I saw the same happiness I felt on the faces of the others. The Nägelsbachs smiled as if they were sharing a precious secret; Philipp’s face no longer showed his peevishness at growing old; and Füruzan’s face no longer showed the weariness of her long path from Anatolia to Germany and all the many nights during which she earned the money that she sent back home. Brigitte was beaming, as if finally everything were fine. Welker wasn’t dancing. He was leaning with folded arms against the door frame watching us with a friendly smile, as if waiting for us to leave. We left when it started getting late for the children.
A few days after the party Brigitte and I went to Sardinia. Manu’s school was on vacation, and to everyone’s surprise Manu’s father announced that he was taking Manu skiing. Brigitte, who hadn’t anticipated her ex-husband’s plan, hadn’t scheduled any appointments at her massage practice so she wouldn’t be working during Manu’s break. She said to me: “It’s now or never.” That’s how far things had come—her calendar would dictate what we would or wouldn’t do; mine didn’t count.
Ten days in Sardinia. We’d never spent so much time together. Our hotel was past its heyday; in the lobby the dark red leather of the armchairs and sofas was frayed, the candelabras in the dining room were no longer lit, and the brass fittings in the bathroom spewed out rusty water when we first turned on the faucets. But we were attentively served and looked after. The hotel stood among the trees of an overgrown garden on a small pebble-beach bay, and whether we decided to linger in the garden or by the water, the staff was quick to bring us two loungers, a table, and a beach umbrella if needed, and they were eager to serve us espresso, water, Campari, or Sardinian white wine.
The first days we did nothing but lounge about, blinking through the leaves at the sun and gazing dreamily over the sea to the horizon. Then we rented a car and drove along the coast and up into the mountains over narrow, winding roads to small villages with churches and market squares and vistas of valleys that at times stretched all the way to the sea. Old men sat in the squares, and I would have liked to sit with them and hear their tales of what dangerous brigands they used to be, tell them what a capable detective I had once been, and parade Brigitte before them. In Cagliari we climbed interminable steps up to the terrace of the Bastione and looked down at the harbor and the motley rooftops. In a small harbor town there was a feast with a procession and a chorus and orchestra that played and sang so heartrendingly that Brigitte’s eyes welled with tears. The last days we again spent lying on the beach under the trees.
It was in Sardinia that I fell in love with Brigitte. I know it sounds foolish; we’d been together for years, and what tied me to her if not love? But it was in Sardinia that my eyes were opened. How beautiful Brigitte was when she wasn’t stressed out and didn’t have to worry. How gracefully she walked—light of foot but also with a certain determined step. What a wonderful mother she was to Manu, and what trust she had in him in spite of her many worries. How witty she could be. How charmingly she linked her arm in mine. How lovingly she handled my ways and peculiarities. How she massaged my back when it hurt. How she brought brightness and cheer into my life.
I tried to recall the longings she had sometimes talked of and strove to fulfill them. To say something nice from time to time for no particular reason, to give her flowers, to read something to her, to come up with something fun that we hadn’t done yet, to surprise her with a bottle of wine she had enjoyed in a restaurant, or to buy her a handbag that had caught her eye in the window of a boutique. They were all minor things, and I was ashamed that like an old cheapskate I had withheld them from her for so long.
The days flew by. I had taken some books with me, but didn’t finish any of them. As I lay on the lounger I preferred to watch Brigitte reading instead of reading myself. Or I watched her sleep and wake up. Sometimes she didn’t know right away where she was. She saw the blue sky and the blue sea and was a little confused until she remembered, and then she smiled at me sleepily and happily.
I happily smiled back. But I was also sad. Again I had been too slow—something that shouldn’t have taken more than a few weeks or months had taken me years. And because I have always realized that I’ve been too slow at a point when I’ve irrevocably missed a chance or lost something through my slowness, now, too, I had the feeling that it was too late for our happiness.
2
Matthew 25: 14–30
Manu returned from his ski trip with a deep tan and delighted Brigitte by saying, “But it’s great to be back again.” He surprised me by announcing that he wanted to go to church the following morning. During the ski trip his father had taken him to mass, as he also used to do in Brazil. His mother had never taken him to church here.
So on Sunday I went with him to the Christuskirche. The sun was shining, and around the water tower narcissus and tulips “bloomed in greater splendor than all the silks of Solomon can render.” The golden angel with the golden trumpet greeted us from the top of the church cupola. I was struck by what the priest had said about the parable in which the servant buries the money that has been entrusted to him instead of putting it to work, thus dodging his responsibility. What was I intending to do with the money I had buried under the potted palm? Drop it in the collection box? It had slipped my mind.
Manu, too, had been listening attentively to the sermon. Over lunch he told Brigitte and me that his friend had a brother who was a few years older and who was increasing his money by buying and selling stocks on the Internet. Manu gleaned from that and from Matthew 25: 14–30, that either his mother or his father ought to get him a computer. Then he looked at me. “Or will you?”
