involved with the Communist League of West Germany, and he kept provoking the police and the courts, so they finally framed him and put him away. That's how it was. He told me that a policeman actually said to him that he'd had his fun with the police long enough, now the police would have their fun with him.”

“And all of that sounded plausible to you?” “Sure, and I could see why Helmut wanted to pay them back. In the beginning he'd only considered blowing up the German army recruiting office, but now he was going to do something really big. He realized that what he had to do was target the people who were really behind everything: the Americans. Sometimes we walked down the Bunsenstrasse, and right around the corner from my apartment there's an old villa on the Häuserstrasse where the army recruiting office used to be and where the Americans now have some kind of office. 'You see,' he told me, 'the attack on the army recruiting office wasn't just a waste of time, because a recruiting office isn't just a recruiting office: The fact that the Americans came in and took it over shows more clearly than any bomb can that American imperialism is behind German militarism. It's an insult to my intelligence that they thought me capable of such an idiotic attack in the fight against capitalism and imperialism!'“

Even back in the sixties and seventies I'd had a hard time taking all this political jargon seriously. And the zeitgeist of the nineties doesn't make taking it seriously any easier. In spite of her self-rolled cigarettes I couldn't imagine Leo reading Marx and Engels. I carefully asked her about her own involvement in the fight against capitalism and imperialism.

“That was Helmut's soapbox. When someone has lived with it for such a long time and paid such a price for it, I guess he can't climb off it anymore. We sometimes made fun of him. He just couldn't see that good politics needs to be concrete, to hit the mark, to be fun. But I must say, he did teach us a lot.”

“Us? You mean you and the other two in the police photos?”

“I mean just me. I don't want to drag anyone else into this. I don't even know the people in the newspaper shots.”

I didn't push her any further. She continued talking, and I concluded from what she said that there were two others, a certain Giselher and a certain Bertram, that they had met at a demonstration, got together from time to time, and at first had only ranted and railed against the establishment.

“But there came a point when we had had it up to here! You talk and talk and don't change anything. All the mess goes on: forests dying, chemicals in the air and in the water, nuclear power plants, rockets, and the way they destroy the cities and arm the police. All you accomplish is that the papers and the media sometimes give these things a bit more coverage, but then the stories dry up, there's no more coverage on the forest, and people think that everything's A-OK, while things only keep getting worse.”

So they decided to act instead of talk. They aimed fireworks at the nuclear plant in Biblis, set off stink bombs in Heidelberg and Mannheim sex shops, stuffed bananas in the exhaust pipes of police cars, tried but failed to stop a car race on the Hockenheim Circuit one night by blasting potholes in the track, and brought down a power pylon between Kirch-heim and Sandhausen. Then Helmut Lemke joined them and convinced them that their tactics were just childish pranks.

“What role did Rolf Wendt play in all this? I know you don't want to drag anyone else into it, but after all…”

“I know, he's dead. As I've told you already, he wasn't part of any of this. We were just friends. He and Helmut somehow knew each other from before. We ran into Rolf at the Wein-loch Bar, and Helmut introduced him to me. That's how I met him.”

“The papers mentioned an attack on an American military installation.”

“That was the result of our new tactics.” Lemke had put them up to it. Their operations should not try to prevent the unpreventable, but simply expose all the terrible things that were going on. This made sense to Leo and her friends, so they planned to break into the Rhineland Chemical Works at Ludwigshafen and tamper with the plant's emissions so that the air and the water, which were already poisoned, would end up brightly colored, too. The poison would reveal itself in violet clouds and a yellow Rhine. They also planned an attack on the traffic network at Römerkreis, Bismarckplatz, and Adenauerplatz. They would disable the traffic lights during rush hour, bringing Heidelberg to a standstill that would underline the traffic overload. None of their plans panned out, so Helmut Lemke came up with Operation Bonfire.

“Why bonfire?”

“We wanted to set fire to an American installation so that the public would finally realize what it was the Americans were storing there. Normally they don't let anyone into such installations, but when there's a fire, all hell breaks loose and Germans appear on the scene: police, firemen, reporters. Of course it would have to be a big fire. But when a munitions depot goes up in flames…”

I was dumbfounded and looked at her dumbfounded. She defended herself against my accusations faster than I could come up with them. I realized that for weeks she had been her own prosecution, defense, and judge.

