Silence (4 page)

Chapter 6

April 21, 1998, evening

After bringing the telephone conversation to an end, Therese Mende spent a long time on the spacious terrace of her house. Her eyes wandered sightlessly over the bay and out to the Mediterranean. The sea was calm. Some waves were breaking against the cliffs far below, while others continued into the bay and lapped up onto a narrow sandy beach where there were now more holidaymakers than a few days before. The tourist season was approaching fast, and peace would only return, gradually, in October. Shouts wafted up to her, fleeting wisps of words that vanished before giving up their meaning.

The calendar said late April, but this year everything seemed to be in a hurry. Summer’s plays of light were already dancing on the water; soon the shadows of the cliffs would move across the bay like the hands of a clock and, at noon, that shadowless moment, converge.

Such urgency! With each passing year, the days seemed longer and the years shorter. Wasn’t it only yesterday that the winter almond blossoms had been on the branches, glowing like pink snow?

Shaking her head, she turned away. A red-tiled roof, supported on four pillars of natural stone, extended the entire breadth of the house, plunging the terrace into shadow to half its depth. She went to the sideboard, took out the bottle of sherry and a glass, and sat down in one of the wide wicker chairs.

It was age. Time sped up with age. So one clung fearfully to every moment and hoped to see the next day too. A certain lack of moderation. A thirst for life that did not desire a longer life. A thirst for life that feared death.

She poured herself a generous glass and ran her left hand through her pageboy-style gray hair.

“The tenant,” Hanna had said on the telephone. “The tenant has a photo and is sniffing around.”

So that was how simple it sounded, when the past caught up with a person after nearly fifty years.

The sherry was dark and mild, leaving only a slight burning sensation on the tip of her tongue.

For the first moment or two, she had not understood what Hanna was talking about at all. In a way that was quite unplanned, the life of Therese Peters had receded over the years. Whenever she had filled in a form and entered Therese Mende, née Pohl, it was as if she were drawing a line through Therese Peters’s life. The words piled up more and more densely over the images, and sometimes, in Rome and London, where she had spent the early years with her second husband, Tillmann Mende, she had stopped in the street and asked herself whether the seven years of being Therese Peters had really happened.

And now they were back, those drab and meaningless years, and she did not even feel surprise.

The woman claimed she had found the photo in the cottage, in the kitchen drawer, but that could not be right. Why did she say it? How had she really come by the picture? “A journalist,” Hanna had said. Someone like that would go on digging. She would collect a whole suitcase full of verifiable facts, interpret them as she wished, and then talk in that arrogant way about truth. And none of it would be true.

Therese drank the rest of her sherry in one gulp and poured out some more.

All these years she had worked hard and, together with her husband Tillmann, built up the Mende Fashion label. It had not always been easy. Tillmann had a creative mind, but his recklessness had often brought them to the brink of ruin. It was not until he handed over the management of the business to her, and her alone, that things had started to go uphill. Today, Mende Fashion was a presence throughout Europe.

Tillmann’s sudden death three years before had thrown her into a deep depression. Without his recklessness, at a stroke, nothing had any meaning; everything was pointless, empty. But she had not understood that until months later. She had handed the management of the company over to her daughter, Isabel, and retreated here.

Her husband was the only one who knew about her life as Therese Peters. Isabel had no idea.

She sat there motionless for a long time, her thoughts wandering aimlessly. The sun migrated inland. On the horizon, the line between sky and water grew indistinct. Soon it would disappear, and only the narrow band of spray where the waves broke would show that there was an above and a below.

Luisa, her housekeeper, was standing in the entrance to the living room, clearing her throat in that cautious manner of hers. Therese started.

“Excuse me, but dinner is ready,” said Luisa, vanishing as silently as she had appeared.

Therese was not hungry, but she went in and made her way to the dining room. Her loose-fitting turquoise silk robe rustled at every step. She took only a few bites. As Luisa cleared the table, she looked at her with concern. “Didn’t you like it? Should I bring you something else?” Therese smiled and patted her hand. “The food is excellent, Luisa, but I’m not hungry today.” The housekeeper’s face relaxed. Deftly, she put the plates and cutlery on a tray and disappeared into the kitchen with it. A short while later, she came back one more time and said, as she did every evening, “I’ll be going then, Frau Mende. Is there anything else you need?” and Therese replied, as she did every evening, “No, thanks, Luisa. Have a good night.”

Then she was alone. With a woolen blanket around her shoulders and a glass of red wine in her hand, she sat out on the terrace again. The beach had emptied; the only sound was the constant, regular murmur of the sea.

Fragments of recollection came back to her, unchecked, swirling in her head like the remnants of a time that had collapsed in on itself.

Her mother kneeling among the pews, swathed in the bitter, musty scent of old incense.

