‘Will you please finally start to tell me?’
‘Didn’t Firner mention my run-in with plant security on Thursday night?’
‘No. I think he’d gathered I was with Peter.’
I started with the talk I’d had with Korten yesterday, lingered over the question of whether old Schmalz was the last link of a well-functioning chain of command, had crazily set himself up as the saviour of the plant, or had been used, nor did I spare the details of the murder on the bridge. I made it clear that what I knew, and what could be proved, were leagues apart.
Judith strode along firmly beside me. She’d hunched her shoulders and was holding the collar of her coat closed with her left hand against the north wind. She hadn’t interrupted me. But now she said with a small laugh that cut me even further to the quick than her tears would have done: ‘Do you know, Gerhard, it’s so absurd. When I took you on to find out the truth I thought it would help me. But now I feel more at a loss than ever.’
I envied Judith the purity of her grief. My sadness was pervaded by a sense of weakness, of guilt, because I’d delivered Mischkey to the dogs, albeit unwittingly, a feeling that I’d been used, and a strange pride at having come so far. It also saddened me that the case had initially connected Judith and myself then entangled us so much with one another that we’d never be able to grow closer without a sense of awkwardness.
‘You’ll send me the bill?’
She hadn’t understood that Korten wanted to pay for my investigation. As I explained this to her, she retreated even further into herself and said: ‘That fits perfectly. It would also fit if I were to be promoted to Korten’s personal assistant. It’s all so repulsive.’
Between warehouse number seventeen and number nineteen we turned left and came to the Rhine. Opposite lay the RCW skyscraper. The Rhine flowed past, wide and tranquil.
‘What do I do now?’
I had no answers. If she managed tomorrow to lay the folder of letters in front of Firner to sign, as though nothing had happened, she’d come to terms with it.
‘And the terrible thing is that Peter is already so far away, inside. I’ve cleared out everything at home that reminded me of him, because it hurt so much. But now my loneliness feels tidied away, too, and I’m getting cold.’
We walked along the Rhine, following it downstream. Suddenly she turned to me, seized me by the coat, shook me and said: ‘We can’t just let them get away with it!’ With her right arm she made a sweeping gesture encapsulating the Works opposite. ‘They shouldn’t be let off the hook.’
‘No, they shouldn’t be, but they will be. Since the beginning of time, people with power have got away with it. And here perhaps it wasn’t even the people with power, it was a lunatic, Schmalz.’
‘But that’s exactly what power is, not having to act yourself, but getting some lunatic to do it. That can’t excuse them.’
I tried to explain to her that I didn’t want to excuse anyone, but that I simply couldn’t pursue the investigation.
‘Then you’re just one of the somebodies who does the dirty work for those people with power. Leave me alone now, I’ll find my own way back.’
I suppressed the impulse to leave her there, and said instead: ‘That’s mad, the secretary of the director of the RCW reproaching the detective who carried out a contract for the RCW, for working for the RCW. That’s rich.’
We walked on. After a while she put an arm through mine. ‘In the old days, if something bad happened, I always had the feeling it would all be okay again. Life, I mean. Even after my divorce. Now I know nothing will ever be the same again. Do you recognize that?’
I nodded.
‘Listen, it really would be best if I go on walking here on my own for a bit. You needn’t look so worried, I won’t do anything silly.’
From Rheinkaistrasse I looked back. She hadn’t moved. She was looking over to the RCW at the levelled ground of the old factory. The wind blew an empty cement sack over the street.
Part Three
1 A milestone in jurisprudence
After a long, golden Indian summer, winter started abruptly. I can’t remember a colder November.
I wasn’t working much then. The investigation in the Sergej Mencke affair advanced at a crawl. The insurance company was hemming and hawing about sending me to America. The meeting with the ballet director had taken place on the sidelines of a rehearsal, and had taught me about Indian dance, which was being rehearsed, but otherwise only revealed that some people liked Sergej, others didn’t, and the ballet director belonged to the latter category. For two weeks I was plagued by rheumatism so that I wasn’t fit for anything except getting through the bare necessities. Beyond that I went on plenty of walks, frequented the sauna and the cinema, finished reading Green Henry – I’d laid it aside in the summer – and listened to Turbo’s winter coat grow. One Saturday I bumped into Judith at the market. She was no longer working at RCW, was living off her unemployment money, and helping out at the women’s bookshop Xanthippe. We promised to get together, but neither of us made the first move. With Eberhard I re-enacted the matches of the world chess championship. As we were sitting over the last game, Brigitte called from Rio. There was a buzzing and crackling in the line; I could barely make her out. I think she said she was missing me. I didn’t know what to do with that.
December began with unexpected days of sultry wind. On 2nd December the Federal Constitutional Court pronounced as unconstitutional the direct emissions data gathering introduced by statute in Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate.
It censured the violation of constitutional rights of business data privacy and establishment and practice of a commercial enterprise, but eventually the statute was annulled for lack of legislative authority. The well-known columnist of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung celebrated the decision as a milestone in jurisprudence because, at last, data privacy had broken free of the shackles of mere civil rights protection and was elevated to the rank of entrepreneurial rights. Only now was the true grandeur of the court’s judgment regarding data protection revealed.
I wondered what would become of Grimm’s lucrative sideline. Would the RCW continue to pay him a fee, for keeping quiet? I also wondered whether Judith would read the news from Karlsruhe, and what would go through her head as she did. This decision half a year earlier would have meant that Mischkey and the RCW wouldn’t have locked horns.
That same day there was a letter from San Francisco in the mail. Vera Müller was a former resident of Mannheim, had emigrated to the USA in 1936, and had taught European literature at various Californian colleges. She’d been retired for some years now and out of a sense of nostalgia read the Mannheimer Morgen. She’d been surprised not to hear anything back about her first letter to Mischkey. She’d responded to the advertisement because the fate of her Jewish friend in the Third Reich was sadly interwoven with the RCW. She thought it a period of recent history that should be more widely researched and published, and she was willing to broker contact with Frau Hirsch. But she didn’t want to cause her friend any unnecessary excitement and would only establish contact if the research project was both academically sound and fruitful from the aspect of coming to terms with the past. She asked for assurances on this score.
It was the letter of an educated lady, rendered in lovely, old-fashioned German, and written in sloping, austere handwriting. Sometimes in the summer I see elderly American tourists in Heidelberg with a blue tint in their white hair, bright-pink frames on their spectacles, and garish make-up on their wrinkled skin. This willingness to present oneself as a caricature had always struck me as an expression of cultural despair. Reading Vera Müller’s letter I could suddenly imagine such a lady being interesting and fascinating, and I recognized the wise weariness of completely forgotten peoples in that cultural despair. I wrote to her saying I’d try to visit her soon.