The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (24 page)

So my powers of memory
had
failed me, and Nagel told the truth. I had seen someone at the Vienna station, but it was not Dr. Nagel. The news relieved me, frankly. I could end my search and return to Munich, where I’d collect my things, take the train to Paris, and begin the process of building P&C Consulting Engineers from a company of two into a going concern of thirty.

I had worked up an appetite and, for sentimental reasons, found the café where Liesel and I had come to discuss our visit with Zeligman’s widow. I was two kilometers from the apartment, well beyond my range for surveying shop owners and hoteliers for a hit on Nagel’s photograph. Still, almost reflexively, I presented the photo.

The woman behind the counter called into the kitchen for the owner, who took one look and made a face, remarking on how stern-looking a man Nagel was. “I wouldn’t soon forget him,” she said. “No, he never came here.”

I ordered, admiring the canals and heavy willows and steeply pitched roofs with their fish-scale tiles. A woman turned the corner, negotiating the cobblestones in preposterously high heels. Thunderheads rumbled and Bruges, old as it was, seemed a steady, timeless place. There’s a comfort in returning to things that never change, an illusion, I suppose, that a life can be reset, mistakes erased. I was pleased to think I’d be returning for work.

But I could hardly leave before visiting the chocolatier, Anton Dumont. The pot-bellied, apron-stained master himself stood behind the counter when I entered the shop. “My young friend who used to be on crutches,” he said. “Where’s the pretty lady?”

“You remembered.”

“And apparently you don’t remember my telling you about my memory? Eat more chocolate, son. It’s the oils, the bioflavonoids, that will keep your brain sharp. A lifetime of eating my father’s and my own product has bestowed two gifts. This.” He patted his stomach. “And this.” He tapped his head. “Mark my words, chemists will one day discover that dark chocolate, it must be seventy-percent cacao or better, is restorative. I eat chocolate every day and drink red wine. I’ll live to be a hundred.”

Isaac put his faith in butterscotch and cognac, little good that it did him. But he enjoyed both. The candy I ate alongside him on our park bench from the earliest days. It wasn’t until I returned during my first year at University that he let me drink with him. I had climbed the stairwell at rue Jeanne d’Arc to find my parents out. I left a note, dropped off my bags, and found Isaac and Freda at their kitchen table, reading.

“Tell me,” he said, “my big man of the world. What have you learned?” They were so clearly happy to see me. At the door, Freda all but sang my name. Isaac threw his arms wide. He kissed me, then sat me down at the table.

“Wait,” he said. “You’ve had a birthday. You’re nineteen! Wait!” He rummaged for three glasses and a bottle of Rémy Martin. “I don’t even want to know what you’re drinking at school. With me, you’ll have a proper champagne cognac.”

Freda reached for the bottle. “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning!”

“So what?” he said. “Because of a clock I should deny the boy and myself our first drink together?” He poured, then looked at me. “First lesson,” he said. “Drink nothing out of a bottle unless you find yourself in Russia in a blizzard.”

Freda grinned. “You know, it happened once.”

When my parents arrived, Isaac found two more glasses. The four of them toasted my future, all of us halfway to drunk by noon. My father suggested the bistro around the corner, and we made a day of it—the very first day, I recall, that my parents and the Kahanes took me into their lives as something other than a child. In my presence, Isaac and Freda held hands. My mother rested her head on my father’s shoulder. The music played. And ever since, I’ve had a fondness for Rémy Martin.

I looked over at Anton Dumont and considered the boast he’d made about oil of cacao. “How old is Monsieur Dumont, the elder?”

“He died last year at fifty-nine—but he had bad genes.”

He said it as if throwing down a challenge, and I bought a box of pre-packaged nougats, Dumont’s so-called Bruges Memories, instead of arguing. I also ordered four loose truffles and mentioned that I’d be seeing him regularly, once I returned in the autumn for work.

I was nearly out the door when I set down my bags and laid my photo on the counter above a tray of pralines, which I regretted not ordering. “Pardon, Monsieur Dumont, would you please?”

He reviewed the photo. “Your pretty lady and three men of a certain age. This one I’ve seen.”

He was pointing to Nagel.

