Munich

Munich becomes a meeting point between Caspar Leinen’s legal search and his personal past. He travels there from Berlin after Johanna Meyer asks him to come, revisits the offices of Meyer Engineering Works where he once waited for Hans Meyer, and later leaves the city with Johanna to examine Hans Meyer’s private papers in Rossthal.

Arrival and the Meyer Connection

Two days after the murder charge reached Leinen’s chambers, Johanna called and said they had to talk. He drove from Berlin to Munich in the old Mercedes his father had given him and parked outside the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten on Maximilianstrasse. Meyer Engineering Works kept two rooms at the front of the hotel permanently reserved for guests, with a costly view.

The company’s Munich branch was more than a convenient meeting place. Leinen had known its conference room since childhood: the large oval walnut table and green curtains were familiar from visits with Hans Meyer. As a boy, he would sit at the table reading while he waited for Meyer to return and take him with him. Now Johanna occupied the place where her grandfather used to sit, bringing the family’s history into the room where Leinen had once waited for it.

The Company Office

Leinen and Johanna met that afternoon at the branch. He greeted her with a kiss on both cheeks, but she was grave and did not look at him. The biscuits set out on porcelain plates remained untouched, a small detail that matched the meeting’s strained atmosphere.

A company lawyer attended, but the meeting yielded no answers. He said the firm had searched its archives and found nothing, not even an invoice from or to anyone named Collini. After listening to the lawyer’s evasive, routine assurances for several minutes, Leinen concluded there was no point continuing the meeting. Munich thus offered a route into the company’s records, but not the evidence he had come to find.

A Pause in the City

After leaving the meeting, Leinen took a tram to Tivolistrasse and walked through the English Garden to Kleinhesseloher See. He watched the birds there, drawing on lessons about birds that his father had taught him in childhood. His father had said that ravens knew everything. The pause links Leinen’s present uncertainty to a remembered piece of his upbringing, before he returns to the urgent search for answers.

The Road to Rossthal

In the late afternoon, Leinen called for Johanna at the Munich branch. They drove together from the city to Rossthal, planning to look through Hans Meyer’s private papers. Munich is therefore both the site of a failed attempt to learn from the company and the threshold to a more intimate investigation: the journey from its offices leads them to the house and papers left by the man whose past they are trying to understand.