The Safety Net

  All he really wanted was to spend the rest of his life observing birds in flight, drinking tea, watching Käthe knit, listening to her play Beethoven in her wonderfully amateurish way, “richly” as she called it; and now he had not only the one enormous, senseless office at his paper but also a second enormous, senselessly large one, was required to fill both “with his personality,” and hadn’t even known that his daughter was expecting a baby, had to be told by Bleibl of all people, who had seen it in the sports section of all places; new blood, although it wasn’t a young Tolm, only a Fischer.

  One thing was certain, anyway: there was a young Tolm called Holger, and he prompted frequent speculations on strange problems of inheritance: if they killed off Rolf as a renegade, and himself as newly elected president, a nice chunk would be left for this seven-year-old boy as Rolf’s direct heir, for this grandson whom he hadn’t seen for three years, with whom, when the boy was still a toddler, he had fed ducks in the park, as he had with Kit. Had, had, had—not even this was considered advisable now, since that day not long ago when one duck had veered off, in a completely unnatural way, from the flock that was so charmingly patterning the dark water; it swam toward the shore, and out of the bushes rushed Hendler, the young security guard, shouting “Take cover! Down!” and thrusting Kit and himself down onto the grass, flinging himself beside them, while the duck, which later turned out to be made of wood, ended its unnatural course at a projecting piece of turf and began to spin even more unnaturally. Hendler had taken it for a floating bomb, camouflaged as a duck or hidden inside the duck. Fortunately he was mistaken, but the upshot was a detailed investigation leading to a kitchen maid’s tearful confession. She had discovered the wooden duck in the basement, cleaned it, and set it adrift, “for fun,” as she put it. He had great difficulty in preventing the dismissal of the maid and a report in the press, partly due to the fact of its being an idea, a notion, that someone might pick up. Ever since then he had been suspicious of the ducks, he even began to distrust the birds he had so long enjoyed observing. Presumably it was possible to develop remote-control mechanical birds which, filled with high explosives, would suddenly switch to horizontal flight and fly through an open window bearing havoc in their artificial breasts, in their artificial bellies. With the exception, he supposed, of swallows, sparrows, crows. But pigeons, perhaps, starlings, storks, and wild geese—whole flights, all mechanical, all bearing havoc, and he found himself saying, to Bleibl of all people: “Even the birds of the air aren’t to be trusted anymore.” Whereupon Bleibl answered: “Nor the cake delivered to your house by the baker.” Yes, ever since the affair of Pliefger’s birthday cake they had all their baking done at home, if not exactly under supervision, at least with considerable precautions.

  That affair of the birthday cake had been a perfect example of the meticulous precision of the planning: someone must have known the baker, must have made exact notes of the delivery van’s route, known the moment at which the railway barrier was lowered. The baker’s van had been forced by a blue Ford to slow down so that it had to stop just as the barrier was lowered; the blue Ford had repeatedly squeezed in front of the bakery van, at places where the van couldn’t pass, and at the barrier the genuine cake had been exchanged for the “hot” one—the genuine one being found subsequently in a garbage can near the barrier. And if somebody hadn’t phoned and warned Pliefger—he always hoped it might have been Veronica, who loved to phone: unthinkable. Only Beverloh could have been behind this, he was always said to be “figuring, figuring, figuring.” They had copied the cake exactly, TO OUR WONDERFUL BOSS, ON HIS SIXTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY—and nothing, nothing, the interrogation of the baker, of his family, of the apprentices and staff, of the neighborhood, the examination of the phone lines—nothing had brought any suspect to light. The ladies in Pliefger’s office, who had ordered the cake, thought up the text and the decoration (forget-me-nots on white icing), had sobbed hysterically. Everything about the cake had been just right, even the weight; and if Pliefger had cut it, as anticipated, he would have been torn to shreds—Pliefger, his predecessor, “And you can’t even trust the bread on your table anymore, nor the packet of cigarettes you tear open.…” Since the Plotteti affair.

