Karl whistled through his teeth. Then he asked, with a lightly ironic undertone, “And? Was she here, and did she kill Albers?”
Steiner grabbed his glasses, which were dangling in front of his chest. “So far we have no indications that she was here, but . . . someone like her wouldn’t do it herself.”
“Have you spoken to her?”
“No. Köbler, that journalist, left only a quarter of an hour ago. But it gets even better. Our colleagues in Hamburg report that Robert Lubisch has left the country, and guess where he is?” Steiner left a dramatic pause and then said, triumphantly, “He flew to Mallorca yesterday.”
Karl sat down and rubbed his cheek and mouth with his left hand. “That means he’s found her too.”
Steiner snapped his glasses back and forth. “That’s one possibility. The other would be that they knew each other already.”
Karl shook his head slowly. “Come on, why would he have asked Albers to do any research if he already knew, and had known for a long time, who Therese Peters is today?”
Steiner sighed. “That’s true enough, but we only know from him that he asked Albers to do the research. There’s no other proof of it.” He tapped the file lying open on his desk. “Neither the woman in the residents’ registration office nor this Schröder from the archives mention her saying anything about a contract. What if Albers didn’t have the photo from him, but ran across Lubisch in the course of her research and made contact with him? What if he wasn’t happy about it?”
“Hmm.” Karl ran it through in his mind. It was true, of course, that they did not know much about Robert Lubisch. “But if your investigations are tending in that direction, you must be assuming it has something to do with the disappearance of Wilhelm Peters, no?”
Steiner put his glasses on. “Yes, that seems probable. In any case, we don’t have anything else at the moment, and Köbler says Albers was talking about a pretty big story. She didn’t have everything put together yet, but she had obviously stumbled upon a hornets’ nest and somebody stopped her.”
Karl seemed absorbed in staring at the stack of files on Steiner’s desk. “The gardeners had a contract to dig a new well,” he said pensively, without looking up.
Steiner frowned. He shook his head uncomprehendingly. “So what?”
“I’m just saying. I don’t rightly know how you dig a well these days, but they would certainly have had to drill or dig a hole on the property. The report says the land was searched back then, but Gerhard was in charge, and he . . . well, he has skeletons in his closet.”
Steiner said nothing for a moment. “You think . . .”
Karl stood up. “Exactly. I think. I’ll have a word with Schoofs. It would be interesting to know who knew about the new well.”
At the garden center, Matthias Schoofs and his wife were busy moving young plants into the greenhouse. Schoofs raised his hand in greeting. “What’s up now, Karl?” he called out, without interrupting his work. “The boys have finished for the day. They won’t be back till Monday.” He paused. “Don’t you ever take the weekend off?”
Karl laughed good-naturedly. “I do, I do. I just have one more question about that well at the Albers place.”
Schoofs gestured dismissively. “We never did it. The problem had taken care of itself.”
“Yes, yes. What I’m interested in . . . I mean, who knew about it? Who knew you were going to dig a well there?”
Schoofs shrugged. “How should I know who she told? Here it was only me, my wife, Jan, and Klaus who knew about it. Nobody else.” He went over to a metal rack holding wooden crates of lettuce plants, snapped the brake lever up with the back of his foot, and pushed the rack toward the greenhouse. Karl was disappointed.
“Oh, I called Hanna. Asked her if she remembered where the old well was, and how deep it was.”
Karl went over to Schoofs and helped him push. He felt a catch in his throat as he asked, “And what did she say?”
“That it had been blocked up since the war. She couldn’t remember how deep it was.” Once in the greenhouse, Schoofs went round the rack and kicked the brake back on.
Karl thanked him and wished him a good weekend. He sat in his car for several minutes. Hanna and Paul. Everything in him resisted this suspicion; everything told him not to drive over to the Höver farm. He started his car and drove away only when he saw Schoofs looking worriedly down the driveway at him.
At the Höver farm, he found Hanna in the stables.
