by Nele Neuhaus
“That clears that up.” Henning took a glass from the shelf and poured himself some water. “Now bring me up to speed on the latest developments.”
Bodenstein and Pia took turns relating the events of the past twenty-four hours.
“We definitely need proof of what happened on January sixteenth, 1945,” Pia concluded. “Otherwise, we can forget about a murder charge against Vera Kaltensee. On the other hand, she will try to bury us under legal proceedings and complaints. And no court in the world would convict her on the basis of Auguste Nowak’s testimony. In the end, she would simply claim that she did not personally fire any shots. Besides, we don’t know where the diaries are, and Ritter hasn’t surfaced yet.”
“Vera and Elard Kaltensee have disappeared, as well as Auguste Nowak,” Bodenstein added. With effort, he stifled a yawn and glanced at the clock.
“If you fly to Poland tomorrow morning, please leave your service weapon here,” he told Pia. “Not that there won’t be other difficulties.”
“Check.” Pia nodded. Unlike her boss, she was wide awake. Bodenstein’s cell phone rang. He took the call as Pia put the dirty plates in the dishwasher.
“A female skeleton has been found on the grounds of Mühlenhof,” he said in a weary voice once the call had ended. “And our Swiss colleagues called. Vera Kaltensee is not at either of her houses, not in Zürich or in Ticino.”
“I hope it’s not too late,” said Pia. “I’d give anything to bring her to trial.”
Bodenstein got up from his chair.
“I’m going home,” he said. “Tomorrow is another day.”
“Wait and I’ll close the gate behind you.” Pia followed him out, accompanied by her four dogs, who’d been waiting by the front door for the signal for their late-night walk. Bodenstein stopped by his car.
“What are you going to tell Engel tomorrow when she wants to know where I am?” Pia asked. She had a bad feeling that Bodenstein was still on the brink of being suspended.
“I’ll think of something,” he said with a shrug. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Just say that I simply got on a plane.”
Bodenstein looked at her for a moment, then shook his head.
“I know you mean well, but I’m not going to do that. Whatever you do, you’ll be doing it with my full backing. I’m your boss, after all.”
They stood there looking at each other in the floodlit courtyard.
“Take care of yourself,” said Bodenstein in a hoarse voice. “I really don’t know what I’d do without you, Pia.”
It was the first time he’d ever called her by her first name. Pia didn’t know quite what to think of it, but something had changed between them in the past couple of weeks. Bodenstein was no longer keeping his distance.
“Nothing’s going to happen to us,” she assured him. He opened the car door but didn’t get in.
“The conflicts over those investigations are not the only things between Nicola Engel and me,” he finally admitted. “We met in law school in Hamburg and were together for two years. Until Cosima crossed my path.”
Pia was holding her breath. Where had this sudden need to confide in her come from?
“Nicola never forgave me for breaking up with her and marrying Cosima only three months later.” He grimaced. “She’s still holding a grudge. Idiot that I am, I’ve now given her another chance to score against me.”
Pia understood for the first time what her boss feared most.
“You mean she might tell your wife about the … uh … incident?”
Bodenstein heaved a sigh and nodded.
“Then tell her yourself what happened, before she finds out from Engel,” Pia advised him. “You do have the lab results as proof that the Kaltensee woman lured you into a trap. Your wife will understand; I’m sure she will.”
“I’m not,” replied Bodenstein, climbing into his car. “So, take good care of yourself. Don’t take any unnecessary risks. And check in regularly.”
“I will,” Pia promised, and waved as he drove away.
* * *
Bodenstein was sitting at his laptop, in which he had shoved a copy of the CD-ROM with the manuscript of the biography of Vera Kaltensee. He was trying to concentrate. Half a pack of aspirin hadn’t done anything to alleviate his pounding headache. The text swam before his eyes, and his thoughts were somewhere else entirely. He had lied when he’d told Cosima earlier that he had to read the manuscript before he went to bed because it was important to his investigations. She had believed him without question. After wasting two hours, he was now deliberating whether he should tell her about the incident, and, if so, how to begin. He wasn’t used to keeping secrets from Cosima, and he felt utterly miserable about it. With each minute that passed, his courage sank. What if she didn’t believe him? What if in the future she would always distrust him whenever he was away for any length of time?
