by Cara Black
Aimee almost dropped her spoon. Morbier's men had found evidence of a struggle near the garbage.
"Your mother had already been down in the light well."
Stein shook his head. "Maman never went in there. Refused."
Something clicked in her brain—the closeness of Javel's shop, the light well where his fiancee had been found, and now where Lili Stein's blood traces were fifty years later. Everything was pointing to Javel.
She braced herself to explore an ugly avenue. "Monsieur Stein. . ."
"Abraham." He smiled for the first time.
"D'accord. Call me Aimee." This made it harder. Too bad, she liked this man, felt his pain almost as her own. "Please don't be offended. I'm sorry to ask this. Many women who fraternized with the Nazis got branded with swastikas on their foreheads after Liberation. Would there be a connection?"
Abraham sighed. "I've heard that, too. But Maman was definitely not a collaborator. On the contrary, she pointed them out, as she self-righteously told me one time."
His eyes squinted in pain and he buried his face in his hands. Aimee reached over to him and stroked his arm. She waited until he stopped shaking and gave him a napkin.
Giggling students scurried across the cobbled street, past the almost empty sidewalk cafe. She reached in her backpack and pulled out the first thing her hand touched. It was the wrinkled copy of The Hebrew Times she'd wrapped Lili Stein's coat in.
She gasped. Cochon l'assassin—Swine assassin—in bold angular handwriting was scrawled across a small photo and accompanying article. She smoothed the newspaper. Politicians and ministers were outlined by fat red lines in that writing. Aimee couldn't make out the faces but she could read the names.
She thrust the paper at him. "Your mother wrote that, didn't she?"
"Ah yes, Maman ranted about this one night. A Nazi liar strutting in black boots, she knew all about him. She carried on so but when I asked her particulars, she shut up. Wouldn't discuss it. Maman wasn't the easiest person to deal with." Abraham grimaced. "But family is family, you know how that is."
Aimee nodded as if she did, but she didn't.
He continued. "Last week, Sinta noticed Maman went out a lot." Abraham paused to drink some mineral water. "Sinta remembers her saying that she wasn't going to be put off by ghosts anymore." He stopped, hesitating.
"Go ahead, Abraham." She wondered what he was afraid to tell her.
"I doubted you before, Aimee." He looked down. "Blame it on my old-fashioned thinking about women. But now, wrong or right, I worry for you."
She was touched by his concern and didn't know what to say.
Abraham spoke in a measured tone. "The last words I can remember Maman saying were 'I'll come to Ital's later,' as if she was expecting something."
Aimee felt conflicted, wanting to tell Abraham that his mother had been expecting her. But if she did, that could put Abraham in danger and put her no closer to Lili's murderer.
Abraham continued. "Then Maman said, 'You will take the boards down from my window tonight.'"
She sat up. "What did she mean by that, Abraham?"
"I don't know," he said.
"Obviously it struck you as unusual," she said. "What do you think she meant?"
"With Maman you never knew. . .but maybe she felt guilty."
"Guilty? For what?"
"That's just a feeling I got," he said. "No concrete basis."
He looked upset. "I have to get back." He slapped some francs on the table and hurried away.
She rose, carefully putting the folded newspaper in her backpack, more confused than before. What did the boarded-up window have to do with the photo she'd deciphered?
AIMÉE STOPPED at the corner kiosk near her office on rue du Louvre. Maurice, the owner, nodded at her. He had a clipped mustache and bright sparrowlike eyes.
"Usual?" he said.
She smiled and placed some francs on a fat pile of newspapers.
Maurice whisked a copy of Le Figaro with his wooden arm into hers. An Algerian war veteran, he ran several kiosks but wasn't above dog-sitting Miles Davis occasionally.
She clutched her paper and climbed the old, worn stairs to her floor. All the way up she wondered why Lili would feel guilt over Arlette's murder she supposedly hadn't even seen. And if she'd recognized an old Nazi, why hadn't she talked about it?
Back in her office, she logged onto both her and Rene's computer terminals. She knew where she had to look. Files not destroyed by the Germans had been centralized. On Rene's terminal she accessed the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem and downloaded the R.F. SS Sicherheits-Dienst Memorandum file 1941–45. Thick black Gestapo lightning bolts were emblazoned across her computer screen as the documents came up.
