The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  ‘I’ll check upstairs, the bedrooms.’ Vedel went on into the corridor.

  Matthias walked over to the sofa. There was an indentation worn into the seat cushion; he could almost feel the lingering warmth of Ulrich’s body as he imagined him sitting there staring into the fire.

  A tattered blanket was thrown over one arm and a paperback book lay splayed and page-down beside it. Matthias glanced at the title: it was Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. It seemed darkly poignant to him that an ex-SS officer should be reading an American book about the end of the world triggered by a nuclear-driven third world war.

  On the other side of the room in a window alcove a secretaire was placed so that whoever sat at it had a view of the driveway.

  Matthias began rifling through the secretaire’s drawers and shelves. Nothing but old lottery tickets, expired bus tickets, a couple of used concert tickets. He clearly liked Brahms – as did Matthias, who, turning back to the room, found himself searching for something intimate, something that would betray the personality of Ulrich Vosshoffner.

  There was one photograph on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. It was a family group – a shot that looked as if it dated from the early 1920s. He glanced across at the older figures – his German grandparents, no doubt: a man in his forties posed with his wife and a blond youth of twenty or so in front of the Brandenburg gates. The woman a heavy-busted matron, her dress almost of the nineteenth century not the twentieth, the man an upstanding Prussian gentleman with his groomed moustache. Three lives in aspic, trapped and immortalised by the click of a camera. His family. His blood. Matthias peered closer, then caught his breath – the youth looked exactly how he’d looked at that age. He was fascinated and repelled at the same time. Who was this man? This doppelganger? Finally he dragged himself away.

  There was only one framed print hanging on the wall, of Yuri Gagarin posing proudly in his astronaut suit. Matthias walked up to it. There was something not quite right about it, as if it had been placed there to pay lip service to the Communist government. Instinct made him flip it over, revealing a built-in safe.

  ‘Latcos!’

  In seconds the gypsy was by his side. The safe, in stark contrast to the peeling wall and decrepit furniture, looked as if it was new and state-of-the-art.

  ‘Can you break into this?’ Matthias asked.

  ‘Not easily. But whatever’s inside has to be valuable. You can’t buy safes like these in the DDR. Can you think of any numbers, or series of figures that might mean something to Ulrich?’

  ‘How? I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Something Christoph von Holindt might have let slip, or even Ulrich’s brother?’

  Matthias stared at the lock, searching his memory, then remembered Rudolf Vosshoffner’s description of the gold bars he’d cast from stolen gypsy coins: Ulrich’s personalised stamp. He reached forward and, holding his breath, began to turn the dial. He reached the last figure and stopped, waiting for an alarm to start shrieking. Instead there was silence. The men looked at each other.

  ‘Twenty, four, 1915 – Ulrich’s birthday, the birthday he shared with Hitler,’ Matthias whispered.

  ‘Happy birthday!’ Latcos grinned, then reached out and pushed down the handle. It gave immediately and the heavy door swung open.

  At the very back of the safe were an envelope and a small metal box. Matthias pulled both out. An Iron Cross war medal and an SS officer’s badge were inside the small box while the envelope contained a worn-looking German passport with the swastika emblem, declaring that the owner, Ulrich Vosshoffner, had been born in Munich in 1915. The photograph showed a smiling man of about twenty in a Nazi uniform. Latcos whistled and held it up to Matthias’s face.

  ‘Rajko was right. You two share a face.’

  ‘That’s all we share,’ Matthias told him grimly. ‘We’ll keep the passport – it’s evidence.’ He turned back to the safe and began feeling the underside of each shelf.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘There should be something else – something connected to the list. Vosshoffner would have kept some record.’

  Just then Vedel returned from upstairs. ‘Nothing – just a cupboard full of old clothes, a bed and a heater.’

  Matthias’s fingers found two metal objects taped to the top shelf. He prised them off. One was the size of a key. It was a rendering of the same symbol that had been printed next to the entry for the statuette on the lists of Nazi plunder – the hourglass. The other object was a little larger – a simple metal triangle – but beautifully and very deliberately crafted.

  ‘What are they?’ Latcos asked, leaning over.

  ‘Keys or symbols of some sort, I think.’ The hourglass shape was quite thick and weighty, the edges bevelled in a manner that suggested it was to be dropped into a bigger piece. Matthias tried to imagine the machine or keyhole that might have been designed to take such a shape. He laid it flat on the desk. ‘Maybe it’s designed to fit into a negative of the same shape – maybe once it’s laid into this a lock or door is triggered.’ He lifted the triangle. ‘This looks as if it’s from the same puzzle, but God knows how they fit together.’

  ‘We’re nowhere nearer to finding out where the actual objects are hidden, are we?’ Latcos pointed out.

  They were interrupted by the alarm on Matthias’s wristwatch. He checked the time, then went over to the large, old-fashioned telephone on a small table by the sofa and lifted the receiver.

