“Exactly. The SS had carte blanche. They could do damned near whatever they chose to do.”
Jury thought for a moment. “Would that have appeared as news?”
Maples laughed. “In the media? The shooting of a Jewish child? Probably not. It must have been happening on a daily basis. Not, of course, with that particular intent, yet many children were shot down while their parents watched. No, it wouldn’t be newsworthy. We looked; we couldn’t find anything.”
“But the first incident, the boy named Hans—?”
“The general’s son. One of them; he had two boys. That I did discover. Yes, that happened. A Jew named Aaron Stein leveled a shotgun at a group of German soldiers across the street from his apartment building. He killed one of the soldiers, but in doing it, shot a little boy by accident. Hans Röhm. The general’s son.”
“And what happened to the shooter?”
“That shouldn’t be hard to guess: he was shot and killed. When the SS moved to round up the man’s family, they discovered they were all dead. Murdered, naturally, in the course of things. So Herr Stein knew he wasn’t putting them at risk.”
“But the other people who lived in the building?”
“Ah. Yes. Herr Stein should have thought of that. Everyone in the building was gathered up. There was a pretense of demanding a confession from whichever of them had fired the shots, but naturally, no confession was forthcoming. The man was dead. The officers knew the shooter was dead on the floor of number 21 Lindenstrasse. Since obviously no one confessed, they shot them all. Shot them where they stood. It was a mercy, I suppose, to Herr Stein that he didn’t witness that. He should have thought of that, but with his entire family slaughtered, he wouldn’t be thinking too clearly.”
“Such massive retribution. People not only innocent but unconnected to this Stein.”
“There was one connection: they were Jews.”
Jury finished off his whiskey and sat thinking. He said, “That bit about Röhm wondering if it was an accident.” He jabbed his finger toward the file. Maples opened it again and read:
“‘He claimed that he had not meant to shoot the boy…’”
They were silent for a moment. Jury said, “But what if he did? This Stein actually meant to shoot Hans Röhm. That would mean that General Röhm must have done something prior to this. He speaks somewhere in there of revenge. Vengeance against himself, I mean.”
Maples gave an uncertain laugh. “Dear God, it goes on and on, doesn’t it? Röhm commits some crime against Stein; Stein shoots Röhm’s son; Röhm shoots the child in the station.”
“Yes, it goes on and on. There’s never an end to revenge. It’s all connected. Who was Aaron Stein and why did he shoot the general’s son? Assuming that was really his target.”
Maples shook his head. “We don’t know. There was no more said beyond the report that such a shooting did take place. But not with Hans Röhm as the target. Just the SS troops.”
“That nightmare part of the army.”
“Yes. The Schutzstaffel. Himmler’s boys. Death’s heads on their hats, runes on their collars, murder in their hearts. It was an SS officer who murdered Stein’s family. I’d say that might be a motivator.”
“Röhm himself?”
“I shouldn’t think so. He was too high ranking to perform such a routine task.” Maples picked up, set down his glass. “I’ve found that people who seek revenge can wait; they can wait a long, long time. They have no hesitancy about taking down the innocent along with the guilty. None at all.”
Jury asked, “Why did you bring this up?”
Maples didn’t answer immediately and Jury took the silence to mean he was questioning whether he should answer at all. But then he said, “Kurt Brunner is, as you know, German.”
Jury waited.
“I’ve been thinking about this Kindertransport and Kurt Brunner.”
Because of Sir Oswald’s obvious discomfort, Jury tried to help the story along: “You think Kurt Brunner has something to do with this incident involving General Röhm?”
Curtly, Maples nodded. “I do, yes.” He shifted his weight on the chair and went on. “Kurt is in his midfifties, I believe. That would have made him somewhere around three or four at the time the Kindertransport started. It was 1939.”
Jury frowned. “Yes. What?”
“The little Jewish boy shot by Röhm. His name was Josef Brunner. He had a younger brother.” Maples paused, looked across at Jury.
“Are you telling me Kurt Brunner is that brother?”
Maples nodded. “It’s possible.”
