Liz paused and drained the last of her drink. “I could use another.” She signalled to the waiter and tapped her glass.
“Anyway,” she continued, “about two years later, after the war had ended, and Germany was occupied, an investigation was made into the events, and a trial was held in West Germany, somewhere—I’ve forgotten. Murder and assault were the charges made but the perpetration of war crimes was the nub of the accusation. There were several civilians on trial, those who had either assaulted the prisoners or incited the assault. They were found guilty and received a variety of jail terms. But all the members of the guard detail were found guilty of murder and subsequently hanged. However, one person escaped justice, the officer in charge—Staudt. He had slipped out of occupied Germany before the case was ever brought to trial.”
The waiter interrupted them with Liz’s drink, a tall glass that glistened and sweated in the circle of light. Another waiter settled a food-laden tray against the rim of the table. Liz leaned her head back and took a deep swallow of vodka. A slight flush came to her pale cheeks. She glanced at the impassive waiter, then took a deep breath.
“It turns out that Karl Staudt lives right here in the city.”
35
Rendezvous
Liz barely noticed the waiter fussing about the table, placing a heated plate in front of her, setting down the platters and bowls of food. So little had she eaten all day, she was beyond hunger. The vodka lay heavy on her stomach; the food, beautiful and clever as it looked, smelled almost revolting. As she waited, her mind flew to her meeting with Paul Friday evening.
His manner on the telephone had been formal, so unlike the endearments of other phone conversations, that she had walked to his apartment through the gathering gloom of day’s end with a gnawing sense of dread. In the front lobby of the building, she had nearly changed her mind and made a hasty exit, but for some reason she had turned her head at that moment and looked into the face of the caretaker whose tiny office opened out toward the elevators. His perennially cheerful expression had given her heart. He was like the faithful pet whose simple presence alone restores tranquillity and she returned his wave as one might pat a dog, as a ritual connection to the normal and the familiar.
On the phone, she had said she needed to speak to him urgently, but when Paul opened the door to her, surrounded by the strains of recorded music—and thank god it wasn’t Wagner—she sensed that he knew precisely why. Normal concern or curiosity was absent in his expression. Instead, the deeply etched frown lines had pulled his mouth into a look of bitter disapproval. His eyes quickly assessed her own and she saw in the hall mirror as she removed her coat that hers betrayed her despair. Her courage began to drain at that moment.
“As I said on the phone, I’m pressed for time.” Paul followed her into his living room. His voice was cold. “Else will be arriving shortly. We have a social engagement.”
“I’ve tried to reach you a couple of times in the last two days to talk—”
“And I’ve been very busy with rehearsals. But you haven’t come here this evening to admonish me for failing to return your phone calls, have you?”
No, she thought. And in that moment she wondered what she had come for. To hear from his own lips that his whole adult life was a lie? To hear him deny Michael’s evidence? To receive, gratefully, some other story that would absolve this crime? Her actions in that last hour or so had been driven by raw emotion. Now she wondered if she had made an intelligent choice by coming to see him.
“I needed to see you because I’ve had some—” She faltered. “—some disturbing news.” How lame the description sounded. “Well, more than just disturbing…Paul.”
What she was going to say next sounded absurdly like something from an old film and she attempted a laugh. But it was more a cough that sounded from her throat.
“But then Paul Richter isn’t your real name, is it?”
He had moved to the black leather couch that dominated the room and motioned for her to sit down.
“I’ve used it long enough to make it real,” he replied neutrally. “It’s who I am now, and have been for forty years. That other person, Karl Staudt—I’m sure you know the name—died in the war.”
It was blunt. And she was glad of it. She hadn’t known how she would have handled denial.
“My knowing this doesn’t seem to disturb you,” she continued, sitting tentatively on the edge of the matching chair opposite him.
“Disturb me? Of course, it disturbs me. But I’m neither surprised nor shocked. I suppose I’ve known in the back of my mind that a moment might come when someone would challenge my identity. But,” he added with distaste, looking away from her, “as it happens, this is not the moment. This is only the aftermath.”
“Michael Rossiter, you mean.”
“Yes. He came to my office last week. He’d been in Europe. He’d found out. By chance, I gather. But trust him to be thorough.”
“You didn’t deny it.”
“How could I? He’d gone to some length to get the documentation, and I’ve never been prepared to go through the kind of circus that idiot Kushniryk is going through, standing up in court, pretending—”
“Then why didn’t he—?”
“What? Go to the authorities? He told me he had to think about what he was going to do. He said he was going away again. Or something. Anyway, he intimated to me in our meeting that handing it to the press might be the way to deal with it.”
“Blackmail?”
“Hardly. Rossiter needed nothing from me.”
“He could have gone to the police.”
“He could have. But perhaps there’s something of his family’s newspaper legacy in him.” He added archly, “A good story, as it were?”
“And this is why you were so distant Tuesday at Martin and Bunny’s.”
Paul shrugged. “I thought perhaps you might be one of the reporters he would get in touch with. After all, he knew nothing about our…relationship. I doubted Rossiter would give the story to the squalid Examiner.”
