Self's Deception

1 A final favor

I set out on my homeward journey with a hangover. The three days of sun, wind, and having Leo beside me had gone to my head.

I closed the book of my journey with Leo and put it away. It was at any rate only a thin little book. I had met her Tuesday morning in Amorbach, and by Friday evening I was back in Mannheim, though I felt I had been away for weeks. The traffic, the jostling pedestrians, the din of construction all around, the big, bleak palace in which there's supposed to be a university, the renovated Water Tower that looks as peculiar as Frau Weiland from next door when she comes back from the hairdresser, my apartment with its smell of stale smoke- what was I doing here? Wouldn't I have done better to head from Locarno down to Palermo, even without Leo, and swim from Sicily to Egypt? Should I get back in my car?

I quickly read through the newspapers that had piled up during my absence. They reported a terrorist attack on an American military installation, Leo's hiding in the State Psychiatric Hospital and the part Wendt had played in it, and an account of Wendt's life and death. There was nothing that I didn't already know. The Saturday edition reported that Eberlein had been temporarily suspended and that someone from the ministry had provisionally assumed his duties. I took note of that. I also took note of the fact that I had disappointed Brigitte.

A wanted poster with Leo's face on it had been put up at the post office, just as she had predicted. Ever since wanted posters, which I only knew from Westerns, had been reintro-duced with the rise in terrorism, I have been expecting some roughneck with clanging spurs to come marching into the post office with a saddle bag slung over his shoulder and a Colt at his hip, stop in front of the poster, eye it, snatch it off the wall, roll it up, and put it in his bag. As the door falls shut behind him the dumbfounded customers hurry to the window to watch him swing himself up onto his horse and go galloping down the Seckenheimer Strasse. This time, too, I waited in vain. Instead, I came up with a few questions and answers. If the two dead men had belonged to the terrorist group, how did the police know that they had to search for Leo? For them to know about Leo, they had to have caught one of the terrorists and made him talk. And then, how come the police knew about Leo but not about the other members of the group? They must have caught one of them, and only one: the guy who Leo said had just come back from Tuscany, Bertram. He could have provided the police with only vague descriptions of Lemke and the fifth man, which was why the police had not managed to come up with particularly good composites. The other guy, Giselher, had to be dead.

But what really preoccupied me that weekend was my wanderlust and homesickness. Wanderlust is the longing for anew country that we don't yet know, and homesickness is a longing for an old country that we no longer know, even if we think we do. Why did I have this longing for the unknown? What did I want-to leave or to return? I puzzled over these thoughts until a toothache suddenly drove the nonsense away. It started Saturday evening with a slight twinge during the late movie, just as Doc Holliday rode out from Fort Griffin to Tombstone. By the end of the broadcast, as the camera passed above and beyond Helgoland, the pain, to the sound of the national anthem, was pulsating all the way up to my temples and my left ear. When the picture faded out at Helgoland's eastern tip with its crumbling tooth-shaped rock, I felt utterly demoralized. If only we could trade in Helgoland for Zanzibar again!

I haven't been to a dentist since my old one died ten years ago. I looked in the phone book and chose one two blocks away. The pain kept me awake all night. At seven thirty I started calling the dentist every five minutes. At eight on the dot a woman's cool voice answered. “Ah, Herr Self? Is your tooth bothering you again? Would you like to drop by now? We've just had a cancellation.” I went over right away. The cool voice belonged to a cool blonde with flawless teeth. She sent me in right away, though I was not the same Herr Self who was already a patient there. I hadn't been aware that there was another Herr Self in the area. From what I know of our family tree, I'm the last twig to have sprouted.

The dentist was young, with a sure eye and a calm hand. The dreadful moment when the syringe approaches, fills your field of vision, and disappears because it has entered the oral cavity in search of a place to puncture, then the wait for the puncture, and finally the puncture itself-the doctor was so quick that I barely suffered. He managed to keep me calm, do his job, and flirt with his assistant. He explained to me that he wasn't sure if he could save tooth three-seven. It was deeply decayed. But he'd give it a try. He would remove most of the cavities, apply Calaxyl, seal it with Cavit, and put in a temporary bridge. A few weeks would show if tooth three-seven would hold. Was that all right?

“What are my options?”

“I could extract the tooth right away.”

“And then?”

“Then we wouldn't opt for a permanent bridge, but we'd do something removable for three-five to three-seven.”

“Do you mean I would be getting dentures?”

“Don't worry, not a full denture, just a removable prosthesis for the rear of the third quadrant.”

But he could not deny that the prosthesis was meant to be put in and taken out, and was to remain overnight in a glass, where I would find it waiting for me in the morning. I quickly consented to any and all measures necessary to save tooth three-seven. Any and all measures.

I saw a movie once in which a man hanged himself because he was about to get dentures. Or had it been an accident? He had wanted to hang himself, but then as he was dangling there changed his mind but couldn't do anything because the dog had pushed over the chair on which he had been standing with the noose around his neck.

Would Turbo render me this final favor?

2 What insanity!

I went to Nägelsbach's office. He didn't ask me why I came only now, or where I'd been. He took down my statement. He already knew that I had passed myself off to Frau Klein-schmidt as Wendt's father. He also knew that she had let me into his apartment, thinking I was his father. But he didn't reproach me for that. I found out from him that the police were still completely in the dark about what Wendt's death meant.

“When is the funeral?”

“Friday, at the cemetery in Edingen. Wendt's parents live there. Remember the commercial back in the fifties? 'Want a house that's nice and new? Wendt will make your dreams come true!' Old Wendt used to have a small office in the arcade at the Bismarckplatz. Now it's grown into a big agency, with offices in Heidelberg, Schriesheim, Mannheim, and God knows where else.”

I was already at the door when Nägelsbach touched on Leo. “Did you know that Frau Salger was hiding in Amorbach?”

“Have you arrested her there?”

He looked at me carefully. “No, she was already gone by the time one of the neighbors who'd seen her mug shot on TV called us. That's the way of the world-mug shots are also seen by the people you're looking for.”

“Why weren't you able to tell me the other day why you had a search out for Frau Salger?”

“I'm sorry, I can't tell you that now either.”

“The media says it's all about a terrorist attack on an American military installation-was that around here?”

“It had to have been in Käfertal or in Vogelstang. But we don't have anything to do with that.”

“What about the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency?”

“What about it?”

“Has it been brought into the case?”

Nägelsbach shrugged his shoulders. “One way or another, the Agency's always involved in such cases.”

What I was interested in was how the Agency was involved in all this, but I could see from his expression that there was no point in asking any more questions. “By the way, do you remember an attack on the army recruiting office in the Bun-senstrasse about six years ago?”

He thought for a while, and then shook his head. “No, there wasn't any attack in the Bunsenstrasse-not six years ago, nor at any other time. What's that all about?”

“Somebody mentioned it the other day, and I couldn't remember there having been such an attack either, though I wasn't as sure as you seem to be.”

He was waiting for me to continue, but now it was my turn to stall. Our interaction had become extremely wary. I asked him about his work on Rodin's Kiss, but he didn't want to talk about that either. When I asked him to give my regards to his wife, he nodded. So the creative and marriage crises were continuing. When I was young, I thought that the worst was over once you made it through high school, then it became university finals, the first day at work, the wedding ceremony, and last of all, widowerhood. But things never get any easier.

Old Herr Wendt ruled his real-estate empire from an office in Heidelberg's Mengler-Bau. While I sat waiting in the reception area I watched the bulldozers digging up the Adenauer-platz yet again. On a big empty desk stood a small yellow bulldozer, a matching crane, and a small blue truck and trailer.

Wendt's executive secretary turned out to be more of an executive than a secretary. She was running the business until further notice. Herr Wendt had also entrusted her with the handling of his personal affairs, so could I please tell her how she might help me? Frau Büchler stood facing me, coolly toying with my business card. Gray hair, gray eyes, gray outfit-but she was no gray mouse. Her face was practically wrinkle free and her voice was young, as though a wily Brazilian cosmetic surgeon had lifted her vocal cords as well as her face. She moved as if today she owned the office, and tomorrow the world.

I informed her of my dealings with Dr. Rolf Wendt, of our last conversation, our scheduled meeting, and how I had gone looking for him and found him. I hinted at the connection between Wendt's death and the current investigation into Leonore Salger and told her how, in my view, these ought to be looked into. “Perhaps that is what the police are doing. But the way they're handling things seems suspicious. First they didn't want to say why they're looking for Frau Salger, and then they went on the air and publicly announced their hunt for terrorists, and as for Rolf Wendt's death: They either know more than they're saying, or less than they ought to know. Solving the Wendt case can't be left entirely up to the police. This is why I'm here. I want to take on the case. I stumbled into this case by chance, and now it won't leave me in peace. But I can't continue working on it at my own expense.”

Frau Büchler showed me over to the lounge, and I sat down in a bulky construction of steel and leather. “If you work on this case, I assume you will want to talk to Herr and Frau Wendt, am I right? And you'll be asking them quite a few questions?”

I replied with a vague wave of the hand.

She shook her head. “It's not a question of money. In his own way, Herr Wendt has always been generous with his money, and now he has lost all interest in it. He intended it all for Rolf. Their relationship was not good, otherwise Rolf would not have lived in that hole-with a father with Herr Wendt's resources! But Herr Wendt had not given up hope. In the past, he had hoped that Rolf would join the family business and run it one day, but then later Herr Wendt hoped that Rolf might want to have his own psychiatric hospital. Herr Wendt would see to the construction of the hospital and its administration. This almost became an idée fixe with him. Time and again over the past few years we looked for old hospitals, schools, barracks, just for his son. Once we even bought some riding stables in the Palatinate because Herr Wendt felt they would be ideal for converting into an insane asylum. What insanity! Can you imagine? Throwing good money at some ramshackle stables, just like that? I'm only glad that we…” She smiled at me. “As you can see, Herr Self, for me real estate is the be-all and end-all. But enough of that. If you are hired for this case, you must promise that, for a while at least, you will not disturb Herr or Frau Wendt. If you are hired, you would report to me. What do you say?”

I nodded. She sat with her legs neatly and symmetrically together, like a model in a fashion magazine. Her hands were clasped quietly, only to start up sometimes unexpectedly in a brisk gesture. This gave her an air of competence and authority. I decided to try that myself at the earliest opportunity.

She rose. “Thank you for dropping by. You will hear from us.”

3 A bit flat

By that evening I had the case.

This time I didn't have to worry about ruffling anybody's circle of friends and could go at it no holds barred: Wendt's friends and girlfriends, his colleagues, his acquaintances, his landlady, his sports club, his local bar, his garage. I tracked down the young woman I'd seen him with at the Sole d'Oro, the friend from university with whom he'd traveled to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and his card-playing pals: an unemployed teacher, a tomato-fetishizing artist, and a violinist from the Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra. I also dropped in at the Eppelheim Squash Courts, where he was a regular. Everyone expressed their dismay at Wendt's death. But the dismay was not so much about Wendt's having died as the fact that somebody they knew had been murdered. Murder was something that only existed in papers and on TV! Rolf, of all people! He got on so well with everyone, he was so well-regarded!

The violinist was the third person who told me that.

“Well-regarded? Why 'well-regarded' and not 'liked'?”

eyed her strong hands with their short nails. “We were together for a while, but somehow there wasn't much of a spark. You know what I mean?”

According to the young woman from the Sole d'Oro, there hadn't been much of a spark with her either. She worked at the Deutsche Bank where Wendt had an account. He'd approached her and asked her out. “He was utterly dependable, as dependable with his account as with our dates.”

“That sounds a bit flat.”

“What can I say? We never really hit it off. At first I thought he was a bit standoffish and didn't want me to get too close, because he went to university and had a doctorate, and me with my banking traineeship. But that wasn't it. He just couldn't break out of himself. I waited and waited, but nothing happened. Maybe there wasn't anything there. You'd think that there'd be more there when someone's a shrink, but I guess why should there be? I mean, I'm in banking and it's not like I've got any money.”

I'd caught her on her lunch break, and she stood in front of me in her business outfit with her perfect hairdo and discreet makeup. Very appropriate for a young employee in a big German bank. But there was more to her than money and percentages. Rolf Wendt, who couldn't break out of himself, whom one is seriously interested in for a while, with whom one wonders at first if one did something wrong, and then if something's wrong with him-the others had not seen him or defined him as clearly as she did. And it wasn't a matter of his being reserved with women. His squash instructor said more or less the same thing: “He was a doctor? See, I didn't even know that. A good player, though, and I wanted to get him into sets with others. We've got a good club thing going with our squash courts, even though they're new.” He eyed me. “You could do with some exercise. Anyway, Wendt always kept to himself. He was a nice guy, but he always kept to himself.”

Frau Kleinschmidt didn't hold it against me that I wasn't Herr Wendt. “So you're a detective? Like Hercule Parrot?” She asked me in and put the kettle on. We sat in her kitchen, which had a corner bench, a cupboard, and a linoleum floor. The washing machine and the stove were brand-new. The drapes, the curtains in the glass doors of the cupboard, the oilcloth on the table, and the decals on the refrigerator all had Delft tile patterns.

“Are you in any way connected with Holland?” I asked.

“You saw the tulips in the garden and put two and two together!” She beamed at me with admiration. “My first husband was from there. Willem. He was a driver, a trucker, and when he had the Rotterdam route he always brought back the bulbs. Because he knew I liked flowers. He had connections, you see, and didn't have to pay for the bulbs. Otherwise we'd never have been able to afford all those flowers, what with the kids. Now that they're grown up, my second husband brings them from town-the bulbs, I mean.”

“Your children have left home?”

“Yes.” She sighed. The water whistled in the kettle and she poured it through the coffee filter.

“You must have been happy to get a nice young tenant.”

“I was. We didn't ask for too much rent, because I said to my husband, 'Günther,' I said, 'the young doctor is in the psychiatric hospital. The only people who end up there are poor devils. The rich who pay their own doctors big money end up in other places.' But things didn't really go the way I hoped.

The young doctor was nice and polite, always said hello and asked how we were, but he never came in and sat down. He never came by for dinner, or to see us on a Sunday. Even after he spent the whole day studying. When I was out in my garden, you know, I could see him at his desk with his books.”

“What about friends, or girlfriends?”

Frau Kleinschmidt shook her head. “We wouldn't have minded if he'd brought in a girl from time to time-we're not like that. And we've got nothing against friends either. But I guess he was a loner.”

That was all she had to say. There were no unusual contacts, no unusual activities. A picture-perfect tenant. I had shown Frau Kleinschmidt Leo's picture before, but showed it to her again. I also showed her a picture of Helmut Lemke. She didn't recognize either of them.

“Have the police sealed Wendt's apartment?”

“Do you want to take another look?” She got up and took a key off a hook on the wall. “We can get in through the boiler room. The police said we can't go in through the front door until the investigation is over. We're not allowed to break the seal on the lock.”

I followed her down the cellar steps, through the boiler room, and through the broom closet into Wendt's apartment. The police had done a thorough job in turning the place upside down. What they hadn't found I wouldn't find either.

The days passed. I did my job by the book, but wasn't really getting anywhere. I'd have liked to talk to Eberlein, but he was out of town. I'd also have liked to talk to Wendt's sister. She was living in Hamburg and, like her brother, didn't have a phone. Frau Büchler wasn't sure if the sister intended to come to the funeral. There had been some tension between her and her father, and also between her and her brother. I sent Dorle Mähler, née Wendt, a letter.

I also got a call from my old journalist friend Tietzke. “Thanks for having tipped me off the other day.”

“For having tipped you off?”

But no sooner had I spoken the words than I knew what he was talking about. How could I have missed that! On the day of Wendt's murder, Tietzke had appeared on the scene at the same time as the patrol car and the ambulance. Only I could have tipped him off that fast. Or the murderer.

4 Peschkalek's nose

I saw everyone again at the funeral: Inspector Nägelsbach, Wendt's university friend, the card-playing pals, the woman from the Deutsche Bank, the instructor from the squash courts in Eppelheim, Frau Kleinschmidt, and Frau Büchler. Only Eberlein was missing. I came early, sat down in the back row, and watched the small chapel fill up slowly. Then some sixty people came in all at once. Their whispering gave away that old Herr Wendt had closed his offices and ordered his workforce to attend the funeral. He himself came late, a large, heavy man with a stony face. The woman on his arm was wearing a heavy black veil. As the organ began to play, Peschkalek darted into the empty seat next to me. During the first hymn he nimbly changed the film in his small camera. “Jerusalem! High tower thy glorious walls!” Despite this oblique allusion to real estate and Frau Büchler's stern glances, Wendt's employees did not join in wholeheartedly. The singing was sparse.

Peschkalek nudged me. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Then I guess we're both doing the same thing.”

After the priest, a senior doctor from the psychiatric hospital spoke. He talked about his young colleague with respect and warmth, about his care for the patients, and about his dedication to research. Then the squash instructor from Eppelheim stepped forward and praised Rolf Wendt as having been the heart and soul of the squash courts. We were singing the final hymn when the door opened a crack and a young woman entered. She hesitated, looked around, and then marched determinedly up to the first row and stood next to Frau Wendt. Rolf's sister?

At the grave I stood a ways to the side. Nägelsbach, too, decided to keep his distance so he could observe everyone carefully. Peschkalek circled the mourners in a wide arc, taking pictures. When the last of Herr Wendt's employees had thrown their spadeful of earth into the grave, the mourners all made a quick getaway. I heard the motor start up on one of those small power shovels that today's gravediggers use to make their jobs easier for themselves.

Peschkalek came and stood next to me. “That's that, I guess.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

“You knew Wendt personally?”

“Yes.” I saw no reason not to tell him. “His father has commissioned me to investigate.”

“Then we really are on the same track. Not that I'm investigating for his father-I'm investigating for myself. But you and I are aiming to get to the bottom of this. Want to grab some lunch? You can leave your car here; I'll bring you back afterward.”

We drove over to Ladenburg. In Zwiwwel they were serving chervil soup followed by lamb with potatoes au gratin. Peschkalek had the waiter bring us a bottle of Forster Blauer Portugieser. For dessert we had fresh strawberries. Needless to say, I wanted to know why Peschkalek was investigating, what he was looking for, and what, if anything, he had managed to unearth. But I was in no hurry. Again our get-together was short and pleasant. He told me of his travels as a photojournalist all over Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, and quite nonchalantly touched on a colorful hodgepodge of wars, conferences, artwork, crime, famines, and celebrity weddings that he had covered. I was amazed. Wanderlust or no, I was happy enough to be the provincial that I am. Much as I like to head off to faraway places, my travels have been pretty much limited to a short trip to America, a few Aegean jaunts on a yacht with an old Greek girlfriend from my student days, and a few trips to Rimini, Carinthia, and Langeoog with Klara. I don't think I want to see a civil war, regardless of how photogenic it is, or Elizabeth Taylor marrying Boris Becker with the Taj Mahal as backdrop.

Over an espresso and a sambuca, his pipe and my cigarette lit, Peschkalek began of his own accord: “I bet you're wondering what I'm doing photographing all these things to do with Wendt. I'm not sure yet. But I have a nose for hot stories. And when there's a hot story somewhere, I take hot pictures. It's not the text that's the issue. If push comes to shove I even throw something together myself. Probing-that's what counts, and probing means photographing. If it isn't in the camera, it doesn't exist. Do you know what I mean?”

He had expounded his journalistic credo with passion, and I was happy to nod my assent.

“What did your nose get wind of?” I asked.

He reached into the inside pocket of his denim jacket and took out a piece of paper. “All you have to do is put two and two together. A week ago yesterday, Wendt was murdered. He had hidden a young terrorist, Leonore Salger, in the State Psychiatric Hospital. The police are looking for this terrorist because of an attack on an American military installation. The official search is initiated on the evening of the murder-Monday evening I saw it on TV, and Tuesday morning I read it in the papers. You're not going to tell me that's a coincidence, are you? Did Leonore Salger kill him? Or someone from the CIA, FBI, or DEA? Since the Achille Lauro incident, the Americans aren't too pleased about attacks on their installations or people of theirs being taken hostage or murdered. They retaliate. And from what I hear, there were some casualties during the attack on their installation.”

I pointed at the piece of paper in his hand. “What's that?”

“Now we're getting to the mystery. I'm not sure how carefully you've been following things. So the police aren't saying anything about the circumstances of Wendt's death or about motives and suspects? Fine, I can understand that. I guess they don't know enough. But can you explain why not a word has been said about the exact time or place of the terrorist attack, or how the attack was perpetrated, and what came of it all? There's been nothing specific, not a single specific thing! Not on TV and not in the papers. I even went so far as to take a look at some of the old articles about Baader, Meinhof, and Schleyer. What they wrote back then was often wishy-washy, but still more precise than what we're reading and hearing now. Do you see what I'm saying?”

“I certainly do. And it's not just the media. The police, too, are pussyfooting more than they usually do.”

“I said to myself, something's got to be wrong. You can't trumpet an attack like that to all the world on one hand, and keep your lips tightly sealed on the other. If such an attack had passed unnoticed…But I can't imagine that either. Perhaps people just didn't realize what was going on. But somebody must have noticed that something happened. And then that somebody wouldn't have kept it to himself. But I can't cover the whole area questioning everyone and his mother. However, I did look through all the newspapers, the local news. The Mannheimer Morgen, the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, the Rheinpfalz, and all their offshoots. I sifted through the local items, looking for something like, 'Last night Mr. L, a farmer, was shaken out of deep sleep by a blast that shattered the windows and rattled the plates in the cupboards. The incident remains a mystery…' Do you know what I mean?”

“Did you come up with anything?”

With a broad, proud smile he handed me the paper. Over the article he had written “Viernheimer Tageblatt” and a date in March.

“Go on, read it.”

Explosions at the Munitions Depot?

“Have there been any explosions in the past few years at the American Forces Munitions Depot near Viernheim? Why has the guard detail for the last few months been issued special protective clothing?”

In the District Council yesterday, the Green Party put this question to the council chief, Dr. S. Kannenguth, in his function as the head of the Emergency Management Agency of the Bergstrasse District. The speaker of the Green Party, J. Altmann, did not clarify the background of the question.

As was to be expected, the council chief could not provide an immediate reply, but promised an investigation and an official written response by the next session.

In fact, in January of this year, I happened to be driving through the woods one evening when I observed the glow of a fire above the munitions depot. The Viernheim police at the depot gates were not authorized to provide me with any information, and repeated queries to the press office of the American Forces have remained unanswered.

H. Walters

5 Gas needn't stink

I read the piece twice. And then a third time. Was I missing something? Was I slow on the uptake? The attack had taken place in January at a munitions depot near Viernheim, and had caught the attention of Walters. I could not gather more from the article than a confirmation of Leo's account. Peschkalek couldn't even do that. What did he find so exciting about it?

I kept to the matter at hand. “What were the district council chief's findings?”

“What do you think? Inquiries made to both German and American agencies indicated no explosions at the munitions depot. As for the guards at the depot, they're periodically issued protective clothing for training purposes. The safety of the people of Viernheim has at no time been compromised through activities at the munitions depot.”

“Did you speak to Altmann? Or to Walters?”

“It was Altmann who provided me with the district chief's reply. Otherwise, he was a bit of a disappointment.” Peschkalek grinned at me. “And I admit I'm a bit of a disappointment as a pipe smoker. I think I'd rather go for one of your cigarettes.” He put away his pipe, which hadn't lit despite his desperate attempts, reached for my yellow pack of Sweet Aftons, and began smoking with relish. “Altmann doesn't have any insider information worth mentioning. Everything he knows comes from Walters. But what Walters happened to see that night was all Altmann needed to take a little swipe at the district council chief. I don't know if Walters knows more. I didn't manage to catch him yesterday.” Peschkalek looked at his watch, out the window, and then at me. “What if we head over to Viernheim and have a chat with him? He should be in his office now.”

It was three thirty already. I would rather have sent myself and the alcoholized lamb in my stomach for a nice long siesta.

As we drove through Heddesheim to Viernheim, I remembered an old case of mine, the Viernheim denominational wars. An altar painting of Saint Catherine had disappeared from the Catholic church, and the chaplain, suspecting the Protestants, fulminated from his pulpit against thieving heretics. The Evangelical church was sprayed with graffiti, then the Catholic church, then church windows were broken. That was all a long, long time ago. A presbyter with an ecumenical bent had hired me to get the painting back. I found it in the room of the chaplain's pubescent altar server, who happened to be a fan of the actress Michelle Pfeiffer. And Michelle Pfeiffer happened to be the spitting image of Saint Catherine.

