Self's punishment (3 page)

6

A veal ragout on a bed of mixed greens

When I entered the restaurant, a small, thin, pale, black-haired man addressed me. ‘Herr Self?’ he lisped. ‘Schmalz here.’

My offer of an aperitif was declined. ‘No thank you, I don’t drink alcohol.’

‘And what about a fruit juice?’ I didn’t want to forgo my Aviateur.

‘I have to be back at work at one. Happy if we could directly . . . Little to report anyway.’

The answer was elliptical, but without sibilants. Had he learned to eradicate all ‘s’ and ‘z’ words from his working vocabulary?

The lady at the reception area rang the bell for service, and the girl I’d seen serving at the directors’ bar took us up to the large dining hall on the first floor to a window table.

‘You know how I love to begin a meal?’

‘I’ll see to it straight away,’ she smiled.

To the headwaiter Schmalz gave an order for ‘A veal ragout on a bed of mixed greens, if you would.’ I was in the mood for sweet and sour pork Szechuan. Schmalz eyed me enviously. We both passed on the soup, for different reasons.

Over my Aviateur I asked about the results of the investigation of Schneider. Schmalz reported extremely precisely, avoiding all sibilants. A lamentable man, that Schneider. After a row over his demand for an advance, Schmalz had tailed him for several days. Schneider gambled not only in Bad Dürkheim but also in private backrooms and was accordingly entangled. When his creditors had him beaten up, Schmalz intervened and brought Schneider home, not seriously injured, but quite distraught. The time had come for a chat between Schneider and his superior. An arrangement was entered into: Schneider, indispensable as a pharmaceutical researcher, was removed from work for three months and sent to a clinic, and the relevant circles were informed that they were not to allow Schneider to gamble any more. The security unit of the RCW used its influence around Mannheim and Ludwigshafen.

‘A good three-year gap while the guy lay low. But in my opinion he remained a ticking bomb, even ticking today.’

The food was excellent. Schmalz ate his at a rush. He didn’t leave a single grain of rice on his plate – the obsessive behavior of the food neurotic. I asked what, in his opinion, should be done with whoever was behind the computer shambles.

‘Above all, interrogate him thoroughly. And then make him get in line. He can’t be a threat to the plant any more. Bright guy. He could . . .’

He flailed around for a non-sibilant synonym for
certainly
or
surely
. I offered him a Sweet Afton.

‘Prefer my own,’ he said, and took a brown plastic box from his pocket containing homemade filter cigarettes. ‘Made by my wife, no more than eight a day.’

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s homemade cigarettes. They are way up there with crocheted modesty covers for toilet paper. The mention of his wife reminded me of the janitor’s apartment with the nameplate ‘Schmalz’.

‘You have a young son?’

He looked at me guardedly and deflected the question with a ‘Meaning what?’

I told him about how I’d lost my way in the old factory, of the enchanted atmosphere of the overgrown yard and the encounter with the little boy with the brightly coloured ball. Schmalz relaxed and confirmed that his father lived in the janitor’s flat.

‘Member of our unit, too. The general and he knew one another well from the war. Now he . . . keeping an eye on the old plant . . . In the morning we take the boy to him, my wife being an employee here in the company, too.’

I learned that lots of the security people had lived in the compound and Schmalz had more or less grown up there. He’d been through the rebuilding of the Works after the war and knew its every corner. I found the idea of a life spent between refineries, reactors, distilleries, turbines, silos, and tankers, for all its industrial romance, oppressive.

‘Didn’t you ever want to look for a job beyond the RCW?’

‘Couldn’t do that to my father. His motto: we belong here. Did the general throw in the towel? No, nor do we.’ He looked at his watch and leapt up. ‘Too bad, can’t linger. Am on personal security’ – words he spoke almost error free – ‘duty at one o’clock. Kind of you to invite . . .’

My afternoon in the personnel office was unproductive. At four o’clock I conceded I could quit studying the personnel files once and for all. I stopped by to see Frau Buchendorff, whose first name I now knew to be Judith, also that she was thirty-three, had a degree in German and English, and hadn’t found a job as a teacher. She’d been at the RCW for four years, first in the archives, then in the PR department where she’d come to Firner’s attention. She lived in Rathenaustrasse.

‘Please don’t get up,’ I said. She stopped feeling for her shoes with her feet under the table, and offered me a coffee. ‘I’d love one. Then we can drink to being neighbours. I’ve read your personnel file and know almost everything about you, apart from how many silk blouses you own.’ She was wearing another one, this time buttoned up to the top.

‘If you’re coming to the reception on Saturday, you’ll see the third one. Have you received your invitation already?’ She slid a cup over to me and lit a cigarette.

‘What reception?’ I peered at her legs.

