“Then my uncle had stayed for me, praying no one had been left behind to wait for me. No one had been, of course. Why bother? They knew I would go to the Polizei in Diessen, in the village, to find out what had happened. And they could arrest me then. We were, you see, a law-abiding family.
“My uncle and I, we walked all night. All night. My uncle had brought with him the shovel. From planting the Japanese maple tree. It had been lying still on the ground, and he’d picked it up and carried it. He led me, stupefied, to the outskirts of Munich. There was a Lastwagen, a truck, stopped on the side of the road. My uncle spoke with the driver. He offered to give him the shovel. He whispered. The driver didn’t want to take us. Then my uncle started to act very strangely, poking at the man with his elbow. Winking. I was naive, but I knew what he was doing. He wanted the man to believe I was his schatzi, his girlfriend. My uncle, remember, was an old man. “But”—Iris shrugged meaningfully—“so was the truck driver. Finally, winking and snickering back, he let us come with him to Munich. And he took the shovel. He had it the whole time he drove, banging between his legs. He was pleased with that shovel. He drove a long time on country roads. I remember we passed Nymphenburg. We passed the palace. You could see the glint of gold everywhere in the very dark and the folded white wings of the swans, like small boats, gliding down and then up the canals.
“At last, my uncle told the man to stop. We must get out. It was not yet dawn, but already the light climbed in the distance. My uncle jumped from the door of the truck, but he was no longer young enough to move so suddenly so quickly. He was stiff, and he hurt himself as he landed. His hip. He pretended he had not, but I knew he had. He tried not to grimace because he thought I wouldn’t let him continue if I knew he was in pain. I knew. But I let us conspire together to save my young life.
“We came to a village along the banks of the Isar. It was called Saint Hildegard’s. Named for Saint Hildegard of Bingen.”
“Saint Hildegard’s!” Claire cried out. “I know Saint Hildegard’s!” It was the charming inn and beer garden where all the “right” artsy people met and drank and argued and gossiped. Everyone knew Saint Hildegard’s Mill. Not everyone could afford to go there, though. And if you weren’t their sort, they conveniently forgot you and let you sit there stewing till you vowed never to set foot in the place again—which was just what they intended. Artists were always tolerated, though, and according to how promising they were, encouraged to loll about as long as they liked, signing their bills rather than paying cash. As a result, the walls were hung with beautiful, unusual paintings. The house was notoriously affable to taking payment in work rather than elusive cash.
“I remember the way it looked,” Iris continued, too absorbed to notice Claire’s excitement, “so quaint and misty in the dawn. A grassy meadow and a small, steep hill with a chapel, like a bell on the meadow. It was such a pretty place. My uncle knew somebody there. Or of someone. A man he could trust. We stopped. He gave this man at the Mühle, the Mill, he gave him Geld. Well, not money; stones—diamonds. At least one diamond he gave that man. I saw him take it out first from the boot-polish container. He turned to me as he took it out, as if no one, even God, should see what he had there. I saw the glitter of all the stones. Sixty stones. All blue-white and clear. ‘Irislein,’ he said to me, he always called me Irislein—his pet name for me—’your future.’
“He nodded to make sure I understood, and I nodded back. He told me this would keep me safe until he could come back for me. I should sew the stones into my clothes to keep them, when I could. And so he put me to wait beside a great tree on the hill. I sat there, cold with terror, but with joy and relief, too, for already I had learned, during that long, dark night, to cling to my survival. Even already I knew, with that cold box warming on my breast, that no matter what happened to my family—my mother, my father, all of them—I was prepared to go through anything, do anything, to live. I remember I cupped my bleeding feet inside my hands to comfort them. I saw the churning mill water under the lifting mist. The grass was sharp and short. A bird cried out from the chapel roof, and let me tell you, I wanted to live.”
