TWO DAYS AFTER Rolf received the Gestapo list from Helmut, Klara called Rolf at work and told him to meet her at the Diana Pavilion in the Hofgarten for lunch. Over the previous two days they’d been fighting over bills, keys, books left off shelves, and undone dishes. The particulars, which seemed worth sore vocal cords during the fight, became elusive in memory. Rolf was nonetheless surprised at Klara’s tone when she invited him to the park. It was cold, yes, but unexpectedly free of recriminations about crumbs in the butter dish.
Rolf took the brief stroll from the office to the park, not knowing why Klara had asked to meet him there. Maybe she wanted to make up, or maybe she’d packed up her belongings in the morning, had them loaded onto a truck, and was coming here to say goodbye before she boarded the next train for her cousin’s place in Bordeaux. Rolf sweated into his shirt. The noonday heat and the thick air lightened Rolf’s head. The street teemed with shoppers and cops and children, zipping around like dragonflies.
Finally, Rolf reached the park and made for the shade of the pavilion. Music from a band oompahed across the square. A bell chimed the quarter hour. Rolf sat on a bench in the pavilion. The shade restored some of his senses. When they were restored enough, he found his wife sitting next to him, with two brown bags in her hand. She handed a bag to Rolf.
“Liverwurst,” Klara said. “Are you all right?”
Rolf opened the bag. The smell of liver sausage and pickles hit him hard enough to make him sway. “No. It’s too hot.”
Klara put her hand on Rolf’s forehead and held it there. It was the longest period she’d sustained physical contact with him in two days. Rolf wished it wouldn’t end, but she withdrew her hand and said. “Did you have a movement this morning?”
“No.”
Klara nodded. “Last night?”
“No.”
“Wait here.” Klara got up and walked out of sight. It felt to Rolf as if at least three months passed, but finally Klara came back with a tall glass of water. “Drink slowly, dear.”
Rolf obeyed. The water, fresh and cool, swirled down his throat and landed in his gut with what for all the world felt like a pleasant splash. “You’re dehydrated. The morphine did it. It constipated you. You’ll need to drink more water to compensate.”
“It would also be best for me not to walk around in hot weather.”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to mention, at your office, that your doctor friend called, or that he said that Anika wants to meet you, at this spot, at OneAM. Eat your sandwich, dear.”
Rolf took a bite. It didn’t include a pickle, which was a disappointment. He sipped some more water. “When did the doctor call?”
“About a half hour before I called you.” Klara wiped a stray crumb from her lip. “I’ll drive you there, and I’m told that they’ll drop you back at home. Exciting stuff.”
“Yes. My spine tingles, though that may just be a sign of incipient paralysis.” He took another bite of his sandwich. As he chewed and swallowed, he could feel Klara’s look.
“What are you doing?”
“Making a silent assessment of you.”
Rolf had seen her assess him this way before. She’d questioned him about a draw on their bank account for three hundred and seventy-nine RM. It was their custom, from the beginning of their marriage, to alternate each month the responsibility for balancing their books. They’d made this arrangement because, when Klara’s father died, her mother had lacked a single clue about where her husband’s financial papers were, or how much money was in which account. Klara and her mother had spent weeks straightening the mess out.
Rolf had made the draw to pay for Anika’s abortion. He’d tried to get her to wait a couple of weeks so that he would have control of the books when the statement came from the bank and could hide the expense, but she’d demanded that “it come out now”. So he’d taken her to Doctor Tollner and paid his fee, and so it had been done. When, three weeks later, Klara had asked Rolf about the money draft, Rolf had told her about some old debt that an informant had needed to pay to a bookmaker, lest the bookmaker’s associates break his knees. When he’d finished his story, Klara had given him the look that she was now giving him, the silent assessment. What Rolf hadn’t known, and what Klara had told him about two hours later, was that she’d followed Rolf to Anika’s and tailed them both to Doctor Tollner’s office, a place to which she had, in her practice, sent those of her patients who were too psychologically fragile to endure a pregnancy.
“Eat your sandwich, Rolf.” Klara said. She took a bite of hers, but her eyes never strayed from him.
Before she chauffeured Rolf to the rendezvous point at 0100, Klara shot him once again with morphine. He noticed that she was sneaking the dosages down. They drove to the park in silence, dressed formally so that they could, if detained, claim to have been coming back from a late meeting of their bridge club.