‘We’ve had a delegation from China here since Monday, and as a finale we want to show them that not only our plants, but also our buffets are better than the French. Firner thought it would be a chance for you to get to know a couple of people of interest to your case, informally.’

‘Shall I also have the chance to get to know you informally?’

She laughed. ‘I’m there for the Chinese. But there is one Chinese woman, I haven’t figured out what she’s in charge of. Perhaps she’s a security expert, who wouldn’t be introduced as such, so a kind of colleague of yours. A pretty woman.’

‘You’re trying to fob me off, Frau Buchendorff! I shall have to lodge a complaint with Firner.’ Scarcely had the words left my lips than I regretted them. An old man’s hackneyed charm.

7

A little glitch

The next day the air lay thick over Mannheim and Ludwigshafen. It was so muggy that, even without moving, my clothes stuck to my body. Driving was staccato and hectic, I could have used three feet to work the clutch, the brake, and the gas pedal. Everything was clogged on the Konrad Adenauer Bridge. There’d been a collision, and immediately after it another one. I was stuck in a traffic jam for twenty minutes. I watched the oncoming traffic and the trains, and smoked to avoid suffocating.

The appointment with Schneider was at half past nine. The doorman at Gate 1 told me the way. ‘It’s not even five minutes. Go straight on, and when you come to the Rhine it’s another hundred metres to your left. The laboratories are in the light-coloured building with the large windows.’

I set off. Down at the Rhine I saw the small boy I’d met yesterday. He’d tied a piece of string to his little bucket and was ladling water out of the Rhine with it. He emptied the water down the drain.

‘I’m emptying the Rhine,’ he called, when he recognized me.

‘I hope it works.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m going to the laboratories over there.’

‘Can I come with you?’

He shook out his little bucket and came. Children often attach themselves to me, I don’t know why. I don’t have any, and most of them get on my nerves.

‘Come on then,’ I said, and we made our way together to the building with the large windows.

We were about fifty metres away when several people in white coats came rushing out of the entrance. They raced along the banks of the Rhine. Then there were more, not only in white coats, but also in blue overalls, and secretaries in skirts and blouses. It was an odd spectacle, and I didn’t see how anyone could run in this heat.

‘Look, he’s waving at us,’ the little boy said, and indeed one of the white-coats was flailing his arms and shouting something at us I couldn’t understand. But I didn’t have to understand; it was obviously about getting away as quickly as possible.

The first explosion sent a cascade of glass shards raining down the road. I grabbed the little boy’s hand, but he tore loose. For a moment it was as though I were paralysed: I didn’t feel any injury, heard a deep silence in spite of the continuing rattle of glass, saw the boy running, skidding on the glass shards, regaining his balance then finally falling two steps later and somersaulting forward from the impetus of movement.

Then came the second explosion, the scream of the little boy, the pain in my right arm. The bang was followed by a violent, dangerous, evil-sounding hissing. A noise that struck panic into me.

It was the sirens in the distance that made me act. They awakened reflexes inculcated in the war to flee, to help, to seek cover, and give protection. I ran to the boy, tugged him to his feet with my left hand, and dragged him in the direction we’d just come from. His little legs couldn’t keep up, but he pedalled his feet in the air and didn’t let go. ‘Come on, little one, run, we’ve got to get out of here, don’t slow down.’ Before we turned the corner I looked back. Where we’d been standing a green cloud was rising into the leaden sky.

In vain I waved at the ambulance tearing past. At Gate 1 the guard took care of us. He knew the little boy, who was clinging tightly to my hand, pale, scratched, and frightened.

‘Richard, in the name of God what happened? I’ll call your grandfather right away.’ He went over to the phone. ‘And I’ll call the medics for you. That doesn’t look good.’

A splinter of glass had torn open my arm and the blood was staining red the sleeve of my light-coloured jacket. I felt dizzy. ‘Do you have a schnapps?’

I only faintly recall the next half-hour. Richard was collected. His grandfather, a large, broad, heavy-set man with a bald head, shaved clean at the back and sides, and a bushy, white moustache, gathered up his grandson effortlessly into his arms. The police tried to get into the Works to investigate the accident, but were turned away. The doorman gave me a second and a third schnapps. When the ambulance men came they took me with them to the Works doctor, who put stitches in my arm and wrapped it in a sling.

‘You should lie down for a while next door,’ said the doctor. ‘You can’t leave now.’

‘Why can’t I leave?’

‘We have a smog alarm, and all traffic has been stopped.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? There’s a smog alarm, and no one can leave the centre of the smog?’

‘Your understanding of it is completely wrong. Smog is a meteorological overall occurrence and has no centre or periphery.’

This I considered complete nonsense. Whatever other sort of smog there might be, I’d seen a green cloud growing larger. It grew larger right here over the compound. And I was supposed to stay here? I wanted to talk to Firner.

