Self's Murder (6 page)

When and how the Sorbian Cooperative Bank was to recover from this blow would have to wait till tomorrow. Weller & Welker had taken the bank over, so it must have recovered and had a happy ending. On my way home that night I found the cooperative idea so sensible that the usual hankering of banks and bankers for more and more money suddenly struck me as strange. Why heap money upon money? Because a child’s compulsion to collect things can in adult years no longer be satisfied by collecting marbles, beer coasters, and stamps, and so must turn to money?

The following morning I was sitting once more at the desk in my office before the children of the neighborhood were heading to school. The bakery a few doors down was already open, and a steaming cup of coffee and a croissant stood before me. There wasn’t much more to the story of the Sorbian Cooperative Bank. While other such banks were closed down by the Soviets, those in and around Cottbus continued to be run under the name of Sorbian Cooperative Bank. The bank was completely absorbed into the system of a state-owned savings bank. Yet it did keep its name; respect for the Sorbian Slavic people, brothers of the victorious Soviet people, forbade its abolition. Along with its name it also kept sufficient autonomy for the Treuhand Agency, formed after the reunification of Germany to privatize East German enterprises, to put the Sorbian Cooperative Bank on the market, ultimately selling it to Weller & Welker.

It was nine o’clock and the morning traffic on the Augustaanlage had quieted down. I heard children, who for some reason or other didn’t have to get to school till later. Then I heard a car pull up by the sidewalk, where it stopped with its engine running. The rattling and chugging began to get on my nerves after a while. Why didn’t they turn the engine off? I got up and looked out the window.

It was Schuler’s green Isetta. Its door was clapped open, but the car was empty. I went out onto the sidewalk. Schuler was standing in the entrance next door, reading the names beside the buzzers.

“Herr Schuler!” I called, and he turned and waved. He waved as if he were shooing me away from the sidewalk—as if he wanted me to get back into my office. I didn’t understand, and though he seemed to be calling out something to me I couldn’t hear him. He came staggering toward me, his right hand still waving, his left hand pressed to his stomach. I could see that his left hand was holding the handle of a black attaché case that was knocking against his legs. I took a few steps toward him and he bumped into me. I got a whiff of his bad smell and heard him whisper “Take this!” and “Go!” He shoved the case toward me and I took it. He steadied himself on me with the hand that had just given me the case and righted himself. He hurried over to his car, got in, closed the door, and drove off.

He swerved in a crooked line from the sidewalk to the right lane, and then from the right lane into the left. He steered toward the steel bollards bordering the traffic island in the middle of the Augustaanlage, scraped one, scraped the next, scraped the traffic light at Mollstrasse, and picked up speed without paying any attention to the light, which had turned red, to the cars that had just started entering from Mollstrasse, or to the children who had begun crossing the Augustaanlage. At first it looked as if he would crash into the lights or the tree at the edge of the island on the other side of Mollstrasse. But he rolled over the curb, missed the lights, and grazed the tree lightly, and yet the curb and the tree tilted the Isetta enough to capsize it, sending it sliding on its side over the grass until it crashed into another tree.

It was a loud crash, and at the same moment, in the opposite lane, into which the Isetta had almost careened, brakes screeched and drivers he had cut off blew their horns. A child over whose feet he’d almost skidded began to bawl. All hell broke loose. My Turkish neighbor came hurrying out of his store, took the attaché case from me, and said: “Go see if he’s all right. I’ll call the police and an ambulance.” I hurried over, but I’m not as quick as I used to be, and by the time I got to the Isetta a crowd of onlookers had already gathered. I pushed my way forward. The tree had crushed the door and was lodged between the roof and floor of the car. I looked down through the side window: the car was full of glass and blood, the crushed door had pinned Schuler back into the seat, and the wheel was jammed into his chest. He was dead.

The police and ambulance arrived and, as they could not pry the Isetta loose from the tree, the fire department was brought in. The police made no sign of taking a statement from me, and I did not come forward to present myself as a witness. I headed back to my office, the front door of which I’d left open. From a distance I saw someone leave my office. I couldn’t imagine what he’d be doing there, or what he might be looking for. Nothing was missing.

