“Don't forget the Communists,” Headmaster Hasenklee, sitting next to me, mumbled. “For them something like this would be heaven-sent.”
“In this day and age?”
“We used to have old Henlein around here—back in the sixties and seventies he kept handing out fliers about the forest and making a big stink. He was a Communist. It's true you don't hear anything about him anymore, or about Marx or Lenin. But if you ask me, our Karl-Marx-Strasse here is an outrage. Leningrad has been changed back to Petersburg, and in a few years you won't find a single street or square with Karl Marx's name on it anywhere in the East—except here in Viernheim!”
I asked if they knew about the tanker trucks in Strassen-heim. They did. “You mean the orange trucks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency? They're always around, doing exercises and things.”
I took my leave. The streets were empty. Everyone was already sitting at their Sunday roast, and I hurried to the green dumplings and the Thüringer leg of mutton that was roasting in Brigitte's oven. She has managed a seamless culinary unification of East and West German cuisines.
I didn't know whether Weller and his friends at the Golden Lamb had been putting on a charade for me or for themselves, or if they had told me what they really and truly believed. Weller's position was clear. Even if poison gas was being stockpiled in the forest, posing a threat to him and everyone else, you couldn't simply get up and leave, turning your back on everything you had worked for all your life. Were you supposed to start all over again at the age of sixty in Neustadt or Gross Gerau? One didn't do that at fifty, or even at forty. The only difference is that when one is younger one might still have a few illusions. I understood all that. And yet the presbyter and his friends at the pub struck me as weird, as I thought of them sitting there at that gloomy, smoky table, spinning out their conspiracy theories.
The afternoon was bright and breezy. We had our coffee in the garden. Manu followed in his Brazilian father's footsteps by flirting up a storm with Sonya, while Brigitte's friend Lisa turned out to be a very nice young woman. She knew all the stories about poison gas in the forest. She also remembered old Henlein, a hunchbacked little man who, for a long time, Saturday after Saturday, had stood on the Apostelplatz handing out flyers. She also knew about patients who periodically complained of rashes, suppurative sinusitis, cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea—this more often than in Rohrbach, where she had lived and worked before.
“Did you ever discuss this with any of the local doctors?”
“I did, and they knew exactly what I was talking about. But at the end of the day, none of us was really sure. You'd have to do a statistical analysis with control groups. And there is the Association of Insurance-Approved Physicians, which does all the accounts and has an overview. You'd think that the Association would notice if things in our district were different than elsewhere.”
“Are you worried?”
She looked me straight in the eyes. “Of course I'm worried. Chernobyl, global warming, the destruction of the rain forests and biodiversity, cancer, AIDS—how can one not be worried in this world?”
“Do you think one should be particularly worried in Viern-heim?”
She shrugged her shoulders. By the end of our discussion I realized that I hadn't dug up any more than I had that morning at the Golden Lamb. And that it was Sunday, and that Sunday is not a day for digging, was no consolation.
10
And both sound so harmonious together
I brought Turbo back home. He had broken Rudi the rat's neck, and Räschen had retaliated by giving him some tuna. He seemed to be losing his figure.
I dedicated the evening to my couch. I took a razor blade, one of those big old ones that are nice and sturdy, not the platinum-laminated, double-track blades embedded in a springy razor head. I tipped the couch on its side, cut open the seam at the bottom, plunged my arm into the stuffing, and groped around for the bullet from Lemke's gun. The other bullet, which had sent Dante's marble Beatrice plunging into the Inferno, I had thrown out with the fragments in my befuddled confusion. But that bullet hadn't been preserved as well as the one I had managed to fish out of the couch. The other one had finished off the marble, which in turn had flattened and scratched it. The first bullet had been gently buffered by the stuffing of the couch. I showed the smooth, shiny, shapely and malignant projectile to Turbo, but he didn't want to play with it.
Sewing the seams back together again proved harder than cutting them open. I see sewing and ironing as active meditation and often think with envy of the many, many women to whom this meditative bliss falls in such abundance. But in the case of my couch it was a tough battle with leather, needle, thimble, and a thread that kept breaking.
When the job was done I set the couch upright, put away the sewing kit, and went out onto the balcony. The air was mild. The first moths of summer beat against the window or found their way in through the door and danced about the ceiling light. I have no bone to pick with my age, but there are early summer evenings when, if you're not young and in love, you're simply out of place in this world. I sighed, closed the door, and drew the curtains.
The phone rang. I picked up, and at first heard only a loud crackling and a low, distant voice I couldn't understand. Then the voice sounded near and clear, although the crackling continued in the background and every spoken word was echoed. “Gerhard? Hello? Gerhard?” It was Leo.
“Where are you?”
“I'm to tell you…I want to tell you, that you needn't be frightened of Helmut.”
“What I'm worried about is you. Where are you?”
“Hello, Gerhard? Hello? I can't hear you. Are you still there?”
“Where are you?”
The line had gone dead.
