“No!”
“Or you can leave it on the bed, listen to what I have to say, then give me the dignity of choosing how I’m to go. You decide, Paul, but whatever happens, I will get what I want. What I need.”
Paul sat on the floor, or rather collapsed onto it, clutching the leather bag. For a long while the only sound in the room was the metallic tick of Eduard’s alarm clock. Eduard closed his eyes until he felt a movement on his bed.
His cousin had dropped the leather bag within reach of his hand.
“God forgive me,” said Paul. He was standing at Eduard’s bedside, crying, but not daring to look at him directly.
“Oh, He doesn’t give a damn what we do,” said Eduard, caressing the delicate leather with his fingers. “Thank you, Cousin.”
“Tell me, Eduard. Tell me what you know.”
The wounded man cleared his throat before beginning. He talked slowly, as though each of the words had to be dragged out of his lungs rather than spoken.
“It happened in 1905, which is what they’ve told you, and up to that point what you know is not so far from the truth. I remember clearly that Uncle Hans was on a mission in South-West Africa, because I loved the sound of that word and used to say it again and again as I tried to find the place on the map. One night, when I was ten years old, I heard shouting in the library and went down to see what was happening. I was very surprised that your father had called on us at that time of night. He was in discussion with my father, the two of them sitting at a round table. There were two other people in the room. I could see one of them, a short man with delicate features like a girl’s, who was saying nothing. I couldn’t see the other one from the door but I could hear him. I was about to go in and greet your father—he always brought me presents from his travels—but just before I entered, my mother grabbed me by the ear and dragged me to my room. ‘Did they see you?’ she asked. And I said no, over and over. ‘Well, you’re not to say a word about this, not ever, do you hear me?’ And I . . . I swore I’d never tell . . .”
Eduard’s voice trailed off. Paul grabbed his arm. He wanted him to continue the story, whatever it took, though he was aware of the suffering that it was causing his cousin.
“You and your mother came to live with us two weeks later. You weren’t much more than a baby, and I was pleased, because that meant I had my own platoon of brave soldiers to play with. I didn’t even think about the obvious lie my parents told me: that Uncle Hans’s frigate had gone down. People were saying other things, spreading rumors that your father was a deserter who’d gambled everything away and had disappeared in Africa. Those rumors were just as untrue, but I didn’t think about them, either, and eventually I forgot. Just as I forgot what I heard soon after my mother left my bedroom. Or rather, I pretended that I’d made a mistake, in spite of the fact that no mistake was possible, given the excellent acoustics in this house. Watching you grow up was easy, watching your happy smile as we played hide-and-seek, and I lied to myself. Then you started getting older—old enough to understand. Soon you were as old as I’d been that night. And I went off to war.”
“So tell me what you heard,” said Paul in a whisper.
“That night, Cousin, I heard a shot.”
7
Paul’s understanding of himself and his place in the world had been teetering on the edge for some time, like a porcelain vase at the top of a ladder. That last sentence was the final kick, and the imaginary vase tumbled, shattering into pieces. Paul heard the crash it made as it broke, and Eduard saw it in his face too.
“Forgive me, Paul. Christ help me. You should go now.”
Paul got up and leaned over the bed. His cousin’s skin was cold, and when Paul kissed his forehead, it was like kissing a mirror. He walked to the door, not quite in control of his own legs, only vaguely aware of having left the bedroom door open and of having slumped down on the floor outside.
When the shot rang out, he barely heard it.
But as Eduard had said, the mansion’s acoustics were excellent. The first guests to leave the party, busy exchanging farewells and empty promises as they collected their overcoats, heard a bang that was muffled but unmistakable. They’d heard too many in the preceding weeks to fail to recognize the sound. Their conversations had all ceased by the time the second and third echoes of the report rebounded through the stairwell.
In her role as the perfect hostess, Brunhilda had been saying goodbye to a doctor and his wife whom she couldn’t stand. She identified the sound but automatically activated her defense mechanism.
“The boys must be playing with firecrackers.”
Disbelieving faces popped up around her like mushrooms after a rainstorm. At first there were only a dozen people, but soon more emerged into the hallway. It wouldn’t be long before all the guests knew that something had happened in her house.
In my house!
Within two hours it would be the talk of all Munich if she didn’t do something about it.
“Stay here. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Brunhilda picked up the pace when she began to smell gunpowder halfway up the stairs. Some of the braver guests were looking up, perhaps hoping she would confirm that they had been mistaken, but not one set foot on the staircase: the social taboo against entering a bedroom during a party was too strong. The murmuring grew, however, and the baroness hoped Otto would not be so foolish as to follow her, as someone would inevitably want to accompany him.
When she reached the top and saw Paul sobbing in the corridor, she knew what had happened without putting her head around Eduard’s door.
But she did anyway.
A spasm of bile rose to her throat. She was gripped by horror and by another incongruous feeling that she would recognize only later, with self-disgust, as relief. Or at least the disappearance of the oppressive feeling she’d been carrying in her breast ever since her son had returned, maimed, from the war.
