Self's deception Read online

  “I'll be happy to let you into your son's apartment. One moment; I'll go get the keys.”

  She came back with the keys and a plate of marble cake. “I was intending to leave this on his doorstep.” She pressed the plate into my hands and unlocked the door. “Perhaps you'd like to try a piece. What did you say you were doing in Heidelberg?”

  “I'm with the Union Bank of Baden.” As a matter of fact I do have an account there, and the old gray suit I was wearing fitted the image of a Baden official who had erred into banking. Frau Kleinschmidt found me sufficiently reputable and kept nodding her head respectfully. Her chin doubled, tripled, and quadrupled.

  It was cool in Wendt's apartment. There were four doors in the hallway. The bathroom was to the left, the living room and the bedroom, which also served as his study, to the right, and the broom closet straight ahead. The kitchen lay beyond the living room. I hurried, as I wanted to be out of there by six. I looked for the telephone, to no avail. Wendt didn't have one. So there wasn't going to be one of those little books with names, addresses, and phone numbers lying next to a phone. In the chest of drawers I found only shirts and linen, in the closet only pants, jackets, and sweaters. In the wooden cabinets that Wendt used as supports for his writing desk there were ring binders, technical books, and a dictionary that was still in its shrink-wrap. Also loose letters, and letters in bundles, bills, reminders, traffic tickets, and thick reams of writing paper, as if he were planning to write a big book and had wanted to make sure that he wouldn't run out of supplies. Pinned on the cork board above the desk were a movie schedule from the Gloria Theater, a brochure for a water pick, a postcard from Istanbul and another from Amorbach, a key, a shopping list, and a cartoon showing two men. “Do you find it hard to make a decision?” one man was asking the other. “Yes and no.”

  I took down the postcards. A thankful former patient and his wife had sent greetings from Istanbul, while Gabi, Klaus, Katrin, Henner, and Lea sent greetings from Amorbach, with the message that Amorbach was beautiful in the spring, that the children and Lea were getting on well together, that the renovation of the mill was almost finished, and that Wendt should come visit them soon. Gabi had been the one who wrote the postcard, Klaus had signed with a flourish, Katrin and Henner had scrawled something in childish letters, and from Lea came: “Hi, Lea.” I looked carefully, but Lea remained Lea, not Leo.

  In the ring binders I found the notes and drafts of Wendt's doctoral dissertation. The letters that were bundled together were ten or more years old; in the loose letters his sister described her life in Lübeck, his mother her vacation, and a friend wrote on professional matters. I rummaged through the pile of books, newspapers, patient files, and papers and found a bank savings book, a checkbook, a passport, travel brochures of Canada, a draft for a job application to a hospital in Toronto, a Wieblingen parish newsletter, a note with three phone numbers on it, and the beginning of a poem.

  Who can tell

  if parallel lines

  meet

  at infinity?

  Who can tell

  if you and I…

  I would have liked an optimistic continuation for that “you and I.” My father, an official with the German railways, with tracks in mind, had answered the question of whether parallel lines meet in infinity with a “no.”

  I jotted down the three phone numbers. On the bookshelf I found a photo album documenting Wendt's childhood and youth. In the bathroom there was a picture of a naked girl stuck to the mirror. Under the mirror was a packet of condoms.

  I gave up. Whatever Wendt might be hiding, his apartment didn't reveal it. I stood a few more minutes with Frau Klein-schmidt by her strawberry patch. I showed her Leo's picture and told her how happy my wife and I were that our son had met this nice young woman. She had never seen Leo before.

  14

  Twenty Smurfs

  Back at my office I found an envelope with Salger's next payment. Again, fifty hundred-mark bills. I called Salger's answering machine, confirmed that I had received his payment, and informed him that Leo had been a patient at the State Psychiatric Hospital, had checked out again, and that for the time being that was all I knew.

  Then I called the numbers that Wendt had jotted down: a number in Munich, one in Mannheim, and one that Information identified as an Amorbach number. Nobody answered in Munich, in Mannheim the Institute for Mental Health replied, and in Amorbach a woman with a heavy American accent.