“And you think he killed Billy?”
Sir Oswald opened his mouth, but seemed unable to form words.
“But why? Billy Maples wasn’t involved in these back-and-forth acts of revenge.”
“No, but neither was his brother, Josef, involved in the shooting of the Röhms’ son. As you said, they are back-and-forth; the innocent so often have taken the blame for the guilty, have taken, in a way, the place of the guilty.” Maples rubbed at his forehead with his thumb.
“The guilty meaning who in this case?”
Maples didn’t answer directly. “I find it too coincidental that Billy was murdered while Brunner was working for him.”
Jury frowned. “Coincidental? I don’t see any connection, though.”
“The connection, I fear, is Roderick.”
“Roderick? What’s his connection to Kurt Brunner?”
“You remember I told you he was adopted. That was after the war. He was one of the children sent here for safekeeping, and my wife—she had a lot of sympathy for these children—she wanted to take one in.”
Jury sat forward. “What are you saying?”
“His father was German. I can understand, I suppose, the lure of vengeance in this case. It’s rather horrible.”
Jury leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Oswald, you’re not telling me that Roderick’s father was—”
As if he hadn’t been dropping bombs all evening, Maples said in a perfectly calm and composed voice, rubbing his thumb across his brow, “Yes, I expect I am saying that—General Röhm. Which would make Röhm Billy’s grandfather. Remember, I told you we adopted Roderick. I’m not the grandfather by blood. If you were the brother of Josef Brunner, the child Röhm shot, wouldn’t you want to murder Röhm? And since the general wasn’t available, having died of natural causes…Kurt Brunner could, of course, have murdered Roderick. But if you wanted to inflict as much pain as possible, the grandson would be your target, wouldn’t he? It would cause pain to more people—” He shrugged. “I don’t know; I just don’t know.”
Neither did Jury. He could hardly take it in.
THIRTY-THREE
In Berkeley Square, the trees were just coming into leaf. It had been a cold spring.
A dwarflike maid with a face Jury did not want to compare with the objects on the wall opened Angela Riffley’s door this time. She was a strange-looking little creature. Jury wondered if her misshapen face and small stature were a genetic thing or if Riffley had had a go at her at some point. He had the impression Riffley was not one of the chief supporters of PETA. Jury thought about Riffley while he cooled his heels in the hall and took in this time what he’d missed on his previous visit: at least a dozen niches in the plaster, no bigger than eight or nine inches high and each less than a foot wide, in which were housed various gargoylelike carvings that he had no desire to inspect.
Those were the Riffleys: he with his sadistic trophy-hunting streak, she with her only hinted-at illustrious career and genuine talent for mystification. Had Jury been a police profiler he would have come up blank as far as Angela was concerned.
“Mr. Jury!”
He smiled. Was this an attempt to demote him or merely a sardonic comment on London’s finest? He bet she would be happy to use the same lingo the denizens under Waterloo Bridge used to refer to the police, if she knew it.
“Mrs. Riffley.” He allowed himself a sardonic lit
tle bow.
Today she was dressed in a tight white skirt with a graceful sort of ruffle at the hem, a white silk shirt, and a lemony cashmere cardigan tied jauntily around her shoulders. She looked ambrosial. “Come on into the library.”
“How about some tea?” she asked.
He wanted to say, No, and don’t leave me alone in here, but he put on a brave face. Malcolm Mott would have done this better. “I think I’d like a whiskey.”
That seemed to please her to death. “Absolutely!” She threw up her hands as if she’d been waiting all day for someone to ask for it. She went to the drinks table.
It was, he supposed, a compliment that she valued him more than his purpose in coming. “Soda? I know you don’t want ice, you purist.”
“Soda, yes. A lot.”
She splashed around at the table with such abandon, she might have been swimming through it. She brought him his drink. “I don’t see why diluting a drink one way is any better than diluting it in another.” She returned to the table and made her own drink: whiskey and ice.
“It’s the tradition you’re toying with, that’s all.”
“Sorry.” She eased herself down on the zebra love seat, a mate to the one on which he sat, and raised her glass to him.
