“I don’t want our happiness to-”
“I know you don’t want to, Gerhard, but you do it anyway.”
I couldn’t let that go. I wasn’t ready to roll over and turn my back to her, lonely, difficult, and old. Not after our days in Sardinia.
“Brigitte?”
“Yes?”
“What would you rather do instead of your massage practice?”
She was silent for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to say anything more. Then she wept a few tears. “I would have liked to have had children with you. I had Manu despite my sterilization. I didn’t have any with you, though I didn’t take any precautions. We would have had to try it in vitro.”
“You and me in a test tube?”
“You think the doctor will shake us up in a test tube like a barman with a cocktail shaker? He would lay your sperm and my egg on a glass slide and then let them do what people in love do in bed.”
I liked the idea of the two cells on a glass. It was a pleasant image.
“Now it’s too late,” Brigitte said.
“I’m sorry. I just told you about Schuler. He would still be alive if I hadn’t been too slow. I’ve always been too slow, and not just since I’ve grown older. I should have asked you after our first night together whether you wanted to marry me.”
I reached out my hand, and after a slight hesitation Brigitte raised her head and I slid my arm under it.
“It’s not too late for that.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.” She nestled up to me and nodded.
“First I have to finish this case. It’ll be my last case.”
3 Stealing tractors
This time I avoided Berlin. I went by car, got off the autobahn at Weimar and meandered over back roads. There was a park before Cottbus that had been created by Count Pückler, with a pyramid for himself and his wife, one for his favorite horse, and one for his favorite dog. The count’s Egyptian girlfriend had to make do with a grave in the cemetery. She had been young, beautiful, and dark, but her delicate Middle Eastern lungs couldn’t bear the Sorbian climate. I understood her. I hadn’t been able to stand up to the Sorbian climate on my last visit, either.
I had called Vera Soboda at her home in the morning and she’d invited me to dinner. She made a local potato dish with curd and offered me some Lausitzer Urquell, a beer from the region that has a sharp tang of hops but is easy on the palate.
“What brings you to Cottbus?” she asked.
“The Sorbian bank. Do you know how I can get at the data you told me about last time?”
“I don’t work there anymore. I was fired.” She laughed. “Don’t look so surprised. I wasn’t actually the bank manager. I just ran everything because someone had to do it, and the position had never been filled. Two weeks ago some idiot who knows nothing about banking was made manager. On his third day he fired me. It was all over in a flash. He came up to my desk and said: ‘Frau Soboda, you are fired. You have half an hour to remove any personal items from your desk and to leave the premises.’ He stood beside me and watched me, as if I might take the hole-puncher, the paper clips, or a pen. Then he walked me to the door and said: ‘You will receive seven months’ pay. Fair is fair.’”
“Did you see a lawyer?”
“The lawyer only shook his head and said my chances were up in the air. It seems I might have spoken my mind a little too clearly to the new manager. So I let it be. We have no experience here in taking employers to court. Were I to lose, who’d pay for it all?”
“What are you going to do now?”
“There’s enough to do around here. The problem is that what we need in these parts doesn’t generate money, and what generates money, we more often than not don’t need. But everything will fall into place. Our Lord in Heaven will not abandon a good Communist, as my former boss who took me under her wing always used to say.”
I was certain she would make it. She again looked like a tractor driver with whom one would gladly set out to steal tractors. She furrowed her brow. “What kind of data are you looking for?”
“I’d like to know if money’s still being laundered.”
“But you wrote me that-”
“I know. It’s just that I’m not sure if what I wrote you was right. I have a feeling that-”
“Do you know your way around computers?”
“No.”
She got up, placed her hands on her hips, and looked me up and down. “Do you expect me to go prowling with you through the night, break into the Sorbian bank, turn on the computer, and sift through it for data, just because you have ‘a feeling’? You expect me to risk my neck for this feeling of yours? Do you think I’ll get so much as a cleaning job in a bank if I’m caught at the Sorbian? Are you out of your mind?” She stood there scolding me in a way that I hadn’t been scolded since the days my mother used to tell me off. If I’d stood up I’d have towered over her by a head, ruining the magic. So I remained seated and stared at her enthusiastically until she stopped, sat down, and burst out laughing.
“Did I say anything about breaking in?”
“No,” she replied, still laughing. “I said it. And I’d like nothing more than to do it and give those programs and databases a good whirl. But I can’t. Not even with you, who didn’t say anything about breaking in, but thought about it.”
“How about without you? Could I get inside without you and turn the computer on and look for the data?”
“Didn’t you just say you don’t know anything about computers?”
“Can’t you lay out for me what you did back then? Step by step? I-”
“You want to become a hacker in a single day? Forget it.”
“I-”
“It’s almost eleven, and we Sorbians go to bed early. Let’s have another beer, and then I’ll fix you up on the sofa.”
4 In the broom closet
“Theoretically speaking,” I said to Vera Soboda over breakfast, “is there a way of getting into the Sorbian bank under cover of darkness?”
She answered so quickly that she, too, must have given this some thought overnight.
“Under cover of darkness is not the time to break in. What you would have to do is unlock the door to the kitchen area with a skeleton key in the afternoon and hide in the broom closet until everyone’s gone. Then you would have the bank to yourself. Getting in isn’t hard-it’s getting out. At seven in the morning, when the cleaning ladies show up, you would have to hide again until the bank opened, when you could mingle with the customers. But you couldn’t hide in the closet, because that’s where the detergents and mops are kept, and the ladies will be cleaning the toilets, the room with the copiers, behind the tellers’ counters, and under the desks. And you can’t get into the room that has the deposit boxes and the safe.”
“How do the cleaning ladies get into the bank?”
“They have a key for the side entrance.”
“Could I tear past them when they unlock the door?”
She gave the idea some thought. We were having eggs and bacon with potatoes, along with bread and jam and coffee. She ate as if she hadn’t eaten in ages and wouldn’t eat again in ages. When I gave up at my second egg, she ate what was left on my plate, too.
“Eat breakfast like a bishop, lunch like a priest, dinner like a mendicant,” she said. “The cleaning ladies would get the fright of their lives and call the police. But why not?”
She wiped both plates clean with a piece of bread.
“Shall we continue theorizing a little?” I asked.
She laughed. “No harm in that, I suppose.”
“If you were in the bank, sitting at the computer, and couldn’t figure out the programs and the data but happened to have a cell phone handy with which you could call someone who knew what was what, wouldn’t you then-”