“Five, six weeks ago. He complained he didn’t get to Europe much anymore, and that he missed the chocolate. He bought our Belgian Memories collection, forty-eight pieces, a superior mix. And also a bag of loose truffles, like you. My male customers frequently do, you know. They buy a gift
de cacao
for the wife or lady friend but can’t really present it with three pieces missing.”

“Did he say anything else? Did he say where he was from?”

“Not Europe is all I remember. Hey, are you police?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Then is it proper, these questions?”

I felt lightheaded. “It’s proper,” I said. At a wall calendar by the door, I worked a timeline backwards to the day Zeligman died. I fixed the date in my mind, lifted the calendar off its nail, and presented it to Dumont. “I know your memory is good,” I said. “But how good? Can you tell me when this man visited your shop?”

Dumont grew more suspicious. “Perhaps I should call the police. I’m not comfortable, you know. What if this should come back at me? What if the man in the photograph should hear of it?”

I reminded him that Nagel no longer lived in Europe. “In any event,” I said, “perhaps it would help if I bought, say, four or five of your Belgian Memories?”

He thought it over. “Which is it, four or five?”

“Five.”

“I have just enough inventory for seven.”

“Seven it is.”

“It is our premier collection, you know, a nicely mixed collection of nougats, truffles, pralines, and our signature dark chocolate
petite maisons,
with and without nuts. I’ve been experimenting with Madagascan vanilla bean. It makes for a
very
interesting truffle. Look for the one wrapped in gold foil.”

He ducked into the kitchen and returned with a file box. “I’m good with faces, Monsieur, but not so good with dates. I record all sales of our Belgian Memories. The Bruges Memories, the one you just bought, is half the size. I may sell thirty of those a week, in season. But the Belgian Memories . . .” He flipped though his index cards and looked up at me. “July eighth.”

“You’re certain?”

He showed me the card. “We sold two Belgians that day, to different customers, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. I ask for names and addresses, because we’ve started a mail order business. It’s quite profitable, you know. The customer in the afternoon gave me his particulars. But not this one.” He tapped a pudgy finger on Nagel’s face.

I
SPENT
a sleepless night in Bruges, wrestling with my newfound information, and placed a call the next morning to Serge Laurent. He answered, and without announcing myself, I said: “How do I know if you’re an Interpol agent? We’ve met three times, and you go by three names.”

“Monsieur Poincaré?”

I waited.

“Where are you?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“All right. If you’re in a city, go to police headquarters. Ask to speak with a detective. Tell that detective you need to contact Interpol. It may take all day. They’ll want to know why, and they’ll question you. Eventually they’ll place the call. When they do, tell them to ask for Inspector Serge Laurent. An assistant will answer. I will call her now and leave this message: Inspector Laurent is in Iceland.”

I thought it over. “Add ‘hunting seals.’”

“Fine. Now, what can I do for you? Do you need a friend, after all?”

“I need information.”

“Don’t we all. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Laurent told me that his dossier on Anselm Kraus’s use of slave, or near-slave, labor was complete. But he wanted to know about the computers he saw in Hong Kong and their relation to the sordid empire Kraus had built. “Can you tell me about the computers?” he asked.

I could, though at a terrible cost. I could betray Anselm and, in the process, Liesel. But faced with betrayal on the one hand and the possibility of Nagel’s getting away with murder, I had no choice. I hadn’t forgotten my lessons in statistics: Nagel’s presence in Vienna and Bruges on the days two men died proved nothing. Then again, my gut told me otherwise, and I was ready to turn logic on its head.

I agreed to send what I knew of Anselm’s plans for salvaging precious metals if Laurent would locate the eight remaining witnesses
and,
I insisted, track the international travel of Eckehart Nagel. If for reasons I couldn’t guess Nagel had begun killing the men who signed the affidavit, the others needed to be warned. And I wanted them safe for my own selfish ends. Every one of them who died placed Isaac Kahane that much further from my reach.

We had a deal.

Sure enough, I found the police station in Bruges and learned that Inspector Laurent of Interpol would have to get back to me because he was off hunting seals in Iceland. On my return to Munich, wrestling a final time with the knife I was thrusting into Anselm’s back, I faxed my report on the gold salvage to Laurent.

Then I called my father.

I could remember only two or three times interrupting him at work, but I had entered dangerous territory. I needed him.

