by Cara Black
Scraping, then a loud thunk as Philbert heaved one of the small crates into the cart. Then another.
“Back the cart closer, Alain. They’re damn heavy.”
Gaubert climbed down and helped Alain grab the reins to back the horses up. Then he climbed into the cart bed and the four men worked in pairs, hefting and stacking the heavy little crates by the leather handles. Ignoring the bodies. When they were done, they jumped out, splashing in the swirling mud.
“Now,” said Alain, “the truck goes down the bank into the river.”
Gaubert ground his teeth. Remembered. “We’ve got to strip the bodies.”
“Too late, we don’t have time—”
“At least take off the uniform insignia.”
“He’s right,” Bruno said, climbing back into the truck. He took over the unpleasant work of stripping away the murdered Germans’ identification.
Finally, on the count of three, all four of them shoved the truck, grunting and cursing in the sheeting rain. Gaubert’s leg, frozen and numb, caught in the sucking mud. At last the truck slid down and sank with a trail of bubbles below the surface.
“We should have dumped the gold in the river,” Gaubert said, peeling off his sopping jacket, his shirt. Alain had driven the team and cart to Gaubert’s barn, where the four men now stood. The silver light of incipient dawn peeped in through the barn’s single, high window. “You’re crazy, we can’t keep this here.”
“Just for now, Gaubert,” said Alain. He seized a shovel and cleared a space by the hay rack, where he began to dig. There was gold lust in his narrow eyes.
The rain had erased the cart tracks, at least. Yet it would only be a matter of time until the truck was discovered missing. Until the fifth German washed up somewhere.
“What if that truck across the river was searching for them?” said Gaubert. “Or they saw us?”
He imagined his wife, Fanny, a widow, and five-year-old Gaby fatherless, hungry . . .
“Alors, we wouldn’t be here in that case,” said Philbert, who’d stripped off his overalls, grabbed a shovel, and was pitching in. “Who’s to tell them, eh? We keep this between us. D’accord? A pact of silence.”
“What if—?”
“If anyone outside our village knows, there will be reprisals, comprends? We can’t share this. We’ve risked our lives.”
“More like committed spontaneous idiocy,” said Gaubert. “We can’t eat gold bars.”
“Not now. Not for a while. But wait till this hell of a war ends,” Philbert said. “For now we contact your old comrade, the jeweler in Saint-Felice.”
Baret, a man he’d fought with at Ypres. Baret had been gassed and lost his arm. “He’s not much of a jeweler these days, in case you hadn’t noticed. He works on his brother’s farm.”
“Why don’t we have Minou melt part down into smaller bits we can use?” said Bruno.
The village blacksmith, who had the intelligence of a ten-year-old.
“And let Minou in on it?” said Alain.
Gaubert heard the greed in their voices. And only a few hours earlier, they had killed with their bare hands. “We don’t do anything now,” he said. “We wait, see if there’s any reaction.”
As if he hadn’t heard Gaubert, Alain said, “Why should we offer Minou a cut when he didn’t even—”
“Worry about that later,” Philbert broke in. “Remember, flogging gold bars will lead right back to us.”
“They’d never search the church,” said Gaubert. “Let’s move them there. I don’t like it here on my land.”
“Damn it, it’s just for now,” Alain said. “We can’t move them again until it’s dark.”
Reluctant, he agreed. In the dim November dawn, they could do little without attracting attention.
“I wonder why the truck wasn’t part of a convoy,” Bruno said. “Seems strange.”
Philbert scowled. “Not even the Boches are stupid enough to move gold in one truck without protection.”
A German troop truck carrying fifteen crates full of gold bars vanished in a rainstorm. How could it be that no one knew or cared? Those broken German words Gaubert remembered hearing—lost, train, bridge—ran through his head.
Chilled to the bone, exhausted by having worked through the night, he stumbled into the kitchen. His Fanny looked up from the stove, rubbing her eyes. She wore her nightdress and Gaubert’s thick wool socks. She smelled of sleep. Wisps of hair fell from her bun as he buried himself in her neck, her skin so warm he wanted to curl up beside her.
