Self's punishment (10 page)

3

A silver St Christopher

My old friend in the Heidelberg police force is Chief Detective Nägelsbach. He’s just waiting for retirement; since starting as a messenger at the age of fifteen at the public prosecutor’s office in Heidelberg he may have constructed Cologne Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, Lomonossov University, and Neuschwanstein Castle from matches, but the reconstruction of the Vatican, his real dream, is simply too much alongside his police work, and has been postponed for his retirement. I’m curious. I’ve followed my friend’s artistic development with interest. In his earlier works the matches are somewhat shorter. Back then his wife and he removed the sulphur heads with a razor blade; he hadn’t known that match factories also distribute headless matches. With the longer matches the later models took on a gothic, towering quality. Since his wife no longer needed to help with the matches she began reading to him as he worked. She started with the first book of Moses and is currently on Karl Kraus’s
The Torch
. Chief Detective Nägelsbach is an erudite man.

I’d called him in the morning and when I met him at ten o’clock in police headquarters he made me a photocopy of the police report.

‘Ever since data protection came on the scene no one here knows what he’s allowed to give out. I’ve decided not to know what I’m not allowed to give out,’ he said, handing me the report. It was only a few pages long.

‘Do you know who oversaw the accident protocol?’

‘It was Hesseler. I thought you’d want to talk with him. You’re in luck, he’s here until noon and I’ve let him know you’ll be coming by.’

Hesseler was sitting at a typewriter, pecking away laboriously. I’ll never understand why policemen are not taught to type properly. Unless it’s supposed to be a form of torture for the suspects and witnesses to watch a typing policeman. It is torture; the policeman pokes away at the typewriter helplessly and aggressively, looking unhappy and extremely determined – an explosive and fearful mixture. And if you’re not induced to make a statement then at least you’re deterred from altering the statement once it has been written and completed by the policeman, regardless of how unfamiliar he’s rendered it.

‘Someone who’d driven over the bridge after the accident called us. His name’s in the report. When we arrived the doctor had just turned up and clambered down to the accident vehicle. He saw immediately that nothing could be done. We closed the road and secured the evidence. There wasn’t much to secure. There was the skid mark showing that the driver simultaneously braked and swung the steering wheel to the left. As to why he did that there’s no indication. Nothing points to the fact that another vehicle was involved, no shattered glass, no trace of body paint, no further skid mark, nothing. A strange accident all right but the driver lost control of his vehicle, that’s all.’

‘Where is the vehicle?’

‘At Beisel’s scrapyard, behind the Zweifarbenhaus, the brothel behind the railway station. The professionals examined it. I think Beisel will scrap it soon. The storage fees are already higher than the scrap price.’

I thanked him. I looked in on Nägelsbach to say goodbye.

‘Do you know
Hedda Gabler
?’ he asked me.

‘Why?’

‘It cropped up yesterday in Karl Kraus and I didn’t understand whether she drowned or shot herself or neither of the above, and whether she did it in the sea or in a vine arbour. Karl Kraus is pretty complicated at times.’

‘All I know is that she’s one of Ibsen’s heroines. Why not read the play next? Karl Kraus can easily be interrupted.’

‘I’ll have to talk to my wife. It would be the first time we interrupted something.’

Then I drove to Beisel. He wasn’t there. One of his workers showed me the shell.

‘Do you know what’s going to happen with the car? Are you family?’

‘I think it’ll get scrapped.’

Looking at it from the rear right you’d have thought it was almost unscathed. The top had been down when the accident occurred and closed by the towing company, or by the expert, due to the rain; it was in one piece. On the left-hand side the car was completely crushed at the front and gashed open at the side. The axle and the engine block were twisted to the right, the hood was folded into a V, the windshield and the headrests lay on the back seat.

‘Ah, scrapped. You can see, yourself, that there’s not much to the car now.’ He peered at the stereo with such obvious furtiveness that it caught my attention. It was completely intact.

‘I won’t take the stereo from you. But could I look at the car now, alone?’ I slipped him a ten-mark note and he left me in peace.

I walked round the car once more. Strange, on the right headlight Mischkey had stuck black sticky tape in the shape of a cross. Again I was fascinated that the right side seemed almost intact. When I took a close look I discovered the blotches. They weren’t easily visible against the bottle-green paintwork, nor were there many. But they looked like blood and I wondered how it had got there. Had Mischkey been pulled out of the car on his side? Had Mischkey bled at all? Had someone hurt themselves during the recovery? Perhaps it was unimportant but whether it was blood or not now interested me so much that I scraped off some shavings of paintwork where the stains were into an empty film canister with my Swiss penknife. Philipp would get the sample tested.

