Before I left he showed me a picture of his daughter. She was not the opulent beauty I’d imagined from seeing the photograph of her grandaunt at Schuler’s place, or from Nägelsbach’s description. She had a slender face, straight dark hair, and stern lips, and though her eyes had fire and soul, they also had an alert intelligence. “She was a banker and had studied law. She inherited the sixth sense for finances that our family developed over the centuries. If she were still alive the bank wouldn’t be in the state it’s in.” He took his out wallet and gave me fifty marks. “For the war graves.”
I drove home by way of Schwetzingen. The waitress at the café greeted me as an old regular. It was three thirty: time for a hot chocolate and a marble cake, and the end of a Friday workday at the Weller & Welker bank. At four o’clock the four young women emerged from the bank. They stood there for a moment and said good-bye to one another, and then two went off along the old moat, the other two in the direction of the train station. At four thirty the three young men appeared and went along the moat in the opposite direction. I left a twenty-mark bill on the table, waved to the waitress, and followed them. They walked quite a distance, past Messplatz and under the railroad tracks to an area where there was a car wash, a home-improvement outlet, and a liquor store. They went into an eight-story hotel and I could see them being given room keys at the front desk.
Back at the office, the light on my answering machine was blinking. Babs’s son, Georg, had found my message and wanted to drop by: Would Sunday or Monday be better for me? Brigitte wanted us to go to the movies Saturday evening. The third call was from Schuler. “I’m sorry if I was a bit abrupt on the phone. I’ve had a chat with Bertram and Gregor, and I know now that you didn’t say anything bad about me. It turns out Bertram has had a little too much on his plate of late, but he’ll be dropping by later. Come and see me again: Perhaps next week? Maybe Monday?” He laughed, but it was not a joyful laugh. “There’s life in the old badger yet. He’s caught himself a fat goose.”
12 Chock-full
That weekend spring assured us it meant business, that it had come to stay and would not be chased away by any more ice or snow. In the Luisenpark the deck chairs were out on the lawns, and I was dozing away, wrapped in a blanket as if all was well with the world and my heart was sound. Later, when Brigitte and I came out of the movie theater, the full moon lit up the streets and squares. Some punks were playing soccer with a beer can in the pedestrian zone, some bums were passing a bottle of wine around in front of the town hall, and couples were making out under the arbors of the Rosengarten.
“I’m looking forward to summer,” Brigitte said, putting her arm around me.
On Sunday I had lunch with Georg in the Kleiner Rosengarten. He said he was willing to go to Strasbourg to search for the silent partner in old registries and telephone directories, the records of legal and notary chambers, and lecture schedules. He was ready to leave on Monday. I appointed him assistant detective and ordered champagne, but he wanted to stick to alcohol-free beer.
“You drink too much, Uncle Gerhard.”
That evening I was back in my office poring over the history of banking. The Sorbian Cooperative Bank also had a paragraph dedicated to it. It was a rarity. Cooperative banks had actually come about as self-help establishments set up by occupational groups. Schulze-Delitzsch had set out to make artisans into members of a cooperative through cooperative banks, while Raiffeisen strove to do the same with farmers. Hans Kleiner from Cottbus, who founded the Sorbian Cooperative Bank in 1868, wanted to inspire cooperative ideas in the Sorbian Slavic minority. His mother was Sorbian, wore Sorbian dress, told little Hans Sorbian fairy tales and taught him Sorbian songs, with the result that he made Sorbian affairs his life’s work. During his lifetime the bank had only Sorbian members, but after his death it opened its doors to others, expanded, flourished, and survived the great inflation and the worldwide depression. Then came a great blow. The Nazis wanted nothing to do with the Sorbians and turned the bank into a regular cooperative bank.
When and how the Sorbian Cooperative Bank was to recover from this blow would have to wait till tomorrow. Weller & Welker had taken the bank over, so it must have recovered and had a happy ending. On my way home that night I found the cooperative idea so sensible that the usual hankering of banks and bankers for more and more money suddenly struck me as strange. Why heap money upon money? Because a child’s compulsion to collect things can in adult years no longer be satisfied by collecting marbles, beer coasters, and stamps, and so must turn to money?
The following morning I was sitting once more at the desk in my office before the children of the neighborhood were heading to school. The bakery a few doors down was already open, and a steaming cup of coffee and a croissant stood before me. There wasn’t much more to the story of the Sorbian Cooperative Bank. While other such banks were closed down by the Soviets, those in and around Cottbus continued to be run under the name of Sorbian Cooperative Bank. The bank was completely absorbed into the system of a state-owned savings bank. Yet it did keep its name; respect for the Sorbian Slavic people, brothers of the victorious Soviet people, forbade its abolition. Along with its name it also kept sufficient autonomy for the Treuhand Agency, formed after the reunification of Germany to privatize East German enterprises, to put the Sorbian Cooperative Bank on the market, ultimately selling it to Weller & Welker.
It was nine o’clock and the morning traffic on the Augustaanlage had quieted down. I heard children, who for some reason or other didn’t have to get to school till later. Then I heard a car pull up by the sidewalk, where it stopped with its engine running. The rattling and chugging began to get on my nerves after a while. Why didn’t they turn the engine off? I got up and looked out the window.
It was Schuler’s green Isetta. Its door was clapped open, but the car was empty. I went out onto the sidewalk. Schuler was standing in the entrance next door, reading the names beside the buzzers.
“Herr Schuler!” I called, and he turned and waved. He waved as if he were shooing me away from the sidewalk-as if he wanted me to get back into my office. I didn’t understand, and though he seemed to be calling out something to me I couldn’t hear him. He came staggering toward me, his right hand still waving, his left hand pressed to his stomach. I could see that his left hand was holding the handle of a black attaché case that was knocking against his legs. I took a few steps toward him and he bumped into me. I got a whiff of his bad smell and heard him whisper “Take this!” and “Go!” He shoved the case toward me and I took it. He steadied himself on me with the hand that had just given me the case and righted himself. He hurried over to his car, got in, closed the door, and drove off.
He swerved in a crooked line from the sidewalk to the right lane, and then from the right lane into the left. He steered toward the steel bollards bordering the traffic island in the middle of the Augustaanlage, scraped one, scraped the next, scraped the traffic light at Mollstrasse, and picked up speed without paying any attention to the light, which had turned red, to the cars that had just started entering from Mollstrasse, or to the children who had begun crossing the Augustaanlage. At first it looked as if he would crash into the lights or the tree at the edge of the island on the other side of Mollstrasse. But he rolled over the curb, missed the lights, and grazed the tree lightly, and yet the curb and the tree tilted the Isetta enough to capsize it, sending it sliding on its side over the grass until it crashed into another tree.