"Self’s Murder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Schlink Bernhard)

3 A job’s a job

I didn’t go to Schwetzingen the following day, nor the day after. In fact, I had no intention of going. Our encounter that stormy night on the Hirschhorner Höhe, and his invitation, reminded me of the promises one makes with holiday acquaintances. They never work out.

But a job’s a job, and a case is a case. I had spent last fall investigating the sick-leave claims of salesladies at the Tengelmann department store chain, and had managed to catch one or two who were feigning illness. That was about as rewarding as being a train conductor on the lookout for fare dodgers. In the winter no cases came my way. It’s just the way of the world: one doesn’t hire a private detective who is over seventy as a bodyguard, or send him around the world to chase down stolen jewels. Even a department store chain that wants to spy on its sales staff will be more impressed by a younger fellow with a cell phone and a BMW who’s a former cop turned private investigator than by an old guy driving an old Opel.

Not that I didn’t manage to keep myself busy all winter without cases. I cleaned my office at the Augustaanlage, waxed and polished the wooden floors, and washed the window. It is a big window; the office used to be a tobacconist’s store, and the window was for display. I cleaned my apartment, around the corner in the Richard-Wagner-Strasse, and put my cat, Turbo, who’s getting too fat, on a diet. I showed Manu The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in the Kunsthalle museum, and the Suebenheim burial mounds at the Reiss Museum. In the Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit I showed him the electrified chairs and beds that were used in the nineteenth century in attempts to drive tapeworms out of people’s intestines. I took Manu to the Sultan Selim mosque and to the synagogue. On TV we watched Bill Clinton being sworn into office. In the Luisenpark we went to see the storks, which had not flown to Africa this winter, and walked all the way down the bank of the Rhine to the Strandbad-its closed restaurant white, unapproachable, and dignified, like an English seaside casino in winter. I tried to convince myself that I was relishing the opportunity to do everything I’d always wanted to but couldn’t find time for.

Until Brigitte asked me: “Why are you always going shopping? And why don’t you go during the day, when the stores are empty, instead of in the evening, when they’re packed? That’s the kind of thing old people do.” Her questions went on. “And is that why you eat lunch at the Nordsee and the Kaufhof? When you had time on your hands, you always used to do your own cooking.”

A few days before Christmas I couldn’t make it up the stairs to my apartment. I felt as if my chest were clamped in iron, my left arm hurt, and my head was, in a strange way, both clear and befuddled. I sat down on the first landing until Herr and Frau Weiland came and helped me up to the top floor, where our apartments are across from each other. I lay down on my bed and fell asleep, slept through the whole of the following day, the day after that, and Christmas Eve. When Brigitte came looking for me on Christmas Day, first irritated and then worried, I did get up, and had some of her roast beef along with a glass of red wine. But for weeks afterward I was tired and could not exert myself without breaking out in a sweat and getting out of breath.

“You had a heart attack, Gerhard, and not a small one at that-I’d say a medium one. You should’ve been in intensive care,” said my friend Philipp, a surgeon at the Mannheim municipal hospital, shaking his head when I told him later about it. “There’s no messing with the old ticker. If you aggravate it you’ll end up biting the dust.”

He sent me to his internist colleague, who wanted to push a tube from my groin into my heart. A tube from my groin into my heart! I told him thanks, but no thanks.