The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (26 page)

The librarian returned the phone to its cradle. “Done,” he said, smiling. The man had a genius for fact-finding. He wrote an address on a slip of paper. “Ten-thirty. They’re expecting you.”

thirty-four

I
parked my car by a barn and approached the porch, where I found two rocking chairs, one empty, and two bottles of beer on a table. Ulrich Bloch didn’t acknowledge me. He stared across a pasture to the hills of Salzgitter, rich with ore and history, steel for the making beneath a carpet of wild daisies and ryegrass. His cows grazed, their bells clinking.

“Sit,” said the man.

He was eighty or better, his clothing too large and worn smooth from use, his hair a white filament that lifted in the breeze. Bloch was shrinking, on his way to the graveyard I’d passed on the drive to his farm. He didn’t look especially concerned about that.

“My granddaughter told me about you.”

He couldn’t know the particulars because I hadn’t shared them with the librarian. I was careful. Bloch was old enough to remember, if his mind was intact.

I tried the beer. “It’s early in the day. But it’s good, Herr Bloch.”

“My son-in-law makes it now. Family recipe.”

“You were born here?”

“In 1898, in this house. Do you need to see the bed?”

I tipped the beer in Bloch’s direction. “Thanks, no. I won’t take any more of your time than I need to. The librarian told me you worked in the mines before the war. I have some questions about those years and about the steel works. Will you talk with me about that?”

He hadn’t stopped his rocking, and he watched the pasture more than he watched me. He nodded, or so I thought. It might have been the motion of the chair. His cane leaned against the house.

“Talk? What else am I good for at this age? All I’ve got left is my mind and those cows. At least they’ll be meat one day.” He tugged at the turkey flaps beneath his jaw. “Not much of me left. . . . What do you want? Courtesy’s a waste for a man who doesn’t have much time. Why are you here?”

“Otto von Kraus. What do you know about him?”

“What did you say?”

“Otto von—”

“
Von
? What’s this
von
?”

“This is . . . was, his name.”

“My ass. He was born Otto Kraus, farmer, just like the rest of us. The
von
he must have taken on after the war. The self-important fool. Bismarck was a
von.
Hindenburg was a
von.
Kraus was a piece of local shit who wanted to puff himself up. What would the British do to a man who anointed himself ‘Lord’? They’d eat him alive. Here, somehow, no one cares. Why do you want to know about him?”

Bloch was plenty sharp. My search could end with him, and I wasn’t about to play games. My answer surprised me. “I want to know about him because I love his daughter.”

“He had a daughter?”

“And a son.”

“I knew about the son. Anselm, a major pain in the ass as a kid.”

“Opa, it’s time for your medicine.” A young woman let the screen door slam behind her. “Here’s water. The doctor told you not to take pills with beer.” She swapped his bottle for a glass, and he cursed her.

“Anselm,” I said. “Before the war he would have been—”

“I know exactly how old. Otto’s son and my youngest son were born the same year. Mine died while I was off fighting Russians. His didn’t. That’s what I know. He would have been forty-three in September.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry when you don’t know me and didn’t know my son! Don’t. What do you need from me?”

His granddaughter called from inside the house: “Opa, the doctor told you not to yell. It’s bad for your nerves. Please!”

Bloch placed his water on the table and grabbed my beer, drank half of it, and belched. “She wants to keep me alive for some reason. I’ll tell you. First thing, Otto Kraus was a son of a bitch. Hell, in those years everyone was a son of a bitch. We ate turnips for the better part of a decade, and in 1935, we ate grass if we were lucky. But Otto and his cousin and uncle, they ate meat.”

“Why, Herr Bloch? Were they wealthy?”

“No, they were cruel. His father died, and the boy lived with his mother and her brother.” Bloch turned from the meadow and considered me with slow-moving eyes, much as he’d considered his cows. He had cataracts and a blue, bulging vein at his temple. “Do you know how to shut up?” he asked. “Can you listen and not interrupt? Because I’ll talk if you’ll listen. Otherwise, leave.”

“I’ll listen.”

“Good,” he said. “I never liked Kraus, not even when we were boys. He was a lazy sheep-fucking prick who waited for you to go into the woods and collect berries, then kick your ass if you didn’t hand them all over to him at the road. His younger cousin Nils was worse. I didn’t like Kraus then, and I don’t like thinking about him now. What, I’ve got a year left, maybe months, and you want me to talk about
that
man?”

