Self's Murder (17 page)

Brigitte rested her head on her hands and looked up at the ceiling. “
I
could put the money to good use. What I’d like to do instead of my massage practice, what I would need to expand my practice, things Manu would like—I could definitely put it to good use.”

“It’s drug money, and money from prostitution and blackmail. It’s dirty money. I’ll be happy when it’s gone.”

“Money doesn’t stink—weren’t you taught that?”

I propped myself on my elbow and looked at Brigitte. After a while she turned her eyes from the ceiling and looked at me.

I didn’t like her expression. “Come on, Brigitte …” I didn’t know what to say.

“Maybe that’s why you are what you are. A lonely, difficult old man. You don’t see happiness when it comes your way, so how are you supposed to grab it if you can’t even see it? Here it’s served to you on a silver platter, but you let it slip away. Just like you’ve let our happiness slip away.” She looked back up at the ceiling.

“I don’t want our happiness to—”

“I know you don’t want to, Gerhard, but you do it anyway.”

I couldn’t let that go. I wasn’t ready to roll over and turn my back to her, lonely, difficult, and old. Not after our days in Sardinia.

“Brigitte?”

“Yes?”

“What would you rather do instead of your massage practice?”

She was silent for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to say anything more. Then she wept a few tears. “I would have liked to have had children with you. I had Manu despite my sterilization. I didn’t have any with you, though I didn’t take any precautions. We would have had to try it in vitro.”

“You and me in a test tube?”

“You think the doctor will shake us up in a test tube like a barman with a cocktail shaker? He would lay your sperm and my egg on a glass slide and then let them do what people in love do in bed.”

I liked the idea of the two cells on a glass. It was a pleasant image.

“Now it’s too late,” Brigitte said.

“I’m sorry. I just told you about Schuler. He would still be alive if I hadn’t been too slow. I’ve always been too slow, and not just since I’ve grown older. I should have asked you after our first night together whether you wanted to marry me.”

I reached out my hand, and after a slight hesitation Brigitte raised her head and I slid my arm under it.

“It’s not too late for that.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.” She nestled up to me and nodded.

“First I have to finish this case. It’ll be my last case.”

T
his time I avoided Berlin. I went by car, got off the autobahn at Weimar and meandered over back roads. There was a park before Cottbus that had been created by Count Pückler, with a pyramid for himself and his wife, one for his favorite horse, and one for his favorite dog. The count’s Egyptian girlfriend had to make do with a grave in the cemetery. She had been young, beautiful, and dark, but her delicate Middle Eastern lungs couldn’t bear the Sorbian climate. I understood her. I hadn’t been able to stand up to the Sorbian climate on my last visit, either.

I had called Vera Soboda at her home in the morning and she’d invited me to dinner. She made a local potato dish with curd and offered me some Lausitzer Urquell, a beer from the region that has a sharp tang of hops but is easy on the palate.

“What brings you to Cottbus?” she asked.

“The Sorbian bank. Do you know how I can get at the data you told me about last time?”

“I don’t work there anymore. I was fired.” She laughed. “Don’t look so surprised. I wasn’t actually the bank manager. I just ran everything because someone had to do it, and the position had never been filled. Two weeks ago some idiot who knows nothing about banking was made manager. On his third day he fired me. It was all over in a flash. He came up to my desk and said: ‘Frau Soboda, you are fired. You have half an hour to remove any personal items from your desk and to leave the premises.‘ He stood beside me and watched me, as if I might take the hole-puncher, the paper clips, or a pen. Then he walked me to the door and said: ‘You will receive seven months’ pay. Fair is fair.’”

“Did you see a lawyer?”

“The lawyer only shook his head and said my chances were up in the air. It seems I might have spoken my mind a little too clearly to the new manager. So I let it be. We have no experience here in taking employers to court. Were I to lose, who’d pay for it all?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“There’s enough to do around here. The problem is that what we need in these parts doesn’t generate money, and what generates money, we more often than not don’t need. But everything will fall into place. Our Lord in Heaven will not abandon a good Communist, as my former boss who took me under her wing always used to say.”

