‘You’re wasting your time, Freeman.’ He spoke English slowly but with an impeccable accent, gained during his years at a British public school before the Second World War. ‘You say you’ve discovered evidence that my company has been supplying ingredients for poison gas to Iraq? Whatever you have stumbled across, there is not one shred of evidence on paper. If you print a word, I shall sue your newspaper in every country in the world.’
Merlin sat down without being invited, then plunged straight in with: ‘I don’t care what you sold to Saddam Hussein, Baron. Plenty of bigger companies on both sides of the Atlantic went right on trading with Baghdad until August last year so why should I pick on you? What I really came to talk about is the same subject as last time: that sunny day in June 1944.’
The baron looked relieved. ‘I can tell you nothing. I was not at Oradour. My Kubelwagen was machine gunned on the eighth of June near Brive-la-Gaillarde by some terrorists. Resistance heroes, as you would doubtless call them. My driver was killed and,’ he tapped his right leg, ‘I lay unconscious, wounded, and should have had my throat cut by those Communist swine, had not a Wehrmacht patrol come along in the nick of time. I spent the rest of June that year in a military hospital at Bad Flinsburg. It’s all in the divisional medical records captured by the Americans. With your countrymen’s passion for recording history, I imagine that my temperature chart may still be carefully preserved in the archives of some University campus in Minnesota or Iowa. At any rate, by the time I was fit to rejoin my unit …’
‘It’s a neat alibi,’ Merlin interrupted.
Kempfer looked tired. ‘It happens to be the truth. I conserve in a safe place my original paybook which shows the period of my sick leave. So I don’t have to defend myself from the gutter press after all these years.’
Merlin noted that the baron was having difficulty with his breathing.
‘What are you really after, Freeman? I’ll give you five minutes of my time, no more.’
‘The gold,’ Merlin gambled. ‘I know all about the gold of Oradour.’
The baron lifted his stiff leg onto a padded footstool. ‘There was none. That was an excellent example of some journalist’s febrile imagination running away with him. Oradour is very simple, Mr Freeman. Don’t try and complicate the issue. It was an exemplary reprisal against the Resistance. Nothing more nor less.’
‘There was no Resistance in Oradour-sur-Glane.’
Kempfer patted his leg. ‘You think I shot myself? I tell you, the terrorist swine were everywhere. They had to be taught a lesson.’
‘This lesson cost seven hundred lives, mainly women and children.’
Kempfer took an aerosol from his pocket and squirted two bursts into his mouth. ‘In war, these things happen, on both sides. You of all people should know that. I wonder whether – in the interest of journalistic balance – you would write the story of the hundreds of German soldiers who were taken prisoner of war and then shot by Eisenhower’s nice, democratic, gum-chewing GIs?’
‘SS men?’
‘Soldiers in uniform, Mr Freeman, protected by international law and the terms of the surrender. And would you write about the hundreds of thousands – maybe a million – of men who had simply fought for their country and were deliberately starved to death in Allied POW camps after the cessation of hostilities?’
Merlin tried another angle: ‘Is it just a coincidence that you live here, Baron, under the very castle where Richard Coeur de Lion was held prisoner? I’m asking because it was Coeur de Lion’s gold that was supposed to be buried at Oradour.’
The baron stroked his stiff leg, massaging the kneecap. ‘Go on,’ he said quietly.
Merlin was floundering, like a wrestler who had pushed and found no resistance. ‘How long have you lived here?’
Kempfer smiled. ‘My family has lived in Dürnstein for eight hundred years. You know Kämpfer means "fighter" or "warrior" in German? My first recorded ancestor, to whom a grant of land is still to be found in the town archives, was a man called Mercadier. He was a mercenary captain who served Richard the Lionheart. Sometime after the king’s death, this Mercadier arrived in Dürnstein and married the widow of one of the French hostages who had died here. He took the name Kempfer when he settled among German-speaking people because it was more suitable than translating his real name which, I believe, means merchant.’
