Most Germans he had met so far made special efforts to help him, as if by such little acts of penance their inherited guilt for history’s greatest crime might be mitigated. But McCall’s hostility to their nation was absorbed osmotically from childhood comics but more so from Bea and Francis. It was impossible for him to unlearn it overnight. Francis had taken a lifetime.
The burning rubble he and his crews left behind was buried beneath shimmering glass offices now. The stench of the entombed dead had long since blown away. For those taking their ease in the Königsallee that sunny day, only the future mattered. The old will die, the world shall move on. The God of Profit forgives all in the end.
McCall paid his bill and plotted a route on his street map. He crossed a paved square towards a district of solid, four-storey tenements built of red engineering brick during the Kaiser’s time.
It took only a few minutes to locate Bruckner Strasse. Inside the large communal hall of Number 7, a row of mail boxes showed Herr Theo Rösler living in Flat 5 on the first landing.
McCall walked up the wide stone steps to Rösler’s door. The sound of a piano being played grew louder the closer he got. He knocked and the music stopped. Someone approached a Judas hole to peer at him. Here was the joy of journalism... waiting to be either told to go forth and multiply or offered the key to a box of secrets unopened for years. Whatever it would be, McCall got ready to pitch.
*
Evie could tell Bea was improving. Her eyes sparkled again. The depression of those first days in hospital was much less evident. She tried her hardest to speak, struggling to make herself understood and not depend upon scrawling near illegible messages. But the speech therapist still had much work to do.
‘Gone, Mac. Not here, why?’
‘He’s working on something, Mrs Wrenn... a story he’s picked up.’
‘See me, when?’
‘As soon as he comes back. I’m sure he’ll be in to visit you straight away.’
‘Where gone?’
‘I’m not sure. Abroad somewhere, I think.’
‘Why?’
Evie lied for her country but confronted by Bea’s unblinking stare, her hesitation was an answer in itself. Bea’s mood changed. She became quite distracted. Evie already knew McCall had shown her the photograph of Minsky and asked his name. Bea must suspect a link between that and why McCall was overseas.
‘He’ll be home soon, Mrs Wrenn. Please don’t worry.’
Bea’s face suggested it was too late for that. She found her pad to write a note.
Stay, you stay.
‘Of course I’ll stay.’
Talk, us. Talk.
Evie was about to reply when she heard the sound of a metal tipped walking stick striking the tiled floor behind her. She turned quickly. And there stood Arie Minsky, the missing mourner, smiling at them both.
*
Theo Rösler was his father’s son. He had the same silvery hair and strong, intelligent features but much warmer, kinder eyes. McCall said he was researching a possible television programme for the BBC and would like to discuss it with him. Rösler pondered, but only for a moment, then stood aside and gestured him in. McCall had not expected it to be that easy. He offered McCall English tea and left him alone in the main living area. It was a room of rare serenity. The pale walls were empty save for a single oil painting of a child by a tree in a garden. Six vermilion tulips in a glass vase formed a centrepiece on a table of plain alpine sycamore and one entire corner of the apartment was dominated by the Bechstein piano he had heard being played.
Rösler returned from his kitchen and served tea in white Wiesenthal cups with chocolate biscuits on matching plates.
‘So, this is about my father, yes?’
‘If it’s painful for you, I apologise.’
‘All pain passes one day but it is strange to me that you should come all this way to talk about him all these years later.’
Hacks always play with a marked deck. They also hide cards up their sleeves then deal from the bottom. It is what detectives do, too. But with Rösler, McCall could hear Mrs Bishop’s voice. Honesty is always the best policy. McCall needed Rösler more than Rösler needed McCall.
‘It’s about the car accident in which your parents died.’
‘Why is that now important to create such an interest for you?’
McCall told him of the covert footage – but not his true relationship to the man who shot it.
‘It was filmed by someone who was then working for the British government.’
‘I do not understand why such a person should make a film like this.’
‘Nor me – but he did.’
‘For what purpose would he do such a thing?’
‘I would love to have asked him myself but unfortunately he is dead so I can’t.’
‘How do you know what you have seen is the same accident of my parents?’
‘I’ve checked your father’s picture in the public record and he is the man in the film.’
‘And tell me, please, how this material came into your hands.’
‘A lawyer gave it to me but I cannot give you more than that just yet.’
‘So, will you tell me what sort of motor car my parents had?’
‘We call them Beetles, a Volkswagen from the early 1950s... split rear window.’
Rösler nodded then put down his cup. He told McCall to wait and went into another room. A short haired cat with only half a tail moved with stealth across the dove-grey carpet and lay in a patch of sunlight by the glass doors to a narrow balcony. Rösler returned with a box of photographs. He spread them on the table – women in long frocks and big hats, men with whiskers, all self-importance. McCall immediately recognised several pictures of Rösler senior – strolling across a lawn, seated at a desk then standing with his wife by the very car in which they were to die.
‘Is this the man in your film?’
‘Yes. That’s him.’