  No doubt they had enough money, perhaps even from Käthe, to hatch such birds, also enough imagination, certainly Veronica did; might have a flock of thirty wild geese (sweeping through the night!) rigged up. Aimed at the manor, they could have the effect of an ultramodern rocket launcher. Why not? With the highly intelligent, minute electronic brains now available, with which, among other things, Bleibl made his money, and of course he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even to Käthe, let alone Bleibl, who could have commissioned one of his highly qualified physicists or engineers to take up this idea, if only to produce a new armaments hit, or merely “to enliven the ballistic discussion.”

  And then, of course, Holzpuke might have been inspired to stretch steel nets across the sky above and around the manor: no more birds, no more clouds, even if they did consist only of Hetzigrath steam. He wanted to go on enjoying his view of the park, the sky, wanted to go on smoking his cigarette with his own hand, blow out the match with his own lips, go on feeding the ducks with Kit, from the terrace—from there one could throw the bread crumbs farther, guide the flocks, produce patterns—at night the owl, the little screech owls, the bats, whose flight habits he didn’t know. In his dreams eagles came, vultures, with enormous wingspan, flying straight and hard at him, exploding breast to breast against him, in fire and smoke, with a roar that still sounded in his ears long after he had awoken and grasped Käthe’s hand, seeking comfort in her warmth, her pulsebeat. Or he would quietly get up, ring for Blurtmehl, and have him rub his icy feet with ointment. And there had been moments during the day, too, when he flinched at the sight of a pigeon or a swallow flying toward the manor, sometimes just a sparrow, and he had to hold on to himself not to scream the way Kortschede had done.

  Blurtmehl cautioned: “Not too long, sir,” and he allowed himself to be helped out of the tub, onto the table to be rubbed down with aromatic oils, wrapped in the big bath towel, rubbed and patted dry by Blurtmehl, who discreetly covered his genitals and told him to make treading movements, “treading air,” he called that.… It wasn’t easy, mind you, to find a mechanical solution to the difference between a flying object and a bird, one realistic enough to prevent detection: could the nuances in a bird’s movements be imitated to that degree, considering that the explosive hidden in the flying object required its own mechanism that had to be inserted and hidden and still function? Come to think of it, mechanical birds were nothing new, and he recalled a conversation with Veronica on the terrace in Eickelhof, when Veronica had maintained that artificial birds flew “more naturally” than real ones, just as wound-up toy birds “walk more naturally than real ones.…”

  With his gentle hands, Blurtmehl stopped the “air treading” and began to massage the soles of his feet, asking him to report any pain, even the slightest, soon declared himself satisfied, noting a surprising relaxation, probably due to the disappearance of his fear in exchange for curiosity and fantasy. The oil felt good, as did Blurtmehl’s hands; and now, his head slightly raised, he could even look out on the terrace and into the moat, and he wondered: Might it be Blurtmehl after all? Weren’t there those mysterious, tiny bolts that could be catapulted into a person’s brain? And after all, why shouldn’t it come from Blurtmehl himself, perhaps something was hatching in him, at a hidden level, that might suddenly provoke the stranglehold? And without question he was sufficiently versed in anatomy (he was forever taking refresher courses!) to disguise the consequences of a stranglehold as an accident in the tub. Blurtmehl with his long, rather bony hands, with those gentle, sad eyes that masseurs and priests sometimes have in common. How much did “documented data” mean, after all? Born 1940 in Katowice, original name Blutwitzki or something like that; after dropping out of a Catholic boarding school, “disillusioned by postwar deve
lopments in Poland,” he had renounced his Polish citizenship and taken the strange name of Blurtmehl, the etymology of which no one, not even Blurtmehl himself, had yet been able to explain to him. In the West he had not even tried to graduate from high school, had refused any and all assistance, became a male nurse and, although talented enough in the opinion of all who knew him, never did finish school in order to study medicine. He stayed with the nuns down south somewhere in the Allgäu, bought himself a surprisingly powerful and expensive motorcycle, tore around on it in his free time, at random through the countryside (whether seemingly or actually at random could never be established with complete certainty), from Munich to Hamburg and to Berlin (where no Eastern contacts could be detected), finally becoming manservant, masseur, and chauffeur to a bishop, whom he served for ten years, until that same bishop recommended him to Tolm. The bishop virtually made a present of him: “He’s irreplaceable, simply irreplaceable, but I’ll let you have him, provided he’s willing—you need him more than I do, in your position!” (He knew the bishop from his tutoring days, as well as from his art studies; the bishop had written his thesis on Hieronymus Bosch and had later crossed his path somewhere as a sergeant in the artillery—but otherwise it was always embarrassing when the bishops occasionally turned up in their organized solidarity, paid social calls, so to speak, because they wanted to “maintain contact with all social groups”—it was always a bit embarrassing because it inevitably led to some degree of servility, a bit of backslapping—those “We’re all in the same boat” gestures—and what did that mean, “in the same boat”? What boat? Weren’t they in the same boat as those poor prostitutes? No, this bishop was really a nice man, had the very ordinary first name of Hans and an even more common surname, was still interested in Hieronymus Bosch, and had genuinely meant to do him a favor.)

