by Nele Neuhaus
* * *
All morning long, Pia plowed through the mountains of files and documents that had been stored in Schneider’s house for safekeeping. Ostermann used all means at his disposal to gather information about KMF, as Bodenstein had requested.
It was almost noon when Pia gave up in frustration.
“The guy had half the tax office archives in his basement,” she said with a sigh. “I just have to ask why.”
“Possibly these documents earned him the true allegiance of the Kaltensees and others,” Ostermann conjectured.
“How do you mean? Extortion?”
“For example.” Ostermann took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Maybe he used the files to exert pressure. Just think of the payments from KMF to Schneider’s Swiss bank account.”
“I don’t know.” Pia was doubtful. “At any rate, I don’t think these documents were the motive for the murder.”
She closed a document binder with a bang and tossed it on the floor with a pile of others.
“Were you able to find out anything?”
“Quite a lot.” Ostermann bit on the earpiece of his glasses as he rummaged in a pile of paper until he found the right page. “KMF is a group of companies with three thousand employees worldwide and representation in one hundred and sixty-nine countries. It encompasses about thirty corporations. The chairman of the board is Siegbert Kaltensee. The concern has equity of forty percent.”
“And what do they do?”
“They make rolling mills for processing aluminum. The founder of the firm invented the first type of press for shaping aluminum into various thicknesses. Even today KMF holds the patent to this rolling press and the new developments that have come out of it. Well over a hundred in all. It seems to be a lucrative business.”
He got up from his desk. “I’m hungry. Should I order us a couple of döners?
“That would be great.” Pia dived into the next box. Their colleagues from the evidence team had marked it “Cabinet Contents, Lower Left,” and it contained several shoe boxes that were tied with cord. The first box held travel mementos; boarding cards for a cruise ship; postcards with pictures of exotic lands; a dance card; menus; invitations to christenings, weddings, birthdays, funerals; and other keepsakes that had no value to anyone but Schneider. The second shoe box contained neatly bundled handwritten letters. Pia unfolded one of them. It had been written on March 14, 1941. She laboriously deciphered the faded old-fashioned script. Dear son, we hope and pray each day that you are well and that you will return to us in good health and in one piece. Here everything is as peaceful as always. Everything seems just the same, and you’d hardly believe there’s a war on. This was followed by news of friends and neighbors, and descriptions of daily occurrences that would have interested the recipient of the letter. The letter was signed Mother. Pia took letters from the stacks at random. Schneider’s mother seemed to have been an avid letter writer. One letter was still in its envelope. Käthe Kallweit, Steinort, Landkreis Angerburg was the return address. Pia stared at the envelope, which was addressed to a Hans Kallweit. She was surprised to see that these letters weren’t from Schneider’s mother at all. But why had he saved them, carefully tying them up in bundles? A vague memory began stirring in her mind, but she couldn’t pin it down. She read more of the letters. Ostermann came back, bringing her a döner with extra meat and feta. Pia put the food on the table without touching it. Ostermann started eating, and soon the whole conference room smelled like, a döner stand.
On June 26, 1941, Käthe Kallweit wrote to her son, Herr Schlageter from the castle told your father that a whole wing had been requisitioned for Ribbentrop and his men. He said it has something to do with the construction site of the Askania at Görlitz. Then a passage had been blacked out by the censor. Your friend Oskar visited us and brought greetings from you. He says that he now has things to do in the area and will try to visit us regularly, the letter continued.
Pia stopped. Vera Kaltensee had claimed that Schneider was an old friend of her late husband, but Elard Kaltensee had said only “That’s right” and then gave his mother an odd look. And Miriam’s Oma said she remembered that the phony Goldberg’s name used to be Otto or Oskar.
“What sort of letters are they?” Ostermann asked, chewing his food. Pia picked up the last one she’d read.
“‘Your friend Oskar visited us…’” she began reading aloud. Her heart was beating excitedly. Was she getting close to the secret?
“Herrmann Schneider saved bundles of about two hundred letters from a Käthe Kallweit from East Prussia, and I’m asking myself why,” she said, rubbing the tip of her nose thoughtfully. “Supposedly he was born in Wuppertal and went to school there, but these letters came from East Prussia.”
