The Defeated Aristocrat (32 page)

Reading the pain etched on Colette’s face Wolf said. ‘They attacked you?’

‘Not straight away. They were laughing, so at first we thought it was a joke. A bad joke – but a joke. Colonel Dorfman was there and although he was as drunk as his officers we thought he would protect us. Captain von Braunsch  locked the door behind us and threw the key to Lieutenant Kappel who put it in his pocket so we couldn’t escape. He grabbed Sister Rachel, pushed her against a wall and kissed her. Sister Andrew tugged at Lieutenant Kappel’s arm to pull him off. I tried to help. The men clapped and jeered. Lieutenant Dresdner tore Sister Rachel’s habit …’

She stared wide eyed, unblinking. ‘Sister Rachel started crying and screaming but that didn’t stop Lieutenant Dresdner or the others. They stripped Sister Rachel then turned on Sister Andrew and me. I cried out to Colonel Dorfman, begging him to help us, but he was laughing even louder than the others. They passed us around from one man to another. I thought it would never stop.’

‘They raped you.’ Wolf said the words, Colette couldn’t.

‘The whole time it was happening I could hear Mother Superior and our sisters banging on the door but they couldn’t open it because the lock held. Eventually, our gardener brought his axe and chopped open the door. Too late for Sister Rachel. She was dead.’

‘How did she die?’ Wolf hated himself for asking but he had to know.

‘Protecting me. She put herself between one of the men and me. He lashed out at her with his gun, hit her on the head, and cracked her skull. The men moved away from us when Mother Superior and the sisters entered the refectory. The sisters covered me, Sister Andrew, and Sister Rachel. Mother Superior sent for a doctor. He came with the priest who was our confessor. The sisters carried us into our cells. The doctor gave me something to make me sleep and stitched my wounds. Sister Andrew woke me in the night. She could barely walk. She said we were defiled, no longer fit to be brides of Christ and it was better we join Sister Rachel in death. She gave me something to drink. It tasted foul. I vomited and went back to sleep. The next morning I discovered Sister Andrew had given me rat poison. She’d taken it herself. I sat with her and watched her die, slowly and horribly. It took her three days and the entire time I wished I’d been strong enough join her.’

Wolf shook his head. ‘Dear God, you’d been through enough.’

‘You shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Colonel von Mau,’ Colette admonished. ‘Father Duval, our Father Confessor, buried Sister Rachel and Sister Andrew. I watched the coffins being lowered into the ground and wanted to lie alongside them. But Father Duval told me that would have been a mortal sin. He said as I was defiled I could no longer be a bride of Christ. He ordered me to leave the convent within the hour.’

‘He threw you out?’

‘He disbanded the convent of Our Lady of the Sorrows and stripped Mother Superior of her position. She and the sisters went to another convent to beg admittance. I found work on a farm.’

‘What happened to the officers who attacked you?’ Josef asked.

‘They walked around the village as if nothing had happened. Dresdner even came to the farm to buy milk. I told him Sister Rachel had died and Sister Andrew had killed herself. He said it was nothing to do with him. That he’d given them and me the good time all women want. I told Father Duval what Dresdner said. He insisted that the men had paid for their sin, the subject was closed, and as everyone in the village knew what had happened, I was an abomination in God’s and my fellow man’s eyes and it was time for me to leave the area.’

‘When he said “paid” you mean with money?’ Wolf questioned.

‘Father Duval never said how they paid. The war ended. A sister by blood, as well as convent, to Sister Andrew discovered Captain von Braunsch  and the men who’d attacked us were from Konigsberg. She heard a French priest was embarking on a mission to the city to help rebuild relations between France and Germany and volunteered to go with him. Other nuns from our convent asked permission to travel with her. When Father Duval gave me money on condition I leave the village, the sisters suggested I travel with them so I could help identify the men who’d defiled me, Sister Andrew, and Sister Rachel. When we reached here, I found work at the Green Stork. The sisters from my old convent visited me after they discovered that some of the men were working as police officers. They told me that we were all God’s instruments and it was our duty to make the men pay for what they’d done. They needed my help. To my shame I agreed to do whatever they asked me, because I wanted revenge.’

‘That was understandable,’ Wolf consoled.

