Self's deception (23 page)

24
After Fall Comes Winter

Shouldn't I have realized it? This was of course a futile question. But it preoccupied me all the way to Gättingen. I remembered the conversation in prison, when Peschkalek had spoken of Leo and me: the old man and the young girl. I hadn't ever told him anything about her. Had he got that from Lemke? It also struck me now that he had turned up at Brigitte's place, even though I'd never mentioned her. Had he been spying on me? Had our first meeting on the autobahn not been a coincidence, but set up by him? Had he been spying on me at that very moment?

Everything became even more confused. That Peschkalek might have heard about me and Leo from Lemke, but had come to me wanting to dig up the facts about the attack Lemke had launched, didn't pan out. Had he heard about Leo and me and the case I was investigating from the police, and not from Lemke? Let's say he'd read the article in the
Viernheimer Tage-blatt
, his curiosity was aroused, he started investigating, found out from a police source that I, too, was investigating, and fastened onto me… And then, as coincidence would have it, his old comrade Lemke turned out to be behind everything? There was a little too much coincidence in all of this for my liking.

When in the evening, after a long drive, I reached Mannheim, I had a backache but no answers. All I knew was where I wanted to search for those answers. The phone book listed Peschkalek's apartment and studio in the Bäckstrasse. I called Brigitte, told her I was still on the road and would be at her place by eight, and asked her to invite Peschkalek for dinner at eight, too. Then I parked my car in good time outside his place in the Bäckstrasse. Shortly before eight he came out, got into his VW Golf, and drove off. He didn't look right or left. I read the names on the buzzers and went inside.

The hallway was narrow and gloomy. After a few steps it widened out on the left into a stairwell. Straight ahead it led to a backyard. Peschkalek's buzzer was on a board with six others. When I got used to the dark, I could make out a sign with his name on it and an arrow pointing to the back.

In the yard were an old elm tree and a two-story wooden shack leaning on the firewall of the building next door. Next to the outside staircase that led to the second floor was another sign, ATELIER PESCHKALEK. I climbed the stairs following the arrow. The landing was wide enough for Peschkalek to put a table and two recliners on it and use it as a balcony. The door had only a peephole, and the window that looked out onto the landing was secured with a grille. I reached into my bag, snapped open the large key ring that had a good hundred different keys on it, and tried them one by one. It was quiet in the yard. The wind rustled in the elm tree.

It took a long time for me to find the key that released the pin tumblers and turned the lock. The door opened into a large room. The back wall showed the unplastered firewall of the neighboring building. To the right were three doors, leading into a tiny bedroom, a kitchen that was no larger than a closet, and a bathroom that also served as a darkroom, in which the necessities of personal hygiene had surrendered to the developing of film. On the left I could look out into the neighbor's yard through two large windows. A gap in the buildings of the Hafenstrasse even offered a narrow vista of the warehouses and cranes of the harbor and the red strip that the setting sun had left behind on the pale sky.

Dusk was setting in, and I had to hurry. His place was filled with lamps that could have made the interior bright as day, and there were also black blinds on the windows—but one of the blinds was stuck. So I had to look things over as best as I could and take as close a look as possible at anything interesting in the windowless bathroom.

Despite the tangle of lamps, curtains, and folding screens, the Venetian chair, piano stool, grandfather clock, Styrofoam column, and fake jukebox, I soon realized that Peschkalek had an eye for order. In one desk drawer he kept stationery with a letterhead, in another stationery without, in the second drawer envelopes arranged by size, and in the last drawer supplies ranging from punchers to scissors. His unanswered mail and unpaid bills lay in a little basket on his desk. Everything that didn't have to be dealt with right away must have been in the binders lining the right-hand wall between the doors. They didn't have labels, but were numbered from 1.1 to 1.7, and under fourteen heading numbers there were between two and eleven further numbers. The heading numbers stood for topics such as portraits, nudes, fashion, politics, and commercials, and the further numbers stood for

single big projects and also the small projects of a given year. It was quite straightforward. Under the heading number 15, Peschkalek had filed away his big features, the first about Italian contrabass makers, the second about closed steelworks in Lorraine, and the next three about football, alpine-horn blowing, and child prostitution in Germany. Binder number 15.6 was dedicated to the Viernheim attack.

