The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  ‘My father’s brother built this caravan for Keja. He was a master carpenter,’ Latcos said, holding the flame to the gas ring of the camping stove. ‘It’s not much but it will heat the place quickly. So, since you’ve come this far you might as well meet the rest of the family. These photographs were taken by my mother’s second cousin from another familiya. Apart from my uncle he was the only man to survive the war. The rest were shot by Ulrich Vosshoffner’s men, after the statuette and my mother were taken.’

  He unhooked the larger photograph from the wall and laid it on the table in front of Matthias. A group shot – a family gathered together in the centre of a camp – it looked as if it were at least fifty years ago: a man in his thirties, handsome and short with a proud bearing, a hat pushed back on his forehead, stood in the centre of the family group. A woman, sharp-featured with high cheekbones and huge black eyes stood beside him. At their feet sat five children, but it was the girl in the centre who attracted Matthias’s gaze; he recognised her immediately. Latcos pointed to the man.

  ‘Our grandfather. This photo was taken in 1938 in the Ukraine. He would have been about thirty-six years old here. He was also a great coppersmith and horseman. And his guitar-playing could make the birds stop singing, according to my mother. I, of course, never met him.’ He pointed to a youth of about fifteen kneeling in front of the other children. ‘That is Yojo, and that…’ his finger moved along to the twelve-year-old girl next to him.

  ‘… is my mother, Keja,’ Matthias said, anticipation rattling through his body uncomfortably.

  ‘You might have some of our blood, but you are a horse with the head of a cat, a lost soul, a man who falls between two cracks, someone who has no clan,’ Latcos said imperiously.

  ‘I know I was born from evil, from an act of rape. But I want to amend that. I want to right the wrongs, bring both the gold and the statuette back to the family.’

  Latcos lit a cigarette. Exhaling, he filled the caravan with smoke.

  ‘Noble sentiments, but why should I trust you? I think your Swiss family might have murdered my uncle already. There are dark secrets kept by powerful forces, more powerful than you or I, so tell me why I should join with you?’

  Matthias breathed in the sweet smell of the thick coffee, and the musk of Latcos’s clove cigarette as well as the fresh forest air filtering in under a crack in the window – all gave him the impression of a timelessness, or a time he’d lived before but couldn’t remember. He didn’t know the man in front of him, but he trusted him, saw some of his own reticence in the young gypsy’s countenance. And Matthias needed to voice his experiences of the last few days, and by voicing them, give them a greater reality, a solidity, and so he began.

  By the time he’d finished, the afternoon had darkened outside to a cobalt blue and the caravan was filled with flickering shadows. Latcos had listened in absolute silence. It hadn’t been easy, but now that Matthias had finished he felt lighter, as if he no longer had to carry the burden of shame and confusion alone. But as, in silence, Latcos lit a small brass oil lamp and placed it on the table between them, Matthias began to panic. Had he miscalculated Latcos’s reaction?

  Finally the young gypsy spoke. ‘You did well, phral.’ He leaned forward and stared into Matthias’s eyes. ‘But what if I tell you your blood father still lives?’

  Something between fear and excitement passed through Matthias’s body like a shiver.

  ‘Ulrich Vosshoffner? How do you know? Do you have evidence?’

  ‘Not physical evidence, but the nun I told you about, the one who took you from my mother, she was convinced he still lives, in East Germany, under the alias of Pieter Schmidt.’

  ‘I must see him!’ Matthias burst out. ‘He could tell us where the statuette and gold are hidden.’

  ‘And why would he tell us that voluntarily?’

  ‘Who says it would be voluntarily?’

  Latcos smiled, a gold tooth in his upper jaw catching the lamplight. ‘The two of us are one on this – and then you will get your redemption one way or another.’

  They were interrupted by the murmur of female voices outside. Leaning over, Latcos gripped Matthias’s arm. ‘It’s my mother – not a word about Ulrich Vosshoffner still being alive, understand?’

  Matthias nodded as the door was pushed open, and a tiny black-haired woman stepped in, her long skirt swishing against the floor. Exhausted by the effort of climbing up the steps she rested her arm against the door handle without looking up. Matthias stood politely, his heart pounding in his chest.

  ‘Dej, he’s come,’ Latcos murmured in Romanes, his own face tense in expectation.

  The old woman looked up at Matthias and gasped, Latcos catching her arm as she stumbled in shock. Then, straightening, she took one of his hands, huge against her tiny olive-skinned fingers and Matthias felt a tiny bolt of electricity, a kind of familiarity shoot through him and, to his amazement, he found himself struggling against tears. Keja, pretending not to notice, turned his large hands over, examining them with fascination.

  ‘You might look like him, but the hands, the mouth and the heart are mine. Although you were forged from great evil, the core of you is good.’ She looked back up at Matthias, who was lost for words. ‘What have the gadjé called you?’

  ‘Matthias.’ He finally found his voice, still struggling with the complexity of emotions that ran through him, compounded by the strange sensation that he was looking at his own daughter in about fifty years’ time.

