The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  The young girl pushed past him, only inches away and he could smell her perfume, her scent. She was far better-looking in the flesh than in the photograph. You’d never guess she was under eighteen. It wasn’t just the heavy eye make-up or face powder, it was her poise. There was a confidence and a defiance that lent her maturity. But what really amazed him was how different she looked from her father. Where Matthias was blond she was a striking brunette with thick black hair, pale skin and black eyes. Only the shape of her features betrayed any of Matthias von Holindt’s genes. But the most erotic aspect was her anger: angry young girls were somewhat of a speciality of his – a fatal propensity, he noted dryly to himself. The girl had muscled her way between the pimply-faced guitarist and the blonde and they appeared to be arguing. Destin moved closer.

  ‘Go away, Liliane, I’m busy!’ Willi slipped his arm around the blonde and turned his back to Liliane. Furious, she pulled his arm off the other girl.

  ‘Not with her, you’re not!’

  Willi swung round and pulled her aside. ‘This is so uncool. I’ll see you another time, but tonight I’m with Flossi, okay?’ He turned back to the gloating blonde and began walking backstage.

  ‘Wait, Willi!’ Liliane tried to follow but a bouncer blocked her path. Just then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  She swung round. The man was older, strikingly handsome, with a French accent. The most noticeable thing was his eyes: one was green while the other was blue.

  ‘Forget about him; he doesn’t know what he’s missing. Can I buy you a drink?’

  Liliane held out her vodka. ‘I have a drink already.’

  ‘Another one won’t hurt, assuming you’re of age,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Do I look that young?’ She kept her tone confrontational, but switched to fluent French, to Destin’s delight.

  ‘Total jail bait,’ he countered teasingly.

  ‘But that just makes it more exciting, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So let’s get that drink.’

  She turned and began walking back to the bar, Destin following. She slipped back onto the stool, thrusting her breasts forward. It felt good to be provocative with an older man like this; it made her feel powerful, in control. Fuck Willi.

  ‘Barman, another vodka for the lady.’ The bartender was over in an instant.

  Liliane was impressed; it always seemed to take hours for Wilhelm to get bar staff’s attention and it was always her who seemed to have to pay. It was nice being with a man who had money, who wasn’t her father or grandfather.

  Destin watched her sip her drink. ‘So is this the best Zürich can offer?’

  ‘Afraid so. Club Hey used to have punk bands a few years ago, Willi told me. It was him that got me into punk, he’s a few years older than me. Guess I missed my time.’

  ‘You should have visited New York, the Mudd Club, CBGB on Bowery – it was fantastic, totally happening. Saw The Sex Pistols at the Hundred Club in London once; that was truly amazing.’

  She looked at him with some curiosity; there was something paradoxical about him that she didn’t understand but found attractive anyway. For example his indeterminable age. She guessed he was in his thirties, perhaps almost as old as her father, but he felt much younger, in both his attitudes and sensibility. Then there were those strange hypnotic eyes of his… they fascinated her. It was almost as if the two sides of his face didn’t quite match, like a puzzle that had slipped. Somehow this oddity underpinned all the other contradictions, like the expensive watch and the tattoo she now noticed half-covered by his T-shirt sleeve: a skull and crossbones with some Latin motto written underneath.

  ‘God, I would give anything to have been there. Where are you from?’

  ‘Originally Marseilles, but I travel all over the world for work.’

  ‘What are you, a spy?’

  ‘A thief and an assassin,’ he cracked back with a straight face, ‘with great taste in music, and women.’ He lifted his glass up to toast her. ‘I’m Destin Viscon, and you?’

  ‘Liliane von Holindt.’

  ‘Holindt? The watches, right?’

  ‘My grandfather’s company. I’m the black sheep of the family. My father doesn’t know what to do with me.’

  ‘I think I’ve read about your father. Isn’t he a scientist?’ He kept it nonchalant, verging on indifferent. It was almost too easy, the way she took the hook.

  ‘A physicist, famous.’

  ‘And there was something about your mother…’

  ‘She died in an avalanche, skiing. The papers were all over it – “What a tragedy, glamorous young wife of Switzerland’s most promising scientist and financial officer of the Holindt Watch Company… blah blah blah”. It’s like that, being a von Holindt. I hate it. Our lives are public property. Anyway, Papa went weird after that. I mean, he’s a great physicist and all that. But now it’s all he breathes and lives apart from his fucking flute-playing. He’s a Jethro Tull fan – how embarrassing is that? Anyway, we’re completely different. I’m like an annoying piece of furniture to him that won’t stay in its place.’

  ‘I’m sure he loves you.’

