The Roses Underneath (18 page)

“Well what were you doing out there in the middle of the night? Maybe you could explain it to me,” Anna said.

Cooper smiled over her shoulder. “Duchess! You’re up late.”

Amalia stepped inside the bathroom and regarded him with frightened eyes. “Is he hurt?” she asked with a mosquito voice.

Anna knelt down and put her arms around her daughter. “He’s a little bit hurt. He had a car crash.” She switched to English. “You had a car crash, didn’t you, Captain?”

Cooper nodded. “Jeep drove right into a tree. I never could see in the dark.” He smashed his hands together and made a face. “Don’t worry, duchess. I’ll be right as rain.
Alles okay
.”

Amalia hugged her mother’s leg. “I’ll be right back,” Anna said. She picked the child up and went into the living room. She put Amalia back in the bed with stern instructions to stay there, softened with the promise of a cookie for breakfast. Madeleine continued to snore softly, oblivious. Amalia lay down and snuggled her body next to the old woman. She didn’t close her eyes.

In the bathroom, Anna took the washrag and dabbed at the cut at the back of Cooper’s head. His hair had hardened with the drying blood. She rinsed the rag and worked at the wound until finally she could see the cut.

“Well, I don’t think you need stitches, but you do need a some proper medical attention.”

“Ah, forget it. Just give me that bar of soap.”

Anna gave him the sliver left over from the washing. He ran it under the tap and rubbed the wet bar on his face and neck. Anna winced. “This is how you do it on the farm,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

Anna sat on the edge of the tub. She felt icy in her wet bathrobe. The adrenaline was starting to wane and she clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. “Tell me again, what happened?” she asked.

Cooper shrugged. “Well, the thing is, I don’t sleep well. And it was bugging me, what you said about the villa maybe being a store room for the black market and that the boy is acting all squirrely about why he was there. So I drove out there to have a look around. I was in the basement when I heard the door open. I pulled my weapon, but the other guy was too fast. Next thing I knew, I was down, and he was cracking me on the back of the head with my own gun.” He reached down to touch the holster on his hip. “Oh shit.” He spun around as if looking for something behind him. “Oooh shit. He took it. God damn it.” He closed his eyes. “That’s gonna be real hard to explain.”

Anna’s teeth freed themselves and began to jabber, telegraphing her anxiety despite her best efforts. She pulled the robe around her body, making the damp cold on her skin worse.

“They took your gun? Damn it, Captain. Why did you have to do go out there?”

Cooper smiled at her. “Now take is easy, sister. Everything will be fine. Don’t you worry. This has nothing to do with you.”

“So tomorrow you’ll secure the repository and we’ll start doing things, how do you say it…by the book?” Anna asked.

“Well, no.”

“No, I didn’t think so.”

He sat on the edge of the tub next to her. “The guy that hit me took the Runge.”

“What? How do you know?”

“What do you mean, how do I know?” He pointed at his head. “I was there.”

“You saw him take the painting?”

“No, it was there when I got to the basement. But when I left, it was gone. I must have passed out for a while. I checked everywhere. The painting is definitely gone.”

Anna closed her eyes. Part of her wanted him to walk away. She could go back to the typing pool and type up other people’s reports. Thomas would come and they would restart their little life together. The other part of her asked Cooper, “Why would they only take the Runge, I wonder?”

“Anna?” a voice came from the living room. “Are you all right? What’s going on?”

Anna sighed. “Well, we might as well go into the living room and be comfortable. Everyone’s up now.” She took the candle and led the way. She lit more candles before remembering that the room was decorated with her dripping underwear. She shook her head and decided not to care.

Madeleine was sitting up in bed with her arm around Amalia. “Captain, you’ve had an accident?” she said in her best English.

Cooper smiled and sat down on the couch, his arms reaching back onto the seat to steady himself. “Yes, ma’am. Nothing to worry about.” His eyes fell on the basket on the table and then traced the laundry hanging like misshapen and tattered banners in the dark. “I like what you’ve done with the place. Did you have a nice dinner today?” He pointed at Schneider’s basket.

