Raven Sisters (Franza Oberwieser Book 2) (22 page)

As they had suspected, the apartment was empty, the coffee machine still on, the birds clearly flown in panic. But the detectives discovered a lot, nevertheless. They unearthed another part of the story.

51

Tonio’s death. And that which followed. We avoided it, didn’t speak about it—not for a long time. Not until the end. Not until there was no choice.

It was September. It was September back then, too. Twenty-two years ago. Greece. Kos. The black sand. We dug ourselves in there.

Back to Gertrud’s kitchen. She had boiled up the last damsons. Small beads of sweat shone on her brow as she stirred the bubbling jelly in the large pan. She said she had to do it before she left, she was flying to Greece, to the house, and she had to get everything in order before she went.

She was barefoot, wearing a short dark red dress, sleeveless. I rinsed the jelly jars, dried them, and lined them up on the shelf. We worked in silence, concentrating.

It was hot, although it was nearing the middle of September.

“Coffee?” Gertrud asked.

I nodded. She made the coffee, and its scent spread through the room. She took cups from the cupboard, milk from the fridge, sugar from the sideboard.

I watched her, my eyes gliding down her back and her legs, their shape outlined by her red dress, and tried to remember the old times, the Gertrud she had been back then.

A jelly-making session,
I thought.
We’re having a jelly-making session.

We were silent, dwelling on our thoughts.
Happiness is dangerous,
I thought.
You cling to it and it deserts you and you don’t know why. Contentment is what counts. Contentment is security.

Gertrud’s kitchen was bathed in late summer sunlight and the heat of the boiling damsons. She stood before the stove, which was speckled with drops of damson purée and damson jelly, and as she began to wipe and scrub, I finally realized that I had not thought about Tonio for a long time. Yet I missed him, missed him, missed him.

The evening hung on the air, and a drop of jelly fell in the fading humidity onto Gertrud’s brown knee.

So that’s why I’m here,
I thought.
That’s why. To remember. To become one again with my memories. To become one with myself. To be reconciled,
I thought.
As if doing a jigsaw puzzle, I’m slowly putting all the pieces inside myself together.
Now the last piece should finally fit into place, too. But can I bear it? And Gertrud? Will she be able to?

“Did you send me that letter, Gertrud?” I asked. “Was it you who sent it?”

She turned, brushed the hair from her brow with the back of her hand, and I remembered that she had always done that, always. Warmth flowed through me, and I wanted to hug her.

She looked at me thoughtfully, as if wondering what she wanted to say to me, and what not to say.

“Letter? No, I didn’t send you any letter. It wasn’t me, though I know who it was.”

She sat down by me at the table and began to talk. About Tonio’s son, whom he must have had with someone else, long before we’d met him. He’d appeared, searching for his father’s past.

I was amazed. A son? Tonio had a son?

Gertrud nodded as if she could read my thoughts. “Yes,” she said, “a son.”

She fell silent, giving me time to get used to the idea.

“I saw him,” she went on. “I told him everything I knew, and that’s not much. I hope he’ll leave us alone now. Will you come with me to Greece? Hanna? Will you come with me?”

Go with her to Greece? I hadn’t been back since that time. I’d suppressed it all, forgotten it all, avoided that country, that island, that sea, without knowing why—I didn’t want to go back down the trail of misfortune.

“Yes,” I said. “Greece. Kos. Why not? Yes, I’ll come with you. Maybe there’ll be a seat on your plane, and if not I’ll come later. It won’t do any harm to see the place again.”

Then the letter occurred to me again. “But how did he get ahold of that letter?”

“He inherited Tonio’s father’s apartment. And he found it all there. Our names. Photos. The letters. Tonio’s father kept it all, and his son found it. Strange, isn’t it?”

I still didn’t understand it. How could Tonio’s letter to me have ended up with his father? Gertrud explained. “I sent them to him. After I returned from Greece and you were off traveling somewhere in the world, I gave up our apartment in Munich. I didn’t know what to do with all the things but I couldn’t just throw them away. So I sent everything that involved Tonio to his father.”

Silence. I must have nodded. Those letters
. . .

“Did you read them?” I looked at her cautiously, hoping
. . .
but knew deep down
. . .

