Self's Murder by Bernhard Schlink

before he died.
    Then I opened the attaché case. It was chock-full of money, used fifty-and hundred-mark bills.
     
     
     

— 13 —
     
Shadowed
     
     
    N o, I didn’t consider stuffing the bills into a suitcase along with a few shirts and pants, sweaters, underwear, toothbrush, and razor, heading to the Frankfurt airport, and getting on the first plane to Buenos Aires. Or the Maldives, the Azores, or the Hebrides. My life here in Mannheim is complicated enough. How would it be someplace else, where I don’t even speak the language?
    I didn’t look for a hiding place for the money, either. As it is, I would surely tell all under torture. I lowered the rolltop of my filing cabinet, squeezed the few old files into one of its compartments, and slid out the bottoms of the other compartments, making enough space for the attaché case. Then I pulled the rolltop shut.
    I didn’t count the money. There was a lot of it. Enough to give someone reason to put the fear of God into a man. Thinking of my final meeting with Schuler on the sidewalk—the way he staggered toward me waving his arms, his grimacing, his hoarse whisper—I felt that someone must have frightened him to death.
    Nägelsbach sounded no happier on the phone than he’d been when I had seen him.
    “What was it, an accident or a murder?” he asked me. “As you know, each has its own department.”
    “All I want to know is when Schuler’s body will be sent over to Forensics.”
    “Yes, I know, so you can call your friend at the Mannheim municipal hospital, who’ll then put in a quick call to Forensics. By the way, what are you doing … I mean, on Tuesday … my wife … you see … tomorrow’s my last day, and we would be delighted if you and your girlfriend would come by. Are you free?”
    He sounded worried that nobody would come to his party. He and his wife struck me as never really needing friends, as if they were quite self-sufficient, and there were times when I envied that. They’d sit in his workshop, he working on a matchstick model of the Munich Palace of Justice, she reading aloud to him from Kafka’s
The Trial
, and before bed they’d have a glass of wine together. Does marital harmony last only till retirement?
    As I drove to Schwetzingen I was shadowed. Even as I walked to my car, just around the corner from my office, I had the feeling that someone was following me. But whenever I turned around nobody was there, and such feelings can be wrong, even if Brigitte believes that feelings always tell the truth and that only thoughts tell lies. There wasn’t much traffic on the autobahn. The beige Fiesta I noticed in my rearview mirror after the Mannheim intersection passed me when I pulled over on the shoulder near Pfingstberg, drove on, and disappeared from view around the next bend. But when I drove on and then passed a truck and looked into my rearview mirror, there it was again. I repeated my little maneuver a few hundred yards from the Schwetzingen exit. When he passed me I tailed him until he took the exit. I drove on and then, a few kilometers beyond Brühl, pulled over the shoulder onto a bumpy dirt road.
    I was not surprised to find a police car outside Schuler’s place. No one was parked outside the old warehouse. I rang and managed to get in, but I couldn’t open the door to the archives. When I drove off, I once again saw the Fiesta in my rearview mirror.
    I felt tired—tired of a world in which a harmless, malodorous old archivist could at the drop of a hat be frightened to death. A world in which there were too many used fifty-and hundred-mark bills. In which someone could snoop about in my office and shadow me in a beige Fiesta without my knowing who he was and what he wanted. I felt tired of being at odds with my case. It didn’t interest me and couldn’t interest my client, either. What interested me instead was my client himself, and the death of his wife and his archivist. And that I was interested in this was,