I looked at him.
He shrugged. “Martin Cyngler. The name goes with my new address.”
She showed us into a breakfast room, a glass alcove that overlooked a garden. A number of other guests had already worked through a buffet of smoked meats, cheeses, and dense German rye breads.
“So Kraus walked free,” he said as we took our seats. “He returned to his mill and built an empire. The ten of us who saved him from the hangman got three thousand dollars apiece while he made hundreds of millions. Look,” he said, holding a hand over his plate. “What do you see?”
I looked.
“Tell me.”
“What do you mean? I see a hand.”
“Do you see these burnt spots? Last week, a doctor cut off two skin cancers. We were getting old, the ones who signed, and three of us grew bitter that we made Kraus wealthy and got next-to-nothing. They called a meeting to renegotiate with the corporation. There were eight living signers by that point. I told them it was a bad idea, that these people are vicious. The three insisted that Kraus Steel provide us with an annuity. Zeligman was the worst. He sent the letter, and a month later the killing began.”
Grossman piled cheese on a slice of bread and took a bite.
“Which was when you changed your name and moved.”
“Who wouldn’t? Well, that’s not true. They didn’t. I had a wife and family to protect. But so did they, the fools. They thought all the killing was over thirty years ago. Why should they have expected anyone to change? The Nazis didn’t go away because Germany lost the war.”
I thought of the Edelweiss Society in Buenos Aires. I thought of Schmidt. I watched Grossman. Thirty years gone, and the war smoldered.
“The man who’s coming for you calls himself Eckehart Nagel,” I said. “He was a guard at Drütte, which would connect him to Otto Kraus and his family.” I shuddered to think Anselm was capable of murder. Schmidt, on the other hand, must have been in direct contact with Nagel.
“His real name is Menard Gottlieb. He lives in Buenos Aires. He’s a doctor and will come to you, I believe, dressed as a deliveryman. He will try to administer a drug of some sort that will stop your heart. It will look like an arrhythmia killed you.”
“Clever,” said Grossman.
“Why’s that?”
“We were all fairly religious, and observant Jews don’t believe in autopsies. The body is not to be desecrated and must be buried quickly. So if it looked like a heart attack, everyone must accept it as a heart attack. They likely read up on Jewish burial practices. Gottlieb, you say?”
“Jacob Zeligman called out the name before he died.”
“Do you have a photo?”
I went to my room, where the photo Liesel had given me remained neatly pressed between the pages of the Kraus biography. I could have burned that book. I studied the picture and put a finger to Liesel’s face. To be born into this madness, fed lie after lie until she built her father into a hero. Someone would have to tell her. It wouldn’t be Anselm or Schmidt.
When I presented the photo to Grossman, he exploded from the table. The chair fell backwards. Plates scattered, the staff scrambled. “Vogt! Reinhard Vogt!” He was pointing at Franz Hofmann. Grossman rushed from the breakfast room, and I found him pacing in the garden.
“That man lives?”
Yes, he did. But if Vogt was Franz Hofmann, the living corpse kept on like a pet by the Kraus family, who was Viktor Schmidt?
“Vogt ran the SS guards. He was a monster.”
“Have you ever seen this one?” I pointed to Schmidt.
“No. Never. But this other one, maybe.”
I had made a grave mistake in denouncing Schmidt to Gustav Plannik. Schmidt was guilty of one murder that I knew of—in August 1978. He hadn’t served as a guard at Drütte, at least not as Reinhard Vogt. But he had founded a steel mill with Otto Kraus and, thirty years later, counted Vogt and Gottlieb as friends. Uncle Viktor ran with a murderous crowd. Still, he was not Plannik’s business. Not yet.
forty-three
“Perhaps I saw this Nagel or Gottlieb or whatever you call him. The Reichswerke was large. There were thousands of us and many guards. But Vogt? Everyone knew him. You trembled when you saw him. Tell me where he lives.” I hesitated.
“I could beat it out of you.”
I didn’t doubt it. “Vogt walks with a cane, now. He had a stroke.”
Grossman thought it over. “He despised infirmity. Tell me, is he bitter?” I nodded.
