A Song of Shadows

by John Connolly

  He didn’t even try to disguise his sarcasm. No trace of Bernhard Hummel remained in the house, as far as he could see, not unless the first floor was a trap to fool the unwary and Theodora had preserved the second as a kind of mausoleum, all set to receive her father’s ashes.

  ‘What do you want, Pastor?’ asked Theodora.

  ‘To ask what you knew of your father’s past.’

  ‘I knew enough.’

  ‘Enough?’

  ‘Enough not to speak of it – to him, or to others.’

  So there would be no games, Werner realized. Good.

  ‘I take it that you wish me to conduct the funeral service,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure that’s what my father would have wanted.’

  ‘We have to be careful at such times,’ said Werner. ‘We are consigning a soul to its maker. There is, in the view of some, the requirement of an honest accounting. We cannot speak ill of the dead, yet we cannot whitewash their failings either. But perhaps, in this case, a private acknowledgement of them between ourselves may suffice.’

  ‘My father was a Nazi war criminal.’

  ‘So it might be said.’

  ‘He was helped to make a home in the United States by your father.’

  ‘My father, like yours, made mistakes in his life.’

  ‘But that was not one of them.’

  ‘I couldn’t comment.’

  ‘I thought we were acknowledging sins.’

  ‘We are: the sins of Bernhard Hummel. We need not trouble ourselves with those of others.’

  Theodora wet her lips. They were too large for her face, the lower lip in particular. It hung, pendulous and dark-blooded, like a slug.

  ‘I have a reputation to protect,’ she said.

  ‘I hear that you may be about to become principal of your school. Congratulations.’

  ‘I’ve worked hard for it.’

  ‘I’m sure that you have.’

  She rose and went to kitchen. When she returned, she was holding an envelope. She handed it to Werner. It was addressed to Bernhard Hummel. The letter inside bore the seal of the Justice Department, and came from the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section at the Main Justice Building, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. Werner read it through. It requested that Bernhard Hummel present himself for interview over possible irregularities in his original immigration paperwork, and advised him to make contact with the section to arrange a suitable time and venue for a discussion of the same. It was signed by Marie Demers.

  ‘When did you receive it?’ asked Werner.

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Unfortunate timing – for the Justice Department.’

  ‘My father had not had contact with Thomas Engel for many years,’ said Theodora. ‘They had a falling out over money, and my father refused to speak to him again.’

  ‘Did someone call to warn you that Engel might be talking?’

  ‘Ambros Riese. He and my father were once close. Riese hates Engel.’

  ‘Have you seen the news today?’ Werner asked.

  ‘No, I have not.’

  ‘It appears that Thomas Engel died of a stroke early this morning.’

  ‘Should I pretend to be sorry?’

  ‘Not on my account, or even his. I doubt that he would have wished it.’

  Werner folded the letter, replaced it in the envelope and returned it to Theodora.

  ‘Your father suffered from dementia in his later years,’ he said carefully.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Sometimes such people may not know to whom they are talking, or speak of the past as a thing of the present. Was your father such a man?’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘Was he careless?’

  ‘He was very paranoid, even before he entered Golden Hills,’ said Theodora. ‘I think his illness reinforced that paranoia, but I also did my best to make sure that he did not speak out of turn. I drummed the potential consequences into him. I think he was afraid to speak to those whom he did not know.’

  ‘The Justice Department may be in touch with you again when they learn of his passing.’

  ‘I don’t see what help I can be to them.’

  ‘Your father did not keep records, or old documents, that might interest them?’

  ‘I threw out boxes of his old junk when he left for Golden Hills. I don’t think I even looked at what was inside. Anything that remains, I may burn tonight. I feel a chill in my bones.’

  Werner stood. He was satisfied.

  ‘Then your father’s passing was, I think, fortunate,’ he said. ‘A man should not have to live in such a state of distress.’

  Theodora stood too. She was the same height as Werner, and could look him in the eye. She handed him his coat, and helped him put it on.

  ‘They are investigating my father’s death at the home,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘An autopsy is to be carried out. I think it’s standard procedure – not that there should be any cause for concern. His death was an accident.’

  ‘Yes. He choked, I believe.’

  ‘On grapes,’ said Theodora. ‘That’s the only odd thing about it.’

  ‘Odd?’ asked Werner. ‘How?’

  Theodora smiled.

  ‘My father didn’t like grapes.’

  That evening, Marcus Baulman poured himself a large celebratory snifter of brandy, and drank it while watching German soccer from the Bundesliga on his computer. Hummel was dead, and now Engel, too, was gone. Had he been a religious man, it might have been enough to make him send up a prayer of thanksgiving. Instead he watched Bayern Munich score again against Kaiserslautern, and was glad that he seemed assured of living out his final days in this great country.