Claire held her breath, and Iris rocked quickly back and forth. There was no sound but the clock. Claire thought perhaps Iris meant her to go, but she wasn’t sure. She stayed sitting there. Finally Iris continued. “My uncle left me there a long, long time. I put my head down on the ground. Perhaps I slept. I don’t remember. I remember looking up and seeing my uncle coming toward me with a very big, a huge, Bavarian man. Adam. Adam von Grünwald. You could always tell what was a Bavarian. They are dark and round and compact. This fellow, though, he was massive. He looked at me on the ground like that, and”—Iris’s eyes filled with tears—“he felt so sorry for me. He picked me up like I was a run-over animal. He carried me back to the Mühle, it was also a Gaststube, an inn, for artists mostly, and he put me upstairs. It was his mother’s room. He put me in her bed, and he had this great big hand, and he”—Iris touched her withered cheek—“he stroked me softly with this big hand and looked into my eyes with his shrewd black eyes and he said something in Bayerish—Bavarian. Who understood that dialect, gentry Berliner that I was? But whatever it was, I understood him and I felt safe, and I slept. He saved my life.”
“And what happened to him?”
Iris sighed.
Claire leaned forward. “He took the diamonds, right?”
“He? He didn’t take the diamonds. He hid them. He hid them good, too. For me, right there at Saint Hildegard’s Mühle.
“He and I, we were lovers. He was, you see, the great love of my life.” Iris smiled kindly at Claire. “Yes, even this old, ugly woman once was beautiful enough to be loved.” One gnarled, arthritic finger flicked a years-gone-by-and-vanished pin curl from her livered eye. “You sit there young and feel immortal, Claire. I tell you I was once immortal too. And now, I live in time.” She tossed her head. “We always thought we would go back together, get back there. It never occurred to us that we wouldn’t. I never saw my Uncle Oswald again. They intercepted him that next day returning from Munich to Diessen. He died in Dachau. But then everything started to happen. The whole world turned, somehow, upside down. There was no going back. There never will be. I should have sewn the stones into the lining of my clothes, as my uncle instructed me to do. But I didn’t. I left them, nice and safe there, hidden.”
“What? But, you mean it’s all still there?”
“Yup. But I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t.”
“But, you mean you’re really sure they’re still there?”
“He told me he would hide them there for me. Keep them. They would never leave the Mill until I came back for them. He swore this.”
“You believed him?”
“Oh, I believe it still.”
Claire remembered the opulent green of the Mill in the spring. A green as green as a Tunisian sky was blue. Wouldn’t Jupiter Dodd just love it as a background? She could even—her heart grew strong within her chest—use the dashing girls from Isolde’s wedding party. “I could,” she said out loud, “I could go.”
Iris lit a small cigar. A Davidoff. “I’d give you half,” she said. She puffed a fancy, contemplative cloud around her head. “Well. A third.”
2
Two old former models sat at the fresh-squeezed carrot-juice and yogurt kiosk in Munich Airport. They both had married well and just now bundled their husbands off to Zurich on the everybody-gray-suit, early-breakfast flight. The ladies’ legs were knotted around themselves, and each bottom foot tapped out an agitated ditty.
“Wasn’t that Claire Breslinsky, the photographer?” the one said to the other.
“You know, I think it was.”
“My God, she looks forty!”
“She is forty,” the other one said. “Why shouldn’t she look it?”
I solde thwacked Claire’s light luggage into the spotless trunk of her silver 850 CSI BMW. Claire was very smug about her light luggage.
“Directly to the Mill?” Isolde raised an eyebrow at her. “Or shall we take a coffee on the Leopoldstrasse first?”
“Oh, the Mill, please.” Claire displayed her exhausted face. Isolde on the Leopoldstrasse would find innumerable unworthy subjects to talk to, “tchotchkes” to buy, lunch to linger over.
