The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (34 page)

The time had come.

Saying nothing committed me to a lie that would drive me away from her. And speaking committed me to a truth that would drive her away from me. I wrestled with the dilemma and when I finally asked about Bieler, the question came of its own. I hadn’t planned the day or hour. I hadn’t rehearsed. Some part of me thought we were ready, and I asked.

We were seated on her couch by the window, overlooking the garden. The first trees were changing color, announcing a new, chillier season. I had propped a pillow behind my head, but felt the raised stitching of needlepoint. It was the present Liesel’s mother had given her, and I set it aside as Liesel had once asked me to do. Once more, I noted the initials: A B L v K.

“Bieler is my father’s biographer. You know that, Henri.”

“Liesel,” I said. “There is no A. Bieler. I went to the University of Hanover, which Bieler listed as his academic home. They never heard of him, not as a student or as a teacher, full or part time. I have an idea who he is.”

She kept a copy of the biography on the bookshelf, and I retrieved it.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “I’m feeling cooped up. You know, all this business with the press, and my expanded role. I need air. Come, it will do you some good to raise your pulse a bit, to get the blood flowing.”

She found a sweater and hat.

My pulse was already up, and my blood warm. I flipped through the first hundred pages, looking for Bieler’s description of Otto Kraus in Salzgitter, meeting Anna, his wife. Liesel was tugging at my bad arm. It hurt, and I shook her off.

“Please,” she said, “let’s go.”

“Just a second.” I flipped a page, then another, and found it.

I was ready to present well-ordered facts that she could not deny: Anselm had written, or paid someone to write, the flattering portrait, and had convinced university libraries to place it on their shelves. I assumed the news would wound her, but she had to understand that her father was a perpetrator, not a saint. The complete story, the real story of Kraus Steel, had yet to be written.

Why it occurred to me only then to scan the book for information on her mother I don’t know. The lettering on the pillow, perhaps. But there it was, on page 132: an account of how young Otto had met and married one Anna Bieler. Anselm had played an inside joke.

“Here,” I said, pointing to the page. “A for Anselm, Bieler for Anna Bieler. Your brother gave a hundred twenty pages to Otto’s life before the war, twenty pages to the war years, and two hundred thirty pages to life after. Anselm knew exactly what happened at Drütte. Otto
was
rescued by the OSS. Schmidt knew it, and he ordered Nagel to murder the blackmailers because they had actual dirt on the company.”

The hat fell from her hands. She took the biography from my hands and closed it. I followed her eyes to the pillow her mother stitched.

“You told me your given name is Antonia?”

When she nodded, I knew.

Plannik had said when I showed him the photo of Nagel:
I recognize this woman from somewhere. I just can’t remember.

I slumped into the couch. I looked past her to the trees of the Englischer Garden and their last bright shout of life. “How did you get the ID made?” I asked. “They let no one into the Zentrale Stelle without an ID. Every document I found listed A. Bieler. You read every file. You knew everything.”

She shrugged. “The ID was left over from my school years, when I was underage. I paid to have it made so I could go drinking with my friends. We all did it, Henri.”

“Did you steal the photos of Gottlieb and Vogt?”

“No, they were gone by the time I got to the Archive. As I was growing up, Ecke and Franz were friends. They were my uncles, like your Isaac. They were sweet, if you can imagine Franz as sweet. Before the stroke, he could be . . . with me. You’re not suggesting I knew what they did during the war? It was monstrous. I could never—”

I hardly knew what to believe.

“And Schmidt. Did you know about him?”

“Viktor was Anselm’s father-in-law. Did you investigate your parents’ friends or relations? I grew up with these people. I didn’t need to know more than that. Don’t ask me to turn away from my family.” Her voice was rising, shaking. “Everybody has a past, Henri, and I gave them theirs. What’s so terrible about that? What is it you need from me?”

I stared at her.

“You think it’s wrong that I loved my father? He was my
father!
”

She dug through a drawer and found the ID that gained her entry to the Archive. I studied the photo on the card, and I studied her. At that moment, everything hung in the balance: between Liesel the child who didn’t know enough to ask and the woman I loved, standing before me, who had chosen not to ask. In Bruges she said that she wondered about German men of a certain age. Yet she hadn’t wondered about
these
men and what they did during the war.

