“Why would Lemke have shot Wendt?” Frau Nägelsbach asked.
“I don't know,” I replied. “All we know for sure is that Wendt was killed with Lemke's gun. I'm hoping your husband and I might put our heads together on this one.”
“I don't know how much I can contribute,” Nägelsbach said. “You seem to know more than I do. Of course we put out a search for the man and the VW Golf that Frau Klein-schmidt saw, questioned the neighbors, and looked for people who'd been out walking. But it was pouring that day, as you well know, and nobody saw anything. Or at least anything we could use. In the house the Golf was parked in front of, the children kept looking out the window, as they were waiting for their mother. The girl says the Golf was red, the boy says black—and they don't recall the license plate.” He laughed. “Crazy as it may sound, every time I come across a red or a black Golf, I try to catch a glimpse of the driver. Does that sort of thing ever happen to you?”
“You bet it does.” I waited, but Nägelsbach did not continue. “It almost sounds as if the Wendt case has ended up in the files,” I said.
“To tell you the truth, we didn't know what else we could do,” Nägelsbach said. “Now that you have brought us all these new leads, we can set things rolling again. But who is Lemke? Where did his and Wendt's paths cross? Might Wendt have been the fifth man in the attack after all?”
“No, he wasn't.”
“You're handing me that on a silver platter, too. I guess you won't want to tell me how you come to know that either?”
“If you're hinting that I haven't told you where I have the bullet from, I'll be glad to make amends.”
I told him about my encounter with Lemke.
“But now you have definitely found out a good deal more from me than I have from you,” I said.
Frau Nägelsbach agreed with me. “I think you owe Herr Self something, too.”
He disagreed. “I will keep him posted, I assure you. But he had a bullet, and I had one. Both he and I had to bring them together so we could compare them and ascertain that they came from the same weapon. Now we're both moving forward. My progress I have already mentioned. And he can call his client tomorrow morning and announce his first success.”
12
Tearing along
That is exactly what I did. Frau Büchler was pleased. No, I could not speak to Herr and Frau Wendt yet. They were in Badenweiler with their daughter.
The morning was cool, and I wore a sweater with my corduroys and hiking boots. I drove over the Friedrich-Ebert Bridge, the Friedrich-Ebert Strasse, through Käfertal and Vogelstang, and over the Entlastungsstrasse to Viernheim, where the Nibelungenstrasse took me to yet another Friedrich-Ebert Strasse. Everything flows: We drive along the same Friedrich-Ebert Strasse and yet it is not the same Friedrich-Ebert Strasse, we are the same and yet not the same.
To my left the fence reached the Lorscher Weg Road, and I parked my old Opel and walked. I followed the fence westward through the woods. The ground was springy beneath my feet, the birds were singing, the trees were rustling in the wind, and an aroma of pine resin, decaying foliage, and fresh green hung in the air. I didn't see any watchdogs or security patrols on the asphalt path behind the fence, nor did the fence look as if it had been damaged or repaired in the last few months. After a quarter of an hour, the rustling grew louder—it wasn't the wind anymore, but the autobahn. The fence ran northward alongside it. The cars tore past me, and once an empty can barely missed my head. I was glad when the fence veered back into the woods again.
But then I changed my mind. I knew that the tire tracks left by the car Leo's group had used to get to the depot would no longer be there, but I wanted to see what route they might have taken. The embankment that I found posed no problem for a regular car. I also found a wide path through the woods that a car could easily have used, and which could be reached from the embankment. The path led out of the woods and into an open area with stunted shrubs, dried grass, blueberry bushes, and wildflowers. Leo had said that they followed a path leading across the meadows to the woods, and I followed the path to where I imagined the fence to be behind the trees. I made a mental note of the rampant brambles along the edge of the woods so I could come back in August for some berry picking. In the woods I soon came upon the fence again.
I saw right away that this part of the fence had been repaired. I listened for the bulldozers, the conveyer belts, and the trucks that I had seen from the airplane. I heard the birds, the wind, the distant rumbling of the cars—otherwise there was silence. My watch showed ten o'clock. Was the construction crew on a break? I sat down on a rock and waited.