  ‘I’m not. They say if he succeeds in his research he’s going to change the world, but he’s not even functional as a human being.’ The drink was making her tell him things she’d never told anyone, and the cocaine meant she couldn’t stop, her resentments spilling out of her in a cathartic stream. ‘He’s really moral. You know, anti-war, anti-big corporations, but it’s hypocrisy, because my grandfather has been funding most of Dad’s research up until now, and the Holindt Watch Company is a big corporation. I mean, what’s so ethical about making watches for very rich people, right? And Granddad’s a borderline fascist, a real racist frankly. I love him but hate him too, if you know what I mean. He expects Papa to take over the company when he dies, but it’s not going to happen and Opa hates that.’

  ‘Really?’ Behind her back he indicated to the barman that he wanted another vodka. It was next to her in seconds.

  ‘Once, after I’d had a really big argument with my father, I broke into his laboratory late one night.’

  ‘How did you do that?’ Destin had to be careful, sound interested but not too interested.

  ‘I stole his keys.’ She downed her third drink, her words beginning to slur slightly. ‘I was so sick of hearing what a genius he was. Anyhow, the lab was really creepy at night. God knows what I expected to see, maybe glowing bits of electricity springing around, but actually it was really boring. He never knew and I never told him.’ Her gaze wandered over to the stage. The band had started playing again. ‘C’mon, let’s dance.’ Liliane took his hand and led him to the dance floor, determined to show Wilhelm what he was giving up by taking the blonde home that night.

  Destin let her pull him to the front of the stage. Soon a circle formed round them as they danced provocatively, Liliane rubbing her crotch and breasts against him, her breath on his face smelling of limes, her skin incredibly soft under his fingers. The game she was playing amused Destin, especially as her boyfriend on stage seemed just as determined to ignore her wild antics. I could take you and snap you, he thought. But there was something a little too frenetic about her that made him hesitate. She might be easy to manipulate but she was also unpredictable and that could be both an advantage and a liability.

  By the time Liliane and Destin left the club it had started to snow, big thick flakes. Liliane thought they were beautiful, clean, new. A white world, one she wanted to disappear into, to shrink down as small as a snowflake then melt against the heat of someone’s skin, she thought as she held out her hand to catch the damp flakes.

  ‘The car’s over here.’

  She followed Destin, stumbling in her stilettos towards an E-type Jaguar sports car; nothing seemed to matter – she was so intoxicated she felt like she was functioning in the past tense, like all of this had happened before. It was a fantastically liberating feeling. ‘Let’s go to your house.
C’mon, it’s not even two yet,’ she murmured flirtatiously, touching his crotch.

  ‘I’m driving you back home. You’re drunk; I don’t take advantage of drunken women.’ He removed her hand.

  ‘You’re just worried about being arrested…’

  ‘Arrested?’ He laughed then pulled away from the kerb. ‘Oh, ma chérie, I live above the law.’

  ‘That sounds fantastic, living above the law.’ She leaned her head back on the seat. It felt good being drunk, obliterating all the images, the betrayal she felt over Wilhelm, the anger towards her father. She could sit there for ever watching the night sky flash past as the sports car purred down the narrow streets.

  ‘Will I see you again?’ she wondered out loud.

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘Yes. It will be our secret. Our secret from the rest of the world.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Destin replied, shifting gears with a triumphant air. ‘Now where do you live?’

  Küsnacht was cold but the air was fresh and there was forest around and between the elegant, expensive houses where Latcos knew he could disappear against the shadows of the trees. He’d been watching the house, with its large glass square windows and flat wooden roof, for hours. What he was watching for he didn’t exactly know.

  Keja had sent him, but he had felt the calling himself, although he would never admit it to her. It was more an impulse, the sense that whatever had drawn him there would manifest when it was ready. There was a right timing for everything, his mother had always told him, but you have to put yourself in the way of it. This was Luck; this was Fate. Latcos wasn’t sure whether he really believed in such matters. The Rom were lucky when they were free, but at the last Springfire festival he’d heard stories of arrests, torture and murder, in Romania, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Heard of young Rom men beaten to death by gangs of youths, caravans driven off farms they had visited for decades. Was this Luck? Was this Fate?

  And what about his uncle’s murder?

  They’d buried Yojo the day before; a gypsy band had walked ahead of the coffin loaded onto a van covered in flowers, while Keja and Latcos and Rom friends followed wailing and grieving. Back in Romania Yojo’s house had been closed up, the door painted so that his spirit would not recognise it if he decided to return home. His possessions had been sold as was marime and it was now forbidden to mention him by name. All had been properly executed according to custom and the thought gave Latcos some comfort. Nevertheless, some of his uncle’s soul had entered him. He could feel him now, under his skin, wanting him to find the taken child, to reclaim what had been theirs. He shivered. The first fingers of dawn had begun to climb up from behind the pine trees and he was just about to walk away when a white sports car turned into the quiet cul de sac. Latcos stepped back into darkness. There were two figures in the car, a man and a young girl. He watched as it pulled up several houses down from the one he was watching. The young girl climbed out, unsteady on high heels. To Latcos’s eyes she looked like a prostitute, with her skin-tight T-shirt, her short skirt and torn stockings, as she tottered drunkenly down the pavement towards him. Latcos held his breath as the girl walked past only inches away, the sweet musk of her perfume drifting across. Somewhere behind him there was a sudden rustling in the low scrub – a bird scrounging for its breakfast. Liliane swung, stumbling, a bangle slipping off her wrist as she steadied herself against a tree trunk. It fell silently into the snow, unnoticed. Latcos found himself staring at her face as she looked blindly back, not seeing him at all in the shadows. The sight made his heart leap in his ribcage; he knew her as he might know his own sister – he knew that beauty.

