The Cathar Secret: A Lang Reilly Thriller (16 page)

     "Get off my property or I'm calling the police," she said through the door.

     "Mrs. Charles?" came a reply muffled by the solid oak. "Department of Family and Child Services."

     A quick look through the peephole showed a black woman extending some sort of credential wallet. Her other hand held a briefcase.

     Paige unlatched the door and opened it. "I was just taking my son to nursery school. Can you come back?"

     ID still extended, the woman thrust her way across the threshold into the foyer. "We don't have the resources to make repeat visits just for convenience's
sake," she said huffily. "Besides, regulations require I see the child."

     Anger and adrenaline shot through Paige's body and it was all she could do not to harangue this rude government functionary about who pays her salary and general standards of respect and etiquette. But dealing with various federal agencies and commissions as a lawyer had taught her that pissing off a bureaucrat, particularly one with any power, usually did not bring the results the client sought.

     She extended her hand. "Paige Charles."

     The woman ignored the hand, bypassing Paige and settling on Wynn-Three. She was still holding her creds, "Attrita Byron-Smith, investigator, Georgia Department of Family and Child Services."

     "Well, please come in," Paige said.

     If Attrita Bryron-Smith noted the sarcasm, she ignored it. "This the child?"

     "It would so appear, yes."

     The woman shifted her gaze to Paige for the first time. "Is it or isn't it?"

     Swell. Not only had a social worker invaded her home, Paige was going to have to deal with someone lacking a sense of humor.

     "It, he, is."

     The woman was unabashedly gawking, looking around like a potential burglar casing the place. "I'm going to want to see where he stays."

     Paige pointed. "At the head of the stairs."

     The social worker set down her briefcase, extracting a clipboard with a form on it, picked up the case, and started up. The sound of each step seemed to express anger, suspicion, and jealousy all at once. Paige guessed the woman didn't visit a lot of homes in Ansley Park.

     The social worker clumped back down a few minutes later, writing something on the form. "The child's father?"

     "What about him?"

     Attrita Byron-Smith glared at her as if she were the butt of some sort of joke Paige was making. "He stay here?"

     Paige nodded. "He
lives
here, yes."

     The woman checked several items on her form. "He here now?"

     Paige shook her head. "He's at work."

     Pen poised above her clipboard, the social worker frowned. "I'll need to meet him, too."

     "As I said, he's at work."

     "And as I said, we do not have sufficient personnel to suit the convenience of everyone we interview."

     Paige smiled, anticipating what was coming. "What do you suggest, that he drop what he's doing and come home now?"

     "I'm not suggesting. I'm telling you I need to talk to him. Now."

     "Tell you what: at this very moment he's trying a lawsuit in federal court downtown. Why don't you just go down to the Richard Russell Building, Judge Craig's courtroom. You tell 'em you're not in a position to convenience the judge and jury. I'm sure they'll stop the trial for you."

     It didn't take long for Attrita Byron-Smith to see the flaws of that plan. "When will he be out of court?"

     Paige tried to keep the triumphant tone out of her voice. "In about three weeks."

     The social worker knew when she was beaten. She shoved her clipboard back into her briefcase and turned for the door. "I'll be back."

     Threat or promise?

     "You got a daytime phone number, case I need to call?" Attrita Byron-Smith wanted to know.

     Paige gave her a number. "My cell. We no longer have a landline."

     "You got a pen and something to write on?"

     Paige looked around and went to a small desk in the living room, returning with one of her old business cards. "Here. I've written our number on the back."

     The social worker slipped it into her purse and, without thanks or good-bye, turned and left.

In the meantime, several miles south, Wynton had received his own nasty surprise. His heart sank when a cluster of microphones and cameras greeted him, Glen Richardson, and Charlie Frisk as they stepped off the elevator. For the briefest instant, he prayed the media was there for something else, some political scandal, some widely publicized case he had been too busy to read about. It was too much to hope that the press had suddenly developed an interest in class-action litigation.

