Dead Man's Tale (5 page)

“That Milo Hacha came to say good-bye to the child.”

Old Joost felt the woman's strong hands on his shoulders. She was shaking him. “What are you saying?” she cried again.

When he tried to push her away, Old Joost's big hands found her neck. The pipe fell from his fingers and clattered on the floor.

“Joost!” she managed to cry.

The rain water dripped from the eaves and there was the familiar creak of the windmill. The old man felt fists beating against his chest and face. This was like choking the Englishman all over again. Now Katrina would be safe. The fists against his chest grew feeble. Then they stopped.

Presently Old Joost went out behind the windmill and dug a hole. Because the ground was wet he could remove the sod in big rectangular chunks matted with grass. The spade splattered him with mud.

When he was finished, he carried her there. He felt a terrible pain in his chest. He stood absolutely still, breathing in gasps. When the pain was gone he buried the mayor's wife. Groping in the mud on hands and knees, he carefully replaced the sod. Tomorrow he would tell the Americans that Milo Hacha was not dead but had merely gone away.

When he returned to the house, moving heavily, feet dragging, he bumped into the dead woman's car. It was just like the other time, when he had stumbled over the Englishman's bicycle.

But he could not bury a car.

6

The porter at the hotel agreed to drive them to Old Joost's farm and act as interpreter for ten guilders.

“Pretty fancy job,” Steve said, indicating the red-and-black Karmann Ghia parked in front of the stone farmhouse.

“But that is not Old Joost's car. Joost cannot drive. That is Mayor Hilversum's car.”

“You think his nibs found out about the note?” Steve asked Andy.

“How could he have?”

The porter, still wearing his green apron, pulled his old Citroën up behind the sleek Karmann Ghia. “Joost!” he called.

A girl came from behind the windmill, leading a cow. She was small and darkly pretty. Perhaps sixteen, Andy thought. She had high cheekbones and pale olive skin. Obviously she was not a native of Oosterdijk. In fact, she looked Slavic.

As she passed, Andy smiled at her. She did not return his smile, but goaded the cow with her stick and walked faster. Just then the door of the farmhouse opened.

An old man appeared in the doorway and shouted something to the girl. Her answer was to goad the cow again and walk still faster. The cowbell clanked. The old man stared straight ahead.

“He's blind, isn't he?” Andy asked the porter.

“Yes. The Nazis did it.”

They walked over to the farmhouse. Although Old Joost was a big man, he had once been even bigger, for the shirt and black trousers he wore hung loosely. The stubble of his beard was white, like his hair.

“Who's the girl?” Andy inquired.

“His granddaughter,” the porter said in a rather peculiar way. “Katrina.” The old man stood aside so they could enter. There was sweat on his face and his head was shaking. He looked sick.

Andy said, “Tell him we'll only take a minute. Tell him we were told he had information about Milo Hacha.”

“Hacha?” the porter said in surprise. “But Hacha is dead.”

“I'm telling you, it's a wild-goose chase,” Steve said.

Andy shrugged. “This is what you wanted, isn't it? To find out about Hacha?”

The porter said something in Dutch. The old man stood motionless, his bluish lips parted, his breath whistling. At last he went directly to a hard-backed chair and sat down. His pale, sightless eyes told nothing. He spoke in a low voice, and what he said seemed to surprise the porter.

“Old Joost says that Milo Hacha is not dead.”

“Ask him where Hacha is,” Andy said.

“He doesn't know.”

Steve frowned. “How the hell does he know the guy's still alive then?”

The porter asked a question and the blind man answered at length. “Once Old Joost did Milo Hacha a favour. Hacha was grateful. Also, right after the war, he lived here for a while. (That is the truth.) They were friends. Then, one day in 1947, Hacha was out on the old Zuider Zee in a fishing boat. There was a storm, and Hacha's boat never returned. No one in Oosterdijk ever saw him again. Everyone believed he had gone down with his boat.

“But now Old Joost claims Hacha came to say good-bye to him afterward. There were those in Oosterdijk who resented Hacha, an ex-German soldier, living among us. They were plotting against him, Old Joost claims. So, Hacha decided to go away. At least, that is what Old Joost claims. Believe it or not, as you wish.”

