The Grave of Truth

The Grave of Truth

Evelyn Anthony

Also in Arrow by Evelyn Anthony

Albatross

The Assassin

The Avenue of the Dead

The Company of Saints

The Defector

The Legend

The Malaspiga Exit

The Occupying Power

The Poellenberg Inheritance

The Rendezvous

The Return

No Enemy But Time

To Paul

with my love

Chapter 1

‘You've had that nightmare again, haven't you?'

He was shaving and he could see her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She wore pink pyjamas with a pattern on them; without make-up she was as pretty as a doll, with big brown eyes and marvellous American teeth. Pink was a colour he loathed, yet she insisted on wearing it, and the look of concern on her face irritated him so much that he nicked himself shaving. She had been trying for years to convert him to an electric razor. A little nodule of dark blood appeared on his lower lip. ‘Oh, darling,' his wife said, ‘you've cut yourself.'

‘Ellie'—with a great effort he kept his tone gentle—‘please don't fuss.' The reflection in the mirror shook its head at him; the curly brown hair fluffed round her shoulders.

‘I'm not fussing, Max. I know you've had that dream again and it's upset you. Why won't you talk about it?'

He put down the razor, splashed his face and dried it. There was a blood spot on the white towel. Then reluctantly he turned round to look at his wife.

‘All right, I did dream the same thing last night. It happens now and again; I don't know why you have to make such a drama out of it.'

‘Because of what it does to you,' she said. ‘I remember the first time, when we'd just got married. You were soaking with sweat and shaking all over. We talked about it and you felt better. It was a long time before it happened again. We used to communicate in those days; now when anything goes wrong you just shut me out.'

‘I've got an early interview this morning,' he said. ‘I must get dressed.' They went into the bedroom and his wife sat on the bed; he didn't have to look at her to know that her eyes were full of tears.

‘It used to be very rare,' she said. ‘Now I know it's happening regularly. You can't fool me, darling. You get moody, withdrawn, you snap at me and the children—you're not yourself for days!' He was dressed, fastening his watchstrap. The watch was a gold Piaget; she had given it to him for Christmas, with a note that overwhelmed him with guilt: ‘Just to prove to you I love you.'

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I don't mean to be difficult. It's just a phase—I probably won't dream about it again for months.'

‘Max, darling, you've been saying this for years,' she said. ‘Why won't you see a doctor, get him to analyse what it is that's worrying you? Dreaming about the war is just symbolic of some inner anxiety.…'

‘For Christ's sake,' he said, ‘don't start that psychiatric stuff again. There's nothing symbolic about what happened to me in Berlin. I don't need any half-baked therapist telling me it's because my grandmother took away my teddy bear. I dream about being bombed and blown up because I bloody well was! Now I've got to go—I'm going to be late.'

‘Don't forget to kiss the children good morning,' she said. She got up and went into the bathroom, locking the door. He knew she was going to cry. He paused outside the kitchen door; they had coffee in their room in the mornings—Max never ate breakfast since it meant starting the day with a meal with his children. Kiss the children good morning. Otherwise they'll feel you don't love them and they'll grow up insecure. The headache which was there when he woke, intensified suddenly as he went into the kitchen and forced himself to smile at his children and the English student who was giving them breakfast. She was a nice girl, shy and ill at ease. He was ashamed of the way his son and daughter bullied her. ‘Good morning, Pat … Peter … Francine.…'

Fifteen and twelve were said to be difficult ages, pre-teens and teens; Ellie was always saying how traumatic it was for their children to be growing up and how understanding they both had to be and how careful not to pressurize them.

His son Peter was dark and good-looking like his mother; Francine was small and fair-haired. ‘Hello,' she said. Peter didn't speak at all. He was eating cereal and scowling. Max kissed his daugher and, seeing the boy's expression, decided to damage his psyche by ignoring him that morning. Both children were at the local
lycée
, at his insistence, where, in spite of their mother's disapproval, they had to work extremely hard. His son was exceptionally clever, specializing in science and mathematics. His scholastic abilities did not compensate Max for his lack of good manners and consideration for anyone but himself. His father's attempts to impose discipline early on had been successfully frustrated by his mother; by the time he was seven Peter was adept at playing off one parent against the other. His relationship with his father was hostile and competitive; he bullied Francine because he suspected that his father found her more congenial.

‘Good-bye, Daddy,' Francine said.

‘Peter,' the English girl pushed back her chair, ‘you'll be late for school.'

Max had turned towards the door when he heard his son answer.

‘So I'm late—so what's it got to do with you?'

Max didn't pause to think, he didn't take a decision, he just lost his temper as he had been losing it inwardly for years. Perhaps the dream was responsible; perhaps he suddenly saw his son through eyes which hadn't been conditioned by modern child psychology and an American wife who had been reared on a deadly combination of Freud and Spock. He turned back, reached the table in three long strides, and smacked his son across the left ear. The boy overbalanced and fell off his stool. There was a few seconds' pause of shocked silence, and then his daughter burst into tears, and his son, crouching in shock and amazement on the ground, suddenly began to roar with rage.

Max looked down at him.

‘Don't you ever dare to speak to anyone like that again!'

He wasn't aware till he had left the apartment and was getting into his car that he had shouted at his son in German.

