Strassenheim lay behind us.
“How come you know all this?”
“I'm the kind of guy who puts two and two together. Know what I mean? The official agencies will never tell you anything, but here they're keeping such a low profile that that in itself is suspicious.” He began driving faster again. “We're crossing the border of the Käfertal watershed area. The munitions depot lies in the outer perimeter. Viernheim junction, where the inner perimeter of the wells begins, is about two kilometers beyond Strassenheim. It's anybody's guess how the damn groundwater flows. Be that as it may, Strassenheim has had to bear the brunt of it.” His right hand made a resigned wave, came clapping down onto his bald head, and then brushed back all the missing locks of hair. He chewed his mustache angrily, his teeth grinding.
I can't say that the sky looked any less blue or the rapeseed any less yellow. I've always had trouble believing in the existence of something I cannot see: God, Einstein's relativity, the harmfulness of smoking, the hole in the ozone. I was also skeptical because the munitions depot lay only a few kilometers away from the Benjamin-Franklin-Village in Käfertal, and I had a hard time imagining that the Americans would put their own people at risk. Not to mention that Viernheim lay closer to the depot than Strassenheim, and Viernheim's water supply didn't seem to have been affected. All things considered, had Peschkalek himself tasted the Strassenheim water, or had he sent it to be analyzed?
We were back in Edingen. As we drove down the Grenz-häfer Strasse, we saw Frau Büchler and Wendt's people coming out of the Grüner Baum Restaurant. The funeral meal had taken a long time. My old Opel was waiting in front of the cemetery.
“You and I have to talk this through at leisure,” I said to Peschkalek.
He handed me his card. “Call me when you have a moment. You don't believe me, do you? You're thinking: These are the ravings of a reporter, this is journalistic gob-bledygook. Well, let's pray that you're right.”
7
Tragedy or farce?
Peschkalek's poisonous groundwater streams pursued me into my dreams, and I saw the small Strassenheim chapel grow into a cathedral, the gargoyles on its roof spitting green, yellow, and red water. By the time I realized that the cathedral was made of rubber, its walls bloating and distending, it was too late. It exploded, and revolting brown slime burst from it. I woke up as the slime was about to reach my feet, and I couldn't go back to sleep. During my conversation with Peschkalek I had not been frightened. Now I was.
My father's stories came back to me. Throughout the years I was at school, he hadn't said a word about his experiences in World War I. Some of my classmates bragged about their fathers' heroic deeds, and I would have liked to have done the same. I knew that mine had been wounded a number of times, that he had been decorated and promoted. I wanted to talk about that at school, to brag a little. But he didn't want me to. He only became talkative in the last few years of his life. Mother had died, his days had become lonely, and when I visited him he spoke about many things, and about the war. Perhaps he also wanted to rid me of the idea that the Reich needed more lebensraum, even if it meant war.
He had been wounded three times. The first two times decently, as he put it, by a grenade splinter near Ypers and by a bayonet near Peronne. The third time, his company suffered a gas attack at Verdun. “Mustard gas. It's not a stinking, yellowish-green cloud, like chlorine gas, which you can see and so protect yourself against. Mustard gas is devious. You don't see it and you don't smell it. If you didn't see a comrade grab at his throat or didn't have a sixth sense and quickly slip on your gas mask, then that was it, in the blink of an eye.” My father had had a sixth sense and survived, while most of the men in his company had died. But he had gotten a big enough dose of gas to suffer for months. “The fever went. But that dizziness, even when you weren't moving, and all the retching, retching, retching…and then, mustard gas burns out the eyes. That was the worst part, the fear that it had got you in such a way that you'd never be able to see again.”
I heard the story of the gas attack more than once. Every time my father spoke about putting on the gas mask, he closed his eyes and covered his face with his hand, until he came to the part where he was released from the infirmary.
Had Leo known what her bonfire was capable of? Was that what she had wanted? Was that why she had accused and convicted herself so sternly? As for Lemke, I couldn't imagine that he didn't know what it was all about.
I was now fully awake. Terrorism in Germany. I had read somewhere that all major historical events happen twice, the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce, and I had always seen the terrorism of the seventies and eighties, the commotion around it and the fight against it, as some kind of farce. Now I had to ask myself if I had been wrong. Poison gas in the air, the water, and the ground was no farce. And there I was, driving with Leo through France and Switzerland as if the world were one long spring.
Now self-recrimination was added to my fear. Whichever way I lay in bed felt wrong. Whether my eyes were open or shut, my thoughts whirled in the same circle. They whirled crazily until the dawn broke, the birds sang, and I showered and was once again my conscious, rational, skeptical self.
8
It makes sense, doesn't it?
I had promised Brigitte and Manu that we would spend Saturday in Heidelberg. Shopping, some ice cream, the zoo, the castle—the works. We took a tram and got off at the Bismarckplatz.
I hadn't been there for a long time. Everything was purple: The tram stops, tram shelters, kiosks, benches, trash cans, lights. The purpleness was disturbed by a yellow mailbox and a pale bust of Bismarck.
“How do you like that! The women's movement has taken over the Bismarckplatz!”
