1503954692

by Steve Robinson

  Right now though they had another appointment to get to, and while the car’s navigation system told Tayte that they were close to their destination in the city’s northern borough of Schwabing, Munich’s former Bohemian quarter, he was cursing himself for not anticipating just how congested Munich’s streets were likely to be. They were already running ten minutes late for their meeting with Tobias Kaufmann, a man who had dedicated his life to bringing the Demon of Dachau to justice.

  The address Tayte had been given when he’d made the appointment to see Kaufmann was on a tree-lined avenue just wide enough for two cars to pass one another, with parallel parking along both sides of the road for the people working in the various offices located there. When the voice on the sat-nav told Tayte he had reached his destination, he saw the words Kaufmann und Kaufmann on the building beside him, and as he pulled into a vacant parking space he realised that the Nazi hunter’s day job was as a lawyer, presumably having gone into business with his son or his father.

  Briefcase in hand, Tayte pressed the buzzer on the intercom at the entrance. He announced himself, adding, ‘I’m sorry we’re a little late.’

  A moment later the door buzzed. Tayte pushed it open and followed Jean into a stairwell where he read a sign that told him Kaufmann und Kaufmann were on the first floor. They went up, and at another door they were greeted by a short, bearded man who looked to be in his mid-fifties. He wore a charcoal-coloured suit and a black skullcap—a kippah or yarmulke depending on whether the wearer spoke Hebrew or Yiddish. Tayte shot a hand out and gave the man a wide smile.

  ‘I’m Jefferson Tayte,’ he said. ‘This is my friend, Jean Summer.’

  ‘Tobias Kaufmann,’ the man replied in accented English. ‘Please, come in.’

  They followed Kaufmann along a tight walkway between a few desks that were loaded with paperwork and the usual office electronica. At the end of the walkway they entered into a smaller office that was no less drowning beneath stacks of loose paper and lever-arch files. There was another man in dark apparel sitting in a corner of the room. He was a much older man with a long beard that was almost white. He, too, wore a skullcap and he had a walking cane between his legs, upon which his hands were resting.

  ‘This is Herr Kaufmann senior,’ Tobias said. ‘My father. He still insists on attending meetings whenever the topic is about Volker Strobel. My father was ten years old when he and the rest of my family were arrested by the Gestapo. As far as my bloodline is concerned, he is the sole survivor of the holocaust. My family were murdered at Auschwitz and Treblinka, but Elijah, perhaps because he was young and strong, was sent to the work camp at Dachau. That’s how he came to live in Munich after the war.’

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Herr Kaufmann,’ Tayte said to the older man, and Jean smiled at him and nodded.

  Elijah Kaufmann just nodded back, saying nothing.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ Tobias said. ‘He’s a quiet man. Did you know that before the Nazis came to power in Germany there were around ten thousand Jews living in Munich? By the end of the war there were fewer than ten. Even now, with the general population of the city having roughly doubled since then, the number has only recently reached pre-war levels.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Tayte said. ‘But given the circumstances, I’m not surprised.’

  ‘No, it’s not surprising at all,’ Tobias said. ‘Please take a seat.’

  Tayte had to move some papers off the chair closest to him before he could sit down. He put them on the floor beside his briefcase and they sat around a small pedestal desk as their host began to clear some space for them.

  ‘We call this the Strobel room,’ he said. ‘It isn’t usually in such a mess, but I’ve been going through some old files and haven’t got around to putting them all away again.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Tayte said. ‘It’s knowing where everything is that’s important.’

  ‘Very true, Mr Tayte. Very true. Now, you’re both interested in Volker Strobel, and that makes me very interested in you. What specifically has brought you here?’

  Tayte showed Tobias the photograph of his mother standing outside Johann Langner’s building and proceeded to tell him what he’d told Langner the previous day, bringing him up to date with the reason he and Jean were in Munich.

  ‘If my mother was interested in Volker Strobel,’ he added, ‘it stands to reason that she would know about your efforts to bring him to justice. I believe she must have come to see you about him at some point. Perhaps while she was in Munich in 1963, when she had her picture taken.’