“Now what?” she said, by way of greeting, as she cleared the horse manure from a stall.
“I need a word with you,” he said tonelessly. Hanna leaned on her pitchfork and looked at him calmly.
“About what? We’re busy,” she retorted in her brusque way, looking at him suspiciously. “Besides, Paul’s out.”
“It’s about the well.” Karl opened the half-height stable door and saw Hanna’s face wince in distress. She tapped the pitchfork tines rhythmically against the concrete floor but said nothing. He leaned against a wooden post with a leather halter and bridle hanging on a hook. She laughed bitterly. “I’m sure you have time to let me finish here.” She shoved the pitchfork into the straw and tossed it into the wheelbarrow, as if Karl were not present. And Karl knew she would not talk to him until she finished her work.
Chapter 38
April 25, 1998
Therese Mende pushed her chair back. “Wait here a moment, Robert. I’d like to get something and let Luisa know you’re staying for dinner. I can tell her that, can’t I?”
Robert Lubisch ran both hands through his hair. Then he said, “With pleasure.” He brought his arms down, and now felt, just as he had when Rita Albers telephoned him, that anxiety, that shying away from what might yet come. Therese Mende disappeared into the house, and the sense of foreboding, a nameless weight on his shoulders, increased. He threw his head back and looked up at the high, soft blue of the sky. He had always searched for a stain on his father’s snow-white waistcoat, had always wanted, while his father was still alive, to be able to mount a challenge to the self-control he had been so proud of. And now, he was quite sure of it; he was going to find it, and it would not just be a stain. He stood up and strode up and down the terrace; he had a momentary impulse to leave, to let things rest.
When Therese Mende came back, they sat down again, and she placed a leather wallet, a sort of envelope, on the table. She looked at him intently. “You can still leave.” After a brief hesitation, he shook his head. “No,” he said, suddenly decisive. “No, I can’t do that. Not anymore.”
She picked up the leather wallet and, as they spoke, held it tightly in her lap with both hands.
It was a hot day, that August 12, 1950, and it was the first Marksmen’s Fair since the war. There was a carousel with a red-and-white-painted roof that shone in the sun. There was a stand selling raisin donuts, and the air was filled with the sticky-sweet smell of the sugar that people were licking off their fingers. The adults gathered around the drinks stand for beer, wine, and lemonade, and by the afternoon a good many had had too much to drink. Children lined up in front of a table to buy cotton candy. The motor that ran the centrifuge kept overheating. Whenever the vendor shouted, “No more for another half hour!” small hands would shove their tightly gripped five-pfennig coins back into the pockets of their shorts and skirts, and the children would go running off. A long counter had been set up in the main tent. A band played dance music. The whole community was there; people had come from the surrounding villages and farms, and groups of young people had come on their bicycles from as far away as Kleve. There were many strange faces. The heat mounted inside the tent, the smell of sweat mingled with cigarette and cigar smoke, and whenever Therese had had a dance and the band inserted a pause, she would go out to cool off a little. At about four, she sought refuge on the edge of the fairground, in the shadow of an oak tree, and watched the
goings-on. She found Paul Höver behind the trunk. He had obviously drunk too much beer for his sixteen years and was throwing up.
She went up to him and said, “Oops, too much of a good thing, Paul?” Paul was visibly embarrassed, and asked her not to say anything to his father. He leaned against the trunk, slipped down, and sat there with his legs outstretched.
“Shall I take you home?” she asked cautiously, prepared for his pride not to allow it.
“No, no. It’ll soon pass. I want to stay.” He spoke slowly, but his words were clear.
Therese thought he would soon recover in the fresh air and sat down beside him. “I need a break myself.”
Paul leaned his head against the trunk and looked at her with slightly troubled eyes. “Can I ask you something, Therese?”
She smiled. “But of course.”
“Why did you marry Wilhelm, after what he did?”
She shook her head and asked, still smiling, “What do you mean?”