“Good. That will do for the moment.”
I explained how I had found him through the Zentrale Stelle. “Now that the court schedule in Hanover is published and you’re slated to appear, Nagel will find you, too. He doesn’t know yet what you look like. That’s your advantage. He’ll come to court to identify you on the day you give testimony against the magistrate from Celle. Then he’ll come after you.”
Grossman shook his head. “Zeligman and the others were greedy bastards. I have to run from my home and change my name because they decided Kraus could afford to pay them? Zeligman said he was doing it for my sake. Now he and the others are dead, and I could be, too. This war won’t let me go.”
“The police will be there to arrest him.” It was a promise I had no right to make.
“He must never learn where I live. I can’t allow it. He cannot follow me home, to my family.”
“He won’t.”
“Can you guarantee it?”
This was not possible.
“Then I’ll take care of the creature myself. Even if they arrest and convict him, why should he enjoy the luxury of a prison cell with three decent meals a day?”
“There are laws, Herr Grossman.”
He smiled. “You’re joking.”
I wasn’t.
“I’ll tell you something about laws,” he said. “When Hitler wanted to strip the Jews of civil rights, he passed the Nuremburg Laws. When he wanted to set the Jews apart as a despised race, he passed the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. When it came time to kill us, he legalized murder. So don’t speak to me of laws. Nagel does not deserve a warm bed and food, even in prison. I’ll make other arrangements for him. And for Vogt, in time.”
“The police will be looking for Nagel. Don’t you get mixed up in it.”
He laughed at me. “I’d say I already am!”
A car pulled into the lot adjacent to the garden, and a couple stepped out. They opened the rear doors and three children tumbled onto the asphalt. Americans.
“It’s beautiful, Mommy,” said the youngest, a girl. She was pointing to the flower boxes at each window of the inn. The family was black. They seemed like any other family on a tour of the mountains.
Grossman stared. “How is it possible,” he said under his breath, “that they should be allowed to sleep in the same beds as you and I? These schwarzes.”
The young receptionist stepped into the garden in her dirndl, a model Austrian hostess. “Mr. and Mrs. Patrick, welcome to Gnadenwald. We’ve been expecting you. Grüss Gott!”
forty-four
Who is truly innocent?
No course in my engineering studies could have prepared me for what I encountered that summer: torture and death, serial murders, a shameful historical fraud, and learning that both the Catholic Church and the Red Cross helped Nazis to escape justice. Worse, I discovered that America, moral beacon to the world, rewarded men who rose to prominence on the backs of slaves. Yet it was Grossman’s disgust with that family and my own disgust for the gypsy woman and her child that rang loudest in my ears.
I left Gnadenwald for Harlingen feeling as bruised inside as I was outside.
Alec welcomed me onto the barge with real alarm. “Henri, what the hell?”
I struggled up the ladder.
“You should have seen the other guy.”
“Really, what happened?”
Hillary Gospodarek joined us and winced when she saw me.
“All right, enough!
I wrecked my rental car. I hurt my ribs and jaw. I have two black eyes, and I actually feel worse than I look. But I’m here, so stop with the third degree. In fact, I don’t even know why I’m here.”
“Shall I tell him?” Alec slipped an arm around Gospodarek.
Behind them, the deck was empty, the sluice silent. The crane operator was nowhere to be seen. Even the dive shack was quiet. Light and plenty of noise spilled out onto the deck from the crew’s quarters. A farewell party, then. Alec was shutting down the barge.
“Hillary and I are getting married,” he announced. Before I could congratulate them, he added: “You know what my parents will say? She isn’t Chinese. But when she proposed, I couldn’t refuse.”
She elbowed him in the ribs.
I had seen it coming. I joked that forced seclusion on a barge at sea made Alec a more promising prospect then he’d appeared on dry land. “Try him out back home before you commit,” I advised her, “when you can compare him to a reasonable cross-section of adult males.”
