The Tenth Witness

by Leonard Rosen

  “Pol Pot?”

  He caught my meaning.

  “You think I don’t read the papers? He’s a genocidal madman who’s cash poor at the moment, which creates an opening.”

  “For the Kraus one-two punch.”

  He backed off the throttle and sat the boat hard into the sea. It rose, then dipped as it lost forward motion, and began to pitch violently. I threw up again. One wave nearly dumped me overboard.

  “Don’t lecture me, Henri.”

  I saluted him.

  “Hell, forget that,” he said. “Liesel thinks you’re dating.”

  Seawater slapped my face, and I was liking him less and less. “Start the damn boat, Anselm.”

  “I don’t care if you’re poor,” he said. “Everybody begins somewhere. I like your ambition, and I might even like you. I just need to know your intentions. Do you understand? My parents are gone, and I’m Liesel’s older brother. So let’s establish something.”

  I lifted my head.

  “Tell me you’re not leading her on.”

  I grabbed the windscreen and the gunwale and lifted myself to a sitting position. “She’s thirty years old. Do you really think it’s necessary for you to—”

  “You’re goddamned right it is! She’s a wealthy woman, and men have broken her heart hunting for money.”

  German men, I nearly said. My own laughter sounded bizarre to me. The sky was the color of steel. The sea was slate, and the world spun. I hardly knew which way was up, and it struck me as odd that history should land me at so strange a moment, bobbing like a cork and about to lose my stomach lining because Anselm Kraus needed to interrogate me.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “I fell for Liesel the old-fashioned way. Did your father-in-law question you like this? Start the boat. I’m suffering out here, Anselm.”

  He cocked his head. “Viktor and my father were friends. He knew me my whole life. I came pre-loved.” He smiled.

  A wave hit my face and Kraus stared, appraising me again. It wasn’t the very best time to vomit, but I did.

  “Look me in the eyes.”

  I tried my best. “What the hell? Get us moving.”

  “Tell me you understand.”

  “I do. I just don’t want to vomit anymore.”

  “She’s my sister,” he said, as if that explained this abuse. “And that, I believe, is your dive platform. Unless you can think of anything else out here lit up like a department store.” Kraus hit the throttle. “The Lutine!” he yelled. The engines roared, and Blast Furnace jumped like a sprinter at a starting gun.

  nine

  “Ugly enough to be gorgeous” was how my partner described the dive platform when we first designed it. Alec had a talent for seeing projects in three dimensions while still in the drawing phase. I was made of denser stuff and needed to see the thing itself, under construction, before making judgments. But now that the platform was built and towed into position over the ballast pile, I agreed that it was both ugly and gorgeous—a magnificent blend of safety and function. I saw our achievement all over again in the face of Anselm Kraus as he climbed aboard.

  We built the platform with a crew’s quarters, a diving hut, a conservator’s lab, a dining room and a lounge—all bolted, then welded, deep into the structure of the repurposed coal barge. Twelve people would live aboard during the weekdays throughout the salvage season, with a watchman posted on weekends. Lloyd’s had hired six divers working in two shifts throughout the day, a sluice operator, a crane operator, a cook, a marine archeologist and her assistant, and us to serve as ongoing coordinators. But that was Alec’s job. My plan was to stay as far from the North Sea as possible.

  We had anchored the barge platform at four corners with beams of Kraus steel driven deep into the sand. Loops of heavy chain connected these beams to the barge, which rose and fell with the tides. I had consulted historical records, tide charts, and lunar cycles to calculate the maximum storm surge during a hundred year event. I spec’d the anchor beams five meters above that, figuring any storm strong enough to float the barge off its anchors would overwhelm northern Europe—in which case, a barge lost at sea would be the least of Lloyd’s worries.

  The risk, our employer agreed, was acceptable.

  My head cleared as we climbed aboard the rig. With its mass, it moved like an enormous beast slow to anger. Blast Furnace, meanwhile, bucked against its line at the pontoon dock.

  Before he said a word, Kraus surveyed the platform. Then he turned to me. “You designed and built this?” Beauty for a man who ran steel mills meant function. He approved.