My Turkish neighbor’s store experienced a mini-boom. The onlookers were watching the goings-on surrounding the Isetta, offering expert commentary, and buying candy, chocolate, and granola bars.

It was only when everything was over and things had calmed down that I remembered Schuler’s attaché case. I picked it up from the Turk, placed it on my desk, and eyed it. Black matte faux leather, a gold-colored combination lock—an ugly, run-of-the-mill attaché case. From my desk I took out the bottle of Sambuca and the box of coffee beans I kept there, poured myself a drink, and dropped three beans into the glass. I found a package of Sweet Aftons in the filing cabinet and lit both—the Sambuca and the cigarette—and watched the blue flames and blue smoke.

I thought of Schuler. I’d have liked to hear him once again tell his tales: why Lieutenant Welker and the Prussian had gotten into an argument, what had been the fate of the young Weller girl after her beloved had met his death, much like Romeo—except that in this case the families were not hostile to each other, but too friendly. I would have liked to have known when Bertram and Stephanie had fallen in love. I blew out the flame and drank. I wished Schuler could have recovered his sense of taste and smell before he died.

Then I opened the attaché case. It was chock-full of money, used fifty-and hundred-mark bills.

N
o, I didn’t consider stuffing the bills into a suitcase along with a few shirts and pants, sweaters, underwear, toothbrush, and razor, heading to the Frankfurt airport, and getting on the first plane to Buenos Aires. Or the Maldives, the Azores, or the Hebrides. My life here in Mannheim is complicated enough. How would it be someplace else, where I don’t even speak the language?

I didn’t look for a hiding place for the money, either. As it is, I would surely tell all under torture. I lowered the rolltop of my filing cabinet, squeezed the few old files into one of its compartments, and slid out the bottoms of the other compartments, making enough space for the attaché case. Then I pulled the rolltop shut.

I didn’t count the money. There was a lot of it. Enough to give someone reason to put the fear of God into a man. Thinking of my final meeting with Schuler on the sidewalk—the way he staggered toward me waving his arms, his grimacing, his hoarse whisper—I felt that someone must have frightened him to death.

Nägelsbach sounded no happier on the phone than he’d been when I had seen him.

“What was it, an accident or a murder?” he asked me. “As you know, each has its own department.”

“All I want to know is when Schuler’s body will be sent over to Forensics.”

“Yes, I know, so you can call your friend at the Mannheim municipal hospital, who’ll then put in a quick call to Forensics. By the way, what are you doing … I mean, on Tuesday … my wife … you see … tomorrow’s my last day, and we would be delighted if you and your girlfriend would come by. Are you free?”

He sounded worried that nobody would come to his party. He and his wife struck me as never really needing friends, as if they were quite self-sufficient, and there were times when I envied that. They’d sit in his workshop, he working on a matchstick model of the Munich Palace of Justice, she reading aloud to him from Kafka’s
The Trial
, and before bed they’d have a glass of wine together. Does marital harmony last only till retirement?

As I drove to Schwetzingen I was shadowed. Even as I walked to my car, just around the corner from my office, I had the feeling that someone was following me. But whenever I turned around nobody was there, and such feelings can be wrong, even if Brigitte believes that feelings always tell the truth and that only thoughts tell lies. There wasn’t much traffic on the autobahn. The beige Fiesta I noticed in my rearview mirror after the Mannheim intersection passed me when I pulled over on the shoulder near Pfingstberg, drove on, and disappeared from view around the next bend. But when I drove on and then passed a truck and looked into my rearview mirror, there it was again. I repeated my little maneuver a few hundred yards from the Schwetzingen exit. When he passed me I tailed him until he took the exit. I drove on and then, a few kilometers beyond Brühl, pulled over the shoulder onto a bumpy dirt road.

I was not surprised to find a police car outside Schuler’s place. No one was parked outside the old warehouse. I rang and managed to get in, but I couldn’t open the door to the archives. When I drove off, I once again saw the Fiesta in my rearview mirror.