I waited.

“Ach. Listen. Hell, close your eyes and we’ll pretend it’s a bedtime story. That’ll wake you up screaming. Ha!” He turned to me again. “Can you listen and say
nothing?
”

I nodded.

“Well, then.” He turned to the pasture.

I did close my eyes, and the old man’s words played like a movie.

“In those days we all worked in the mines,” he began. “We farmed, but the country wasn’t so good for it. Raised sheep and pigs, mostly. A bit of feed crop. In the larger families, the girls stayed on the farms. Once we boys reached twelve or thirteen, we went to the iron mines. The ore out here is low-grade shit. But there were a few blast furnaces in the district, one run by a fellow named Frick. His parents died young, and he was an only child, like Kraus. He couldn’t manage the farm, and he sold it and bought a small steel mill, and he paid us for the ore. A good man, Frick. Hard worker. He had a wife. They were just starting. This would have been, what, 1928? He was twenty-five or so. Younger than me. He worked like a plough horse, and he had a little business going, for sure, making short beams.

“Otto, me, and the others—we were stupider, so we worked the mines. But Otto’s uncle was the mayor of Gross Mahner, and one day at the end of a long shift Otto goes to Frick and says, ‘There’s plenty of steel business. Let’s be partners.’ And Frick, he told me this himself, says, ‘Go on, get out—who needs you?’ Otto tried again and this time brought his cousin Nils. Frick got angry at being threatened. Nils had a reputation as a barrel-chested pair of teenaged fists who’d pound your face raw for looking at him sideways. He ended up in Hitler’s navy, a captain of some sort. Died at sea, thank God.

“Anyway, Frick’s wife, Kerstin, was sweet and devoted. Pretty. She talks him down, and Otto and Nils leave without any blood spilt. But Otto tells his uncle the mayor what happened, that Frick won’t play, and the mayor sends the police out to the mill. Everybody knows everybody in these villages. Hell, the man his uncle sent went to school with Otto and me. I won’t tell you
his
name, because he was following orders. I can’t find fault with that, even if it was a bad business. The policeman says, ‘Frick, you’re wanted for questioning.’ And Kerstin, she tells me this afterwards, says: ‘What for?’ And the policeman says, ‘Someone reported a health code violation in this district. Did you hurt your hand?’ Frick holds up his hands and says, ‘My hands are fine. I cut them and bang them every day in the shop. What do you mean?’

“‘Come with me,’ says the policeman. So there’s nothing to be done. Frick tells his wife everything will be fine, that he’d done nothing wrong, and that he’ll be back by supper. But he didn’t come back for supper that evening or any evening. The mayor, and I know this for a fact, was a National Socialist. Fought in the first war. Was a goddamned zealot for wounded German pride. He says to Frick, ‘You’ve hurt yourself on the job and haven’t reported the injuries, as the law requires. This is an offense against the health of the district. What have you done with the bloody bandages?’ Frick tells him there were no bloody bandages, that he has no idea what the man’s talking about. The mayor says, ‘So, now you’re telling me that public safety is a trivial thing? You make light of public safety, the spread of disease?’

“And Frick, who can’t believe what’s happening, says, ‘What’s this about? You’re out of your mind! Go catch criminals, why don’t you.’ At which point the mayor turns furious. He’s spitting mad, he’s red in the face, he’s snorting. ‘Do you dare to challenge my authority or doubt the seriousness of this offense? Herr Frick, this is no longer a matter of exposing the district to disease. You’re disrespecting the rule of law. You’re dangerous. I will do my duty!’

“And the mayor throws Frick in jail for the night on a charge of endangering public safety. Kerstin goes to visit, Frick tells her it’s some monstrous mistake, but he must stay in jail for a few days. A few days become a month. Frick gets congested lungs and dies. He dies! Kerstin is lost in grief. They’d held off having children while he got the business started. She’s childless, she has nothing. Frick already sold the farm, and she doesn’t know how to run a steel mill. A month later, when she’s desperate from the loss and out of money, who should knock at her door but Otto Kraus, with an offer to buy the business for an eighth of what it’s worth.”

“Kraus set him up? He got his uncle, the mayor to—”

“Shut
up!
Did we not have an agreement?”

I fell silent.