“Why should he lie?” Andy asked.

The porter shrugged. “I did not say he lied. But, except for the girl, he lives alone. He is old. He imagines things.”

“Look, kid,” Steve said. “It was a crazy idea coming here. We read the stuff the mayor gave us. It tells the same story, about the boat and all. When he certifies the papers they're all the legal proof we'll need that Milo Hacha is dead. Why knock ourselves out over an old nut's pipe dreams?”

“I thought you wanted to find Hacha,” Andy said angrily. “It seems to me that if even one man says he's still alive, and since we have the name of the girl who tried to find him for CARE—what's her name? Ohlendorf—we ought to follow it up.”

“Don't get yourself in an uproar. We'll see about it.” Steve looked worried. “Do you think the old guy's telling the truth.”

“How should I know?”

“Well, let's get going.”

“Please thank him for us,” Andy said to the porter.

Old Joost followed them outside. The girl was nowhere in sight, but Andy heard the clanking of the cowbell behind the windmill.

As they approached the Citroën another car drove up from the direction of Oosterdijk. It was a white Volkswagen convertible with the word
Polizei
stencilled on the door. The Volkswagen came to a squealing stop and a policeman got out.

He said something sharply to the porter. Andy recognized the name Hilversum. The porter replied with his shrug. Old Joost said something, and the policeman wheeled on him with a question. Joost began to shout. Then he gasped, his knees buckled; and he fell heavily to the ground and lay there, face down, without moving. The policeman kneeled and began to chafe one of the big limp hands while the porter went into the house for some water. When he returned the policeman was no longer holding Old Joost's hand. He shook his head at the porter and spoke again in Dutch.

The porter said in English, “He is dead.”

From Andy Longacre's diary:

… the second body. It had been in the ground much longer, for years. I get sick to my stomach even now, just thinking about it, because Steve and I hung around until the policeman, whose name is Vander Poel, finished digging it up.

In the second grave, Vander Poel found a passport. The identification photo had rotted away, but the cover was more or less intact. It was a British passport. Near the body—I don't know why, but this is the grisliest fact of all—Vander Poel found a rusted bicycle.

The serial number on that was intact and they traced it to the one bicycle shop in Oosterdijk. The proprietor had rented it, in 1948, to an English private investigator named Dickson.

All that was three days ago. Yesterday, the criminal-investigation team came down from Amsterdam and made its report. Vander Poel told me what the findings were, probably because he wants our co-operation. I'd better make the bicycle the second grisliest fact, because the autopsy showed that when Mrs. Hilversum was put into the ground she was still alive. The old man must have been off his rocker, at that.

I told Vander Poel all I knew, which isn't much—that we were looking for Milo Hacha because he's the heir to a large estate left by an American airman, whose life he'd saved in the war. At first Steve wouldn't give the testator's name, but Vander Poel got tough about it. He told us he would check all this with the American legation in Amsterdam. This made Steve very unhappy.

The girl Katrina has been sent to a foundling home in Amsterdam. Vander Poel says she refuses to believe anything they say about her grandfather. Poor kid.

When they tell us we can leave Oosterdijk—after the inquest or coroner's jury or whatever they have here—we're going to Lucerne, Switzerland, to look up Gertrude Ohlendorf.

The idea of going to Switzerland fascinates me, and I feel kind of guilty about that. It isn't merely Switzerland I want to see, either. It's Milo Hacha. There's a strange sort of magnetism even in the name for me now. I don't know what it is. All Oosterdijk remembers him as a hero of the resistance. Almost all Oosterdijk. Because Mayor Hilversum, for one, tried to build up a case against Hacha. Then there was Old Joost.

Did Joost kill twice to prevent anyone from finding Hacha's trail? If so, why? It doesn't make sense, because he quite eagerly told us Hacha wasn't dead. Why us?

There's talk, according to the porter, that Katrina Joost is really Milo Hacha's daughter. That figures. She sure looks Slavic enough. And the porter suggested, without coming out and naming any names, that I ought to be able to figure out who the mother was. He means Mrs. Hilversum, of course. Which could explain a thing or two.

