“We? How many more children do I have?”

“There’s no need to make fun of me.” He told me that he had seen his file after the fall of the Berlin Wall and had discovered that he had been adopted, and that his real mother was Klara Self from Berlin.

“What file was this?”

“My cadre file.”

“Cadre…?”

“I worked for the Stasi-the East German secret services-and am proud of it. I investigated serious crimes, and I’ll have you know that our total of solved cases was higher than you here in the West could ever hope for. Things weren’t all bad in East Germany, and I won’t have it or me painted black.”

I motioned to him to calm down. “When were you born?”

“March ninth, 1942. Your fascist Wehrmacht was attacking the Soviet Union.”

I did my arithmetic. March 9, 1942, I was living at the hotel in Heidelberg, behind me the Poland Campaign, getting wounded in action, and the field hospital. I had finished my law degree and begun working at the public prosecutor’s office. I had not yet found an apartment, so Klara was staying with her parents in Berlin. Or was she traveling with her girlfriend Gigi through Italy? Or was she somewhere in hiding so she could give birth to a child? I would have liked to have had children. But not a child born on March 9, 1942. From May to August 1941, I was in Warthegau and had been with Klara only a single night.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but-”

“I knew it. I knew you’d shake your head and say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.’ You could talk about us as brothers and sisters. That you could do, but you could never act like we were. There you shake your head and raise your hands.” He shook his head and raised his hands, the way he imagined us doing. He was trying to sound derisive but in fact sounded despondent.

I shouldn’t have told him that I was sorry. I was not sorry that I wasn’t his father. Furthermore, my apology provoked more accusations, which again triggered my apology reflex. I was on the point of apologizing for all the rigors the West did and did not unleash upon the East.

“I’m not coming empty-handed. You didn’t notice the blue Mercedes when you were driving to Schwetzingen, and I imagine you didn’t notice it this morning, either.” He saw the interest in my face. “You want to know more. Well, I’ll tell you more. The Mercedes came after the old man gave you the attaché case and got into his car. It pulled up, and during the brouhaha the man sitting next to the driver got out and went snooping, first around your office and then around the old man’s car. I needn’t tell you what he was looking for.”

“Do you know who these men were?”

“All I know is that the Mercedes’s number plates were from Berlin. But I’ll find out. As it is, you and I are in the same line of business, and soon you’ll be… soon enough you’ll be…” He fell silent.

He actually was thinking of taking over my business, from father to son. Not right away, but after a period of transition in which we would operate as “Detective Agency: Gerhard Self & Son.” I did not propose “Gerhard Self & Klara Self’s Son.” I didn’t explain to him that he might possibly be the son of my deceased wife, but that he was most definitely no son of mine. I didn’t want to confide in him, talking about my marriage, opening up about myself, compromising Klara. In later years our marriage had been empty. But in those early days, when I had started at the Heidelberg public prosecutor’s office and Klara was soon to follow me to Heidelberg, our marriage was young and, I thought, full of magic, promising lasting happiness. It did affect me that there might have been someone else with whom Klara had had a relationship and a child, someone who didn’t even love her enough to insist she divorce me and marry him. Or did he die on the battlefield? I recalled an officer she knew, about whom she initially spoke a lot but then stopped mentioning, an officer who fell outside Moscow. I searched the face of the man before me for that officer’s features but found no trace of them.

“What is your name?”

“Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, with a hyphen. The Ulbrich without a T.”

“Where do you live?”

“At the Kolpinghaus. Its address is R 7-isn’t that crazy? That sounds like… like a cigarette brand name, not a street.” He shook his head in disbelief.

I forbore explaining the Mannheim street system. I also didn’t ask him whether he wasn’t ashamed as an old Communist to be staying at the Kolpinghaus.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, Turbo returned from one of his forays over the rooftops, jumped from the windowsill onto the sofa, and rubbed against Karl-Heinz Ulbrich’s legs on his way to the kitchen. Karl-Heinz said “puss-puss,” his eyes following Turbo with satisfaction. He looked at me triumphantly, as if he’d always known that animals in the West were friendlier than people and that this had now been proven. Luckily he didn’t say this out loud.

He got up. “I guess I’d better go. But I’ll be back.”

Without waiting for a good-bye, he walked through the hall to the door, opened it, and from outside carefully closed it again.

15 Without confession there is no absolution

I called Strasbourg. I couldn’t get hold of Georg-though after he’d been there just a day he wouldn’t have had much to report. So I had to make do with what Schuler had told me.

The silent partner from Strasbourg whose first or last name bore the initial C, L, or Z seemed to spark little interest in Welker or Samarin. As I sat opposite them making my report, Samarin looked visibly bored, while Welker seemed to be trying to suppress his impatience.

I’d said all I had to say. “I’ve picked up the Strasbourg lead and can either follow it or drop it. I do get the impression, however, that you’ve lost interest in the silent partner.”

Welker assured me that the silent partner was as important to him as ever. “Let me write you another check. Strasbourg won’t be a cheap venture.”

He took his checkbook and a fountain pen out of his jacket and wrote me a check.

“Herr Self,” Samarin said, leaning forward and looking me in the eye. “It seems that Schuler had access to the bank and withdrew some money. He left that money with you, and-”

“He brought me an attaché case, which I have placed in the care of a third party. I’m not sure whether I should hand it over to his heirs or the police. I don’t even know who his heirs are, or the exact circumstances of Schuler’s death.”

“He died in a car crash.”

“Somebody frightened him to death,” I countered.

Samarin shook his head-slowly, ponderously-and as he did so he rocked his upper body back and forth. “Herr Self.” He squeezed out the words. “When someone takes something that doesn’t belong to him, it doesn’t do that person any good.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Welker said soothingly, glancing at Samarin and me with some irritation as he handed me the check. “You must understand that decades ago Herr Schuler was our teacher, a good teacher, and we don’t forget it. His death was a blow to us, and the suspicion about the money, too. I must say that I cannot believe-”

Samarin exploded. “You will believe what-”

“What you tell me?” Welker looked at Samarin and me triumphantly for a few seconds.

Samarin was so furious that he almost tipped the heavy chair over as he got up. But he managed to get a grip on himself. Slowly and menacingly he said, “You will be hearing from me, Herr Self.”

I walked along the palace gardens to Schuler’s house. I couldn’t figure out what Welker’s moment of triumph was all about. Or why the money that had disappeared seemed to worry him less than it worried Samarin. If there was something fishy about the used fifty-and hundred-mark bills, whether Schuler had taken them or not, then this ought to worry the boss more than his assistant, even if his assistant is responsible for practical matters and has a tendency to be overbearing and is quick to flare up. Or were they playing some version of the good-cop, bad-cop routine with me? But if that were the case, Samarin could have exploded instead of getting a grip on himself.