Self's deception (18 page)

11
Under the pear tree

Nägelsbach shook his head when I looked over at his workshop. “I don't have anything to show today. In fact, I've dropped the idea of doing Rodin's
Kiss
in matchsticks—it was a crazy idea. I could see how embarrassed you were the other day when I was carrying on with all that nonsense about matchstick sculpture. Thank God I have Reni.”

We were standing on the lawn. He had his arm around his wife, and she nestled against him. They'd always struck me as a loving couple before their recent crisis, but I'd never seen them so much in love.

“Don't look so surprised,” she said to me, laughing, and smiled up at her husband. “Come on, let's tell him.”

“Well…” Nägelsbach grinned. “When the model arrived—it's standing over there—Reni said we ought to sit like that, too, so I could get a better feel for the sculpture. And so we …”

“Made up again?”

A replica of Rodin's lovers kissing stood among the flowering rhododendrons; Nägelsbach looked somewhat gaunter in the flesh, and his wife plumper, but Rodin would surely have been delighted by this double echo.

We sat under the pear tree. Frau Nägelsbach had made some strawberry punch.

“The bullet you brought over is from the same weapon with which Wendt was shot. Are you also bringing me the murderer?”

“I don't know. I'll tell you how far I've gotten. On January sixth, four men and a woman launched a bomb attack on an American military installation in the Lampertheim National Forest—”

“In Käfertal,” he interrupted.

“Don't interrupt him,” Frau Nägelsbach intervened.

“The woman and two of the men managed to escape, but one of the others was killed and another arrested. The media mentioned two dead men: The other one must have been a soldier or a guard. I don't know if there had been an exchange of gunfire or if it was the explosion. That's not important.”

“I heard it was the bomb,” Nägelsbach said.

“For the police it was bad luck in disguise. They had caught some guy called Bertram and made him talk, but he didn't know all that much about his accomplices. He knew Leonore Salger and the man who had died—some Giselher or other—but he didn't know the two men who got away. Now I'm not saying that the terrorists put their team together willy-nilly, so that the members wouldn't know each other and couldn't give each other away. The way I see it, the attack was more a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. Anyway, Bertram could give only a vague description of the two men, because he didn't know them. And, let's face it, in the night all terrorists are gray—not to mention that they'd blackened their faces. The pictures that are being used for the manhunt are composites, right?”

“I'm not working on this case,” Nägelsbach replied, “but if the Agency doesn't have their names…Did the media say these were composites?”

“Maybe they did and I missed it. Anyway, on January sixth we have the attack, and it's not until May that the search is made public? There could have been a public appeal for information right after the attack. There could have been pictures in the media the moment the arrested man began talking, identified Leonore Salger, and described the two men. That would have been in February at the latest, because at that point the police were already looking for Leonore Salger. And yet when the public appeal for information finally came, we were given as good as no information about the time, place, and circumstances of the attack. You're not going to tell me that this is the way things are usually done, are you?”

“As I said before, I'm not working on this case. But if the Americans request that we treat the attack on their terrain confidentially, and that we tread carefully, then that's exactly what we do.”

“Why would they make such a request?” I asked.

“How should I know? Maybe Holy Islamic Warriors had threatened them with an attack like this in retaliation for their support of Israel, or perhaps some Panamanians were trying to free Noriega. In that case the Americans would have to weigh how to handle this from a foreign-policy perspective. There could be thousands of reasons.”

“Then how come they went public on the very day Wendt was killed?” I asked him.

“Was it the same day?”

Frau Nägelsbach nodded. “Yes, it was,” she said. “When the name 'Salger' came up in the late-night news, I remembered it right away because of the spat the two of you had just had. And then by the time you came home late that night, because you were working on the Wendt case, my asparagus soufflé had collapsed.”

“It all fits together, because in Wendt's briefcase there was a map showing the section of the Lampertheim National Forest where the Americans have their depot and where the attack took place. I know you're saying that the attack was in Käfertal, and that Viernheim is not in your jurisdiction, and that it is the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency that deals with terrorist attacks. But someone in your office had to have seen the connection and made it clear to the decision makers that it was high time for them to go public. Because they couldn't take the risk that the attack would trigger God knows what else after Wendt's murder. And that someone in your office was right.”

Nägelsbach's face remained a blank. Was he the someone who had seen the connection? Had he known from the start that the attack had been in Viernheim and nowhere else? Was the matter so secret and delicate that he preferred to play the fool rather than give anything away? I shot a glance at his wife. I knew from experience that she was up-to-date on everything that preoccupied him. “There are no professional secrets in a childless couple,” was one of his mottos. She eyed us nervously.

“The bullet that killed Wendt comes from a gun that belongs to one of the two men you're looking for,” I said. “Helmut Lemke, mid-forties, not unknown in Heidelberg. I don't have a recent photograph of him, but the one I've got here is better than the composites you have, and I have no doubt that the photographers from the Agency will know how to make him look fifteen years older.” I gave him a copy of one of the pictures I had from Leo's photo album.

