The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  ‘The kind of material a man’s kerchief might be made of?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The gypsy Yojo, Klauser thought; the kerchief he was wearing at the time of his murder. He must have tracked the book down somehow, tied it to Christoph von Holindt – but why? Frau Neumann continued, ‘The book is Eberhard’s all right, but what it means I can’t tell you – there was always so much stuff going through the gallery. And Eberhard never told me much about the business. I had my hands full, you see, looking after our son.’

  ‘Do you know whether any evidence was taken from the scene of the murder?’

  ‘No, but surely it’s all in the file.’

  ‘Well, that’s the strange thing, Frau Neumann; when I checked on your husband I discovered that he had been murdered, but the investigation file was missing from the archives.’

  ‘Missing? That’s appalling. My husband just wiped out like that? Like he never existed?’

  ‘Which is exactly why it’s important to get all the facts down now.’

  She sighed. ‘My husband was killed in the gallery at around four in the afternoon; my son was with him – he was only ten at the time. Eberhard had seemed agitated that morning, but I’d just assumed he was worried about some business deal.’

  ‘Your son was a witness?’

  ‘Not exactly. He was in shock by the time the police arrived. All he could tell me and the detective who interviewed him afterwards was that there had been a ring at the door, and my husband had told him to wait in the back and not come in until the visitor was gone. Fritz saw nothing but he heard everything. He was out of his mind with fear when they found him.’

  ‘Was that usual? For your husband not to allow him to be there when there were visitors to the gallery?’

  Frau Neumann looked down. ‘Yes, Eberhard was ashamed of him. He was old-fashioned that way.’ She looked up, a plea in her eyes Klauser couldn’t quite interpret. ‘You have to understand my husband was a lot older than me.’

  Klauser studied her. She seemed to be telling the truth, yet he sensed she was holding back information. He thought about the bloodstain in the book, possibly the record of a murder captured in fatal ink.

  ‘Do you know whether your husband had business partners?’

  She leaned forward. ‘A man used to come from Germany.’ She was whispering now, clearly frightened of being overheard. ‘He stopped coming before Eberhard was murdered. His last visit was in 1961, I think – I never met him, but I had a feeling he was coming from Berlin, from the East side, just little things Eberhard would say.’

  ‘The wall went up in sixty-one.’

  ‘Exactly. I always knew when he was going to arrive because Eberhard would get nervous the day before. He once said to me if anything should happen I should look for Wilhelm Gustloff. After his death I tried the directory once but there is no Wilhelm Gustloff.’

  Klauser looked at her incredulously. ‘You don’t know who Gustloff was?’

  ‘Eberhard was a whole different generation…’

  ‘Wilhelm Gustloff was the German leader of the Nazi Party in Switzerland. In 1936 he was assassinated in Davos by a young Jewish student, after which Hitler made him an icon, a martyr for the Nazi cause.’

  ‘Detective Klauser, my husband was a Jew. Nobody knew, but he was a Jew nevertheless. Perhaps Gustloff was a metaphor for something… There is something else, just before Eberhard was murdered there seemed to be a lot more money around, as if he’d made some big sales. He never talked directly to me about it.’

  ‘Was it possible he was selling stolen art objects?’

  The woman immediately closed up. ‘I have said too much already…’ Just then they were both startled by a noise at the door.

  ‘Mutti, who is this?’ A man in his thirties, dressed in pyjamas, stood in the doorway, peering out from the shadows.

  As he leaned forward Klauser could see the distinctive features of Down Syndrome defining the man’s face. Frau Neumann got up hurriedly. ‘He’s a friend, Fritz. Now go back to your bedroom.’

  ‘Not without Teddy.’ The man’s voice was as plaintive as a child’s.

  Frau Neumann turned back to Klauser. ‘Please, excuse me a moment.’ She picked the teddy bear up then ushered him back out, the quiet tragedy of the pair closing over their departure as the room shifted, like a prism, into the next moment.

  Klauser glanced round then walked over to the antique writing bureau against the far wall. To his relief the top drawer was not locked. Inside were various papers shoved messily into the wooden compartments. A photograph, blank side up, an inscription visible, lay on top of some airmail letters. He picked it up and turned it over. It was of five young men at a table, three of them in military hats and jackets, mugging for the camera – one was in civvies, and the fifth man was showing only the back of his head. Klauser recognised only one of them: Christoph von Holindt, wearing the distinctive cap of the Swiss air force. The man sitting next to him was barely in profile, looking slightly younger with the cap of the infantry perched on his head at a rakish angle – there wasn’t enough of his face in view to place him, but wisps of red hair were clearly visible. The third man, a tall blond also in profile, appeared to be wearing the jacket of the German navy. He looked slightly older than Christoph, though even with his face turned Klauser could see the physical resemblance between the two men. The slight man sandwiched between them Klauser assumed was Eberhard Neumann but the fifth man, turned away, wearing a military beret, was also unidentifiable. It was a strange photograph almost as if it had been taken clandestinely – like a secret record. Klauser stared down, an association resonating in his mind – Air, Earth, Water… He peered closer at the beret and recognised the emblem on it as belonging to the artillery battalion of the Swiss army. Fire, he said quietly to himself. Flipping the photograph back over he read the inscription: Glücklichere Zeiten – Kronenhalle 1933.