Merlin hovered. There were ten different ways to play it, but sometimes, to get the real story, it was necessary to stake everything on a hunch. ‘And did this progenitor of yours perhaps bring with him from France an heirloom of some kind? Maybe a poem of a type known as sirventès?’
The baron’s face was completely white. ‘For a war correspondent,’ he said slowly, ‘you are unusually cultured.’
‘May I see it?’
The baron was caught off balance. ‘Why not?’ he muttered.
He limped, leaning on the cane, to a painting which slid sideways and revealed an ordinary domestic wall safe from which he took a number of documents. He shuffled through them and held out to Merlin a piece of yellow-brown parchment with frayed edges, enclosed in a plastic envelope.
‘I must ask you not to take it out of the envelope,’ he said.
Merlin held the parchment to the light. The faded writing was in stylised Gothic script which he could not read. A bold signature sprawled across the bottom of the sheet.
The baron sat down, out of breath. ‘The signature is genuine. I had it authenticated some years ago by an old comrade who is a scholar, highly respected in this area. He told me that the poem was written down by a clerk, but signed by the hand of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the mother of King Richard.’
Merlin moved to the window where the light was better. ‘I can make out the last line: something about Chartres, Bordeaux and …’
‘Fontevraud.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘It is an abbey where you will find the tombs of Eleanor and Richard the Lionheart. And if you turn the parchment over,’ suggested the baron, ‘you will find my friend’s translation into German and also a translation into English which I myself did many years ago.’
Merlin read aloud the English text: ‘The heathen maze is straight beside / the trail that you must follow / to the stone that is hollow / and the church of the bride. / Like a pilgrim onward go / To Chartres, Bordeaux and Fontevraud.’ He checked the rhyming scheme. It was ABBACC but the words meant nothing to him.
‘May I photograph this?’ He expected the baron to refuse.
‘If you can work without flash,’ Kempfer said tiredly. ‘I am told that it damages old documents.’
Merlin laid the parchment on the carpet by the window where there was most light. It was difficult to avoid the reflections on the plastic so he took several shots and varied the exposure, bracketing the reading on the light meter. When he was satisfied, he packed the Pentax away in his camera case and handed the document back to its owner.
‘A trade,’ said the baron. ‘I show you my heirloom. Now you tell me how you come to know about medieval poetry.’
Merlin shrugged. ‘I’m working on this angle of the gold of Oradour and I happened to stumble over one of these rhymes, carved on Châlus castle.’
‘And do you have the words of this other sirventès with you?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’
The baron looked increasingly unwell. ‘Now I must ask you to leave. I am an old man and my health is not very good.’
Merlin picked up the camera case. He had got bewilderingly more than he had expected.
‘Before you go …’ The old man was wheezing so badly, he could only get out a few words at a time. ‘Write down your address. This old comrade … whom I mentioned … has other material you may find interesting. I’ll put him in touch with you.’
‘Give me his address and I’ll contact him.’
‘That would not be a good idea. He is a very private person.’
Merlin took out a card with his office address
in New York and wrote Leila’s telephone number on the back: ‘Your old comrade can reach me in France during the next few weeks.’
Driving out of the garden gates, Merlin saw three figures standing between the shrubs. Two were the gardeners who had been there when he arrived. The third was the veiled woman who had led him to safety ten years before in Beirut. He skidded on the gravel, narrowly missing the gate post and pulled up. By the time he had stepped out of the car there were only two figures to be seen in the garden.
Chapter 3
‘I had a hell of a job prising your telephone number in France out of your mother.’
Jay had been sitting in the sun-warmed porch of the cottage at St Denis for two hours, her mind blank as a vegetable. The voice on the other end of the line said hallo several times before she recognised the Australian accent of Andy Burrows, a television producer who had been talking for months about making a series with her Early Music ensemble.
‘I’m sorry, Andy,’ she apologised. Her brain felt as though made of cotton wool. ‘I’m taking a few days off, so I told Mummy not to pass on calls.’
