The Safety Net (37 page)

“Will you have the courage to read out the letter Kortschede wrote you? I imagine it’s some kind of a legacy.”

“I won’t have the courage, Käthe. I know that without even reading the letter. I’ve never had any courage, not even that small amount which would have been necessary to prevent the instrument I happened to possess—my newspaper—from sinking to such deplorable standards; not enough courage to put the brakes on Amplanger senior or to keep Amplanger junior at arm’s length. I looked on, or failed to notice, as they gradually deactivated my old-timers, and there was always one justification, just one: the public, the readers, who, they claimed, would desert us if we didn’t follow the trend. Of course I was attracted by the money, and the successes proved the Amplangers and their cohorts right—I gave way every time. To whom? To myself, till I became exactly like our readers. What did I have to lose? Nothing. There would always be enough for us to live on, for the good life, and maybe it would have been better to allow Zummerling to swallow us long ago, with suitable compensation, instead of us now swallowing other newspapers that consider
my paper a shade more liberal and find me a bit more to their liking. Now I’m going to hand it over, remain in the Tolm holding, and Zummerling won’t have to swallow me yet because he already has the Amplangers in there. My sons are right: I did not succeed in fooling the system, the system has fooled me.”

“You’re going to hand over the paper? That’s new.”

“It no longer makes any sense to lend my name and thus a semblance of liberalness. Let’s hope they
have
found a way of monitoring our conversation—then perhaps I really will get the letter meant for me—let’s go inside. We’ll have some coffee, warm up, and drive to Cologne, there’s a new exhibition of Madonnas there that I’d like to see. Shall we ask Miss Klensch if she’d like to come along? Perhaps I can fill in a few gaps in her education, the way I used to with Bleibl’s Number Two. We might ask Herbert to join us for lunch, as long as we don’t have to go to that horrible high rise of ours. Perhaps Herbert has something to pass on to us under the umbrella.” His voice had dropped so low that she had to hold her ear close to his mouth. “Do you have a hand, I mean any money, in that Anti-Auto Action?”

She placed her mouth right against his ear, kissed it quickly, and whispered: “I’ve managed to talk them out of it. And they gave me back what was left of the money. The plan was simple and terrible: in towns all over the country, some quite widely separated, they rented truck-and-trailer units—fifty-foot monsters, I believe—twenty or thirty of them, I think. According to a precise timetable—which, by the way, your son Herbert figured out—they were going to block all the bridges, all the access roads, all major intersections, placing those huge things somehow across the highway—the idea was to turn the town into a traffic hell within fifteen minutes. They were going to pull out the keys, jump down, and disappear. I explained to them that many people might have fainted, suffered a nervous collapse or a heart attack, or even died—ambulances stuck in traffic and so on and so forth. You can’t use the death of others to demonstrate for life, I talked them out of it. Of course they’d had to make down payments or pay compensation to
the rental companies—I took back the balance, just to be safe, and yet—when Zummerling called just now.…”

“You thought they’d done it anyway—and Herbert would be the latest scandal?”

“Yes, after all someone else might have given them the money, they could have got it somehow or other. For a while I trembled each time I listened to the news. It wasn’t the scandal I was afraid of—it was the thing itself. It was masterminded by that Wilhelm Pohl, and he really looks like an angel incarnate.”

“That’s how Kortschede’s Petie looks too—like an angel incarnate. He showed me some photos.…”

“Yes, I’ll remember that, later when you show me your Madonnas. Most of them look like angels too. Well, Tolm, I really made them see all the things that could happen if the center of town were suddenly jammed for any length of time: people would have died, or suffered psychic shocks with long-lasting effects, there would have been fistfights. No, it’s not the scandal—the blind involvement in actions with unpredictable results: that’s the bad part. And those whom it’s supposed to hurt are not hurt: they have their helicopters standing somewhere in a courtyard or on a roof. When all’s said and done, Rolf merely set fire to a few cars which he could be certain had no one sitting in them. It’s a good idea to have Herbert for lunch and reassure ourselves again. After all, they were fair, wouldn’t take a check, only cash. So I’ll ask Bleibl over for tea, and for lunch today I’ll reserve a table for five, in the private room at Getzloser’s, he’ll make us a nice lunch. We’ll have to invite Blurtmehl too, of course. Those poor Madonnas with their angel faces: I hope they won’t wince at the sight of all those machine pistols. Do you really mean to go to the museum today, one day after your election, cause all that commotion?”

“Look, I can’t have those hundred and twenty Madonnas sent here, and I intend to see them. Don’t forget to let Holzpuke know. By the way, I did enjoy it with you under the umbrella. It was almost like a forbidden secret rendezvous.”

