by Vaseem Khan
Lockhart’s dark eyes flashed. A moment of uncomfortable silence passed, and then she spoke. ‘Well, there’s no point denying it, I suppose. Though that’s only half right. The Quit India exhibition is real and part of what I’m doing out here pertains to that. But, yes, the main reason I came here is to try and persuade the Society to part with the Dante manuscript. Let’s be honest. It’s wasted, sitting out here in the middle of nowhere. The Smithsonian is the world’s finest museum. A treasure like that doesn’t belong in India.’
Anger flared inside Persis. The unthinking manner with which Lockhart spoke about the country. Her automatic assumption that the rightful place of all things of value was in the west. She impaled the American with a glare. ‘India was once the richest nation on earth. The country was systematically looted of some of the world’s greatest treasures. The Divine Comedy is one of the few items that came in the opposite direction.’ She stopped, hating herself for allowing Lockhart to goad her into a response. A good detective was a poker player, as Seth had reminded her more than once. ‘Why didn’t you approach the Society directly?’
‘I wanted John as an ally first.’
‘Is that why you seduced him?’
‘No. That just . . . happened.’
Persis paused. ‘And what did Healy think of your attempts to manipulate him?’
She shrugged. ‘He wasn’t keen on helping. But I was bringing him round.’
Persis leaned in. ‘Did you know that the sleeping tablets that killed him were manufactured by an American company? Eli Lilly. They’re a new product, very difficult to get hold of in India.’
Lockhart’s cheeks tightened. ‘What exactly are you asking?’
‘Did you give him the tablets?’
‘Yes. What of it? He needed them, I had a load with me – I sometimes have trouble sleeping when I’m abroad.’
‘You don’t sound very upset by the fact that your tablets killed him.’
‘I didn’t realise I’d need to put on a performance for you. Should I weep a little? Beat my breasts?’
They stared at each other, neither willing to give ground.
Persis stood, sweeping her cap up from the desk. ‘Don’t leave town.’
Chapter 30
Her next appointment, late in the afternoon, was at the Ratan Tata Institute on Hughes Road, in the upmarket area of Kemps Corner. She knew the locale; a thriving Parsee community had long ago settled there. The Institute itself was just a stone’s throw from Doongerwadi, the fenced-off tract of forested land on which the Towers of Silence were located. One day, her own corpse would be laid out atop one of the stone towers – known as dakhmas and left for the vultures there.
The Ratan Tata Institute, with its iconic RTI sign perched atop the roof, had been around since the late 1920s, a philanthropic endeavour aimed at helping destitute Parsee women. Now, the Institute ran a soup kitchen famed across the city for its Parsee cuisine.
She found Fernandes waiting for her outside the office of Dr Akash Sharma, Francine Kramer’s therapist.
The office, located on the fifth floor, was tastefully decorated, with a comfortable sofa, a marble-topped coffee table, shelves stacked with vases, and a wing chair in which Sharma sat, scribbling on a notepad. A wide man with a comfortable belly, a round face, and curly grey hair, he waved them on to the sofa without looking up.
When he finally turned his attention to them, his gaze was searching. ‘I was very sorry to hear of Francine’s death. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be able to reveal anything about her discussions with me. But, given how her life ended, I’d like to help in any way that I can.’
‘How long were you treating her?’ asked Fernandes.
‘She came to me some four years ago. I run a clinic here pro bono, for women with emotional difficulties. Usually it’s domestic violence, abandonment, post-natal depression. Francine’s problems were a lot more complicated. To be frank, I don’t really know how much help I was to her. It took her a long time to open up. Even then, her attendance was erratic. She’d disappear for long stretches of time, and then return of her own accord.’
‘What exactly was she suffering from?’ asked Persis.
He rubbed the side of his nose. ‘Francine was harbouring dark secrets, and they corroded her from the inside out. Her real name wasn’t Francine Kramer. She was born in Latvia, a village called Emburga. Her name was Katya Edelberg, and she was Jewish.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘At the age of seventeen, she was taken by the Nazis and placed in the Latvian concentration camp at Jungfernhof before being transferred to another concentration camp at Salaspils. This was around late 1941, when Hitler’s plan for the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Central and Eastern Europe was in full swing.
‘Millions of Slavs were murdered. Mass shootings, starvation, extermination through labour. In the worst incident, twenty-five thousand Jews from Riga were murdered in two days in the Rumbula Forest. I read an article about it last year.’ His mouth bent into a grimace of distaste. ‘For the next two years, Francine – Katya – was used as a sex slave at Salaspils. At some point, she became pregnant. The child wasn’t aborted. When it was born, it was taken from her.’ He paused. ‘She was told that the child, a boy, was to be cared for at a medical institution. She later discovered that the institution was being run by a Nazi doctor carrying out illegal medical experiments on human subjects. Children, to be precise. She never saw the child again.
‘Francine survived the war. But her mind, unfortunately, didn’t make it through intact. She suffered trauma that few of us can truly comprehend. That trauma became monsters lurking inside her, climbing up from the darkness whenever she closed her eyes. They chased her all the way out here, to Bombay.’ He leaned back, took a cherrywood pipe from his pocket, tamped tobacco into it, then lit it. ‘That really is all there is to it.’