“Why would Lemke have shot Wendt?” Frau Nägelsbach asked.

“I don't know,” I replied. “All we know for sure is that Wendt was killed with Lemke's gun. I'm hoping your husband and I might put our heads together on this one.”

“I don't know how much I can contribute,” Nägelsbach said. “You seem to know more than I do. Of course we put out a search for the man and the VW Golf that Frau Klein-schmidt saw, questioned the neighbors, and looked for people who'd been out walking. But it was pouring that day, as you well know, and nobody saw anything. Or at least anything we could use. In the house the Golf was parked in front of, the children kept looking out the window, as they were waiting for their mother. The girl says the Golf was red, the boy says black—and they don't recall the license plate.” He laughed. “Crazy as it may sound, every time I come across a red or a black Golf, I try to catch a glimpse of the driver. Does that sort of thing ever happen to you?”

“You bet it does.” I waited, but Nägelsbach did not continue. “It almost sounds as if the Wendt case has ended up in the files,” I said.

“To tell you the truth, we didn't know what else we could do,” Nägelsbach said. “Now that you have brought us all these new leads, we can set things rolling again. But who is Lemke? Where did his and Wendt's paths cross? Might Wendt have been the fifth man in the attack after all?”

“No, he wasn't.”

“You're handing me that on a silver platter, too. I guess you won't want to tell me how you come to know that either?”

“If you're hinting that I haven't told you where I have the bullet from, I'll be glad to make amends.”

I told him about my encounter with Lemke.

“But now you have definitely found out a good deal more from me than I have from you,” I said.

Frau Nägelsbach agreed with me. “I think you owe Herr Self something, too.”

He disagreed. “I will keep him posted, I assure you. But he had a bullet, and I had one. Both he and I had to bring them together so we could compare them and ascertain that they came from the same weapon. Now we're both moving forward. My progress I have already mentioned. And he can call his client tomorrow morning and announce his first success.”

12
Tearing along

That is exactly what I did. Frau Büchler was pleased. No, I could not speak to Herr and Frau Wendt yet. They were in Badenweiler with their daughter.

The morning was cool, and I wore a sweater with my corduroys and hiking boots. I drove over the Friedrich-Ebert Bridge, the Friedrich-Ebert Strasse, through Käfertal and Vogelstang, and over the Entlastungsstrasse to Viernheim, where the Nibelungenstrasse took me to yet another Friedrich-Ebert Strasse. Everything flows: We drive along the same Friedrich-Ebert Strasse and yet it is not the same Friedrich-Ebert Strasse, we are the same and yet not the same.

To my left the fence reached the Lorscher Weg Road, and I parked my old Opel and walked. I followed the fence westward through the woods. The ground was springy beneath my feet, the birds were singing, the trees were rustling in the wind, and an aroma of pine resin, decaying foliage, and fresh green hung in the air. I didn't see any watchdogs or security patrols on the asphalt path behind the fence, nor did the fence look as if it had been damaged or repaired in the last few months. After a quarter of an hour, the rustling grew louder—it wasn't the wind anymore, but the autobahn. The fence ran northward alongside it. The cars tore past me, and once an empty can barely missed my head. I was glad when the fence veered back into the woods again.

But then I changed my mind. I knew that the tire tracks left by the car Leo's group had used to get to the depot would no longer be there, but I wanted to see what route they might have taken. The embankment that I found posed no problem for a regular car. I also found a wide path through the woods that a car could easily have used, and which could be reached from the embankment. The path led out of the woods and into an open area with stunted shrubs, dried grass, blueberry bushes, and wildflowers. Leo had said that they followed a path leading across the meadows to the woods, and I followed the path to where I imagined the fence to be behind the trees. I made a mental note of the rampant brambles along the edge of the woods so I could come back in August for some berry picking. In the woods I soon came upon the fence again.

I saw right away that this part of the fence had been repaired. I listened for the bulldozers, the conveyer belts, and the trucks that I had seen from the airplane. I heard the birds, the wind, the distant rumbling of the cars—otherwise there was silence. My watch showed ten o'clock. Was the construction crew on a break? I sat down on a rock and waited.

Then I heard something that at first I couldn't place. Did conveyer belts rattle like that? Did bulldozers squeak like that? But the rumble of engines was missing. I couldn't believe the guards would be patrolling the fence on mountain bikes, but that is exactly what it sounded like. Then I heard voices, one light and one deep.

“Do be careful, Eva!”

“I am being careful, Grandpa, I am.”

“If you keep tearing along like this I'll end up with a broken neck. And when you rattle me like this, I can't stop coughing—
cough cough cough
.”

“It's not the rattling that makes you cough, it's the smoking!”