Anna reddened and pulled her bathrobe around her legs as she sat down at the end of the bed.

“A present.” Amalia piped up in English before Anna could speak. “From a man.” She tugged at her mother. “
Sags ihm
, Mama, tell him.”

“It was misdelivered,” Anna lied. “Amalia answered the door and he was gone before I could stop…” she sighed. “Oh, what the hell. It came from Schneider. He wants me to help him get a job at the Collecting Point, I guess.”

“We decided to eat the food anyway,” Madeleine said. “Would you like some sausage or maybe some bread? We have cucumbers too. Anna, fix him a plate. The poor man.”

“No thanks, I’m good,” Cooper said. “So, Schneider was here?” He pointed at the floor and looked at Amalia, who nodded.

“I was doing laundry,” Anna said. She felt the escalating embarrassment warm her.

Cooper leaned forward. “So he knows where you live. Isn’t that interesting. But you didn’t talk to him?”

“He’s a horrible little man. I’ve known him for years,” Madeleine whispered.

Cooper put a finger to his inflated lip and pointed to the open window. Anna nodded and crossed the room to close the shutters. When they were alone with the dripping laundry, Cooper gestured for Madeleine to go on.

“He was such a little weasel. My husband and I never bought a thing from him but many of our friends did. Then the political situation began to separate us from our friends. People we thought we knew, and even liked, turned out to be nothing more than ignorant and hateful beasts. And greedy, too. When Hitler took power in March of ‘33, all of a sudden being a Nazi was the fashionable thing. People were afraid to be caught on the wrong side. March Violets the old Nazi guard called them—late bloomers. So many people applied for Party membership that they had to stop taking them. You know, having a low Party membership number was a big honor in those circles. I guess people liked to prove that they were idiots before most others had caught on. After the Nazi Party stopped taking members, people joined the SA since it wasn’t so particular. As long as they had some paper with a Swastika on it to identify themselves, they were happy.”

“Like I said, that explains how Herr Schneider ended up in the SA,” Anna said. “He didn’t want to be left out in the cold.”

“So you would consider Herr Schneider an enthusiastic follower?” Cooper asked as he dabbed at the nape of his neck with the wet rag.

Madeleine stroked Amalia’s hair. “Of course. He became one when he saw which way the flag was waving, so to speak. And it worked, too. I heard he had the job of appraising the confiscated Jewish property. Of course, all those things were obscenely undervalued. And only Aryan buyers were permitted. Schneider once wanted to buy what few pieces we had—nothing important—but my Otto had the sense to sell it in ‘38, while it was still worth something. Probably the Nazis got their hands on it in the end anyway. We took the money and sat on it, kept it in cash.” She waved her hand over her head. “It’s what helped me survive. I’m down to one room but I have a kitchen and a bath, and I am grateful. Our old apartment isn’t even standing anymore.”

“Uncle Otto died in 1942,” Anna said. “A heart attack. He was a banker. The greed and the corruption were too much for him. He was always trying to do the right thing. The insurance refused to pay because they said he had not kept up the premiums. That was a lie. He just wasn’t a good Nazi. Before he died they moved into this small apartment. He bought it for her before things got really bad—the rations, the hunger, the bombs. Of our two families, we are the only ones left now.”

Cooper looked at Madeleine. “Do you have children, Frau Wolf?”

Madeleine nodded. “A son. He died at the Somme, in the Great War. Anna’s mother was a great champion of the soldiers of that war because of him. She was my best friend.” She smiled, but her eyes flitted.

Anna rubbed Madeleine’s back. Cooper glanced at his watch. “I should go. People will be up soon. Better if I’m gone before the wagging tongues wake up.”

They are already awake
, Anna thought. No one in Germany slept very deeply anymore, and everyone was trained to jump at the sound of banging on a neighbor’s door in the middle of the night. It was not the kind of thing you got used to, no matter how often it happened, or who was doing the banging. She helped him off the couch.