Walters studied engineering in Darmstadt but had been born and raised in Viernheim and had deep roots there. He was a member of the male choir, the carnival association, the chess club, the shooting club, and the marching band. “That makes me the ideal local reporter, wouldn't you say? I'm not partial to any political group. I was happy to give Altmann the information about the munitions depot, but I'd just as readily tip off the CDU about the planned collectivization of the Rhein-Neckar Center, or the SPD about child labor at the Willi Jung company. That's how I work. So you read the little piece I wrote about the question Altmann put to the District Council-and I take it you want to know more, right? Well, I'd like to know more myself.” His office was tiny. There was barely enough space for a desk, a swivel chair, and an extra chair for visitors. Walters had offered me the chair and Peschkalek a corner of his desk. The narrow window looked out on the Rathausstrasse. “Unfortunately I can't get it to open, so I'd be grateful if you didn't smoke.”

Peschkalek put away his pipe and sighed as if he were forfeiting a true pleasure and not just another of his futile battles with tobacco, matches, and pipe paraphernalia. “Journalists never know enough,” Peschkalek said. “We're all in the same boat, regardless of whether we're working for Spiegel, Paris Match, The New York Times, or the Viernheimer Tageblatt. I liked your article. It pinpoints the problem, it's written in a clean style, and you appeal to the reader by the fresh and direct way you introduce yourself into the article. One can see right away that the writer has solid background information and knowledge of the area. I'm impressed, Herr Walters.”

At first I thought Peschkalek was laying it on too thick, but I was quick to see that Walters was lapping it all up. He leaned back in his swivel chair. “I like the way you put it. I see what I do as grassroots journalism, and myself as a grassroots journalist. I'd be happy to write an article for your paper about the situation here in Viernheim. You're with Spiegel, did you say? Or was it Paris Match or The New York Times? If I'm to do something in English or French for you, somebody will have to go over it and clean it up.”

“I'll definitely keep you in mind. If Viernheim becomes a story, I could see to it that you get a column or a box in the coverage. But is Viernheim a story? A glow in the night is not necessarily a catastrophe. When did that actually happen?”

Peschkalek had roped him in. We found out that Walters had been driving from Hüttenfeld, where his girlfriend lived, to Viernheim at around midnight on January 6, when he saw three police cars in front of the gate to the munitions depot. He asked the officers what was going on but was brushed off. He drove on and saw the glow of a fire above the depot. “I didn't actually see the fire. But hey, my interest had been roused. So right away I headed onto the autobahn and took the turnoff to Lorsch. The depot is between Route 6 and the L 3111. But the glow was gone.”

“That's all?” Peschkalek was disappointed and didn't hide it.

“I stopped, got out of the car, and sniffed the air. Later I sniffed it again, as I drove through the Lampertheim Forest. You see, I had to stay on the autobahn all the way to Lorsch, where I took a back road and returned to Viernheim by way of Hüttenfeld. I couldn't smell anything. But what I've found out is that poison gas doesn't necessarily stink.”

“Poison gas?” Peschkalek and I burst out simultaneously.

“The rumor's been going around for years. Fischbach, Hanau, and Viernheim-after the war, the Americans are supposed to have set up depots there. Some people even say that the Germans stored and buried their poison gas there. Word has it that everything's been removed from Fischbach, and perhaps from Viernheim, too. Or that there was never anything there. Or that it's still there, and that all the commotion about its being removed from Fischbach was only a diversion from the poison gas stored in Viernheim. Be that as it may, I developed an interest in all of this after January sixth.” He shook his head. “A real devil's brew. Phosgene, tabun, sarin, VE, VX-have you read up on what that stuff can do? Even when you read about that stuff, it's enough to turn your stomach.”

“Were the police cars still at the gate?”

“No. But an American fire truck came out and drove away.”

Peschkalek sat up. “Where did it go? And how come you didn't put that in your article?”

“I was going to disclose things bit by bit. But then my editor didn't think the fire truck was exciting enough to warrant a sequel. The truck had headed down the Nibelungenstrasse and the Entlastungsstrasse, I think over to the American barracks.”

We thanked him. When we came out of Walters's cell, Peschkalek was ebullient. “What did I tell you? It's even better than I thought! The attack wasn't on any old American military installation, but specifically on an American poison-gas depot. You can bet your life that the Americans wouldn't turn a blind eye on such an attack. I wonder if Wendt orchestrated it all, and then had to pay for it with his life? Or did the Americans buy him off? Did he switch sides, and Leonore Sal-ger assassinated him? Mark my word, Wendt wasn't murdered just like that.”

6 A summer idyll

Nobody gets murdered just like that. The map in Wendt's briefcase showed the Viernheim triangle. When I stopped in front of the big map on the wall of the editorial office I recognized the Frankfurt-Mannheim autobahn and, leading straight down from it, the autobahn to Kaiserslautern.

Peschkalek stopped, too. “What's our next step, Herr Self? Shall we go take a look for ourselves?”

We drove along the Lorsch Road through the woods. A high fence ran alongside the road to our left, and just beyond it ran an asphalt path. Signs in German and English warned of explosives, of military and security patrols, of watchdogs, and that firearms were in use. The gate, which we passed half a kilometer down the road, was secured with iron bars and orange and blue warning lights and was plastered with signs that along with all the other warnings also cautioned against smoking. Then the fence veered to the left, and the road continued straight on. At the next left we made a big detour back to Viernheim, over and under the autobahn, but we no longer saw the fence.

“You ought to have a word with some of the local people, Herr Self.” Peschkalek had not said much during our reconnaissance, but he became talkative once we reached Viern-heim. “Poison gas. You heard it yourself. You'd think it would worry the people around here. But it doesn't. What surprises me is that our wild young reporter”-he pointed in the direction where he imagined the offices of the Viern-heimer Tageblatt to be-”even managed to get his little article printed. Nobody here wants to read that kind of stuff.” He headed along the road to Heddesheim, but soon took a right. “Just one more small detour, Herr Self.”

We drove past long rows of fruit trees and rapeseed fields beneath a blue sky. In the distance mountains rose and quarries shone. A water tower and a small church with a roof turret appeared before us, surrounded by a few farms, cottages, and old meadows-the perfect summer idyll.

“Have you ever been to Strassenheim?” Peschkalek asked me. I nodded. He drove slowly. “You're wondering why I brought you here? Take a good look.”

I was struck by the stately building next to the church. According to a sign, it housed the mounted detachment and the canine unit of the Mannheim police headquarters. “No, take a good look. There, that truck to the left, and those two to the right. Do you know what they are? They're tanker trucks, each carrying thousands of liters of water. Water for drinking and cooking, and also for the animals. Why do you think these trucks are here? Well?” He enjoyed the suspense. “It looks like the regular water isn't drinkable, wouldn't you say? I suppose that though Strassenheim belongs to Mannheim, it is not connected to Mannheim's water supply, nor to that of Viernheim or Heddesheim. Strassenheim must have its own wells. Can they have dried up? With all the rain we've had in the past few weeks? No, there's plenty of water around here, and the water looks perfectly clear. It might smell a little, but then again it might not. It might taste a little weird, but then again it might not. I'm not saying that you drop dead if you drink it. Perhaps you'll feel a bit queasy, or maybe even get sick as a dog; maybe you'll shit or retch your guts out.”

Strassenheim lay behind us.

“How come you know all this?”

“I'm the kind of guy who puts two and two together. Know what I mean? The official agencies will never tell you anything, but here they're keeping such a low profile that that in itself is suspicious.” He began driving faster again. “We're crossing the border of the Käfertal watershed area. The munitions depot lies in the outer perimeter. Viernheim junction, where the inner perimeter of the wells begins, is about two kilometers beyond Strassenheim. It's anybody's guess how the damn groundwater flows. Be that as it may, Strassenheim has had to bear the brunt of it.” His right hand made a resigned wave, came clapping down onto his bald head, and then brushed back all the missing locks of hair. He chewed his mustache angrily, his teeth grinding.

I can't say that the sky looked any less blue or the rapeseed any less yellow. I've always had trouble believing in the existence of something I cannot see: God, Einstein's relativity, the harmfulness of smoking, the hole in the ozone. I was also skeptical because the munitions depot lay only a few kilometers away from the Benjamin-Franklin-Village in Käfertal, and I had a hard time imagining that the Americans would put their own people at risk. Not to mention that Viernheim lay closer to the depot than Strassenheim, and Viernheim's water supply didn't seem to have been affected. All things considered, had Peschkalek himself tasted the Strassenheim water, or had he sent it to be analyzed?

We were back in Edingen. As we drove down the Grenz-häfer Strasse, we saw Frau Büchler and Wendt's people coming out of the Grüner Baum Restaurant. The funeral meal had taken a long time. My old Opel was waiting in front of the cemetery.

“You and I have to talk this through at leisure,” I said to Peschkalek.

He handed me his card. “Call me when you have a moment. You don't believe me, do you? You're thinking: These are the ravings of a reporter, this is journalistic gob-bledygook. Well, let's pray that you're right.”

7 Tragedy or farce?

Peschkalek's poisonous groundwater streams pursued me into my dreams, and I saw the small Strassenheim chapel grow into a cathedral, the gargoyles on its roof spitting green, yellow, and red water. By the time I realized that the cathedral was made of rubber, its walls bloating and distending, it was too late. It exploded, and revolting brown slime burst from it. I woke up as the slime was about to reach my feet, and I couldn't go back to sleep. During my conversation with Peschkalek I had not been frightened. Now I was.

My father's stories came back to me. Throughout the years I was at school, he hadn't said a word about his experiences in World War I. Some of my classmates bragged about their fathers' heroic deeds, and I would have liked to have done the same. I knew that mine had been wounded a number of times, that he had been decorated and promoted. I wanted to talk about that at school, to brag a little. But he didn't want me to. He only became talkative in the last few years of his life. Mother had died, his days had become lonely, and when I visited him he spoke about many things, and about the war. Perhaps he also wanted to rid me of the idea that the Reich needed more lebensraum, even if it meant war.

He had been wounded three times. The first two times decently, as he put it, by a grenade splinter near Ypers and by a bayonet near Peronne. The third time, his company suffered a gas attack at Verdun. “Mustard gas. It's not a stinking, yellowish-green cloud, like chlorine gas, which you can see and so protect yourself against. Mustard gas is devious. You don't see it and you don't smell it. If you didn't see a comrade grab at his throat or didn't have a sixth sense and quickly slip on your gas mask, then that was it, in the blink of an eye.” My father had had a sixth sense and survived, while most of the men in his company had died. But he had gotten a big enough dose of gas to suffer for months. “The fever went. But that dizziness, even when you weren't moving, and all the retching, retching, retching…and then, mustard gas burns out the eyes. That was the worst part, the fear that it had got you in such a way that you'd never be able to see again.”

I heard the story of the gas attack more than once. Every time my father spoke about putting on the gas mask, he closed his eyes and covered his face with his hand, until he came to the part where he was released from the infirmary.

Had Leo known what her bonfire was capable of? Was that what she had wanted? Was that why she had accused and convicted herself so sternly? As for Lemke, I couldn't imagine that he didn't know what it was all about.

I was now fully awake. Terrorism in Germany. I had read somewhere that all major historical events happen twice, the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce, and I had always seen the terrorism of the seventies and eighties, the commotion around it and the fight against it, as some kind of farce. Now I had to ask myself if I had been wrong. Poison gas in the air, the water, and the ground was no farce. And there I was, driving with Leo through France and Switzerland as if the world were one long spring.

Now self-recrimination was added to my fear. Whichever way I lay in bed felt wrong. Whether my eyes were open or shut, my thoughts whirled in the same circle. They whirled crazily until the dawn broke, the birds sang, and I showered and was once again my conscious, rational, skeptical self.

8 It makes sense, doesn't it?

I had promised Brigitte and Manu that we would spend Saturday in Heidelberg. Shopping, some ice cream, the zoo, the castle-the works. We took a tram and got off at the Bismarckplatz.

I hadn't been there for a long time. Everything was purple: The tram stops, tram shelters, kiosks, benches, trash cans, lights. The purpleness was disturbed by a yellow mailbox and a pale bust of Bismarck.

“How do you like that! The women's movement has taken over the Bismarckplatz!”

Brigitte stopped. “You and your silly chauvinism. Füruzan is oppressing Philipp, I am oppressing you, and now women have occupied the Bismarckplatz and you, poor man that you are, no longer know-”

“Come on, Brigitte, I was only joking.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” She walked off without beckoning me or Manu with a look or gesture to follow her, and I suddenly felt guilty, even though my conscience was clear. She marched into the Braun bookstore, and I waited outside. Should I have followed her to the Women's Studies section with suppliant eyes, drooping shoulders, and sensitive questions? Manu stayed outside with Nonni and me.

We watched the heavy traffic on the Sophienstrasse. “Where do they come out?” Manu asked, pointing at the cars disappearing down the entrance to the underground garage on the Sophienstrasse.

“Somewhere behind these trees, I think.”

“Can they come out where we parked the other day?”

I didn't understand what he meant. “But that was…Do you mean the underground garage behind the Heilig-Geist Church?”

“Yes, that's how it is sometimes, isn't it?” Manu said. “I mean, you come up somewhere different from where you disappeared. It would be great if you could go under the earth from one underground garage to another whenever all the parking spaces are full or if there's a traffic jam. It makes sense, doesn't it?” He looked at me as if I were a little slow and launched into an intricate explanation.

I stopped listening. His vision of an underground flow of traffic took me back to Peschkalek's poisonous groundwater streams.

“You're not even listening!”

Brigitte came out of the bookstore. I bought her a skirt that flared out, and she bought me a pair of shorts in which I looked like a Brit on the River Kwai. Manu wanted a pair of jeans-not any old jeans, a specific brand-and we went all the way up the main street to the Heilig-Geist Church. I find the tide of strolling consumers in pedestrian areas no more agreeable, either aesthetically or morally, than comrades on parade or soldiers on the march. But I have grave doubts that I will live to see Heidelberg's main street once again filled with cheerfully ringing trams, cars honking happily, and related, bustling people hurrying to places where they have something to do, and not simply to places where there's something to see, something to nibble at, or something to buy.

“Let's give the castle a miss,” I said, and Brigitte and Manu stared at me, crestfallen. “Let's forget about the zoo, too.”

“But you said we-”

“I have a much better idea. We'll go flying.”

I didn't have to suggest it twice. We took a tram back to Mannheim and got out at the Neuostheim airfield. A small tower, a small office, a small runway, and small airplanes- Manu had seen bigger and better things on his flight from Rio de Janeiro to Frankfurt. But he was enraptured. I signed up for a half-hour flight. The pilot who was to take us up got his one-propeller four-seater ready for takeoff. We went rattling down the runway and rose into the air.

Mannheim lay beneath us like a toy town, neat and dapper. It would have been wonderful for the elector who had ordered the squares to be laid out centuries ago to see his city from this perspective. The Rhine and the Neckar glittered in the sun, the stacks of the Rhineland Chemical Works sent little white clouds puffing into the sky, and the fountains by the Water Tower danced in their basins. Manu was quick to spot the Luisenpark, the Kurpfalz Bridge, and the Collini Center where Brigitte has her massage practice. The friendly pilot flew an extra arc until Manu managed to spot his house in the Max-Joseph-Strasse.

“Could we swing over to Viernheim?”

“Is that where you live?” the pilot asked me.

“I used to.”

Brigitte's interest was piqued. “When did you live in Viern-heim?” she asked me. “I didn't know that.”

“After the war. For a while, that is.”

Beneath us were the blocks of the Benjamin-Franklin-Village. The golf course, the autobahn junction, the Rhein-Neckar Center, the narrow, crooked streets surrounding the town hall and churches. We had reached the last houses of Viernheim, and the pilot swung to the right.

I pointed left. “I'd rather fly back over the forest than over Heddesheim.”

“In that case, we'll have to climb quite a bit higher.”

“Why's that?”

He flew toward Weinheim and began to pick up altitude. “It's the Americans. They have a camp in the forest. There's no taking pictures either.”

“What will happen if we don't climb higher? Will they shoot us down?”

“No idea. What is it you want to see?”

“To tell you the truth, it's the camp I want to see. Back in 1945, it was a prisoner-of-war camp-that's how I got to know the forest.”

“Ah, old memories. Let's see what we can do.” He swung to the left without rising any higher, but picked up speed.

I couldn't spot the fence, but I saw the grass-covered bunkers, some on the open field, others hidden among trees. I saw the connecting asphalt paths and the clearings in which trucks or trailers in camouflage paint were parked close to one another. An area farther on was practically without vegetation and had been flattened by truck or tank tracks.

Then, not far from the autobahn, I saw bulldozers, conveyer belts, and trucks at work. Dirt had been dug up over a surface the size of a tennis court. I could not tell how far down they had dug, or if something was being buried or dug up. It was surrounded by woods, but at one end of the tennis court the trees were black, charred skeletons. There had been a fire.

9 Old hat

“You weren't really in Viernheim at that camp, were you? You never mentioned it before,” Brigitte said when Manu was already in bed and we were sitting like an old married couple on the couch in front of the TV.

“No, I wasn't. It has to do with the case I'm working on.”

“If you want some inside information about Viernheim, I have a girlfriend who lives there. Actually, she's a colleague, and you know how we masseuses find out everything, just like hairdressers and priests.”

“That sounds great. Can you set up a meeting?”

“What would you do without me?”

Brigitte stood up, gave Lisa a call, and arranged for us to meet for coffee on Sunday.

“She's a single mother, too, and her daughter Sonya is the same age as Manu. We've been wanting to set up a play date for the two of them, and Lisa's been saying she wants to see what kind of a man I-”

“Have managed to bag?”

“Your words, not mine.” Brigitte sat back down next to me. In the movie we were watching, an old man was in love with a young woman who loved him, too, but they gave each other up because he was old and she was young. “What a stupid movie,” Brigitte said. “But we had such a great day today, didn't we?” She looked at me.

At first I was worried that a straightforward yes would again conjure up the question of marriage and children, and I had every intention of answering with a noncommittal grunt. Never say yes or no when the other person will make do with an mm. But then I did say yes, and Brigitte snuggled up to me, quiet and content.

At ten o'clock the following morning I was at the Church of the Resurrection in Viernheim. I tried in vain to remember the name of the presbyter who'd commissioned me to find Saint Catherine all those years ago. After the sermon and the chorale, he sent a collection box down the rows, recognized me, and nodded to me. The sermon had focused on the dangers of addiction, and the chorale on the willfulness of the flesh, and the collection was to go to rehabilitate drug addicts. I was prepared to drop my pack of Sweet Aftons into the collection box and give up smoking forever. But what would I have smoked after church?

“To what do we owe this pleasure, Herr Self?” I had waited for him in front of the church, and he came over to me right away. Behind us the tram drove past.

“I have some questions to which you might know the answers. Let me invite you for a round or two.”

We went over to the Golden Lamb.

“Hello there, Weller! You're early today!” the pub keeper called out to the presbyter, and took us over to his regular table.

“We can have a nice quiet chat,” Weller said. “The others won't be turning up till later.” We ordered two glasses of house wine.

“I'm working on a murder case. There was a map in the victim's briefcase that showed the woods to the north of Viernheim, the Viernheim Meadows, and the Lampertheim National Forest. I don't think he was killed on account of the map-but maybe on account of the forest? I keep hearing things about that forest, and I keep reading things about it. I'm sure you know the article that appeared in the Viern-heimer Tageblatt back in March.”

He nodded. “That wasn't the only article, you know. There was one in Spiegel about poison gas in the forest, and in Stern, too. Never anything specific, just rumors. And you're hoping I'll tell you what's going on, am I right? Ah, Herr Self.” He shook his gray head.

I remembered that he was an upholsterer by trade, and that back then he'd had his own upholstery business and was complaining that everyone was going to IKEA to buy their couches and chairs at a discount. They'd sit on them till they fell apart and then throw them out.

“Do you still have your upholstery business?”

“Yes, and things have picked up again. I have quite a few clients from Heidelberg and Mannheim now who are into upholstering their old furniture. Things they have from Grandma and Grandpa, or just antiques. But what do you want me to tell you about the forest? To be honest, I don't give it much thought. No point. I'm sure they see to it that nothing happens. It's not my place to tell them how to run their business-just as it's not their place to tell me how to run mine. If something were to happen, I mean, because technically something could happen, what am I supposed to do? Move away? Kiss my house and business good-bye, just because some muckrakers are dredging up mud in the papers?”

A stubby little man with an important air approached us, tapped the table twice with his fist, greeted us with a playful “Enjoy,” and sat down.

“This is Herr Hasenklee,” Weller told me, “our headmaster.” Drawn into the conversation by Weller, he lost no time in assuring me that he wouldn't be running a school here if his pupils were in any kind of danger.

“And if they were, what would you do?”

“What kind of question is that? I've been a teacher for twenty years and have always been totally committed to my pupils.”

Other regulars joined us: a pharmacist, a doctor, the manager of the local savings bank, a baker, and a man who ran the local employment office. Poison gas in the Lampertheim National Forest? That's old hat. But the director of the employment office dropped a few hints, which the bank manager made specific: “I'll tell you something, it's not a coincidence that this rumor keeps surfacing. Viernheim is an industrial zone that's waging all-out competition on every side. First there's Mannheim, which needs every penny it can scrape together, then there's Weinheim, which is expanding its industrial zone around the autobahn junction, and the minute we here in Viernheim come up with an investor, the guys in Lampertheim snatch him away with a juicier offer. There are solid interests behind these rumors, I tell you, solid interests.” The others nodded. “I'm glad they removed the stuff from Fischbach, though. That way, all the claptrap about poison gas has stopped making headlines.”-”Then again, maybe it's our turn now. You know, Viernheim instead of Fischbach?”- “Nonsense. All the papers said that with Operation Lindwurm all the poison gas was cleared out of Germany.”-”It's incredible that the Viernheimer Tageblatt printed that story in March.”-”Have you noticed the reporter who's been creeping around here for the past few days?”-”And then on top of everything, we have to be nice to those guys, otherwise they take it out on us.”

“Don't forget the Communists,” Headmaster Hasenklee, sitting next to me, mumbled. “For them something like this would be heaven-sent.”

“In this day and age?”

“We used to have old Henlein around here-back in the sixties and seventies he kept handing out fliers about the forest and making a big stink. He was a Communist. It's true you don't hear anything about him anymore, or about Marx or Lenin. But if you ask me, our Karl-Marx-Strasse here is an outrage. Leningrad has been changed back to Petersburg, and in a few years you won't find a single street or square with Karl Marx's name on it anywhere in the East-except here in Viernheim!”

I asked if they knew about the tanker trucks in Strassen-heim. They did. “You mean the orange trucks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency? They're always around, doing exercises and things.”

I took my leave. The streets were empty. Everyone was already sitting at their Sunday roast, and I hurried to the green dumplings and the Thüringer leg of mutton that was roasting in Brigitte's oven. She has managed a seamless culinary unification of East and West German cuisines.

I didn't know whether Weller and his friends at the Golden Lamb had been putting on a charade for me or for themselves, or if they had told me what they really and truly believed. Weller's position was clear. Even if poison gas was being stockpiled in the forest, posing a threat to him and everyone else, you couldn't simply get up and leave, turning your back on everything you had worked for all your life. Were you supposed to start all over again at the age of sixty in Neustadt or Gross Gerau? One didn't do that at fifty, or even at forty. The only difference is that when one is younger one might still have a few illusions. I understood all that. And yet the presbyter and his friends at the pub struck me as weird, as I thought of them sitting there at that gloomy, smoky table, spinning out their conspiracy theories.

The afternoon was bright and breezy. We had our coffee in the garden. Manu followed in his Brazilian father's footsteps by flirting up a storm with Sonya, while Brigitte's friend Lisa turned out to be a very nice young woman. She knew all the stories about poison gas in the forest. She also remembered old Henlein, a hunchbacked little man who, for a long time, Saturday after Saturday, had stood on the Apostelplatz handing out flyers. She also knew about patients who periodically complained of rashes, suppurative sinusitis, cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea-this more often than in Rohrbach, where she had lived and worked before.

“Did you ever discuss this with any of the local doctors?”

“I did, and they knew exactly what I was talking about. But at the end of the day, none of us was really sure. You'd have to do a statistical analysis with control groups. And there is the Association of Insurance-Approved Physicians, which does all the accounts and has an overview. You'd think that the Association would notice if things in our district were different than elsewhere.”

“Are you worried?”

She looked me straight in the eyes. “Of course I'm worried. Chernobyl, global warming, the destruction of the rain forests and biodiversity, cancer, AIDS-how can one not be worried in this world?”

