The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (27 page)

For Liesel’s sake, I wanted to believe it.

I stood on the side of a road some distance from the mill, recalling from Isaac’s funeral how some mourners left stones on the grave markers. The custom was new to me, so at the time I asked the rabbi, a kind, skinny man with a soft beard and a bow tie, what it signified.

“The stone’s a marker,” he explained, “more for us than the deceased. In ancient times, farmers would bury their kin in the fields and build stone cairns so that others would steer their ploughs elsewhere. Who would sow grain or plant a fruit tree where men are buried?”

Otto Kraus, perhaps.

In the absence of any memorials to consecrate this place, I set a cairn, three stones point-to-point. I laid a fourth on top. It was a small thing. I knelt beside it and thought of Isaac, who once presented me with a stone as we sat on our park bench.

Henri, here’s what you do with a stone. Any stone will do. You take it in hand and you think on it for a time. You might give it a thought for someone you love, perhaps for the one you haven’t met but may one day love. You could think of a place you d rather be or a place you’ve been. I’ve thought of my parent’s farm and scrubbing dirt from my fingernails before the Sabbath meal. And after the scrubbing and washing, I’ve thought of how at the table my father would bless my sisters and brothers and me. I’ve thought of sitting down to my mother’s bread, the way it steams and the way the butter melts. There are times I would have traded a fortune for a slice of her Sabbath bread! The thing is to give the stone one true piece of yourself, just one, then throw it as far as you can knowing you could never find it even if you went looking. That’s important. If you’ve been true, the stone, out of sight, will roll and keep rolling until it stops and takes root.

Uncle, how could it keep rolling?

If it’s out of sight, how do you know it doesn’t?

But stones don’t take root and grow. That’s silly!

And you know this for a fact?

I’ve never seen one grow.

You have, Henri.

Never. What do they grow into?

He pinched my cheek.
My boy, how do you think the Alps got there?

“Y
OU
WROTE
a fine report,” said Laurent.

I had stopped at a petrol station on the A2 at nine that same evening, on my way to Ludwigsburg, and phoned Laurent for an update. “Who knew gold could be mined from computers? Kraus, he’s a clever one.”

“Is it what you wanted?” I asked.

I was standing at an outdoor phone booth, the traffic roaring past. Across the highway rose a forest, its canopy silent and dark.

“It certainly rounds out the profile. I’ve established his labor methods at eight of his Third World facilities.I’d say I have him nailed. His steel mills in Europe are state-of-the art, a safety inspector’s dream. Overseas, it’s a bucket of shit. He plays by very different sets of rules.”

“But he hasn’t built a salvage yard for computers. Not yet.”

“You’re defending the bastard? When he
does
build his salvage yards for electronic junk, and he will when there’s money to be made, he’ll choose some desperately poor place like Delhi, some other Chittagong. Do you think he’ll make it safe for the men mixing hydrochloric and nitric acid? You think he’ll buy his workers the gas masks and eye protection you called for in your report?”

We both knew better.

“In the morning I’m forwarding my dossier to a prosecutor in The Hague. I’m quite sure your girlfriend’s brother is running debt slaves. It’s against international law, and if you give me a minute I’ll recite chapter and verse.”

“Don’t bother,” I said.

At the far end of the lot, I saw a man on the driver’s side of a late model Mercedes, stretching. A taller man, also dressed in a suit, rose from the passenger side. They had parked just beyond the sharply defined wash of a lamppost, and I couldn’t quite make them out. Others crossed the lot.

“Fair is fair,” said Laurent. “You gave me your report, and now I’ve got news for you. Seven of the remaining eight on your list are dead. Two died from cancer in the sixties. Nothing remarkable about that. But the other five died of heart attacks in the last two months. That’s the past eight weeks, if you’re hearing me. Ventricular arrhythmias. Add to those five the two you crossed off your list in the last month, Zeligman and Montefiore—who was a confirmed heart attack, I checked—and we’ve got seven men who died this summer. Suddenly. What’s going on?”

