by Simon Toyne
Amand struggled through the statements, looking for anything that might prove useful. He was about to give up when he turned a page and saw something that sucked the breath right out of him. It was a note from one of the beat cops who’d spotted some graffiti written in chalk on an alley wall at the back of Lansky’s apartment building. The policeman noted that he’d served as an infantryman in the war and knew the language as well as its unpleasant meaning. He also noted that he’d scrubbed it out because Herman Lansky was Jewish and he didn’t want to risk stirring up bad memories of Nazi evil that people were still trying hard to forget in 1949. But first he had copied it down:
Das zuende bringen was begonnen wurde.
Amand sat back in his chair. He had not expected to find the Lansky files, let alone something in them that might link his death to the murders of both Josef Engel and Saul Schwartzfeldt almost seventy years later. He knew now that Jean Baptiste could not have killed both Engel and Schwartzfeldt, because the Schwartzfeldt murder had happened six months ago when Baptiste was locked up in Lannemezan. That left two other possibilities. He pulled a business card from his pocket, dialled the number on it and Magellan answered on the second ring. ‘Commandant. How can I help?’
‘Six months ago, where was Solomon Creed?’
‘In my facility in Mexico.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Positive. The ICP is a maximum-security facility with the same level of security as a penitentiary. James Hawdon broke out twenty-five days ago. Why do you ask, has there been a new development?’
Amand paused before answering. After the vanishing email, his instinct was to trust no one, but Magellan was an outsider who only seemed concerned with the well-being and safety of his patient. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I no longer consider Solomon Creed a suspect.’
‘Good. Have you found him?’
‘Not yet. Let me check a few things out and I’ll call you back.’
He hung up and closed all the emails and windows until the only one left was the Nazi discussion forum he’d been reading when the Blagnac email had come in. He scrolled down the page until he found a photograph he’d seen earlier of two men standing by the barbed-wire fence of Die Schneider Lager. They were the same height, but one was thin and wore a guard’s tunic whereas the other wore the uniform of an officer.
Amand studied the two faces staring back at him across seventy years of history, the same pale grey eyes, cold and unreadable: Standartenführer Artur Samler, Commandant of Die Schneider Lager, and Günther Samler, his son. He must have been a teenager in the photograph, a skinny apprentice hoping to one day take over his father’s kingdom until the war ended and took away any chance of that. Or maybe not. Günther Samler’s death had never been confirmed, he had simply vanished along with scores of others fleeing the crumbling ruins of the Third Reich. And he and his father were the only ones with a personal link to all three victims. Maybe he was following in his father’s bloody footsteps after all:
Das zuende bringen was begonnen wurde – Finishing what was begun.
63
The car pulled off the péage and into one of the rest areas, coming to a halt beneath a large ash tree that spread its shade wide. He switched off the engine, wound down the windows to let in some air and sat listening to the cheep and caw of birds overhead and the distant hiss of the motorway. His head ached from caffeine and his mind was foggy from the honey-laced morphine that kept the worst of his pain at bay.
He opened the door and his joints cracked like gunshots as he unfolded himself from his seat. He shuffled round the car, stretching gently and breathing deeply for three full circuits that felt like laps of a running track, then sat on the bonnet and felt the heat of the engine through the steel. He was tired and the world around him shifted and flexed like it was starting to come apart. Sometimes he saw things that he knew were not there, strange creatures lurking in the shadows, watching him with hollow eyes.
The doctors said these visions were a symptom of the tumour in his occipital cortex, the part of the brain that controlled his visual imagination, but he knew the truth. When Saul Schwartzfeldt’s identity had been revealed to him, he understood what these visions really were: not things to be feared, but augurs of what was to become, of what he was to become. He realized that the tumour was not death growing inside him but a new life, an egg from which his new self would hatch, reborn as something divine and eternal and righteous. And the Wild Hunt was his journey towards it.
He looked up at the great ash tree creaking and whispering above him, the sunlight flashing yellow through shimmering leaves of bright green. There was a rope tied high in its branches, swaying slightly with the movement of the tree, the noose looped into the end of it wide enough for a neck to pass through. This was no ordinary tree he was standing beneath, it was Yggdrasil, the great tree that grew through all the worlds, the gallows upon which he would sacrifice his human self in order to be reborn as Wotan.
He stared up at the rope swinging like a beckoning arm and wondered how he might climb high enough to reach it, tired and weak as he was. Movement shook the tree and leaves fluttered down as two scraps of black tore away from the green, cawing hoarse as they flew away. Two ravens, Wotan’s birds, Huginn and Muninn – thought and memory. He watched them flap and glide, weaving in and out of each other’s path as they headed north, following the line of the motorway. He looked back up at the ash tree and the rope had gone, nothing there now but sunlight and shifting green shadows. Maybe he had imagined it all. He found it increasingly difficult these days to tell the difference between what was really in the world and what was only in his head.
