The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (29 page)

If Schmidt knew what Nagel was up to, then he knew very well that Tosha Zeligman’s husband had signed the affidavit. He was playing me, probing to know what I knew, and for once in my life I was happy to be injured. For it was my bruised throat and jaw, not Schmidt’s sentimental concern for Liesel’s happiness, that saved me that day. If I could have talked, he would have twisted a confession out of me with merely the threat of using one of those instruments on his table.

My eyes flashed between the steel and Schmidt’s bulldog face. I made a few guttural noises and blinked. He seemed more exasperated than furious, as if I were a son gone wrong. The leather straps cut the circulation to my legs and arms. My entire body was throbbing. But I had news from the larger world: Liesel loved me, he said. It was a thought to keep hope alive.

They had emptied my pockets. Schmidt inspected my father’s T. “Fine craftsmanship,” he said. He held Isaac’s medallion up to the light, and I grew enraged that he touched it. “The old Reichswerke logo. Really, it’s strange you should be carrying this.”

I made a noise.

“You’re a stupid, stupid man. Why couldn’t you just have come into Liesel’s life, loved her and married her, then gotten rich and enjoyed your life? Now I’m in a predicament.” He grabbed an instrument off the table, a pair of clamps—or reverse clamps. I had no idea what they were, but my heart exploded as he approached. “You have no reason to know this,” he said. “Before the war I studied to be an ophthalmologist. But history got in the way, you know? Things happened.”

He nodded to his assistants. One grabbed my face from behind and snapped me against the wooden back of the chair. A searing pain shot from my jaw down through my legs. Someone cinched a leather belt around my forehead, forcing me to look directly ahead. Schmidt leaned close. “It stands to reason that one cannot do surgery on an unwilling patient. Take the eyes, for instance. The lids must be kept open, but they squeeze shut when the patient senses any foreign object or threat. Do you feel threatened, Henri?”

I was staring at him when my bladder let go. He laughed when he saw that. “So I’ve got your attention. Excellent.”

Without another word, Schmidt leaned in and reverse-clamped both of my eyelids open, so that I was forced to look ahead without a hope of closing my eyes. I screamed, but only a ripped note escaped.

“There’s nothing to get excited about just yet. Relax.”

He barked an order to his assistant, who rolled in a gurney. On the gurney was a man with his mouth taped shut. He was secured with leather straps, as I was, but held fast to a table elevated at the head. Beneath his feet they laid plastic sheeting in a large square. Directly below the gurney they set a tub, on casters. The man was awake, his eyes bulging. He was also naked, and as he breathed his chest and abdomen expanded and contracted violently. A stink of alcohol and urine followed him into the room. He was pencil thin, bordering on malnourished. I could count his ribs.

Schmidt said: “I found this rodent in the gutter. He’s more of an
it
than a man. He’s subhuman, a parasite that consumes everything and gives nothing. Why do we even suffer these vermin to exist? Someone must be strong enough to do what I do. It’s the way I give back to society.”

The man made noises that died in his throat. He was lost and knew it. I, too, tried screaming but nothing emerged. I wanted to say,
I’m here, you won’t die alone.
It was all I could give him.

Schmidt snapped on a pair of gloves.

“Who would miss a rodent plucked from the streets? His fellow rodents? They’re too drunk and grasping to know the difference. The police? I don’t think so. To them, this is one less drunk to haul downtown. I want you to listen and watch closely, Henri. What I do to this half-man I will do to you if
ever
I learn that you’ve worked to undermine this family or this company. Not one more visit to the Zentrale Stelle. No more visits to Bloch or others from the old days. No more inquiries into my friends in Buenos Aires. No more calls to or from Interpol. Watch and listen. A large and very sharp sword is hanging over you. So help me, it will swing—one small cut at a time—if you disappoint me again or speak a word of what you’re about to see.”

He circled my chair and tested the leather straps. “A family hangs in the balance,” he said. “You could be part of it, or not. It’s just the same to me. Now watch and listen, you piece of shit.”