  Well, Blurtmehl had been willing, had entered his service in 1971, and did turn out to be irreplaceable because of his skills as chauffeur, manservant, masseur, and because of his character—he was the very soul of discretion, this slight, pleasant, quiet man who looked more like a monk manqué than a servant (or was there no contradiction there?), who looked as if he had no private life yet did: a mother whom he supported and a sister whom he visited periodically. They had kept their Polish-sounding name and lived near Würzburg, and not the slightest suspicion attached to either of those innocuous people; his brother-in-law was even with the police. Moreover—and this was the real surprise since actually he had always thought of Blurtmehl as a platonic homosexual, or even asexual—Blurtmehl had a girlfriend, thirty-two-year-old Eva Klensch, with whom he openly spent his free days and nights, went to restaurants, movies, the theater; for the last ten years, going back to his time with the bishop, his steady girlfriend.

  Eva Klensch, who ran a boutique in Frankfurt: Israeli, Turkish, Arab-Palestinian knickknacks, caftans, and the like, made frequent trips—in the opinion of a number of security experts, according to Holzpuke, a little too frequent—to the Near East, had even set up a whole cottage-industry network in Palestinian refugee camps. Eva Klensch was by no means suspect, but neither could she be classified as “completely above suspicion,” and it was solely on her account that Blurtmehl had not been unreservedly accorded that rating. One never knew, did one, what was being whispered, what was being swapped, when she went shopping in the back alleys of Beirut and its surroundings, and near Nablus, not far from Damascus or Amman. And although she could be watched and searched via the customs—for mightn’t hashish or heroin be involved, if not politics?—even strict and lawful customs checks had never been able to turn up anything suspicious about Eva Klensch: a pretty, self-confident, businesslike young woman who made skillful and quite legal use of the fluctuating dollar exchange; nor did a perfectly normal and lawful tax audit turn up anything suspicious, apart from a few questionable expense vouchers such as could be found in any tax audit. Her hobby was archery, and here too she was successful, was district or regional champion and always carried bow, target, and arrows with her in the car. Needless to say, her past history had also been investigated: at the age of thirteen, shortly before the Berlin Wall went up, she had come to the West with her father, an electro-welder, her mother, an armature winder, and her ten-year-old brother, by now a professional soldier with the Bundeswehr. An ambitious and successful student, she had graduated from middle school in Dortmund, had become first a saleswoman, then a buyer, in a department store; at twenty-one she had already opened her own boutique, with what was for her rather bold financing, and had since then even opened a branch, somewhere near Offenbach. Two years ago this attractive Eva Klensch had—a detail that, while not of itself disquieting, had surprised the investigators—converted to Catholicism, quite obviously under the influence of Blurtmehl, who—another surprise—had met her ten years earlier at a Socialist Party function.