She nodded. “Yes, of course I read them. But only your letters. Not his. But yours, yes. And the more often I read them, the more I got the feeling”—she struggled for the words—“the feeling that they were intended for me,” she continued eventually. “As if you’d written them to me.”

My breath caught in my throat. What was she telling me? She looked at me, her eyes impenetrable. I shook my head. The letters came into my mind, the exact words.

. . .
dear hanna
 
. . . dear tonio
. . .

That was how they began, our letters, every letter always the same. I remember.

. . .
dear tonio . . .

In the letters our days were empty and full of sorrow: I was waiting for him, my beloved, with every fiber of my being, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. I was longing for him. I wrote that I missed him as soon as he left the room, that his body was my pitcher, my jug, that my soul had found its place in him as had my heart, that without him I was a
small soft thing
that fell apart, unraveled
. . .

Astonishment spread through me. What did Gertrud say? As if they were intended for her? As if I’d written them to her?

I shook my head vehemently.
No,
I thought.
No, that’s impossible. They could never have been written for anyone other than Tonio and Hanna at that time, when our love was already coming to an end, when it was already driving us apart, in different directions.

“No,” I said, loud and determined. “No, Gertrud, that will never be true, never. Don’t say that. It’s not true.”

Gertrud shrugged, turned away. I saw the letters before me, our handwriting, the color of the ink—changed according to our whims.

. . .
dear hanna
 
. . .

The days were empty and full of sorrow. He was waiting for me, his beloved. With every fiber of his being. Wherever I was. Whatever I was doing. He was longing for me. He missed me. He had always missed me. All his life. Always. And now. As soon as I left the room. My body was his pitcher, his jug. His soul had found its place in me and his heart had finally awoken. Because of me. He fell apart without me. And unraveled without me. As if he’d never been alive before
. . .
as if I’d never been alive before . . .

And he did fall apart. Did unravel. But at least he was alive. That was a consolation.

His death gradually came back to me. I slowly felt the blue swell in Gertrud’s kitchen, a haze; perhaps it was only the damsons, the schnapps we drank on meeting again, that made us cheerful and happy. It was all like a play, a drama of life and death.

I suddenly remembered the newspaper photo in black and white, the picture that had accompanied me around the world: a dead man and me, Tonio and Hanna. It was a crumpled piece of reality that grew truer and more painful, the grayer the shadows that concealed him became. It was not until the journey homeward, that final journey, that I tore up the photo, and bending out of the train window, I watched the scraps of paper get caught up by the nighttime airstream and rapidly, irrevocably vanish from my sight.

And now?

Reconstruction of a death. Back then. Everything that happened. A pain that still hurts, a wound that still bleeds. In the middle of September we were afraid of the final eruption of the memory.

“Let the past lie,” Gertrud had said. “Those old stories aren’t true anymore.”

She said it brusquely, almost nervously, and loudly enough to break the thread that tried to spin its way from back then to now. In the Indian summer the weavers of life spin their threads into time and time disintegrates and becomes as one.

52

They wouldn’t be needing a translator after all. They’d found all the documents about Tonio’s death in the apartment—translated police reports, letters, newspaper clippings—all translated and carefully filed by date and sequence of events. Ernst Köhler had meticulously documented the death of his only son for posterity, so that a picture could be formed of the accident that happened in Greece.

There had been three parties involved, none of them unknown to the detectives: Tonio Köhler, Hanna Umlauf, and Gertrud Rabinsky, or Gertrud Brendler as she was at the time.

The bare facts were that the three of them had spent a vacation on Kos at Gertrud’s parents’ house. The summer was coming to an end, and it was almost the start of the academic year. One night, two weeks after their arrival, Tonio, whom the proprietor of a nearby taverna described as nice and friendly if a little eccentric, had the crazy idea of going for a swim in the turbulent black sea. For several days there had been storm warnings—no swimmers and no boats out on the water. The fishermen cursed, the few vacationers still on the island at that time cursed, but people resigned themselves, it was the right thing to do. No one dared to pit themselves against the force of the sea.

Except Tonio. On that cursed night. First he got drunk, and then he staggered out into the water and threw himself into the waves, yelling and roaring with enthusiasm. He ventured farther and farther out, the waves bore him up, threw him back and forth until he was eventually dashed down beneath the surf.

