We went over to the groundsman. Court eight was reserved under Frau Buchendorff ’s name; the groundsman pointed it out to us curtly and ungraciously, involved as he was in an argument with an older married couple who insisted they had booked a court.
‘Take a look yourselves, if you please, all the courts are taken and your name isn’t on the list.’ He tilted the screen so that they could see it.
‘I can’t allow this,’ said the man. ‘I booked the court a week in advance.’
His wife had already given up. ‘Oh, leave it, Kurt. Maybe you mixed things up again.’
Mischkey and I exchanged a quick glance. He wore a disinterested expression but his eyes told me his game was up.
The match we launched into is one I’ll never forget. It was as though Mischkey and I wanted to compensate for what had been lacking in open combat before. I played beyond my capabilities, but Babs and I were properly thrashed.
Frau Buchendorff was in high spirits. ‘I have a consolation prize for you, Herr Self. How about a bottle of champagne on the terrace?’
She was the only one to have enjoyed the game uninhibitedly and didn’t mask her admiration for her partner and her opponents. ‘I hardly recognized you, Peter. You’re enjoying yourself today, aren’t you?’
Mischkey tried to beam. He and I didn’t say much as we drank the champagne. The two women kept the conversation going.
Babs said, ‘Actually, that wasn’t really a game of doubles. If I weren’t so old, I’d hope you two men were battling for me. But as it is, you must be the one they’re wooing, Frau Buchendorff.’
And then the two women were on to age and youth, men and lovers, and whenever Frau Buchendorff made some frivolous remark, she gave the silent Mischkey a kiss.
In the changing rooms I was alone with Mischkey.
‘How does it go from here?’ he asked.
‘I’ll hand in my report to the RCW. What they’ll do with it, I don’t know.’
‘Can you leave Judith out of it?’
‘That’s not so easy. She was the bait to a certain extent. How else could I explain how I got on to you?’
‘Do you have to say how you got on to me? Isn’t it enough if I simply confess that I cracked the MBI system?’
I thought it over. I didn’t believe he wanted to make trouble for me, nor could I see how that would be possible. ‘I’ll try. But don’t pull any fast ones. Otherwise I’ll have to submit that other report.’
Back at the car park we joined the two ladies. Was I seeing Frau Buchendorff for the last time? I didn’t like the thought.
‘See you soon?’ was her goodbye. ‘How’s the case coming along by the way?’
21
You’re such a sweetheart
My report for Korten turned out to be short. Nonetheless, it took me five hours and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon before my draft was finished at midnight. The whole case replayed in front of me, and it wasn’t easy to keep Frau Buchendorff out of it.
I saw the RCW–RCC link as the exposed flank of the MBI system that allowed not only people from the RCC but also other businesses connected to the RCC to access the RCW. I borrowed Mischkey’s characterization of the RCC as the turntable of industry espionage. I recommended disconnecting the emission data recording system from the central system.
Then I described, in a sanitized way, the course my investigation had taken, from my discussions and research in the Works to a fictive confrontation with Mischkey at which he had declared himself willing to repeat a confession and to reveal the technical details to the RCW.
With an empty, heavy head I went to bed. I dreamt of a tennis match in a railway carriage. The ticket inspector, in a gas mask and thick rubber gloves, kept trying to pull out the carpet I was playing on. When he succeeded we continued to play on the glass floor, while beneath us the sleepers raced by. My partner was a faceless woman with heavy, hanging breasts. Her movements were so powerful, I was constantly afraid she’d crash through the glass. As she did I woke up in horror and relief.
In the morning I went to the offices of two young lawyers in Tattersallstrasse whose under-burdened secretary sometimes typed for me. The lawyers were playing Amigo on their computers. The secretary promised me the report for eleven o’clock. Then, back in my office, I looked through the mail, mostly brochures for alarm and security systems, and called Frau Schlemihl.