“Of course nobody was supposed to get hurt. We were unanimous about that and kept saying so to Helmut, who swore on a stack of Bibles that he agreed with us wholeheartedly. But even if people did get hurt-you mustn't get me wrong, we didn't take that into account-I just mean, even if people…” Her words trailed off.

I looked over at her.

She bit her lip defiantly, and one hand gripped the other so firmly in her lap that the skin beneath her nails gleamed white. “How can you expose something terrible without creating a terrible mess? If something happened, I mean if something had happened, then that would have still been better than if…”

I waited, but she didn't continue. “What did happen, Frau Salger?”

She turned and looked at me intently, as if it were I who was supposed to be offering her the key to a secret. “I'm not sure,” she said. “I hadn't really been that involved in the preparations. The others did all of that, Helmut and Giselher. Bertram only came back from Tuscany the evening before. I knew I was going to be part of things, that I was going to participate. We always carried everything out together. Helmut was utterly opposed to me participating, but he didn't get his way. As it was, even with me there we were still missing one person. Helmut had initially tried to plan the operation with four people instead of five, but then he looked for a new, fifth person and found him. For his safety and for ours, Helmut didn't actually bring him into the group. We met only once the operation was under way. He was with Helmut in one car, while Giselher, Bertram, and I were in the other.”

“And that was at the beginning of January?”

“Yes, January sixth. I don't even know where the meeting place was. I think somewhere outside Frankfurt. We headed up the autobahn for quite a while, north from the Heidelberg or Mannheim junction, and then drove onto the shoulder and down an embankment and onto a back road. We followed it till we came to the edge of some woods. There we met Helmut and the fifth man. Then we headed off.”

“Did you know the fifth man?”

“We had all blackened our faces. I barely recognized Helmut. After a while we came to a fence, cut a hole in it, and climbed through. My job was to secure the way back. At midpoint I was supposed to keep an eye out in both directions in case a patrol turned up and either warn them or divert the patrol. But I guess you don't want to know all those details. It was quite foggy. I was supposed to wait for twenty minutes and then head back on my own.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I waited twenty-five minutes. Then I heard shots. I ran back to the fence and got out of the compound. When I reached our cars, there was an explosion, followed immediately by another. So I went running to the road. At first nobody stopped. They must have thought I was some dangerous nut, my face all black the way it was. But then I realized that and quickly cleaned up. The third car stopped. The driver was a pharmacist from Schwetzingen who'd had a couple of drinks and hit on me. When I reacted hysterically and told him I wanted to go to the psychiatric hospital, he must have thought that that was where I belonged. He took me straight there and thanked his lucky stars that he wasn't arrested or questioned.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head on the headrest. “Rolf was working the evening shift. He gave me a room and an injection, and I slept all the way through to the following evening.”

33 The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein

As we drove through the bright, sunny countryside, Leo's account about dark and gloomy nights, blackened faces, holes cut into fences, bombs, and gunfire struck me as strangely unreal. In Nothweiler I parked the car in front of the church and we climbed up to the ruins of Castle Wegelnburg. The woods sparkled in fresh green, the birds were singing, and an aromatic tang hung in the air after the last few days' rain. Explosions at American installations? What Americans? What explosions? But Leo's thoughts did not leave that night so quickly.

“I felt that that fifth man was somehow fishy. He seemed jittery and all over the place: He'd be walking ahead, then he'd fall back, then he'd suddenly turn up on the side. He had all kinds of equipment with him. I don't know why, or what it was for. After all, we had brought along the explosives.”

The path leading up to Castle Wegelnburg is steep. Leo hadn't let me carry her bag and coat, and I was glad. She was always a good bit ahead of me and would stop and wait. At first she walked as if she'd been wound up with a key. But gradually her steps grew lighter and freer. She took her bag off her shoulder and held it in her hand, swung her arms, threw her head back so that her hair flew, and when she waited for me she pranced backward in front of me. She returned to the subject of Operation Bonfire. An overgrown pile of rotting logs reminded her of the structures the Americans had put up at their installation. “Like garages, but a lot bigger, with slanted sides and covered with earth and grass. Then there were these really long objects, not quite as tall and wide as the garages, but also covered in grass. Who knows what they were.” But the question did not really seem to preoccupy her. When I caught up with her and wanted to discuss the grass-covered garages, she laid her hand on my arm. “Shh.” A rabbit was sitting on the path, watching us.

