The Safety Net (35 page)
Surprisingly enough she liked Kortschede, and even Pliefger. But everyone else she found “bad company, very bad,” and said about many of them: “They stink, you just can’t smell it anymore.” And just when he had begun to encourage something like friendship between her and Sabine Fischer, the marriage went on the rocks, and she went back to Yugoslavia, had finally even begun to describe senior “government types,” if not very senior, as stinking. “They all stink, you people just can’t smell it anymore.” Eventually she admitted to him that he stank too, “not always, but most of the time,” even said so in hours of intimacy when she released him from the mental scene of horror and he could forget about all the whores, but she wouldn’t deign to describe the stink. Things became quite awkward when she began to sniff at people and wrinkle her nose, saying laconically: “Stinks” or “Doesn’t stink,” and it was quite clear that she didn’t only mean this morally, toward the end she spoke openly of a “stinking German cleanliness.” He had to let her go, back to Istria, gave her money for a smart little hotel where he hoped she wouldn’t have to accommodate any other stinking Germans, and he dreamed of her, dreamed of Hilde, of his nice square sons, and thought with apprehension of having to return Bangors’s invitation: hadn’t there been a flicker in his eyes after all? A connivance, yet he couldn’t start anything against him without implicating himself. The body in the vault was not his alone. Probably someone had picked up the “bloodstained money” after them and discreetly removed the corpse.
It was going to be difficult to get rid of Edelgard. She was tough, and she clung in the most tiresome way to the luxury which, for her, included the surveillance; of course the surveillance would be greatly reduced, if not cease entirely. The rest
of the luxury meant nothing to her, yet she wanted it, she liked sitting around in the most expensive hotels reading magazines, listening to her goddamn music, making eyes, driving police officers up the wall, and enjoying her “protocol rank,” driving men crazy, yet none of them wanted her, none of them really swallowed the bait, and she didn’t seem to be all that interested, either. She was worse than a whore, gone rotten early on while hanging around cheap snack bars and bus depots—and she had snared him, had pretended to be panting for him but had then played upon her honor and virginity, had even involved her parents in this crusade of honor, while in fact she had probably been laid at the age of twelve, at the latest thirteen. She had caught him at the right moment, just after Elisabeth had left, when he had had enough of whores and, tired out, was sitting late one evening in his office: a crude approach with freshly made coffee, soft little hand on arm, and a generously granted look at those stupid breasts. Honor, shrieks, virginity, parents, and again a wedding, the fourth. It would be hard to get rid of her, expensive too. There wouldn’t be a fifth. What he needed was a life’s companion, someone like Käthe Tolm, in whose follies there was even a certain charm. Holzpuke had indicated to him that she and her inscrutable son Herbert had probably given that Veronica some money. Even her piety was perfectly genuine, she was worth her weight in gold, like her daughter, whose qualities as horsewoman, churchgoer, mother, housewife, and on the dance floor added up to a fantastic image, beyond price; he must really have a serious word with young Fischer to persuade him not to exhaust that young woman, mentally, physically, possibly even in the bedroom, seeing how he was now on a porn kick. She was a jewel, that young woman, more fragile than she looked—she mustn’t be handled too roughly, as Fischer was obviously doing with his idiotic playboy pose. There must be no danger of the young Tolm woman flipping, clearing out—never mind where to: she had to stick to her role with her cute little brat. Old Tolm needed support too. That left only Herbert, and no one, not even the police, could fathom
him. He was “into” philosophy, and that wasn’t without its dangers; one of these days he’d have to discuss all this with Dollmer, maybe even with Stabski—these were problems going far beyond the interests of the Association. They concerned the state.