  “The Lutine,” he said. “I feel it. She’s down there.”

  Alec had just introduced himself. “Don’t go all Ouija board on us, captain. We’ve got a one-in-fourteen chance it’s the Lutine. I’m sure Henri explained all this: until there’s proof, what you see on this platform is an expensive failure that we, thank God, are not paying for.”

  “What kind of proof?” asked Kraus.

  Alec was quick to answer. “Gold would do. Or a cannon with a fleur-de-lis. Either would give Lloyd’s a proper erection.” He tucked a clipboard beneath his arm and smiled. “That,” he said, pointing, “would not be proof. The divers belted it yesterday afternoon, but we’re just now hauling it up.”

  The crane operator was lowering a long steel shaft onto the deck.

  “Hardly from an eighteenth-century frigate.”

  “Storms must have pushed it onto the wreck site. The divers told me it poses a danger, and they wanted it clear.”

  We approached the crane, and Kraus inspected. “Steel,” he said. “Pitted, fairly low grade with a heavy sulfur content. Do you see the way it’s oxidized? It’s a drive shaft, I’d say, submerged for decades. I would have heard about a commercial ship going down anytime in the last thirty years. This could date to the First or Second World War—and from the looks of the shaft, it was a large ship.”

  Several of the crew members were listening, and I heard some excited talk about another wreck in the vicinity. I gathered they’d be investigating in their spare time; divers earned major bragging rights on being the first to find and identify a wreck.

  “In the last few hundred years, at least a thousand ships sank out here,” said Kraus. “With our tides and storms, I’d expect you to find ship-to-shore radios pushed hard against eighteenth-century frigates. It’s bound to be a junkyard down there.” Kraus was clearly pleased to be aboard. “And to think I sit behind a desk all day. This is real work.”

  Alec pulled me aside to report that the Argentine government had contacted him about using our design to dive on a galleon lost in the River Plate, the Preciado. “They’ll refit their own barge,” he said. “They just want our specs and a welding scheme. Easy money. They’re sending a few people out here soon. Evidently, they heard about us through Lloyd’s.”

  “Everything you need, nothing you don’t!” said Kraus, joining us. “Your platform is perfect.” He looked again at the rig, then at me, as if piecing something together. “Are you related to Jules Henri Poincaré? The mathematician. A connection, perhaps?”

  I walked him to the sluice box.

  “He was my great-grandfather.”

  “Excellent! I see it in your design. Safety. Pragmatism. Elegance. It must be a comfort to know his blood runs in you. Listen to me. Never underestimate the importance of blood.”

  Isaac wasn’t in the ground yet; but had he been, he would have turned at the thought of a German thirty years after the war extolling the virtue of bloodlines. I let it go. I pointed Kraus to the sluice box where, short of finding Alec’s cannon, we were likeliest to prove the wreck was the Lutine. In addition to a thousand bars of gold, she had sailed with strongboxes filled with gold coins. It was the airlift, essentially a long vacuum hose, that would catch the coins. Finding a few bucketsful would be definitive.

  Anselm didn’t want to tempt the weather any longer. He shook my hand, and said, “Call my assistant in Munich. S
he’ll give you Viktor’s contact information in Hong Kong. I want you to tour our facility with him, Henri. Go see that, then let’s talk. You’ve done a fine job here. Outstanding.”

  He was halfway down the ladder at the pontoon dock when I called his name. “She doesn’t need anyone’s permission,” I said.

  Kraus grinned. “Of course she doesn’t. But she has it, for what it’s worth. Happy fishing in Hong Kong. And tell your partner to call if your vacuum cleaner spits out a bar of gold. I’d like to hold it.”

  ten

  “Isaac Kahane lived and Hitler didn’t. L’chaim!”

  I raised a glass in celebration, two fingers deep, in what was threatening to be an even twelve rounds. A dozen of us sat in my father’s book-lined study, where we retreated after the funeral to honor Isaac by serving pickled herring and potato vodka, his favorites. The fruit and vegetable seller, the fishmonger, the tobacconist, the baker, the launderette owner whose machines were always broken: these were the faces of my childhood.