Gertrud, who was recorded in the files as the only witness, had stated that nothing could have held him back, nothing. She had tried everything, but in vain. He had gone into the sea, in the storm, yelling and laughing. First the darkness had swallowed him up and then the sea.

Hanna had been asleep and had only found out about the accident the next morning. She was there when the coastguards retrieved the body that had been washed up on the beach. Before he was transported back to Germany, back home, they had tested his blood. The results showed that Tonio had 0.21 percent alcohol in his blood, but there was no trace of any other drugs. Recklessness was the final verdict in the files, fatal recklessness, brought about by excessive alcohol consumption. So it was self-inflicted. The records ended there.

“What a mess,” Felix said. “A real tragedy.”

“It must have been a great love between Tonio and Hanna,” Franza said.

She held up the pile of letters that had been beneath the photos tacked to the wall. The top photo was of an old man, who must have been the grandfather, and immediately beneath it was a picture of Tonio, who bore an amazing likeness to his son. To either side were photos of the two women in their younger days, with Gertrud positioned farther away from Tonio than Hanna.

They also found photos with more recent dates among the stacks of paper. The pictures of Hanna were taken from newspapers or the Internet, while the ones of Gertrud must have been taken by Tonio himself. They showed Gertrud outside her shop, working or chatting with customers. But they also showed her in the garden outside her house, with her children and husband. Tonio had worked his way into Gertrud’s life, spying on her, stalking her, an uninvited onlooker.

He had probably sat for hours in front of the little altar he had created around the photos. Was it here that he plotted his revenge? But revenge for what?

The fact that he had not had a father? That his childhood had been hard? And he now wanted to punish the women who had torn Tonio from his mother and therefore from him?

The detectives had no answers. Not yet.

“What now?”

Franza opened a window, positioned herself in front of it, and lit a cigarette.

“I have to calm my lungs after that race up the stairs,” she said by way of excuse, grinning sheepishly.

Felix gave her the finger, but came to sit with her by the window and said, “Let me breathe some of it in. A little dose of nicotine every now and then—I just can’t resist it.”

“A minor rebellion against the nanny state?” Arthur’s spirits had risen again.

Franza shrugged. “So where do we go from here?”

“A search, of course,” Felix said, “with full fanfare. We have well-founded grounds for suspicion, so send the composite out to police stations nationwide. It should also be featured on the news. We also need a composite of his accomplice. Arthur?”

“What?”

“You know, what does she look like?” Franza asked. “You saw her, after all.”

“She’s a looker. Well, I think so.” He pulled a despairing face as he realized how inane that sounded.

Franza rolled her eyes.
Men,
she thought. “Good-looking? Is that all?!”

“Well,” Arthur stammered, “it all happened so quickly. She was wearing shades, her hair was
. . .
” He couldn’t recall any more.

“Blonde? Brown? Red? Short? Long?” Franza prompted. But it was no use.

“No idea.” Arthur sighed. “I’m really sorry. Long. No, short. Pinned up, perhaps. I don’t know. I just exchanged a few words with her and then she was gone. I can describe the other one a bit better. I talked to her for longer.”

“Except we don’t need her,” Franza said, trying to appear severe, but failing.

Arthur shrugged apologetically.

“Oh well,” Felix said as Franza crushed the cigarette out on the exterior windowsill. “At least we have Clyde. Bonnie can’t be far behind.”

“We also need to extend the search for Hanna,” Franza said. “What if he’s abducted her, has her hidden away somewhere?”

They were silent for a moment, trying not to imagine what could have happened, the events that could be unfolding.

“Well,” Franza said. “Let’s go. There’s a lot to do.”

They made to leave, pausing only to pick up the toothbrushes lying on a shelf in the bathroom so they could compare them with the DNA traces found in Gertrud’s kitchen.

They went by the apartment of Frau Steigermann again as they left the building.

The old lady turned out to be a tough nut to crack, insisting she knew nothing about Ernst Köhler’s grandson—no surname, no telephone number, nothing about his life.

Perhaps it was true, perhaps not. It was most likely true. Why would Tonio Whatever-his-name-was spend his time going from door to door, giving his name and address to his neighbors if he intended to commit murder?

They left. It had gotten late, and tomorrow was another day.