The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (31 page)

“As Isaac recovered, I told him stories to keep his spirits high, true stories of how the British made former SS guards use their fingernails to dig graves for the dead. There were thousands of dead. They made the
Deutsch
carry rotting bodies on their backs to the burial pits. Some of the guards couldn’t take being prisoners, being treated the way they treated us. I saw one jump into a ditch and drown himself. I told it all to Isaac to improve his spirits. And do you know what he said?”

I waited.

“He said, ‘Don’t.’”

“Don’t
what?
” I asked.

“‘Don’t become one of them.’ After the war, we sent each other postcards the first few years, but that stopped. It happens. I would have come to his funeral, if I knew.”

Two more hikers passed. “
Grüss Gott!
”

Grossman returned the greeting.

A steep hill rose to our left, pastures to our right. “What does it mean,
Grüss Gott?
”

He didn’t break stride. “Roughly, ‘I greet the God in you.’ It’s what Bavarians and Austrians say. In the north of Germany, they laugh at us. They think it’s quaint.” He smiled.

“Come, I’m hungry. We should eat and discuss my upcoming murder. It’s not exactly news, you know. The others were greedy fools who invited all this trouble. I told them they were playing with fire.”

“The others?” I said.

“Three of the other witnesses. They got the bright idea to blackmail Kraus Steel.”

I stopped. “Why would they do that?”

“Why do any blackmailers blackmail? Money.”

“They had damaging information?”

Grossman turned to me. “Young man, the paper we signed was a hoax. They paid us to lie for Kraus. That bastard ran the mill. By rights he should have stayed upstairs in his office. But he walked the factory floors, and I can tell you this. He was worse than the guards.”

forty-two

G
rossman stood my world on its head that morning. He could read my distress. “You didn’t know?”

I didn’t know.

“They call it the CIA now,” he said. “Back then they called themselves the OSS, Office of Strategic Services. They knew survivors of Drütte were at Bergen-Belsen. About a month after the liberation, the Americans came looking for anyone who’d worked at Göring’s steel mill. They found eleven of us, and they said all of Europe was wrecked but we could get a head start on our new lives with some real American money. Isaac was the oldest and the only one who could think to ask, ‘Sign what?’ And they said, ‘A statement that Otto Kraus saved people and was a good man.’ Isaac wouldn’t stand for it. He begged us not to sign the affidavit. He knew exactly who and what Kraus was.

“Of course, Kraus was notorious. With my own eyes I saw a worker collapse onto the floor of a mill, by the furnaces. Kraus made the rest of us watch as the guard marched the man up through the catwalks, put a bullet in his neck, and dumped him into the furnace. Kraus yelled:
This
is German steel! We will have no weakness on this floor!’ He had quotas to meet. He told us the next person who collapsed would be thrown straight into the furnace without a bullet.

“For three thousand American dollars, a fortune, ten of us signed. We knew it was a lie, but we also knew that American dollars could help us make a new start. I asked the OSS man why they needed the affidavit, and he said: ‘In about six months we expect to be at war with the Russians. We need a strong Europe. We need steel, and we need Otto Kraus.’ ”

I listened to Grossman and knew it was true. Just as Plannik had said, the Americans had scoured the Nazi rosters for scientists who could help them defeat the Soviets. They found von Braun and brought him to Huntsville, Alabama in Operation Paperclip. I had no doubt they protected Kraus. But rather than ship him to the States, they kept him in place to make the steel that would rebuild Europe and saw to it he won plenty of contracts.

As we drove in Grossman’s car back to my hotel for breakfast, he was perfectly at peace about his role in the deception. “Later, I learned how the OSS used the paper we signed to free Kraus from prison. Before the Nuremburg trials, each of the Allied powers held war crimes trials in the sectors of Germany they controlled. The Americans arrested Kraus for crimes at Drütte, and he would have been hanged. But the OSS stepped in with our sworn testimony that he was a good man, and he walked free.”

We arrived at the Michaelerhof Inn, and Grossman greeted the young woman behind the reception desk with a hearty “
Grüss
Gott.” She was wearing a dirndl, her costume for the tourist trade. She curtsied.

“
Grüss Gott,
Herr Cyngler.”

I looked at him.

He shrugged. “Martin Cyngler. The name goes with my new address.”