‘I really had to twist yer ma’s arm.’ He sounded a long way away. ‘And I tried several times to call you last night.’
‘I was working on some new repertoire and didn’t want to be interrupted,’ Jay excused herself. ‘What can I do for you, Andy?’
‘D’you want the good news or the bad news first?’
‘Either way,’ she said.
‘The bad news,’ he chuckled, ‘is that I’m going to ask you to cut short your holiday, sweetheart.’
‘Why’s that, Andy?’
‘Because of the good news. A programme’s been cancelled and there’s an Outside Broadcast unit going spare for two days. If I move smartish, I can use one day for travelling and the other to record you and your group as a pilot for a series. What do you say to that?’
Jay felt her brain slip into gear for the first time since she had woken that morning. Never mind her father’s idea of a rest cure, if she could just do this one programme and prove that her nerve had not gone, that would be the best cure of all for whatever had happened at Canterbury.
‘Yes,’ she said, mind made up.
He laughed. ‘Good on yer. There’s a catch. We have to get the programme into the can the day after tomorrow. Can you be there at such short notice?’
‘What time’s the call?’
‘Ten a.m. for a run-through without cameras. That okay? I hope to have pictures to look at about two-thirty. That gives me four hours’ rehearsal-and-recording time excluding the tea-break. It’s going to be a hell of a sweat, Jay. And what about your musicians? Can you be sure they’re free at such short notice?’
‘Don’t worry, Andy.’ Jay felt calm and in control, her normal self again. ‘If they have another job that conflicts, I’ll see they’ll put in deps. We’ll all be there, ten a.m. the day after tomorrow.’
‘You’re a beaut!’
Jay replaced the telephone on the rest and checked her wrist watch. If she set out immediately and drove nonstop, she could catch the midnight ferry from Calais and be home by breakfast next day.
She grabbed some paper and started making lists.
*
Merlin drove into Vienna and checked the rental car into the Hertz downtown office. His overnight bag was in a locker at Schwechat airport. It was several years since he had been in the city, so he strolled through a light drizzle, past the Opera House and Sacher’s. He wandered into a couple of bars used by pressmen but saw no familiar faces. Since leaving Dürnstein he had had the feeling that the old baron had made everything too easy for him. Why had Kempfer been so cooperative?
He went over everything he could remember about the first interview with Kempfer, years before. He had filed that story and flown off on another lead the next day. Yet he was certain he had made a note to follow up some anomaly in the baron’s story, if he ever had the time. The gap in his memory would nag him until it was filled in by an alcoholic ex pat in a smoke filled Spanish bar.
He bought a martini in the cocktail bar of the Hilton, which entitled him to use a warm and comfortable telephone booth. There he sat down with his contact book and a pile of tokens to ring some Vienna-based colleagues, in the hope of getting more background on Kempfer. The first correspondent he called had been posted back to the States months before. Two others were out of town. And so it went on. After drawing blanks all round, Merlin called Jay’s number in St Denis. No answer, so he redialled in case of faulty routing.
When she picked up the phone, Jay sounded breathless, as though she had been running. Merlin thought he detected disappointment in her voice. ‘You were expecting someone else?’ he guessed.
‘I’d just locked up the house when the phone went,’ Jay gasped. ‘I had to unlock everything. That’s why it took me so long to answer.’
‘I’ll be back in St Denis by midday tomorrow,’ Merlin announced. ‘And guess what? I’ve found another sirventès. Can I take you to lunch at Chez Dominique and talk about it?’
Jay explained that she was about to jump into her car and drive fast back to Britain. Merlin felt deflated; there was so much he wanted to tell her. ‘I couldn’t get through to you last night,’ he apologised. ‘I did try.’
‘There was something wrong with the line,’ said Jay.
‘But you’re okay?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
Because I saw the veiled woman, thought Merlin. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘to what I found in Dürnstein.’
He read her the words of the second sirventès over the phone.
‘What does it mean?’ Jay sounded more polite than interested.
