Self's deception (3 page)

5
Turbo on my lap

My next move was to scour the hospitals, even though I knew in cases where they have patients who are unable to speak they contact relatives. They also notify the police when a patient's identity is unclear. But it's rare for a doctor to authorize that relatives be contacted against a patient's will. A person being sought by relatives could be lying in a hospital only a few streets away. Perhaps the patient doesn't care that his loved ones are crying their eyes out not knowing where he is. Perhaps that's just what he wants.

But neither of these possibilities fit the impression I had of Leo. Even if her relationship with her parents was more strained than her father had admitted, why would she want to keep her hospital stay a secret from Professor Leider or the catastrophe philosopher? But the devil works in mysterious ways, so I made my way through the Heidelberg university clinic, the Mannheim Municipal Hospital, the district hospitals, and the hospitals of the diocese. Here I didn't run the risk of ruffling any of her circle of friends. I didn't have to adopt any of my character roles but could be Private Investigator Self, hired by an anxious father seeking his missing daughter. I didn't rely on the phone, though it's a pretty dependable way of determining whether a person is in a certain hospital. But if you want to know whether someone was a patient somewhere a few weeks or months ago, then it is better to go there in person. I spent two whole days going from place to place. There was no sign of Leo.

The weekend came. The rain that until now had been accompanying April stopped, and the sun was shining as I went on my Sunday walk through the Luisenpark. I had taken along a little bag of stale bread and was feeding the ducks. I had also brought along a copy of the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, intending to settle into one of the chairs there. But the April sun wasn't yet warm enough. Or my bones don't warm up as fast as they used to. I was quite glad, back home, when Turbo, my tomcat, curled up on my lap. He purred and blissfully stretched out his little paws.

I knew where Leo had lived, studied, and hung out, and that she wasn't in some hospital in or around Heidelberg, nor had she been. She'd been missing since January, and in February someone had been looking for her. In July of last year she'd been arrested and fingerprinted. Her professor had good things to say about her, as did her roommates. Her contact with her parents left a little to be desired. She smoked. I also knew where to find Leo's friends and acquaintances, colleagues, and teachers. I could make inquiries at the translation institute, at the Drugstore Bar, and in neighborhood stores. But I wouldn't be able to manage that without disturbing any of her friends. So I had to give Salger the option of either giving up the case or allowing the possibility that Leo might get wise to the search. This was the second point that I made a note of for Monday.

The first point ought to have been on my to-do list of the previous week: the State Psychiatric Hospital outside Heidelberg. It had not been an oversight on my part—I'd just kept putting it off. Eberhard had spent a year and a half there; I had visited him quite often, and those visits always took it out of me. Eberhard is a friend of mine, a quiet person who lives off his modest fortune. He is a chess grand master, and in 1965 came back completely bewildered from a tournament in Dubrovnik. Philipp and I set him up with a string of housekeepers, none of whom could deal with him. So he ended up in the psychiatric hospital. The patients were crammed into large rooms, slept in double-decker beds, and didn't even have their own closets or lockers—not that they needed any, as all their personal belongings, even wristwatches and wedding rings, had to be handed in. For me the worst was the sweetish smell of food, cleansing agents, disinfectants, urine, sweat, and fear. How Eberhard managed to get well again in these circumstances is a mystery to me. But he made it, and is even playing chess again, against the advice of his doctor, who had read Stefan Zweig's
Royal Game
. From time to time Eberhard and I play a game or two. He always wins. Out of friendship he sometimes leads me to believe that I play a tough game.

6
Well, what do you think?

The State Psychiatric Hospital lies out where the mountains begin. I was in no hurry and took the long way through the villages. The nice weather was holding, the morning was bright, and there was an explosion of fresh green and bright blossoms. I opened the sunroof and put on my cassette of
The Magic Flute
. It was great to be alive.

The old building is the core of the hospital complex. It had originally been constructed in the shape of a large U toward the end of the nineteenth century and used as barracks for a Baden bicycle regiment. In World War I it served as a military hospital, then later as a homeless shelter, and finally in the late 1920s as a sanatorium. World War II turned the large U into a large L. The walls that had closed off the old building into an elongated rectangle disappeared, and the courtyard now extends into the hilly terrain where many new clinic buildings have sprung up. I parked my car, closed the sunroof, and turned off the music. The columns around the entrance of the old building, as well as the whole edifice, were covered in scaffolding, and unpainted brickwork glowed around the windows. Apparently thermoglass windows had just been installed, and painters were busy applying a new coat of delicate yellow. One of them had picked up on the Queen of the Night aria and kept whistling it as I walked over the gravel toward the entrance.

The doorman told me the offices were on the second floor, to the right. I climbed the wide, worn, sandstone steps. By the door to room 107 was a sign, ADMINISTRATION
/
RECEPTION. I knocked and was told to enter.

