Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,92
and unpaid bills lay in a little basket on his desk. Everything that didn't have to be dealt with right away must have been in the binders lining the right-hand wall between the doors. They didn't have labels, but were numbered from 1.1 to 1.7, and under fourteen heading numbers there were between two and eleven further numbers. The heading numbers stood for topics such as portraits, nudes, fashion, politics, and commercials, and the further numbers stood for
single big projects and also the small projects of a given year. It was quite straightforward. Under the heading number 15, Peschkalek had filed away his big features, the first about Italian contrabass makers, the second about closed steelworks in Lorraine, and the next three about football, alpine-horn blowing, and child prostitution in Germany. Binder number 15.6 was dedicated to the Viernheim attack.
Before I sat down on the toilet in his bathroom with the binder, I called Brigitte and told her about traffic jams and construction. “Is Ingo there yet? I won't make it before ten— don't wait for me with dinner.”
They had finished the soup already and were about to start on the monkfish. “We'll keep a plate warm for you.”
As in the other binders, in this one, too, were pictures first and then the text. It took a while till I realized what the photos showed. They were dark, and I was at the point of judging them failures. But they were night shots. A car, disguised figures in a forest, dug-up mounds of earth that the disguised figures were doing something with, uniformed figures, and an explosion with two bodies flying through the air, a fire, people running. The Viernheim attack in pictures.
The texts began with a letter to the local and regional press, in which the group After Fall Comes Winter took credit for the attack on the poison-gas depot in the Lampertheim National Forest and made threats against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In a later letter, Peschkalek wrote about a terrorist who wanted out, had confided in him, and had handed him a confession and a video recording showing the Viernheim attack. Peschkalek praised the material and enclosed stills as proof of the video's quality, and excerpts from the confession. He wanted a million marks for it. The letter was to the ZDF television network. The next page in the binder listed who else he had contacted: the various broadcasting corporations, a Hamburg magazine and weekly, the serious press, the tabloids, and finally the gutter press. Then came the responses. At best they were surprised: The material looked interesting, but nothing was known about an attack on a poison-gas depot in the Viernheim Meadows. Some of the replies were curt, saying that the police knew nothing of such an attack—someone had spent time looking into it and was angry. More often than not, the replies were form letters thanking him, but unceremoniously turning him down. Finally I found in the binder the confession of the terrorist, an eighty-page manuscript, obviously printed on the same printer as Peschkalek's letters, and, in a plastic cover, the American file. I did not look at the video marked 15.6—the stills were enough.
I needed a breather before I could head over to Brigitte's place. I put a few photos in my bag, turned out the light in the bathroom, put the binder back, sat down in the Venetian chair, and looked out the window. On a balcony across the way three men had settled down to a game of Skat. I heard the bidding and calling of suits and sometimes a fist banging on the table along with a card. A red light blinked over the harbor, warning airplanes of a crane.
Had Lemke and Peschkalek mounted a spectacle for the media? I ought to have figured out much earlier that Lemke no longer believed in political battles or waged such battles anymore. A fanatic, a terrorist—that didn't pan out with him. He was able to slip into the role and play it convincingly. But that was all. Lemke was a player, a strategist, a gambler. He had staged a terrorist attack with a few foolish youngsters, staged it in a way that ought to have pitched the media into a feeding frenzy. There were even casualties, presumably unplanned, but heightening the worth of the spectacle and the price of the material. But nobody played along: not the Americans, not the police, not the media. None of the million marks they had intended to