Brigitte stopped. “You and your silly chauvinism. Füruzan is oppressing Philipp, I am oppressing you, and now women have occupied the Bismarckplatz and you, poor man that you are, no longer know—”
“Come on, Brigitte, I was only joking.”
“Ha-ha-ha!” She walked off without beckoning me or Manu with a look or gesture to follow her, and I suddenly felt guilty, even though my conscience was clear. She marched into the Braun bookstore, and I waited outside. Should I have followed her to the Women's Studies section with suppliant eyes, drooping shoulders, and sensitive questions? Manu stayed outside with Nonni and me.
We watched the heavy traffic on the Sophienstrasse. “Where do they come out?” Manu asked, pointing at the cars disappearing down the entrance to the underground garage on the Sophienstrasse.
“Somewhere behind these trees, I think.”
“Can they come out where we parked the other day?”
I didn't understand what he meant. “But that was…Do you mean the underground garage behind the Heilig-Geist Church?”
“Yes, that's how it is sometimes, isn't it?” Manu said. “I mean, you come up somewhere different from where you disappeared. It would be great if you could go under the earth from one underground garage to another whenever all the parking spaces are full or if there's a traffic jam. It makes sense, doesn't it?” He looked at me as if I were a little slow and launched into an intricate explanation.
I stopped listening. His vision of an underground flow of traffic took me back to Peschkalek's poisonous groundwater streams.
“You're not even listening!”
Brigitte came out of the bookstore. I bought her a skirt that flared out, and she bought me a pair of shorts in which I looked like a Brit on the River Kwai. Manu wanted a pair of jeans—not any old jeans, a specific brand—and we went all the way up the main street to the Heilig-Geist Church. I find the tide of strolling consumers in pedestrian areas no more agreeable, either aesthetically or morally, than comrades on parade or soldiers on the march. But I have grave doubts that I will live to see Heidelberg's main street once again filled with cheerfully ringing trams, cars honking happily, and related, bustling people hurrying to places where they have something to do, and not simply to places where there's somet
hing to see, something to nibble at, or something to buy.
“Let's give the castle a miss,” I said, and Brigitte and Manu stared at me, crestfallen. “Let's forget about the zoo, too.”
“But you said we—”
“I have a much better idea. We'll go flying.”
I didn't have to suggest it twice. We took a tram back to Mannheim and got out at the Neuostheim airfield. A small tower, a small office, a small runway, and small airplanes— Manu had seen bigger and better things on his flight from Rio de Janeiro to Frankfurt. But he was enraptured. I signed up for a half-hour flight. The pilot who was to take us up got his one-propeller four-seater ready for takeoff. We went rattling down the runway and rose into the air.
Mannheim lay beneath us like a toy town, neat and dapper. It would have been wonderful for the elector who had ordered the squares to be laid out centuries ago to see his city from this perspective. The Rhine and the Neckar glittered in the sun, the stacks of the Rhineland Chemical Works sent little white clouds puffing into the sky, and the fountains by the Water Tower danced in their basins. Manu was quick to spot the Luisenpark, the Kurpfalz Bridge, and the Collini Center where Brigitte has her massage practice. The friendly pilot flew an extra arc until Manu managed to spot his house in the Max-Joseph-Strasse.
“Could we swing over to Viernheim?”
“Is that where you live?” the pilot asked me.
“I used to.”
Brigitte's interest was piqued. “When did you live in Viern-heim?” she asked me. “I didn't know that.”
“After the war. For a while, that is.”
Beneath us were the blocks of the Benjamin-Franklin-Village. The golf course, the autobahn junction, the Rhein-Neckar Center, the narrow, crooked streets surrounding the town hall and churches. We had reached the last houses of Viernheim, and the pilot swung to the right.
I pointed left. “I'd rather fly back over the forest than over Heddesheim.”
“In that case, we'll have to climb quite a bit higher.”
“Why's that?”
He flew toward Weinheim and began to pick up altitude. “It's the Americans. They have a camp in the forest. There's no taking pictures either.”
“What will happen if we don't climb higher? Will they shoot us down?”
“No idea. What is it you want to see?”
“To tell you the truth, it's the camp I want to see. Back in 1945, it was a prisoner-of-war camp—that's how I got to know the forest.”
“Ah, old memories. Let's see what we can do.” He swung to the left without rising any higher, but picked up speed.
I couldn't spot the fence, but I saw the grass-covered bunkers, some on the open field, others hidden among trees. I saw the connecting asphalt paths and the clearings in which trucks or trailers in camouflage paint were parked close to one another. An area farther on was practically without vegetation and had been flattened by truck or tank tracks.
Then, not far from the autobahn, I saw bulldozers, conveyer belts, and trucks at work. Dirt had been dug up over a surface the size of a tennis court. I could not tell how far down they had dug, or if something was being buried or dug up. It was surrounded by woods, but at one end of the tennis court the trees were black, charred skeletons. There had been a fire.
9
Old hat
“You weren't really in Viernheim at that camp, were you? You never mentioned it before,” Brigitte said when Manu was already in bed and we were sitting like an old married couple on the couch in front of the TV.
“No, I wasn't. It has to do with the case I'm working on.”
