The Excalibur Codex (15 page)

‘
Buenas tardes
?’ The voice came from their right where a grey-haired woman in a shapeless dark work dress and wearing neon-yellow rubber gloves appeared from round the side of the house.

Jamie responded to the greeting with a smile that wasn’t reciprocated by the washed-out blue eyes or the small, bitter mouth. She would be in her sixties, he guessed, and something about her said the world had not been kind. A soul corroded by anger.

‘We are seeking Senor Lauterbacher, Senor Rolf Lauterbacher?’ He spoke in Spanish, but she surprised him by replying in perfect German.

‘My father is dead, sir, and good riddance.’

Charlotte froze and Jamie felt as if all the breath had been knocked out of him. He winced as the pain from his damaged ribs returned with a vengeance.

‘Our condolences, Frau …?’ It wasn’t exactly appropriate given her sentiments of a few seconds earlier, but what else do you say if someone tells you their father has just died? At least her manner indicated Lauterbacher’s death had been recent. But just how recent?

‘Fräulein Inge Lauterbacher.’

‘Would it be possible to talk with you about your father, Fräulein?’

She snorted dismissively and he saw irritation flash across her face. More people to get in the way of her work. As if she hadn’t more important things to do. ‘I am just disposing of some of his rubbish …’

For the first time Jamie became aware of the scent of smoke on the woman’s clothes. Christ, if that meant …

‘Perhaps if I …’ He reached into his pocket but before his fingers reached the wad of euros Gault had placed at his disposal, Charlotte laid her hand on his arm.

‘We would be ever so grateful,’ she said with a warm smile.

The dark eyes narrowed and the lined features hardened, if that were possible, but nothing grim could survive in the face of Charlotte’s unwavering charm. Slowly, the lips lost their malign certainty, dismissal was replaced by acceptance and finally something that might have been welcome. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Please, wait while I change my shoes.’ She disappeared round the corner and a few moments later they heard the sound of bolts being drawn before the door opened.

Jamie made the introductions as Inge Lauterbacher led them through a bare hallway into a large bay-windowed room with equally bare walls and heavy antique furniture devoid of any ornament. The furniture and a small, old-fashioned TV apart, her every possession appeared to be contained in eight or nine large brown
cardboard boxes arranged neatly in the centre of the carpeted floor.

‘Please, sit.’ She indicated a worn cloth sofa. ‘
Kaffe
?’

‘
Danke,
’ Jamie replied for them both.

She placed a small table in front of them and vanished through a doorway into what must have been the kitchen, giving them the opportunity to study their surroundings more closely.

‘It must have been very elegant once,’ Charlotte whispered.

‘Mm,’ the art dealer grunted. Seedy and run down were the words that came to mind. Symmetrical patches marked the walls where paintings and photographs had obviously hung for many years. The paper itself was peeling in places, the paintwork cracked and flaking, and the furniture had seen better days. Jamie’s eyes were drawn to the flickering, barely discernible images on the television. There was no sound, but they appeared to show the aftermath of some kind of accident, with blue flashing lights and people rushing around in panic.

Before he could work out what was happening on the screen, Inge Lauterbacher returned bearing two cups, which she placed carefully on the table. She flicked an annoyed glance at the television. ‘Some kind of bomb, in Cologne, of all places.’ She grimaced. ‘Apparently there are many children dead.’ She switched it off and took her seat opposite the two visitors, smoothing her dress over her knees and placing wrinkled, claw-like hands together in her lap.

‘You said you wished to talk to me about my father?’

‘Yes, Fräulein.’ Jamie nodded. ‘We had hoped to speak with him personally, but obviously that will not be possible …’ He left the sentence unfinished, hoping to draw her into the conversation, but Inge Lauterbacher would not be drawn.

‘Perhaps you might enlighten me as to the reason for this interest?’

He had been prepared to make Lauterbacher a straightforward offer for any information he could provide about the sword called Excalibur and the ritual, but his manifestly embittered daughter was an entirely different proposition. What to say? One wrong word and the interview would be over before it had begun. He felt Charlotte shift beside him, but the responsibility was his. Reluctantly, he took a first step into the minefield.

