The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (33 page)

“Anselm passed the letter from the blackmailers directly to me. I told him I’d deal with it, and I did.”

“Did he ask you how?”

“Not once.”

“And Liesel?”

“She never knew about the letter.”

I thought of Schmidt as being many things, but not as a protector of the ones he loved. Yet there it was in his eyes and trembling lips. I had wounded his honor. He had kept the hands of his son-in-law and goddaughter clean. She didn’t know about the blackmail attempt, and Anselm was willing not to know. Plausible deniability. The man whom Ulrich Bloch remembered as a pair of fists in search of a fight loved his children. It was nearly quaint.

“The press will crucify Kraus Steel,” I said. “And it will be deserved, Nils. I’ve made my calls. Interpol knows about the list and the murders. Gottlieb will be picked up when he lands in Europe to kill the tenth witness. They won’t know what to charge him with first, thirty-year-old war crimes or seven current murders. The navy knows about your suspected murder of German seamen. Lloyd’s wants their money back. I’ll try to convince someone you dismembered that drunk, but I probably won’t have any luck. And your overworked, overburdened son-in-law, who looks as if he’s about to drown, won’t be able to suppress the news about the OSS. They sprung Otto to fight their cold war, and no one was ever supposed to know. Now they will.

“And if all this isn’t bad enough, Anselm may be facing a slave labor charge at The Hague. Whatever you’ve touched has turned to shit. Absolute shit. So go and have a nice day. See you back at the mansion.”

I turned away from him. Liesel and the others had hiked out of view, and the gray sky showed no hints of sun, offered no help to anyone trying to find his way home. I pulled Liesel’s compass from my pocket and set a course back to Terschelling. Behind me, I heard Schmidt whistle. When I turned, I found the dogs looking eagerly at him as if expecting another bag of meat. He called to me.

“You’re too clever by half. You know what I think?”

Flanked by his lion killers against a screen of mud and storm clouds, I saw it. I found what I had come looking for: a glimpse of Isaac’s world during the war, in every direction a Viktor Schmidt or an Otto Kraus, a nation of them, a continent of blood and brutal dominance. The man was sane and had always been sane. Even the dismemberment had had its cool method, and I was its object every bit as much as the poor man who suffered and died.

Is this the world, then?
I wondered.
Is this it?

He patted his animals and cooed their names. He scratched them behind the ears. Then he raised his hand in my direction and yelled: “Henri, I believe it’s time for both of us to die. Albert, Hermann, Zind!”

His arm swept towards me, and I reached for the T in my pocket.

forty-six

T
hey would have killed me but for the mud. The Boerboels could get no traction on the flats. At Anselm’s home in Munich, they had been tawny, graceful streaks racing across a firm lawn to protect Friedrich. On the Wadden seabed, their paws sank as they tried to gain a foothold.

Schmidt meanwhile had turned away, walking south into the void.

Had there been a tree, I would have climbed it. A door, I would have slammed it shut. I checked my watch: 6:35. To the west, the tide was stirring, more dangerous, even, than the dogs. I could outrun neither, and unless I killed or maimed the animals quickly, I would drown. So I gripped the T and set my stance as first one and then the other leapt.

I let them bite once, then went for the eyes.

Hermann lunged at my throat, and I blocked with my left forearm. At the same moment came a searing pain in the meaty part of my thigh. I screamed, but ignored it as best I could. Both animals kept their eyes open and bit hard. The bone in my arm snapped. I screamed again as I hammered the T into Hermann’s skull. He wailed but didn’t let go. The next time I aimed, and the jelly of the one eye popped onto my fist, which I brought down again and again until I heard another wail and left the animal blind. Still, it hung on until I hammered its muzzle, then came underneath for its throat. Hermann fell limp.

Albert had ripped my thigh open. The blood ran, and I prayed it wasn’t the deep artery pumping what was left of me into the mud.

I killed him.

I took my belt and closed the wound at my thigh. I shook my head to stay conscious. I pulled the compass from my pocket and set a course to the island. But my leg was no good. I began to crawl.

6:58.

