Self's deception (24 page)

27
If we had put our money where our mouth is

At nine o'clock I was at my office. I watered the potted palm, emptied the ashtrays, dusted the desk and filing cabinet, and neatly laid out fountain pens and pencils next to one another.

The phone rang. Herr Wendt's chauffeur informed me over his car phone that Herr Wendt would be at my office in half an hour.

A Mercedes pulled up. The chauffeur opened the car door. Before Herr Wendt got out, he eyed the building and my office, the smoked glass and the display window of the former tobacconist's, and the golden letters GERHARD SELF
,
PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS. He got out of the car with difficulty and hesitated, carefully steadying himself, as if with his heavy body he had to find his balance: an elephant swaying his rump, head, and trunk, and one is uncertain whether he has forgotten how to use his power, or if he will stampede and flatten everything in his path. He approached my door with heavy steps. I opened it.

“Herr Self?” His voice boomed.

I greeted him. Despite the summer temperature, he seemed chilled and kept his coat on.

We sat down at my desk facing each other, and he immediately came to the point. “Who killed him?”

“You wouldn't know him. He and your son used to be friends, then for years their ways parted, but their paths crossed again and the two of them clashed. I am not yet sure whether he put pressure on your son, or whether your son put pressure on him; in other words, if he wanted something from your son or if your son wanted something from him. Were you in touch with your son in the days or weeks before he died?”

“I resent that question, we are father and son! He is a man of letters. He has his master's and a doctorate, and I'll be the first to admit that what he does and says is sometimes beyond me. And more often than not he simply doesn't understand how things are done in my world. But he has always respected me! Always!” Old Herr Wendt was blustering, but his face remained set. The bones of his temples were strong and his cheeks and chin square despite the considerable fat, and his eyes peered from beneath a wide forehead and profuse eyebrows, his pupils not vacillating, his eyelids not twitching. Only his mouth moved, letting the words drone out.

“Do you know the area between Viernheim and Lam-pertheim, Herr Wendt? The forest where the Americans have a depot.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Your son was involved in the attack that was perpetrated there. To be precise, he was involved with the people who perpetrated the attack. There was a map of the region in his briefcase. Didn't the police tell you about that?”

He shook his head. “What map?”

“Nothing special. It was a map of the autobahn triangle near Viernheim and a few kilometers around it, with boundary or section numbers. It was a letter-size black-and-white photocopy.”

“Rolf …” He didn't continue.

“Yes?”

“I would have liked to have done more for my son. You know where he lived and how. Ah, Herr Self, the apartments he could have had! Why did I work my fingers to the bone all my life?”

I couldn't tell him why, so I waited.

“I would have given him everything, everything! But that map …”

“What do you mean?”

He stared down at the desk between us, reached for a pencil, and turned and twisted it in his gnarled hands. “I didn't want all of that to start again. Not that I know how deeply involved he was back then. Be that as it may, he didn't break free from it easily, let me tell you. When he started working, all that nonsense caught up with him, and now, when he was on the brink of making something of himself, with his own practice or his own hospital, he couldn't get mixed up in all that again!”

“What's the connection between the political things your son was involved in during the early seventies and the map you mentioned?”

The pencil snapped, and Herr Wendt slammed the two halves onto the desk. “I didn't hire you to cross-examine me!”

I remained silent.

He didn't say anything either and looked at me as if I were a bitter pill. To swallow or not to swallow, that was the question. I made to say something, but he waved his hand dismis-sively and began to talk. “A few days before his death, Rolf had asked for the map I have that indicates where poison gas had been buried at the end of the war in the Viernheim Meadows and the Lampertheim National Forest. He had wanted the map once before. He was still at school then and had just had an accident while driving a stolen car without a license. I moved heaven and earth to patch all that up, and I had just pulled it off when one night I caught him rifling through my desk and my safe, looking for the map. I gave him the hiding of his life. Perhaps …” There was a sudden uncertainty in his eyes. “That was the end of all the trouble. He finished school and passed his exams and his doctorate. So the hiding did him some good, don't you think? I learned to live with the fact that he didn't go on to become a surgeon; a man has to make his own choices. Also that he didn't talk to me much anymore—I don't know what people will have told you, but I was convinced that things would turn out well. At a certain age boys don't get along with their fathers. That's just a phase.” He looked at me hard again.

