Self's deception (17 page)

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.”