Self's Murder (16 page)

At first the conversation was a little stiff, but the awkwardness quickly evaporated. The wine, a chardonnay from the Palatine, went down so easily, the food was so simple and convincing—from thick green spelt soup and Victoria perch to blackberry trifle—and the glow of candles was so cozy. Welker gave a little speech; he was happy to be reunited with his children. He thanked the water tower commandos—though he preferred not to touch on why he had been away or what he was thanking us for. But everyone was pleased.

It grew cooler, and a fireplace was glowing inside the house.

“Shall we go for a stroll in the garden before we go inside?” Welker said, taking me aside.

We crossed the lawn and sat down on a bench beneath the blackthorn.

“I’ve thought a lot about Gregor Samarin—and us Welkers, too. We took him in, but everything we gave him was like a handout. Because we gave, we also expected his services. When I was a boy I had the room in the attic, while his room was in the cellar so he could take care of the central heating, which back then still ran on coal, not oil.” He slowly shook his head. “I’ve been trying to remember when I first realized that he hated me. I can’t recall. Back then it simply didn’t interest me, which is why I can’t remember.” He looked at me. “Isn’t that terrible?”

I nodded.

“I know that shooting him was even worse,” Welker continued. “But somehow it’s terrible in the same way. Do you know what I mean? What happened in our childhood bore fruit, as the Bible says. In his case, it was murdering my wife and everything else he did, and in my case, that I could only save myself from him the way I did.”

“He told me he liked your wife.”

“He liked Stephanie the way a servant might like the daughter of a master he hates. At the end of the day her place is on the other side, and when the chips are down, that’s all that matters. When Stephanie confronted him, the chips were down.”

The lights went on in the house and their glow fell on the lawn. It remained dark beneath the blackthorn. Someone put on a Hildegard Knef record: “One and One That Makes Two.” I wanted to take Brigitte in my arms and dance a waltz. “As for Stephanie,” he continued, “I don’t know where it was that they … Were they waiting for her up at the hut? I have no idea how they could have followed us without our noticing. We thought we were alone.” He pressed his hands against his eyes and sighed. “I still can’t rid myself of this nightmare. And yet all I want is to wake up and put it all behind me.”

I felt sorry for him. At the same time, I didn’t really want to hear what he was telling me. I wasn’t his friend. I had completed the case he had hired me for. I now had another case.

“What did you talk about with Schuler the evening you went to see him?” I asked.

“Schuler …” If I had hurt him by the abrupt change of topic, he showed no sign. “Gregor and I went to see him together. He told us about his work with the files and about the Strasbourg lead concerning the silent partner, which you later followed. Otherwise …”

“Did you ask him for the money? The money in the attaché case?”

“He talked about it, but back then I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about. Schuler said that a person becomes suspicious when he finds money in a cellar and starts wondering whom it might belong to, knowing that no good comes of evil, and had we forgotten that? He was looking at Gregor when he said it.”

“What did you—”

“I wasn’t there the whole time. I had … I had diarrhea and kept having to go to the toilet. Schuler must have found the money Gregor had stashed away in a part of the old cellar, where he had no business being. He put two and two together and suspected Gregor, because I am a Welker and Gregor doesn’t belong to the family. He wanted to get his former pupil back on the straight and narrow.” Welker laughed with a touch of mockery and sadness. “I suppose you’ll also want to know what state Schuler was in. He smelled bad, but he was fine. Furthermore, he didn’t make any threats. He didn’t even say that he had the money. Gregor found that out the next day.”

Hildegard Knef’s song had ended. I heard applause, laughter, voices, and then the song was played again, louder this time. If I couldn’t take part in the dancing, I’d at least have liked to sing along: “God in Heaven is all-seeing, he’s seen right through you, there’s no point in fleeing.”

Welker laid his hand on my knee. “I won’t ever forget what you did for me. One day, thank God, the memories of the last few months will pale. Until now the good things that have happened to me have remained clearer in my mind than the bad, and what you did for me as my private investigator was a good thing.” He got up. “Shall we go inside?”

When Hildegard Knef sang the song for a third time, I danced with Brigitte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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