“Do you think one should be particularly worried in Viern-heim?”

She shrugged her shoulders. By the end of our discussion I realized that I hadn't dug up any more than I had that morning at the Golden Lamb. And that it was Sunday, and that Sunday is not a day for digging, was no consolation.

10 And both sound so harmonious together

I brought Turbo back home. He had broken Rudi the rat's neck, and Räschen had retaliated by giving him some tuna. He seemed to be losing his figure.

I dedicated the evening to my couch. I took a razor blade, one of those big old ones that are nice and sturdy, not the platinum-laminated, double-track blades embedded in a springy razor head. I tipped the couch on its side, cut open the seam at the bottom, plunged my arm into the stuffing, and groped around for the bullet from Lemke's gun. The other bullet, which had sent Dante's marble Beatrice plunging into the Inferno, I had thrown out with the fragments in my befuddled confusion. But that bullet hadn't been preserved as well as the one I had managed to fish out of the couch. The other one had finished off the marble, which in turn had flattened and scratched it. The first bullet had been gently buffered by the stuffing of the couch. I showed the smooth, shiny, shapely and malignant projectile to Turbo, but he didn't want to play with it.

Sewing the seams back together again proved harder than cutting them open. I see sewing and ironing as active meditation and often think with envy of the many, many women to whom this meditative bliss falls in such abundance. But in the case of my couch it was a tough battle with leather, needle, thimble, and a thread that kept breaking.

When the job was done I set the couch upright, put away the sewing kit, and went out onto the balcony. The air was mild. The first moths of summer beat against the window or found their way in through the door and danced about the ceiling light. I have no bone to pick with my age, but there are early summer evenings when, if you're not young and in love, you're simply out of place in this world. I sighed, closed the door, and drew the curtains.

The phone rang. I picked up, and at first heard only a loud crackling and a low, distant voice I couldn't understand. Then the voice sounded near and clear, although the crackling continued in the background and every spoken word was echoed. “Gerhard? Hello? Gerhard?” It was Leo.

“Where are you?”

“I'm to tell you…I want to tell you, that you needn't be frightened of Helmut.”

“What I'm worried about is you. Where are you?”

“Hello, Gerhard? Hello? I can't hear you. Are you still there?”

“Where are you?”

The line had gone dead.

I thought of Tyberg's pleading for us to mind our own business. I could see Leo with Lemke in Palestine or Libya. When we were together, I was certain that she wasn't setting her sights on a career in terrorism. She had gotten mixed up in a foolish thing, wanted to leave it behind her and get out of it unscathed and lead a normal life again-if not the old life, then a new one. I was also certain that this would be the best solution. Children don't get better in prison. But they don't get better in guerrilla training camps in Palestine or Libya either.

These are not the kind of thoughts that are conducive to sound sleep. I was up early, and early at Nägelsbach's office in Heidelberg.

“All's forgiven and forgotten?” I asked.

He smiled. “You and I are working on the same case. I hear that your new client is old Herr Wendt. But all things considered, neither you nor I know where the other stands. Am I right?”

“But you and I both know that whatever the other is doing can't be all wrong.”

“I should hope so.”

I put the bullet on the desk in front of him. “Can you find out if this comes from the same gun that killed Wendt? And can we get together this evening? In your garden or on my balcony?”

“Come over to our place. My wife would be pleased.” He picked up the bullet and balanced it in his hand. “I'll have the results by this evening.”

At the editorial office of the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung I found Tietzke at his computer. The way he was sitting there reminded me of one of those Jehovah's Witnesses who stand with their Watchtower on street corners. The same gray, joyless, hopeless conscientiousness. I didn't ask him what gray subject matter he was writing about.

“Do you have time for a coffee?” I asked.

He continued typing without looking up. “I'll meet you at the Café Schafheutle in exactly thirty minutes. A mocha, two eggs in a glass, a graham roll, butter, honey, and a couple of slices of Emmental or Appenzell cheese. We got a deal?”

“We got a deal.”

He ate with gusto. “Lemke? Sure I know him. Or rather, knew him. Back in 1967, '68, he was quite a figure here in Heidelberg. You should have heard how he whipped up auditorium thirteen. When the right-wingers, who hated him with a vengeance, started chanting 'Sieg Heil Lemke, Sieg Heil Lemke!' and he would lead a competing chorus of 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!' all hell would break loose. At first if the chanting wasn't at full blast, he could shout them down. Then they'd get louder, and he'd fall silent and stand motionlessly on the podium, wait for a moment, raise his arms, and then begin hammering the lectern with both fists to the beat of 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.' At first you couldn't hear him above the shouting of the others, then some would begin chanting with him, and then more and more. Then he would stand there silently. After a while he'd stop banging his fists on the lectern and start waving his arms, just like a conductor. Often he'd turn this into a comic skit, and the auditorium would end up roaring with laughter. Even when the right-wingers were a majority, 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh' would win out over 'Sieg Heil Lemke.' He had a great feel for timing and would start at the moment when the others were still yelling for all they were worth but beginning to run out of breath.”

“Did you know him personally?”

“I wasn't into politics back then. He was in that radical Students for a Democratic Society party, and sometimes I'd show up there the way I'd show up at the other political parties. I was just an observer. I didn't meet Lemke there, but in a movie theater. Do you remember those spaghetti Westerns back in the late sixties? Every week a new one would hit the theaters, a Leone movie, a Corbucci, a Colizzi, and whatever else their names were. For a while the Americans caught on that that was the new style of Western and made some good movies themselves. Back then the movies didn't premiere on Thursdays but on Fridays, and every Friday at two Lemke would be in the first row at the Lux or the Harmonie, sitting there with a couple of friends from the SDS-he'd never miss any of those openings. I, too, was eager to see the movie at the very first showing, and as the theater was empty except for us, sooner or later we got to talking. Not about politics, but about movies. You know Casablanca, right, the scene where the German officers sing the 'Wacht am Rhein' and the French sing the 'Marseillaise,' and both sound so harmonious together? He once told me that that was how he wanted it to be with 'Sieg Heil Lemke' and 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.' That was the most political conversation we ever had. Back then, you know, I actually liked him.”

“Later you didn't?”

“After the Students for a Democratic Society were outlawed, he joined the Communist League of West Germany, a cadre party with a Central Committee and general secretary, and all that crap. He started out as a candidate, then became a member of the Central Committee, lived in a high-rise in Frankfurt, edited party information bulletins, and drove around in a big black Saab-I don't know if it had a driver and a curtain or not. I don't think he finished university. Sometimes I'd bump into him at the Weinloch Bar, but he stopped going to the movies, and I was in no mood to talk about world revolution and the Russian, Chinese, and Albanian paths. At the beginning of the eighties the Communist League was disbanded. Some of them went over to the Green Party or to the German Communist Party, some ended up with the anarchists, and some simply were fed up with politics. I don't know what became of Lemke. There was a rumor that he'd made off with a hefty chunk of cash from party funds when the Communist League was disbanded and that he settled in America, where he speculated in stocks. There was also talk that Lemke was Carlos, the arch terrorist. But all of that is rumors and bullshit.”

“Have you run into him recently?”

“No. Not too long ago I did bump into someone else from those first-row movie seats, a theologian who is now the head of the Evangelical Academy in Husum. We talked a bit about old times, and it turns out he's still reappraising the '68 radicals in his seminars at the academy. That's it. I've got to get back to the office. So-are you going to tell me what's in it for me, besides coffee and cake? What are you looking into right now?”

“I wish I knew.”

11 Under the pear tree

Nägelsbach shook his head when I looked over at his workshop. “I don't have anything to show today. In fact, I've dropped the idea of doing Rodin's Kiss in matchsticks-it was a crazy idea. I could see how embarrassed you were the other day when I was carrying on with all that nonsense about matchstick sculpture. Thank God I have Reni.”

We were standing on the lawn. He had his arm around his wife, and she nestled against him. They'd always struck me as a loving couple before their recent crisis, but I'd never seen them so much in love.

“Don't look so surprised,” she said to me, laughing, and smiled up at her husband. “Come on, let's tell him.”

“Well…” Nägelsbach grinned. “When the model arrived-it's standing over there-Reni said we ought to sit like that, too, so I could get a better feel for the sculpture. And so we…”

“Made up again?”

A replica of Rodin's lovers kissing stood among the flowering rhododendrons; Nägelsbach looked somewhat gaunter in the flesh, and his wife plumper, but Rodin would surely have been delighted by this double echo.

We sat under the pear tree. Frau Nägelsbach had made some strawberry punch.

“The bullet you brought over is from the same weapon with which Wendt was shot. Are you also bringing me the murderer?”

“I don't know. I'll tell you how far I've gotten. On January sixth, four men and a woman launched a bomb attack on an American military installation in the Lampertheim National Forest-”

“In Käfertal,” he interrupted.

“Don't interrupt him,” Frau Nägelsbach intervened.

“The woman and two of the men managed to escape, but one of the others was killed and another arrested. The media mentioned two dead men: The other one must have been a soldier or a guard. I don't know if there had been an exchange of gunfire or if it was the explosion. That's not important.”

“I heard it was the bomb,” Nägelsbach said.

“For the police it was bad luck in disguise. They had caught some guy called Bertram and made him talk, but he didn't know all that much about his accomplices. He knew Leonore Salger and the man who had died-some Giselher or other-but he didn't know the two men who got away. Now I'm not saying that the terrorists put their team together willy-nilly, so that the members wouldn't know each other and couldn't give each other away. The way I see it, the attack was more a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. Anyway, Bertram could give only a vague description of the two men, because he didn't know them. And, let's face it, in the night all terrorists are gray-not to mention that they'd blackened their faces. The pictures that are being used for the manhunt are composites, right?”

“I'm not working on this case,” Nägelsbach replied, “but if the Agency doesn't have their names…Did the media say these were composites?”

“Maybe they did and I missed it. Anyway, on January sixth we have the attack, and it's not until May that the search is made public? There could have been a public appeal for information right after the attack. There could have been pictures in the media the moment the arrested man began talking, identified Leonore Salger, and described the two men. That would have been in February at the latest, because at that point the police were already looking for Leonore Salger. And yet when the public appeal for information finally came, we were given as good as no information about the time, place, and circumstances of the attack. You're not going to tell me that this is the way things are usually done, are you?”

“As I said before, I'm not working on this case. But if the Americans request that we treat the attack on their terrain confidentially, and that we tread carefully, then that's exactly what we do.”

“Why would they make such a request?” I asked.

“How should I know? Maybe Holy Islamic Warriors had threatened them with an attack like this in retaliation for their support of Israel, or perhaps some Panamanians were trying to free Noriega. In that case the Americans would have to weigh how to handle this from a foreign-policy perspective. There could be thousands of reasons.”

“Then how come they went public on the very day Wendt was killed?” I asked him.

“Was it the same day?”

Frau Nägelsbach nodded. “Yes, it was,” she said. “When the name 'Salger' came up in the late-night news, I remembered it right away because of the spat the two of you had just had. And then by the time you came home late that night, because you were working on the Wendt case, my asparagus soufflé had collapsed.”

“It all fits together, because in Wendt's briefcase there was a map showing the section of the Lampertheim National Forest where the Americans have their depot and where the attack took place. I know you're saying that the attack was in Käfertal, and that Viernheim is not in your jurisdiction, and that it is the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency that deals with terrorist attacks. But someone in your office had to have seen the connection and made it clear to the decision makers that it was high time for them to go public. Because they couldn't take the risk that the attack would trigger God knows what else after Wendt's murder. And that someone in your office was right.”

Nägelsbach's face remained a blank. Was he the someone who had seen the connection? Had he known from the start that the attack had been in Viernheim and nowhere else? Was the matter so secret and delicate that he preferred to play the fool rather than give anything away? I shot a glance at his wife. I knew from experience that she was up-to-date on everything that preoccupied him. “There are no professional secrets in a childless couple,” was one of his mottos. She eyed us nervously.

“The bullet that killed Wendt comes from a gun that belongs to one of the two men you're looking for,” I said. “Helmut Lemke, mid-forties, not unknown in Heidelberg. I don't have a recent photograph of him, but the one I've got here is better than the composites you have, and I have no doubt that the photographers from the Agency will know how to make him look fifteen years older.” I gave him a copy of one of the pictures I had from Leo's photo album.

“Why would Lemke have shot Wendt?” Frau Nägelsbach asked.

“I don't know,” I replied. “All we know for sure is that Wendt was killed with Lemke's gun. I'm hoping your husband and I might put our heads together on this one.”

“I don't know how much I can contribute,” Nägelsbach said. “You seem to know more than I do. Of course we put out a search for the man and the VW Golf that Frau Klein-schmidt saw, questioned the neighbors, and looked for people who'd been out walking. But it was pouring that day, as you well know, and nobody saw anything. Or at least anything we could use. In the house the Golf was parked in front of, the children kept looking out the window, as they were waiting for their mother. The girl says the Golf was red, the boy says black-and they don't recall the license plate.” He laughed. “Crazy as it may sound, every time I come across a red or a black Golf, I try to catch a glimpse of the driver. Does that sort of thing ever happen to you?”

“You bet it does.” I waited, but Nägelsbach did not continue. “It almost sounds as if the Wendt case has ended up in the files,” I said.

“To tell you the truth, we didn't know what else we could do,” Nägelsbach said. “Now that you have brought us all these new leads, we can set things rolling again. But who is Lemke? Where did his and Wendt's paths cross? Might Wendt have been the fifth man in the attack after all?”

“No, he wasn't.”

“You're handing me that on a silver platter, too. I guess you won't want to tell me how you come to know that either?”

“If you're hinting that I haven't told you where I have the bullet from, I'll be glad to make amends.”

I told him about my encounter with Lemke.

“But now you have definitely found out a good deal more from me than I have from you,” I said.

Frau Nägelsbach agreed with me. “I think you owe Herr Self something, too.”

He disagreed. “I will keep him posted, I assure you. But he had a bullet, and I had one. Both he and I had to bring them together so we could compare them and ascertain that they came from the same weapon. Now we're both moving forward. My progress I have already mentioned. And he can call his client tomorrow morning and announce his first success.”

12 Tearing along

That is exactly what I did. Frau Büchler was pleased. No, I could not speak to Herr and Frau Wendt yet. They were in Badenweiler with their daughter.

The morning was cool, and I wore a sweater with my corduroys and hiking boots. I drove over the Friedrich-Ebert Bridge, the Friedrich-Ebert Strasse, through Käfertal and Vogelstang, and over the Entlastungsstrasse to Viernheim, where the Nibelungenstrasse took me to yet another Friedrich-Ebert Strasse. Everything flows: We drive along the same Friedrich-Ebert Strasse and yet it is not the same Friedrich-Ebert Strasse, we are the same and yet not the same.

To my left the fence reached the Lorscher Weg Road, and I parked my old Opel and walked. I followed the fence westward through the woods. The ground was springy beneath my feet, the birds were singing, the trees were rustling in the wind, and an aroma of pine resin, decaying foliage, and fresh green hung in the air. I didn't see any watchdogs or security patrols on the asphalt path behind the fence, nor did the fence look as if it had been damaged or repaired in the last few months. After a quarter of an hour, the rustling grew louder-it wasn't the wind anymore, but the autobahn. The fence ran northward alongside it. The cars tore past me, and once an empty can barely missed my head. I was glad when the fence veered back into the woods again.

But then I changed my mind. I knew that the tire tracks left by the car Leo's group had used to get to the depot would no longer be there, but I wanted to see what route they might have taken. The embankment that I found posed no problem for a regular car. I also found a wide path through the woods that a car could easily have used, and which could be reached from the embankment. The path led out of the woods and into an open area with stunted shrubs, dried grass, blueberry bushes, and wildflowers. Leo had said that they followed a path leading across the meadows to the woods, and I followed the path to where I imagined the fence to be behind the trees. I made a mental note of the rampant brambles along the edge of the woods so I could come back in August for some berry picking. In the woods I soon came upon the fence again.

I saw right away that this part of the fence had been repaired. I listened for the bulldozers, the conveyer belts, and the trucks that I had seen from the airplane. I heard the birds, the wind, the distant rumbling of the cars-otherwise there was silence. My watch showed ten o'clock. Was the construction crew on a break? I sat down on a rock and waited.

Then I heard something that at first I couldn't place. Did conveyer belts rattle like that? Did bulldozers squeak like that? But the rumble of engines was missing. I couldn't believe the guards would be patrolling the fence on mountain bikes, but that is exactly what it sounded like. Then I heard voices, one light and one deep.

“Do be careful, Eva!”

“I am being careful, Grandpa, I am.”

“If you keep tearing along like this I'll end up with a broken neck. And when you rattle me like this, I can't stop coughing-cough cough cough.”

“It's not the rattling that makes you cough, it's the smoking!”

“No, no, Eva. The cigarettes have hit me in the legs, not the lungs.”

Eva, flushed and sweating, must have been about eighteen; Grandpa in his wheelchair was somewhere between eighty and a hundred and ten. He was a shriveled little man with sparse white hair and a thin beard like that of a Chinese sage. He was hunchbacked and sat crookedly in his wheelchair, his hands gripping the armrests, and the stump of his leg, which had been amputated below the knee, rested against the raised footrest. In their struggle, Eva and Grandpa only saw me when I got up from the rock I was sitting on. They looked at me as if I'd come from another planet.

“Good morning,” I said. “Fine weather we're having.” I couldn't think of anything better.

Eva returned my greeting. “Good morning.”

“Shh!” Grandpa cut into Eva's and my budding conversation. “Can you hear them? I knew it!”

We listened, and now the bulldozers, conveyer belts, and trucks could clearly be heard.

“I suppose they're just back from their break,” I said, and the two of them looked at me, even more surprised. “You meant the construction going on beyond the fence, didn't you? The new fence. Does the construction interest you?”

“Does it…? You're not from these parts, are you? When I got my pension and still had both legs-cough coughcough-I used to walk along this fence every day. Later I came as often as I could, at least once a week. Now she brings me here whenever she can. If you were from around here, I'd know you. And you'd know me, too-cough cough-No one else ever comes here.”

“I've heard about you, Herr Henlein.”

“What do you say to that, Eva? People have heard about me. Are you with the Green Party? Are you interested in the forest again? I heard about that-cough cough-you're all rearing to go, and then you fizzle out because you can't get quick results. All you guys want to make the world a better place, but you don't even take the time to hear what I've got to say.”

“I didn't know you were still active. Where do you live? Could we meet somewhere?”

“You'll have to come over to Mannheim. I don't live in Viernheim anymore. I live near my children-cough cough- in E 6, in a retirement home. Come on, Eva, off we go.”

I followed them with my eyes. She was dexterous and had a knack for steering the wheelchair clear of roots and stones, but didn't manage to dodge them all. She needed all her strength to push the wheelchair, with Henlein cursing loudly, over some of the obstacles.

I hurried after them. “Would you like me to help you?”

“I can manage, thank you very much-cough cough.”

“You can manage, Grandpa, but I wouldn't mind a little help,” Eva said.

It took us almost two hours to reach the road. Henlein cursed, coughed, and reminisced about his campaigns in the sixties and seventies, with which he wanted to get to the bottom of things. “The Americans' poison gas-that wasn't even the worst of it. You can bet they'd be pretty careful when they handle that stuff. But what about the old stuff…” In 1935, he'd been interned in a concentration camp, and in 1945 put to work moving and burying the Wehrmacht's stocks of poison gas. “Near Lossa, Sondershausen and Dingelstädt in East Germany-I wrote about that later on and even managed to go there and hand out flyers. But the East German authorities deported me back to the West. Ha, there's model Communists for you! Then I did the same thing here in Viernheim. There were rumors that there was poison gas from World War I still buried in Viernheim. Yellow-cross gas, blue-cross gas, mustard gas, and later on we dug in tabun and sarin.” After Hen-lein had been freed from the concentration camp, he'd drifted around for a while, and in 1953 came to Mannheim. There he worked at Brown Boveri & Co., married in 1955, and built a house in Viernheim. He saw it as preordained (if for a Communist there is such a thing) that he ended up here. His calling in life was to fight to defuse the time bomb in the Lam-pertheim National Forest. “Maybe it stopped ticking ages ago. Maybe the Americans dug everything up after '45 and took it all away. But would you believe a thing like that?”

I invited Grandpa and Eva for lunch in the Kleiner Rosen-garten, and then drove Henlein back to his retirement home. His room was filled with binders. He had been collecting material since 1955. I read how poison gas is manufactured, stored, and employed, how it works and how one can protect oneself, and where it was manufactured and stored in Germany-and that nobody really seems to know where it was buried after World War I and II. Henlein had cut out every local and regional report containing the slightest evidence of poison gas in the Lampertheim National Forest or on the Viernheim Meadows. He had also saved all the reports about local and regional projects for which the ticking time bomb could be particularly dangerous. Both the realized and unrealized projects reflected the development of the Federal Republic of Germany: Hunting preserves, woodland communities, adventure parks, waste management plants, test tracks, nature preserves, golf courses-all kinds of grand plans had been made for the area, anticipating the time when the Americans would give back the Lampertheim National Forest and the Viernheim Meadows.

“Do you know if maps of the stockpiling areas were made in '45?”

“I think so. And I think they also had maps back then that showed where the leftover stuff from World War I had been buried. But I've never managed to track any of those maps down. Think about it: That stuff is still lying buried all over the place, and the Americans give us back the land-those maps would be worth a fortune!”

13 Life's illusions

Worth enough to lead someone to murder? A woodland community on the Viernheim Meadows and in the Lampertheim National Forest would interest a real-estate mogul like old Herr Wendt, both for itself and for its effect on the real-estate market. I admit I haven't shown much talent in my occasional speculations in the stock market, but even I could see that one could make hefty gains with such maps. All you needed was to publish such a map at the right moment: Planning in the area would grind to a halt, and land prices would rise or come crashing down.

I left Henlein's retirement home and crossed the Planken Boulevard to the Ring, where I had parked the Opel. I bought a whole carton of Sweet Aftons, a tie with little white clouds on a night blue background, and an ice-cream cone with five scoops. I sat down in the park behind the Water Tower, ate the ice cream while listening to the splashing of the fountains, and thought, not for the first time, how nice it would be to live in one of the round towers that crown the two corner houses at the Augusta-Anlage. Would old Herr Wendt pull a few strings for me? Herr Wendt, I imagined myself saying, my investigations have revealed that you used some old maps to pull a shady trick or two for some crooked deals. You used your son, and lo and behold he got murdered along the way. Now I'm not saying that you pulled the trigger, Herr Wendt, but you let it happen. So here's the deal: I want you to fix me up with one of those two tower apartments up there, and I'll be happy to look the other way.

People don't murder simply for money. In fact, they murder for one reason, and one reason only: to save their life's illusions. There's the one who murders out of jealousy: If my beloved is dead, she's mine and nobody can take her away from me, not a lover, not she herself. There's the one who kills as a professional: He knows no trade, is nothing, but wants to hold his own in a world in which professional success makes the man. Tyrants murder because they want to be greater than they are and are murdered in turn because somebody wants the world to be a better place than it is. There is collective murder for collective illusions-the history of the twentieth century is riddled with it. Then of course there is also murder sparked by greed. But its aim is not to gather and hoard money: It, too, aims to salvage dreams of greatness and eminence. It had been many years since old Herr Wendt had stopped dreaming of being the emperor of a real-estate empire in favor of being a father who has reconciled with his son. No, old Herr Wendt had nothing to do with his son's murder.

While we're on the subject: What about your own illusions, Gerhard Self? There was that matter of you and Kor-ten. But Gerhard Self was in no mood for a dialogue with Gerhard Self.

In my office there was a message from Peschkalek on the answering machine saying that he had an idea, and a message from Philipp asking me to call him back. A few callers had hung up. Then I heard a distant whir of voices, humming, and the synthetic twitter of an international call. I knew it was Leo before she even spoke. “Gerhard? Gerhard, this is Leo.” There was a long pause. “I just want you to know that Helmut didn't kill Rolf.” There was another long pause before she went on. “I'm far away. I hope you're doing well.” She hung up. As if Lemke would admit to her that he'd killed Wendt!

Philipp complained when I returned his call: “How come I can never reach you? Are you spending the merry month of May rolling in the hay? A bit of action to charge up those old batteries of yours?”

“Nonsense! I was over at Brigitte's one evening, but…”

“You don't have to excuse yourself to me, I'm a man of the world. In fact, I'm bristling with envy. My days are numbered-I count on you to keep the flag flying.”

“What happened?” I asked him. What could put a stop on Philipp other than AIDS?

“The wedding's on Friday,” he said. “Will you be my best man?”