“I hope you feel better, Captain,” Amalia said. “Tell him, Mama.”

Anna translated and Cooper gave her a thumbs-up, which Amalia returned halfheartedly. She lingered behind her mother’s bathrobe as Anna ushered Cooper to the door.

“Tomorrow you will explain to me why you were out at the villa in the middle of the night,” Anna said.

“I thought I already had,” Cooper said. “I told you, I thought something fishy was going on there. I guess I wanted to just go there and think, but maybe I wanted to find something, too.”

“And now you’ll prepare the report and have the art brought to the Collecting Point, yes?”

“Well, I could do that, but I’d have to leave out some parts. And now one of the pieces is stolen. And so is my gun.”

“Because you didn’t report that you found the stash when you should have.”

“Right.”

“Right. So what happens now?”

“I’ll figure it out. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

As soon as he was gone Anna closed the door and bolted it. It was five o’clock. They could maybe get two more hours of sleep. She pulled off the damp robe and crawled into bed with Madeleine and Amalia. The bed was warm and dry but sleep eluded her. Questions danced together in her head: Why was
Cooper not following protocol? Who took the Runge painting? And why, of all places, had Cooper come here in the middle of the night?

“Frau Klein?”

A whisper startled Anna back to reality. She had been bent over a pad of paper, doodling the name Ludwig Schneider, Reichskammer, Frankfurt. Then she wrote:
Breuer, Darmstadt, Runge
. She looked at the page and drew circles around all three sets of information and pondered all that had happened.
Isn’t this how the detective would solve the crime in one of those English mystery novels?
In the middle of page she wrote the name Oskar Grünewald and tapped her pencil as if to elicit some response from the paper itself. Now she turned to see Cooper limping to his desk. She jumped up and pulled out his chair.

“Captain. Is everything all right?”

He sat down. “Oh sure. Fine. I told my CO I got into a bar fight with some enlisted men. He rolled his eyes and told me to go get cleaned up. Gave me a warning. The nurses fixed me up and I even got some aspirin so things are looking up. I didn’t mention the case of the missing side arm. You okay?”

“Yes. Of course.” She took a step back and straightened as a group of GIs walked past the desk. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Sure—go down to Records and get the list of galleries that have filed to reclaim property or asked to re-open or just declared themselves to still exist. We can take a look and see if any claims or gallery names match our find.”

“And you’ll send someone to retrieve the art today? And file your report?”

Cooper sighed. “Yeah. I pulled together a couple of guys and got the trucks. We’ll go out there today. You okay to stay here?”

Anna breathed a sigh of relief. She wanted nothing more than to sit at her desk and scour lists all day.

“Oh yeah, one more thing.” Cooper winced as he shifted his weight in the chair. “I meant to ask you last night. Have you ever heard of some Nazi department called Lebensborn?”

Anna searched her memory and come up with only a vague idea relating to mothers and children. “I think it was some kind of program for pregnant women. There were some homes where women went to have babies? I’m not sure. Why do you ask?”

“I inquired downstairs about adoptions, you know—how that worked and if there were any records of birth parents or things like that. I figured you people keep such good records, there had to be a paper trail somewhere. One of the girls in the personnel department said Lebensborn, as if everyone should know this, but when I asked her what that was, she clammed up and turned red as a radish. Wouldn’t say another word about it.”

“So you think maybe it had something to do with Oskar’s adoption? I do remember Himmler was always going on about how women should give the Führer a child.
The more the better. So I think Lebensborn was some kind of SS program? It was all sort of secret and mysterious. And, of course, we didn’t ask any questions. Maybe I’ll see what I can find out.” She turned to go, but Cooper grabbed her hand.

“Hey, listen. Thanks. I know you didn’t really sign up for this. I’m sorry I’ve dragged you into the mess I’m making with the art and all. And I’m sorry about last night. I had nowhere else to go.” He looked genuinely apologetic and the gesture took her aback.