The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (30 page)

“When?” I said. “When will you leave?”

“There’s bad weather on the way, and no one wants any part of it. Soon.”

He gave me a week and a half to visit.

I’
D
SLEPT
for the better part of two days after the emergency room doctor released me with advice to stop running into car doors. I promised to watch for them, and he wrote a prescription after explaining that I was concussed and would be groggy even when I wasn’t taking the codeine for my aching jaw and ribs. I was badly bruised and dizzy, he concluded, but not broken. Bright lights hurt my eyes, which had dried out from being unable to blink. Over the course of a week, I let fast food cartons pile up on the bureaus. I hung a “Do not disturb” sign on my door.

When I did rouse, I fought the impulse to call Liesel. She would have asked about my health, which was battered, and my voice, which had barely returned at that point. Dullard that he was, Alec didn’t think to question that I had a bad cold. Liesel would have sensed my trembling and pushed for information. In time, I knew, the whole long tale would tumble out, but I wasn’t ready to speak.

I assumed that whatever information Plannik gave me would find its way to Schmidt, either through his informant at the Zentrale Stelle or one of his other sources concerning all things Kraus. It was possible that he or Nagel had been a guard on the prisoner transport at Celle, in which case he might have been following the trial of the magistrate and known that Grossman was scheduled to be called as a witness in September. Who cared where Grossman had disappeared to if he was going to testify in a Hanover courtroom?

My one advantage was time. I still had Nagel’s contact information in Buenos Aires, so I called for a phone consultation under an assumed name and was advised to call back because the good doctor was busy with patients. For the moment, then, there would be no threats from that quarter. I merely needed to evade Schmidt’s surveillance team a second and final time. If caught, I’d be taking the place of the man on the warehouse gurney. But I didn’t intend to be caught.

I placed a call to Serge Laurent.

forty

W
here the valley climbed from the Inn River to the mountains, the roads narrowed and the distance between farms lengthened. The pastures were as green as any on Terschelling. Cows lazed, and the sky was a broad, unperturbed blue. I stopped as tractors maneuvered around me. A few farmers had begun mowing their fields, and I could smell freshly cut grass. Not twenty minutes out of Innsbruck, I reached Gnadenwald and saw a single church spire set amid fields and a few isolated homes. Forests claimed the hillsides, and beyond that granite. The Alps began in earnest here.

My plan was to find a local hotel from which I could hike past Grossman’s new home. Grossman had no idea who I was, and if he saw me I would appear to be just another tourist with a backpack and a walking stick enjoying the fine air. I passed the house twice, once on my way out to an overlook that gave me a commanding view of the village, and once back an hour later. At sunrise, on the morning after I arrived, I waited in my car for Grossman to leave his house. He might find it less threatening, I reasoned, if we met for the first time in a public place. I would follow him and find the right moment to introduce myself.

So I was up early that day, and while I waited I replayed my little drama of the preceding twenty-four hours. My escape from Ludwigsburg would have been comical had so much not depended on the outcome. After my call to Laurent, I waited in my hotel for an unmarked police car to fetch me. I checked out of my room and stepped into the car with my bags. As the driver, a detective out of uniform, drove off, three cars followed: one directly across from the hotel; one, which must have come from the alley behind, watching the rear exit; and a third from up the street.

What Schmidt’s men didn’t know was that the police had first sent an unmarked car to the hotel twenty minutes ahead of my escort. This first policeman spotted the three tails and made a radio call to four marked police cruisers. With lights flashing, uniformed police stopped Schmidt’s surveillance team to conduct registration checks. My escort looped back to the hotel to drop me at my car, and I was gone well before anyone connected with Schmidt could guess my intentions.

“A clean exit will cost you,” Laurent had warned. I knew it would, and I learned something important about him when he agreed to spring me without demanding an explanation. When he called the Ludwigsburg police for an intercept, he told them he needed to protect an Interpol source. “So I’m expecting you to be a source,” he said. “Do what needs doing, then call me.”