“All right,” Isolde agreed, surprising Claire. Everything was a fight with Isolde, and when it wasn’t, you tended to be wary. But Claire’s vision was both sharpened and softened by time and distance. She leaned her head back on the sheepskin headrest and let go, let the green fields of Raps, the onion domes and pretty farms, turn to a blur of chartreuse cushion on each side of the silvery autobahn. It was loaded with massive, well-kept trucks and spotless Teutonic vehicles. They wouldn’t slow Isolde down. On the contrary, she drove at breakneck speed, her only speed, behind designer-black-and-golden glasses, weaving determinedly onward, never hesitating, shifting instinctively down, then up, prowling momentarily behind two giant riggers, then plunging suicidally forward between them, her pretty, slippered foot flat down and slicing through the steely middle.
I will not be afraid, Claire instructed herself, clutching the weary hand luggage on her lap. She reminded herself of the sink inevitably full of dishes back home. There were fates worse than death. What amazed her was that this all had happened so easily, had fallen into place the way things will when they are meant to be.
Her children were well stashed away; Anthony with his grandparents on a long-awaited, often-postponed and now finally realized trip to Disney World; Dharma was with her Aunt Carmela, Claire’s sister. Carmela was slowpoking her way through an opulent grant from a feminist group and, Claire suspected, all this was right up Dharma’s liberated little alley. Her heart tugged for a moment at the thought of the children’s missing her, but she wouldn’t be gone that long and then it would all start in again, wouldn’t it. The dog was safely with her other sister, Zinnie, a New York City detective. That left only Johnny to worry about, and you know something, she told herself, remembering the suspiciously still-fragrant bottle of Chivas she’d stumbled over accidentally while rummaging around the cellar looking for her stuff, the hell with him. Well, maybe not the hell, but a little limbo wouldn’t hurt either of them. And if it did, perhaps it was meant to. She took a deep, cleansing, deliberately young and defiantly free breath. “It’s awfully nice of you to pick me up like this,” she said.
“Blacky insisted.” She shrugged. “Not like the old days, is it? With the cozy little Humphrey Bogart airport just outside Bogenhausen. This new airport is a hike. Twenty kilometers.”
“Tch,” Claire commiserated.
“And the benzene! You can’t imagine what I spend a week on benzene. Of course you know everything is through the roof. These are terrible times in Germany.”
Claire eyed Isolde’s 22-karat Rolex. One of them, at least, had hit pay dirt. So it was Claire’s abandoned pay dirt—at least one of them still had it. Claire glanced sideways at Isolde’s been-around thighs. Still good, those thighs, brown and lithe from tennis. She was prettier than most women, taller than most men, and thinner than most human beings. Her shrewd brown eyes flashed with restless energy and life. Isolde was perfumed, important, and, Claire had not quite forgotten, impossible.
It hadn’t been in the least difficult to get her to marry at the Mill, though. All she’d had to mention was where she’d read Kristina von Ekelsdorf was having her fund-raiser there this summer for the Bosnian orphans. Kristina was, after all, the hostess to outdo in Munich. Isolde, despite her efforts, never could hope to keep up. Now, with Blacky’s money, well sir, there was no end to the possibilities. The fact that Claire had never really read that Kristina von Ekelsdorf was having the fund-raiser at the Mill didn’t matter. Maybe when she’d read about Isolde’s posh wedding there, she would. Claire felt quite like Brer Rabbit. She turned and gazed fondly at Isolde’s beautiful profile glittering in the light. Isolde might be a professional beauty, but she was a beauty nonetheless. She was a priceless friend to have. There was no one, nor would there ever be, anyone like Isolde.
She wondered if she would do well to tell her about Iris and the diamonds. Isolde was so good at that sort of thing—what sort of thing that was, Claire was not exactly sure—but Isolde would doubtless be good at it. Claire might find herself lost without her prowess.
Reading just enough of her mind to misunderstand, Isolde said, “I hope you don’t mind staying at the Mill?”
“Of course not.” Claire smiled. How like Isolde not to remember the Mill had been her idea in the first place. Better that way.
“The Gästehaus at the English Garden was all filled up,” Isolde continued. (That meant she’d booked it up with her more prestigious friends.)
“I prefer the Mill. Really. It’s so romantic.”
“Well, they’re not always good with guests. They’re so … independent. And they’re so out of the way for you without a rent-a-car.”
