Self's deception (7 page)

17
In response to an official request

I was back in Mannheim at four thirty. On my way there I had still not figured out what to make of all this. I wanted to talk to Salger, but not on the phone and definitely not by way of his answering machine. It was clear that he knew more than he had led me to believe.

I drove straight over to the Max-Joseph-Strasse. Brigitte greeted me as if our spat had never taken place. We embraced. She felt good, warm, and soft, and I only let go of her when Manu tugged at us jealously.

“Why don't the two of you take Nonni out?” she suggested. “And come back around seven thirty. I'll finish my tax returns and cook something—the sauerbraten should be ready by seven thirty.”

Nonni is Manu's dog, a tiny creature, a fluffy toy. Manu put him on a leash and we made a grand tour of the town: the Neckar embankment, the Luisenpark, the Oststadt, and the Water Tower. We made slow progress. In general I have my doubts when it comes to evolution and progress, but the fact that erotic attraction between humans doesn't involve sniffing tree trunks and corners is without doubt a clear sign of evolutionary progress.

I called Salger from Brigitte's place. The answering machine wasn't on. Was Salger back in Bonn? The phone rang futilely. I tried again at nine and at ten, but still nobody picked up.

On Sunday, too, and even Monday morning at eight my attempts were futile. At nine I took Manu to school and Brigitte to her massage practice at the Collini Center, and then drove on to the main post office to look through the regional phone books. If Salger was back in Bonn, he had to be back at work, too. I found Bonn in phone book number 53, and under Federal Government found the number of the chancellor and seventeen federal ministries. I started with the Federal Chancellery and the Press and Public Relations Office. They didn't have an Under-Secretary Salger. There was no Salger at the Federal Ministry for Work and Social Services, nor at any of the other ministries listed. At the Federal Ministry for Justice nobody picked up until ten fifteen, at which point the lady on the phone, though sounding rested and exceptionally friendly, had never heard of an Under-Secretary Salger. I turned to phone book number 39 and called the various departments at the state government in Düsseldorf. It didn't seem too farfetched that Salger might be living in Bonn but working in Düsseldorf. But no regional minister of Nordrhein-Westfalen had an under-secretary by the name of Salger.

I drove over to the Municipal Hospital. It was time to find out a few things. I wanted to pin down my client: the mysterious under-secretary without a department, the owner of a phone number that was listed nowhere, the sender of letters containing five thousand marks without a return address. I had his telephone number, but Information will only disclose a subscriber's name and address in response to an official request or in a case of an emergency. A doctor who finds nothing but a telephone number in the pockets of an unconscious patient and needs to know his name and address can call Information and put in his request, and he will be called back. Philipp had to help me make this request official.

Philipp was still in the operating theater, and the head nurse showed me into his office. I had intended to ask him to put the call through to Information, but then I decided to save him the trouble and do my own lying.

“Hello, this is Dr. Self, Mannheim Municipal Hospital. We have an accident patient without ID. All we have is a number in Bonn: 41-17-88. Can you please provide me with the name and address for this number?”

I was put on hold twice. Then they promised to check and call me back. I gave them Philipp's number. Five minutes later the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Dr. Self?”

“Speaking.”

“41-17-88 belongs to a Helmut Lehmann …”

“Lehmann?”

“Ludwig, Emil, Heinrich, Marta, Anton, Nordpol, Nordpol. The address is Niebuhrstrasse 46a in Bonn, District 1.”

I made a cross-check, calling Information in Bonn and asking for the number of Helmut Lehmann, Niebuhrstrasse 46a, and was given 41-17-88.

It was twenty past twelve. I checked the train schedule: There was an intercity train from Mannheim to Bonn at 12:45.I didn't wait for Philipp.

By 12:40 I was standing in the long line in front of the only open ticket window. By 12:44 the bored clerk and his boring computer had served four passengers, and I could see that I wasn't going to get to my ticket before 12:48. I rushed out onto the platform. No train came at 12:45, 12:46, 12:47, 12:48, or 12:49. At 12:50 there was an announcement that intercity train 714 was running five minutes late, and it pulled into the station at 12:54. I get worked up, even though I know that this is how things are nowadays with the train system, and that getting worked up isn't good for me. I remember the railways in the old days, punctual and treating passengers with sober, firm, Prussian respect.

