The Ice Queen: A Novel (43 page)

“The house where you met Nowak and in which Watkowiak’s body was found belongs to you,” said Pia. “What do you have to say to that?”

“What should I say?” Katharina Ehrmann didn’t seem particularly bothered. “It was my parents’ house, and I’ve wanted to sell it for years. The real estate agent called me last Saturday to reproach me. As if I could do anything about Robert deciding to take his own life in precisely that location!”

“How did Watkowiak get into the house?”

“With a key, I presume,” Katharina Ehrmann replied, to Pia’s astonishment. “I let him use the house when he needed a place to stay. We were once good friends, Robert, Jutta, and I. I felt sorry for him at the time.”

Pia highly doubted that. Katharina Ehrmann didn’t make an especially compassionate impression.

“By the way, he didn’t take his own life,” she said. “He was murdered.”

“Oh, really?” Even this information did not disconcert the woman.

“When was the last time you spoke with him?”

“It wasn’t that long ago.” She thought about it. “I think it was last week. He called and told me that the police were looking for him for the murders of Goldberg and Schneider. But he said he didn’t do it. I told him the smartest thing to do would be to turn himself in to the police.”

“Unfortunately, he didn’t do that. Otherwise, he might still be alive today,” said Pia. “Do you think that Ritter’s disappearance might have something to do with this biography he’s writing?”

“It’s possible.” Katharina gave a shrug. “What we’ve discovered about Vera’s past could put her in prison. And probably for the rest of her life.”

“You mean that the death of Eugen Kaltensee was no accident? It was murder?” Pia asked.

“Among other things,” said Katharina. “But primarily it’s the fact that Vera and her brother were said to have shot several people back in East Prussia.”

January 16, 1945. The Four Musketeers in the jeep on their way to the Lauenburg estate. The Zeydlitz-Lauenburg family, which since then had been presumed dead or missing.

“How did Ritter find out about it?” Pia inquired.

“From an eyewitness, a woman.”

An eyewitness who knew the secret of the four old friends. Who was she, and whom had she told about it? Pia felt electrified. They were only millimeters away from solving the three murders.

“Do you think it’s possible that somebody from the Kaltensee family has kidnapped Ritter in order to prevent the publication of the book?”

“I would believe anything of them,” said Katharina Ehrmann. “Vera would stop at nothing. And Jutta isn’t much better.”

Pia glanced at her boss, but he was feigning indifference.

“But how did the Kaltensees learn that Elard had passed this information to Thomas Ritter?” she now asked. “Who knew about it?”

“Really only Elard, Thomas, Elard’s friend Nowak, and myself,” replied Katharina after a moment’s thought.

“Did you ever talk on the phone about it?” Bodenstein asked.

“Yes,” said Katharina hesitantly. “Not about details, but about the fact that Elard would put the contents of this trunk at our disposal.”

“When was that?”

“On Friday.”

The following Monday Nowak had been attacked. That fit.

“I just remembered that Thomas called me the night before last from the office. He was worried because there was a panel truck in the parking lot with two men in it. I didn’t take it very seriously, but maybe…” Katharina fell silent. “Good God! Do you think they may have tapped into our phone conversation?”

Bodenstein nodded with concern. “It’s possible, I think.” The people from K-Secure were well equipped. They had been listening to the police band on their radios and learned where Nowak’s cell phone had been traced to. For them, it was probably an easy task to listen in on other phone conversations.

There was a knock on the door, and Behnke came in and handed Pia the padded mailer, which she opened at once.

“A CD-ROM,” she said. “And a cassette.”

She reached over for her dictation machine, put in the cassette, and pressed
PLAY.
Seconds later, they heard Ritter’s voice.

“Today is Friday, May fourth. My name is Thomas Ritter, and facing me is Mrs. Auguste Nowak. Mrs. Nowak, you would like to tell us something. Please go ahead.”

“Stop!” Bodenstein ordered. “Thank you, Ms. Ehrmann. You may go now. Please inform us if you hear anything from Thomas Ritter.”

The dark-haired woman understood and got up.

“What a shame,” she said. “Just as it was getting exciting.”

“Aren’t you worried about Thomas Ritter at all?” Bodenstein asked. “He’s still your author, who’s going to deliver a best-seller.”

