Bernhard Schlink - Self's Punishment

Then I realized that the music was coming from my own loudspeaker. I don’t have a radio attached to the system. I fiddled with the amplifier and couldn’t get rid of the music. I put on the record. Bach in the forti sections easily managed to drown out the sinister other channel, but the piani he had to share with the newscaster of South-West Radio. My stereo was apparently screwed up.

Perhaps it was due to the lack of good music that I didn’t get much more thinking done that evening. I played through a scenario in which Oelmüller was the culprit. Apart from the psychology it all fitted. He certainly wasn’t the rascal or prankster – could he be the blackmailer? According to everything I’d ever gathered about computer criminality, people who worked with a computer could also use it for criminal purposes, but not make a mockery of it.

The next morning I went to a radio repair shop before breakfast. I’d tried out the stereo again and the interference had gone. That really did annoy me. I can’t abide unpredictable machinery. A car may be roadworthy and a washing machine still wash, but if the last, most insignificant indicator light doesn’t work with Prussian precision, my mind will know no rest.

I got a competent young man. He had compassion for my lack of technical know-how, almost called me ‘Grandpa’ in friendly condescension. Of course, I know that radio waves aren’t brought to life by the radio – they’re always there. The radio merely makes them audible, and the young man explained to me that practically the same circuit that achieves this in the receiver is also present in the amplifier and that, under certain atmospheric conditions, the amplifier may act as a receiver. There was nothing you could do about it, just had to accept it.

On the way from Seckenheimer Strasse to my café in the arcades by the Wasserturm I bought a newspaper. At my kiosk, lying next to Süddeutsche is always the Rhine Neckar Chronicle and for some reason the abbreviation RNC stuck fast in my head.

When I was sitting in Café Gmeiner, coffee in front of me, awaiting my ham and eggs, I got that feeling of wanting to say something to someone but not remembering what. Was it related to the RNC? It struck me that Tietzke’s interview with Firner hadn’t appeared in the paper yet. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. Hadn’t someone spoken to me yesterday about the RNC? No, Oelmüller had said the RCC had had reason to trigger the smoke alarm. That was apparently the office responsible for the smog alarm and analysis of emission data. But there was something else I wasn’t getting. It had something to do with the amplifier functioning as a receiver.

When the ham and eggs arrived I ordered another coffee. The waitress didn’t bring it until I’d asked for a third time. ‘Sorry, Herr Self, there’s a lot of static in the air today. I’m miles away. I was taking care of my daughter’s boy last night because the young folk have a subscription for the opera and got back late yesterday. Wagner’s Götterdämmerung went on and on.’

A lot of static, miles away, long-distance. Of course, that was it, the long-distance reception at the RCC. Herzog had told me about the direct emission model. The same emission data are also recorded in the RCW system, Oelmüller had said. And Ostenteich had spoken of the online connection with the state monitoring system. Somehow the computer centre of the RCW and the RCC had to be connected. Was it possible to penetrate the MBI system via the RCC? And was it possible that the people at RCW had simply forgotten this? I cast my thoughts back and remembered clearly that there had been talk of the terminals in the plant and of telephone lines to the outside when we’d been discussing possible breaches in the system. A cable running between RCC and RCW, as I was now picturing it, had never been mentioned. It belonged neither to the telephone lines nor to the terminal connections. It differed from those by not being a mode of direct communication. Rather a silent flow of data migrated from the various sensors onto tape. Data that interested no one at the plant and could be immediately forgotten unless there happened to be an alarm or an accident. I understood why the musical confusion on my stereo had preoccupied me for so long: the interference came from inside.

I played around with my ham and eggs and the multitude of questions going through my mind. Above all I needed additional information. I didn’t want to speak with Thomas, Ostenteich, or Oelmüller now. If they had forgotten an RCW-RCC connection, that would ultimately cause them more concern than the connection itself. I needed to take a look at the RCC and find someone there who could explain system connections to me.

From the phone booth next to the restroom I gave Tietzke a call. The RCC, it transpired, was the Regional Computer Centre in Heidelberg. ‘To a certain degree even trans-regional,’ said Tietzke, ‘as Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate are hooked up to it. What do you have in mind, Herr Self?’

‘Do you ever let up, Herr Tietzke?’ I retorted, and promised him the rights to my memoirs.

I drove straight to Heidelberg. In front of the law school I found a parking space. I walked the few steps to Ebert-Platz, the former Wrede-Platz, and found the Regional Computer Centre in the old building with the two entrance pillars where the Deutsche Bank used to be. The doorman sat in the former banking hall.

‘Selk from Springer Publishing,’ I introduced myself. ‘I’d like to talk to one of the gentlemen from emission supervision, the publishing house called ahead.’

He picked up the telephone. ‘Herr Mischkey, there’s someone here from Springer Publishing, he says he wants to talk to you and has an appointment. Should I send him up?’

I interjected. ‘Can I talk to Herr Mischkey myself?’ And as the doorman was sitting at a table not screened by glass and since I was already reaching for it, he handed the receiver to me, nonplussed.

‘Hello, Herr Mischkey, Selk from Springer Publishing here, you know? We’d like to include a report on the direct emission model in our computer journal, and after talking with the industry I’d like to hear the other side. Will you see me?’

He didn’t have much time but invited me up. His room was on the second floor, the door was open, the view opened onto the square. Mischkey was sitting with his back to the door at a computer that had his full concentration and on which he was typing with two fingers at great speed. He called over his shoulder, ‘Come on in, I’ll be finished in a second.’

I looked around. The table and chairs were awash with computer printouts and magazines from Computer Weekly to the American edition of Penthouse . On the wall was a blackboard with ‘Happy Birthday, Peter’ scrawled on it in smudged chalk. Next to that Einstein was sticking his tongue out at me. On the other wall were film posters and a still that I couldn’t assign to a particular film. ‘Madonna,’ he said without looking up.

‘Madonna?’

Now he did look up. A distinctive, bony face with deep furrows in the brow, a small moustache, an obstinate chin, all topped with a wild mop of greying hair. His eyes twinkled at me in delight through a pair of intentionally ugly spectacles. Were the national health glasses of the fifties back in fashion? He was wearing jeans and a dark-blue sweater, no shirt. ‘I’ll call her up on screen for you from my film file.’ He beckoned me over, typed in a couple of commands, and the screen filled in a flash. ‘You know how it is when you’re fishing for a tune that you can’t quite remember? Problem of all music and movie buffs? I’ve solved that with my file, too. Do you want to hear music from your favourite film?’