‘That’s not what happened,’ said Willi. ‘Erich and Eberhardt are lying.’
‘I won’t stand for that, Geismeier. That is an unfounded accusation. They’re both trustworthy men. They’re Barzelhof men.’ Which meant that their fathers and grandfathers had gone through Barzelhof. ‘Enough of the lies and false accusations. I want the truth.’
Tears of anger sprang into Willi’s eyes. ‘I’m telling the truth. I’m not lying!’ he said. ‘They’re lying.’
Willi had gone along with the prank at first, so he had been part of it. He had known Andrea was sickly, and that he was picked on because he was different. And Willi had been slow and tentative in his defense of Andrea, even once he was in distress. But then he had tried to defend the boy, and had helped him home. So that was something, wasn’t it? That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? And yet the commandant, the one man responsible for discipline and fairness at the school, was accepting the obviously untrue accusations of two bullies because they were ‘Barzelhof men.’
Andrea’s and Willi’s parents received letters from the commandant explaining the obligations of a Schloß Barzelhof education. ‘Becoming a Barzelhof Man is a High Achievement,’ he wrote. The commandant favored upper case letters when he wanted to emphasize the importance of certain ideas. ‘But, like all Worthwhile Achievements, it is not Something Everyone Can Achieve. It demands Much but offers Much in Return.’ Andrea and Willi, being guilty of serious violations of the school’s code of honor, were evidently not cut out to be Barzelhof men. Arrangements should be made to fetch them home as soon as possible. ‘We wish your son Well in his Future Endeavors, and Hope he will have Learned from his Failures here at Schloß Barzelhof.’
After that night’s adventure, Andrea had been taken to a clinic in Passau. His mother arrived in a coach two days later to take him home. Willi continued with the daily Barzelhof routine for the next several days, but was not permitted to wear the Barzelhof uniform. And the other boys were under orders to shun him, which they did.
Willi gazed from the train window watching the colorless March landscape slip by – the farms with smoke spiraling up from the chimneys, the fields with strips of snow between stubble where last summer’s crops had been, the impenetrable black shadows of the evergreen forest, and before long the gloomy mills and industrial buildings of Munich. Willi and his father spoke very little during the ride. Willi’s father tried to embrace his son, but Willi did not want to be embraced. He did not want to be comforted. Nothing had changed between them, but Willi’s father could see that something momentous had happened to Willi. He hoped Willi had not been damaged by the experience.
Willi had by no means been damaged. In fact, it was as though a veil had lifted from in front of Willi’s eyes, and understanding had flooded in. Willi understood the commandant’s motivation and his failure. He understood that in the adult world, the world he was soon to enter, truth, fairness, honesty, things adults talked on and on about, were often less important than other trivial things, like manliness, tribal loyalty, popularity. He could not have articulated this until much later, but Willi recognized then and there where he stood in the world and what he had to do. For instance, he would have known even then that he had no choice now but to try to find out who had attacked and hurt Lola, and then bring him to justice.
As he grew up, he became a student of human psychology and a lover of justice. The first time Willi read a Shakespeare play – he was in university and it was Julius Caesar – it took him back to Schloß Barzelhof. The commandant, Andrea Welke, Eberhardt von Hohenstein, all the others, they were all there. Shakespeare’s understanding of their complicated and contradictory motives was profound and exact. Willi found in Shakespeare an exhaustive catalogue of human behavior.
He decided to learn English so he could read the plays in their original language. He found a professor who was willing to indulge his interest, and who could guide him. He charted the plays’ structures, scrutinized the make-up and motivation of the characters, and discovered what drove them, both their inner dynamics, and their interactions which made up, to his way of thinking, a kind of metaphysical clockwork. He even spent a year in England, just so he could continue his studies where Shakespeare had lived and worked.
To everyone’s surprise, after these years of study Willi joined the Munich police force. He saw something Shakespearean in police work, something he did not find in the academic world or in the manufacture of seamless ceramic pipe. After the slapdash and, to his mind, inferior training he got at the police academy, Willi saw no reason not to apply the methods that had unlocked the secrets of Shakespearean drama for him to the study of criminal behavior. Willi examined the setting and circumstances of every case that came his way, as though it were a play, as though its dynamics were a clue to how it had unfolded. He found the seeds of the tragedy or comedy (some crimes were comic) tucked in obscure corners of the larger drama. He searched out and examined the actions and motives of even the minor characters, believing that their apparently incidental activity could well have influenced the trajectory of the principals. After all, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had moved Hamlet; three old hags had influenced Macbeth. Predicting Macbeth’s downfall had, in a sense, led to his downfall. And Richard the Third bounced off one secondary character after the other, thinking all the while he was a free agent.
Willi did not hesitate to focus on peripheral characters, those who might be connected by only the slimmest of threads to whatever case he was working on and might appear,