I don't mean to say that Philipp, who's pushing sixty, is too old to get married. Nor do I mean that because he chases every skirt that comes his way he's too young to get married. But the simple truth is that I can't imagine him as a married man. “Are you pulling my leg?”

“Don't give me any of that bullshit. Be in front of the city hall at five to ten. The ceremony's at ten o'clock sharp. After that we'll be celebrating at Antalya Türk. And I'm warning you to bring lots of time and Brigitte.” He was in a hurry. “I'd love to hit the town with you one last time before I get married, but there's so much to do. I'm sinking with all hands, even though my little Fur-ball has taken time off from work. We can hit the scene sometime after the wedding; I'm sure she won't mind.”

My impression that in a Turkish marriage the man was king of the castle was somewhat dated. Or had his little Fur-ball Füruzan specifically not chosen a Turkish husband? Or was Philipp making a mistake? Should I train him as a fighter in the marriage war-me, of all people?

Peschkalek didn't just have an idea, he had a suggestion, about which he wanted to talk to me. We decided to meet at the sauna in the Herschelbad pool.

He, too, liked a sauna to be piping hot and without steam, and he, too, smoked between sessions. We also shared the same sequence: three Finnish sauna sessions one after the other, and then, after a lengthy break, two Turkish ones. In the big pool we launched a water battle worthy of Admiral Pushkin. With his large stomach, bald head, and bushy mustache glittering with water drops, Peschkalek looked like a friendly sea lion. We lay on the loungers, covered with white towels, napped for a while, and then stretched, feeling that we had had some good bonding.

“What was that little song and dance the other day at lunch all about, Peschkalek?” I asked him with a smile. “You were acting as if it had just struck you what a good idea it might be to drop by the Viernheimer Tageblatt. And then acting like it only struck you during our conversation with Walters that there might be poison gas in the munitions depot. You knew the story about the poison gas, also about the munitions depot, not to mention Strassenheim.”

“You win, Self, you win. I admit I put on a little show to whet your appetite. I don't think I can handle this case on my own. I didn't want to run the risk of you not taking the story about the poison gas seriously and not wanting to look into it. I need your help.” He hemmed and hawed. “Which brings me to my suggestion. Let's go to the Americans and tell them to lay their cards on the table.”

“Great idea!”

“No, I'm serious! I'm not saying we should drive over with a 'Permit me to introduce myself, my name is Peschkalek, and this is Herr Self. Please be so kind as to explain the January attack.' No, we would go there officially.”

“You mean as General Peschkalek and Sergeant Self of the Marines?”

“No, not the Marines, the German army, and I'll be happy enough with the rank of major. I'll be the military man, and you could be from the office of the president. The president wants to award some medals to the men of the fire brigade who fought the fire and the guards who were injured in the line of duty. We'll go speak to the American fire chief and discuss the number of medals to be awarded, the names to be engraved on them, and the wording of the citations.”

“Unauthorized assumption of authority, falsification of documents, perhaps there is also something like abuse of uniforms and medals-this is playing for real! If we're lucky, we'll walk away knowing that the attack was in Viernheim and not in Käfertal or Vogelstang, and that they're storing new or old poison gas there. As for the Wendt case, this wouldn't bring me a single step closer to solving it.”

“I'm not so sure. Your only lead up to now is that Wendt had something to do with this mysterious attack that is being covered up. If there's nothing mysterious or covered up, you can kiss your lead good-bye.” He sat up straight, held his palm before his mouth, and blew the lead away.

“And you're not concerned about the long list of felonies?” “Don't worry, I'm going to set up our little excursion to the Americans so that nothing can go wrong.” He explained where he was going to get hold of the uniforms, how he would manufacture our laminated IDs, and who would instruct him about the relevant names and ranks.

He saw that I was still not satisfied. “What is it? Are you afraid the Americans will call our departments to check up on us? We're not supposed to have a regular central office, that's the whole gist of it. The foolish husband who wants to have some fun on the side will tell his wife that he has business trips, meetings, and appointments with colleagues-all of which he has, but not to the extent he pretends he does. This course of action inevitably runs aground. The clever husband, on the other hand, invents new friends and associates and new activities. Where nothing exists, nothing can run aground. The Americans won't call the president of Germany. As far as they know you're working for him, while I'm one of his representatives, and I will invent my department in a way that though it doesn't exist, it very well could. I still haven't convinced you? Let's leave it for now-I'll get everything ready, and give you a call in a couple of days.”

14 Not a particularly good impression

He called me two mornings later. “I'll drop by at nine. The whole thing won't take more than two hours. I'll bring your ID along-wear a dark suit.”

“What happened to all the careful preparations? You think that in a single day you can-”

He laughed. “I won't lie to you. I've been working on this for ages. The reason I asked you two days ago was because by then I was sure I could pull the whole thing off. And I only know if I can pull something off once the preparations are under way.”

“How do you know I'll play along?”

“You will play along? Great! I've already called and announced our arrival.”

“You did what?”

“I'm not pressuring you, am I? It's up to you. If you don't want to do it, that's fine with me. See you later.”

I put on my dark blue suit and slipped my reading glasses into my pocket. When I let them slide halfway down my nose and peer over the top, I look like an elder statesman. I wasn't going along only because I wanted to find out what was happening at the American depot. I also felt that if I didn't go I'd be letting Peschkalek down.

We walked to the train station. His uniform was too tight, but he assured me that German army uniforms were notoriously bad fits. “As I said, we're from the president's office. You will make a few general statements, and I'll discuss the details. You don't have to say more than that the firemen and guards are to be awarded medals for their service on January sixth. Should your English fail you, I'll jump in.”

From the station we headed to Vogelstang in a taxi, as if we had just come on the train from Bonn. Peschkalek took two laminated, credit card-sized ID tags out of his jacket pocket and clipped one on his lapel and one on mine. They looked good. I liked the color photo of me; Peschkalek had taken it at Wendt's funeral.

Despite his assurances, I was worried about having to chatter away in English. I called to mind the sixties, when jokes about old President Lübke's English bloopers were all the rage. More often than not I didn't understand them, a fact I would hide from others with a knowing chuckle, but I couldn't hide from myself that I didn't know any English worth mentioning. Could this be why I remember Lübke so warmly? No, I have a soft spot for all politicians once they're out of office: for our singing President Scheel, our hiking President Carstens, and I even have a soft spot for grim Gromyko.

“Sir!” The soldier at the gate stood to attention in his white cap and belt.

Peschkalek greeted him with military abruptness, and I raised my hand to an imaginary cap. Peschkalek explained that we had an appointment with the chief of the fire brigade. The soldier put through a call, an open jeep pulled up, and we got in. I sat next to the driver and rested my foot outside, which is the thing to do when sitting in a jeep, if American war movies are anything to go by. We drove along a path bordered by lawns and trees. A squad of trotting women soldiers in bobbing T-shirts came toward us. In the distance, a white wooden building came into view, with fire trucks parked outside its large doors. The fire trucks were not red and gold, the way I had imagined them, but the same green as everything else.

The driver walked us up an outside staircase to the office floor above the garages. A dapper officer greeted us, and Peschkalek did the honors. My ears didn't fail me: Peschkalek introduced me as Under-Secretary Dr. Self! We sat down at a round table and were served watery coffee. The large window looked out onto some trees. Behind the desk was an American flag, and President Bush stared down at me from the wall.

“Dr. Self?” The officer looked at me questioningly.

I launched into an English sentence: “Our president wants place an order on the brave men of the night of sixth Januar.”

The officer continued to look at me questioningly. Peschkalek jumped in. He spoke of Viernheim and the terrible threat of terrorism. The German president did not want to place an order, but to give the men a medal. Peschkalek also talked about documents, a speech, and a reception. I didn't understand why the men should have to go to a reception desk to get their medals, but then it dawned on me that he might be talking about a reception as in a soirée. I spoke up, suggesting that a pathetic speech should be given; after all, soldiers always like a bit of pathos, but that didn't seem to go down too well either. The word “sensitive” kept cropping up-were American soldiers worried about our rough German ways? “Make you no sorrows,” I quickly said, but before I could calm the officer's fears about German brusque-ness, Peschkalek cut in and asked him for a list of names that would go on the medals. He also asked if what the individuals had done should be recognized uniformly, or whether the actions of different men warranted first-and second-grade medals.

The officer sat down at his desk, took a folder from a pile, opened it, and began leafing through it. I leaned over to Peschkalek: “Don't lay it on too thick.” As far as I was concerned, since we'd talked about the attack of January 6 and the officer had not contradicted us our mission was accomplished. Peschkalek leaned over to me. He grabbed the leg of my chair and pulled it away, and the chair and I went crashing to the floor. I banged my head and elbow. My elbow ached, my head buzzed. I didn't manage to get up right away.

In an instant the officer was at my side, and helped me first of all to a sitting position, then onto my knees, and finally back onto the chair, which he had set upright again. Peschkalek emitted regretful and worried sounds. Lucky for him he didn't touch me, otherwise I'd have tackled him, wrung his neck, cut him into tiny pieces, and fed him to the birds.

But he wasn't afraid of me. He seized my left arm and marshaled the officer to my right, and both of them helped me to the door and down the stairs. Peschkalek talked and talked. Downstairs the jeep was waiting for us and all three of us got in the back, with me in the middle. As Peschkalek helped me out of the jeep at the main gate, I managed to ram my healthy elbow into his solar plexus. That winded him, but he quickly got his breath back and continued talking at the officer.

The taxi came. The officer was sorry, Peschkalek was sorry, I was sorry. “But we must make us on the socks,” I said, and the officer again looked at me oddly. The soldier with the white cap and belt held the door open for us, we got in, and the soldier slammed the door shut. I rolled down the window to say a few last words, but the officer and the soldier had turned away.

“That's what happens when you have an army with nothing to do,” I thought I heard the officer say to the soldier, and if I had heard right, our visit had not made a particularly good impression.

15 Black on white

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Please!” he hissed. “Wait till we're out of here!” He had told the taxi driver to head for the train station. He asked him to hurry so we wouldn't miss the 12:11 train. He also asked him all kinds of questions: How was the local Lorenz Standard Electric Company doing, and Brown, Boveri & Co., since when did Mannheim have streetcars, what was playing at the National Theater, was there actually any water in the Water Tower, and he wove into the conversation that this was our first time in Mannheim and that we needed to get back to Bonn on time. I felt he was laying it on a bit thick, that all this was unnecessary and embarrassing. I leaned my buzzing head in my hands, looked out the window, and hoped to God that the driver wouldn't recognize me if he ever picked me up again.

Peschkalek and I went into the train station through the main entrance and out again through a side door on the left. “Take off your jacket. The Heinrich-von-Stephan Strasse is visible from the taxi stand.”

Here, too, I played along. When we were safely out of view, Peschkalek flipped out. “I got my hands on it!” he shouted. “I got my hands on it!” He threw his jacket on the ground and triumphantly held up the binder. In the commotion after my fall he had snatched it from the fire chief's desk and hidden it in his jacket. He grabbed me by the arms and shook me. “Self! Cheer up! You were great-we were great! Here's the proof, and nobody can say there was no attack!”

I freed myself from his grip. “You don't even know what's in that binder!”

“Well, let's take a look. How about grabbing a bite somewhere nice and elegant. We have something to celebrate, and I owe you one. You know, I thought of telling you what I was thinking of doing, but then you'd have tensed up and really ended up hurting yourself. Plus, you'd never have been as convincing as you were!”

I was in no mood to have lunch with him. Nor was he too pleased that I wanted to make myself a photocopy of the file at the nearest copy center. He tried to forestall it, but in the end couldn't refuse. When my copy was ready we said a cool good-bye.

I went home and took two aspirin. Turbo was out roaming the rooftops. In the refrigerator there were eggs, Black Forest ham, tuna, cream, and butter, and in the freezer a package of spinach. I made a béarnaise sauce, warmed the spinach, poached two eggs, and let the ham sizzle for a bit. I placed the can of tuna in hot water. Turbo enjoys his tuna just as much when it's ice cold, but I can't believe it's good for him. I served lunch on the balcony.

Over a cup of coffee I began going through the American file with the help of a dictionary. When the fence had been cut, the alarm had gone off in the guardhouse. There had been fog, and it took the guards a while to locate the hole. The fog also made a systematic search of the terrain difficult. At one point they thought they had found the intruders. They had called out to them and then fired, both actions specified by regulation 937 LC 01/02. Then came the first explosion, and when they reached the area there was another, the result of which was that one intruder and one guard were killed, and a second intruder was injured and taken into custody. The second explosion had ignited stored chemicals. The fire brigade and the ambulance had been called in and appeared promptly. The fire was extinguished within minutes. No toxic substances were released. There was also a reference to two further reports: numbers 1223.91 CHEM 07 and 7236.90 MED 08. Along with report number 1223.91 CHEM 07, there was a further reference to suggestions for future storage of the chemicals. There had been no authorization at any time for the involvement of the German police, who had appeared at the entrance of the depot. A brief report furnished by the fire brigade was enclosed. The reports identified the fire brigade and guard patrol units, and named the two dead men and the arrested man: Ray Sachs, Giselher Berger, Bertram Mohnhoff. The respective superiors had signed the reports.

Now I had it in black and white. I could imagine Pesch-kalek cursing up a storm, trying to figure out how to get his hands on those other two reports, 1223.91 CHEM 07 and 7236.90 MED 08. Perhaps he'd return to the depot as a member of a cleaning detail? Or disguised as an American army chaplain? I, for one, had no intention of heading out with Peschkalek, dressed as Donald Duck and Daisy, to entertain the poor boys of the chemical and medical divisions.

16 Mänch, Eiger, Jungfrau

The afternoon was still young. I drove down the autobahn, realized when I got to the Waldorf junction that I'd gone too far, turned off at the next exit, and meandered back through villages I'd never been through before. When I reached the psychiatric hospital and drove up the winding road leading to the old building, I saw it shining in the distance. The scaffolding had been removed, and the building was covered in fresh yellow paint.

I found the temporary director ensconced in Eberlein's office. “What I have to say,” he told me, “I shall say to the police and to the Public Prosecutor's Office.” He let there be no doubt that I was not welcome.

“When will Professor Eberlein be back?”

“I don't know if he will return, or when. Do you have his address on Dilsberg Mountain? He lives on the Untere Strasse-my secretary will give you the number.” He bade me good day. He hadn't even asked me to sit down, and I was standing before his desk like a corporal before an officer. I walked to the door, and through an intercom he ordered hissecretary to give me one of Eberlein's remaining business cards. I had barely crossed the threshold when I found her standing at attention with a little envelope in her hand. Would the janitor salute as I walked past? No, he was reading a tabloid and only looked up for an instant.

I headed straight over to Dilsberg without calling Eberlein first, parked my Opel in front of the old town gate, and found his house on the Untere Strasse. There was a note taped to the door. “I'm at the Café Schäne Aussicht. E.” I found him on the terrace of the café.

“You? The detective?”

“I realize you were expecting someone else-I figured the note wasn't meant for me. But do you mind if I sit down for a moment?”

“Please.” He made a hint of a bow, seated as he was. “Look at that!” He pointed to the south.

The Dilsberg Mountain blended into the gentle hills of the Kleiner Odenwald. It was a spectacular view. The restaurant on whose terrace we were sitting definitely merited its name: Schäne Aussicht-beautiful view.

“No,” he said, “look higher.”

“Are those the…?” I couldn't believe it.

“Yes, the Alps. Mänch, Eiger, Jungfrau, Mont Blanc. I don't know the names of the others. You can only see them a few days a year; one would have to ask a meteorologist why. But I've lived here for six years, and it's only the second time I've seen them.”

On the horizon the sky was a deep blue. Where it became lighter, a delicate white brush had painted the chain of peaks. To the right and left they faded into the mist. Above them arched the clear sky of early summer, a normal Rhine-Neckar sky that did not betray anything of the wonder that it showed on the southern slope of the Dilsberg.

“You and I might well be the only ones who are witnessing this,” I said. There was no one else on the terrace.

He laughed. “Does that make it twice as nice?”

In the magic of the moment I had forgotten that he was a psychiatrist. What would he have deduced from my remark? That I am incapable of sharing? That I was a single child? That I became a private investigator because I want the truth for myself instead of leaving it for others? That I'm infantiliz-ing, and I shit and don't get off the pot-

“Herr Self, I imagine you want to talk to me about Rolf Wendt. The police have told me that you are working for his father. How far have you got?” He looked at me attentively. Tanned, relaxed, his shirt unbuttoned, his sweater over his shoulders, the cane with the silver knob leaning against the railing as if he no longer needed it-there was no sign that the last few weeks might have shaken him, or at least I couldn't see any sign.

I told him that the bullet that killed Wendt had come from a gun belonging to Lemke, whom he knew as Lehmann, and that I didn't know if Lemke had killed Wendt, or why he might have wanted to. I also told Eberlein that all murders were committed by people who wanted to save their life's illusions, and that I would have to know the illusions of all the parties involved, but that I didn't know them.

“What was Wendt's illusion?” I asked. “What kind of man was he?”

“I know what you mean by life's illusions, but I don't believe that they exist in your sense. There are life issues, and Wendt's issue was doing it right.”

“It?”

“Everything. He was the only person I could really and truly rely on, whether it was attending patients and dealing with their families, collaborating on articles, or just administrative stuff. Rolf Wendt wouldn't rest until whatever he had undertaken to do was done as well as possible.”

“Hence that look of strain on his face?”

He nodded. “To shield himself from excessive strain, a perfectionist must limit himself, must ration and budget himself. He cannot live life to the fullest. He can set up his work environment that way, but in his personal life he often ends up being miserable. In his attempt to do the right thing by his friends, the perfectionist doesn't get to enjoy his friendships, and in his attempt to do the right thing by women, he doesn't get around to loving them. Wendt wasn't happy, either. But I must say that in his unhappiness he actually managed to develop an empathy for the unhappiness of others.”

“How does one become a perfectionist? How did Wendt-”

“What a question, Herr Self! We Swabians have perfectionism in our blood. Protestants become perfectionists so that they get to heaven, and children become perfectionists because their parents expect it of them. Does that answer your question? Wendt was a clever, sensitive, competent, and agreeable young man. There was no reason whatsoever to analyze his perfectionism. OK, he wasn't happy. But where does it say that we are here in order to be happy?” He picked up his cane and tapped the dot beneath the question mark.

I waited a few moments. “Did you know what the deal was with Leo Salger, and about Wendt's relationship to her?”

He laughed. “That's why I was fired, so I ought to know a thing or two about it. I did in fact know what Leonore Salger was mixed up in. I took it the way I take all entanglements, entanglements with drugs, with relationships, with work. It was obvious that she wanted to break free from it. It was also obvious that her childhood friend, or friend from her adolescent years-Lemke, Lehmann, this archangel Michael-was playing a disastrous role. You are aware that Wendt knew him? They had had quite a few dealings with each other in the early seventies, when Wendt participated in that radical Socialist Patient Collective, and Lemke was building up his cadre.”

I know nothing about psychiatry and psychiatric hospitals. I know that the idea of the lunatic asylum, with screaming, raving lunatics and barred doors and windows, is out of date. I'm glad it is. The way things were back when Eberhard was in the hospital was not good. But I couldn't agree that Leo belonged in a psychiatric hospital. The therapy offered by Wendt did not seem particularly professional to me: He was a friend of hers, was even in love with her, not to mention that he knew Lemke, from whom Leo wanted to break free with the help of this therapy. The whole thing sounded more like a therapeutic cover for something quite different: Leo's hiding from the police. And all of that was going on right in front of Eberlein's eyes. I could understand the decision of the authorities to suspend him.

I told Eberlein my doubts.

“When Leonore Salger came to us, she was suffering from severe depression,” he replied. “It didn't come out until later, and then only bit by bit, that she had known Wendt from before, and that Wendt knew Lemke, and that she knew Lemke. You are right that these aren't the best conditions for a cure. But then again it is always a delicate matter to break off therapy in the middle. I must say that once all the problems were laid out on the table, Wendt went ahead and did the right thing: He brought Leonore Salger's therapy to a quick conclusion and arranged for her release from the hospital.”

I must have looked skeptical.

“I can't convince you? Your view is that I should have handed Wendt and Leonore Salger over to the police?” He waved his left hand in resignation.

The Alps had disappeared.

17 Too Late

When I got into bed that night, I hoped I would dream about the Alps. I would take a running start on the Dilsberg, swing into the air, and with wings calmly beating fly over the Oden-wald Range, Kraichgau, and the Black Forest, all the way to the Alps, where I would circle around the peaks and land on a glacier.

I had just fallen asleep when the phone rang. This time, too, there was a rustling and an echo on the line. But I could hear her voice clearly, and as far as I could tell she could hear mine, too.

“Gerhard?”

“Are you doing OK? I've been worrying about you.”

“Gerhard, I'm frightened-and I don't want to stay with Helmut anymore.”

“Then don't stay with him.”

“I think I want to go to America. What do you think?”

“Why not? If you like the country and the people. After all, you liked it there when you were in high school.”

“Gerhard?”

“Yes?”

“Must one pay for everything in life?”

“I don't know, Leo. Tell me, did you know about the poison gas in the American military depot?”

“I have to go. I'll call you again.” She hung up.

I lay awake listening to the bells from the tower of the Heilig-Geist Church pealing off the time, quarter hour by quarter hour. At dawn I fell asleep. Again the phone woke me. This time it was Nägelsbach.

“A warrant for your arrest has just come up on our computer.”

“What?” I looked at the clock. It was eight thirty.

“Aiding a terrorist organization, obstruction of justice- according to this, you warned little Miss Salger and got her across the border. For Christ's sake, Self-”

“Who said I did that?”

“Don't play cat and mouse with me. The Agency got an anonymous call and followed up on it. They say you were seen together in Amorbach, and then an innkeeper in Ernsttal saw you. Tell me it isn't true.”

“Is a Mannheim patrol car going to come get me?”

I suddenly remembered that at ten I was supposed to be best man at Philipp's wedding. I hadn't even gotten him a present yet. “Will you do me a favor? I need you to put things on hold. Tell the computer system that you've already taken me into custody. I promise to come in this evening. Philipp is marrying Füruzan, that nurse-you know her from the New Year's party-and I'm to be their best man. 'For one brief sun my fate delay, to wed the nurse, and then away.'“

He was silent for a long while. “So it's true?”

I didn't reply.

“This evening at six. At my office.”

I flicked the switch on my coffeemaker, rushed into the shower, and then threw on my blue suit. I was already on the stairs when I remembered my little suitcase. Corduroys, sweater, pajamas, toothpaste and toothbrush, shampoo, and my eau de cologne. Presumably the cell would reek of rat piss and the sweat of fear. I picked up a volume of Gottfried Keller, my traveling chess set, and Keres's Best Games of Chess. Turbo was roaming the roofs instead of waving farewell.

Frau Weiland promised to look after him. “Are you off on a little weekend getaway?”

“Something like that.”

I put my suitcase in the car. All kinds of foolish thoughts flashed through my mind. Did prisons offer parking for inmates? Short-term and long-term parking like at the airport? Wouldn't it be a great idea if there were something like prison insurance that paid prisoners on remand a daily allowance, as well as paying the state the necessary supplement for a single cell? On the way to the city hall I bought a large umbrella for Philipp's balcony. He didn't have one, as he rarely sat outside. But that would change now. I could see them there, Füruzan crocheting, Philipp polishing his surgical instruments, from time to time a little chat with the neighbors, and geraniums in bloom along the railing.

Füruzan and her family were waiting outside the registrar's office beneath a balcony that was propped up by two stone men on either side of the entrance. Füruzan was wearing a pale apricot-colored dress, had a white rose in her dark hair, and looked most charming. Her mother had gained with girth the kind of distinction only found in emperors, kings, and chancellors. Füruzan's spindle-thin little sister giggled. Her brother looked as if he had just come galloping down a wild Kurdish mountain and then got all dressed up.

“My father passed away three years ago,” Füruzan told me when she saw my eyes flit over the group. She pointed at her brother. “He is going to give me away to Philipp.”

The city hall clock struck ten. I tried to make small talk. But her mother only spoke Turkish, her little sister answered all my questions with the same fit of giggles, and her brother seemed unable to unclench his teeth.

“He's studying landscaping at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe,” Füruzan said, building a bridge on which her brother and I could have met to chat about Semiramis's hanging gardens or the Luisenpark. But he remained silent, his jaws grinding.

Periodically the mother uttered a wordy Turkish sentence, sharp and fast like a blow. Füruzan did not react. She looked over the marketplace, her face cool and proud. The pale apricot-colored dress was turning dark under her arms.

