17 The black attaché case

I lay awake that night. Should I give Samarin the black attaché case? Or should I give it to the police, making certain that the men in the blue Mercedes followed me to the station and saw what I did? Or should I put it by the lamppost outside my office while they were parked a few cars away and wait for them to get out, pick it up, and drive off-out of my life?

When I called Nägelsbach in the morning, he was hungover. It wasn’t easy to explain to him what I intended to do. When he finally understood, he was appalled. “You want to do that at the Heidelberg police headquarters? Where all my life I-” He hung up. Half an hour later he called back. “Okay, we can do that at the headquarters in Mannheim. They know me, and there’ll be no problem with me parking there for a while. Did you say at five?”

“Yes, and could you please thank your wife for me?”

He laughed. “She put in a good word for you.”

I packed only a few things. It all had to fit in the black attaché case. I didn’t need a lot; it wouldn’t take more than a couple of days.

Turbo sensed that I was going away. The neighbors would look after him, but he pouted and disappeared, as children do when they realize that Mom and Dad are about to go on a trip.

I took my things and dropped in at Brigitte’s massage practice at the Collini-Center. I had to wait, so I read an article in an old magazine about a movie set in East Germany before reunification: a young couple set out on heists in Bonnie-and-Clyde fashion, robbing the old-style, vulnerable banks of the new currency that had just been introduced. Until they got too wild and began robbing banks in Berlin and got shot.

Brigitte saw her patient off and sat down next to me. “I’m expecting the next client any minute, and thank God for that, because the health-care reform has cost me a third of my old patients, and finding new ones who’ll come in even though their insurance won’t reimburse them isn’t easy.”

I nodded.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ll be away for a few days. My case has ground to a halt. I might be able to get it going again someplace else. Not to mention that I feel a bit spooky around here. If anyone asks for me, you can tell them that.”

She got up with a hurt look. “I know the script well enough: ‘What’s going on?’ she asks him. ‘Nothing,’ he replies, looking out the window into the twilight with a stony glare. Then he turns and looks deep into her eyes. ‘It’s better this way, honey. The less you know, the better. I don’t want the guys to get on your case, too.’”

“Come on, Brigitte. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Believe me, I don’t want to hide anything from you. But right now it’s better if you don’t know what’s going on. Believe me.”

“‘Trust me, my darling,’ he tells her, looking at her intently. ‘I’ve got to think for the two of us right now.’” The bell rang and Brigitte got up to open the door. “Well, take care of yourself!”

I found a place to park on the Augustaanlage, not far from my office. When I got out of the car I didn’t see the blue Mercedes anywhere. Back at my office, I took out the black attaché case and emptied the bills into a trash bag. There was a large plant pot under my desk and a bag of soil that I had bought quite a while ago to replant my potted palm. I put the trash bag inside the new pot beneath the palm tree; the plant didn’t get quite as much soil under its roots as I’d initially planned, but if it didn’t like it, it could go to hell. I never liked that plant.

I put my overnight bag into the attaché case. When I left my office with it, the blue Mercedes was waiting on the other side of the street. The man beside the driver opened the door, got out, and came running toward me. By the time he made it across the street through the evening traffic I was already in my Opel, driving off. He waved to the Mercedes, which honked its horn and cut into traffic and made a U-turn to my side of the street at Werderstrasse, despite a red light. There it picked up the other man and tailed me through the Schwetzingerstadt district.

Mollstrasse, Seckenheimer Strasse, Heinrich-Lanz-Strasse-the streets were filled with cars and bicycles, the stores were open, the sidewalks were bustling, and children were playing in front of the Heilig-Geist Church. This was my safe everyday world. What could happen to me here? Yet the Mercedes was tailing me so closely that I couldn’t see its grille in my rearview mirror but could clearly make out the humorless, set faces of the driver and the man beside him. In the Heinrich-Lanz Strasse he tapped me-a gentle meeting of his bumper with mine-and fear crept up my spine. When the light turned red at the Reichskanzler-Müller-Strasse and we stopped, the man got out of his car and walked up to my locked door, and I don’t know what he would have done if a patrol car hadn’t gone by and the light turned green.

In front of police headquarters I drove half up onto the sidewalk and, clutching the attaché case, was out of the car, up the stairs, and through the door before the man could even get out of the Mercedes. I leaned against the wall, hugging the attaché case to my chest and panting as if I’d run all the way from the Augustaanlage.

Nägelsbach was waiting in his Audi inside the yard of the police station. I gave him the attaché case and he put it on the floor by the front seat. Then he helped me climb into the trunk. “My wife’s put a blanket in there-do you think you’ll manage?”

When he let me out at the airport parking lot at Neuostheim, he was certain nobody had followed him. He was also certain that nobody had seen me climb out of the trunk.

“Do you want me to come along with you?”

“Are you already at loose ends at home, with all that free time on your hands?”

“Not at all. I’ve been conscripted into cleaning up after yesterday’s party.” But he stood there, hesitant and somewhat despondent. “Well, then.”

A little later I was in the air, looking down at Mannheim, keeping my eyes peeled for beige Fiestas and blue Mercedes.

18 Fear of flying

The woman next to me was afraid of flying. She asked me to hold her hand, and I did. As we were taking off, I reassured her with the information that most airplane accidents occur not during takeoff but during landing. An hour and a half later, when our plane began to descend, I confessed that I had not been all that honest with her. The truth is that most airplane accidents do in fact occur during takeoff, not when the plane is landing. We had taken off quite a while ago, so she could sit back and relax. But she didn’t, and at Berlin Tempelhof she rushed off without so much as a good-bye.

I hadn’t been in Berlin since 1942, and I wouldn’t have been tempted to come if the fastest route to Cottbus hadn’t been by plane via Berlin. I knew that the five-story house in which I had grown up had been destroyed in 1945, along with all the neighboring houses, and replaced in the fifties by a six-story apartment block. My parents had died in the attack. Klara’s parents had moved out of their villa near Wannsee to a villa on Lake Starnberg shortly before the end of the war. The friends of my childhood and youth had dispersed in all directions. In the seventies we had a class reunion. I didn’t go. I don’t want to remember.

I found a cheap hotel at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. As I stood by the window, looking down at the traffic, I got the urge to go out and take a look around and perhaps find a restaurant where the food tastes like it used to, like it did at home. I went to the Brandenburg Gate, saw the buildings rising on the Pariser Platz, the cranes towering into the skies. On the Potsdamer Platz they had sawed open the city’s torso and were conducting open heart surgery: floodlights, excavations, cranes, scaffolding, and building skeletons, sometimes already floor after floor with finished masonry, balconies, and windows. I walked on and recognized the Ministry of Aviation and the remains of the Anhalter train station, and on Tempelhofer Ufer the building where I had worked as a junior clerk for a lawyer. I avoided the street where I had been a child.