Then I heard something that at first I couldn't place. Did conveyer belts rattle like that? Did bulldozers squeak like that? But the rumble of engines was missing. I couldn't believe the guards would be patrolling the fence on mountain bikes, but that is exactly what it sounded like. Then I heard voices, one light and one deep.
“Do be careful, Eva!”
“I am being careful, Grandpa, I am.”
“If you keep tearing along like this I'll end up with a broken neck. And when you rattle me like this, I can't stop coughing—cough cough cough.”
“It's not the rattling that makes you cough, it's the smoking!”
“No, no, Eva. The cigarettes have hit me in the legs, not the lungs.”
Eva, flushed and sweating, must have been about eighteen; Grandpa in his wheelchair was somewhere between eighty and a hundred and ten. He was a shriveled little man with sparse white hair and a thin beard like that of a Chinese sage. He was hunchbacked and sat crookedly in his wheelchair, his hands gripping the armrests, and the stump of his leg, which had been amputated below the knee, rested against the raised footrest. In their struggle, Eva and Grandpa only saw me when I got up from the rock I was sitting on. They looked at me as if I'd come from another planet.
“Good morning,” I said. “Fine weather we're having.” I couldn't think of anything better.
Eva returned my greeting. “Good morning.”
“Shh!” Grandpa cut into Eva's and my budding conversation. “Can you hear them? I knew it!”
We listened, and now the bulldozers, conveyer belts, and trucks could clearly be heard.
“I suppose they're just back from their break,” I said, and the two of them looked at me, even more surprised. “You meant the construction going on beyond the fence, didn't you? The new fence. Does the construction interest you?”
“Does it… ? You're not from these parts, are you? When I got my pension and still had both legs—cough coughcough—I used to walk along this fence every day. Later I came as often as I could, at least once a week. Now she brings me here whenever she can. If you were from around here, I'd know you. And you'd know me, too—cough cough—No one else ever comes here.”
“I've heard about you, Herr Henlein.”
“What do you say to that, Eva? People have heard about me. Are you with the Green Party? Are you interested in the forest again? I heard about that—cough cough—you're all rearing to go, and then you fizzle out because you can't get quick results. All you guys want to make the world a better place, but you don't even take the time to hear what I've got to say.”
“I didn't know you were still active. Where do you live? Could we meet somewhere?”
“You'll have to come over to Mannheim. I don't live in Viernheim anymore. I live near my children—cough cough— in E 6, in a retirement home. Come on, Eva, off we go.”
I followed them with my eyes. She was dexterous and had a knack for steering the wheelchair clear of roots and stones, but didn't manage to dodge them all. She needed all her strength to push the wheelchair, with Henlein cursing loudly, over some of the obstacles.
I hurried after them. “Would you like me to help you?”
“I can manage, thank you very much—cough cough.”
“You can manage, Grandpa, but I wouldn't mind a little help,” Eva said.
It took us almost two hours to reach
the road. Henlein cursed, coughed, and reminisced about his campaigns in the sixties and seventies, with which he wanted to get to the bottom of things. “The Americans' poison gas—that wasn't even the worst of it. You can bet they'd be pretty careful when they handle that stuff. But what about the old stuff …” In 1935, he'd been interned in a concentration camp, and in 1945 put to work moving and burying the Wehrmacht's stocks of poison gas. “Near Lossa, Sondershausen and Dingelstädt in East Germany—I wrote about that later on and even managed to go there and hand out flyers. But the East German authorities deported me back to the West. Ha, there's model Communists for you! Then I did the same thing here in Viernheim. There were rumors that there was poison gas from World War I still buried in Viernheim. Yellow-cross gas, blue-cross gas, mustard gas, and later on we dug in tabun and sarin.” After Hen-lein had been freed from the concentration camp, he'd drifted around for a while, and in 1953 came to Mannheim. There he worked at Brown Boveri & Co., married in 1955, and built a house in Viernheim. He saw it as preordained (if for a Communist there is such a thing) that he ended up here. His calling in life was to fight to defuse the time bomb in the Lam-pertheim National Forest. “Maybe it stopped ticking ages ago. Maybe the Americans dug everything up after '45 and took it all away. But would you believe a thing like that?”