In his office a crisis headquarters had been set up. Through the door I could see policemen in green, firemen in blue, chemists in white, and some grey gentlemen from the management.

‘What actually happened?’ I asked Frau Buchendorff.

‘We had a little glitch on site, nothing serious. But the authorities foolishly turned on the smog alarm, and that caused some excitement.’

‘I got myself some little scratches at your little glitch.’

‘What were you up . . . ah, you were on your way to Schneider. He’s not here today, by the way.’

‘Am I the only injured person? Were there any deaths?’

‘What are you thinking of, Herr Self? A few first-aid cases, that’s all. Is there anything else we can do for you?’

‘You can get me out of here.’ I had no desire to battle my way through to Firner and be saluted with a ‘Greetings, Herr Self.’

A policeman sporting several badges of rank emerged from the office.

‘You’re driving back to Mannheim, aren’t you, Herr Herzog? Would you mind taking Herr Self with you? He got a few scratches and we don’t want to keep him waiting here any longer.’

Herzog, a vigorous type, took me with him. Gathered in front of the gates to the Works were some police vans and reporters.

‘Do avoid having your photograph taken with that bandage, please.’

I had absolutely no desire to be photographed. As we drove past the reporters I bent down to reach for the cigarette lighter, which was low on the dashboard.

‘Why did the smog alarm go off so rapidly?’ I asked on our drive through deserted Ludwigshafen.

Herzog proved to be well informed. ‘After the spate of smog alarms in the autumn of nineteen eighty-four we in Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate started an experiment with new technology under a new law, with overriding authority over both states. The idea is to record the emissions directly, to correlate with the weather report, rather than just setting off the smog alarm when it’s already too late. Today the model had its baptism of fire. Until now we’ve only had dry runs.’

‘And how is cooperation with the Works? I gathered that the police were being turned away at the gate.’

‘That’s a sore point. The chemical industry is fighting the new law tooth and nail. At the moment there’s a complaint about infringement of the constitution before the Federal Constitutional Court. Legally we could have entered the plant, but we don’t want to rock the boat at this stage.’

The smoke of my cigarette was irritating Herzog, and he rolled down the window. ‘Oh Lord,’ he said, rolling it up straight away, ‘could you please stub out your cigarette.’ A pungent odour had penetrated the car, my eyes began to stream, on my tongue was a sharp taste, and we both had a coughing fit.

‘It’s just as well my colleagues outside have their breathing apparatus on.’ At the exit to the Konrad Adenauer Bridge we passed a roadblock. Both police officers stopping traffic were wearing gas masks. At the edge of the approach were fifteen or twenty vehicles. The driver of the first one was in the midst of talking with the police officers. With a colourful cloth pressed to his face, he looked funny.

‘What’s going to happen with the rush-hour traffic this evening?’

Herzog shrugged. ‘We’ll have to wait and see how the chlorine gas develops. We hope, in the course of the afternoon, to be able to get out the workers and the RCW employees. That would considerably relieve the problem of rush-hour traffic. Some may have to spend the night at their workplace. We’d inform them of this via radio and loudspeaker vans. I was surprised before how quickly we cleared the streets.’

‘Are you considering evacuation?’

‘If the chlorine gas concentration doesn’t decrease by half in the next twelve hours we’ll have to clear east of Leuschnerstrasse and maybe also Neckarstadt and Jungbusch as well. But the meteorologists are giving us grounds for hope. Where should I let you off?’

‘If the carbon monoxide concentration in the air permits it, I’d be delighted if you’d drive me to Richard-Wagner-Strasse and let me off at my front door.’

‘The carbon monoxide concentration alone wouldn’t have been enough for us to set off any smog alarm. It’s the chlorine that’s bad. With that I prefer to know people are safely at home or in their office, not, at any rate, out on the street.’

He drew up in front of my building. ‘Herr Self,’ he added, ‘aren’t you a private detective? I think my predecessor had something to do with you – do you remember the case with the senior civil servant and the sailboat?’

‘I hope we’re not sharing a case again now,’ I said. ‘Do you know anything yet about the origins of the explosion?’

‘Do you have a suspicion, Herr Self? You certainly didn’t just happen to be at the site of the occurrence. Had attacks been anticipated on the RCW?’

‘I don’t know anything about it. My job is innocuous by comparison and takes a quite different direction.’

‘We’ll see. I might have to call you down to headquarters to ask you a few more questions.’ He looked skywards. ‘And now pray for a gusty wind, Herr Self.’

I walked up the four flights of stairs to my apartment. My arm had started to bleed again. But something else was worrying me. Was my job really going in a quite different direction? Was it coincidence that Schneider hadn’t come to work today? Had I cast off the idea of blackmail too quickly? Had Firner not told me everything after all?