“So you are taking up my offer?” I asked.
“There are almost a hundred thousand marks here. I’ll account for every penny.”
She handed me a little gray booklet. “I found it among the bills.”
It was a passport from the Third Reich. I opened it and found a picture and the name Ursula Sara Brock, born October 10, 1911. A cursive J was stamped over it. It was clear that when it came to the money Schuler had left me a bequest. But why had he left me this passport? I leafed through it, turning it this way and that, and put it in my pocket.
8 Keep an eye out!
On the way back I took the autobahn. I wanted to float along in the stream of cars without distractions, without having to pay too much attention to the road. I wanted to think.
Who was Ursula Brock? If she were still alive she would be an old lady and could hardly have frightened Schuler to death. Would Samarin or his people have frightened him to death? Among the many unanswered questions was why they wouldn’t have taken the money from him right away. Would Welker, who only later laundered money, if he was laundering money at all… No, even if I could prove that Welker was laundering money now, it wouldn’t make sense that he would have frightened Schuler to death. Unless, that is, he already knew he was going to inherit Samarin’s money-laundering enterprise and was afraid of Schuler’s insatiable inquisitiveness.
I drove in the right lane, among trucks, elderly couples in old Fords and Opels, Poles in rattling, smoking wrecks, and diehard communists in Trabants. When an exhaust pipe in front of me stank too much I switched to the left lane and drove past the trucks, Poles, and communists until I found an elderly couple behind whom I pulled in again. In one car a plastic dog was enthroned in the back window, shaking his head from side to side and up and down with insight and sorrow.
What did I have to go on? A dark Saab on the Schlossplatz in Schwetzingen and Vera Soboda’s replacement by Karl-Heinz Ulbrich-at the end of the day, this was so little that I asked myself if I really had any proof against Welker. Was I envious of his wealth, his bank, his house, his children? The ease with which he had achieved everything? The ease with which he sauntered through life? The ability to remain untouched by both the evil that befell him and the evil he wrought? Was it a case of age envying youth, the war and postwar generation envying the generation of the economic miracle, the guilty envying the innocent? Was I being gnawed at by his having shot Samarin and having put Nägelsbach in danger without batting an eye? Was it that I didn’t feel so innocent and uninvolved?
I spent the night in Nuremberg. The following morning I set out early and was in Schwetzingen by eleven. Until seven I sat around in various cafés, keeping my eye on the bank. A few cars, a few clients on foot, a few employees who sat down on a bench on the square at lunchtime and who at six said their good-byes in front of the gate-that was all.
As I sat in my office that evening, Brigitte called and asked if my trip had been a success. Then she asked: “Does this mean your case has come to an end?”
“Almost.”
While I was jotting down what I knew and didn’t know, what still had to be done and still might be done, there was a knock at the door. It was Georg.
“I happened to be walking by and saw you at your desk,” he said. “Do you have a moment?”
He had been riding his bike and now cleaned his glasses. Then he sat down opposite me in the cone of the desk lamp. He eyed the half-empty wine bottle. “You’re drinking too much, Uncle Gerhard.”
I poured myself another glass and made him some tea.
“There must be a file at the Restitution Office,” he said. “The nephew’s son who emigrated to London and died there in the 1950s must have put in a claim after the war for the restitution of the family fortune. The Nazis wrecked and ravaged his home so completely that his parents killed themselves. Maybe the son knew something and mentioned it.”
I needed a few moments to see where he was heading. “You’re talking about the silent partnership? Nobody here’s interested in that anymore. Nobody was ever really interested in it; my client wasn’t, and I wasn’t. It was just that it took me a long time to realize what it was a pretext for.”
But Georg was on a roll. “I looked further into the matter. In the fifties, restitutions were a big thing, and there was one case after another. Lots of minor cases, but also really major ones. Jews who’d been forced to sell factories, department stores, or land for next to nothing, who either wanted their property back or compensation. Don’t you remember all that?”
Of course I remembered. Particularly the expropriations of Jews. There had been a naive Jew who didn’t want to sell, and when his business partner extorted him he turned to the public prosecutor’s office. When I started as a public prosecutor in 1942, this incident already lay some time back but still made for a good joke.
“Aren’t you interested in what happened?” Georg asked.
“Why would I be?”
“Why would you be? I want to know,” Georg said, staring at me obstinately. “I’ve tracked down the silent partner. I know what kind of guy he was. He was conservative and liked to listen to music, drink wine, and smoke Havanas. He’d been awarded a pile of medals, made a fortune providing expert legal advice to the nobility, and was a modest man who invested all his money for his niece and nephew. As far as I’m concerned he’s alive and kicking.”
“Georg-”
“He’s dead, I know. It’s just a way of putting it. But I find Laban interesting enough to want to know everything. What are you paying me, by the way, for the research I’ve done up to now?”
“I was thinking a thousand plus expenses. Speaking of which…” I wrote him a check for two thousand marks.
“Thanks. That’ll be enough for me to get to Berlin and dig through the files. I’ve still got a few days until my job begins. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Georg?”
“Yes?”
I looked at his slim face, his serious, alert eyes, his lips that were usually lightly parted as if he were surprised.
“Keep an eye out for those skinheads.”
He laughed. “I will, Uncle Gerhard.”
“Don’t laugh. And keep an eye out for those other guys, too!”
“I will.”
He got up, still laughing, and left.
9 Blackouts
On Monday I called Philipp, but he didn’t want to phone Dr. Armbrust on the doctor’s first day back from vacation.
“You can’t imagine how hectic things are here,” he told me. “Give me till tomorrow, or better, Wednesday.”
On Wednesday he dropped by my office.
“As I don’t have much to report,” he said, “the least I could do was come and tell you in person. This Doctor Armbrust is a very nice fellow. It turns out he’s referred several patients to me over the years.”
“Well?”
“I asked him if Schuler had asthma or any allergies. The answer was no. The only things wrong with Schuler were his high blood pressure and heart problems. He was taking Ximovan for insomnia, which doesn’t make you drowsy the next day. He was taking an ACE inhibitor, Zentramin for his heart, and a diuretic. He was on Catapresan for blood pressure, a great medication as long as you don’t stop taking it abruptly-if you do, you run the risk of blackouts.”
I recognized the medications. They were among those I’d taken from Schuler’s bathroom so Philipp could tell me about Schuler’s possible condition. I had even started reading the package inserts. “Blackouts?”
“While driving, talking, doing anything that involves concentration,” Philip said. “That’s why we don’t prescribe it to people who are scatterbrained, confused, or forgetful. Armbrust described Schuler as a somewhat odorous but exceptionally alert elderly gentleman.”