Self's deception (22 page)

21
Stuttering a little

By late afternoon I was a free man. There had been no further questioning and no hearing before the judge. The trusty had brought me a tray with cauliflower soup, spareribs, a vegetable platter, potatoes, and a vanilla custard. Otherwise I had remained alone, and with the help of Keres's
Best Games of Chess
had cornered Alyekhin into checkmate, until the warden came, told me I could go, and walked me to the gate. Thank God prisons don't follow the example of hospitals, which never release a patient on a weekend, even if he is cured.

I stood outside the prison gate with my little suitcase, savoring the smell of freedom and the warmth of the sun. And when I reached the Neckar River I took pleasure in the smell of dead fish, motor oil, and old memories. In the lock by the Karlstor a barge was being lowered. A blanket was spread out over the top of its hold with a little playpen in which a child was playing.

“Can you take me along?”

The bargeman could see that I was calling out something to him, but couldn't make out what I was saying. I pointed at myself, at the barge, and waved my hand downriver. He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. I took this as a yes, hurried down the embankment, and jumped from the edge of the lock onto the barge, which quickly disappeared into the lock's depths. It was darker and colder than up above, and water, menacing and forceful, was seeping through the gap in the back gates. It was a relief when the front gates opened and we had the river in front of us, the old bridge, and the silhouette of the old town.

“What you did was dangerous,” the bargeman's wife said. She was holding the child in her arms, eyeing me with a mixture of curiosity and rebuke.

I nodded. “I wish that I'd at least brought along some cake. But when I passed a pastry shop just now, I didn't know I was going to meet you. Is your husband going to throw me overboard?”

Needless to say he didn't, and his wife offered me a slice of the sponge cake she had baked. I sat down, let my legs dangle from the side, ate the cake, and watched the town wander by. We passed beneath a bridge, the Alte Brücke, the child's squeals of delight echoing as its mother kissed its tummy. Under the Neue Brücke, I recalled the wooden bridge that had crossed over the Neckar River after the war, and the sight of the island awoke my childhood longing for both adventure and the snugness of home. Then we pulled into the canal and the autobahn bridge came into sight. From the dam I could have seen the spot where I had found Wendt.

I had cleared up a case that had mystified me, but which I had not actually been working on: A group of youngsters organize an attack, the police want to cover up the attack but still punish the youngsters, and so the police come up with the clever idea of moving the attack to another site. Relocating it, so to speak, as Bleckmeier would rightly say. But the police had to proceed with caution and a light touch. They couldn't afford to trumpet to the world that they were looking for these youngsters. It wouldn't do to mount a big search in connection with an attack in Käfertal and then, as they were being arrested, have them blabbing to cameras and reporters with pens poised about their attack in Viernheim. So the police initiated their search in secret, until Wendt's death, which was somehow linked to the attack and raised God knows what fears and no longer allowed further delay. The police had to go public with their search. All the same, they had struck a deal with one of the perpetrators that he could secure a milder sentence by confessing to the attack in Käfertal. He might even become the chief witness. The only thing the police would be risking was that the others might slip up or refuse to play along. But slipups can be fixed, and why shouldn't they want to play along?

In fact, I myself had not been aware that Wendt's death had somehow been connected with the attack. Wendt had a map of Viernheim on him when he was found. He had been killed by a bullet from Lemke's gun. He had known Lemke from before, had been introduced to Leo by Lemke, and had helped Leo after the attack. Had he been the fifth man Lemke had brought along on the attack, and whom Leo had not recognized, and who then made it back to the psychiatric hospital before she did?

I got off the barge at the Schwabenheim lock. I sauntered along the riverbank to the Schwabenheimer Hof and sat down at a table in the garden of the Zum Anker pub. Many families had come on foot or by bicycle from Ladenburg, Neckarhausen, or Heidelberg. It was past the hour of coffee and cake and the fathers had switched to beer, while the children were beginning to whine because they, too, wanted something but didn't know what. A Madonna in a light blue dress and dark blue cloak stood in a niche in the wall. Two tables farther down sat a middle-aged woman cheerfully reading a newspaper and drinking wine. I liked her. To go to a pub alone, and sit comfortably with a newspaper and a glass of wine, is something that men do, not women, and never mind about emancipation. But she was an exception. Occasionally she looked up and our eyes would meet.

The taxi that I had the waiter call for arrived. I paid the check, walked over to her table, sat down, told her how very attractive she was, got up, and was gone almost before she could thank me for the compliment with a bemused smile. I think I stuttered a little.

During the ride to Heidelberg I was initially proud of myself. In fact, I'm somewhat shy. Then I got angry at myself. Why had I run away? Why hadn't I stayed at her table? Had there been an invitation in her glance, a promise in her smile?

I was about to have the driver turn back, but I didn't. One should never want too much at once. And as for the promise—perhaps she'd only made it because she could tell that she wouldn't have to keep it.