“And Tuesday, you weren’t sure if I already knew.”
“At first. But by the time we had sat down to dinner, I realized you couldn’t know. Your manner was too…sociable. If you had known, I assumed you would look, and probably feel, as you do now.” He paused and looked at her clinically, his eyes unwavering below the tufted eyebrows. “How do you feel?”
The question had disconcerted her. Then she understood it was somehow calculated to deflect the course of the conversation onto more familiar ground—her psychological state, an area she realized with a burst of anguish she had shared with him much too often, and without reciprocity. He had always been daddy. Now she felt she was being manipulated. But habit was strong and she answered in terms she knew he would find agreeable: “I just feel numb, Paul. I feel completely out of my depth. I don’t know what to do.”
“Why should you do anything?”
“Because…because you’re someone else, someone with another name, with this…this past attached to it.”
“And you want to do what? Expose me? Like a good intrepid little journalist?”
“Paul, please don’t do this. What I want is to understand.” Her voice constricted. “Your life is a lie, isn’t it? A horrible lie.”
“That would be overdramatizing, Liz. Part of my life is an invention, I don’t deny it. But it was a necessary invention. The rest of my life, the great part of my life, is as public as that of anyone in my position.”
“That’s not quite true. You’ve never been the social animal some of the WSO’s past music directors have been. You’ve rarely done interviews or gotten involved in public events unless there was some direct link with the orchestra. Yet you’ve never been so reclusive that curiosity would be sharpened. You’ve taken a risk just being an orchestra conductor. But at the same time you’ve tried to minimize that risk. You’ve been very careful.”
“Liz, when I was a boy I wanted nothing more
in the world than to be what I am now. The war interrupted my musical education. Nothing, nothing!—including that incident on that stupid little island—was going to stop me reaching my goals. I took a risk escaping occupied Germany. I took a risk entering England. Think of my eyes! I had to keep one covered with bandages, pretending I had an injury. I dyed my hair. Every day for the first year I feared recognition, arrest. There were items about the Esslingen trial in the papers. I read them. But then, as time went on, the fears lessened. My English was nearly flawless. I had a new identity and no one questioned it. But, yes, I’ve had to be careful over the years. Of course I have.”
“But that incident, as you call it, is not a minor event. It’s coloured your whole life. It has to have done. I remember asking you when I first interviewed you about American engagements and you brushed the question off. You said there was sufficient work elsewhere. But now I know why you don’t conduct in the U.S., the single richest classical music market in the world. You might be on a list. Or someone might make a connection. You’re just lucky the Americans so completely ignore this country.
“And,” she continued, pieces of the puzzle rapidly falling into place for her, “it’s always been a wonder that you’ve stayed so long in this city. You’re so good at what you do, everybody says so. Much too good for a city as small and isolated as this. Most accomplished people only stay here briefly. They want brighter lights, better opportunities. The natural destination for someone like you has always been some large American centre.”
Paul regarded her gravely. He gave an ambiguous grunt and then said, “I’m not displeased with my career.”
Liz didn’t believe it. Something in his eyes, some small regret told her so. Suddenly he seemed diminished to her, disappointed, older.
“Do others know about you?” she asked quietly.
He shrugged. “Perhaps one or two suspect, but they are members of a community who would rather let the past go undisturbed.”
“And Else? Does she know?”
“Of course she knows. She knows everything.”
His emphasis on the final word alerted her to something else. “Including…?”
He looked at her with exasperation. “I’m trying to tell you, Liz, that there are no secrets between Else and me.”
“Including us, I suppose.”
“Are you surprised? You never once asked.”
It was true. She hadn’t. She had just assumed that their relationship was as precious to him as it was to her; that their time together was privileged; that, perhaps—and this was a fantasy, admittedly—both their lives would be altered in some profound way—each would leave his spouse, they would marry, perhaps have a child. It was not too late for either. But now she knew what she was: someone’s mistress. At the Kingdons’, she thought she had been enjoying the stimulation of intrigue when all the while Else had known precisely the reason for her mood. She felt herself burning with humiliation.
“…understood that the arrangements were for Spencer’s sake,” Paul was saying. “We’ve always met here, at the same time.”
“And I was just part of your schedule?”
“No, Liz. You’re interpreting this badly. I do care for you. But Else and I are bound together in an unusual way. She knows my past. But I know hers, or, rather, I know her family’s. But I shouldn’t even have told you that. Do you see how I trust you?”
Was she wrong, or was there an element of special pleading in his voice?
“In other words,” she said, “your marriage is based on mutual blackmail.”
“Not at all.” He paused as if to gather his thoughts. “You were right earlier, when you said that island episode had coloured my life. What it has coloured is my relationships with other people. I can never afford to be completely candid, completely free, with anyone. With Else I can be. There’s a level of understanding and trust that few others can appreciate. Ironically, our marriage is, in other respects, ‘open.’ So, you see, now that you know, there’s no reason we can’t continue as we’ve been doing.”