I leaned against the phone booth, staring into the forest.

“What about the tenth witness?”

“Witness?”

“Forget it. Did you find the last one on the list?”

“David Grossman? No. He’s dropped off the face of the earth. He lived in Innsbruck for twenty-five years, then this past June, during the same time the others are dying, he sells his house and moves with no forwarding address. I’ve run down tax records, phone records, certificates of death. I’ve checked passport control in every Interpol member nation. He’s likely changed his name. You’ve got my attention,” said Laurent. “What’s this about?”

A truck sped past and lifted grit into my eyes. The two men were walking my way.

“Eckehart Nagel,” I said. “What about his travel records?”

“Those are a gem. The five whose hearts decided to stop beating lived in Lisbon, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and London.

Nagel landed at JFK two days before the first heart attack victim in the U.S., and left LAX the evening after the third. His visits to England and Portugal overlapped the heart attacks in London and Lisbon. I checked. He’s a cardiologist.”

“How did you get his travel information?”

“The police in Buenos Aires. They asked him to visit headquarters with his passport. Maybe you’ve heard. When the police ask you to do something in Argentina—”

One of the men approaching me was Schmidt’s assistant, from the lab.

“They photocopied, then faxed the passport. Who is Nagel? What are you not telling me, Henri? What is his relation to these dead men?”

I didn’t know.

I had already betrayed Anselm and Liesel by releasing the report to Laurent. I wouldn’t betray them again by tainting the Kraus name with a murder investigation, not until I knew where it led. I owed Liesel that much, but I was frightened and wanted to spill it all.

“Come on,” I said, trying to sound casual. “A thousand businessmen overlapped those cities and countries on the same dates. It’s just that we don’t know who they are. Nagel’s schedule is no big deal. What does it prove?”

Laurent waited long enough for me to appreciate the stupidity of what I’d said. “You asked me to investigate,” he said. “Without your list, no one could have linked these deaths. You’ve got a handful of sixty- and seventy-year-olds dropping dead in different cities around the world. What’s the big deal? I don’t know. But you’ve managed to link them somehow, and I’m left with several possibilities.”

Schmidt’s man and his colleague stopped eight paces from me and waited.

“Let’s dismiss the first,” said Laurent. “That all this is coincidence. Let’s not insult each other. The second possibility: you’re way over your head in something you don’t understand and can’t possibly manage.”

The smaller of the two men lit a cigarette and waved. Why had Schmidt sent them? I had seen him not two days ago, on Terschelling and at the dive platform. While he was unusually solemn, he didn’t seem particularly angry with me or suspicious. Just out of sorts.

But here were his men, and the sickening thought occurred to me that all this time, after the visit to the lab and his ham-handed effort to have me followed, he
was
following me: expertly now, after a first, obvious warning that he’d meant for me to see. Now his men had tracked me to Bruges and Salzgitter. They knew I visited Ulrich Bloch. They had reported back, and here they were.

“Third possibility,” said Laurent. “Grossman, the one who’s dropped out of sight, may have killed the others and is now a fugitive. Fourth: Nagel killed them, and Grossman is running for his life. Fifth: You’ve orchestrated all of this and are using me to trap Nagel or Grossman. You don’t strike me as someone who’d hire an assassin, but I’ve seen stranger things. Where are you now?”

Schmidt’s men stepped toward me.

I spoke so that they could hear.

“I’m at a rest stop near the Dortmund exit on the A2, traveling west. I’m driving a yellow Fiat rented yesterday from the GSX Agency in Harlingen. There are two large men in suits standing in my face, not looking very kind. I want you to tell them exactly who you are.”

My voice was shaking. I handed the phone to the one from the lab. “It’s Interpol,” I said. “For you.”

The rest stop was busy with late-night haulers and families on holiday. I waited at a table, and after a minute Schmidt’s men joined me. We were surrounded by truckers drinking coffee and children slurping ice cream and downing burgers.

“Viktor would like to see you.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll call him in the morning.”

