I served the food and we ate. Vera wanted to know what had happened at the Sorbian bank, and I told her. I explained where I knew Ulbrich from and why I was certain he knew nothing of former or present money laundering at the bank. “He suspected that something crooked was going on at Weller and Welker, had talked about the Russian or Chechen Mafia, and might have been thinking of money laundering. But as for anything specific-he himself can’t have found out anything, and I’m certain Welker wouldn’t have clued him in. That is, if there’s still anything to be clued into.”
“I… I see I was quick to jump to conclusions,” Vera said.
“Yes, you might have been.”
“In that case,” she said, “Ulbrich might be right in saying that the bank doesn’t need a manager who knows anything about banking. Perhaps the Sorbian bank needs to economize because no more money is being laundered, and firings are called for, and they took the first step with me. Perhaps they wanted to get rid of me so I wouldn’t make trouble with the other firings.” She looked at me with a sad smile and shook her head. “That’s just a fantasy; I wouldn’t have made any trouble about the other firings.”
I got up and took the trash bag with Schuler’s money out of my suitcase. I told her how I’d gotten the money and how Schuler had probably stumbled upon it.
“There’s a whole lot that needs to be done around here,” I said. “Take the money and get it all done.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. I’m not saying you can do everything that needs doing. Just some of it.”
“I… this is… This is quite a surprise. I don’t know if I can… I mean, I do have some ideas. But you’ve seen how angry I can get, and when I get angry I really do foolish things. Wouldn’t you want to approach someone who… well, someone who’s better? How about you yourself?”
The following morning I found her in her nightgown in the kitchen. She had apportioned most of the money into little bundles on the table and was counting the rest with unparalleled dexterity.
“We were made to practice counting money the old way,” she said with a laugh, “and whoever counted fastest was made supervisor.”
“So you are taking up my offer?” I asked.
“There are almost a hundred thousand marks here. I’ll account for every penny.”
She handed me a little gray booklet. “I found it among the bills.”
It was a passport from the Third Reich. I opened it and found a picture and the name Ursula Sara Brock, born October 10, 1911. A cursive J was stamped over it. It was clear that when it came to the money Schuler had left me a bequest. But why had he left me this passport? I leafed through it, turning it this way and that, and put it in my pocket.
8 Keep an eye out!
On the way back I took the autobahn. I wanted to float along in the stream of cars without distractions, without having to pay too much attention to the road. I wanted to think.
Who was Ursula Brock? If she were still alive she would be an old lady and could hardly have frightened Schuler to death. Would Samarin or his people have frightened him to death? Among the many unanswered questions was why they wouldn’t have taken the money from him right away. Would Welker, who only later laundered money, if he was laundering money at all… No, even if I could prove that Welker was laundering money now, it wouldn’t make sense that he would have frightened Schuler to death. Unless, that is, he already knew he was going to inherit Samarin’s money-laundering enterprise and was afraid of Schuler’s insatiable inquisitiveness.
I drove in the right lane, among trucks, elderly couples in old Fords and Opels, Poles in rattling, smoking wrecks, and diehard communists in Trabants. When an exhaust pipe in front of me stank too much I switched to the left lane and drove past the trucks, Poles, and communists until I found an elderly couple behind whom I pulled in again. In one car a plastic dog was enthroned in the back window, shaking his head from side to side and up and down with insight and sorrow.
What did I have to go on? A dark Saab on the Schlossplatz in Schwetzingen and Vera Soboda’s replacement by Karl-Heinz Ulbrich-at the end of the day, this was so little that I asked myself if I really had any proof against Welker. Was I envious of his wealth, his bank, his house, his children? The ease with which he had achieved everything? The ease with which he sauntered through life? The ability to remain untouched by both the evil that befell him and the evil he wrought? Was it a case of age envying youth, the war and postwar generation envying the generation of the economic miracle, the guilty envying the innocent? Was I being gnawed at by his having shot Samarin and having put Nägelsbach in danger without batting an eye? Was it that I didn’t feel so innocent and uninvolved?
I spent the night in Nuremberg. The following morning I set out early and was in Schwetzingen by eleven. Until seven I sat around in various cafés, keeping my eye on the bank. A few cars, a few clients on foot, a few employees who sat down on a bench on the square at lunchtime and who at six said their good-byes in front of the gate-that was all.
As I sat in my office that evening, Brigitte called and asked if my trip had been a success. Then she asked: “Does this mean your case has come to an end?”
“Almost.”
While I was jotting down what I knew and didn’t know, what still had to be done and still might be done, there was a knock at the door. It was Georg.
“I happened to be walking by and saw you at your desk,” he said. “Do you have a moment?”
He had been riding his bike and now cleaned his glasses. Then he sat down opposite me in the cone of the desk lamp. He eyed the half-empty wine bottle. “You’re drinking too much, Uncle Gerhard.”
I poured myself another glass and made him some tea.
“There must be a file at the Restitution Office,” he said. “The nephew’s son who emigrated to London and died there in the 1950s must have put in a claim after the war for the restitution of the family fortune. The Nazis wrecked and ravaged his home so completely that his parents killed themselves. Maybe the son knew something and mentioned it.”
I needed a few moments to see where he was heading. “You’re talking about the silent partnership? Nobody here’s interested in that anymore. Nobody was ever really interested in it; my client wasn’t, and I wasn’t. It was just that it took me a long time to realize what it was a pretext for.”
But Georg was on a roll. “I looked further into the matter. In the fifties, restitutions were a big thing, and there was one case after another. Lots of minor cases, but also really major ones. Jews who’d been forced to sell factories, department stores, or land for next to nothing, who either wanted their property back or compensation. Don’t you remember all that?”
Of course I remembered. Particularly the expropriations of Jews. There had been a naive Jew who didn’t want to sell, and when his business partner extorted him he turned to the public prosecutor’s office. When I started as a public prosecutor in 1942, this incident already lay some time back but still made for a good joke.
“Aren’t you interested in what happened?” Georg asked.
“Why would I be?”
“Why would you be? I want to know,” Georg said, staring at me obstinately. “I’ve tracked down the silent partner. I know what kind of guy he was. He was conservative and liked to listen to music, drink wine, and smoke Havanas. He’d been awarded a pile of medals, made a fortune providing expert legal advice to the nobility, and was a modest man who invested all his money for his niece and nephew. As far as I’m concerned he’s alive and kicking.”