He raised his glass and avoided looking at the wall.
He heard a slight rasp as she crossed her stockinged legs. The sound was not unpleasant. Nor were the legs. “Mrs. Riffley—”
“Can’t you call me Angela? Or is that against code?”
He leaned forward, put his drink on the table beside the strange cigarette lighter. “It’s about the time Billy took you to his parents’ estate.”
“Oh, that.” She put her head back and gave a short laugh. “Isn’t the father just too provincial? But the stepmother’s worse.”
“Billy wanted you to look at a couple of paintings—”
She nodded, sipped her drink. “He did, yes. A Klimt and a Soutine. That was a few months ago. That Klimt was a marvel. Just wonderful. It couldn’t have been one of the two well-known portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s since we know where those are. What I think is that it’s a preliminary sort of study. Billy wanted to know if they were reproductions. That he’d think so rather surprised me. And I wondered why he didn’t ask his father; after all, they were his paintings. But Billy just said no and that he wanted my opinion. They’re authentic, of course they are. Definitely originals. So what you want to know is why the father was fobbing them off as reproductions?”
“That’s one thing. Another is how you can be so sure.”
She took a cigarette from the inlaid box. Jury refused to pick up the lighter, so she lit her own cigarette and sat back. Was she buying time, he wondered? In order to organize her past careers?
“I know because I’ve a good deal of experience along that line. I was curator for a small gallery in Luxembourg.”
Now there was a place the imagination probably didn’t hover for long. Not that there was anything wrong with Luxembourg, it’s just one didn’t often think about it. Excellent choice! “Luxembourg? What gallery was that?”
“The Kersten. It’s not there anymore. I have no idea what happened to it.”
Jury sat back, wondering where it had gone and where it had been. “But in order really to know, wouldn’t the canvas have to be subjected to tests?”
“Oh, my, yes, without question. One wouldn’t want to depend on somebody’s eye, no matter how well trained. But of course one couldn’t tear the Klimt off the wall, could one? And the smaller work, the Soutine, not quite so valuable but it would still cost someone dear to own it—Roderick wouldn’t see any reason to test it. He insisted it was a reproduction. Why are you interested in this?”
“Because I think it’s important. Billy apparently did. Did he give you some idea as to what he was looking for?”
She shook her head. “Not a clue, no.”
“Have you done that kind of work—I mean, as a curator—anywhere else?”
“Not as curator. However, I’ve served as consultant for a few collectors. Lucky for one I did, as he would have been stuck with a not very distinguished Raphael. He was laboring under the impression it was the Raphael that’s still missing after it was taken to Germany.”
“Who was this collector?”
Angela just looked at Jury and stubbed out her cigarette. With a smile she asked, “Why do you want to know, for heaven’s sakes? One would think you were a detective.”
“I do give that impression, unfortunately.” He smiled. “I’m just curious.”
“No, you’re not. You’re vetting me.”
Jury ignored that. “There must be databases—”
“Of course. There’s a central registry in just about any country involved in World War Two. And museums and auction houses—Christie’s for instance—do provenance investigations. Museums have provenance lists. There’s a great deal of information floating about. In the case of the Klimt and the Soutine, as I knew where the paintings are now, and to whom they belong, it wasn’t hard.” She drank off her whiskey.
“Wait a moment.” Jury sat forward suddenly. “You mean you did investigate?”
“Well, of course I did. I assumed you knew that.”
“No, I didn’t. Why didn’t you mention it before?”
Angela Riffley looked over at the half-alive wall of mounted heads and other things, and said, “It could be because I’m not a mind reader, Superintendent. What do you think?”
Jury gave a brief laugh. “Okay, sorry. What did you come up with?”
She set her drink down. “I’ll just fetch the paper. Wait here.”
Jury spent the five minutes it took her to go and come back in practicing lighting the cigarette lighter buried in the awkward piece of wood.
