The councillor with his trolley was in front of him.
'What a charming sight – the dutiful widower with flowers, a devoted man for whom a stranger might feel sympathy.'
'Your way, the island would be concreted from north to south,' Oskar growled. 'From east to west.'
'But the stranger would be ignorant. The stranger would not have known of the poison an old fool can spurt.'
'I do what's right for Baltrum.'
'Flatulent arrogance. Can't keep your nose out, can you? Have to interfere. The island survives on the money it makes in the season – and only a senile idiot fails to see that fact.'
'Step aside.'
'When I've finished/ the councillor spat back. 'All of us, in a competitive world, strive for the future of the island. Each year thousands of euros, which could be better spent on our community, are wasted by the required legal investigations to your objections. You, one man, bleed us dry. Prying and interfering, Herr Netzer, is all you are good for… I say this, and I am not proud of it, she is better where she is than listening to the drivel you manufacture.'
'Would you have made money from the extension to the pasta and pizza place?'
'I offer you the future. One day you will interfere once too often, pry into a hole, find a wasps' nest and be stung. Who then will help you?'
'I go my own way. I know what is right.'
The trolley was pushed out of his path. The wind fluttered the councillor's hair. The short spat had no effect on Oskar. He thought that the price he paid for his vigilance was the rudeness of those who did not comprehend his concern for the island of Baltrum. He would not change, he would fight until death took him – as it had taken Gertrud. He strode away and his fist was tight on the stems of the daffodils. To his right was the grass strip for light aircraft to land; he had opposed it and said that the noise of the planes would disturb the island's wildlife. Further to his right was the little lake that was fed only by rainwater and the field converted to a children's play area; he had opposed that and said it was too adjacent to the Westheller, the marshland, a summer haven for wading birds. Before he reached Ostdorf, the smaller of the two villages at the western end of the island, a horse-drawn cart had veered by him because he would not give way. All building work was done in autumn, winter and spring, and the materials were brought in by the ferry, then loaded on to horse-drawn carts to be taken to the site. This one was to change a two-bedroom house into a five-bedroom eyesore, the extra rooms for visitors – and that fight, too, after a year of conflict, he had lost.
He came to the cemetery at the limit of Ostdorf's development. The flowerbeds in the garden of house number 23A, which she had tended, were overgrown and beyond recognition, but the daffodils she had planted still flourished for him to pick. The garden in front of her grave was meticulously tended. Not a weed in the sandy soil. He bent awkwardly, lowered himself to kneel and laid the flowers in front of the stone. They had a cleanness and purity about them, which should have been the island's virtues.
On Baltrum, Gertrud – dead five years – had been the only soul who knew of his past, and the torture it had brought him. She had sat beside him, and his mother, in the Hamburg lawyer's office when his uncle's will was read and when the letter of confession – with a dying man's shake in the handwriting
– had been produced. First the letter had been read in the lawyer's clipped tone; its second reading had been in his mother's halting, shocked voice. The confession had driven him from his work as a construction fore-man in the Blohm amp; Voss shipyard: he had resigned the day after the visit to the lawyer's room in the humid summer of 1975. He had sold their property, a three-room apartment in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort, cheaply for speed. They had gone to Baltrum, bought the house and he had believed himself safe from the intrusion of the outside world.
As a child, Oskar Netzer had come through the Feuersturm bombing in August 1943. As an adult he should have been stronger when confronted with the letter of confession; he had not. It had made of him the self-centred recluse kneeling in front of the weathered stone. He was alone with her, the only company – other than the beloved eider ducks – that he sought.
'I showed them, my sweetheart, that they could not ignore me. They loathe me but I do not care. I thought they would burst blood vessels. Now, coming here, I am accosted by a councillor – you will remember him, Schulz, with the face of a goat. He accuses me of interference, prying, putting my nose where it has no business. The idiot thinks he offends me. I am proud of his description. More important, my sweetheart, is that the eider are back…'
The rain came on harder, soaking his shoulders and the back of the coat, and dribbling on his face; it crushed the blooms of the daffodils and ran on to the stone.
In truth, not much more than interference, prying and putting his nose into other persons' business remained in the life of Oskar Netzer. It was his spine.
The Bear drove Timo Rahman away from the house in Blankenese. As they approached the electrically operated gates, Timo lowered the window, extended his arm and waved. He looked back and for a moment glimpsed the wan face of Alicia in an upstairs window, but she did not wave to him. They pulled out into a quiet street, and he had the window up again.
To neighbours, there was little remarkable about the Albanian who had come to live among them in Blankenese, a speckgurtel district of Hamburg.
Blankenese was one of the affluent 'bacon-belt' areas of the city, where the well-fed had their homes. Those neighbours knew little of the man who kept himself to himself, whose wife they rarely saw, whose children were taken by car to school and driven home. His name was not in the newspapers, he did not entertain locally, and offers of drinks or summer barbecues were always politely refused – 'We are already committed on that evening/ weekend / lunchtime, and so are unable to accept your kind invitation.' It was the way of the pate that the least should be known about him.
He had come far in his life from the village north of Shkodra in the Albanian mountains close to the border with Montenegro.
A VW Passat had been parked on the main road, backed into a driveway so that its occupants could see up the dead-end street and respond easily to whichever way his car turned on the main road: north towards the Blankenese station for the S-Bahn line, or south and the Elbchaussee. Timo leaned across the Bear's shoulder and peered into the mirror. A woman was driving the Passat with a man as her front-seat passenger. Sometimes the surveillance on him was covert, and needed his instinct – and the Bear's – to spot. Sometimes the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat section put a car on his tail in the full knowledge that it would be instantly identified.
It was a gesture, covert or obvious, and one to be ignored. Lesser men than Timo Rahman were in the maximum-security wing of the gaol at Fuhlsbuttel.
Other than to visit a blood relation eleven years back he had never been there, and such visits were now inappropriate and beneath his stature.
He did not remark on the Passat, two cars back in the traffic behind them, neither did the Bear.
It was the assumption of Timo Rahman that every remark he made – in his bedroom, his kitchen, his car, at a business meeting – was overheard by audio devices. He had been told that the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat boasted to favoured politicians that the equipment available to them was the best in Europe. Nothing that incriminated him ever passed his lips and those he dealt with were schooled at the same desk. He discussed with the Bear, as the VW Passat followed them, the weather forecast for that day in northern Germany, as any of his neighbours would have.