The Pieces from Berlin (19 page)

“I heard a master say: ‘Get in, boys.’ I waited for Helmut to make his complaint, but he just said, when he had pulled off his boots in the main building: ‘My arm’s gone funny.’

“In the sanitarium he said it was an accident, because he could never say he had been beaten by an Italian. And then I was the violent Italian, which helped.” Nicholas smiled.

Sarah Freeman concentrated, but now like a child at an exam, like someone trying to see past the horizon. Georg Meier made a note of this.

“I saw the table in a Christie’s catalogue,” Sarah said. “In London. I knew it at once. It was on consignment from a shop in Zurich, and I rang Christie’s to ask if I could see it, but they told me it had been withdrawn very suddenly. The shop belongs to Mrs. Müller-Rossi, but of course I didn’t know that.”

Helen said: “And you saw it in the window?”

Sarah said: “Oh, no. I didn’t see any one thing in Lucia’s window. I recognized everything. It was like seeing a world that died, all on show.”

“You do know what they will do?” Meier said, quickly.

Sarah took in the round, small eyeglasses, the neat brush-cut hair, the expensively modest suit, the immaculate skin: a man with a profession, but no experience of his own.

“Mrs. Freeman?”

She said: “I have some idea.”

“They will point to your age. They will ask for your medical records. If there is any suggestion of a stroke, of odd behavior, of the first signs of dementia—”

“I don’t think so.”

“They may simply point out that you are trying to recall events from sixty years ago.”

“I am not trying to recall them. I am remembering them.”

Helen said: “Is it necessary to be so aggressive, Dr. Meier?” She gave his doctorate its full defensive force.

“I could be kind,” the lawyer said, “but then Mrs. Freeman would be entirely unprepared for what may come. Do you want that?”

Helen said: “If I wanted that, I would never have suggested she talk to you.”

“I know this is not a pleasant process,” Sarah said. “I’ve seen worse.” She grinned, and grinned even more at the disconcerted quiet in the room.

The lawyer cleared his throat. Old men do that, pompous men in clubs, judges on benches; and he could not be more than—what—thirty-five? She wanted to laugh at her worry that she was losing her skills at placing men.

“Very well,” he said. “There is a rather exact list of questions I have to ask. Who made the table? Is it known?”

“Pierre Fléchy.
Maître ebéniste.
Born 1715. His work is very valuable.”

“There’s no title, of course, no subject. The date, can you say?”

“I don’t know. 1760, maybe.”

“And the country of origin?”

“France.”

“Type of object. Well, that’s obvious enough. The medium, now.”

“Wood. Marquetry. Lacquer.”

It had been her garden when she could no longer walk freely outside: a single object that proved she and Max had not yet been destroyed, that they still had eyes and hearts.

“And the measurements?”

“I never measured it. It was the last nice thing we kept in the apartment, in a corner. I suppose I could guess.”

“Better not to guess. If you’re wrong, it looks like proof you’ve misidentified the piece.”

“Oh,” Sarah said. “Oh, yes.”

The table had stood surrounded by piles of books. She remembered the rough edges of the pages, like stacks of leaves. She imagined the titles on the top. Max kept rereading Balzac at the time, but he read magical Balzac,
La Peau de Chagrin
.

“Now,” Dr. Meier said. “Is the piece signed?”

“It’s stamped. The stamp was still attached when we had it.”

“And dated?”

“I told you.”

“Any edition, any number? Inscriptions? Any special marks—did you ever have it repaired?”

She had polished the table even when she couldn’t get polish, had saved it from the faintest scratch of dust. Thinking now, all that care simply puzzled her.

“It wasn’t repaired while we had it,” Sarah said.

“And the present location? Or the last known location?”

“In a shop in Zurich. You know that.”

“Any other description?”

She wondered how the table would look to anybody else. She didn’t know. So she shook her head, gently. Then she said: “It’s chinoiserie. That’s what Fléchy was known for.”

“Photograph?” She shook her head again. “Insured, I suppose?”

She said: “Max would have handled that. He’d be the policy-holder. I don’t even know the company and I don’t know which city and I don’t know the number of the policy.” She thought she might have to explain so she said: “I have no papers. Nothing from that time.”