Liz froze. His proposal that she sweep what she knew under the carpet was obscene.
“I can’t do that!” she cried. “You committed a horrible crime. You’re a war criminal—two of the most odious words of the twentieth century! You asked me how I felt earlier. I don’t feel numb. I’m horrified. I’m appalled. I can’t believe you could have done what you did.”
“It was war, Liz. War. Millions were killed. I was a soldier of the Reich. What do you think I was supposed to do? What do you think English and Canadian and American soldiers were doing? I don’t accept this term, ‘war criminal.’”
“You’re listed as such with the United Nations War Crimes Commission and with some other registry—”
“The Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Subjects.”
“Thank you,” she continued coldly. “The men you were with were all tried and hanged as war criminals.”
“‘War criminals’ ran concentration camps. They were SS. I was not.”
Liz rose from her chair. Its confines, its proximity to Richter suddenly seemed odious to her.
“The uniform doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter whether it was the six million, or seven. Jews or Americans. What you did has been called by minds older and wiser than mine a war crime. You engineered the murder of seven American airmen in the most sadistic and public manner. You, particularly…”
She could feel her head swimming with the memory of the words she had read, of Karl Staudt brutally pummelling poor Albert Bird in the face and she closed her eyes. A second later she opened them to see Paul, his features emblazoned with rage, rise from the couch.
“They murdered my father, my sister, my aunts, my whole family!” he shouted, coming toward her. “American airmen. English airmen. Do you think this episode was not an act of revenge on the part of the Allies?”
“But those men, those seven, weren’t the ones who killed your family. They were innocent—”
“Innocent!” He grabbed the back of her neck with one powerful hand and pushed her head forward so that her eyes could not avoid his. “What would a woman of your generation know of any of these things? You can’t have any idea of what it was like, what we were feeling, what we had to go through.”
Frightened, yet unwilling to believe he would harm her, Liz pushed at his arm.
“They were prisoners of war,” she said. “You were trained soldiers. There are conventions, norms—I don’t know what exactly—about how such people are to be handled. I do know you don’t kill your prisoners.”
She broke free of his hand and took a step back. “Don’t you have any remorse?” She could hear in her voice an appeal for something she could understand.
But Paul’s rage seemed to evaporate as quickly as it had appeared. He turned away. “No,” he said dismissively, “I don’t have any remorse. It was war. I was young. They were the enemy.”
So this was it then, Liz thought. Somehow if he had expressed regret, given a sign of repentance, even a hint at the guilt that must surely attend such a crime, she would have understood. She would have been able to forgive him, defend him perhaps, if it came to that. Now she felt fevered, as though bacilli implanted in her at some point had suddenly bloomed along her veins. She heard herself say, “On Tuesday, at the Kingdons’, when Martin came into the room and announced the Michael was dead, the most peculiar expression crossed your face. You didn’t looked shocked.”
“Death doesn’t shock me, Liz. Remember, darling, I’ve been though a war.”
The endearment, delivered with disdain, pricked her like a shard of ice, cold and sharp.
“But to clarify,” he continued, oblivious to her pain, “if you need clarification, I thought that since he was dead, his knowledge of my past would die with him. I thought perhaps any evidence he had—papers, pictures, transcripts—would be incomprehensible to the police; that they would just dismiss them as part of some hobby activity. That was naive, of
course. But then when the police mentioned nothing to me during questioning at the Kingdons’ and then again at my house the next morning…well, anyway, let’s just say it was a feeling of relief that came over me at dinner. And, of course, surprise.
“Now let me ask you a question.” He moved over to the stereo and pressed a button. The music stopped instantly and a hollow sound rushed to fill Liz’s ears. He looked at her steadily and asked, his voice suddenly loud and reverberating in the still of the room so cushioned from outside noise: “Since you have this file in your possession, what do you intend to do with it?”
It was then that she had lied. Some small fear had snatched at her brain, tying her tongue.
“It’s locked in my desk drawer at work,” she had said. “I…I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.”
“You realize of course that it will ruin my career, my reputation. I may be deported, charged, forced to face trial. Is that what you want?”
Then, as now, sitting with Leo and Stevie in the restaurant among all the chattering Crescentwood diners, she didn’t know what she wanted. It was all too late anyway. She had given over possession of the damning evidence to another person. Then it had struck her, finally: Paul was capable of lying on a grand scale. He had murdered. He, more than anyone as far as she knew, had something to gain by Michael Rossiter’s death. Maybe, somehow, he had gone earlier to his house, before the dinner party, struck Michael a killing blow, and gathered up what he could find—computer disks, whatnot—not realizing that a copy had already been mailed to her. But, no, it didn’t make sense. There were alibis. That look on his face had been surprise, wonder. Not satisfaction.
Oh, surely.
Still she had asked. She had had to.
“Did you kill Michael Rossiter?”
And those were the last words she had spoken to him. They were probably the last words she would ever speak to him.
36
Hide in Plain Sight
Death in Cold Type Page 33