Self's Murder

by Bernhard Schlink

  “Take me to my husband,” she said to Philipp. “I want to be with him when he wakes up.”

  They left. Welker stayed. “I’ll wait for your friend. I want Nägelsbach to have whatever he needs—the best of everything, whatever the expense. You must believe me: I am terribly sorry he was shot.” He looked at me as if he really were terribly sorry.

  I nodded.

  8

  A sensitive little fellow

  Outside the hospital I hoped to find a taxi at the stand. But it was still too early in the morning.

  A man came up to me. At first I didn’t recognize him. It was Karl-Heinz Ulbrich. “Come along, I’ll drive you home.”

  I was too sick and too tired to turn his offer down. He took me to his car—no longer a beige Fiesta, but a light green Polo. He opened the door for me and I got in. The streets were empty, but he didn’t exceed the speed limit.

  “You don’t look too good.”

  What could I say?

  He laughed. “Not that I’m surprised, after all you’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours.”

  Again I said nothing.

  “The water tower meeting—that was impressive. But in the park you had more luck than brains.”

  “You really aren’t my son. You might be my deceased wife’s son, but I’m not your father. When you … when you were conceived, I was in Poland, far away from my wife.”

  He wasn’t swayed. “I imagine you already know that the men in the blue Mercedes are Russians. They’re from Moscow, and have been in Germany for two or three years, first in Berlin, then in Frankfurt, and now here. I spoke to them in Russian, but their German isn’t bad.”

  “They really trained you to be a pro in shadowing.”

  “Shadowing was always my specialty. Do you see now that we’d make a great team?”

  “The two of us a team? From what I can tell, you’re working not with me but against me.”

  He was hurt. “It’s not like you’re letting me work with you. Anyway, it’s always good to know as much as possible.”

  I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s just that I’m not a team player. I’ve never been one, never wanted to be one, and in my old age have no intention of becoming one.” Then I felt there was no reason not to tell him the whole truth. “Not to mention that the days of small detective agencies are numbered. The only reason I’ve been able to stay above water is that I know everything so well here—the area, the people, their way of life—and because I know to whom I can turn for help, and when. But nowadays that’s not enough. The few cases I still get barely pay for my office. If there were two of us, we wouldn’t be generating any more work.”

  He drove along the Luisenpark. The police had gone by now. The lawn, the bushes, and the trees were serene in the gray of dawn.

  “Couldn’t you … I don’t know whether you’re not my father or just don’t want to be. I’d like to see a picture of my mother and find out what kind of person she was. And if you’re not my father, then who might be? You must have some notion. I know you want me to leave you alone, but you can’t just pretend I don’t exist, that we don’t exist!”

  “We?”

  “You don’t have to keep asking the same question. You know what I’m talking about. To you we’re a nuisance. You’d be happiest if we’d all stayed in the East and you would neither see us nor hear another word from us.” He was hurt again. What sensitive little fellows the Stasi recruited!

  “That’s not true. I just got back from Cottbus and found it to be a pretty little town. I’m simply not your father. Regardless of where you’re from, I’m not your father. Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Prenzlau, north of Berlin.”

  I glanced at him sideways. His dutiful, hurt face. His neatly parted hair. His beige anorak. His shining rayon pants and light gray loafers. I’d rather have bought him something to wear than tell him about Klara. But I could see there was no way to avoid it.

  “How long will you be in Mannheim? How about dropping by next Sunday? But give me a little space till then.”

  He nodded. “Will four o’clock do?”

  We agreed on four. We pulled into the Richard-Wagner-Strasse. He got out and hurried over to my side to open the door.

  “Thank you.”

  “I hope you feel better soon.”

  9

  Othello

  I stayed in bed all day. Turbo curled up on my legs and purred. At noon Brigitte dropped by with some chicken soup. In the evening I got a call from Philipp. His conscience was bothering him that he hadn’t sent me home on Sunday. Had my heart been up to all this? Nägelsbach was doing well enough; I could visit him on Wednesday. It would be good for the three of us to talk. “The police didn’t come by today. Can you imagine us staying out of the fray? I can’t.”