     He had just wheeled the two carts containing the files into the lobby when any other explanation disappeared like punctured bubbles.

     A man in a suit and expensive haircut shoved a mike into his face. "Mr. Charles, how long have you been aware of your son's previous life?"

     Glen Richardson stared, open-mouthed. Wynton had never seen him speechless. Frisk, with a banker's distaste for anything out of the ordinary, recoiled as though he had stepped on a snake. Indifferent, the press corps thrust more mikes and cameras in Wynton's direction and their questions came in torrents.

     "Do you or your wife have any relatives who were at Auschwitz?"

     "Anyone in your family Jewish?"

     "What are your plans for your son, Mr. Charles?"

     Not waiting for the other two men, Wynton fled to the sanctity of the courtroom, grateful Judge Craig had used the imperial powers of the federal judiciary to ban cameras and microphones.

     Richardson and Frisk made it into the otherwise empty courtroom in a dead heat. Through a window, the banker watched the newsies milling about outside the door like a great white shark held at bay by a diver's cage.

     Richardson sat down heavily next to Wynton. "What the hell was that all about?"

     Wynton was trying to think where to begin when Frisk answered from his post by the door. "You must not read your city's newspapers, Glen."

     "Why would anyone who can read above third-grade level?"

     Frisk turned to face the courtroom. "Because if you had, you'd know Wynton here is sort of a celebrity. Seems his three-year-old son recalls a previous life, is a reincarnated soul from a Nazi death camp."

     Richardson looked as if he had just swallowed something that tasted very bad. "Reincarnation? Nazi death camp?"

     Wynton was rescued, at least temporarily, by the arrival of Buddy Karp and the team of plaintiffs' lawyers. If they had read the article, they showed uncharacteristic decency in not mentioning it.

     Wynton prayed again, this time for deliverance from this reincarnation business. It was a prayer that would go unanswered.

Zagstrasse 18

Munich, Germany

Two Days Later

09:29
A.M.
Local Time

F
RIEDRICH GRATZ FINISHED HIS COFFEE AND
stood up from the small table in his tiny kitchen. He was about to wad up that day's
Süddeutsche Zeitung
when a small headline on one of the back pages caught his eye. He sat down again.

     Auschwitz.

     High among things about which Friedrich not only had no interest but an active aversion were stories about the camps, those places his father's generation had used to house those they considered detrimental to the Reich. As a younger man, he had accepted the camps as a particularly unattractive and uninteresting part of history. The older he got, the more he became annoyed that the subject would not slide into obscurity. It was always the Jews who would not let the matter die a natural death, the Jews who still bewailed what had happened. No matter that America's great ally, Stalin, had managed to exterminate twice as many of his own countrymen, as well as even more Jews and Gypsies, than Hitler, it was the Germans at whom the Jewish finger inevitably pointed.

     Tiresome.

     But this back-page story was different and certainly worthy of a closer reading. Among the extracts from the foreign press was one from a paper in Atlanta, Georgia. It seemed that a small boy somehow remembered being imprisoned in one of the camps as a Polish Jew named Solomon Mustawitz.
The name, of course, meant nothing. The number on the Jew's arm, though, was a different matter.

     The number.

     Friedrich was almost sure he remembered it from the list left by his father, a list he had wistfully reviewed a number of times before reluctantly conceding it was probably as worthless as the artifacts with which it was stored.

     Friedrich read and reread the article before going into the single bedroom. Under his father's old uniform hanging in the back of the closet was a box, dusty and almost invisible in the dim light. Friedrich took it out of the closet and turned on the overhead light. He closed the curtains against the bleak, overcast Bavarian winter day. With fingers shaking in anticipation, he lifted the top. Beneath an old photo album lay an envelope, its once white color now stained with the spotted yellow of age. Carefully, almost reverently, he opened the flap and pulled out the list. At the top of the single sheet of paper an embossed eagle clutched a swastika in its talons above the words,
Meine Ehre heißt Treu
, my honor is loyalty. The symbol and motto of the SS. Below, in ink faded to a pale blue, were a list of a dozen numbers. Friedrich ran a finger down the column. He unconsciously and unintentionally stopped at the third, 14257.

