That weekend spring assured us it meant business, that it had come to stay and would not be chased away by any more ice or snow. In the Luisenpark the deck chairs were out on the lawns, and I was dozing away, wrapped in a blanket as if all was well with the world and my heart was sound. Later, when Brigitte and I came out of the movie theater, the full moon lit up the streets and squares. Some punks were playing soccer with a beer can in the pedestrian zone, some bums were passing a bottle of wine around in front of the town hall, and couples were making out under the arbors of the Rosengarten.

“I’m looking forward to summer,” Brigitte said, putting her arm around me.

On Sunday I had lunch with Georg in the Kleiner Rosengarten. He said he was willing to go to Strasbourg to search for the silent partner in old registries and telephone directories, the records of legal and notary chambers, and lecture schedules. He was ready to leave on Monday. I appointed him assistant detective and ordered champagne, but he wanted to stick to alcohol-free beer.

“You drink too much, Uncle Gerhard.”

That evening I was back in my office poring over the history of banking. The Sorbian Cooperative Bank also had a paragraph dedicated to it. It was a rarity. Cooperative banks had actually come about as self-help establishments set up by occupational groups. Schulze-Delitzsch had set out to make artisans into members of a cooperative through cooperative banks, while Raiffeisen strove to do the same with farmers. Hans Kleiner from Cottbus, who founded the Sorbian Cooperative Bank in 1868, wanted to inspire cooperative ideas in the Sorbian Slavic minority. His mother was Sorbian, wore Sorbian dress, told little Hans Sorbian fairy tales and taught him Sorbian songs, with the result that he made Sorbian affairs his life’s work. During his lifetime the bank had only Sorbian members, but after his death it opened its doors to others, expanded, flourished, and survived the great inflation and the worldwide depression. Then came a great blow. The Nazis wanted nothing to do with the Sorbians and turned the bank into a regular cooperative bank.

When and how the Sorbian Cooperative Bank was to recover from this blow would have to wait till tomorrow. Weller & Welker had taken the bank over, so it must have recovered and had a happy ending. On my way home that night I found the cooperative idea so sensible that the usual hankering of banks and bankers for more and more money suddenly struck me as strange. Why heap money upon money? Because a child’s compulsion to collect things can in adult years no longer be satisfied by collecting marbles, beer coasters, and stamps, and so must turn to money?

The following morning I was sitting once more at the desk in my office before the children of the neighborhood were heading to school. The bakery a few doors down was already open, and a steaming cup of coffee and a croissant stood before me. There wasn’t much more to the story of the Sorbian Cooperative Bank. While other such banks were closed down by the Soviets, those in and around Cottbus continued to be run under the name of Sorbian Cooperative Bank. The bank was completely absorbed into the system of a state-owned savings bank. Yet it did keep its name; respect for the Sorbian Slavic people, brothers of the victorious Soviet people, forbade its abolition. Along with its name it also kept sufficient autonomy for the Treuhand Agency, formed after the reunification of Germany to privatize East German enterprises, to put the Sorbian Cooperative Bank on the market, ultimately selling it to Weller & Welker.

It was nine o’clock and the morning traffic on the Augustaanlage had quieted down. I heard children, who for some reason or other didn’t have to get to school till later. Then I heard a car pull up by the sidewalk, where it stopped with its engine running. The rattling and chugging began to get on my nerves after a while. Why didn’t they turn the engine off? I got up and looked out the window.

It was Schuler’s green Isetta. Its door was clapped open, but the car was empty. I went out onto the sidewalk. Schuler was standing in the entrance next door, reading the names beside the buzzers.

“Herr Schuler!” I called, and he turned and waved. He waved as if he were shooing me away from the sidewalk-as if he wanted me to get back into my office. I didn’t understand, and though he seemed to be calling out something to me I couldn’t hear him. He came staggering toward me, his right hand still waving, his left hand pressed to his stomach. I could see that his left hand was holding the handle of a black attaché case that was knocking against his legs. I took a few steps toward him and he bumped into me. I got a whiff of his bad smell and heard him whisper “Take this!” and “Go!” He shoved the case toward me and I took it. He steadied himself on me with the hand that had just given me the case and righted himself. He hurried over to his car, got in, closed the door, and drove off.

He swerved in a crooked line from the sidewalk to the right lane, and then from the right lane into the left. He steered toward the steel bollards bordering the traffic island in the middle of the Augustaanlage, scraped one, scraped the next, scraped the traffic light at Mollstrasse, and picked up speed without paying any attention to the light, which had turned red, to the cars that had just started entering from Mollstrasse, or to the children who had begun crossing the Augustaanlage. At first it looked as if he would crash into the lights or the tree at the edge of the island on the other side of Mollstrasse. But he rolled over the curb, missed the lights, and grazed the tree lightly, and yet the curb and the tree tilted the Isetta enough to capsize it, sending it sliding on its side over the grass until it crashed into another tree.

It was a loud crash, and at the same moment, in the opposite lane, into which the Isetta had almost careened, brakes screeched and drivers he had cut off blew their horns. A child over whose feet he’d almost skidded began to bawl. All hell broke loose. My Turkish neighbor came hurrying out of his store, took the attaché case from me, and said: “Go see if he’s all right. I’ll call the police and an ambulance.” I hurried over, but I’m not as quick as I used to be, and by the time I got to the Isetta a crowd of onlookers had already gathered. I pushed my way forward. The tree had crushed the door and was lodged between the roof and floor of the car. I looked down through the side window: the car was full of glass and blood, the crushed door had pinned Schuler back into the seat, and the wheel was jammed into his chest. He was dead.

The police and ambulance arrived and, as they could not pry the Isetta loose from the tree, the fire department was brought in. The police made no sign of taking a statement from me, and I did not come forward to present myself as a witness. I headed back to my office, the front door of which I’d left open. From a distance I saw someone leave my office. I couldn’t imagine what he’d be doing there, or what he might be looking for. Nothing was missing.

My Turkish neighbor’s store experienced a mini-boom. The onlookers were watching the goings-on surrounding the Isetta, offering expert commentary, and buying candy, chocolate, and granola bars.

It was only when everything was over and things had calmed down that I remembered Schuler’s attaché case. I picked it up from the Turk, placed it on my desk, and eyed it. Black matte faux leather, a gold-colored combination lock-an ugly, run-of-the-mill attaché case. From my desk I took out the bottle of Sambuca and the box of coffee beans I kept there, poured myself a drink, and dropped three beans into the glass. I found a package of Sweet Aftons in the filing cabinet and lit both-the Sambuca and the cigarette-and watched the blue flames and blue smoke.