  “Hello, Dr. Hopfen's residence.” Children were making a racket in the background.

  I tried a simple ruse: “Could I speak to Dr. Hopfen? We worked on the insulation at the mill, and this is a follow-up call to see if everything is fine.”

  “I can barely hear you.” The children had come closer and were making even more noise. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Self, insulation services. The cellar in the mill was damp, and we …”

  “One moment, please.” She held her hand over the receiver, but I could hear every word of the children's shouting match, and her reply: Henner had given Katrin twenty-three Smurfs— No, Katrin had only gotten twenty-one, and he'd only gotten eighteen back—No, she'd given him back nineteen. “Eighteen!” “Nineteen!” “Seventeen!” Lea established the facts. “One, two, three…twenty. You have twenty Smurfs, which is more than you counted. That's more than enough!” Twenty— that threw the kids for a loop and shut them up for a while. “You want to speak to Dr. Hopfen, because you're wanting to go in the mill?” She asked in a thick German accent, slipping up on nouns and verbs. “The painters are there, you can go inside the cellar with no problems. Now they're off work, but tomorrow morning the painters will be working again.”

  “Thank you very much. Are you English?”

  “I'm from America, the Hopfens' au pair.”

  For a moment we both waited, in case she or I might say something more. Then she hung up without a word. I watered my potted palm. Something had caught my attention, but I couldn't pin it down.

  Philipp called. “Gerhard, don't forget the spring festival tomorrow evening at the yacht club. It'll start at around seven, but most people will turn up between eight and nine. Eight would be a good time, otherwise you might lose Eber-lein in the crowd. And bring Brigitte.”

  I spent the following day at the municipal library, reading up on psychiatry. I thought that if I picked up a few pointers I might get more information out of Eberlein about the State Psychiatric Hospital, and about what Wendt had done there for or against Leo and what he might be hiding. I learned that the psychiatric hospital in Trieste had been closed down and that the State Psychiatric Hospital in Wunstorf was being restructured, which made me realize that the changes I had noticed at Eberlein's hospital were part of a major development in psychiatry from incarceration to healing. I found mental health defined as the ability to play the social game well. Someone is mentally ill when we no longer take him seriously because he does not play along or does not play along well. A chill ran down my spine.

  15

  Smashed china

  Yacht clubs, rowing clubs, riding clubs, and tennis clubs may all be lavish to a greater or lesser degree, but they look like they've sprung from one and the same unimaginative clan of architects. On the ground floor are the equipment rooms, shower rooms, and changing rooms; on the first floor the lounge with the bar for social events, one or two adjoining rooms, and a terrace, which looked out over the Rhine and Friesenheimer Island.

  On my way through the lounge I lost Brigitte. We'd had another of our spats in the car, because she wants us to get married and I don't. Or at least not yet. Then she tells me that at sixty-nine I'm not getting any younger—I tell her that one never gets any younger—and she tells me I'm talking nonsense. When she's right, there are no two ways about it. So I shut my mouth and dug in my heels. We parked among the many Mercedeses, BMWs, and even two Jaguars and a Rolls-Royce, but by the time I had walked to the other side of the car to open the door for her she had gotten out,
cool and haughty.

  Philipp, Füruzan, and Eberlein, who had a young woman on his arm, were standing by the railing of the terrace.

  “Gerhard!” Füruzan gave me a kiss on each cheek, and Philipp squeezed my arm.

  Eberlein introduced me to his wife and then grabbed the bull by the horns. “Why don't you young people leave us alone for a while? We elderly gentlemen have a thing or two we need to confer about.”

  He steered me to a table. “You're obviously here to talk to me, so why keep you on tenterhooks? You came to our hospital inquiring about a young lady, but all you managed to find out was that she was a patient. Wendt fobbed you off with some story, and I started philosophizing. Now you've come to sound me out on neutral territory. Fair enough, fair enough.” He laughed his smug laugh and exuded harmlessness. He accepted a cigarette, refused a light, and twirled the cigarette between the tips of his thumb and middle finger while I smoked. His fat fingers executed the movement tenderly.