Theo Rösler went to his piano as if distracted and needing refuge. He began the opening bars of a prelude. McCall knew Rösler was stalling, playing for time.
‘Do you know the works of Schumann?’
‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t.’
‘Some of it is said to represent the opposite states of mind... even the duality of characters he saw within his delusional self... you might think that quite fitting for us Germans.’
Even to McCall’s tin ear, Rösler’s playing was sublime.
‘You must understand we were not always barbarians in this country... always having to atone for the sins others committed. I was a child when Hitler rose to power and I can remember the excitement and those parades and my father being swept up in the fervour of this great national renewal. Only later did we begin to understand... about the camps and the Jews. You will know the Jews wore yellow stars to mark them out as the damned but there were other coloured badges in the camps.’
Rösler suddenly stopped playing and advanced on McCall.
‘The criminals wore green triangles and the political prisoners red and homosexuals pink. What colour badge do you think I would have been made to wear?’
‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t say.’
‘A pink triangle. That is what I would have been made to wear before I was shot or gassed and thrown into the ovens.’
‘But your father was in the SS, wasn’t he?’
‘And do you think that would have saved me?’
‘Your politics were obviously not his.’
‘No, not then, not later. I became a music teacher and I would never talk to him about those days.’
‘Do you think he was guilty of war crimes?’
‘My mother swore to me he never killed anyone. He was in business before the war and then in the army and was no more than a clerk. That is what she said.’
‘Did you believe her?’
‘I cannot know what the truth was from those times and if you ask me if my mother did then I would say she probably did not
, either. It was convenient for all people to forget.’
McCall asked if he thought his parents were killed accidentally.
‘What is behind your question?’
‘I’ve looked at a newspaper of that time and it reported that your parents’ car veered off the road for no reason.’
‘That is so. The car was not old, nothing was found wrong with it.’
‘So how was the accident explained officially?’
‘It wasn’t but if you are saying someone made it crash deliberately, why should anyone do such a thing?’
‘Your father had been an SS man. Maybe he had enemies?’
‘No, he was not important in the war or after it. He was in jail for what he did and it makes no sense for anyone to kill him, whatever you are seeing in your bits of film.’
Rösler stood up almost angrily. He insisted McCall should see the place where his parents died. It was if he needed to convince not just McCall of what he believed but himself, too.
They drove into undulating farming country in Rösler’s Audi, parked off the main road then walked towards a large tree half way down an embankment. It was a Norway maple, the sort which folklore says protects against witches.
This was where Jakob Rösler burnt to death like a heretic. His cultured son went very quiet.
‘Beyond the tree, my mother was thrown there... .they told me she did not suffer.’
McCall began to detect a profound need in Rösler to believe his parents died through an act of God, not man. The alternative was unbearably bleak.
They would have been murdered. Their sensitive, artistic son would then have to ask why anyone should do such a thing... and the answer would scar him for life.
And so it was with McCall.
*
When Evie left Bea and Arie, her affection and regard for the old lady was boundless. They were sure it had been right to tell her the truth, as much for their sakes as for Evie’s. When they waved her from the ward, Bea felt her soul being released from its cell.
Arie explained everything when Bea’s words wouldn’t come and she couldn’t write quickly enough to keep pace with her jumbled thoughts. Evie listened and questioned until at last she, too, understood. They did not bind her to secrecy but urged discretion about how and when she let McCall into his own life.
With Evie gone, Bea had a final confession to make. She had Arie push her wheelchair into the patients’ lounge. The view was across the Shropshire hills, to all that was and all which might have been. She drew him to her and kissed his face again and again then held his hand to her belly.
He was not sure why Bea was doing this then she pointed at him, at herself, at her womb. She sketched the outline of a baby on her pad... a boy baby. Arie began to speak. Bea shook her head. Below the image of the child, her uncertain hand formed the crudest representation of a gravestone.
On it, she wrote Liad, RIP September 3rd 1939.
Now she had told him. They had had a son. Arie shut his eyes and all those he once loved came to him again and in their arms, each cradled this unbodied child, this new holy innocent whose smile he had never seen, whose hand he had never held.
Arie knelt and held Bea close.
Chapter Twenty Nine
The Röslers were killed thirty years earlier. Police, fire and ambulance officers who might have attended the crash had retired or died. Their records no longer existed, either. McCall checked. Even the back-street garage where Francis filmed the Volkswagen being scrapped had closed down. No independent evidence existed to cast doubt on Jakob Rösler and his wife dying in anything other than a freak accident. On its own, Francis’s footage proved nothing. But there had to be links, common factors in a bigger story. Somewhere. McCall just needed to find it.
He caught a train to Munich then a connection seventy kilometres south to the little town of Murnau on the edge of the Bavarian Alps. Here he waited on a bench – newly vandalised by a swastika cut in the blue paint work – for a local service to Oberammergau.