“Damn it,” he muttered, and closed the laptop. He turned off the desk lamp and went upstairs with a heavy heart. Cosima was in bed, reading. When he came in, she put the book aside and looked at him. How beautiful she was, how familiar the sight of her! It was impossible to keep such a secret from her. Mutely, he looked at his wife, searching for the right words.
“Cosi,” he said, trembling inside, his mouth as dry as paper, “I … I … have to tell you something.…”
“Well, it’s about time,” she said.
He stared at her as if struck by lightning. To his surprise, she was even smiling a little.
“Your guilty conscience is written all over your face, my dear,” Cosima said. “I just hope it’s nothing to do with your old flame Nicola. Now tell me.”
Friday, May 11
Siegbert Kaltensee was sitting at his desk in the workroom of his house, staring at the telephone as his daughter cried her eyes out in the kitchen. It was now thirty-six hours since Thomas Ritter had vanished, as if swallowed up by the earth, and in her despair Marleen had seen no option but to confide in her father. Siegbert hadn’t let on that he already knew about everything. She had begged him for help, but there was nothing he could do. In the meantime, he had learned that he wasn’t the one pulling the strings as he had assumed the whole time. The police, using the ground-penetrating radar at Mühlenhof, had found the remains of a human skeleton. Siegbert couldn’t get what the police had told him out of his head—that he was Robert’s biological father, and that Vera had killed the maid Danuta shortly after her child was born. Could that be true? And where was his mother anyway? He had talked to her around noon. She had decided to have Moormann drive her to the house in Ticino, but so far, she hadn’t called him back. Siegbert Kaltensee grabbed the phone and dialed his sister’s number. Jutta hadn’t wasted any thought on her mother or on Elard, who had also disappeared, like Ritter. Her only concern was for her career, which might be damaged by all these unfortunate events.
“Have you even looked at the clock?” she asked him indignantly.
“Where is Ritter?” Siegbert asked his sister. “What have you done with him?”
“Me? Are you nuts?” she said, incensed. “You were the one who latched onto Mother’s suggestion so eagerly.”
“I had him taken out of circulation for a while, that’s all. Have you heard anything from Mother?”
Siegbert admired and adored his mother. All his life he had fought for her love and recognition, and he had always complied with her orders and requests, even when he wasn’t convinced he was doing the right thing. She was his mother, the great Vera Kaltensee, and if he obeyed her, then she would one day love him the way she loved Jutta. Or Elard, who had burrowed his way in at Mühlenhof like a tick.
“No,” said Jutta. “I would have told you already if I had.”
“She must have arrived long ago. Moormann hasn’t called from his cell phone, either. I’m worried.”
“Listen, Berti,” said Jutta, lowering her voice. “Mother will be all right. Don’t believe the crap the cops are telling you that Elard i
s after her. You know Elard. He’s probably flown the coop, that coward, along with his little friend.”
“Who’s that?” Siegbert asked, sounding worried.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know.” Jutta gave a venomous laugh. “Lately, Elard has been inclined toward pretty young men.”
“What nonsense!” Siegbert despised his older brother with all his heart, but Jutta was really going too far.
“How typical.” Jutta’s voice turned cold. “I wonder whether all of you are doing this just to hurt me. Mother and her Nazi pals, a gay brother, and a skeleton at Mühlenhof! If the press gets wind of this, I’ve had it.”
Bewildered, Siegbert Kaltensee said nothing. In the past few days, he’d gotten to know a whole different side of his sister, one that had been utterly foreign to him before. He now realized that everything she did was determined by an ironclad calculation. She didn’t give a shit where Vera was hiding, whether Elard had shot three people, or whose skeleton the police had found—as long as they didn’t connect her name with any of it.
“Now don’t lose your nerve, you hear me, Berti?” she cajoled him. “It doesn’t matter what the police ask us about; we don’t know a thing. And that’s actually the truth. Mother has made mistakes in her life, and I’m certainly not going to take the blame for them.”