“You’re as cold as ice,” she said. She rubbed his frozen arms. “You’re shaking.”
He let Fanny sit him down by their large, open farmhouse fireplace. She wrapped a warmed brick in a blanket to thaw his numb leg. He was tired, so tired, and fear banged in his heart.
“We’ve got to talk, ma chère,” he said.
“Papa, Papa.” There was a tugging on his arm. “You’re supposed to take me to school.” His little son’s big blue eyes stared into his. They were the same blue as those of the young soldier he’d strangled.
“Shh, Papa’s tired,” Fanny said.
“He’s always tired.” Gaby pouted. “Like a big bear.”
Fanny grinned. “So mama bear will walk her little bear to school. We’ll sniff for honey and berries.”
Gaby’s eyes gleamed. He loved to pretend.
Gaubert was asleep before they had left the room. He dreamed of river eels writhing around a gold treasure chest that turned into the soldier’s blue eyes open to the rain.
“Wake up.” Fanny was shaking him. “The Germans are shooting people in Givaray.”
She handed him a bowl of steaming chicory, the ersatz substitute for coffee. How long had he been asleep? The weak afternoon light faded in the kitchen’s corners.
“Why . . . ? I don’t understand.”
Her hands clasped his shoulder. Fear, he saw fear and sadness in her eyes. “The cheese maker, the priest’s parents—they’re rounding up anyone. They said they’ll execute sixty more if no one confesses.”
“Confessed to what?”
“Four Boches bodies. Soldiers. They found them in the water.”
She told him how less than a kilometer away, across the river, four bloated bodies had washed up on the Givaray village bank.
Acid bile rose in his stomach. Why the hell hadn’t they taken the extra step and stripped off the uniforms?
So the damn current had freed the bodies from the canvas. Would the Germans dredge the river and discover the truck? Would they realize the gold was missing? Outside the window there were gunshots in the pewter twilight. For a split second he was back in the trenches, the horror as fresh as it had been in 1916.
He tried to clear his head. People—innocent village people—were dying because of their impulsive tussle last night. They’d been so distracted by the gold that they hadn’t taken the care they should have in hiding the bodies. What would happen when the fifth body washed up? It could turn up here, on the Chambly-sur-Cher bank.
Gaubert leapt up and pulled their suitcase from under the armoire. “Take Gaby and go stay with your aunt.”
Fanny’s eyes, a pale topaz color, widened in fear. “Why, Gaubert? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
He shared everything with her, always had. But he couldn’t share this.
“Saddle up the draft mare. Forget the roads—they’re impassable,” he said, throwing an armful of sweaters into the case. “Use the south fields.”
“I’m not leaving you, Gaubert. Who will feed the cows?” Stubborn as always and he loved her for it. But not now.
“Fanny, our village could be next.” He took her warm hands. Squeezed. “It’s not safe here.”
“What do you mean, next?”
If he told her anything, he’d put both Fann
y and Gaby in danger.
“There’s no time to argue. Take what you can and I’ll bring the rest.”
Fanny stared. He felt her gaze plumbing his soul. She knew him so well.
He shivered. “For Gaby’s sake and yours, don’t ask me any more. Please.”
“You had something to do with those dead German soldiers, n’est-ce pas?”
“I’m telegraphing your aunt from the post office, right now, that you’re coming.”
Loud knocking came from the farmhouse’s front door. He peeked through the lace kitchen curtains and saw Rouxel from the local Parti Populaire Français, the fascist political party. A rumored collaborator.
Terror-stricken, Gaubert looked around. Threw the suitcase back in the armoire. “You have to leave now.” He thrust her coat into her arms. “Through the barn. Quick.”
“But Gaubert . . .” Tears glistened in her eyes.
“Where’s the woman I married, who promised to love and obey?”
He pushed her toward the back door. She clung to him. “And didn’t you promise to have and hold me forever?” She wouldn’t go.
Trembling with panic, he raised his hand at her—the first time he ever had.