“So what’s your theory?” Ostermann wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and rummaged in his drawer for a paper towel.
“That Schneider falsified his identity, too. The phony Goldberg’s real name was Oskar, and he attended the SS Junker School in Bad Tölz.” Pia looked up. “And this Oskar was, in turn, a friend of Hans Kallweit from Steinort in East Prussia, whose mother’s correspondence we found in Herrmann Schneider’s cabinet.”
She pulled over her keyboard and mouse. She entered the key words on Google that she had found in the letters—East Prussia and Steinort, Ribbentrop and Askania—and found an extremely informative site about the former East Prussia. For almost an hour, she delved into the history and geography of a lost region and realized to her shame how rudimentary her knowledge was of the recent past in Germany. The construction site of the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters in the East, had been given the cover name “Askania Chemical Works.” No one in the general populace had any idea what was going on deep in the thick Masurian forests not far from the hamlet of Görlitz, near the town of Rastenburg. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop had actually requisitioned a wing of Steinort Castle from the Lehndorff family for himself and his staff, starting in the summer of 1941, when Hitler moved into the Wolf’s Lair. Käthe Kallweit from Steinort had apparently had some sort of connection to the castle—she might have worked there as a maid—and kept her son informed in her letters about the daily gossip and news. Pia gave an involuntary shudder at the idea of how the woman must have sat at her kitchen table a good sixty-five years earlier and written this letter to her son at the front. Pia jotted down a few key words and her information sources from the Internet, then grabbed her phone and dialed her friend Miriam’s cell.
“How can I find information about fallen German soldiers?” she asked after a brief greeting.
“You can try the War Graves Commission,” Miriam told her. “What, exactly, are you looking for? Oh, I have to warn you. This call could be expensive. I’ve been in Poland since last night.”
“What? What are you doing there?”
“This Goldberg case has piqued my curiosity,” Miriam admitted. “I thought I’d do a little research on-site.”
For a moment, Pia was speechless.
“And where is that?” she asked at last.
“I’m in Wegorzewo,” said Miriam, “formerly called Angerburg, on the Mauersee. The real Goldberg was born here. There are advantages to speaking Polish. The mayor himself has opened the city archives to me.”
“You’re out of your mind.” Pia had to grin. “Well, good luck. And thanks for the tip.”
She clicked through the Internet until she came to a Web site with the title worldwarvictims.de. It had a link to an online graves search. She entered the full name of the murdered Herrmann Schneider as well as his birth date and birthplace. She stared at the monitor as she waited. A few seconds later, she read with amazement that Herrmann Ludwig Schneider, born March 2, 1921, in Wuppertal, recipient of the Knight’s Cross, first lieutenant and squadron captain of the Sixth Squadron of Fighter Group 400, fell in action on December 24, 1944, in an aerial battle at Hausen. He had flown a Focke-Wulf Fw 19 A-8, and his morta
l remains were buried at the main cemetery in Wuppertal.
“That can’t be true!” she exclaimed, and then told Ostermann what she had found. “The real Herrmann Schneider has been dead for fifty-two years.”
“Herrmann Schneider is an ideal pseudonym. A common name.” Ostermann frowned. “If I wanted to falsify my identity, then I would also seek out a name that was as ordinary as possible.”
“Right.” Pia nodded. “But how did our Schneider get hold of the data on the real Schneider?”
“Maybe they knew each other, were in the same unit. When our Schneider needed a new identity after the war, he remembered his friend, who had died in the meantime, and took his name.”
“But what about the family of the real Schneider?”
“They had already buried their Schneider, so that settled the matter for them.”
“But it was way too easy to figure out,” said Pia, sounding dubious. “I found him in a few seconds.”
“You have to put yourself back in time,” replied Ostermann. “The war is over and chaos reigns. A man in civvies with no papers appears before the officials of the occupation forces and claims his name is Herrmann Schneider. Maybe he even got hold of the real Herrmann’s military service book. Who knows? Sixty years ago, nobody could have imagined that it would be possible to find things in a few seconds by computer—things that previously required a detective and a lot of luck, in addition to a heap of money and large amounts of time. In that situation I would have taken the identity of somebody I knew something about, but only if it was absolutely necessary. And I would have made sure to stay out of the public eye. That’s what our Schneider did. For his whole life, he was unobtrusiveness personified.”