The receptionist drew a blank at the name Leonore Salger, and returned to her medical records. Passport photos were stapled to some of them, which gave me the idea of showing her Leo's picture. She took it, studied it carefully, asked me to wait for a moment, locked her filing cabinet, and left the room. I looked out the window at the park. The magnolia trees and forsythia bushes were in full bloom, and the lawn was being mowed. Some patients in everyday clothes were sauntering along the paths; others were sitting on benches that had been painted white. How everything had changed! Back in the days when I used to visit Eberhard, there were no lawns beneath the trees, just trodden earth. In those days patients had also been let out for fresh air, but in gray institutional overalls, walking one after another in a circle at a certain hour every day for twenty minutes, like the yard exercise of prison inmates.

The receptionist didn't come back alone.

“I am Dr. Wendt. Who are you, and what is she to you?” He held Leo's picture in his hand and looked at me coldly.

I handed him my card and told him of my search.

“I am sorry, Herr Self, but we can only provide patient information to authorized individuals.”

“So she is—”

“That is all I am prepared to say. Who was it who commissioned you to undertake this search?”

I had brought along Salger's letter and handed it to him. Wendt read it with a frown. He didn't look up, although he most certainly had finished reading it. Finally he got a grip on himself. “Please follow me.”

A few doors down he showed me into a conference room with a round table. This room also faced the park. The workers had not finished renovating here. The old frames and glass had been removed from the windows, which were now sealed with a temporary transparent plastic sheet. A fine layer of white dust covered the table, shelves, and filing cabinets.

“Yes, Frau Salger was a patient here. She came about three months ago. Somebody brought her here; he had picked her up…hitchhiking. We have no idea what happened before or during that car ride. The man just told us he'd picked her up and taken her along.” The doctor fell silent and looked pensive. He was still young, wore corduroys and a checked shirt beneath his open white gown, and looked athletic. He had a healthy complexion and his hair was artfully tousled. His eyes were too close-set.

I waited. “You were saying, Dr. Wendt?”

“As they were driving, she had begun to cry and simply wouldn't stop. That went on for over an hour. The man didn't know what to do, and finally decided to bring her to us. Here she continued crying till we gave her a Valium injection and she fell asleep.” Again he stared pensively.

“And what then?”

“Well, what do you think? I initiated her therapy.”

“No, I mean where is Leonore Salger now? How come you didn't contact anyone?”

Again he took his time. “We didn't have…well, it's only now that I find out from you what her real name is. If our receptionist”—he waved his hand in the direction of room 107—”hadn't happened to deal with her a couple of times…she doesn't usually get to see our patients at all. And then you come with a passport photo …” He shook his head.

“Did you notify the police?”

“The police?” He fished a crumpled pack of Roth-Händle cigarettes out of the pocket of his pants and offered me one. I preferred to smoke my own, and took out my pack of Sweet Aftons. Wendt shook his head again. “No, I don't like the idea of having the police here at our hospital, and in this case having her questioned by the police would have been utterly inappropriate from a therapeutic standpoint. And then she got better soon enough. She was here voluntarily and was free to leave any time she wanted. It's not like she was a minor.”

“Where is she now?”

He cleared his throat a couple of times. “I should inform you…I have to…um…Frau Salger is dead. She …” He avoided my eyes. “I am not exactly sure what happened. A tragic accident. Please extend my sincerest condolences to her father.”

“But Dr. Wendt, I can't just call her father and tell him that his daughter died in some tragic accident.”

“True…true. Well, as you see”—he pointed at the window—”we're installing new windows. Last Tuesday, she…On the fourth floor we have these large windows along the hallway from the floor to the ceiling, and she fell though the plastic cover down into the courtyard. She died instantly.”

“So if I hadn't happened to come to see you now you'd have authorized her burial without informing her parents? What kind of a crazy story is this, Dr. Wendt?”

“Of course her parents have been informed. I'm not certain of the exact procedure our office followed, but her parents were most definitely informed.”

“How could your office have informed them if you only found out her name from me?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“And what about the burial?”

He stared at his hands as if they could tell him where Leo was to be buried. “I suppose that is waiting on the parents' response.” He got up. “I've got to go back to my station. You can't imagine the commotion this has created: Her fall, the ambulance sirens, our patients have been very shaken up. May I show you out?”

I tried to take leave outside room 107 but he pulled me away. “No, our offices are now closed. Let me say how pleased I am that you came. I would be grateful if you would speak to her father at your earliest convenience. That was a point you had there—perhaps our office didn't manage to reach her parents.” We stood by the main entrance. “Goodbye, Herr Self.”

7
Scratch a Swabian and you'll find a small Hegel

I didn't drive far. I stopped at the pond by Sankt Ilgen, got out of the car, and walked over to the water. I threw a couple of stones, trying to make them skip over the water. Even as a boy on Lake Wannsee I'd never got the knack. It's too late to learn now.