That afternoon we went to Schwetzingen and visited the palace gardens, which I had so often seen from a distance while I was working on my case. We walked down the avenue that looked so new with its young chestnut trees, past the orangerie and to the Roman aqueduct, over the Chinese bridge, and along the lake to the Temple of Mercury. Brigitte showed us where her parents had hidden Easter eggs for her and her brothers and sisters. At the mosque Manu declared, “Allah leads to the light whom He wills!”—which he’d learned at school when the class had an assignment on Islam. Then we sat down in the sun on the Schlossplatz and had some coffee and cake. I recognized the waitress, but she didn’t recognize me. I looked across the way to Weller & Welker.
Locals and tourists were strolling over the Schlossplatz, which was bustling with life. A dark Saab slowly and patiently made its way through the throng. It stopped in front of the bank. The gate swung open and the car drove in.
That was all. A car stops in front of the gate, the gate swings open and stays open for a moment, the car enters, and the gate closes again. This was not the image that had stayed in my mind from the afternoon when I had watched the bank for the first time. Back then the square had been empty, while today it was full. Back then the cars that entered and exited the bank gate were not to be overlooked, while today the dark Saab was almost swallowed up in the hustle and bustle of the square.
But it struck me like an electric shock. You insert the key into the lock of your car or turn on the radio, or you step out onto the balcony, perhaps in your pajamas and dressing gown, to check the temperature and take a look at the sky, and you lean on the metal railing. The static shock barely hurts. What strikes you is not the pain, but the sudden realization that the car, the radio, the railing—everything we are so familiar with and rely on—also has an unreliable, malignant side to it. That things are not as reliable as we suppose them to be. The car entering and the opening and closing of the gate! Just like back then, I had the feeling that something was not quite right in what was happening before my eyes.
A client on a Sunday? I couldn’t rule that out for a small bank and an important client. But the one business that would not rest on a weekend or holiday was money laundering.
When the gate opened again half an hour later, letting the dark Saab out and then closed, I was standing nearby. The car had a Frankfurt license
plate. The windows were tinted. A fifty-mark bill that had fallen out during the delivery was peeking out from the edge of the trunk.
When I told Brigitte that evening in bed that I would be out of town for a few days, she asked wryly: “So, the lone cowboy is riding silently into the setting sun?”
“The cowboy is riding to Cottbus, and into the rising sun, not the setting sun. And he isn’t riding silently, either.” I told her about the money laundering at the Sorbian Cooperative Bank and that I wanted to find out if it was still going on. I told her about Vera Soboda. I told her about Schuler and his money. “The money came from the East and has to go back to the East. Perhaps I can find a priest or some institution that can put it to good use. And perhaps I will find something that will help throw some light on Schuler’s death.”
Brigitte rested her head on her hands and looked up at the ceiling. “I could put the money to good use. What I’d like to do instead of my massage practice, what I would need to expand my practice, things Manu would like—I could definitely put it to good use.”
“It’s drug money, and money from prostitution and blackmail. It’s dirty money. I’ll be happy when it’s gone.”
“Money doesn’t stink—weren’t you taught that?”
I propped myself on my elbow and looked at Brigitte. After a while she turned her eyes from the ceiling and looked at me.
I didn’t like her expression. “Come on, Brigitte …” I didn’t know what to say.
“Maybe that’s why you are what you are. A lonely, difficult old man. You don’t see happiness when it comes your way, so how are you supposed to grab it if you can’t even see it? Here it’s served to you on a silver platter, but you let it slip away. Just like you’ve let our happiness slip away.” She looked back up at the ceiling.
“I don’t want our happiness to—”
“I know you don’t want to, Gerhard, but you do it anyway.”
I couldn’t let that go. I wasn’t ready to roll over and turn my back to her, lonely, difficult, and old. Not after our days in Sardinia.
“Brigitte?”
“Yes?”
“What would you rather do instead of your massage practice?”
She was silent for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to say anything more. Then she wept a few tears. “I would have liked to have had children with you. I had Manu despite my sterilization. I didn’t have any with you, though I didn’t take any precautions. We would have had to try it in vitro.”
“You and me in a test tube?”
“You think the doctor will shake us up in a test tube like a barman with a cocktail shaker? He would lay your sperm and my egg on a glass slide and then let them do what people in love do in bed.”
I liked the idea of the two cells on a glass. It was a pleasant image.
“Now it’s too late,” Brigitte said.
“I’m sorry. I just told you about Schuler. He would still be alive if I hadn’t been too slow. I’ve always been too slow, and not just since I’ve grown older. I should have asked you after our first night together whether you wanted to marry me.”
I reached out my hand, and after a slight hesitation Brigitte raised her head and I slid my arm under it.
“It’s not too late for that.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.” She nestled up to me and nodded.
“First I have to finish this case. It’ll be my last case.”
3
Stealing tractors
This time I avoided Berlin. I went by car, got off the autobahn at Weimar and meandered over back roads. There was a park before Cottbus that had been created by Count Pückler, with a pyramid for himself and his wife, one for his favorite horse, and one for his favorite dog. The count’s Egyptian girlfriend had to make do with a grave in the cemetery. She had been young, beautiful, and dark, but her delicate Middle Eastern lungs couldn’t bear the Sorbian climate. I understood her. I hadn’t been able to stand up to the Sorbian climate on my last visit, either.
