The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  ‘He was with the political police, wasn’t he? Hans Engels, quite the unsung war hero, if you believe the stories,’ the detective retorted.

  Choosing not to reply, Christoph angrily swung the wheelchair back to the window.

  Under the ornate marble portico, Klauser stamped his feet to keep warm.

  ‘A real character, your father. Must be hard for a man like that, used to being in control – though, of course, some would argue he still is.’ Klauser stole a look at Matthias, gauging his reaction. ‘This murder of the gypsy outside the company store – it is not just an arbitrary coincidence, Herr Professor.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do to help the investigation… I would hate to think the family is implicated,’ Matthias said.

  ‘Naturally, but then all families have at least one skeleton in the cupboard.’ Klauser reached into his pocket and held out his card. ‘Even yours…’ he added enigmatically. Slightly perplexed, Matthias took it. ‘I will be in contact,’ Klauser said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all. And it would be better if you questioned me rather than my father – he is not a well man.’

  ‘Danke schön, tschüss.’

  The patrol car was waiting for him beyond the sweep of snow-covered lawn, his deputy at the wheel. It hadn’t been a completely wasted journey, Klauser concluded. He’d liked the son; Matthias von Holindt seemed less arrogant than the father – or was he just playing naive?

  Back in the patrol car he turned to his deputy. A twenty-six-year-old with a pregnant wife and recently promoted, Timo Meinholt was eager to prove he was worthy of the position. Tall, broad-shouldered and a little overweight, the young detective would have made an intimidating figure if it wasn’t for his unfortunate protruding ears. Looks like Dumbo, Klauser noted a little ungenerously. A more intimidating co-worker would have been useful.

  ‘Congratulations, you’ve just landed your first mission.’ Klauser turned the heater up.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You are to monitor the movements of Christoph von Holindt for the next forty-eight hours. I want to know where he goes, who he calls, when he shits.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you are to melt into the walls, understand?’

  The young officer grinned. He’d fought to be assigned to Klauser, whose reputation for an unorthodox methodology often produced unexpected results and made him exciting to work for.

  ‘Oh, I can do that.’

  ‘Well, it won’t be easy with those ears, but if you don’t, we’re both fucked.’

  THREE

  Latcos stood at the edge of the village in his best suit, the one he wore to church. Wearing it always made him feel empowered, like a king. And he was on official business – Kris business – at least it would be after he had brought it to the attention of the Rom court, the only legal system he abided by. He had carefully moved his mother into the back of the caravan, installing her in the top bunk and hanging her favourite amulets and icons around her, then, with a supply of vegetables, chickens and dried meats, had driven up from Timişoara across the border into Hungary, then into Austria. As with all Rom, borders were annoying but irrelevant to him, an absurd division of the natural world into territories. For the Rom, mankind was there to serve nature, not nature to serve mankind. The gadjé, with their fences and checkpoints, seemed pathetic.

  He took out the piece of old card Keja had given him that morning, her face tight with excitement; it was a nametag snatched from the apron of the nurse who had taken the baby. He peered at it – he couldn’t read or write – but he knew it was German and would mean something to someone. As he walked from the caravan hidden behind a cluster of linden trees at the edge of a potato field, houses replaced fields and the street narrowed into a matrix of lanes. He entered a small town square with an old war memorial in the centre. A sign saying ‘Postamt’ hung from one of the shopfronts. Latcos, recognising the postboxes, stepped inside.

  It was a small stone cottage on the other side of the village; the postmistress had reluctantly drawn him a map after she’d noticed the gold cross Latcos wore about his neck. This abrupt change in attitude had surprised the Kalderash, who initially was worried she might call the police, despite his spoken German being quite good.

  He opened the gate. All the lace curtains in the front windows were drawn. Next door a dog started barking. Latcos glanced over the low stone wall dividing the properties, only to catch an old woman peering at him from behind a lifted curtain. She stared, hostile and cold, until Latcos blew her a kiss, at which she dropped the curtain and retreated into the shadows. Grinning, he arrived at the front door. Not sure what to expect or what attitude he should adopt, he paused. There was a brass knocker cast in the shape of a hand. He curled his hand in the same shape as the knocker and held it in front of the door for a moment, gathering courage in this tiny irreverent gesture, then raised the knocker tentatively.

  To his amazement an elderly woman in a nun’s habit answered the door.

  ‘Fräulein Wattenstein?’ he asked hesitantly. The elderly nun studied him, her pale blue eyes scanning his dark skin, his moustache, the hat with the black cockerel’s feather tucked into the band, the red kerchief tied round his neck.

  ‘I was once Fräulein Wattenstein; I am now Sister Blau,’ she replied in an alto voice that was emotionless. He held out the nametag and she stared down at it, her face crumpling in recognition.

  ‘I am —’ he began to say, but she interrupted with a curt wave of her hand.

  ‘I know who you are. I recognise you from your mother’s face. I have been expecting a visitor like you for years.’ She glanced across at the neighbour’s window – the woman Latcos had seen earlier was again peering out. ‘You’d better come in.’