I had broken into a sweat, too. The market was lively. A little old lady at a nearby stand was touting fine Mangold beets. On the Breite Strasse, a delivery truck honked and a streetcar jingled. Early strollers had settled at the tables outside the Café Journal and were enjoying the sun. A waiter was opening the umbrellas. Whenever there is a big catastrophe, when everything collapses, I always keep my cool. But small catastrophes, those treacherous crags in life's broad stream, finish me off.

Before I even caught sight of Philipp, I saw from Füruzan's hurt, startled eyes that he had turned up. He was holding himself upright and was impeccably dressed: a dark blue silk suit, a white and blue striped shirt with a white collar, a gold collar pin, and a paisley tie. He walked with long strides, bumping here and there into market stands and pushing people out of the way, because he wasn't in a state to walk around them. He saw us, raised his arm, waved, and smiled sheepishly.

“I'm late.” He raised his shoulders apologetically. “Why don't we head over to the restaurant right away? I mean, it'll be nice for us to get to know each other, or see each other again. That in itself is reason enough for a celebration, even if we don't-”

“Philipp…”

He looked at the ground. “I'm sorry, my little Fur-ball. I can't go through with this. I downed a whole bottle of the stuff that Gerhard always drinks, but I still can't go through with it. I wish I could, but I…” He looked up. “Perhaps a little later. After all, now that I've drunk so much, it wouldn't even be valid.”

The mother hissed, and Füruzan hissed back. The brother raised his hand and struck Füruzan across the face. She held her cheek, astonished, incredulous, said a few words to him that made the blood drain from his cheeks, and with a disparaging gesture slapped him across the mouth with the back of her hand.

I noticed his bleeding lip that had been cut by Füruzan's ring and didn't notice his hand, in which a knife flashed. “Easy, easy, young man!” Philipp said, stepping between brother and sister, and the knife plunged into his left side. The brother pulled it out, ready to take another stab, but I managed to knock the umbrella against him just in time. It surprised him more than it injured him, but the knife went clanging to the ground, and as he bent forward to pick it up, I quickly stepped on his fingers. Phillip collapsed, falling onto the knife, and the brother had to make do with spitting on the ground in front of his sister. He turned around and walked away.

“You have to bandage it up,” Philipp said in a low but clear voice, pressing his left hand against the wound. “Real fast and real tight. The spleen bleeds like crazy. Tear your shirt.”

I took off my jacket and shirt, tore at my shirt to no avail, and gave it to Füruzan, who bit at it, shredding it strip by strip.

She began bandaging him. “Harder,” Philipp snapped.

People stopped, asked what had happened, offered help.

“Can your giggly little sister get a taxi from the Parade-platz?” Philipp asked Füruzan. “She can? OK, Gerhard, call the hospital and tell them to get the operating theater ready. Shit, he got me in the lung, too.” Philipp was talking with a bloody mouth.

Füruzan's little sister ran off. I saw from the phone box that she was back in a few minutes with a taxi. Füruzan had finished bandaging Philipp and led him to the taxi. The driver must have taken him for drunk and groggy, but obviously didn't see any blood, just that his dark blue silk suit might have gotten a little wet. Füruzan got in with him, while her mother shooed away the crowd. I don't know what Füruzan said to the driver, but he drove off with screeching tires.

18 A little peace of mind

“As far as we can tell, he should be fine. We took out the spleen and patched up his lung.” The surgeon who had operated on Philipp took off his green cap, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash. He noticed my cigarette. “Can I have one, too?”

I handed him the pack and a lighter. “Can I see him?” “If you like. But you ought to put on a gown. It'll take a while, though, for him to come around. When his girlfriend comes back, she'll take over.”

When I got to the room, Füruzan was no longer there. Perhaps she was in the process of shooting her brother. Or reconciling with him. Or was mad at Philipp and didn't want to see him again. I sat at his bedside listening to his labored breathing and to the low hissing of the pump from which a tube leading to his ribcage disappeared beneath his hospital gown. Another tube ran from a drip to the back of his hand. His hair, wet with sweat, was sticking to his head. It was the first time I noticed how thin and sparse it was. Was my vain friend a maestro with a hair dryer? Or had I just never noticed? The blood around his mouth had not been cleaned away properly; it was brown and dry, and flaking at the corners of his mouth. From time to time his eyelids twitched. The sun and the blinds drew lines through the room that slowly wandered across the linoleum floor, the bedcover, and up the wall. When the nurse changed his drip, he woke up.

“Maria with the pretty ears.” Then he recognized me. “Remember, Gerhard: Nice earlobes mean nice breasts.”

“Really, Herr Doctor!” Maria said, playing along.

“I'd do better not to speak,” Philipp whispered with some effort.

The nurse left the room, quietly closing the door. After a while Philipp beckoned me to come closer. “My spleen is out? The pump is running? I used to dream sometimes that I was dying. I'd be lying in the hospital, in a room and a bed just like now, and I would bid all the women I ever knew farewell.”

“All of them?” I, too, was whispering. “You mean they'd be lining up outside, along the corridor and down the stairs?”

“Each woman would say that after me she never met another guy like me.”

“I see.”

“And I would tell each of them that I never again met anyone like her.”

“What you'd need is a room with two doors, one in front and one in back. The women you've already spoken to mustn't come face-to-face with the women still waiting. Can you imagine if word got down the line that you were telling every woman that you never met another woman like her?”

Philipp sighed and was silent for a while. “You have no idea about love, Gerhard. In my dream, all of them get together anyway. They leave my deathbed and go to the Blaue Ente, where I've arranged a banquet for them, and they eat and drink and remember me.”

I don't know why Philipp's dream made me sad. Because I have no idea about love? I took his hand. “Forget all that for the time being. You're not dying.”

“No, I'm not.” He found it increasingly hard to talk. “As it is, I couldn't even speak to all of them now. I'm much too weak.” He fell asleep.

Füruzan came around five. I could see that her brother had beaten her, but she whispered to me that they had made up. “Do you think Philipp will forgive me, too?”

I didn't understand.

“Because the knife was meant for me.”

I didn't feel that this was the time to give her a crash course in emancipation. “I'm sure he'll forgive you.”

I didn't wait for Philipp to wake up again. At six I was in Nägelsbach's office, at seven in prison at the Fauler Pelz. Nägels-bach was taciturn, and so was I. He did, however, tell me that there'd be no more food by the time I got to the prison and took me shopping. Pretzels, some Camembert, a bottle of Barolo, and a few apples. I remembered the Mangold beets being sold at the market in Mannheim. I have a soft spot for this underrated local vegetable when it is cooked au gratin or served as a salad-but one has to put the beets in a marinade while they are still warm and let them sit for a few hours.

I hadn't been at the Fauler Pelz prison since the days when I was a public prosecutor. More than forty years had passed, and I no longer recognized the layout. But I did recognize the smell, the echoing sound of steps, the correctional officer's fumbling for the right key on the jangling bunch, and the unlocking and relocking of the cell door. The warden closed my door and locked it. He and Nägelsbach walked away, and I listened to the echo of their steps. I ate a few of the pretzels with some cheese and apples, drank the Barolo, and read Gottfried Keller. I had taken along his Zurich stories, and learned from the Bailiff of Greifensee to what extent one can be driven to gather together all one's old loves. I wondered if Philipp, too, was seeking a graceful and edifying end to a ridiculous story, as well as a little peace of mind.

I was doing quite well until I lay down on the bunk for the night. Numbing cold seeped through the thick walls, and yet a summer breeze blew waves of warmth through the openings in the window. It also brought the voices of reveling barhop-pers, calls of greeting and good-bye, the droning laughter of men and the bubbling laughter of women. Once in a while there was utter silence, until I heard faraway steps and voices approaching, getting louder, and then fading again in the distance. Sometimes I caught shreds of conversation. Sometimes a couple would stop beneath my window.

Suddenly I was gripped by longing for the bright, warm, colorful life outside, as if I had been locked up and would be locked up in this cell for years. Locked up for years-was that what was in store for me? I thought of the pride that comes before a fall, and of the fall that follows pride. I thought of the successes I had striven for in my life and the failures I had had. I thought about Korten's death. Was I experiencing the victory of poetic injustice?

The next morning I attempted a few squats and push-ups. They are said to help you survive years of solitary confinement. My joints ached.

19 Pending proceedings

At nine thirty I was taken for questioning. I had expected Bleckmeier and Rawitz. Instead I sat opposite a young man with a clever face and manicured hands who introduced himself as Federal Public Prosecutor Dr. Franz from the Federal High Court. In a clear, pleasant voice he read me the charges, ranging from aiding a terrorist organization to obstruction of justice. He asked me if I wished to be represented by a lawyer of my choice. “I am aware that you have a legal background,” he said, “but so do I, and when it comes to my own affairs I wouldn't touch something as simple as a purchase or rent dispute. Never act on your own behalf in legal matters-that's a solid old legal principle. In your case, the main issue will be the severity of the sentence, so overview and experience will be necessary, neither of which you have.” He smiled affably.

“You mentioned Frau Salger-and what did you say was the crime for which I am supposed to have obstructed justice?”

“I haven't said anything yet. The crime is an attack on an American military installation perpetrated on January sixth in Käfertal.”

“Käfertal?”

Dr. Franz nodded. “But I think we'd better talk about you. You picked up Frau Salger in Amorbach and helped her cross the border into France. You need not worry about any infringements against the Passport Law, Herr Self; we will be happy to sweep that under the rug. I would like you to tell me what happened after you got her to France.” He continued to smile affably.

After I had closed the book of my journey with Leo and put it away on my return to Mannheim, I hadn't touched it again. Now it flipped open of its own accord. For an instant I forgot where I was, didn't see the Formica table, the dirty yellow walls, the barred windows. I let myself be carried away by a wave of memories of Leo's face, the moon above Lake Murten, and the air in the Alps. Then the wave set me back down, and once again I sat facing Dr. Franz. His smile had frozen into a grimace. No, the book of my journey with Leo would remain shut for him. And what about the obstruction of justice? Does not obstruction of justice require that a crime has actually been perpetrated and can be punished? Without an attack in Käfertal on January 6, there was also no obstruction of justice. Without an attack, there was also no terrorist organization that I could have supported. What if, instead of the attack in Käfertal, there had been one in the Lampertheim National Forest?

When I asked him that, he looked at me, puzzled. “Instead of that attack another one? I don't quite understand.”

I got up. “I'd like to return to my cell.”

“Are you declining to make a statement?”

“I'm not sure yet if I will decline or not. I'd like to give the matter some thought.” He was about to reply, and I knew what he was going to say. “Yes, I am declining to make a statement.”

He shrugged his shoulders, pressed the bell, and without saying a word waved me off with the warden who came in.

Back in my cell I sat down on the bunk, smoked, and was incapable of thinking in an orderly manner. I tried to remember the name of the professor with whom I had studied criminal law as a young man, as if his name were of the greatest importance. Then images of my years as a public prosecutor went through my mind: interrogations, trials, and executions at which I had been present. In the flood of images there wasn't a single one that might have instructed me about the specifics of obstruction of justice, or otherwise about the legal problems of my situation.

The warden returned and led me into the visiting room.

“Brigitte!”

She was crying and could not speak. The officer allowed us to embrace. He cleared his throat, and Brigitte and I sat down at the table, facing each other.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Nägelsbach called me yesterday evening, and this morning another friend of yours, a journalist, Peschkalek. He was the one who actually brought me here. He wants to talk to you, too.” She looked at me. “Why didn't you call me? Were you trying to hide the fact that you are in jail?” Nägelsbach had told her my situation was serious, and she had immediately set out to get me a good lawyer. Because the sick like to be treated by a professor, she wanted me to be represented by a professor and had called the Heidelberg professors of law. “Some of them said it wasn't their field, which sounded like internists who don't want to operate; with others it seemed to be their field but they couldn't understand what I was talking about; and then there were also those who didn't want to get involved in pending proceedings. Is that how it is? Aren't defense lawyers allowed to get involved in pending proceedings? I thought that that's what they're there for.”

“Did you find one?”

She shook her head.

“It doesn't matter, Brigitte. I might not even need one. If I do, I know one or two lawyers I can turn to. What does Manu say to my being in prison?”

“He thinks it's great. He's behind you-we're both behind you.”

Peschkalek also assured me he was behind me. He twirled his mustache anxiously and asked if he could do anything. “You could bring me a meal from the Ritter Restaurant. It's only a few steps away.” He had brought a carton of Sweet Aftons.

“How did you find out about my arrest? Was it in the papers?” If I was to get out quickly, I didn't want Frau Büch-ler to hear the news and hit the roof.

“I tried calling you at home, and when I couldn't reach you there I called your girlfriend's place, and she told me the news. No, there's nothing in the papers yet. I don't think it will hit the local or regional press till the middle of next week. But things won't really get going till you appear in court. A former public prosecutor being cross-examined: You'll be the star of the show! Then you'll turn the tables on them, and become the accuser instead of the accused. You'll question them on the exact location where the attack took place, what the damage was, what the aftereffects were, and then the bombshell: The attack was in the Lampertheim National Forest, the target was a poison-gas depot, and all this is being covered up because the fact that there is poison gas stored there is itself being covered up. What a tour de force! I admit I'm quite jealous.” He beamed, delighted by the scenario he had created and my role in it. “And then we have the romantic touch-not that I think the judge will be interested, but the readers will love it. Ticking bombs, beating hearts, an old man and a young girl: That kind of stuff makes for a great story. The old man and the young girl,” he savored his words, “that would make a good title, wouldn't it? If not for the whole story, then at least for an episode.”

“You're skinning me, basting me, roasting me, carving me up, and serving me-I am still alive, Peschkalek, and old stag that I am, it is closed season right now, not shooting season.”

He blushed, ruffled his mustache, clapped his hand on his bald head, and laughed. “Oh no! The vultures of the press, the hyenas! Am I confirming all those preconceptions about reporters? Sometimes I frighten myself when I can't see or hear anything without thinking whether it would make a good story. Reality is only real when I've captured it”-he tapped his hand against his hip, where his camera usually hung-”or, rather, when the story has been aired or is in print. We've talked about this before. Who cares about anything that isn't in the media? And when nobody cares, the thing itself has no effect, and if it has no effect it's not real. It's as simple as that.”

I let Peschkalek have his media-driven idea of reality. I didn't hold it against him that he reduced my story to a feature article. He asked me to forgive his déformation professionelle, asked anxiously how I was, and looked at me again the way a friendly sea lion might. No, I didn't hold any of it against him. But the favor I had wanted to ask of him I asked of Brigitte instead, and also asked her not to tell him anything about it.

20 As if

If the first night in prison was bad, the second was worse, not to mention the fear now plaguing me that things would escalate, each night proving worse than the one before.

I dreamed that I had to arrange the layout of the front page of a newspaper. Every time I thought I had artfully put together the pictures and articles I had been given, another picture or article would turn up. And every time, I was faced by the insolubility of the task: The page was full and there was no space for additional material. But I would start over every time, moving things around, thinking I had pulled it off, but then realizing yet again that I had missed a picture or an article. I was unsettled, but hard-nosed and persistent. Then it struck me that I hadn't really looked at the material properly. The articles all had the same foolish headline-”Self Himself”-and the pictures showed me always with the same wide eyes and awkward grin. But even this didn't wake me up. I continued moving the pictures and articles around, failing each time, until the sun woke me.

“We want to set up an interrogation on Sunday. We'd like to talk to you one more time before you are brought before the judge.” Dr. Franz was again sporting his affable smile. Nägelsbach was sitting next to him unhappily, Bleckmeier looked glum, and Rawitz had grown even fatter, holding his paunch in place with folded hands. “Unfortunately we had a silly little slipup, and your arrest was entered on Saturday instead of Friday. As a result, we couldn't secure the judge yesterday and will have to do it today. We'd be grateful if you wouldn't mind considering yourself as having been arrested on Saturday.”

Had Nägelsbach entered me under the wrong day? Was that why he was looking so unhappy? I didn't want to cause him any problems, and waiting an additional day for a hearing before a judge didn't make much difference to me. But what was I to make of the prosecuting attorney's “as if” philosophy?

“I will be brought before the judge as if I'd been arrested yesterday. I am being accused of obstruction of justice as if a sentence for Frau Salger is imminent for a crime she committed in Käfertal. An attack in Viernheim is going to be handled as if it had occurred in Käfertal. Wouldn't you say there are a few too many 'as ifs' here?”

Rawitz unclasped his hands and turned to Franz. “There's no point. Let him tell the judge whatever he wants to. If the judge decides to release him, we'll just bring him in again. And don't worry, we'll purge him of that Käfertal-Viernheim nonsense by the time of the hearing.”

“You have arrested one of the men and are intending to put him on trial,” I said. “Are you intending to convict him of a crime he didn't commit? Are you-”

“The crime, the crime,” Franz interrupted me impatiently. “What a strange notion of crime you have. It is the charge that generates the crime. The charge scoops up a few specifics from the infinite and overwhelming flood of occurrences, activities, and actions, and puts them together into what we call the crime. One man shoots, another falls dead, at the same time birds are chirping, cars go by, bakers are baking, and you're lighting a cigarette. The charge knows what it is that counts. The charge turns the shot and the dead man into a murder, and neglects everything else.”

“One man shoots, you say, and another falls dead-but the attack was not in Käfertal but in Viernheim. Käfertal is neither here nor there.”

“Oh, yes?” Rawitz said sarcastically. “Käfertal is neither here nor there? So where is Käfertal, then?”

“A place is one thing, and what happens at a place is another,” Bleckmeier jumped in. “What is punished is what happens, not the place.” He looked at us uncertainly and, when there was no reaction, added, “so to speak.”

“The place is neither here nor there and isn't punishable,” Rawitz said. “How long do I have to listen to this bullshit? It's Sunday, and I want to go home.”

“Bullshit?” Bleckmeier was prepared to take quite a lot, but not that.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Franz said soothingly, “let us forget the philosophical questions of space and time. You, too, Herr Self, have more important issues you should be thinking about. You are right, we have arrested someone. He has confessed to the attack in Käfertal and will also confess in court. Furthermore, we will have the statements of our German officials and our American friends. Let us leave the pointless preliminaries and come to you and Frau Salger.”

“Could you have the envelope brought here that arrived for me this morning?” I asked. I had found out from the officer who had brought me to the questioning that the folder Brigitte had sent me had arrived, but that it was going to be given to me on Monday, after inspection by the court. “You, of course, are authorized to open and view it without a judge.”

After some back and forth Franz had the folder brought in, opened it, and took out a copy of the American file.

“Go ahead, read it,” I said.

He read it, and his mouth tightened. After he read each page he handed it to Rawitz, who then handed it on to Bleck-meier and Nägelsbach. For ten minutes there was complete silence in the room. Through the small window I could see a section of the Heidelberg Castle. From time to time a car drove along the Oberer Fauler Pelz. In the distance someone was practicing on the piano. Everybody was silent until Nägelsbach had read the last page.

“We have to get the original. We'll have his place searched.”

“I doubt he'd have the original lying around at home.”

“Perhaps he does-it's worth a try.”

“Why don't we go have a word with the Americans?”

“I don't like this business either,” Nägelsbach said, looking at me sadly. “But an attack in Viernheim in which poison gas was released-poison gas belonging to the Americans or from old German stockpiles-that's simply not acceptable.”

“Was poison gas released?” I asked

“Our American friends…” Bleckmeier began, only to fall silent at a glance from Rawitz. I repeated my question.

“Even if poison gas was not released-if the trial centers on it and the press zeros in on the story, all hell will break loose. Even if mass panic can be avoided, Viernheim will be a branded town. People will want to avoid it the way they would avoid Chernobyl. The terrorists should not be allowed to boast of this potential damage and threat. And the inhabitants don't deserve to be plunged into such fear by the terrorists.”

“Are you trying to justify-” I tried to ask.

“No,” Franz interrupted, “you've got your logic all mixed up. The trial can't take this course, but that certainly doesn't justify letting the perpetrators get away. What it boils down to is that we have a double responsibility: on one hand to the people of the area, particularly in Viernheim, and on the other for the implementation of the government's charge. And our responsibility doesn't end even there. We must consider the Americans, and the relationship between Germany and America, and the fact that the abandoned hazardous sites of the world wars have to be approached with a systematic solution. If there is ice in Viernheim, then we are dealing with the tip of the iceberg and we can't do things by half. You know as well as I do…”

I stopped listening. I was tired of all the talk, and tired of the grand words of double, triple, quadruple, and quintuple responsibility, and all the bickering surrounding my head. Suddenly I was no longer interested in threatening to throw a wrench into the Käfertal trial, nor in them letting me go free in order to save the trial. I just wanted to go to my cell, lie down on my bunk, and not give a damn about anyone or anything.

Franz looked at me. He was waiting for a reply. What was it that he had asked? Nägelsbach helped. “Dr. Franz is referring to a mutual rapprochement-on one side your role in the legal proceedings, and on the other the question of guilt and punishment.” They looked at me expectantly.

I didn't want to take on the role they were trying to foist on me. I told them that. They called the warden and had him take me back to my cell.

21 Stuttering a little

By late afternoon I was a free man. There had been no further questioning and no hearing before the judge. The trusty had brought me a tray with cauliflower soup, spareribs, a vegetable platter, potatoes, and a vanilla custard. Otherwise I had remained alone, and with the help of Keres's Best Games of Chess had cornered Alyekhin into checkmate, until the warden came, told me I could go, and walked me to the gate. Thank God prisons don't follow the example of hospitals, which never release a patient on a weekend, even if he is cured.

I stood outside the prison gate with my little suitcase, savoring the smell of freedom and the warmth of the sun. And when I reached the Neckar River I took pleasure in the smell of dead fish, motor oil, and old memories. In the lock by the Karlstor a barge was being lowered. A blanket was spread out over the top of its hold with a little playpen in which a child was playing.

“Can you take me along?”

The bargeman could see that I was calling out something to him, but couldn't make out what I was saying. I pointed at myself, at the barge, and waved my hand downriver. He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. I took this as a yes, hurried down the embankment, and jumped from the edge of the lock onto the barge, which quickly disappeared into the lock's depths. It was darker and colder than up above, and water, menacing and forceful, was seeping through the gap in the back gates. It was a relief when the front gates opened and we had the river in front of us, the old bridge, and the silhouette of the old town.

“What you did was dangerous,” the bargeman's wife said. She was holding the child in her arms, eyeing me with a mixture of curiosity and rebuke.

I nodded. “I wish that I'd at least brought along some cake. But when I passed a pastry shop just now, I didn't know I was going to meet you. Is your husband going to throw me overboard?”

Needless to say he didn't, and his wife offered me a slice of the sponge cake she had baked. I sat down, let my legs dangle from the side, ate the cake, and watched the town wander by. We passed beneath a bridge, the Alte Brücke, the child's squeals of delight echoing as its mother kissed its tummy. Under the Neue Brücke, I recalled the wooden bridge that had crossed over the Neckar River after the war, and the sight of the island awoke my childhood longing for both adventure and the snugness of home. Then we pulled into the canal and the autobahn bridge came into sight. From the dam I could have seen the spot where I had found Wendt.

I had cleared up a case that had mystified me, but which I had not actually been working on: A group of youngsters organize an attack, the police want to cover up the attack but still punish the youngsters, and so the police come up with the clever idea of moving the attack to another site. Relocating it, so to speak, as Bleckmeier would rightly say. But the police had to proceed with caution and a light touch. They couldn't afford to trumpet to the world that they were looking for these youngsters. It wouldn't do to mount a big search in connection with an attack in Käfertal and then, as they were being arrested, have them blabbing to cameras and reporters with pens poised about their attack in Viernheim. So the police initiated their search in secret, until Wendt's death, which was somehow linked to the attack and raised God knows what fears and no longer allowed further delay. The police had to go public with their search. All the same, they had struck a deal with one of the perpetrators that he could secure a milder sentence by confessing to the attack in Käfertal. He might even become the chief witness. The only thing the police would be risking was that the others might slip up or refuse to play along. But slipups can be fixed, and why shouldn't they want to play along?

In fact, I myself had not been aware that Wendt's death had somehow been connected with the attack. Wendt had a map of Viernheim on him when he was found. He had been killed by a bullet from Lemke's gun. He had known Lemke from before, had been introduced to Leo by Lemke, and had helped Leo after the attack. Had he been the fifth man Lemke had brought along on the attack, and whom Leo had not recognized, and who then made it back to the psychiatric hospital before she did?