The car’s open windows admitted a cool breeze, laden with moisture. Eyes closed, Rolf ruminated on a method to catch the killer. If he could call upon the full contingent of uniformed officers, he could have them patrol, visibly, even noisily, all the neighborhoods the killer had hit, except for one. That one he’d patrol with plainclothes detectives in unmarked cars. They would be under orders to stop anyone who accosted a young girl. They’d take their names. Anyone approaching a girl in the plainclothes area would be searched, along with their vehicle. It sounded like a good plan, some kinks aside; but it was an idle dream. Helmut would never approve the manpower for such a gambit, which would probably have to run for weeks to be effective.
It was best, Rolf thought, to just forget it.
When they reached the park, Klara stopped the car, coolly wished Rolf luck, and let him out. She drove away, and Rolf walked toward the pavilion. From out of it stepped a young woman, silhouetted against the light reflecting off the palace behind her. It was Anika. He came in close enough to whisper and asked, “What now?”
Rolf heard, from close behind, the click of a Browning’s hammer. A pair of hands, attached to God-knew-who, frisked Rolf thoroughly. “I feel something under his dinner jacket.”
“It’s a rib wrap,” Rolf said. “I was attacked defending Anika.”
“Take off your jacket.”
“A cop could come by here any second and spot you with that gun,” Rolf said. “Do you really want to fuck around with this? I’m not armed.”
Anika nodded quickly. “He’s right. Let’s go.”
Rolf’s kidnappers led him to a car parked in a dim alleyway across the street from the park. Anika opened the door to the back seat and slid in. Rolf followed her, and her gun toting friend followed him. Soon the doors were shut, the gun’s barrel was digging firmly into Rolf’s side, and the driver had the keys in the ignition. He reached down to something out of Rolf’s view on the passenger side, and came up with a dark strip of cloth.
“A blindfold? Come on,” Rolf said. “Anika, didn’t you vouch for me?”
The man with the gun said, “That only goes so far. Wear it.”
“Please,” Anika said.
Rolf reached up slowly and took the blindfold from the driver. “Okay. I’ll wear it. But only if Destry here puts the gun away. I don’t want to be blown in half just because we hit a bump. Deal?”
Anika said, “Sounds reasonable. Deal.”
The man with the gun said, “No.”
Anika growled at him, “Put it away, moron. He’s right.”
The man with the gun became just the man, handing his weapon to his partner in the front seat. Rolf tied the blindfold on. He felt a sharp breeze close to his face soon after, as if someone were testing whether he’d flinch from an oncoming hand. The car’s engine rumbled to life, and soon he felt the acceleration of their departure in his back.
“Who am I meeting?” Rolf asked.
“Three people on your list.” Anika said. “Rudolf Klausner, Geli Buchwald, and Ignaz Schwimmer.”
“Will I be back by morning?”
“Shut up,” the man next to Rolf barked.
“Shlomo, don’t talk,” Anika said.
“Why not?”
“Because no situation was ever improved by your opening your mouth,” Anika said. The driver snickered.
“Fuck you both,” Shlomo said.
“I don’t know about Franz, but you’re not getting me,” Anika said.
“Fine, you fucking bull-dyke. Fuck you,” Shlomo said.
“Anyway, Rolf,” Anika said. “To answer your question, you’ll probably be back by morning. It took some persuading to get these people to talk to you.”
“Who handled that?”
“The doctor and I,” Anika said. “So how’s Klara?”
“Doing well.”
“I wish I’d had a chance to see her, but she pulled away so quickly,” Anika said. “I don’t like thinking she still resents me.”
“I don’t think she ever did,” Rolf said, perplexed at the statement.
“Honestly?”
“I was the one who broke vows. Do you really want to talk about this now?”
“Those two don’t care, and I’m just trying to pass the time. We have a few hours.”
“How did you manage to get away from home?”
“My masters went on a trip to visit relatives in Saarbrucken. I have the house to myself until tomorrow night. I’m not looking forward to their return.”
“Why not?”
“Take a good guess.” Anika said.
Visions of the way he’d found her in the Spender house simul-taneously aroused and sickened him. They seemed to him a smutty parody of their nights and afternoons together, in her flat, on her couch, amid her dirty laundry on the floor. He remembered most a feeling of complete abandon, a profound liberation. He’d assumed Anika had felt the same way, even though their affair ran counter to her usual taste in erotic partners. He’d pursued her, and after he’d caught her she’d matched his moves with what seemed like enthusiasm. But suddenly, and for the first time, he wondered where her enthusiasm had come from. He’d never asked her through the twelve weeks of their affair, “Why me?” Maybe with all the interrogating he’d been doing in other areas, he’d just wanted to preserve this one parcel of his life from close scrutiny. But now, he wondered.