“Next,” said Dr. Meier, making a copperplate note. “Circumstantial information. Was the victim present at the seizure of the object?”

Sarah said: “Yes.”

“Ah. Then we don’t need to ask if he fled his home.”

“He did. He knew what was happening and he went into hiding. We used to call people like him the ‘divers.’ ”

“But he was present when the object was seized?”

“It wasn’t seized. I handed it to Lucia for safekeeping.”

“Now,” Dr. Meier said. He tapped his pencil on the perfect stone shine of his table. “What if Frau Müller-Rossi says that your husband gave her the table? Gave it to her without entail?”

“Why should he do such a thing?”

“You admit you entrusted her with the table. And he expected at any moment—”

“He expected to be killed.”

“Frau Müller-Rossi was an attractive woman?”

“She was—bright. And redheaded. And she had a vast smile. And she had good legs. Yes, she was an attractive woman, I suppose. A professionally attractive woman.”

“And your husband might have been susceptible to such a woman?”

“You mean, did they have an affair?”

“I mean, could your husband have been persuaded, by her attractions or his feelings, to make her a gift of the table?”

Sarah stared at the shining man. She, too, thought she never saw anyone so clean.

“I know he did not.”

“Do you know everything about your husband?”

“How could I not know? We couldn’t go out at night. We couldn’t go to the movies or go to a concert. We had to shop at special hours.”

Dr. Meier waited. It was not entirely a kind waiting.

“We spent every day, all day, in our apartment, in each other’s company. You didn’t lose sight of people, Dr. Meier. If you lost sight of them you might never see them again.”

“Memory is very odd, isn’t it?”

Nicholas sneezed, abruptly.

“I remember I walked too fast when I was in Zurich. You walked fast in Berlin so you spent less time at each point a bomb might fall so you had more chance of living. But in Zurich, there just wasn’t enough city to walk fast.”

He opened a new bottle of wine.

“I remember once, when my mother was out, opening her wardrobe, which was more like a small room. It smelt like roses and old wine and a little like a dry-cleaning shop. There were so many clothes. Some of them, a few, had her initials. Some of them had monograms like ERK and SL and MH. I counted sixteen different monograms and I couldn’t count anymore.

“So I ran away. I went down to the lake. There were swans plodding around. A hot-chestnut vendor on the waterside. The smoke hung about, sociably. There was ice everywhere, creeping out over the water.”

He didn’t say that the ice was starting to break into great gray-white plates, each big enough to be a boat that could push out from the river walls and tack back if the current seemed too lively. Boys were out on the ice boats, punting them with long poles, edgily balanced. Their adventure couldn’t last: the ice would soon melt or crack or capsize.

In any case, he had to get home. In any case, they didn’t know him and wouldn’t ask him to join them. He went home crying for friends.

“I know what Max told me,” Sarah said.

“Max always told the truth?” Georg Meier treated interrogation like plainsong; he didn’t like to miss his cue.

“He told no more lies than most men.”

“You realize a court would expect a widow might be ignorant of her husband’s little affairs? Or that a widow might deny they ever happened, in order to keep a memory entirely for herself?”

“I only want Lucia Müller-Rossi to acknowledge that she stole that table.”

Meier said: “One last set of questions. Can you document the piece? Appraisals, maybe? Transport records or maybe a storage bill? Did anyone ever put your table in a magazine?”

“I’m afraid not. It was just furniture.”

“And you are absolutely sure there could be no piece like it?”

“I am going to swear an oath. I am going to tell the truth that I know. What else do you want me to do? You want papers and—”

“It’s absolutely true that an invoice for the table when you first bought it—”

“Does everyone have to prove their whole lives? I thought an identity card was enough.”

“Not,” Dr. Meier said, “with the power you have to harm Frau Müller-Rossi. She’d be out of business, out of Zurich if you won. In the present atmosphere. So the court will sit and it will think—How much do we need to know in order to do this terrible thing?”

“This,” Sarah said, “is a terrible thing? A little justice is worse than the crime?”

Helen said: “Sarah, if you don’t want to go on?”

Meier said: “One last thing. Is there anything in the medical record which could suggest impaired memory? Anything at all?”