‘Your father had an unusual war, and perhaps an even more unusual peace …’ The thin lips twitched into an unlikely ghost of a smile at this cryptic excuse for a question. ‘We are interested in certain areas of his war service. Did he ever speak about particular aspects of his career? He mixed with some very high-ranking members of the, ah, German hierarchy.’

‘If you mean the Nazi party, Herr Saintclair, why don’t you say so? My father never talked about the war and I never asked him about it. Let us be frank. I despised my father for what he had been and what he had done to us, his family. He married my mother on the day Adolf Hitler invaded Russia and she did not see him again for
more than six years. His position in the party allowed him to put her up in an apartment in Berlin and that was where she stayed until the end of the war.’

Jamie listened as a voice that had begun flat and emotionless, like a soldier giving a report, became shriller and more bitter as her story unfolded. He noticed idly, that though Charlotte raised her cup to her mouth, she was so hypnotized by Inge Lauterbacher’s tale that the coffee never touched her lips.

‘How she survived when the Russians came I never knew, because she would not speak of it. Not a single word. One day she piled her belongings in a small cart and walked all the way from Berlin to the Harz, in the British zone. She thought my father was dead, but at the end of nineteen forty-seven he appeared at her door demanding food. He stayed for a single night and left again, leaving me as the only evidence of his existence. In the next six years my mother had two postcards to confirm he was still alive, one from South America and the other from Egypt, but he did not send a single
pfennig
to support her or her child. He must have become desperate, because he reappeared for a month when I was eight, then vanished again for good. My mother died of neglect in nineteen seventy-six still loving him. Do you wonder that I should despise him? Yet when a worn-out husk of a man sought me out in the summer of nineteen eighty-eight, claiming that I was his only kin and offering to treat me like a princess if I would come and live with him in Spain, I was flattered
enough to accept.’ The memory made her face twitch with suppressed fury and the wrinkled hands twisted in her lap as if they were strangling something. ‘Twenty years. Not as a princess, but as a prisoner in this gilded cage. Oh, I see you look at our tattered walls, but then it was very different; beautiful. But Rolf Lauterbacher, in addition to his many other faults, was a miser, who would spend nothing on food, or clothes or any luxuries, not even on wallpaper. For twenty years nothing was replaced. Not a painting, or a sheet, or a stick of furniture. I hate this place, I hate these arrogant, selfish people I am forced to live among and I hate their greasy food and their garlic and their sour wine.’

‘Why didn’t—’

‘Why didn’t I leave?’ Her flat chest heaved with emotion. ‘I could not. He kept my passport locked away.’ She reached into her pocket and with a malicious gleam in her eyes brandished the maroon rectangle of a German passport. ‘But I have it now and I have done with the old
schwein
for good.’ Her voice rose an octave. ‘I found it in the wardrobe in a safe I never even knew existed. And do you know what I found in that safe, lady and gentleman, when I finally discovered the key where he had hidden it beneath the floorboards?’ She stood up and marched to a sideboard, bending stiffly to recover something heavy that turned out to be a leather satchel. She opened it and poured the contents at their feet, a cascade of loose coins, tubes of coins, rolls of notes and among it, the unmistakable
glitter of cut diamonds. ‘Almost half a million euros, the lawyer says,’ she almost choked on the words, ‘and for twenty years he treated me, his own daughter, as a servant, and refused to buy me a dress or a pair of shoes. I would have been naked and barefoot if it had not been for the pittance I made from my sewing.’ She fought for composure and eventually the fury subsided. ‘So now you know why I do not mourn my father. I was a teacher, Herr Saintclair, I had the love of my children and that was enough. But he took it away from me. You should also know that the only reason I am speaking to you is because I am done with him. I will walk out of this house tomorrow and never look back. I will answer your questions and then you will leave me alone, so that I never need think of him again. Do you understand?’ Jamie nodded. ‘Then ask your questions.’

‘You say your father never talked about the war. Yet you also said you despised him for what he’d done. Forgive me, but there seems to be some contradiction in those two statements?’