Of course, he wasn’t going to ask now, and as best as he could tell he’d never have an opportunity to talk to Anika alone. So instead he just added this to the list of issues that frustrated and perplexed him.
“Klara still has one of your sculptures in her study. Your work has always touched her.”
Anika said nothing to this. Rolf felt a rush of cool air coming from her side of the car, so presumably she had opened a window. Why would Klara still be a sensitive subject for Anika? It couldn't be guilt at having been the other woman. She'd just expressed regret at losing a chance to see Klara. Maybe it was something else. Unrequited love? Anika never seemed the type to quietly moon, but Klara might have seemed forbidding to her back then. Too tall, too smart, too married, too everything. Had Anika feared rejection? Anika had never shown fear of anything. Or was it that she felt something beyond the physical for Klara, and rejection would have meant damaging that?
Rolf’s only answer was the nose itching smell of pollen in the breeze.
The car’s tires started running over gravel and dirt instead of pavement. The engine stopped. Anika said, “We’re here.” Someone held Rolf’s head down and guided him out of the car. From there to the sound of a creaking door thirteen steps came and went.
One of Rolf’s three companions shoved him forward into a warm room that smelled of coffee and cigarettes. He felt fingers laboring at the back of his head, and soon the blindfold fluttered down from his face. The lights forced Rolf’s eyes shut for a minute, but soon the yellow spots faded, and he was able to open them properly.
In chairs arranged before him, with small tables in between, three people, an older man, a younger man, and a teenaged girl, sat. On the tables two coffee mugs steamed. The ash tray on the old man’s table had a butt burning in it. Rolf said, “Ignatz?”
The old man raised his hand. He was a heavy, round old Jew, who, from the cut of his clothes and the gold ring on his finger looked prosperous. He turned his eyes to the younger man, Rudolf. He looked haggard, and his cheek and forehead bore long, deep, ropy scars. If he were in any kind of clandestine resistance, those identifying marks would prove an inconvenience. The teenager, dressed simply, was so thin she could have hidden behind the edge of a sheet of typing paper. Of the three, she was the only one who looked Rolf in the eye.
Rolf plucked a notebook and pen from his jacket pocket. He said, “I’m Kommissar Wundt of KRIPO. I’m here to listen. I don’t plan on identifying you to anyone, and I’ll never ask you to testify at any legal proceeding. I just need information.”
“You chase this man now,” the old man said. “Why didn’t you chase him when he was going after our children?”
“I wasn’t in Munich back then, sir. But someone was chasing him. You all spoke to him ten years ago. He’s the reason I’m here. He told me about you.”
“What happened to him?” Geli asked.
“He was sent to Dachau. They broke him in there. Anyway, he rid you of the man who stalked your neighborhood, sent him to a mental hospital, until National Socialism came.”
“Maybe it’s justice,” Rudolf said.
Rolf looked at Rudolf as if the young man had monkeys flying out of his ears. “I beg your pardon.”
“You hunt us. You attack us. You kill us. And so now the violence you’ve released comes back and takes some of your own. That sounds like justice to me,” Rudolf said.
“Anika, I thought these people were ready to talk to me,” Rolf said. “I went through a lot to get you that list.”
Ignaz waved Rolf off. “Miss Wagner doesn’t control us.”
Rudolf nodded his concurrence. “Damned straight, you Nazi bastard.”
Anika snapped, “Take that back, Rudy.”
“He’s a Nazi bastard,” Rudolf said.
Anika grabbed a fistful of Rudolf’s collar. “This man saved my life, you little shit. He’s gotten us a list of names that’s going to help save a lot of lives. He’s never been a Nazi. Never. If you’re going to attack him, do it for something real. Otherwise, give the man what he’s paid for.”
Anika stepped back. Rudolf folded his arms. Ignaz looked away. The sound of Anika’s grinding her teeth was like a fifteen ton truck rolling slowly over loose gravel. But without anything to say to them, Anika turned around, looked at Rolf, and shrugged. She walked back behind him.
It was at this moment that Geli’s eyes met Rolf’s. She said, “The man you seek, I remember him.”
Rolf scratched Geli’s name into his notebook. “Go on. When was this?”
