The Tenth Witness

by Leonard Rosen

  She looked at Liesel. “Deutsch?”

  Liesel nodded, and the widow grabbed her arm, digging in her fingernails. “They killed my daughter. They clubbed my brother to death at the rail yard for stopping to help a child. From that day I cried. Who cries for you, Deutsch? Who cries for the murderer? Out! How dare you bring a filthy woman into a house of mourning. Out, Deutsch. Get out!”

  twenty-five

  “I can’t breathe,” she said. “We’ve got to leave Bruges.”

  We were standing in the courtyard. Above us, Tosha Zeligman sat at her window, rocking back and forth. If I returned in a month, should she live that long, she would be rocking still. Through an archway, we could see the spire of the Church of Our Lady.

  “The Nazis were here,” said Liesel.

  “You told me you’d never been to Bruges.”

  “You think I don’t know German history? I can smell Nazis. They overran the city, rounded up Jews, then walked to that church to admire Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child. How do you do this? Kill in the morning and admire a sculpture in the afternoon?”

  She held my good hand and led me from the courtyard. “Do you understand, they were here. Here.” She stamped her foot. “Sometimes I can’t breathe because of it. I love my country, but how did it happen? We were not all monsters! But I can’t help myself. I go walking in Munich or Berlin and see a man with white hair, and I wonder how many people he killed during the war. Why do I struggle like this? My father was a good man. He was gentle with me. If you knew him you’d know he never wanted to be one of them. He never was one of them. Not in his heart.”

  She buried her face in her hands.

  “I need to get out of here. I need air.”

  WE ROARED out of the city. Liesel drove hard, squealing the tires and opening the throttle wide on the ring road, tears streaking her cheeks. She headed north and, after thirty minutes, found a coastal road.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere off this fucking continent. Back to Löwenherz.” She began to sob again, this time so violently I couldn’t trust her driving. We raced through lowland farm country, past fields of wheat and rye. She braked hard, then pulled the car onto a dirt road.

  “Watch out!” I called.

  I felt a hard bump beneath the car. She skidded to a stop and we got out.

  Behind us, on a road, lay a small dog, a terrier mix. The car had crushed its abdomen and spine. The animal was dying, unable to move its hind legs. When she saw what she’d done, Liesel dropped to her knees and wailed. “Oh, my God. Gott! Gott! For the love of God. Liebe Gottes.” She touched the animal. She stroked its muzzle as it closed its eyes, blood pooling on the dusty roadbed.

  The dog had a kerchief tied where its collar would have been. Someone’s pet, then. Liesel murmured, she spoke softly as the life drained out. “I killed it,” she said, looking at me. “I killed it. I’ve never killed anything, Henri.” I knelt beside her. “Oh Henri, I’ve killed this poor dog.”

  “Liesel, you didn’t see. You couldn’t stop. It was an accident.”

  We heard a rumbling behind us, and when I turned a farmer was stepping from the cab of his tractor. “What’s the problem?”

  I walked back to explain, and the man came to inspect.

  “I didn’t mean to do this. Liebe Gottes” She broke down again.

  Without a word, the farmer returned to his rig for a shovel. Again, without speaking, he scooped up the animal and heaved it into a drainage ditch. “A dog,” he said. “There are other dogs.” He climbed back into his tractor, pulled around the BMW, and drove off.

  I placed my jacket around Liesel, then opened the trunk of the car. The closest I could come to a shovel was a tire iron. I grabbed it, then rummaged through my suitcase for a shirt. I lifted the dog from the ditch. Liesel watched as I wrapped it and scratched out a shallow grave along the edge of a field. My hand and ankle ached.

  We didn’t make Terschelling that day. I drove to Cologne and we found a hotel. In bed, Liesel cried and I held her until she stopped shaking, finally, and her breathing grew even.

  How could I help, I wondered. I could no more remove the stain of war from her German soul than I could swim an ocean. I couldn’t speak to her father’s complicity, however much he may have helped innocents. I felt her drifting off, but then she startled and looked at me, beautiful even in her pain. She made an effort to smile, then let it go.