  But as is often the case with those who manage to escape punishment for an offense of which they are actually guilty, Baulman’s relief was tempered by rage at his persecutors. Baulman had lived a blameless life after the war. He was a loving husband, a good citizen. He paid his taxes. He contributed time and money to charitable works. But the Justice Department dogs smelled on him only the blood of seven decades before; for them, Baulman’s actions during the war defined him. Yet if he was the monster that they claimed, why had he not continued to kill when the war was over? He had never even considered hurting a child since the end of the conflict. The very thought was repugnant to him. The war had transformed him, but not utterly, and not permanently. Instead, the circumstances in which he had found himself caused aspects of his personality to metastasize into strange forms, and a man who had once thought of becoming a vet instead found himself euthanizing children, just as it was said that the devotional aspect of Klaus Barbie’s personality might have seen him become a priest had the war not intervened. Baulman was not Reynard Kraus: Kraus had vanished with the surrender, along with all that he represented, and all the sins he had committed.

  Marcus Baulman was a blameless man.

  Detective Gordon Walsh arrived at Golden Hills shortly after eight, when many of the home’s residents were already asleep. The call had come just an hour or two before from Marie Demers, asking for a favor. He supposed that he could have done it over the phone, but he preferred to take care of these matters in person. Besides, he had loved war movies as a child, and the thought of hunting Nazis appealed to him. He identified himself over the intercom, showed his badge to the orderly on duty, and asked to see the visitors’ book for the day of Bernhard Hummel’s death. He went through the list of names, and asked if there was a photocopier he could use. He was shown to a small office, where he copied the relevant pages. None of the names meant anything to him, but they might mean more to Demers, he supposed.

  Walsh was about to leave when a thought struck him. He turned back to the orderly, who had already returned to his puzzle book.

  ‘Does every visitor have to sign in?’ Walsh asked.

  ‘Physicians who make regular visits usually don’t get asked,’ said the orderly. ‘Priests and clergy too
, I guess, once we get to know them. Basically, if you’ve been coming here for a while, and you’re trusted, we let it slide.’

  ‘Do you know who was on desk duty that day?’

  ‘I can check.’

  The orderly came back with the names of three staff members, one of whom happened to working elsewhere in Golden Hills that evening. Walsh spoke to him in person, and called the other two from his cellphone in the lobby.

  When he was done, he had added four more names to the list of visitors.

  64

  A light burned in the detective’s house, but Werner could see no sign of Parker. With Engel and Hummel dead, and Theodora Hummel revealed to be her father’s child in her capacity for self-preservation, Werner felt that they were almost out of danger.

  Baulman still concerned Werner, but with Engel’s death the threat to the old man had receded. Of course, there might be more inconsistencies in Baulman’s paperwork if they dug deeply enough, but it would take them a long time to assemble a workable case against him, if they could manage it at all. They still had allies in Germany, the last vestiges of the Kamaradenwerk, and files were easily lost, even in this computerized age. It would be less complicated than getting rid of Baulman, especially with the Justice Department still circling him, at whatever the distance. But if it came down to it, he would find a way to remove Baulman from the picture, one that wouldn’t draw too much attention. It would have been difficult in the past because Baulman was the amateur accountant, the Geldscheisser, but now the money was reduced to small change at the bottom of the jar, and Baulman’s importance to them had vanished with it.

  That left only the detective. His continued presence in Boreas was unfortunate, and his visit to Werner’s house had left the pastor deeply disturbed. He had decided against moving Oran Wilde’s body. It was too risky. Maybe once all this was over …

  Werner knew that he had to kill the detective. It wasn’t just that Parker would keep looking, for that alone would not necessarily bring him down upon them. No, it was the fact that he had a kind of luck. It was a function of his perseverance, Werner supposed. What was that old Woody Allen line: eighty percent of success is showing up? Well, Parker showed up, and once established, he didn’t go away. If a man had the patience to wait and watch for long enough, something of the world would reveal itself to him, especially if he already knew what he was hoping to see.

  But Werner also admitted to himself that he wanted to kill the detective. Had he been alive to see it, Steiger might have acknowledged that he was mistaken, at least to a degree, about Werner’s nature. Killing might not have given him pleasure, but it did endow him with a sense of vocation, beyond paying lip service to a god in whom he often struggled to believe.

  A figure appeared on the beach, emerging from the shadows to the north. It was the detective. He was wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt, with a hooded top hanging open over it. Werner had heard that the detective walked regularly on the beach as part of his efforts at rehabilitation. It appeared that he had resumed this habit. Werner checked the time. Was the detective a man of routine? Possibly, but Werner decided to allow an hour either side for safety.

  A day or two, he thought. I will give it a day or two in the hope that fortune intervenes. If not, I’ll kill him.

  65

  Parker ate breakfast at Olesens the next morning before beginning a door-to-door canvass of stores and businesses on and off Main Street. When he was done, he drove west to the small town of Cawton, parked in the municipal lot, and took a window table at a coffee shop called Ma Baker’s, where the coffee was terrible and the pastries worse, but which gave him a clear view of a neat house with flowering planters on the windowsills and a car in the drive.

  After an hour, an elderly man appeared at the door of the house, holding a Weimaraner on a leash. Parker left the coffee shop, and intercepted him as he headed for a pedestrian access between two buildings that led down to a pebbled beach.

  ‘Mr Baulman?’ said Parker.

  ‘Yes?’

  The dog looked to its master for some clue as to how to behave toward the newcomer.