“Why did your son want that map?”

“The first time around, I admit I didn't even give him a chance to explain himself, and the second time he wouldn't say. Did my son's murderer want that map? Are you saying that my son would still be alive if I'd given him that map?” He stood up. “It was him I was thinking of, do you understand, only him. I wanted him to be done once and for all with all that crazy political nonsense. As far as I was concerned he could have had the map; I don't need it anymore.”

I couldn't tell him what he wanted to hear. I didn't know what had preceded Rolf's death that rainy afternoon beneath the autobahn bridge. But even if the map was worth murdering for, I couldn't imagine that somebody would murder Rolf if he were trying to extort the map from him. I told Wendt as much. “Is the map worth killing for?”

“Today? In the old days, perhaps. Take the metropolitan area of Ludwigshafen-Mannheim-Heidelberg: If one intended to establish a city, a real city, instead of letting it sprawl haphazardly, then only the area between Lampertheim, Bürstadt, Lorsch, and Viernheim would have come into question. There is access to the autobahn and the train, twenty minutes on the high-speed train to Frankfurt and twenty minutes by car to Heidelberg, there's nature all around, the Odenwald Range and the Palatinate Forest right at your fingertips—sounds good, doesn't it? In the sixties and seventies it sounded very good indeed. But today we don't think and plan that way anymore. Today we like everything to be small and cozy, with little towers and bay windows. Only the expansion of the high-speed train network is in the works. If you ask me, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in if we had put our money where our mouth is.”

“Were the Americans planning to leave back then?”

“They were, by all accounts. And so we started buying. Prices rose in Neuschloss, and one Realtor tried to be particularly clever and put down half a million for the old forester's lodge on the road to Hemsbach.” He laughed, slapping his thighs. “Half a million!”

“And with that map, you knew what was worth buying and what to avoid?”

“No. You couldn't get at the actual terrain. The Americans were there, and they still are. But ifthey had left, and ifthey had not cleaned up the place while they were still there, and if the city were to be built, then the map would have been a gold mine. If, if, if—that map was never a jackpot.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I bought it.”

I looked at him, puzzled.

“Needless to say, not at my local bookstore. A young man found it in his father's papers and was clever enough to realize its value for the real-estate market. I had to fork out a good chunk of cash for it.”

I showed him young Lemke in a photograph from Leo's album. He looked at it: “Yes, he was the one who sold it to me.”

I didn't for a moment believe that Lemke had found the map among his father's papers. Leo had told me about Lemke's internship at her father's office in the Ministry of Defense. Lemke had to have come across the map there and stolen it. Then he had sold it to old Herr Wendt and tried to get it back from young Rolf Wendt—presumably to cut the same deal with the next Realtor, for the funds of the Communist League, or for his own pocket.

“Herr Wendt, did you tell your son how you got the map?”

“I suppose so.”

“That is what helped your son, not the beating you gave him. Lemke, who sold you the map, was trying to get your son to take it away from you again. He wouldn't have told him that he had sold you the map. He wouldn't even have spoken of money, but of high political aims. He was your son's political idol, and your son believed in him, until he realized that Lemke had duped him and used him.”

“Did he …”

“No, he didn't kill your son.”

He took the two halves of the broken pencil and tried to put them back together again.

“Can I have the map?” I asked.

“Will it help with your investigation?”

“I think it will.”

He eyed me silently. Our conversation had exhausted him. Without asking me, he picked up my phone, called his chauffeur, and told him to pull up outside. He got up, steadied himself on the desk, found his balance, walked to the window, and waited for the car. “You'll hear from me,” he said over his shoulder as he walked out the door.

28
Marked red

I didn't have to wait long for Wendt's reply. I got off the phone with Brigitte and immediately received a call from Frau Büchler. She had just sent a messenger to my office, and Herr Wendt hoped I would know to use what was in the package prudently—he didn't want it back. After the close of the investigation he expected a detailed written report. “You are to send the report to me, and the invoice, too,” Frau Büchler said. “I wish you much success, Herr Self.”

