“Oh, come on, Gerhard.” It was clear I was getting on his nerves. But he gave in. “Okay, I’ll call him right away.”
When I called Philipp back a little while later, he told me that Dr. Armbrust was on vacation for three weeks. “Will you get off my back now?”
“Can’t you call him at home?” I asked. “Who knows whether he’s gone anywhere.”
“You mean-”
“Right away. Yes, call him now.”
Philipp sighed, but he found the number. “Stay on the line; I’ll call him on my cell phone.”
Dr. Armbrust wasn’t at home, either. His housekeeper explained that he’d be traveling till the last day of his vacation.
13 Apple pie and cappuccino
Ulbrich came by on Sunday afternoon. He no longer held my refusal to be his father against me. I once read somewhere that East Germans have a taste for the finer things in life, so on Saturday I had baked an apple pie. He ate a piece with pleasure and asked for some chocolate sprinkles for the whipped cream I had made so he could turn his cup of coffee into a cappuccino. Turbo let Ulbrich cuddle him, and I can’t imagine things having been any cozier back in the old Socialist days.
I had selected some photographs of Klara for him to look at. There are five albums on my shelf: one with pictures of Klara as a baby and little girl with her brother and parents; one with Klara as a beautiful tennis and ski debutante, one devoted to our engagement, marriage, and honeymoon; and one to our last months in Berlin and our first years in Heidelberg. All these albums make me sad. The one that makes me saddest is the last album, of the postwar period and the fifties and sixties. Klara, who had dreamed of a sparkling life at the side of a public prosecutor with a glittering career, and in these dreams had herself glittered and sparkled, had had to readjust her sights to a scrimping reality and had become increasingly bitter. Back then I had held her bitterness and reproaches against her. I simply could no longer be a public prosecutor, first because I was no longer wanted on account of my past in the Third Reich, but also because I resisted, body and soul, acting with my colleagues as if we had no past, even if we were expected to. So I had become a private investigator. Couldn’t she accept that? Couldn’t she love me as I was? I have come to realize that love can be as much a matter of the expression, the laughter, the wit, the intelligence, or the other one’s caring as it can be a matter of his standing in the world and his circumstances. Would she have been a happy mother? After giving birth to Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, she could no longer have children; during his birth something must have gone wrong.
But you couldn’t tell just by looking at her. She was laughing in the photograph of April 1942, which I’d taken outside our house in the Bahnhofstrasse after her so-called Italian trip with Gigi. And again in a picture from June 1941, where she is walking along Unter den Linden and comes across as cheerful. Had the other man taken this picture? I had also brought out a picture from her school days, one from the 1950s where she was finally playing tennis again, since I was once more earning enough, and a picture taken shortly before she died.
Ulbrich looked at the photos slowly, without saying a word. “What did she die of?”
“Cancer.”
He assumed a troubled look and shook his head. “It’s still not fair though. I mean, once a child is born it also has to…” He didn’t continue.
What would I have done if Klara had wanted to keep the child? Had she ever asked herself this and concluded that I couldn’t have handled something like that?
He shook his head again. “It’s all very unfair. What a beautiful woman she was. The man… the man must have also been quite handsome. And take a look at me.” He held his face toward me as if I’d never seen it before. “If you’d been my father, I could understand. But with two such good-looking people…”
I burst out laughing, and he was taken aback. He made himself another cappuccino and had another slice of apple pie.
“I read that article in the Mannheimer Morgen. I must say, your police force goes about things quite casually. Back in the East things would have been done very differently. But perhaps things will be done differently here, too, if someone points the police in the right direction.” His look was no longer sad but defiant, the way he had looked at me when we first met. Could it be that today he wasn’t so disappointed in me because he felt he had the upper hand?
I didn’t say anything.
“You haven’t really done anything. But the other guy, the one from the bank…” He waited, and when I was still silent, he continued feeling his way forward. “I mean, he clearly preferred not to tell the police that he… And I imagine that he’d also prefer that nobody else would tell them that-”
“You would tell them?”
“You needn’t say that so sharply, as if I were some… All I’m saying is, he’d do better not to leave anything to chance. Are you still working for him?”
Did he intend to blackmail Welker?
“Are you in such bad financial shape?” I asked him.
“I-”
“You’d do better to go back where you came from. I’m sure the security network will soon be flourishing there the way it is everywhere else. Firms will be looking for representatives, and insurance companies will be looking for agents who know their way around. There’s nothing for you to gain here. It’ll be your word against ours-how far will you get?”
“My word? What do you think I’m going to say? I was only asking. I mean…” After a while he said quietly: “I tried to get a job as a security guard, and also as an insurance agent, even as a zookeeper. It’s not that easy.”
“That’s a pity.”
He nodded. “There are no free rides anymore.”
After he left I called Welker. I wanted to warn him. Should Ulbrich seek him out, I didn’t want him to find Welker unprepared. “Thank you for informing me,” he said. He took down Ulbrich’s name and address and seemed quite unruffled. “See you next Saturday.”
14 One and one that makes two
The children enjoyed Welker’s party most. They were the right age-Manu and Welker’s son, Max, were a little older than Isabel, Welker’s daughter, and Anne, the daughter of Füruzan’s colleague who had taken part in the operation at the water tower. At first the boys sat at the computer, ignoring the girls, who went to another room and dolled themselves up. Brigitte crinkled her nose-she’d rather have seen them at the computer than falling into the beauty trap. But once the girls were all prettied up the boys forgot about the computer and began to flirt. Manu with Isabel, who had inherited the dark hair and fiery eyes of her mother, and Max with Anne, both blond. The garden was large, and when Brigitte and I took a walk over to the pear tree by the fence, we saw that one of the teen couples was making out on the bench beneath the blackthorn, and the other couple was sitting on the wall by the roses. It was a sweet and innocent sight. Still, Brigitte was worried when it got dark and the children didn’t come to the table that had been set up in the garden, so she went looking for them. They were sitting on the balcony drinking Coca-Cola and eating potato chips and talking about love and death.
The Nägelsbachs were there, along with Philipp and Füruzan, Füruzan’s colleague and her boyfriend, and Brigitte and me. I could see how relieved Philipp was that Nägelsbach had decided not to go to the police. There was also a young woman there whom Welker introduced as Max’s teacher at the Kurfürst-Friedrich Gymnasium and on whom he lavished as much attention as a young widower with two children could afford to. I’ve forgotten who the other guests were. They were Welker’s neighbors and friends, or acquaintances from his tennis club.