The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (14 page)

“Yes,” I said. “I went to the Archive.”

“Why?”

“I don’t really think that’s your business.” I fought a bizarre impulse to run. I had located my lab at the butt end of a building that, in flagrant violation of code, had only a single exit along the corridor, which led directly past the second door and Schmidt’s assistant. “What’s your problem, Viktor?”

Schmidt stepped past me and turned the valve of the Bunsen burner. The gas hissed, and he reached into his pocket for a lighter. The butane ignited with a
whoosh.
“The problem arises when you or anyone researches this family. I find that rude. If you have questions, ask. Anselm or Liesel or I will be happy to answer them.”

I didn’t understand why he had brought an assistant, this silent goon. Schmidt was frightening enough on his own. He was twice my age, but with his bull neck and thick chest communicated a threat that made matters perfectly clear: our present exchange was civilized, but he would not hesitate to break me and eat me if he had cause. I couldn’t resist him physically, let alone his assistant.

I gave him the slimmest version of the truth. “I went searching for information about my uncle, my adopted uncle, the one who died. Remember, you offered your condolences.”

“That’s right. But why go to an archive of Nazi-era crimes?”

“I don’t understand that it’s your place to ask.”

“Humor me. Why the Zentrale Stelle and the file on Otto von Kraus?”

I explained Isaac’s vague connection to Zeligman, and Zeligman’s name on the list of ten who had vouched for Kraus. “I thought that if Isaac knew Zeligman and Zeligman signed that document, the others who signed might have known Isaac. So I have the list and thought I would call on them. It’s a bit of unfinished business, Viktor. I want to know more about my uncle.”

“That’s admirable. But you pulled other files as well.”

It had to have been the administrative assistant, the woman who’d seemed so helpful. She must have retrieved the files and called Schmidt. I could scarcely believe this interrogation.

“I’m filling in holes,” I said. “This is about my uncle. I owe him this, a little research. Now please explain your problem.”

“Leave it alone, Henri. Those witnesses are long dead.”

“It’s been thirty years. If they were twenty or thirty at the time, it wouldn’t be unreasonable—”

“Suit yourself. If they’re alive, I very much doubt you’ll find them. Scattered to the winds. America, South America, Europe. Good luck.”

“All right, then. Are we done?”

Schmidt killed the flame on the Bunsen burner. “You seem wise enough to take advice. Ours is a tight-knit family, Henri. My daughter married Anselm. I was Otto’s right hand in building this company. I’m Liesel’s godfather. She’s quite fond of you, and I can see why. You’re a clever man with great promise.” He surveyed the lab and nodded. “Here.” He handed me a business card. “My address in Buenos Aires. I give it only to friends and family, and despite your indiscretion at the Archive I would like to think we’re friends. I take you at your word, Henri. Should you go and find yourself there on a Friday afternoon, stop in. You’ve already met Dr. Nagel. He would be there. You know, a home-cooked meal in a faraway land never hurts.”

Schmidt stepped past me into the corridor.

“What about him?” I nodded to the second door.

“He keeps me company . . . how shall I say it? The Zentrale Stelle is about the past. The future is what matters. Let’s not get ahead of the facts, but Liesel is fond of you. Anselm thinks the world of you. You should visit our family in Buenos Aires. Get to
know
us, Henri. . . . You’re good at math?”

“There’s some talent in my family. Yes.”

“Well, then. Add two plus two. By the way, I really do want to get out to that platform of yours. I’m waiting for an invitation.”

“I’m busy here, Viktor. But I’ll let my partner know to expect you. Go anytime. Really.”

“Well, thank you for this little talk. I feel better.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll see you at the picnic, yes? Sunday?”

At the far end of the warehouse, Schmidt’s assistant opened and closed the second door. Two sets of footsteps receded down the corridor, then died. I turned back to the lab trying to understand what had just happened. That evening I found that a can of shaving cream, which I usually kept on a shelf above the sink, had moved to a ledge by the tub.