  But it seemed that we were staying out of the fray. Welker was the only one questioned by the police. He told them about Gregor Samarin’s Russian origin, his trips to Russia, the six months he spent there, his shady contacts, and his attempts to deposit large amounts of cash at Weller & Welker for supposed Russian investors. The police found the gun with which Gregor had been shot, a Malakov, in a trash can in the Luisenpark near the entrance by Werderstrasse. Samarin was found wearing a straitjacket; he had been shot in the back. An execution. People living near the park had heard shots, car doors slamming, cars driving away—a gang affair.

  The Tuesday edition of the Mannheimer Morgen sported the headline EXECUTION IN LUISENPARK, and the Wednesday edition GANG WAR IN MANNHEIM. A few days later the papers wondered whether the Russian Mafia had taken hold in Mannheim’s and Ludwigshafen’s underworld. But by then it was only a small item.

  Philipp and I sat by Nägelsbach’s hospital bed and were strangely diffident, like boys who played a prank they have gotten away with, but for which someone else had to pay the price. The boys hadn’t intended that. But it was too late to fix things. Probably Welker should be sentenced. Probably Nägelsbach and Philipp should be disciplined. Probably I should be charged with reckless something or other.

  “Damn it all!” Philipp said. “In fact, I grow more optimistic every day that the police won’t come looking for us. Today I’m twice as optimistic as I was on Monday, and by tomorrow I’ll be four times as optimistic.” He grinned.

  “I’m not sure you’ll see eye-to-eye with me,” Nägelsbach said, looking at us apologetically, “but I don’t want to keep the police out of this. I’ve always been on the level in matters concerning me or the law. It’s true I discussed my cases with Reni, which I shouldn’t have. But she’s discretion personified, and I’ve had a case or two in my time that I couldn’t have cracked without her help. But this is something else. Welker has to be charged. What Samarin did to him is no doubt an extenuating circumstance, but at the end of the day a judge must decide whether Welker is to serve a few years, end up on parole, or be acquitted.”

  “What does your wife think?” Philipp asked.

  “Her view is …” He blushed. “She says it’s a matter of my soul, that she and I can handle the consequences, and that she’s prepared to go out and work if it comes to that.”

  “A matter of your soul?” Philipp said, looking at Nägelsbach as if he had gone mad. “What about my soul?”

  Nägelsbach looked at him despondently. “I’ve spent my life making sure that people are called to account for their actions. I can’t suddenly—”

  “The law doesn’t expect you to go to the police or see to it that Welker is charged,” I cut in. “You can be on the level with the law if you don’t go.”

  “But you know what I mean,” Nägelsbach replied.

  Philipp got up, hit his palm against his forehead, and left the room.

  Nägelsbach doesn’t play chess, so I had brought along my Othello board game.

  “Shall we play?” I asked him.

  We sat down and laid out the double-sided pieces along the grid, flipping them fro
m their white sides to their black sides and back. When that game was over, we played a second game in silence, and then another.

  “I do see your point,” I told Nägelsbach. “I also see what your wife is saying. There is, by the way, another good reason to go to the police: Do you remember the man who came to your retirement party unannounced and wanted to talk to me? He’s been watching us, and there’s a good chance he might be out to blackmail us—though probably Welker rather than you, Philipp, or me.”

  “I don’t remember seeing him at my party,” Nägelsbach said, smiling with a touch of embarrassment. “I admit I had a glass or two too many.”

  “Of the three of us, I have the least to lose if you go to the police. Involuntary manslaughter, because we let Welker take Samarin’s pistol. We could explain the sequence of events, though I guess it would sound quite contrived. But unlike you or Philipp, I wouldn’t be facing disciplinary proceedings. Not to mention that for a private investigator our escapade would not generate negative publicity: quite the opposite. For a retired police officer, though, and for a surgeon at the municipal hospital, it’s another matter altogether. So don’t worry on my account. But three of us were involved in this—we planned it, set it up, and carried it out. So it’s only fair that we three come to a decision as to whether we will inform the police or not. I’d say you either have to convince Philipp that that’s the way to go or you’ll have to live with the fact that Welker won’t be charged.”

