Stanislas swiveled to his right, to his wall calendar. Today was the fifteenth. “Christophe,” he shouted into the corridor, hating the obligation imposed, as he reached toward his phone console. “We’ve an emergency. Grab your laptop. Call Officer Leclair.” The case had come alive. They must get to Papandreou’s Self-Storage at once. No telling what an irate creditor might do.
Monsieur Spiros Papandreou jumped up from his chair as soon as he spotted them through his plate-glass office window. Though mid-afternoon, he bounced with morning brightness, grabbing Stanislas’s hand and pumping out his honor at meeting a prominent functionary. He waved away the ID. It wasn’t necessary, he assured Stanislas. His call earlier had provided enough proof. “One can’t go through life distrusting everyone, which my friend, Monsieur Pincus, never seemed to understand. This way, please,” he said, leading him and Christophe into his office, while the judicial police waited outside. “In twenty years running my business never a problem like this. A friend and customer murdered. How can I help?”
Stanislas said he needed to ask some questions and afterwards inspect Pincus’s storage. Would Monsieur Papandreou raise his hand for the oath?
“…and first business day of the month if not earlier, eight o’clock, he was here with his check,” the self-storage owner explained. “‘What’s wrong with the mail?’ I ask him. ‘Don’t you trust it?’ ‘I leave trust to others,’ was his reply, Monsieur Examining Magistrate. Always the same joke when I see him. Always the same answer, ‘I leave trust to others.’”
“Was he ever late with his payment?” Stanislas asked.
“No, never. Sometimes a week early. On time. Always. Until this last time. Several months ago, I thought, a good customer. I should always be lucky with my accounts. I liked him and made an offer. ‘Monsieur Pincus, what’s with this month-to-month business? For you, a special. Rent me six months, nine, whatever your pleasure, and I give you a bigger than normal discount.’ He wanted four months only. Till the end of November. After that, back to paying every thirty days or so. Fine, four months and a discount. For my favor, he gave me late with his December payment. I gave him one grace period and another and hear nothing. Naturally, I was angry. He had no phone, so I wrote. I was going to pay him a visit until you called.”
Stanislas dictated the answer to Christophe. “Did he say why he refused to pay for a period longer than a month, after November?”
“He said he was storing for maybe a little longer while he looked for another place to live. He told me where he lived wasn’t safe. A burglary or something around May.”
Stanislas finished his questions and asked to inspect the cubicle.
Monsieur Papandreou clapped his hands and pushed himself up. “My pleasure, messieurs. Follow me.”
They walked down a long corridor, walled both sides with private storage rooms. All the time, Papandreou chatted in a loud voice that made several customers turn and stare. They continued down another passage of the cavernous warehouse until they came to Number 458. “We take such a long walk we’re almost in Spain.” He laughed, and his thick brows bobbed at his joke as he searched inside his baggy pants for the combination.
He hadn’t paid full taxes in years. He employed illegal immigrants from Algeria or had broken the law in some other way, Stanislas decided, and was trying to charm away any suspicion. He didn’t care what the owner might have done. Just the contents inside mattered.
“There you are.” Monsieur Papandreou pushed open the door.
Stanislas asked everyone to stand back. He wanted his first impression untainted by their opinions. Standing at the threshold in the half-light, he had the queer sensation for a moment he had invaded a mausoleum. The passageway’s weak light paled the few steps before him ashen and cold like marble. Odors, built up since Pincus had last entered, smelled stale and dust made him sneeze. His eyes adjusted. The ill-defined lumps became books, stacks of newspapers and magazines, and boxes that bulged from three sides toward an island of space in the middle. He could see through the semidarkness ahead a desk Pincus had fashioned from a board and supported on crates. In the lower one he had stockpiled what looked like boxes of crackers, canned goods, and cartons of mineral water. A lamp, clamped to the top of a six-tiered shelf, poked out over the desk.
The cubicle looked like an office. His curiosity growing, he stepped inside and hobbled over to the desk. After a moment’s study, he gripped the board and shook it. Nailed into the crates, it didn’t budge. The desk was sturdily constructed, built to last like the man himself, he thought. Until one evening, someone had terrified him to death.