I wondered if it was time to call Serge Laurent.

twenty-one

I
woke Saturday morning to find Schmidt’s muscled assistant waiting outside my apartment. The heavy-handed reminder should have infuriated me, yet I realized I must have gotten close enough to something at the Archive to raise alarms. The administrative assistant had said that prosecuting wartime criminals was difficult because perpetrators moved and changed names. Perhaps Schmidt was worried I’d find his name.

Why wasn’t I surprised?

The man stood across the street, leaning on a car and pretending to read a newspaper, pitifully obvious. I had no doubt he’d follow me at least for that day and report back to his master. This surveillance wouldn’t do, and I could make the point in one of two ways. I could drive to Schmidt’s home, knock on his door, and tell him to stop the nonsense; or I could demonstrate how futile his attempts at surveillance would be.

I opted for a demonstration.

Early Friday morning, I had spent a few hours checking two local names from the Otto Kraus affidavit. One, Felix Schumpter, had given an address in a suburb of Munich. A phone book and a call to the tax assessor’s office quickly established that no one by that name currently lived at the address, though the records did show a Schumpter in residence before 1939. The assessor’s office gave me a phone number for the address, and the woman who answered had never heard of him. Her father had bought the apartment before the war, and that’s all she could say. Perhaps she didn’t care to know more—for instance, that prime German real estate often sold for a song after the original Jewish owners fled or were shipped off to the camps.

I tried the next closest city listed on the affidavit, Vienna. I found a phone number and called. To my delight a woman answered the phone and said that yes, Aaron Montefiore, her grandfather, was alive and well but was napping at the moment and couldn’t talk. I thanked her and said nothing more because I wouldn’t risk an easy rejection by phone. My plan was to visit Vienna, unannounced—a possibly flawed tactic, I knew. He might be away. He might resent the liberty I’d taken, ambushing him. But if I found Herr Montefiore and he refused to answer questions about Drütte and Isaac Kahane, he would have to deny me to my face. He needed to
see
my love for Isaac. If he knew Isaac and still said no, I could do nothing but move to others on the list.

Given my frustrations in the lab with platinum and palladium, I decided to spend the day walking, as I sometimes will when encountering a problem. My habit is to keep a notebook close at hand and divert my attention elsewhere. As often as not, answers will suggest themselves when I’m admiring the patterns of a leaf or lost in contemplation of an article I’ve read.

Schmidt’s man settled the matter. I would go walking . . . but in Vienna. I thought it through, packed an old suitcase, and stepped out of the apartment.

I behaved as if unaware anyone was following me and boarded a bus bound for the Munich rail station. I wore tan pants, a darker tan sports jacket, and no hat. At the station, I bought a ticket to Stuttgart, sure to say
Stuttgart
loudly enough so that anyone standing within six meters would hear. I was first in line at the platform and first onto the train when it was ready for boarding. I assumed that Schmidt’s man would not be bold or stupid enough to sit in the same car. As a precaution, I took a seat in the last row of a car with forward facing seats, so whoever had an interest in my affairs would need to turn to see me.

When the train departed, I gathered my suitcase and stepped into the lavatory. Inside my suitcase was a smaller day bag in which I had packed a change of clothes, a gray suit and a black felt hat. I stuffed the clothes I had worn from my apartment into the day pack and zipped the larger suitcase shut. I grabbed the hat and my day bag and waited. By this point, I had made the trip to Stuttgart several times and had chosen a local train, not the express, knowing that within twenty minutes it would take on passengers at Augsburg.

When the train stopped, I exited the lavatory in my fresh set of clothes and new bag, returned my original suitcase to its position on the luggage rack, and stepped off the train. I immediately turned my back to the train and opened a newspaper, which I’d bought at the Munich station as a prop. Schmidt’s man didn’t move. The train to Stuttgart left the station with him aboard, which gave me just enough time to follow the passageway beneath the tracks and emerge onto an adjacent platform, where I stepped onto an eastbound commuter back to Munich. From there, I boarded an express to Vienna.

Again, I chose the last row of a forward-facing car. I recognized no one from the Stuttgart-bound train. I checked the car behind me and found three people, none familiar. A conductor waved and blew a whistle. I settled into my seat and pulled the list of witnesses from my suit jacket.

