The Tenth Witness

by Leonard Rosen

  I tried the next closest city listed on the affidavit, Vienna. I found a phone number and called. To my delight a woman answered the phone and said that yes, Aaron Montefiore, her grandfather, was alive and well but was napping at the moment and couldn’t talk. I thanked her and said nothing more because I wouldn’t risk an easy rejection by phone. My plan was to visit Vienna, unannounced—a possibly flawed tactic, I knew. He might be away. He might resent the liberty I’d taken, ambushing him. But if I found Herr Montefiore and he refused to answer questions about Drütte and Isaac Kahane, he would have to deny me to my face. He needed to see my love for Isaac. If he knew Isaac and still said no, I could do nothing but move to others on the list.

  Given my frustrations in the lab with platinum and palladium, I decided to spend the day walking, as I sometimes will when encountering a problem. My habit is to keep a notebook close at hand and divert my attention elsewhere. As often as not, answers will suggest themselves when I’m admiring the patterns of a leaf or lost in contemplation of an article I’ve read.

  Schmidt’s man settled the matter. I would go walking . . . but in Vienna. I thought it through, packed an old suitcase, and stepped out of the apartment.

  I behaved as if unaware anyone was following me and boarded a bus bound for the Munich rail station. I wore tan pants, a darker tan sports jacket, and no hat. At the station, I bought a ticket to Stuttgart, sure to say Stuttgart loudly enough so that anyone standing within six meters would hear. I was first in line at the platform and first onto the train when it was ready for boarding. I assumed that Schmidt’s man would not be bold or stupid enough to sit in the same car. As a precaution, I took a seat in the last row of a car with forward facing seats, so whoever had an interest in my affairs would need to turn to see me.

  When the train departed, I gathered my suitcase and stepped into the lavatory. Inside my suitcase was a smaller day bag in which I had packed a change of clothes, a gray suit and a black felt hat. I stuffed the clothes I had worn from my apartment into the day pack and zipped the larger suitcase shut. I grabbed the hat and my day bag and waited. By this point, I had made the trip to Stuttgart several times and had chosen a local train, not the express, knowing that within twenty minutes it would take on passengers at Augsburg.

  When the train stopped, I exited the lavatory in my fresh set of clothes and new bag, returned my original suitcase to its position on the luggage rack, and stepped off the train. I immediately turned my back to the train and opened a newspaper, which I’d bought at the Munich station as a prop. Schmidt’s man didn’t move. The train to Stuttgart left the station with him aboard, which gave me just enough time to follow the passageway beneath the tracks and emerge onto an adjacent platform, where I stepped onto an eastbound commuter back to Munich. From there, I boarded an express to Vienna.

  Again, I chose the last row of a forward-facing car. I recognized no one from the Stuttgart-bound train. I checked the car behind me and found three people, none familiar. A conductor waved and blew a whistle. I settled into my seat and pulled the list of witnesses from my suit jacket.

  I STEPPED outside the Vienna station looking for a taxi—but not before an odd event. As I exited the train, on an adjacent platform another train was idled, about to depart for the airport. I saw a familiar-looking man: tall, impeccably dressed, and completely bald—his head shaved. He looks like Dr. Nagel, I thought, the physician from Buenos Aires. I looked a second time to be sure, then called across the platform.

  “Herr Nagel!”

  The woman beside him heard clearly enough. A raised voice bordering on a shout can be alarming in public, and she looked in my direction. The man I thought was Eckehart Nagel didn’t move, however.

  “Herr Nagel!”

  Others stared, but he didn’t. He boarded the Airport Express, and I went about my business, forgetting him. I left the station, and a fifteen-minute taxi ride brought me to the edge of a neighborhood of townhouses outside the center of the city.

  “You’ll have to walk,” said the driver on encountering the flashing lights of a police car. I paid him and made my way up the street, checking an address on a scrap of paper against the numbers on the houses, rehearsing what I would say all the while. I was nervous, about to throw myself at the mercy of whoever answered that door. As a habit, I avoid placing my fate in the hands of others. I prefer to rise or sink by my own efforts. But in this business, I was the supplicant. I needed information. There I was, a stranger about to make a very strange request.