“Oh, I won’t be wanting a car.”
“They are expensive.” Isolde’s penny-pinching detector was always up.
Claire wasn’t going to tell her Jupiter Dodd was footing the bill. She didn’t like to admit to having sunk to shooting accessories. Isolde would think she was washed up. Well, she was washed up. And at the moment, she rather liked the feeling. It was the same as starting fresh.
Isolde eyed her shrewdly. “You’re not going to go trying to seduce my fiancé, I hope.”
“Wha—?”
“Because if I see even the slightest signs of flirtation—”
“Oh, Isolde, really!”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Isolde, really!’ me! I know your sweet little two-goody-shoes routine.”
Claire laughed. “It’s Goody Two-shoes. And I’m flattered that you would even consider me a threat.”
“I don’t. I just don’t like Blacky to think he’s one up on me. He’s a little—uh—piqued just now about all my admirers, as ridiculous as that is!”
Claire pursed her lips. “How little you must think of me—to imagine I would come all this way to your wedding and then turn around and—”
“Oh, shut up! Everyone knows what a tease you imagine yourself.”
Offended, stony Irish indignation fumed through the car. To think she’d almost been fool enough to share her secret about the diamonds with her! And—she snorted a firm burst of air through pinched and righteous nostrils—that would be the end of Isolde’s getting her hands on the heavy bottle of Jack Daniels she’d lugged just for her all the way from the Duty-Free at Kennedy.
Isolde, realizing she had gone too far, or at least too soon, reapproached.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get you a better room at the Mill.”
“What do you mean—can’t I have a front room?” She imagined cooking smells and late-night noise.
“I’m afraid not. There’s a crew staying there. You know how they’re always putting artists up. This lot are film people.”
“No, I didn’t know,” Claire said, happy again. Claire loved the movies. She would always be a fan. “What sort of film people? Hollywood?”
“Heavens, no! British. Temple Fortune and his entourage. They wouldn’t like regular hacks to stay here. They fancy themselves the only aristocratic patrons of the arts in Bavaria.”
“Temple Fortune … Temple Fortune … I know I’ve heard the name …”
“You remember”—Isolde swept a dismissive, heavily braceleted arm past Claire’s face—“he made that award-winning film in Marrakech, all Italian colors and Episcopalian dialogue, the one where the girl commits suicide at the end.”
“Vaguely…”
“Oh, you know. He finds all these well-written pieces of literature where the grandson of the dead author’s estate just lost a million-something in Monte Carlo and he offers him a piece of the profits. At least that’s what he did on this one he’s making now. I don’t know. Funny you haven’t heard of him. To hear him talk, you’d think he had this
enormous following in the States.”
“Who told you that?” Claire smiled. “Him?”
Isolde glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. “Yes.”
“Oh, don’t go by me.” Claire yawned outright. “The only films I get to see lately are PG-rated or two years old, late at night on cable.”
“Well, I wouldn’t brag about it.”
“No,” Claire said, “you’re right.” This trip wasn’t going to be about how ordinary her life had become. They were nearing the town. Bright, furiously awake Bavarians marched to their bicycles and trams and U-Bahns and cars. At the traffic light on Prinzregentenplatz, the fragrant aromas of coffee and warm sweet rolls wafted enticingly through open windows trimmed with white lace and red geraniums. Well-scrubbed, red-cheeked workers stood good and still at the red light despite the fact that no traffic passed. You wouldn’t find jaywalkers lurking in this town.
Claire took a sharp breath in. “I do remember. There was an article about him in the Trib. It was a while ago, though. No. It was in the gossip column, and it was about his new star. I remarked on it because I tried to book her once. She was very short but very good. I wasn’t surprised that she’d made the transition from model to actress, she had something interesting about her—intense. Anyway, I never got her because she was all booked up with Günther Sachs in Gstaad. Jesus. That was years ago. Mara, that was her name. Mara Morgen. So she’s still with him, this Temple Fortune?”
Keeper of the Mill Page 3