I won't waste any words on the lunch in the restaurant car. The ride along the Rhine is always beautiful. I like seeing the railway bridge from Mainz to Wiesbaden, the Niederwald Memorial, the Kaub Castle on the island, the Loreley, and Castle Ehrenbreitstein. At 2:55 I was in Bonn.

I won't waste any words on Bonn either. A taxi took me to Niebuhrstrasse 46a. The narrow house was, like most houses on that street, a product of the mid-nineteenth century Gröünderzeit period with columns, capitals, and friezes. On the ground floor, next to the entrance, was a tiny shop in which nothing was on display or being sold anymore. The pale black lettering on the gray frosted glass above the door announced HABERDASHERY. I ran my eye over the names on the buzzers: There was no Lehmann.

I didn't find a Lehmann on the buzzers of Niebuhrstrasse 46 or 48 either. I read the buzzers of number 46a once more but found no further information. I was on the point of giving up, but then I hesitated, perhaps because I had glimpsed something from the corner of my eye that had been picked up by my subconscious. The tiny plaque by the door of the shop read HELMUT LEHMANN. Helmut Lehmann—nothing more. The door was locked. Inside the shop there were a counter, two chairs, and an empty display stand for pantyhose.

On the counter stood a telephone and an answering machine.

18
A demigod in gray

I knocked, but nobody emerged from a hidden trapdoor or stepped out of a secret panel. The shop remained empty.

Then I rang the second-floor apartment and found the landlord. He told me that the old widow who had run the haberdashery had died a year or so ago and that her grandson had been paying the rent ever since. “When might I be likely to find young Herr Lehmann?” The landlord eyed me with his piggish little eyes and spoke in a whiny Rhineland tremolo. “I have no idea. He told me that he and his friends want to turn the shop into a gallery. Sometimes one of them is here, sometimes another, and then for days on end I don't see or hear anyone.” When I delicately tried to ascertain if he was certain about the identity of the grandson, Lehmann, the landlord's whininess turned to outrage. “Who are you? What is it you want?” His tone smacked of bad conscience, as if he had let his doubts be bought off by a high rent.

I went back to the station. There wasn't a train until 5:11 in the afternoon, so I sat down in a café across the street. I sipped some hot chocolate and went over what I knew and didn't know.

I knew that Lea was Leo. I could also imagine why Leo had altered her name to Lea. I, too, always chose aliases close to my real name. In one of my past assignments I had used the alias Hendrik Willamowitz to infiltrate a gang that traded in American cigarettes and stolen German antiquities. There was something I liked about the name. But on two occasions I didn't react fast enough when someone called me Willamowitz, and that was that as far as the gang boss was concerned. Ever since, I have been Gerhard Sell, or Selk, or Selt, or Selln whenever I needed an alias, and these are the names I also have on my fake business cards.

But what did Leo need a fake name for? She'd turned up at the psychiatric hospital under a fake name and was registered under that name—the receptionist there had no information on a Leonore Salger, and Dr. Wendt, too, had said that he'd only learned her real name from me. A patient at the State Psychiatric Hospital and an American au-pair girl in a remoter part of the Odenwald—a good move if one wanted or needed to go underground. But why would Leo want or need to hide? It was crystal clear that she was not hiding within the guise of therapy from a threatening father, but from the phony Herr Salger, the phony or real Herr Lehmann, or myself—his informant or client. Did Wendt know more about this? Everything undeniably pointed to Wendt's having arranged the au-pair position for Leo in Amorbach. Even Eberlein seemed to assume that Wendt had something to do with Leo's disappearance. Maybe he had even helped her hide out in the psychiatric hospital in the first place.

I ordered another cup of hot chocolate and a chocolate meringue. Who was the mysterious Herr Salger? He had played the role of under-secretary from Bonn quite convincingly on the phone. He knew that Leo had studied French and English at the Heidelberg Institute for Translation and Interpretation. He had a photograph of Leo that came from her. Had she given it to him?