  “If I died tonight,” she said, “if I died, would you cry for me?”

  WE HAD been gone a week. In the morning, Liesel called Munich to pick up her messages and discovered that Anselm had tried multiple times to reach her. “What?” she said, when they finally connected. “Not again! You go this time. You fix it!”

  She slammed the phone down.

  “What?”

  “Our ship-breaking yard in Bangladesh. One of the workers cut the wrong truss with his torch, and a three-ton section fell away from a tanker and crushed several men. One disaster after the next, Henri. What is happening? I’ve got to get back to Munich. Let’s go.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  She stared at me.

  I could hardly explain it to myself. “I need to see Tosha Zeligman again. Something doesn’t make sense. Jacob was a strong man. He was old and could have had a stroke and fallen. Even so, something’s missing. I need a day or two.”

  She looked doubtful.

  “It’s me, isn’t it? You can’t stand to be with me anymore. It’s my family. It’s everything. There’s too much shit in my life.” She put a hand to her head as if to stanch a wound and leaned against a bureau. A tray fell, and she kicked it across the room.

  “That’s not true, Liesel.”

  “Then why stay behind?”

  I couldn’t say more because I didn’t know.

  I held her and forced her to look at me. “I’ll return to Munich soon. I’ll be with you. I want to be with you. Do you understand?”

  She choked off a sob. Her pain at the death of these workers was real. I knew then that she needed me.

  “Are you OK to drive?”

  She nodded.

  “Something,” I said. “Give me something, a photo. I’m going to keep it in my wallet and I’m going to look at it and think of you.”

  She wiped her nose with her sleeve and tried to laugh. “You want my picture?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re coming home soon?”

  “I just said so. I am.”

  She crossed the room for her purse. “Before we left, I picked these up from the photographer, photos from Anselm’s party at Löwenherz. There’s one of me and you that I’m keeping.” We sat on the edge of the bed as she flipped through them. “There’s this other one. You don’t mind, I hope?”

  “Impossible. I’ll cut them out.”

  “No, you can’t. They’re my uncles.”

  The photographer had posed Liesel with Hofmann to one side, and Nagel and Schmidt to the other. I asked if I could at least fold the photo. She said no.

  “They look like trolls, and you look like their prisoner.”

  “At least I’m smiling, Henri. It’s this or nothing. I’ll get you a better one when you’re back in Munich.”

  So I took the photo, pressed it between the pages of Steel and Service: The Life of Otto von Kraus, and waved as she drove off. The ache I felt as she turned onto the highway and disappeared didn’t surprise me, exactly. I thought of other partings. My parents sending each other, and me, off with a kiss. My leaving Isaac for University. Isaac’s leaving us. Get over it, I thought. You won’t see her for a day or two. Get a grip. But I couldn’t help myself then and can’t help myself now. From my earliest days, I have felt that delight in this world carries within it the seeds of its own agony. Nothing lasts.

  As Liesel drove off, I recognized the void.

  Still, there was work to do. I rented a car and headed back toward Bruges for something important left behind, though I couldn�
��t remember what. In Ghent, I found it. I had stopped for lunch—why hurry if you don’t know what’s coming next?—when, in the way of things, the world snapped into focus over a random choice. For no particular reason I turned right, not left, out of the café where I had enjoyed a salad and baguette. Fifteen minutes later, I found myself before Saint Nicholas’s Church. Strung above the main entrance was a large banner that read “God Loves You” in Belgium’s three official languages: Dutch, God houdt van u. French, Dieu vous aime. And German, Gott liebt Sie.

  Agnostic bordering on atheist that I was, I chuckled and wondered if just to be safe I should be crossing myself in all three languages. I kept walking but then stopped on realizing, with a jolt, why I’d let Liesel return to Munich alone. Tosha Zeligman said Jacob fell to the courtyard hailing God’s love in his native Polish: Boża miłość. I turned back to the sign. In German, God loves is Gott liebt. I repeated the words until they blended and became something else: Gott liebt, Gott lieb, Gottlieb. Zeligman hadn’t called to God when he died. In his final moments, in the language of his childhood, he had bellowed the name of his killer.