A picture of some kind hung from string tied to a nail hammered into the wall. He reached toward the lamp and noticed at its base it was battery-operated as he clicked a button. It snapped on in the dusty quiet. A stark bulb lit the darkness. A family emerged, four daughters and three sons posed stiffly either side of their parents. He leaned over and peered, wondering which one was Léon. The youth preening maturity with his scraggly mustache? The one who wore his cap cocked back? He guessed the one whose lower lip pushed against the upper in a show of defiance that might have decades later caused his murder.
His elbow nudged a thermos. He twisted off the top, sniffed, rubbed around the moist inside with his finger, and touched it to his tongue. It was coffee that tasted grainy and bitter. Not American or French. Maybe some Middle Eastern brand, strong enough to stimulate someone, driven to work for hours.
He noticed a book that Pincus had left open. He shone the lamp directly on it. The words looked German with many underlined in some colored code the man must have devised. On the opposite page faced an organizational chart, Heinrich Himmler at the top, Reinhard Heyrich below him, and someone, whose name he didn’t recognize, a Théodor Dannecker, at the bottom.
For a feverish instant he feared he might stumble upon a document that showed his grandfather’s complicity with these Nazi war criminals. He felt warmer than the air the central heater pumped through the building. He jerked loose his tie and reached for a button on a fan, screwed into the board next to the thermos. The battery still worked. A breeze stirred. He remained warm.
He remembered the overhead lights and absently flipped a switch to his left. As he pulled back the chair, he noticed on the cushioned seat a magazine. It was a past issue of a news weekly, he saw when he reached for it, and featured on its cover an army truck heaped with mutilated bodies of blacks and the title, “Never Again?”
His legs weakened. He gripped the chair’s posts for support, yet couldn’t sit, couldn’t relax, couldn’t leave, and after a moment when his strength returned, decided to remain standing. As he put the magazine aside, his attention wandered to the shelves before him. A Comprehensive Guide to Departmental Archives in France guarded the right flank of the top shelf. A thick French-German dictionary propped up the other. Books, deadly with the past, occupied the middle ground. Two had short titles on cloth spines that punched: World War II Documents of Destruction and The Crime of State. Another carried a cumbersome title, whose length didn’t lessen its power: The Persecution of the Jews in France and in Other Countries of the West. A five-volume set on the Nuremberg war trials burdened the shelf below.
His cell phone went off. He ignored it. Sweat oozed from his armpits and down his back. He shucked off his jacket, flung it aside not caring where it fell, rolled up his sleeves. Then from his back pocket, he jerked out a kerchief and patted his forehead and back of his neck with it.
Colored slips of paper in that code only Pincus understood flagged from tops of another book’s pages. He tugged the book out, flipped through, saw it was a guide to documentation centers in Paris. Each archive listed its address, phone number, nearest metro, and most intriguing, he thought, floor plans with the exists circled in red.
A bundle of some kind lay next to the guide. They were fold-out maps of Berlin, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York, and Tel Aviv, he saw when he fanned them out, alphabetized, primed like everything else
there. But for what?
You’ll pay with nightmares for months, he warned himself, smelling his sweat. It’s not worth it. Get out. Let Officer Leclair inside for the inventory.
Against his instincts, he unfolded the Berlin map. It was far more detailed than that tourist giveaway he had discovered in Pincus’s studio. He scanned slowly each sector for markings that might reveal the man’s thoughts. He discovered nothing until he reached the coordinate D8 where he found a section of a metro line circled in red near a vast patch of green.
Did Pincus board the line there or get off? If he did leave, where did he go? To meet someone in the Grunewald Forest? The man hadn’t left any trace or hint of his mission except that red circle, encrypted, off limits, private like everything else in his retreat, his freedom room where he had for some reason placed someone within his cross hairs?
In the shelf below, a stack of pre-paid phone calling cards. No wonder the police couldn’t trace the man’s calls, he realized. Pincus had given up the expense of the telephone to save money.
Beside that stack, a camera, a Minox IIIs, he discovered when he squinted at it. It looked as small as a candy bar, as deadly as a revolver, the camera no doubt Monsieur Lenoir had discovered Pincus clicking.