She leaned in close to her fiancé. “Yes, well, he’s looking pretty good at the moment. Your Lutine dive isn’t, however. We’re done, Henri. I’ve catalogued everything of interest. Three gold bars, two handfuls of coins, and plenty of buttons and broken clay pipes. But no treasure to speak of. Time to pack up.”
Voices spilled from the crew’s hut. I pointed. “At least I can say goodbye and thank them.” Long rolling waves from the northwest lifted the barge. The weather was calm enough for the moment, but I had checked the reports in Harlingen before visiting and a major storm near Greenland had already overwhelmed two tankers. Worse, a low pressure system over the continent was pin-wheeling north, and forecasters were predicting the systems would join over the Dutch coast.
“ There’s something you’ll want to see,” Alec said.
We walked to the hut, and at last I felt as though I was getting my sea legs under me. As the barge heaved on the waves, I adjusted my step without a thought. I might have stayed the night had the coming weather looked reasonable.
“The Cruxhaven U-boat archive sent their guy out yesterday,” Alec continued. “He inspected the sub and confirmed its identity. He brought a copy of its final orders, issued on April 2, 1945. The commander was to run to the North Atlantic and interrupt sea traffic. After he fired all his torpedoes, he was to ram his sub into an American troop or supply ship and sink it. It was a suicide run, Henri. Germany had lost the war by that point. What a stupid sacrifice.”
“So what were they doing here? We’re a long way from the North Atlantic.”
“That’s just it,” he said.
We walked into the galley.
“No one knows. The diver from Cuxhaven confirmed what our guys saw. Two blasts from the inside of the sub, forward and aft, sank her. U-1158 wasn’t lost to antisubmarine warfare from the sea or air. Something happened on board. She shows all the signs of being scuttled, but that makes no sense because there are bones enough to account for an entire crew.”
The divers and the equipment operators on the barge were a friendly, hard-working lot who enjoyed a good-natured joke, often at my expense because of my seasickness. But they watched in silence as I joined them at the galley table. My battered appearance must have alarmed them. Who knew, maybe they respected me for surviving a fight.
But that wasn’t it.
On the table before me was a copy of the sub’s orders. In a folder beside it was the crew roster. I opened it and scanned a list of names. In a second folder was the officer roster. A thermos and a clean mug sat on the table. I poured myself a cup and sipped, looking from face to face to pay someone a compliment for an excellent brew. They were still staring, though, and it was only on opening the second roster that I understood why.
There, smiling from the page, was the U-boat’s handsome young captain, Nils Hauer. He looks familiar, a few had told Alec when they first viewed the documents. Some thought he looked like the man who had visited a few weeks earlier. Indeed he did, for Oberleutnant Hauer was a younger, more handsome version of Viktor Schmidt.
Alec was shaking his head. “You go hunting for gold and there’s no telling what you’ll dredge up.”
forty-five
The one quiet place in a storm is its center, and that’s where I went. Liesel shouted in alarm when I entered the sitting room of Löwenherz. She rushed to my side, and when we embraced I said, “Careful, twenty different parts of me hurt.” My voice was husky but returning.
“What happened?”
“Car accident. The hike is on? I told you I’d make it.”
We hadn’t seen or spoken with each other for a week, and my injuries hurt less when I stood beside her. I wanted nothing in this world more than to leave with Liesel and forget everything I’d discovered.
The children hung back and stared. Anselm, looking as if he were carrying a heavy load, approached and with real concern said: “What’s this? What happened to you?”
Theresa went for a medical kit. It seemed she was always going for a medical kit when I was around.
I tried making light of the injuries. “My rental car looks worse than I do. I don’t think it’s going to pull through. A truck ran a light.”
Schmidt poured himself a drink. He snapped his fingers and released Albert and Hermann to come sniff me. He appeared as sympathetic as anyone. “Thank God you’re well,” he said, clapping a hand to my shoulder. “You’re a resilient young man, Henri. Nine lives, eh?”
All I wanted was one life, with him out of it.
“We’re still set for the hike, I hope. I promised. I’m here.”
“Really,” said Liesel. “In your condition?” She made me sit and brought me a glass of wine.