  PART III

  twenty-six

  I went to Argentina.

  The Hong Kong project wouldn’t begin paying for several months, not until Alec and I began consulting with the architects in Stuttgart. The Bruges public works department could be counted on to pay slowly, weeks after I completed work that wouldn’t begin until February. The Argentines, however, promised payment on receipt of my already completed specs for their dive platform. Alec was the one who worried over balance sheets and cash flows, and in the end he prevailed upon me to go.

  “Look at it this way,” he said. “They fly you first class. You arrive one day, solidify our relationship with the generals, and leave the next day with a fat check. We pay off our bills, we pay ourselves for once, and all you sacrifice is a few days and some sleep.”

  He had a point, notwithstanding the reputation of the Argentine government. Our work out there, Alec assured me, was attached to a cultural program reappraising South America’s colonial past.

  I could live with that.

  The forced concentration of a transatlantic flight helped me to think matters through. Zeligman had a long life, and who knew what enemies he’d made along the way. What if he had been murdered? The possibility alarmed me, of course. But I couldn’t explain why I should become involved, especially if the Bruges police had investigated and found nothing suspicious. They couldn’t have known about Boża miłość because they knew nothing of Gottlieb. That much I could do, tell them on my return. Beyond that, I wasn’t so sure. I had no training as an investigator. I had no facts. I had wisps, not even strands, to hold onto. Gottlieb was a phantom who’d disappeared after the war. He was connected to Drütte, and Drütte was connected to Liesel’s father. It was all tantalizing, but none of it advanced my one certain goal of learning more about Isaac. Yet if pushed, I would have placed Zeligman, Isaac, Gottlieb, and Otto von Kraus in the same pot.

  What a strange soup it was.

  My training as an engineer had taught me to distinguish primary problems from secondary ones. Solve for the primary, said my professors, and the secondary have a way of sorting themselves out. Finding Isaac was my first responsibility. The other business I would leave alone or risk, through diluting my efforts, failure in everything. On the long flight to Buenos Aires, I therefore resolved to locate and interview the remaining eight witnesses. If they had died or were scattered beyond my powers to reach them, I would reconstruct Isaac’s wartime life in other ways. I knew the Nazis had imprisoned him at Drütte. I would start there.

  CALL IT a bad habit, but when I travel to a new country, I tend to avoid well-worn tourist paths and search out spots favored by locals. For example, by that point in my life I’d visited London half a dozen times yet hadn’t seen Westminster Abbey or the Tower because I was too busy drinking ale in neighborhood pubs and wandering the ancient market squares. Wise or not, it’s the way I prefer to travel, and I had made it into an art. I would arrive and walk for hours, watching everything, eating the food from street vendors, not saying much. Then with questions gathered through the day, I’d chat up the locals and before long would stitch together a promising itinerary. My goal was to travel in a place, not dance through the brochures describing it.

  It wasn’t unusual, then, that on landing in Buenos Aires my radar would be tuned to the streets. I was well aware of Argentina’s troubles because of coverage in the European press. Two years before my visit, a military coup had ousted Isabel Perón, who according to the generals lacked the strength to defeat a leftist insurgency. Only a sustained campaign against the guerrillas and subversives of all stripes, many of them students, could save the nation.

  What followed was a reprise of Germany in 1933 in which thugs called for patriots to stand tall, then inflicted a murderous, traumatizing order upon their countrymen. On the particular Thursday I landed in Buenos Aires, a media storm had descended to cover the World Cup soccer tournament. The generals enjoyed the attention, yet they showed no interest in putting a gentler face on the junta. Just days before, the Argentine ambassador in Paris had insisted that the French citizens gone missing in Buenos Aires, including a pair of nuns, were terrorists who deserved their fates. Even with the international press in town, police continued to raid homes at night, throwing hoods over suspected troublemakers and hauling them off.