Persis absorbed the information. Francine’s solitude, the sadness picked up on by those who knew her, now made sense. ‘Did she mention anything about a recent man in her life, possibly a lover?’
He frowned. ‘Francine found it impossible to develop normal relations with men. Her experience in that Nazi camp warped her ideas of love and sex. She treated her body as an instrument, nothing more. She slept with men for money; just enough to survive.’
Fernandes’s broad face crumpled in confusion. ‘But why would she continue to allow herself to be abused? The war ended years ago.’
‘It’s difficult to explain. It’s the same reason women who have been abused at home keep returning to their partner. Guilt, self-loathing, a raft of complex emotions at the core of our psyche.’ He puffed on his pipe.
Persis lingered on the awful perfection of his logic. Could it be true?
At least Sharma’s story explained one thing: the tattoo on Francine’s breast that she’d tried to remove through burning. She recalled now reading about female concentration camp inmates who had been branded by the Nazis in that way. ‘Is there anything at all you can tell us, anything that might help?’
He thought before answering. ‘A few weeks ago, she came to me. There was something different about her. Something had fired her up. She told me about a recurring dream she’d been having. In the dream, a Nazi, a senior man, had walked into the establishment where she worked. She recognised him because he’d once attended the camp where she’d been held in Latvia.
‘Of course, he was now masquerading under a new identity – like all the other Nazis on the run, I suppose. In the dream, she seduced him, then convinced him to see her outside of the club, at her home. She wasn’t entirely sure, you see. She wanted to keep talking to him, get him to reveal something that would give her some certainty as to his identity.’ He stopped.
‘And then?’
He shrugged. ‘And then nothing.’
Persis blinked. Her stomach had clenched of its own accord. ‘You realise she wasn’t talking about a dream?’
He pulled the pipe from his mouth, ran a thumb over his lower lip.
‘I considered that possibility.’
‘Then why didn’t you alert the authorities?’
‘What would I have said? That my emotionally unwell patient may have seen a Nazi in a Nariman Point bar? Besides, it would have violated patient-doctor confidentiality.’
‘And instead, Francine is now dead.’
He stared at her with calm eyes, but said nothing.
She reined in her anger. It would do no good. ‘Did she describe this man? The Nazi from her “dream”?’
‘Yes. Tall, broad, heavy-set. Black hair. And a long scar running across his left cheek.’
Outside, she spoke to Fernandes without looking at him. ‘I think she was trying to trap him. Her Nazi.’
‘What if she was mistaken?’ muttered Fernandes.
‘If she was mistaken, would she have ended up dead?’ Persis glanced at a woman waiting in reception, unassuming, petite, eyes affixed to the floor. Cowed. That was the word she was looking for.
A drumbeat of anger pounded in her chest.
A world commanded by men, where misogyny was par for the course, where women like Francine Kramer were abused, then murdered on a whim.
It would not stand. It could not stand.
She checked her watch. She had an appointment with Frank Lindley in just over an hour.
‘Go to Le Château des Rêves. Ask about this mysterious Mr Grey. He should be easy enough to recall. A man with a scar like that.’ She locked eyes with him. ‘And if they try and run you around, tell them that the full weight of the Indian Police Service will follow unless they cooperate. Tell them this isn’t just about Francine’s murder any more. Harbouring a Nazi fugitive is an international crime.’
Chapter 31
Frank Lindley’s office had recently been aired and cleaned, which was more than could be said for the man himself. If anything, he looked sweatier and more dishevelled than the last time she’d been here.
The clock on the wall chimed softly. Six o’clock. Where had the day gone?
After the meeting with Sharma, she’d stayed on at the Ratan Tata Institute canteen to eat, the first solid meal she’d had all day.
The hour to herself gave her a chance to compose her thoughts.
The horror of Francine Kramer’s death and the past that Sharma had revealed beat away at her like a moth against a windowpane. The Healy investigation may be all that mattered to her seniors, but, for her, Kramer’s murder had taken on just as great a significance. Whoever Mr Grey was, he couldn’t be permitted to simply murder a resident of the city and walk away unscathed.
And if he was indeed a Nazi, then he was probably a murderer many times over.
Lindley jolted her back to the present. ‘I managed to find a German guard who served at Vincigliata from August 1943 through to March 1944. He claims to have been in charge of John Healy’s cell.’
Excitement quickened inside her.
She waited as Lindley squinted at a chit before him, then dialled a number with his sausage fingers on the black Stromberg Carlson. He asked for an outside line, waited to be connected, then spoke briefly in German, before handing the phone to Persis.
‘I don’t speak German.’
He sniffed. ‘I hadn’t realised I’d have to act as translator, too. Perhaps I should have charged more.’
Christian Fuchs was a native Berliner who’d managed to avoid the worst of the war thanks to a congenital heart defect that consigned him to less stressful duties than having to weather bombs and bullets on the front line. These duties included serving as a guard in various POW camps. His record showed that he had never served in a concentration camp.
