The Rendezvous (21 page)

‘What sort of questions?' he said again.

‘Oh, why must I go so soon again? Couldn't I just telephone? He misses me.'

She said it sadly, because it was true. Robert missed her, and he was showing it. The real reason he felt her absence for a night or two once every ten days, or even once in three whole weeks, was because she was really far away from him when they were in the same room and the same bed. She had gone from him; she was sorry for him now to such an extent that it hurt her to look at him, but nothing could alter the truth. She belonged with the man who was walking beside her; and he belonged to her. He treated her as if he would never have enough time to make up to her for what had happened twenty years ago. He wouldn't even let her walk in a cold wind.

‘It can't go on,' he said.

He said it every time they met and she had stopped arguing with him.

‘He'll find out, and then you'll have to choose between us. Him or me, my darling. I lie awake wondering what you'll do when that time comes. And then I say to myself, “She'll come to me. She'll leave him and come to me. And we'll be married.”'

He had refused to marry Julia; now that he wanted to secure Terese for himself, he had begun to push the obstacles aside. No marriage in New York, because of papers and questions – all the difficulties he had envisaged when Julia used to try and win him round to the idea. He couldn't marry, he couldn't ever trust a woman to get that close to him. Now no woman would ever be closer to a man than she was to him. They could fly down to Mexico, and marry there.

‘I want to make a proper life for us,' he said. So much had changed; all he had wanted was to stay alive, then to make money, be safe, be comfortable and do his work. Now he wanted to make plans, to live completely like other men.

‘I want you to be my wife, and find you at home when I come back and beside me when I wake up in the morning. I want to plan holidays with you, and talk to you about my work. I want you to get ill, so I can care for you. You'll have to leave him, Terese, and come to me. I'll never let you go, you know that.'

‘I can't have children,' she said. ‘I never gave any to Robert, and I couldn't give any to you. Why do you love me so much, Karl? Why do we love each other more and more?'

‘Because we are alone here,' he said. ‘That's part of it. We can't escape the past; it's all we really know, my love. I'm still Brunnerman and you're still Terese Masson. We haven't changed except on the outside. Let's take a cab and go home now.'

In the taxi she put her arms round him. ‘How long will you be in Chicago?'

‘Three days, perhaps four. I'm nearly finished.'

‘It's so long to be without you,' she whispered. ‘I don't think I can do without you.'

‘Then come with me.'

‘No, I daren't. I'm not ready to hurt Bob yet; I can lie to him because I love you, but I'm not able to see any pain in his face, and know I caused it. I'll go to Boston, and I'll stay at our house. You fly up there from Chicago and we'll find somewhere to be together. I'll book a hotel room. We can have an afternoon, an evening.'

The cab pulled in and he paid it hurriedly, while she slipped into the entrance of the apartment block. They went up in the elevator together, and let themselves in.

‘I'll come to you in Boston,' he said.

It was a thick envelope, sealed with blue wax and decorated with a long line of stamps, marking it ‘Air Mail, Express'. It measured ten inches by six, and it had taken eight days to reach Joe Kaplan's office from Buenos Aires. His secretary had not opened it; he had given her instructions to leave his mail to him for the next fortnight; he was expecting something highly confidential. She had been working for the doctor for five years, she liked him. He was considerate, and gave her chocolates on her birthday. She brought him the package, and smiled.

‘Here's your mail. Doctor. Is this package what you've been expecting? It's from Buenos Aires.'

‘That's it, Dora.' He smiled up at her. ‘Open the other stuff, and deal with it, will you? Thanks.' He began sawing it open with a paper knife. There was a photostat of a file, several copies of typed foolscap, and, at the back, four photographic prints. They accounted for the size and shape of the envelope. He didn't do more than look quickly at the pictures; he had seen many like them and a good few that were worse. Then he opened the photostat copy and began to read. It was taken from the original in the Gestapo files at 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin, photostated and documented for reference after the war when the War Crimes Commission was being set up.