Leonard, standing in the field of stubble and demanding her promise of eternal friendship, then later, his eyes wide with terror, impermanent as a ghost.

Yuri, who wanted to believe in God, pressing himself against the plank wall of the barn to stop himself from wavering.

Her father, with the eyeglasses in which one lens was shattered, wordlessly stroking her cheek with the back of his hand and trying to smile.

And Wilhelm. Wilhelm, pacing agitatedly up and down in her room and saying, at last, “Marry me.”

The strangeness of the images soon fell away. The intervening years shrank to minutes.

Chapter 7

April 21, 1998

At about ten o’clock, Rita Albers rode her bicycle to Kranenburg. The red-brick facade of the town hall was almost completely overgrown by a wild grapevine. The young leaves lay against the masonry as if they had been waxed in place, glowing with the rich green of spring. The young woman at the residents’ registration counter greeted her pleasantly. A plaque on her desk read, “You are being served by Frau Yvonne Jäckel.” Frau Jäckel frowned with irritation when Rita introduced herself as a journalist and told her she was researching an old missing-persons case.

“Well, I don’t really know. Such old dates. We have everything after 1950 in the computer, but before that . . .” She looked helplessly at Albers. “What were the names again?”

Rita smiled winningly. “Therese Peters, née Pohl, and Wilhelm Peters. If I’ve understood correctly, Wilhelm Peters was killed at the end of the war, and Therese left town shortly afterward.”

The young woman shook her head. She entered the names into her computer, as if by force of habit, and Rita rolled her eyes.

“Look, the war ended in 1945. Do you have an archive, maybe? I mean, could I have a look?”

Frau Jäckel was fully occupied with her screen and asked, without looking up, “Do you have the birth dates?”

“Yes, Wilhelm Peters’s.” Rita took out the copy of the SS card. “Born June 22, 1920.”

The young woman looked back and forth between the document and the screen. “I don’t understand this,” she said pensively. “I have Wilhelm Peters here, but he wasn’t killed in the war. He was removed from the register in 1951, with the comment, ‘missing.’ ”

Rita sat absolutely still for a moment. She asked, “Does it say when he went missing?”

The young woman turned the screen toward Rita. “Look here. Wilhelm Peters, born June 22, 1920, removed from the register March 18, 1951. And down here there’s a comment: ‘Reported missing August 15, 1950.’ ” She scrolled down a little. “And then here. Therese Peters, née Pohl, marriage certificate dated August 25, 1944. Likewise taken off the register March 18, 1951, this time with the comment, ‘Moved to unknown destination.’ ”

Rita’s thoughts came thick and fast. What was this? The journalist in her scented something. The story that Robert Lubisch had told her could not be true. Had he lied to her? Why would he do that? No, that was unlikely.

“What does that mean? I mean, why were they both taken off the register on March 18, 1951?”

Yvonne Jäckel leaned back in her chair, visibly pleased with herself and her database. “There’s an official procedure. They wait a few months, try to find out where the woman has moved, or in case she deregisters in the proper way so that she can register somewhere else. As far as missing people are concerned, I don’t have any personal experience, but I think the procedure is similar.”

“Can you check for parents or siblings?”

The young woman tapped at her keyboard. When another visitor, a woman, came into the office, she hurriedly swiveled the screen back into its proper position and gave Rita Albers a brief, apologetic smile.

“I’ll have another look later if I have time,” she said, almost conspiratorially, “but I don’t think I’ll find anything here. The records of immediate relatives are linked, but I don’t have any more entries here. If the people died first, or deregistered . . .” She shrugged helplessly. “You’d have to get in touch with the municipal archives, or ask at the church. The trouble is, Kranenburg was almost completely destroyed at the end of the war.”

Rita pointed at the printer sitting on a filing cabinet behind Yvonne Jäckel. “Could you print out the data on Wilhelm and Therese Peters?”

Equipped with two further documents on the Peterses’ life, she stepped out into the square. She pushed her bicycle down the main street and stopped at an ice-cream stand on an impulse. Four small tables had been put out on the cobblestones for the first time that year. The sun, pleasantly warm, still had the mildness of spring. She ordered a cappuccino and tried to bring some order to this new information.

Wilhelm Peters had not been killed in the war. Why had Friedhelm Lubisch served up this story to his son, and, above all, how had he really come by the papers? And if Wilhelm Peters didn’t go missing until five years after the war, then it must be . . .

She finished her cappuccino hurriedly, paid, and rode out into Waldstrasse.

When she entered the police station, two officers were sitting at their desks behind a counter. A portly man in his late forties, with prematurely thinning hair, came over to her.

Rita introduced herself, took out the printouts from the residents’ registration office, and laid them on the counter. She came straight to the point.

“I’m a journalist, you see, and I’m researching a missing-persons case from the year 1950. Wilhelm Peters is the name. He lived in the Höver cottage with his wife and was reported missing here in Kranenburg. His wife disappeared a few months later.”

