“But you know what I mean,” Nägelsbach replied.
Philipp got up, hit his palm against his forehead, and left the room.
Nägelsbach doesn’t play chess, so I had brought along my Othello board game.
“Shall we play?” I asked him.
We sat down and laid out the double-sided pieces along the grid, flipping them from their white sides to their black sides and back. When that game was over, we played a second game in silence, and then another.
“I do see your point,” I told Nägelsbach. “I also see what your wife is saying. There is, by the way, another good reason to go to the police: Do you remember the man who came to your retirement party unannounced and wanted to talk to me? He’s been watching us, and there’s a good chance he might be out to blackmail us-though probably Welker rather than you, Philipp, or me.”
“I don’t remember seeing him at my party,” Nägelsbach said, smiling with a touch of embarrassment. “I admit I had a glass or two too many.”
“Of the three of us, I have the least to lose if you go to the police. Involuntary manslaughter, because we let Welker take Samarin’s pistol. We could explain the sequence of events, though I guess it would sound quite contrived. But unlike you or Philipp, I wouldn’t be facing disciplinary proceedings. Not to mention that for a private investigator our escapade would not generate negative publicity: quite the opposite. For a retired police officer, though, and for a surgeon at the municipal hospital, it’s another matter altogether. So don’t worry on my account. But three of us were involved in this-we planned it, set it up, and carried it out. So it’s only fair that we three come to a decision as to whether we will inform the police or not. I’d say you either have to convince Philipp that that’s the way to go or you’ll have to live with the fact that Welker won’t be charged.”
I waited, but Nägelsbach didn’t say anything. He lay there with his eyes shut.
“As for Welker’s justification for shooting Samarin,” I continued, “I think he’s right: Samarin would never have left him alone. In the long run, neither the police nor the law would have managed to protect Welker from Samarin. There’s no way they could have. You know that as well as I do.”
He slowly opened his eyes. “I’m going to have to give this some thought. I-”
“I want to say one more thing about the soul,” I said. “You won’t compromise your soul if, for once, you aren’t level in a matter concerning you and the law. If you’re always on the level, you don’t need a soul. We have a soul so we can look at ourselves in the mirror, even when we think we can’t. I don’t like corrupt policemen. But I know some who at one time or another didn’t stick to the book, and who then had a rough time of it but got over it, and precisely because of that became fine policemen. Policemen with a lot of soul.”
“I know such policemen, too. But I must admit I always looked down on them a little.” He propped himself up in bed and with a sweeping gesture pointed at the room, the empty space for a second bed, the TV, the telephone, and the flowers, and made a stab at a joke. “You see, I, too, am corruptible. I could never pay for all of this. Welker’s paying.”
10 Like a new case
That evening I sat in my office writing a letter to Vera Soboda, saying that there would be no more money laundering at Weller & Welker; that the bank had been a madhouse in which the patients locked up the doctors and the nurses and were passing themselves off as doctors and nurses; that Samarin, their leader, was dead; and that the institution was once again being run by its doctor, Welker. I liked Nägelsbach’s metaphor.
I found a letter from Welker in the mail. He thanked me with a check for twelve thousand marks. He also invited me to a party the Saturday after next to celebrate his move back to the Gustav Kirchhoff Strasse-it would be a pleasant opportunity for us all to meet again.
I wondered whether I should draw up a detailed invoice for him, as I had promised when I took on the case. I usually also submit a written report to my clients once a case is closed. But was the case closed? My client wasn’t expecting anything more from me. He had thanked me, paid me, and the convivial get-together to which he was inviting me would also serve as a farewell party. As far as he was concerned, the case was closed. But was it, as far as I was concerned?
Who had frightened Schuler to death? Samarin had neither admitted it nor denied it. I couldn’t believe that he got rid of Schuler just because of the money; otherwise, he wouldn’t have mentioned that Schuler taught him to read and write. If Samarin had killed him, or had him killed, there was more behind it than the attaché case with the money. But what? And by what means had Schuler been frightened to death?
Or was I on the wrong track? Could it be that I didn’t want to accept that I was the reason for Schuler’s death? Was I looking for a plot when it was nothing more than Schuler’s infirmity and disorientation, and my slowness to react? A weak constitution, a bad day, a perplexing amount of money-wasn’t that enough to put Schuler into the state he was in when I met him?
I got up and walked over to the window. His Isetta had been parked over there, he had given me the attaché case over there, and then had driven in a long, crooked line across the street and onto the grassy island between the traffic light and the tree. He had died at that tree. The light turned red, yellow, green, and then yellow and red again. I couldn’t take my eyes away: the funeral lights of the teacher Adolf Schuler, retired.
Regardless of whether Samarin had frightened him to death or if his advanced years had gotten him into such a state, I could have saved him but didn’t. I owed him. I couldn’t do anything about his death now. All I could do was to throw light on it. It was like a new case.
Red, yellow, green, yellow, red. I owed it not only to Schuler to clear up his death but also to myself to solve my last case. Which in fact it was: my last case. I hadn’t had one in months when this one came along thanks to a chance encounter on the Hirschhorner Höhe. Perhaps I might be sent out again to investigate people filing false claims for sick leave. But I wouldn’t want to do such a job anymore.
It’s a shame one can’t choose one’s last case. A high point, a finale, one that rounds off with a flourish everything one has achieved. Instead, the last case is as accidental as all the others. That’s how it goes: you do this, you do that, and before you know it, that was your life.
11 A thousand and one reasons
I ran into Philipp in the corridor. “I’d be happy if I didn’t have to go back in there,” he said, nodding toward Nägelsbach’s room.
“Did you get the forensics report?”
“The forensics report?” Then he remembered what I wanted and that the report was lying on his desk. “Come with me.”
Both chairs in front of his desk were heaped high with files and mail, so I sat down on his examination table, as if he were going to come over and tap my knee with a little hammer to check my reflexes. He leafed through the report. “Schuler: chest and stomach crushed, vital organs damaged, neck broken. It was a bad accident.”
“I was with him just minutes before it happened. Something was wrong with him. It was as if someone had frightened the living daylights out of him.”
“Perhaps he was sick. Perhaps he’d taken too many sleeping pills. Perhaps his medications interacted. Perhaps he had an adverse reaction to a new sedative or blood-pressure medication. By God, Gerhard, there are a thousand and one reasons why someone might be in a bad state and have an accident.”
But I just couldn’t believe that Schuler could have taken the wrong blood-pressure medication or too many sleeping pills. He was no fool. The piles of books and folders seemed chaotic but were in meticulous order, and surely his medications would have been, too.