Basic Law

by J Sydney Jones

  “Thanks for the advice. Invest in government bonds,” Kramer says, and hangs up.

  “Dickhead,” he says to himself. “I’ll give him objectivity.”

  Then he wonders, Am I too close to this? Am I pushing too hard, looking for connections where there aren’t any? Is that why the world is full of coincidences lately, because I’m manufacturing the connections in my head?

  But Vogel isn’t a manufactured coincidence, he reminds himself. He was at Reni’s farm. He as much as admitted it.

  And was Rick a coincidence? Kramer wonders. Perhaps some of Vogel’s goons traced Reni to Rick. Maybe they wanted to teach Rick a lesson for messing around with the purity of a German woman. That sort of thing. It’s happened before. It’s the reason for the deaths of more than one Turk or Vietnamese lately.

  And if Reni made off with names of donors and secret members of Vogel’s party, would that be reason enough to eliminate her?

  A knocking at the glass of the phone booth brings him out of this analysis. Randall is munching on a sandwich. White fat of smoked ham hangs over the edges of a poppy seed roll. Kramer looks more closely at the sandwich: actually it’s Westphalian ham, much moister than prosciutto, more like raw bacon. He shudders watching Randall chomp contentedly.

  Randall says something, but Kramer cannot make it out and opens the door. Randall continues to mouth more silent words, then grins broadly and laughs at his stupid joke.

  “Piss off, Randall.”

  “Come on, Sam. Enough with the Hamlet stuff. Who’d you call?”

  “Pahlus. Seems Reni’s will must have provided for the return of the advance.”

  “No shit.”

  Kramer says nothing, getting up from the bench and exiting the tiny booth.

  “But that means …”

  “I know what that means. Or indicates. That she suspected she was going to die.”

  “Which makes it look like suicide again.”

  Kramer considers this. “Or that she knew she had enemies.”

  Randall squints to show how little he thinks of this theory, then takes another bite of the ham sandwich.

  “We don’t even know if Reni was the one who provided for the money,” Kramer says.

  Randall swallows, picks a string of fat from his teeth, looks at it appreciatively for a moment, then flicks it off his fingers like nose-pickings.

  “Right, Sam. So you’re saying Herr Müller just decided to lay eighty thousand on a leftist publication because he’s such a public-spirited guy.”

  “Could be.”

  “Not in this life. What’s in it for him?”

  “Who knows? But it’s worth checking on.”

  Randall has the courtesy not to ask him how he intends checking on it, but merely follows him out of the hotel and through the main square to the old town hall. They enter the building opposite this and go straight up to the offices of Schnelling and Walther. The secretary is filing her nails today, looking as pretty as ever, but surprised to see him.

  “I’d like to see Schnelling,” he says.

  “Do you have an appointment, Herr Kramer?”

  He smiles at her. “No. But they’re expecting me.” He heads for Schnelling’s door.

  “But you can’t go in now, Herr Kramer. They’re in conference.”

  Randall shrugs his hands at her as if to apologize for Kramer’s manners, and they enter the office to find Schnelling bent over the desk. Walther is standing next to him and has his arm draped over the smaller man’s shoulders. They are examining an architect’s model of what appears to be a housing development. Schnelling looks up angrily at the intrusion, the skin around his mouth red and raw-looking.

  “What is it, Fräulein …” He stops when he sees Kramer in the doorway. “Herr Kramer.” A false smile from Schnelling. Walther smiles at him, as well.

  Kramer feels loved.

  “I wasn’t aware we had an appointment,” Schnelling says, turning his back to the desk. Walther does the same.

  The trained seals, Kramer thinks. “We don’t have an appointment. But I have an urgent question and didn’t want to have to wait until next week. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Schnelling does not move from the desk. “Well, if it is important. How can we help you?”

  “Renata Müller’s will. Was there a stipulation in there for eighty thousand marks to be paid to Real Editions in case of her untimely death?”

  Schnelling and Walther exchange glances. Randall hovers behind Kramer, half in and half out of the office. No polite have-a-seat today.