‘The sisters asked me to entice the men into rooms so they could be punished. They said it was God’s work but when I heard people talking about how the men had died, I was unsure. After Captain von Braunsch was killed I told the sisters I didn’t want to help them again. They reminded me that they couldn’t identify all the men without my help. I arrived late at the brewery, saw they had picked the wrong man … so I agreed to carry on.’

‘Luther Kappel?’ Wolf asked.

‘Many nuns work in the town hospital in Hinterrossgarten. It was easy to borrow a habit, go inside, and identify him.’

‘You saw him being killed?’

‘I left before the killing. I never stayed – not for that. The sisters are right. Those men’s deaths are deserved and God’s will. If it wasn’t His will they would be alive. We are, all of us the instruments of God’s will.’

Realising argument would accomplish nothing Wolf kept his thoughts to himself. ‘The notes Sister Luke posted in the Richters’s letterbox …’

‘How do you know Sister Luke posted them?’

‘Because I watched her place a note there through the keyhole of the door to the office. The first note said:

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. For the wages of sin is death.

14 Wasser Strasse, Room 10. So the last shall be first and the first last.

‘We know von Braunsch was the last, who was the first, and why were they the first and last?’

‘Von Braunsch was the last to rape me.’

‘Who was the first?’

‘Colonel Dorfman.’

Wolf felt as though someone had punched him in the stomach. He couldn’t comprehend how any German officer, much less a colonel, could stand back and watch helpless nuns being raped and do nothing to help them. Let alone join in. Yet he was certain Colette was speaking the truth.

‘Did none of the officers try to help you or stop what was happening?’ Although they’d both seen war in all its ugliness and dishonour, Josef was finding it as difficult as Wolf to comprehend his fellow officers’ actions.

‘None. Lieutenant Engels didn’t join in, neither did Lieutenant Schult, but they were both very drunk. I can’t be sure they were awake but if they were they didn’t try to stop the others.’

‘You’re certain it was the colonel who raped you?’ Josef pressed.

‘I’m certain,’ Colette reiterated. ‘He was the one who hit Sister Rachel on the head with his gun when she tried to protect me. Sister Rachel wasn’t always Rachel. When we were sisters growing up together, her name was Michelle.’

CHAPTER THRITY-THREE

Baumgarten’s Store, Konigsberg, Sunday January 12th 1919

‘What’s going to happen now?’ Colette asked Wolf and Josef after they’d sat in silence for ten minutes.

Wolf checked the clock on the wall. Its hands pointed to half past eight. ‘Nothing tonight.’

‘You need to sleep. There’s a room next door father uses for meetings. It has chairs and sofas. If I brought up pillows and blankets from haberdashery you could make yourself comfortable there, Colette.’

‘Not alone. You wouldn’t leave me alone …’

‘It’s next door. We’ll leave the doors open. Take a look.’

Colette left her chair and Wolf rose to his feet. His body ached and he was still stiff from cold. Josef opened a door to the side of the desk. The room was in darkness, but before he switched on the light he went to the window and pulled down the blind.

‘As you see comfortable sofas. Can I get you anything to eat or drink?’

Colette shook her head. She sat on the sofa bent down and unlaced her boots. ‘There’s another sofa, Colonel von Mau.’

‘So I see, but I need to talk to Mr Baumgarten, Colette. We’ll only be next door.’

‘You’ll leave the door ajar? In case the police come.’

Wolf realised the police officer who’d tried to detain her outside the church had frightened her more than he’d thought. ‘If they come to arrest us, Colette, there won’t be much we can do about it other than find a lawyer to represent us.’

‘No one will find either of you here,’ Josef reassured. He left and returned ten minutes later with an armful of pillows and blankets.

Wolf returned to the office, slumped in an upholstered chair next to the stove, and propped his feet on one of the visitors’ chairs. Josef handed him a pillow and blanket.

‘You trying to send me to sleep?’

‘That’s the general idea.’

‘I can’t remember the last time I slept. Yes I can, it was on the kitchen floor of the Post Office in Lichtenhagen.’

‘The Post Office?’

‘It’s a long story.’

Josef took blankets and pillows into the meeting room. He left the door ajar when he returned. ‘The girl’s already asleep. I covered her with a rug.’

‘You switched off the light?’

‘There’s a glass skylight in the door. The light’s on in the passage and here. I’ve locked the door at the end of the corridor that connects these rooms with the rest of the building.’

‘You should go home.’

