The Stolen (32 page)

‘Father…' The word sounded strange, foreign, but it was an undeniable genetic truth. ‘This is your last chance to do something good. Redeem yourself, tell us the location of the vault.'

Ulrich stared up at him, his eyes bloodshot. ‘I am sixty-seven. There was a time I thought I'd be dead by thirty. You must make sure I am buried in Munich, my hometown. I have a fear of dying here in this monstrosity the Soviets have made of my country. Promise me? I don't want to walk this earth as a ghost.'

‘You should have thought of that before,' Vedel hissed.

Ulrich ignored him. ‘Promise?' he asked Matthias again.

‘Perhaps.' Matthias kept his gaze steady and Ulrich seemed to weaken.

‘There were four of us: Water, Fire, Earth and Air. I was Water because of my brother who was in the navy; I had useful links to shipping. We developed a code to protect the Party's assets – it was a plan drawn up in those last months, when it became apparent all was lost.'

‘It wasn't just Christoph. Who is the leader?'

‘I don't know.'

Matthias levelled the gun at him. ‘Liar! Tell me, did they kill my wife?'

‘We had friends there, loyal to the Party. The money was meant to go to
Die Spinne
, to ex-SS men like me, but our Swiss friends were greedy. Christoph was meant to control them but he was always weak…'

‘Ulrich, the vaults?'

‘There
are
no vaults. The property is not hidden in a bank; we were not so stupid.' Then Ulrich inhaled sharply, as if in pain. ‘My heart… my heart!'

‘Are you okay?'

‘
Nein
, I need my heart pills.'

‘Let him die,' Vedel snarled and Matthias pushed him away.

‘No, I need the information. Where are they?'

‘You have to untie me, I need the key… ⁠'

‘It's a trick!' Vedel spat out furiously.

But the German appeared to deteriorate, groaning and thrashing about in his chair.

‘Latcos, untie him – we need him to live!' Matthias kept his gun on Ulrich as Latcos untied him. Matthias pulled him up by the arm, still training the gun on him with his free hand; in that moment Ulrich reached for the gun and, pushing himself against the barrel, wrapped his hand round Matthias's, forcing him to squeeze the trigger. The bullet went straight into Ulrich's chest, jolting him back onto the floor.

‘No!' Matthias screamed, and knelt down beside the dying man who stared up at him.

‘Time has a face, you know… there's one that gazes out over Altestrasse. I visited there once, many years ago —' Ulrich stopped mid-sentence and his head fell back, lifeless. The two gypsies looked on in shock.

Matthias stood up then looked at his hands. They were covered in blood, just as they were when Yojo's spirit had visited him.

‘Keja's curse,' Latcos said softly in Romanes.

Matthias walked to the window. The wintry sun was now visible, a pale gold disc against a white sky. It felt like he'd been in that room for years.

‘Are you all right?' Latcos's concerned voice brought him back into the moment.

‘Of course, why wouldn't I be?'

‘He was your father.'

‘No, he wasn't. I've had no father.'

Outside there was the distant rumble of a tractor starting up in a nearby field.

‘So are we going to bury him in his hometown as he wanted?' Vedel asked.

‘No.' Matthias's voice was flat; the gypsies exchanged glances.

‘His spirit will walk,
phral
.'

‘Let it walk until the end of Time, I don't care.'

Christoph stared at the drip hanging over the bed like a bloated bladder, the tube they'd inserted into his vein throbbing with his heartbeat. It was hard not to be acutely aware of his own body, his skin now stretched across the bone like silk over the frame of a kite. That was how frail the attack had left him. His head, which felt like the translucent egg of some great bird, abandoned on the bleached shoreline of his pillow, pounded faintly as he squinted at his granddaughter with his good eye – the other having swollen into a crimson oblivion.

‘Thanks for coming,' he told her, thinking how pretty and youthful she looked and, despite the black leather mini-dress and heavy black eye-shadow, impossibly young, impossibly innocent.

‘I didn't have a choice; they told me you were dying,' Liliane said bluntly.

Christoph emitted a bark of a laugh. There was a brutal honesty to the girl that he appreciated. It was refreshing; the rest of the hospital staff had been so politely evasive on the subject of his health that it made him want to scream. But his body had spoken loudly: he was dying, and quickly, and he had demanded that he be sent back to his own house and to the secret that was hidden there.

‘The papers said it was a break-in – was that true?' Liliane asked.

‘It is true the assailants broke in and Bertholt died most bravely trying to protect me.'

‘Yet nothing was stolen?'

‘How do you know that?'

‘That was also in the papers.'

Hunching her shoulders up defensively, Liliane began searching through her bag for a cigarette, distressed at the sight of her grandfather looking shrunken and vulnerable. She lit up.

‘You're not meant to smoke in here,' he told her, longing for a cigarette himself.