“Tonight.”

I had no doubt they would have delivered me personally but for Laurent. “Is there anything in particular he wants to talk about?”

“Call him.”

They left, and ten minutes later I followed. I couldn’t find their car in the parking lot, and drove off thinking I was free of them. What I didn’t notice was a blue Saab, which followed me all the way to Ludwigsburg.

thirty-six

G
ustav Plannik looked like a man freshly returned from vacation. He was tan and the puffy half moons beneath his eyes had receded. He might have lost weight and, if I wasn’t mistaken, he’d worked some boot black into his hair. It was a good day to drop in unannounced on the director.

I had no choice, given Laurent’s news. If Nagel found Grossman, he would follow the other witnesses to the grave. If I found him first, he had a chance of surviving, and I had a chance of learning something, perhaps, about Isaac.

I needed no reminder that Schmidt had someone at work for him inside the Zentrale Stelle. But I didn’t plan to stay long enough for an informer to place a call back to Munich and have it matter. I stopped in Stuttgart to empty the safe deposit box, then headed to the Archive. The risk was that Plannik himself was Schmidt’s man, though I doubted it. If I were wrong, so much the worse for me. I had little choice but to tell him everything.

After a bit of negotiating at the main gate, I was buzzed into the compound and was met by the director himself, who’d walked halfway down a corridor to greet me. The bounce had returned to his step, and his seemed genuinely pleased by my visit.

In his office he brushed aside a photo of two soldiers posing beside a pile of bodies. One had a hand on the shoulder of his comrade, who’d set a boot on the rump of a corpse as if it were a lion shot on safari.

Surrounding us on the pale walls, still, were the organizational charts of the SS and Gestapo. Thirty years removed from Hell, Plannik chose to sit in the middle of it every morning at nine o’clock. Given the photos and sworn statements he confronted daily, Australia seemed about the right distance for a vacation.

Plannik folded his hands. “So,” he said. “Still searching?”

I told him I was, and that I had something for him.

Outside the open windows I heard traffic on Schorndorfer Strasse. A utility crew was jackhammering a section of road, and the sound of concrete breaking carried into Plannik’s office like a bass-note concussion.

The director leaned forward. “So, how can I help? More time in the Archive?”

I reached into my bag for the list of witnesses, and he reached for his glasses.

“Okay,” he said. “I recognize this list from your last visit, when I approved the documents you copied. These are the witnesses in the Kraus affair. One of them, Grossman, is circled. The others . . . they have lines drawn through them.”

“May I close your door?”

Five minutes later, having shared my suspicions, I concluded the only way I could. “I don’t know why they’re dying, Herr Plannik, but they are. I think it has something to do with this place.”

“Something to do with Drütte.”

I agreed. I produced the file I’d copied on the camp and opened to a group photograph of several SS guards. Ever since my return from Buenos Aires, I was often nagged by the thought that I had already encountered the men of the Edelweiss Society. I’d been busy and preoccupied, and let it slide until early that morning, before I returned to the Archive. Sleep was impossible in any event. I startled at every sound in the hotel corridor, imagining Schmidt’s men hunting me down. I thought to call Laurent and ask for police protection. But I held off, concluding for the second time in twelve hours that any talk with the authorities would lead back to Anselm, and I wasn’t prepared to betray him a second time.

Nagel was entangled in the murders; but it was a stretch, pure conjecture, to suppose that Anselm was. I had no reason to contact Laurent, no theory at all on why the signatories to the affidavit were dying.

Much of that night, I reviewed my notes and the photocopied materials before calling on Plannik. Using a large magnifying glass, for the first time I scrupulously studied the photos that hadn’t gone missing. It was then I recognized in the Drütte folder eight smoothly shaven faces looking into the middle distance, dressed in the crisp uniform of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the Death’s Head formations. The Edelweiss brotherhood had enjoyed a long history after all. These were not random expat Germans who happened to find each other in Buenos Aires after the war. They’d served together at the Reichswerke Hermann Göring.