“You don’t give a damn what’s happening to her,” Siegbert asserted tonelessly. “But she’s still our mother, after all.…”
“Don’t get sentimental on me, Berti. Mother is an old woman who has lived her life. I still have plans, and I won’t let them be ruined by her. Or by Elard or Thomas or—”
Siegbert Kaltensee hung up. He heard in the distance his daughter sobbing and the soothing voice of his wife. He stared unseeing into space. Where did these doubts come from all of a sudden? Doubts that had been gnawing at him ever since the conversation with those two Kripo officers? He had been forced to do what he could to protect the family. Family was everything, after all—that was his mother’s credo. Then why did he suddenly feel that she’d left him in the lurch? Why didn’t she call?
* * *
Miriam was waiting for them, as agreed, at eight-thirty in front of the regional airport near Szczytno-Szymany. It was the only airport in the region of Warmia-Masuria, and its days were numbered anyway. The flight in the surprisingly comfortable Cessna CE-500 Citation had taken just four hours, the passport control three minutes.
“Ah, Dr. Frankenstein.” Miriam offered her hand to Henning Kirchhoff after she had warmly hugged Pia. “Welcome to Poland.”
“You are really unforgiving,” said Henning, grinning. Miriam took off her sunglasses and scrutinized him; then she grinned, too.
“I have the memory of an elephant,” she told him, grabbing one of Kirchhoff’s bags. “Come with me. It’s about a hundred-kilometer drive to Doba.”
In a rented Ford Focus, they buzzed along the highways, heading northeast into the heart of Masuria. Miriam and Henning talked about the castle ruins and speculated about whether the cellar would even be accessible after sixty-plus years of neglect. Pia sat in the backseat, listening with one ear and staring silently out the window. She had no connection to this countryside and its tumultuous and unhappy past. For her, East Prussia had been merely an abstract concept, nothing more than a recurrent theme of TV documentaries and theatrical films. Her family had never had to flee or suffer expulsion. Looking out the windows in the misty light of morning, she saw hills, woods, and fields flitting by, while cottony swaths of fog still hovered over the many large and small lakes. The haze only gradually dissolved under the warm rays of the May sun.
Pia’s thoughts shifted to Bodenstein. The trust he had shown her moved her deeply. He didn’t have to confide in her, but he obviously wanted to be honest with her. Nicola Engel had it in for Bodenstein for purely personal reasons; it was unfair, but there was no changing the situation. The only way to help him was to make no mistakes here today. At Mragowo, Miriam turned onto a narrow, rougher road that led them past sleepy farms and little villages as they drove along idyllic old tree-lined avenues. They kept catching glimpses of blue water through the dark woods. Masuria, Miriam had explained, was the largest lake plateau in Europe. A while later, they drove past Lake Kisajno and through the tiny hamlets of Kamionki and Doba. Pia called Bodenstein on her cell.
“We’re almost there,” she reported. “What’s the mood like at headquarters?”
“So far so good,” he said. “I haven’t seen Dr. Engel. Anyway, Auguste Nowak hasn’t turned up yet, and the others are also … afford … morning … talk … with Améry … with … nothing … got … they…”
“Boss, I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up,” Pia shouted; then she lost the connection completely. In huge tracts of the former East Prussia, there weren’t many cellular towers, and the mobile phone network was erratic, as Miriam had already told them. “Crap,” Pia said.
Miriam stopped at a crossroads and turned right onto a paved road. They drove a few hundred yards through a sunlit deciduous forest, and the car bumped from one pothole to the next, so that Pia whacked her head against the side window.
“Wait till you see this,” said Miriam. “It’s going to take your breath away.”
Pia leaned forward and peered between the seat backs as they left the woods behind. To the right lay Doben Lake, dark and glittering; to the left stretched an expanse of hills, broken here and there by groves of trees and woods.
“See those ruins on the left? That used to be the village of Lauenburg,” Miriam explained. “Almost all the residents worked at the estate. There was a school, a store, a church, and, naturally, a village pub.”