“What have you done?” she cried, looking at Paul. “I’m asking you: What have you done?”
The boy didn’t raise his head from his hands.
“What did you do to my father, you witch?”
Brunhilda took a step back. For the second time that night, someone had recoiled at the mention of Hans Reiner, but ironically the person doing it now was the same one who had used his name as a threat earlier.
How much do you know, child? How much did he tell you before . . . ?
She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t: she didn’t dare.
Instead, she squeezed her hands into fists until her nails stuck into her palms, trying to calm herself and decide what to do, just as she had done that night fourteen years earlier. And when she had managed to recover a minimum of composure, she went back downstairs. On the first floor she poked her head over the banister and smiled down into the entrance hall. She didn’t dare go any farther, because she didn’t think she could keep up the pretense for long in front of that sea of tense faces.
“You’ll have to excuse us. Friends of my son have been playing with firecrackers, just as I thought. If you don’t mind I’ll deal with the chaos they’ve caused up there”—she gestured to Paul’s mother—“Ilse, my dear.”
The faces softened when they heard this, and the guests relaxed when they saw the housekeeper following their hostess up the stairs as though nothing were wrong. They already had plenty of gossip about the party, and could hardly wait to get home to bore their families with it.
“Don’t even think about screaming,” was the only thing Brunhilda said.
Ilse had been expecting some childish mischief, but when she saw Paul in the corridor, she was afraid. Then, when she half opened Eduard’s door, she had to bite her fist to stop herself from screaming. Her reaction was not so very different from that of the baroness, except that with Ilse there were tears as well as horror.
“Poor boy,” she said, wringing her hands.
Brunhilda watched her sister, her own hands poised on her hips.
�
��Your son was the one who gave Eduard the gun.”
“Oh, Holy God, tell me that’s not true, Paul.”
It sounded like an entreaty, but her words contained no hope. Her son didn’t reply. Brunhilda approached him, exasperated, waving her index finger.
“I’m going to call the magistrate. You’ll rot in prison for giving a gun to an invalid.”
“What did you do to my father, you witch?” Paul repeated, slowly getting up to face his aunt. She didn’t step back this time, even though she was scared.
“Hans died in the colonies,” she replied, lacking conviction.
“That’s not true. My father was in this house before he disappeared. Your own son told me.”
“Eduard was sick and confused; he was making up all kinds of stories because of the injuries he suffered at the front. And in spite of the fact that the doctor forbade him visitors, you’ve been in here, making him agitated, and then you go and give him a gun!”
“You’re lying!”
“You killed him.”
“That’s a lie,” said the boy. Nonetheless he felt a chill of doubt.
“Paul, that’s enough!”
“Get out of my house.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” said Paul.
“You decide,” said Brunhilda, turning to Ilse. “Judge Strohmeyer is still downstairs. In two minutes I will go down and inform him what’s happened. If you don’t want your son to spend tonight at Stadelheim, you’ll leave straightaway.”
Ilse paled in terror at the mention of the prison. Strohmeyer was a good friend of the baron’s, and it wouldn’t take much to convince him to charge Paul with murder. She grabbed her son by the arm.
“Paul, let’s go!”
“Not until—”
She slapped him so hard that it hurt her fingers. Paul’s lip began to bleed but he stood watching his mother, refusing to move.
Then, finally, he followed her.
Ilse didn’t allow her son to pack a suitcase; they didn’t even go by his room. They went down the service staircase and left the mansion through the back door, skulking along the alleys to avoid being seen.
Like criminals.
8
“And may I ask where the hell you’ve been?”
The baron appeared, furious and tired, the edges of his frock coat creased, his moustache disheveled and his monocle hanging loose. An hour had passed since Ilse and Paul had left, and the party had only just ended.
Only when the very last guest was gone did the baron go and look for his wife. He found her sitting on a chair she’d brought out into the fourth-floor corridor. The door to Eduard’s room was closed. Even with her immense will, Brunhilda couldn’t manage to bring herself to return to the party. When her husband appeared, she explained to him what lay inside the room, and Otto felt his own share of pain and remorse.
“You’re calling the judge in the morning,” said Brunhilda, her voice dispassionate. “We’ll say we found him like this when we came to give him his breakfast. That way we can keep the scandal to a minimum. It might not even get out.”
Otto nodded. He drew his hand back from the door handle. He didn’t dare to go in, nor would he ever. Not even after the traces of the tragedy had been scrubbed from the walls and the floor.
“The judge owes me a favor. I think he’ll be able to sort it out. But I wonder how Eduard got hold of the gun. He can’t have got it on his own.”
When Brunhilda told him Paul’s role and that she had thrown the Reiners out of the house, the baron was livid.
“Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“They were a threat, Otto.”
“And have you by any chance forgotten what’s at stake here? Why we’ve had them in this house all these years?”
“To humiliate me and ease your conscience,” said Brunhilda, with a bitterness she’d been holding in for years.
Otto didn’t bother to reply, since he knew what she said was true.
“Eduard talked to your nephew.”
“Oh, God. Do you have any idea what he might have told him?”
