The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  ‘Timo?’

  Timo, now slouched in the corner in the only other chair in the tiny office, looked up. ‘I want you to find out where Janus Zellweger lives.’

  Klauser waited until he heard the click of the door closing behind the lieutenant, then picked up the telephone and dialled the number of an old journalist friend who worked for the Argus der Presse press-cuttings agency – the company the ex-fascist politician Rolf Henne had run until his death in 1966.

  ‘Dieter?’

  ‘Klauser. I was hoping the long radio silence meant that you died.’ At the other end of the line Dieter Schwitters, a caustic man in his late fifties, held the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he flicked through the four international newspapers he had open on a wide table in front of him. Despite their love/hate relationship he was secretly pleased to have heard from the detective; he’d begun to worry that the rumours of an early retirement were true.

  ‘No, just some involuntary leave. You know how Engels is.’

  ‘The saviour of the canton? Klauser, you know this line is probably bugged, right?’

  ‘It was, but not any longer. A little trick I learned while on leave, danke Engels.’

  ‘So what do you want?’ Dieter asked, after checking that the corridor outside his office was empty.

  ‘Am I that transparent?’

  ‘You’re like a needy woman: whatever I give you you want more.’

  ‘No woman has ever wanted you, Dieter, and certainly not for seconds. Not even your wife.’

  ‘That’s true, but at least I have a functional relationship.’

  ‘And I have an arrangement – I pay and she puts out, no confusion and no delusion and guess what? I am the happier man.’

  ‘Okay, you win. So what’s the deal?’

  ‘I need a roll-call of Rolf Henne’s merry band of men – around 1936.’

  ‘Whoa, that’s stepping on sacred ground.’

  ‘Come on, the boss has been dead for fourteen years.’

  ‘I like my job. I have a pension, insurance, a good three weeks off for Christmas…’

  ‘And you have a fatal weakness for moral crusaders like me.’

  ‘Is that what it’s called? All right, I’ll do it. Am I looking for any particular name?’

  ‘Two names actually – possibly linked. Christoph von Holindt and Janus Zellweger.’

  He heard Dieter whistle in disbelief.

  ‘Why don’t you throw in the president of the Swiss Confederation while you’re at it?’

  ‘Do you think I should?’ Klauser was serious.

  ‘I was joking. That’s what I’ve always loved about you: your lack of ambition. When do you need the information by?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  Klauser put the receiver down, then picked up the profile of the arms manufacturer and the list of Nazi artefacts and took them over to the photocopy machine in the corner. He’d made his mind up – he would pull Matthias von Holindt further into the investigation. Why he trusted him he couldn’t exactly explain. It was more than an instinct; it was a certainty: the recognition that Matthias was his kind of animal.

  He slipped the photocopies into an envelope and addressed it to Matthias von Holindt’s laboratory with the physicist’s name clearly at the top – better sending it there than to the house in Küsnacht. Klauser glanced up at the clock. He had time to get to the post office before it shut.

  Matthias stood in the centre of Helen’s office. It was late – she’d stayed back after getting his call. The physicist had sounded distressed, genuinely so, and she’d had no choice but to postpone the trip home.

  ‘Are you okay? I have some bourbon somewhere…’ she said. Matthias looked pale, drawn. She began rummaging through the drawers of her desk.

  ‘I met my mother for the first time today.’

  She looked up. ‘Your real mother?’

  ‘I drove out toward the airport, to the Sinti camp there.’ He collapsed into the leather armchair she kept by the window, the lamplight transforming the planes of his face into a sculptured prism. ‘It was extraordinary, the bizarre sensation of feeling familiar yet entirely alien at the same time. But you know, when she embraced me, a part of me recognised her, a deep, almost primordial part of me that I think I’ve been repressing for decades. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?’

  Outside the light had faded and the room was dark around the oasis of light falling on Matthias.

  ‘No, not at all.’ And despite her reservations, she found herself feeling protective towards this socially awkward man, who, she now recognised, was a loner like her. ‘I can’t imagine what you must feel: elation, confusion, some sadness.’ Helen poured two glasses of bourbon, then placed one on the side table beside the armchair. Matthias didn’t touch it.

  ‘Do we ever know who we really are?’ he said. It was a rhetorical question she didn’t answer, and sensing he just needed to be listened to she moved closer, leaning against the desk opposite him.

  ‘There is something about my background I haven’t told you,’ he said, his voice hanging in the space between them like smoke. ‘It’s strange. I hardly know you and yet it is easier to talk to you than anyone else. I trust you; maybe that’s foolish —’

  ‘Maybe it’s because I can be a bridge between you…’

  ‘And my new family?’ He looked up at her. ‘Tell me about what happened to the Romanes in the war. I need to know about their holocaust.’

  She studied him: the deep-set eyes now eclipsed in shadow, impossible to read, the high planes of his cheekbones catching the light, the slightly crooked ridge of his nose. As always when she was about to speak of the holocaust, a faint tension gripped her.