  For all my young life I ran errands for my parents and the Kahanes to and from their shops. I played football with their sons and kissed their daughters. We exchanged holiday presents and shared meals on summer evenings. After paying their respects to Freda, each in turn squeezed my hand; for after Freda, they knew, I was the one who would suffer most.

  Of the assembled, the one couple I didn’t know was the Zeligmans. Jacob had offered the last toast, and I figured him for family—from Poland, judging by the accent. Yet to the best of my knowledge, the Nazis had erased Isaac’s relations. Some died in the Warsaw ghetto; some, in the remote villages to the east, standing over trenches they’d dug themselves; some, in the camps; some, in the cargo holds of repurposed furniture trucks, sucking down carbon monoxide.

  Whoever this Zeligman was, he stood in my father’s study like a centuries-old oak. Parts of him were broken. His fingers were bent. He used a cane to help with an arthritic hip. For all that, however, he was full of life. His white hair was thick, his face pocked with skin cancers. He wore a Star of David around his neck on a thick gold chain and, just as much a testament to his faith, a tattooed number on his left forearm.

  Auschwitz.

  He had wept at the grave. By the time we reconvened at the apartment, he was almost giddy in celebrating the life of a Jew who’d outlived the Reich. “The fucking Deutsch,” he roared, pouring himself another shot.

  “Yaakov, stop,” said his wife. “Don’t curse!”

  “Why not? Isaac lived. And while we’re at it, let’s spit in the eye of Reinhard Vogt, that twisted bastard.”

  I raised my glass to the curse, though I had no idea who Vogt might be. Meanwhile, Tosha Zeligman swayed back and forth, whimpering, “Gottenyu, God, oh God,” looking as if she’d never left her shtetl in Belarus. She wore black stockings rolled to the knee, a black dress and a black, lace kerchief. Wringing her hands, she looked across the room to Freda.

  “Yaakov’s right,” she said. “Your Isaac died the normal way. The Deutsch didn’t kill him.”

  My father was the next to stand. He was drunk, I could tell, though dignified. He steadied himself on the table where I worked out fractions as a child. “My parents and Allete’s parents live in Lyon.” He faced Freda, then turned to me. “We’ve visited when we could, a few times a year, but here in Paris, Freda and Isaac were Henri’s grandparents and our friends. Isaac seldom spoke about the war, but I know this much: he saw enough to be bitter, yet he showed the world kindness.”

  At the open window, I smelled rain.

  My father had told me we’d be gathering after the service. As I traveled to the cemetery from the airport, I considered what to say even though I had no words for death. I walked along rows of headstones carved in a Semitic script. I didn’t understand the language, but then I didn’t need a dictionary. Whatever its letters, a tombstone tells the same story: a newborn’s wailing, a span of years, a hole in the ground, and dirt thudding onto a box. Isaac’s life was so much more than this, but I could find no words to honor him.

  I so wanted to honor him.

  Surrounded by my father’s books and photos of Poincarés past and present, I stood. I raised a glass: “Isaac gave me the world,” I said. “I can’t remember life before he and Freda moved downstairs. I have no practice living without the ones I love. I don’t know how to do this.”

  My voice cracked. I looked at my parents.

  BACK AT my apartment, I recalled my brief conversation with Zeligman. Isaac had shielded me from virtually all talk of the war. Yet here was a man who took the opposite view. Judging from what I’d seen, you couldn’t shut him up. Zeligman knew Isaac from those days, and he promised to drink vodka with me and tell me everything I wanted to know. “By talking,” he said, “I bury the Deutsch and keep them buried. You come to Bruges,” he added, patting my hand. “We’ll sit by my window and talk. I’ll tell you plenty.”

  I told him to count on it.

  That night I sat at my desk drinking coffee, trying to flush the alcohol from my system as I ran my hands across the beveled edges of a box on my desk. More than one visitor had examined its contents and wondered why I’d collect such junk. Item by item, I examined my treasures: the cat’s-eye marble that started a war, the pen that freed the serfs, Charles de Gaulle’s pipe. I learned later that De Gaulle never smoked a pipe, but that hardly mattered.

  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 kep
t 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.

  PART II

  eleven

  The 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?”