I invited Grandpa and Eva for lunch in the Kleiner Rosen-garten, and then drove Henlein back to his retirement home. His room was filled with binders. He had been collecting material since 1955. I read how poison gas is manufactured, stored, and employed, how it works and how one can protect oneself, and where it was manufactured and stored in Germany—and that nobody really seems to know where it was buried after World War I and II. Henlein had cut out every local and regional report containing the slightest evidence of poison gas in the Lampertheim National Forest or on the Viernheim Meadows. He had also saved all the reports about local and regional projects for which the ticking time bomb could be particularly dangerous. Both the realized and unrealized projects reflected the development of the Federal Republic of Germany: Hunting preserves, woodland communities, adventure parks, waste management plants, test tracks, nature preserves, golf courses—all kinds of grand plans had been made for the area, anticipating the time when the Americans would give back the Lampertheim National Forest and the Viernheim Meadows.
“Do you know if maps of the stockpiling areas were made in '45?”
“I think so. And I think they also had maps back then that showed where the leftover stuff from World War I had been buried. But I've never managed to track any of those maps down. Think about it: That stuff is still lying buried all over the place, and the Americans give us back the land—those maps would be worth a fortune!”
13
Life's illusions
Worth enough to lead someone to murder? A woodland community on the Viernheim Meadows and in the Lampertheim National Forest would interest a real-estate mogul like old Herr Wendt, both for itself and for its effect on the real-estate market. I admit I haven't shown much talent in my occasional speculations in the stock market, but even I could see that one could make hefty gains with such maps. All you needed was to publish such a map at the right moment: Planning in the area would grind to a halt, and land prices would rise or come crashing down.
I left Henlein's retirement home and crossed the Planken Boulevard to the Ring, where I had parked the Opel. I bought a whole carton of Sweet Aftons, a tie with little white clouds on a night blue background, and an ice-cream cone with five scoops. I sat down in the park behind the Water Tower, ate the ice cream while listening to the splashing of the fountains, and thought, not for the first time, how nice it would be to live in one of the round towers that crown the two corner houses at the Augusta-Anlage. Would old Herr Wendt pull a few strings for me? Herr Wendt, I imagined myself saying, my investigations have revealed that you used some old maps to pull a shady trick or two for some crooked deals. You used your son, and lo and behold he got murdered along the way. Now I'm not saying that you pulled the trigger, Herr Wendt, but you let it happen. So here's the deal: I want you to fix me up with one of those two tower apartments up there, and I'll be happy to look the other way.
People don't murder simply for money. In fact, they murder for one reason, and one reason only: to save their life's illusions. There's the one who murders out of jealousy: If my beloved is dead, she's mine and nobody can take her away from me, not a lover, not she herself. There's the one who kills as a professional: He knows no trade, is nothing, but wants to hold his own in a world in which professional success makes the man. Tyrants murder because they want to be greater than they are and are murdered in turn because somebody wants the world to be a better place than it is. There is collective murder for collective illusions—the history of the twentieth century is riddled with it. Then of course there is also murder sparked by greed. But its aim is not to gather and hoard money: It, too, aims to salvage dreams of greatness and eminence. It had been many years since old Herr Wendt had stopped dreaming of being the emperor of a real-estate empire in favor of being a father who has reconciled with his son. No, old Herr Wendt had nothing to do with his son's murder.
While we're on the subject: What about your own illusions, Gerhard Self? There was that matter of you and Kor-ten. But Gerhard Self was in no mood for a dialogue with Gerhard Self.