Before I sat down on the toilet in his bathroom with the binder, I called Brigitte and told her about traffic jams and construction. “Is Ingo there yet? I won't make it before ten— don't wait for me with dinner.”

They had finished the soup already and were about to start on the monkfish. “We'll keep a plate warm for you.”

As in the other binders, in this one, too, were pictures first and then the text. It took a while till I realized what the photos showed. They were dark, and I was at the point of judging them failures. But they were night shots. A car, disguised figures in a forest, dug-up mounds of earth that the disguised figures were doing something with, uniformed figures, and an explosion with two bodies flying through the air, a fire, people running. The Viernheim attack in pictures.

The texts began with a letter to the local and regional press, in which the group After Fall Comes Winter took credit for the attack on the poison-gas depot in the Lampertheim National Forest and made threats against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In a later letter, Peschkalek wrote about a terrorist who wanted out, had confided in him, and had handed him a confession and a video recording showing the Viernheim attack. Peschkalek praised the material and enclosed stills as proof of the video's quality, and excerpts from the confession. He wanted a million marks for it. The letter was to the ZDF television network. The next page in the binder listed who else he had contacted: the various broadcasting corporations, a Hamburg magazine and weekly, the serious press, the tabloids, and finally the gutter press. Then came the responses. At best they were surprised: The material looked interesting, but nothing was known about an attack on a poison-gas depot in the Viernheim Meadows. Some of the replies were curt, saying that the police knew nothing of such an attack—someone had spent time looking into it and was angry. More often than not, the replies were form letters thanking him, but unceremoniously turning him down. Finally I found in the binder the confession of the terrorist, an eighty-page manuscript, obviously printed on the same printer as Peschkalek's letters, and, in a plastic cover, the American file. I did not look at the video marked 15.6—the stills were enough.

I needed a breather before I could head over to Brigitte's place. I put a few photos in my bag, turned out the light in the bathroom, put the binder back, sat down in the Venetian chair, and looked out the window. On a balcony across the way three men had settled down to a game of Skat. I heard the bidding and calling of suits and sometimes a fist banging on the table along with a card. A red light blinked over the harbor, warning airplanes of a crane.

Had Lemke and Peschkalek mounted a spectacle for the media? I ought to have figured out much earlier that Lemke no longer believed in political battles or waged such battles anymore. A fanatic, a terrorist—that didn't pan out with him. He was able to slip into the role and play it convincingly. But that was all. Lemke was a player, a strategist, a gambler. He had staged a terrorist attack with a few foolish youngsters, staged it in a way that ought to have pitched the media into a feeding frenzy. There were even casualties, presumably unplanned, but heightening the worth of the spectacle and the price of the material. But nobody played along: not the Americans, not the police, not the media. None of the million marks they had intended to rake in had materialized.

25
That's strange

I didn't call Nägelsbach. I drove over to Brigitte's place, where I found her, Peschkalek, and Manu having chocolate, espresso, and sambuca over a game of Risk. I had a hard time responding to their cheerfulness. But I'd had a long drive and could plead tiredness. I ate the leftovers and watched them play.

It was a heated game. After years of living in Rio, Manu conquered and defended South America tooth and nail. His strategy was to occupy North America and Africa in order to secure South America—he didn't care about the rest of the world. Brigitte had only joined in the game because she didn't want to be a wet blanket. She had captured Australia, was fantasizing about harmonious coexistence with aborigines, and was not interested in further conquests. So Peschkalek managed to capture Europe and Asia without effort. But his mission was to free Australia and South America, and unlike Brigitte or Manu he took his mission seriously, got entangled in a hopeless war on two fronts, and didn't rest until he was utterly defeated. Manu and Brigitte were overjoyed, and he laughed along with them. But he was rankled. He wasn't a good loser.