After the war, he’d retired to the beautiful, violin-making town of Füssen in Bavaria, where he now worked as a hospital orderly.
‘Yes, I remember Healy,’ he said, in response to Persis’s question. ‘The famous scholar. We used to talk about his work. Or at least, I liked to listen to him. I didn’t understand much of what he was talking about. But he spoke beautiful German.’
‘When did he arrive?’
‘Around September 1943. I remember, because I had only been there a month. We were told to take good care of him, even though he was of a low rank. All the others there were of a much higher rank.’
‘Take care of him? Are you saying that Healy wasn’t tortured at Vincigliata?’
‘Not to my knowledge. I mean, it could have happened when they took him away.’
Her whirling thoughts stopped. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, Herr Healy was taken away one month after arriving with us.’
Seconds passed. She could hear her own breathing. ‘Are you sure you translated that properly?’ she asked Lindley.
‘Are you questioning my German?’ He coughed, nicotine rattling around his lungs.
‘Why was he taken away? To where?’
‘I don’t know,’ continued Fuchs. ‘A senior Nazi arrived, a Sturmbannführer. He was Waffen-SS, so we didn’t ask too many questions. He went into Healy’s cell and spoke with him. When he’d finished, he came out and told me he would be taking him.’
‘Then why does Healy’s prison record at Vincigliata show him as being present there from September 1943 to June 1944? Almost ten months?’
‘I don’t know. You would have to ask Pepe. Salvatore Pepe. He was the camp’s adjutant, the chief administrator. He kept all our records.’
She paused. ‘One last question. What was the name of the man who came to take Healy?’
Fuchs ransacked his memory. ‘I think his name was Bruner. Sturmbannführer Matthias Bruner.’
The bookstore, to her surprise, was quiet. She glanced at her watch. A quarter to eight. Unusual for her father to retire so early. She hoped he was feeling well.
She considered going straight upstairs, but something had been gnawing away at her on the drive over from Bombay University. Something she’d remembered.
She entered the shop, set her cap on the front counter, then walked towards the rear.
The aisles here were shrouded in a ghostly darkness, the light falling in from the front windows swallowed by the gloom. Not that she needed the light; she could have found her way here in pitch-black.
She reached the sofa at the back of the shop and turned on a single low-watt bulb. It flickered, then shivered to life with a hum.
For a moment, she contemplated falling on to the sofa and simply closing her eyes. A sudden tiredness had infected her; her limbs felt heavy, as if she were walking around in a suit of armour, a medieval knight in search of the Holy Grail.
Not yet. There was still work to do.
She walked along the aisles, towards the section of books her father kept on prominent historical figures. She quickly found what she was looking for.
It was entitled, simply, Leonardo da Vinci, a blue-bound edition with gilt lettering on the front board and spine. Inside: hundreds of coloured plates and text illustrations.
She’d thumbed through the edition many times.
Like so many others before her, da Vinci’s life fascinated her, the polymath with the mind of a magpie, a genius to rival the greatest thinkers in human history. Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, astronomer, anatomist, naturalist, mathematician.
But it was in his capacity as inventor that Persis now sought Leonardo’s help.
The brilliant Florentine had filled notebook after notebook with his musings for inventions, many of them years ahead of their time, devices ranging from parachutes and flying craft to strange cannons and portable footbridges for use by soldiers on the march. What really interested her were da Vinci’s many curios, throwaway designs for artefacts that he had invented simply because it amused him to do so.
Artefacts that included puzzles.
The idea had come to her as she had sat in the Ratan Tata Institute, a memory from childhood that had pierced her with knife-like clarity – reading about da Vinci with her mother. Sanaz had infected her with many of her passions: music, a love of books, and a
healthy respect for science and those who practised it.
She flicked through the pages.
To her disappointment, there was nothing in the book resembling the box she now had in her possession.
And then she came across something the author had labelled as the ‘da Vinci Ball Bearing Puzzle’. The illustration showed a small boat-shaped block of wood, hollowed out at the top. Two ball bearings had been set into grooves in the hollow. The aim of the puzzle was to somehow juggle the ball bearings into pits on either side of the block. As a puzzle, there really wasn’t much to it . . . An idea sent up a flare.
Ball bearings.
She sat down on the sofa and held the puzzle box in the palm of her left hand, staring closely at the enigmatic join between the upper and lower halves.
No keyhole. No way to simply slide it open.
Which meant there was some sort of locking mechanism inside preventing that from happening. If it wasn’t metal pins, might it not be ball bearings?
She held the box to her ear and shook it.
Nothing.
She then held it with her right hand, lifted it up, and smacked it hard against the palm of her left hand.
Nothing. She did this three more times, turning it through ninety degrees each time so that she was focusing on another of the four corners.
Nothing.
Frustrated, she considered the problem for a second. Then she turned the box over, and repeated the procedure. On the second thump, she heard a tiny snick.
Her pulse quickened.
She fiddled with the box, pulling the upper half in various directions. Her initial attempts met with resistance, and then, suddenly, as she pulled along its diagonal axis, the top slid away, to reveal a grooved inner section at the centre of which lay a cavity.