Given the crimes Viktor Schmidt had committed, I no longer had any problems with that. Within weeks I expected to be telling him everything. But for the moment I needed to find the tenth witness. Laurent didn’t push me, and I was grateful.

G
ROSSMAN
LEFT
his house just after seven o’clock. Parked some distance away, off the road and behind a stand of trees, I followed him to the parking lot of the church I’d passed on my way into Gnadenwald. I watched him descend a stone stairwell to a basement room. Others drove up and did the same. Meanwhile, no lights shone in the church above; I saw no movement there. After the cars stopped arriving and ten minutes had elapsed, I grasped my father’s T and made for the stairwell.

The entry smelled of loamy earth and rot. The light over the stairwell was out, and the metal banister had rusted off its anchors and lay useless on the steps. Through the door, slightly ajar, I heard chanting.

The men stood with their backs to me, in prayer shawls. As I entered, each turned and looked up from his book without breaking rhythm. Their lips moved in a language that would have gotten them shot in this very place decades earlier. They nodded their helloes. One man pointed to the top of his head and then to a basket by the door. I reached for a skullcap and stood when they stood and sat when they sat. For thirty minutes more they mumbled and chanted, and then it was over. Nine men filed past, wishing me a good day. Only Grossman remained.

He turned and said: “Are you the one they sent to kill me?”

forty-one

H
e asked that I empty my pockets to prove I meant no harm. He examined the T and set it aside. He held the medallion to a light too dim to read by, then walked to a half window hermetically sealed from years of neglected dirt. He passed his fingers over the stamped metal, turning it in his hands.

Still, Grossman couldn’t make it out. Cobwebs hung in the corners of the window well. Lower on the wall, a wood shelf sagged with cans of paint, and he used that as a ladder to get at the glass. He spit on his fingertips; he reached, the dirt smeared, and a bit of sunlight leaked into the room. It took him a moment, but when Grossman recognized what he held, the past stained his face like ink from a tipped bottle.

“Where did you get this?”

He was my height, thirty years my senior and thin, thin as though after three decades out of the camps his body still didn’t know how to metabolize a decent meal. The years had cut canyons across his face.

“Where did you get it?”

“My uncle. Isaac Kahane.”

Grossman lowered himself to a bench.

“Did you know him?”

He looked up. “Isaac lives?”

I smiled sadly.

I had forgotten how beaten and truly frightening I must have appeared with my bruises and rough voice. Grossman had every right to be wary.

“Isaac lost his entire family. He wasn’t your uncle.”

I explained it all. I explained the park bench, the gifts and the medallion he placed in my hand without a word. Stories poured out of me, stories confirming my love of the man and my sorrow for what he had endured.

When I was done, Grossman looked at me. “It adds up to one thing or it doesn’t, young man. After the war, did Isaac live and die the normal way?” I followed his eyes to the basement walls and the crumbling mortar. A mouse skittered across the room. At the sound of footsteps overhead he startled. The priest or caretaker had arrived.

“In the camps,” he said, “nothing about life and death was normal. They beat us when we followed orders; they beat us for not following orders. They starved us. If we didn’t die of hunger, we died of disease. If we didn’t die of disease, they eventually shot us. What I want to know is if Isaac had enough to eat and if the police ever came for him in the night. Did he have a
life
after the war?”

I found it difficult to speak.

“And what of his death? After a year, the designated time, will there be a marker on his grave?”

At the head of the room was a cabinet that held a scroll covered in a deep red velvet. Before leaving, each man put fingers to his lips and touched the covering. Grossman now spoke to the cabinet, letting his focus go soft. “Isaac was one of the oldest at Drütte and I, one of the youngest. It’s a wonder either of us survived. I lost my parents, he lost his wife and children. We found each other and held tight.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Not here,” he said. “Come. I walk after morning prayers.”

H
E
WAS
born in the east, a small town in Hungary that was destroyed in the war and can no longer be found on a map. At Auschwitz, he survived the initial selection by lying about his age. For a year he made fuses for a Krupp munitions factory in the camp. Then he was transferred to the burial detail. We were walking shoulder to shoulder at that point, in the woods beneath a canopy of beech and oak.