“That thing with Yuri back then. That’s what I mean. With Yuri and you.”
Suddenly, something ominous lay in the air. The cool of the shade, which had been pleasant, now felt cold. She folded her arms over her chest and rubbed her hands against her bare arms. “I don’t understand what you mean,” she said, and she could hear that her voice sounded rough and strange.
“Well, your being arrested, and because they shot Yuri anyway.”
Therese Mende looked at Robert Lubisch. “I was relieved. Paul was just a child back then, and he’d obviously gotten everything wrong. I said, ‘Oh, Paul, you were still little back then. You’ve gotten it all wrong.’ But he shook his head.”
Therese Mende looked down, staring at the leather wallet again.
Suddenly, Paul was in tears. “No, Therese, I haven’t gotten it wrong. I was the one who betrayed you back then.” He had buried his face in the crook of his arm.
She took hold of his thick hair and said, “Paul, I know you told Gerhard about me and Yuri. But you were a child. I’m not angry with you about that.”
Paul calmed down gradually. He looked at her through tear-filled eyes. “You knew?”
She nodded. “Yes, but you’re not to blame. Theo Gerhard’s to blame.”
Paul pulled his legs up and put his arms around them. He said, “But I told Wilhelm, not Gerhard.”
In hindsight, it seemed to her that what he said reached only her ears at first, strange and false, his words distorted and unrecognizable. She knew too that she thought he was just drunk and falling to pieces.
She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “That’s not true, Paul. You told Gerhard, not Wilhelm.” He started crying again. And then he said the words that snuffed out the light for her: “No, I told Wilhelm, and I saw him and Gerhard shoot Yuri in the clearing too.”
She heard a shrill sound in her head, louder and louder, screaming, and behind it pictures falling one on top of the next, without rhyme or reason and yet, in sequence, seemingly logical. She heard Alwine saying, “You’re going to marry him?” She saw Wilhelm at her bedside, swearing he knew nothing about it all. She heard Yuri asking, “What have you done, Therese? Why are they letting me go?” and saw him heading toward the forest in the fog. Forever.
Hope flared up in her for a moment. For a moment she thought Paul might have seen Gerhard shooting the stranger, and she said, “Wilhelm wasn’t there. You saw Gerhard on the road, didn’t you? It was Gerhard and a stranger,” and her voice rose, breaking. But Paul shook his head and looked at her wide-eyed, as if it were only clear to him now what he had seen back then. As if he were only now realizing that she really had not known about all this. His voice came to her from afar. “No. You met Yuri behind the barn. I followed Yuri. Theo Gerhard and Wilhelm shot him in the clearing, from the lookout. That’s the truth, Therese, I swear.” Something tore, something fell, and Yuri disappeared into the fog and kept asking, endlessly, “What have you done? Why are they letting me go?”
The rest of the afternoon was deaf, mute, and blind. Days later, witnesses testified that she was screaming in front of the tent and attacked Wilhelm, and that Hanna had taken her home. But she did not remember. What she did remember was a sensation in her gut, as if she were swinging higher and higher, and it made her feel faint. She felt pressure in her head and then, as if the swing had reached its highest point, as if she had leaned her body back once too often and, at just the right moment, thrown her legs up at the sky, a feeling of floating.
Afterward, the pictures were not of her, or so she felt later. Her body sat in that flowery, blue summer dress, barefoot and motionless on the chair between the kitchen table and the cold stove.
She felt nothing. Empty of feeling.
She thought nothing. Empty of thought.
The door stood open. In the yard, the evening sucked the yellow out of the earth, tinting it darker and darker brown until the night extinguished all colors.
Hours must have gone by before she heard him. He was tipsy, singing and talking to himself. She picked up the poker that lay beside the range, positioned herself next to the entrance, and, when he reached the door, she struck.
He fell, and at the same time he was standing there.
He was lying on the floor, and at the same time he was breathing his boozy breath into her face at eye level.
He was lying on the floor, and at the same time he was reaching for the light switch.