On her terminal she bypassed a tracer link and downloaded GROUPER, the back door into Interpol. She accessed GROUPER and queried under Griffe, Hartmuth, the name under the newspaper photo Lili had written over. A pleasantly robotic, digitally mastered voice said, "Estimated retrieval time is four minutes twenty seconds."
Rene's screen displayed a long report in German titled Nachtrichten-Nebermittlung, dated August 21, 1942. Even with her rudimentary grasp of German she could figure out the general idea. Addressed to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, the subject of the report was "Abtransport von Juden aus Frankreich nach Auschwitz" or "Transportation for French Jews to Auschwitz." According to Aimee's rough translation, there had been no provisions made for Jewish transport to Auschwitz in October and the Gestapo chief was asking Eichmann what he was going to do about it.
Well, here was a zealous Nazi, she thought; in August he was already worried about getting enough people to the gas chambers in October. An Adolf brown-noser, he probably stayed up nights worrying about the possibility of empty ovens. The report had been signed R. A. Rausch, Obersturmführer. Two other signatures, those of K. Oblath and H. Volpe, were listed as underling Si-Po Sicherheitspolezei und Sicherheitsdienst responsible for Jewish roundups.
Back on her terminal, she checked for a reply to her GROUPER query. A loud whir, then a reggae version of the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme came on. GROUPER access came via an eclectic server today, she thought. Old Soviet war records flashed on the screen. She ran the names of the three Gestapo she had found: Rausch, Oblath, and Volpe. Each name came up as deceased. That was odd.
Searching deeper, she found each one separately listed as dead in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. Why would Rausch, the head of the Gestapo, be sent to the front in 1943, Aimee wondered.
She checked other memorandums from the file. Rausch was still signing memos deporting Jews from Paris in 1944 but he'd been listed as dead in 1943? Aimee sat back and let out a low whistle.
Interpol identity files cross-referenced to the postwar U.S. Documents Center in Berlin, circa 1948, appeared on her screen. In them, a Hartmuth Griffe had been listed dead, as a combatant in the Battle of Stalingrad. That was all.
These records had obviously been tampered with. Here was proof. But not enough proof to identify who, if any, of these Nazis was still alive.
Sinta had told her that Lili felt ghosts were haunting her. But it had been Rachel's threatening fax that warned her to leave the ghosts alone.
Sunday Evening
"RESERVE A SEAT FOR me on the late flight to Hamburg, please." Hartmuth's fingers thumped on the elegant walnut secretary that served as the hotel's reception desk.
That afternoon he'd realized he'd had enough. He'd placate Cazaux by signing the treaty, and make the Werewolves happy. The European Union agreement sanctioned concentration camps but maybe Cazaux meant it when he'd promised to delete the racist provisions afterwards.
Hartmuth had thought he could stop it. He realized now how futile that was—the Werewolves couldn't be stopped. Now he just wanted to toe the accepted party line and get back to Germany. The Werewolves would win, no matter what; their claws stretched everywhere.
"Of course, Monsieur, I'll inform you when the reservations are completed," the clerk sa
id.
And I can escape the ghost of Sarah hovering in my mind, Hartmuth thought, courteously thanking him. How foolish he'd been to think she might have survived! But deep inside, a tiny hope had fluttered. There would be no records of her either, he'd taken care of that himself in 1943. Hartmuth gazed sadly over Place des Vosges below him.
"Excuse me, Herr Griffe," the clerk bowed abjectly. "I almost forgot, this came for you." He handed Hartmuth a large white envelope.
Hartmuth thanked him again absentmindedly and went to the elevator. As he entered and nodded to the other occupants, he idly noticed his name on the envelope. It was scrawled in the familiar cursive script of his time, not how people wrote these days, squat and uniform. The system had changed after the war, like so much else. As the elevator stopped and let a couple off, he looked forward to this evening when his plane took off. Finally he would be safe. He'd make it out of Paris.