I had called Vera Soboda at her home in the morning and she’d invited me to dinner. She made a local potato dish with curd and offered me some Lausitzer Urquell, a beer from the region that has a sharp tang of hops but is easy on the palate.
“What brings you to Cottbus?” she asked.
“The Sorbian bank. Do you know how I can get at the data you told me about last time?”
“I don’t work there anymore. I was fired.” She laughed. “Don’t look so surprised. I wasn’t actually the bank manager. I just ran everything because someone had to do it, and the position had never been filled. Two weeks ago some idiot who knows nothing about banking was made manager. On his third day he fired me. It was all over in a flash. He came up to my desk and said: ‘Frau Soboda, you are fired. You have half an hour to remove any personal items from your desk and to leave the premises.’ He stood beside me and watched me, as if I might take the hole-puncher, the paper clips, or a pen. Then he walked me to the door and said: ‘You will receive seven months’ pay. Fair is fair.’”
“Did you see a lawyer?”
“The lawyer only shook his head and said my chances were up in the air. It seems I might have spoken my mind a little too clearly to the new manager. So I let it be. We have no experience here in taking employers to court. Were I to lose, who’d pay for it all?”
“What are you going to do now?”
“There’s enough to do around here. The problem is that what we need in these parts doesn’t generate money, and what generates money, we more often than not don’t need. But everything will fall into place. Our Lord in Heaven will not abandon a good Communist, as my former boss who took me under her wing always used to say.”
I was certain she would make it. She again looked like a tractor driver with whom one would gladly set out to steal tractors. She furrowed her brow. “What kind of data are you looking for?”
“I’d like to know if money’s still being laundered.”
“But you wrote me that—”
“I know. It’s just that I’m not sure if what I wrote you was right. I have a feeling that—”
“Do you know your way around computers?”
“No.”
She got up, placed her hands on her hips, and looked me up and down. “Do you expect me to go prowling with you through the night, break into the Sorbian bank, turn on the computer, and sift through it for data, just because you have ‘a feeling’? You expect me to risk my neck for this feeling of yours? Do you think I’ll get so much as a cleaning job in a bank if I’m caught at the Sorbian? Are you out of your mind?” She stood there scolding me in a way that I hadn’t been scolded since the days my mother used to tell me off. If I’d stood up I’d have towered over her by a head, ruining the magic. So I remained seated and stared at her enthusiastically until she stopped, sat down, and burst out laughing.
“Did I say anything about breaking in?”
“No,” she replied, still laughing. “I said it. And I’d like nothing more than to do it and give those programs and databases a good whirl. But I can’t. Not even with you, who didn’t say anything about breaking in, but thought about it.”
“How about without you? Could I get inside without you and turn the computer on and look for the data?”
“Didn’t you just say you don’t know anything about computers?”
“Can’t you lay out for me what you did back then? Step by step? I—”
“You want to become a hacker in a single day? Forget it.”
“I—”
“It’s almost eleven, and we Sorbians go to bed early. Let’s have another beer, and then I’ll fix you up on the sofa.”
4
In the broom closet
“Theoretically speaking,” I said to Vera Soboda over breakfast, “is there a way of getting into the Sorbian bank under cover of darkness?”
She answered so quickly that she, too, must have given this some thought overnight.
“Under cover of dar
kness is not the time to break in. What you would have to do is unlock the door to the kitchen area with a skeleton key in the afternoon and hide in the broom closet until everyone’s gone. Then you would have the bank to yourself. Getting in isn’t hard—it’s getting out. At seven in the morning, when the cleaning ladies show up, you would have to hide again until the bank opened, when you could mingle with the customers. But you couldn’t hide in the closet, because that’s where the detergents and mops are kept, and the ladies will be cleaning the toilets, the room with the copiers, behind the tellers’ counters, and under the desks. And you can’t get into the room that has the deposit boxes and the safe.”
“How do the cleaning ladies get into the bank?”
“They have a key for the side entrance.”
“Could I tear past them when they unlock the door?”
She gave the idea some thought. We were having eggs and bacon with potatoes, along with bread and jam and coffee. She ate as if she hadn’t eaten in ages and wouldn’t eat again in ages. When I gave up at my second egg, she ate what was left on my plate, too.
“Eat breakfast like a bishop, lunch like a priest, dinner like a mendicant,” she said. “The cleaning ladies would get the fright of their lives and call the police. But why not?”
She wiped both plates clean with a piece of bread.
“Shall we continue theorizing a little?” I asked.
She laughed. “No harm in that, I suppose.”
“If you were in the bank, sitting at the computer, and couldn’t figure out the programs and the data but happened to have a cell phone handy with which you could call someone who knew what was what, wouldn’t you then—”
She laughed again, her belly shaking as she steadied herself on the table as if she would fall off her chair if she didn’t. I waited for her to calm down.