‘My father’s on a buying trip to Dresden. I phoned my mother from the switchboard and told her I’d found something that needs checking and would probably be here all night.’

‘What could possibly need checking to keep you here all night?’

‘Stock in the silverware department.’

‘She believed you?’

‘Why shouldn’t she. I’ve never lied to her in my life.’

‘Until now,’ Wolf reminded.

‘The less she knows about what’s going on the happier she’ll remain.’ Josef sat behind the desk. ‘What can we do? We promised Colette we wouldn’t tell anyone what she’s told us, yet there’s a group of murderous nuns who for all we know are killing another veteran this minute.’

‘Hopefully all the nuns in Konigsberg will be too busy praying on a Sunday evening to think about murder. But I wouldn’t mind them murdering Dorfman.’

‘You don’t mean that?’

‘After what he did to Colette and the other nuns? Yes I do.’

‘We have to go to the authorities.’

‘A laudable Prussian sentiment, but what authority, Josef?’ Wolf unfolded the blanket and covered his legs. ‘Dorfman is head of the police, and if what Colette says is true, and I believe her, a murderer and a rapist.’

‘All of us have murdered men in the last four years,’ Josef commented.

‘While observing the rules of war.’

‘Don’t you think it’s ridiculous to observe rules when killing our fellow men?’

‘Yes,’ Wolf answered shortly.

‘As for rape, thank heaven for whores. If it hadn’t been for them there would have been a lot more rapes on the Western Front. I had to pull Dresdner off an old woman who was scrubbing a floor in a café after one stand down. She looked eighty years old. What is it about fighting that makes men need women?’

‘A primitive desire and impulse to procreate before they get wiped from the face of the earth, which given the age of Dresdner’s prospective victim, defies logic,’ Wolf guessed. ‘To return to Dorfman. The fact he sent money to a French convent that’s been closed indicates he’s trying to pay someone off to keep quiet about what happened. I’m guessing the recipient of his charity is the priest who shut the house and told Colette she was no longer fit to be a nun.’

‘That doesn’t explain why Dorfman’s arrested Georg Hafen and Lilli Richter and put out a warrant for your arrest,’ Josef picked up his coffee. It was cold.

‘He’s obviously been unnerved by the murders and is terrified of what Georg might uncover during the course of his investigation. Dorfman arrested Hafen to prevent him from finding out the truth. Don’t forget it’s not only Colette who knows what happened in that convent. The surviving officers were nervous when I spoke to them this morning, especially Emil Grunman. Any one of them could talk and implicate Dorfman. The kriminalrat probably targeted Lilli because she’s the editor of the only Konigsberg paper with any integrity.’

‘And you? Don’t forget he has an arrest warrant out for you as well as the girl?’

‘Colette because she knows the truth,’ Wolf surmised. ‘Me, because he’s seen me with Georg and can’t be sure how much I know. It wouldn’t surprise me if Peter’s next on his list of people to silence, along with the surviving officers who were present in that convent, Engels, Schult and – Grunman.’

‘Any idea where they are?’ Josef asked.

‘No. But I doubt Dorfman would shed any tears if they were murdered like the others.’

‘We have to stop the nuns from killing them and Dorfman from arresting them but beyond arrest I can’t see Dorfman doing anything else to them. Konigsberg’s not a war zone under military rule. A kriminalrat can’t lock people up for ever.’

‘No,’ Wolf agreed, ‘but accidents happen, even in police cells. A fire – a flood – food poisoning.’

‘Dorfman wouldn’t go that far?’

‘You’re talking about a man who not only turned a blind eye to men under his command raping nuns, but one who joined in. He might not have intended to kill Colette’s sister but manslaughter or murder, she’s dead. If Dorfman hadn’t been there she’d still be alive.’

Josef took one of the pillows from the desk and tossed it to Wolf who slipped it behind his head.

‘Thank you, Mother. I’m comfortable but I’m also aware Colette and I can’t hide out here for the rest of our lives. We have to get a message to Johanna Behn.’

‘The lawyer? Can you trust her?’

‘I don’t trust anyone except you, Peter, and Ralf, but as none of you are acquainted with the legal system and she’s the only lawyer I know, I have little choice. If we can find a way to contact her and Ralf it would be a start. Georg told me Ralf’s father is “an honest rogue”, whatever that means.’