  Latcos balanced the cup of coffee on his lap but left the slice of sachertorte on the small table that was between him and the elderly nun in the tiny front room. The décor was sparse, impersonal; there was a plain wooden crucifix hanging over a gas fire, a small collection of chintzy china dogs on the mantelpiece, a worn settee and the two armchairs they now sat in. The nun had tried to speak a few words of Romanes, which she claimed his mother had taught her, and Latcos was struggling to stay angry with the woman – the nun’s habit had confused him. According to Keja the woman, although in the service of atrocity, had been neither cruel nor kind – she had merely followed orders. Orders, Latcos had reasoned later to himself, any humane individual would have found repugnant. But she’d allowed the baby to live.

  ‘You are wondering about my attire; I can see it in your eyes,’ Sister Blau observed sharply.

  ‘Was it the war?’

  ‘You mean did I end up regretting my involvement? That would be the easy answer, but no, I followed orders. I was always good at that – I still am. No, it was the statuette – the statuette of Sara la Kali.’

  ‘You knew about her?’

  ‘Of course, Ulrich was obsessed by it. He was a member of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce – the ERR. It was dedicated to the confiscation of artworks. Every member of the ERR knew that the most valuable object owned by the Nazi Party was a gold statuette of Nefertiti over three thousand years old, and Ulrich was hoping the statuette of Sara la Kali would rival the Egyptian one, but when he found it he could not let it go. It was haunting that way. He took a huge gamble and lied to the SS-Einsatzgruppen and kept it from being sent to Neuschwanstein castle along with the rest of the plunder. They guessed there’d been a transgression and that’s why he was transferred to Buchenwald. Once he found the statuette he was never going to hand it over – he realised it had powers but he could never work out how to use them.’

  ‘My mother told me that it was made of sky metal and that the family had had it for as long as history, from the time before the Roma were in Europe. She said it could heal.’

  ‘Perhaps… I don’t doubt it was a holy relic. The last time I saw it I was at my wits’ end… Ulrich wanted to kill the baby, your moth
er’s son. But the child was a perfect Aryan, blond and well-featured – there was no trace of the gypsy in him. I told Ulrich: he is your blood, send him away to another family, someone who needs a son. I thought he hadn’t listened and I was praying near the holy relic, when suddenly the gold cross I was wearing began to move across my chest towards it. It was a sign, a sign from God. The baby was saved and in that moment I saw my own future path.’

  ‘What happened to the relic?’

  ‘I don’t know, but Ulrich would.’

  For a moment Latcos wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. He placed the coffee cup back into its saucer, trying to control his hand, which had begun to tremble as a slow wave of anger rolled up from the pit of his stomach. He knew the feeling; it was one he’d struggled with all his life to control, a heritage of violence, a gift from his father – a fist-fighter who’d been trained by his father before him to defend his family and his women from any gypsy man who challenged him, like generations of Rom men before. Hoping the nun wouldn’t notice, Latcos slipped his battered hands under his thighs, trying to ignore an idea that was taking shape above his head like a fiery angel with revenge as her halo.

  ‘So Standartenführer Ulrich Vosshoffner didn’t die at the end of the war?’

  ‘He might have, he might not have,’ she replied. ‘I think not. You see, when I took my final vows ten years ago my mother put a notice in the newspapers and I received a congratulatory postcard from a Pieter Schmidt in East Germany, near the Czech border. I don’t know a Pieter Schmidt, and it is a ridiculously common name, is it not? Anyhow, the image on the postcard was of a German battleship.’

  ‘And why does that make you think he is still alive?’

  ‘The battleship was the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, sunk by a Soviet submarine in 1945. The thing is – Ulrich’s older brother was serving on that ship when it was hit. He was devastated and I’d been there to comfort him. It was a coded message. Are you sure you won’t try the sachertorte? I made it myself.’

  Now Latcos held out his plate, although he hated chocolate. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because, young man, I want to be tried by God and no one else. And Ulrich? Ulrich is beyond redemption.’ She leaned forward. ‘Your people nicknamed him “the Soul-less one”. They thought he was born without empathy, without a soul. Nowadays we might say psychopathic. But he let the baby live. I think it was his way of staying sane, of thinking he was in control of the situation. He wasn’t, you know. None of us were.’

  The Kantonspolizei HQ, a rectangular four-storey pale brick building with red trimmings, stood on its own opposite the river in a rather drab part of the Kasernenstrasse. Klauser’s office – on the top floor – was a small, cell-like room with one window that stared across to the tiled roof of an office block opposite, tucked away at the end of a corridor down which few ventured. A deliberate isolation on Klauser’s behalf, and he and the office had got on comfortably for years. The other detectives on the floor tolerated his eccentricities, out of respect for his age (he was sixty, after all, at least fifteen years older than anyone else) and for his record – which was faultless when it came to solving anything involving imagination and a thoroughly original perspective.

