Self's punishment (9 page)

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 time 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.

‘The funeral was the day before yesterday.’

I considered. ‘Tell me, Frau Buchendorff, apart from the details of the event, do you have any reason to doubt that it was an accident?’

‘In recent weeks I often barely recognized him. He was morose, dismissive, turned in on himself, sat at home a lot, hardly wanted to join me on anything at all. Once he even threw me out, just like that. And he evaded all my questions. Sometimes I thought he had someone else, but then again he’d cling to me with a kind of intensity he hadn’t shown before. I was at a complete loss. Once, when I was especially jealous . . . You’ll think, perhaps, I’m not coping with my grief and am being hysterical. But what happened that afternoon . . .’

I topped up her cup and looked at her encouragingly.

‘It was on a Wednesday that we’d both taken off to spend more time together. The day started badly and it wasn’t the case that we wanted to spend more time with one another; actually I wanted him to have more time for me. After lunch he suddenly said that he had to go to the Regional Computing Centre for a couple of hours. I knew very well that wasn’t the truth and was disappointed and furious and could feel his frostiness and imagined him with someone else and did something that I think is actually pretty lousy.’ She bit her lip. ‘I followed him. He didn’t drive to the RCC, but into Rohrbacher Strasse and up the hill on Steigerweg. It was easy to follow him. He drove to the War Cemetery. I’d been careful to keep an appropriate distance. When I reached the cemetery he’d parked his car and was striding up the broad path in the middle. You know the War Cemetery, don’t you, with that path that seems to lead straight to heaven? At the end of it there’s a man-size, chiselled block of sandstone that looks like a sarcophagus. He went up to it. None of this made any sense to me and I hid in the trees. When he’d almost reached the block two men stepped out from behind it, suddenly and quietly, as if they’d come out of nothingness. Peter looked from one to the other; he seemed to want to turn to one of them, but didn’t know which.

‘Then everything went like lightning. Peter turned to his right, the man to his left took two steps, grabbed him from behind, and held him tightly. The guy on the right punched him in the stomach, over and over. It was quite unreal. The men seemed detached somehow, and Peter made no attempt to defend himself. Perhaps he was just as paralysed as I was. And it was over in a flash. As I started to run, the one who’d punched Peter took his glasses from his nose with an almost careful gesture, dropped them, and crunched them beneath his heel. Then just as silently and suddenly, they left Peter and disappeared again behind the sandstone block. I heard them running away through the woods.

‘When I reached Peter he had collapsed and was lying awkwardly on his side. I . . . but that doesn’t matter. He never told me why he had gone to the cemetery and been beaten up. Nor did he ever ask me why I’d followed him.’

We were both silent. What she’d recounted sounded like the work of professionals and I could understand why she doubted Peter’s death was an accident.

‘No, I don’t think you’re being hysterical. Is there anything else that seemed odd to you?’

‘Little things. For example, he started smoking again. And let his flowers die. He was apparently strange with his friend Pablo as well. I met him once during that time because I didn’t know what else I could do and he was worried, too. I’m glad you believe me. When I tried to tell the police about the thing in the War Cemetery they weren’t in the least bit interested.’

‘And that’s what you want me to do, to carry out the investigations the police neglected?’

‘Yes. I can imagine you’re not cheap. I can give you ten thousand marks and in exchange I’d like clarity about Peter’s death. Do you need an advance?’

‘No, Frau Buchendorff. I don’t need any advance, nor can I tell you now whether I’ll be taking on the case. What I can do is conduct a kind of pre-investigation: I have to ask the obvious questions, check the evidence, and only then will I decide whether to take the case. Do you agree?’

‘Good, let’s do it that way, Herr Self.’

I noted down some names, addresses, and dates, and promised to keep her informed. I took her to the door. Outside the rain was still falling.