We stopped for a rest on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein. At the gas station I had bought a kilo of Granny Smith apples and some chocolate with whole nuts. “What are you going to do on the other side?” I asked her. Just beyond the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein lies France.

“I'll take a vacation. As long as my money lasts. These past few weeks with the children were really exhausting. I think after that I'll find myself another au-pair job.” She was sitting on the ground with her back to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein. She bit loudly into her apple, her eyes blinking in the sun. The question of what would come after her au-pair job was on the tip of my tongue, of how she expected to live a normal life again. But why ask someone the kind of worrying questions they could easily ask themselves, but don't?

Then I had an idea. “We could make our way to the Tessin. I have friends there I've been wanting to visit for a long time. If you can see yourself working as an au pair in the Tessin, my friend Tyberg has all kinds of connections.”

She nibbled at the core of her apple and threw it away. She looked up at the sky and then at the trees, and wrinkled her nose. “Comme ça?” She snapped her fingers again.

“ Comme ça.”

The path that went by the ruins of the Hohenburg and Löwenburg castles to Château Fleckenstein in France was relatively short, and Leo could take her time. I hurried back to Nothweiler and drove across the border by Wissembourg. A young border guard asked me where I was coming from and where I was heading, and an hour later I was at Château Fleckenstein. Leo was talking and laughing with a young Frenchman. She was engrossed in the conversation and didn't see or hear me approach. I was worried that she would give me the kind of look Manu gives Brigitte when he is playing with one of his friends and is ashamed that his mother is keeping an eye on him. But Leo greeted me quite unself-consciously.

That evening we didn't drive very far. At the Cheval Blanc restaurant in Niedersteinbach she ate oysters for the first time in her life and didn't like them. But she did like the champagne, and after the second bottle we felt like Bonnie and Clyde. If the pharmacy had still been open we'd have pulled up in front, wielded a gun, and gotten me a toothbrush and some razor blades. At ten I called Brigitte. She could hear I was tipsy and telling her only half the truth, and she was hurt. I didn't care, though I was still sober enough to register how unfair my indifference was. With Brigitte, who was generous, I was belatedly fighting for my independence-a fight I hadn't even started with my grouchy and whining wife, Klara, in all the years of our marriage. When I said good night to Leo at the door to her room, she gave me a kiss.

It took us two days to get to Locarno. We meandered through the Vosges and the Jura mountains, crossed from the French side to the Swiss, spent the night in Murten, and drove through passes the names of which I had never heard: Glaubenbüelenpass, Brünigpass, Nufenenpass. Even up in the mountains it was warm enough for us to spread out a blanket at noon and have a picnic.

As we drove, Leo talked about a thousand things: studying and interpreting, politics, even about the children she had looked after in Amorbach. She liked sitting with her legs on the dashboard or sticking her right foot out the window. She chose programs on the radio ranging from classical music to American pop, and in Switzerland included the farming broadcasts. From nine till ten, Jeremias Gotthelf's Uli, the Farmhand was broadcast in Swiss dialect. In Uli, the Farmhand all was still well with the world, while in the American pop songs the world was on its head: Men crooned and women had metal in their voices. Leo whistled along. She studied the countryside and the cities we drove through. On both days, after lunch she fell asleep in the car. Occasional periods of silence between the two of us made neither of us uncomfortable. I let my thoughts roam. Sometimes I would ask Leo a question.

“When you got to the psychiatric hospital, did you manage to find out what had gone wrong that night, and what happened to the others?” In our shared early-morning hangover we had began talking informally.

“I kept trying to find out. You can't imagine how happy I'd have been to hear that it was just a false alarm. But I could never reach Giselher or Bertram whenever I called, and it would have been too dangerous to try to get in touch with their friends.”

I reminded her that two casualties had been announced. “And they're only searching for the three of you, even though five took part in the attack.”

“Three of us? That's me in one of the pictures, but I don't know who the other two are.” She immersed herself in the Bote vom Untermain newspaper. “Take a good look at that guy,” she said, pointing at one of the two men whose pictures were next to hers. “Something about him reminds me of Helmut. It's not him, but he reminds me of him. Weird, isn't it?”