Before I felt or heard the flood tide trickling, I smelled the water as a silent, subtle onrush of air. I was an animal myself by that point, on hands and knees with a broken arm and gaping thigh, alone. That’s when I realized the earth didn’t care if I lived or died, wasn’t partial to either me or Schmidt. The mud could suck me down or spit me back, and the tide would run that night and the next and the next. I lifted one paw then the other, panting. I smelled water. I felt the planet spinning and the tide stirring. I made for dry land. I wanted to be human again and to live.

What is this place,
I thought, sniffing the air.

In the west, a yellow stain broke through the clouds. I checked my compass and crawled north toward Liesel. By the time I saw Terschelling harbor, the tide was running in earnest and the water had covered my hands. Soon it was at my elbows. By the time I reached the landing, it ran chest deep. Ten minutes more and I would have succumbed. I pulled myself onto the landing.

Tap tap shuffle. Tap tap shuffle.

I heard him before I saw him: the three-legged beast, Reinhard Vogt.

forty-seven

“W
here’s Viktor? Where are Albert and Hermann?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He raised his cane and brought it down hard across my broken arm. I hadn’t let go of the T. Even though I was sure I had killed the dogs, I feared they or something would come for me—Schmidt, perhaps, rising from the deep. But it was the stroke-hobbled half man, Reinhard Vogt, Liesel’s beloved Uncle Franz, who inflicted the crushing blow.

I nearly passed out.

I brought the T down hard on his foot and felt bones crack. He went down without a grunt. Vogt clawed at my face but I fought him off, panicked that he was pulling me into a grave. I gave him nothing to hold onto. I lunged with my father’s weapon. I hit him again, in the knee.

Liesel saw it all. She ran from the parking lot for me, then Vogt. “What
is
this?” she cried. “What’s happening? What are you doing? Where’s Viktor?” My eyes began to roll, and she stuffed us somehow into the backseat of her Land Rover and raced across the island to Löwenherz. “Talk to me,” she pleaded, as Vogt mumbled curses and lifted one limp fist after the next, punching me in the face.

A
LL
MY
life since, I have regretted this ending.

We took the morning ferry to Harlingen in advance of the storm. I had gone into shock at Löwenherz. I could offer no words of explanation for a night and a long day, not until the clinic in Harlingen stabilized me and sent me off to Amsterdam and a proper hospital. The reckoning didn’t come until two days later, as Liesel and Anselm sat at my bedside.

“They found Viktor in the marsh grass yesterday. And the dogs,” she said.

I told them everything, and Anselm’s and Liesel’s reactions confirmed what Schmidt had said: they hadn’t known the worst, that Schmidt had dispatched Gottlieb from Buenos Aires to kill the eight living witnesses. Anselm wept at the price his father-in-law had paid to save the good name of Kraus Steel.

What was worse was the news that Schmidt had funded their father’s business with bloodstained gold. No one would ever know the details of how he did it, what combination of diving bells and pulleys he had used to haul the treasure off the
Lutine.
But over the next year Lloyd’s very clearly established that one Viktor Schmidt, whose existence could not be traced before the war, had appeared in Otto Kraus’s life with a fortune sufficient to re-launch the Göring steel mill at Salzgitter.

An inquiry began. Without admitting guilt, Kraus Steel paid Lloyd’s not only the millions it had used to capitalize the company in March of 1947, but also the millions more the gold was worth in 1978. The corporation was large enough to absorb the blow. Its bankers issued stock, which an eager public was willing to buy because the business world knew that Anselm, burdened though he was, still had a gift for making money. Kraus Steel issued even more stock to establish a reparations fund for the slaves Otto used during the war.

“It is a stain we are just now discovering,” said Anselm in a press release. “This history grieves us, and we will do our very best to make amends.” His new public relations office had prepared the release.

Serge Laurent came to my hospital room with the news that the prosecutor’s office in The Hague had declined to take on the slavery case against Kraus Steel. It turned out that Schmidt and Anselm were right: the subsidiary facilities in Bangladesh, Uganda, and elsewhere met all local laws to protect workers and the environment. It made no difference that these laws were considered scandalously deficient in developed nations.

“To hell with it,” said Laurent. “I gave my entire file to that reporter from the
Times
.”