“1926. Springtime. April, I think. I remember because it was the first truly warm day of the year, and I was out in my lighter clothes. No sweater.” Geli smiled, as if by talking about it she’d gone back there. “Normally I walked home from school with Gertrude, my best friend, but she’d gotten in trouble over something and had to stay after. Still, it had been a good day. None of the bullies found me, and I didn’t have much homework. What else can you want when you’re nine?”
“A bicycle. perhaps?” Rolf said.
A wistful look blossomed on Geli’s face. It didn’t last, but it made her look younger and more alive. “That had to wait a while. Those were hungry times for my family.”
Ignaz said, “That’s right. We had hard times too.”
Anika shushed him. Rolf kept to his notes. “Where did your family live?”
“Kliegelstrasse 5C. We shared an apartment with another family. Six of us in two rooms. I used to make my walks home long, just so that I could have some time to think.”
“Go on.”
“I was across the street from Schwegmann’s Candy Store, and because I’d been saving, I had enough to buy some white chocolate candies. I was looking to cross when he came.”
“Who came?”
“The man you’re looking for.”
“Could you describe him?”
Geli nodded. “He was very tall to me. Of course, even now, everyone’s still very tall to me. I remember thinking that it was odd that he wore a full length coat, even though it was warm. Still, he seemed trim. Not skinny trim, but athletic. He was blonde.”
“Straight hair or curly?”
“Straight, but short and neatly cut. What I remember most though are his glasses. They were, I guess the best way to say it would be hexagonal. I remember, not just because they were odd looking, but also because I’d missed hexagons on a test a couple of weeks earlier and had studied up on them. I thought, ‘that’s what I missed on the test!’”
“They were wire frame glasses?”
“Yes.”
“What happened when he approached you?”
“He said, ‘Little girl, I need your help.’”
“Did he give his name?”
“No,” Geli said. “He just kept talking. He said he was a doctor and he had this person he needed help with, she was dying. Could I help?”
Rolf jotted this down. “Go on.”
“So I didn’t ask questions at first. He just pointed down the alley and I went. I mean, he had a doctor bag, and he seemed like the sort of man who’d be a doctor. My mother had always made doctors sound handsome and winning, and he definitely seemed like that. So I went down the alley, and I saw his car.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“It was big and shiny and red. It looked expensive, but if you’re looking for a model or a license plate, I couldn’t say. I didn’t know too much about cars. Anyway, I stopped short because I didn’t see anyone next to the car or anything. So the man passed me, opened the back door of his car and said, ‘She’s in here. Get in.’ And when he said that, I felt this need to get in, as if, even though he was in front of me, he was pushing me from behind. I took a step forward, but something in the man’s face stopped me.”
“What?”
Geli pursed her lips in thought, then said, “Well, it was just something about his face and the way he said things. He didn’t seem worried about anybody. He just seemed anxious about getting me into the car. He wasn’t even looking in the back seat to check on anyone, and he didn’t talk to anyone. So I turned around and ran away. I ran all the way home and told my mother. She didn’t believe me, and I got grounded for telling fibs. It wasn’t until Bertha Hofstetter went missing that my mother started to listen. That’s when she went to the police.”
“Did you ever see the man again?”
“Yes,” Said Geli, “Only once, and only briefly. I was playing with friends. I saw him get out of a car. I think he saw me just as he got out, because he got back in and drove away. Kommissar... um... Wundt?”
“Right.”
“May I ask a question?” Geli drew her legs up to her chest as if to protect herself.
“Yes.”
“Was he brutal?” Geli asked. “Did the other girls suffer?”
“He doesn’t kill gently. Why?”
“I just wanted to know,” Geli said.
Rolf ran a few of the questions over again, just to check. Geli’s story stayed consistent without sounding rehearsed. He varied the questions, and even thought of new ones along the way that fleshed out the picture, but from Geli he had the essentials: tall, early 30s, blonde, good looking, unusual glasses, doctor bag, expensive car. These fit with things he already knew. If this man were in the SS, as seemed increasingly likely, he’d have to be tall. (The SS had a minimum height requirement.) Blonde, straight hair also checked out, as did the doctor bag and expensive car. As a doctor, and as a member of a well heeled family, the suspect could surely afford the best. And the SS had worked hard to recruit doctors and give them top positions, vacated by Jews and women, in the medical field. (Klara’s replacement at the Steindorf Center was a Hauptstürmführer and consultant to the Health Court.)