She showed us into a breakfast room, a glass alcove that overlooked a garden. A number of other guests had already worked through a buffet of smoked meats, cheeses, and dense German rye breads.

“So Kraus walked free,” he said as we took our seats. “He returned to his mill and built an empire. The ten of us who saved him from the hangman got three thousand dollars apiece while he made hundreds of millions. Look,” he said, holding a hand over his plate. “What do you see?”

I looked.

“Tell me.”

“What do you mean? I see a hand.”

“Do you see these burnt spots? Last week, a doctor cut off two skin cancers. We were getting old, the ones who signed, and three of us grew bitter that we made Kraus wealthy and got next-to-nothing. They called a meeting to renegotiate with the corporation. There were eight living signers by that point. I told them it was a bad idea, that these people are vicious. The three insisted that Kraus Steel provide us with an annuity. Zeligman was the worst. He sent the letter, and a month later the killing began.”

Grossman piled cheese on a slice of bread and took a bite.

“Which was when you changed your name and moved.”

“Who wouldn’t? Well, that’s not true. They didn’t. I had a wife and family to protect. But so did they, the fools. They thought all the killing was over thirty years ago. Why should they have expected anyone to change? The Nazis didn’t go away because Germany lost the war.”

I thought of the Edelweiss Society in Buenos Aires. I thought of Schmidt. I watched Grossman. Thirty years gone, and the war smoldered.

“The man who’s coming for you calls himself Eckehart Nagel,” I said. “He was a guard at Drütte, which would connect him to Otto Kraus and his family.” I shuddered to think Anselm was capable of murder. Schmidt, on the other hand, must have been in direct contact with Nagel.

“His real name is Menard Gottlieb. He lives in Buenos Aires. He’s a doctor and will come to you, I believe, dressed as a deliveryman. He will try to administer a drug of some sort that will stop your heart. It will look like an arrhythmia killed you.”

“Clever,” said Grossman.

“Why’s that?”

“We were all fairly religious, and observant Jews don’t believe in autopsies. The body is not to be desecrated and must be buried quickly. So if it looked like a heart attack, everyone must accept it as a heart attack. They likely read up on Jewish burial practices. Gottlieb, you say?”

“Jacob Zeligman called out the name before he died.”

“Do you have a photo?”

I went to my room, where the photo Liesel had given me remained neatly pressed between the pages of the Kraus biography. I could have burned that book. I studied the picture and put a finger to Liesel’s face. To be born into this madness, fed lie after lie until she built her father into a hero. Someone would have to tell her. It wouldn’t be Anselm or Schmidt.

When I presented the photo to Grossman, he exploded from the table. The chair fell backwards. Plates scattered, the staff scrambled. “Vogt! Reinhard Vogt!” He was pointing at Franz Hofmann. Grossman rushed from the breakfast room, and I found him pacing in the garden.

“That man lives?”

Yes, he did. But if Vogt was Franz Hofmann, the living corpse kept on like a pet by the Kraus family, who was Viktor Schmidt?

“Vogt ran the SS guards. He was a monster.”

“Have you ever seen this one?” I pointed to Schmidt.

“No. Never. But this other one, maybe.”

I had made a grave mistake in denouncing Schmidt to Gustav Plannik. Schmidt was guilty of one murder that I knew of—in August 1978. He hadn’t served as a guard at Drütte, at least not as Reinhard Vogt. But he had founded a steel mill with Otto Kraus and, thirty years later, counted Vogt and Gottlieb as friends. Uncle Viktor ran with a murderous crowd. Still, he was not Plannik’s business. Not yet.

forty-three

“P
erhaps I saw this Nagel or Gottlieb or whatever you call him. The Reichswerke was large. There were thousands of us and many guards. But Vogt? Everyone knew him. You trembled when you saw him. Tell me where he lives.” I hesitated.

“I could beat it out of you.”

I didn’t doubt it. “Vogt walks with a cane, now. He had a stroke.”

Grossman thought it over. “He despised infirmity. Tell me, is he bitter?” I nodded.

“Good. That will do for the moment.”

I explained how I had found him through the Zentrale Stelle. “Now that the court schedule in Hanover is published and you’re slated to appear, Nagel will find you, too. He doesn’t know yet what you look like. That’s your advantage. He’ll come to court to identify you on the day you give testimony against the magistrate from Celle. Then he’ll come after you.”