  When I cleared customs, I found a limousine driver holding a card with my name. We set off for my hotel, and I eased into my passable but rudimentary Spanish. It was all going well until I saw a large number of people walking down Avenida de Mayo. Police and army trucks had set up toward the end of the avenue, and I thought it strange that in a police state people would be walking toward a commotion.

  Something was up. I rolled down the window and could hear a woman chanting through a bullhorn, though I couldn’t make out the words.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  The answer, Plaza de Mayo, came in a dead monotone.

  I had time before my first meeting with Colonel Batista, my main contact with the Argentine government. “Let’s go,” I said.

  The driver didn’t slow and didn’t turn. He glanced in the rearview mirror. “My instructions are to take you to the hotel, Señor, then return for your meeting with General Perez. Colonel Batista will take you for a helicopter tour of the river, and the two of you and the general will dine this evening.”

  I told him I appreciated the plan, then repeated my request.

  At the next stoplight, he pulled on the emergency brake and turned to me. “Why there? At this hour, the plaza is filled with the madres. It’s no place for tourists. We should go to the hotel.”

  That settled it. “Let me get my bags from the trunk. I’ll walk to the plaza and take a taxi to the hotel—or directly to see Colonel Batista. I have the address. It’s no problem.”

  The man implored me. “I’ll have trouble if I don’t drop you at the hotel. Take a taxi from there. It would be better for me.”

  He was my age, dressed in the crisp uniform of his trade: black suit, white shirt, black cap, black shoes, black tie. Something dangerous, I knew, was brewing down the avenue. With my French passport, I could find out what it was and return to Paris unharmed. As an Argentine aiding my unscheduled stop, this driver might well be buried in his black suit. His fear was real. I was not ten minutes into my visit when I got my first bitter taste of Argentina.

  We drove to the hotel.

  It was a fabulous, ornate affair that rivaled the Peninsula Hotel of Hong Kong for opulence. I dropped my bags with a porter, leaving a card and advising him I’d register later. I climbed into the first taxi in the queue and gave my instructions. The driver was an unshaved man in a plaid, rumpled shirt. His cab smelled of stale sweat, and his only reaction to Plaza de Mayo was a raised eyebrow. Fifteen minutes later, he pulled to a curb and pointed east. “It’s the closest I’ll go. Three block
s that way. You can’t miss it.”

  I walked in the direction of the flashing lights, toward the sound of more chanting. It was late June, winter in Argentina, the air cool. The crowds grew dense near the plaza—which, I’d learned from an in-flight magazine, was the natural and fitting spot for any sort of protest, for it packed into one place Argentina’s symbols of power: the great cathedral, the Bank of Argentina, the security secretariat, City Hall, and the Presidential Palace.

  Walking slowed to a shuffle as the crowd backed up at a checkpoint that funneled people through metal detectors. Military police were snapping photographs, less nervous-making for me than for the locals, who had every reason to fear that government personnel would be attaching names to faces and opening files. Still, thousands came in support of the madres.

  The police presence was robust, both along the perimeter of the plaza and milling about the crowd itself. What are they looking for? I wondered. Subversives? I had no idea what a subversive looked like. I was surrounded by grandmothers holding the hands of schoolchildren, teenagers carrying books, old men walking their bicycles. To the generals, the entire country must have been suspect.

  I shuffled along with a few hundred others until I saw a procession of women, many of them carrying placards with images of younger men and women, circling the Pirámide de Mayo. This, perhaps, was the most potent symbol of Argentine independence, the obelisk celebrating the May revolution of 1810 that broke the nation free of European control. The protesters covered their hair with white kerchiefs and walked behind a hand-painted sign strung between poles. It read, “Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.”

  A woman was shouting into a bullhorn. “Tell us what has happened to our children. No matter what they’ve done, they deserve to be charged and tried. Let them face their accusers. Let their mothers visit with them in jail.” She passed the bullhorn. The next woman, older by thirty years, made the same plea: Give us news. And the next woman, and the next. Their children were disappearing. Years later, I learned that the generals had ordered the kidnapping, torture, and murder of two of the founding madres, along with a French nun.