At first the conversation was a little stiff, but the awkwardness quickly evaporated. The wine, a chardonnay from the Palatine, went down so easily, the food was so simple and convincing-from thick green spelt soup and Victoria perch to blackberry trifle-and the glow of candles was so cozy. Welker gave a little speech; he was happy to be reunited with his children. He thanked the water tower commandos-though he preferred not to touch on why he had been away or what he was thanking us for. But everyone was pleased.
It grew cooler, and a fireplace was glowing inside the house.
“Shall we go for a stroll in the garden before we go inside?” Welker said, taking me aside.
We crossed the lawn and sat down on a bench beneath the blackthorn.
“I’ve thought a lot about Gregor Samarin-and us Welkers, too. We took him in, but everything we gave him was like a handout. Because we gave, we also expected his services. When I was a boy I had the room in the attic, while his room was in the cellar so he could take care of the central heating, which back then still ran on coal, not oil.” He slowly shook his head. “I’ve been trying to remember when I first realized that he hated me. I can’t recall. Back then it simply didn’t interest me, which is why I can’t remember.” He looked at me. “Isn’t that terrible?”
I nodded.
“I know that shooting him was even worse,” Welker continued. “But somehow it’s terrible in the same way. Do you know what I mean? What happened in our childhood bore fruit, as the Bible says. In his case, it was murdering my wife and everything else he did, and in my case, that I could only save myself from him the way I did.”
“He told me he liked your wife.”
“He liked Stephanie the way a servant might like the daughter of a master he hates. At the end of the day her place is on the other side, and when the chips are down, that’s all that matters. When Stephanie confronted him, the chips were down.”
The lights went on in the house and their glow fell on the lawn. It remained dark beneath the blackthorn. Someone put on a Hildegard Knef record: “One and One That Makes Two.” I wanted to take Brigitte in my arms and dance a waltz. “As for Stephanie,” he continued, “I don’t know where it was that they… Were they waiting for her up at the hut? I have no idea how they could have followed us without our noticing. We thought we were alone.” He pressed his hands against his eyes and sighed. “I still can’t rid myself of this nightmare. And yet all I want is to wake up and put it all behind me.”
I felt sorry for him. At the same time, I didn’t really want to hear what he was telling me. I wasn’t his friend. I had completed the case he had hired me for. I now had another case.
“What did you talk about with Schuler the evening you went to see him?” I asked.
“Schuler…” If I had hurt him by the abrupt change of topic, he showed no sign. “Gregor and I went to see him together. He told us about his work with the files and about the Strasbourg lead concerning the silent partner, which you later followed. Otherwise…”
“Did you ask him for the money? The money in the attaché case?”
“He talked about it, but back then I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about. Schuler said that a person becomes suspicious when he finds money in a cellar and starts wondering whom it might belong to, knowing that no good comes of evil, and had we forgotten that? He was looking at Gregor when he said it.”
“What did you-”
“I wasn’t there the whole time. I had… I had diarrhea and kept having to go to the toilet. Schuler must have found the money Gregor had stashed away in a part of the old cellar, where he had no business being. He put two and two together and suspected Gregor, because I am a Welker and Gregor doesn’t belong to the family. He wanted to get his former pupil back on the straight and narrow.” Welker laughed with a touch of mockery and sadness. “I suppose you’ll also want to know what state Schuler was in. He smelled bad, but he was fine. Furthermore, he didn’t make any threats. He didn’t even say that he had the money. Gregor found that out the next day.”
Hildegard Knef’s song had ended. I heard applause, laughter, voices, and then the song was played again, louder this time. If I couldn’t take part in the dancing, I’d at least have liked to sing along: “God in Heaven is all-seeing, he’s seen right through you, there’s no point in fleeing.”
Welker laid his hand on my knee. “I won’t ever forget what you did for me. One day, thank God, the memories of the last few months will pale. Until now the good things that have happened to me have remained clearer in my mind than the bad, and what you did for me as my private investigator was a good thing.” He got up. “Shall we go inside?”
When Hildegard Knef sang the song for a third time, I danced with Brigitte.
PART THREE
1 Too late
Why couldn’t things stay as they were? Light, cheerful, and breezy, with a little sadness and a little mourning-mourning for Stephanie Welker, Adolf Schuler, and Gregor Samarin. Yes, for Gregor Samarin, too, destructive as his life had been. And sadness, because Brigitte and I only now discovered the lightness with which our feet found the right steps as we moved in harmony and enjoyed each other. Why couldn’t we dance like this through the whole year, this year, next year, the one after, and as many years as we would have?
I saw the same happiness I felt on the faces of the others. The Nägelsbachs smiled as if they were sharing a precious secret; Philipp’s face no longer showed his peevishness at growing old; and Füruzan’s face no longer showed the weariness of her long path from Anatolia to Germany and all the many nights during which she earned the money that she sent back home. Brigitte was beaming, as if finally everything were fine. Welker wasn’t dancing. He was leaning with folded arms against the door frame watching us with a friendly smile, as if waiting for us to leave. We left when it started getting late for the children.
A few days after the party Brigitte and I went to Sardinia. Manu’s school was on vacation, and to everyone’s surprise Manu’s father announced that he was taking Manu skiing. Brigitte, who hadn’t anticipated her ex-husband’s plan, hadn’t scheduled any appointments at her massage practice so she wouldn’t be working during Manu’s break. She said to me: “It’s now or never.” That’s how far things had come-her calendar would dictate what we would or wouldn’t do; mine didn’t count.
Ten days in Sardinia. We’d never spent so much time together. Our hotel was past its heyday; in the lobby the dark red leather of the armchairs and sofas was frayed, the candelabras in the dining room were no longer lit, and the brass fittings in the bathroom spewed out rusty water when we first turned on the faucets. But we were attentively served and looked after. The hotel stood among the trees of an overgrown garden on a small pebble-beach bay, and whether we decided to linger in the garden or by the water, the staff was quick to bring us two loungers, a table, and a beach umbrella if needed, and they were eager to serve us espresso, water, Campari, or Sardinian white wine.
The first days we did nothing but lounge about, blinking through the leaves at the sun and gazing dreamily over the sea to the horizon. Then we rented a car and drove along the coast and up into the mountains over narrow, winding roads to small villages with churches and market squares and vistas of valleys that at times stretched all the way to the sea. Old men sat in the squares, and I would have liked to sit with them and hear their tales of what dangerous brigands they used to be, tell them what a capable detective I had once been, and parade Brigitte before them. In Cagliari we climbed interminable steps up to the terrace of the Bastione and looked down at the harbor and the motley rooftops. In a small harbor town there was a feast with a procession and a chorus and orchestra that played and sang so heartrendingly that Brigitte’s eyes welled with tears. The last days we again spent lying on the beach under the trees.