She was right. There was a vague similarity. Or does every picture start to resemble somebody if one looks at it long enough? Also, some of the features of the second of the two men suddenly seemed familiar.

Somewhere in the Jura Mountains, she asked me if Rolf Wendt's death could not have been an accident.

“Are you worried Helmut might have killed him?”

“I can't imagine anyone killing Rolf. I'd swear Rolf didn't have any what you would call enemies. He was far too cautious to lock horns with anyone. He was clever that way: He could always fend off a person and deflect tricky situations. I saw him do it a couple of times, both at the hospital and outside. Are you sure it couldn't have been been an accident?”

I shook my head. “He was shot. You don't know where Helmut and Rolf knew each other from?”

“It was only that once at the Weinloch Bar that I was with the two of them, and they only said a quick hi. I didn't ask Helmut or Rolf how they knew each other. At the hospital I told Rolf about Helmut-Rolf was my therapist and stuck to protocol as closely as possible. Of course he didn't always stick to protocol, but if he hadn't treated me as a regular patient, I'd have been exposed.”

“Eberlein said something about… something about a depressive veneer, but that deep inside you were a cheerful girl.”

“I am a cheerful girl, inside and out. When I feel fear coming on, I say 'Hello, fear!' and let it do its thing for a while, but I don't let it get the better of me.”

“Fear of what?”

“Don't you ever have that feeling? It's not a fear that something bad will happen, but just like when you have a fever, or when you feel cold, or sick.” She looked at me. “No, you don't ever have that feeling, do you? But I think Rolf did. He didn't get it just from his patients or from books. That's why he could help me a lot.”

“Was he in love with you?”

She took her feet off the dashboard and sat up straight. “I'm not really sure.”

I don't believe women when they say that they're not sure if they're attractive. Leo was sitting next to me in her jeans and a man's checked shirt, but I felt the woman in her voice, in her scent-even in the nervous movements with which she rolled her cigarettes. And she didn't know if Rolf Wendt was in love with her?

She could tell I didn't believe her. “OK, so he was in love with me. I didn't want to face up to it; I had a bad conscience. He'd done so much for me and got nothing in return, didn't even expect anything, but I'm sure he hoped I'd fall in love with him.”

“What about Helmut?”

She looked at me puzzled.

“Is he in love with you? Why is he so eager to know where you are? Ten thousand marks is a lot of money.”

“Oh.” She blushed and turned her face to the window. “Does it surprise you that he wants to know where I am? He was my leader, was in charge of me, and then lost me.”

34 Angels don't shoot at cats

That evening we sat in Murten, above the lake. From the terrace of the Hotel Krone we watched the late sailboats. In the evening lull they slowly made their way back into the harbor. The last steamer from Neuenburg forged past them with majesty, as if to prove the superiority of technology over nature. The sun set behind the mountains on the opposite shore.

“I'll go get my sweater.” Leo got up and stayed away a long time. The waiter brought me a second aperitif. Silence rose from the lake and swallowed the buzz of voices behind me. I turned around just as Leo came out onto the terrace through the glass doors. She hadn't put on a sweater. She wore a tight, long-sleeved black dress that reached from her neck to just above her knees, and black high-heeled shoes. Her pantyhose, the stole, and the comb in her luxuriant pinned-up hair were red. She took her time crossing the terrace. She sashayed her way around tables, and when she squeezed between chairs that were too close together she pulled her shoulders up so high that her breasts were tight within the dress. Where there were no obstacles she walked with swaying hips, her head held high. I got up, pulled her chair out for her, and she sat down. The guests on the terrace had followed her with their eyes because of her swinging hips, and also because her dress was bare down the back.

“You're gorgeous.”

We sat opposite each other. Her sparkling eyes-blue beneath a blue sky and sometimes gray or green beneath gray clouds-shone darkly. In her smile was delight at the game she was playing. A touch of seduction, a touch of complacency, a touch of self-mockery. She shook her head at my compliment, as if to say: “I know, but don't tell anybody else.”