I was certain she would make it. She again looked like a tractor driver with whom one would gladly set out to steal tractors. She furrowed her brow. “What kind of data are you looking for?”

“I’d like to know if money’s still being laundered.”

“But you wrote me that—”

“I know. It’s just that I’m not sure if what I wrote you was right. I have a feeling that—”

“Do you know your way around computers?”

“No.”

She got up, placed her hands on her hips, and looked me up and down. “Do you expect me to go prowling with you through the night, break into the Sorbian bank, turn on the computer, and sift through it for data, just because you have ‘a feeling‘? You expect me to risk my neck for this feeling of yours? Do you think I’ll get so much as a cleaning job in a bank if I’m caught at the Sorbian? Are you out of your mind?” She stood there scolding me in a way that I hadn’t been scolded since the days my mother used to tell me off. If I’d stood up I’d have towered over her by a head, ruining the magic. So I remained seated and stared at her enthusiastically until she stopped, sat down, and burst out laughing.

“Did I say anything about breaking in?”

“No,” she replied, still laughing. “I said it. And I’d like nothing more than to do it and give those programs and databases a good whirl. But I can’t. Not even with you, who didn’t say anything about breaking in, but thought about it.”

“How about without you? Could I get inside without you and turn the computer on and look for the data?”

“Didn’t you just say you don’t know anything about computers?”

“Can’t you lay out for me what you did back then? Step by step? I—”

“You want to become a hacker in a single day? Forget it.”

“I—”

“It’s almost eleven, and we Sorbians go to bed early. Let’s have another beer, and then I’ll fix you up on the sofa.”

“T
heoretically speaking,” I said to Vera Soboda over breakfast, “is there a way of getting into the Sorbian bank under cover of darkness?”

She answered so quickly that she, too, must have given this some thought overnight.

“Under cover of darkness is not the time to break in. What you would have to do is unlock the door to the kitchen area with a skeleton key in the afternoon and hide in the broom closet until everyone’s gone. Then you would have the bank to yourself. Getting in isn’t hard—it’s getting out. At seven in the morning, when the cleaning ladies show up, you would have to hide again until the bank opened, when you could mingle with the customers. But you couldn’t hide in the closet, because that’s where the detergents and mops are kept, and the ladies will be cleaning the toilets, the room with the copiers, behind the tellers’ counters, and under the desks. And you can’t get into the room that has the deposit boxes and the safe.”

“How do the cleaning ladies get into the bank?”

“They have a key for the side entrance.”

“Could I tear past them when they unlock the door?”

She gave the idea some thought. We were having eggs and bacon with potatoes, along with bread and jam and coffee. She ate as if she hadn’t eaten in ages and wouldn’t eat again in ages. When I gave up at my second egg, she ate what was left on my plate, too.

“Eat breakfast like a bishop, lunch like a priest, dinner like a mendicant,” she said. “The cleaning ladies would get the fright of their lives and call the police. But why not?”

She wiped both plates clean with a piece of bread.

“Shall we continue theorizing a little?” I asked.

She laughed. “No harm in that, I suppose.”

“If you were in the bank, sitting at the computer, and couldn’t figure out the programs and the data but happened to have a cell phone handy with which you could call someone who knew what was what, wouldn’t you then—”

She laughed again, her belly shaking as she steadied herself on the table as if she would fall off her chair if she didn’t. I waited for her to calm down.

“Frau Soboda, can you show me on your computer what I would have to do tonight? And would you help me if I got stuck and called you on a cell phone? I know there isn’t much chance I’ll find anything, but I won’t rest if I don’t at least give it a try.”

She looked at the clock. “In six hours,” she said. “Do you have a cell phone?”