She hemmed and hawed a great deal, but eventually I got my lunchtime meeting with Korten in the canteen. Before I collected the report, I booked a flight on the spot at the travel agent’s for that evening to Athens. Anna Bredakis, a friend from university days, had asked that I give her plenty of prior warning. She had to get the yacht she’d inherited from her parents sail-worthy and assemble a crew from amongst her nieces and nephews. But I’d prefer to be in Piraeus, haunting the harbour bars, than reading about Mischkey’s arrest in the Mannheimer Morgen and having Frau Buchendorff connect me to Firner, who’d congratulate me with his silver tongue.
I arrived half an hour late for lunch with Korten, but I couldn’t use that to make a point. ‘Are you Herr Self?’ asked a grey mouse at reception who’d caked on too much rouge. ‘Then I’ll call the general director straight away. If you’d be so kind as to wait.’
I waited in the reception hall. Korten came and greeted me rather curtly. ‘Things not advancing, my dear Self? You need my help?’
It was the tone of a rich uncle greeting his tiresome, debt-producing, and money-begging nephew. I looked at him in bewilderment. He might have a lot of work and be stressed and hassled, but I was hassled, too.
‘All I need is for you to pay the bill in this envelope. You could also listen to how I solved your case, but then again you could also let it be.’
‘Not so touchy, my dear friend, not so touchy. Why didn’t you tell Frau Schlemihl right away what this is about?’ He took my arm and led me into the Blue Salon once again. My eyes searched in vain for the redhead with the freckles.
‘So, you’ve solved the case?’
I briefly summarized my report. When, over the soup, I came onto the slip-ups of his team, he nodded earnestly. ‘Now you see why I can’t hand over the reins yet. Nothing but mediocrity.’ I didn’t comment. ‘And what sort of man is this Mischkey?’
‘How do you imagine someone who orders a hundred thousand rhesus monkeys for your plant and deletes all account numbers that begin with thirteen?’
Korten grinned.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘A colourful character, and a brilliant computer expert to boot. If you’d had him in your computer centre, these mess-ups wouldn’t have happened.’
‘And how did you get on to this brilliant chap?’
‘What I choose to say on that is contained in the report. I don’t have any wish to expand greatly on that now. Somehow I find Mischkey likeable and I don’t find it easy to turn him in. I’d appreciate it if you weren’t too severe, not too hard – you know what I mean, don’t you?’
‘Self, you’re such a sweetheart!’ Korten laughed. ‘You’ve never learned to do things thoroughly or not at all.’ And then, more reflectively, ‘But perhaps that’s your strength – your sensitivity lets you get inside things and people; it lets you cultivate your scruples, and at the end of the day you do actually function.’
He rendered me speechless. Why so aggressive and cynical? Korten’s observation had got me where it hurt, and he knew it and blinked with pleasure.
‘Don’t worry, my dear Self, we won’t cause any unnecessary trouble. And about what I said – I admire it in you very much, don’t get me wrong.’
He was making it even worse and looked me mildly in the face. Even if there was some truth in his words – doesn’t friendship mean treading carefully when it comes to the lies the other person builds into his life? But there wasn’t any truth in it. I felt a surge of fury.
I didn’t want dessert any more. And preferred to have my coffee in the Café Gmeiner. And Korten had a meeting at two.
&nbs
p; At eight I drove to Frankfurt and flew to Athens.
Part Two
1
Luckily Turbo likes caviar
In August I was back in Mannheim.
I always enjoy going on vacation and the weeks in the Aegean were spent in a glow of brilliant blue. But now that I’m older I enjoy coming home more, as well. After Klara’s death I redecorated the apartment. During our marriage I hadn’t managed to assert myself against her taste and so, at fifty-six, I caught up on the pleasures of decorating that other people delight in when they’re young. I do like my two chunky leather sofas that cost a fortune and also hold their own with the tomcat, the old apothecary shelves where I keep my books and records, and the bunk-bed in my study I had built into the niche. Coming home I also always look forward to Turbo, whom I know is looked after well by the next-door neighbour but who does, in his quiet manner, suffer in my absence.
I’d put down my suitcases and opened the door when, with Turbo clinging to my trouser leg, I beheld a colossal gift hamper that had been placed on the floor of the hallway.
