The bank closed at four. At five the employees left. At six the manager left, too. I followed her to the streetcar. It was empty and the two of us sat alone-she in the second row, and I behind her in the seventh. After a few stops she got up, and on her way out she stopped next to me and said, “You might as well come along.”

We walked in the rain through a residential area with old villas. Some of the houses had been restored to their former splendor. Plaques bore the names of the companies, law firms, and tax consultants that now occupied them. But in other villas the stucco was crumbling, the brickwork was exposed, windows and doors were rotting, and here and there a balcony or two were missing. Frau Soboda walked in silence, and I walked in silence beside her. I followed her into one of the shabby houses. The third floor had been divided into apartments. Frau Soboda unlocked the door to one and showed me into her living room.

“It’s still warm,” she said, pointing to a large green tiled stove. “The fire’s just died down a bit. But it’ll be warmer in here in a minute.” She put in some more coals and closed the fire hatch.

“I’m-”

“I know, you’re with the police.”

“How-”

“You look just like those men of ours used to. I mean the men from the Firm. The Stasi. The way you came into the bank and looked around. The way you didn’t let the bank out of your sight all day. So one wouldn’t notice right away, but if one did it didn’t matter, as the game was up, anyway.” She eyed me. “You are from the West, and are older than those men of ours used to be. And yet…”

We were still standing. “May I hang up my coat outside? I don’t want to get your rug wet.”

She laughed. “Give it to me. That’s something those former men of ours wouldn’t have asked.” When she returned she offered me a chair, and when we were seated she said: “But I’m glad it’s all over.”

I waited, but she was lost in thought. “Would you like to start from the beginning?” I asked.

She nodded. “I didn’t notice anything for a long time. I think that’s why they let me run the bank. I learned my trade in the old East German days. I had no idea about the way banking is done in the West, and had to work my way into it slowly, and with difficulty.” She patted down the cover on the little table that stood between her chair and mine. “I really thought this was the chance of a lifetime. Many of the other East German savings banks were shut down and many of my colleagues were let go, and those who were allowed to stay had to go stand at the back of the line. As for me, I went from being bank teller to bank manager. For a while I was worried that the only reason was that they wanted an old employee of the bank to fire everyone else, so that none of you guys would have to get your fingers dirty. I need not tell you that this was how things were done more often than not. And yet nobody at our Sorbian bank got fired. So I had pulled the winning ticket, and I worked my fingers to the bone, until… until… my marriage fell apart.” She shook her head. “Not that it was much of a marriage. It would have fallen apart anyway. But perhaps it wouldn’t have happened a year ago, when I was studying and reading like a maniac, when I could see that I was making it, that everything I’d read was coming together, everything I’d learned, seen, and done right. Even though it was mostly out of sheer luck. Now I’m sure I could easily run any bank of similar size in West Germany.” She looked at me with pride. “But I wouldn’t be given such a bank, especially not now.”

“If I had a bank, you’d be its manager,” I told her, to apologize for having thought when I first saw her that she looked like a tractor driver.

“But you don’t.” She smiled. While she was talking I noticed the cleverness in her tough face. Now I also saw a touch of charm.

“When did you notice what was going on?”

“About six months ago. At first I noticed only that something was wrong. It took me a while to realize what it was. I’d have been glad to go straight to the police, but the lawyer I cautiously consulted wasn’t sure if I was actually allowed to go to the authorities. By all accounts, industrial law provides for the firing of a whistle-blower, even if an employer has done something he ought not to have done and the employee was right to blow the whistle. It wasn’t only losing my job that I was frightened of. You see”-her eyes challenged me-“I have a knack for landing on my feet. But what about my colleagues at the bank? There are many of us, perhaps too many, and I don’t think the bank will stay above water if everything comes to light.”

The longer she talked the more I liked her. In the old days, I used to think that men were the realists and women the romantics. Nowadays I know it’s the other way around, and that pragmatic men and romantic women were just pretending, to themselves and to others. I also know that a pragmatic woman with a heart, and a romantic man with common sense, is a rare and wonderful thing. Vera Soboda was just such a woman.

“How did you find all this out?”

“Quite by chance, the way one does. It’s not as if one expects this sort of thing, or keeps an eye out for it. One of our customers insisted that she had deposited fifty marks a week earlier, on a day when she forgot to bring her savings book with her. Now she had brought her savings book in order to have her fifty-mark deposit entered, but our bank system had no record of it.”

“What did you do?”

“I’ve known Frau Sellmann forever. She’s an old lady who I’m sure scrimps and saves all she can, and she is conscientious to a fault. She had her deposit slip with her, and though it’s not impossible to forge one, Frau Sellmann is no forger. So I entered the fifty marks in her savings book, and then in the evening I initiated a search through our system to see where her deposit might have ended up. Tanya, the teller who had signed the receipt, is just as conscientious as Frau Sellmann. I just cannot imagine her forgetting to deposit the money.”

“Did you find the fifty marks?”

“We have a system we use and a program that tracks every step of every transaction. But we can’t access it because it’s there to monitor us, and the whole idea is that we shouldn’t be able to manipulate it. But I’m very good with computers, so I tried to get into the program.”

“And did you?”

She laughed. “You’re on pins and needles.”

I nodded. My fever was getting worse, and I had the feeling I couldn’t hold out much longer-just a little more, and during this time I’d have to find out all I could.

“I got into the tracking program, and in fact it had registered the deposit of those fifty marks. But at the same time there was a deposit of thirty-five thousand marks to her account, more than Frau Sellmann with all her scrimping could have ever scraped together. The tracking program had recorded that the thirty-five thousand marks had not gone into Frau Sellmann’s real account but into a false account that had been set up under her name. As both payments had taken place at the same time, both the fifty marks and the thirty-five thousand marks had somehow gotten into her false account. When I looked further, I found that Frau Sellmann’s false account had a balance of one hundred twenty thousand marks, a good hundred thousand more than in her real account. I also found all the other accounts in which my poor Sorbian compatriots were made out to be wealthy men and women, not to mention the accounts that show poor, dead Sorbians to be alive and wealthy.”

“The whole thing’s quite straightforward,” I said, hoping she would agree with me and elaborate further so that I might finally get some insight into all of this.

“When you own a bank,” she said, “it isn’t all that difficult to launder money-in this way, and I imagine in other ways, too. Once the money is in the bank, all the bank has to do is invest it in a manner so that it gets lost. They’ve invested most of it in Russia.”