“That’s what it was.”

Shortly after landing at Frankfurt Airport, a Turkish engineer, traveling on a plane from Istanbul, handed the boy over to the police, who had been alerted by the flight captain. A seven-year-old child who could easily have passed for Turkish, dark-haired, slight, brown-skinned, in jeans, wearing sandal-like shoes, a sort of poncho cape, and a straw hat with a round crown, not quite consistent in style but sufficiently foreign-looking; a quiet boy who even smiled when the Turkish engineer said as he handed him over: “I have the impression this child is dynamite. I was asked to take him with me on my passport, I have an eight-year-old son, but he’s stayed behind in Turkey. A woman—I am tempted to say, a lady—handed the boy over to me in Istanbul, flight ticket, five hundred marks, and this letter, which she said was vitally important—for you, the police. Here is the letter, here are the five hundred marks, I don’t wish to accept any fee for this slight service. I take the liberty of adding that the lady was in tears.…”

“That was my mother,” said the boy. It was all he said, even when there was a sudden excitement, amounting to commotion, at the police station, after the Turk had given his
address and left. Telephones were picked up, put down again, plainclothes police officers, men in plain clothes not looking at all like police officers. Then a nice woman gave the boy a glass of milk and a piece of cake, although he had sandwiches and a bottle of orange juice in his paper bag. “Tell me, son,” the woman whispered urgently, “can you speak Arabic?” He shook his head with a polite smile, keeping his eyes on the door, Veronica had told him: “If photographers turn up you must hide, at least hold the paper bag in front of your face,” but none did, there were now more men in plain clothes around than in uniform. Then one of the uniformed men took him to the phone, and he said: “Hello?”

“Holger, this is Rolf, do you remember me? Do you recognize my voice, Holger—can you remember Berlin, and Frankfurt? Holger!”

“Yes, Rolf, and Grandfather—the ducks on the pond, Grandmother Paula—jam—Grandmother Käthe—her cookies—Berlin, yes … how are you …?”

“Fine, fine, just fine. I’m glad you’re back.… Veronica—you don’t have to say anything.…”

“I won’t say anything. Are you coming to get me?”

“Yes, no one must know you’re back. You know that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to be taken now by helicopter to Grandfather, you can land in the park, no one will notice, helicopters land there quite often, I’ll pick you up there, in an hour and a half or so—Holger! I’m so happy—we’ll make a big fire, I have a big garden—and Katharina, do you know Katharina?”

“No … but don’t I have a brother—a little brother …?”

“Yes, he’s also called Holger. We’ll have to find a way of keeping you apart. Well, just come—go along with the police officers who will be bringing you here. Are you all right? Tell me!”

“Yes, I’ll go with them. I’m all right. Do I have to go to school right away?”

“No, there’s plenty of time for that. Don’t worry, just get here. See you soon.”

“Goodbye, Rolf.”

Later the officers expressed the opinion that the boy had been not only calm but cool and collected. Acting on instructions, they spoke only of harmless matters: from the air they pointed out the autobahn, the Rhine, the mouths of the Mosel and the Lahn; it all seemed to interest him: an alert, one might even say a bright boy who wanted to know the name of every bridge as he sat there eating his sandwiches—obviously an Oriental type of bread, incidentally, baked in flat cakes, but with sausage that looked like a kind of salami—and finding this flight more interesting than “way up there, because you see more here, almost everything, you can even see chickens fluttering around down below.” No, there was nothing special about the bottle containing the orange juice, nothing remarkable, no distinguishing marks. The boy had even offered the pilot some juice, and the pilot had drunk a bit from the bottle: no, it hadn’t been freshly squeezed orange juice, just the ordinary stuff one could buy at any supermarket, and no doubt there were supermarkets in Istanbul too, and orange-juice multinationals—no, there was nothing remarkable about the juice. Yet the boy had insisted on taking along bottle and paper bag, and anyway what more could they have discovered from the bottle: they already knew who had sent him on his journey, and they had all read that terse note: “You will bitterly regret it if you inform the press of Holger’s return—and if you try to question him. Hand him over to his father. Tel. no. below. No fuss, please! Bev.” It hadn’t even been typed, but impudently handwritten on airmail paper, the kind that lay around in thousands of hotels, these days even in cheap ones.