  Complicating matters was the voice of my father ringing in my ears, an old argument he used whenever my mother wanted to visit Vienna: the Austrians, he grumbled, were more enthusiastic Nazis than the Germans. Why would anyone willingly visit Vienna? My mother would protest and point to the architecture, the music, and the food. My father switched off the radio whenever Mozart played.

  I was not visiting a Nazi, I reminded myself, but a man who survived Nazis. Would he be more like Zeligman, a large personality who freely discussed those years, or Isaac, who didn’t? I walked up the street, ignoring a gathering commotion ahead of me—a knot of cars and more flashing lights—and rehearsed my appeal to Aaron Montefiore. To build confidence, I recalled Isaac at our bench and dinners downstairs on Friday nights as he chanted over the wine. I reached into my pocket and grasped his medallion. I could do this. I would knock and state my case simply.

  I didn’t get the chance.

  The flashing lights belonged to an ambulance and a second police car. An officer had set a perimeter barricade with yellow tape. A crowd watched someone being carried on a stretcher down marble steps. I checked the number on the scrap in my hand against the number of the building. They matched. There were three apartments, I assumed, each floor-throughs.

  “Who?” I asked a woman.

  “Ah, Herr Montefiore. His granddaughter ran screaming from the house that he’d collapsed. I live over there.” She pointed. “I called the ambulance. Such a good man.”

  Not possible, I thought. I was so upset I nearly blundered into one of the horse-drawn carriages that serve the tourist trade near St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The mare clip-clopped on the cobblestones, making a cruel sound. She stopped, I stopped. The driver asked if I needed help.

  I sat on a curb to collect myself.

  Within the hour, I was leaning my head against the window of the return train to Munich, confused. The odds were against it, my wanting to talk with two men and their dying before I got the chance. I recalled Montefiore’s handsome street with its white limestone townhouses and black wrought-iron lamps and shutters. Flower boxes sat at each window. The buildings were narrow and tall, elegant. Montefiore had prospered. I convinced myself he would have spoken to me.

  The train lurched, and I crossed another name off my list.

  twenty-two

  Liesel ran into my arms after clearing customs. I had hoped for some small sign that our affection would hold after our delirious weekend in bed. I needn’t have worried. She ran to me as if we were lovers long separated by a war and reunited, miraculously, on the far side. What she had seen in Uganda had unsettled her.

  She needed to talk.

  “The mine,” she said, clutching me. “It’s awful, Henri, and our name is all over it. Thirty men died. Trapped, suffocated. The Times of London had a reporter in the country. He’d already called in the story by the time I landed. I met with the widows and children after he interviewed them.”

  Her shoulders began to shake. She fought the emotion and stepped away, wiping her eyes. “Government ministers were screaming. The widows and children threw dust on their heads. It was a nightmare. More reporters came. They were swarming like insects. We would never stand for something like that in Europe, Henri. How did Anselm let it happen? He should have fixed this!”

  Did she really not know? Could Anselm have separated her that sharply from the business arm of Kraus Steel?

  That night, after a bath and with a Scotch in hand, more composed, Lies
el reported more or less the Ugandan version of what I’d found in Hong Kong, and what Laurent had found in Kraus facilities worldwide. Anselm’s workers lived in shanties with roofs of thatch or, if they could afford extra payments to the company store, corrugated tin. “We don’t give them the hardhats or headlamps,” she said, pouring another drink. “They pay the store for that. I give my staff office equipment. I don’t make them pay. Christ.”

  She sipped her Scotch.

  “The collapsed mine is a tomb. We shut it down, but Anselm has his geologists drawing up plans for a new shaft several kilometers to the east where he can work the same deposits. This time he had better do it right. What a fiasco.”

  The hour was late and the lights low, though still bright enough to make a mirror of the window overlooking the Englischer Garden. We sat on the couch in her living room, watching each other’s reflection in the glass.

