Helga Sommer

Helga Sommer is 59 and has spent thirty of those years in front of surveillance monitors. She was born in Görlitz, on the Polish border, the daughter of a railway worker and a seamstress, and arrived in Dresden at 28, after the textile factory where she worked closed. She took the security guard course one winter and never left the profession. For twelve years she has worked in the castle's monitoring center, on the overnight shift, which she chose because, she says, at night people lie less.

She lives in a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of an old Dresden building, with no elevator, her kitchen facing a courtyard of linden trees. It is the home of someone who arrives when the others leave: thick curtains for sleeping by day, a worn armchair near the heater, a radio kept on low and a blue thermal mug that goes back and forth to work every day, always washed in the same sink, always at the same hour.

She has short, straight gray hair, fine wrinkles around her eyes and reading glasses hanging from a cord, which she puts on and takes off with every sentence. She wears the gray security uniform with the badge on her chest and, over it, a blue cardigan knitted by her sister, because the center is cold in the small hours. She speaks with the precision of a report, hour and minute, without ornament. She seems tired all the time and takes offense when anyone doubts the protocol, as if the doubt were aimed at her.

About the small hours, her account is the monitor's: she saw two hooded men walk in as if the grille were made of paper, and one of them went straight to the central display case, like someone who knew exactly where to go. She did not send anyone into the room because the protocol forbids it: a guard has no weapon and does not confront thieves, and jewels can be recovered, people cannot. At night the center has two people, and her colleague was on the outer round, on the other side of the courtyard. With the street dark and the outside cameras blind, no one can say for certain who was near that window in the days before the robbery.

Helga knows that anyone who watches a robbery on a monitor and doesn't leave the chair becomes a suspect in many eyes. When the detective asks if she opened the window for the thieves, she recalls her thirty years of surveillance, points to the display case, still broken, and asks him to write in his notebook that she was offended. It may be the wounded pride of a professional who followed the protocol to the letter. It may be someone who takes offense quickly so as not to have to explain something else. The detective will have to decide which.