‘His birthday?’
‘Ja, he was born the same day as Hitler – not the same year of course. Ulrich saw that as something special.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a cigarette packet. After offering one to Matthias he lit up himself. ‘You were a quiet baby – too quiet. At first I was worried that you might be sick. It had started to become hard to find enough to eat; I had to bribe a local farmer for milk for you, but luckily we found a courier, a local woman who could take you across the border and —’
Matthias wasn’t interested in such details. ‘What happened to the gold bars after the war?’
Rudolf exhaled wearily. ‘I’m not entirely sure. He had sent us more coins in 1943, which we also turned into bars, and I think Ulrich arranged for them to go to a Swiss bank before the war ended.’
‘And tell me, did you ever see any of the other artefacts Ulrich had confiscated from the gypsies? Jewellery, amulets – a statuette they called the statuette of Sara la Kali?’
‘I never saw it personally. Your father spoke of it once. He said it was the one puzzle that had eluded him, and that it would, maybe, cost him his life.’ He patted Matthias’s hand as if he were still a child, ignoring Matthias’s slight recoil. ‘You mustn’t condemn us; we were thinking of your future. We thought by giving you away to Christoph von Holindt you would never be known as the son of a high-ranking SS officer. But you must understand I have had no real contact with Christoph since the end of the war – he is an innocent in all of this.’
‘So where is my real father now?’
Rudolf sighed. ‘As far as I know Ulrich killed himself the day Germany surrendered.’
NINE
Marktgasse 13. Destin peered out of the window of his E-type at Baph Records. Judging from the display of punk memorabilia and posters in the window, he was at the right place. According to his file, it was one of the only record stores in Zürich that sold punk records – including Neue Deutsche Welle and Swiss punk. He was certain he’d find Liliane there on a Saturday afternoon. He’d been right, he’d already seen her through the shop window, browsing the racks of albums. Like a good hunter stalking his prey, he waited patiently behind the wheel, ignoring the assortment of wildly clad youths adorned with piercings, mohawks and the obligatory bondage trousers exiting the store; some gazing in open admiration at the car, others giving it a calculated sneer. Finally Liliane stepped out of the door, petulant in black eye-shadow, a cigarette already lit between her fingers. Fascinated, he watched her through the side mirror. It was as if he owned her already, so well did he know that sense of alienation, of being the outsider. He opened the car door.
‘Liliane!’
Surprised, she looked over and smiled, the sullen expression breaking into undeniable beauty. She climbed into the car. ‘Destin! Are you shadowing me?’
‘Didn’t you notice?’ he joked, but Liliane frowned. She had had the sense she’d been followed for the last few days but had assumed she was imagining it. Now she wasn’t sure. She glanced at the Frenchman; his face was alive with amusement. Could she trust him? She didn’t know and in that moment she didn’t care – it was just exciting to be treated like an adult by one of her father’s peers, to be in that expensive car with a handsome man.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Home. I was just passing and thought you might appreciate a lift.’
‘We could just keep driving, run away.’
‘I don’t think your father would appreciate that.’
‘I don’t care! I’m sixteen soon and that is definitely adulthood. Oh, and I discovered my grandfather is definitely an ex-Nazi.’ She tossed it out casually – a deliberate attempt to shock. ‘Yeah, the great Christoph von Holindt did business with the Nazis during the war. That was another happy families moment.’
Destin glanced at her. ‘Liliane, you have to remember that the Germans almost won the war; your grandfather was probably just hedging his bets.’
‘That’s no excuse! I mean, I knew some of his attitudes were a little politically incorrect, but he’s like a God to some of the charities and now it turns out he’s a big fat hypocrite.’
‘Cut him a break. We can’t all be angels a hundred per cent of the time.’
‘I still can’t forgive him.’
‘War is made simple after the fact. It’s never that black and white at the time.’
‘Yes, it is.’
Destin smiled to himself, accelerated round a corner, the power exhilarating under his foot. Gaining her trust was too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. He could even start feeling sorry for Matthias von Holindt, but then he wasn’t a sentimental man.
‘You’re a smart girl, you know that?’
Secretly thrilled by the compliment, she grimaced. ‘No kidding.’
In Küsnacht Matthias had watched the pale winter sun sink below the fir trees as he waited for Liliane. He’d arrived back from Basel late afternoon and had missed her. He’d been sitting there by the table that used to be his wife’s desk, trying to develop some kind of strategy by which he could look his daughter in the eye and not have to lie to her about her ancestry. He himself could barely assimilate all of the facts, but Liliane? She was too unstable. A cup of cold coffee and an uneaten gipfeli sat beside him. The housekeeper had left it there for him over an hour ago, but he still hadn’t moved. It was as if he was waiting for all the pieces of his childhood, all the unanswered questions of his adolescence, to settle back into a new jigsaw, one that finally made sense.
