Guilt (17 page)

I hadn’t been made aware of this until now. I had to ask myself what I was doing in this case. I wouldn’t be able to help her.

“Many thanks,” I said. “I’m going to visit her now. We can talk again after that.”

Alexandra was in the prison hospital. She smiled, the way you smile at a stranger who visits you on the ward. She sat up and put on a bathrobe. It was too big for her; she looked lost in it. The floor was covered with linoleum, everything smelled of disinfectant, and one of the edges of the washbasin had broken off. Next to her was another woman; their beds were only separated by a yellow curtain.

I sat in her room for three hours. She told me her story. I arranged for her broken body to be photographed. The medical report ran to fourteen pages: spleen and liver ruptured, both kidneys crushed, large areas where blood had pooled under the skin. Two cracked ribs; six others with evidence of previous fractures.

——

The trial began three months later. The presiding judge would be retiring shortly. Gaunt face, crew cut, gray hair, rimless glasses—he didn’t look as if he belonged in the new courtroom. An architect had designed it in contemporary style with bright green plastic molded chairs and white Formica tables. It was supposed somehow to represent democratic justice, but it didn’t have any effect on the sentences being handed down. The presiding judge called the court to order and established that all parties in the trial were present. Then he ordered a halt in the proceedings while the public was asked to leave and Alexandra was taken back to the holding cell. He waited till everything was quiet.

“I’m speaking to you openly, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. His voice was slow; he sounded tired. “I don’t know what we should do. We will proceed with the trial and we will make sure that we comprehend the files. I do not wish to condemn the accused; she has suffered under this man for ten years, and he almost killed her. And his next act would probably have been to assault the child.”

I didn’t know what I should say. In Berlin the DA’s office would have had the judge removed immediately for bias; such candid comments at the beginning of a trial would be unthinkable. But out here in the provinces it was different. People lived closer together, and everyone had to get on with one another. The presiding judge didn’t care what the DA thought, and Kaulbach stayed sitting quite calmly.

“I will have to sentence her, the law gives me no choice,” he said. He looked at me. “Unless of course something occurs to you. I will give you every latitude.”

——

The trial indeed lasted only two days. There were no witnesses. Alexandra told her story. The medical examiner testified about the autopsy of the victim and, at greater length, about Alexandra’s injuries from the abuse. The hearing of evidence took place in closed court. The DA argued that it was murder; he spoke without emotion and there was no way to find fault with his presentation. He said that the defendant met all the conditions that would apply with a less serious charge. But in cases of murder the law offered no possibility of mitigation of sentence; that was how it had been drafted. Thus the only appropriate verdict was a life sentence. My address to the jury was scheduled for the following day. Until then the court was adjourned.

Before we left the courtroom, the presiding judge asked the DA and me to approach the bench. He had taken off his robe. He was wearing a green jacket; his shirt was frayed and covered with stains.

“You’re wrong, Kaulbach,” he said to the DA. “No, there isn’t any lesser charge in cases of murder, but there are other possibilities.” He handed each of us some Xeroxed sheets. “Study the decision before tomorrow. I would like to hear some sensible arguments from you.” That last remark was directed at me.

I was familiar with the decision. The Federal Supreme Court had ruled that the sentence in cases of murder is not absolute. Even a life sentence can be commuted in certain
exceptional cases. That was the argument I used in my summing up; I didn’t have any other ideas.

The court set Alexandra free. The presiding judge said she had acted in self-defense. It’s a difficult rule. In order to be allowed to defend yourself, an attack must be either in progress or imminent. You cannot be punished for defending yourself. The only problem was that a sleeping man cannot instigate an attack. And no court had ever accepted that an attack is imminent when the attacker is asleep. The presiding judge said it was a unique decision, an exception; it was valid only in this one instance. Alexandra had not been obliged to wait until he woke up. She had wanted to protect her daughter, and she was permitted to do so. She herself had been in fear of her life. The court lifted the order of arrest and released her from detention. Later the judge persuaded the DA not to appeal.

After the decision was announced, I went to the café on the opposite side of the street, where you can sit outside under an enormous chestnut tree. I thought about the old presiding judge, the hasty trial, and my stupid address to the jury: I had prayed for a mild sentence and she had been declared not guilty. It suddenly occurred to me that we hadn’t heard from any fingerprint experts. I checked the files in my laptop: no traces had been found on the statue. The perpetrator must have worn gloves. The statue weighed ninety pounds, Alexandra barely weighed that herself. The bed was almost two feet off the ground. I read her statement once
again. She said that after she’d done it, she’d sat in the nursery until first light, then she’d called the police. She hadn’t showered and she hadn’t changed her clothes. Roughly one hundred pages further on in the file were the photos of her clothes: she had been wearing a white blouse. There was no trace of blood on it anywhere. The presiding judge was experienced. There was no way he could have overlooked it. I closed the screen. It was late summer, the very last days, and the wind was still warm.