  ‘If your mother did come to see us,’ Tobias said, ‘her visit will be on file. Where Volker Strobel is concerned, we’ve always been meticulous about recording the particulars of everyone who visits us, although looking around you, that might seem unlikely.’

  The idea of there being a file on his mother right there in that room excited Tayte. He glanced around again and thought that if there was such a file it could take a while to find it. He brought Kaufmann’s attention back to the photograph of his mother and asked the question he aimed to ask everyone he showed it to.

  ‘Do you recognise my mother?’

  Tobias shook his head. ‘I’m fifty-six years old, Mr Tayte. In 1963 I was only a small boy.’ He stood up and took Tayte’s photograph to show his father. ‘Papa, do you recognise this woman?’

  Elijah Kaufmann adjusted his glasses and leaned closer.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Tobias added. ‘She might have come to see you in the 1960s.’

  The old man shook his head and sat back again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tobias said as he returned to the desk and sat down. He handed Tayte’s photograph back to him.

  ‘That’s okay. As you said, it was a long time ago, and I’m sure your father has seen plenty of people since then.’

  ‘You’re welcome to check our files,’ Tobias said. ‘It might take a while, but we’ve been in the habit of photographing our visitors since around 1950, when Papa acquired our first Park instamatic camera.’ He paused and reached into the desk drawer. ‘It’s all digital now, of course,’ he continued as he withdrew a small digital camera. ‘Many of the older pictures have faded beyond recognition, but it could help to locate the file you’re looking for if we have one.’

  ‘It’s worth a try,’ Jean said.

  ‘Where do we start?’ Tayte added.

  Tobias Kaufmann held up the camera. ‘We start with me taking a picture of you for my files before I forget. Now, if you could move closer together so I can get you both in. That’s it.’ He clicked the shutter and checked the image. Next he had Tayte fill in a form, giving his and Jean’s names and the address where they were staying. Tobias began to pull at his beard as he gazed up at the wall of lever-arch files behind Tayte and Jean, as though considering which files to start with. He stood up and went to them, and then he turned back and pointed at Tayte’s chair. ‘Do you mind?’

  Tayte stood up and Tobias pulled the chair closer to the files. He stood on it and slid a couple of boxes out and handed them to Tayte, who was tall enough to reach them without the chair. ‘Here, let me help,’ he said, and Tobias pointed at a few others to try, which Tayte lifted down.

  ‘There might be something in these,’ he said. ‘If not, we can try a few more.’

  Tayte set the photograph of his mother down onto the desk and they each took a box to go through. The photographs inside were mostly faded, as Tobias had suggested. Some files were no more than a single page, with little information on them. Others contained several pages, but offered no connection for Tayte. The majority were from survivors of the holocaust, in particular the survivors of Dachau, whose accounts of their incarceration at the concentration camp were perhaps of the greatest value to Kaufmann und Kaufmann.

  An hour passed in relative silence, with only the sound of rustling papers to be heard. Then Jean sat up with a short gasp, drawing Tayte’s attention. She was scrutinising one of the photographs
, as though she’d seen a possible match. She handed the image to Tayte. It showed a man and a woman standing side by side in that same room, but with a less full wall of files in the background. It was washed out completely in places, and Tayte was glad he’d had a copy made of his mother’s photograph before it began to go the same way. He recognised what he could see of the woman’s face immediately—he’d stared at his own photograph of his mother long enough to know it was her. He turned back to Jean, whose eyes were wide with interest as she read through the file.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she said.

  ‘Here, let me see.’

  Jean handed the file to Tayte. ‘I don’t think you’re going to like it, either.’

  With a sense of foreboding Tayte took the file and glanced over it. There were two pages, and on the first page his eyes were drawn to the two names that appeared at the top: Sarah and Karl. Status: married. There was no surname.

  ‘So my mother’s name is Sarah,’ Tayte said under his breath.