  Holding his body and his beating heart as still as he could, Latcos watched the girl turn back and ascend the steps leading up to the front door. Just before she stepped into the house she paused and looked back as if she might have sensed his presence after all. It took all his willpower not to call out to her.

  After the door was closed, he steadied himself against the tree trunk; he’d found the right house.

  Carefully, he retraced the girl’s footsteps. The bangle was halfway along the path, edge up in the snow, its gold a glinting half-circle. Latcos reached down and slipped it into his pocket.

  FIVE

  The morning breeze was still coming off the mountains. A shivering Klauser stared up at the apartment. It was characteristic of the houses built for the bourgeoisie in the Hottingen district. A mansion that had seen better days, Klauser noted as he climbed up the steep steps, the book he’d found hidden in the priest’s mattress now under his arm carefully wrapped in brown paper. He reached the top out of breath and stared at the tiny typed names next to each buzzer. There had to be at least four flats in the one building; squinting, he saw that Frau Neumann’s was at the top. He sighed. It was going to be a long climb.

  Earlier he’d driven over to Rindermarkt 56, only to discover a kebab shop had replaced the Eberhard Neumann Galerie. The Turkish owner, still in his dressing gown and annoyed at being disturbed at eight in the morning, relaxed only after Klauser reassured him he wasn’t from the Department of Immigration. He claimed he had originally taken over the lease from a widow, who sold him the premises after her husband had been murdered. With a shrug, the man told Klauser he’d initially carried on running it as an antiques gallery, selling Turkish rugs and artefacts, but had to downgrade to kebabs as they sold better. Klauser had left with Frau Neumann’s address and a free lamb and sauerkraut kebab for breakfast that was still repeating on him as he pressed the buzzer.

  ‘So, has some new clue turned up?’ Frau Neumann, a diminutive woman in her late fifties squeezed into a tight day dress, asked as she opened the door. She didn’t seem happy at the intrusion to her morning.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Klauser answered, waiting to be invited in.

  ‘But when you rang and said you were a detective…’

  ‘I am a detective.’ Klauser flashed his badge. Taking the initiative, he pushed past her into the tiny entrance hall. Somewhere further in the apartment a door was slammed shut. ‘I won’t be long, Frau Neumann. I just need to ask you a few questions about your deceased husband and something that might have once belonged to him.’ He tried smiling but she scowled back, unresponsive.

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘No.’ Klauser, abandoning the last vestiges of protocol, stepped into the small living room that led off the entrance hall. Despite the worn carpet and décor there was an antique case with several expensive-looking old volumes on the walnut shelves and a rather fine candelabra on the mantelpiece. He sat down on a leather armchair, the wrapped book resting on his lap.

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ Frau Neumann said sarcastically as she sat opposite on the couch. He noticed a large old teddy bear propped up in its corner. With one glass eye missing, it seemed to stare back at him with the same aggressive expression as Frau Neumann.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘I will,’ then pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Fingers itching, he reluctantly replaced the packet back into his pocket. ‘Your husband was an antiques dealer. Murdered in 1963, wasn’t he?’

  ‘The detectives working on the case decided it was a robbery gone wrong. But he was shot at close range, in the gallery. The door hadn’t even been forced.’

  ‘He was German, your husband?’

  ‘Naturalised in 1934. He loved Switzerland. He didn’t deserve to die like that, like a dog.’ She crossed her arms over her large bosom, her face settling into a mask of defensiveness. ‘He wasn’t just an ordinary antiques dealer, you know; he had a doctorate specialising in theology and history – once upon a time he was one of the foremost suppliers of holy relics and objets d’occult in the whole of Switzerland. And yet they dismissed his case as an arbitrary accident.’

  ‘You obviously think it wasn’t.’ The woman’s face tightened even further, and she chose not to reply.

  Klauser pulled the book out fr
om its wrapping. ‘Do you recognise this? The address on the cover suggests it was once your husband’s property.’

  She stared at it, startled. ‘Where did you get this book?’ She failed to keep the emotion out of her voice.

  ‘That’s not important. I just want to know whether you recognise it.’

  ‘Recognise it? It sat on that counter over there for twenty years until two weeks ago. We had a burglary and the strange thing is the only thing taken was that book.’

  ‘Did you report it?’

  ‘No, I have low expectations of detectives. I did however find a strand of yellow cloth caught on an old nail near the counter.’