by Paul Sussman
The woman waved a hand dismissively. 'Oh I heard about it. But I never saw it. And even if they did take a crate away, that doesn't mean there was anything in it. It could have been full of rocks for all we know. Or empty. No, I think the whole thing's an old wives' tale. Complete rubbish.'
She held up another mushroom, examined it, then, with a tut, threw it aside into the undergrowth.
'If you want to do a story about Castelombres, you should write about the children.'
Layla frowned. 'The children?'
'The Jewish children. The twins. I sometimes think it's the reason everyone in the village spends so much time going on about treasure and crates and what-not. To try and forget what happened to them. Divert attention.'
Again Layla frowned, not understanding. 'What twins?'
The woman paused for a moment, then, laying aside the basket, sat herself down on the stone. There was another faint rumble of thunder, the trees whispering and hissing as their branches shuddered in the wind.
'Their parents sent them down here from Paris,' she said, gazing out over the wooded hills. 'After the Germans invaded. Paid a local farmer to take them in. Thought they'd be safer here, in the south, out of the occupied zone, being Jews and all that. Like I said, I was only five at the time, but I remember them very clearly, especially the girl. We used to play together, although she was older. Ten or eleven. Hannah, that was her name. And her brother Isaac' She sighed and shook her head. 'A terrible thing, it was. A terrible thing.' She looked up at Layla. 'The Germans found them, you see. Up here, at the castle. Playing. They didn't mean any harm, they were only children, but it didn't make any difference. No-one was supposed to go near the ruins. The man in charge – horrible man, wicked – he brought them down to the village and stood them in the street: I'll never forget it, as long as I live, the two of them standing there side by side, terrified, so small, and the man screaming that if anyone disobeyed his orders again he would do to them what he was going to do to these Jew vermin. That's what he called them. Jew vermin. And then he beat them, right there in front of us, with his own hands. Little children. Beat them unconscious. And no-one in the village, not a single person, did anything to help them. Not a single voice was raised, not even when they threw them in a truck and drove them away.'
She shook her head sadly.
'Isaac and Hannah, that's what they were called. I sometimes wonder what happened to them. Died in the gas chambers, I expect. It's them you should be writing about, the real secret of Castelombres, not all this rubbish about buried treasure. But then, being a Palestinian, maybe that sort of thing doesn't interest you.'
She swung her eyes out over the hills again, then, with a sigh, got to her feet, picked up her basket and, with a glance up at the sky, which had turned a forbidding slate grey, said that she ought to be on her way.
'It was nice meeting you,' she said. 'I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay.'
She smiled, raised a hand in farewell and, turning, set off across the terrace, disappearing into a clump of fir trees on the slope above, her basket of mushrooms swinging in her hand. There was a third groan of thunder, nearer this time, and it started to rain, heavy drops spilling down from above as though the sky was weeping.
CAIRO
'Oh, my poor Anton. My poor darling Anton. Why couldn't you let us die together? Like we were supposed to. Why are you torturing me like this?'
Inga Gratz's hand crept its way across the bed-sheet and clasped Khalifa's wrist, her grip cold, clammy, surprisingly firm. The detective winced, repelled by her touch, as if some large venomous spider had curled its legs around his arm. He made no move to pull his hand away, however. He sensed that the entire investigation had somehow narrowed itself to this meeting, and if allowing her to hold on to him encouraged the old woman to be more forthcoming, tell him what he needed to know, then he was prepared to put up with it, even if it did make him feel faintly nauseous.
It was past eleven at night. For five hours he had paced up and down the corridor outside Inga Gratz's hospital room, chain smoking, going over and over the scene back at the apartment block, waiting for her to regain consciousness. When she finally did the doctors had been reluctant to allow him into the room, saying that she was still too weak to speak, that he should wait until the following morning. With uncharacteristic bluntness, he had insisted on being let in to see her, had threatened to take the matter to the highest level, and in the end they had relented, allowing him fifteen minutes with her, on the proviso that a nurse was in attendance.
'Vermin,' she was mumbling, fingers clenching and unclenching around his wrist, her voice dull and vague, presumably a result of the drugs she had been administered. 'You must see that. Vermin. Every one of them. Bloodsuckers. We were doing the world a favour. You should be thanking us.'
She stared up at Khalifa, face deathly pale in the soft glow of her bedside lamp, a pair of plastic tubes descending from her nostrils like thin worms slithering out of the burrow of her skull. Then she turned away and began to weep. There was another intravenous tube plugged into her arm, and with her spare hand she started to claw at it, prompting the nurse, who was hovering beside the door, to come forward and lift the hand away, gently tucking it back beneath the sheets. There was a long silence, the only sounds the halting, uneven flutter of the old woman's breathing and, from outside the window, the rhythmic fut-fut of a water sprinkler in the hospital grounds.
'Dieter,' she said eventually, her face still turned away from Khalifa, her voice barely audible, just a low whisper.
'I'm sorry?'
'That was Piet's real name. Dieter. Dieter Hoth.'