  “I've come to sound you out? As far as I'm concerned, we can call it that. A young doctor in your institution tells me that a patient, whose father commissioned me to find her, fell out a window and died. Nobody else knows anything about this. An employee at your institution tells me that someone's pulling my leg, but when I inform him where I got my information from, he suddenly retracts what he said. Then I hear about small slipups and glitches at your hospital, while you spin a yarn about infections and infarctions, viruses and bacteria. Yes, I would be grateful for an explanation.”

  “What do you know about psychiatry?”

  “I've read this and that. Years ago a friend of mine was a patient at your hospital, and I've seen firsthand how things were done back then and how much things have changed.”

  “And what do you know about the responsibility and burden of psychiatric work? Of the worries a psychiatrist can't leave behind in his locker along with his white gown, worries that follow him home, pursue him in his sleep, and are waiting for him the next morning when he wakes up? What do you know about that? You with your jokes about viruses, bacteria, infections, and infarctions …”

  “But it was you who …” I couldn't figure out where he was coming from. Or is it with psychiatrists as it is with the kind of firemen who are covert arsonists and policemen who are covert criminals? I looked at him, bewildered.

  He laughed and cheerfully tapped the floor several times with his cane. “Can a man with a face that is so easily readable be a private investigator? But don't worry, I'm just confusing you a little so that you can better understand the confusion about which you are asking me.” He leaned back and took his time. “Don't be too hard on young Wendt. He isn't having an easy time of it. All things considered, he might well be a good doctor some day.”

  What I needed now was time before I could continue. “You're saying I shouldn't be too hard on him. Well, before I do anything, I want to give him one last chance.” I didn't have a clear concept of what I was talking about. Needless to say, it had gone through my mind to tell Nägelsbach about Wendt's behavior, or someone from the medical association or the appropriate board of physicians. But I couldn't see what I would gain by doing that. That would get Wendt into trouble, so I could perhaps try to put pressure on him by threatening such an action. But there was also the problem that Leo wasn't supposed to realize that I was looking for her, and were I to carry out my threat, I didn't know if that could be avoided.

  “Of course it was foolish of Wendt to invent a fatal accident,” Eberlein said. “But imagine that you are a dedicated therapist, conscious that the relationship between your client and her father is the core issue, are working on it, have successes, setbacks, and finally a breakthrough that will bring your client back on the right track. And then suddenly a private investigator appears, and through that private investigator the father raises his fist—Wendt simply reached for the first lie he could think of to shake you off and shield his client.”

  “So where is she?”

  “I have no idea, Herr Self. I also do not know if things happened as I told you. The reason for my telling you this is so you can understand what might drive a doctor like Wendt to invent a foolish story like that.”

  “So it could have been altogether different?”

  He ignored my question. “I liked that girl—a cheerful spirit beneath a depressive veneer, not to mention her good pedigree. I hope she'll make it.” He thought a while. “Be that as it may, I have neglected my wife long enough. Let's go back.”

  He got up and I followed him. The band had begun to play, and couples were whirling over the floor. We didn't have to force or edge our way through the crowd—standing and dancing couples spontaneously parted before Eberlein. We found the others. I danced with Frau Eberlein after he tapped his cane against his wooden leg and gave me a prompting glance, and then with Füruzan, and with a woman who approached me during ladies' choice and towered a head above me. By eleven thirty the crowd became too much for me, the room too small, the music too loud.

  I found Brigitte on the terrace. She was flirting with a nobody in a turquoise suit and with an oily slick of hair.

  “I'm leaving. Are you coming along?” I asked her.

  She stayed. I drove home. At six thirty in the morning the doorbell rang, and there was Brigitte with a packet of fresh rolls. I didn't ask her where she'd just come from. Over breakfast I was going to propose to her, but as she got up to get the eggs from the stove she stepped on Turbo's tail.