“Unbelievable.” Pia made some notes. “Then we need to search for a Hans Kallweit from Steinort in East Prussia. Steinort is in the vicinity of Angerburg, where the real Goldberg came from. And if your theory is right, then the phony Goldberg—Oskar—could actually have known the real Goldberg before the war.”
“Precisely.” Ostermann cast a covetous glance at Pia’s döner on the desk; it had gone cold. “Are you going to eat that?”
“No.” Pia shook her head absently. “Be my guest.”
Ostermann didn’t have to be told twice. Pia was already back on the Web. Anita and Vera had been friends, as were the phony Schneider—Hans Kallweit—and the phony Goldberg—Oskar. Not three minutes later, she had a brief bio of Vera Kaltensee on her screen.
Born April 28, 1922, in Lauenburg am Dobensee, Angerburg district, she read. Parents: Baron Heinrich Elard von Zeydlitz-Lauenburg and Baroness Hertha von Zeydlitz-Lauenburg, née von Pape. Siblings: Heinrich (1898–1917), Meinhard (1899–1917), Elard (1917, missing Jan. 1945). Fled in Jan. 1945; the rest of the family died in a Russian attack on the column of refugees trekking from Lauenburg.
She clicked further to the informative East Prussian site, entered “Lauenburg,” and found a reference to a tiny village named Doba on the Dobensee, near the ruins of the former castle of the Zeydlitz-Lauenburg family.
“Vera Kaltensee and Anita Frings came from the same corner of East Prussia as the phony Goldberg and the phony Schneider,” Pia told her colleague. “If you ask me, all four of them must have known one another in the past.”
“That could be,” said Ostermann, leaning his elbows on the desk. He looked Pia in the eye. “But why did they make such a secret out of it?”
“Good question.” Pia was nibbling at her ballpoint pen. She thought for a moment, then grabbed her cell and called Miriam again. Her friend picked up seconds later.
“Have you got something to write with?” Pia asked. “Since you’re already doing research, keep an eye out for a Hans Kallweit from Steinort and an Anita Maria Willumat.”
* * *
The Frankfurt Kunsthaus, one of the premier addresses for national and international contemporary art, was located in a historic town house right on Römerberg Square. Pia had to admit that her SUV was not very practical on a Saturday afternoon downtown. The parking garages around Römer and Hauptwache were all full, and finding a parking spot on the street for the bulky Nissan turned out to be hopeless. Finally, she gave up and drove right onto the big square in front of the Frankfurt city hall. It took less than a minute for two zealous female officers to show up and motion for her to drive off at once. Pia got out and showed the officers her ID and Kripo badge.
“Is that real?” asked one of them suspiciously, and Pia imagined her biting the badge to see whether it might be made of chocolate.
“Of course it’s real,” Pia said impatiently.
“You wouldn’t believe the stuff people show us.” The officer handed back her ID and badge. “If we confiscated it all, we could open our own museum.”
“I won’t be long, don’t worry,” Pia assured them, and headed for the Kunsthaus, which was always open on Saturday afternoon. Personally, she didn’t care much for contemporary art so she was astounded to see how many people were crowded into the foyer, the exhibition rooms, and on the stairs. All to see the work of a Chilean sculptor and painter whose name Pia had never heard before. The café on the ground floor was also jammed. Pia looked around and felt like a real cultural philistine. None of the names of the artists in the brochures and flyers were even vaguely familiar, and she asked herself what on earth people saw in those blobs and slashes.
She asked the young woman at the information stand to inform Professor Kaltensee that she had arrived. As she waited, she leafed through a brochure that described the focus of the Frankfurt Kunsthaus. Besides the emphasis on so-called contemporary art in all its forms, the Eugen Kaltensee Foundation, which owned the property, also supported and promoted young and talented musicians and actors. On one of the upper floors, there was a concert hall as well as living quarters and work studios for artists in residence from Germany and abroad. Considering Professor Kaltensee’s reputation, Pia suspected these were primarily young female artists whom the director of the Frankfurt Kunsthaus found to be particularly attractive. Just as she was thinking this, Pia saw Elard Kaltensee coming down the stairs. The man had made no real impression on her at Mühlenhof, but today he seemed completely transformed. He was dressed in black from head to toe, almost like a priest or magician—a somberly impressive figure, before whom the crowd parted respectfully.