Hartmuth noticed a bulge in the envelope. And then he panicked. Had he trustingly picked up a letter bomb? This was Paris, after all. Terrorist attacks happened all the time! His hands started shaking so much he dropped the envelope. But the only thing that happened was that a piece of ivory bone wrapped in faded yellow cloth rolled soundlessly onto the carpeted elevator floor.
He kneeled and gently unfolded the tattered yellow star, the childishly embroidered J with broken black threads that every Jew had been required to wear. Could this be Sarah's? He'd seen it for so many years in his dreams, reminding him of her. He cupped the bone in his hands. Nothing else was in the envelope. Could she be alive after all these years? Had she survived?
The bone had been their signal. She would leave a bone lying on a ledge outside the catacombs. It had meant "Meet me tonight." Who else would send a message like this? Tears brimmed in his eyes.
He would go and meet her where they had always met. When night fell and the lights hid behind the marble salamander on the arch.
Hartmuth took the elevator back down and he went to the reception desk.
He smiled. "Excuse me again, there's been another last-minute change. Cancel that flight for me tonight. Who delivered that last message for me?"
"I'm sorry, Herr Griffe, I just came on duty at two and the message was already here."
"Of course, thank you," Hartmuth said. He felt the pounding of his heart must be audible to the clerk. In several hours it would be dark. They had always met just after sunset, the safest time since Jews were forbidden on the streets after 8:00 P.M.
He walked out of the lobby, through the courtyard bursting with red geraniums, to the sun-dappled Place des Vosges. He entered the gate, closed it behind him, and let his feet and mind wander. Duty. Hartmuth knew all about that since most of his life was based on it—his political life, marriage, and being an upright German.
The plane trees still held some foliage, but yellow leaves fell and danced in the bubbling fountains. Toddlers bundled in warm jackets chased pigeons and tumbled onto the grass with cries of glee. Like his daughter, Katia, had done once. Before she'd blindly stepped in front of a GI troop truck on the outskirts of Hamburg and died in Grete's arms. She was only six years old.
But he couldn't forget the first time he'd seen Sarah. She could have stepped right off the shelf of porcelain figurines that lined his grandmother's Bremerhaven cottage.
As a young boy, he'd spent every summer at the cottage playing with his cousins near the sea. Sometimes for hours at a time, he would stare at his grandmother's collection and make up stories about each figurine. Grandmother never allowed him to touch, that was forbidden, but he had been content to look.
His favorite, though it had been a hard decision, was the shepherdess, with her coal black wavy hair, azure eyes with dark blue pinpoints, and white porcelain skin. She held a staff and beckoned to her fluffy sheep, whose hooves were forever poised in flight.
Of course, it was all gone. His grandmother's cottage, as well as miles of other suburban cottages, had been firebombed during early raids on the Bremerhaven harbor.
But Hartmuth had seen his shepherdess alive and in the flesh that day in 1942. He'd been checking the Marais again near the building with the salamander. In the courtyard with sleepy midday shuttered windows, a figure leaned over, petting an orange marmalade–colored cat.
A girl with wavy black hair had looked up, smiling, as he'd approached. She had incredible sky blue eyes and alabaster skin. Her expression had changed when she saw the black uniform with the lightning bolts of the Waffen SS on his sleeve and his heavy jackboots. He'd ignored her look of terror as she haltingly rose. Hartmuth always remembered her as the only French girl who had ever greeted him with a smile. Love at first sight can happen when you're eighteen, he thought. It had lasted all his life.
She'd recoiled in fear, but he'd put a finger to his lips and knelt down to pet the cat. Its fur was uneven and it had scaly patches of mange, which probably explained why no one had eaten it. He opened his heart to her and smiled. Then she nodded, kneeling down beside the cat and next to him.
Her schoolbooks peeked out of the worn satchel on the cobblestones. Something about her was so defenseless that he decided to ignore the yellow star embroidered on her school smock. They took turns petting the cat, who was purring furiously now and hoping for something to eat. She had the biggest blue eyes he'd ever seen. Hartmuth couldn't stop staring into them. When she looked up at him he pulled a bit of chalk out his pocket. He drew a whiskered cat and they both smiled. His French was so minimal and his urge to communicate so desperate that he did the only thing he could think of.