In my office there was a message from Peschkalek on the answering machine saying that he had an idea, and a message from Philipp asking me to call him back. A few callers had hung up. Then I heard a distant whir of voices, humming, and the synthetic twitter of an international call. I knew it was Leo before she even spoke. “Gerhard? Gerhard, this is Leo.” There was a long pause. “I just want you to know that Helmut didn't kill Rolf.” There was another long pause before she went on. “I'm far away. I hope you're doing well.” She hung up. As if Lemke would admit to her that he'd killed Wendt!
Philipp complained when I returned his call: “How come I can never reach you? Are you spending the merry month of May rolling in the hay? A bit of action to charge up those old batteries of yours?”
“Nonsense! I was over at Brigitte's one evening, but…”
“You don't have to excuse yourself to me, I'm a man of the world. In fact, I'm bristling with envy. My days are numbered—I count on you to keep the flag flying.”
“What happened?” I asked him. What could put a stop on Philipp other than AIDS?
“The wedding's on Friday,” he said. “Will you be my best man?”
I don't mean to say that Philipp, who's pushing sixty, is too old to get married. Nor do I mean that because he chases every skirt that comes his way he's too young to get married. But the simple truth is that I can't imagine him as a married man. “Are you pulling my leg?”
“Don't give me any of that bullshit. Be in front of the city hall at five to ten. The ceremony's at ten o'clock sharp. After that we'll be celebrating at Antalya Türk. And I'm warning you to bring lots of time and Brigitte.” He was in a hurry. “I'd love to hit the town with you one last time before I get married, but there's so much to do. I'm sinking with all hands, even though my little Fur-ball has taken time off from work. We can hit the scene sometime after the wedding; I'm sure she won't mind.”
My impression that in a Turkish marriage the man was king of the castle was somewhat dated. Or had his little Fur-ball Füruzan specifically not chosen a Turkish husband? Or was Philipp making a mistake? Should I train him as a fighter in the marriage war—me, of all people?
Peschkalek didn't just have an idea, he had a suggestion, about which he wanted to talk to me. We decided to meet at the sauna in the Herschelbad pool.
He, too, liked a sauna to be piping hot and without steam, and he, too, smoked between sessions. We also shared the same sequence: three Finnish sauna sessions one after the other, and then, after a lengthy break, two Turkish ones. In the big pool we launched a water battle worthy of Admiral Pushkin. With his large stomach, bald head, and bushy mustache
glittering with water drops, Peschkalek looked like a friendly sea lion. We lay on the loungers, covered with white towels, napped for a while, and then stretched, feeling that we had had some good bonding.
“What was that little song and dance the other day at lunch all about, Peschkalek?” I asked him with a smile. “You were acting as if it had just struck you what a good idea it might be to drop by the Viernheimer Tageblatt. And then acting like it only struck you during our conversation with Walters that there might be poison gas in the munitions depot. You knew the story about the poison gas, also about the munitions depot, not to mention Strassenheim.”
“You win, Self, you win. I admit I put on a little show to whet your appetite. I don't think I can handle this case on my own. I didn't want to run the risk of you not taking the story about the poison gas seriously and not wanting to look into it. I need your help.” He hemmed and hawed. “Which brings me to my suggestion. Let's go to the Americans and tell them to lay their cards on the table.”
“Great idea!”
“No, I'm serious! I'm not saying we should drive over with a 'Permit me to introduce myself, my name is Peschkalek, and this is Herr Self. Please be so kind as to explain the January attack.' No, we would go there officially.”
“You mean as General Peschkalek and Sergeant Self of the Marines?”
“No, not the Marines, the German army, and I'll be happy enough with the rank of major. I'll be the military man, and you could be from the office of the president. The president wants to award some medals to the men of the fire brigade who fought the fire and the guards who were injured in the line of duty. We'll go speak to the American fire chief and discuss the number of medals to be awarded, the names to be engraved on them, and the wording of the citations.”
“Unauthorized assumption of authority, falsification of documents, perhaps there is also something like abuse of uniforms and medals—this is playing for real! If we're lucky, we'll walk away knowing that the attack was in Viernheim and not in Käfertal or Vogelstang, and that they're storing new or old poison gas there. As for the Wendt case, this wouldn't bring me a single step closer to solving it.”