  Later that afternoon, holding a piece of landjäger sausage, Detective Klauser was just reading up on what he’d been able to discover about the von Holindt family, particularly Matthias von Holindt, when the telephone rang. I’m surprised it’s taken him this long, he thought, putting the sausage down as he glanced back at the paragraph that described the physicist as both a flute player and an avid Jethro Tull fan. Nothing like the camaraderie of a fellow fan, Klauser concluded, cheered by the thought as he waited for the telephone to ring twice more before picking the receiver up.

  ‘Grüezi…’ He deliberately made the greeting sound as colloquial and disrespectful as possible – the boss hated informality.

  ‘Detective Klauser?’ The nasal voice with its upward inflection had that terse tone of irritation most of the Zürich police department dreaded.

  ‘Chief Inspector Engels, what an honour to be called personally at my very own office.’ Klauser flicked a crumb of sausage off the desk and adjusted the photograph of his wife and son walking in the Alps – his wife, aged thirty, looked radiantly blonde and his son, aged eight, sullen even then; taken before the divorce, it was one of the only pieces of evidence he had of a happier life, and just then he needed the reminder.

  ‘It’s not an honour; it’s an inconvenience. I was pulled out of an awards ceremony by a phone call from my good friend Christoph von Holindt, who, I might add, is not a well man.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Don’t play naive with me, Klauser. You’re a maverick and I respect that, except when you step on my toes. No more interrogation of the von Holindt family without consulting me first, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, chief inspector, but a man was murdered outside their shopfront —’

  ‘The victim was a gypsy, a nobody. Besides, I have it on good authority that there was a Kuwaiti sheik in town who was having some difficulty with one of his security who’d gone missing this morning – I suspect he was just out for some target practice.’

  ‘Have you pulled him in?’

  ‘A member of my division is questioning him now. I shall keep you informed. Meanwhile – keep away from the von Holindts, Klauser.’

  Klauser smiled into the receiver. ‘Oh, I promise I have been keeping well away, sir.’ It was at least a half-truth.

  ‘Good, keep staying away, that’s an order.’ The receiver went dead. Klauser put the phone down then picked up his landjäger again – if there had been an incident with foreign security he would have heard of it.

  It had been plaguing Matthias all through the drive to the laboratory, the equation that had floated into his head in the early hours of the morning. He’d written it down on a piece of paper he’d left by the typewriter in the study but had forgotten to take it to work, and then his father and the visit from the detective had pushed it out of his mind. But it was back, screaming for attention. So he’d got into his car and turned onto the road back to Küsnacht and home, the solution knocking against the forefront of his mind like a forming rhyme at the tip of his tongue, frustratingly just out of reach.

  The ghost had been at the periphery of Liliane’s vision, smiling and gesturing for her to come with him. He’d sat with her all the way through her geography lesson, then halfway through English in his wide-brimmed black hat, his dark eyes twinkling beneath it, the moustache and gold tooth gleaming from the smile that was as real as the pen in her hand, exotic yet familiar. She’d tried to ignore him. It had been then that she’d asked permission to use the toilet.

  Half an hour later she was at the Autonome Youth Centre, at the back of the main train station, where she knew she would find Wilhelm, her boyfriend, and where she could score. Her timing, as usual, had been impeccable. Wilhelm turned up five minutes after her; more importantly he had money.

  The front door was closed but unlocked and a trail of muddy footsteps encrusted by dirty snow led into the house. Matthias tensed. He pushed the door open; music blared out and the open-plan living room was a mess: a leather jacket tossed on the floor, a half-drunk bottle of whisky in front of the fireplace and a half-eaten cheesecake next to an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. The Ramones boomed out from the stereo while an episode of Liliane’s favourite show, Tatort, played out on the muted TV screen. Where was the housekeeper? Matthias spun round, despairing at the chaos, then remembered it was her day off.

  Liliane let Willi roll the sleeve of her school shirt up. She liked the feel of his guitarist’s callused fingertips on her skin, his large-knuckled hands firm in their intent.

  ‘Cool school uniform,’ he told her, grinning. ‘Kinky.’ He pulled the tourniquet tight and tapped for a vein on the inside of her elbow, his head with the letter X shaven into the scalp bent over her. She could smell him, could smell herself on h
im: their lovemaking, cigarette smoke and his cheap cologne. She loved the danger of him, so raw, so unobtainable. Son of an Italian cabdriver and older than her by a good five years, he was her portal to a world that pushed up against the edge of life, one that promised to keep her sharp and alive. But right now she just wanted to make her ghosts disappear.

  On the stairs leading up to the bedrooms Matthias found an abandoned bra, then a pair of black stilettos. As Liliane’s laughter burst from her bedroom, Matthias’s chest started to tighten in the nausea of expectation. He raced down the corridor and tried opening the locked door; in seconds he’d kicked it open. Liliane was lying on the bed, half-dressed, a rubber tourniquet around her upper arm and, kneeling over her, a half-naked, rake-thin youth with a shaven head and a used syringe in his hand. Matthias hauled him off then threw him against the wall.

  ‘Papa!’ Liliane cringed on the bed.