The waiter suggested fish from the lake and wine from the opposite shore. Leo ate hungrily. Over dinner I learned that she had spent a year in America as a high school student, that jersey sweaters don't get wrinkled, that the shirt and jacket I'd bought at her suggestion in Belfort suited me, and that her mother had been a voice-over actress and had previously been married to a washed-up movie director. It was clear that her relationship with her mother was not good. She asked me what life as a private investigator was like, how long I had been one, and what I had done before.

“You were a public prosecutor?” She stared at me in amazement. “How come you gave that up?”

During the course of my life I have given many different answers to this question. Perhaps all of them true. Perhaps none. In 1945, they turned their back on me for having been a Nazi public prosecutor, and when they wanted the old Nazis again, I turned my back on them. Because I was no longer an old Nazi? Because the let's-look-the-other-way attitude of my old and new colleagues at the bar rubbed me the wrong way? Because I had definitely had enough of others laying out for me what is just and unjust? Because as a private investigator I am my own boss? Because in life you should never pick up again what you've put down for good? Because I don't like the smell of government offices? “I can't quite say, Leo. Back in 1945, being a public prosecutor was simply over for me.”

A cool wind rose and the terrace emptied. We sat down to finish our bottle on a bench that was shielded by a wall. Vully was an unpretentious local wine without frills that I had never tried before. The moon had risen and was mirrored in the lake. I felt a chill, and Leo snuggled up to me, warming and seeking warmth.

“My father stopped talking in the last years of his life. I don't know if he couldn't talk or just didn't want to. I guess a bit of both. I remember at first trying to have conversations with him-I'd talk to him about something or ask him a question. I hoped he'd tell me more about himself. There were also times when he'd try to speak, but only a croaking rattle would escape from his throat. Mostly he'd look at me with a kind of crooked smile that asked for forgiveness and understanding, but perhaps it was also the result of the minor stroke he'd had. Later I just sat by his bedside, held his hand, looked out the window into the garden, and let my thoughts wander. That's where I learned to be silent. And to love.”

I put my arm around her shoulder.

“That was actually a nice time. For him and for me. Otherwise it was sheer hell.” She took the pack of cigarettes out of my coat pocket, lit one, and smoked it, inhaling deeply. “He couldn't hold his piss or shit anymore in those last years. The doctor said his condition was psychological, not physical, which he also told my father. That was before things got really bad. The doctor wanted to help him, to give him a healing shock, but he accomplished the opposite. Perhaps my father wanted to prove that he really couldn't do anything else. It turned into a ritual between him and Mother, like a last dance that the two of them had before they were executed for a crime they had committed together. He would soil the bed, and his pride and dignity suffered. She would clean him up and change the sheets, her face turned away in disgust. He knew that he disgusted her, but that she would not shrink from tending him, even though she was slowly running herself into the ground. I shit on you, he wanted to tell her, but he could only tell her this by shitting on himself, and she could only show him that he was a pitiful shit by slaving over his shit.”

Later Leo again returned to the subject. “When I was a little girl I wanted to marry my father. All girls do. Then when I realized that that wasn't possible, I wanted somebody like my father. You see, I've always liked older men. But those last years with Father…How ugly everything had become, how spiteful, nasty, dirty…” She looked past me, her eyes wide. “Sometimes Helmut seemed to me like an angel with a burning sword, destroying, judging, cleansing. You wanted to know whether I loved him. I loved the angel, and at times cherished the hope that he would take his sword and burn away my fear. But perhaps the heat was too much. I have…have I betrayed him?”

Angels do not shoot at couches and cats. I told her that, but she wasn't listening.

35 A nation of cobblers

I had put in a call from Niedersteinbach to Tyberg in Locarno. He told me he was looking forward to our visit. “You're bringing a young lady with you? My butler will prepare two rooms. I won't let you stay in a hotel, and that's that! You must stay at my place.” We reached his Villa Sem-preverde in Monti above Locarno at teatime.

Tea was served out in the arbor. The table and chairs were made of granite and were pleasantly cool in the heat of the summery afternoon. The Earl Grey gave off a strong aroma. The pastries were delicious, and Tyberg was attentive. And yet something wasn't quite right. His attentiveness was so formal that it struck me as forced and distant. I was taken aback: He had been so warm on the phone. Could it be because Judith Buchendorff, Tyberg's secretary and personal assistant, whom I had known slightly longer and better than I had known him, was away doing research for his memoirs? Or was the distance between us the kind of distance common between people who became important to each other under certain circumstances, but who in fact have nothing in common? Were we like vacationers, classmates, or war buddies who meet again?