This train passed through rich green pastures spotted with yellow and white alpine flowers. The landscape got steeper and more wooded as they clattered through tidy little villages – Bad Kohlgrub, Saulgrub, Unterammergau. Each had neatly ordered houses with neatly tended gardens and long stacks of split logs, drying for winter fires to come.
Most of McCall’s fellow passengers were elderly. None would meet his gaze with their watery eyes. He wondered if these people were as guiltless as Theo Rösler wished his father to be or if their hands, bent and liver-spotted now, had saluted the Fuhrer and torn down his enemies.
McCall checked into the Hotel Alte Post in Oberammergau where he had stayed with Bea all those years before. He walked into its remembered streets, a religious toy town of a place, hardly more than a painted backdrop to the Passion play its people staged every ten years since escaping the plague three centuries back.
He stood once more by buildings decorated with high priests and garishly coloured angels then gazed again at Christ’s execution – an image of mob hatred, intrigue and revenge which had so terrified him as a child.
*
‘They’ve banged nails into him, Bea... he’s bleeding all over himself.’
‘It’s only a picture.’
‘But why are they hurting him?’
‘They were cruel times, Mac. Horrible things were done.’
He doesn’t like Germany or Germans. This is where murderers come from. He is frightened but must never show it. The Germans tried to kill Francis and his other Daddy but they were more clever and killed the Germans first.
People passing by look ordinary enough but they could try and murder him at any time because that is what they do in the comics. But he has his cowboy gun and they will not take him without a fight.
‘Bang! Bang! You’re dead.’
*
McCall headed to the outskirts of Oberammergau and the NATO school where Francis once taught. It was a fortress, bulwarked on two sides by walls of the blackest stone he had ever seen. The Nazi secret police once used it and all of Bavaria’s mountain air would never cleanse its residual stench of evil.
Then he hurried on up the dirt path to the marble statue of Christ on the cross, high in the woods above the village. It was as he recalled, a brooding, silent place with rags of misty clouds caught in the fir trees. He went to the same bench where he had sat with Bea and looked across to Francis passing something to Arie Minsky – Uncle Harry. They said it was not him. But even as a child, he knew different.
After dinner in the hotel, he rang Evie. She wanted to know what he had discovered about Rösler.
‘Quite a lot – and Frau Rösler died in the crash, too.’
‘You can’t still feel this is worth all the effort, McCall.’
‘I’ve only just started.’
‘Bea’s coming out of hospital tomorrow. She’s still very feeble.’
‘She’s bound to be.’
‘I’m going back up there this weekend. Shall I give her your love?’
‘Sure. Why not?’
*
McCall’s search of the Garmisch Partenkirchner Tagblatt’s files for the six months after the holiday he and Bea had in Oberammergau failed to produce a single story about a suspicious death like Rösler’s. The village librarian, a woman of infinite goodwill, tracked through every copy of the paper then opened her hands to heaven.
‘Nothing. We find nothing, I am so sorry.’
McCall tried to stay positive. He walked the streets till he found where the toy shop was – or used to be. It had been converted into a private house. An elderly man answered his knock but understood nothing of McCall’s phrase book German. He called inside for his young granddaughter who was learning English. McCall said he was searching for the two wood carvers who ran the toy shop in the mid 1950s. She translated for the old man who gabbled a defensive reply and turned back indoors.
‘My grandfather says he doesn’t know anything.’
&
nbsp; ‘About the wood carvers?’
‘No, about all that happened.’
‘I don’t understand. What happened?’
‘We only live in this place for nine years.’
‘You mean something happened here before you came?’
‘Yes. There is a policeman, very old now. You can talk to him.’
She gave directions to a house beyond the church on Ettaler Strasse, under the shadow of Mount Kofel. When McCall reached it, he saw a sandy-haired man digging manure into his front garden. His hands were chapped red and soiled by the shit of cows. He had been a big man once, well over six feet, but was shrinking with age and wore his skin like an overcoat several sizes too big.
McCall smiled and got out his deck of marked cards.
*
They sat in an untidy, widower’s kitchen eating cold veal and cheese. Konrad Wetzel had been a sergeant of police – steady, astute, the sort of dependable country cop the authorities leave alone. Not that crime was rife in a village devoted to the glory of God.
Wetzel chewed with ruminant efficiency and waited for McCall to open.
‘I came here with my parents when I was very young and my father has just died. My mother is very ill now so I’m on a kind of pilgrimage, I suppose.’
‘But why are you looking for the wood carvers?’
‘Because when we were here many years ago, we bought some religious carvings from these people and I would like to take some home for my mother.’
‘Many shops sell carvings in Oberammergau. Go there.’
‘Yes, but I want my carvings from these same people.’
‘Well, it is not possible now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Tell me first, what is your profession?’
‘I am a legal representative. I work with many lawyers and the police.’
Wetzel left the table. His head almost bumped into the beams of his ceiling. He lit a briar pipe and moved to an armchair by his kitchen range. Old policemen like talking about old cases.
A Place Of Strangers Page 19