I waited for the messenger and looked out the window. There are seldom pedestrians out and about on the Augusta-Anlage. There are a couple of schools in the area, but the children use the side streets. There are also several offices, big and small, but the people who work there use their cars. I watched the traffic cop writing out tickets. Then my vista remained empty for a while, until two dark men in light suits came into view, stopped, talked vehemently at each other, and continued on their way, one of them angrily in front, the other anxiously following. A young woman pushed a stroller through the picture. A small boy ran by carrying a schoolbag. I lit a cigarette.

The messenger arrived on a motorbike. He didn't switch the engine off while he handed me a large yellow envelope on the steps leading up to my door, and he had me sign a receipt. Before he thundered off, he tapped his index finger on his helmet.

I had to clear my desk in order to lay out the map. It looked utterly insignificant. Little green numbers, ones and twos, denoted evergreen and deciduous woodland. To the west of the small pond called Baumholzgraben were a few brown altitude lines, and the whole area was cut into rectangles by cleared areas in gray, numbered between ten and forty. At eleven points, matchstick-thin areas about two centimeters long were marked red next to the cleared areas. Some were marked with a particularly wide hatching, and some with an additional question mark. Was that where poison gas from World War I was buried, or thought to be buried? The map bore no caption, and no heading either, just a multidigit number, an indication of the scale, a stamp with eagle and swastika, and an initial that was illegible.

I folded the map up again. I don't have a safe, but nobody has ever broken into my file cabinet. I laid the map on the middle shelf, under my blank-cartridge pistol. I wondered if there were any copies. I supposed that Lemke must have made a copy before he sold it to Herr Wendt, which he then could have used in preparation for the attack. Maybe the map had even given him the idea. Otherwise copies were not of much use, not then and not now. No Realtor would have paid for a copy, and no newspaper would have been interested.

I gazed at the shadow play that the sun and the gold lettering on my glass door conjured up on the floor: long, airy letters stretching upward and away from one another. I didn't have anything to do till evening. But I wasn't particularly interested in doing anything. I wanted to finish this case and put the whole thing behind me.

At the Kleiner Rosengarten I had a veal schnitzel in lemon sauce. I saw a matinee of a movie in which at first she loved him but he didn't love her, and then he loved her but she didn't love him, and then nobody loved anybody, until finally, after a chance meeting years later, he loved her and she loved him. I sweated, swam, and napped at the Herschelbad. I woke up to Peschkalek and Brigitte bringing me a birthday cake, whose candles I was supposed to blow out but couldn't. The two of them stood next to me, talked at me, and kept slapping my shoulders, their hands meeting. I felt they were holding onto each other and tried to turn around, but couldn't. They were holding me in a vise.

I disentangled myself from the sheet and looked at the clock. It was high time.

29
Another matter altogether

I remembered which key it was. The lock clicked open right away.

I looked around. An hour and a half had to be enough. I had asked Brigitte to invite Peschkalek again, which she readily did, but I wouldn't be able to put her off any longer than that.

I called her. “I'm sorry, but—”

“You'll be late?”

“Yes.”

“Don't worry. Manu isn't home yet. When do you think you can make it?”

The grandfather clock struck. “It's eight now. Nine thirty—that shouldn't be a problem.
Bon appétit—
and don't forget to leave something for me.”

“Will do.”

It stayed light a little longer than last time. I could still see well. This time I looked not only at the desk, but also searched every compartment and drawer for the gun. I also looked behind every binder. I searched through the bedroom, groping my way through the closet from sweaters to shirts and underwear to socks, and I patted down every jacket and pair of pants. I couldn't find his shoes. There was no shoe closet, no shoe shelf, nor were they lying around anywhere on the floor. A man without shoes—that couldn't be. When I tackled the bed and lifted the mattress, I found a drawer built in under the bed and packed with shoes, organized by color and polished to a spotless sheen. Pulling the drawer out all the way to look behind it proved difficult in the narrow room. But I managed that, too, crawling under the bed on my stomach and groping about in the area between the back of the drawer and the wall. Nothing.

It was very tight beneath the bed and I wanted to get out. But that proved more difficult than getting in. I pushed against the wall and kicked my legs but didn't get very far. I had used my legs to push my way under the bed, but I couldn't use them to pull myself out. More proof, I thought, that getting oneself into something is easy enough, but getting out again is another matter altogether. Just like monasteries or marriage, the foreign legion, or bad company, I reflected. I remembered a pool I had jumped into as a small boy. I had just learned to swim. After two laps I realized that there was no climbing up the smooth concrete walls. I was trapped.