“Hit me a thousand times, I’ll still love you.”
He turned away. His heart was bleeding. “If you love me, you’ll take our son, keep him safe.”
Gaubert waited until Fanny was gone before he answered the door.
Dresden · November 10, 1989 · Friday Evening
Heinz Felsen was irritated to see the teaching assistant waving to him from the back of Dresden University’s full lecture hall. What now? Unless his granddaughter had gone into labor early, they knew not to disturb him during his evening lecture.
“Entschuldigung, Herr Felsen,” the TA said, handing him an envelope. “This came priority for you. It’s marked urgent.”
Felsen took his glasses from the lectern and tore the strip on the yellow-and-red DHL envelope. Inside he found a slip of paper. On it: Go to a secure phone. Dial-in procedure activated.
Wasn’t that all over now? He’d once been a low-level Stasi, a communist double agent, but he had been out of the field for years, done his time in a West German prison until he’d been traded. Now he just taught espionage techniques. Questions flitted through his mind. But habit and instinct died hard.
“Take over, finish up the class for me,” he said to the TA, handing over his notes. “Make sure you hand out next week’s assignment, verstehen Sie?”
Outside the lecture hall, he waved to his teaching colleagues, pointed to his watch and shook his head. No time for their usual evening beer after classes. Out in the Universität’s parking lot, he got in his Russian-made Trabant, drove it out onto the potholed road and past the Stalin-era concrete housing projects. Put Robert Schumann’s Sonata in D minor in the tape deck and tried not to overthink this.
He’d taken care of his files long ago. The old boys’ network turned up loose cannons sometimes, an erstwhile informer needing money and thinking the world hadn’t changed.
The Wall had fallen, for God’s sake, and after the semester ended he’d be lucky to have a job. Who knew what this new era would bring.
Twenty kilometers away, he pulled into the Gasthaus. The phone cabin—a working one, so rare these days—was shielded from view from the road by the car-wash exit.
He dialed the number he remembered by heart. A number he hadn’t called in ten or more years. Not since he’d been sent back to the East in a prisoner exchange.
“Take this number down,” said a voice. The required three-second pause. “Ready?”
He was. Pencil and Nestlé chocolate wrapper in hand. Prepared as always, according to Stasi procedure.
He wrote the message down. Hung up. Read it slowly. Then again.
He felt tempted to call back for reconfirmation. Instead he called the number he’d written down with a Munich area code and used his alias.
“It’s Willi,” he said. “How are the reunion plans going?”
A woman answered. Standard procedure. Only his former handler from the old days would track him down like this to relay a message. Whatever it was, it was important or he wouldn’t have gone through such machinations.
“The invitation from Marie got lost,” she said. “She wants a reply.”
His Paris informer needed to speak to him—his Paris informer from his SS days in occupied France.
After all these years. It would have to mean . . . He sucked in his breath. But no, it couldn’t.
His brother.
Heinz twisted the worn gold signet ring on his pinkie. The ring matching the one worn by his brother Gottfried, who’d disappeared in France in 1942. Gott im Himmel. This was about Gottfried—she had information. He knew it. His pulse raced like it hadn’t in years.
He drove to the storage facility to visit his locker and withdrew an alternate passport, French francs, and a carton of Ernte 23 cigarettes. At Dresden Bahnhof, he left the Trabant on a side street, purchased a ticket to Paris. In Leipzig, he disembarked, smoked a cigarette on the platform, and used the public phone to call his wife and tell her he wouldn’t be home for a few days. The next call was a message for his Paris informer, whom he hadn’t seen in forty-five years.
Paris · Friday, 11 p.m.
Aimée knew Vortek, the photographer around the corner from Leduc Detective, kept late hours in his darkroom. She also knew she had to get her film developed right away.
She gave a quick glance behind her in case she’d been followed, but saw only a few taxis passing in the mist. She parked in the garage on rue Bailleul, the narrow street by Leduc Detective, in her grand-père’s spot. The damn sidecar filled up a whole space. She shook wet drops off her grand-père’s motorcycle jacket and nodded to the young attendant, safe and dry in his office, where he listened to the radio.
