Self's Murder (3 page)

Theirs is a history that can hold its own alongside that of other private banks that not only have a history but have made history: the Bethmanns, Oppenheims, and Rothschilds. The author regretted that he was not able to write more about private banks; they kept their archives under lock and key, and if they did open them it was only to scholars they commissioned to do research for jubilees and commemorative tributes. Private banks gave their archival records to public archives only in cases of liquidation, or of foundations being established.

I took out a pack of Sweet Aftons from the filing cabinet where I lock up my cigarettes so that when I want a smoke I don’t just open a pack but have to get up, go over to the filing cabinet, and unlock it. Brigitte hopes this will make me smoke less. I lit a cigarette. Welker had mentioned only his own documents, not the bank’s archives. Had the bank Weller & Welker dissolved its archives and disposed of their contents? I put a call through to the state archives in Karlsruhe, and the official responsible for industry and banking was still in the office. No, the archives of Weller & Welker were not on deposit with them. No, they were not on deposit at any other public archive, either. No, he could not say with certainty if the bank had an archive. Private archives are only randomly collected and preserved. But hell would freeze over before a private bank would—

“And we’re not talking about any old bank,” I cut in. “Weller and Welker was founded almost two centuries ago. The bank cofinanced the Gotthard Tunnel and the Andes Railroad.” I was boasting a little with my newly acquired knowledge. And they say boasting gets you nowhere.

“Ah,
that
bank! Didn’t they also finance the Michelstadt-Eberbach Railroad? Could you hold on for a second?”

I heard him put down the receiver, push back a chair, and open and shut a drawer. “In Schwetzingen there’s a certain Herr Schuler who is involved with the archives of that bank. He’s researching the history of the Baden railways and kept us quite busy with his questions.”

“Do you happen to have Schuler’s address?”

“Not at hand. It must be in the file with our correspondence. I’m not certain, though, if I can … I mean, it’s personal information, isn’t it? And it would be confidential, wouldn’t it? May I ask why you want his address?”

But I had already taken out the white pages, opened them to Schwetzingen, and found the teacher Adolf Schuler, retired. I thanked the official and hung up.

T
he retired teacher Adolf Schuler lived behind the palace gardens in a tiny house that wasn’t much bigger than the nearby garden sheds. I looked in vain for a bell and knocked on the door, then walked through the slushy snow of the garden to the back of the house, where I found the kitchen door open. He was sitting by the stove, eating out of a pot while reading a book. Heaped on the table, the floor, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the sideboard, and the cupboards were books, files, dirty dishes, empty and full cans and bottles, moldy bread, rotting fruit, and dirty laundry. There was a sour, musty smell in the air. Schuler himself stank. His breath reeked and his spattered tracksuit gave off a haze of old sweat. He wore a sweat-rimmed cap the way Americans do, and wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose, and so many age spots covered his wrinkled face that his skin had acquired a dark complexion.

He did not protest at my suddenly appearing in his kitchen. I introduced myself as a retired official from Mannheim who now has all the time in the world to occupy himself with the history of railroads, for which he’s always had a passion. At first Schuler was grumpy, but he warmed up when he saw my pleasure at the wealth of knowledge he displayed. He led me through the burrows of his house, which was chock-full of books and papers, from one cavern to the next, from one hallway to the next, picking up a book here, pulling out a file there to show me. After a while he did not seem to notice or care that I was no longer asking questions about the involvement of Weller & Welker in the building of the Baden railways.

He told me about Estefania Cardozo, a Brazilian woman who had been a lady-in-waiting at the court of Pedro II, whom old Herr Weller had married in 1834 during a journey through Central and South America. They had a son who as a youth had absconded to Brazil and set up a business there, and returned to Schwetzingen with his Brazilian wife after the death of old Herr Weller. There he ran the bank with young Welker. Schuler told me of the centenary celebration in the palace gardens, which had been attended by the grand duke. There a lieutenant from Baden, one of the Welker clan, and a lieutenant from the grand duke’s entourage got into an argument. This resulted in a duel the following morning, at which, to Schuler’s great pride as a man from Baden, the Prussian lieutenant fell. He also told me of a sixteen-year-old Welker who in the summer of 1914 had fallen in love with Weller’s fifteen-year-old daughter, and because he could not get permission to marry her enlisted right at the outbreak of the war, seeking and finding death in the bravura of a foolish cavalry charge.