He broke off his thoughts of that morning when he noticed two red files marked “L. Boucher” and “T. Dannecker” in shadow. He pulled out the Dannecker file first. Telegrams from the 1940s from something murky in Berlin called IV-B-4 to 31A Avenue Foch, Paris, as well as minutes of meetings and memorandums, the bureaucrat’s weapons of war, all coded in German, filled the folder. Across the tops of many documents, someone had inked in capitals what looked like a warning.
He flipped through Boucher’s file next. Newspaper clippings from dailies long since folded and magazine articles, including a September Paris Today devoted to still-living World War II collaborators, filled it. Across the tops of many write-ups ran a similar warning.
He tumbled books from some of the shelves, stacked them into piles, flipped through the pages. It was there in French, pounded in with such force the black ink had splattered to the edges, the archivist’s stamp… LIMITED CIRCULATION…. PROPERTY OF…. NOT TO BE REMOVED…. THEFT IS PUNISHABLE BY.
“You cunning bastard,” he muttered. For security, Pincus the thief had moved his paper armory from his studio in boxes the concierge had noticed to this cubicle, hidden within the labyrinth of others. Here he continued to work out what furies possessed him. Here he might have plotted a war.
“Monsieur Examining Magistrate.” Officer Leclair poked his head inside. “Should we start the inventory?”
He had forgotten about Leclair, Christophe, and the others until that moment. They did have that task as well as the duty to put everything under seal. He also had to inform the public prosecutor about this discovery and afterwards write a report on his search. But first he had to understand the secrets the German language held.
He tossed back the flap to his satchel and reached for his cell phone. He didn’t like being dragged deeper into the case. He had no choice, though. He wouldn’t relinquish any dossier to another criminal investigator. He punched in some numbers. “I’ve discovered a cache of documents that may help an investigation. I need a German translator.”
He received from the Palace of Justice a harangue. They couldn’t spare a one. Not now. Not for the foreseeable future. Hadn’t he heard about that slew of retirees from Cologne, caught in that terrorist blast? It was on TV, Monsieur Cassel, the stress from the bombings no doubt overcoming her decorum. Metro Saint-Paul? Everyone of them bawling like babies? The German ambassador demanding their care? she continued. The Palace had to contract with a translator from the Sorbonne to help with the load, in fact.
Stanislas overlooked her sarcasm and kept his tone polite. What about that woman who translated Russian? Wasn’t she studying for placement in the translator book on the German page?
Out with the flu, she snapped, followed by a pause. She must have realized her rudeness because she apologized with a suggestion. Did he know a language teacher or friend, fluent in his need? He could enlist that person as long as the stand-in took an oath and worked under his supervision.
“Anna,” he said, her expertise forgotten until the suggestion, to which the woman replied, “I’m sorry?”
“A friend of mine. She might help.”
Of course, Anna, he thought after he rung off. With her fluency in languages, including German, he felt certain, and knowledge of the Occupation, the obvious choice all along. This time he punched in numbers quicker, eager to see her again.
CHAPTER 20
THE DARK YEARS
An hour later she arrived, breathless from hurrying. She stood silently beside him in the doorway, gazing at the boxes in a mysterious fascination, he sensed. From what he had explained on the phone, she appeared to perceive something beyond the material, something beyond his understanding and experience.
“My God,” she finally whispered. “Who would have believed?” Her voice was low and uttered to herself.
He motioned ahead, though he wondered if she noticed. “A chart in that book mentions Reinhard Heyrich and Adolf Eichmann. I’ve vaguely heard of them. It also shows a Théodor Dannecker—”
She broke toward the desk before he could finish. She sat at the edge of the chair without speaking, without removing her shoulder bag. She stared at the pages for a long moment. Then she caressed them like rare artifacts unearthed, and when she examined the book’s spine she pressed a hand to her lips with a gasp. “We must have privacy,” she demanded.
“I trust my police,” he said.
She glared at him. “Absolute privacy. Do as I say.” As she turned back, the fan blew a few strands of hair across her forehead. She ignored them, remained still except for her hand that caressed. Then energized by some thought she fumbled absently in her bag, still over her shoulder, while she continued reading.