First of all he had to find out whether by this time Kolzheim and Grolzer had settled down a bit: those two really had flipped, hadn’t been able to take all that guff, Amplanger’s “knife in the face,” they had begun to hit the bottle in a big way and get involved with women who did them no good: greedy bitches out for apartments and furs, wanting to bathe in champagne, so to speak. Out of a sense of surfeit and unrelieved boredom, the two men had then embarked on trendy perversions, three-way, four-way deals, or even by the dozen. As a result, they had dipped into the till, padding their expense accounts. That was inexcusable, they had to be sent back to the front lines, to the harshest, grimmest conditions, and were confronted with the alternative: to be taken to court or to prove themselves in the front line, not at any staff headquarters but right in the trenches. Three or four years behind bars, or demotion: they chose the latter and were sent to one of the supermarkets out in the country, in the sticks anyway, where it was up to them to increase sales, do the dirty work, nag the salesgirls, gyp the customers with wilted lettuce, dream up “special offers,” arrive for work on time in their soiled white smocks, bully the cleaning women, and make sure the cash balanced. If they felt like it, they could join outdoor clubs out there in the sticks, have a grand time with the women at fairs and local hops, go hiking over hill and dale dressed up in all the right togs complete with walking stick and red socks, and could prove their impregnable virtue on the thin ice of small-town sex parties. It must be three or four years now since they had been sent to the front. He must inquire as to how far Kolzheim and Grolzer had proven themselves, whether they had managed to work their way up without patronage and pass all the front-line tests. They had been good assistants, university graduates, smart sociologists
with a command of the leftist jargon yet capable of arguing from the right. It would be too bad if they went to seed among the lettuce heads and petty affairs with salesgirls and cashiers.
He would have to ask Amplanger for a report, and he must give the Tolms a call, talk to them at long last after they had been lugging prejudices around like heavy lumps for thirty-three years. Perhaps he could phone Hilde too and ask her to be, if not his life’s companion, maybe his housekeeper. He’d had enough of this wild-bull image, didn’t need it anymore either, was sick and tired of women, including whores. Above all he must convince Tolm that no one in the world was out to destroy him. On the contrary: they wanted to keep him and to keep him well, and at last he was to have time for his Madonnas or cathedrals or crucifixes. He was to get well and stay well, for as long as possible, and if Kolzheim and Grolzer had been purified, had been tempered to new hardness, they would be the best assistants for him: streamlined young whippets, with a sense of humor and, after three or four years in the crucible, a long way from being spoiled. Perhaps Käthe Tolm was the only person he could talk to about his corpse in the vault, about his loneliness.
After breakfast a delegation from the newspaper turned up after all, with flowers and a blown-up front page, mounted on cardboard, of that day’s edition, which had been devoted to his election. That was nice of them, it really touched him, especially since they sent only three people—old Thönis, who officially was still editor-in-chief, one of the old émigré bunch originally sent him by Major Weller, newsprint allocation and license alone not being quite enough. From Thönis and the vanished Communist Schröter he had learned at least the rudiments of journalism, again and again they had dinned into him the word “jour, jour, jour,” for one day, to last one day. He had understood, but he had never learned it, and in whatever he wrote he had never been able to drop his academic diffuseness and thoroughness. They had also sent along Blörl, one of the old printers, and his secretary Birgit Zatger, not that young either, all of them old-timers, they were fond of him, as he was of them, and they knew that. Thönis had actually dug out Tolm’s doctoral thesis: “The Rhenish Farmhouse in the
Nineteenth Century”—that pathetic, cold, unfriendly architecture, those little Frankish farmhouses with their tiled walls, their yards, not much more than burrows. He could only hope that no one would read this unflattering dissertation, with its many comparisons with North and South German peasant architecture. Somehow or other those shabby façades had always reminded him of confessionals, and they were something he couldn’t stomach.
Pictures of himself: as a boy with his bike outside the manor house, as a student, as a returning soldier, and Käthe hadn’t escaped them either—as a young wife carrying Rolf, sitting beside Zummerling at a dinner party. Himself again with his postwar decorations, standing with smiling cabinet ministers. “A full life. A successful life.” He actually felt a few tears come to his eyes as he raised his glass with Thönis, Blörl, Miss Zatger, and Käthe; Käthe not quite in tears but moist-eyed. Champagne, cigars, a promise to appear before the staff, who felt they shared in his honor, to accept their congratulations, and on a sudden impulse he suggested to Thönis that they use first names, after thirty-three years, tried desperately to remember Thönis’s first name, felt that his suggestion had come too late and at the wrong moment. Thönis was embarrassed, couldn’t bring himself to say Fritz, and it occurred to him too late that Thönis was called Heinrich—and all this time he was thinking of Sabine, of her future, thinking of Kortschede’s prediction of a new, inescapable expulsion. Where to? Where to?