It took a moment for the detective to make the connection. When he did, he dropped his head and sighed, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, although there was no humour in the expression, just a sort of weary self-reproach. For God's sake! Hoth – that's what Hannah Schlegel had whispered to Gemal fifteen years ago, as she lay dying on the temple floor at Karnak. Hoth, not Thoth. All this time he'd been chasing the wrong name. How many other things had he got wrong, he wondered; how many other blind alleys had he run down?
'He was . . . a Nazi?' he asked.
She gave a weak nod. 'We all were. Were proud to be. To serve our country, our Führer. No-one understands now, but he was a good man. A great man. He would have made the world a better place.'
She turned her head back to him, that helpless, imploring look still in her eyes, although he now saw something else there as well, deeper down, something he hadn't noticed before: a cruelty, a hardness, as if her feeble body was no more than an outer casing within which was contained a wholly separate, altogether more malevolent being. He clenched his teeth, more repelled than ever by the clammy clasp of her hand.
'And Hannah Schlegel?' he asked. 'He killed her? Piet Jansen – Dieter Hoth.'
She gave another weak nod, no more than a fractional inclination of the head. 'She knew who he was, you see. Came to find him. Vermin. They never stop looking.'
She puckered her mouth and rolled her eyes up towards the ceiling, little shudders rippling through her body as though she was receiving tiny electric shocks. There was another extended pause, the ticking of a clock on the wall sounding unnaturally harsh in the enveloping silence; then slowly, falter-ingly, she began to talk again, spilling out bit by bit, fragment by fragment, the story of her own life – Elsa Fauch was her real name, wife of Wolfgang Fauch, both of them former guards at Ravensbruck concentration camp – and that of their friend Dieter Hoth: who he was, where he came from, his work with the SS. Khalifa allowed her to tell it at her own speed, in her own way, occasionally interjecting the odd question or comment when it seemed as if she was losing the thread of her narrative, but otherwise listening in silence, all the different elements of the case, all the things that had so confused him these past two weeks, gradually resolving themselves in his mind into a clear, coherent whole.
'We all got out together,' she mumbled, staring up at
the ceiling, eyes half closed. 'At the end of the war. April 1945. Me, Wolfgang, Dieter, another man named Julius Schechtmann. Julius went to South America, we went to Egypt. Dieter had contacts, you see, people who could help us.'
In Khalifa's mind another fragment of the jigsaw slotted into place.
'Farouk al-Hakim,' he said.
She nodded. 'Dieter knew his family. He was just a young man then, a clerk. Clever, though, ambitious. We'd brought money with us, bullion, whatever we could lay our hands on. We paid Farouk, he helped us disappear. Later, others came out; Farouk organized things for them as well. We used to pay him an annual retainer; he made sure no questions were asked. It was a good business for him.'
The meeting with Chief Mahfouz reared in Khalifa's mind. I told al-Hakim about Jansen, but he said he was off limits. Said dragging him into it would only make matters worse. Piss the Jews off even more. No wonder, he thought. Investigating Jansen would have brought the whole Nazi thing out into the open; exposed Egypt as a haven for murderers and war criminals; and deprived al-Hakim of what was clearly a lucrative sideline. Far better to leave Jansen alone and have someone else convicted for Schlegel's murder. Even if that someone else was entirely innocent.
'We had a good life,' the old woman was saying. 'Started a business, made new friends. There was quite a little group of us at one time. All gone now. Me, Wolfgang, Dieter – we were the last. Just me now'
She sighed, and shifted her frail body slightly beneath the sheets, her hand still clasped around Khalifa's arm.
'We had to be on our guard, of course. Especially after what happened to Julius. They hanged him, you know, the dirty animals. In general, though, we just got on with things, minded our own business. Thought we'd live out the rest of our days in peace and quiet.'
'Until Hannah Schlegel arrived,' said Khalifa quietly.
She grimaced at the name, her thin, pale lips pulling back off her teeth so that the detective had the momentary, unnerving impression that he was looking not at a human being but rather at some fierce snarling animal, a dog or a wolf.
'God knows how she found Dieter,' she muttered. 'He'd been so careful, done everything he could to cover his tracks. Faked his own death before we left Berlin, left some of his personal possessions on a dead body so that it looked like he'd been killed during the Russian bombardment. But then, that's the Jews for you, isn't it? Vampires. Always hunting, always looking for blood. Always, always, always.'
She was becoming agitated, turning this way and that in the bed, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. Stepping forward again, the nurse laid a hand on her putty-grey forehead, trying to settle her. Khalifa took the opportunity to free his arm, no longer able to bear the touch of her skin, as though the contact would somehow infect him, leak poison into his bloodstream. He shifted his chair backwards, out of her reach, crossed his legs and waited for her to recover herself.
'He never told us the full story,' she resumed eventually, the nurse having calmed her down sufficiently. 'Something about France, an excavation . . . it was never entirely clear. All he said was that he'd sent her to the camps back in 1943, and then, forty-five years later, she suddenly calls out of the blue from a hotel in Luxor and demands to meet him.' She shook her head. 'At first he thought she wanted to blackmail him. Typical greedy Jew. But then, when they met up, the stupid bitch started shouting about justice and revenge, said she had a knife, was going to kill him. He was in his seventies at the time, but he was still strong, fit. Gave her a good beating, then finished her off with his walking cane. Or at least he thought he'd finished her off. We later heard from Farouk that she was still alive when he left her.' She grunted. 'Like cockroaches, they are. So hard to kill cleanly.'