  ‘Over Europe the different groups of Roma experienced different persecutions – but they all suffered under the Nazis’ race laws and hundreds of thousands were interred under the category of work-shy. The rounding up of the German Sinti began as early as 1933; initially they were used as slave labour to boost the productivity of the Nazi war machine, but then, as Hitler had begun to occupy the rest of Europe, they were sent to the same concentration camps as the Jews – Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen – among others. The rounding up and capture of the Rom in the occupied countries followed, many of which had a high population of Roma – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France… the Axis countries allied with the Nazis had their own methods. In Romania, your Kalderash family would have been rounded up by the Ukrainian fascist army then marched for days to a camp – I know that they marched thousands out of Romania into Ukraine in the middle of winter, to a camp that had mud huts for a couple of hundred. There were many who froze on the first night trying to claw their way in through the roofs, doors, windows. A core made it through starvation, slave labour and rape. Many were murdered. Some were forced to resort to cannibalism – a living hell. But when the Nazis marched into the Soviet Union they didn’t bother shipping gypsies or Jews back to the camps. They were shot on site.

  ‘In the German concentration camps the gypsies had slightly different treatment from the Jews; they had the honour of being liquidated a little later, thanks to Dr Mengele, who had a perverse belief that the Rom were Aryan like the Nazis. He personally tortured and dismembered hundreds of twin children, injecting their eyes to turn them blue; women and some men were forcibly sterilised, many thousands gassed and worked to death…’

  ‘My mother wasn’t sterilised, she was kept as a sex slave.’

  ‘Your father was a Nazi?’

  He put his head in his hands, the yellow gold of his wedding band catching the light. Finally he spoke. ‘I will find him and then I will kill him.’

  She sat on the arm of the chair he was in and tentatively laid her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘No, you won’t, because you’re a better man than him,’ she told him, then bent down to kiss him, falling into his lap as she did. Their noses bumped awkwardly, and a lock of her wild hair caught in his shirt button as a wave of uncontrollable desire rush
ed through him. His hands felt huge and fumbling, his body hijacking all rationality, and even more humiliating all co-ordination. Somewhere she laughed.

  ‘It’s been so long, I’m sorry,’ he murmured.

  ‘Hold on a minute.’ Straddling his lap, she pulled back for a minute and disentangled her hair from his buttons then slipped off her glasses. ‘Now we can start again.’ Then, to his joy, she started to unbuckle his belt, the heat of her fingers an unbelievable release as she freed him, thick and hard in her hands. His hands found the curve of her small breasts, the large nipples erect against his palms, her skirt pushed high over her hips, tendrils of perfume catching at his lips. His finger was at her, in her, wet in the memory, the glorious memory of woman, of all he had missed those past few years. Her groaning an ocean somewhere before him, all he was conscious of was her scent, the desire to lose himself in her. And so she mounted him, the tightness of her a veil in which to lose his mortality, his history. Now he was nothing but this, this pounding, bursting pleasure in which to forget.

  Wrapping her legs around his hips, he stood and carried her across the room, knocking over the lamp as he did. He pushed her up against the wall and, thrusting, took them both to the brink then stopped just before, the heat of their sex pulsating between them. Then he lowered her to the floor and started over, this time slowly, as slowly as he could bear. The length of him entering and leaving, a planting, a union, a whole narrative played out, her cries grew louder and louder until, with her nails digging into his back, she came and finally he allowed himself to climax, a great shuddering that left him both empty and profoundly satiated.

  They lay on the carpet, a tangle of limbs in the shadow-lace the moonlight had made through the branches of the linden tree outside. There was no need for words.

  THIRTEEN

  Matthias realised he’d overslept when he was woken by heavy knocking on his bedroom door. He lay there as his brain tried to reassemble the images and emotions of the previous night.

  ‘Herr Holindt! Herr Holindt! Your father is downstairs!’ the housekeeper yelled through the door. Immediately Matthias jumped out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown as he crossed the room. The underfloor heating radiating up through the bare soles of his feet was a brief reminder of how cold it had been the day before in Latcos’s caravan. There was another tentative knock on the door and Matthias, now completely awake, opened it. The housekeeper had always been intimidated by Christoph and there was no doubt, glancing at her pallid face, that the old man was in his usual irascible mood.

  ‘Tell my father that I will be down in a minute, thank you, Johanna.’

  He washed and dressed quickly then picked up the small recorder he used when he had one of his epiphanies in the middle of the night. It still had a blank cassette inside. Excellent, he thought, as he slipped it into the inside pocket of his blazer.

  Christoph appeared marooned in the centre of the open-plan lounge room, his fury at being kept waiting only apparent in the twitching of his left hand. Bertholt and a young nurse stood on either side of his wheelchair. ‘I’m surprised to see you here,’ Matthias ventured.