  Somewhere in the apartment the distinctive click of a door. Quickly Klauser replaced the photograph and closed up the bureau. Within seconds he was back in the leather chair.

  A moment later Frau Neumann entered the living room.

  ‘I’m sorry; he gets upset when there are strangers in the house. So this interview is over, Detective Klauser.’ As she walked him to the front door she suddenly asked, ‘Is Engels still running the department?’

  ‘He is. Why, do you know him?’

  ‘A little. He was a good friend of Eberhard’s when he was just a young inspector. That was something I never understood: you would have thought, with a friend like that, the police might have spent a little longer trying to solve my husband’s murder.’

  Klauser turned the key in the door of his one-bedroom apartment. It was still early but already the air was peppered with police sirens, the occasional domestic and the odd beat-box blaring out either disco or Turkish ballads. But he appreciated his flat, mainly for the way it was the opposite of the immaculate townhouse his ex-wife had imposed on him. His cat, a large overweight tabby, the sole survivor of his marriage, wound his furry body round Klauser’s legs purring his usual greeting – a miaow that sounded suspiciously like an indignant welcome.

  ‘Yeah, I know, Erasmus, I’m addicted to my job and I’m a terrible father. I was a terrible husband for the same reason.’ He walked through the living room to the kitchen. He placed the book on the table, running his fingers over the embossing. Three powerful men and one unknown all associated with one murder victim, except for Christoph von Holindt, who appeared to be associated with two murder victims: Eberhard Neumann and Yojo, the gypsy. Inspector Engels wanted the case buried; more than that, he wanted Klauser buried, of that the detective was sure. There was no other way, he told himself. He’d have to risk the nice retirement he fantasised about, like a shimmering oasis just beyond the dreary outlook of his office window, and continue his investigation secretly. And there was Timo to consider – the lad had fought hard to be partnered with him, but the young detective had a wife and a ch
ild on the way; could he afford to jeopardise Timo’s career too?

  He reached into the fridge and pulled out a carton and a tin of cat food. He emptied the cat food into a dish and put it down. Erasmus was over in a minute, vacuuming down the rabbit entrails. Klauser leaned against the kitchen bench, opened the carton of orange juice and drank deeply. The facts around the priest’s murder, Galerie Neumann and the mysterious bloodstained antique book swirled in his mind, then settled in a pattern – one that required a single telephone call to expose the web that held it all together.

  ‘Bruno…’ On the other end of the line Klauser heard the sound of the receiver being knocked to the ground then the familiar growl of notoriously bad-tempered Bruno Munster, historian and independent expert for the UN. An infamous anarchist, Munster was famous for his outspoken political views and his support for the Baader-Meinhof gang – a group he insisted, to the great embarrassment of his university department, on calling revolutionaries.

  ‘Jesus, Klauser, you again.’

  ‘What do you mean me again? I haven’t spoken to you for at least six months.’

  ‘Exactly and I’m still suffering the consequences.’

  ‘I’m flattered I have some influence.’

  ‘Influence! I’m being audited. Can you believe it? Audited in Switzerland and I’m an academic, for fuck’s sake. Don’t ask me to research anyone else again, especially if they are associated with a corporate body, private or otherwise. So how do you want to fuck up my life this time?’

  ‘You worked on the government investigation into the Reichskulturkammer and their nice little business of shipping looted cultural assets into Switzerland?’

  ‘A massive can of worms, that one – most of them still crawling around the backrooms of half the galleries in Zürich, not to mention Lucerne. They were all involved. Lovely people, art dealers, too artistic to keep records. If you’re lucky there might be the provenance somewhere, or someone is actually brave enough to recognise a work. Rumour is that there are at least a hundred thousand looted art works at large.’

  Klauser whistled. ‘That’s a lot of dosh. Tell me, is 1962 significant?’

  ‘It is. That was the first year there was any real pressure, the year the world Jewish lobby started leaping up and down, the SNB freaked, and everyone suddenly got very nervous about the security and privacy of their vaults. Me, I don’t have one, but try telling that to the taxation department.’

  ‘Interesting. Did a Galerie Neumann come up in your investigation?’

  There was a pause and Klauser knew he’d struck gold.

  ‘I hate you,’ Munster growled down the line.

  ‘C’mon, professor, I have a murdered gypsy and a murdered priest on my hands.’

  ‘It was on our list; there was a series of suspect deliveries from 1937 until 1945, but what we had was little more than a rumour on paper. By the time we got around to investigating the owner had been killed in a burglary gone wrong. And after we got a call from the chief of police asking us to desist, we didn’t pursue it. In truth, the commission was so under-funded we didn’t have the manpower to investigate properly anyhow. At the time I had the sense there were some heavy hitters involved. I mean, that gallery was small; it was nothing. The perfect front.’

  ‘Any of those deliveries mention a statuette – a holy relic?’