  Finally, Walther answers in his deep radio announcer’s voice, “I’m afraid that is privileged information, Herr Kramer. We cannot divulge it.”

  “It’s a matter of public record,” Kramer says.

  Walther shakes his long head. “No. It is made known to the federal bureau of taxes, perhaps, but not public.”

  “Look,” Kramer says, attempting to be reasonable, though he does not feel that way at all. “I’m an executor in her will. She had a contract with Real Editions. I should be able to know these facts.”

  Another shake of Walther’s head. “Why not ask Herr Müller? Maybe he will tell you. But I am sure you understand our position, Herr Kramer. The professional restrictions …”

  Kramer tries to get a look at the architectural model in back of them on the desk and both Schnelling and Walther follow his gaze.

  “What you got there?” Kramer says. There is something familiar to the layout.

  “Oh, nothing,” Schnelling says, folding his hands together in front of him. “A little project of ours.”

  Kramer approaches, and Walther sits on the desk as if to hinder his view.

  “More row houses,” Kramer says, getting closer to the desk. “More suburbia. I thought you boys were lawyers, not developers.”

  “Really, Herr Kramer,” Schnelling finally protests. “I don’t know what business it is of yours. Now if you do not mind, we have a lot to do.”

  But Kramer is close enough to see why the model looks familiar. The core of it is Reni’s farmhouse; what’s left of the acreage around it has been subdivided into five other kitschy-looking farmhouses for tired execs.

  “Nice,” he says. “I bet Reni would have loved that. How long have you gentlemen been waiting for her to die, anyway?”

  “Really, Herr Kramer, I resent that,” Schnelling splutters.

  Walther gets off the desk now, standing eye-to-eye with Kramer.

  “I think it’s time you left, Herr Kramer. Before we are forced to call the police.”

  Kramer nods, but does not move, staring at the desecration of Inheritance. It was the one thing Reni wanted never to change; the one thing that held meaning for her in an ever-changing world.

  “You seem desperate to impute improper intentions, Herr Kramer,” Walther says. “I don’t know what your problem is. Do you believe the whole world is in a conspiracy against you? That everyone held a dagger hidden under a cloak to kill Frau Müller? I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. Renata Müller killed herself. The property reverted to the inheritor whose representative found worth in the housing scheme you see before you. That is his concern. Not yours. And surely not Frau Müller’s, for she is dead and gone. Now, good day.”

  They walk for a time along the town’s newly cobbled streets, Kramer saying nothing, hands stuck in his pockets, seething. Finally, Randall taps him on the shoulder.

  “How about we eat lunch, Sam?”

  It is all Kramer needs to set him off. “Christ, Randall! Is all you can fucking think about is your stomach?”

  An old lady dressed in chic country clothes leading a long-haired dachshund on a leather leash crosses to the other side of the street at the sound of Kramer’s angry voice.

  Randall squints at him. “No, I can think of
lots of other things, Sam, since you ask. Like why you’re as tight as an overwound watch. Like why you’re beginning to see killers in every closet. Like how maybe you could use a beer and some food to bloody well slow down. But I’m sorry to be such a bore for suggesting it.”

  Kramer feels the heat leave him to be replaced with shame.

  “You’re right, Randall. Sorry. Okay?”

  Randall shrugs. “If you say so.”

  “No sulking, please. I say I’m sorry, you say that’s okay. That’s the way it’s supposed to go. Get the drill?”

  “I mean we can’t just go bursting into lawyers’ offices, Sam. Even I know that. You might as well have accused them of killing Reni for her property. You can’t believe that.”

  Kramer is not sure what he believes anymore.

  “I think you’re right,” Kramer says. “It is time for lunch. Then we’ll have a talk with Herr Müller.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Karl-Heinz Müller doesn’t come into the office anymore, according to the secretary at the International Development Bank. He’s semi-retired, she tells Kramer over the phone.

  “Besides, with fax and a modem, your office is anywhere.”

  Which makes Kramer wonder if the person he’s talking to is even at the bank offices, or is tucked away in a neat little bungalow with her fax and modem plugged in and the afternoon soaps from the United States turned down low on the television.