For a moment she stood below the overhang at the corner of rue de l’Arbre Sec, thinking. Hadn’t she done the job—found Suzy and questioned her?
But there’d been another murder. This murder, with the same MO as the murder of Elise’s father—how could they not connect? It wouldn’t be right not to follow up.
Her hands were still shaking. She couldn’t clear the image of the body bobbing in the quai, the old man’s blood-matted hair.
What the hell was going on? Was a serial killer attacking old men—old men who met at that chic restaurant?
She wished her father were there, that she could ask him what to do—or, better yet, let him take over, make everything right. But he’d rushed off to Berlin with no explanation. She had no idea how to even reach him.
In the pouring rain she ran across the street and through the opening of a small courtyard. The shop was dark. A steady drip from the gutter beat a rhythm on the cobbles. Wet and shivering, she shouldered her bag and hurried under the passage to the shop’s side door.
She knocked. Knocked again. “Vortek, it’s Aimée. Please, I need your help.” She pounded now. “It’s important.”
A window shutter on the top floor creaked open. “Quiet out there. We’re trying to sleep.”
The door cracked open a few centimeters.
“Please, Vortek—”
Then her wet sleeve was yanked forward so hard she almost tripped. “Shh, careful of the steps,” said Vortek, “and be quiet.”
The shop, which had been a warehouse, was stacked with turn-of-the-century magazines, old press photos, and newspapers halfway to the peaked glass ceiling. In addition to his photography business, Vortek collected and sold vintage photographs, newspapers, and magazines. The smell of newsprint made her sneeze. He guided her toward the door on the far wall, a small office full of index-card boxes whose dates went back to the seventeenth century.
“Call next time. You’re lucky I opened the door.” A Polish accent tinged his speech. He
wore a dark wool sweater, corduroy pants, and slippers. Salt-and-pepper hair stuck out in thick tufts and a scarf was wrapped around his neck. “What’s so important?” He lit a cigarette.
“Can I have this film developed?” She handed him the roll she’d taken out of the camera. “Please, as fast as possible.”
“It’s for your father?”
Her father brought Vortek work all the time. Leduc had an account. Vortek made the best false papers this side of Lodz, her father said.
“You could say that,” she said, not wanting to lie.
His gaze hovered on the roll of film. “Then let’s say that.”
“Prints only. Three copies each. And I want the negatives back.” Merde, that sounded naïve. Vortek could make prints anyway. She handed him three hundred francs. “We’ll keep this off the account for now. How long, Vortek?”
“That’s it? And you want a rush order?”
She handed over another hundred-franc bill and nodded.
“I’ll call you when it’s done. You know the way out.” He let her out of the office and disappeared behind another door, offering her a brief glimpse of a small room bathed in red light and dripping photos hanging from a clothesline.
Even using her penlight, she stumbled in the warren of dusty aisles, knocking into a stack of 1900 Paris Illustrés. Back outside, she walked in the wet shadows through the covered passage, then back into the downpour, through the sliver of a courtyard and to the street.
She wished she had an umbrella and her boots weren’t soaked. She bolted down the narrow cobbled street. In Leduc Detective she took off her wet clothes, kicked the radiator into life, and put on her father’s English Hobbs electric kettle.
Wearing her father’s oversized Breton sweater and her old riding jodhpurs from her lycée days which she’d just discovered in the back armoire, she scrounged in the secretary’s desk drawers for the old-fashioned pair of Charentaise felted wool slippers she hid in her desk. Now at least her feet wouldn’t freeze on the wood floor. She found a tilleul sachet of lime flower tea, poured in the hot water, and inhaled the steam. Always good prevention against a winter cold, her grandmother used to say. She’d been gone several years now—how Aimée missed her. Thinking of her grandmother made her wonder about her grandfather and the fluffy puppy he’d brought into the bistro. He had a knack for picking up strays; it used to make Aimée’s grandmother shake her head in faux despair whenever ragged mutts followed him home.