“No, no, Eva. The cigarettes have hit me in the legs, not the lungs.”

Eva, flushed and sweating, must have been about eighteen; Grandpa in his wheelchair was somewhere between eighty and a hundred and ten. He was a shriveled little man with sparse white hair and a thin beard like that of a Chinese sage. He was hunchbacked and sat crookedly in his wheelchair, his hands gripping the armrests, and the stump of his leg, which had been amputated below the knee, rested against the raised footrest. In their struggle, Eva and Grandpa only saw me when I got up from the rock I was sitting on. They looked at me as if I'd come from another planet.

“Good morning,” I said. “Fine weather we're having.” I couldn't think of anything better.

Eva returned my greeting. “Good morning.”

“Shh!” Grandpa cut into Eva's and my budding conversation. “Can you hear them? I knew it!”

We listened, and now the bulldozers, conveyer belts, and trucks could clearly be heard.

“I suppose they're just back from their break,” I said, and the two of them looked at me, even more surprised. “You meant the construction going on beyond the fence, didn't you? The new fence. Does the construction interest you?”

“Does it… ? You're not from these parts, are you? When I got my pension and still had both legs—
cough coughcough
—I used to walk along this fence every day. Later I came as often as I could, at least once a week. Now she brings me here whenever she can. If you were from around here, I'd know you. And you'd know me, too—
cough cough
—No one else ever comes here.”

“I've heard about you, Herr Henlein.”

“What do you say to that, Eva? People have heard about me. Are you with the Green Party? Are you interested in the forest again? I heard about that—
cough cough
—you're all rearing to go, and then you fizzle out because you can't get quick results. All you guys want to make the world a better place, but you don't even take the time to hear what I've got to say.”

“I didn't know you were still active. Where do you live? Could we meet somewhere?”

“You'll have to come over to Mannheim. I don't live in Viernheim anymore. I live near my children—
cough cough
— in E 6, in a retirement home. Come on, Eva, off we go.”

I followed them with my eyes. She was dexterous and had a knack for steering the wheelchair clear of roots and stones, but didn't manage to dodge them all. She needed all her strength to push the wheelchair, with Henlein cursing loudly, over some of the obstacles.

I hurried after them. “Would you like me to help you?”

“I can manage, thank you very much—
cough cough
.”

“
You
can manage, Grandpa, but I wouldn't mind a little help,” Eva said.

It took us almost two hours to reach the road. Henlein cursed, coughed, and reminisced about his campaigns in the sixties and seventies, with which he wanted to get to the bottom of things. “The Americans' poison gas—that wasn't even the worst of it. You can bet they'd be pretty careful when they handle that stuff. But what about the old stuff …” In 1935, he'd been interned in a concentration camp, and in 1945 put to work moving and burying the Wehrmacht's stocks of poison gas. “Near Lossa, Sondershausen and Dingelstädt in East Germany—I wrote about that later on and even managed to go there and hand out flyers. But the East German authorities deported me back to the West. Ha, there's model Communists for you! Then I did the same thing here in Viernheim. There were rumors that there was poison gas from World War I still buried in Viernheim. Yellow-cross gas, blue-cross gas, mustard gas, and later on we dug in tabun and sarin.” After Hen-lein had been freed from the concentration camp, he'd drifted around for a while, and in 1953 came to Mannheim. There he worked at Brown Boveri & Co., married in 1955, and built a house in Viernheim. He saw it as preordained (if for a Communist there is such a thing) that he ended up here. His calling in life was to fight to defuse the time bomb in the Lam-pertheim National Forest. “Maybe it stopped ticking ages ago. Maybe the Americans dug everything up after '45 and took it all away. But would you believe a thing like that?”

I invited Grandpa and Eva for lunch in the Kleiner Rosen-garten, and then drove Henlein back to his retirement home. His room was filled with binders. He had been collecting material since 1955. I read how poison gas is manufactured, stored, and employed, how it works and how one can protect oneself, and where it was manufactured and stored in Germany—and that nobody really seems to know where it was buried after World War I and II. Henlein had cut out every local and regional report containing the slightest evidence of poison gas in the Lampertheim National Forest or on the Viernheim Meadows. He had also saved all the reports about local and regional projects for which the ticking time bomb could be particularly dangerous. Both the realized and unrealized projects reflected the development of the Federal Republic of Germany: Hunting preserves, woodland communities, adventure parks, waste management plants, test tracks, nature preserves, golf courses—all kinds of grand plans had been made for the area, anticipating the time when the Americans would give back the Lampertheim National Forest and the Viernheim Meadows.

“Do you know if maps of the stockpiling areas were made in '45?”

“I think so. And I think they also had maps back then that showed where the leftover stuff from World War I had been buried. But I've never managed to track any of those maps down. Think about it: That stuff is still lying buried all over the place, and the Americans give us back the land—those maps would be worth a fortune!”