Not finding what she wanted, she grabbed the bag with both hands and shook its contents fiercely onto the desk. With an exasperated sigh, she lifted her head to a coffee can in front of her crammed with sharpened pencils, when she noticed the old news weekly. She grabbed the magazine and shook it at him. “See this mutilation? Rwanda. This is how it is. The powerful keep saying ‘Never Again,’ yet allow slaughters like this to happen. It’s disgusting.” She tossed the publication aside. It fell onto the floor. She didn’t bother to pick it up. Instead she pinched out a pencil from the can.
Stanislas ordered his men to wait further back in the corridor and shut the door.
“Lock it,” she ordered, oblivious to his position.
For a second he heard a brusqueness in her voice he imagined she got from Gerti. This time he didn’t object and threw a bolt while he watched her.
“Both of them.”
Compelled by her urgency, he did.
She became quiet as she returned to reading. Sometimes she jotted a word or phrase on a pad. Other times she murmured to herself, as though communing with ghosts. Mostly she read. She traveled the pages, checked the index, reached to the shelf to grab some volume along with Boucher’s and Dannecker’s files.
He watched her finger trace each word in the index in deliberate slowness. “Anna,” he asked, liking the sound of her name. “What is it?”
She raised her hand for silence; she needed to think. She turned another page without looking at him and moved her finger down the index again. Would she stop at the Cs, he feared, and find “Marcel Cassel: pamphleteer, demagogue, and traitor”? Would he finally hear a harangue? But she passed to the Js, then into the Ks without any comment. At last she brushed back the wisps of hair across her forehead. When they blew back, she didn’t bother with them again. She appeared to have forgotten everything, he sensed, detached herself, and slipped away as she interpreted the meaning beneath the words. He stood aside, once more an outsider to a mood that had gripped her.
A typewriter lay on the make-shift desk. He pulled i
t forward, and its underside rasped against the splintered wood. Anna turned another page. He brushed away dust that powdered the top and lifted the case off. The keys appeared well oiled for they jumped smartly when he tapped on a few. He hit them hard. They whacked against the paper Pincus had left rolled in and left sharp, mean tracks. Anna shifted to a pile of clippings from the Dannecker file. He tilted the typewriter up and spotted a plate screwed into the bottom. It was an ancient Royal, he noticed, a throwaway Pincus might have bought at a flea market and turned into a weapon of war.
Minutes passed. Then many more. And then: “Our Léon, what a beautiful man.” Anna finally roused herself from her trance in the middle of some thought. She glanced up and saw he stood beside her. Her eyes were teary with happiness. “I can’t believe it, Stanislas. What brilliance with research. These telegrams and typed reports and office logs, a lot that I see here, primary sources. They’re worth more than diamonds. My God in heaven, if I live another fifty years, I won’t believe it. Look at this.” From a stack she had gathered, she waved a plastic packet that looked like those used at a crime scene to preserve evidence. “An original handwritten note. Notice the German word in the margin? Ausrottung. It means ‘tearing up by the roots.’ By the green pencil used to write, I’d say Himmler must have scribbled it in thinking about the Final Solution. In this same packet, some Nazi party membership files from the Berlin Document Center. There, on that third shelf, extracts from German Foreign Ministry records. Maybe stolen from the same archive, too. And this, an original handwritten page of Vichy cabinet minutes from our own National Archives.” She laughed at her discoveries, and her laughter smoothed away the wrinkles on her cheeks.
“If he had wanted money,” she continued, “the Bank of France wouldn’t have been safe. What a beautiful, beautiful man.”
She stood and started to pace off her excitement. “I wish I could have met our beautiful man. I’d have made love to him daily. He was quite a thief. Oh yes, certainly. He knew what to steal and how. I think cunning, Stanislas. Yes, I’m sure of it. Cunning was one of his weapons. That’s how I’d do it, if I were him. Maybe our beautiful man accidentally took a book home from an archive without checking it out and got an idea. He returned the next day, replaced it, and you know what else he might have done? Stolen telexes or something else restricted.” She pushed the volume into the case and smiled at him. “After that, he displayed these telexes or whatever he had and said to this careless guard in that archive’s section, ‘See what happened on your watch?’”
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