Bernhard Schlink - Self's Punishment

Towards evening I was feeling better. My temperature had gone down and I was weak, but I felt like eating the beef broth with pasta and vegetables that Brigitte had prepared, and smoking a Sweet Afton afterwards. How should work on the case proceed? Murder belonged in police hands, and even if the RCW, as I could well imagine, pulled a veil of oblivion over yesterday’s incident I’d never find out anything more from anyone in the Works. I called Nägelsbach. He and his wife had finished dinner and were in the studio.

‘Of course you can come by. You can listen to Hedda Gabler, too, we’re in the third act just now.’

I stuck a note on the front door, to reassure Brigitte in case she came to check on me again. The drive to Heidelberg was bad. My own slowness and the quickness of the car made uneasy companions.

The Nägelsbachs live in one of the Pfaffengrunder settlement houses of the twenties. Nägelsbach had turned the shed, originally meant for chickens and rabbits, into a studio with a large window and bright lamps. The evening was cool and the Swedish wood-burning stove held a few crackling logs. Nägelsbach was sitting on his high stool, at the big table on which Dürer’s Praying Hands were taking shape in matchstick form. His wife was reading aloud in the armchair by the stove. It was a perfect idyll that met my eyes when I came through the garden gate straight to the studio and looked through the window before knocking.

‘My word, what a sight you are!’ Frau Nägelsbach vacated the armchair for me and took another stool for herself.

‘You must really have something on your mind to come here in this state,’ was Nägelsbach’s greeting. ‘Do you mind if my wife stays? I tell her everything, work-wise, too. The rules of confidentiality don’t apply to childless couples who only have one another.’

As I recounted my tale, Nägelsbach worked on. He didn’t interrupt me. At the end of my narration he was silent for a little while, then he switched off the lamp above his workplace, turned his high stool toward us, and said to his wife: ‘Tell him.’

‘With what you’ve just told us, maybe the police will get a search warrant for the old hangar. Maybe they’ll find the Citroën still there. But there’ll be nothing remarkable or suspicious about it. No reflective foil, no deadly triptych. That was pretty, by the way, how you described that. Right, and then the police can interrogate a few of the security people and the widow Schmalz and whoever else you named, but what is it going to achieve?’

‘That’s it, and of course I could prime Herzog in particular about the case, and he can try to use his contacts with security, only it won’t change a thing. But you know all that yourself, Herr Self.’

‘Yes, that’s where my thinking has brought me too. Nonetheless I thought you might have an idea of something the police could do, that… oh, I don’t know what I thought. I haven’t been able to resign myself to the case ending like this.’

‘Do you have any idea of a motive?’ Frau Nägelsbach turned to her husband. ‘Couldn’t we get further that way?’

‘I can only imagine from what I know thus far that something went wrong. Just like that story you read to me recently. The RCW is having trouble with Mischkey, and it’s getting more and more bothersome, and then someone in control says, “That’s enough,” and his subordinate gets a fright and in his turn passes the baton: “See to it Mischkey is quietened down, exert yourself,” and the person this is said to wants to show his dedication and prods and encourages his own subordinate to think of something, and it can be unusual, and at the end of this long chain someone believes he’s supposed to knock off Mischkey.’

‘But old Schmalz was a pensioner and not even part of the chain any more,’ his wife offered.

‘Hard to say. How many policemen do I know who still feel like policemen after retirement?’

‘Dear God,’ she interrupted him, ‘you’re not going to-’

‘No, I won’t. Perhaps Schmalz senior was one of those who still thought of himself as being in service. What I mean is there needn’t be a motive for murder in the classical sense here. The murderer is simply the instrument without a motive, and whoever had the motive wasn’t necessarily thinking about murder. That’s the effect, and indeed the purpose, of commanding hierarchies. We know that in the police, too, and in the army.’

‘Do you think more could be done if old Schmalz were still alive?’

‘Well, to begin with, Herr Self wouldn’t have got as far. He wouldn’t have found out at all about Schmalz’s injury, wouldn’t have looked in the hangar, and certainly wouldn’t have found the murder vehicle. All traces would have been removed long before. But, all right, let’s imagine we’d come by this knowledge in a different way. No, I don’t think we’d have got anything out of old Schmalz. He must have been a tough old nut.’

‘I can’t just accept this, Rudolf. Listening to you, the only person you can get in this chain of command is the last link. And the others are all supposedly innocent?’

‘Whether they’re innocent is one question and whether you can get them is another. Look, Reni, I don’t know of course whether something really went wrong, or whether it’s not the case that the chain was so well-oiled that everyone knew what was meant without it being spoken out loud. But if it was oiled like that, it certainly can’t be proved.’

‘Should Herr Self be advised to talk to one of the big cheeses at the RCW? To get a sense of how that person conducts himself?’

‘So far as prosecution goes, that won’t help either. But you’re right, it’s the only remaining thing he can do.’

It was good to watch the pair of them, in this question-and-answer game, making sense of what I was too groggy to work out for myself. So what was left for me was a talk with Korten.

Frau Nägelsbach made some verbena tea and we talked about art. Nägelsbach told me what appealed to him in his reproduction of Praying Hands . He found the usual sculpture reproductions no less sickly sweet than I. And that very fact made him want to achieve the sublime sobriety of Dürer’s original through the rigorous simplicity of the matches.

As I left he promised to check up on the licence plate of Schmalz’s Citroën.

The note for Brigitte was still hanging on the door. When I was lying in bed she called. ‘Are you feeling better? Sorry I couldn’t come round to see you again. I just didn’t manage it. How’s your weekend looking? Do you think you’ll feel up to coming to dinner tomorrow?’ Something wasn’t right. Her cheerfulness sounded forced.

On Saturday morning I found one message from Nägelsbach on the answering machine and one from Korten. The number on the licence plate on old Schmalz’s Citroën had been allotted to a Heidelberg postal worker for his VW Beetle five years ago. Presumably the licence plate I saw originated from this scrapped predecessor. Korten asked whether I wouldn’t like to visit them in Ludolf-Krehl-Strasse. I should call him back.

‘My dear Self, good to hear you. This afternoon, tea in the loggia? You whipped up quite a storm for us, I hear. And you sound as though you have a cold. It doesn’t surprise me, ha ha. Your level of fitness, I’m full of respect.’

At four o’clock I was in Ludolf-Krehl-Strasse. For Inge, if it was still Inge, I had brought an autumn bouquet. I marvelled at the entrance gate, the video camera, and the intercom system. It consisted of a telephone receiver on a long cable that the chauffeur could pick up and pass on to the good ladies and gentlemen in the rear. Just as I wanted to sit back in my car with the receiver I heard Korten with the tortured patience you use for a naughty child. ‘Don’t be silly, Self! The cable car is on its way for you.’