He stood there, staring at the man lying on the floor, and suddenly seemed stone-cold sober. “You meant . . . me?” he asked, and his astonishment was genuine. He pointed at the man at his feet. The tip of the poker was embedded in his head. He said, “His name’s Lubisch. He wanted to see you.”
Therese Mende pressed the leather wallet to her chest and took a deep breath. Then she opened it and passed it across the table. “This is our wedding photo,” she said neutrally, and Robert was looking at his father’s young face. He did not dare to pick up the picture. His eyes went back and forth in disbelief between the photograph and Therese Mende. “I—I don’t understand,” he stammered.
“You see, Wilhelm understood the situation quickly, much more quickly than I did, and if it was true that I had quarreled with him at the fairground, then he knew Yuri’s murder would come to light, that I wouldn’t keep quiet. I learned from Hanna, later on, that Friedhelm Lubisch had been asking for me in the big tent. He wanted to come and visit me. Hanna told him I had left, but she could point out my husband to him. He spent the evening with Wilhelm, and probably told him his whole life story.
“That evening, as he knelt down beside Lubisch, Wilhelm seemed to understand immediately that this was his chance. He took the man’s wallet with the discharge papers, ran into the bedroom, and packed a few things.”
Robert put his hands in front of his face to fight off what he was hearing. And the suspicion that had been growing in the farthest reaches of his brain, ever since Therese Mende mentioned Wilhelm Peters’s burns a few hours before, was now definitively confirmed. He could see his father’s scarred upper arms and left calf in his mind’s eye. “A house fire, right at the beginning of the war,” he had always claimed. His father!
It was dusk. An unreal, purple light lay over the water as Therese Mende stood up and returned with a bottle of cognac and two snifters. She poured generously. They drank in silence. Then she leaned forward. Her eyes were wet with tears. “When he left, he said, ‘I can’t help you anymore now. You have to take responsibility for this on your own. But you should know one thing: Everything I did then, I did for love.’ He really said that. ‘For love.’ ”
Chapter 39
April 25, 1998
Having spread fresh straw in the stall, Hanna brought the wheelbarrow into the barn, hung the pitchfork, point up, in a wooden rack in which more forks, rakes, shovels, and spades were tidily arranged in a row. Karl stood in the yard and watched h
er. He thought Hanna must be over seventy, but in her checked shirt and overalls, and with her industrious energy, she looked like a woman in her midfifties.
She came out of the barn and said, as she marched past him, in her abrupt way, “I’ll get dressed. Then we can go.”
Karl watched her walk toward the house. He thought he would clear up the death of Rita Albers now, and he felt neither pride nor satisfaction. He waited by his car. The Hövers’ orchard and vegetable garden extended all the way to the road. A gentle breeze wafted through the fruit trees, which were in bloom. A brimstone butterfly settled on the roof of the car, apparently taking a short breather.
When she came out of the house, she had put on her good clothes, and it looked strange. She was wearing a white blouse with an elongated shawl collar, which she had tied in a large bow over her chest. The narrow gray skirt reached to her calves, and in her matching pumps she looked even taller than usual. Without a word, she went up to his car and got in on the passenger side.
Karl sat behind the wheel. She looked out of the window and said, “I’ve written Paul a note. I’m sure he’ll follow.” On the way to the police station, she sat quietly beside him. Her thoughts seemed to revolve entirely around her brother. At one point she said, “He’ll have to hire someone to help.” At another, “It won’t be easy for him,” and then, “He’s hardworking, but writing out the bills, sales tax, feed prices—he can’t handle that.”
Karl knew he should really take her straight to Steiner, but he thought about the Long One’s manner and decided to talk to her alone first.
At the station, he made coffee, and Hanna said, after trying it, “Your coffee’s good, but if you put a little pinch of cinnamon in with the powder, it would be even better.” She smiled, and Karl thought he had seldom seen her smile.
She put her cup down and, unprompted, began to talk.
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