Tea was served out in the arbor. The table and chairs were made of granite and were pleasantly cool in the heat of the summery afternoon. The Earl Grey gave off a strong aroma. The pastries were delicious, and Tyberg was attentive. And yet something wasn't quite right. His attentiveness was so formal that it struck me as forced and distant. I was taken aback: He had been so warm on the phone. Could it be because Judith Buchendorff, Tyberg's secretary and personal assistant, whom I had known slightly longer and better than I had known him, was away doing research for his memoirs? Or was the distance between us the kind of distance common between people who became important to each other under certain circumstances, but who in fact have nothing in common? Were we like vacationers, classmates, or war buddies who meet again?

After tea, Tyberg gave Leo and me a tour of the gardens, which extend far up the mountain behind the house. In his office he showed us the computer on which his memoirs were being written and told us how he had struggled to find the right title. “My whole life has been dedicated to the chemical industry-the only title I could think of was He Who Touches Pitch and Sulfur.” But that reminded him too much of verse one of Jesus Son of Sirach, chapter thirteen. In the music room he opened a chest and took out a flute for me and then sat down at the grand piano. We played Telemann's Suite in A Minor, and after that, just as we had once before, the B Minor Suite by Bach. He played far better than I, and we started off shakily. But he knew where he had to slow down for me, and soon enough my fingers remembered the much-practiced runs. Above all, the two of us understood Bach the way one can only understand Bach when one is pushing seventy. That Tyberg and I came together so naturally and felicitously in his music convinced me that I had only imagined the atmospheric disturbances. But after dinner the storm broke loose.

With his full head of white hair, his gray beard, and bushy eyebrows, Tyberg looked like an elder statesman, a visionary Russian dissident, or Santa Claus after a Christmas party. His brown eyes stared at me sternly. “I have given the matter much thought, wondering whether I should talk to you privately. Perhaps it would make the matter easier. But then again it might make it harder, and I don't want to have to ask myself if I tried to skirt the issue.” He got up and began pacing up and down behind the table. “Do you think we don't have German television here? Do you think you can simply come to the Tessin, an old man and a young woman, playing father and daughter, grandfather and granddaughter, or come visiting me in the guise of Uncle Gerhard and his young girlfriend?” Judith had first introduced me to him as her uncle Gerhard, and for him I had always remained Judith's “Uncle Gerhard,” though he was well aware that it had only been a matter of incognito. “We have cable television here in Locarno, Uncle Gerhard, and I get twenty-three channels. And I'm not the only one who watches the Tagesschau around here-there are hundreds of Germans living here. You could argue that mug shots give a distorted picture, and blond hair can change one's looks to some extent”-he looked sternly at Leo-”but it didn't take me more than fifteen minutes to recognize you. And I'm not the only one here who has a good eye for people. There are many artists, painters, and actors in Monti, for whom a careful eye is part of what they do. All I can say is that it was a crazy idea to come here.”

“It was my idea,” I said.

“I am aware of that, Uncle Gerhard. I'm not reproaching her. Nor am I reproaching her-or you-for the crime they're after her for. For now, we are only talking about an indictment, not a conviction. I'm sorry I am being so brusque.” Tyberg looked at Leo with a quick smile. “At my age, one aims to be as charming as possible to young ladies. But the matter is too important. It also has to do with an old story between Gerhard and me. Did he tell you how we met?”

Leo shook her head. I was filled with admiration for her. She sat there unperturbed, looking at Tyberg attentively and somewhat puzzled. She did not return his smile, nor did she rebuff it with a hard look. She was waiting. Every now and then her hands fiddled with a cigarette or brushed crumbs off her long white summer dress.

“But we can let that matter rest. I shall do things the way the Bedouins do. You can be my guests for three days. But I will ask you to leave my house on Saturday.”