“At sixteen?”

“What is sixteen too young for? For death? For war? For love? The Weller girl had inherited Portuguese and Indian blood from her mother and grandmother, so by fifteen she was already a woman who could turn men’s heads and make their senses reel.”

He took me to a wall covered with photographs and showed me a young woman with large dark eyes, full lips, a rich cascade of curls, and a pained, haughty expression. She was spectacularly beautiful, and had still been so as an old woman, as the picture hanging next to the first one testified.

“But their parents considered them too young for marriage,” I said.

“It wasn’t a question of age. Both families had agreed not to allow their children to marry. They did not want the two partners to end up as brothers-in-law or cousins, adding family quarrels to potential business conflicts. Well, the children could have eloped and faced being disinherited, but they weren’t strong enough. With the last Welker, though, it wasn’t a problem anymore. Bertram was an only child, as was Stephanie, and their parents were happy enough that the money would remain in the family. There’s not much left anymore.”

“She died?”

“She fell to her death last year when the two of them were on a mountain hike. Her body was never found.” Schuler was silent, and I didn’t say anything, either. He knew what I was thinking. “There was a police investigation,” he continued. “There always is in such cases, but he was cleared. They had spent the night in a hut. He was still asleep in the morning when she went out onto a glacier that he hadn’t wanted to hike on. Didn’t you read about it? It was all over the papers.”

“Did they have any kids?”

He nodded. “Two—a boy and a girl. They’re now at a boarding school in Switzerland.”

I nodded, too. Yes, yes, life’s tough. He sighed, and I made a few commiserating sounds. He shuffled into the kitchen, took a can of beer out of the refrigerator, picked up a dirty glass from the table, wiped at it with the sleeve of his track-suit, struggled to open the can with his gouty fingers, and poured half the contents into the glass. With his left hand he held out the glass to me, but I took the can out of his right hand and said, “Cheers!”

“Here’s to you!”

We drank.

“Are you the archivist of Weller and Welker?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The official at the state archives talks of you as if you are colleagues.”

“Well …” He burped. “I wouldn’t say I was a colleague, exactly, nor could you call this a real archive. Old Herr Welker was interested in the history of his bank and asked me to put all the old files in order. We knew each other from school, old Herr Welker and I, and were like friends. He sold me this house for next to nothing, and I tutored his son and his grandchildren, and whenever we could help each other out we did so. His cellar was full of old things, as was his attic. No one had the slightest idea what was there or knew where anything was. Nobody ended up doing anything with it.”

“What about you?”

“What about me? When Old Herr Welker had the storage area renovated, he had lights, ventilation, and heating installed in the cellar. So here are all the old things, and I’m still busy sorting it all out. Well—perhaps you
could
say that I’m the bank’s archivist.”

“And every year you acquire more old files. It sounds like a Sisyphean task.”

“That it is.” He headed back to the refrigerator, took out two beers, and gave me one. Then he looked me in the eye. “I used to be a teacher, and all my life had to listen to my pupils’ clever or silly lies, their excuses, their explanations, their little dodges. This place is a mess. My niece keeps telling me that, and I know it myself. I can’t smell a thing: no good smells, no bad smells, no flowers, no perfumes. I can’t tell if the food is burning on the stove or the clothes on the ironing board. I can’t even tell if I stink. And yet”—he took the cap off his head and ran his fingers over his bald pate—“I’m no fool. Are you going to tell me who you really are and what it is you really want?”