“My job,” he said, “was to salvage gold from teeth. The guards would exhaust the gas from the showers, and we’d pile the bodies and cart them out to the crematoria and burial pits. But we made a stop, first. A guard showed me how to do it, how to cut from the corners of the mouth out to the ears. This way, when you pull the jaw down, it hangs open and it’s much easier to get at the fillings. I could pull the fillings from your mouth in ninety seconds. You have to do it before the body turns stiff.”

I stopped.

“What? You said to tell you.”

“About
him
.”

“You think it was any prettier for him? None of us knew the particulars of other prisoners’ lives. Still, everyone’s story was more or less the same. Maybe not yanking gold from people’s mouths. But it was
all
detestable, and all anyone wanted to do was live. I saw boys abandon fathers because they were too slow. Brothers abandoned brothers.”

Two hikers approached. “
Grüss Gott!
” they called, waving. Grossman returned the greeting. From the shade of the trail we looked across a freshly mowed field. Beyond that I saw a road, a stream, more fields, then a gradual rise to woodlands and mountains.

“Young man, I generally can’t abide people asking what the camps were like. I don’t need others to use my suffering to have a good cry.”

Was he talking about me?

“What, I should lose my family so some pisher studying the Holocaust at the university can make solemn declarations about evil? Evil doesn’t
mean
anything. Evil is someone’s boot in your teeth, a knife at your eye for the fun of it. I survived the Warsaw ghetto. I watched my sister, eight years old, flushed from a basement by soldiers. She was terrified, searching for a kind face. She saw a soldier and ran to him crying, for help. Surely this man would help. He stuck a bayonet in her throat and lifted her into the air. I watched this from across the street, in hiding. I couldn’t make a sound, I couldn’t save her.

“I’ve stopped talking about all this. I didn’t suffer so students can get drunk reading
Mein Kampf
and cry how awful the world is.” He patted my hand. “But for you, for Isaac’s sake, I make an exception.”

He spoke the unspeakable for an hour, pausing to ask if I wanted more, if I could stand it. I wanted it all.

And then it ended.

“One day the British came. They said, ‘You’re free.’ They expected us to figure out how to live in the world again after all that. As if we still weren’t surrounded by barbed wire and rotting bodies. Tell me, young man, what does living an ordinary life look like after the camps?

“I walk down the street and have no idea what’s inside the head of another man. Is he looking at me and thinking:
Jew?
Does he want to kill me? Does he think of me as vermin, as subhuman? Will he report me to the authorities? One moment I find myself happy, playing with my grandchildren. Then I stop to check that the doors are locked. But then that doesn’t help because the police break down doors, you see. They come crashing in at night and yell:
Out! Everyone out!
”

Grossman lit a cigarette.

“I saw you praying,” I said.

“Every morning, yes.”

“You believe in God?”

“You seem like a bright boy. Why should my prayers suggest I believe in God?”

“Do you?”

“That’s between me and God.”

We walked for a time, and he began again. “From Auschwitz they moved me to Buchenwald. From there I went Drütte, to the steelworks. Isaac and I shoveled coal into furnaces for two years. When I was sick, he shoveled my load so the guards wouldn’t notice. The ones who got sick disappeared, so Isaac and I covered for each other. It was Isaac who saved me in the woods at Celle and hid us from the hunters. He grew up on a farm and could read the woods. He found a hollow, and he pulled leaves and branches over us. All that first night we held each other, listening to the screams of the dying.

“We waited until the shooting stopped. Three days. When all was quiet and we heard planes overhead that weren’t dropping bombs, we staggered out of the woods. The British had come.

“They moved us to Bergen-Belsen. If you drank or ate too much, you died. So we ate spoonfuls of soup at first. Isaac held me back when I grabbed for more. In the camps, I’d been a wild animal who’d do anything to survive. When were back among the living, I wouldn’t leave his side. When he got ill with typhus, I stole clean water from the British until I was caught, and a soldier said: ‘Son, take all the water you want. You don’t need to steal anymore.’ I looked at him, not quite understanding.