‘So, what is your nurse going to do? Arrest me?'

Christoph smiled. They might not be directly related but she'd certainly inherited his feistiness.

‘Can I have a drag?'

She leaned over and held the cigarette to his lips; he inhaled deeply, the smoke burning deep into his lungs, a flood of pleasure sweeping through his blood. ‘I know we've had our disagreements, Liliane, especially recently.' It was an effort to talk, but this was his last chance to be heard.

‘Oh, you mean when I exposed you for being an old Nazi?'

Christoph winced and another flame of pain shot up from his jaw. But he was determined, and far beyond insult. ‘That was unfortunate and rash, as well as terribly indiscreet. You could have, at least, waited until there was just family in the room.' He fell into another coughing fit.

‘But, Opa, I am renowned for my indiscretion and in our family you have to be famous for something,' she deadpanned, and to Christoph's amazement, he found that they were both laughing, his wheeze running under her pealing mirth.

‘I'm sorry I haven't spent more time with you, Liliane, these last few years.' How meaningless all the rules and social expectations of a dynasty now seemed against the emotion of love,
I did what I had to; I tried to be a better father than my own father was,
he told himself for the hundredth time that afternoon. Now, in the face of extinction, the only thing that mattered was the confirmation that he had been loved, would be remembered.

Liliane stared at him, not knowing how to deal with this new, needy creature that had emerged from the grandfather she had always seen as invincible.

‘You were busy, like Papa.'

‘You must forgive me, Liliane, for all the mistakes I might have made.'

Liliane squirmed in embarrassment. She could never forgive him, for to forgive would mean to condone everything that Christoph von Holindt stood for. No, she would not forgive. Christoph read her silence correctly. He covered his piercing disappointment with a shrug. ‘Where is your father? Does he know I'm on my deathbed?'

‘Papa's away – on a work trip.'

Thank God I reset the clocks
, Christoph thought to himself.
The boy is bright – he always was good at puzzles.
Then, annoyed he couldn't see Liliane fully, he gestured with his left arm, remembering just in time that it was hooked to the drip. ‘Sit near so I can see you.'

She moved reluctantly, perching at the very edge of the bed as if fearing he was contagious.

‘What work trip?' Christoph asked warily.

‘He didn't tell me. Probably something to do with the lab. I think he said he was going to Germany…'

So it's begun,
Christoph thought, as his eyes travelled down to the girl's hands. She may not have his colouring, but she had her father's elegant hands and long limbs, a certain grace of movement, his heart clenching as he remembered Matthias as a small boy. Surely Matthias realised it would have been impossible to be honest with him from the beginning. Christoph had protected him, had to allow him the possibility of an unencumbered destiny, one he could choose, not one dictated by the mistakes of the father. Had Matthias found Ulrich? For a moment the dying man's memory slipped back to a day in 1945, and he was staring down into a bassinet, held there by the serious expression of the baby inside, its tiny fist gripped tight as if in battle already.
My son
…

Liliane, worried by this sudden silence, leaned forward.

‘Papa's due back tomorrow, Opa.'

Tomorrow, tomorrow will be too late
. He knew it with a dull clarity. It had been too late for years.

‘Tomorrow will be too late,' he murmured and Liliane edged nearer, unsure how to respond – was he really dying? Christoph had been close to death before, only five months earlier, and he'd recovered from that – but he'd been determined to live, even to work again. Now it was as if her grandfather's spirit had already started to leave his body. Where was her father? He'd left four days ago and he'd only called her once, from a telephone booth somewhere in Germany; there was the sound of heavy traffic in the background like he was beside the motorway and the line was so bad they were cut off. Was he with that gypsy – Latcos? If so, why? So much of the routine and normalcy of her life had crumbled in the last few weeks that she was beginning to float off again, in the same way she did when her mother was killed. That insidious sense of being separated from her own body had started to hijack her. And now this – Opa wanting forgiveness… this wasn't in the narrative.

She forced herself to study Christoph's mottled cheeks and bloodshot eyes. She should really pick up his hand and stroke it, like she'd seen in death scenes in the movies, but the plastic tube taped into the vein in the top of his hand revolted her.

‘It's just one more day. If you can only wait until then I know he will come when he hears how serious it is and when he knows what happened,' she told him earnestly.

‘He won't come.' It was a statement of fact, yet one that was viscerally inconceivable to Christoph. He knew deep in his soul, on his very genome, his physical self would fail him probably sometime in the early hours of the next morning, but the idea of never seeing Matthias, nor the dawn, nor anything else that made one human remained an enigma – a surreal absurdity.
The habit of life sticks hard
, Christoph, an atheist, observed bitterly.
Am I frightened? No, I'm tired of life and there is only one thing left to do. If I cannot give it directly to Matthias I will give it to Liliane and she will make sure he gets the key.