“Time to go to bed!” Brigitte clapped her hands.

“No, no, no!” Manu was in high spirits and ran from the living room to the kitchen and back to the living room, and turned on the TV. Yugoslavia was falling apart. Rostock was bankrupt. A baby had been abducted from a hospital in Lüdenscheid and found in a phone booth in Leverkusen. The Frenchman Marcel Croust won over Viktor Krempel in the Manila chess tournament, establishing himself as the challenger to the world champion. The Federal Public Prosecutor's Office announced the arrest of the suspected terrorists Helmut Lemke and Leonore Salger in a village in Spain, from where they were to be extradited to Germany. The TV showed them being led in handcuffs to a helicopter by policemen in black-lacquered hats.

“Isn't that…”

“Yes.”

Brigitte knew Leo from the picture leaning against the small stone lion on my desk. Brigitte shook her head. Leo, with her unwashed, stringy hair, bleary-eyed face, and grubby checked shirt, did not meet her approval.

“Are you going to see her again?” she asked me casually. Even when I had told her about my trip with Leo to Locarno, she had not made much of a fuss. Even then I hadn't fallen for it.

“I don't know.”

Peschkalek stared at the television screen without a word. I couldn't see his face. When the news was over he cleared his throat and said, “It's amazing what the teamwork of the European police can pull off nowadays.” He turned to me and launched into a minilecture about Interpol and the Schen-gen Treaty, the investigative role of the computer, Europol, and the new European forensic database.

“You'll try to get to see those two …” I began.

“I guess I ought to, don't you think?”

“… and you'll try to talk them into playing the role I didn't want to play?”

He weighed which answer would trigger what question, wasn't sure, and dodged. “I'll think about it.”

“What can you offer them?”

“What do you mean?” He seemed uncomfortable.

“Well, the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office can drop charges, apply for a lower penalty, or even grant pardons in order to salvage its story of the Käfertal attack. What can you offer? Money?”

“Me, money?”

“For a good feature article there's always good money, wouldn't you say?”

“Things aren't that good.” He got up. “I've got to get going.”

“Things aren't that good? There should be hundreds of thousands of marks in something like this, and with the real photos and documents even more. What would you say to a million?”

He looked at me, vexed. He was trying to figure out whether I'd just hit on that number or if I was hinting at something. His flight-instinct won. “Well, so long, then.”

Brigitte had listened to us annoyed. When Peschkalek had gone, after kisses on both cheeks, she asked what was going on. “Are you fighting?” I dodged her question. As we lay in bed, she rested her head on my arm and looked at me.

“Gerhard.”

“Yes?”

“Is that why they let you out of prison? I mean, did you tell them where to find the two of them?”

“For God's sake …”

“What would be wrong with that? I don't know the girl, but she's on the run with him, and he did assault you, after all. That was him, wasn't it? The one I met at the door when I found you in terrible shape and covered in blood.”

“Yes, but I had no idea they were in Spain. Leo called me once or twice, and it sounded far away—that was all.”

“That's strange.” She turned around, nestled her back against me, and fell asleep.

I knew what she found strange. How would a policeman in a godforsaken village in the Spanish provinces come upon German terrorists? Not without a tip-off. I conjured up the image of a German tourist abroad going to the police to make a statement that he recognized the inhabitants of a neighboring bungalow as the terrorists for whom there was an alarm out. Then I remembered the tip-off that had led Rawitz and Bleckmeier to me, not to mention the tip-off that had landed me in prison. These had not come from a tourist. Nor had the tip-off that had brought Tietzke to Wendt's corpse. I might have been pointed out by someone who happened to see me, someone from Mannheim who had been drawn to the Oden-wald and Amorbach by the warm summery day. But the tip-off about Wendt's corpse had come from Wendt's murderer.