  His eyes were then drawn to the reason for Sarah’s and Karl’s interest in Volker Strobel, and as soon as he read it, he knew Jean was right—he couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it.

  He screwed his face up. ‘My mother came here with her husband, Karl, trying to identify Karl’s father.’

  The spelling of Karl’s name hadn’t slipped Tayte’s attention. It had German or Scandinavian origins, but under the circumstances, Tayte felt it was almost certainly a German given name. The implications of what he’d read left him numb. He looked at the faded instamatic photograph of the couple again, and he studied the pale image of the man standing beside his mother.

  ‘Is this my father?’

  Just because Karl was married to his mother, Tayte understood that it didn’t necessarily follow that Karl was his father, although there was a strong possibility that he was. He checked the date at the top of the file. It was dated September 1973, which was ten years after the date on the newspaper cutting Marcus Brown had left him, suggesting to Tayte that the trail had gone cold for his mother and Karl after their visit to the former Hitler Youth building. He thought then that it most likely was Karl who had taken the photograph his mother had left for him when she abandoned him. They must have picked up the trail again at some point and it had brought them here. Something else that stood out about the date on the file was that 1973 was close to the year Tayte was born.

  Tayte’s mind began to wander as he tried to imagine what was going on with his mother and Karl back then, but he was distracted by the facts in front of him. The file stated that Sarah and Karl were trying to identify Karl’s father, and they had visited Elijah Kaufmann because they were interested in Volker Strobel. Tayte didn’t want to say what he was thinking, but he couldn’t deny the possibility.

  The file was shaking in his hands as he said, ‘Is the Demon of Dachau my paternal grandfather?’

  He hoped it wasn’t true, yet at the same time he’d never felt closer to the answers he’d been searching for since he’d found out he’d been adopted.

  Tobias Kaufmann leaned in across the desk and interrupted Tayte’s thoughts. ‘It’s a curious situation, don’t you think?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, that if Karl here is your father, then, like yourself, he didn’t know who his father was either.’

  Tayte nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  ‘I expect the circumstances are different, though,’ Jean offered.

  ‘Different,’ Tayte said, ‘but perhaps connected. If Strobel is Karl’s father, and my grandfather, maybe my parents came close to proving it. Maybe they found something out about Strobel that he didn’t want anyone to know about—Strobel being a man who, for obvious reasons, doesn’t want to be found. Maybe they got too close for comfort and that’s why I was abandoned—for my own protection.’ Tayte turned to Kaufmann and explained. ‘I later found out that’s what my mother told the sister at the Catholic mission in San Rafael, Mexico, when she handed me over.’

  ‘I think there are a lot of possibilities here, JT,’ Jean said. ‘You know you’re only speculating. It doesn’t mean anything without proof to back it up. Aren’t you always saying that? All we know for sure is that your mother came here in 1973 with a husband called Karl, looking for a connection to his father. Everything else is guesswork for now.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Tayte said, thinking that maybe he was allowing his emotions to guide him a little too easily towards what only appeared to be the obvious answers. He didn’t even know for sure whether Karl was his father yet, let alone that Volker Strobel was his grandfather. ‘So we need to keep digging,’ he added. ‘I see there’s an address in the file here. It’s in Munich.’

  At that point, Elijah Kaufmann, who so far had been sitting so still and quiet in the corner of the room that Tayte had all but forgotten he was there, said with a heavy Jewish-German accent, ‘That was only a temporary address.’

  All eyes turned to Elijah. Tayte supposed something about the conversation must have jogged his memory, which meant he had all Tayte’s attention.

  ‘Your mother is English,’ Elijah said. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘She had an English accent,’ Tayte said. ‘That’s all I know.’

  The old man nodded. ‘She was an Englishwoman,’ he stated. ‘I may not recall her face, but I remember her and her husband quite well. It’s not every day we get visitors looking for family connections to the Demon of Dachau.’ He almost laughed at the idea. ‘And you were right.’

  ‘I was? What about?’

