The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (6 page)

Isaac Kahane had presented me with sixty-two gifts but only sixty-one stories. I replayed each that night as I studied the gifts and recalled our time on the park bench. At last I came to his final gift, the one without a story: a medallion—a wafer-thin oval of steel that fit easily into my palm, stamped on one side with a pattern I sometimes thought looked like a boot.

For years I figured it to be a memento of Isaac’s career as a shoemaker. I was eighteen at the time, headed off to University. He arrived at our bench first, as usual. He was reading the paper when I found him. He saw me and folded it, then patted the seat. I presented a large bag of butterscotch candies.

“Callard & Bowser,” he said. “You went all the way to London for these?”

“How did you know?”

“You didn’t, really.”

“No, Uncle, I didn’t. But they’re the best.”

We wouldn’t be seeing each other for a long time, and already I felt the strain of it. As much as my parents, in some ways more, Isaac anchored me. Yet here I was leaving to make my way in a world that had murdered everything he loved.

He sat there in his bow tie on his day off, the Sabbath, smelling of his work from the week, of shoe leather and polish. Isaac didn’t want to lose me, either, but he had the grace to say nothing. Maybe he still believed in the world. More likely, he understood that I was eighteen and ready to discover cruelty and benevolence on my own.

The worst excesses of history repeat themselves, I’m afraid, not because we love misery or don’t wish to learn from the past, but because we’re compelled to live and test ourselves in the present. Isaac’s grief—and at that point I hardly knew its contours— could not be my grief; for I was young, full of vigor and eager to confront the beasts that had already burnt his life to a shell.

“Well, then,” he said. “I have a little something for you.” He dipped into a pocket and produced the medallion. I waited for the story, but nothing came. Only tears, which he tried to hide.

“Maybe another time,” he managed. He kissed my forehead and my hand, then left.

He and I met often in the years between that visit in the park and his burial that morning. Yet no story followed, and it wasn’t my place to ask. Since that day, when I’d held the medallion or recalled it, a mixture of dread and confusion settled over me. For I knew this last token concerned the war and that it was different, in kind, from the other gifts. He had come a long way, though only partway, in telling his story. The rest, I understood, was mine to discover.

So I pocketed the medallion and heard it jangle against that other piece of metal, long kept close: my father’s T. On an impulse, not wanting to let Isaac go, I grabbed a few other trinkets for my briefcase. Armed thus with gifts from the men I loved best, I stood and stretched, then packed my bags for China.

P
ART
II

eleven

T
he trip to Paris had bumped me onto a later departure out of Schiphol and, as it happened, onto Viktor Schmidt’s flight to Hong Kong. I had thought it might be Schmidt when from behind I saw a stocky man with white bristle hair and a well-cut suit. He broke into a broad grin when he saw me and, after I explained the circumstance, placed a paternal hand on my shoulder.

“A funeral? That’s a bad business,” he said. “I’ve never accepted it, that one’s reward for a long life is death, particularly the wasting-away kind. I hope he didn’t suffer.”

But Isaac had.

“In any event, it’s up to us to carry on. Isn’t it, Henri?”

“It is, Viktor.”

“Well, it’s fine luck to meet you here. I promised Anselm I’d treat you to a tour in Hong Kong. He told me all about your dive platform. He’s very impressed, you know—which isn’t easy to do. Exciting, eh?”

“It is.”

“And what’s this I hear about some sort of drive shaft at the wreck site? These eighteenth-century frigates didn’t have propellers, did they?” He laughed from somewhere deep in his belly and didn’t seem to mind people staring.

“It’s a junkyard down there,” I said. “We’ll be pulling up refrigerators before the dive is over. Count on it.”

“Was it a commercial ship, military?”

I didn’t know.

“Well, you keep me posted. I want a tour. Tit for tat, right? Because I’m going to give you a tour. We arrive in the morning, and the trick to getting on local time is to stay up and be active all day. If you don’t have meetings when we land, my driver will take us to my hotel. We’ll drop our bags, then tour the ship-breaking facility directly, so we won’t be tempted to sleep. I tell you, that platform of yours must be something. I mean it, tit for tat. I give you my tour, you give me yours. What do you say?”

The frontal assault left me no choice. I had rescheduled my meetings for Isaac’s funeral, and Schmidt’s plan would work. In fact, I was as curious to see where my steel anchor beams had come from as Schmidt was to see the platform.

When we boarded, he turned left off the jetway into the land of linen and seats that reclined into beds. I turned right and found my own seat well to the rear, in cattle class, beside a woman who apologized for the two-year-old on her lap with a runny nose. “Ear infection,” she said.

During takeoff, as the cabin pressure changed, the child wailed.
Just my luck,
I thought. The seven-hour time difference when I landed in Hong Kong would be difficult enough to manage if I were rested. The mother was no happier. “I can’t get another dose of medicine into him for six hours,” she said.

Every seat on the plane was taken.

At altitude, I ordered wine and asked for earplugs. I’d pulled a file on the parts manufacturer I’d be meeting and set it on the tray table before me. But the boy, tugging at his ears, was miserable. The mother bounced him and did her best to distract him. She apologized several times.

“Don’t,” I said. “I’ll get my turn. I hope.”

Which is when I smiled.