26
A pointed chin and broad hips

Philipp wasn't in his hospital room.

“He's out in the garden.” The nurse followed me to the window. Philipp, in his dressing gown, was walking around a pond, every step as cautious as if he were treading on thin ice. This is how old men walk, and even if Philipp were able to walk normally again, there would come a day when this would be the only way he could walk. A day would come when this would be the only way I could walk, too.

“This is my third round already. Thanks, but I don't need your arm. I'm not using the cane they've been trying to foist on me either.”

I walked beside him, resisting the urge to tread as cautiously as he did.

“How long are they going to keep you here?”

“A few days, perhaps a week—just try pinning one of those doctors down. When I tell them they really don't have to treat me with kid gloves, they just laugh. They tell me I should have operated on myself, then I'd be fully up-to-date on my condition.”

I wondered if that was possible.

“I've got to get out of here!” He waved his arms. The pretty young nurses were unsettling him. “It's crazy! I've always liked them, the sweet ones as much as the mean ones, the firm ones, the soft ones. I'm not one of those guys who need big breasts or blond hair. It used to be, if they were young and had that look in their eyes, that blank look where you can't tell if it sees through everything or is utterly clueless, when they have that scent that only young women have—that was it. And now”— he shook his head—”now a girl can be sweet and flutter her eyelashes at me all she wants, but I no longer see the young girl she is, just the old woman she will one day turn into.”

I didn't understand. “You mean, a sort of X-ray vision?”

“Call it whatever you want. In the mornings there's Nurse Senta, for instance—the cutest face, soft skin, a pointed chin, small breasts, and broad hips. She acts stern, but loves to giggle. In the past, the air would have been charged. Now I look at her and see that one day her stern act will crease her mouth with scowling lines, blood vessels will spot her cheeks, and love handles will bulge over her midriff. Have you ever noticed how all women with pointed chins have broad hips?”

I tried to conjure up the chins and hips of the women I knew.

“Then there's Verena, the night nurse. A hot-blooded woman—but what looks wild now will look ravaged soon enough. In the past I wouldn't have given a damn. Now I see it, and it's like a bucket of cold water.”

“What do you have against ravaged women? I thought you saw Helen of Troy in every woman?”

“I did. That's the way I liked it, and that's the way I'd like it to be again.” He looked at me sadly. “But it doesn't work anymore. Now I only see a shrew in every woman.”

“Perhaps it's just because you're still under the weather. You've never been sick before, have you?”

He had already weighed this explanation, too, but brushed it aside. “I used to fantasize about being a patient in a hospital and being spoiled by the nurses.”

I wasn't able to cheer him up. On the way back to his room, he steadied himself on my arm. Nurse Eva helped him into bed. She wasn't just called Eva, she also looked the part, but he didn't grace her with a single glance. As I was about to leave, he grabbed my arm. “Am I paying now for having loved women?”

I left. But I left too late. His morose brooding had gotten to me. Here was a man who had made women the center of his life. His passion had not been for anything fleeting like fame or glory, nor for something external like money or possessions, nor for deceptive erudition, nor vain power. But it didn't help. The brooding and the life crisis still came, as they did for everybody else. I couldn't even think of a crime with which Philipp could salvage his life's illusion.

I called Frau Büchler. “I know who the murderer is. But I don't know his motive, nor do I have proof. Perhaps Herr Wendt knows more than he realizes. I really must speak to him at this point.”

“Can you please call back in a few hours? I'll see what I can do.”

I went to the Luisenpark and fed the ducks. At three o'clock I spoke again with Frau Büchler. “Could you please wait at your office tomorrow morning,” she said. “Herr Wendt doesn't know yet when he will come by, but he will.” She hesitated for a moment. “He is a man used to having his own way and can be somewhat imperious and gruff. But he is also sensitive. Whatever painful things you have to say to him about his son or his son's death, please say them carefully. And please don't hand him the invoice—send it to me.”

“Frau Büchler, I—”

She had hung up.