“That doesn’t matter. After leaving tonight they’ve become suspects, even if we don’t turn them in tomorrow. They won’t dare speak out, and they have no proof of anything. Unless the boy finds something.”
“Do you think I’m worried about them finding out the truth? For that they’d have to find Clovis Nagel. And Nagel hasn’t been in Germany for a long time. But that doesn’t solve our problem. Your sister is the only one who knows where Hans Reiner’s letter is.”
“Keep an eye on them, then. From a distance.”
Otto reflected for a few moments.
“I’ve got just the man for the job.”
Someone else was present during that conversation, though he was hidden in a corner of the corridor. He had listened without understanding. Much later, when Baron von Schroeder retired to their bedroom, he went into Eduard’s room.
When he saw what was inside, he sank to his knees. By the time he rose, what was left of the innocence his mother had not been able to burn away—the parts of his soul that she hadn’t been able to sow with hatred and envy toward his cousin over many years—were dead, turned to ashes.
I’ll kill Paul Reiner for this.
Now I am the heir. But I will be the baron.
He couldn’t make out which of the two competing thoughts excited him more.
9
Paul Reiner was shivering in the light May rain. His mother had stopped dragging him, and now walked by his side through Schwabing, the Bohemian district at the heart of Munich, where thieves and poets sat side by side with painters and whores in the taverns until the early hours. Few of the taverns were open now, however, and they didn’t go into any that were, as they didn’t have a pfennig.
“Let’s take shelter in this doorway,” said Paul.
“The night watchman will throw us out; it’s happened three times already.”
“You can’t go on like this, Mama. You’ll catch pneumonia.”
They squeezed into the narrow doorway of a building that had seen better days. At least an overhang protected them from the rain that drenched the deserted pavements and uneven flagstones. The weak light of the streetlamps cast strange reflections on the wet surfaces; it was unlike anything Paul had ever seen.
He was afraid and pressed even closer to his mother.
“You’re still wearing your father’s wristwatch, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Paul, alarmed.
She had asked him this question three times in the past hour. His mother was drained and empty, as though slapping her son and hauling him through the alleys far from the Schroeders’ mansion had used up a reserve of energy even she hadn’t known she possessed, and which was now lost forever. Her eyes were sunken and her hands trembled.
“Tomorrow we’ll pawn it and everything will be all right.”
The wristwatch was nothing special; it wasn’t even made of gold. Paul wondered if it would pay for any more than one night in a boardinghouse and a hot dinner, if they were lucky.
“That’s a great plan,” he forced himself to say.
“We need a place to stay, and then I’ll ask for my old job back at the gunpowder factory.”
“But, Mother . . . the gunpowder factory doesn’t exist anymore. They demolished it when the war ended.”
And you were the one who told me that, thought Paul, now extremely concerned.
“The sun will soon be up,” said his mother.
Paul didn’t reply. He craned his neck, alert to the rhythmic steps of the night watchman’s boots. Paul wished he would stay away long enough to allow him to shut his eyes for a moment.
I’m so tired . . . And I don’t understand any of what’s happened tonight. She’s behaving so strangely . . . Perhaps now she’ll tell me the truth.
“Mama, what do you know about what happened to Papa?”
For a few moments Ilse seemed to awake from her lethargy. A spark
of light burned deep in her eyes, like the last embers of a bonfire. She held Paul’s chin and stroked his face gently.
“Paul, please. Forget it; forget everything you’ve heard tonight. Your father was a good man who died tragically in a shipwreck. Promise me that you’ll cling to that—that you won’t go looking for a truth that doesn’t exist—because I couldn’t bear to lose you. You’re all I have left. My boy Paul.”
The first glimmers of dawn cast long shadows on the Munich streets, carrying away the rain.
“Promise me,” she insisted, her voice fading.
Paul hesitated before answering.
“I promise.”
10
“Whooooah!”
The coal merchant’s cart screeched to a halt on the Rheinstrasse. The two horses stamped restlessly, their eyes covered by blinkers and their hindquarters blackened by sweat and soot. The coal merchant jumped to the ground and distractedly ran his hand along the side of the cart, which bore his name, Klaus Graf, even though only the first two letters were still legible.
“Clean this, Hulbert! I like my customers to know who is bringing them their raw material,” he said almost amiably.
The man in the driver’s seat removed his hat, pulled out a rag still bearing distant memories of the original color of the cloth, and set about working on the wood, whistling. This was his only way of expressing himself, as he was a mute. The melody was gentle and swift: he, too, seemed happy.
It was the perfect moment.
Paul had been following them all morning, ever since they came out of the stables Graf kept in Lehel. He’d also observed them the previous day and understood that the best time to ask for a job would be just before one in the afternoon, after the coal man’s midday rest. Both he and the mute had polished off large sandwiches and a couple of liters of beer. Left behind was the bad-tempered drowsiness of early morning, when the dew accumulated on the cart as they waited for the coal store to open. Gone, too, was the irritable tiredness at the end of the day, when they’d drink their final beer in silence, the dust constricting their throats.
The Traitor's Emblem Page 6