Alfred Brunnerman. Born February 1919, Frankfurt, parents Professor Freidrich Alfred Brunnerman and Frau Brunnerman, born Minna Elsa Neustadt. Educated privately, student at Frankfurt University from 1934 to '37, member Hitler Jugend, recruited S.S. '38. The details of his service in the S.S. followed; like all photostats, it was difficult to read and, as an old copy, it was beginning to fade. Kaplan read on slowly; he understood German very well. There was an identification photograph, but taken when the subject was still in his early teens and newly recruited into the Führer's personal army. It showed a round, rather unformed face with close-cut hair and a fixed stare. It didn't look like anybody in particular and a hundred eighteen-year-old boys in general. In 1941 Brunnerman had transferred to the S.D. Section IV of the Gestapo itself. His record began to soar from there. He was quite a Nazi, Kaplan thought; quite a super specimen.

‘Intelligent, diligent, displays outstanding qualities of initiative and leadership.' Promotion was rapid, like bullets being fired. Transferred to Paris under Obergruppenführer Knochen and promoted to Standartenführer for outstanding intelligence work. That was where the file stopped. He read it through quickly again. He didn't allow himself to get despondent because he hadn't found anything at the first glance. He began reading the foolscap sheets. They were mostly scraps. A piece of information here and there. Brunnerman had taken up his post in Paris; his file at the Avenue Foch had been lost after the war. Its last appearance had been in 1946, when the French were conducting an investigation and had undoubtedly ‘lost' it, so that they could conduct the search in their own way. It had not reappeared since, and presumably any photograph attached to it was also mislaid. There weren't any others discovered so far.

This particular report had been compiled by the Israeli contact in Paris; he was a respectable jeweller in his seventies, and his entire family had been deported to Germany in 1942 and exterminated. He had good friends in the Deuxième Bureau, and they, in turn, made discreet enquiries which disclosed that the Paris file on Alfred Brunnerman had not been handed over to the Israelis, and all they could find through their Resistance records, many of which were missing or suspect because of Communist affiliations, were a few names of French prisoners and collaborators, who had had a connection with the man, and the inconclusive report on these and the missing file itself by a Colonel Baldraux of the French Military Intelligence after the war. Colonel Baldraux, it noted, had died in 1957. Joe Kaplan lit a cigarette; Hoffmeyer had not exaggerated when he said that there was almost nothing known about the man. His height and description fitted Amstat on the German dossier, but this meant nothing. It was the only detail that did fit him, as far as he had read. He picked up Baldraux's report. This was a copy, too. ‘This former Gestapo officer was last heard of during the final stage of the Russian invasion of Germany, and posted missing, believed killed. However, we have received a report from the Russian military authorities that an S.S. lieutenant, who belonged to his company in the Waffen S.S., said Brunnerman was alive and had deserted in Germany in 1944. On the basis that he may be alive, we are making enquiries for the S.S. officer Brunnerman, for his criminal activities against members of the French civil population while in the Paris section of the S.D. Counter-intelligence Group IV. I am aware that he is on the official list of war criminals responsible for the massacre of Jews at Lodz, but our investigation is not connected with atrocities committed anywhere but in France, and against French nationals. In the course of my enquiries, I have interviewed three surviving members of the Resistance with whom he was concerned: Jean Paul Belmont, François Laffont, and Eduard de Bré. These described him as an expert in psychological interrogation, but did not suffer direct brutality under his direction. The first and last named were subsequently tortured by his subordinates, and Laffont was being held by us on charges of giving information to the Gestapo when I made my enquiries. I was unable to question a woman member of the Paris Resistance, who had been interrogated by Brunnerman, a Terese Masson, because she was married to an American officer and he refused to allow me …' Kaplan stopped. The name enlarged into huge black capitals in his mind. He actually put his finger on the place where it was written.

Terese Masson,
TERESE MASSON
. He moved his finger slowly on to the point where he had stopped reading the dead man's report.