Her frown deepened and Jamie imagined her taking a question in class, studying it from every angle, to ensure she had considered every nuance before answering. Eventually, she nodded.

‘My mother kept pictures of my father in the house until the end of her days. He was a handsome man, I think, though there was a cruelty in those pictures that always disturbed me. Sometimes he would be in civilian clothes, sometimes in uniform. But always with the
same symbol on his arm. Later I would come to know what the symbol and the uniform signified.’

‘So you know he was in the SS.’

‘I knew that he had been in the SS and that he had served in the East. I was a great reader, sir, until I came here and he denied me even my books, and the things I read about what happened in the Soviet Union convinced me he was a monster.’

‘Yet you still agreed to look after him.’

‘He was my only blood relative, Herr Saintclair.’ A bitter smile swept like a passing cloud across her worn features. ‘And he was a great charmer. My mother used to say he could talk the birds from the trees if he wished. I paint a picture of an ogre, but he was different with other people. He could not have survived after the war without friends. In the early days, when we first came to Madrid, they would visit him, and they would talk and drink schnapps. And afterwards, he would sit in this chair and boast about the great people he knew. The Old
Kameraden
who ruled Germany now, the new friends he had made in Washington and New York and something he called “The Pullach Boys”. He made occasional trips to America at the invitation of his friends up till the early nineties, and they sometimes came here. There had not been so many visitors in recent years, but one of them saw him a few days before he died.’

Jamie exchanged glances with Charlotte. ‘You haven’t said how he died.’

‘Yes, of course.’ She hesitated and he thought she
was composing herself, but she was only taking time to think. ‘It was two weeks ago. A Friday. I’d been out at the market as usual trying to make the few euros he had given me buy enough food to make a meal for two. The trip took longer than usual because I had to haggle with that
schwarzer
bitch Maria at the fruit stall over the price she charged for her rotten peaches. When I opened the door on my return he was lying at the bottom of the stairs. His eyes were open and he looked peaceful, even serene, but he was quite dead.’ Jamie felt a chill run through him at the memory of another old man’s death. He had found his own grandfather in similar circumstances only two years earlier. ‘The police said he had broken his neck and would have been killed instantly,’ Inge Lauterbacher continued. ‘They looked at the stair carpet. Near the top there’s a worn patch and they said he must have been coming down, and tripped. When they said it, they were looking at me, and I knew they thought it was my fault. But they left, and the mortuary car came and took him away, and I heard no more. I thought it was strange.’

‘That they didn’t come back?’

‘No, that he was coming downstairs. You see,’ she met his eyes and there was something unfathomable in her expression, ‘he had never left the bedroom once in eight years. Not once. I fed him and I washed him. I dressed him and emptied his necessaries. Eight years and never a word of thanks.’

‘Are you saying it may not have been an accident?’
Charlotte’s voice mirrored the puzzlement on her face.

Inge Lauterbacher shrugged. ‘He had friends, but he also had enemies. He used to talk in his sleep. Sometimes it was the Russians who were coming for him. Sometimes the Israelis. There were others, but they were just names. He kept a gun by his bed, an ugly great black thing, but I put it out with the rubbish before the police came. I didn’t want any trouble.’

‘But surely—’

‘I didn’t want any trouble,’ she repeated. ‘He is gone and I am free and that is all that matters, Herr Saintclair.’

Jamie stared at her, waiting for more. He’d discovered his grandfather, a man a little older than Rolf Lauterbacher, at the bottom of the stairs at his house in Welwyn Garden City with his neck broken. The police had called that an accident too. Six months later, Jamie had tracked down the two men who had murdered Matthew Sinclair. He was certain that Inge Lauterbacher knew more than she was telling, but she met his gaze with a challenge and he knew it wasn’t worth pushing her further. He changed course. ‘You mentioned a gun. I wondered if your father had any other mementoes of the war – photographs, papers, perhaps a diary?’ He said it without much hope of a positive response.

But the question was followed by a stillness in the woman opposite and a gleam somewhere deep in the wide-set eyes that convinced him this was the point of the interview she had been waiting for. As if she could
read his mind she rose from the seat without a word and walked from the room, returning a moment later with another large cardboard box.