“You were twenty-three or so when you went to Ludwigsburg?”

“I looked enough like the sixteen-year-old on this card, if that’s your question. I don’t look so terribly different now, do I?” She tried hard to change the mood. She wanted the old me and the old us. She grabbed the ID and mimicked the pout of her younger self.

“Antonia Bieler Liesel von Kraus. A. Bieler.”

I saw it. I was sick.

“Do we really need to go through this, Henri? Anselm was too busy, and we decided I should write the biography. Siemens, Bayer, all the big German companies were rewriting their histories of the war years. We had to tell our story. Otto
was
a hero. He helped save Europe from the Soviets. Everything else is negotiable.” She reached for my hand, and I shook her off. “We couldn’t put our own name on the biography. How would that have looked?” She reached again. “Dearest, do you think we’ve gotten where we are without knowing who our father was? Those were bad times, and people did bad things. But the world turns and we move on. Otto did good things, too. Great things. Did you think I didn’t know? You’ve got to take the whole man in the balance. I loved him.”

I closed my eyes.

“And all your protesting to me that the blackmailers were lying about the OSS?”

“We thought it was what you needed to join the company. That’s what Anselm wants, and that’s what I want. But we were waiting for you, Henri. I’ve been waiting.” She smiled. “There’s so much we can do together. Come.”

She held out her hand. “Tell me you love me.”

forty-nine

T
he statute of limitations never runs out on murder. It’s the law’s way of saying that memory matters and that we must stand for who we are and what we’ve done. Viktor Schmidt did what cowards do. He killed himself rather than stand and face history. Like Hitler. Like Göring. I suspect Schmidt held the world in contempt until the end, cursing ordinary mortals who would not bow to his superior method. We are well rid of him, though the daily newspapers are evidence enough that his spirit is alive and well.

Sometimes I think of David Grossman, the tenth witness, and how the police had blunted his designs on Gottlieb. He so wanted to kill the man and make him, and Vogt, suffer. I attended the trial that day in Hanover when he testified against the magistrate from Celle.

Gottlieb entered the courtroom, unaware of the trap Laurent had set. I watched the police surround and cuff him. And what should they find before settling him into a holding cell but the tools of his trade: a powerful synthetic opioid delivered as an aerosol to knock victims out with a puff, and three syringes and as many vials of potassium, which administered intravenously crashes the heart into a fatal arrhythmia. Zeligman, ox that he was, had fought him off and staggered to his window, where he fell and called out his murderer’s name. The others succumbed according to plan. Court-ordered exhumations of the recently buried witnesses confirmed the presence of excess potassium, and Gottlieb was convicted.

Grossman did have the satisfaction of confronting his would-be killer. Before they hauled him out of the courtroom, he approached Gottlieb and introduced himself.

“Germany lost the war,” he said. “Did no one tell you?”

A year later, he testified against Reinhard Vogt, who was convicted of crimes against humanity and died an old man, alone, behind bars.

I
LONG
mourned my decision to leave Liesel. She and Anselm would have welcomed me into the bosom of Kraus Steel had I accepted Otto’s wartime record as a necessary evil. The demand for their steel remained high. And, indeed, as the personal computer market matured, they entered the business of salvaging precious metals from circuit boards. The last I checked, their operation outside Delhi was an open sore that, nonetheless, exceeded local safety and environmental codes. In her new job, Liesel ran her offshore facilities more humanely than her rivals ran theirs. She installed infirmaries and enforced the laws against hiring underage workers. She doubled wages, not that that amounted to much. No doubt she believed she did the best she could in a business that demanded ever-more handsome returns on investment.

The following year, she married Hans Kellerman, the pharmaceutical magnate she avoided that day at Löwenherz by bringing home a summer experiment. Me. She’d been right about his wealth. Mr. Bayer controlled twenty percent of a company that, during the war, manufactured Zyklon B. He had money, he had a home with a name, and he came from good Austrian stock.
Grüss Gott!