I saw her coming out of the courthouse. Felix was waiting for her in a taxi. She got into the backseat with him. He took her hand. She was going to go with him to her parents’, take Saskia in her arms, and it would all be over. They would have to be very careful with each other. Only when she felt the warmth in her stomach would she reciprocate, squeezing the hand that was squeezing hers and had killed her husband.

Waller graduated from school with the highest marks of anyone in Hannover. His father was an ironworker, a little man with drooping shoulders. He had managed somehow to make sure his son qualified for the elite high school, although his wife had run away, abandoning the boy. Sixteen days after Waller passed his exams, his father died. He slipped and fell into the freshly poured foundation of a new building. He had a bottle of beer in his hand. They couldn’t stop the machine in time, and he drowned in the liquid concrete.

Besides Waller, four of his father’s workmates attended the funeral. Waller wore his father’s only suit, which fit him perfectly. He had his father’s square face and his thin lips. Only his eyes were different. And everything else.

The German Scholarship Fund offered Waller a grant, but he turned it down. He bought a ticket to Japan, packed a suitcase, and traveled to Kyoto, where he entered a monastery for twelve months. In the course of the year he learned Japanese. After that he applied for a job with a firm of German mechanical engineers in Tokyo. Five years later he became head of the branch. He lived in a cheap boardinghouse. All
the money he earned went into an investment account. A Japanese carmaker hired him away. After six years he had reached the highest position that a foreigner had ever held there. He now had approximately two million euros in his account, he was still living in the boardinghouse, and he had spent almost nothing at all. He was thirty-one years old. He resigned and moved to London. Eight years later he’d made almost thirty million on the stock exchange. In London, too, all he had was one tiny room. When he turned thirty-nine, he bought a manor house on a lake in Bavaria. He put all his money into bonds. He didn’t work any more.

A few years ago, I rented a small house on this lake for three weeks in the summer. You could see the manor house through the trees; there was no fence between the two properties. I met Waller for the first time on the dock in front of my house. He introduced himself and asked if he might sit down. We were roughly the same age. It was a hot day, we put our feet in the water, and we watched the dinghies and colorful windsurfers. It didn’t bother us that neither of us said much. After two hours, he went back home.

The next summer, we arranged to meet in the lobby of the Frankfurter Hof. I arrived a little late; he was already waiting. We had coffee; I was tired after a day at trial. He said I must come back soon; every morning herons, a great flock of them, flew over the lake and the house. Finally, he asked me if he might send me a file.

——

It arrived four days later, and was the story of his family, compiled by a detective agency.

Waller’s mother had married again a year after the divorce, and had given birth to another son, Waller’s half brother, Fritz Meinering. When Fritz Meinering was two, the new husband left his family. The mother died of alcohol poisoning as the boy was starting school. Meinering ended up in a children’s home. He wanted to become a carpenter. The home found him a place as an apprentice. He began drinking with friends. It wasn’t long before he was drinking so much that he couldn’t make it to work in the mornings. He was fired, and he left the children’s home.

After that the crimes began: theft, bodily harm, traffic offenses. He spent two brief periods in jail. At the Oktoberfest in Munich, he drank enough to produce a blood alcohol level of 3.2. He insulted two women and was sentenced for public drunkenness. He spiraled down, lost his apartment, and started sleeping in homeless shelters.

A year after the incident at the Oktoberfest, he held up a grocery store. All he said to the judge was that he’d needed the money. He’d still been so drunk from the night before that the salesgirl was able to knock him down with a dustpan. He got two and a half years in prison. He went into a treatment program for alcoholics, which earned him early release.

For a few months he succeeded in staying sober. He found a girlfriend. They moved in together. She worked as a salesclerk. He was jealous. When she came home too late one night, he hit her over the ear with a saucepan lid and
the eardrum burst. The judges sentenced him to another year.

Fritz Meinering got to know a drug dealer in prison, a week before they were released. The man persuaded Meinering to carry cocaine from Brazil to Germany. His airfare would be covered, plus he’d be paid five hundred euros. The police were tipped off and he was arrested in Rio de Janeiro in a taxi on the way to the airport. There were twelve kilos of uncut cocaine in the trunk. He was sitting in prison there, awaiting trial.

This was where the file ended. After I’d read it all, I called Waller, who asked me if I could organize his half brother’s defense in Brazil. He didn’t want any personal contact with him, but he felt he had to do this. He asked me to fly there, arrange for lawyers, talk to the embassy, and take care of everything. I agreed.