"Woof, woof," he barked.
Her incredulous look gave way to stifled giggles and then outright laughter as he stood up and started scratching like a monkey and jumping around. Hartmuth didn't care how he embarrassed himself, he just wanted to make her laugh. She was so beautiful. He remembered something his uncle, a bachelor who had many mistresses, had said: once you've got them laughing, they're yours.
It was important to him that she want him, too, that he wasn't just her captor. He gently put his hand on her shoulder, feeling bones and her thinness, and gestured with his other hand. Trembling, she reached into her satchel and handed him her school card with the ausweis permit attached to the back. He recognized the address. His men had raided it during the Vel d'Hiver roundup in July. He gestured forward with his arm and led her through the courtyard, up the staircase with a winding metal rail.
"Ja. C'est bien, kein problem." He smiled and patted her arm to reassure her.
Just as they approached the apartment, a door across the hall opened and an old man hobbled out using a cane. His rheumy eyes took a long look as he stopped and clicked his tongue in disapproval. Sarah had looked up in fear, but Hartmuth purposely ignored the old man, who shuffled down the hall. In front of her door, Hartmuth pantomimed eating, trying to make her understand that he would bring food.
Hartmuth used the little French he knew and motioned with his hands for her to wait. He showed her his watch and what time he would be back. She seemed to understand and nodded vigorously. He took her chin in his hand, it was warm and smooth, and he smiled. He still couldn't stop staring at her. Then he left.
The apartment was empty when he came back. She'd run away from him.
So he waited and watched in the Marais. He would find her. On the third day he saw her, emerging from the boarded-up courtyard of a derelict mansion, an hôtel particulier, off the rue de Pavee. Dusk had fallen when she finally returned. He stood waiting. Waiting to follow her. She wouldn't get away this time. He watched her pick her way through debris, then disappear behind a pile of rubbish.
Clutching his parcel of food, he slicked his dark hair under his cap, brushed the dust off his epaulets, and buffed his black leather jackboots quickly with his handkerchief. He approached the bushes, his boots crunching branches and bits of broken furniture as he walked.
He came face to face with an old rusted wire bed frame. He kicked it aside, the wire rattling drunkenly
askew, and he saw the opening. He found the footholds and climbed down, realizing he'd entered a candle-lit cavern sprinkled with bones, part of the old Roman catacombs that honeycombed Paris. She was curled up in a fetal position in a dim corner, wedging herself into the damp earth. Her hands quivered as she tried to ward him off.
"Non, s'il vous plaît. Non!" she pleaded.
"Mangez, mangez." He smiled, putting his fingers to his lips to indicate food.
In a corner of the catacomb, a patched blanket lay spread over a lumpy mattress while a battered wooden tea chest doubled as a table. He beckoned to her and pointed to his package of food. From under his arm he pulled out some dog-eared books.
"Ja. Amis. Étudiez f-francais?"
He removed his Gestapo dagger from its hilt, setting it flat on the tea chest. Eagerly, he motioned with his arms and she slowly crawled forward, her eyes never leaving the dagger shining in the candlelight.
Her eyes widened as he opened the parcel and spread out tins of foie gras, chewy Montelimar nougat, calisson d'Aix from Provence, and crusty brown bread.
In the primitive French he'd rehearsed he said, "Let's be friends, share."
As if to offer hospitality in return she spread her arms, thrust bottled water into his lap, and kept her eyes down.
At first, she was reluctant to eat but after he opened the bottle of red wine, she almost inhaled the contents of the chewy nougat tin. Hartmuth started talking in German while she ate. Constantly consulting a French-German dictionary, standard Third Reich army issuance, and an old phrase book he'd found in a book stall on the quai Celestin, he tried to relax her. He punctuated each word with looks in the dictionary to make sure.
She would raise her eyes when he stuttered. It had begun when he was ten and his father died. Now his mouth wasn't cooperating again. Watching him intently, she saw his frustration. Then she took his hand and put it on her lips to feel how she formed the words with her mouth.
"Je m'appelle Sarah. SA' RAH."