“Henri? Is anything wrong?”

Alarm in his voice, alarm in mine. I tried to stay calm. “No, Papa. Well, maybe.”

The night before, I had dreamed of watching myself asleep in an apartment in Buenos Aires, waking to shouts and boots on the stairs. I heard a boom, then a crash as my apartment door exploded inward. More shouts, and in full riot gear Alphonse Batista, his breath stinking, leaned into my face:
I need more money. You stole my money!
He spoke in machine-gun Spanish. They hooded me, then dragged me to a prison where other soldiers, wearing swastikas at their lapels, questioned me in German.

“Papa,” I said. “Do you remember when the dog came after me in the park, and afterwards, when I was better you gave me your present?” I reached for the T in my pocket. It jangled against Isaac’s medallion.

“Yes, of course.”

His voice itself was a tonic, and I knew that one day I would call and he wouldn’t answer. Isaac’s death confirmed it. I mourned Isaac all over again, and I mourned my father though he was still very much alive. Was this the price of love, I wondered: to ache with loss even in the presence of the living?

“Papa, when you gave me the T, you said always to face the beast. Never to run. You told me that if I had to I should let it bite me once, then aim for the eyes and throat. You weren’t talking just about dogs, were you?”

Dead air.

“What’s wrong, son?”

“Please, answer.”

I knew what he would say. He had watched Nazis invade the city he loved. He had seen friends killed in battle and former friends collaborate before the Partisans killed them or deported them after the war. He had watched neighbors with names like Epstein and Cohen herded to the transit camp at Drancy before being shipped in cattle cars to Poland.

“Henri,” he said. “Beasts come in all shapes and sizes. The worst ones walk on two legs.”

thirty-two

I
t would be our final weekend before I returned to Paris, and Liesel and I decided to see Munich as tourists do. “You live in a place so long that you forget why people come from around the world to visit. I haven’t seen half these sites,” she said, showing me a “Munich’s Top Ten List” ripped from a guidebook.

That morning we saw the Glockenspiel at the Marienplatz and watched a nearly life-sized mechanical knight knock another off his horse. We visited the Viktualienmarkt for a sausage and wheat beer. We strolled and held hands as lovers do, planning her visits to Paris and mine to Munich. We vowed to shrink the distance and visit often, every weekend if possible. In truth, the flight between cities was not even an hour. But despite our best intentions, we both knew what became of most long-distance affairs. Already we were missing each other, and as we walked, we clasped hands all the tighter as if happiness were a tangible thing that could be gathered up and stored against lean times, like wheat. I promised again to join the family at Terschelling for its end-of-summer trek.

“It’s only two weeks off,” she said. “September arrives, and I always wonder where the summer went.”

By midafternoon, we were hot. My ankle had begun to ache where the dogs had feasted, and I was feeling cranky. At that point we had visited eight of Liesel’s top attractions, and the ninth was a welcome sight: the Frauenkirche, the Cathedral of Our Dear Lady. Our plan was to step out of the heat and rest a bit in one of the pews before climbing the south tower, where we would enjoy a fine view of Munich and, if the smog was down, the Alps.

At the doorway of the cathedral, a woman in a muddy skirt sat on a paver with a ragged-looking child beside her. As each visitor passed, the woman pushed her daughter forward to beg. The little one made her approach with an open palm and the most miserable, forlorn of expressions. They were gypsies: Roma, stateless, and likely living in a makeshift camp along the river well out of the city.

It’s a common-enough scene throughout Europe, repeated hundreds of times each day. When Liesel and I reached the massive cathedral door, the child made her way to us, whimpering like a sick animal. Liesel didn’t hesitate. She dipped into a pocket, dropped a coin into the child’s outstretched hand, and stepped into the half light of the nave.

What surprised me wasn’t the begging but how suddenly annoyed I’d become. No doubt I was irritable from the heat and my gimpy ankle. Perhaps watching tourists offering coins to a child raised to beg struck me as useless because nothing about her life would improve from that exchange. Frankly, I didn’t care. After a lifetime of depositing coins in the hands of Roma women who, from what I could tell, did nothing to advance themselves beyond begging, I for once, a solitary, irritable once, wanted to be left alone.