From Geli’s description, Rolf could tell that the subject had, by the time he’d approached her, acquired considerable experience in luring his intended victims. He was assured, and for a time he was convincing and she convinced. He might have been killing for ten years before this, which would carry his timeline back to the war. Had the war done this to him? Were his atrocities another echo of Verdun, the Somme, the Russian front, or Gallipoli? He was the right age to have been a soldier. Rolf had known men in the prison camp who spoke of killing with pleasure. One man had told him how he was always disappointed when he couldn’t find an occasion to use his bayonet, that he loved it when someone looked into his eyes and despaired. “It’s like you’ve become more than human,” he said. “It’s like you’ve become the living avatar of death.” Rolf spent much of his imprisonment avoiding this man, who met his death toward the end of the war when he choked himself with his bedsheet while jerking off.
Rolf concluded his questions by saying “Thank you” to Geli and asking, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Geli asked, “Can you arrest Hitler so I can go home?”
“I’d like to,” Rolf said. “But I can’t.”
“Then there’s nothing else.”
Rolf turned the page in his notebook and his gaze to Rudolf and Ignaz. “Herr Klausner, would your description of this man agree substantially with Geli’s?” Rudolf sat askew. He tried not to look at Rolf, but Rolf leaned to try to stay in his field of vision. “Was he tall and blonde? Did you happen to notice eye color? Did he have a bag?”
After a period of quiet disturbed only by the sounds of crickets and the distant hoot of an owl, Ignaz said, while looking at the wall to Rudolf’s right, “He had a bag.”
With that, stories emerged. Ignaz, once a barber in Lehel, had had a young woman working for him after school. She was Dora Klein, whom Rolf knew as the fourth victim in the file. The last time he’d seen her was the day she disappeared. He’d gone to the bank with the money for deposit. On his way back, he’d spotted Dora getting into the passenger seat of an expensive red car with a tall, blonde man in his early thirties. He’d thought something perverted might have been afoot, but before he could cross the street to stop them, the man had already driven off with her. Rolf asked if Dora had gone willingly. Ignaz replied, “It looked that way to me.” Had they shown signs of familiarity? “No. He unlocked the car door to let her in the passenger seat, but he didn’t put a hand on her.” Had the man worn spectacles? “I didn’t see. He did, however, have a bag.” A doctor’s bag? “Yes. Black leather, with handles. He tossed it into the back seat before he got into the front.”
“It was blue when I saw it,” Rudolf said. Rudolf told the story of a blonde watcher staring at the Niedermeyer household, from which the second victim would go missing. Rudolf, at the time, had been a mailman. For two days before the disappearance, Rudolf, carrying his deliveries, had passed this man. He never saw him speak to anyone, or meet anyone at that spot. He seemed intent on just watching the house where the Niedermeyer girl lived.
“He just gawked?” Rolf asked.
“For the three days before Ulli Niedermeyer disappeared. When she vanished, so did he.”
“Did he wear glasses?”
“Yes. Hexagonal. His eyes were brown.”
“Would he just stare?”
“No. He brought a book with him the first day, and I think it was a newspaper the second.” Rudolf said. “He would try to look interested in his reading, but I could tell his eyes were peering over his glasses.”
“Why were you so interested in him?”
“It was the glasses. He wasn’t dressed remarkably. In retrospect I think he was dressing down, trying not to be too noticeable. But the glasses, I’d never seen anything like them. Usually they’re round or square. Sometimes rectangular. But hexagonal, I wondered who bought such things.”
“Did you ever speak to him?”
Rudolf shook his head. “What would I have said?”
“Was he tall?”
“Taller than me, yes,” Rudolf said. “I’m just over 180 cm.”
“Did you ever see this man after that?” Rolf’s pencil scratched out the question on the last line of his notebook page. He flipped it to the next.
“Once. It was some weeks later. I was off work and walking home. I saw him in a restaurant, sitting at a table by the window. He was with a woman, and I take it they were on a date. He saw me, and to this day, it frightens me just thinking about it.”
“Why?”
“He looked at me very intensely, and I froze there, feeling like I was locked in the freezer of a slaughterhouse. Then he grinned, this wide toothy grin. He knew me, and he knew that I knew him, and he didn’t care. I backed away and went to the police.”