  These two details—Socialist Party and Catholicism—made him uneasy. Not that he would have had any objection to either one—apart from the Nuppertz traumata—no, he merely felt the lack of a certain consistency, and he was surprised, too, that Blurtmehl hadn’t married the girl long ago: there was something there that didn’t fit, or maybe he—that might be more to the point—didn’t fit anymore. Still: bow and arrow were silent weapons.

  While Blurtmehl was massaging his neck, moving slowly to the shoulders, where he suspected “extensive rheumatism,” Tolm abstained from making an imaginative leap to Blurtmehl’s and Eva’s potential caresses. No doubt about it: Blurtmehl was known to be an open Socialist Party sympathizer, ever since his days with the bishop, and presumably Eva was too. After he, Tolm, had caught himself itching for months, out of sheer curiosity, to see a photo of this girl Eva (he could hardly expect Holzpuke to show him one!), Blurtmehl had voluntarily produced one, with the gentle remark: “That’s her, that’s my friend Eva!” and the words “That’s her” had confirmed him in his suspicion that Blurtmehl was indeed a mindreader. The picture showed Eva as an extremely attractive, rather small, dark-haired woman with a pleasant bosom, merry eyes, and an intelligent mouth, booted, self-assured. Meanwhile he had learned that she was—something he had long ceased to be—a churchgoer, sometimes with Blurtmehl, usually without, when he would stay home and make breakfast. So this former bishop’s masseur, near-graduate of a Catholic boarding school, avid motorcyclist, had brought this young woman from a highly secular background into the bosom of the Church.

  Would it be Eva’s hands, as slender as they doubtless were firm, from which Blurtmehl would receive “it,” transmitted via unfathomably complex Palestinian conspiracies, handed over or whispered in gloomy camps, discreetly passed along in Beirut, transmitted in code, decoded, implanted in Blurtmehl’s brain, where it fed and festered? And in the end, in the bathtub or during a massage, a gentle throttling, a pressing of the head under water! After all, Grebnitzer himself was skeptical about all those baths, so an accident in the tub was not unlikely; and the Palestinians had their own secret service, by this time his own grandson might very well be speaking their language. They weren’t short of money (money that, as Rolf had once again calmly remarked, “is your own money, energy money that flows dangerously back to you via Libya, Syria, or the Saudis—just so you know what money is capable of”).

  There remained only one question, to which the answer contained some consolation: what good would it do them to kill him off without at least profiting by the publicity? No bombs, no machine pistols, no “hot” birthday cakes—just an accident in the bathtub—what would they get out of that? What good would it do them to prove their power without being able to demonstrate that power publicly?

  Capitalist has accident in the bathtub! So what? What Käthe had sometimes offered him as consolation—his manifest, vouched-for humanity—might be his very undoing. After him it would be Amplanger’s turn, one of the “new men”: ruthlessly dynamic, jovial, robust—his smile was enough to scare a person, and perhaps they needed him quickly to kill him off spectacularly, and could there
fore get himself—Tolm—quietly out of the way. Amplanger stood for stock exchange, Olympic shooting team, tennis, Zummerling, and teeth-grinding ruthlessness. Perhaps they wanted to speed up Amplanger’s election—he, Tolm, radiated too many humanistic thoughts, self-doubts, too much capitalist melancholy. And damn it all, why didn’t they go for Bleibl, the most ruthless of the ruthless, who never felt a second’s pain, never an instant’s regret, when a few hundred more people perished somewhere in Bolivia or Rhodesia, while in himself there dwelled this sadness, this elemental sadness, fed by Rolf’s “front-line communiqués,” by Katharina’s analyses and reports; and no doubt it was precisely this authentic sadness whose television value Bleibl had recognized and craftily exploited to catapult him into his present position. Yet surely they knew that he might be bad in his weakness but not the worst, and perhaps that was his grim fate—not to be the worst; and what was the meaning of Veronica’s whisper over the telephone: “Don’t ever have tea at the Bleibls’ ”?