  I wondered aloud if Anselm was in the habit of visiting his facilities.

  “He visited the mine when it opened, yes. But they hadn’t dug the shafts deep enough to create any hazards. The store and the huts were all new and fresh-looking then. That was twelve years ago, and he never went back. Now he says he’s as shocked as anyone and that he didn’t know. How is this possible? He runs the business. I can tell you one thing. Our facilities in Europe are all safe and well run. Anselm assigns the management of our offshore holdings to his vice presidents. That’s why he didn’t know.”

  “And they report to—?”

  “Uncle Viktor.”

  That night Liesel nearly consumed me in bed. Our first efforts were a sweet, if hurried, welcome home. When I turned on my side to rest, she turned me back and, nearly pleading, asked me to hold her. I did, but that wasn’t enough. I woke while it was still dark to find her straddling me. She turned on a night-light. We thrashed. I urged her to get some sleep, but she woke me again at first light and called my name: “Hold me,” she said.

  Later, when I rose and crossed the apartment to sit by the balcony, I felt her watching until, finally, I returned and sat beside her, smoothing her hair. I kissed her forehead and she closed her eyes. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

  She looked at me and wept.

  WHEN WE parked at Anselm’s estate, I stepped from the car to hear Friedrich from his perch in the Stuka in furious aerial combat. Eeeerrrrrr rat-at-tat. Eeeerrrrr. He was too consumed to wave, and I could imagine one day having children, hoping they’d have a passion, any passion, as pure and beautiful as his.

  The day was hot and sunny. Anselm worked a barbecue grill, and Theresa, arms held wide, came to greet us. She was a sturdy woman in the way opera singers can be sturdy. Heavy, not fat. Strong and big bosomed. Also tender. Magda, sucking her thumb, had attached herself to her mother’s skirts. Theresa kissed Liesel on both cheeks and did the same for me, with equal warmth. I hesitated to think so, but her greeting felt as cheerful and easy as if I were already a member of the family.

  “Opa!”

  I wasted no time when I saw Schmidt.

  I walked directly to him, shook his hand, and whispered, “This is idiotic. Stop the surveillance.” I didn’t do him the discourtesy of making a scene, and I wouldn’t be telling Liesel that her godfather didn’t trust me enough to leave me on my own. My disagreement with Viktor would remain between us, if he listened to reason.

  He returned my whisper. “Just a reminder to take care, Henri.”

  “It’s heavy-handed and insulting.”

  “True. But I wanted to be sure you heard me yesterday. You don’t think it’s just as insulting that you’d check on this family in a war crimes archive? Exactly what and who do you think we are?”

  He said this over his shoulder, having turned toward the house as Franz Hofmann shuffled by with his cane. It was not the stroke and the resulting deficits that made Hofmann so unpleasant. I didn’t mind that he’d taken an immediate dislike to me. But after fifteen minutes in his company, I’d concluded he was a bitter man who looked at the world through a lens that colored everything and everyone deficient. He saw me but didn’t acknowledge me. Tap tap shuffle. Tap tap shuffle. One could wake screaming in the night at the sound.

  I offered my hand in greeting, ready for his grip.

  “I remember you,” he said. “I didn’t like you.”

  “I bet you still don’t.”

  His lower lip flapped. The stroke had affected his voice, which sounded as rough as if he’d spent the previous week shrieking. He stepped closer: “You’re French, aren’t you? That’s the problem.”

  “Mais oui.”

  “Go to hell.”

  He shuffled on, and his aide joined him for a walk in the rose garden.

  Flanked by his Boerboels, Schmidt reappeared with a tray of drinks. “Schnapps for the adults,” he called. “Lemonade for the children.” The dogs raced from his side to Liesel, prancing about her. They sniffed around my shoes and pants, smelling my uneasiness. My calf seized up, but I resisted reaching for the T in my pocket. With Schmidt present, I figured I was safe. Even I believed he controlled these animals. On cue, they broke away from me when their master called, “Hupt!”