Grossman shook his head. “Zeligman and the others were greedy bastards. I have to run from my home and change my name because they decided Kraus could afford to pay them? Zeligman said he was doing it for my sake. Now he and the others are dead, and I could be, too. This war won’t let me go.”

“The police will be there to arrest him.” It was a promise I had no right to make.

“He must never learn where I live. I can’t allow it. He cannot follow me home, to my family.”

“He won’t.”

“Can you guarantee it?”

This was not possible.

“Then I’ll take care of the creature myself. Even if they arrest and convict him, why should he enjoy the luxury of a prison cell with three decent meals a day?”

“There are laws, Herr Grossman.”

He smiled. “You’re joking.”

I wasn’t.

“I’ll tell you something about laws,” he said. “When Hitler wanted to strip the Jews of civil rights, he passed the Nuremburg Laws. When he wanted to set the Jews apart as a despised race, he passed the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. When it came time to kill us, he legalized murder. So don’t speak to me of laws. Nagel does not deserve a warm bed and food, even in prison. I’ll make other arrangements for him. And for Vogt, in time.”

“The police will be looking for Nagel. Don’t
you
get mixed up in it.”

He laughed at me. “I’d say I already am!”

A car pulled into the lot adjacent to the garden, and a couple stepped out. They opened the rear doors and three children tumbled onto the asphalt. Americans.

“It’s beautiful, Mommy,” said the youngest, a girl. She was pointing to the flower boxes at each window of the inn. The family was black. They seemed like any other family on a tour of the mountains.

Grossman stared. “How is it possible,” he said under his breath, “that they should be allowed to sleep in the same beds as you and I? These
schwarzes
.”

The young receptionist stepped into the garden in her dirndl, a model Austrian hostess. “Mr. and Mrs. Patrick, welcome to Gnadenwald. We’ve been expecting you.
Grüss Gott!
”

forty-four

W
ho is truly innocent?

No course in my engineering studies could have prepared me for what I encountered that summer: torture and death, serial murders, a shameful historical fraud, and learning that both the Catholic Church and the Red Cross helped Nazis to escape justice. Worse, I discovered that America, moral beacon to the world, rewarded men who rose to prominence on the backs of slaves. Yet it was Grossman’s disgust with that family and my own disgust for the gypsy woman and her child that rang loudest in my ears.

I left Gnadenwald for Harlingen feeling as bruised inside as I was outside.

Alec welcomed me onto the barge with real alarm. “Henri, what the hell?”

I struggled up the ladder.

“You should have seen the other guy.”

“Really, what happened?”

Hillary Gospodarek joined us and winced when she saw me.

“All right, enough! I wrecked my rental car. I hurt my ribs and jaw. I have two black eyes, and I actually feel worse than I look. But I’m here, so stop with the third degree. In fact, I don’t even know why I’m here.”

“Shall I tell him?” Alec slipped an arm around Gospodarek.

Behind them, the deck was empty, the sluice silent. The crane operator was nowhere to be seen. Even the dive shack was quiet. Light and plenty of noise spilled out onto the deck from the crew’s quarters. A farewell party, then. Alec was shutting down the barge.

“Hillary and I are getting married,” he announced. Before I could congratulate them, he added: “You know what my parents will say? She isn’t Chinese. But when she proposed, I couldn’t refuse.”

She elbowed him in the ribs.

I had seen it coming. I joked that forced seclusion on a barge at sea made Alec a more promising prospect then he’d appeared on dry land. “Try him out back home before you commit,” I advised her, “when you can compare him to a reasonable cross-section of adult males.”

She leaned in close to her fiancé. “Yes, well, he’s looking pretty good at the moment. Your
Lutine
dive isn’t, however. We’re done, Henri. I’ve catalogued everything of interest. Three gold bars, two handfuls of coins, and plenty of buttons and broken clay pipes. But no treasure to speak of. Time to pack up.”

Voices spilled from the crew’s hut. I pointed. “At least I can say goodbye and thank them.” Long rolling waves from the northwest lifted the barge. The weather was calm enough for the moment, but I had checked the reports in Harlingen before visiting and a major storm near Greenland had already overwhelmed two tankers. Worse, a low pressure system over the continent was pin-wheeling north, and forecasters were predicting the systems would join over the Dutch coast.