There weren’t many pedestrians in the streets. The bank’s few customers mostly pulled up in their cars; they drove up to the gate, which swung open to let them in, and about half an hour later let them out again. At five o’clock, four young women left the bank, and at seven, three young men. In Welker’s office the lights remained on till nine thirty. I worried that I might not make it to my car fast enough to be able to tail him. But I stood on the square waiting in vain for the gate to swing open and for him to drive out or to emerge from the door within the gate. The bank lay in darkness. After a while I sauntered across the square and around the block. I didn’t find another entrance to the bank, but from a neighboring yard that was accessible from the street I got a rear view of the bank’s roof. It had been built out, and the windows and balcony door were brightly lit. I could make out paintings on some of the walls, and I could tell that the curtains were made of fabric. These weren’t more offices; this was an apartment.
I didn’t head back home right away. I called Babs, an old girlfriend, a German-and French-language teacher. She never went to bed before midnight.
“Sure, come by,” she said.
She was grading papers, sitting over a second bottle of red wine and a full ashtray. I told her all about my case and asked her to contact a detective agency in Strasbourg for me and have them look into lawyers bearing the initials C, L, or Z who had lived in Strasbourg between 1885 and 1918. I don’t know any French.
“What’s the name of the detective agency?”
“I’ll let you know tomorrow morning. I once worked with them on a case back in the early fifties. I hope they’re still there.”
“How did you manage to get by without knowing French?”
“The guy I was working with knew German. But he was already of a certain age, so he can’t possibly still be with us. A young man from Baden-Baden had gotten involved with the Foreign Legion-he’d been abducted, by all accounts-and we managed to find out his whereabouts. It wasn’t us, though, who got him out. Heaven and earth had to be set in motion, ambassadors and bishops. We did, however, give thought to how we might give it a try. Can you imagine a German-French commando going out on a mission just a few years after the war?”
She laughed. “You miss the old times? When you were young and strong and on a roll?”
“On a roll? Even during the war I wasn’t on a roll, let alone afterward. Or do you mean I’m preoccupied with growing old? In the past I used to think that one day one starts aging, and that a few years later one’s done and is old. But it’s nothing like that. Aging’s an ongoing process; you’re never done.”
“I’m looking forward to my pension. I don’t like teaching anymore. The kids do their thing. They plod through school, and then through job training, and don’t let anything get to them: no book, no idea, no feelings of love. I no longer like them.”
“What about your own kids?”
“Them I love. You can’t believe how pleased I was when Röschen finally let her hair grow out and stopped coloring it green. You know she finished high school with honors and got a grant from the German National Academic Foundation? And after only two semesters of business administration she spent a year at the London School of Economics. Even as a student she’s already earning more than I am as a veteran teacher.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“She’s set up a small and successful fund-raising firm. She’s built up and is expanding a mammoth database with the help of some students whom she pays minimum wage, because in fund-raising everything depends on whose birthday falls on what day, when a company is celebrating its anniversary, the personal interests of possible donors, and what kinds of lives their ancestors lived. The other day she said to me, ‘Mom, do you think it’s a good idea for me to rope in some Eastern European students who’re studying German? I could cut my labor costs in half.’”
“So what did you tell her?”
“‘Good idea,’ I said, and told her she might want to set up those students with computers instead of paying them wages, and let them pay off the computers with their work for her. Needless to say, old computers that are being phased out here-over in Eastern Europe they’ve no need for modern computers.”
“So?”
“She thought my suggestion was great. But come to think of it, why don’t you send my eldest to Strasbourg? It’s not really a detective job-it’s more like historical research-and now that he’s spent three semesters in Dijon, his French is better than mine. He passed his exams but has time on his hands, as he’s not starting his job at the industrial tribunal till May.”
“Does he still live in Jungbusch?”
“Yes. Give him a call.”
10 So funny you could split your sides
The following day I didn’t even try to get in touch with Welker. Instead I turned my attention to the police investigation into his wife’s murder.
“Of course we have a file on him. The Swiss sent us their final report, not to mention that we did our own bit of investigating. Just a minute.” Chief Inspector Nägelsbach would usually have hesitated a little longer before letting me peek into a file. “By the way, have you noticed any changes here?” he asked after he returned with the file.
I looked at him and then glanced around the room. There was a pile of sealed boxes beneath the window. “Are you moving?”
“I’m heading home. I’m gathering everything that belongs to me that I’ll be taking along. I’m retiring.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
He laughed. “I am. I’ll be sixty-two this April. When the government came up with the pension-at-sixty-two plan my wife made me promise I’d stop working then. Starting next week I’ll be taking all the vacation days I have coming. There you go.” He pushed the folder across the desk toward me.
I began to read. Bertram and Stephanie Welker were seen together for the last time the morning they climbed up to the hut above the Roseg Glacier. On the afternoon of the following day Welker turned up alone at the Coaz chalet below the glacier. That morning he had found a note from his wife saying she was out hiking on the glacier and would meet up with him at eleven o’clock, halfway up the path he intended to take around the glacier. He had set out right away, at first waited for her at the halfway mark, and then ventured out onto the glacier, where he started looking for her. Finally he made his way as fast as he could down to the chalet and called the rescue service. The search went on for a number of weeks.
“How can one not find a body on a glacier?” I asked Nägelsbach.
“On a glacier? You mean in a glacier. She must have fallen into one of the countless crevasses, and since no one knew exactly where she’d been hiking, they couldn’t look for her in a specific area, as they would have in other cases.”
“What a gruesome idea: the woman lies buried in the ice, her youth and beauty preserved, and when they find her someday in the distant future, her aged husband is called in to identify her.”
“My wife said that, too. She says something like that happens in some novel. But who’s to say it will happen? Think of the Stone Age mummy from the Ötztal Alps, or Hannibal ’s soldiers, or those of the German emperors, or General Souvarov. Think of the Bernadine monks and all the early British mountain climbers. They were lost in the glaciers a lot longer than Frau Welker and have yet to be found.”