  SEVENTEEN

  Andro stood in the shadow of the bakery, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. It hadn’t been easy: he’d already caught the attention of the baker’s assistant behind the counter inside the building, a steel-haired, tight-lipped matron who kept looking out at the young gypsy. He’d tried to blend in by buying a newspaper and reading it as if waiting for someone, but as he’d been there for longer than half an hour, the ruse was wearing thin. He glanced at the café – Ulrich Vosshoffner sat hunched over a cup of coffee and a piece of half-eaten strudel. Andro had recognised the former SS officer immediately – it wasn’t so much the physical description he’d been given as the military stance that gave him away. Although he walked with a slight limp, the German was still an imposing figure, standing at about six foot two – slightly shorter than Matthias. There was a swagger, the air of a man used to being in command, that made him stand out among the factory workers and other workmen.

  The German hadn’t seen Andro, the youth had made sure of that – he had no desire to be in the sight or memory of a man his great uncle had described as ‘the Soul-less one’, a man whose heart fed off the blood of all those he had murdered. Andro’s reverie was interrupted by the sound of the telephone ringing in the kiosk. He slipped in and picked up the receiver, Matthias’s voice bringing him back to his mission.

  ‘Andro?’

  ‘Ja. He’s just paid his bill – he’s leaving now.’ The young gypsy turned his back to the café as Vosshoffner stepped into the square. At the edge of his vision he watched the German pull his collar up and walk briskly to a car parked on the other side of the square.

  ‘You have about fifteen minutes. He’s driving a small black Volkswagen,’ Andro told Matthias then put the receiver down. It was time he disappeared.

  Ulrich Vosshoffner made his way carefully across the icy path the street sweeper had made of the snow, using his walking stick to prevent himself from slipping. He still found it humiliating, this dependency, this public admission of frailty. This was not who he was inside. Inside, he reminded himself, as he manoeuvred round a dog’s turd half-buried in the filthy snow, he was still Standartenführer Vosshoffner, in charge of his own platoon and later of a whole division of a concentration camp. It was how he stayed sane, running this parallel existence in his mind – a whole hidden dimension of ‘what ifs’, the alternative history that he, his country and the world should have experienced.

  He stopped for a minute to catch his breath, knocking at a pile of snow angrily with the
stick, the taste of strudel still in his throat. Damn this drab excuse for a country, he thought to himself. Everything was so cheap and second-rate – the cars, the clothes, the food – he’d never got used to it; he’d only ever fitted his psychology around the utter tedium of the DDR to survive. He’d known fellow officers who had escaped prosecution at the end of the war only to turn themselves in – five, ten years later – not because of any guilt but more the grinding tension and sheer monotony of pretending to be someone else, when once it had been so glorious to be themselves.

  It had been okay when he could still travel across the border incognito, then he’d been betrayed. Someone had sent his photograph and fake identity details to an American Jewish Nazi hunter anonymously. After that it was impossible to go to the West without risking arrest and certain execution. He’d never found out who gave his identity up but he had his suspicions – he’d never entirely trusted his Swiss comrades and then there was that antiques dealer – Ulrich always suspected he was a Jew. For the men in Zürich it wasn’t so much a question of ideology as of material gain, that was the difference between himself and those he had recruited. But he still had his connections in the Vory and the occasional deal to be brokered.

  ‘On top of the world, scheisse, we were the world,’ he muttered. In two days he would be turning sixty-eight, a daunting prospect – he felt every minute of it. With a shaking hand he managed to unlock the car door and slip into the warmth of the interior. Some days, the good days, he forgot how they lost the war. But this was not a good day. Sighing, he started the engine up and pulled out into the street. He did not notice the young gypsy boy watching him from behind a lamppost as he drove away.

  It was just past eleven in the morning – the time Christoph von Holindt usually had the medication that slowed his heart rate and prevented the possibility of cardiac arrest. Without it he would die. This had been clearly explained to him by his physician, who knew the old man’s propensity to believe that by some miracle of good breeding he was immortal. And so he had been, until the massive stroke five months earlier. It had only been then – paralysed and suddenly felled by a great sense of his own vulnerability – that Christoph had ever even considered the possibility of death. Now he thought about it all the time.

  It lay under his sleep – like a sexual liaison you would like to forget. It hovered over him when he stumbled, it laughed at the trembling of his withered legs and turned up in his dreams in the shape of his dead wife and the stillborn baby they’d had years before they’d agreed to take his cousin’s abandoned offspring. Yes, Christoph von Holindt was no friend of Death, and Death no friend of his, but most of all he hated this new understanding of his mortality because with it had come something he’d never thought he’d be capable of – a genuine empathy for the weak. It was like a dismantling of the fortress he’d made of his psyche: a perfect, good and comfortable place to have existed – at least for the first seventy years of his life. He’d been unquestioning, ruthless, efficient, and the little intimacy he’d allowed had been vetted and compartmentalised into manageable neat encounters. This compartmentalising had always worked for him – more than worked, had succeeded. He’d always assumed he’d evolved far beyond the paltry narrative of his own childhood – his father little more than a barking caricature whose only expectation of his son was to inherit the company and exceed his own achievements, his mother forever ill. What need of sentiment for a man who had survived that and had pushed the family company into international renown? None – until the day his mortality stared him in the face.