How many times had Freda or Isaac come upstairs to nurse me when my parents were off working? There’s nearly a luxury in getting sick, though not seriously sick, as a child. The adults in my life doted on me. They smoothed my hair and dabbed cool compresses on my forehead and chest. Freda brought soup from downstairs. Isaac read to me, or we played chess.

I searched my briefcase for one of his treasures that I knew well, a hand-carved knight. I made sure the child saw it as I stood the horse on its legs. I could hear Isaac speaking as clearly as if he were perched on my shoulder.
Are you sure you want to move your Queen this far, Henri? Study the board. Think it through.

He had carved every piece of that set. I asked him why when he could have bought chess pieces at a store. That’s when he gave me a story.

I once had another set like this,
he began.
In those days, we had to make our own pieces, and we drew our boards in the dirt so we could erase them quickly when someone came. It took months, but I found pieces of wood and used stones to smooth and shape them. I made a little sack for the pieces. It was a long time ago.

Nine or ten at the time, I didn’t understand that he’d gone back to the war for that story. I didn’t understand, in fact, until the long flight to China. Where had he made it? At the camps? Had he played chess with his own sons before the Nazis shot them? I pranced the hand-carved horse across my files up to the very edge of the fold-down table, rearing as if the rider had come to a cliff. I could feel the child watching.

Then why didn’t you use a knife, Uncle . . . to carve the pieces? It would have been easier.

I remember his smile and that he touched my cheek.
Because the Lord decided it would be better to shape the pieces with stones.
I could smell his aftershave; his fingers were stained with shoe polish.
Keep it,
he said, handing me the horse.
I’ll carve another.

I backed the horse up across my files and pranced through a series of high, looping arcs. By this point, the child had stopped crying. He watched me jump the horse through a last arc . . . and into his lap. He sat up and began to play. The mother’s head went slack against the seat with relief.

She mouthed the words
Thank You
, and we all got some sleep.

T
HE
TRAVELERS
in the customs hall at Hong Kong International Airport stood queued before eight of twenty active kiosks, each staffed with a control agent who sat on a high stool behind a raised counter. I had nothing to declare and nothing to hide, yet found myself nervous just the same. I scratched my chin, which didn’t itch, and checked a watch I’d already reset to local time in an effort to look unconcerned. Behind me, Schmidt was pushing a flatbed hand truck loaded with his own suitcase and three large cardboard boxes, which I had helped him load from the baggage terminal.

The customs agent waved me through after a few routine questions, without opening my suitcase.

Schmidt was not so lucky.

“Your boxes,” said the agent. “I will open them.” The officer was a young man with jet black hair and a clipped British accent, his uniform starched and spotless. “What’s inside, Sir?”

“Consumer electronics,” said Schmidt. “I have a card here with the names of two officers on the customs staff. They’re expecting me. Please find either of these men, and we can make quick work of your inspection—with all due respect, of course.”

The agent read the card without touching it, then unzipped the suitcase as if Schmidt hadn’t spoken. I watched the exchange from the far side of the kiosk, behind a bright yellow line which signified that I stood, officially, in Her Majesty’s Colony of Hong Kong. The agent removed a shirt from Schmidt’s suitcase and shook out its folds. He poked through undergarments and unzipped a toiletries kit.

Schmidt watched in disbelief.

The agent re-zipped the suitcase and looked up. “Tell me about these electronics. What kind?” He sliced open one of the boxes along a seam. “I see glass in here—it looks like a small television. There is also a keyboard built onto the unit. It looks like a typewriter. What is this?”

Schmidt leaned across the counter and presented his card a second time. “Contact one of these men.”

“Do the other boxes contain the same items, Sir?”

Schmidt was losing control. I could see the veins in his neck.

“What is this?” said the agent.

“A computer.”

The man looked at him. “I’ve worked with computers at the University of Hong Kong. Computers take up entire rooms and use card files for data. I see no mechanism for accepting card files. And the unit is too small. It cannot be a computer, Sir. I ask again, what is this?”

“It’s called a
personal
computer,” said Schmidt. “It’s new, from America. I’m bringing it to show some people here.”

The agent read something from inside the box. “What is this
Apple?
”

“A computer company. American.”

“What are you intending to do with this Apple in Hong Kong?”

“
Business
,” said Schmidt. “Call your supervisor!”

“We will open the other cartons now. And I must ask you to keep your voice down.” He used his box cutter and read off two more names: “
Tandy. Commodore.
These are also computers?” The man placed a call and spoke to someone in Chinese, then re-inspected Schmidt’s passport. “Mr. Schmidt,” he said, flipping pages. “You travel extensively. Uganda, Cambodia, and Libya in the last six months. And with some regularity to Argentina. Why, may I ask?”

“Is this any of your business?”

“It is. This is our Customs Hall. I ask questions, you answer.”

“Have I done something to offend you?”

“Answer the question, Sir.”

“I
live
in Argentina. I work in Germany. I visit my wife. Satisfied?”

“I see a visa here to enter the People’s Republic of China in three days. Why?”

“Business.”

“Relating to computers?”

“Sir,” said Schmidt, making a futile attempt at civility, “I’m a businessman traveling on business. Any more questions will have to come from your superior. I gave you two names.” He crossed his arms and waited.

The impasse broke when a man in uniform, eyes puffy and hair dyed too black for his age, approached the kiosk. Without a word, he read Schmidt’s card. He addressed his subordinate, then excused himself. The young man backed away.