The door to the next-door apartment opened and Frau Weiland greeted me. ‘How nice that you’re back, Herr Self. My, you’re tanned. Your cat has missed you very much, haven’t you, puss wuss wuss wuss? Have you seen the hamper yet? It came three weeks ago with a chauffeur from the RCW. Shame about the beautiful flowers. I did consider putting them in a vase, but they’d be dead now anyway. The mail is on your desk as always.’
I thanked her and sought refuge behind the apartment door from her torrent of words.
From pâté de foie gras to Malossol caviar it contained every delicacy I like and dislike. Luckily Turbo likes caviar. The attached card, with an artistic rendition of the firm logo, was signed by Firner. The RCW thanked me for my invaluable service. They’d paid, too.
In the mail were account statements, postcards from Eberhard and Willy, and the inevitable bills. I’d forgotten to cancel my subscription to the Mannheimer Morgen; Frau Wieland had stacked the papers neatly on the kitchen table. I leafed through them before putting them in the trash, and sampled the musty taste of old political excitement.
I unpacked and threw a load in the washing machine. Then I did my shopping, had the baker’s wife, the head butcher, and the people in the grocer’s shop comment admiringly on my rested appearance, and I enquired after news as though all sorts must have happened in my absence.
It was the summer holidays. The shops and the streets were emptier, my driver’s eyes picked out parking spaces in the most unlikely of places, and a stillness infused the town. I’d returned from my break with that lightness of spirit that allows you to experience familiar surroundings as new and different. It all gave me a floating sensation that I wanted to savour. I put off my trip to the office until the afternoon. Fearfully, I made my way to the Kleinen Rosengarten: would it have shut down for the holiday? But from a distance I could see Giovanni standing in the garden gate, napkin over his arm.
‘You come-a back from the Greek? Greek not good. Come on-a, I make you the gorgonzola spaghetti.’
‘Si, old Roman, great.’ We played our German-converses-with-guest-worker game.
Giovanni brought me the Frascati and told me about a new film. ‘That would be a role for you, a killer who could just as easily be a private detective.’
After the spaghetti gorgonzola, coffee, and sambuca, after an hour with the Süddeutsche by the Wasserturm, after an ice-cream and another coffee at Gmeiner I gave myself up to the office. It wasn’t as bad as all that. My answering machine had announced my absence until today and not recorded any messages. In amongst the newsletters from the Federal Association of German Detectives, a tax notice, advertisements, and an invitation to subscribe to the Evangelical State Encyclopedia I found two letters. Thomas was offering me a teaching appointment on the security studies course at the technical college of Mannheim. And Heidelberg Union Insurance asked me to get in touch as soon as I returned from my holiday.
I dusted a little, flicked through the newspapers, got out the bottle of sambuca, the jar with the coffee beans, and poured myself a measure. While I reject the cliché of whisky in the desk of a private detective, there’s got to be some sort of bottle. Then I recorded my new message, made an appointment with Heidelberg Union Insurance, put off replying to Thomas’s offer, and went home. The afternoon and evening were spent on the balcony, seeing to this and that. The account statements got me calculating and I realized that with the jobs so far I’d almost fulfilled my annual target. And coming after the holiday, too. Most reassuring.
I managed to hold on to my sense of floating into the following week. The insurance fraud case I’d taken on I worked through without getting involved. Sergej Mencke, a mediocre ballet dancer at Mannheim National Theatre, had taken out a high insurance policy on his legs and promptly suffered a complicated break. He’d never dance again. A million was the sum in question and the insurance company wanted to be sure all was above board. The notion that a person could break their own leg repelled me. When I was a small boy, as an example of male willpower, my mother told me how Ignatius of Loyola re-broke his leg himself with a hammer when it healed crookedly. I’ve always abhorred self-mutilators, the young Spartan who let his belly be mauled by a fox, Mucius Scaevola, and Ignatius of Loyola. But so far as I was concerned, they could all have had a million if it meant them disappearing from the pages of our schoolbooks. My ballet dancer claimed the break occurred when shutting the heavy door of his Volvo; on the evening in question he was running a high fever, had to get through a performance nonetheless, and afterwards wasn’t himself. That’s why he’d slammed the door although his leg was still hanging out. I sat in my car for a long time trying to imagine whether such a thing was possible. There wasn’t much more I could do with the summer break that had scattered his theatre colleagues and friends in every direction.