     Clasping the list, he returned to the kitchen and held it next to the newspaper page.

     No doubt.

     With amazing prescience, his father prepared for the possibility of Germany losing the war and the acrimony that would follow. A list of Jews to whom he had shown some degree of kindness might inoculate him against the retribution sure to follow. Although the old man could not have foreseen the witch hunt of the so-called War Crimes trials (and had somehow escaped them), he had kept the list of numbers because, for all practical purposes, Jews shed names once they entered the camps.

     He had never really expected to ever match one of those numbers but he had fantasized what he would do. Now it was time to act.

     In the living room of the flat, he withdrew a large, thin volume, an atlas from a bookcase against the wall. A few flips of the pages confirmed that Atlanta was in the southeastern part of the United States. All Friedrich knew about the city was that the 1996 Olympics had been held there and someone had planted a bomb in a public park during the Games. He
believed he had read somewhere that Lufthansa had direct flights from Munich.

     Leaving the open newspaper on the table, he returned the sheet to its place in the closet. He made sure his cell phone was charged, stuffed it into an overcoat, and went out.

     He crossed two streets that pointed like an arrow to the Münchner Freiheit U-Bahn station. Just outside the entrance, two men older than Friedrich had scraped away last night's light snow from a chessboard of large tiles embedded into the small
Platz
and were playing with pieces a meter and a half tall. Their faces were blurred by the steam of their breath as they taunted each other with good-natured insults.

     The cold dampness of the day had kept the park visitors to a minimum. Friedrich used a gloved hand to clear as much snow as he could from one of the benches and, while pretending to watch the chess game, he made four phone calls. Minutes later, he descended into the station, stopped to get his ticket franked, and boarded a train.

     Two stops later, he climbed up another set of stairs, careful not to slip on the melted snow that had been tracked in by the morning's commuters. He turned left on Neuhauser Strasse onto Marien Platz, past the Marien Kirche, and was soon abeam of the Neues Rathause. A huge Netherlands Gothic structure that could have been centuries old but in fact was completed in the late nineteenth century, the structure housed the Glockenspeil, a clock-driven display of figures that, at noon, marched, moved, and played musical instruments, all illustrating Bavarian history and legend. It included a pair of knights on horseback that charged each other with lowered lances. The mixture of tourists and lunching workers always applauded the victory of the rider cloaked in the blue-and-white check of Bavaria as forty-three bells pealed in concert.

     Past that and a left turn was the
Hofbräuhaus
, a former royal brewery. Lately it had become a tourist mecca, but the management remained loyal to its local clientele.

     Inside was a large hall. White tablecloths floated like islands in a sea of semidarkness that was hardly disturbed by weak light filtering through opaque colored glass. It was too early for the luncheon crowd, but the bustle of waiters anticipated the kinetic energy to come. The place had the faint odor of beer and a stronger smell of meats roasting in the kitchen.

     A man in a business suit approached Friedrich.
"Herr Gratz! Wie gehts?"

     
"Sehr gut, danke,"
Friedrich replied. He explained he was meeting some old
Kameraden
and wanted a private room upstairs.

     He did not have to wait long. Within fifteen minutes, his four companions had joined him around the table. Their conversation stopped each time the waiter entered to deliver another round of beer or to clean out the ashtrays. Friedrich tried not to show his disgust at the stinking mound of cigarette butts. The things not only smelled bad, but cigarettes, along with the Alzheimer's disease, had killed his father.

     All five men watched the server close the door behind him before Friedrich looked around the table. "We are all in this, then?"

     Four heads nodded.
"Jawohl!"

     Friedrich could not help but wonder if this was what it had been like when his father had gathered with friends from an old war no one wanted to remember. He hoped this enterprise would be more successful.