She wanted Katrina to have Milo Hacha's legacy so she gave me the note? Then went out to see Old Joost—and got strangled for her trouble? Why? Because Old Joost didn't want it known that Hacha wasn't dead, and she found out somehow? But then why did he tell Steve and me?

And, since Vrouw Hilversum gave us the tip about Joost, why did she have to go out and see him herself? To make sure he told us what she wanted him to? That Katrina was Hacha's daughter?

One thing I'm not is a detective. But I've got this gnawing curiosity about Milo Hacha.

If only I could stop worrying about Steve. He seems ready to crack. He's really scared.

Maybe in Lucerne …

PART III

INTERLUDE—VIERWALDSTAETTERSEE

7

Now he looked like a musician entirely.

Watching him, Trudy Ohlendorf sighed. He was a robust man in his forties. He wore a white linen suit with padded shoulders. He had glossy black hair greying picturesquely at the temples and the suggestion of a bald spot on the crown of his head.

The baton in his right hand looked very small and he waved it with, great vigour. He was directing the Grand Orchestre du Casino in the garden of the Lucerne Kursaal Casino.

They were playing the Moldau music from Smetana's
My Fatherland
. He had explained the score to Trudy with enthusiasm, for he was a Sudeten German from Czechoslovakia, and loved his native music. It was programme music, following the course of the Vltava River from its source in the dark Bohemian forest—rushing across the rock bed and through the black forestland, past hunters with their horns and peasants dancing to the roaring cataracts of the St. Johns Rapids and finally, majestically, wide and serene through Prague.

But it wearied Trudy. The magic had gone out of it simply because Heinz Kemka, musician, looked like a musician. This, Trudy knew, was unreasonable of her. But she had always catered to her whims and quirks. Why bother to be reasonable?

At first Heinz Kemka, musician, had looked to her like anything but a musician. When she had met him, almost a year before, on the Lucerne Lido she had taken him for a professional athlete. Professional athletes as such held no particular fascination for Trudy, but to discover him leading the orchestra with athletic vigour at the Kursaal … Their affair had lasted almost a year.

It was ending now. It was ending because the mystery was solved. There should be in a man an aura of the unknown, Trudy thought, to hold a woman, to challenge her.

Trudy had long suspected that she had allowed herself to have an affair with Heinz Kemka because he was an exiled Czech.… For that other exiled Czech had meant so much in her life. Milo Hacha. Just thinking his name made her breath come quickly. Milo Hacha.…

Good-bye, Heinz, Trudy thought. Tonight, and then goodbye. Of course good-bye. The athlete was entirely gone and the complete musician stood there, coaxing the Moldau out of the Kursaal Orchestre in the garden on Haldenstrasse overlooking the dark, silent lake.

At the ringside table, listening to the music, Trudy Ohlendorf ordered another bottle of Pony Hell export beer. It was her third. When it came, the glass beaded with condensed moisture. Trudy drank deeply. She was a handsome woman who was thirty-two and looked twenty-five. Her hair was chestnut, her legs long and pretty, although on the sturdy side. Swiss Alpine legs, Heinz Kemka had called them, caressing her with his big strong athlete-musician's hands. She wore a summer dress with a low neckline. It showed wide, smoothly curved shoulders, an expanse of flawless tanned skin and the beginning of a cleft between her breasts.

Tonight could be like any other night, Trudy Ohlendorf decided. Why not? She would tell Heinz that it was all over between them afterwards. Perhaps she wouldn't even bother to explain. She was hoping he wouldn't make a scene. Already she had in mind exactly what she wanted to do.

A walk down Haldenstrasse to Schwanenplatz and over the old Chapel Bridge across the River Reuss (Moldau, she thought, and smiled) to the old quarter of town for some cheese fondue and a good white wine. A new Swiss wine, at the Wilden Mann, where the fondue was so thick a spoon would stand in it.

Then back across the bridge to Alpenstrasse, where Heinz had set her up in an apartment and where, tonight, they would make love for the last time. At dawn, a walk at the lakeside to watch the sun come up behind the snowy Alps. Heinz would express his amazement, for the three-hundredth morning, at her unflagging energy. At that moment he would look most like a musician and least like an athlete—his hair mussed, tired shadows under his eyes—and so then she would tell him.