“Not to worry, I’ll have it fixed the day after tomorrow at the latest.”
“I’m not worried. I need a car today, and if you can’t do it, I’ll take your limo.”
He giggled. Riebl was one of those people who seem to be drunk all the time while never touching a drop of the stuff. He was just a little goofy.
“That’s no joke. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
He kept on giggling and mumbled something. I hung up.
“Be right there.”
Riebl was lying under the hood of my green Opel Kadett. The place smelled of gasoline and lubricant. A radio in a corner was screeching tunes of the German homeland. Then he surfaced.
“Oh, it’s you, Mr.…”
“Kayankaya.”
“Right.”
“What’s with my car?”
He scratched his neck and stared absently at the floor, as if he had just heard an immoral proposition.
“We-ell …”
“Well, what?”
“You know, it’s so easy to make a wrong estimate. At first it just seems to be the sparks, but then it turns out the whole engine is screwy. You know what I mean?”
“Give me the keys to your car. I’ll be back tonight, at half past seven.”
He shook his pinched head.
“Tch, tch, tch, I don’t know …”
“Come on.”
Hesitantly he produced a bunch of keys out of a pocket of his overalls.
“But really … I don’t …”
“See you tonight.”
I left him standing next to my Kadett. Twenty kilometers past Darmstadt, I took the Doppenburg exit.
4
I first heard it from a guy with red hair in the Zum Grossen Schiff tavern in Sachsenhausen: He insisted on calling the place Dopeyburg, not Doppenburg. However, since he also pronounced “cider” “soyder,” I didn’t pay much attention, but later I noticed that other people of more cultivated speech habits also referred to the place by that pejorative name. Well, I thought, just another instance of that rather less than brilliant sense of humor that turns a professor into a perfesser. Only now, years later and on site in Doppenburg, did I realize how appropriate it was.
Doppenburg was a small town centered around an ugly pedestrian mall. Supermarkets were interspersed with third-rate fashion shops staffed by saleswomen who resembled the sausages in the butcher’s window. Flower planters, round light fixtures, and empty benches adorned the street. Retired people pulled their shopping bags on carts across the pavement, probably attracted by some advertised sale in spite of the wet and the cold. In sheltered corners, housewives discussed the problems of noodle casseroles, children, and varicose veins. At one end of this parody of an urban environment stood the inevitable Italian ice-cream cafe frequented by Coke-guzzling teenagers perched on their motorbikes, cradling helmets under one arm and cracking bad jokes about their girls.
I parked the car on the main street and strolled uphill into the old part of town, with its rows of half-timbered houses that looked as if children had modeled them out of clay, then baked and neatly painted them. Immaculate streets. Not even the smallest pile of dog shit to offend German cleanliness. Except for a couple of shiny pink tea and health shops, the streets were dead. A young man stood at a deserted intersection waiting for the traffic light to turn green. When he saw me cross against the red, his lips tightened disapprovingly. I think he would have liked to follow me in order to punch me in the face, for the sake of law and Fatherland, but the light didn’t change.
At a refreshment kiosk I asked for directions to the Bollig plant. Two guys stood there in the rain, drinking their dinner.
They grinned.
“Bollisch? With his broken pipe?”
He slapped his companion’s shoulder.
“Our pipes are broken too. Right, Ennst? What does the Mrs. say to that? Hey, Ennst! Broken pipe!”
“How do I get there?”
“Bollisch … Hey, Ennst! How does he get there? Ennst!”
Ernst squinted at me slyly and said, almost choking with mirth, “And how do I get to the opera?”
“Practice. A lot of practice,” I said, and walked away.
“Har, har. That was a good one. The old ones are the best ones.”
The baker’s wife gave me directions. I walked back to the car and followed the flow of traffic down the main street toward Weinheim. After a kilometer or so, tall brick walls appeared by the side of the road, their tops covered with barbed wire: Ruhenbrunn Private Clinic. Just past those walls was the paved entry road to the Bollig plant.
The factory stood on a hillside, with the notorious lake to its right. The dirty yellow water lapped gently against the bright gravel on the shore.
I stumbled across the little wet rocks to the demolished waste pipe. Such concrete pipes did not require major amounts of explosives for their destruction. The action must have been about as exciting as a flat tire in a no-parking zone. I contemplated the shoreline. Where the gravel ended, small clumps of reeds separated the moldering soil from the water. It seemed an unlikely site to choose for a camping trip. I turned around. The factory was a pile of corrugated iron. Out of it, at seemingly random intervals, rose three mighty smokestacks. On top of one of them, a thin flame flickered. On the side of a warehouse, a row of faded red letters proclaimed that this was BOLLIG DRUGS-FOR LIFE, FOR THE FUTURE, FOR OUR CHILDREN. Chemical enterprises have a weakness for hyperbolic publicity.
“Hey, you! What are you doing there? This is factory property!”
A skinny fellow wearing a sea captain’s cap came running across the gravel and stopped in front of me, breathing hard.
“Just looking around. The site of that sabotage.”
“You can’t just walk in like that. Do you have a permit?”
“I’m investigating the matter for the public prosecutor’s office.”
He scratched his chin. “You are?”
“I am.”
“But you don’t look the type.”
“So?”
“The public prosecutor’s office, that’s an important office, to do with the law and all … But really, you look … I’m sorry. If you’re really working for them …”
He fussed with the sleeves of his uniform jacket. “Are you the night watchman?”
“Yes, that’s my job.”
“You were knocked out, a while ago?”
“Yes, I was.”
His knees were twitching, and he kept looking back at the factory buildings, as if he were afraid he could be seen from there.
“You saw the man?”
He was trying hard not to avoid my eyes. “I already told the police all about it.”
“So you saw the man?”
“Yes, I did.”
Once again his eyes turned toward the factory. “What did he look like?”
“He didn’t look like anything. He had something over his head, a stocking or a cap, I couldn’t tell. It was
