I felt sorry for him. At the same time, I didn’t really want to hear what he was telling me. I wasn’t his friend. I had completed the case he had hired me for. I now had another case.
“What did you talk about with Schuler the evening you went to see him?” I asked.
“Schuler…” If I had hurt him by the abrupt change of topic, he showed no sign. “Gregor and I went to see him together. He told us about his work with the files and about the Strasbourg lead concerning the silent partner, which you later followed. Otherwise…”
“Did you ask him for the money? The money in the attaché case?”
“He talked about it, but back then I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about. Schuler said that a person becomes suspicious when he finds money in a cellar and starts wondering whom it might belong to, knowing that no good comes of evil, and had we forgotten that? He was looking at Gregor when he said it.”
“What did you-”
“I wasn’t there the whole time. I had… I had diarrhea and kept having to go to the toilet. Schuler must have found the money Gregor had stashed away in a part of the old cellar, where he had no business being. He put two and two together and suspected Gregor, because I am a Welker and Gregor doesn’t belong to the family. He wanted to get his former pupil back on the straight and narrow.” Welker laughed with a touch of mockery and sadness. “I suppose you’ll also want to know what state Schuler was in. He smelled bad, but he was fine. Furthermore, he didn’t make any threats. He didn’t even say that he had the money. Gregor found that out the next day.”
Hildegard Knef’s song had ended. I heard applause, laughter, voices, and then the song was played again, louder this time. If I couldn’t take part in the dancing, I’d at least have liked to sing along: “God in Heaven is all-seeing, he’s seen right through you, there’s no point in fleeing.”
Welker laid his hand on my knee. “I won’t ever forget what you did for me. One day, thank God, the memories of the last few months will pale. Until now the good things that have happened to me have remained clearer in my mind than the bad, and what you did for me as my private investigator was a good thing.” He got up. “Shall we go inside?”
When Hildegard Knef sang the song for a third time, I danced with Brigitte.
PART THREE
1 Too late
Why couldn’t things stay as they were? Light, cheerful, and breezy, with a little sadness and a little mourning-mourning for Stephanie Welker, Adolf Schuler, and Gregor Samarin. Yes, for Gregor Samarin, too, destructive as his life had been. And sadness, because Brigitte and I only now discovered the lightness with which our feet found the right steps as we moved in harmony and enjoyed each other. Why couldn’t we dance like this through the whole year, this year, next year, the one after, and as many years as we would have?
I saw the same happiness I felt on the faces of the others. The Nägelsbachs smiled as if they were sharing a precious secret; Philipp’s face no longer showed his peevishness at growing old; and Füruzan’s face no longer showed the weariness of her long path from Anatolia to Germany and all the many nights during which she earned the money that she sent back home. Brigitte was beaming, as if finally everything were fine. Welker wasn’t dancing. He was leaning with folded arms against the door frame watching us with a friendly smile, as if waiting for us to leave. We left when it started getting late for the children.
A few days after the party Brigitte and I went to Sardinia. Manu’s school was on vacation, and to everyone’s surprise Manu’s father announced that he was taking Manu skiing. Brigitte, who hadn’t anticipated her ex-husband’s plan, hadn’t scheduled any appointments at her massage practice so she wouldn’t be working during Manu’s break. She said to me: “It’s now or never.” That’s how far things had come-her calendar would dictate what we would or wouldn’t do; mine didn’t count.
Ten days in Sardinia. We’d never spent so much time together. Our hotel was past its heyday; in the lobby the dark red leather of the armchairs and sofas was frayed, the candelabras in the dining room were no longer lit, and the brass fittings in the bathroom spewed out rusty water when we first turned on the faucets. But we were attentively served and looked after. The hotel stood among the trees of an overgrown garden on a small pebble-beach bay, and whether we decided to linger in the garden or by the water, the staff was quick to bring us two loungers, a table, and a beach umbrella if needed, and they were eager to serve us espresso, water, Campari, or Sardinian white wine.
The first days we did nothing but lounge about, blinking through the leaves at the sun and gazing dreamily over the sea to the horizon. Then we rented a car and drove along the coast and up into the mountains over narrow, winding roads to small villages with churches and market squares and vistas of valleys that at times stretched all the way to the sea. Old men sat in the squares, and I would have liked to sit with them and hear their tales of what dangerous brigands they used to be, tell them what a capable detective I had once been, and parade Brigitte before them. In Cagliari we climbed interminable steps up to the terrace of the Bastione and looked down at the harbor and the motley rooftops. In a small harbor town there was a feast with a procession and a chorus and orchestra that played and sang so heartrendingly that Brigitte’s eyes welled with tears. The last days we again spent lying on the beach under the trees.
It was in Sardinia that I fell in love with Brigitte. I know it sounds foolish; we’d been together for years, and what tied me to her if not love? But it was in Sardinia that my eyes were opened. How beautiful Brigitte was when she wasn’t stressed out and didn’t have to worry. How gracefully she walked-light of foot but also with a certain determined step. What a wonderful mother she was to Manu, and what trust she had in him in spite of her many worries. How witty she could be. How charmingly she linked her arm in mine. How lovingly she handled my ways and peculiarities. How she massaged my back when it hurt. How she brought brightness and cheer into my life.
I tried to recall the longings she had sometimes talked of and strove to fulfill them. To say something nice from time to time for no particular reason, to give her flowers, to read something to her, to come up with something fun that we hadn’t done yet, to surprise her with a bottle of wine she had enjoyed in a restaurant, or to buy her a handbag that had caught her eye in the window of a boutique. They were all minor things, and I was ashamed that like an old cheapskate I had withheld them from her for so long.
The days flew by. I had taken some books with me, but didn’t finish any of them. As I lay on the lounger I preferred to watch Brigitte reading instead of reading myself. Or I watched her sleep and wake up. Sometimes she didn’t know right away where she was. She saw the blue sky and the blue sea and was a little confused until she remembered, and then she smiled at me sleepily and happily.
I happily smiled back. But I was also sad. Again I had been too slow-something that shouldn’t have taken more than a few weeks or months had taken me years. And because I have always realized that I’ve been too slow at a point when I’ve irrevocably missed a chance or lost something through my slowness, now, too, I had the feeling that it was too late for our happiness.