I got off the barge at the Schwabenheim lock. I sauntered along the riverbank to the Schwabenheimer Hof and sat down at a table in the garden of the Zum Anker pub. Many families had come on foot or by bicycle from Ladenburg, Neckarhausen, or Heidelberg. It was past the hour of coffee and cake and the fathers had switched to beer, while the children were beginning to whine because they, too, wanted something but didn't know what. A Madonna in a light blue dress and dark blue cloak stood in a niche in the wall. Two tables farther down sat a middle-aged woman cheerfully reading a newspaper and drinking wine. I liked her. To go to a pub alone, and sit comfortably with a newspaper and a glass of wine, is something that men do, not women, and never mind about emancipation. But she was an exception. Occasionally she looked up and our eyes would meet.

The taxi that I had the waiter call for arrived. I paid the check, walked over to her table, sat down, told her how very attractive she was, got up, and was gone almost before she could thank me for the compliment with a bemused smile. I think I stuttered a little.

During the ride to Heidelberg I was initially proud of myself. In fact, I'm somewhat shy. Then I got angry at myself. Why had I run away? Why hadn't I stayed at her table? Had there been an invitation in her glance, a promise in her smile?

I was about to have the driver turn back, but I didn't. One should never want too much at once. And as for the promise-perhaps she'd only made it because she could tell that she wouldn't have to keep it.

22 Write an article!

I found Peschkalek at Brigitte's place. “We were coming over to visit you when Chief Inspector Nägelsbach called. Congratulations! Have you been released till the trial?”

“I don't know. I might not even be called. I somehow think the last thing they want at the trial is a stubborn old man who keeps insisting that the attack was in Viernheim and not in Käfertal.”

Peschkalek frowned. “You told them the attack was in Viernheim?”

I nodded. “I think they released me because-”

“Are you out of your mind?” he cut in, bewildered. “I thought we had agreed how we'd handle this. Your statement at the trial was supposed to explode like a bombshell! Now the only thing that has exploded is a little firecracker that nobody saw or heard! What's going to become of the trial now?” He grew increasingly irate. “What were you thinking? All that work for nothing! Am I supposed to start from the beginning? Are you no longer interested in the fact that the police are covering up a terrorist attack? You don't care that the trial will turn into a farce?” Now he was shouting.

I didn't understand. “What are you going on about? Bombshells are your job, not mine. Go ahead and write an article!”

“An article!” He waved his hands dismissively, no longer furious, just tired. “It's crazy. Here we had our goal within reach: We have the American report, you're about to go on trial-and then, nothing.”

Brigitte looked at him and then at me. “You mean the report that I-”

I didn't want her to continue. As long as it wasn't clear why Peschkalek was making such a fuss, I didn't want him to know that I had shown the report to the police. So I shouted: “What do you mean 'nothing'? And furthermore, what do you mean by the goal being 'within reach' and me about to go on trial? What goal are you talking about?”

But he waved his hands again and got up. He smiled painfully. “I'm sorry I raised my voice. Don't take it personally, it's a legacy from my father. My mother can only bear to live with him because she has a hearing aid that she can turn off whenever he gets too loud.”

Brigitte talked him into staying for dinner. After dinner, he helped Manu with his essay. “A visit to the planetarium” turned into a sharp, fast-paced report, and Manu was filled with admiration. Brigitte was charmed, too. As he helped her wash up in the kitchen, he suggested that they speak informally. As we sipped our wine, Brigitte suggested that he and I should call each other by our first names as well, and I could hardly refuse. “Gerhard”-”Ingo”-we clinked glasses. But I felt wary.

23 R.I.P

The next day I drove to Husum. It's a journey to the end of the world. Beyond Giessen the mountains and forests become monotonous, beyond Kassel the towns become poor, and by Salzgitter the terrain turns flat and bleak. If we were to banish dissidents in Germany, we would banish them to the Stein-huder Lake.

I had called the main office of the Evangelical Academy and been told that the director, whom Tietzke had identified as a former comrade of Lemke's, was currently conducting a workshop: Abused-Aggrieved-Affected: Coping with Threat in the Whirlwind of Time. I was told that I could sit in on a session and talk to him during one of the breaks. I found the room and tiptoed to the only free chair. The speaker announced that he was coming to the end of his paper, and finally did so after a few lengthy detours. I learned that aggrievement was a passive state while affectedness was an active one, and that we could not hide behind the whirlwind of time but had to stand our ground. I was also initiated into the law of entropy, according to which the world doesn't have much of a prospect to end well. A bearded man of about fifty thanked the speaker. His paper, he said, had extended a hand to us that we would all want to clasp heartily, and we would have ample opportunity to do so during the two-thirty session; now it was time for lunch. Was this the director who had sat with Lemke in the front row at those spaghetti Westerns in '68 and '69? He was immediately besieged by the workshop participants, but when they dribbled away, taking the speaker with them, he remained behind, jotting down notes.

I greeted him and introduced myself. “I have a question that has nothing to do with your workshop. I'm a private investigator and am investigating a murder. I believe that you know, or knew, the main suspect. Were you a student in Heidelberg around'68,'69?”

He was a careful man. He made me show him my ID and had his office call Wendt Real Estate in Heidelberg to ask Frau Büchler to confirm that I had indeed been commissioned by old Herr Wendt to investigate young Wendt's murder. He was pale when he hung up. “This is terrible news. Someone I knew well becoming a victim of a crime. I suppose this is a daily occurrence in your profession, but in my world I experience it as severe aggrievement.”

He seemed shaken, so I refrained from offering him my hand and advising affectedness instead of aggrievement.

“When were you involved with Rolf Wendt?”

“Let me see, when was the Socialist Patient Collective in Heidelberg? When all that ended, Wendt was looking for a new path, a new direction. He met us and for a while was something like a little brother to us. He must have been about seventeen or eighteen back then.”

“You said 'us'-do you mean Helmut Lemke and yourself?”

“I mean Helmut, Richard, and myself-the three of us spent a lot of time together.” He reminisced. “You know, as much as the news of Wendt's death has shaken me, when I think back, I realize that for me Rolf, dead as he now is, is not more dead than the other two, who I imagine are still alive but from whom I haven't heard in years. Though I must say that back then we lived like there was no tomorrow; all our thoughts and feelings were for the present. Despite world revolution-or because of it? As one grows older, a part of one's heart clings to the past while one's head worries about the future, and one no longer believes that friendships are forever.”

I don't know what a man can still believe in when year after year he parcels out questions of fate into topics for workshops. He stood up. “Let's go and sit outside. Nowadays I hardly get out.”

He leaned far back on the bench in front of the building and held his face up to the sun. I asked him if back then Lemke and Wendt had had a particularly good or particularly bad relationship to each other, and found out that everyone had a special relationship with Lemke. “You either admired him or locked horns with him, or both. But you couldn't deal with him as an equal. And when I said we were Rolf's big brothers, that's not quite right. It was Helmut Lemke who Rolf particularly looked up to.”

“Admiration, locking of horns, not dealing with him as an equal-and yet you remember it as a golden time?”

He sat up and looked at me. His forehead was smooth for a man of fifty, but his eyes were tired with age-the eyes of a man who is duty-bound by his profession to love people, although by now they only get on his nerves. As a priest, therapist, or whatever he basically was, he had offered more advice, given more comfort, and granted more forgiveness than he had within him. “I didn't say it was a golden time, nor would I say such a thing. There is a photograph from those days hanging on the wall of my office in which I can see everything: what was golden-if it was golden-compulsions and conflicts, the living in the present. I can show it to you, if you'd like.”

“How long did your gang-of-four last?”

“Until Helmut's career at the Communist League of West Germany took off. Then he no longer had time for tabletop soccer and spaghetti Westerns, and in politics only what had to do with the Communist League. What is strange is that none of us went over to the Communist League with him, even though he had been so dominant in our group that without him we scattered to the winds. Maybe he didn't want us there with him. Anyway, he didn't proselytize us. I'd say, one day he was simply gone.”

“Did he also drop Rolf from one day to the next?”

“Yes, I think they had a fight or something. Richard was the only one who kept in touch with Helmut and whom Helmut seemed to want to keep in touch with. I don't know how long that lasted. The last time I saw Richard was when I passed my exams and was heading to Pforzheim for my internship as vicar, and was waiting in the Heidelberg station for my train. Richard was no longer working as a laboratory assistant, which is what he'd trained for, but was now working for a lawyer. A divorce lawyer, he said, though I wondered if it was really a divorce lawyer or a terrorist lawyer-you know, I mean one of those who are in cahoots with terrorists. Richard had always been frustrated that we could only watch those spaghetti Westerns and not actually live them: On one side large-scale landowners, corrupt generals, greedy priests, and on the other poor Mexican farmers in white pajamas and revolutionaries with ammunition belts crossed over their chests, and then lots of ripe mangoes, wine, and mariachis. He'd have loved to import all that over here.”

Lunch was over. The participants of the various workshops had walked their legs off in the park. When one group caught sight of us and started heading over, he got up. “They think you are the next speaker, or they want to corner me. The workshop's starting up again in a few minutes. Come along, I'll show you the photograph.”

It was hanging in his office. I had expected a photo the size of a postcard, but it had been enlarged to poster size and placed behind glass in a black frame. It showed a picnic in black and white: a lawn, a white cloth spread with fruit, bread, and wine, and Wendt and Lemke lounging across from each other. Behind them, the current director of the academy, already sporting a beard, was bending over picking flowers, and a few steps away was a Borgward with its sunroof pulled back. Instead of a number on its license plate it had the letters “R. I. P.” Lemke was talking at Wendt, gesticulating wildly, and Wendt had been listening to him with his head resting on his hand and his hand resting on his knee, but now he looked up, and the flower-picking future director of the academy had also raised his head and was looking up, bent forward as he was. They had planted a presumably red flag on a thin, glittering stick: At this instant a magpie was flying off with the stick and the flag.

“Is that… no, it's not a snapshot, is it?”

“You mean because of the Manet motif? No, we didn't arrange ourselves like that on purpose. We didn't arrange for the magpie either, though it had already stolen a silver fork from us, and Richard had planted the flag lightly enough so the bird could snatch it away. Richard had been hovering around us all afternoon with his camera, shooting us from a distance, in closeup, with a telephoto lens and without one. He took hundreds of pictures. This was the last one. Do you like it?”

It was an attractive picture. But at the same time it made me sad. Lemke in his dark jacket, white shirt, and dark, narrow tie looked boyish in an old-fashioned way, energetic and self-confident. Wendt's face was already showing the overtaxed quality I had seen. A fearful, childlike face eager to be excited about the bird flying off but not quite daring to.

“Why should that beautiful Borgward automobile rest in peace?” I asked.

He didn't understand.

“R. I. P., requiescat in pace. Wasn't that meant for the car? Was it meant for capitalism, or…”

He laughed. “That wasn't on the car. Richard retouched the picture later. He always smuggled his initials into photos that he thought were particularly successful. R. I. P.-that's short for Richard Ingo Peschkalek.”

24 After Fall Comes Winter

Shouldn't I have realized it? This was of course a futile question. But it preoccupied me all the way to Gättingen. I remembered the conversation in prison, when Peschkalek had spoken of Leo and me: the old man and the young girl. I hadn't ever told him anything about her. Had he got that from Lemke? It also struck me now that he had turned up at Brigitte's place, even though I'd never mentioned her. Had he been spying on me? Had our first meeting on the autobahn not been a coincidence, but set up by him? Had he been spying on me at that very moment?

Everything became even more confused. That Peschkalek might have heard about me and Leo from Lemke, but had come to me wanting to dig up the facts about the attack Lemke had launched, didn't pan out. Had he heard about Leo and me and the case I was investigating from the police, and not from Lemke? Let's say he'd read the article in the Viernheimer Tage-blatt, his curiosity was aroused, he started investigating, found out from a police source that I, too, was investigating, and fastened onto me… And then, as coincidence would have it, his old comrade Lemke turned out to be behind everything? There was a little too much coincidence in all of this for my liking.

When in the evening, after a long drive, I reached Mannheim, I had a backache but no answers. All I knew was where I wanted to search for those answers. The phone book listed Peschkalek's apartment and studio in the Bäckstrasse. I called Brigitte, told her I was still on the road and would be at her place by eight, and asked her to invite Peschkalek for dinner at eight, too. Then I parked my car in good time outside his place in the Bäckstrasse. Shortly before eight he came out, got into his VW Golf, and drove off. He didn't look right or left. I read the names on the buzzers and went inside.

The hallway was narrow and gloomy. After a few steps it widened out on the left into a stairwell. Straight ahead it led to a backyard. Peschkalek's buzzer was on a board with six others. When I got used to the dark, I could make out a sign with his name on it and an arrow pointing to the back.

In the yard were an old elm tree and a two-story wooden shack leaning on the firewall of the building next door. Next to the outside staircase that led to the second floor was another sign, ATELIER PESCHKALEK. I climbed the stairs following the arrow. The landing was wide enough for Peschkalek to put a table and two recliners on it and use it as a balcony. The door had only a peephole, and the window that looked out onto the landing was secured with a grille. I reached into my bag, snapped open the large key ring that had a good hundred different keys on it, and tried them one by one. It was quiet in the yard. The wind rustled in the elm tree.

It took a long time for me to find the key that released the pin tumblers and turned the lock. The door opened into a large room. The back wall showed the unplastered firewall of the neighboring building. To the right were three doors, leading into a tiny bedroom, a kitchen that was no larger than a closet, and a bathroom that also served as a darkroom, in which the necessities of personal hygiene had surrendered to the developing of film. On the left I could look out into the neighbor's yard through two large windows. A gap in the buildings of the Hafenstrasse even offered a narrow vista of the warehouses and cranes of the harbor and the red strip that the setting sun had left behind on the pale sky.

Dusk was setting in, and I had to hurry. His place was filled with lamps that could have made the interior bright as day, and there were also black blinds on the windows-but one of the blinds was stuck. So I had to look things over as best as I could and take as close a look as possible at anything interesting in the windowless bathroom.

Despite the tangle of lamps, curtains, and folding screens, the Venetian chair, piano stool, grandfather clock, Styrofoam column, and fake jukebox, I soon realized that Peschkalek had an eye for order. In one desk drawer he kept stationery with a letterhead, in another stationery without, in the second drawer envelopes arranged by size, and in the last drawer supplies ranging from punchers to scissors. His unanswered mail and unpaid bills lay in a little basket on his desk. Everything that didn't have to be dealt with right away must have been in the binders lining the right-hand wall between the doors. They didn't have labels, but were numbered from 1.1 to 1.7, and under fourteen heading numbers there were between two and eleven further numbers. The heading numbers stood for topics such as portraits, nudes, fashion, politics, and commercials, and the further numbers stood for single big projects and also the small projects of a given year. It was quite straightforward. Under the heading number 15, Peschkalek had filed away his big features, the first about Italian contrabass makers, the second about closed steelworks in Lorraine, and the next three about football, alpine-horn blowing, and child prostitution in Germany. Binder number 15.6 was dedicated to the Viernheim attack.

Before I sat down on the toilet in his bathroom with the binder, I called Brigitte and told her about traffic jams and construction. “Is Ingo there yet? I won't make it before ten- don't wait for me with dinner.”

They had finished the soup already and were about to start on the monkfish. “We'll keep a plate warm for you.”

As in the other binders, in this one, too, were pictures first and then the text. It took a while till I realized what the photos showed. They were dark, and I was at the point of judging them failures. But they were night shots. A car, disguised figures in a forest, dug-up mounds of earth that the disguised figures were doing something with, uniformed figures, and an explosion with two bodies flying through the air, a fire, people running. The Viernheim attack in pictures.

The texts began with a letter to the local and regional press, in which the group After Fall Comes Winter took credit for the attack on the poison-gas depot in the Lampertheim National Forest and made threats against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In a later letter, Peschkalek wrote about a terrorist who wanted out, had confided in him, and had handed him a confession and a video recording showing the Viernheim attack. Peschkalek praised the material and enclosed stills as proof of the video's quality, and excerpts from the confession. He wanted a million marks for it. The letter was to the ZDF television network. The next page in the binder listed who else he had contacted: the various broadcasting corporations, a Hamburg magazine and weekly, the serious press, the tabloids, and finally the gutter press. Then came the responses. At best they were surprised: The material looked interesting, but nothing was known about an attack on a poison-gas depot in the Viernheim Meadows. Some of the replies were curt, saying that the police knew nothing of such an attack-someone had spent time looking into it and was angry. More often than not, the replies were form letters thanking him, but unceremoniously turning him down. Finally I found in the binder the confession of the terrorist, an eighty-page manuscript, obviously printed on the same printer as Peschkalek's letters, and, in a plastic cover, the American file. I did not look at the video marked 15.6-the stills were enough.

I needed a breather before I could head over to Brigitte's place. I put a few photos in my bag, turned out the light in the bathroom, put the binder back, sat down in the Venetian chair, and looked out the window. On a balcony across the way three men had settled down to a game of Skat. I heard the bidding and calling of suits and sometimes a fist banging on the table along with a card. A red light blinked over the harbor, warning airplanes of a crane.

Had Lemke and Peschkalek mounted a spectacle for the media? I ought to have figured out much earlier that Lemke no longer believed in political battles or waged such battles anymore. A fanatic, a terrorist-that didn't pan out with him. He was able to slip into the role and play it convincingly. But that was all. Lemke was a player, a strategist, a gambler. He had staged a terrorist attack with a few foolish youngsters, staged it in a way that ought to have pitched the media into a feeding frenzy. There were even casualties, presumably unplanned, but heightening the worth of the spectacle and the price of the material. But nobody played along: not the Americans, not the police, not the media. None of the million marks they had intended to rake in had materialized.

25 That's strange

I didn't call Nägelsbach. I drove over to Brigitte's place, where I found her, Peschkalek, and Manu having chocolate, espresso, and sambuca over a game of Risk. I had a hard time responding to their cheerfulness. But I'd had a long drive and could plead tiredness. I ate the leftovers and watched them play.

It was a heated game. After years of living in Rio, Manu conquered and defended South America tooth and nail. His strategy was to occupy North America and Africa in order to secure South America-he didn't care about the rest of the world. Brigitte had only joined in the game because she didn't want to be a wet blanket. She had captured Australia, was fantasizing about harmonious coexistence with aborigines, and was not interested in further conquests. So Peschkalek managed to capture Europe and Asia without effort. But his mission was to free Australia and South America, and unlike Brigitte or Manu he took his mission seriously, got entangled in a hopeless war on two fronts, and didn't rest until he was utterly defeated. Manu and Brigitte were overjoyed, and he laughed along with them. But he was rankled. He wasn't a good loser.

“Time to go to bed!” Brigitte clapped her hands.

“No, no, no!” Manu was in high spirits and ran from the living room to the kitchen and back to the living room, and turned on the TV. Yugoslavia was falling apart. Rostock was bankrupt. A baby had been abducted from a hospital in Lüdenscheid and found in a phone booth in Leverkusen. The Frenchman Marcel Croust won over Viktor Krempel in the Manila chess tournament, establishing himself as the challenger to the world champion. The Federal Public Prosecutor's Office announced the arrest of the suspected terrorists Helmut Lemke and Leonore Salger in a village in Spain, from where they were to be extradited to Germany. The TV showed them being led in handcuffs to a helicopter by policemen in black-lacquered hats.

“Isn't that…”

“Yes.”

Brigitte knew Leo from the picture leaning against the small stone lion on my desk. Brigitte shook her head. Leo, with her unwashed, stringy hair, bleary-eyed face, and grubby checked shirt, did not meet her approval.

“Are you going to see her again?” she asked me casually. Even when I had told her about my trip with Leo to Locarno, she had not made much of a fuss. Even then I hadn't fallen for it.

“I don't know.”

Peschkalek stared at the television screen without a word. I couldn't see his face. When the news was over he cleared his throat and said, “It's amazing what the teamwork of the European police can pull off nowadays.” He turned to me and launched into a minilecture about Interpol and the Schen-gen Treaty, the investigative role of the computer, Europol, and the new European forensic database.

“You'll try to get to see those two…” I began.

“I guess I ought to, don't you think?”

“… and you'll try to talk them into playing the role I didn't want to play?”

He weighed which answer would trigger what question, wasn't sure, and dodged. “I'll think about it.”

“What can you offer them?”

“What do you mean?” He seemed uncomfortable.

“Well, the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office can drop charges, apply for a lower penalty, or even grant pardons in order to salvage its story of the Käfertal attack. What can you offer? Money?”

“Me, money?”

“For a good feature article there's always good money, wouldn't you say?”

“Things aren't that good.” He got up. “I've got to get going.”

“Things aren't that good? There should be hundreds of thousands of marks in something like this, and with the real photos and documents even more. What would you say to a million?”

He looked at me, vexed. He was trying to figure out whether I'd just hit on that number or if I was hinting at something. His flight-instinct won. “Well, so long, then.”

Brigitte had listened to us annoyed. When Peschkalek had gone, after kisses on both cheeks, she asked what was going on. “Are you fighting?” I dodged her question. As we lay in bed, she rested her head on my arm and looked at me.

“Gerhard.”

“Yes?”

“Is that why they let you out of prison? I mean, did you tell them where to find the two of them?”

“For God's sake…”

“What would be wrong with that? I don't know the girl, but she's on the run with him, and he did assault you, after all. That was him, wasn't it? The one I met at the door when I found you in terrible shape and covered in blood.”

“Yes, but I had no idea they were in Spain. Leo called me once or twice, and it sounded far away-that was all.”

“That's strange.” She turned around, nestled her back against me, and fell asleep.

I knew what she found strange. How would a policeman in a godforsaken village in the Spanish provinces come upon German terrorists? Not without a tip-off. I conjured up the image of a German tourist abroad going to the police to make a statement that he recognized the inhabitants of a neighboring bungalow as the terrorists for whom there was an alarm out. Then I remembered the tip-off that had led Rawitz and Bleckmeier to me, not to mention the tip-off that had landed me in prison. These had not come from a tourist. Nor had the tip-off that had brought Tietzke to Wendt's corpse. I might have been pointed out by someone who happened to see me, someone from Mannheim who had been drawn to the Oden-wald and Amorbach by the warm summery day. But the tip-off about Wendt's corpse had come from Wendt's murderer.

26 A pointed chin and broad hips

Philipp wasn't in his hospital room.

“He's out in the garden.” The nurse followed me to the window. Philipp, in his dressing gown, was walking around a pond, every step as cautious as if he were treading on thin ice. This is how old men walk, and even if Philipp were able to walk normally again, there would come a day when this would be the only way he could walk. A day would come when this would be the only way I could walk, too.

“This is my third round already. Thanks, but I don't need your arm. I'm not using the cane they've been trying to foist on me either.”

I walked beside him, resisting the urge to tread as cautiously as he did.

“How long are they going to keep you here?”

“A few days, perhaps a week-just try pinning one of those doctors down. When I tell them they really don't have to treat me with kid gloves, they just laugh. They tell me I should have operated on myself, then I'd be fully up-to-date on my condition.”

I wondered if that was possible.

“I've got to get out of here!” He waved his arms. The pretty young nurses were unsettling him. “It's crazy! I've always liked them, the sweet ones as much as the mean ones, the firm ones, the soft ones. I'm not one of those guys who need big breasts or blond hair. It used to be, if they were young and had that look in their eyes, that blank look where you can't tell if it sees through everything or is utterly clueless, when they have that scent that only young women have-that was it. And now”- he shook his head-”now a girl can be sweet and flutter her eyelashes at me all she wants, but I no longer see the young girl she is, just the old woman she will one day turn into.”

I didn't understand. “You mean, a sort of X-ray vision?”

“Call it whatever you want. In the mornings there's Nurse Senta, for instance-the cutest face, soft skin, a pointed chin, small breasts, and broad hips. She acts stern, but loves to giggle. In the past, the air would have been charged. Now I look at her and see that one day her stern act will crease her mouth with scowling lines, blood vessels will spot her cheeks, and love handles will bulge over her midriff. Have you ever noticed how all women with pointed chins have broad hips?”

I tried to conjure up the chins and hips of the women I knew.

“Then there's Verena, the night nurse. A hot-blooded woman-but what looks wild now will look ravaged soon enough. In the past I wouldn't have given a damn. Now I see it, and it's like a bucket of cold water.”

“What do you have against ravaged women? I thought you saw Helen of Troy in every woman?”

“I did. That's the way I liked it, and that's the way I'd like it to be again.” He looked at me sadly. “But it doesn't work anymore. Now I only see a shrew in every woman.”

“Perhaps it's just because you're still under the weather. You've never been sick before, have you?”

He had already weighed this explanation, too, but brushed it aside. “I used to fantasize about being a patient in a hospital and being spoiled by the nurses.”