Nine months, the doctors had given him. Maybe a year. That was six months ago. He looked down at the ground, saw a spot of black in amongst the leaves and bent down stiffly to pick it up. He rolled it between trembling fingers, watching the green and blue play across the surface of the black feather like petrol on water. He had seen the ravens. They had been sent to remind him that the Hunt was not yet over. He rose and walked slowly back to his car. He needed to follow the birds north, back to his home where he could rest, and refill his flask with the bitter honey water, and prepare for the final part of the Wild Hunt. He collapsed into the driver’s seat and glanced at his pale eyes in the mirror – old and bloodshot and so, so tired.
He opened the glovebox, tucked the black feather in among the bottles of pills and pulled his phone from the back of the compartment. He needed some darker fuel to drive him forward and chase away the bone-weary urge to close his eyes and sleep. He fitted the earphones in his ears, crunched a couple of painkillers and swilled them down with the last drops of sweet coffee from a Thermos flask. He opened the video player application on his phone. There were three files in it. He selected the middle one and started it playing.
An old man appeared on the screen, head bowed and on his knees in the same position Josef Engel had been in only this morning. The Star of David was cut into flesh made loose by the cancer this man had recently battled. He touched the screen and dragged his finger along to shuttle through footage showing the man getting bloodier and more wretched. He stopped before the end and found the part that always worked best for him in low moments like these when he needed a boost. He pressed play and felt a mild buzz as the sugar and caffeine hit his bloodstream.
I am the man known as Saul Schwartzfeldt … the wretched man on the screen said, his voice syrupy from pain and the drugs that had incapacitated him.
… I wish to record my final confession before Death claims a debt that should have been paid a long time ago in Die Schneider Lager …
This was the thing that always worked for him, the reason for the Hunt and why he had to continue it to the end. The revelation of truth.
64
The ancient sergeant returned to the basement office and Amand immediately headed out. He still had calls to make and things to check and didn’t want anyone listening to his conversations. He stepped out on to the street and
headed into the breeze towards the red brick monolith of the cathedral. He looked up ‘Die Schneider Lager Museum’ on his phone, found a contact number and was almost at the cathedral before someone answered.
‘Mulhouse Museum.’ The voice sounded old and weary, as if the phone had dragged him up a long flight of stairs or out of bed.
‘This is going to sound like a bizarre question,’ Amand said, ‘but have you had any break-ins at the museum in the last year or two?’
‘Who is this?’
Amand hesitated, but since no one else would be likely to call up and ask these questions, he answered: ‘My name is Benoît Amand, I’m Commandant at the Cordes Commissariat in the Tarn.’
‘My grandson recently joined the Police Nationale. Shitty pay and terrible hours.’
Amand smiled. ‘That sounds about right, Monsieur …?’
‘Carrièrre. Guillaume Carrièrre. What were you asking?’
‘I was asking if the museum had been broken into recently or if anything has been taken, particularly items relating to Artur Samler.’
‘Well, it’s funny you should ask, because there was an incident at the Commandant’s house about six or seven months back, but it’s hard to say if anything went missing. The museum is run by volunteers, you see, and it’s a real struggle to keep track of everything. Most of us are retired and it gives us something to do, and we think it’s important to tell the younger folk about the war and what happened – a warning from history kind of thing.’
‘Monsieur Carrièrre – the break-in?’
‘Oh yes. Well, in the Commandant’s house we have a room set up as Artur Samler’s study. It’s been recreated from photographs and is filled with items that have been donated over the years, lots of things that were actually his.’
‘And something was taken from there?’
‘Well, like I said, it’s difficult to say for sure. We add and take things away from the room all the time because we have so many items in storage. Only we’re not exactly systematic about it and things don’t always get written down. What I’m saying is, we don’t know precisely what was in Samler’s house at the time of the break-in, so it’s hard to know if anything is missing from it.’
‘What about something small, like a cane or a swagger stick, something like that?’
‘Well, it’s funny you should ask, because that’s exactly what I wondered at the time. Samler kept a stand full of sticks by his office door, because he used to beat the prisoners with them and the sticks often broke. We’ve got a stand there too, but as I said, we can’t be certain one was taken because none of us could remember how many canes were supposed to be in the damn stand. The only thing we know was taken beyond a doubt was from the Brutus mausoleum.’
Amand felt the skin tighten on the back of his neck. ‘What did they take?’
‘Well, it’s the damnedest thing, but they went and took the dog’s skull. We didn’t report it because there’s no real value to it as far as insurance goes, though I bet if you went on eBay and did a search for “Nazi dog skull” you’d find some crazy person trying to sell it. There’s quite the growing market out there for Nazi memorabilia, particularly stuff that belonged to someone infamous like Samler. Isn’t that a sorry state of affairs? You’d think people would want to avoid anything touched by such evil, but no, quite the contrary. That’s why we’re forced to spend money we don’t have on extra security, otherwise the whole damn museum would end up on eBay.’
‘Apart from the skull and maybe a swagger stick, nothing else was taken?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘And this was around six months ago?’
‘Autumn of last year.’
‘Thank you for your time, Monsieur Carrièrre. If we recover anything, I’ll make sure it’s returned to the museum.’