  Now he found himself lying awake at night, worrying about what he would leave behind, his granddaughter and her strange psychology, but even more disturbing was how the estrangement between himself and Matthias had begun to play on his conscience. It had even taken on a persona of its own, answering back during his inner dialogues, and in the last few days his conscience had been winning all the arguments.

  Somewhere in the villa he could hear the clocks chiming eleven. Christoph lay back on his bed and stared at the pot plant sitting on the bedside table. A lavender sprig he’d had grown from a large bush in the garden. Just staring at it reminded him of spring, the inevitable cycle of renewal – would he see it this year? He suspected not. Depressed, he rang for Bertholt. Already he could feel his heart ratcheting up a notch. If he didn’t take the medicine soon his heart rate would rise again, this time dangerously. Bertholt knew this, so where was he? Hoisting himself up, he reached over and hit the intercom.

  ‘Bertholt! Wer ist hier, wo!’ he yelled into it, then collapsed back on the pillows. He lay there listening, his ears straining over his heartbeat thumping against his eardrums like some internal funeral march.

  But then came a new sound – one that filled him with fear. Shouting. Running footsteps. Desperately he reached towards the bedside table. His shaking fingers pulled the drawer open and took out a small blue box. Inside was a metal emblem, a small triangle with the tip marked off. Christoph pushed it firmly into the soil of the lavender that stood on the table so that it was completely concealed, then wiped his fingers on the base of the bed frame. He lay back, breathing deeply as he tried to control his terror.

  The bedroom door was suddenly kicked open, the wood splintering against the wall with a thud. Christoph shrank back and shouted, ‘Security! Security!’

  ‘Now that’s no way to greet an old friend.’ Janus Zellweger, his bald pate like some great polished red apple, sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Besides, I sent security away for the day – you don’t mind, do you?’ He pulled out a large white handkerchief, then began wiping his hands methodically – the handkerchief, Christoph noticed, to his great disquiet, was marked with a fine spray of blood.

  ‘What do you want, Janus?’

  ‘What do you think?’ His finger idly traced a symbol on the bedspread.

  ‘I thought we’d decided that it was safer if the pieces stayed separate.’

  ‘Safer until someone started prising open Pandora’s box.’

  ‘That detective Klauser been bothering you from beyond the grave, Janus? It’s not like you to be frightened of ghosts.’ Christoph kept his voice steady; he did not want to excite his colleague unnecessarily, knowing how Janus thrived off fear – especially when he was causing it. He could hear the sound of smashing glass as Janus’s men searched the house. Now he started worrying about Bertholt; the assistant would lay down his life protecting Christoph’s property. Where was he? Why hadn’t he contacted the police?

  ‘Oh, it’s not Klauser. It’s that boy-wonder son of yours. Someone should tell him it’s better for his health to stick to science. Talking of health, you look a little ill yourself. Isn’t it a good fifteen minutes since your medication was due?’

  ‘How do you know that?’ he asked faintly.

  ‘Oh, a little bird told me.’

  ‘Janus, please, I need my pills.’

  Janus shook himself, an involuntary movement that Christoph recognised – it indicated the onset of rage in the arms manufacturer.

  ‘You need your pills? You need your pills!’ He was shouting now. ‘I need my peace of mind, Christoph!’

  Christoph’s heart rate lurched up another five notches – waves of panic alternated with waves of nausea as he tried to control any expression of fear. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Matthias, that arrogant shit of a scientist who thinks he is so morally superior to all of us, the ones who really cracked heads to get him where he is today. What side does he think he belongs to? Christoph? Or will I have to remind him?’ Janus punched the mattress for emphasis, as if he were punching Matthias himself. Again, Christoph forced himself to stay calm.

  ‘I’m sure he had nothing to do with Klauser’s investigation —’

  ‘And I’m sure he had. You do realise what will happen if he gets hold of all four keys, don’t you? We will go down as war criminals.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’ />
  ‘Really? It’s amazing what he’s already learned.’

  ‘He’s no fool – but while we’re on the subject: my daughter-in-law… was that really an accident?’ He’d never had the courage to ask before and there had been no evidence, but Marie had been an excellent skier. Had she been careless? Had she stumbled upon something in her duties as financial officer for the company? If he was going to die now he needed to know.

  ‘They never told you, did they?’ Janus’s chilling tone answered everything. He squinted at Christoph. ‘My goodness, you do look pale.’

  ‘I need my pills…’

  ‘That’s right, you die without them. That would be unfortunate but swift, don’t you think? A swift death, however painful, is better than a slow one, surely.’

  ‘Do you have them?’

  ‘They’re outside with your assistant. Control your son, otherwise I will kill him myself. It’s the least I can do for an old friend.’ Janus got off the bed. Now Christoph could see Janus’s bodyguard Olek, his knuckles covered in the distinct tattoos the Russian mafia revelled in. Staring over, he deliberately wiped his hands on his shaven head, leaving two long smears of blood, like war paint, on either side.