The Crowded Grave

by Martin Walker

  There seemed to be no pictures of a father, until he turned one page and stopped in surprise at a family group, of Horst as a baby in his mother’s arms. The older boy was sitting on the knee of a man in black uniform with a swastika armband. On the lapels were the two jagged lightning flashes that Bruno knew stood for SS.

  Horst was in his mid-sixties and had already stayed on at his university beyond the usual age of retirement. He’d have been born close to the end of the war, so he shouldn’t be surprised at Horst’s father, if that was indeed who he was, being in uniform. Being in the SS was somewhat different.

  He and Horst had never talked about the war, nor had Horst discussed his parents, although once or twice he’d remarked on the occasional incident of anti-German prejudice. But he seemed to understand it as the result of the ferocity with which the local Resistance had been crushed by the Wehrmacht. Bruno leafed back quickly through the remaining photos. There was one, clearly a wedding day with a younger, prettier version of Horst’s blond mother holding the arm of the same man, still in uniform and with an Iron Cross around his neck.

  Bruno eased the photo from the little corner tabs that held it in place, and on the back was a faded stamp of a photographer with an address in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin. There was no date, but tucked beneath it was another photo, the same man sitting on top of a tank with some other men in overalls, all of them grinning for the camera. Behind them was a burning house and one of the old French road signs. Bruno strained to read the words on the concrete arrow and was pretty sure it was Dunkerque.

  This could put a different perspective on Horst’s disappearance. Some local with long memories might consider this as a motive to do Horst harm, although Bruno had never understood those who sought to blame young Germans for the sins of their fathers. He’d have to get an expert to look at the photos to see if they could identify the units Horst’s father had served in. Some of them, like the SS Panzer Division Das Reich, were infamous in this part of France for the atrocities they had committed while heading for the Normandy beaches to attack the allied beachheads after D-day in June 1944.

  Bruno closed the family album and went to the printer, but the out-tray was empty. Beside it on the wide shelf was a tray where Horst kept his keys for house and car and museum, and they were still there, along with his mobile phone, his passport and wallet, cash and credit cards inside. Whatever had happened was no burglary. He pulled out his own phone and called Clothilde at the museum.

  “I’m at the house now and I’m worried. His wallet and passport and keys are all here, along with the car. When did you last see him?”

  “Yesterday morning. We spent the night together and had breakfast at Fauquet’s, then he drove me to the dig where I saw you, and he went to the museum to deal with all the phone calls. He was out somewhere for lunch, and when I got back to the museum he’d gone to the dig.”

  “Had you been cooking? There’s an onion half sliced and an open bottle of wine.”

  “That’s not like him. Horst is positively anal about corking his wine and leaving his kitchen clean. And I told you, we went to Fauquet’s for coffee and croissants.” She sounded as if she were going to add something but then remained silent.

  “What is it, Clothilde?”

  “I suppose you ought to know. We had a row over breakfast, about that damn girl who caused all the trouble, the Dutch one. I wanted her sent home, off the dig, but Horst said I was overreacting. Her professor back in Leiden is a close friend of his, and he didn’t want to offend him.”

  “It doesn’t sound too serious.”

  “It got serious. It was my fault. I said he was giving her a break because she was young and pretty. It wasn’t fair, but I suppose I was worried about the farmers doing something to damage the dig or the museum. It had been on my mind overnight and I raised it when we woke up. We started to argue, and it got worse in the car and over breakfast. By the time we got to Les Eyzies we were hardly speaking.”

  “So he was upset?”

  “Yes, but he was much calmer than me. I tend to get emotional and he doesn’t, or at least he doesn’t show it. When we have rows he usually goes off to that friend of his for a few hours and lets me cool down.”

  “What friend?”

  “The Danish guy, Jan. You know him.”

  “The blacksmith?” Bruno asked.

  “Yes, they’re pretty close. But I called him before I called you, and he said he hadn’t seen Horst since the night at the museum. That was when I got worried.”

  “Anything else that might have upset him?”

  “Not that I know of. I’m worried sick now. If I hadn’t gotten so worked up … And that damn girl has gone anyway.”

  “You mean the Dutch girl? Gone where?”

  “Back to Holland, according to Teddy. She’s on the train to Paris now. She had a big fight with some of the other students when she turned up at the dig this morning because she hadn’t done the cooking and it was her turn. And then Kasimir attacked her about the animal rights stuff and somebody else complained they’d had to buy pizzas last night because there was no food and she tossed a fifty-euro note at them. Then it was ‘poor little rich girl,’ and she stormed off. Teddy persuaded one of the boys to give them a lift to the station.”

  “Has he gone too?”

  “No, just her. She wasn’t much use anyway. But Teddy’s good, in fact Horst and I had talked about offering him a research post at the museum once he graduates.”

  “Time for a visit to Jan, I think. See if he can throw any light on Horst.”