I felt tired—tired of a world in which a harmless, malodorous old archivist could at the drop of a hat be frightened to death. A world in which there were too many used fifty-and hundred-mark bills. In which someone could snoop about in my office and shadow me in a beige Fiesta without my knowing who he was and what he wanted. I felt tired of being at odds with my case. It didn’t interest me and couldn’t interest my client, either. What interested me instead was my client himself, and the death of his wife and his archivist. And that I was interested in this was, needless to say, of no interest to my client. But what was his interest? And why had he hired me for a case that surely could not be of interest to him?

The message on my answering machine sounded as if Welker had read my mind. “Hello, Herr Self. Can you drop by tomorrow? I haven’t heard from you in a while and would like an update. As things stand, time’s not on our side, and …” He covered the mouthpiece and there was a sound on the line like in the shell from the Timmendorf beach in which my mother had me listen to the sea when I was a little boy. In between I heard mumbled words that I couldn’t make out. Then Samarin came on the line: “We know that Herr Schuler came to see you, and that he left some money with you. You must help us see to it that his reputation isn’t ruined by this one foolish act. The money belongs back in the bank. Come by tomorrow at three.”

I was tired of the game Welker and Samarin were playing. I didn’t call either of them. I decided to call Georg the following day in Strasbourg to see what he’d come up with. I also decided to call Nägelsbach on his last day at police headquarters. I had forgotten that I had been shadowed by a Fiesta.

B
ut the driver of the Fiesta had not forgotten me. At eight thirty the following morning he was at my front door, ringing the bell. He rang many times. Later he explained to me that he had been quite considerate; he had kept ringing even though he could have easily gotten the door open. The lock was a joke.

When I opened, he stood there skulking like a salesman, his face both defiant and dispirited. He looked to be about fifty, not too tall and not too short, not fat and not thin, his cheeks covered in spider veins and his hair sparse. He was wearing pants of some dark synthetic fabric, light gray loafers, a light blue shirt with dark blue edging on the pocket, and an open parka. His parka was the same beige color as his car.

“So it was you,” I said.

“Me?”

“Who was shadowing me yesterday.”

He nodded. “That maneuver of yours near Schwetzingen wasn’t bad, but I knew where you were heading. You went off the autobahn just like that? Over the shoulder and onto a dirt road?” He spoke with magnanimous amiability. “What about the blue Mercedes? Did it follow you onto the dirt road?”

I didn’t want to let on that I had no idea what he was talking about, but he saw that right away.

“Are you telling me you didn’t notice him? As for me, you only noticed yesterday.”

“I’d be happy enough not to notice you today, either. What do you want?”

He looked hurt. “Why are you talking to me like that? I didn’t do anything to you. I just wanted—”

“Well?”

“You are … I am …”

I waited.

“You are my father.”

I’m not the fastest person and never have been, and with the passing years I haven’t gotten any faster. More often than not my emotions are slow to react, and I might notice only at noon that someone had offended me in the morning, or I might realize in the evening that someone had said something nice to me at lunch that would have pleased me. I don’t have a son. And yet I didn’t burst out laughing or slam the door in his face, but invited him into my living room and had him sit on one sofa while I sat on the other.

“You don’t believe me?” he said, and then nodded. “I see you don’t believe me. We don’t even exist for you.”

“We? How many more children do I have?”

“There’s no need to make fun of me.” He told me that he had seen his file after the fall of the Berlin Wall and had discovered that he had been adopted, and that his real mother was Klara Self from Berlin.

“What file was this?”

“My cadre file.”

“Cadre …?”

“I worked for the Stasi—the East German secret services—and am proud of it. I investigated serious crimes, and I’ll have you know that our total of solved cases was higher than you here in the West could ever hope for. Things weren’t all bad in East Germany, and I won’t have it or me painted black.”

I motioned to him to calm down. “When were you born?”

“March ninth, 1942. Your fascist Wehrmacht was attacking the Soviet Union.”