As I nibbled at my meringue I sketched out a love story. Leo, wearing a crumpled yellow blouse, is cutting class. She is sitting on the bank of the Rhine. A young attaché from the Foreign Ministry comes sauntering by. “Hello young lady, may I…” They go for a walk. More walks follow. The banks of the Rhine are not the only place where they kiss. Then the attaché is posted to Abu Dhabi and she stays behind, and while he only sees veiled women who remind him of Leo, she meets a handsome young man or two. The attaché returns from Abu Dhabi—there is jealousy, arguments, stalking—she moves from Bonn to Heidelberg—he follows her, threatens her. A foolish story. But what made it compelling was the locality. Salger/Lehmann had to have a reason why he would choose to play the role of the father from Bonn, and the most obvious reason was that Leo was from Bonn.

I finished my chocolate, asked the waitress the way to the main post office, paid, and left. It was only a few steps. I already knew that I would not find the name Salger in phone book number 53 under Bonn. But perhaps the widow of an under-secretary, whom I could picture as Leo's mother, might be living out in the suburbs. I could see the private home bought with a state subvention, small and white, in a pretty, colorful garden with a lodger's apartment and a rustic fence. I didn't find the name Salger in Bad Honnef, Bornheim, Eitorf, Hennef, Königswinter, or Lohmar. I did find a landscape designer by the name of Günter Salgert in Meckenheim, and a management consultant called Philipp Salsger. Encouraged, I worked my way through Much, Neunkirchen-Seelscheid, Niederkassel, Rheinbach, and Ruppichteroth to St. Augustin. There I found an E. Salger, and that was that. Siegburg, Swisttal, Troisdorf, and Windeck only offered up an M. Sallert who specialized in renovating frame houses, and a nurse by the name of Anna Salga. I wrote down the address and phone number of E. Salger and went into a phone booth.

“Yes, hello?” It was the shaky voice of a woman who had been struck by congestive heart failure, had had a stroke, or was an alcoholic.

“Good afternoon, Frau Salger. My name is Self. Your daughter Leonore will have told you about my son. My wife and I are so pleased about the two of them and think it is high time that we met you. You see, I happen to be in Bonn today and I thought—”

“My daughter isn't here. Who is this please?”

“My name is Self. I am the father of her friend …”

“Ah, you are the TV repairman. I was expecting you yesterday.”

I could rule out congestive heart failure. It had to be a stroke or alcoholism. “Will you be home around six?” I asked her.

“I couldn't see my TV movie yesterday. And now I can't even see the movies I have on video.” The voice shook once more and broke. “When will you come?”

“I'll be over in half an hour.” I bought a small black-and-white TV set at Hertie for 129 marks, and a screwdriver for 9.99, and gray overalls for 29.90 at a sale. Then I was ready to make my appearance as a demigod in gray at Frau Salger's sickbed.

19
Why don't you go, too?

The taxi driver in front of the train station was pleased. The trip to the Drachenfelsstrasse in Hangelar is one of the good longer fares. But when I struggled into my gray overalls on the backseat, he peered at me, frowning, through the rearview mirror, and when I walked through the garden gate carrying the TV set, his wary eyes followed me. He waited with the engine running; I have no idea why. I rang twice. There was no answer, but I didn't go back to the taxi. He finally drove off. Once I could no longer hear him, there was total silence. Sometimes a bird chirped. I rang a third time, the doorbell echoing and dying away like a weary sigh.

The house was big, and there were tall old trees in the garden. Only the fence was as I had imagined it. I made a wide detour over the lawn and reached the terrace at the back. She was sitting on a wicker lounger under an awning with green and white stripes. She was asleep. I sat down across from her on a cane chair and waited. From a distance, she could have been Leo's sister. Close up, her face was deeply furrowed, her shoulder-length ash blond hair had gray strands, and her freckles had lost their mirth. I tried to immerse my own face in those furrows and gauge the inner state that would correspond to them. I felt the harsh wrinkles over my own nose and the sharp lines in the corners of my eyes as I defensively strained to narrow them.

She woke up, and her gaze, blinking carefully, flitted over me, to the bottle on the table, and back to me again. “What time is it?” She burped, and a haze of alcohol wafted over to me. I ruled out a stroke, too.

