Sorry

“Trust,” she replies without a moment’s hesitation. “Of course you can also ask for a report, then we put the conversation in writing and send you the report.”

“Sounds interesting. What’s the catch?”

“The only catch is that we don’t take personal requests. Is it a private or a business problem?”

“Business,” you lie. “Definitely business.”

“Wonderful. Should I mail you a copy of our standard business terms?”

You weren’t prepared for that. It’s all happening very quickly. Too quickly.

Don’t hang up!

You switch the receiver to your other hand and ask:

“Is everyone at the agency as nice as you?”

“No, just me, unfortunately. If you heard the others you’d never call us again.”

She laughs; you like her laugh.

“Miss Berger—”

“Tamara,” she says.

“Okay, Tamara, I’ve got a really pressing problem, and I’m not sure whether you can really help me. How fast is your agency?”

“How pressing is it?”

“Very.”

“Then we’re very fast,” she promises.

Minutes later you’ve printed out and read the business terms and the application form. You log on to your bank and transfer the advance payment to the agency’s account. The pace of it all takes your breath away. It’s going to happen in ten days’ time. You still can’t get your head around it.

GIVE US A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PROBLEM

To concentrate on your text, you sit down on the balcony and take a deep breath. You think of the mirrors hanging in your flat. You think about how long it’s been since you could look yourself in the eye. Two months, twenty-six days, eleven hours.

You pick up the pen and fill out the form.

The words have to be right.

Every sentence is important.

WOLF

HIS ROOM IS AT the end of the corridor. His name is in brightly colored wooden letters on the door. Frank. He lives in his mother’s flat. On the walls there are pictures of guardian angels. Pink little fatties, lowering their heads in prayer; stormy angels, bathed in light. Soft filters and kitsch. The whole flat smells of air freshener, all the curtains are drawn, and a budgerigar sings from a tiny cage.

The mother adjusts her skirt, she can’t look Wolf in the eye. Her son is single, thirty-six years old, and a failure. She doesn’t know what she did wrong. Her hand trembles slightly as she pours out the coffee. Cups with floral patterns and gold rims. One of the cups has a crack at the top, and a dark lipstick stain can be seen in the crack. Wolf is glad it isn’t his cup. A glass of powdered milk is pushed in front of him. Wolf pushes it back. At last the mother starts talking. Her son is working at Lidl now, stacking shelves. He hopes to make it to cashier this year. Wolf isn’t learning anything new here. There isn’t a photograph of the son anywhere in the living room.

“It was all different in the old days,” says the mother and touches the coffeepot with the back of her hand to check that it’s really hot enough.

Wolf knows how different it was. Her son’s decline occurred incredibly quickly. There are still idiots who think they can surf the internet and download sex clips without anyone finding out. And then there are idiots who go in search of child pornography during their lunch break. The company sacked Frank Löffler without hesitation. Until September his monthly income was 3,377 euros before tax, a week later he was clearing the shelves at the discount supermarket for 9 euros an hour.

“He works till eight,” his mother says, “but he should soon have a break.”

By the door she clutches Wolf’s arm for a second.

“Luckily there wasn’t a scandal. I wouldn’t have survived a scandal under any circumstances.”

Frank Löffler looks exactly as you would imagine. Widow’s peak, belly hanging over his belt, greasy hair. His eyes are never still, his handshake is slack. After Wolf introduces himself, Löffler says he hasn’t got a break for twenty minutes and could they meet outside.

“The management doesn’t like us talking to the customers.”

“I’ll be over there,” Wolf says, crossing the street to a laundromat. He’s always liked laundromats. They’re like waiting rooms for people who never travel. Wolf gets a hot chocolate from the machine. Around him the washing swirls in the drums. A woman is sleeping on two chairs, she looks uncomfortable. Wolf wishes he’d brought something to read. He wonders when he was last in a place like this. Once he and a friend tried to break into a vending machine in the laundromat on the Kaiserdamm. Screwdriver and jimmy. They gave up after a quarter of an hour, when the screwdriver got stuck in the metal and wouldn’t come out again. They shared a hot chocolate and then cleared off. Sixteen years later Wolf is sitting in a laundromat on an uncomfortable plastic chair, checking his e-mails on his cell phone. Life is plainly treating him well.

Frank Löffler arrives on the dot. He steps outside the supermarket and looks up and down the street as if he doesn’t know what to do next. Wolf can understand why the company fired him. Frank Löffler is a born victim.

They walk around the block and past a playground. The children are screeching and throwing sand at a dog. Löffler tries not to look. He says he’s received threatening letters. One night a stone came through his car windshield. The neighbors saw nothing; they say it’s what you get.

“This is a respectable area,” Löffler explains, as if he understands people’s reaction. It makes things even worse because he’s innocent.

“I’m here because with that conversation your file will have vanished,” Wolf says. “You’re clean, or cleansed, or whatever you want to call it.”

Löffler doesn’t react; he probably didn’t understand. Wolf wants to shake him.

“The world’s your oyster again,” he says instead, as if Löffler had spent the last year in jail.

Löffler’s face flickers for a second, his hands move in his trouser pockets as if they wanted to come out. Wolf waits to be asked what happened. It takes a whole minute, then Löffler clears his throat:

“What happened?”

Four months after his dismissal the same download was discovered on another PC. The perpetrator wasn’t revealed, because he was a clever co-worker who sat down at his colleagues’ desks at lunchtime and scoured the internet as he saw fit. The company didn’t know what to do and installed blockers. No one mentioned Frank Löffler. It was as if he had never existed. For six months the head of the company lived with the fact that he had fired the wrong man and reported him to the police. Then his conscience got the better of him. He dropped the accusation and turned to the agency.

“And they don’t know who it was?” asks Löffler.

“One of your colleagues, that’s all we know.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway.”

Wolf agrees.

“How much?” Frank Löffler wants to know.

“Eighty thousand.”

He stops.