The conversation among them lasted another forty minutes or so, as Rolf probed the three witnesses for as many details as he could extract from them. The hour grew later and by degrees everyone started to fade. Geli’s head kept drooping, and the old man was able to stay awake only with generous helpings of the coffee Anika brewed. (Rudolf refused to drink it, saying the caffeine gave him panic attacks.) By four in the morning, Rolf shut his notebook, satisfied. He thanked them all and stood up to leave. Geli said, just as Anika handed him the blindfold, “You think you can find this man now?”
“Yes.”
“What will you do with him once you find him?”
Kill him, almost escaped his lips. Rolf paused for a moment, thought, and said, “I’ll stop him.”
“How?”
“Any way I have to.”
Before he had much time to absorb Geli’s reaction, Anika said, “We need to get going, Rolf.”
Rolf put the blindfold on and allowed Anika to lead him back outside. It was raining now, and the larks were starting to sing. If he were an avid birder, as his father had been, Rolf could have worked out where he was based on the calls of the birds. The late Mr. Wundt used to try to instill his enthusiasm about the natural world in Rolf, but Rolf always preferred the city, games in the street, trips to the pictures, and rides on streetcars. As Rolf matured, he came to think of nature less as a place of enchantment and innocence, and more as a landscape dotted with freshly turned earth that covered the holes where victims lay to rot.
Someone pushed Rolf’s head down to help him get into the car. As the engine whirred and roared to action, Anika said something.
"What?”
Anika repeated, “What are you thinking?”
Rolf scratched his nose. “Has it occurred to you just how many crimes were committed in the name of innocence?”
“Yes,” Anika said. Rolf wasn’t sure if she knew what he was talking about or simply wanted to end things there.
“It has?”
“Sure. I did an entire series on innocence for one of the gallery shows Klara helped arrange for me. Don’t you remember?”
Rolf shook his head.
“You never paid attention to my work.”
“So what did you think about innocence?”
“Okay.” Anika paused, presumably to gather her thoughts. “Think of how much agony we put our mothers through just to be born. We come into the world inflicting pain. And as children, well, most children are savages, selfish and cruel. And as adults, we just find more sophisticated ways to injure each other, on and on. And how often do we ever think that we were wrong to inflict the harm we inflicted?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know, Rolf. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not fixable. I think Marx underestimated how good we are at finding new ways to divide ourselves up and torture each other. That’s how I think it goes.”
“Yeah.” Rolf had no more thoughts to convey on the subject. It didn’t seem to him like an avenue of reasoning worth following any further. Still, he supposed that Anika needed to take these notions for a walk from time to time, just to exercise her wits. Besides, he’d never been a prisoner or a slave, so he had no way of knowing what it took to cope with having to be one.
“You used to talk more.”
“Yes. I was a different person.”
“So was I, I guess,” Anika said. “Is Klara different too?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Would you tell her how sorry I am? I’d like her to know. I didn’t get a chance to make it clear to her before. I was young, and I was hurting, and I was stupid. All right?”
“You were hurting?”
“Yes.”
“Because of me?”
Anika snorted. “No. Not because of you.”
“Who then?”
“The woman I loved, who couldn’t bring herself to come with me when I asked her to.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” said Anika. She shifted a little, as if she were turning away. The engine rumbled. The driver sucked his teeth.
Rolf felt like sleeping now. His skin felt like a foreign body, grafted onto him. “If I drift off, I want to thank you for doing this before I do.”
“I pay my debts.”
That was the last thing Rolf heard before a hard nudge to the shoulder woke him. His eyes focused slowly, and he saw that he was in the car, in front of his house. The blindfold was on the seat between him and Anika. The door to his right was open and crisp morning air was flowing in. Anika was asleep. Shlomo, glaring at him, said, “Okay, lazybones. Out.”
Rolf clambered over Shlomo and eventually negotiated the rest of the way out of the car. He shut the door behind him, and the car slowly rumbled away.
Stumbling toward his front stoop, Rolf took the notebook out of his pocket and read through it, just to make sure that the discussion with the witnesses hadn’t been a dream. All of the shorthand was legible and sensible. As Rolf tromped up his two steps to the front door, Klara opened it. Dressed in her bathrobe and slippers, she helped Rolf inside and guided him to a chair in the front room — one of the hard ones they usually reserved as a tossing place for unwanted mail. Rolf kicked his shoes off. His feet felt like a pair of overfilled hot water bottles. He handed Klara the notebook.
As Klara thumbed through the first few pages, Rolf said, “Take it to Epp. Confirm everything.” With that, Rolf passed into impregnable slumber on the world’s least comfortable chair.