  I waited, but Nägelsbach didn’t say anything. He lay there with his eyes shut.

  “As for Welker’s justification for shooting Samarin,” I continued, “I think he’s right: Samarin would never have left him alone. In the long run, neither the police nor the law would have managed to protect Welker from Samarin. There’s no way they could have. You know that as well as I do.”

  He slowly opened his eyes. “I’m going to have to give this some thought. I—”

  “I want to say one more thing about the soul,” I said. “You won’t compromise your soul if, for once, you aren’t level in a matter concerning you and the law. If you’re always on the level, you don’t need a soul. We have a soul so we can look at ourselves in the mirror, even when we think we can’t. I don’t like corrupt policemen. But I know some who at one time or another didn’t stick to the book, and who then had a rough time of it but got over it, and precisely because of that became fine policemen. Policemen with a lot of soul.”

  “I know such policemen, too. But I must admit I always looked down on them a little.” He propped himself up in bed and with a sweeping gesture pointed at the room, the empty space for a second bed, the TV, the telephone, and the flowers, and made a stab at a joke. “You see, I, too, am corruptible. I could never pay for all of this. Welker’s paying.”

  10

  Like a new case

  That evening I sat in my office writing a letter to Vera Soboda, saying that there would be no more money laundering at Weller & Welker; that the bank had been a madhouse in which the patients locked up the doctors and the nurses and were passing themselves off as doctors and nurses; that Samarin, their leader, was dead; and that the institution was once again being run by its doctor, Welker. I liked Nägelsbach’s metaphor.

  I found a letter from Welker in the mail. He thanked me with a check for twelve thousand marks. He also invited me to a party the Saturday after next to celebrate his move back to the Gustav Kirchhoff Strasse—it would be a pleasant opportunity for us all to meet again.

  I wondered whether I should draw up a detailed invoice for him, as I had promised when I took on the case. I usually also submit a written report to my clients once a case is closed. But was the case closed? My client wasn’t expecting anything more from me. He had thanked me, paid me, and the convivial get-together to which he was inviting me would also serve as a farewell party. As far as he was concerned, the case was closed. But was it, as far as I was concerned?

  Who had frightened Schuler to death? Samarin had neither admitted it nor denied it. I couldn’t believe that he got rid of Schuler just because of the money; otherwise, he wouldn’t have mentioned that Schuler taught him to read and write. If Samarin had killed him, or had him killed, there was more behind it than the attaché case with the money. But what? And by what means had Schuler been frightened to death?

  Or was I on the wrong track? Could it be that I didn’t want to accept that I was the reason for Schuler’s death? Was I looking for a plot when it was nothing more than Schuler’s infirmity and disorientation, and my slowness to react? A weak constitution, a bad day, a perplexing amount of money—wasn’t that enough to put Schuler into the state he was in when I met him?

  I got up and walked over to the window. His Isetta had been parked over there, he had given me the attaché case over there, and then had driven in a long, crooked line across the street and onto the grassy island between the traffic light and the tree. He had died at that tree. The light turned red, yellow, green, and then yellow and red again. I couldn’t take my eyes away: the funeral lights of the teacher Adolf Schuler, retired.

  Regardless of whether Samarin had frightened him to death or if his advanced years had gotten him into such a state, I could have saved him but didn’t. I owed him. I couldn’t do anything about his death now. All I could do was to throw light on it. It was like a new case.

  Red, yellow, green, yellow, red. I owed it not only to Schuler to clear up his death but also to myself to solve my last case. Which in fact it was: my last case. I hadn’t had one in months when this one came along thanks to a chance encounter on the Hirschhorner Höhe. Perhaps I might be sent out again to investigate people filing false claims for sick leave. But I wouldn’t want to do such a job anymore.