  He knows the address in the Bad Godesberg section of Bonn. He and Randall take the local train and walk from the suburban station. It’s villa land here; not as swank as Helmut’s Elbchaussee, but you couldn’t touch one of these villas for under a million marks, Kramer reckons. Yards large enough to be called parks; two- and three-story structures in styles from neoclassical to flat-roofed international; here and there, the conical roof of a gazebo amid beds carefully mulched in leaves and pine boughs.

  Müller’s is on Fleischauerstrasse, Butchers’ Lane, a rather downscale name for this upscale neighborhood. The house is very much like the ritzy villas in Vienna’s wealthy suburbs, Kramer thinks. Pale yellow with forest green trim on the door and shuttered windows. There’s a tall spiky wrought-iron fence around Müller’s grounds and an intercom at the gate. Kramer pushes the black button and announces himself. There is no verbal response, but the gate buzzes unlocked, and he and Randall enter onto a cobbled drive leading up to the massive front door intended for the passage of carriages. A smaller door is cut into this, and it opens as Kramer puts a hand to the ring knocker, revealing a stooped, gray-haired woman who is old and old. Her right hand resting on the latch bears knotted blue veins like the roots of an oak.

  “Traudl,” Kramer says, as surprised as the woman herself is. “You’re still …” he stops himself from saying alive, “with the family.”

  The old woman’s eyes light up as she slowly focuses on him; recognition comes with a smile. “Mister Gerhard. You’ve come back.”

  Kramer shoots Randall a glance. “No, Traudl. Not Gerhard. It’s Sam. Sam Kramer.” He takes her frail hand in his, smiling into her wrinkled face.

  “Sam?” She says it like a foreign word. “Miss Renata’s Sam?”

  He nods, squeezing her hand.

  She looks confused. “But Miss Renata isn’t here any longer. Haven’t you heard?”

  “I know,” Kramer says. “We’ve come to see Herr Müller.”

  At the word we, she glances at Randall, visibly wincing. He is obviously not her idea of an ideal visitor in the afternoon, or any time of the day.

  “I wonder if you remember Randall,” Kramer says. “He knew Miss Renata in Vienna.”

  She shakes her head. There is a fleck of white spittle in the corner of her mouth; a pink tongue darts out to clean it.

  “It must be … what? Twenty years?” Kramer says.

  “All of that.” She looks at him keenly; she must be in her eighties but, despite the fact she mistook him for Gerhard, it is obvious she retains all her faculties. Faithful Nanny, Reni used to call her. Surrogate mother, filling in the holes Reni’s father could or would not.

  “And you’re still working?”

  She laughs at this lightly as if it were the silly question of a five-year-old.

  “Do I look like a worker?” She peers up at him. Permanently stooped over, she has to crane her neck to speak to him. “I’ve been an official leech on the state for the past fifteen years. Retirement is shit, if you don’t mind my saying so, Sam. I’ve just come over to help Herr Müller sort through Miss Renata’s things. He doesn’t know what to do with them all. I suggested he burn them, move on with what’s left of his life. But he is stricken, Sam. Stricken. He insists we go through everything with a fine-tooth comb, separate the effects into piles of save, toss, give away. Tedious man.”

  She takes her hand out of Kramer’s, wiping it on the housecoat she is wearing like someone determined to get down to work.

  “But what are we doing talking out here? Come in, come in. Have a cup of coffee. Bring your friend along.”

  Kramer smiles at Randall. “Come on, friend. You’re invited, too. Just don’t track in any dirt.”

  They follow Traudl into the entryway and up the back stairs that lead to the kitchen. He remembers his first visit here with Reni; that was in 1969, after the year in Vienna, and she wanted to bring him home to meet her family. Her mother was still alive then, but failing already, and Traudl had obviously run the domestic scene for some time. Herr Müller had been distantly polite, but upon that first visit, Traudl asked only one question, “May I wash your clothes for you?”

  Kramer smiles as he remembers this inauspicious beginning; it took him several years to win the old lady, not that he had cared or tried, but they became real friends by about the time Reni decided to leave him.