“Hello, Ms. Kirchhoff.” He stopped in front of her and held out his hand without smiling. “Please excuse me for making you wait.”
“No problem. Thanks for finding time to see me on such short notice,” Pia replied. Seen up close, Elard Kaltensee also looked exhausted today. There were dark shadows under his red-rimmed eyes, and a three-day growth of beard covered his sunken cheeks. Pia had the impression that he had put on a disguise to play a role that he no longer enjoyed.
“Come with me,” he said, “and we’ll go up to my residence.”
She followed him curiously up the creaking stairs to the fifth floor. For years, the wildest rumors had been circulating through Frankfurt society about this residence on the top floor of the building. Apparently, plenty of decadent parties had taken place here. People whispered about orgiastic cocaine binges with prominent guests from the city’s art and political scenes. Kaltensee opened a door and politely allowed Pia to enter first. At that moment, his cell phone rang.
“Please excuse me.” He stayed on the landing. “I’ll be right there.”
A dim twilight reigned in the apartment. Pia looked around the huge room with its exposed ceiling beams and worn hardwood floorboards. In front of the windows that reached from floor to ceiling stood a cluttered desk made of dark mahogany. Stacks of books and catalogs covered every available inch of the surface. In one corner, the sooty maw of a fireplace gaped in front of a leather sofa group arranged around a low wooden coffee table. The walls, which seemed to be freshly painted, were bright white and bare except for two huge framed photographs. One depicted the rather attractive back view of a naked man, the other a close-up of someone’s
eyes, mouth, nose, and chin covered by splayed fingers.
Pia sauntered farther through the apartment. The scarred oak floor creaked under her feet. From the kitchen, a glass door led out onto a roof terrace. The bathroom was done all in white, with wet footprints still visible on the tiles. A used towel tossed next to the shower, a pair of jeans dropped carelessly on the floor, the smell of aftershave lingering in the room. Pia wondered whether she might have interrupted Elard Kaltensee in a bit of hanky-panky, because the jeans weren’t the sort of thing he’d wear.
She couldn’t resist the temptation to cast a curious glance into the next room, which was separated only by a heavy velvet curtain. She saw a wide, rumpled bed and a clothes rack. Every single item of clothing was black. A gilt figure of the Buddha served as the base for a glass table on which a bouquet of withered roses stood in a silver champagne cooler. The fragrance of the flowers hung heavy and sweet in the air. On the floor next to the bed stood an old-fashioned steamer trunk and a massive, many-armed bronze candelabra. The candles had burned down, leaving a fanciful pattern of wax on the wooden floor. Not quite the love nest Pia had expected. Her adrenaline level shot up involuntarily when she saw a pistol on the nightstand. Holding her breath, she ventured a step closer and leaned over the bed. Just as she was about to reach for the gun, she noticed a movement directly behind her. Startled, she lost her balance and suddenly found herself lying on the bed. Next to her stood Elard Kaltensee, scrutinizing her with a strange look in his eyes.
* * *
Marleen could smell that he’d been drinking, and he’d obviously had quite a lot. But before she could say a word, he took her face in his hands and planted a kiss on her lips with such passion that her knees got weak. His hands slipped underneath her blouse, undid her bra, and enveloped her breasts.
“Jesus, I’m crazy about you,” Thomas Ritter said in a husky whisper. As he urged her toward the bed, her heart was pounding in her throat. With his eyes fixed on hers, he unzipped his pants and dropped them to the floor. Then he was on top of her, pressing her onto the bed with his whole weight. He thrust his pelvis against hers, and her body instantly responded to his demand, matching his need with her own. Arousal flowed through her body, and even though she had imagined the afternoon proceeding somewhat differently, she was starting to enjoy it. Marleen Ritter kicked off her shoes and wiggled with feverish impatience out of her jeans as they continued to kiss. Only then did she realize that today she’d put on a pair of panty hose, those love killers, but her husband didn’t even seem to notice. She gasped for breath and closed her eyes as he entered her without a trace of tenderness. It didn’t always have to be pure romance with candlelight and roses.…