A nice boy, not a bit aggressive, but not cooperative either; curious and interested, yes; cooperative, no; alert, asking about the Niederwald Monument and Ehrenbreitstein Castle, all the bridges and castles—even minor tributaries like the Wied and the Ahr—and refusing to reply to the most innocuous questions: “Must’ve been pretty hot there, where you came from,
mustn’t it?” Gave a kind of significant smile and said only: “Oh, it was hot all right! But we had snow too, and rain.…”

His clothes, superficially observed at any rate, and of course they had no authority to do more, showed nothing clearly definable: his jeans—well, the kind made by the million; his shirt, maize yellow, of European cut, but these days they were also being produced in the Orient; his sandals, nothing specific; his socks, the most ordinary hand-knitted, homemade kind: the only remarkable items: poncho and hat. The poncho not genuine, certainly not South American, imitation stuff, cotton—they had managed to pull out a few threads. But these things were also available everywhere nowadays: in boutiques, for boutiques, even in department stores. There remained the straw hat, but there had been nothing whatever Arabian about that, it looked quite cheap like that terrible junk sold in tourist centers—could just as easily have been bought in Coblenz as on Crete. And finally the boy himself: more self-possessed than calm, quite obviously on his guard, probably even trained never to give away anything; never anything but polite and, well, unapproachable, actually the only thing he had admitted was that he had felt hot, and as for that you could feel hot anywhere south of Athens or Syracuse. In his pockets apparently nothing more than a few crumpled Kleenexes. He did show some emotion when they saw Cologne Cathedral from above, said: “You can see how big and how small it is”—laughed when they slowly swung toward the manor house, exclaimed: “There they are, the ducks, the ducks!”—and cried when his dad folded him in his arms, that was all. Nothing could be got out of him, but he had actually cried, and his father had too. Following instructions, they had landed as close as possible to the orangery, enabling the boy to get out without being seen and be handed over to his father at the entrance to the orangery; through the orangery into the manor house, from the manor courtyard into Daddy’s car, and off. Very sensibly, the old people had not been informed but left to their Madonnas. That was sensible, they would have made a big fuss.

There were seven photographs in which Veronica Tolm’s footwear was visible, altogether four different pairs of shoes with one thing in common: they were all expensive, as smart as they were sensible, rather expensive wear for a rebel, brand-name shoes, the photos taken over a period of five years, and that seemed to indicate that she had remained faithful to that make, and it took only a single phone call to establish where that make was available in Istanbul: in five stores and at none of the bazaars, unless—one never knew what might end up in the bazaars, without the knowledge of the company—yes, and size 38 was very popular, and no doubt madam would find what she was looking for in one of the five stores.

The aircraft carrying the boy had landed at 10:35 a.m., and the Turkish engineer had been intelligent enough not to rely on the vagaries of passport control: shortly before landing he had notified the captain, who in turn had notified the police, thus by 10:50 they already knew about the “delectable cargo” from Istanbul, about the letter and the warning. The next was
routine, which made him whistle all day long the hit tune he still remembered from the twenties: “Under one umbrella in the evening”—since he only whistled the tune and wasn’t singing the words, he could mentally supply his own words to the tune: “Under one umbrella in the morning,” and he could laugh too: how naïve she was, that Käthe Tolm: as if he hadn’t known about the preparations for the Anti-Auto Action! As if any group could rent that many tractor-trailers unobserved! They’d have pounced on them right away, and there was no way her little Herbert wouldn’t have ended up in jail.

Well, it was a good thing she’d prevented it; he cared just as little for scandals as she did, but then of course what she hadn’t whispered in the old man’s ear was that she had also financed a good number of the Molotov cocktails that had been thrown at and into cars in those earlier days. Not a great deal of money, but still: one had to keep an eye on her, for her own good, she had a somewhat too generous hand—not only for illegal activities, mind you. She supported many people, old Dr. and Mrs. Zelger, for instance, and had tried in vain to get some money into old Beverloh’s hands. And he couldn’t believe that her son Rolf had tipped her off about the umbrella: surely he knew better. Probably he had said the opposite: never say anything under an umbrella that you don’t want anyone to hear—and the old lady had misunderstood him! Good to know, too, that the old man was beginning to rebel: a bit late, but, watch out, he might be capable of spouting some nonsense at the cemetery in Horrnauken, and wait until he saw that letter! They would have to give it to him, he supposed: it was the farewell letter of one of his best friends, but that could wait a few more days. “Under one umbrella in the morning” the two old people had been whispering to each other like lovers. After the phone conversation between Tolm and Zummerling, Dollmer—probably because of Kortschede’s letter—had ordered “full alarm.” And indeed alarm was appropriate: the old man in rebellion and the boy being sent back meant they were on the march, and it was quite possible that that charming mother of his might
need some shoes before starting out. It was fairly certain that they had been lying low for a long time, perhaps for years, in a region where that make was not so easy to come by.