I pushed back the top and looked inside. I saw no blood on the driver’s seat. The side pockets of the doors were empty. A silver St Christopher was attached to the dashboard. I picked it up; maybe Frau Buchendorff would like to have it even though it had let Mischkey down. The radio and cassette player reminded me of the Saturday I’d followed Mischkey from Heidelberg to Mannheim. There was still a cassette inside that I took out and pocketed.

I don’t have much of a clue about the inner workings of cars. So I refrained from staring blankly at the motor or crawling under the wreck. What I’d seen was plenty to give me a picture of the car’s collision with the railings and the descent onto the tracks. I retrieved my small automatic camera from my coat pocket and took a couple of pictures. Along with the report Nägelsbach had given me were some photos but they were scarcely recognizable on the Xerox.

4

I sweated alone

Back in Mannheim, the first thing I did was drive to the city hospital. I located Philipp’s room, knocked, and went in. He was in the process of hiding his ashtray, complete with smouldering cigarette, in the drawer of his desk. ‘Ah, it’s you.’ He was relieved. ‘I promised the senior nurse I’d stop smoking. What brings you round my way?’

‘I’ve a favour to ask you.’

‘Ask me over a coffee, let’s go to the canteen.’ As he strode ahead, white coat billowing, a cheeky one-liner for every pretty nurse, he looked like a lecherous Marcus Welby, MD. In the canteen he whispered something at me about the blonde nurse three tables away. She shot him a look, the look of a blue-eyed barracuda. I’m fond of Philipp but if he’s gobbled up one day by a barracuda like that he’ll deserve it.

I fetched the film canister from my pocket and placed it in front of him.

‘Sure, I can get your film developed in the X-ray lab. But now you’re shooting pictures you’re not comfortable taking to the photo shop? Well, Gerd, that’s a shocker.’

Philipp really did have one thing on the brain. Was it the same with me when I was in my late fifties? I thought back. Following the stale years of marriage to Klara I’d experienced those first years as a widower like a second springtime. But a second spring full of romance – Philipp’s pose as the gay Lothario was alien to me.

‘Wrong, Philipp. There are some grains of paint in the film canister with something on them and I need to know whether it’s blood, if possible which blood group. And it doesn’t come from a deflowering on the hood of my car, as you’re doubtless thinking, but from a case I’m working on.’

‘The one doesn’t necessarily contradict the other. But, whatever, I’ll see to it. Is it urgent? Do you want to wait?’

‘No, I’ll give you a call tomorrow. How are things, by the way? Shall we drink a glass of wine sometime?’

We decided to meet on Sunday evening in the Badische Weinstuben. As we were leaving the canteen together he suddenly shot off. An Asian nurse’s aid was stepping into the elevator. He made it just before the doors closed.

Back in the office I did what I should have done a long time ago. I called Firner’s office, exchanged a few words with Frau Buchendorff, and was put through to Firner.

‘Greetings, Herr Self. What’s up?’

‘I’d like to thank you very much for the hamper that was waiting for me when I got back from holiday.’

‘Ah. You were on holiday. Where did it take you?’

I told him about the Aegean, about the yacht, and that I’d seen a ship full of RCW containers in Piraeus. He’d gone walking in the Peloponnese as a student and now had business every so often in Greece. ‘We’re protecting the Acropolis from erosion, a Unesco project.’

‘Tell me, Herr Firner, how did my case proceed?’

‘We took your advice and severed our system from the emission data site. We did so immediately after your report and since then haven’t had any further annoyances.’

‘And what did you do with Mischkey?’

‘A few weeks ago we had him here with us for a full day and he had a great deal to say about the system connections, points of entry, and possible security measurements. A capable man.’

‘You didn’t get the police involved?’

‘That didn’t strike us as particularly opportune. From the police it gets into the press – we don’t like that sort of publicity.’

‘And the damages?’

‘We considered that, too. If it interests you: some of our people found it unbearable simply to let Mischkey go after calculating the damage he caused at five million. But at the end of the day, fortunately, economic sense triumphed over the legal aspect. Also over the legal reflections of Oelmüller and Ostenteich, who wanted Mischkey’s case to be brought before the Federal Court. It wasn’t a bad idea: before the Federal Court the Mischkey case would have demonstrated the dangers to which businesses are prey under the new emissions law. But it would have brought undesirable publicity. Besides, we’re hearing, via the Economics Ministry, about rumblings from Karlsruhe that would make any further arguments on our part unnecessary.’

‘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.