22
Write an article!

I found Peschkalek at Brigitte's place. “We were coming over to visit you when Chief Inspector Nägelsbach called. Congratulations! Have you been released till the trial?”

“I don't know. I might not even be called. I somehow think the last thing they want at the trial is a stubborn old man who keeps insisting that the attack was in Viernheim and not in Käfertal.”

Peschkalek frowned. “You told them the attack was in Viernheim?”

I nodded. “I think they released me because—”

“Are you out of your mind?” he cut in, bewildered. “I thought we had agreed how we'd handle this. Your statement at the trial was supposed to explode like a bombshell! Now the only thing that has exploded is a little firecracker that nobody saw or heard! What's going to become of the trial now?” He grew increasingly irate. “What were you thinking? All that work for nothing! Am I supposed to start from the beginning? Are you no longer interested in the fact that the police are covering up a terrorist attack? You don't care that the trial will turn into a farce?” Now he was shouting.

I didn't understand. “What are you going on about? Bombshells are your job, not mine. Go ahead and write an article!”

“An article!” He waved his hands dismissively, no longer furious, just tired. “It's crazy. Here we had our goal within reach: We have the American report, you're about to go on trial—and then, nothing.”

Brigitte looked at him and then at me. “You mean the report that I—”

I didn't want her to continue. As long as it wasn't clear why Peschkalek was making such a fuss, I didn't want him to know that I had shown the report to the police. So I shouted: “What do you mean 'nothing'? And furthermore, what do you mean by the goal being 'within reach' and me about to go on trial? What goal are you talking about?”

But he waved his hands again and got up. He smiled painfully. “I'm sorry I raised my voice. Don't take it personally, it's a legacy from my father. My mother can only bear to live with him because she has a hearing aid that she can turn off whenever he gets too loud.”

Brigitte talked him into staying for dinner. After dinner, he helped Manu with his essay. “A visit to the planetarium” turned into a sharp, fast-paced report, and Manu was filled with admiration. Brigitte was charmed, too. As he helped her wash up in the kitchen, he suggested that they speak informally. As we sipped our wine, Brigitte suggested that he and I should call each other by our first names as well, and I could hardly refuse. “Gerhard”—”Ingo”—we clinked glasses. But I felt wary.

23
R.I.P

The next day I drove to Husum. It's a journey to the end of the world. Beyond Giessen the mountains and forests become monotonous, beyond Kassel the towns become poor, and by Salzgitter the terrain turns flat and bleak. If we were to banish dissidents in Germany, we would banish them to the Stein-huder Lake.

I had called the main office of the Evangelical Academy and been told that the director, whom Tietzke had identified as a former comrade of Lemke's, was currently conducting a workshop:
Abused—Aggrieved—Affected: Coping with Threat in the Whirlwind of Time
. I was told that I could sit in on a session and talk to him during one of the breaks. I found the room and tiptoed to the only free chair. The speaker announced that he was coming to the end of his paper, and finally did so after a few lengthy detours. I learned that aggrievement was a passive state while affectedness was an active one, and that we could not hide behind the whirlwind of time but had to stand our ground. I was also initiated into the law of entropy, according to which the world doesn't have much of a prospect to end well. A bearded man of about fifty thanked the speaker. His paper, he said, had extended a hand to us that we would all want to clasp heartily, and we would have ample opportunity to do so during the two-thirty session; now it was time for lunch. Was this the director who had sat with Lemke in the front row at those spaghetti Westerns in '68 and '69? He was immediately besieged by the workshop participants, but when they dribbled away, taking the speaker with them, he remained behind, jotting down notes.

I greeted him and introduced myself. “I have a question that has nothing to do with your workshop. I'm a private investigator and am investigating a murder. I believe that you know, or knew, the main suspect. Were you a student in Heidelberg around'68,'69?”

He was a careful man. He made me show him my ID and had his office call Wendt Real Estate in Heidelberg to ask Frau Büchler to confirm that I had indeed been commissioned by old Herr Wendt to investigate young Wendt's murder. He was pale when he hung up. “This is terrible news. Someone I knew well becoming a victim of a crime. I suppose this is a daily occurrence in your profession, but in my world I experience it as severe aggrievement.”

He seemed shaken, so I refrained from offering him my hand and advising affectedness instead of aggrievement.

“When were you involved with Rolf Wendt?”

“Let me see, when was the Socialist Patient Collective in Heidelberg? When all that ended, Wendt was looking for a new path, a new direction. He met us and for a while was something like a little brother to us. He must have been about seventeen or eighteen back then.”

“You said 'us'—do you mean Helmut Lemke and yourself?”

“I mean Helmut, Richard, and myself—the three of us spent a lot of time together.” He reminisced. “You know, as much as the news of Wendt's death has shaken me, when I think back, I realize that for me Rolf, dead as he now is, is not more dead than the other two, who I imagine are still alive but from whom I haven't heard in years. Though I must say that back then we lived like there was no tomorrow; all our thoughts and feelings were for the present. Despite world revolution—or because of it? As one grows older, a part of one's heart clings to the past while one's head worries about the future, and one no longer believes that friendships are forever.”