Sometimes I thought about Frau Buchendorff and about Mischkey. I hadn’t found anything about his case in the papers. Once I happened to walk along Rathenaustrasse and the second-floor shutters were closed.
2
Everything was fine with the car
It was pure coincidence that I got her message in time one afternoon in September. Normally I don’t pick up messages in the afternoon. Frau Buchendorff had called in the afternoon and asked if she could talk to me after work. I’d forgotten my umbrella so had to go back to the office, saw the signal on the answering machine, and called back. We agreed to meet at five o’clock. Her voice was subdued.
Shortly before five I was in my office. I made coffee, rinsed the cups, tidied the papers on my desk, loosened my tie, undid my top button, pushed my tie up again, and moved the chairs in front of my desk back and forth. Finally they stood where they always stand. Frau Buchendorff was punctual.
‘I really don’t know if I should have come. Maybe I’m only imagining things.’
She stood, out of breath, next to the potted palm. She smiled uncertainly, was pale, and had shadows beneath her eyes. As I helped her out of her coat her movements were nervous.
‘Take a seat. Would you like a coffee?’
‘For days I’ve done nothing but drink coffee. But, yes, please do give me a cup.’
‘Milk and sugar?’
Her thoughts were elsewhere and she didn’t reply. Then she fixed me with a look of determination that hid her uncertainty.
‘Do you know anything about murder?’
Carefully I put the cups down and sat myself behind the desk.
‘I’ve worked on murder cases. Why do you ask?’
‘Peter is dead, Peter Mischkey. It was an accident, they say, but I simply can’t believe it.’
‘Oh, my God!’ I got up, paced back and forth behind my desk. I felt queasy. In the summer on the tennis court I’d destroyed a part of Mischkey’s vitality, and now he was dead.
Hadn’t I ruined something for her, too, then? Why had she come to me anyway?
‘You met him just that one tim
e playing tennis, and he did play pretty wildly, and it’s true, he was also a wild driver, but he never had an accident and drove so confidently with such concentration – what happened doesn’t fit.’
So she knew nothing about my meeting with Mischkey in Heidelberg. Nor would she refer to the tennis match that way if she knew I’d turned Mischkey in. It seemed he’d told her nothing, nor had she, in her role as Firner’s personal assistant, discovered anything. I didn’t know what to make of that.
‘I liked Mischkey and I’m terribly sorry, Frau Buchendorff, to learn of his death. But we both know that not even the best of drivers is immune to road accidents. Why don’t you believe it was an accident?’
‘You know the railway bridge between Eppelheim and Wieblingen? That’s where it happened, two weeks ago. According to the police report, Peter skidded out of control on the bridge, broke through the railings, and crashed down onto the tracks. He had his seatbelt on, but the car buried him beneath it. His cervical vertebra was broken and he was killed on the spot.’ She sobbed convulsively, brought out a handkerchief, and blew her nose. ‘Sorry. He drove that route every Thursday; after his sauna at the Eppelheim baths he rehearsed with his band in Wieblingen. He was musical, you know, played the piano really well. The section over the bridge is straight as an arrow, the roads were dry, and visibility was good. Sometimes it’s foggy but not that evening.’
‘Are there any witnesses?’
‘The police didn’t trace any. And it was late, around eleven p.m.’
‘Did they check the car?’
‘The police say everything was fine with the car.’
I didn’t have to enquire about Mischkey. He’d have been taken to the forensic medicine department, and if any alcohol or heart failure or any other failure had been ascertained the police would have told Frau Buchendorff. For a moment a vision of Mischkey on the stone dissection table came to me. As a young attorney I often had to be present at autopsies. I had a sudden image of his abdominal cavity being stuffed with wood shavings and sewn up with large stitches at the end.