We rocked in our chairs. The cow bells clinked. Far down the road, a truck kicked up a plume of dust. I grabbed the armrests of my rocker as if the chair might fly off the porch with what I’d heard. None of this, none of it appeared in the airbrushed history of Otto Kraus—aside from the purchase of a small steel works in Salzgitter in 1928.

“Kerstin went mad with it,” said Bloch. “She just lost her mind at how one day the sky was blue and the next day, black. What kind of hell had she slipped into? A catastrophe that came from nothing! But her shakes didn’t begin until she sold the foundry. In town one day she met Frick’s cousin, who had a bandage on his hand. She said, ‘What’s this?’ and he said, ‘You know, I nearly sawed it off in an accident a few months back. But I’m on the mend, at last. The doctor saved my hand.’

“That’s when Kerstin realized that the mayor had heard about the cousin, not Frick, but wanted Frick gone anyway. He made it up, made all of it up so his nephew Otto could own a blast furnace.

“Now I have to say Otto was clever with that furnace. He tinkered with the smelting process and got the shitty ore in these parts to render usable steel. What was it, ten or twelve years later, Hermann Göring himself comes to Salzgitter to build a mill for the Reich, and he makes Otto Kraus his man. Gives him the run of the place. Just like that!”

Bloch tried to snap his boney fingers, but no sound came.

“And the worst of it, that beautiful woman, Frick’s Kerstin, goes mad. It was the mayor’s town, the mayor’s law, the mayor’s justice. No wonder Kraus made such a good Nazi.”

When I opened my eyes, the meadow was just as lush and fragrant as when I arrived. I waited until I could wait no longer. “Herr Bloch?”

“I’m done. Goddamn it, I shouldn’t have remembered that. It upsets me. Otto Kraus and his cousin Nils and his uncle were born Nazis. They were Nazis before there was a Nazi party. They were thugs looking for a club to join. In the Wehrmacht we fought a war, at least we were soldiers. We met other soldiers in combat. We killed like soldiers kill. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed either. What I won’t own is how, when we pushed east and north into Poland and Russia, the SS came in behind us to stabilize the country. Stabilize? They lined up women and children and old men in front of pits and gunned them down. That’s not what I fought for.”

He brought something up from his chest and spit into a rag.

“The wife,” I said. “What became of her?”

“Kerstin? Went to live with a cousin. Her hands started shaking, and they stopped only when she slept. She put it to good use, though. Give her a baby, colicky, whatever. Drop any kind of wailing child into her arms and she’d shake it right to sleep. Touched by God, some people said. A gift.”

He looked at me.

“I’m done. Get the hell out.”

thirty-five

I
stood before the sprawling steelworks that Otto Kraus resurrected in 1947, when the furnaces lay cold and dormant. Thirty years later, rail cars fed the beast with mountains of ore; flatbed cars rolled away, stacked with high-grade beams. The furnaces were roaring again—this time in support of a modern economy, not a war machine. The people of Salzgitter paid their taxes, and they revered Otto Kraus and his son as industrialists who’d brought prosperity to their region.

Inside the steelworks, meanwhile, undisturbed and long forgotten, lay the remains of a darker past, the Drütte concentration camp. The SS had built Drütte within the yard’s perimeter so that prisoners wouldn’t waste time and precious strength marching to and from the mill in winter.

Isaac had survived this.

In those days, factory managers in sectors critical to the war economy paid the SS for the right to use camp inmates on the production line. Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist whose V-2 terrorized London and who later helped the United States reach the moon, used slaves. So did Alfried Krupp, who made Hitler’s guns and bombs. So did Hugo Boss, the clothier who designed and manufactured the Reich’s snappy uniforms. Kraus was no different. He paid in deutschmarks and received slaves fed on thin soup and stale bread. When the prisoners died after the expected four or five months, a never-ending stream of dazed, starving new ones replaced them. Which meant that very near the spot I was standing on, some forty years earlier, Liesel’s father had negotiated with SS administrators to compel Isaac and others to work, while on a diet that couldn’t sustain a dog.

Yet Kraus
saved
lives, the story went. Could it be? Had he played a double game
that
convincingly—a thug in childhood who, in war, saw the light and turned prince? Ten witnesses had said so. The Allied courts said so when they freed him, even as they were bringing the managers of other plants to account and sentencing them to prison.