Indeed, a month later, a major exposé hit the newsstands, reporting that for years Kraus Steel had been using a form of debt slavery to staff its facilities around the world.
BARELY
LEGAL
ran the headline. Once again, Anselm pled ignorance. In a second press release, he said:

I visited these facilities as they opened, when the operations were clean and safe. Little did I know what our vice president for globalization would let them become. But ultimately, as chairman of Kraus Steel, it is my responsibility to ensure safe and clean working conditions, and I failed. We will do better. My sister, Liesel Kraus, who sits on the corporation’s Board of Directors, will bring a higher standard to bear for our workers worldwide.

They issued yet more stock to fund cleaner, safer facilities. In the end, buying a good conscience amounted to spending breadcrumbs for Anselm and Liesel. On paper, fixing their troubles cost them many tens of millions. But on paper, they were still worth hundreds of millions.

forty-eight

“W
elcome to the world,” said Laurent some months after my release from the hospital.

We sat at a café in Paris, where he assaulted a marble table top with his thick fingers, driving home an appeal he wanted me to consider: that I abandon the profession of engineering for a career at Interpol. “You have a talent,” he said. “Seven deaths by heart attack, in seven cities, over two months. No one could have connected those dots. You cracked a subtle case, Henri.”

“Without knowing I was on a case. That’s not talent.”

“Call it beginner’s luck,” he said. “My superiors and I don’t think so. They want you to begin your training in January.”

His appeal moved me. Still in my twenties, I had trained for a profession that brought technical answers to difficult problems. When rivers needed spanning and foundations needed shoring, I was your man. Give me a dive platform to build and anchor over a treasure ship, and I could do it. Viktor Schmidt was a different sort of problem. For him I had no answers, yet the world needed answers—or at least more men like Gustav Plannik.

I talked it over with Alec. Our consulting company was flush with new business. Of the fourteen proposals I had written earlier that summer, fully ten were accepted, and in months we grew from a pair of engineers to more than fifty. We were launched, Alec and I, with clients on four continents. P&C Consulting Engineers promised to become the company we had trained for and dreamed of.

“You’d give up all this success for international police work? Go,” he said, “if it makes you happy.”

Happiness I wasn’t so sure about. But it’s what I wanted.

“The irony of it,” said Alec, “is that you’ll leave just when we’re large enough to send younger guns to go vomiting on barges at sea. We’ll never have to do
that
again.” He thought it over. “On the other hand, you never know where you’ll meet your future wife.”

The
Lutine
project had worked out well for Alec and Hillary. They married and brought children into the world, and I was happy for them.

Liesel and I didn’t get nearly that far. Indeed, we didn’t last another month. I was pleased to recuperate at her apartment in Munich. I gathered my strength as she and a busy Anselm jousted with the press over the suddenly notorious operations of Kraus Steel. She returned home in the evenings exhausted and despondent over the turn her company had taken. She vowed to do better, and I believed she meant it. All the while, neither of us spoke of my role in exposing Kraus Steel; but as I expected, a veil as much of my making as hers was falling between us.

One day, we were seated on her white couch. She was nursing a Scotch. I drank a beer.

“Who is A. Bieler?” I asked.

It was the one discovery I’d held back in the hospital. Broken as I was, my arm splinted, tubes running into me and out of me, I hadn’t the strength to push this final, awful legacy into the light: that her brother had lied to her. That he was Bieler and had cemented the sainthood of Otto Kraus with an official-looking but spurious biography.

For weeks Liesel resisted the central fact on which all the bad news of that summer rested. Yes, she asserted, the affidavit was real. Yes, three of the witnesses had attempted to blackmail the company. Yes, Schmidt to her infinite regret had directed Nagel to murder the witnesses. All that was true, she acknowledged. But why should she take the word of a bitter David Grossman that the OSS had arranged for her father’s release and revived his career? The company requested documentation from the Americans but received no official response.

Liesel insisted that Anselm had handled the blackmailers correctly: he, too, claimed that the OSS charge was false, but he had to respond to spare the company embarrassing publicity. That the response was disastrous and Schmidt had stained Kraus Steel was not in dispute. But the murders, in themselves, did not prove the OSS had made a deal for her father. Liesel continued to insist that Otto saved lives.