They never had children.

I lived in Paris for a few months before moving to Lyon to begin my career with Interpol. I visited with my parents and with Freda as frequently as my case load allowed. On Sundays, after sharing a meal, I would sometimes visit the park where Isaac and I met. Our bench was still there. I would sit and wait, but nothing came to me, no voices, no visions. I didn’t know what to expect, but I waited for a sign nonetheless. Perhaps it was a stranger I needed, someone well-tuned to the ether who could have walked up to me and said: “You did what you could. You told his story. He’s proud.” But there was no stranger and there were no signs, save for the sun and the wind and the children playing.

Yet, in these, Isaac was near.

He had given me the medallion to say what he could not. And that summer it spoke, though the story is far from fixed and is hopelessly tangled with the story of Kraus Steel. There’s so much I don’t understand.

I don’t understand what it means to say that six million souls perished in the camps and that since, in the Gulag and Cambodia and Rwanda, millions more perished and that tens of thousands at this moment suffer the whims of tyrants. I can hardly comprehend the mystery of a
single
soul. Here by the fire sits my bride, dozing, the one with whom I have shared my life and for whom I would gladly give it. Claire bore my son. She shares my hopes and sorrows. I love her beyond telling. Yet in her essential, beautiful self, she is a mystery to me. She is perfect yet unknowable. What, then, can it mean that a million, twenty million Claires were murdered?

The mind cannot hold it.

Joseph Stalin, who knew about such things, must have been right: a million dead is a statistic, a single death, a tragedy. Which is why on Christmas Eve I light candles for the children of Isaac and Freda Kahane, who died in the winter of 1940 well before their time. Freda lost her daughters, Fanny and Rose, to the twins’ experiments at Auschwitz. Isaac’s sons never made it to the camps. The SS shot them into a freshly dug pit. They had names. Samuel, David, Julius, Lipman, Bernd, and Louis. I did not know them, but each year I light candles and claw them back.

O
NE
S
UNDAY
I chose to visit the cemetery instead of taking lunch with my parents and Freda. It had been a year before I was ready to approach Isaac’s grave with a last, vexing question. How, after everything, could he have chosen kindness? After the Reich and the murders, after Drütte and Celle, he chose to be a gentle man. How did he do it in a world of Viktor Schmidts? And now that I had joined Interpol and was committed to hunting Schmidt down and confronting him again and again, how could I?

During that year, as I made my long approach to the cemetery, I gathered stones from my travels. Some came from the coast of England, some from a scree field at Mt. Blanc, a few from a park in Lyon. I carried a pocketful of stones as I approached the grave. I built my cairn before the bronze marker, then knelt over the remains of Isaac Kahane and opened my heart. The day was beautiful, the air sweet, and I cried and cried. I will not report what I said, for words of love offered to ghosts are written in fire. So were the deaths of millions.

But so, too, I swear it, is love.

Author’s Note

T
he Tenth Witness
builds on certain facts worth noting.

In 1799, HMS
Lutine
sank off the Dutch coast (near the Wadden Sea) with a thousand bars of gold. When Lloyd’s of London paid on the loss, it assumed title to a vast treasure. Despite many salvage attempts, the bulk of the gold was never recovered. The salvage recounted in this novel is fiction, as is the existence of U-boat 1158. Many German submarines sank during the war, though none as far as I know in the vicinity of the
Lutine.

From 1939–1945, the Hermann Göring Reichswerke of Salzgitter, Germany produced steel for the Nazi war machine under the direction of Paul Pleiger, not Otto Kraus. The SS built the Drütte concentration camp on the premises of the steel works, using prisoners as slave labor. During the forced retreat of April 1945, many of these prisoners died in the notorious “Rabbit Hunt” of Celle. Postwar, the Reichswerke was renamed Salzgitter AG and, after several reorganizations, remains among the largest steel producers of Europe. Not until the 1980s did the company drop its Nazi-era logo, the so-called Gö-ring,
, which resembled the Hermann Göring coat of arms.