Helen said: “I don’t think so.”

“Who was the foreign minister of Britain in 1947?”

Sarah said: “Bevin.”

“What’s the church behind the Berlin Opera House?”

“It’s a cathedral. St. Hedwig.”

“Who painted the
Demoiselles d’Avignon
?”

“Picasso,” Sarah said. And then: “Pablo Ruiz Picasso,” just for emphasis.

“This is general knowledge,” Helen said.

“Yes, it is,” Dr. Meier said. “It matters, because we would have to show that Mrs. Freeman knows enough about art and the world, and remembers it clearly enough, to identify that particular table. There are many pretty tables.”

“I know when I don’t know, too,” Sarah said.

All Sarah could see was his shine, as though he was bottled and the light was on the glass.

“I imagine my medical records could be found. I had cancer once, but they caught it very early. Cancer of the breast. I have had no mental problems, unless, of course,” and again she tried to make him smile, “I’ve forgotten them.”

For a moment, she had the oddest sense of slipping into one of Max’s fantasies. He loved English whodunits, loved their sense of order and propriety and the moral certainties that you could comfortably expect in the last ten pages; and now she, too, would like a pleasant, written world out of English novels, where death had proper witnesses, was documented and proved, where there were priests and doctors and wills read out aloud to family gatherings at long polished tables, and lawyers to tot up what was left and assign it with all the nice pedantry of the makers of great dictionaries, or phone books.

Dr. Meier then asked, as though the question was social and casual: “What did you have for breakfast this morning, Mrs. Freeman?”

“I had coffee, and a
Gipfli
. I had raspberry jam with the
Gipfli
. I did not have butter.”

“And where did you have it?”

“In my room.”

“I mean: at what address?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“At what address? What number, what street?”

Sarah Freeman said: “Ninety-seven. Hotel Grindelwald.”

“And the street?”

“My short-term memory still functions, Dr. Meier. I know where the bathroom is. I know how to catch a bus in London when I need one.”

“The street?”

Helen said: “I’m not sure we need to go any further today.”

“We’ll need to go much further,” Meier said. “Any hesitation, any pattern of hesitation, any tendency to fluster or be unsure, anything like that will tend to discredit you. And it will be used. Perhaps not in a court, but when the lawyers discuss whether to bring a case, and when Müller-Rossi’s lawyers argue among themselves. If all this had been solved in 1945—”

“We’re here precisely because it was not,” Helen said.

“Of course,” Meier said. “But if we had witnesses—”

“I have one enormous advantage as a witness,” Sarah Freeman said. “I am alive.”

Meier smiled for the first time.

Sarah stood up. “I had breakfast on Tiefenaustrasse this morning,” she said. “Number ninety-seven Tiefenaustrasse.”

Helen smiled at Meier on the way out, but she wouldn’t stay to talk. She was afraid of all the wonderful possibilities of a clean, mechanical, biddable lover.

“My mother has absolutely no talent for worrying,” Nicholas said.

“They should have rung by now,” Clarke said.

“She thought it a kind of failure, an admission that she could not reason her way out of trouble. I could tell something must be wrong, I wanted to help. I wanted to be there. But I’d head back to school and after the train and the funicular, and the bus, after settling into the dormitory again with the same official friends, after the first games of tennis and the first failures with irregular neuter nouns of the fourth declension, she faded in my mind. I read, and I played, and I hardly noticed what everyone was saying.

“Schools work like that, I think. Everyone knows something, long before the person affected has the slightest clue. Everyone knew that I might be leaving, but I smashed balls back across the tennis court and I knew nothing at all.

“I did notice that other boys began to be kind, in a rather slippery way. Even the ‘slaves,’ which I regret to say is what we called the cleaning women, seemed ominously sympathetic, and smiled if I wanted more coffee at breakfast.

“I used to watch the woods and the driveway to the school from our dormitory window. I liked the flicker of birds on the boundaries of the woods. I liked the random order of the vans and cars that made their way to the door: meat, priests, bread, parents, fruit.

“I saw a taxi come to the door. I saw my own mother.

“She’d said nothing at all to me about coming to the school. She wasn’t supposed to be there. You hate the unusual when you’re a junior boy.