“The year 1950,” said the man sonorously, having thoroughly examined the printouts in silence. He looked up and added laconically: “That’s when I was born.” He did not stir from the spot.

Rita took a deep breath. “Look, I’m not assuming you worked on the case back then. I’d just like to know where I can inspect the files.”

The younger policeman at the desk seemed to be following the conversation with amusement.

“In the archives,” said the fat one at length, in his rather ponderous way. “But first there would have to be a search, and that takes time.”

“Oh, I’ll wait.” Rita smiled broadly. “I have time.”

The younger policeman leaned over his desk to hide his grin. The older one examined her with his small brown eyes, as if she were some rare beast.

“You don’t have that much time,” he said, “or have you brought food with you?”

At this the man at the desk spluttered with laughter. This did not bother the fat one, who looked steadily at Rita as the other one left the room.

“Look, your archives can’t be that big, and if they’re arranged by year . . . I mean, I could help you.”

“I see. You want to help,” he said, again in his ponderous way, and Rita grew more and more annoyed. Was this fellow making fun of her joking, or was this just the way he was? And if he searched the way he spoke, then maybe the comment about food wasn’t such a joke after all.

He glanced to his left across the counter and pointed at the clock hanging there. “Midday soon.”

Rita was about to explode, when the young man came back in and said to his colleague, “They have them.”

The fat one nodded with satisfaction. “You see? Order is half of life. We’ve investigated the matter.” He stretched out the word
in-ves-ti-gat-ed
, emphasizing every syllable. “The archives are in Kleve, and the files are available.”

Half an hour later, she swapped her bicycle for her runabout and drove to Kleve. They had been notified. She had to identify herself and was allowed to view the files marked “Disappearance of Wilhelm Peters.”

Rita read and took notes.

Wilhelm Peters’s wife reported him missing on Tuesday, August 15, 1950. They had been at the Marksmen’s Fair in Kranenburg together on Saturday, August 12. Therese Peters had left the tent early; her husband had stayed behind. Since he usually made the most of such events by staying to the end, she had thought nothing of it when he did not come home on Sunday. She assumed he had been celebrating all night. It was not until Monday morning that she went back to the tent, expecting to find her husband having a morning drink. She did not find him, and she waited out the rest of the day. Wilhelm Peters worked in the planning department; he had taken Monday off and should have been back at work on Tuesday. As far as his job was concerned, he was reliable. On August 15, 1950, Therese Peters went to the town hall first thing in the morning and asked after her husband in the planning department. When she found out that he had not arrived at work, she reported him missing.

In the days that followed, the police established that Wilhelm Peters had not been seen since the Saturday night, and that some patrons had observed a heated altercation between him and his wife in front of the marquee. There were further reports that Wilhelm Peters had taken his leave, somewhat inebriated, after midnight. Soon it was being said that he was probably no longer alive, and Therese Peters came under suspicion.

Rita Albers looked up as a policeman brought her a cup of coffee.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, smiling at him. “Tell me.” Rita cleared her throat. “Your colleague in Kranenburg . . . Is he always like that?”

The man grinned broadly and nodded. “You mean Karl van den Boom? He’s all right. He never loses his cool, and under the worst kind of stress he restores calm. He always says, ‘If people would just do everything at half the speed, only half as much would happen.’ We always send Karl out to domestics. As far as we’re concerned, de-escalation has a name: Karl. And he has his own particular sense of humor.”

“I’ll say,” Rita growled.

She leafed through the thin paper of the files, which rustled beneath her fingers, and found the record of the interview. Some of the typed characters seemed to have embedded themselves in the almost transparent pages over the years; they were pale and barely legible. The carbon paper had left halos around the lowercase
n
’s and
r
’s, and they lay scattered across the pages like small planets.

She pointed at the signature. “The reports are all signed by Sergeant Theo Gerhard. Is he still around?”

The man shrugged. “Certainly not in the police force, but he may still be alive. You’d best ask Karl.” Rita groaned quietly to herself.

An hour later, having read the files, she snapped them shut. Therese Peters had remained the prime suspect to the end. She had been interviewed several times but had stuck to her story. There had been neither a body nor sufficient evidence.

Toward the end of the file were two handwritten notes.

Dec. 28, 1950

Frau Therese Peters did not comply with the summons of Dec. 21 of this year. Today, her home was found to have been abandoned. There were no personal items or clothing to be found. Her current place of residence is unknown.

Police Sergeant T. Gerhard

Feb. 15, 1951

Efforts to establish the whereabouts of Therese Peters have been unsuccessful. Since the circumstantial evidence against her in the case of the missing Wilhelm Peters has not been corroborated, we are abandoning the police search.

Police Sergeant T. Gerhard