‘So, all’s well that ends well.’
‘That would have a somewhat cynical ring to it, I think, in the knowledge that Mischkey went on to die in a car crash. But you’re right, for the Works the matter had a happy ending, all things considered. Will we be seeing you here again? I had no idea that the general and yourself were such old friends. He told me about it when my wife and I spent an evening at his home recently. You know his house in Ludolf-Krehl-Strasse?’
I knew Korten’s house in Heidelberg, one of the first to be built in the late fifties from the perspective of personal security. I can still remember Korten one evening proudly demonstrating the cable car to me that connects the house, situated high up on the steep cliff above the street, with the entrance gate. ‘If there’s a power cut, it runs on my emergency power supply.’
Firner and I said our goodbyes with a few niceties. It was four o’clock, too late to make up for the missed lunch, too early to eat dinner. I went to the Herschel baths.
The sauna was empty. I sweated alone, swam alone beneath the high cupola with its Byzantine mosaics, found myself alone in the Irish-Roman steam bath and on the roof terrace. Shrouded in a large, white sheet, I dozed off on my deck chair in the rest room. Philipp was roller-skating through the hospital corridors. The columns he passed were shapely female legs. Sometimes they moved. Philipp avoided them, laughing. I laughed back at him. Then I suddenly saw that it was a scream that gashed his face. I woke up and thought of Mischkey.
5 Hmm, well, what do you mean by good?
The proprietor of Café O had expressed his personality in an interior design that summarized everything that was fashionable at the end of the seventies, from the imitation fin-de-siècle lamps and the hand-operated orange juice squeezer to the little bistro tables with the marble tops. I wouldn’t want to know him.
Frau Mügler, the dancer, I recognized by the severe black hair pulled back into a little ponytail, her angular femininity, and her look of sincere engagement. She’d gone as far as she could to look like Pina Bausch. She was sitting at the window, drinking a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
‘Self. We spoke on the phone yesterday.’ She looked at me with raised eyebrows and nodded almost imperceptibly. I joined her. ‘Nice of you to take the time. My insurance firm still has some questions regarding Herr Mencke’s accident that his colleague may be able to answer.’
‘How did you hit on me in particular? I don’t know Sergej especially well, haven’t been here in Mannheim for long.’
‘You’re simply the first one back from vacation. Tell me, did Herr Mencke strike you as particularly exhausted and nervous in the last few weeks before the accident? We’re looking for an explanation for its strange nature.’ I ordered a coffee; she took another orange juice.
‘Like I said, I don’t know him well.’
‘Did anything attract your attention?’
‘He seemed very quiet, oppressed at times, but what do you mean by “attract attention”? Perhaps he’s always like that, I’ve only been here six months.’
‘Who from the Mannheim National Theatre knows him particularly well?’
‘Hanne was closer to him at some point, so far as I know. And he hangs out with Joschka a lot, I think. Maybe they can help you.’
‘Was Herr Mencke a good dancer?’
‘Hmm, well, what do you mean by good? Wasn’t exactly Nureyev, but then I’m no Bausch. Are you good?’
I’m no Pinkerton, I could have replied, but that wouldn’t have been appropriate for my role.
‘You won’t find another insurance investigator like me. Could you give me the last names of Hanne and Joschka?’
I could have saved my breath. She hadn’t been there long; don’t forget, ‘and in the theatre we’re all on a first-name-terms basis. What’s your first name?’
‘Hieronymus. My friends call me Ronnie.’
‘I didn’t want to know what your friends call you. I think first names have something to do with one’s personality.’
I’d love to have run out screaming. Instead I thanked her, paid at the counter, and left quietly.
6 Aesthetics and morality
The next morning I called Frau Buchendorff. ‘I’d like to take a look at Mischkey’s apartment and things. Could you arrange for me to get in?’
‘Let’s drive over together after office hours. Shall I pick you up at three-thirty?’
Frau Buchendorff and I took the back roads to Heidelberg. It was Friday, people were home early from work and getting their homes, yards, gardens, cars, and even the pavements ready for the weekend ahead. Autumn was in the air. I could feel my rheumatism coming on and would have preferred to have the top up, but I didn’t want to appear old and kept quiet. In Wieblingen I thought about the railway bridge on the way to Eppelheim. I’d go there in the next few days. Now, with Frau Buchendorff, the detour hardly seemed appropriate.
‘That’s the way to Eppelheim,’ she said, pointing past the small church to the right. ‘I have the feeling I should take a look at the spot, but I can’t do it yet.’
She left the car in the parking lot at Kornmarkt. ‘I called ahead. Peter shared the apartment with a friend who works at Darmstadt Technical University. I do have a key but didn’t want just to turn up.’
She didn’t notice I knew the way to Mischkey’s apartment. I didn’t try to play dumb. No one answered our ring and Frau Buchendorff opened the front door. The lobby contained cool air from the cellar: ‘The cellar goes down two levels into the hillside.’ The floor was made of heavy slabs of sandstone. Bicycles were propped against the wall decorated with Delft tiles. The letterboxes had all been broken into at some point. Only a faint light trickled through the stained-glass windows onto the worn stairs.
‘How old is the house?’ I asked as we climbed to the third floor.
‘A couple of hundred years. Peter loved it. He had lived here since he was a student.’
Mischkey’s part of the apartment consisted of two large interlinking rooms. ‘You needn’t stay here, Frau Buchendorff, while I’m looking around. We can meet afterwards in a café.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll manage. Do you know what you’re looking for?’
‘Hmm.’ I was getting my bearings. The front room was the study with a large table at the window, a piano and shelves against the remaining walls. In the shelves files and stacks of computer printouts. Through the window I could see the rooftops of the old town and Heiligenberg. In the second room was a bed with a patchwork quilt, three armchairs from the era of the kidney-shaped table, one of the aforementioned tables, a wardrobe, television, and a stereo system. From the window I looked left up to the castle and right to the advertising column I’d stood behind weeks ago.
‘He didn’t have a computer?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘No. He had all sorts of private stuff on the RCC system.’
I turned to the shelves. The books were about mathematics, computing, electronics, and artificial intelligence, films and music. Next to them an absolutely beautiful edition of Green Henry and stacks of science fiction. The spines of the files indicated bills and taxes, product registration forms and instruction manuals, references and documents, travel, the public census, and computer stuff I barely understood. I reached for the folder of bills and leafed through it. In the references file I discovered that Mischkey had won a prize in his third year of high school. On his desk was a pile of papers that I looked through. Along with private mail, unpaid bills, programming notes, and sheet music, I came across a newspaper cutting.