  Jan had been in the district for twenty years or so, much longer than Bruno, and his smithy had become a modest tourist attraction. The credit should go to his late wife, a local schoolteacher, who had started taking schoolchildren to watch a blacksmith at work and arranged for the département’s educational budget to pay a small fee to Jan for each visit. Then she began running guided tours of the smithy in the tourist season, with herself as guide. She had pushed him to make candlesticks and boot scrapers, table lamps and crucifixes and name plaques for houses, items that the tourists would buy. They soon started bringing in more money than the horseshoes and plow repairs and door fittings for house restorations that had so far made Jan a bare living. Eventually Jan realized that Anita had made herself so indispensable to his life that he’d married her.

  He still lived in the small farmhouse that he had bought and restored when he first arrived, but it had been Anita who had cajoled and bullied him into restoring the huge barn so that it looked like a smithy of the nineteenth century. The fire was stoked with a vast bellows that Jan could operate with a foot pedal. Jan was about Bruno’s height, but heavier, with massive arms and shoulders from his work, and with a healthy belly that looked as firm as rock despite his age. He wore wooden sabots on his feet and a heavy apron of cowhide, black with age and scorch marks. A black bandanna kept the sweat from his eyes, and the great bucket where he cooled the red-hot iron was made of wood and leather.

  The only modern item in the barn was the computer that Anita had installed in the small office behind the showroom for his work, where she had kept the accounts and taken care of orders that came in over Jan’s website. Bruno had known Anita only briefly before her death but admired her bustling energy. Jan probably had to do all that for himself, these days.

  Bruno could understand why Horst enjoyed his visits, the tap-tap sound of Jan’s hammer as he worked, the throat-catching sharpness of the coke dust in the air, the sudden burst of Danish curses that mixed with Jan’s accented French. Bruno had not been to the place since Anita’s funeral some years earlier. Jan had always worked alone so Bruno was surprised to find beside him in the smithy a slim, dark-haired young man whose arms so far showed few signs of the bulging muscles that Jan’s work had developed.

  “This is Galder, one of Anita’s relatives,” Jan said by way of introduction, wiping his hands clean on a towel before greeting Bruno. The young man seemed tense, but nodded coolly a
nd murmured a greeting in mangled French. “He wants to learn the trade.”

  “I’ve come to see if you’ve heard anything of Horst since yesterday,” Bruno said. “Clothilde called me, worried because she couldn’t find him. I went to the house and it looked a bit suspicious, as though there might have been a scuffle.”

  “I haven’t seen him since the night of the lecture in Les Eyzies,” Jan said quickly. He didn’t sound worried. “Nothing wrong then. Maybe he was called back to Germany. That lecture made quite a stir.”

  “His passport and wallet are still at the house, so I don’t think he can have gone far.”

  “Maybe he had a fight with Clothilde and went away to cool off,” Jan said. “It’s one of those relationships, up and down, hot and cold.”

  “Clothilde said that you’re his closest friend here, and when they had a row he usually came to see you.” Bruno felt the young man watching him carefully. Given his poor command of French, the lad was probably trying to work out what Bruno was saying.

  “Yes, often enough,” Jan said, looking down at the iron bar he had been hammering when Bruno first arrived. “But not this time, I haven’t seen him.” He took the rag, picked up the iron bar and thrust it back into the brazier as if he wanted the conversation to end so that he could get back to his work.

  “Did he ever talk to you about his family?” Bruno asked, thinking of the photo album.

  Jan shook his head. “Mostly we just drank and played cards. Sometimes he said he missed speaking German, so we spoke that.”

  “But you’re Danish. Isn’t that your mother tongue?”

  “Yes, but I’m from a place just over the border, and we all speak German, just like a lot of Germans on the other side speak Danish. Schleswig-Holstein, it used to be Danish until the 1860s.”

  “Is that where Horst comes from?”

  “No, he’s from farther south, near Hamburg.”

  “So you talked about that, his childhood, where he grew up?”

  “No,” said Jan, looking impatient. “It was just something that came up. You know, in conversation, ‘How come you speak German?’ And I say I’m from the border and he says he comes from near Hamburg. It was my wife who introduced us. She’d taken her schoolkids to one of his archaeological digs and got to know him that way.”

  “Do you know anything about Horst’s family?” Bruno said. He kept his tone conversational, but determined to press the issue. Jan was not reacting as Bruno had expected. There was no sign of concern about his friend, no evident readiness to help. It didn’t feel right. Maybe he’d better check on Jan’s permis de séjour when he got back to the mairie.

  “No, I already said so. I’m pretty busy here, Bruno, so if you—”

  “Did you know Horst’s father was a Nazi, in the SS?” Bruno interrupted.

  Jan looked as if he’d been hit by his own iron bar. He seemed to stagger, and then glanced quickly sideways at the young man before looking back at Bruno.

  “No, I didn’t know. How could I?” he said. “That’s quite a shock, learning something like that about a guy you’ve known for so many years.” Jan paused. “No wonder he didn’t want to talk about his family. It’s not something I’d want to talk about either. Nor would you.”

  “Did Horst ever talk about having any enemies here, someone who hated Germans, maybe someone who might have known about his father?”