It was a glorious spring day in 1970, and Paris was awake early, the shops open, the traffic clotting at junctions and traffic lights. The city had a smell which was exclusive to itself; had he been blinded Max would have known Paris from any capital in the world by that original blending of food smells and street smells, and a thousand varieties of human and artificial scents.

He had lived there for fifteen years and he loved Paris. Ellie loved it too; she hadn't liked London where they had lived when they were first married in 1954. It had been a grey, sad place after the war, pinched by austerity, its people weary and seeking change, as if the conflict which had destroyed Nazi Germany had somehow defeated them too. It hadn't been easy for Max, working in London during the fifties. Anti-German feeling was stronger in Britain than in some countries which had suffered Nazi occupation. The articles he had written on the changes taking place in post-war Britain attracted a lot of attention in European political journalism, and the by-line ‘Max Steiner' appeared in leading West German newspapers and prestige political publications on the Continent. When he was offered the post of chief foreign affairs correspondent for
Newsworld
, based in Paris, he was married to Ellie and she was pregnant with their son.

Driving along the rue Constantine, the sunshine roof of his smart new Peugeot open to admit the morning sun, he ignored his headache, concentrated on the traffic, and told himself, as he had done so many times in the past year, that he was an ungrateful bastard who didn't appreciate his family and his job, and it was time he realized how lucky he was. He had no right to criticize his wife: most men were sexually bored after sixteen years of marriage, and, naturally, when sex had ceased to be an urge and become a habit, the critical faculties sharpened and trifles previously unnoticed began to grate. He had been unfaithful to her once or twice, during trips to the States, and formed a brief liaison with an Italian girl who lived in Rome. As a result his sex life at home became guilty as well as tedious, the guilt partially eased by the certainty that had Ellie known, instead of being jealous, she would have sat down with him to analyse his reasons for going to bed with someone else.

It was unfair of him to resent her intellectual limitations. What had happened to the attractive girl whose naïvete had enchanted him when they first met? Why should the plus have become such a minus that her opinions irritated him until he tried to avoid any serious discussion? … Motherhood. He could blame that. Women changed when they had children. There at least he had reason for complaint. She had become obsessed with the children. He had definitely shifted down two places in her scale of priorities. But how much time had he spent travelling, leaving her alone with the children he resented …?

A right turn at the end of the street and along the river. A very pretty girl in a short skirt crossed in front him, threading her way through the stationary traffic. He watched her without interest. His marriage was falling to pieces. He had hit his son. As hard as he had once been hit, so that he fell to the ground … the dream again. They didn't speak German at home; he and Ellie spoke English and the children brought up in France were bilingual. Peter wouldn't have understood what he was shouting at him. Why, suddenly, had he lapsed into his own language, except that his wife was right and the nightmare persisted in his mind long after he had woken?

Of course, he
had
been dreaming about it regularly; it had begun after Christmas. He woke with his heart and pulse rate galloping with fear, his mind full of fire and thunder and the distortion of the dream world, but a world still real and horribly recognizable. He hadn't dared to go to sleep again. The first time he had made the excuse that he was tired, that he'd drunk several whiskies after dinner—he'd rationalized it, and remembered everything quite deliberately to disarm the subconscious that Ellie was always talking about. He wasn't hiding anything from himself. He had even written an article about his own experience in Berlin at the end.

Not everything, though. Was that the thorn embedded in his mind? He drove his car into the car park under the
Newsworld
building in the Champs Elysées, got out, closed it up and locked it.

From January onwards he dreamed about it, sometimes on consecutive nights, sometimes with a merciful gap of nearly a week. He formed a routine: he got up, went into the kitchen, made coffee, had a cigarette, woke himself up thoroughly and then went back to bed. His wife only surprised him twice, and he had lied to her. He couldn't have endured her attempts to comfort him and explain it all away. Because of course she couldn't, because she didn't know the truth. He had told her no more than anyone else when he described the last days in Berlin. And yet although he called her stupid in his private thoughts, bilious and disloyal as they'd become, she'd sensed what was happening and faced him with it that morning.

‘You've had that nightmare again.'

It came nearly every night now, sometimes in episodes, at others in rich detail. He walked through the entrance to the lift, pressed the third-floor button, ascended and got out. He had an interview that morning, although it was not for another hour; lying to Ellie was becoming a need rather than a habit. He wanted to look through his notes and fix the line of his questions in his mind. He never wrote anything down when he was talking to people, nor did he produce a tape-recorder. He carried that in his pocket. People said more when they imagined themselves to be talking off the record.

He had a bright modern office, and an efficient French secretary who was too intelligent to try to be sexy. He liked her but he had never even bought her a drink.

‘Martine—good morning. Could you get me some coffee and some aspirin? Don't put anyone through to me: I'm going to read over the notes on Sigmund Walther.'

Sigmund Walther was a West German politician who had graduated to politics through industry. His background was well documented: father a naval officer killed during the war, mother a member of the minor Bohemian aristocracy; a bright young man, too young to have fought for Nazism, brought up through the harsh post-war years by his mother and grandparents, his time at university followed by a spectacular career in the industrial rebirth of West Germany. Married to a member of the old
Junker
military caste; five children, all born close together—unusual for an ambitious man. Joined the Social Democratic Party and began a determined and ruthless campaign to reach ministerial level. Was known to have made a large personal fortune since the war.