M
Y
EARLIEST
recollections of swimming are as a child who splashed in the heavily chlorinated water of a community pool. While my family enjoyed regular vacations at the seashore, for many years I was too timid to do much besides jumping in waves that rose, at most, to mid-shin. My father would take me into the surf, and safe in his arms I would squirm, my wet skin slick against his, and scream as he dunked us in the waves.

One day, it was my turn. I was ten, and both my parents swam alongside me out past the breakers as I held onto a floating board and kicked.

“Now!” they said. I let go.

And then came the glory of swimming, really swimming, for the first time in the ocean. I paddled and splashed. I floated and watched sea birds and clouds as a living mountain heaved beneath me. I was a matchstick, a leaf carried on a vastness both incomprehensible and, with my parents near, benevolent.

In the course of an hour, Viktor Schmidt plunged me into a different sort of ocean. He tortured, then ministered to that man, keeping him alive for as long as he could using clamps, cauterizing irons, and even intravenous drips. Strapped into his chair, I grasped instantly and purely the presence of something in this world as real and vast as the ocean of my childhood.

I
HAD
every confidence that, in time, Gustav Plannik would indict Viktor Schmidt. But I was not sure I could wait the months, or more likely years, it would take to convict him. Nor had I any confidence that I could persuade the police he’d just committed a murder. Schmidt was correct: the victim had been a nonentity, missed by fellow drunks, perhaps, but not by anyone rich or connected enough to demand an investigation. I’d been hooded on my way to and from the warehouse. I had no idea where to point anyone for what little evidence remained of the crime. Without physical proof, I’d be dropping a bomb onto the Kraus family only to see Schmidt vindicated and Anselm and Liesel appalled—at what, I wondered, my lack of loyalty?

What, exactly, did they
know
about this man?

“The engines of justice turn slowly,” Plannik had said. Wise in years, he must have also understood that young men are not known for patience. Schmidt enraged me. His very existence offended me. As I lay crumpled amid crushed coffee cups and brittle leaves, dumped into the filthy corner of a hospital parking lot in Ludwigsburg at two in the morning, I vowed to see him dead.

And yet.

I had come searching for Isaac Kahane ignorant of the depravity he faced. Yes, I had read of the war and seen the films and photos; as a schoolchild, I dutifully wept as I was expected to weep. But I confess to a kind of dumb incomprehension and weariness as I wrote my solemn essays on evil. I nodded, we all nodded, and said,
We must never forget!
And then the bell for recess sounded and we played football.

Viktor Schmidt’s laboratory had been my classroom. I would never know, nor did I ever want to know, the horror that Isaac and Freda endured. No one who hadn’t survived the camps could know. But I had learned enough. I learned, finally, what men can do to men. For the first time in my life, I trembled.

Everything changed for me.

P
ART
IV

thirty-eight

O
f all the places in a wide world. Innsbruck.

Somewhere in his millions of documents at the Zentrale Stelle, Plannik found the one slip of paper that Interpol, with all its resources, could not.

The story Plannik told strained belief. In early April 1945, with the Allies about to overrun Salzgitter, the SS evacuated the Drütte concentration camp. They crammed sixty or more inmates into each of eighty open-air boxcars headed to Bergen-Belsen. The transport stopped at Celle, a town of 65,000 north of Hanover, where it joined other prisoner transports. On a nearby track sat a train hauling fuel and munitions.

The Allies had already bombed Celle and its train depot a month earlier. On April 8th, a Sunday, they attacked again with 132 American B-26’s. The devastation was immense. The munitions train exploded and engulfed the prisoner transport, burning hundreds alive. Those who survived the initial blast climbed from the boxcars to face a storm of bullets fired by German soldiers. Everyone in Celle knew the British would soon overtake the town. Still, the soldiers fired. Many prisoners escaped to a nearby forest.