Khalifa shook his head, barely able to believe what he was hearing, that such things could be said so coldly, so matter-of-factly, and by a little old lady too. 'I can't comprehend this,' he thought to himself. 'Everything about this case, everywhere it takes me – it's like I'm in an alien world. Fumbling my way around a pitch-black room where all my instincts and senses, everything I know and value, count for nothing. I just don't understand it. I don't understand any of it.'
'Hannah Schlegel's flat?' he managed to ask. 'It was Jansen who asked you to burn it?'
The old woman nodded. 'He called us, explained what had happened, warned she might have left notes, details of how she'd tracked him down. He'd taken her wallet, and that had her address in it. Wolfgang contacted some business associates in Jerusalem. They took care of everything.'
She closed her eyes, her ugly, withered fingers tweaking the edge of her bedspread.
'Poor Dieter. He was never the same after that. None of us were, but he took it worst of all. Terrified, he was. Convinced more of them were going to come, that they were going to take him back to Israel, put him on trial. He stopped seeing anyone, had locks put on all his windows, slept with a pistol beside his bed. And then, when Farouk died last year, he was even more frightened because with him gone there was no-one to protect us any more. It gave him cancer. I genuinely believe that. The worry, the constantly looking over his shoulder. He might have killed her at Karnak, but the old Jew bitch got him in the end. Got all of us in the end. They always do. Scum, they are. Vermin.'
She was reaching the end of what little strength she had left, and the nurse, who was still standing beside the bed, coughed and tapped her watch, indicating it was time to bring the interview to an end. Khalifa nodded, got to his feet and turned towards the door, only to turn back again.
'Before he died, it seems Mr Jansen was trying to contact the Palestinian terrorist al-Mulatham. Said he was in possession of some weapon he could use against the Jews. Do you know anything about this?'
To his surprise, the old woman chuckled, a nasty, viscous sound, like bubbling mud.
'Dieter's riddle,' she said, a little strength seeming to return to her voice. 'That's what we used to call it, me and Wolfgang. He was always going on about it, especially after he'd had a drink or two. How he'd found something that would help destroy the Jews. "I can still hurt them, Inga." That's what he used to say. "I can still hurt the bastards." '
She chuckled again and, lowering her hands, sank back into the pillow as though into a drift of snow, eyes fluttering open and shut.
'Did he tell you what it was, this thing?' asked Khalifa.
'No,' she replied, 'he never said.'
'Where?'
She gave a frail shrug. 'I think he mentioned a safe deposit box once. But then another time he said he'd left the details with an old friend, so who knows? He could be very secretive, Dieter.'
She sighed, staring up at the ceiling.
'A new generation, that's what he was hoping for. Someone he could pass it on to, who would help Germany become strong again. But the years went by and no-one took up the mantle, and then he found out he had cancer so he decided to hand it over to the Palestinians instead. "Give it to the people who need it," that's what he said. We sent a letter for him.'
'A letter?' Khalifa's eyes narrowed.
'To a Palestinian woman. In Jerusalem. Dieter thought she could help him. Al-Madani, that was her name. Layla al-Madani. No idea if she ever got back to him. I hope she did. We have to keep fighting. Show the Jews they can't have it all their own way. Vermin, they are. A plague. We were doing the world a favour. You must see that. Surely you must see that? We're your friends after all. We've always been your friends.'
Her eyes were gradually slumping shut, her voice growing weaker and more distant. Khalifa stared down at her, trying, and failing, to dredge up even a shred of pity, then walked to the door. As he reached it she somehow managed to heave herself up in the bed and called after him.
'I'll be all right, won't I? You won't tell the Israelis? You'll look after me? They're your enemies too, after all.'
He paused for a fraction of a second, then, without answering, stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind him.
KALANDIA REFUGEE CAMP,
BETWEEN JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH
Yunis Abu Jish rose before first light, after just a couple of hours' uneasy sleep, and, having washed himself at the tap outside their makeshift cinderblock house, returned to his bedroom and began his dawn prayers, trying to keep his voice low so as not to wake the four younger brothers with whom he shared the room.
It was three days since he had received the call from al-Mulatham, during which time those closest to him had noticed a dramatic change in the young man. His face, already gaunt and sunken, seemed to have receded even further into the bony catacomb of his skull, as though sucked inwards from behind, while his heavy-lidded eyes had expanded and darkened, assuming an unfathomable, opalescent blackness, like peat-stained water. His manner, too, had altered beyond recognition. Formerly talkative and outgoing, he had withdrawn into himself, shunning the company of others, spending all his time alone, lost in prayer and solitary contemplation.
'What is wrong, Yunis?' his mother had pleaded with him on more than one occasion, alarmed at this sudden change in her son's appearance and manner. 'Are you ill? Should we call the doctor?'