  ‘Probably. Neumann had all kinds of weird shit: shrunken human heads, fake mermaids, buddhas, priceless Russian icons – it was what he was known for – objects of the occult. You’d be surprised at what people will pay for that rubbish. For all I know he could have been bumped off by a disgruntled customer.’

  Matthias sat at the kitchen bench nursing a large cup of black coffee, a steaming plate of rösti the housekeeper had just made sitting before him, battling a growing panic about how he was going to keep the laboratory running. It was past eleven in the morning and he’d slept in, the stress of the fundraiser he guessed. He was sure he’d made a hash of it; and there was the issue of ethics. A backer without strings simply doesn’t exist, he concluded ruefully. I have no choice but to sell. If he liquidised his current stock in the Holindt Watch Company he would be set up for years – and he only needed a few more months. But that would totally alienate his father. Matthias owned over ten per cent, and he knew exactly who to sell them to: Wim Jollak, who, apart from Christoph himself, was the other major shareholder. Jollak, Matthias believed, was the only one young and innovative enough to understand the threat of the electronic luxury watches now flooding the market.

  ‘You’re up late?’ Johanna, the housekeeper, stood before him in her customary black blouse, skirt and white collar, her gold cross flat on her wide bosom.

  ‘We had the fundraiser yesterday; I gave myself the morning off to recover. Did Liliane get off to school this morning?’

  ‘School? It’s Thursday, she never goes in on Thursday mornings – religious study, remember? You told her that was okay, although I disapprove. Shall I get her up?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I expect she’ll make her own way down in a minute.’

  ‘So are you going to eat that beautiful plate of rösti?’

  ‘Sorry, Johanna, I’m just distracted.’ He picked up his fork and began eating.

  ‘When are you not? You need a new woman, you do.’ In her early fifties, she had been with him since he was first married. She took both her own widowhood and Catholicism seriously and after Marie’s accident it had been Johanna’s stoic pragmatism that had carried the family through the initial grief and shock.

  ‘That’s the last thing on my mind, right now.’

  ‘Maybe so, but you need to notice the outside world. Which reminds me, last night I saw something, just outside the house. A gypsy…’ She failed to keep the disgust out of her voice. ‘Hiding behind a tree, just staring over this way.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘I think he was planning to break in. But the strange thing is, Herr von Holindt, he wasn’t interested in any of the other houses. So why this one? It’s not the biggest.’

  ‘Firstly, you don’t know he was checking the house out. Secondly, I have a state-of-the-art security system, including a camera over the front door. And thirdly, in this town if he is a gypsy he’s a gypsy king with a net value of at least a hundred million, so I doubt he’d bother burgling us.’

  Johanna remained stony-faced. ‘This is no joking matter, sir. Those people are not to be trusted; they don’t belong here.’

  Matthias was just about to launch into a defence of plurality when the doorbell interrupted him.

  ‘That’ll be the church, collecting money…’ he sighed.

  ‘Are you in?’

  ‘To anyone except my father,’ Matthias replied and, to steel himself for another possible encounter, took a deep swig of coffee.

  Liliane, hangover throbbing at her temples, stood at her bedroom window, staring down at the garden path. She’d climbed out of bed after hearing a car pull up, hoping it would be her grandfather. He had the habit of spontaneously turning up to take her for a stroll along the waterfront. Together they would talk about the state of the world, Christoph carefully circumventing any of Liliane’s emotional problems. Instead they would chat about the Middle East, the oil crisis and how it might affect the world politically, the escapades of the Holindt Watch Company’s latest clientele, anything to distract Liliane, Christoph making his granddaughter laugh with anecdotes about the impossible demands of the rich and famous while she would regale him with her dreams of how she wanted to have her own rock band, perhaps go to a music school in New York or London, all of which he would listen to without judgement, something she loved him for, and something she did not have with her father.

  Remembering, she stared down, pressing her pounding forehead against the cool glass, expecting Cristoph’s tall, stooped figure to appear at the top of the path. Instead, a heavy-set man around sixty appeared, wearing an old battered leather coat with a briefcase under one arm
. Something about his air of bemused resignation was vaguely familiar. Detective Klauser – he’d sat in on her interrogation last year when she had been arrested for possession. Unlike the other detectives, he hadn’t been patronising and had actually been quite friendly. But he was still a cop. And what was he doing here?

  She rushed to the leather jacket she’d been wearing the night before and found the cocaine she had wrapped in some silver foil. She stepped into the en suite bathroom and taped it to the inside of the toilet cistern. Putting on a dressing gown, she made her way to the landing and sat on the top step, looking down between the wooden slats of the staircase as the housekeeper let the detective in and led him to the kitchen. Liliane then crept down the stairs and settled in an armchair near the half-open door.

  This was not how Klauser had imagined a scion of the von Holindt dynasty to live. The house was very contemporary with its low ceiling and sweeping wooden floors that seemed to be designed around the views of the town and Zürichsee below, but it wasn’t palatial or impersonal and it was this sense of homeliness that he now felt he had intruded upon.