“Frau Soboda,” I intervened in an attempt to calm her down. But now Ulbrich could no longer hold back.

“You need to get off your high horse! If money was being laundered in the bank, it wasn’t going on just in the past few weeks, but all the time you were there, with your knowledge, under your very nose! Did you do anything about it? Did you go to the police?” He looked triumphant again. “Shit? You were standing in it with both feet, and if you had your way, you’d be happy to still be standing in it. If anyone here is ready for any kind of nastiness, it’s you!”

Now Vera Soboda looked exhausted. She shrugged her shoulders, raised her arms and then lowered them, and went from the hall where we were standing into the living room and sat down.

Ulbrich followed her, saying, “You’re not getting out of this so easily. The least I expect is an apology.” Then Ulbrich didn’t know what else to say.

I went to the kitchen, got three beers from the refrigerator, opened them, and took them to the living room. I put one on the table in front of Vera Soboda, and one in front of an empty chair, and I sat down with one of the beers on the sofa. Ulbrich went over to the empty chair, stood next to it for a moment, and sat down carefully on its edge. He took the beer and slowly rolled it between his palms. It was so quiet that I could hear the computer humming lightly in the covered veranda.

“Cheers,” Ulbrich said. He raised his bottle and drank. Vera looked at him and at me as if it had slipped her mind that we were there. Ulbrich cleared his throat. “I am sorry I fired you. It was nothing personal. I wasn’t given a reason; I was just ordered to-there was nothing I could do. I’m also fully aware that I know nothing about banking. But perhaps the job doesn’t require someone who knows the business. Per haps all it needs is someone who can use the phone. I make a call when there’s something I don’t know and am told what to do.” He cleared his throat again. “And as for what you said about doing dirty work for the other side, we don’t have any say anymore-you don’t and I don’t-and whoever has nothing to say has to accept the job he’s given. Nothing personal there, either.” He took a long sip, burped quietly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and got up. “Thank you very much for the beer. Good night.”

“Has he gone?” Vera asked.

Ulbrich had pulled the door shut behind him so quietly, and gone down the stairs so softly, that no sound disturbed the silence.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I behaved rather badly. And when I got a chance to make up for it, I ruined that, too. He was right, and he even tried to be nice. I was so angry I didn’t even manage to say good night.”

“Angry at him?”

“At him, at me, at his being so disgusting.”

“He isn’t disgusting.”

“I know. I’m angry about that, too. In fact, I owe him an apology.”

“Are the cold cuts in the refrigerator for us?”

“Yes. I was thinking of making some fried potatoes, too.”

“I’ll see to dinner,” I said.

I found some boiled potatoes, onions, bacon, and oil. The chopping, the hissing in the pan, and the aroma did me good after the argument between Vera and Ulbrich. I have come to believe that setbacks don’t make you a better person, just a smaller one. The setbacks in my life didn’t make me better, and Vera Soboda and Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, too, had become smaller through the setbacks that came with Germany ’s unification and postunification. Setbacks don’t cost you only what you have invested-every time, they cut away a piece of your belief that you will survive the next trial, the next battle, that you will manage to tackle your life.

I served the food and we ate. Vera wanted to know what had happened at the Sorbian bank, and I told her. I explained where I knew Ulbrich from and why I was certain he knew nothing of former or present money laundering at the bank. “He suspected that something crooked was going on at Weller and Welker, had talked about the Russian or Chechen Mafia, and might have been thinking of money laundering. But as for anything specific-he himself can’t have found out anything, and I’m certain Welker wouldn’t have clued him in. That is, if there’s still anything to be clued into.”

“I… I see I was quick to jump to conclusions,” Vera said.

“Yes, you might have been.”

“In that case,” she said, “Ulbrich might be right in saying that the bank doesn’t need a manager who knows anything about banking. Perhaps the Sorbian bank needs to economize because no more money is being laundered, and firings are called for, and they took the first step with me. Perhaps they wanted to get rid of me so I wouldn’t make trouble with the other firings.” She looked at me with a sad smile and shook her head. “That’s just a fantasy; I wouldn’t have made any trouble about the other firings.”

I got up and took the trash bag with Schuler’s money out of my suitcase. I told her how I’d gotten the money and how Schuler had probably stumbled upon it.

“There’s a whole lot that needs to be done around here,” I said. “Take the money and get it all done.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. I’m not saying you can do everything that needs doing. Just some of it.”

“I… this is… This is quite a surprise. I don’t know if I can… I mean, I do have some ideas. But you’ve seen how angry I can get, and when I get angry I really do foolish things. Wouldn’t you want to approach someone who… well, someone who’s better? How about you yourself?”

The following morning I found her in her nightgown in the kitchen. She had apportioned most of the money into little bundles on the table and was counting the rest with unparalleled dexterity.

“We were made to practice counting money the old way,” she said with a laugh, “and whoever counted fastest was made supervisor.”

“So you are taking up my offer?” I asked.

“There are almost a hundred thousand marks here. I’ll account for every penny.”

She handed me a little gray booklet. “I found it among the bills.”

It was a passport from the Third Reich. I opened it and found a picture and the name Ursula Sara Brock, born October 10, 1911. A cursive J was stamped over it. It was clear that when it came to the money Schuler had left me a bequest. But why had he left me this passport? I leafed through it, turning it this way and that, and put it in my pocket.

On the way back I took the autobahn. I wanted to float along in the stream of cars without distractions, without having to pay too much attention to the road. I wanted to think.

Who was Ursula Brock? If she were still alive she would be an old lady and could hardly have frightened Schuler to death. Would Samarin or his people have frightened him to death? Among the many unanswered questions was why they wouldn’t have taken the money from him right away. Would Welker, who only later laundered money, if he was laundering money at all… No, even if I could prove that Welker was laundering money now, it wouldn’t make sense that he would have frightened Schuler to death. Unless, that is, he already knew he was going to inherit Samarin’s money-laundering enterprise and was afraid of Schuler’s insatiable inquisitiveness.

I drove in the right lane, among trucks, elderly couples in old Fords and Opels, Poles in rattling, smoking wrecks, and diehard communists in Trabants. When an exhaust pipe in front of me stank too much I switched to the left lane and drove past the trucks, Poles, and communists until I found an elderly couple behind whom I pulled in again. In one car a plastic dog was enthroned in the back window, shaking his head from side to side and up and down with insight and sorrow.

What did I have to go on? A dark Saab on the Schlossplatz in Schwetzingen and Vera Soboda’s replacement by Karl-Heinz Ulbrich-at the end of the day, this was so little that I asked myself if I really had any proof against Welker. Was I envious of his wealth, his bank, his house, his children? The ease with which he had achieved everything? The ease with which he sauntered through life? The ability to remain untouched by both the evil that befell him and the evil he wrought? Was it a case of age envying youth, the war and postwar generation envying the generation of the economic miracle, the guilty envying the innocent? Was I being gnawed at by his having shot Samarin and having put Nägelsbach in danger without batting an eye? Was it that I didn’t feel so innocent and uninvolved?