What a sorry charade it was. A heavy grief was descending on this house. Despite the children’s laughter and all the blessings wealth had bestowed, the family must have felt it. Anselm, for one, looked stricken. The news from Bangladesh and Uganda had unleashed a storm of criticism. Fresh accounts of conditions at Kraus facilities began appearing in newspapers worldwide. With his haunted eyes, Anselm could have sat for a portrait by his beloved El Greco.
“You said nothing stops the annual hike. I’m fine, Liesel. I just look awful.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Schmidt. “Low tide’s at 6:11 this evening. You’ve arrived at exactly the right time.”
Friedrich approached, pointing at the bruise on my jaw and the yellowish-purple rings at my eyes. “Can I touch?”
A servant announced lunch.
After we ate, Liesel took me to her apartment for what she hoped would be a quick tumble in bed. But the moment I lay down, I fell asleep. When I woke, I found her head on my chest. I ran my fingers through her hair.
She felt me stir and said, “Henri, I love you.”
FRIEDRICH WAS the first one onto the mud. He squealed with delight as his feet sank to his ankles, and he promptly picked up a globful and smeared it over his legs. “Look at me!” he cried. For once he couldn’t be a Stuka. The mud wouldn’t let him move that fast or nimbly.
Liesel insisted I hike beside her. It was Anselm’s turn to guide the group this year, but he handed the honor to his sister. “Not this time,” he said, looking nothing like the buoyant, assured man I’d met that first night on Terschelling. “I’ve been making decisions every hour of every day for the past month. For once, I want to follow. You guide us, Liesel.”
She noted the time and stated for all to hear that the tide would turn at 7:10. We’d need to be headed off the flats by 6:30. Her goal, once again, was to go far enough out to lose sight of land. She took a bearing on her compass. She asked that I do the same with the one she’d given me.
We were off.
Even the dour, gray-skinned Franz Hofmann, the estimable Reinhard Vogt, made an effort to join us on the flats. But at the verge of the seabed, where the concrete landing gave way to mud, he poked his cane in and decided to wait for our safe return. “I’ll count you off when you leave and
when you return,” he said.
The children wore life preservers, which protected against falling into the tidal creeks, something I’d done on my hike with Liesel. The dogs didn’t understand the mess of it all. They whined, but at Schmidt’s urging they followed him onto the seabed. The children were soon flinging mud at each other, and no one spoke a word to stop them.
“We let them run wild out here,” said Liesel, walking beside me, reaching for my hand. “You know, every other spot on earth has its rules. They must do this, they can’t do that. As long as they stay safe out here, we let them do whatever. There should be at least one spot where you’re totally free.”
Schmidt walked ahead with the dogs.
We all struggled with the mud, the dogs especially. Hermann and Albert sank to their chests at times, but they pushed on and struggled at Schmidt’s urging. Ten minutes into the hike, we were all caked with mud.
That was when I told Liesel I loved her.
She stopped. “If you’re saying so because I did, that wouldn’t be good.”
Schmidt was ahead of us; Anselm, Theresa and the children, behind.
“I’m very sure I mean it,” I said.
“And you waited until now because—”
“Because I could have died in the accident; and when I realized that, what made me saddest was the thought of losing a chance to spend time with you. I didn’t have a chance to say so. We went to your room, I fell asleep, I woke, and you beat me to it. I wished I had told you first. Does it matter?”
We kissed. I took a handful of her hair and brought it to my face. I inhaled and closed my eyes to remember her, this magnificent woman who chose the wrong father. I had come to Löwenherz to do a nasty but necessary job, and I doubted she would want me when it was over. I held her close. We lost our balance and tumbled onto the mud, a soft landing. The children pointed and laughed. Anselm and Theresa walked by, holding hands.
“Shimmering birch,” I said, looking into her eyes. “I meant it.”
She took a handful of mud and rubbed it on my swollen jaw. “It helps, you know. The fishermen swear by it.” She laughed. “Not even clay. You’re my man of mud. That’s Henri.” There we were, nothing but seabed and sky and each other, and I wondered if a man had ever been so happy and so miserable in the same moment.
The Tenth Witness Page 24