‘You'll see him again; you're just being dramatic,' Liliane said, hoping she sounded sincere.

‘I liked you better when you were honest.' Christoph sank back into the pillows, momentarily exhausted. ‘Come closer…' His energy was failing now, and the throbbing had returned – slow waves contracting up from the base of his spine. They would come with the next dose of painkillers soon; there was little time left before he would lose his lucidity. ‘I have something to give you to give to your father. It's very, very important – you mustn't forget, Liliane.'

‘You can give it to him yourself.'

‘Please, there is no time for illusions…'

Liliane edged further up the bed, careful to avoid the obscenity of the tubes that threaded under the bedcovers and down into the recesses below. Meanwhile Christoph fumbled with one shaking hand under his pillow. Finally he located the small box he had managed to retrieve earlier and pushed it into her hand.

‘Open it,' he commanded, anxious the box would remain closed, that perhaps she would hoard it somewhere and forget it. Tentatively Liliane slid open the lid. Sitting on a nest of tissue was a gold symbol – a simple triangle with a marked-off tip.

‘Is this some kind of heirloom?'

‘No. You are to give it to your father as soon as he returns. Tell him it is part of a map. Tell him to start with the elements then work to the centre. It's like a riddle. Don't lose it. It is very, very valuable.'

‘Don't worry, Opa, I'll take good care of it. It looks as if it's part of a bigger piece, like a puzzle, Opa?'

Christoph collapsed back on the pillow. Having done what he needed to do, he let his mind dissolve into a kaleidoscope of images. ‘A puzzle, yes, that's it. It always was a puzzle. But when you're young and full of ideals you think you can do anything, you think you have the power of a God. We did, the four of us; for a moment there we ruled the world…'

‘Opa? Who ruled the world?'

‘There was to be a
Gauführer
, one federation; we would have had Europe…'

She put the box on the side table and stroked his hand. The touch seemed to bring him back into the present. He opened his eyes again.

‘Oh… it's you, Liliane. Where's your father?'

‘I told you before, he's away.'

‘Oh yes, that's right, he's with your mother visiting his in-laws…'

‘Opa, my mother's been dead for four years. Opa?' She looked up then realised Christoph had fallen asleep.

 

Liliane stood smoking outside the gates of the villa. She was trying not to cry but the grief kept riding up in her chest in great painful bubbles that were harder and harder to swallow. Was this life, this banal almost flat finish to existence with the world turning over indifferently? Did the sky ever fall for anyone?

A young girl, only a few years younger than her walked past, holding the hand of her mother, the woman about the same age as Liliane's own mother, had she lived. The girl glanced at Liliane, obviously wondering at her crackling air of defiance, the torn fishnet stockings and black eye-shadow. Liliane scowled back but the emotion was too much. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, surrendering to the images of the last moments of her mother's life.

This time she could hear some sound: the whistling of the snow beneath the skis, her mother's breath, the wind in the trees as, trapped in the body of her mother, the pine trees flashed past, one tree, two trees, three trees… her mind tensing as tree seven approached. And this time she heard two distinctive booms in the near distance before the rumble of the avalanche, and when her mother looked up, for the first time Liliane saw the outline of a skier, further up the mountain, away from the lip of advancing snow, watching.

 

 

Destin turned the heater up in the car. It was one of those freezing January nights where it felt as if the ice countries in the far north had sent down their spiky tendrils: snowflake crystal upon snowflake crystal solidifying over the land like an impenetrable crust of silence. He hated the way snowstorms closed down the landscape; to distract himself from the claustrophobia that now threatened to tip into a panic he leaned back in the car seat and took himself back to Laos, a humid hotel room, the ceiling fan a dull circle of slow rotating blades, making love to the one woman he had loved, the silk of her hair slipping through his fingers, the sense of finally losing all the anger and pain that defined him, one of the only moments when he remembered forgetting who he was and what he was. A profoundly liberating experience, the memory was a sanctuary he returned to again and again.

The snap of a branch somewhere nearby brought him back to the street, to the place where he'd parked a few metres from Matthias von Holindt's house. He peered through the flurries of snowflakes. He'd been studying the movements of the house next door to the physicist's abode. He'd already observed that the inhabitants only appeared to live there on the weekend; even more useful was the fact that their driveway ran near the back entrance of Matthias's house, and it was concealed from the street by thick foliage and overhanging trees. It couldn't be more convenient. He turned back to Matthias's house. All the lights downstairs were switched off: only two still burned in the house, one on the second floor on the far left, which he knew was the housekeeper's bedroom, and another one on the same floor but at the other side of the building – a room he knew was Liliane's. The sense of power that he felt staring at the window made him hard, knowing it would take little more than ten minutes to break in, then another five before he would have his hands wrapped round her throat. But he wasn't there for the girl, he reminded himself – he was there for the physicist. He needed to know when Matthias was returning to Switzerland.