She directed me to a store where I could get one. When I returned, she sat down with me at her computer. She showed and explained; I asked and practiced. Turning the computer on. Entering the password. What could the right password be? How did one switch from the system to the tracking program? How would I locate the accounts in the system and the tracking program? What routes might lead to the money laundering? How would I describe on the cell phone what was happening on the screen? By three o’clock I no longer knew up from down.

“You still have a few hours to think the whole procedure through again. The new manager tends to stay late, and I wouldn’t recommend your coming out of the broom closet before eight.” She explained how I should smuggle myself into the bank’s kitchen area and said, “Good luck!”

I parked my car on a side street and went into the Sorbian bank. I was to walk past the tellers and the cashier and enter a short hallway at the beginning of which were the restrooms and the kitchen area. It was quite straightforward. Nobody noticed me as I slowly made my way past the busy tellers and, in the hallway, quickly unlocked the door to the kitchen area with my skeleton key and pulled it shut behind me.

The closet was full. I had to rearrange the brooms, mops, buckets, and detergents so that I’d have enough space. It was uncomfortable; I had to stand at attention with the fuse box pressing into my back, my feet locked together, and my hands at my sides. There was a powerful smell of detergent—not the aroma of fresh lemons but a mixture of soap, ammonia, and rotting fruit. At first I left the closet door ajar, certain I would hear anyone approaching the kitchen. But when someone did come in, I noticed him only once he was already in the room, and if he had looked in my direction that would have been the end of me. So I shut the door. When the bank closed at four, the kitchen area livened up. The employees who had worked at the tellers’ counters and now had to tally their accounts all took a coffee break. I heard the coffeemaker hissing and gurgling, cups and spoons clattering, comments about customers, and gossip about colleagues. I felt quite uneasy in the closet. But time flew.

Otherwise it dragged on slowly. At first I went through what I had learned about the computer. But soon I could think of nothing but how to inch my legs into a different position and move my arms so they’d hurt less. I admired the soldiers who stood guard at Buckingham Palace or the Élysée. I also envied them for their spacious sentry boxes. From time to time I heard a sound, but I couldn’t tell if it was coming from the banking hall or the street, if a chair had banged against a desk or a car had rear-ended another or a plank had fallen off some scaffolding. Most of the time I heard only the rustling of my blood in my ears and a low, delicate piping noise that didn’t come from outside but was also in my ears. I decided that at eight I would climb out of the closet, open the kitchen door, and see if I could hear anything in the banking hall.

But at quarter to eight it was all over. I again heard a sound. While I was still trying to figure out where it was coming from and what it might mean, the kitchen door was abruptly opened. For a moment there was silence. The man who had entered stood still, as if he were running his eyes over the sink, the stove, the refrigerator, the table and chairs, the cabinets above the sink, and the broom closet next to the stove. Then he quickly strode toward the closet and tore open the door.

I
was blinded by the light and could see only that someone was standing in front of me. I shut my eyes tightly, opened them wide, and blinked. Then I recognized him. Ulbrich was standing in front of me.

Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, in a dark suit and vest, a pink shirt and red tie, and silver-rimmed spectacles, over which he looked at me with eyes that were doing their best to seem resolute and menacing. “Herr Self.”

I laughed. I laughed, because the tension of the last minute and from having stood for so long was dissolving. I laughed at Ulbrich’s getup, and at the glare. I laughed at being caught in the broom closet as if I were the lover of the Sorbian bank and Ulbrich her jealous husband.

“Herr Self.” He didn’t sound resolute and menacing. How could I have forgotten what a sensitive little fellow Ulbrich was? I tried to cap off my laughing in such a way that he might interpret it as me laughing with him, not at him. But it was too late, and he looked at me as if I had hurt his feelings again.

“Herr Self, I wouldn’t be laughing if I were you. You have entered these premises illegally.”

I nodded. “Yes, Herr Ulbrich. It’s me. How did you find me?”

“I saw your car parked on a side street. Where else would you be, if not here?”

“Who’d have thought that someone in Cottbus would recognize my car! But perhaps I ought to have figured out that Welker would send you here as his new bank manager.”