I don't know what a man can still believe in when year after year he parcels out questions of fate into topics for workshops. He stood up. “Let's go and sit outside. Nowadays I hardly get out.”

He leaned far back on the bench in front of the building and held his face up to the sun. I asked him if back then Lemke and Wendt had had a particularly good or particularly bad relationship to each other, and found out that everyone had a special relationship with Lemke. “You either admired him or locked horns with him, or both. But you couldn't deal with him as an equal. And when I said we were Rolf's big brothers, that's not quite right. It was Helmut Lemke who Rolf particularly looked up to.”

“Admiration, locking of horns, not dealing with him as an equal—and yet you remember it as a golden time?”

He sat up and looked at me. His forehead was smooth for a man of fifty, but his eyes were tired with age—the eyes of a man who is duty-bound by his profession to love people, although by now they only get on his nerves. As a priest, therapist, or whatever he basically was, he had offered more advice, given more comfort, and granted more forgiveness than he had within him. “I didn't say it was a golden time, nor would I say such a thing. There is a photograph from those days hanging on the wall of my office in which I can see everything: what was golden—if it was golden—compulsions and conflicts, the living in the present. I can show it to you, if you'd like.”

“How long did your gang-of-four last?”

“Until Helmut's career at the Communist League of West Germany took off. Then he no longer had time for tabletop soccer and spaghetti Westerns, and in politics only what had to do with the Communist League. What is strange is that none of us went over to the Communist League with him, even though he had been so dominant in our group that without him we scattered to the winds. Maybe he didn't want us there with him. Anyway, he didn't proselytize us. I'd say, one day he was simply gone.”

“Did he also drop Rolf from one day to the next?”

“Yes, I think they had a fight or something. Richard was the only one who kept in touch with Helmut and whom Helmut seemed to want to keep in touch with. I don't know how long that lasted. The last time I saw Richard was when I passed my exams and was heading to Pforzheim for my internship as vicar, and was waiting in the Heidelberg station for my train. Richard was no longer working as a laboratory assistant, which is what he'd trained for, but was now working for a lawyer. A divorce lawyer, he said, though I wondered if it was really a divorce lawyer or a terrorist lawyer—you know, I mean one of those who are in cahoots with terrorists. Richard had always been frustrated that we could only watch those spaghetti Westerns and not actually live them: On one side large-scale landowners, corrupt generals, greedy priests, and on the other poor Mexican farmers in white pajamas and revolutionaries with ammunition belts crossed over their chests, and then lots of ripe mangoes, wine, and mariachis. He'd have loved to import all that over here.”

Lunch was over. The participants of the various workshops had walked their legs off in the park. When one group caught sight of us and started heading over, he got up. “They think you are the next speaker, or they want to corner me. The workshop's starting up again in a few minutes. Come along, I'll show you the photograph.”

It was hanging in his office. I had expected a photo the size of a postcard, but it had been enlarged to poster size and placed behind glass in a black frame. It showed a picnic in black and white: a lawn, a white cloth spread with fruit, bread, and wine, and Wendt and Lemke lounging across from each other. Behind them, the current director of the academy, already sporting a beard, was bending over picking flowers, and a few steps away was a Borgward with its sunroof pulled back. Instead of a number on its license plate it had the letters “R. I. P.” Lemke was talking at Wendt, gesticulating wildly, and Wendt had been listening to him with his head resting on his hand and his hand resting on his knee, but now he looked up, and the flower-picking future director of the academy had also raised his head and was looking up, bent forward as he was. They had planted a presumably red flag on a thin, glittering stick: At this instant a magpie was flying off with the stick and the flag.

“Is that… no, it's not a snapshot, is it?”

“You mean because of the Manet motif? No, we didn't arrange ourselves like that on purpose. We didn't arrange for the magpie either, though it had already stolen a silver fork from us, and Richard had planted the flag lightly enough so the bird could snatch it away. Richard had been hovering around us all afternoon with his camera, shooting us from a distance, in closeup, with a telephoto lens and without one. He took hundreds of pictures. This was the last one. Do you like it?”

It was an attractive picture. But at the same time it made me sad. Lemke in his dark jacket, white shirt, and dark, narrow tie looked boyish in an old-fashioned way, energetic and self-confident. Wendt's face was already showing the overtaxed quality I had seen. A fearful, childlike face eager to be excited about the bird flying off but not quite daring to.

“Why should that beautiful Borgward automobile rest in peace?” I asked.

He didn't understand.

“R. I. P.,
requiescat in pace
. Wasn't that meant for the car? Was it meant for capitalism, or …”

He laughed. “That wasn't on the car. Richard retouched the picture later. He always smuggled his initials into photos that he thought were particularly successful. R. I. P.—that's short for Richard Ingo Peschkalek.”