“Here we are.” She was back and reseating herself and holding a sheet of paper. “Both paintings were acquisitions of a Dresden museum pretty much demolished during the war; if I remember correctly, it was Dresden that was flattened, wasn’t it? But some of the paintings were removed before this. Both the Klimt, unnamed, or, rather, name unknown. I like to call her The Golden Girl. And the Soutine, called Schloss Moser, turned up on a Nazi confiscation list. A number of the paintings were taken over by Göring, who considered himself an art critic when he was actually an idiot. The two we’re interested in went to an SS officer named Werner Röhm. From there, there’s no record of a sale. The two paintings fall off the radar until two years later when they turn up in the home of a couple named Burkhoff in Munich. My guess is that they were family or friends or colleagues of this General Röhm, and that he gave them to the Burkhoffs for safekeeping.
“Somehow or other, Billy’s father, Roderick, was in touch with them and they packed the two paintings and sent them to him.” She gave Jury a long look. “Roderick Maples was apparently the general’s son.”
“How did Billy react to this?”
Angela set down her drink and looked at the fireplace and seemed to study the cold grate. Then she sat back and said, “I couldn’t tell. You’d have to have known Billy. He was the most unreadable person I’ve ever seen. If he wanted to be, that is. Other times, he was quite transparent.”
“He didn’t try to take it any further?”
“Oh, I’m quite sure he did.”
“You mean, as far as this General Röhm is concerned.”
“Yes. But he didn’t tell me if he’d discovered anything.” Her shrug was a little sad, a little helpless.
Jury got up. “I really appreciate this, Angela. You’ve been a lot of help; I understand more than I did about Billy.” He handed her a card jotting down his home phone number in addition to Aguilar’s. He’d like to hear a conversation between the two of them. “If you recall something later, just call one of us.”
She took the card and sat looking at it. Then she recovered some of her old insouciance. He wondered how much it cost her to keep it going.
She picked up her glass. “Would you like
another drink before you go?”
“No, thanks.”
“Would you like to take me to dinner tonight?”
He laughed. “I’d like it, yes, very much. But could I have a rain check?”
Angela Riffley was looking at one of the long windows where sun, the color of apricots, cast rhomboids of light on the floor. “Why? It isn’t raining.”
THIRTY-FOUR
“It’s a bit like that ship, isn’t it?” said Wiggins, stirring his tea. He was thoughtful.
Jury looked across his desk—squinted, actually—thinking that might bring the question into focus as he had no idea what Wiggins meant. “What ship? What are you talking about?”
That morning he had been relating to his sergeant the story he had heard yesterday afternoon from Sir Oswald Maples about the Kindertransport and the shooting. Wiggins had been transfixed, stirring and stirring his tea. Why, then, was he dragging in irrelevancies?
“The seavacs.”
“The what? What’s a seavac?”
“It’s a term they came up with during the war to mean evacuation by sea. Mrs. Jessup was telling me about it, you know, when you and Mr. Plant were lazying out in the garden. You don’t recall that ship Benares? Its actual name was City of Benares.”
Jury felt at this point so far from the shore of his Kindertransport, he would have to swim to it. He knew he’d never make it. “No, I don’t, and we weren’t ‘lazying,’ if that’s a word, and I doubt it. What’s this ship got to do with anything?”
“It was an ocean liner, usually plied the India route, you know the Indian Ocean. When the Blitz happened, it was billeted to transport children to Canada.”
In spite of the conversation with Maples, Jury stayed as far away from the events of World War Two as possible. Maples’s Berlin story, happening as it did in Germany, had not been mined with memories. Jury’s father also had died in the war, his plane shot down.
Wiggins went on. “There was this evacuation of children to Canada. The City of Benares carried some six hundred kiddies across the Atlantic. This wasn’t the safest route by sea, certainly, considering the German U-boats. The children were having a marvelous time—at least this is what I read—with all of that luxury, all of that food, sixty flavors of ice cream, the waiters in Indian dress apparently treating them like princes. Well, a German U-boat fired at the ship and it sank. All of these poor children tossed into the sea, including Mrs. Jessup’s sisters. Awful, isn’t it? Only a handful survived.
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