  ‘That will be your third name, the one used in the gadjé world. Your Romano name was Laetshi, your second name. Your first name, your secret name I gave you when I baptised you two weeks after your birth – this name is never spoken in case the spirits hear it and can name you.’

  ‘But what shall I call you?’ Matthias asked, amazed at how intimidated he was by the natural authority of this tiny woman.

  ‘Mutti. Dej,’ she replied simply, pulling him down to her in an uninhibited display of emotion. Closing his eyes, Matthias surrendered, a wave of memories flooding through him – the scent of her, the feel of her strong arms. Finally he understood the recurring image that had haunted him for so many years, the dark arms reaching out for him as he was snatched away, the child in him finally recognising his mother’s touch. He had come home.

  TWELVE

  The café, attached to a hotel, exuded a seedy grandeur, situated near the opera house on the bank of the Zürichsee. Destin had chosen it because it was the most anonymous venue he could find, a forgotten appendage of a once-vibrant area. ‘No Woman No Cry’ by Bob Marley began playing over the speakers, a tune that had haunted him in the bars and makeshift barracks of Africa, his old hunting grounds, the places he disappeared to after a stint of legitimate soldiering in Algiers. Just the sound of the song made his body tense in a rush of adrenalin and testosterone. He missed it: the sharpness of ordinary moments in extraordinary circumstances: a bullet-riddled poster of Mobutu Sese Seko, young black men loitering with machetes at a street corner, women herding goats past a gun post – missed the addiction of violence. But did he miss his time with the SDECE? he wondered. In some ways he missed the legitimacy, but in other ways he’d never felt more liberated, the freedom to own his nature and all that that implied exhilarating. The Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage can go fuck itself, he thought. All politics is business and you might as well get paid, and paid well, while you’re at it.

  He’d already calculated where the nearest exits were and how long it would take to get out. From behind his aviator sunglasses he scanned the clientele for suspicious characters, an unexplained bulge in a coat, a false pregnancy concealing an explosive.

  But in the dull leaden afternoon of a grey winter day the café held nothing but middle-class, middle-aged good citizens of Zürich. Over at the bar an overweight man in his late seventies, badly fitted toupee and false teeth dozed with a newspaper open in front of him, his dachshund asleep at his feet – a curl of s
unlit brown fur. He had chosen well, Destin thought, amused at his own paranoia. A perfect meeting place if you didn’t want to be noticed.

  He recognised the contact as soon as he arrived. It wasn’t so much his physical appearance as the way he moved. The Libyans had done their homework for a change – the man looked well-fed, bland and Swiss – like a bank manager of a minor branch in Hirslanden who had taken the afternoon off to meet a mistress at a motel or perhaps even to go hunting. He also carried a large leather pouch under his arm and looked utterly innocuous – a real player.

  Destin watched as the man sat at the empty table next to him. Then the Frenchman got up and stepped outside onto the terrace, seemingly to have a cigarette. He lit up, the acrid smoke sinking down into his lungs, calming him. Stamping his feet up and down to keep warm, he glanced over the Zürichsee, still marvelling at an existence in which people were apparently secure and wealthy enough to spend their time sailing aimlessly across what appeared to be a pristine, unchanging world. A moment later he heard the click of the terrace door behind him. He turned and the man held up a cigarette to be lit. Destin flicked his lighter open with a flourish.

  ‘So is the colonel playing?’

  The man half-smiled.

  ‘Oh, he’s playing but he has a few questions.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘A little bird’s told us that the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans are all after the same prize, and that they have the technology ready and waiting – all they need is the key to turn the engine.’

  ‘I can access the technology – and what I’m offering is the key. If the colonel gets this he will be able to hold the world to ransom.’

  Both men leaned against the railings and stared out over the grey horizon; to any onlooker they would appear to be a couple of men exchanging pleasantries as they smoked.

  ‘You’ve made promises before.’ There was a sharp tone under the smooth diplomatic voice – the subtlest of threats but it was there.

  ‘And I’ve kept all of them bar one, and that was only because the KGB got there before me. The colonel should be thankful they saved him a bullet.’

  ‘How do you know your goose is going to lay the golden egg?’

  ‘I have access to the laboratory and I will have the alloy within a month.’

  ‘And afterwards, what happens to the golden goose?’

  ‘He has an unfortunate laboratory accident.’

  ‘A month, you say?’

  ‘At the most. After that, you can forget American aid, Soviet aid, the Syrians – you guys will be able to call the shots. Isn’t that what the colonel wants? To have the biggest cock in the whorehouse?’

  The man threw his cigarette butt into the lake below then turned back to Destin and handed him the leather pouch. ‘Your finding fee – fifty thousand courtesy of His Highness, brotherly leader and guide of the Revolution of Libya. You have two months to deliver; otherwise there will be more than one unfortunate accident.’

  Destin smiled, an old excitement beginning to pound through him like a friend returning after a long absence. Now there was just one other finding fee to collect, one more appointment to make with someone local, someone even hungrier and wealthier than the colonel.