The sound of a sports car screeching to a stop outside jolted him out of his reverie. He turned to the window and watched amazed as Destin Viscon, the Frenchman from the press conference, stepped out of the driver’s side and walked round to open the passenger door. What was he doing outside Matthias’s house in the evening? To his horror, then Liliane climbed out of the car and reached up to kiss the Frenchman on the cheek. Fury gripped Matthias; didn’t the man know how young she was? Galvanised, he started for the front door. He reached it just in time to hear the car roar off. Liliane, still smiling, was standing on the front steps.
‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ he demanded.
‘What are you talking about? I just got a lift back from town, that’s all.’ She pushed past him and threw her bag onto the couch, and then walked through the open-plan reception room into the kitchen area. Matthias followed.
‘I know that man. He was at my press conference!’
‘You’re lying. I met him at a club.’ Nonchalantly she pulled open the fridge and helped herself to a can of Pepsi.
‘Wake up! He’s using you to get to me. You are not to see him, do you understand?’
Ignoring him, she wrenched off the ring pull, froth bubbling onto the floor. ‘What are you frightened of – that I’ll seduce him?’
‘Liliane, you’re out of your league. A man who sinks that low is dangerous.’
‘You’re wrong. Destin likes me; he treats me like a woman.’ She stared up at him defiantly.
‘You’re fifteen – there’s so much you don’t understand yet.’
‘Yeah, like how my grandfather collaborated with the Germans?’
‘It wasn’t that simple.’
‘It was, and you know it was! Why don’t you just trust me and tell me the truth? I’m not an idiot.’
‘You have no idea…’ Suddenly defeated, Matthias sank down onto a stool, covering his face with his hands.
Shocked, Liliane froze. ‘Papa?’ she whispered and walked over to him. ‘Papa?’ The touch of her arms over his shoulders made him break down even further. She held him tighter. ‘Papa, whatever it is, it will be okay – really it will.’
The next morning was Sunday and the streets were empty as Matthias made his way to the laboratory. Inside it was quiet; the fantastic silence of a building emptied of people.
When he left early that morning Liliane was still sleeping. The night before they had talked; he’d found it incredibly difficult, as if b
y telling her the truth he’d betray her somehow. He couldn’t shake off the sensation of guilt, as if he’d failed her by not being Christoph and Elsa’s genetic son. So he told her that, yes, he’d discovered that Christoph von Holindt had had dealings with the Nazis and that his relationship with Christoph might not be all that it had appeared. He had not told her about Keja and the truth about his own identity. The hardest part of the conversation was when Liliane demanded to know what he intended to do about Christoph’s war record. It was then that Matthias found himself without words.
At least here in the laboratory were laws of physics he felt he still had some control over – immutable, safe structures. This is what he would hang his identity on – this security would have to be enough. He sketched out the molecular structure of a ceramic alloy that had some conductive properties next to another one that was already drawn out. It looked as if, with a little alteration, they might just slide and interlock to make a whole new molecule – one that might improve the superconducting properties of the structure. By the time he’d finished he knew what he was going to do about Christoph’s war record.
The sun streamed in through the fir trees lighting up the aluminium edging of the caravans, a line of sheets and pillows hung over a low wooden fence that edged the site, bedding the Sinti women had draped over to air – now billowing like sails in the pine-scented breeze. Keja sat with her eyes closed, nestled in a cane armchair Latcos had set up for her near an open campfire, covered by a heavy embroidered blanket. A raven, attracted to the bright colours and hungry for crumbs of bread, hopped across the snow towards her feet. Keja dozed on, secretly wrestling with a matrix of pain that laced its way across her body in short sharp bursts. Inside her head she was singing the agony away with a healing chant her grandmother had taught her. Chasing the red-blue lines back behind a soft green meadow, a field from her childhood, a place where she could move without pain for at least a few hours. Outside her head, the sound of women chatting happily among themselves came and went: the Sinti women bringing back water containers from the tap. The winter sunlight warmed her face and the sharp fresh mountain air brought strength to her limbs. She opened her eyes; the raven cocked its head in curiosity towards her.
‘Hello, sister,’ she said in Romanes to the bird which, encouraged, hopped closer.
From where she sat she could see Latcos by the roadside, the stand where he’d set up his copper pots as well as some antiques and a copper still – objects he’d brought with him on the trip to sell. He had just finished a negotiation with a man who was pulling away with a large copper pot in the back of his car. Feeling his mother’s gaze he turned and waved a handful of Swiss franc bills triumphantly in her direction.
‘Is the pain any less?’ Latcos, now by her side, lit up a cigarette as he kept one eye on the stall.
Keja sighed. ‘It is like a horse that refuses to be broken: one minute it is on the ground, the next back on its feet. But it’s quiet for now. You’ve spoken to him, haven’t you?’
Latcos avoided Keja’s piercing gaze.
‘It is hard for him to suddenly learn he is pas Rom; he is like a prince in his own world – what would he want from ours?’
Keja reached out for her youngest son’s hand. ‘You have done well, Latcos. He will come to us now; you have made a path he will take when he’s ready.’ At their feet the raven took flight.