He hung up and stared at the pigeons flocking around the cathedral tower like all the new information buzzing inside his head. He imagined the killer, holding the skull of Samler’s dog against Josef Engel’s skin and squeezing the jaws together until they drew blood, a symbolic recreation of a dog attack because the real thing wasn’t practical. Starving rats made no sound but a hungry dog would. That’s why there was no tearing around the shallow bites, because a dog had not bitten him. The killer was recreating the death camp and making his victims die as if they were still there – weak, beaten, brutalized. Finishing what was begun. Could it really be Artur Samler? He would be a centenarian now, if he was still alive. Even his son, Günther, would be in his eighties. Or was it someone else, a relative, a crazy person obsessed with the death camps and carrying on the Samler legacy?
He felt frustrated that he couldn’t share his new information and push the investigation forward, but after watching the email from Blagnac vanish from the police server, he didn’t know who he could trust. His theory about the dog needed proof. They would have to extract DNA from the remaining bones in the mausoleum and hope they matched the tooth chips Evie Zimbaldo had found in Josef Engel’s wounds. All of that was time-consuming and expensive and there was no way Laurent would sanction any of it.
The tightness in his chest was beginning to build again, so he headed over to one of the tourist cafés that surrounded the cathedral, ordered a coffee and a chocolatine, and sat for a while, trying to calm his breathing and think. He felt like he was swimming upstream, fighting against the current while Marie-Claude and Léo were being swept away towards jagged rocks. He opened Maps on his phone and entered ‘Vierzon’, the place the dispatcher at the Police Nationale said she was most likely heading. A blue line appeared, stretching north from his current location, revealing that Vierzon was a four-and-a-half-hour drive away. Too far. Much too far.
Verbier’s warning about slowing down sounded at the back of his mind, but there was too much to do, too much at stake, and too many things stacked against him. Even the judge in charge of the case was opposing him, telling him not to investigate Jean Baptiste, dismissing his theory about the death camp connection, even suggesting he should step down. He would have to burn valuable time and energy persuading him to reconsider, energy he would much rather spend finding Marie-Claude and making sure she was safe. It made him feel tired just thinking about it and the tight feeling in his chest grew worse. He looked up and watched a pigeon flapping furiously as it tried to land on the top of the cathedral, fighting against the high winds before giving up and swooping away with easy speed as its wings caught the wind. So much easier to go with the flow than against it. Amand frowned at the simplicity of this and opened his contacts, found the number for Jacques Laurent’s office and dialled it. ‘I’d like to leave a message for Juge Laurent,’ he said when the secretary answered.
‘He’s in court right now.’
‘I know. I don’t need to speak to him. Just say Commandant Benoît Amand called and that I’ve thought about what he said and he’s right, I am too closely involved with the Josef Engel case. I am therefore officially recusing myself from the investigation.’
‘The Josef Engel case?’
‘That’s right.’
‘OK, I’ll let him know.’
‘Thanks.’ Amand hung up and felt a lightness, like the pigeon on the breeze.
He looked back at the map on his phone, a thought starting to crystallize in his mind. He zoomed in on Vierzon and the map reloaded, filling with more detail – road names, knife and fork symbols for cafés, bed symbols for hotels. The waiter arrived with his order and he emptied a paper tube of sugar into his coffee for the energy and continued to study the map, widening it until he saw what he was looking for south of the town. He tapped the aeroplane icon and a website opened, giving him more details and a name. He pulled Magellan’s card from his pocket and dialled the number, taking a bite of his chocolatine and washing it down with coffee as it connected. He hadn’t intended to call Magellan back because it wasn’t policy to use outside agencies in murder investigations. But since he wasn’t in charge of the investigation any more, that no lo
nger applied.
‘Magellan?’ the deep voice rumbled out of the phone the moment it connected.
‘Hi, it’s Benoît Amand from Cordes. We’ve found Solomon Creed.’
‘Where?’
‘In a car heading north with quite a head start. You said you flew to France on a private jet. I was wondering, do you still have it at your disposal?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is it?’
‘In the air, on its way to Albi. There’s a private airfield outside the city called Le Sequestre. Where’s Solomon?’
‘Heading to a place called Vierzon, about four hundred and fifty kilometres to the north of here. I checked and there’s a private airport in the region called Vierzon Méreau. How quickly do you think we could get there?’
‘We?’
‘I’d like to come too, if I may. I can help smooth things over with the local police if Solomon ends up in custody or if we need their assistance in other ways.’
‘Of course. The jet’s due to land in five minutes. Tell me where you are and I’ll come pick you up. Assuming there are no hold-ups on the ground, I would imagine we can turn around and take off straight away. We should get to Vierzon in less than an hour.’
65
Bull stood by the side of the A20 and felt the wash of traffic whooshing past. He was standing ten metres back from the BMW, close to the barrier and next to a small reflective triangle he’d placed on the road. His phone was clamped to his ear and his attention was focused down the road, like he was watching for a breakdown truck to arrive. Roberto was bent over the engine though his attention was also on the road. If the police came by they would say they’d over-heated and were letting the car cool down. That was the backup plan. In the end, they didn’t need it.