I
STEPPED
outside the Vienna station looking for a taxi—but not before an odd event. As I exited the train, on an adjacent platform another train was idled, about to depart for the airport. I saw a familiar-looking man: tall, impeccably dressed, and completely bald—his head shaved. He looks like Dr. Nagel, I thought, the physician from Buenos Aires. I looked a second time to be sure, then called across the platform.

“Herr Nagel!”

The woman beside him heard clearly enough. A raised voice bordering on a shout can be alarming in public, and she looked in my direction. The man I thought was Eckehart Nagel didn’t move, however.

“Herr Nagel!”

Others stared, but he didn’t. He boarded the Airport Express, and I went about my business, forgetting him. I left the station, and a fifteen-minute taxi ride brought me to the edge of a neighborhood of townhouses outside the center of the city.

“You’ll have to walk,” said the driver on encountering the flashing lights of a police car. I paid him and made my way up the street, checking an address on a scrap of paper against the numbers on the houses, rehearsing what I would say all the while. I was nervous, about to throw myself at the mercy of whoever answered that door. As a habit, I avoid placing my fate in the hands of others. I prefer to rise or sink by my own efforts. But in this business, I was the supplicant.
I
needed information. There I was, a stranger about to make a very strange request.

Complicating matters was the voice of my father ringing in my ears, an old argument he used whenever my mother wanted to visit Vienna: the Austrians, he grumbled, were more enthusiastic Nazis than the Germans. Why would anyone willingly visit Vienna? My mother would protest and point to the architecture, the music, and the food. My father switched off the radio whenever Mozart played.

I was not visiting a Nazi, I reminded myself, but a man who survived Nazis. Would he be more like Zeligman, a large personality who freely discussed those years, or Isaac, who didn’t? I walked up the street, ignoring a gathering commotion ahead of me—a knot of cars and more flashing lights—and rehearsed my appeal to Aaron Montefiore. To build confidence, I recalled Isaac at our bench and dinners downstairs on Friday nights as he chanted over the wine. I reached into my pocket and grasped his medallion. I could do this. I would knock and state my case simply.

I didn’t get the chance.

The flashing lights belonged to an ambulance and a second police car. An officer had set a perimeter barricade with yellow tape. A crowd watched someone being carried on a stretcher down marble steps. I checked the number on the scrap in my hand against the number of the building. They matched. There were three apartments, I assumed, each floor-throughs.

“Who?” I asked a woman.

“Ah, Herr Montefiore. His granddaughter ran screaming from the house that he’d collapsed. I live over there.” She pointed. “I called the ambulance. Such a good man.”

Not possible,
I thought. I was so upset I nearly blundered into one of the horse-drawn carriages that serve the tourist trade near St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The mare clip-clopped on the cobblestones, making a cruel sound. She stopped, I stopped. The driver asked if I needed help.

I sat on a curb to collect myself.

Within the hour, I was leaning my head against the window of the return train to Munich, confused. The odds were against it, my wanting to talk with two men and their dying before I got the chance. I recalled Montefiore’s handsome street with its white limestone townhouses and black wrought-iron lamps and shutters. Flower boxes sat at each window. The buildings were narrow and tall, elegant. Montefiore had prospered. I convinced myself he would have spoken to me.

The train lurched, and I crossed another name off my list.

twenty-two

L
iesel ran into my arms after clearing customs. I had hoped for some small sign that our affection would hold after our delirious weekend in bed. I needn’t have worried. She ran to me as if we were lovers long separated by a war and reunited, miraculously, on the far side. What she had seen in Uganda had unsettled her.

She needed to talk.

“The mine,” she said, clutching me. “It’s awful, Henri, and our name is all over it. Thirty men died. Trapped, suffocated. The
Times
of London had a reporter in the country. He’d already called in the story by the time I landed. I met with the widows and children after he interviewed them.”

Her shoulders began to shake. She fought the emotion and stepped away, wiping her eyes. “Government ministers were screaming. The widows and children threw dust on their heads. It was a nightmare. More reporters came. They were swarming like insects. We would never stand for something like that in Europe, Henri. How did Anselm let it happen? He should have
fixed
this!”