Klauser was watching the football. It was what he did every Sunday, a way of staving off the loneliness and he often wondered how many divorced men in his position did the same – a whole scattered community clustered like hermit crabs around their TVs, the reflected glories of their favourite players flickering across their faces in black and white. Did they stay pinned to the couch and the telephone on the slim chance their estranged son or daughter might phone, like he did? It did not bear thinking about. There was a roar from the box as the commentary grew more excited. His team, the Grasshopper Club, were playing a friendly with arch rival Servette FC in Geneva. Erasmus was purring contentedly on his lap, oblivious to the drama playing out on the screen. Suddenly the cat was flung unceremoniously across the room as Klauser leaped to his feet – GC had scored the winning goal in injury time. Perhaps he would take himself out for a celebratory dinner after all that night – it was still Sunday.
‘And I might even get a piece of real fish for you,’ he promised the indignant animal, now looking up at him, fur bristling.
Outside it was almost sunset.
TEN
Helen put down the telephone somewhat irritated. She was running late for her first Monday morning lecture. Professor von Holindt had now actually called her requesting a meeting, having been given her name when he’d contacted the anthropology department asking for a Romany specialist. It was a strange coincidence, that accidental encounter. But Helen had learned through life and her studies to distrust coincidence. She was one of those people who believed everything happened for a reason. People came into one’s life for a purpose – the trick was to direct the encounter so that it was beneficial and not a trigger for the usual emotional chaos she’d found charismatic men tended to cause. The challenge was her own chemical reaction to Herr Professor von Holindt. She’d made a vow to herself not to be tempted to get involved with any more men; her last affair – with a married professor – had ended disastrously.
Steeling herself against such temptation, Helen glanced at the paper she’d been writing – a lecture on the influence of migration on language in nomadic people. She’d been citing examples of Romanes tracking back to Sanskrit and the Ur-Rom as an illustration, but now it was difficult to concentrate. She had to finish the lecture by the end of the day but the physicist had insisted it was urgent that he talk to her. Who the hell does he think he is? she thought, trying to dismiss fragments of their accidental meeting: the band of green that his gaze had become, framed by those high flat cheekbones, the bemused irony that had played around his mouth. She stared at the half-written paper – the words jumping like wilful sheep, impossible to herd into order. Why would a physicist want to come to talk to her about an artefact – an historical artefact? What was the big mystery? He’d been deliberately vague on the telephone, almost as if he was worried someone was listening in. ‘Damn him,’ she said out loud, ‘if he thinks he can get round me with his charm, he’s wrong,’ then slammed her folder shut.
Klauser stood by the office window staring at a pigeon trying to mount another one on the narrow guttering that broke the monotony of the brick wall opposite. He was wondering about what hormonal madness had triggered such unseasonable lust in the bird that was having trouble trying to find a grip on its indifferent mate, wings flapping wildly. On the one hand, the detective pondered, it could be sheer stupidity, a kind of disconnect to the material world around it and the fact that it was in the dead of winter and spring was at least two months away. On the other hand it could be a defiant stand against the dictates of Time, a Fuck You to the confines of Youth and to the onset of reproductive oblivion. The pigeon, after all, looked scrappy and old, its neck feathers grimy and ruffled, and Klauser couldn’t help relating to its desperate machismo. He often used to feel like that in the last months of his marriage, when he would try to make love to his wife in an attempt to stave off the growing gulf of alienation between them. His tactics never worked. Thank God Celine displayed enthusiasm at his overtures; he might be paying her but at least she achieved orgasm – which was more than his wife ever did. Which brought him back to the pigeon: did female pigeons orgasm? The male pigeon didn’t seem to care. That’s evolution for you, Klauser concluded, then pondered whether, in fact, the pigeon might be more highly evolved than Homo sapiens in these matters?
Perplexed, he took out his yo-yo and started spinning as he stared at the telephone. Why hadn’t Matthias von Holindt contacted him? Had he confronted Christoph von Holindt with the book of antique clocks yet? What had happened at the company’s anniversary dinner that had made Liliane von Holindt leave so earl
y? Klauser was sorely tempted to ring Matthias directly but he knew it would be better to wait, let the physicist do some of his own investigation prompted by guilt and horror. Besides, Matthias would have access to company files that would take Klauser weeks to procure – that’s if he actually stood any chance at all of getting past Christoph von Holindt’s powerful friends in the Stadtrat. And there were other avenues to explore. Now, having reached a decision, the detective pocketed his yo-yo and walked over to the door, locked it and pulled down the old paper blind to cover the glass. Then he reached up to the top shelf of the narrow metal bookcase to lift down a thick volume entitled The Collected Works of Erasmus. Inside, the centre had been neatly hollowed out to conceal pages and notes lifted from cases he’d worked in the past – the unresolved cases, the ones that had troubled him, the victims of which floated aimlessly in his dreams, like women he’d slept with and thought he’d forgotten. He found what he was looking for, carefully held together by a paperclip.
The Stolen Page 14