Free Self's Murder by Bernhard Schlink Page A

Reichskanzler-Müller-Strasse and we stopped, the man got out of his car and walked up to my locked door, and I don’t know what he would have done if a patrol car hadn’t gone by and the light turned green.
    In front of police headquarters I drove half up onto the sidewalk and, clutching the attaché case, was out of the car, up the stairs, and through the door before the man could even get out of the Mercedes. I leaned against the wall, hugging the attaché case to my chest and panting as if I’d run all the way from the Augustaanlage.
    Nägelsbach was waiting in his Audi inside the yard of the police station. I gave him the attaché case and he put it on the floor by the front seat. Then he helped me climb into the trunk. “My wife’s put a blanket in there—do you think you’ll manage?”
    When he let me out at the airport parking lot at Neuostheim, he was certain nobody had followed him. He was also certain that nobody had seen me climb out of the trunk.
    “Do you want me to come along with you?”
    “Are you already at loose ends at home, with all that free time on your hands?”
    “Not at all. I’ve been conscripted into cleaning up after yesterday’s party.” But he stood there, hesitant and somewhat despondent. “Well, then.”
    A little later I was in the air, looking down at Mannheim, keeping my eyes peeled for beige Fiestas and blue Mercedes.
     
     
     

— 18 —
     
Fear of flying
     
     
    T he woman next to me was afraid of flying. She asked me to hold her hand, and I did. As we were taking off, I reassured her with the information that most airplane accidents occur not during takeoff but during landing. An hour and a half later, when our plane began to descend, I confessed that I had not been all that honest with her. The truth is that most airplane accidents do in fact occur during takeoff, not when the plane is landing. We had taken off quite a while ago, so she could sit back and relax. But she didn’t, and at Berlin Tempelhof she rushed off without so much as a good-bye.
    I hadn’t been in Berlin since 1942, and I wouldn’t have been tempted to come if the fastest route to Cottbus hadn’t been by plane via Berlin. I knew that the five-story house in which I had grown up had been destroyed in 1945, along with all the neighboring houses, and replaced in the fifties by a six-story apartment block. My parents had died in the attack. Klara’s parents had moved out of their villa near Wannsee to a villa on Lake Starnberg shortly before the end of the war. The friends of my childhood and youth had dispersed in all directions. In the seventies we had a class reunion. I didn’t go. I don’t want to remember.
    I found a cheap hotel at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. As I stood by the window, looking down at the traffic, I got the urge to go out and take a look around and perhaps find a restaurant where the food tastes like it used to, like it did at home. I went to the Brandenburg Gate, saw the buildings rising on the Pariser Platz, the cranes towering into the skies. On the Potsdamer Platz they had sawed open the city’s torso and were conducting open heart surgery: floodlights, excavations, cranes, scaffolding, and building skeletons, sometimes already floor after floor with finished masonry, balconies, and windows. I walked on and recognized the Ministry of Aviation and the remains of the Anhalter train station, and on Tempelhofer Ufer the building where I had worked as a junior clerk for a lawyer. I avoided the street where I had been a child.
    I didn’t find a restaurant whose food promised to taste the way it used to. But I found an Italian restaurant where the perch and the crème caramel were the way they ought to be, and the carafe of Sardinian white wine overshadowed all the Frascati, suave, or pinot grigios. I was content, asked where the nearest metro station was, and set out for my hotel.
    I wanted to transfer at the Hallesches Tor, but as I got off the