  ‘My name is Charlie Parker. I’m looking into the death of Ruth Winter.’

  Baulman barely reacted. He might even have been expecting Parker to appear, so unperturbed did he appear, and he did not give any of the answers that might have been anticipated in such a situation. He said only, ‘I can’t help you.’ Beside him, the dog stared up mournfully at the stranger who had interrupted the routine of their walk.

  Parker extended a card.

  ‘In case you think of anything.’

  Baulman took the card, tore it in two, and threw the pieces to the wind.

  ‘I told you: I can’t help you.’

  Parker watched the halves of his card blow away.

  ‘Well, thank you for your time,’ he said.

  Baulman continued on his walk. The sun was starting to set. Parker walked to his car and returned to Boreas to wait.

  66

  Cambion’s decline was accelerating. He drifted between consciousness and unconsciousness, and was not always able to identify those in the room with him, even though only Edmund and the woman attended him. He spoke to figures that were not present except as memories, and argued with gods that had no name. He was a being in absolute torment, his physical and psychological pain mingling until one became indistinguishable from the other, so that even dosed up on morphine he remained in a realm of confused agony.

  The only events to have roused him from his sufferings were those taking place far to the north in Boreas, Maine. During the hour or so each day when he was semi-cogent – Cambion tended to be more alert in the morning – he would ask Edmund to show him the newspapers on a laptop computer, the reports magnified to such a degree that just a sentence or two filled the screen. When even seeing these grew beyond him, the news stories were read aloud to him, though the space allotted to them grew smaller and smaller as progress in the investigation slowed, then stopped.

  That very afternoon, Edmund had heard Cambion – half-awake, half asleep – talking with one of his specters. This time, it was Earl Steiger.

  ‘You came up against the wrong man, Earl,’ Cambion was saying. ‘This one has the breath of God upon him. This one bleeds from the palms of his hands …’

  But now Cambion was silent. The bedroom stood at the back of the house, on the first floor. It had a single small window, which Edmund had nailed shut. The only ventilation came from a grating in a corner. The room stank, but it remained reasonably secure.

  Edmund could see that Cambion was already half gone from this world, with one foot in the beyond. It would not be long now. He sat by his master’s bed, and gently bathed his brow with a damp cloth. Cambion was no longer eating, but Edmund forced him to take water mixed with a little protein powder. Sometimes Cambion managed to keep it down.

  Edmund and the woman had fitted Cambion with a catheter. A plastic sheet placed on the bed made it easier to clean him when he soiled himself, and prevented the sheets and mattress from being ruined. It was Edmund who wiped him, and Edmund who fed him. The woman kept her distance unless it was absolutely necessary to approach him. Her hatred for Cambion added a further pollutant to the atmosphere of the room. For a time Edmund had wondered why she had even agreed to take him in. Initially he thought her need for money was so desperate that she could not bring herself to refuse, but he had come to recognize the pleasure she derived from bearing witness to Cambion’s final sufferings, a pleasure complicated still further by the memory of the love she once bore for him. In a terrible way, she now shared his torments.

  None of this was spoken aloud by Edmund. He was not mute: he had simply made a decision not to speak, for no words could describe what he had seen during his years with Cambion. He had not killed for him, but he had watched others do so, although in later years he had refused even to do this. He would transport Cambion to wherever he needed to go – an opulent bedroom, a quiet basem
ent, a disused garage – and leave him to his pleasures or, as his condition worsened, to live vicariously through the pleasures of others. Sometimes Edmund would still be able to hear what was happening, so he grew to be a connoisseur of noise-canceling headphones, which helped. He disliked listening to music to disguise the sound of suffering and dying, though. He found that the melodies became tainted by the knowledge of what they had been used to obscure. Slowly, surely, he began to speak less and less, until eventually he did not speak at all. He feared that if he tried to do so, the only sound to emerge would be a scream.

  Yet, like the woman who hovered in the background, waiting for this man to die, he had a kind of love for Cambion, and a deep loyalty. He loved him because it was too easy to hate him. He was loyal to him because there was so much to betray.

  Edmund used the cloth to wipe Cambion’s mouth. It came away with blood on it, and the water turned pink when he dropped the cloth in the bowl. He set it aside, found the balm, and used it to moisten Cambion’s dry lips. At no point did Cambion open his eyes.

  Edmund walked to the bathroom and emptied the bloody water down the sink, then refilled the bowl. His eyes itched. He suffered from lagophthalmos, a partial facial paralysis that prevented his eyelids from closing, depriving the eyes of effective lubrication. He tilted his head back and tipped some drops into them. His vision had just cleared when he heard a sound at the front door of the house – the squeak of the handle being tested.

  He put down the bowl, drew his gun, and moved into the hallway. Only a lamp burned there. He stayed very still, watching the door. The handle did not move. Still, he was certain of what he had heard.

  Then Cambion cried out in alarm.

  Edmund rushed to the bedroom. Cambion’s eyes were open, and one ruined hand was pointing toward the window.

  ‘Something there,’ said Cambion. ‘Something bad.’

  Edmund stepped carefully to the drapes, and pulled them away from the wall at one side. It gave him only a peripheral view, but it was enough.