Almost all that was left of Lauenburg was the church. Perched atop the half-collapsed spire of red brick was a stork’s nest.
“They’ve used the village as a sort of quarry,” Miriam said. “Most of the working quarters at the estate and even the walls surrounding the castle have vanished the same way. On the other hand, much of the castle itself is still standing.”
From a distance, they could see the symmetry of the manor courtyard: the castle in the middle right on the shore of the lake, surrounded in a U- shape by buildings that were mostly gone, only their foundations shimmering through shining green foliage. In the past, a carefully laid out avenue of trees must have led to the main portal of the castle, but now trees grew in wild abandon in places where they surely never would have been permitted before.
Miriam steered through the arch of the portal, which, unlike the rest of the wall, was still intact, and pulled up in front of the castle ruin. Pia looked around. Birds twittered in the branches of the mighty trees. Seen from up close, the remains of the former manor looked depressing. The brilliant green turned out to be weeds and underbrush, stinging nettles grew a yard high, and ivy covered almost every free surface. What a feeling it must have been for Auguste Nowak to come back here after sixty years of repressed memories and find the site of both the happiest and most horrible moments in her life in this condition. Maybe she had decided on this very spot to take revenge for what they had done to her.
“If only these walls could talk,” murmured Pia as she trudged across the sprawling area that after decades of neglect had been almost completely reconquered by nature. Beyond the fire-blackened ruins of the castle, the lake glistened silver. High above in the deep blue sky, storks were flying, and on the shattered steps of the castle, a fat cat was lolling in the sun, probably feeling like the legitimate heir to the Zeydlitz-Lauenburgs. In Pia’s mind, she could see the manor as it once must have looked. The castle in the middle, steward’s house, smithy, stables. All at once, she could understand why the people who were driven out of this beautiful place were to this day unable to accept the final loss of their homeland.
“Pia!” Henning shouted impatiently. “Could you come over here?”
“All right, I’m coming.” She turned around. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a flash of light. Sunlight glinting of
f metal. Curious, she rounded a pile of rubble overgrown by nettles and stopped abruptly. Fright raced through her all the way to her fingertips. Before her stood the black Maybach limousine belonging to Vera Kaltensee, dusty from a long drive, the windshield sticky with insects. Pia put her hand on the hood. It was still warm.
* * *
“Katharina Ehrmann was the only friend Jutta Kaltensee ever had. She spent her vacations working in the office with Eugen Kaltensee, and he liked her.” Ostermann looked tired from lack of sleep, which was no wonder, because he’d read through Ritter’s entire manuscript the night before. “On the evening that Jutta’s father died, she was at Mühlenhof and accidentally became an eyewitness to the murder.”
“Murder? Really?” Bodenstein asked to make sure. When Ostermann came in, he had been sitting at his desk and looking through the files for the report that Kathrin Fachinger had written after her conversation with Anita Frings’s neighbor from Taunusblick. To his infinite relief, Cosima had not made a scene last night, and she believed that he had been innocently lured into a trap. She had also noticed when she had lunch with Jutta Kaltensee that the purported image campaign was only a lame pretext. Bodenstein could cope with everything else, even Nicola’s attempts to get rid of him. Viewed soberly, allowing Pia Kirchhoff to travel to Poland against Nicola Engel’s express orders was, in his present position, tantamount to career suicide. But in the cellar of the castle in Masuria lay the key to the events that had saddled them with five bodies in eight days. Bodenstein fervently hoped that Pia’s efforts would be crowned with success; otherwise, he might as well pack up his things.
“Yes, it was undoubtedly murder,” Ostermann now replied. “Wait a second, I’ll read you the passage from the manuscript: “‘Vera shoved him down the steep cellar stairs and then ran down as if she wanted to help him. She knelt down next to him, put her ear to his lips, and, when she noticed that he was still breathing, smothered him with his own sweater. Then she went upstairs, unmoved, and sat down at her desk. The body wasn’t discovered until two hours later. A suspect was soon identified: After a vehement fight with his stepfather, Elard had left Mühlenhof in the late afternoon in a great hurry, and took the night train back to Paris that same evening.’”