I thought of Tyberg's pleading for us to mind our own business. I could see Leo with Lemke in Palestine or Libya. When we were together, I was certain that she wasn't setting her sights on a career in terrorism. She had gotten mixed up in a foolish thing, wanted to leave it behind her and get out of it unscathed and lead a normal life again—if not the old life, then a new one. I was also certain that this would be the best solution. Children don't get better in prison. But they don't get better in guerrilla training camps in Palestine or Libya either.
These are not the kind of thoughts that are conducive to sound sleep. I was up early, and early at Nägelsbach's office in Heidelberg.
“All's forgiven and forgotten?” I asked.
He smiled. “You and I are working on the same case. I hear that your new client is old Herr Wendt. But all things considered, neither you nor I know where the other stands. Am I right?”
“But you and I both know that whatever the other is doing can't be all wrong.”
“I should hope so.”
I put the bullet on the desk in front of him. “Can you find out if this comes from the same gun that killed Wendt? And can we get together this evening? In your garden or on my balcony?”
“Come over to our place. My wife would be pleased.” He picked up the bullet and balanced it in his hand. “I'll have the results by this evening.”
At the editorial office of the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung I found Tietzke at his computer. The way he was sitting there reminded me of one of those Jehovah's Witnesses who stand with their Watchtower on street corners. The same gray, joyless, hopeless conscientiousness. I didn't ask him what gray subject matter he was writing about.
“Do you have time for a coffee?” I asked.
He continued typing without looking up. “I'll meet you at the Café Schafheutle in exactly thirty minutes. A mocha, two eggs in a glass, a graham roll, butter, honey, and a couple of slices of Emmental or Appenzell cheese. We got a deal?”
“We got a deal.”
He ate with gusto. “Lemke? Sure I know him. Or rather, knew him. Back in 1967, '68, he was quite a figure here in Heidelberg. You should have heard how he whipped up auditorium thirteen. When the right-wingers, who hated him with a vengeance, started ch
anting 'Sieg Heil Lemke, Sieg Heil Lemke!' and he would lead a competing chorus of 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!' all hell would break loose. At first if the chanting wasn't at full blast, he could shout them down. Then they'd get louder, and he'd fall silent and stand motionlessly on the podium, wait for a moment, raise his arms, and then begin hammering the lectern with both fists to the beat of 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.' At first you couldn't hear him above the shouting of the others, then some would begin chanting with him, and then more and more. Then he would stand there silently. After a while he'd stop banging his fists on the lectern and start waving his arms, just like a conductor. Often he'd turn this into a comic skit, and the auditorium would end up roaring with laughter. Even when the right-wingers were a majority, 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh' would win out over 'Sieg Heil Lemke.' He had a great feel for timing and would start at the moment when the others were still yelling for all they were worth but beginning to run out of breath.”
“Did you know him personally?”
“I wasn't into politics back then. He was in that radical Students for a Democratic Society party, and sometimes I'd show up there the way I'd show up at the other political parties. I was just an observer. I didn't meet Lemke there, but in a movie theater. Do you remember those spaghetti Westerns back in the late sixties? Every week a new one would hit the theaters, a Leone movie, a Corbucci, a Colizzi, and whatever else their names were. For a while the Americans caught on that that was the new style of Western and made some good movies themselves. Back then the movies didn't premiere on Thursdays but on Fridays, and every Friday at two Lemke would be in the first row at the Lux or the Harmonie, sitting there with a couple of friends from the SDS—he'd never miss any of those openings. I, too, was eager to see the movie at the very first showing, and as the theater was empty except for us, sooner or later we got to talking. Not about politics, but about movies. You know Casablanca, right, the scene where the German officers sing the 'Wacht am Rhein' and the French sing the 'Marseillaise,' and both sound so harmonious together? He once told me that that was how he wanted it to be with 'Sieg Heil Lemke' and 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.' That was the most political conversation we ever had. Back then, you know, I actually liked him.”
“Later you didn't?”
“After the Students for a Democratic Society were outlawed, he joined the Communist League of West Germany, a cadre party with a Central Committee and general secretary, and all that crap. He started out as a candidate, then became a member of the Central Committee, lived in a high-rise in Frankfurt, edited party information bulletins, and drove around in a big black Saab—I don't know if it had a driver and a curtain or not. I don't think he finished university. Sometimes I'd bump into him at the Weinloch Bar, but he stopped going to the movies, and I was in no mood to talk about world revolution and the Russian, Chinese, and Albanian paths. At the beginning of the eighties the Communist League was disbanded. Some of them went over to the Green Party or to the German Communist Party, some ended up with the anarchists, and some simply were fed up with politics. I don't know what became of Lemke. There was a rumor that he'd made off with a hefty chunk of cash from party funds when the Communist League was disbanded and that he settled in America, where he speculated in stocks. There was also talk that Lemke was Carlos, the arch terrorist. But all of that is rumors and bullshit.”
“Have you run into him recently?”
“No. Not too long ago I did bump into someone else from those first-row movie seats, a theologian who is now the head of the Evangelical Academy in Husum. We talked a bit about old times, and it turns out he's still reappraising the '68 radicals in his seminars at the academy. That's it. I've got to get back to the office. So—are you going to tell me what's in it for me, besides coffee and cake? What are you looking into right now?”
