“Quite by chance, the way one does. It’s not as if one expects this sort of thing, or keeps an eye out for it. One of our customers insisted that she had deposited fifty marks a week earlier, on a day when she forgot to bring her savings book with her. Now she had brought her savings book in order to have her fifty-mark deposit entered, but our bank system had no record of it.”
“What did you do?”
“I’ve known Frau Sellmann forever. She’s an old lady who I’m sure scrimps and saves all she can, and she is conscientious to a fault. She had her deposit slip with her, and though it’s not impossible to forge one, Frau Sellmann is no forger. So I entered the fifty marks in her savings book, and then in the evening I initiated a search through our system to see where her deposit might have ended up. Tanya, the teller who had signed the receipt, is just as conscientious as Frau Sellmann. I just cannot imagine her forgetting to deposit the money.”
“Did you find the fifty marks?”
“We have a system we use and a program that tracks every step of every transaction. But we can’t access it because it’s there to monitor us, and the whole idea is that we shouldn’t be able to manipulate it. But I’m very good with computers, so I tried to get into the program.”
“And did you?”
She laughed. “You’re on pins and needles.”
I nodded. My fever was getting worse, and I had the feeling I couldn’t hold out much longer-just a little more, and during this time I’d have to find out all I could.
“I got into the tracking program, and in fact it had registered the deposit of those fifty marks. But at the same time there was a deposit of thirty-five thousand marks to her account, more than Frau Sellmann with all her scrimping could have ever scraped together. The tracking program had recorded that the thirty-five thousand marks had not gone into Frau Sellmann’s real account but into a false account that had been set up under her name. As both payments had taken place at the same time, both the fifty marks and the thirty-five thousand marks had somehow gotten into her false account. When I looked further, I found that Frau Sellmann’s false account had a balance of one hundred twenty thousand marks, a good hundred thousand more than in her real account. I also found all the other accounts in which my poor Sorbian compatriots were made out to be wealthy men and women, not to mention the accounts that show poor, dead Sorbians to be alive and wealthy.”
“The whole thing’s quite straightforward,” I said, hoping she would agree with me and elaborate further so that I might finally get some insight into all of this.
“When you own a bank,” she said, “it isn’t all that difficult to launder money-in this way, and I imagine in other ways, too. Once the money is in the bank, all the bank has to do is invest it in a manner so that it gets lost. They’ve invested most of it in Russia.”
“In their own enterprises.”
“I believe so.” She looked at me. “What’s the next step? What will the upshot be when you arrest Welker and Samarin? What will happen to the Sorbian bank?”
“I don’t know. In the old days I could have called and asked Nägelsbach, but he’s retired, and I’d be happy to transfer my money from the Badische Beamtenbank to the Sorbian Cooperative Bank, but it won’t be enough. It wouldn’t matter that I’m not part of the cooperative, would it? I’m also not an official. Schuler was a retired official, but he’s dead. Can you understand that? I still don’t understand why he’s dead.”
She looked at me in alarm.
I got up. “I’ve got to go. I don’t want to leave still owing you an explanation, but I’ve got to get to bed. I’m sick. I’m running a temperature. Some skinheads threw me into the Landwehr Canal yesterday, which in a way served me right, and today I stood outdoors all day in the rain and cold. The only reason my nose isn’t running is because I got some medicine, but now my head’s so heavy and numb that I’d rather not have a head at all. Not to mention that I feel cold.”
My teeth were chattering.
She got up. “Herr…”
“Self.”
“Herr Self, shall I call you a cab?”
“It would be best if I could lie down on your sofa and you’d lie down with me till I warmed up again.”
She didn’t lie down with me. But she set me up on her sofa, heaped all the comforters and woolen blankets she could find over me, gave me two aspirin, made me some grog, and placed her cool hand on my hot forehead till I fell asleep.
21 Childish faces
When I woke up it was bright daylight. My suit was draped neatly over a chair and there was a note on the table: “I’ll try to be back by four. Hope you feel better.” I made some tea in the kitchen, took the cup to the sofa, and lay down again.
I had regained all my senses. But my nose was runny, my throat was sore, and I felt so weak that I wanted nothing more than to doze all day and drowsily look out the window, watching the wind drive the gray clouds across the blue sky and rustle through the bare twigs of the plane tree. I wanted to listen to the rain and watch the raindrops running down the windowpanes. Not think about Schuler, whom I could have saved if I had not been too slow; not about the skinheads I’d let make a fool of me; and not about Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, whom I found touching even though I didn’t like him. But whenever I dozed off, it all came back: Ulbrich seeking my paternal acknowledgement and backing, the skinheads and my fear, Schuler staggering toward me with his attaché case. So I got up and sat by the tiled stove and thought about everything that Vera Soboda had told me. She was right; when you own a bank it’s not hard to launder money. The dirty money went into the false accounts of customers at the Sorbian Cooperative Bank, accounts that were run in a secret parallel system, and from there the money would be invested in companies that only showed losses and perhaps didn’t even exist. That way the customers were rid of money they didn’t even know they had, while the owners of the dirty money and the companies ended up with clean money. Frau Sellmann had a hundred thousand marks too much in her account; even if the idea wasn’t to deposit an extra hundred thousand marks in every illegitimate account, but simply three or four times the amount that people had in their legitimate accounts, with a few thousand clients, millions upon millions of marks could be laundered.
Schuler must have found out where dirty money was being kept. Why hadn’t he gone to the police? Why had he come to me? Because he didn’t want to destroy Welker, his former pupil and the son of his friend and patron?
It was noon. I looked around the apartment. The kitchen area had once been part of the bathroom, and the living room was also her bedroom, the sofa her bed, and she had spent the night in the covered veranda. She also had an office with a desk, a computer, and a hammock. As the manager of a bank she ought to be able to afford more. What did she do with her money? Next to the desk were photographs of her with and without her husband, with and without a child, a girl with a high forehead and blond hair, as dainty as Frau Soboda was robust. Might the girl not be a daughter but a niece? I took a sheet of paper from her desk.
Dear Frau Soboda,
Thank you for everything you have done for me. I enjoyed staying at your place, even though I admit I am somewhat shaken that I might look like a man from the Stasi. I slept a long time, my temperature is almost gone, and I’m glad that my head is back on my shoulders.
I’m not a policeman. I am a private investigator and, though it may be hard for you to believe, Herr Welker hired me: I am investigating a matter for him that I am quite certain is merely a pretext. But I do not know for what.
I wish I knew what it was. I also hope to know more before I go to the police with what I know. I’ll inform you when I get to that point.