I wasn't able to cheer him up. On the way back to his room, he steadied himself on my arm. Nurse Eva helped him into bed. She wasn't just called Eva, she also looked the part, but he didn't grace her with a single glance. As I was about to leave, he grabbed my arm. “Am I paying now for having loved women?”

I left. But I left too late. His morose brooding had gotten to me. Here was a man who had made women the center of his life. His passion had not been for anything fleeting like fame or glory, nor for something external like money or possessions, nor for deceptive erudition, nor vain power. But it didn't help. The brooding and the life crisis still came, as they did for everybody else. I couldn't even think of a crime with which Philipp could salvage his life's illusion.

I called Frau Büchler. “I know who the murderer is. But I don't know his motive, nor do I have proof. Perhaps Herr Wendt knows more than he realizes. I really must speak to him at this point.”

“Can you please call back in a few hours? I'll see what I can do.”

I went to the Luisenpark and fed the ducks. At three o'clock I spoke again with Frau Büchler. “Could you please wait at your office tomorrow morning,” she said. “Herr Wendt doesn't know yet when he will come by, but he will.” She hesitated for a moment. “He is a man used to having his own way and can be somewhat imperious and gruff. But he is also sensitive. Whatever painful things you have to say to him about his son or his son's death, please say them carefully. And please don't hand him the invoice-send it to me.”

“Frau Büchler, I-”

She had hung up.

27 If we had put our money where our mouth is

At nine o'clock I was at my office. I watered the potted palm, emptied the ashtrays, dusted the desk and filing cabinet, and neatly laid out fountain pens and pencils next to one another.

The phone rang. Herr Wendt's chauffeur informed me over his car phone that Herr Wendt would be at my office in half an hour.

A Mercedes pulled up. The chauffeur opened the car door. Before Herr Wendt got out, he eyed the building and my office, the smoked glass and the display window of the former tobacconist's, and the golden letters GERHARD SELF, PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS. He got out of the car with difficulty and hesitated, carefully steadying himself, as if with his heavy body he had to find his balance: an elephant swaying his rump, head, and trunk, and one is uncertain whether he has forgotten how to use his power, or if he will stampede and flatten everything in his path. He approached my door with heavy steps. I opened it.

“Herr Self?” His voice boomed.

I greeted him. Despite the summer temperature, he seemed chilled and kept his coat on.

We sat down at my desk facing each other, and he immediately came to the point. “Who killed him?”

“You wouldn't know him. He and your son used to be friends, then for years their ways parted, but their paths crossed again and the two of them clashed. I am not yet sure whether he put pressure on your son, or whether your son put pressure on him; in other words, if he wanted something from your son or if your son wanted something from him. Were you in touch with your son in the days or weeks before he died?”

“I resent that question, we are father and son! He is a man of letters. He has his master's and a doctorate, and I'll be the first to admit that what he does and says is sometimes beyond me. And more often than not he simply doesn't understand how things are done in my world. But he has always respected me! Always!” Old Herr Wendt was blustering, but his face remained set. The bones of his temples were strong and his cheeks and chin square despite the considerable fat, and his eyes peered from beneath a wide forehead and profuse eyebrows, his pupils not vacillating, his eyelids not twitching. Only his mouth moved, letting the words drone out.

“Do you know the area between Viernheim and Lam-pertheim, Herr Wendt? The forest where the Americans have a depot.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Your son was involved in the attack that was perpetrated there. To be precise, he was involved with the people who perpetrated the attack. There was a map of the region in his briefcase. Didn't the police tell you about that?”

He shook his head. “What map?”

“Nothing special. It was a map of the autobahn triangle near Viernheim and a few kilometers around it, with boundary or section numbers. It was a letter-size black-and-white photocopy.”

“Rolf…” He didn't continue.

“Yes?”

“I would have liked to have done more for my son. You know where he lived and how. Ah, Herr Self, the apartments he could have had! Why did I work my fingers to the bone all my life?”

I couldn't tell him why, so I waited.

“I would have given him everything, everything! But that map…”

“What do you mean?”

He stared down at the desk between us, reached for a pencil, and turned and twisted it in his gnarled hands. “I didn't want all of that to start again. Not that I know how deeply involved he was back then. Be that as it may, he didn't break free from it easily, let me tell you. When he started working, all that nonsense caught up with him, and now, when he was on the brink of making something of himself, with his own practice or his own hospital, he couldn't get mixed up in all that again!”

“What's the connection between the political things your son was involved in during the early seventies and the map you mentioned?”

The pencil snapped, and Herr Wendt slammed the two halves onto the desk. “I didn't hire you to cross-examine me!”

I remained silent.

He didn't say anything either and looked at me as if I were a bitter pill. To swallow or not to swallow, that was the question. I made to say something, but he waved his hand dismis-sively and began to talk. “A few days before his death, Rolf had asked for the map I have that indicates where poison gas had been buried at the end of the war in the Viernheim Meadows and the Lampertheim National Forest. He had wanted the map once before. He was still at school then and had just had an accident while driving a stolen car without a license. I moved heaven and earth to patch all that up, and I had just pulled it off when one night I caught him rifling through my desk and my safe, looking for the map. I gave him the hiding of his life. Perhaps…” There was a sudden uncertainty in his eyes. “That was the end of all the trouble. He finished school and passed his exams and his doctorate. So the hiding did him some good, don't you think? I learned to live with the fact that he didn't go on to become a surgeon; a man has to make his own choices. Also that he didn't talk to me much anymore-I don't know what people will have told you, but I was convinced that things would turn out well. At a certain age boys don't get along with their fathers. That's just a phase.” He looked at me hard again.

“Why did your son want that map?”

“The first time around, I admit I didn't even give him a chance to explain himself, and the second time he wouldn't say. Did my son's murderer want that map? Are you saying that my son would still be alive if I'd given him that map?” He stood up. “It was him I was thinking of, do you understand, only him. I wanted him to be done once and for all with all that crazy political nonsense. As far as I was concerned he could have had the map; I don't need it anymore.”

I couldn't tell him what he wanted to hear. I didn't know what had preceded Rolf's death that rainy afternoon beneath the autobahn bridge. But even if the map was worth murdering for, I couldn't imagine that somebody would murder Rolf if he were trying to extort the map from him. I told Wendt as much. “Is the map worth killing for?”

“Today? In the old days, perhaps. Take the metropolitan area of Ludwigshafen-Mannheim-Heidelberg: If one intended to establish a city, a real city, instead of letting it sprawl haphazardly, then only the area between Lampertheim, Bürstadt, Lorsch, and Viernheim would have come into question. There is access to the autobahn and the train, twenty minutes on the high-speed train to Frankfurt and twenty minutes by car to Heidelberg, there's nature all around, the Odenwald Range and the Palatinate Forest right at your fingertips-sounds good, doesn't it? In the sixties and seventies it sounded very good indeed. But today we don't think and plan that way anymore. Today we like everything to be small and cozy, with little towers and bay windows. Only the expansion of the high-speed train network is in the works. If you ask me, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in if we had put our money where our mouth is.”

“Were the Americans planning to leave back then?”

“They were, by all accounts. And so we started buying. Prices rose in Neuschloss, and one Realtor tried to be particularly clever and put down half a million for the old forester's lodge on the road to Hemsbach.” He laughed, slapping his thighs. “Half a million!”

“And with that map, you knew what was worth buying and what to avoid?”

“No. You couldn't get at the actual terrain. The Americans were there, and they still are. But ifthey had left, and ifthey had not cleaned up the place while they were still there, and if the city were to be built, then the map would have been a gold mine. If, if, if-that map was never a jackpot.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I bought it.”

I looked at him, puzzled.

“Needless to say, not at my local bookstore. A young man found it in his father's papers and was clever enough to realize its value for the real-estate market. I had to fork out a good chunk of cash for it.”

I showed him young Lemke in a photograph from Leo's album. He looked at it: “Yes, he was the one who sold it to me.”

I didn't for a moment believe that Lemke had found the map among his father's papers. Leo had told me about Lemke's internship at her father's office in the Ministry of Defense. Lemke had to have come across the map there and stolen it. Then he had sold it to old Herr Wendt and tried to get it back from young Rolf Wendt-presumably to cut the same deal with the next Realtor, for the funds of the Communist League, or for his own pocket.

“Herr Wendt, did you tell your son how you got the map?”

“I suppose so.”

“That is what helped your son, not the beating you gave him. Lemke, who sold you the map, was trying to get your son to take it away from you again. He wouldn't have told him that he had sold you the map. He wouldn't even have spoken of money, but of high political aims. He was your son's political idol, and your son believed in him, until he realized that Lemke had duped him and used him.”

“Did he…”

“No, he didn't kill your son.”

He took the two halves of the broken pencil and tried to put them back together again.

“Can I have the map?” I asked.

“Will it help with your investigation?”

“I think it will.”

He eyed me silently. Our conversation had exhausted him. Without asking me, he picked up my phone, called his chauffeur, and told him to pull up outside. He got up, steadied himself on the desk, found his balance, walked to the window, and waited for the car. “You'll hear from me,” he said over his shoulder as he walked out the door.

28 Marked red

I didn't have to wait long for Wendt's reply. I got off the phone with Brigitte and immediately received a call from Frau Büchler. She had just sent a messenger to my office, and Herr Wendt hoped I would know to use what was in the package prudently-he didn't want it back. After the close of the investigation he expected a detailed written report. “You are to send the report to me, and the invoice, too,” Frau Büchler said. “I wish you much success, Herr Self.”

I waited for the messenger and looked out the window. There are seldom pedestrians out and about on the Augusta-Anlage. There are a couple of schools in the area, but the children use the side streets. There are also several offices, big and small, but the people who work there use their cars. I watched the traffic cop writing out tickets. Then my vista remained empty for a while, until two dark men in light suits came into view, stopped, talked vehemently at each other, and continued on their way, one of them angrily in front, the other anxiously following. A young woman pushed a stroller through the picture. A small boy ran by carrying a schoolbag. I lit a cigarette.

The messenger arrived on a motorbike. He didn't switch the engine off while he handed me a large yellow envelope on the steps leading up to my door, and he had me sign a receipt. Before he thundered off, he tapped his index finger on his helmet.

I had to clear my desk in order to lay out the map. It looked utterly insignificant. Little green numbers, ones and twos, denoted evergreen and deciduous woodland. To the west of the small pond called Baumholzgraben were a few brown altitude lines, and the whole area was cut into rectangles by cleared areas in gray, numbered between ten and forty. At eleven points, matchstick-thin areas about two centimeters long were marked red next to the cleared areas. Some were marked with a particularly wide hatching, and some with an additional question mark. Was that where poison gas from World War I was buried, or thought to be buried? The map bore no caption, and no heading either, just a multidigit number, an indication of the scale, a stamp with eagle and swastika, and an initial that was illegible.

I folded the map up again. I don't have a safe, but nobody has ever broken into my file cabinet. I laid the map on the middle shelf, under my blank-cartridge pistol. I wondered if there were any copies. I supposed that Lemke must have made a copy before he sold it to Herr Wendt, which he then could have used in preparation for the attack. Maybe the map had even given him the idea. Otherwise copies were not of much use, not then and not now. No Realtor would have paid for a copy, and no newspaper would have been interested.

I gazed at the shadow play that the sun and the gold lettering on my glass door conjured up on the floor: long, airy letters stretching upward and away from one another. I didn't have anything to do till evening. But I wasn't particularly interested in doing anything. I wanted to finish this case and put the whole thing behind me.

At the Kleiner Rosengarten I had a veal schnitzel in lemon sauce. I saw a matinee of a movie in which at first she loved him but he didn't love her, and then he loved her but she didn't love him, and then nobody loved anybody, until finally, after a chance meeting years later, he loved her and she loved him. I sweated, swam, and napped at the Herschelbad. I woke up to Peschkalek and Brigitte bringing me a birthday cake, whose candles I was supposed to blow out but couldn't. The two of them stood next to me, talked at me, and kept slapping my shoulders, their hands meeting. I felt they were holding onto each other and tried to turn around, but couldn't. They were holding me in a vise.

I disentangled myself from the sheet and looked at the clock. It was high time.

29 Another matter altogether

I remembered which key it was. The lock clicked open right away.

I looked around. An hour and a half had to be enough. I had asked Brigitte to invite Peschkalek again, which she readily did, but I wouldn't be able to put her off any longer than that.

I called her. “I'm sorry, but-”

“You'll be late?”

“Yes.”

“Don't worry. Manu isn't home yet. When do you think you can make it?”

The grandfather clock struck. “It's eight now. Nine thirty-that shouldn't be a problem. Bon appétit-and don't forget to leave something for me.”

“Will do.”

It stayed light a little longer than last time. I could still see well. This time I looked not only at the desk, but also searched every compartment and drawer for the gun. I also looked behind every binder. I searched through the bedroom, groping my way through the closet from sweaters to shirts and underwear to socks, and I patted down every jacket and pair of pants. I couldn't find his shoes. There was no shoe closet, no shoe shelf, nor were they lying around anywhere on the floor. A man without shoes-that couldn't be. When I tackled the bed and lifted the mattress, I found a drawer built in under the bed and packed with shoes, organized by color and polished to a spotless sheen. Pulling the drawer out all the way to look behind it proved difficult in the narrow room. But I managed that, too, crawling under the bed on my stomach and groping about in the area between the back of the drawer and the wall. Nothing.

It was very tight beneath the bed and I wanted to get out. But that proved more difficult than getting in. I pushed against the wall and kicked my legs but didn't get very far. I had used my legs to push my way under the bed, but I couldn't use them to pull myself out. More proof, I thought, that getting oneself into something is easy enough, but getting out again is another matter altogether. Just like monasteries or marriage, the foreign legion, or bad company, I reflected. I remembered a pool I had jumped into as a small boy. I had just learned to swim. After two laps I realized that there was no climbing up the smooth concrete walls. I was trapped.

Finally I stemmed and kicked, pushed and pulled myself centimeter by centimeter out from under the bed. Things got easier once my bottom was no longer stuck between the bed and the floor. First my shoulders got free, then my head. I breathed a sigh of relief, closed my eyes for a moment, and rolled onto my back-I simply couldn't get up right away.

When I opened my eyes, Peschkalek was standing over me. He was looking down at me, one hand in his pocket, the other twirling his mustache.

“How long have you been standing there?” This wasn't a good opening. I should have left him the first word and gotten up quietly.

“I should have pulled you out. Perhaps with a little apology, because it's so tight down there? And with an invitation, perhaps: As in, what would you like to see next? Where would you like to snoop around now, Mr. Private Investigator?” He took an ironic bow.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. That wasn't a particularly good beginning either. I was confused. Just the same, I got up.

He grinned. “I heard my clock chime when you called Brigitte.” His grin grew malicious. “And three guesses how I managed to listen in when you called. Now why would your Brigitte and I be sitting cheek to cheek? Well?”

He took his hand out of his pocket and clenched his fist. I don't know whether he hoped or feared that I would fling myself on him. The thought didn't even cross my mind. I took my time.

“Well?” He hopped from one foot to another.

“Where is your gun?”

He stopped in his tracks. “My gun? What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Ingo. No one's here except you and me. There's no police inspector in the closet and no microphone in my tie pin. You know what I'm talking about, and I know that you know. Why play games?”

“I really don't know what you're talking about. How-”

“You're right. My question was a game, too. Why should you tell me where you've hidden the gun? Or did you throw it away?”

“Cut the bullshit, Gerhard. I told Brigitte I'd come get my camera, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. Then I'll take the pictures of Manu she wants, and eat the potato soufflé that's in the oven. Feel free to turn on the light and continue your search for pistols, and don't forget to lock up when you leave.”

He turned around and went into the other room. He was good. He was much better than I'd given him credit for. And the matter-of-factness with which he spoke of Brigitte, Manu, and the soufflé hit me harder than the sucker punch of him and Brigitte sitting cheek to cheek when I called. I watched him pack two cameras and a flash into his leather bag, and said, “I'd also take binder 15.6 and the video.”

He pulled the strap very slowly through the buckle, pushed the prong into the hole in the strap, and pulled it tight. He shot a quick glance at the shelf.

“It's all still there,” I said.

He had finished packing, but seemed unsure what to do next. He stood looking out the window, his hands on the leather bag.

“Not to mention that I have the map you wanted from Rolf.”

Now he was even less certain what to do. Was I throwing him some bait? Was I making him an offer? With his left hand he tapped a disjointed rhythm on the leather bag.

“Isn't Lemke a risk, after all? You assumed he'd play along and keep his mouth shut. Then he'd have made his grand entrance at the trial, and you'd have had your feature in the media. When he gets out of prison, he'll have half the proceeds, with interest and compound interest. He'll get-what, eight years, ten? A high price, but as he got caught anyway and will be punished, what would he stand to gain if he didn't play along and keep his mouth shut?”

Peschkalek's hand tapped slowly and evenly.

“And yet he would stand to gain something,” I said. “He'd be paying you back for squealing on him.”

He turned and faced me. “Squealing on him? I don't understand.”

“I don't know if one can actually prove that you squealed. Voice recordings, voice matches-nowadays there are all kinds of possibilities, but I doubt the police would go to all that trouble.” I shook my head. “But Lemke doesn't need concrete proof. If I point him in the right direction, then he'll realize, just as I've realized, that it could only have been you who made that call to the Spanish police, not some German tourist, or whatever you passed yourself off as.”

Peschkalek looked at me as if he were bracing himself for the next blow.

I took aim. “What's bad for you is that Lemke is not out just to get even. If he's going to start talking, it wouldn't surprise me if he chose to save his own skin. If he ends up as the chief witness, he might only get four to five years. So why not? He'll start talking and lay all the facts on the table. And he'll lay them out in such a way that you'll be the one who was behind it all: You came up with the idea, you masterminded it, and you saw it all through. You fired the gun- both in Viernheim and in Wieblingen. It was you!”

30 All's not lost

He gave up. Bait, offer, threat-whatever game I was playing, he no longer dared not play along. But playing along in my game meant giving his game up.

“You don't seriously believe that it was I who shot Rolf Wendt?” He looked at me, appalled.

“You put him under pressure. You had Lemke's gun. You contacted the newspapers. You-”

“But how-”

“How?” I shouted. “You want to know how it can be proved? One thing you can be sure of is that when the police have a lead they find the proof, too, and whatever they won't find, Lemke will provide them with.”

“No, what I meant was, how could I have been the one who killed him if what I was after was to blackmail him?”

“Believe me, I won't lose any sleep over that one.”

“It was an accident. Rolf-”

“The gunshot was an accident? Come on, Ingo-”

“If I'm going to talk, at least listen to what I have to say.” He looked at me half desperate, half furious. I was silent. “You don't have to tell me it sounds crazy! Rolf and I had gotten into a fight because I wanted the map and he wouldn't give it to me. I threatened that I would tell the police that he had hidden Leo in his psychiatric hospital. He grabbed hold of me and I slapped his hands out of the way and pushed him, and he fell backward.”

“And?”

“He just lay there. At first I thought he was playing games, then I thought he had fainted. Then I suddenly got this really weird feeling and felt for his pulse. Nothing. He was dead.” Peschkalek sat down in the Venetian chair, put his arms on the armrests, raised his hands, and let them fall again. I waited. He smiled crookedly and shot a quick glance at me. “I had taken the gun along to frighten him a little, and, well, as he was dead anyway…I fired it.”

“All that just to sell your story? You thought-”

“I didn't just think. I'd have pulled it off if you hadn't gotten in the way. Then the reporter would have been on the scene before the police, would have found the little map, and would have started giving the matter some thought. Then it would have been easy enough for me to point the reporter in the right direction. But things have gotten moving anyway and become public.”

“Did Lemke give you the gun?”

“Helmut give me something?” He laughed. “Helmut is a taker. And for years I was a giver. I was proud to be part of things, to let him order me about. The girls had to make coffee and cook spaghetti, and I had to see to electrical cables, equipment, and cars. That's why Helmut wanted me around when he was in Spain and got all that new-age stuff going with groups and seminars and nude bathing and hot springs. When that didn't pan out and he came back here, things still went on the way they always had. I was to be part of things- in other words, see to all the technical stuff-but I had learned my lesson.”

The lesson Peschkalek had learned was that nothing is free, that as you make your bed, so shall you lie in it-and nobody will come tuck you in. The whole thing had been Lemke's idea.

“You have to have something to offer people, was his motto. Soccer games, celebrity weddings, accidents, and crime are what excite people, and postmodern terrorism is just as much a media event and has to be organized and marketed like everything else.” Lemke needed Peschkalek in order to fill the gap in the market. This time not only because it was more convenient not to have to worry about the technical side of things, but because Lemke wasn't capable of pulling off the whole thing on his own. He needed a cameraman. “But though he needed me, he didn't want to go fifty-fifty. I was to get only a third. I talked to him about it, but he wouldn't budge. He is…somehow, you can't talk with him. So I thought to myself: Just you wait, my time will come.”

And Peschkalek's time did come. Initially, the horror was great. “The morning after the attack-you can't imagine. There we were, huddled around the radio. There was the news at the top of each hour, and every time we'd think: That's it, here comes the report! But each time, nothing. Even though we had two casualties to offer, and that's not to be sniffed at.” On the following days there wasn't anything in the news either, and added to that disappointment came the uncertainty of what might have happened to Bertram and Leo, what Bertram might have said after his arrest, and if Leo had been arrested, too, or where she had gone into hiding. But Bertram wasn't actually in a position to reveal anything important because he didn't know anything of importance about Helmut and Ingo, and Helmut was certain that Leo would not want to reveal anything. So they set to work, writing to TV stations and newspapers. When that didn't pan out, Helmut wanted to drop the whole thing. “He still hired you to search for Leo and said he was doing it so we could put more pressure on the media without needing to worry that she might mess things up for us one day. He used my money for that. But I think he only did it because he wanted her back-because the way I see it, his mind was already on other projects.”

Then Peschkalek had jumped in, shadowing me, had almost managed to trace her, and had set Rawitz and Bleck-meier on me. When shooting at Rolf didn't bring the whole thing out in the media the way he wanted, Peschkalek had first reported me to the police, then Helmut and Leo. “Helmut had stayed in constant contact with me. It never even occurred to him that he might pull the short straw one day.”

Peschkalek had picked up momentum as he talked and looked at me hopefully. “All's not lost, Gerhard. When the trial comes, Helmut will put the record straight on Käfertal and Viernheim-that will be a real bombshell, and all the TV stations and papers that turned their backs on my story will have a feeding frenzy. With the map that you have, the story will get even better and more lucrative. There's at least half a million in it for each of us.” He rummaged through his pants pocket. “Do you have a cigarette?”

I lit one for myself, threw him the yellow pack and the lighter, and leaned on the bookshelf. “Forget it. It isn't going to work. But you could give me the material.”

“What would you do with it?”

“Don't worry, I won't turn it into cash. Perhaps I can use it to get Leo out.”

“What, are you nuts? I've been working on Viernheim for over half a year! You want me to just chuck everything out the window?”

“Look, Ingo, it's over. The police know that Wendt was shot with Lemke's gun. When they confront Lemke with that, he'll know that you took it and shot Wendt with it. He won't want to pay for a murder he didn't commit. What other options does he have but to hand you over to the police? He has no choice. Give it up, Ingo.”

I took binder number 15.6 and its video off the shelf, and he jumped up and tried to snatch them out of my hands. I held on to them tightly, but didn't have a chance. He was young, strong, and furious. There was a short scuffle, and the binder and video were in his hands.

He looked at me, malicious and ready to pounce.

“You won't get far with those,” I said.

He grinned and threw a mock punch at me with his right hand. I stepped back. He put down the binder and video and came closer. I had no idea what he was doing. He launched into a shadowboxing dance, throwing punches first with one fist, then the other, and I kept stepping back. Had he lost his marbles? Then one of his punches hit me, and I staggered backward through the open bathroom door, taking glass beakers, bottles, and trays with me as I fell, and lay in the rubble of his darkroom.

I struggled back to my feet. I could smell chemicals. There was the gentle puffing sound with which a gas range lights up, and the cigarette I had dropped as I fell lit the puddle beneath the bathtub. I tore past the startled Peschkalek into his living room. Behind me there was another puffing sound, then another. I felt the warmth of the fire, turned around, and saw the flames leap out of the bathroom and seize the carpet and the shelf. Peschkalek tore off his jacket and started beating at the flames. It was completely futile.

“Get out!” I yelled. The fire began to roar. In the bedroom, the bed and closet were in flames. “Get out!”