  It’s a shame one can’t choose one’s last case. A high point, a finale, one that rounds off with a flourish everything one has achieved. Instead, the last case is as accidental as all the others. That’s how it goes: you do this, you do that, and before you know it, that was your life.

  11

  A thousand and one reasons

  I ran into Philipp in the corridor. “I’d be happy if I didn’t have to go back in there,” he said, nodding toward Nägelsbach’s room.

  “Did you get the forensics report?”

  “The forensics report?” Then he remembered what I wanted and that the report was lying on his desk. “Come with me.”

  Both chairs in front of his desk were heaped high with files and mail, so I sat down on his examination table, as if he were going to come over and tap my knee with a little hammer to check my reflexes. He leafed through the report. “Schuler: chest and stomach crushed, vital organs damaged, neck broken. It was a bad accident.”

  “I was with him just minutes before it happened. Something was wrong with him. It was as if someone had frightened the living daylights out of him.”

  “Perhaps he was sick. Perhaps he’d taken too many sleeping pills. Perhaps his medications interacted. Perhaps he had an adverse reaction to a new sedative or blood-pressure medication. By God, Gerhard, there are a thousand and one reasons why someone might be in a bad state and have an accident.”

  But I just couldn’t believe that Schuler could have taken the wrong blood-pressure medication or too many sleeping pills. He was no fool. The piles of books and folders seemed chaotic but were in meticulous order, and surely his medications would have been, too.

  “There’s also the matter of—” Philipp began insistently.

  “What if I track down the medications he was taking?” I cut in. “If I locate his doctor, could you give him a call?”

  “What could his doctor tell us?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe he did prescribe a new medication that backfired. Or maybe Schuler got some pills on his own, and the doctor could confirm that whatever he’d taken interfered with the medication he’d been prescribed. His doctor could even tell us whether he had a strawberry allergy and that someone might have made him eat a strawberry, or that he had asthma and mig
ht have had a fatal shock during an attack when he realized that someone had taken away his inhaler. If I know what might have frightened him, I’d have a better chance of finding out who it was.”

  “If you come up with something, I’ll see to the rest,” Philipp said, trying his best to appear interested. But something else was preoccupying him. “You’ve got to stop Nägelsbach! You’ve got to stop him before it’s too late. I haven’t told you this, because I don’t believe in counting my chickens before they’re hatched, but I’ve been put forward for the directorship of the surgical department of an absolutely first-rate private clinic. Right now I need disciplinary proceedings like I need a bullet in the head.”

  “I thought your retirement was in the works.”

  “I’ll be retiring soon enough. But private clinics are more flexible when it comes to retirement age. Tending flowers on my balcony from morning to night and moving my boat around isn’t my cup of tea. And the nurses at the new clinic … Imagine, a chance to start all over again from scratch! And then the thought of working somewhere where Füruzan can’t keep an eye on me and frighten off all the other nurses! I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason I feel like an old circus horse is because Füruzan’s never more than half a step away.”

  “I’ve already had a word with Nägelsbach,” I said.

  “His soul, his soul … My soul will go to the dogs if I no longer have my hospital!”

  He looked at me in utter desperation. What did women find so attractive in Philipp? Was it that when he was in a certain mood, he was in every way totally in it?

  “Even if you don’t like the idea of facing Nägelsbach,” I said, “if you want something from him, you’ve got to talk to him yourself.”

  “I’m no good at that sort of thing.”

  “Give it a try. He’s not stiff-necked—he’s just extremely conscientious. But he’ll take whatever you say very seriously.”

  “I’ll make a scene, even if I’d rather not,” Philipp said sadly. “The nurses like it when I start bellowing at them, but Nägelsbach won’t.” He glanced at the clock and got up. “I’ve got to move on. What do you think—will Nägelsbach play along?”