  “I shot down four planes, Opa! Two American Thunderbolts and two British Spitfires. Shot them right out of the sky. Four on one, and I got them all!”

  “That’s my boy!”

  “Papa!” Theresa scolded her father. “The Americans and British are our friends now. Have him shoot somebody else down.”

  “Leave it be. Friedrich, run this drink over to Uncle Franz. Don’t spill any. And for God’s sake, don’t drink any.”

  “Really, Papa. He should be shooting down space aliens or Russian MiGs.”

  “Ach! It’s a game.”

  Anselm called to Friedrich: “Watch out—two Spitfires on your tail, five o’clock. Dive hard!” Anselm waved to us, and Liesel and I joined him after relieving Schmidt of three glasses of schnapps.

  “We’ve got to talk,” Liesel told her brother.

  “I know,” he said. There were circles under his eyes. He was taking the news from Uganda seriously. That gave me hope.

  He kissed her cheek. “I heard you met President Amin. You sent my regards—and condolences? And you, my friend,” he said, turning to me. “Viktor tells me you’ve set up the lab. Have you begun work? Any insights yet?”

  Anselm saw me watching as Liesel walked off. “You know, I still look at my wife that way. It will be twenty years next month. . . . Tell me about the lab, Henri.”

  I was in the man’s house drinking his liquor, knowing more than I cared to know about his business and unable to say a word. Besides Uganda, he had a disaster-in-waiting in Hong Kong. He had Interpol perched on his shoulder and didn’t know it, along with the sure prospect of a chemical wasteland if he decided to salvage circuit boards the way he salvaged ships. In spite of it all, I wanted to like Anselm Kraus, not the least reason being his affection for Friedrich and Magda. Somehow the man disarmed my criticisms. If at that moment he swore he didn’t know about the conditions at the mine, I would have believed him.

  I didn’t ask.

  I dug into my pocket and produced three small vials. Gold in one, silver in the next, copper in the third. “Proof of concept,” I said.

  Anselm grinned. “Viktor, come look!”

  “Don’t rush to conclusions,” I told him. “Wait until I finish my report.”

  He clapped my shoulder. “Well done, Henri! I was going to give you this in any event today, but now I’d say you’ve earned it.” He produced a check. “Funds to get you started.”

  I looked at it and looked at him. “Anselm, this is ridiculous.”

  “I’ll be the judge of what I pay a valued consultant.” The grill flared, and he excused himself, laughing. “Really, extracting gold from junk. I love it!”

  Schmidt walked over to inspect, the dogs at his side. “I’ll grant you this,” he said, flicking the vial of gold in the sunlight. “You’re competent. Competence matters, bu
t it’s not enough. You must set up systems, then perfect them. Everything depends on well-run systems. Clear methods. That’s the thing.”

  Theresa called us to lunch, and we found our way to bed sheets spread across the well-tended lawn. The children led Uncle Franz from the rose garden, and he sat beside me.

  SERVANTS CLEANED up after us. I played soccer with the children and engaged in a bit of aerial combat with Friedrich. He and I ran across the lawn, into the woods and back, with the same result as on Terschelling. The child was happy, and Liesel embraced me openly as I returned to the terrace.

  “You’re a good sport, Henri.”

  “No,” I answered. “I’m not. I wanted to beat him but couldn’t. He’s faster and more agile, and that makes me angrier than hell!” We were laughing as Friedrich walked by, sweating and gulping lemonade. “You’re the best combat ace I know,” I said, tousling his hair.

  The dogs perked up.

  Magda, sitting beside her grandfather on a chaise lounge, pointed to the thick picture book propped on his knee: Kinder-und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Schmidt reached an arm around the child, who leaned against him. “Opa,” she said, “let’s read the silly one about the man in the thorns.”

  “Again?”

  “Please, Opa!”

  I helped myself to a lemonade as we all settled in for a story on a pleasant afternoon. Schmidt was clearly pleased to be taking directions from his granddaughter. He consulted the table of contents. “Let’s see now. ‘The Jew Among Thorns.’ That’s the one.”