‘Refused to allow me to question her. As a result of torture and imprisonment, she had lost her memory. Gestapo records on Terese Masson record a preliminary examination by Brunnermann, which was unsuccessful. By comparing her dossier and his personal file at the Avenue Foch, it appears that he was relieved of his duties and sent to the Eastern Front on suspicion of going “soft” on Masson. She was given medical treatment at his order, and this was noted against him. I protested strongly to the American Major Bradford, as I felt that there must have been a closer relationship between Brunnerman and Madame Bradford than was normal in these circumstances. I am sure she had valuable information to contribute, if I had been allowed to ask her a few questions.' Kaplan stopped there. Terese Bradford, the former Gestapo victim, was having an affair with a German pretending to be Swiss. Terese Masson and an association with the Gestapo interrogator, Brunnerman. A closer relationship than was normal. That was Baldraux's impression.

‘She's had some kind of sexual trauma with one of the bastards.'

He had said that himself, to Bob, when she was at the base hospital in Germany. Whatever had happened, had happened with this man, with Alfred Brunnerman. And whatever he had done to break her had broken him too. He had gone soft on this particular victim, and lost his rating as reliable. Terese Masson. He looked at the name again. From the other side of the world, the past was linking up with the present, a man without a face, who had been hunted unsuccessfully for twenty years, was linked to Terese Bradford. He had remembered his own words, and they were spoken long ago. Now he remembered hers, when she had come to him in that same office asking for help because she was in love with another man, with Karl Amstat. He was familiar, she had said, ‘It's as if I've always known him.' It was a common cliché people used, but now it had another meaning.

‘I'm in love with him, really in love.'

She had been frigid for twenty years; Bob, with all his love and care, had never broken through to her. She had never felt anything for him or for anyone until she met Karl Amstat. And she had reached out blindly for something that she recognised subconsciously. That was the real meaning of why Amstat was familiar. They had met before.

Vera's gibe came back to him too, the first piece in the puzzle that had led to other pieces, and perhaps the most important because it was the one that matched with Baldraux's fragments. ‘If she suffered so much under the Gestapo, how can she go to bed with a German …?' Vera had been so nearly right. But not
a
German.
The
German. The one she had wanted to tell, to go home with. That had come out too, when he was probing the wound of her experience, and it had been so deep he sewed it up again. Brunnerman hadn't tortured her; Brunnerman had tried to help her. An expert at psychological interrogation. He must have fallen face down in his own dirty trap. Kaplan lit a cigarette; he wasn't shaking, he was icy calm. The pieces were fitting one by one, and now he had a picture. The same height, the same build, the same age, the same Aryan type, and the same woman who had been involved with Alfred Brunnerman. And the same mistake that got him sent to Russia. He had taken up where he left off, twenty years earlier. He knew now who Karl Amstat really was.

In all probability, so did Terese by now, but she hadn't given him away. That figured too. Kaplan unclipped the photographs and looked at them. It might be twenty years, but he was going to die for what they showed. He didn't waste time with cables or codes now. This was a big one, and he had very nearly got away for ever. He switched on his intercom and said, ‘Dora? Get me a Mr. Karl Amstat on the line, will you? It's an architect's office right in the centre of town; it'll be under his name. Thanks.'

The pictures were spread out in front of him. They had been taken by the Russians six months after it happened, and most of the bodies in the opened trenches were quite well preserved because of the extreme cold. The four prints were slightly different, but what they showed was the same. Corpses, semi-decomposed, heaped one on top of the other; here and there an arm or a skeletal piece of leg stuck out.

‘Is that you, Karl? Hello, it's Joe Kaplan here. How are you? Fine, we're just fine. We were wondering if you were free for dinner any night next week?' He listened for a moment; he had taken his glasses off and they lay on the pictures of his people in their shallow graves.

‘Well, that's a pity. How long will you be in Chicago? Maybe we could arrange something for the week after? Okay, we'll call you then. Have a good trip.'

He put the receiver back and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. He felt unclean after speaking into the phone. His secretary buzzed and he switched on. ‘Your first appointment's here, Doctor.' He had forgotten completely; he couldn't even remember who it was, and he had looked at his appointment book when he got into the office. ‘Who is it, Dora?'