Finally I stemmed and kicked, pushed and pulled myself centimeter by centimeter out from under the bed. Things got easier once my bottom was no longer stuck between the bed and the floor. First my shoulders got free, then my head. I breathed a sigh of relief, closed my eyes for a moment, and rolled onto my back—I simply couldn't get up right away.

When I opened my eyes, Peschkalek was standing over me. He was looking down at me, one hand in his pocket, the other twirling his mustache.

“How long have you been standing there?” This wasn't a good opening. I should have left him the first word and gotten up quietly.

“I should have pulled you out. Perhaps with a little apology, because it's so tight down there? And with an invitation, perhaps: As in, what would you like to see next? Where would you like to snoop around now, Mr. Private Investigator?” He took an ironic bow.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. That wasn't a particularly good beginning either. I was confused. Just the same, I got up.

He grinned. “I heard my clock chime when you called Brigitte.” His grin grew malicious. “And three guesses how I managed to listen in when you called. Now why would your Brigitte and I be sitting cheek to cheek? Well?”

He took his hand out of his pocket and clenched his fist. I don't know whether he hoped or feared that I would fling myself on him. The thought didn't even cross my mind. I took my time.

“Well?” He hopped from one foot to another.

“Where is your gun?”

He stopped in his tracks. “My gun? What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Ingo. No one's here except you and me. There's no police inspector in the closet and no microphone in my tie pin. You know what I'm talking about, and I know that you know. Why play games?”

“I really don't know what you're talking about. How—”

“You're right. My question was a game, too. Why should you tell me where you've hidden the gun? Or did you throw it away?”

“Cut the bullshit, Gerhard. I told Brigitte I'd come get my camera, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. Then I'll take the pictures of Manu she wants, and eat the potato soufflé that's in the oven. Feel free to turn on the light and continue your search for pistols, and don't forget to lock up when you leave.”

He turned around and went into the other room. He was good. He was much better than I'd given him credit for. And the matter-of-factness with which he spoke of Brigitte, Manu, and the soufflé hit me harder than the sucker punch of him and Brigitte sitting cheek to cheek when I called. I watched him pack two cameras and a flash into his leather bag, and said, “I'd also take binder 15.6 and the video.”

He pulled the strap very slowly through the buckle, pushed the prong into the hole in the strap, and pulled it tight. He shot a quick glance at the shelf.

“It's all still there,” I said.

He had finished packing, but seemed unsure what to do next. He stood looking out the window, his hands on the leather bag.

“Not to mention that I have the map you wanted from Rolf.”

Now he was even less certain what to do. Was I throwing him some bait? Was I making him an offer? With his left hand he tapped a disjointed rhythm on the leather bag.

“Isn't Lemke a risk, after all? You assumed he'd play along and keep his mouth shut. Then he'd have made his grand entrance at the trial, and you'd have had your feature in the media. When he gets out of prison, he'll have half the proceeds, with interest and compound interest. He'll get—what, eight years, ten? A high price, but as he got caught anyway and will be punished, what would he stand to gain if he didn't play along and keep his mouth shut?”

Peschkalek's hand tapped slowly and evenly.

“And yet he would stand to gain something,” I said. “He'd be paying you back for squealing on him.”

He turned and faced me. “Squealing on him? I don't understand.”

“I don't know if one can actually prove that you squealed. Voice recordings, voice matches—nowadays there are all kinds of possibilities, but I doubt the police would go to all that trouble.” I shook my head. “But Lemke doesn't need concrete proof. If I point him in the right direction, then he'll realize, just as I've realized, that it could only have been you who made that call to the Spanish police, not some German tourist, or whatever you passed yourself off as.”

Peschkalek looked at me as if he were bracing himself for the next blow.

I took aim. “What's bad for you is that Lemke is not out just to get even. If he's going to start talking, it wouldn't surprise me if he chose to save his own skin. If he ends up as the chief witness, he might only get four to five years. So why not? He'll start talking and lay all the facts on the table. And he'll lay them out in such a way that you'll be the one who was behind it all: You came up with the idea, you masterminded it, and you saw it all through. You fired the gun— both in Viernheim and in Wieblingen. It was you!”