  “No, that never came up,” Jan said. “How do you know about this? Did he ever tell you about it?”

  “I can’t remember him ever saying a word about his own past,” Bruno said. “That’s odd when you think his entire life as an archaeologist was about the past.”

  “So how did you find out?” Jan said, looking sharply at Bruno. His big hands were twisting the rag he’d used to grip the hot bar.

  “Looking around his house today when he was reported missing, I found a photo album with lots of snapshots of Horst as a young man and as a boy. And there were pictures of his mother and father and brother. I can’t imagine either of his parents is still alive so I’ll have to get in touch with the brother back in Germany. Would you have an address or a phone number?”

  “I didn’t even know he had a brother,” said Jan, with a quick glance at the young man beside him.

  “I’ll have to go through his university, they should have something on his next of kin,” said Bruno, and then added in a casual tone, but watching Jan closely to assess his reaction, “If not, I’ll have to go through the German police.”

  There was no reaction from Jan. He was looking down at the iron bar in the brazier, its tip glowing a fierce red. There was sweat on Jan’s face, but there usually was from working so close to the brazier. There was nothing to put his finger on, but Bruno felt Jan was hiding something. It could just be the understandable worry of a foreigner confronted with the French police, but Jan had been here too long for that.

  “I’ll get the embassy onto it, since Horst was an eminent man even before this latest discovery of his,” Bruno added, still probing to get some reaction from Jan.

  “If I hear from him, I’ll let you know,” said Jan.

  16

  Bruno had never paid much attention to birthdays, since nobody had ever deemed his own worthy of attention. As an orphan, he had been left at the door of a church and then raised by cousins with too many children of their own and too little money ever to bother about anniversaries, so such events had never marked his memories of childhood. So he was partly delighted and partly alarmed by Pamela’s insistence that he present himself at her house, showered and shaved and neatly dressed, at 7:00 p.m. sharp. This time, she had announced when he confided that he had never blown out a birthday candle nor ever had a birthday cake, his birthday was going to be properly celebrated. Especially, she had declared while standing at the foot of his bed clad only in a very small towel and brandishing a toothbrush, a Big birthday.

  But the casual comment from the mayor that he would see Bruno that evening had triggered a certain concern. Bruno had assumed that Pamela’s idea of a proper celebration meant a splendid dinner for two, followed by a particularly romantic evening. With this, he would have been more than content. The presence of the mayor, however, suggested something less intimate and probably more formal, two reasons for disappointment. Moreover, Bruno had not the slightest idea how the English marked their birthdays. He had been stunned to learn from Pamela that the French song “Joyeux Anniversaire” had been stolen from their neighbors across the Channel.

  Apprehensive behind the bunch of flowers he had thought it wise to bring, Bruno counted an unusual number of cars parked in the courtyard and along the lane that led to Pamela’s house. He noted that there was no welcoming light in the courtyard, no comforting glow in the windows and indeed no sign of any life at all. Was this some English joke that he would have to pretend to understand and appreciate?

  The kitchen door was locked, and he groped his way along the rosebushes, calling out the occasional “Allô,” until he reached the front door that neither he nor Pamela ever used. Its handle turned at his touch, but the hallway within was dark. Sounds of “Shhhh” and smothered giggles led him into the main room, when the lights blazed on and champagne corks popped and a score or more of people erupted from behind chairs and sofas to call out “Surprise” and begin singing “Joyeux Anniversaire.”

  Pamela, looking magnificent in a long green dress, was first to embrace him. Fabiola and Dominique were quick to follow, then Florence and the wives of Stéphane and the mayor and Sergeant Jules and Albert the chief pompier, who were quickly replaced by Françoise from the gendarmerie, Fat Jeanne from the market and Nathalie from the wine cave. The various husbands came next and some friends from the hunting and tennis and rugby clubs and Julien from the vineyard and Alphonse in his hippie garb clustered around to shake his hand, kiss him and pound him on the back.

  A camera flashed, and Bruno turned to see the inevitable figure of Philippe Delaron, which meant that a photo of this event
would find its way into the pages of Sud Ouest. Then Ivan appeared, wearing his white chef’s blouse and toque. He must have dashed here from his restaurant to attend. One particularly enthusiastic blow came from the meaty fist of J-J. This affectionate ordeal complete, the baron gave him a glass of champagne, and then they all stood back, expectant grins on their faces, and Bruno realized with embarrassment that he was now expected to make a speech.

  He raised his glass to them all. “I’m ambushed, stunned and overwhelmed. And I’m deeply grateful to you all for your friendship, and particularly to Pamela, our charming and beautiful hostess this evening. I suppose the great merit of birthdays is that with each succeeding one, we have more opportunities to make good friends like you all. So thank you for making this the most memorable birthday of my life.”

  Bruno lifted his glass in salute, first to Pamela whose eyes were glowing, and then taking in the entire company. Speeches did not come easily to him, but emotion did, and he felt a stinging in his eyes that suggested tears were not far away. He blinked to hold them back, and then shook his head, surprised at how moved he felt.