The jacket with which he was beating at the fire was burning. I grabbed hold of him, but he tore himself loose. I grabbed hold of him again and dragged him toward the door. I tore it open. A gust of wind blew in, and the whole room was in flames. The heat drove us onto the landing. Peschkalek stood there, staring hypnotized into the burning room. “Let's get out of here!” I shouted, but he wasn't listening. He began walking back toward the door like a sleepwalker, and I pushed him down the stairs, hurrying after him. He tripped, caught himself, tripped again, and went tumbling head over heels.

He lay at the foot of the stairs without moving.

31 Rawitz laughed

The lights went on in the apartments all around and windows opened. People were leaning out and calling to one another what they could all plainly see: Fire! The ambulance arrived even before the fire brigade and took the unconscious Peschkalek away. The fire trucks arrived. Men in blue uniforms and funny helmets, with little axes on their belts, pulled the hoses through the hallway with surprising speed and turned the water on. There wasn't much left to extinguish.

Then I poked around in the hot, wet, black gunk. Even before the fire chief ordered me off the premises I could see that there was nothing left to be found. There wasn't anything even remotely resembling a binder or a video cassette.

The police began taking statements from witnesses, and I stole out of the courtyard. I would rather have headed over to the Kleiner Rosengarten or home than to Brigitte's. But I couldn't just leave her waiting. I gave her a sanitized version of my encounter with Peschkalek. She didn't probe further, just as I didn't probe into why she and Peschkalek had been sitting cheek to cheek. Later that night we called the hospital, where he was recovering from a concussion. He had also broken an arm and a leg, but had no other injuries.

Then I lay in bed mulling over the ruins of my case. I thought of the death of Rolf Wendt, who could have lived in a stylish apartment and had his own hospital; of Ingo Peschkalek, the miserable murderer; and of Leo's life on the edge, between flight and prison. I was worried that I wouldn't sleep a wink, but I ended up sleeping the sleep of the righteous. I dreamed I was running down some stairs and along corridors, pursued by flames. The running soon turned into floating and gliding, and I flitted cross-legged, with billowing nightshirt, over stairs and through more corridors, until I finally left the flames far behind me, braked, and landed on a green meadow among bright flowers.

The shortest way from Brigitte's place to mine is over the footbridge that crosses the Neckar to the Collini Center and then past the National Theater and across Werderplatz Square. At six in the morning the streets are empty, and only on the Goethestrasse or the Augusta-Anlage will you find some light traffic. It had not cooled off in the night, and the warm morning augured a hot day. A black cat crossed my path on the Rathenaustrasse. I could use some good luck.

I wrote my report for old Herr Wendt to the extent that I could. Then I faced the last chapter.

I put a call through to the Ministry of Defense and was passed from one department to another until I finally got hold of the official in charge of overseeing the poison-gas depots of the two world wars. He didn't want to say anything and couldn't say anything, but his department, naturally, was interested in anything that would help avert any potential danger and damage. Viernheim? A map from the archives of the Wehrmacht and later the Ministry of Defense? A reward for handing over the map? He would be glad to look into the matter. I wouldn't give him my number, but he gave me his-his private line, his departmental number, and his number at home.

Nägelsbach, too, didn't want to say anything, or couldn't say anything. “You'd like to know how Frau Salger is doing? The preliminary proceedings are under way, and we have been issued strict instructions not to pass on any information to third parties. My inclination to make an exception in your case is minimal, to say the least.” His tone was as sharp as his words. But Nägelsbach was prepared to arrange a meeting with Dr. Franz from the Federal High Court.

So I sat facing them once again in the Heidelberg District Attorney's Office: elegant Dr. Franz, the unavoidable Rawitz, and Bleckmeier with his gloomy glumness-so to speak. Nägelsbach had joined us but did not pull his chair up to the table, as if he were planning a quick getaway, or planning to stop one of us from doing so.

“You wanted to talk to me?” Dr. Franz asked.

“I have a few facts to put on the table, and an offer to make.”

“Oh God!” Rawitz snapped. “Now he wants us to strike a deal with him!”

“I'll begin with the facts, if you don't mind.”

Franz nodded, and I told them of Lemke's postmodern terrorism, of Wendt's and Peschkalek's first meeting years ago, and of their final meeting beneath the autobahn bridge near Wieblingen. I told them of my visit to Peschkalek's place, of Peschkalek's material, and about the map. All in all, I stuck to the truth. Except that I gave them to understand that I had saved the binder and the cassette from the flames.

“Are you saying that Wendt's murderer is lying in the hospital, waiting, so to speak, to be arrested?”

“So to speak. But I didn't say that he murdered Wendt. I find his version of the story entirely credible.”

“Ha!” Rawitz barked.

“And what is the offer that you mentioned?” Franz asked. He was sporting his affable smile again.

I smiled back, letting the tension mount as I let them stew a little. “I shall hold on to Peschkalek's material. I'll keep it under lock and key and will guarantee that it will reach neither the media nor the defense lawyers. You can tell Pesch-kalek and Lemke that it was lost in the fire.”

“I wonder what Dr. Self might want in return,” Rawitz said with a smirk.

“There's something else. I'm prepared to give you the map.”

“Like we're interested in geography!” Rawitz scoffed.

“Not so fast, Herr Rawitz. If it's worth something, it's worth something,” Franz said.

I gave Franz the phone numbers of my contact at the Ministry of Defense, and he sent Bleckmeier to make the calls.

“And what would you like in return?”

“I would like you to release Leonore Salger and drop all charges against her.”

“There we go!” Rawitz said, laughing.

“So that's what you want,” Franz said, nodding. “And what does your client say to this?”

“One of the last things that Herr Wendt's son did was to take care of Leonore Salger. He hid her in the State Psychiatric Hospital and then found her a position in Amorbach. My client feels deeply for what his son was, and for what his son did.”

Rawitz had started laughing again. Franz looked at him, irritated. “Will you furnish us with copies of Peschkalek's material?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't want you to familiarize yourself with the material and orchestrate something that will defuse it.”

“But surely we can at least take a look at it.”

“That would entail the same risk.”

“Are you expecting us to buy a pig in a poke?”

“You can get access to the material that Peschkalek sent out to the media. It's out there for the asking. And I did bring a few samples.” I laid on the table the copies of the photographs I had pocketed during my first visit to Peschkalek's place.

“Can we trust him?” Franz asked, turning to Nägelsbach. “Can we be certain that he will hold on to this material, come what may?”

“That he'll hold on to it?” Rawitz mumbled, but he gurgled as if he were suppressing a chuckle. “Who can even guarantee that he has the stuff? For all we know, it went up in flames and he's only bluffing. Peschkalek and Lemke might even have other copies.”

Nägelsbach looked at me, and then at Franz. “I would trust him. As for there being other copies, we'll see whether that's the case from Peschkalek's and Lemke's reactions when they're told about the fire.”

Franz sent Nägelsbach off to arrange for Peschkalek's arrest. Bleckmeier returned, and Franz asked me to wait outside. When Nägelsbach came back, he and I stood awkwardly facing each other in the corridor.

“Thank you,” I said.

“There's no need to thank me.” He went back into the office.

I could hear them talking. Rawitz laughed from time to time. After about twenty minutes, Franz came out of the room. “We'll be in touch. And thank you for your cooperation.” He dismissed me with a handshake.

I drove over to my office, finished my report, and wrote out an invoice. I leaned Leo's picture against the stone lion, sat, gazed, and smoked. At home I found Turbo sulking. I sat down on the balcony in the heat and he came over, turned away from me, and groomed himself.

Shortly before eight, the phone rang. Nägelsbach informed me that I could pick Leo up from the Fauler Pelz prison the following morning and told me to bring the map. He spoke in an official tone, and I imagined he would say good-bye right away and hang up. But he hesitated, I waited, and an uncomfortable silence ensued. He cleared his throat. “Expect difficulties with Frau Salger-I just wanted to let you know. Good-bye.”

32 Too late

I had been too proud to ask Nägelsbach to explain what he meant. But I'd seen Leo on TV, and could imagine her being utterly exhausted, confused, perhaps even bitter and aggressive.

The following morning I tidied up my apartment, put a California champagne on ice that I had won a few years earlier as third prize in a seniors' surfing competition, and took a hot and cold shower. Then I spent a good twenty minutes in front of my closet until I finally decided on a brass-colored suit, a light blue shirt, and the tie with the small clouds. “Aren't you acting a little like a love-struck schoolboy?” an inner voice jeered as I drove to Heidelberg. I announced myself at the prison gate and handed the map over to a taciturn Bleckmeier. I had a good many reasons to feel queasy, and I did.

Leo was wearing the checked shirt she had been wearing on television after her arrest. But she had washed it and had slept away her bleary-eyed tiredness, and her brown curls again fell fully and softly over her shoulders. She saw me, waved, laughed, and stretched out her arms. It was a great weight off my mind. Where were the difficulties?

“Is that all you have with you?” I asked her. She was carrying a plastic bag.

“Yes, my things got lost along the way-the last ones when they arrested me. Your friend the chief inspector brought me a few things, even some eau de cologne, look!” She went over to the table and spread out her belongings. She started pushing the few items back and forth, as if she were trying to establish a certain order not yet discovered. The eau de cologne had to go in the middle and the other toiletries in an orbit around it, but there was no place for the handkerchief, the notepad, or the pen.

The correctional officer sitting behind a glass panel operating the gate buttons looked over at us. “What's going on?” he asked.

“Just a minute.” She tried one last time. “No, it just won't work.” She opened up the plastic bag and swept everything back into it. “Gerhard, I'd love to go for a drive somewhere and walk a bit, can we? The Heiligenberg Hill has been peeking into my cell the whole time.”

We drove to the Mönchhofplatz, climbed up the Mönch-berg, and followed the wide coils of the path to Michaels Basilica. It was almost like when we had climbed up to the ruins of Castle Wegelnburg: Leo often ran ahead of me, her hair flying. We barely spoke. She was skipping and jumping around. I watched her, and at times the memory of the trip we had taken together was as painful as if it had been a memory of distant years and long-lost youth. We sat at a table in the garden of the Waldschenke beneath tall old trees. It was only ten thirty in the morning, and we were the only customers.

“So tell me all about it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“How you've been doing since you left me.”

“I didn't leave you. Did I leave you? I can't give you back the four hundred francs yet. I don't have any money. Helmut did have some, and I wanted him to send the four hundred francs to you, but he said you'd already made enough money off us. Did you? Helmut wanted to make money off me, and his friend did, too. I found out about that. But you…” She frowned and ran her finger along the squares on the tablecloth.

“If I hadn't been given the case, I wouldn't have gotten to know you. But by the time we were traveling together I no longer had the case and wasn't making any money. How did you get from Locarno to where Helmut was?”

“I called him and he came and picked me up. We traveled down the whole boot of Italy to Sicily, and then back up to the Riviera, and then over to Spain. Helmut was trying to drum up cash everywhere we went, but he couldn't.” She spoke as if she were talking about two strangers and countered my questions with terse answers. I pieced together that they had gone on a spending spree, squandering all the money he had brought with him, and then slept in the car, pulled off con tricks, filled up their gas tank without paying, and shoplifted at supermarkets. “Then Helmut wanted me to…Well, there were tourists, and others, too, who had the hots for me, and Helmut said I should be nice to them. But I wouldn't play along with that.”

“Why didn't you call me collect? You ran out of money- that's why you didn't call me anymore, right?”

She laughed. “That was fun, wasn't it, us talking on the phone at night? Sometimes you weren't there, but I suppose I wasn't either.” She laughed again. “I told Helmut to have his friend say hi to you from me, but I kind of knew he wouldn't.”

We ate lunch. In the old days they served up nice plain home cooking at the Waldschenke. Today microwaves give the most modest establishment the ability to serve up a bad boeuf bourgignon in minutes.

“You and I have eaten better,” she said, winking at me. “Remember the Hotel above Lake Murten?”

I nodded. “Let's go out and have a real dinner this evening,” I said. “What are your plans, by the way? Are you going to stay in Heidelberg? Are you going to go on with your studies? Visit your mother? I'm sure she's been told about developments-have you heard from her?”

She thought awhile. “I'd like to go to a hair salon. My hair's all stringy.” She took hold of a lock and tugged it straight. “And it stinks like hell.” She sniffed at it and wrinkled her nose. “Go on, smell it yourself.”

I was sitting opposite her and declined. “Don't worry, we'll go to a hair salon.”

“No, I want you to smell it.” She got up, walked around the table, bent toward me, and held her head in front of mine.

I smelled the sun in her hair, and a touch of eau de cologne. “Your hair doesn't stink, Leo, it has an aroma of-”

“It stinks! You have to take a better sniff!” She held her head even closer. I took her face in both hands. She gave me a short kiss. “And now be a good boy and smell it properly.”

“OK, Leo, you win. We'll head over to a hair salon afterward.”

Going back down the mountain was slower than the climb had been. The day had become oppressively hot; it was also strangely quiet. No breeze, no birds twittering in the heat, no cars or hikers, and the haze that covered the Rhine plain dampened the sounds rising from the city. Our steps were loud, heavy, and cumbersome. I felt tongue-tied.

Quite suddenly and spontaneously Leo began telling me about interpreting. She hadn't yet completed her studies, but for years had helped out with sister-town meetings between small German, French, and English communities. She spoke about mayors, priests, association chairmen, and other dignitaries, of the lives of the families that had put her up during these meetings. She mimicked the pastor of Korntal's Swabian attempts at English, and the pharmacist from Mirande who had learned German on a farm in Saxony as a prisoner of war. I laughed so hard that my sides hurt.

“It all sounds nice and fine, doesn't it?” she said, looking at me distressed. “But have you ever thought what interpreting really means? Inter is Latin for cutting between two things, plunging into, slashing through. And pretium means punishment, retribution, just deserts. That's what I've been trained for: slashing and punishing.”

“Nonsense, Leo. I don't know what the exact etymology is, but I'm sure it's not that. If it had such a dark origin, why would it have become the term for the harmless activity of translating the spoken word?”

“You think translation is harmless?”

I didn't know what to say.

Leo arranging and rearranging her things on the table in the prison, speaking of herself as a stranger, holding her hair under my nose, saying wild things about interpreting-what was I to think? She didn't wait for my answer, but went on talking. By the time we got back to the car, she had given me a full lecture on her theory of translation that I didn't understand, and when I'd asked whether this theory came from Professor Leider, she filled me in on his strengths, weaknesses, and habits, and also on his wife, secretary, and colleagues.

“Do you have a particular hairdresser in mind?” I asked.

“You choose one for me, Gerhard.”

Ever since I've lived in Mannheim, I've gone to a barber in the Schwetzinger Strasse and been satisfied. He has grown old along with me, and his fingers tremble, but the few hairs on my head don't challenge his capacity. He'd never do for Leo, though. I remembered that on my way to the Herschelbad I always passed a salon shining with chrome. That's where we'd go.

The young hairstylist greeted Leo as if he'd met her at a party the day before. Me he treated with the elegant respect befitting whatever I might be: her grandfather, father, or elderly gentleman friend. “You can wait here if you like,” he said to me, “but perhaps you might prefer to return in about an hour?”

I sauntered over to the Paradeplatz, bought a Süddeutsche Zeitung, and read it at the Café Journal over an ice cream and an espresso. In the science section, I learned that cockroaches lead warm and caring family lives-we wrong them by abhorring them. Then I saw the bottle of sambuca on the shelf behind the bar. I drank one glass to Leo's health, another to her freedom, and a third to her new hairstyle. It's amazing how a shot or two of sambuca can make the world click into place. An hour later I was back at the salon.

“One more minute!” the Figaro called out from behind the partition, where he could see me, but I couldn't see him. I sat down. “One more minute and we'll be ready!”

I know that women leave salons looking quite different from the way they go in. After all, that's why they go there. I also know that afterward they are usually miserable. They need time-they need our admiration and enthusiasm. Any snide or critical remark, let alone a sarcastic one, must be avoided at all costs. As a daring Indian brave must never show pain, a daring participant at the premiere of a hairstyle must never show shock.

For a second I didn't recognize Leo. For a second I thought that the young woman with the buzz cut was someone else, and so dropped my attentive, enthusiastic expression. By the time I recognized her and quickly reinstated it, it was too late.

“You don't like it?” she said to me in English.

“Oh, no, I do! There is something strict and piquant about you now. Yes, you remind me of the women in those French existentialist movies of the fifties, and at the same time you look younger and more tender, more delicate. I-”

“No, you don't like it!”

She said it so emphatically that I lost courage. What I had told her wasn't entirely false, either. I liked those women in French existentialist movies, and Leo's new look had something of their vulnerable determination. I also liked her head-its beautiful shape was now revealed by the brushlike hair that had been truncated to a finger's breadth. I had loved her curls, but if they were gone they were gone. Curls invite you to plunge your hand into them, while a buzz cut invites you to sweep your hand over it-more appropriate in the circumstances. If only Leo didn't look so shorn, though. She had the air of an inmate of a prison or a psychiatric ward, and that frightened me.

“Okay, let's go.”

I paid, we went to the car, and we drove home.

“Would you like to lie down and rest awhile?”

“Why not.”

She lay down on the couch. Its leather is cool, and even in the heat of summer allows for the cozy comfort of a light blanket. I covered her up and opened the balcony door wide. Turbo came in, crossed the room, jumped up onto the couch, and curled up beside her. Leo had closed her eyes.

I tiptoed into the kitchen. I sat down at the table, opened the newspaper, and pretended to read. The tap was dripping. A fat fly was buzzing at the window.

Then I heard Leo crying quietly. Was she crying herself to sleep? I listened and waited. Her crying grew louder, smooth, throaty, moaning, and wailing. I went back into the living room, sat down next to her, talked to her, held and caressed her. She stopped sobbing, but the tears continued to flow. After a while her wailing started up again, surged, and ebbed. This went on and on. Her tears never dried.

For a long time I didn't want to face that I wasn't equal to the situation. But then her wailing became so intense that she had trouble breathing. I called Philipp. He suggested that I talk to Eberlein. Eberlein told me to take her immediately to the State Psychiatric Hospital. On the way there she continued crying. She stopped as I walked her from the car to the old building.

On the way home I cried.

33 Imprisoned

It was to be a long, hot summer. For two weeks I took Brigitte and Manu to a beach resort, collected shells and starfish, and built a sand castle. Otherwise, I sat on my balcony a lot. I met Eberhard in the Luisenpark to play chess, and went out fishing with Philipp on his yacht. I occasionally practiced playing the flute or baking Christmas cookies. On a courageous day I went to the dentist. Tooth three-seven could be saved, and I was spared a removable prosthesis. Cases in the summer months had always come somewhat reluctantly. Now that I am older, they come very reluctantly indeed. I don't have to retire-I can just let my practice peter out.

In September the trial of Helmut Lemke, Richard Ingo Peschkalek, and Bertram Mohnhoff-the so-called Käfertal terrorist trial-began at the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court. The newspapers were pleased with everything: the quick police investigation, the speedy court proceedings, and the terrorists who were eager to confess. Lemke was dignified and remorseful, Mohnhoff childishly eager. Only Peschkalek dug in his heels: He had had nothing to do with Wendt's death, he had not met up with him in Wieblingen, and the gun had not been in his possession. But then the news broke that the gun in question had been found during repair work in the Böck-strasse behind a brick in his apartment's firewall. When he presented the court with his version of the accident it didn't go over too well, even though the forensics couldn't exclude the possibility that Wendt had been killed not by the bullet but by a fall. Peschkalek was given twelve years, Lemke ten, and Mohnhoff eight. The newspapers were pleased with that, too. The lead writer of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praised the idea the constitutional state had established by building bridges to repentant terrorists, bridges that were both golden and thorny.

I didn't go to the trial. Trials-like surgical procedures, holy masses, and sexual encounters-are events that I either participate in or stay away from. Not that I have anything against public trials, but I would feel like a voyeur.

After the trial was over I got a phone call from Nägelsbach. “These are the last evenings of summer where one can sit outside. Would you like to come over?”

We sat beneath the pear tree and made small talk. The Nägelsbachs were as little interested as I was about how and where we had spent our vacations-they in the mountains, I on a beach.

“How is Leonore Salger doing?” Frau Nägelsbach asked suddenly.

“I'm still not allowed to see her. But I called Eberlein the other day-he's been reinstated as director of the hospital now that the trial's over. He doesn't know when she'll be released, but he's certain that she will get well again and be able to complete her studies and lead a normal life.” I hesitated.

“Why don't you put your cards on the table, Herr Self?” Frau Nägelsbach said. “If you and my husband don't clear this matter up now, you never will.”

“But Reni, I think-” Nägelsbach began.

“That goes for you, too.”

He and I looked at each other uncomfortably. Needless to say, Frau Nägelsbach was right. Frau Nägelsbach was always right. But we both wondered whether it was already too late.

I gave myself a push. “So you knew about the condition Leo was in?”

“She was acting very strangely. During the interrogations there were moments when she seemed completely elsewhere, as if she didn't see or hear us. At times she'd talk up a storm, and then again you'd have to wring every single word out of her. Rawitz said right away that she was insane and that her lawyer would have to be an all-out idiot for her to get convicted. That's why he couldn't stop laughing when you were so set on freeing her. I and the others, however, weren't so sure she'd get off.” He hesitated. Now he, too, gave himself a push. “What's the deal with Peschkalek's material? Do you have it, or was it lost in the fire?”

“Self, the deceiver? I guess that would fit nicely. Lemke and Peschkalek deceived Leo and her friends, the police and the Federal and the Public Prosecutor's Office deceived the courts, perhaps the courts played along and did their bit of deceiving, and the deceived public heralds its deceivers. Is there even any poison gas in Viernheim?”

Nägelsbach looked at me angrily. Then he looked angrily at his wife. “You see, he has no intention of revealing anything- all he wants to do is to hurt me!” Then he looked angrily at me again. “I don't like it either when underhanded little tricks are being played, and I've been unhappy about the Käfertal terrorist case from the start, just as the others were. But we tried to deal with everything as best we could. You, on the other hand…first you wheedle your head out of the noose, and then that of Leonore Salger. Perhaps they couldn't have found her guilty. But even so, now that she has checked herself into the psychiatric hospital of her own volition, and will be free to leave of her own volition, she's in a better position than if a judge had had her committed, not to mention that she's been spared a trial. My compliments, Herr Self. And how does that make you feel? Would you say that the rules that apply to all of us don't apply to you? If so, your deception of yourself is far worse than your deception of others.” He read his wife's glance as a summons to pull in his horns. “No Reni, it's high time that all this was put on the table. He's just sitting here, a successful deceiver, and considers himself above the deception of the police. Are you claiming that the wrong people were convicted? And can you deny that you and Leonore Salger should have ended up in the dock, too, with you, at least, being slapped with a conviction?”

What could I say? That I had, after all, helped the police bring in Lemke and Peschkalek? That I knew that the rules that apply to everyone apply to me, but that I also have my own rules, too? That not all rules are the same, not all deception the same? That he was a policeman and I wasn't?

“I don't raise myself above you, Herr Nägelsbach. And I don't have Peschkalek's material. It was lost in the fire. All I have are the pictures I showed you copies of.”

He nodded, and for a long time gazed at the gnats that danced about the lamp. He refilled our glasses. “Poison gas? Well, I don't know if there's any poison gas in Viernheim. I wasn't informed, nor will I be. I hear, though, that they're out in full force at that depot. So if there is poison gas there, at least they seem to be dealing with it.”

The wind rustled in the leaves. It grew cooler. Voices echoed from the neighbor's garden, and smoke came wafting over from their barbecue. “How about a nice hot goulash soup, and a blanket over your knees?” Frau Nägelsbach said.

“Even if I belong in prison, I must say I'm much happier here with you under your pear tree.”

“You won't be able to dodge prison altogether, you know. My husband can't let you get away entirely unscathed. Come along.”

Frau Nägelsbach got up and led the way to her husband's workshop. I had no idea what was awaiting me, but I couldn't imagine that it would be anything bad. Nägelsbach and I walked in silence. The workshop was pitch black, and I grew a little uneasy. Then the fluorescent light above his workbench flickered on.

Nägelsbach had returned to architecture. On the workbench stood a nineteenth-century prison made of thousands upon thousands of matchsticks. There were a main building and cellblocks in the form of a star with five points, and around the compound ran a wall with a gate and watchtow-ers. There were gossamer wires along the top of the wall, and minute bars on the windows of the cells. Nägelsbach never populates his models with figures. But in this case he or his wife had made an exception: a tiny cardboard man.

“Is that me?”

“Yes, it is.”

I was standing alone in the prison yard in striped prison garb and cap. I was waving to myself.