‘I don’t know yet. The first poem at Chälus seemed to have a meaning in every line and this one seems to have none at all. But the important thing is that it was definitely written by Queen Eleanor. It even has her signature on it. Can you hear me?’
‘Yes. You don’t have to shout.’
‘So you could be right about the one at Chälus. If we can find some way of matching them up, Jay …’
‘Look.’ She sounded impatient. ‘This isn’t the best time to talk, Merlin. I have to get back to England fast for a television recording that’s very important, and I can’t risk missing the ferry-boat.’
‘Sure, I understand.’ Merlin fed tokens into the telephone. ‘When can we meet again? Are you coming back to St Denis after the recording?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Can you give me your phone number and address in London, Jay?’
‘I shan’t be there.’
‘Give me them anyway. Please.’
*
It was long after midnight when Frau Baronin Kempfer dialled the number of the telephone beside Hermann Kreuz’s bed in the Valle de los Cantos. He lifted the handset. ‘Hallo.’
‘Am I talking with Herr Doktor Hermann Kreuz?’
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Do you recognise my voice?’
‘Of course,’ he said impatiently. ‘Why are you ringing?’
‘Rudi is dead.’
‘That’s no reason to call me at four a.m. When a man of his age and state of health dies, it is a perfectly natural event.’
‘Yes,’ faltered the new widow, ‘but I thought, in the circumstances …’
‘There are no circumstances,’ he said swiftly.
‘Rudi asked me to call you just before he died.’
Kreuz sat up in bed, alert. ‘Why should he do that?’
‘The doctor had been in the afternoon and gave him an injection, some kind of sedative. He came again late in the evening.’
‘You said Rudi asked you to call me. That wasn’t about the doctor’s visit.’
Kreuz heard the woman at the other end of the line swallowing a drink of water. Her voice was stronger now: ‘Just before the end, I was sitting beside Rudi’s bed. I thought he was sleeping, but suddenly he sat upright and grasped my arm. He said, You must
call Hermann. Rudi was always so disciplined, you know, even at the end. He said I was to tell you about the American who came yesterday afternoon, just before Rudi was taken ill.’
‘What did they talk about?’
‘I don’t know. But he wrote you a long letter after the reporter had gone. He insisted on finishing it before he let the doctor give him the injection, although he was in great pain.’
‘Send it to me by express mail,’ said Kreuz. ‘No. Better would be by courier. So don’t do a thing. There is a security company in Vienna owned by an old comrade who will look after it for me.’
*
‘Am I as disappointing as all that?’ Leila asked.
Merlin kissed both cheeks and lifted her clear of the ground. ‘Never,’ he whispered in her ear.
‘Liar,’ she accused him. ‘I can see in your face that I am not the woman you’d like to be holding in your arms. And don’t blow into my ear like that. You know what it does to me. Now put me down or I’ll touch you.’
‘Threat or promise?’
‘I’ve a palette in one hand and a brush in the other.’ Leila kissed him on the lips. ‘You’ll be marked and everyone will know.’
‘The story of my life,’ he said, releasing her.
‘Jay’s gone back to England.’
‘I know.’ Merlin busied himself pouring coffee from the pot on her stove. ‘I caught her yesterday afternoon, just as she was leaving.’
Leila looked at the painting on the easel. It wasn’t what she had set out to do. Something had gone wrong and she was making it worse by going on. She put down the palette and brushes, found a turps rag and cleaned the worst of the paint off her hands.
‘Doesn’t sound like you, actually bothering to call a girl when you’re out of town. Oh, talking of telephone calls, guess who tried to talk with you on this number at four o’clock this morning?’
‘Jay?’ Merlin sounded hopeful.
‘Try again.’
‘Surprise me.’
Leila turned on the hot tap at the sink. The water ran cold and there was no washing up liquid. She rubbed her hands together vigorously, trying to get the turps off with cold water. ‘I can’t imitate the voice: it’s about two octaves too low and even my quick-fire wit isn’t fast enough for an impersonation of …’
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 12