“And your lover,” Pia added.

Katharina Ehrmann smiled coolly.

“Believe me,” she said. “He knew what he was getting into. Almost nobody knew Vera better than he did. Besides, I warned him.”

“One more question,” said Bodenstein, holding her back before she left. “Why did Eugen Kaltensee sign over company shares to you?”

Her smile vanished.

“Read the biography,” she said. “Then you’ll find out.”

*   *   *

The voice of Auguste Nowak came from the loudspeaker of the cassette player that stood in the middle of the table. “
My father was a great admirer of the Kaiser. That’s why he had me named after the empress, Auguste Viktoria. People used to call me Vicky, but that was a long time ago.
”

Bodenstein and Pia glanced at each other. The whole K-11 team had gathered around the big table in the conference room. Next to Bodenstein sat Nicola Engel, a blank expression on her face. According to the clock, it was 8:45, and not even Behnke was thinking about going home.

“I was born on March seventeenth, 1922, in Lauenburg. My father, Arno, was the steward at the estate of the Zeydlitz-Lauenburg family. There were three of us girls living there: Vera, the daughter of the baron, Edda Schwinderke, the daughter of the paymaster, and me. All three of us were the same age and grew up almost as sisters. As young girls, Edda and I were wild about Elard, Vera’s older brother, but he couldn’t stand Edda. Even as a young girl, she was terribly ambitious and secretly envisioned herself as the mistress of Lauenburg Manor. When Elard fell in love with me, Edda was utterly furious. She thought Elard would be impressed because at sixteen she was already the leader of the girls’ group in the BDM, but the opposite was the case. He hated the Nazis, even if he never said it out loud. Edda didn’t notice, but she was always showing off with her brother Oskar because he was in the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.”

Auguste Nowak paused. Nobody around the table said a word, waiting for her to go on.

“In 1936, the young girls in the BDM went to Berlin to the Olympiad. Elard was studying in Berlin. He took Vera and me out to dinner, and Edda almost exploded with jealousy. She castigated us for leaving the group without permission, and there was a lot of trouble because of it. After that day, she harassed me every chance she got, ridiculing me in front of the other girls at the weekly social evenings. Once she even claimed that my father was a Bolshevik. When I was nineteen, I got pregnant. Nobody had any objections to a marriage, even Elard’s parents, but the war was on and Elard was at the front. When the wedding date approached, he was arrested by the Gestapo, although he was an officer in the Luftwaffe. The second wedding date also had to be postponed, because Elard was arrested again. By the way, it was Oskar who denounced Elard to the Gestapo.”

Pia nodded. This account confirmed what the former Polish forced laborer had told Miriam.

“On August twenty-third, 1942, our son came into the world. In the meantime, Edda had left Lauenburg Manor. She and Maria Willumat, the daughter of the local Nazi Party group leader from Doben, had reported for duty at a women’s prison camp. Because she was away and could no longer sniff around, Elard and Vera secretly smuggled money, jewelry, and valuables over into the West and into Switzerland. Elard was convinced that the war was lost, and he wanted at least Vera, Heini, and me to go to the West. His mother’s family owned an estate near Frankfurt, and he was going to settle us there.”

“Mühlenhof,” Pia said softly.

“But it never happened. In November 1944, Elard was shot down and came back to Lauenburg Manor with serious wounds. Vera had secretly left her Swiss boarding school and was back at home over Christmas. We helped Elard plan our escape, but we didn’t receive the ‘trek’ permit until January fifteenth, which was much too late. The Russians were only twenty kilometers away. Those on the trek set off at dawn the morning of January sixteenth. I didn’t want to leave without Elard and my parents, and because I stayed, Vera stayed, too. We thought that there would be an opportunity later to make it to the West.”

They heard Auguste Nowak heave a deep sigh.

“Elard’s parents would rather have died than leave the estate. They were both well past sixty and had lost their eldest sons in World War One. My parents were seriously ill with tuberculosis. And my younger sister Ida was in bed with a fever of one hundred and four. We hid in the cellar of the castle, provided with food and bedding, and hoped that the Russians wouldn’t discover us and just move on. It was around noon when a vehicle drove into the courtyard, a jeep. Vera’s father thought that somebody had sent Schwinderke to transport those who were sick, but it wasn’t true.”