“I wish I knew.”
11
Under the pear tree
Nägelsbach shook his head when I looked over at his workshop. “I don't have anything to show today. In fact, I've dropped the idea of doing Rodin's Kiss in matchsticks—it was a crazy idea. I could see how embarrassed you were the other day when I was carrying on with all that nonsense about matchstick sculpture. Thank God I have Reni.”
We were standing on the lawn. He had his arm around his wife, and she nestled against him. They'd always struck me as a loving couple before their recent crisis, but I'd never seen them so much in love.
“Don't look so surprised,” she said to me, laughing, and smiled up at her husband. “Come on, let's tell him.”
“Well…” Nägelsbach grinned. “When the model arrived—it's standing over there—Reni said we ought to sit like that, too, so I could get a better feel for the sculpture. And so we …”
“Made up again?”
A replica of Rodin's lovers kissing stood among the flowering rhododendrons; Nägelsbach looked somewhat gaunter in the flesh, and his wife plumper, but Rodin would surely have been delighted by this double echo.
We sat under the pear tree. Frau Nägelsbach had made some strawberry punch.
“The bullet you brought over is from the same weapon with which Wendt was shot. Are you also bringing me the murderer?”
“I don't know. I'll tell you how far I've gotten. On January sixth, four men and a woman launched a bomb attack on an American military installation in the Lampertheim National Forest—”
“In Käfertal,” he interrupted.
“Don't interrupt him,” Frau Nägelsbach intervened.
“The woman and two of the men managed to escape, but one of the others was killed and another arrested. The media mentioned two dead men: The other one must have been a soldier or a guard. I don't know if there had been an exchange of gunfire or if it was the explosion. That's not important.”
“I heard it was the bomb,” Nägelsbach said.
“For the police it was bad luck in disguise. They had caught some guy called Bertram and made him talk, but he didn't know all that much about his accomplices. He knew Leonore Salger and the man who had died—some Giselher or other—but he didn't know the two men who got away. Now I'm not saying that the terrorists put their team together willy-nilly, so that the members wouldn't know each other and couldn't give each other away. The way I see it, the attack was more a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. Anyway, Bertram could give only a vague description of the two men, because he didn't know them. And, let's face it, in the night all terrorists are gray—not to mention that they'd blackened their faces. The pictures that are being used for the manhunt are composites, right?”
“I'm not working on this case,” Nägelsbach replied, “but if the Agency doesn't have their names…Did the media say these were composites?”
“Maybe they did and I missed it. Anyway, on January sixth we have the attack, and it's not until May that the search is made public? There could have been a public appeal for information right after the attack. There could have been pictures in the media the moment the arrested man began talking, identified Leonore Salger, and described the two men. That would have been in February at the latest, because at that point the police were already looking for Leonore Salger. And yet when the public appeal for information finally came, we were given as good as no information about the time, place, and circumstances of the attack. You're not going to tell me that this is the way things are usually done, are you?”
“As I said before, I'm not working on this case. But if the Americans request that we treat the attack on their terrain confidentially, and that we tread carefully, then that's exactly what we do.”
“Why would they make such a request?” I asked.
“How should I know? Maybe Holy Islamic Warriors had threatened them with an attack like this in retaliation for their support of Israel, or perhaps some Panamanians were trying to free Noriega. In that case the Americans would have to weigh how to handle this from a foreign-policy perspective. There could be thousands of reasons.”
“Then how come they went public on the very day Wendt was killed?” I asked him
.
“Was it the same day?”
Frau Nägelsbach nodded. “Yes, it was,” she said. “When the name 'Salger' came up in the late-night news, I remembered it right away because of the spat the two of you had just had. And then by the time you came home late that night, because you were working on the Wendt case, my asparagus soufflé had collapsed.”
“It all fits together, because in Wendt's briefcase there was a map showing the section of the Lampertheim National Forest where the Americans have their depot and where the attack took place. I know you're saying that the attack was in Käfertal, and that Viernheim is not in your jurisdiction, and that it is the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency that deals with terrorist attacks. But someone in your office had to have seen the connection and made it clear to the decision makers that it was high time for them to go public. Because they couldn't take the risk that the attack would trigger God knows what else after Wendt's murder. And that someone in your office was right.”
Nägelsbach's face remained a blank. Was he the someone who had seen the connection? Had he known from the start that the attack had been in Viernheim and nowhere else? Was the matter so secret and delicate that he preferred to play the fool rather than give anything away? I shot a glance at his wife. I knew from experience that she was up-to-date on everything that preoccupied him. “There are no professional secrets in a childless couple,” was one of his mottos. She eyed us nervously.
“The bullet that killed Wendt comes from a gun that belongs to one of the two men you're looking for,” I said. “Helmut Lemke, mid-forties, not unknown in Heidelberg. I don't have a recent photograph of him, but the one I've got here is better than the composites you have, and I have no doubt that the photographers from the Agency will know how to make him look fifteen years older.” I gave him a copy of one of the pictures I had from Leo's photo album.