  Detective Helmut Klauser sat crouched over his desk, magnifying glass in one hand, all his grief and fury channelled into intense concentration as he examined the note he’d found under Erasmus. The pasted cut-out printed letters were very distinctive, particularly that ‘Z’ for Zigeuner. A dull gong resonated in the recesses of his memory and now it was all flooding back – the humiliating letters his father used to receive when he was a child, all sent in elegant white envelopes with handwritten addresses – expensive paper to send to an illiterate farmer whose payments on his farm were well overdue. Letters the ten-year-old Helmut had to read out, his trembling voice stumbling over the long words: repossession, insolvency; yes, he’d recognise that Z anywhere.

  ‘I’m sorry about your cat.’ The lieutenant’s voice broke into the memory.

  Klauser looked up. Timo stood over his desk, his arms hanging awkwardly at either side of his large body. He seemed genuinely sympathetic.

  ‘My neighbour’s cat had kittens only last week,’ Timo added hopefully.

  Klauser looked back down at the letter, trying to hide the mortifying fact that his eyes were welling with tears.

  ‘Replace Erasmus? Not possible – he had a very distinctive personality – an original, that animal was.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just too soon?’ Timo said, warming to this new familiarity between them.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Klauser barked gruffly, now completely discombobulated. ‘Look, I have a job for you. I need you to get hold of a letterhead used by the Swiss Farmers’ Federation Bank around the early 1930s. And I need it to feature the letter Z. Go to the bank and tell them you’re investigating an old fraud case and you need to look at their records.’

  The lieutenant began walking to the door, then turned. ‘Is this to do with your cat’s murder or the dead gypsy? Just so I know what to file expenses under…’

  ‘Get out of here!’

  Two hours later the lieutenant was back, a bundle of paper under his arm, and with a triumphant bang he thumped it onto Klauser’s desk, waking the detective from a dream about floating kittens. Timo picked up the first page and waved it excitedly in the air. ‘It’s 1931 until 1960, which, you will notice, is when the esteemed institute changed both its printing press and letterhead, choosing instead to go for a more modern typeface to herald the industrial 1960s, or at least that’s what the filing clerk told me.’

  ‘You did well, Timo.’ Klauser placed the first letter against the note he’d found under the dead cat. The Z in the letterhead was an exact match for the Z in the note.

  ‘Bingo,’ he said quietly, then scanned the letters. At the foot of one was the list of directors, all neatly typed. From 1945 to 1960 only one name remained constant: Herr Janus Zellweger. The tugging of the kite string, the wispy tail-end of a possible clue… Time to start hauling the catch in, he told himself, as his blood began to quicken with excitement. He got up out of the desk chair and walked over to his filing cupboard, to a file he kept for his own amusement on the most powerful men in Switzerland, filled with old newspaper clippings. He called it the Dynasty file – a reminder of how small the circle of power was in the country, yet it was a circle of power whose influence rippled out right across the world. Zellweger was one of the players – a shadowy figure who rarely gave interviews. But Klauser had everything that had ever been published on the arms dealer and something about the description Celine had given him about the bull-headed man at the orgies was now resounding.

  Klauser pulled out the clippings on Janus Zellweger. There was a newspaper photograph of him at his eldest daughter’s wedding – a huge extravaganza held in the ballroom of the most expensive hotel in Switzerland – the President Wilson in Geneva. A short, thickly set man with powerful shoulders set on a barrel chest, Zellweger stood next to his daughter, who was at least four inches taller than him, and far more beautiful. Janus, Klauser guessed, had bred with looks not money. The arms manufacturer, who had his arm around his daughter’s bare shoulders, was smiling into the camera, his wide brutal face with the perpetual tan of the very rich. He had tiny eyes set above high cheekbones; the teeth looked capped and he looked as if he were in his fifties. Klauser checked the date of the article: Zellweger would now be in his late sixties, making him a possible contemporary of Christoph von Holindt. Klauser ran his magnifying glass across the image and stopped at Janus’s hands – the manufacturer was wearing a pair of cufflinks with an interesting design on each one.

  Klauser pulled out another article – this time a full centrespread on the man in Der Spiegel. It was full of the usual platitudes: about how he pulled the family company out of near-bankruptcy by capitalising on the Second World War, claiming neutrality by supplying arms to both the Allies and the Axis nations. By 19
61 the arms manufacturing company was one of the most powerful in Europe. Below the article was a photograph of Janus sitting at his desk under a portrait of his father. In the foreground was a gilt paperweight of the symbol of his company, which looked like an hourglass made of two geometric triangles. Janus appeared to be wearing the same distinctive pair of cufflinks. Klauser placed the wedding photograph beside this and compared them – he was right, they were the same pair, small gold bull’s heads – an animalistic piece of jewellery that was in dramatic contrast to the rest of Zellweger’s very conservative attire – the bull: was that the way he saw himself? Violent, relentless, charging?