Over two days, a posse of local police, firefighters, soldiers, enthusiastic citizens, and elected officials went hunting. In time, the massacre would be called the Hasenjagd, or hare hunt, of Celle. Its vigilantes, including Hitler youth as young as fourteen, shot prisoners wherever they were found: running in fields, hiding in bushes, cowering in bombed-out cellars. “Just like hunting rabbits,” one participant said.

More than a thousand men and women died that night and the next day. But not Grossman, or any of the others who signed the affidavit for Otto Kraus, and not Isaac. They had survived both the Konzentrationslager at Drütte and the massacre at Celle. Little wonder Isaac couldn’t find the words for a child who shared a bench with him at a pleasant park. Men wearing swastikas had murdered his first wife and children. Other men wearing swastikas beat and starved him into making steel for Hitler. Still others, dressed as civilians and determined to make a last, grand gesture for the Fatherland, hunted him as they would an animal.

Three days later, the British liberated Celle.

“Finding Grossman was easier than I thought,” said Plannik when I called his private number. “We often copy the names in one file to a master index so that we can connect events and people across files. When we took possession of the Kraus affidavit, we indexed all ten witnesses, including David Grossman. Just two years ago, a series of long-neglected letters became known to us, and we opened a case against one of the magistrates at Celle who helped organize the rabbit hunt. We checked our index for anyone who’d been imprisoned at the Salzgitter camps, including Drütte, and survived the bombing and the hunt. Our state prosecutors reached out to all ten witnesses. Two died in the sixties. Of the eight remaining, only Grossman was willing to testify.

“The trial began last year, and as of this past June, Grossman still hadn’t been called into court. These things take time, and I believe the case is scheduled to resume next month. In June, Grossman contacted the prosecutor and gave him a new address. Apparently, he had to move from his home rather quickly, but he wanted us to contact him when the time came. He said he wanted ‘to help bury the bastard.’”

Plannik gave me the address.

“They shot men running in the fields?”

I couldn’t see his face, but the bitterness in his voice was thick. “Herr Poincaré, I could recite for you details of a hundred massacres you’ve never heard of. When only a thousand die in a Nazi atrocity it doesn’t make news, not compared to what happened at Babi Yar or in the camps. Some of the townspeople fed and sheltered the prisoners, as you might hope. Most didn’t. So yes, they shot at men running in the fields.

“Perhaps the new address will help you. Gnadenwald is a village that sits on a plateau just above Innsbruck. If you meet Grossman, remind him we have a case to prosecute. History demands it. Tell him he must stay alive not only for his sake, but for ours.”

thirty-nine

“I
t’s a ghost ship, Henri. We’ve ID’d the sub as U-1158 and sent the information to the U-boat archive in Cuxhaven. Our divers pulled up plates stamped with Nazi eagles and swastikas, cutlery, and medical kits. There are many human bones. There’s also a metal schematic diagram of the boat, and that’s where we got our ID. Cuxhaven’s sending a diver and some paperwork out here before we tow the barge back to Rotterdam. There’ll be a crew roster. That will give us some closure, I think.

“Our guys want to hold a service and read the names of the sailors who died. They were Germans,” said Alec. “But even I get it after living on this barge for two months, a feeling for anyone who makes his life at sea.”

I lifted the curtain edge in my hotel room, scanning the street for signs of Schmidt’s goons. One was leaning against his car, smoking. There was no need to play hide and seek any longer. At some point, Schmidt would give up his surveillance, and I would be free to move about. Not yet. With Grossman’s address in hand, I needed to leave the hotel—soon and without company.

“The dive season’s over,” said Chin. “Lloyd’s is done. We know we’re sitting over the
Lutine,
but I can’t for the life of me find any gold on that wreck. Either we’re missing it, which I doubt, or someone got here before we did.”

I set the curtain in place.

“It’s no huge deal to Lloyd’s,” he said. “Retrieving the gold was a long shot to begin with. They’ve got a few shiny bars for their display case and a documentary underway. They’re calling it a win. What makes them happiest is that they didn’t insure the U-boat.”