“If you want some inside information about Viernheim, I have a girlfriend who lives there. Actually, she's a colleague, and you know how we masseuses find out everything, just like hairdressers and priests.”
“That sounds great. Can you set up a meeting?”
“What would you do without me?”
Brigitte stood up, gave Lisa a call, and arranged for us to meet for coffee on Sunday.
“She's a single mother, too, and her daughter Sonya is the same age as Manu. We've been wanting to set up a play date for the two of them, and Lisa's been saying she wants to see what kind of a man I—”
“Have managed to bag?”
“Your words, not mine.” Brigitte sat back down next to me. In the movie we were watching, an old man was in love with a young woman who loved him, too, but they gave each other up because he was old and she was young. “What a stupid movie,” Brigitte said. “But we had such a great day today, didn't we?” She looked at me.
At first I was worried that a straightforward yes would again conjure up the question of marriage and children, and I had every intention of answering with a noncommittal grunt. Never say yes or no when the other person will make do with an mm. But then I did say yes, and Brigitte snuggled up to me, quiet and content.
At ten o'clock the following morning I was at the Church of the Resurrection in Viernheim. I tried in vain to remember the name of the presbyter who'd commissioned me to find Saint Catherine all those years ago. After the sermon and the chorale, he sent a collection box down the rows, recognized me, and nodded to me. The sermon had focused on the dangers of addiction, and the chorale on the willfulness of the flesh, and the collection was to go to rehabilitate drug addicts. I was prepared to drop my pack of Sweet Aftons into the collection box and give up smoking forever. But what would I have smoked after church?
“To what do we owe this pleasure, Herr Self?” I had waited for him in front of the church, and he came over to me right away. Behind us the tram drove past.
“I have some questions to which you might know the answers. Let me invite you for a round or two.”
We went over to the Golden Lamb.
“Hello there, Weller! You're early today!” the pub keeper called out to the presbyter, and took us over to his regular table.
“We can have a nice quiet chat,” Weller said. “The others won't be turning up till later.” We ordered two glasses of house wine.
“I'm working on a murder case. There was a map in the victim's briefcase that showed the woods to the north of Viernheim, the Viernheim Meadows, and the Lampertheim National Forest. I don't think he was killed on account of the map—but maybe on account of the forest? I keep hearing things about that forest, and I keep reading things about it. I'm sure you know the article that appeared in the Viern-heimer Tageblatt back in March.”
He nodded. “That wasn't the only article, you know. There was one in Spiegel about poison gas in the forest, and in Stern, too. Never anything specific, just rumors. And you're hoping I'll tell you what's going on, am I right? Ah, Herr Self.” He shook his gray head.
I remembered that he was an upholsterer by trade, and that back then he'd had his own upholstery business and was complaining that everyone was going to IKEA to buy their couches and chairs at a discount. They'd sit on them till they fell apart and then throw them out.
“Do you still have your upholstery business?”
“Yes, and things have picked up again. I have quite a few clients from Heidelberg and Mannheim now who are into upholstering their old furniture. Things they have from Grandma and Grandpa, or just antiques. But what do you want me to tell you about the forest? To be honest, I don't give it much thought. No point. I'm sure they see to it that nothing happens. It's not my place to tell them how to run their business—just as it's not their place to tell me how to run mine. If something were to happen, I mean, because technically something could happen, what am I supposed to do? Move away? Kiss my house and business good-bye, just because some muckrakers are dredging up mud in the papers?”
A stubby little man with an important air approached us, tapped the table twice with his fist, greeted us with a playful “Enjoy,” and sat down.
“This is Herr Hasenklee,” Weller told me, “our headmaster.” Drawn into the conversation by Weller, he lost no time in assuring me that he wouldn't be running a school here if his pupils were in any kin
d of danger.
“And if they were, what would you do?”
“What kind of question is that? I've been a teacher for twenty years and have always been totally committed to my pupils.”
Other regulars joined us: a pharmacist, a doctor, the manager of the local savings bank, a baker, and a man who ran the local employment office. Poison gas in the Lampertheim National Forest? That's old hat. But the director of the employment office dropped a few hints, which the bank manager made specific: “I'll tell you something, it's not a coincidence that this rumor keeps surfacing. Viernheim is an industrial zone that's waging all-out competition on every side. First there's Mannheim, which needs every penny it can scrape together, then there's Weinheim, which is expanding its industrial zone around the autobahn junction, and the minute we here in Viernheim come up with an investor, the guys in Lampertheim snatch him away with a juicier offer. There are solid interests behind these rumors, I tell you, solid interests.” The others nodded. “I'm glad they removed the stuff from Fischbach, though. That way, all the claptrap about poison gas has stopped making headlines.”—”Then again, maybe it's our turn now. You know, Viernheim instead of Fischbach?”— “Nonsense. All the papers said that with Operation Lindwurm all the poison gas was cleared out of Germany.”—”It's incredible that the Viernheimer Tageblatt printed that story in March.”—”Have you noticed the reporter who's been creeping around here for the past few days?”—”And then on top of everything, we have to be nice to those guys, otherwise they take it out on us.”