Bernhard Schlink - Self’s Murder

Yes, that’s how old Herr Weller would have spoken to me, one old poop to another. I could picture it clearly. Had I asked him whether a Gregor Brock wouldn’t have a right to claims that a Gregor Samarin couldn’t make because he didn’t know anything about them, old Herr Weller would have waved me away. Claims? What claims? After the inflation, the Great Depression, and the currency reform? Claims, when he himself and old Herr Welker could have been sent to a concentration camp for all they had done for Ursula Brock?

I could also picture a conversation that would have taken place in the spring between Adolf Schuler and Bertram Welker. Schuler would have been waiting for Welker to fill him in about Samarin, about his identity and his dealings. Schuler had found the money in the cellar, and in his search for documents concerning the silent partner had found the passport: the passport of Ursula Brock, whom he had known only as Frau Samarin. Perhaps he felt obliged to inform Samarin as well. But his foremost loyalty was to the Welkers, so he intended to go to Bertram Welker first with the information. But Welker had come with Samarin, and Schuler couldn’t talk with Welker as openly as he would have liked. Schuler had been secretive, Welker had said, and probably he really had aired a few secrets, not so much about the money as about Gregor Brock. Also, perhaps it wasn’t Welker but Samarin who had diarrhea and kept having to go to the bathroom. Perhaps Schuler was lucky and managed to tell Welker everything he wanted to tell him.

Or had that been Schuler’s undoing?

I drove to my office and took out the medicines I had taken with me from Schuler’s bathroom. I took the little bottle of Catapresan pills to the Kopernikus pharmacy, where the four friendly pharmacists have been so helpful and forthcoming over the years that I’ve almost never needed a doctor. I gave the bottle to the head pharmacist. She told me she wasn’t sure when she’d have an answer for me. But when I dropped by my office that evening after a meal at the Kleiner Rosengarten, she had tested the contents and left the results on my answering machine. The pills were not Catapresan, but Zentramin, a benign magnesium-calcium-potassium concoction used for calming the vegetative nervous system and stabilizing the cardiac nerves during arrhythmia. I knew this medication. Zentramin was also among the medications that Dr. Armbrust had prescribed for Schuler, and which I had found in his bathroom. Zentramin pills look remarkably similar to Catapresan pills.

I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to consider a plan of action. I was standing in my doorway getting the key out of my bag when I heard “Herr Self!” and Karl-Heinz Ulbrich stepped out of the shadows into the light of the door lamp. He was again wearing his three-piece suit, but his vest was unbuttoned, his collar undone, and his tie crooked. He had stopped trying to play the banker.

“What are you doing here?”

“Can I come in?” he asked. When I hesitated a moment, he smiled. “As I’ve told you once before, the lock on your door’s a joke.”

We climbed the stairs in silence. I unlocked the door and had him sit on one of the sofas, as he had before, while I sat on the other. I felt I was being petty. I got up and brought out a bottle of Sancerre, along with two glasses.

“Would you like some wine?”

He nodded. Turbo came over and again rubbed against his feet.

“The mistakes we make,” he suddenly began. “All the things we don’t know! Of course one can always learn, but for us East Germans to have to learn at the age of fifty what you West Germans learned at twenty is difficult, and a mistake that doesn’t affect a person at twenty can be very painful at fifty. Tax returns, insurance, bank accounts, the contracts you people keep signing about every single thing-we had no idea about any of that. Not to mention the language! I still can’t tell when you people mean something or don’t. It’s not just when you’re lying, but words have a whole other meaning when you present yourselves or are pitching or selling something.”

“I can imagine that that’s-”

“No, you can’t. But it’s kind of you to say so.” He picked up a glass and drank. “When Welker offered me the job, I thought at first that you had warned him about me and that he was trying to buy me off. Then I thought: But why? Why do I always think along those lines? Welker and I had a good conversation. It didn’t bother him that I had specialized in financial crimes or that I’d been with the Stasi or that I was from the East. He said he needed someone like me. I told myself that I wanted to believe what he was saying, that I also wanted to believe in myself, that banking wasn’t just some hocus-pocus. I began reading the financial news, even if it’s far from an easy read, and ordered some books about management and bookkeeping. You know, it’s not as if you people here in the West don’t breathe the same air we do. And you don’t even know the local people, while I know the Sorbians like the back of my hand.”

I don’t know what was wrong with me. I remembered the text and melody of a hit by Peter Alexander from the 1960s: “I know your sorrows like the back of my hand.”

“I really tried hard,” he continued, staring in front of him. “But once again I didn’t understand the language. What Welker had in fact said-a thing you would have understood in a flash-was: ‘I need an idiot who doesn’t know what’s going on here. And Karl-Heinz Ulbrich is just such an idiot.’”

“When did you realize this?”

“Oh, weeks ago. Quite by chance. We’ve got a lot of small branches in the area, and I thought I ought to get to know them, so I went to visit them-each time a different one. One day I turned up at one, in the back of beyond, just five little houses, all boarded up as if nobody lived there, on a road to nowhere. The bank itself was in no better shape, and I wondered what it was doing there. Well, what could it be doing there? It was a place to accommodate money. It didn’t take me long to find that out. When I want to know something, I-”

“I know, when it comes to shadowing you’re an absolute ace.”

“I didn’t just shadow. I also sniffed around. Welker isn’t Mafia. His men are Russians and he works for Russians, that’s all. Before his men started working for him, they worked for that other fellow, the one he shot. And he doesn’t only work for Russians. He’s independent, makes a profit of four to six percent, which isn’t a lot, but then again that’s all that laundering brings in. Where you make money is when you launder large amounts. Then you really take it in. And what Vera Soboda and I realized is that laundering cash is only an extra. The actual business is the laundering of money on the books.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“No. If it all comes to light it will be the end of the Sorbian bank, and all my employees will be out on the street. I didn’t have to read too much in my financial textbooks to see that we have far too many employees. The only reason Welker doesn’t rock the boat is because he doesn’t want to make waves. And do you know what else I tell myself? In the old days, we never had anything like that happen. You fellows brought all this with you. So it’s your police who should be dealing with it.”

“I can assure you that we in Schwetzingen had as little money laundering in the old days as you did in Cottbus. Wasn’t it you who said that Chechens, Georgians, and Azerbaijanis-”

“Back in the East German days, the Chechens stayed in Chechnya and the Georgians in Georgia. It’s you people who mixed everything up.”

He had a fixed idea in his mind and would not let anyone shake it. There was a determined look on his face, even if his determination was one of inflexibility.