I stood up. “It wasn't my intention to put you in danger, Herr Tyberg. I am sorry if-”

“I'm surprised you don't understand. It's not a question of danger. It's just that I don't want to have anything to do with this flight from justice. The police are seeking Frau Salger, and she should be brought before a judge and found innocent or guilty. I would be glad to join you in hoping that she will be found innocent. But it is not my right, nor yours, Uncle Gerhard, to interfere in matters that are the job of the police and a court of law.”

“What if they don't know their job? Something is wrong with their preliminary proceedings. First of all, they are looking for Leo without saying why. Then they make a public appeal for information, announcing an attack that is months old as if it happened yesterday. And they bring in people and faces that have nothing to do with the whole thing. No, Herr Tyberg, there's something fishy here.” Tyberg's words had initially made me feel inconsiderate and reckless. I knew I wasn't putting him in any real danger, but the issue was not my view of things, but his. I had been ready to accept his reproaches, but the conversation was now taking another turn.

“You're not the one to judge that,” he said. “You have to go through channels, there are public officials, there are investigative committees that deal with-”

“I can't just stick my head in the sand. There's something fishy about this, and the way the police are handling things definitely isn't aboveboard. If you want to know, the-”

“No, I don't want to know. Let's say everything that you're worried about is true-have you spoken to the commissioner in charge of the police officers who have acted wrongly? Have you spoken to your political representative? Have you contacted the press? I'm not saying you should stick your head in the sand, but how can you take it upon yourself to-”

“Take it upon myself?” I got angry. “I've been a man who minds his own business, a cobbler who has stuck to his last too often in life. As a soldier, as a public prosecutor, as a private investigator, I did what I was told, it was my job, and I didn't go messing about in matters that were in other people's domain. What we are is a nation of cobblers who mind their own business, and look where it's gotten us.”

“You're talking about the Third Reich? If only everyone minded his own business But no: The physicians were not satisfied with curing patients, they had to advance the Volk and racial cleansing. The teachers were not satisfied with teaching reading and writing, they had to teach fighting for the fatherland. Judges did not ask what was just, but what they deemed to be good for the nation, what the Führer wanted; and as for the generals-their trade is to fight and win battles, not to transport and shoot Jews, Poles, and Russians. No, Uncle Gerhard, unfortunately we are not a nation that minds its own business!”

“What about the chemists?” Leo asked.

“What about them?”

“The chemists of the Third Reich-I wonder what, in your view, their business was and if they stuck to it?”

Tyberg looked at Leo with a frown. “I have been asking myself that question ever since I started working on my memoirs. I incline to the opinion that a laboratory is a chemist's business. But that would mean that others always bear the responsibility, and that we scientists are never responsible, and I can see the snag in that, especially when it comes from the mouth of a chemist.”

For a while nobody spoke. The butler knocked, and then cleared away the plates. Leo asked him to compliment the cook for the corn biscuits with oxtail and green peppers that had been served as an appetizer. “Polenta medallions,” he corrected her, flattered, as he himself was the cook, and the reintroduction of polenta as a culinary delicacy was a cherished objective of his. He proposed that we step into the drawing room for a liqueur.

Leo got up, came over to me, and looked at me question-ingly. I nodded. “You don't have to come upstairs, Gerhard. I'll pack your things, too.” She gave me a quick kiss and I listened to her steps as her bare feet pattered on the stone slabs of the stairs. The floorboards upstairs creaked.

Tyberg cleared his throat. He stood behind his chair, his shoulders drooping, his arms resting on the chair back. “At our age we don't get to know and treasure that many people that we can afford to lose them. Please don't leave now.”

“I'm not leaving in anger, and I'd be happy to come back another time. But Leo and I-we really belong in a hotel.”

“Let me have a word with her.” He left the room and returned a little while later with Leo. She looked at me ques-tioningly again and I smiled at her questioningly. She shrugged her shoulders.

We spent the evening on the terrace. Tyberg read to us from his memoirs, and Leo found out how his and my paths had crossed during the war. The candle, by the light of which Tyberg was reading, flickered. I could not interpret the expression in Leo's eyes. At times bats rustled over our heads. They flew toward the house, and right before the wall their flight veered off abruptly into the emptiness of the night.

The following morning I was alone. Leo's things were no longer in the room. I looked in vain for a note. It was only later that I found one in my wallet in place of the four hundred francs I had changed in Murten. “I need the money. You'll get it back. Leo.”