  Christoph rotated his wheelchair slowly, looking frailer and sicker than the last time Matthias had seen him at his birthday celebrations.

  ‘Why? I’m a reasonable man who loves his family.’ He turned to Bertholt and the nurse. ‘Go outside to the car – my son and I need some privacy.’ After they left, he swung back to Matthias. ‘I hate all this fighting and feuding; there is no point to it. Especially when you can feel your own heartbeat grinding to a halt.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Matthias was surprised to realise that he actually meant it.

  ‘I don’t want your pity. I don’t want anyone’s pity. This is life and life finishes. It is the human condition to think we are the exception to the rule, that this consciousness will go on for ever, especially a loud hungry hunter like me. I have made a lot of noise in my life and I have made a lot of mistakes. You were not one of them, Matthias.’ Christoph’s voice cracked as he struggled with such emotional honesty. It wasn’t his way or the family’s way to be so direct. Watching, Matthias fought a sense of growing guilt.

  ‘I apologise if I have made you feel like one,’ Christoph concluded.

  ‘It’s more complicated than that.’

  ‘Ah, you mean Wim Jollak and his takeover bid. Well, after our conversation I started thinking that maybe Jollak is the man for the future, so I arranged a meeting and negotiated a truce. I was hoping to do the same with you.’ He turned the wheel on the chair, inching closer. ‘Please, Matthias, you are my son and I miss my granddaughter. Without family there is no point to it all.’

  He had never sounded more vulnerable or fragile. Softening, Matthias looked up, then he remembered Keja’s face, the relatives he’d never known, slaughtered at Buchenwald. ‘But I’m not your son, am I?’ he said quietly.

  Christoph looked aghast. ‘What are you talking about?’ he whispered.

  ‘Three days ago I drove to Basel to visit a German factory that specialises in instrument castings; gold casings for luxury watches are just one of their lines. The company has been successful since before the war; it supplies Austria, Belgium, West Germany and not surprisingly Switzerland. It has done quite a lot of business with the Holindt Watch Company. Do you know it?’

  ‘Should I?’ Christoph asked faintly.

  ‘You should: it’s run by Rudolf Vosshoffner, your cousin.’

  Christoph pulled himself out of the wheelchair painfully, balancing his weight on a brass-topped walking stick. ‘I had hoped to protect you from your origins. You have to understand, Matthias, that you are my son, my creation. I raised you, I shaped your psychology, and you have my blood – at least partly.’

  ‘I was stolen from my natural mother. I was the result of one of the most appalling atrocities mankind has inflicted upon its own. I am nobody’s son.’

  Christoph took a few stumbling steps towards him, placing a wrinkled hand on his shoulder. ‘Please, Matthias, we loved you, your mother and I. When you arrived, this tiny blond baby, it was as if we recognised you, that you were ours. We forgave you your gypsy blood.’

  ‘Forgave me my gypsy blood?’ It took all of his determination not to break away from the old man. There was only one reason he could stay in the same room as this man he had called his father. ‘So is Ulrich Vosshoffner still alive?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘What do you want from me? The truth? Which truth, Christoph?’ And the old man flinched at the use of his Christian name. ‘I don’t know what my childhood was any more. I can’t deny that you were a good and loving father, but there was always this distance, the sense that whatever I did, whatever I achieved, I failed you somehow. And Elsa —’

  ‘She loved you like her own, like the child she lost!’

  ‘There was a child?’

  ‘A girl. Stillborn.’

  ‘So you took me, the perfect Aryan replacement —’

  ‘It wasn’t like that!’

  ‘No? Then why did I always have the feeling I didn’t quite fit somehow? Do you have any idea what that does to one’s self-esteem? I think that might have been one of the reasons I pursued physics. I was looking for some explanation as to why I always felt like an outsider, trying to prove there was something amiss in the certainty of the world around me. I was trying to break down the pieces and make them fit better. I still am.’

  ‘Sentimental nonsense! You did science because Ulrich, your real father, was a scientist – it’s a genetic trait.’

  Matthias clenched his fists, fighting the desire to lash out, to silence the old man.

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Don’t what? You want the truth? Ulrich originally joined the scientific corps of the SS because he wanted to be out in the field finding archaeological and scientific proof of the Aryan race. He was a fanatic, inflexible. Everything was extreme with him and you are like him.’

  ‘He is s
till alive, isn’t he?’ Matthias asked tentatively, terrified of the answer.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I want the truth.’

  ‘He died at the end, just after the catastrophe in the Führerbunker,’ Christoph answered, after a short pause.

  ‘I’ve been told otherwise. I’ve been told he’s living in a small village in East Germany under the alias Pieter Schmidt.’

  ‘No! He was a wanted man, still would be if he was alive. He would have come to me for help.’ His eyes flickered away for a second and Matthias knew he was lying.

  ‘I want to see him; will you help me or not?’

  ‘The past is dead, Matthias, and the war is over —’