All the same, I wasn't about to let some young kid in a white gown pull the wool over my eyes. Wendt's story stunk. Why hadn't the police been called in? A woman who's been in a psychiatric hospital for three months falls out of an unsecured fourth-floor window, and it doesn't cross anybody's mind that negligent homicide or worse might be at play and that the police should be called? OK, Wendt hadn't exactly said that the police hadn't come and investigated. But he'd only mentioned ambulances, no police cars. And if the police had been brought in on Tuesday, Salger would have been informed by Thursday at the latest, regardless of what name Leo might have registered under. The police wouldn't have taken long to figure out that Frau so-and-so didn't exist but that Leonore Salger was missing, and that consequently Frau so-and-so was none other than Leonore Salger. And if Herr Salger had been contacted on Thursday, he'd surely have called me by now.

I had lunch in Sandhausen. It's no culinary Mecca. After lunch I got into my old Opel, which I'd parked on the market square in the sun, and the heat inside was stifling. Summer was just around the corner.

At half past two I was back at the hospital. It was cat-and-mouse. The receptionist in room 107—a different receptionist from the one in the morning—had Dr. Wendt paged but couldn't find him. Finally she showed me the way to his station through long, high-ceilinged corridors in which footsteps echoed. The nurse was sorry, but Dr. Wendt was definitely not to be disturbed. And I'd have to wait in the reception area; waiting at the station was against regulations.

Back in reception, I managed to barge all the way through to the office of Professor Eberlein, the director of the hospital, and explained to the secretary that Eberlein would doubtless rather see me than the police. By now I was fuming. The secretary looked at me uncomprehendingly. Could I please go to room 107?

When I got back out into the corridor, a nearby door opened. “Herr Self? I am Professor Eberlein. I hear you are kicking up quite a fuss.”

He was in his late fifties, small and fat, dragging his left foot and leaning on a cane with a silver knob. He studied me with deep-set eyes that peered out from beneath thinning black hair and bushy black eyebrows. His lachrymal glands and cheeks hung limply. In nasal Swabian he asked me to accompany him in his leisurely limping gait. As we walked, his cane tapped out a syncopated beat.

“Every institution is an organism. It has its circulation, breathes, ingests and eliminates, has infections and infarctions, develops defense and healing mechanisms.” He laughed. “What kind of an infection are you?”

We descended the stairs and went out into the park. The heat of the day had turned muggy. I didn't say anything. He, too, had only puffed and wheezed as he slowly negotiated the stairs.

“Say something, Herr Self, say something! You'd rather listen?
Audiatur et altera pars
—You're on the side of justice. You are something like justice, aren't you?” He laughed again, a smug laugh.

The flagstones came to an end and gravel crackled beneath our feet. The wind rustled through the trees of the park. There were benches along the paths and chairs on the lawn, and there were many patients outside, alone or in small groups, with or without white-gowned hospital staff. An idyll, except for the twitching, hopping gait of some of the patients, and the empty gazes and open mouths of others. It was noisy. Shouts and laughter echoed against the wall of the old building like the impenetrable confusion of voices in an indoor swimming pool. Eberlein periodically nodded to or greeted this or that person.

I tried this approach: “Are there two sides to this matter, Dr. Eberlein? Either an accident or something else? And what might that something else be? Involuntary manslaughter? Or did somebody murder your patient? Or was it suicide? Are we dealing with a cover-up? I'd like some answers, but all my questions fall on deaf ears. And you come along and start talking about infections and infarctions. What are you trying to tell me?”

“I see what you mean. Murder most foul, or at least suicide. You like dramatic effect? You like imagining things? We have a lot of people here who like imagining things.” He drew a wide arc with his cane.

That was impudent. I didn't quite manage to swallow my anger. “Only patients, or doctors, too? But you're quite right: When the tales I'm being told have holes in them, I start imagining what might fit into these holes. The story your young colleague fed me had neither rhyme nor reason. What do you, as director of this institution, have to say about a young patient falling out a window?”

“I'm no longer a young man, and wouldn't be one even if I still had my left leg. And you”—he looked me up and down with an affable expression—”aren't either. Were you ever married? Marriage is also a kind of organism where bacteria and viruses work, and sick cells grow and proliferate. 'Lay a brick, lay a brick, and your house will be built,' as we Swabians say, and let me tell you, bacteria and viruses are real Swabians.” Again the smug laugh.

I thought about my marriage. Klärchen had died thirteen years ago, and my grief about our marriage long before that. Eberlein's image left me cold.

“So what's festering inside the organism of this psychiatric hospital?” I asked.

Eberlein stopped in his tracks. “It was a pleasure to meet you. Look me up whenever you have any questions. I've got into the habit of philosophizing a little. Scratch a Swabian and you'll find a small Hegel. You're a man of action, with clear sight and sober reasoning, but at your age you should be careful about your circulation in this weather.”

He left without saying good-bye. I followed him with my eyes. His walk, his tense shoulders, the short jolting of his whole body as he swung his left leg forward around its axis, the hard thumping of the cane with the silver knob—there was nothing soft or limp about this man. He was a bundle of strength. If he was out to confuse me, he had done so.