  She takes them into the kitchen, sits them at a table built into a nook in one corner with a window looking out to the back garden. There is a glass enclosure below, steamed over.

  “You will have coffee,” she says, turning on the stove under the kettle and filling a filter cone with ground coffee. She never did wait for answers, he thinks.

  “Is Herr Müller available?” he says finally.

  “Swimming.” She inclines her head toward the window. “An extravagance, I told him when he was putting it in.”

  Kramer looks back out the window. The glass enclosure houses a swimming pool; he can see movement inside.

  “But he does enjoy his swim. Keeps him fit, not like me. He still stands tall. Likes to wear them skimpy trunks, too, so that everybody can see how tall he is down there, as well.” A cackle, like leaves burning.

  She bustles about the kitchen, putting cups and several slices of coffee cake on the pine table. The water comes to a boil, and she pours it over the grounds. The faint smell of skunk comes from the coffee, then a richer, fuller aroma. Kramer keeps his eyes on the indoor swimming pool below. Müller is doing nonstop laps like self-abuse.

  Traudl sets the coffeepot on the table, sitting across from Kramer, cocking her head to one side so as to get a look at him. Otherwise, because of her stoop, she’d be staring down at the table. Her eyes are a pale blue, like shallow water, and he has always been aware of them. They are liquid now, a tear builds up and leaks from the corner of her right eye.

  “Why did she do it, Sam? Why?”

  Kramer thinks a moment, wondering if he should tell her of his suspicions.

  “She talking about Reni now?” Randall asks, not waiting to be served but tipping the white ceramic pot over his cup and filling it with deep black-brown brew.

  Kramer nods, then looks back to Traudl. “I have no idea,” he says. “But I’m trying to find out.”

  “Everything to live for,” Traudl says. “Her whole life before her.”

  Or thirty-plus years of it, anyway, Kramer tells himself, if you go by insurance
actuary tables. But to a woman of Traudl’s age, mid-forties must seem like youth.

  “Did you stay in touch?” Kramer asks her, pouring coffee for himself.

  Traudl daubs at the tear with the sleeve of her housecoat, sniffs defiantly, then attempts to square her bowed shoulders. One of life’s battlers.

  “At Christmas and Easter. That sort of thing. She was a busy woman.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  She thinks about this; normally, her entire head would have looked upward, as if that was where thought originated. Now only her eyes can roll up, the cornea half hidden by her upper lid, revealing half-moon slices of yellow-white below.

  She blows air through her lips finally, making a plosive, despondent sound. “I’m not sure. Isn’t that awful? An old lady losing her memory. Maybe three months ago. Or two.” She shakes her head, annoyed.

  “What was she like when you saw her?”

  “Like?” Her eyes go up again. “Tired. I think she had been playing tennis that day. Her wrist hurt, she said. Complained like an old person about the way her body was slowing down.”

  Kramer gets more direct, “I mean, did she seem despondent to you at the time? Depressed?”

  She shakes her head. “Sore muscles, maybe. But my Miss Renata wasn’t the depressed sort. Never played the role of the hothouse plant. She was too busy giving the world hell.” Another mirthless cackle. “Two kinds of people in this world, Sam. Those who get depressed and those who make others depressed. We both know which one Renata was.”

  Kramer sips the coffee; it’s warm and full of flavor.

  “That’s pretty much what I was thinking,” he says. “She wasn’t the suicide type.”

  An eye blinks at Kramer, turns down to the table, then peers back at him, squinting. “What are you saying, Sam? She didn’t kill herself?”

  Kramer takes another sip, not responding.

  There is silence in the kitchen for a time. Kramer sees boxes stacked here, some of the same ones he saw the movers packing at Inheritance. A Black Forest clock hangs from one wall with a tiny wooden man perched outside the hole, stick rifle in hand, waiting for the bird to pop out at the hour. This vaguely reminds him of something, but he does not know what. On the wall opposite, sits a massive credenza, its open top filled with blue-and-white onion-pattern Bavarian porcelain.