At that point, Ritter asked her who had come.

“Edda and Maria, Oskar and his SS comrade Hans.”

Once again, Auguste Nowak’s account corresponded with the statement of the former forced laborer. Pia held her breath and leaned forward tensely.

“They came into the castle and found us in the cellar. Oskar threatened us with a pistol and forced Vera and me to dig a pit. The ground was sandy, but it was so hard that we couldn’t manage it, so Edda and Hans took over shoveling. Nobody said a word. The baron and baroness knelt down and…”

The voice of Auguste Nowak, until then calm and involved, began to tremble.

“… began to pray. Heini was screaming the whole time. My little sister Ida just stood there, tears running down her cheeks. I can still picture her today. We had to line up facing the wall. Maria tore Heini from my arms and dragged him away. The boy screamed and screamed.…”

It was so still in the conference room that they could have heard a pin drop.

“First Oskar killed the baron and baroness with shots to the back of the head. Then came my sister Ida. She was only nine years old. Then he gave the pistol to Maria, who shot my mother in both knees and then in the head, and then she shot my father. Elard and I were holding hands. Edda took the pistol from Maria. I looked her in the eye, and she was full of hate. She laughed when she shot first Elard in the head, then Vera. Finally, she shot me. I can still hear her laughing.…”

Pia could hardly believe it. What power it must have cost the old woman to speak so soberly and objectively about this massacre of her whole family! How could anyone live with such memories without going crazy? Pia thought about what Miriam had told her about the fates of the women in the East after World War II, the ones she had interviewed as part of her research project. These women had experienced unspeakable things and never talked about them for the rest of their lives. Like Auguste Nowak.

“It was a miracle that I survived being shot in the head. The bullet came out through my mouth. I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but somehow I managed to get out of the pit under my own power. They had shoveled sand on top of us, and the only reason I could breathe was that I lay halfway underneath Elard’s body. I dragged myself up, searching for Heini. The castle was ablaze, and I ran straight into the arms of four Russian soldiers, who raped me in spite of my wounds and then took me to a field hospital later. When I had somewhat regained my strength, I was crammed with other girls and women into a cattle car. It was too crowded to sit down, and only when the guards occasionally were in a good mood was there a bucket of water for forty people. We came to Karelia and had to work by Lake Onega laying rails, felling trees, and digging trenches, at a temperature of forty below zero. All around me they were dying like flies, and some girls were only fourteen or fifteen. I survived five years in the work camp only because the camp commander seemed to like me and gave me more to eat than the others. I didn’t come back from Russia until 1950, with a baby in my arms, a going-away present from the camp commander.”

“The father of Marcus,” Pia said. “Manfred Nowak.”

“I met my husband in the Friedland camp. We got work on a farm in Sauerland. I had long since given up hope of finding my eldest son. I never spoke about it. Even later, I never had the faintest idea that the famous Vera Kaltensee, whom we were always hearing and reading about, could possibly be Edda. Not until my grandson Marcus and I took a summer trip to East Prussia two years ago, and we met Elard Kaltensee in Gizycko, the former Lötzen. That’s when I realized who he was and who had been living very close to me after I moved to Fischbach.”

Auguste Nowak took another pause.

“I kept my knowledge to myself. A year later, Marcus was working at Mühlenhof, and one day he and Elard brought home an old steamer trunk. It was a shock when I saw all those things: the SS uniform, the books, the newspapers from the war. And the pistol. I knew right away that it must have been the exact same pistol used to shoot my whole family. Sixty years it had lain in that trunk, and Vera had never gotten rid of it. And when you, Dr. Ritter, Marcus, and Elard told me about Vera and her three old friends, I knew at once who they really were. Elard kept the trunk, but Marcus put the pistol and the ammunition in his safe. I found out where they lived, the murderers, and when Marcus was out one evening, I took the pistol and went to Oskar’s place. To think that he, of all people, had disguised himself as a Jew all these years! He recognized me immediately and begged for his life, but I shot him the way he had shot Elard’s parents. Then I got the idea to leave Edda a message. I knew that she would understand at once what those five numbers meant, and I was sure they would put the fear of death in her because she would have no idea who could know about it. Three days later, I shot Hans.”