“A quarter past six. You have—”

“Don't think you can hoodwink me like that. You haven't been here since six!” She burped again. “So I won't let you charge me from six. You can go fix my TV now. It's over there on the left.” Her hand pointed to the terrace, seized the bottle on the way back, and poured a glass.

I remained seated.

“What're you waiting for?” She downed the glass.

“Your TV can't be repaired. Here, I've brought you a new one.”

“But mine is …” Her voice became whiny.

“OK then, I'll take your set back to the shop with me. I'll leave you this one here anyway.”

“I don't want that thing.” She pointed at the 129-mark television as if it had a disease.

“Then give it to your daughter.”

Surprise livened her glance for an instant. She asked me in a normal voice to bring her a bottle from the refrigerator. Then she sighed and closed her eyes. “My daughter …”

I went to the kitchen to get the gin. When I came back onto the terrace, she was asleep again. I took a tour of the house and found a room on the second floor that I guessed had once been Leo's. On the corkboard above the desk were several photos of her. But the closet, the bureau, the desk drawers, and the bookshelves revealed as good as nothing about the room's former occupant. She had played with stuffed animals, had worn Betty-Barclay clothes, and read Hermann Hesse. If the drawings on the wall that were signed L. S. were hers, she definitely had a knack for sketching. She had been a fan of an Italian pop star who was smiling from a poster on the wall and whose records stood on the shelf. I was at a loss. I sat down at her desk and studied the photos more carefully. With the opening at knee height, the desk had been built as if each minute a young girl spent sitting there was a minute wasted. As if the idea was to keep girls from learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I have my doubts: Is this really the way to solve the issue of women's emancipation?

I took along Leo's photo album, a thick volume with a linen cover that documented her life from the cradle to her first day at school, the school dances, class excursions, her matriculation party, all the way to university. Why are girls so eager to keep photo albums? They also like showing them, and therein lies a hidden mystery, a matriarchal magic. When I was a young man I always viewed the invitation “Would you like to see my pictures?” as a signal to flee. With my wife, Klara, I either didn't pick up this signal or felt that I couldn't keep fleeing forever and had to stand my ground.

I descended the winding staircase without aim or plan, sauntered through the large living room, and stopped in front of a shelf unit filled with videos. Frau Salger was snoring outside on the terrace. For a moment I was tempted to steal
The Wild Bunch
, a Peckinpah movie I love that can't be found anywhere on video. It was six thirty and it began to rain.

I went out onto the terrace, rolled up the awning, and sat down across from Frau Salger again. The rain was light. It gathered in the hollows of her eyes and ran down her cheeks like tears. Waving her right hand erratically, she tried to shoo away the drops. It didn't work, and she opened her eyes. “What's going on?” Her look was vacant, reeled, and then fled back behind her closed lids. “Why am I wet? It's not supposed to rain over here.”

“Frau Salger, when did you last see your daughter?”

“My daughter?” Her voice became whiny again. “I don't have a daughter anymore.”

“Since when don't you have a daughter?”

“Go ask her father that.”

“Where can I find your husband?”

She looked at me slyly through narrowed eyes. “You're trying to con me, aren't you? I don't have a husband anymore either.”

I made a new attempt. “Would you like to have your daughter back?” When she didn't answer I became more generous. “Would you like to have your daughter and your husband back?”

She looked at me and for an instant her eyes were awake and clear before they became rigid and stared through me. “My husband's dead.”

“But your daughter is alive, Frau Salger, and needs help. Doesn't that interest you?”

“It's been ages since my daughter needed any help. What she needed was a good spanking. But my prick of a husband…my limp prick of a husband…my …”

“How long has it been since you've heard from Leo?”

“Leave me alone. Everyone's left me all alone. First he went, then she did. Why don't you go, too?”

The rain had become heavy, and our hair stuck to our heads. I tried again.

“When did she go?”

“Right after he went. And that's just what the other guy had been waiting for. I guess she wanted to …”

“What?”

She didn't answer. She'd fallen asleep in midsentence. I gave up, rolled the awning back down, and listened for a while to her snoring and the rain rustling on the sailcloth. I left her the TV set.