  ‘About Sarah and Karl being close to something. When they left here I remember feeling that some vital piece of information had just slipped through my fingers. They were nervous about something. They didn’t want to give me their names at first, or have their picture taken. They left a contact address here in Munich in case I had any information for them on Strobel’s whereabouts, which of course I didn’t, although that might soon be about to change.’

  ‘Papa!’ Tobias Kaufmann said, as if his father had said something he shouldn’t have.

  ‘It’s all right, Tobias. These good people are not our enemy, and the time to catch the Demon of Dachau is running out. Perhaps they were sent to us for a reason. Maybe they can help.’ To Tayte and Jean Elijah added, ‘I’m sorry, but we have to be careful. You understand?’

  ‘Of course,’ Tayte said.

  ‘We understand only too well,’ Jean added. ‘We were sent a very clear warning not to ask questions about Volker Strobel after we visited The Friends of the Waffen-SS War Veterans yesterday.’

  ‘Ah,’ Tobias said. ‘The FWK. We know all about them.’

  ‘I was threatened,’ Jean said.

  ‘By a gang of neo-Nazis,’ Tayte added. ‘At least we think so.’

  ‘Their leader had tattoos on his neck—a skull on one side and the SS Sieg runes on the other.’

  ‘That would probably be Max Fleischer,’ Tobias said. ‘He’s a nasty piece of work. The symbols represent the military insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbände—the SS Death’s Head Units. It’s illegal in Germany to display these symbols publicly, so the fact that he’s been so blatant about it suggests he thought it would add to the intimidation.’

  ‘To let us know who we’re up against?’ Tayte said.

  ‘Precicely. I expect he keeps his tattoos hidden beneath a shirt collar at other times. I should take his threat most seriously if I were you.’

  ‘We aim to,’ Tayte said. ‘Although we’re not going home just yet.’ He brought the conversation back to something Elijah had just said. ‘What’s about to change?’

  Tobias looked uncomfortable for a moment. Then he glanced over at his father.

  ‘Tell them,’ Elijah said, his tone impatient.

  Tobias sighed, ‘We have an insider at the FWK. He’s been working under deep cover for three years now. He’s heard that Volker Strobel is coming to Munich. Soon. We were beginning to
think we were chasing a ghost, but this confirms Strobel is still alive, although as my father just pointed out, the time to bring him to justice is running out. It’s for that reason we’re working more closely than ever now with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the German government.’

  ‘And how can we help?’ Tayte asked. ‘It sounds like you already have all the help you need, and if Strobel’s coming to Munich, surely your nets are already closing around him.’

  ‘Volker Strobel has managed to evade capture for seventy years,’ Elijah said. ‘Let’s just say that we don’t like to put all of our eggs in the same basket. This lead we have may come to nothing, as it has many times before. But now you two are in Munich asking questions about Strobel, and with a possible family connection that quite frankly I find irresistible. Your skills in genealogy offer us a new angle. You can perhaps ask questions of people who will not talk to us.’

  ‘I see,’ Tayte said. ‘So, you’d just like us to share our findings with you? Let you know if we hear anything of interest about Strobel?’

  ‘Precisely. Nothing more dangerous than that, although you clearly already have need to exercise caution.’

  ‘I’ve been having trouble getting access to the records I’d like to see,’ Tayte said. ‘Primarily for Strobel and Langner, and the people associated with them. Can you help us with that?’

  ‘We can see what we can do,’ Tobias said. ‘With the German government on board, I don’t see why not.’

  It was an interesting proposition, and Tayte couldn’t see how it put them in any more danger than they were already in, given that he and Jean had already decided to carry on. Access to records which would otherwise be denied him was also a great incentive.

  Tobias Kaufmann’s next line sealed the deal as far as Tayte was concerned. ‘If Volker Strobel does meet with the FWK here in Munich, he’ll be arrested, and it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever get to speak to him. In return for any information you can give us, we’ll make sure you can, before it becomes too late. Maybe then you can confirm whether or not he’s your grandfather.’