Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,42

had been sitting with her elbows propped on the table. Now she leaned back.

“What of it? Wendt helped you. First he hid you in the psychiatric hospital, then he got you the job as an au pair in Amorbach. I didn't know him well, but I admit that it troubles me that he might still be alive if I had told the police what they wanted to know, about you, about this guy”— I pointed at the picture—”and about Wendt. I am quite sure that he would still be alive if you had done one or two things differently.”

The café owner brought us our coffees. Leo got up. “I'll be right back.” Did she want to squeeze her way out the restroom window and head through the woods for Bavaria? I took the risk. The café owner began telling me that our forests have been dying since German boilers have been burning Russian natural gas. “They put something in it,” he whispered. “Those Russians don't need war and weapons anymore.”

Leo returned. Her eyes were swollen with tears. “Can you please tell me what you want from me?” She spoke in a natural voice, but not without effort.

I gave her a condensed version of the last couple of weeks.

“Who are you working for now?”

“For myself. I can do that from time to time, if it's not for too long.”

“And you want to know what I know just out of interest and curiosity?”

“Not only. I also want to know what I might have to expect from him.” I pointed again at the picture. “Incidentally, what's his name?”

“And when I've told you everything, what then?”

“You're asking me if I'll hand you over to the police?”

“That would be an option, wouldn't it? By the way, did you have a hard time recognizing me?”

“Not really. But recognizing people who don't want to be recognized is part of my job.”

“Will you take me away from here?”

I didn't understand what she was getting at.

“I mean, can you take me somewhere where these pictures won't… They'll be up in every post office and police station, like in the days of Baader and Meinhof, won't they? And on TV—do you think they'll show them on TV, too?”

“They already have, yesterday.”

“Do you have any ideas? If you do, I'll tell you what you want to know.”

I needed some time to think. Supporting a terrorist organization, facilitation, obstruction of justice—all the things that could happen to me went through my head. Could I claim at my age a diminished capacity, or was that only permissible in Nazi trials? Would they impound my old Opel as an instrument of crime? I postponed the moral question of whether I would keep my promise to Leo if she had committed the most dreadful atrocities.

I got up. “Fine. I'll take you to France, and on the way to the border you can tell me what you know.”

She remained seated. “And the official at the border will just wave us through with a smile?”

She was right. Even in a Europe of open borders, the police at border crossings take particular care during a hunt for terrorists. “I'll take you over a back road.”

32

Bananas in exhaust pipes

The TV bulletin had warned the public to expect roadblocks and checkpoints. So I took country roads with their tractors, agricultural machinery, and hay carts, which the police avoid as much as everyone else does. We drove through Kleiner Odenwald and Kraichgau, crossed the Rhine at Leopolds-haven, and entered the Palatinate Forest at Klingenmünster. By two o'clock we were in Nothweiler.

“There's not all that much to tell,” Leo had begun after Ernsttal, but then fell silent again. She sat brooding all the way to Neckarbischofsheim, rolling one cigarette after another and smoking it. “I don't get it. Rolf Wendt wasn't part of it at all. He didn't really participate. No one had any reason to kill him, no one. How was he murdered?”

“Why don't you tell me everything from the beginning?” “OK, I'll start with Helmut Lemke. That's not what he calls himself anymore, but whatever. As it is, with that photograph you have of him, you would've had no trouble finding out his real name. You could say he was something like an older brother to me. I wasn't even at school yet when Dad brought him home the first time. Helmut was already a young man, but was happy enough to play tag or hide-and-seek with me in the garden, and when I was older he taught me tennis.