  16

  Wider, straighter, faster

  After lunch things suddenly fell into place. I'd swum a few laps at the Herschelbad on account of my back, and then, returning from the market, saw Giovanni standing outside the door of the Kleiner Rosengarten restaurant.

  I greeted him. “You back? No more Mama-mia and Sole-mio?” But he wasn't in a mood to play our German-con verses-with-immigrant-worker game today. He had a lot to tell me about things back home in Radda, and found it easier to do so in his fluent German than in our bumbling pidgin. Then he brought out my food, which finally was again the way I liked it. He himself had gone shopping in the morning to the market and the slaughterhouse. The veal cutlet was juicy and the sauce had been pureed from fresh tomatoes and seasoned with sage. He brought me espresso and sambuca without my having to ask.

  “Do you count in Italian?” I asked him. Giovanni was standing next to my table with his pad, adding up my order.

  “You mean, even though I speak good German? I think when people count, they fall back into their mother tongue. Even though numbers aren't really that difficult.”

  I thought of the Hopfen family's au pair. One, two, three…she had counted twenty Smurfs. In German, despite her thick accent and her slipping up on nouns and verbs. Brigitte's son, Manu, who had lived for a long time in Brazil with his father but by now speaks good Mannheim German, still counts in Portuguese, even when I'm helping him with his homework and math problems. On the other hand, Lea might have been counting in German just to settle the children's argument.

  I wanted to see her. Only I couldn't remember where I'd parked my car. At the Herschelbad? The market square? At home? It's sad when you have to use your detective's nose to make up for the shortcomings of age. The price tag on the shampoo bottle gave me a clue. It came from a drugstore in Neckarstadt. I remembered that I had driven Brigitte to her place in the Max-Joseph-Strasse after breakfast, had bought the shampoo there, and then had crossed the Kurpfalz Bridge and walked over to the swimming pool.

  I found my car, took the autobahn to Heidelberg, and drove along the Neckar to Eberbach. I hadn't known that all of Route 37 was under construction, that it was being made wider, straighter, and faster, and that it even tunneled under the mountain at Hirschhorn. Will it one day turn into an autobahn? Will one day a monorail line run through forest and meadow, mountain and valley, replacing the dignified sandstone viaducts over which the Grand Duke sent the first trains across the gorges of the Odenwald? Will a Club Med one day take over the enchanted co
mplex of old guesthouse, hunting lodge, and disused factory in Ernsttal? There, on the road from Kailbach to Ottorfszell, the trees are at their greenest and the sandstone at its reddest, and on the shaded terrace beer tastes like ambrosia. Why does it always have to be coffee and cake in the afternoon? I had a schnitzel with my beer, and a salad with a dressing that didn't come out of a bottle, and blinked in the sunlight that breached the leafy canopy.

  In Amorbach I found Dr. Hopfen's office on the market square, and one of his patients told me the way to his home. “Head past the train station, over the tracks, and up toward the Hotel Frankenberg. Keep following the signs for Sommer-berg. The doctor's house is the last one on the left before you get to the driveway of the hotel.”

  After I negotiated the steep and narrow lane and made a U-turn in the hotel's driveway, a little girl opened the gate in front of the Hopfen residence, and a Land Rover pulled out. The girl closed the gate again and got into the car. Two other children were romping around in the backseat. A woman was at the wheel. The engine died a few times, and I looked around: I gazed at the fruit trees on the slope, the building supplies warehouse in the valley, and the church of Amorbach with its two onion domes beyond the railway tracks. I followed the Rover back into town. The throng of tourist cars in front of the abbey left only two parking spaces—one for the Rover and one for my old Opel.

  I followed the woman and the three children on foot to the market square. I still wasn't certain. But then they went into Hopfen's office, and when they came out again I had the young woman in full view, and there was no doubt. She was Leo. Leo in pink sunglasses, a peroxide blond mop of curls, and a man's checked shirt over her jeans. She had done her best to look like an au-pair girl from the American Midwest.