O
nce a teacher always a teacher, and for a good teacher we all remain pupils, no matter how old we might be. I told him who I was and what I was looking for. Perhaps I did this because of our age; the older I get, the readier I am to assume that people as old as I am will be on my side. And I did want to know what he might have to say.

“The silent partner … That’s an old story. Bertram’s right,” he told me. “His silent share was about half a million, about as large as that of both families, and stopped the bank from having to declare bankruptcy. We don’t know his name, and the Welkers and Wellers I’ve known in my time and who are now dead didn’t know, either. I’m not saying we knew nothing about him. He sent letters from Strasbourg and so must have lived there. He was in the legal profession, perhaps a company attorney or a lawyer, or maybe even a professor. When the syndicates came up in the 1880s Weller and Welker took an interest in them, and he clarified for them how to set one up legally, and what the legal aspects would be. In 1887, he thought about moving to Heidelberg; there’s a letter in which he seeks information concerning a house or apartment. But in lieu of a legible signature, we have only an initial—a
C
,
L
, or
Z
—and it’s unclear whether it stood for a first name or a surname, because though he seemed to be on the friendliest terms with both Weller and Welker, in those days one could be the best of friends with someone and still address him by his surname.”

“There can’t have been that many men in the legal profession in Strasbourg. A hundred? Two hundred? What do you think?” I cut in.

“Let’s say there were six hundred in all during the period in question. With those initials I’d say there’d be at most a hundred, half of whom can be eliminated since they did not live there the entire time. To follow up on the remaining fifty would be a lot of work, but it’s doable. Old Herr Welker didn’t think it was worth pursuing, which was my view, too. As for Bertram not being able to write the history of the bank without the silent partner’s name, that’s nonsense. One thing I’d like to know is why he didn’t come to me with his request, but to you?” Schuler was working himself into a rage. “In fact, why doesn’t anyone ever come to me? I sit in my cellar and nobody comes to me. Am I a mole, a rat, a wood louse?”

“You’re a badger. Look at your burrow: caves, tunnels, entries and exits buried in a mountain of files.”

“A badger!” He slapped his thighs. “A badger! Follow me; I’ll show you my other burrow.”

He hurried out into the garden, waving dismissively when I pointed out that he had left the kitchen door ajar. He pulled the garden gate open and started his car. It was a BMW-Isetta, a model from the 1950s in which the front wheels are farther apart than the back wheels, and the front of the car is also the door, which claps open with the steering wheel—the kind of vehicle for which you need a driver’s license not for a car, but for a motorbike. I sat down next to him and we went chugging off.

The old warehouse was not far from the Schlossplatz. It was an elongated three-story building with offices and apartments whose former function was no longer evident. In the eighteenth century the Wellers, when they were still sales and freight expeditors, had had their Palatine center here, with a countinghouse, stables, lofts, and a two-level cellar. Schuler had stored the boxes with the unexamined material in the lower cellar, while in the upper cellar the material he had already been through lined the shelves on the walls. There was again that sour, musty smell. At the same time the aroma of the glue Schuler used for his scrapbooks hung pleasantly in the air. There was bright daylight in the upper cellar. The lawn outside was so low-lying that there was space for a large window. This was where Schuler worked, and he had me sit at the table. I saw the abundance of files as an irredeemable jumble, but Schuler knew exactly what was where, reached for everything with ease, untied one bundle of files after another, and spread out his finds before me.

“Herr Schuler!”

“Here, for instance, we have—”

“Herr Schuler!”

He put the files down.

“You don’t have to prove to me that what you said was true. I believe you.”

“Then why doesn’t
he
believe me? Why didn’t he tell
me
anything, why didn’t he ask
me
?” Schuler was again talking himself into a rage, waving his hands and arms about and sending out waves of the odor of sweat.

I tried to calm him down. “The bank is going through a crisis. Welker’s lost his wife and has had to send his children away—you can’t expect him to be thinking files and archives. He only sent me looking for the silent partner because he happened to meet me.”

“You really think so?” He sounded doubting and hopeful.