Already taking mental leave of the manor house, he recalled that the children had never liked coming here, not even Sabine. They had never felt at home here, they clung to Eickelhof as to a lost paradise, which it had never been, that damp, moldering monster of a building that had proven past repair, and all attempts to revive Eickelhof customs had failed. At times he had considered renting a hotel apartment, a suite, in Cologne, where he could meet his children, but Käthe had rejected that as being “really too far out.” Still, it would have been easier than dragging the whole surveillance apparatus along for every
visit; perhaps one could buy a piece of hotel in Cologne. It wasn’t likely they would flatten the city. But presumably it, too, stood on top of that “brown gold,” and presumably there were technical means of dismantling the cathedral and rebuilding it somewhere else.…
When Käthe called him to the phone, paler even than yesterday, obviously frightened, his thoughts flew to Rolf, then to Zummerling. At the time of Rolf’s arrest she had looked just as pale and frightened when holding out the receiver; again when Veronica disappeared with Beverloh and Holger; and both times it had been Zummerling who had not only broken the news to him but also explained, with profuse apologies, that he wouldn’t be able to suppress these items of news. It did not surprise him that it was Zummerling again: his was the best intelligence service, after all, his spies were everywhere, and he suddenly wondered if it might have something to do with Herbert, who not only had crazy ideas in his head but was capable of carrying them out. Before going to the phone, he had the presence of mind to wave back at Thönis, who at that moment was being helped into his coat by Blurtmehl. Käthe picked up the other receiver and nodded to him. “Tolm speaking,” he said into the phone. “This time, my friend,” said Zummerling in his pleasant, friendly voice, “just so you won’t be alarmed—this time your family isn’t involved, but it’s terrible enough: Kortschede has killed himself, in his car, in the woods near Trollscheid. Are you listening, Tolm?”
“Yes, I’m listening … I … I just can’t take it in yet.…”
“Mutilated in the most ghastly way—in his pocket was a letter to you that Holzpuke, probably even Dollmer himself, will hand over to you—an explosive letter, highly explosive, that must never on any account be made public.… Are you listening?”
“A letter to me that I haven’t read yet, but whose contents you obviously already know—doesn’t that strike you as odd …? Kortschede was my friend, a true friend, one of the few I had.”
“The envelope in Kortschede’s pocket bore no address, so the letter had to be opened. The ‘Dear Fritz’ and the contents prove that the letter is meant for you. Needless to say, the envelope will be handed over to you too. Besides, the letter had to be opened since it might have contained allusions to perpetrators or accomplices—incidentally, the letter also contains some embarrassing allusions to that boy he called Petie. All in all, a letter showing him to have some kind of millennium obsession. I appeal to you, not only as our newly elected president but also as the owner of the newspaper with all its affiliations.… Are you listening, Tolm?”
“Yes, I’m listening.… I trust you’ll understand that I would like to read the letter before you report to me on it—and, when I have read the letter, for us to consider jointly what is to happen about
my
letter? Nor is it quite clear to me why instead of Holzpuke or Dollmer notifying me about the letter it’s—forgive my saying so—you, since to my knowledge you have no official function whatever.”
Zummerling laughed. “But it was Dollmer who asked me to talk to you before talking to you himself and possibly handing over the letter.…”
“Possibly? A letter intended for me?”
“This is a matter of such journalistic explosiveness that—there’s nothing I can do—Dollmer first called me about it, there’s even a chance Stabski will be brought into it. In this situation, my dear Tolm, you shouldn’t be so sensitive, considering the family embarrassments you are facing.… Are you still there … Tolm? Are you …?”
“Yes, I’m still here—have your specialists in pregnancy, that’s to say impregnation, opened fire?”
“Look, my dear Tolm … I find your daughter’s possible lapses more endearing than otherwise, but it so happens that your son-in-law is causing trouble. Not at all on account of some possible lapse, which he’s not likely to admit as yet, but because of the environment his daughter now finds herself in.…”