‘Maybe,’ Tayte said, wondering now why his mother and Karl had given Kaufmann the address of the British Consul-General, and how his mother wound up in Mexico the following year, perhaps on the run from Strobel because she and Karl had come too close to finding him. And where was Tayte’s father when his mother gave him away? The sister at the mission had told him his mother had been alone.
‘How did my mother and Karl know this man, Johnston?’ Tayte asked, thinking aloud.
‘He could have been a friend, or family perhaps?’
The idea that Geoffrey Johnston might have been family excited Tayte. If he was, then being British Tayte thought it more likely that the connection would be on his mother’s side, and he knew that with some digging he should be able to find that connection somewhere in the UK birth, marriage, and death indexes. But it was just one of many possibilities that for now Tayte put to the back of his mind for investigation at a later date. Right now he wanted to stay on track. He wanted to know why his mother had abandoned him, and more and more he was beginning to feel that the answer was inextricably linked to Volker Strobel.
He was about to ask Jean if she wanted another coffee to go with their next line of research, but when he looked up from his laptop screen, he saw that Jean looked terrified. She was staring past him, out of the window, her lips slightly parted, her eyes wide open. Tayte craned his neck around, following her gaze, and for the first time he saw the man they had come to know of as Max Fleischer. The Death’s Head Unit tattoos on his neck were unmistakable. Fleischer was standing just outside the window, no more than three feet away, with only the glass between them. He wore a plain white T-shirt, and now that he had Tayte’s and Jean’s attention, he lifted it up to reveal a handgun tucked into the top of his black jeans. He began to shake his head slowly from side to side, no expression on his face. He didn’t need one to convey the message he was sending them. The gun said it all.
Tayte jumped to his feet and Jean shot a hand out to stop him. ‘No, JT! He’ll kill you.’
‘If these people wanted us dead already, I’m sure they’d have found an opportunity by now.’ Tayte continued to rise. ‘And I’m sure he’s not dumb enough to shoot us in a busy coffee shop.’
He made for the door, thinking about what this man had done to Jean the day before and how he’d threatened to rape her. It gave him both the strength and the courage to confront him, but when he got outside, Fleischer was gone.
Tayte was shaking as he returned to the table and sat down. ‘How do you suppose he found us again? Surely he’s not been following us since we left the hotel this morning.’
Jean scoffed. ‘He might well have been, or maybe he was watching the gallery and knows we went to see Rudi Langner. He obviously knows we’re still asking questions, which isn’t good.’
‘It’s not good at all,’ Tayte said, wondering whether any of Fleischer’s associates had followed them into the coffee shop, and had perhaps sent a text message to him. He looked around. A few people were already staring back at him, no doubt wondering what all the fuss was about, but the place was mostly filled with couples enjoying their coffee. Just the same, Tayte didn’t want to stick around.
He closed his laptop. ‘Come on,’ he said, collecting his briefcase from the floor as he rose.
Jean got up with him. ‘We should report this to the police.’
‘Yes, and we will, but I don’t fancy spending the evening at the police station, and I still can’t see how there’s anything they can do beyond telling us to go home. I know it’s not going to be easy, but let’s try to forget about it for now and go find somewhere to eat. We’ll drop by and report it in the morning.’
Chapter Nineteen
They dined at the Spatenhaus an der Oper on Residenzstrasse. Having been denied taking lunch there by Max Fleischer the day before, Tayte had wanted to go there all the more to spite the man. He’d be damned if he was going to let Fleischer’s appearance outside the coffee shop deny them the pleasure of sampling the restaurant’s traditional Bavarian cuisine for a second time. Jean had wanted to forget about the research while they were there and just enjoy the meal—to pretend, for a few hours at least, that they were like any other sightseeing couple on a city break. Although Tayte managed to avoid talking about it, his mind was often elsewhere, going over everything they had heard that day.
He wondered again whether Karl was his father, and why he and his mother had gone to see Elijah Kaufmann about Volker Strobel in connection with finding Karl’s own father. Had a child come from Strobel’s marriage to Trudi Scheffler? And what about Johann Langner’s marriage to Ava Bauer? Another possibility for a child existed there. By the time Tayte and Jean arrived back in their hotel room, having had a quick nightcap in the hotel bar, Tayte was all the more eager to get his laptop out and continue digging into these lives that he felt more and more were connected to his own. It was just after eight in the evening, the orange glow at the window fading rapidly now as the sun began to set on Munich’s busy city streets.
‘That was a very pleasant evening,’ Jean said, kicking off her shoes. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’m sorry if I seemed a little distracted,’ Tayte said as he hung up his jacket.
Jean put her arms around him and gave him a squeeze. ‘I think you did very well.’
‘I just feel there’s so much at stake here. I want to stay focused in case I miss something.’
‘I know.’
Jean unzipped her dress as she continued into the room. She let it fall to her feet and slowly stepped out of it, catching Tayte’s eye as she stooped to pick it up.
‘That’s not helping.’
Jean laughed. ‘Don’t get your hopes up, big fella. We’ve got research to do, remember?’
‘Touché,’ Tayte said with a grin.
Jean swapped her contact lenses for glasses, and got herself cosy for the evening in her pyjamas and dressing gown while Tayte set up his laptop at the desk. He thought he’d look into Johann and Ava first, while the conversation with Rudi Langner was still fresh.
‘I don’t expect we’ll find much,’ he said as Jean sat beside him. He turned to her, drawing in her scent. ‘You smell great. Have I said that already?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I remember thinking it. I don’t think I actually said it, did I?’
Jean shook her head.
‘Well you do,’ Tayte said. ‘You smell amazing.’
Jean gave him a wry smile and tapped his laptop. ‘Focus. Remember?’
‘Of course,’ Tayte said, turning back to the screen. ‘As I said, I don’t suppose we’ll find much without access to the records. I hope the Kaufmanns come good on that soon. We can run some general searches, but that’s about it. We know plenty about Johann Langner, but until this afternoon, we didn’t know that he married Ava Bauer during the war. Let’s see if we can find anything out about her.’
Tayte entered her name into the search field on his Internet browser. There were several hundred results, many of which were links to social media websites.
‘Do you want to check through those on your tablet?’ Tayte said. ‘I’ll see if any of the other references lead anywhere.’
Jean stood up with a yawn.
‘Sounds like someone’s ready for bed.’
‘It’s probably just the wine,’ Jean said as she sat up on the bed and woke up her tablet.
Tayte turned his attention back to the search results in front of him. He scrolled through the list, and a few pages on he followed an entry that matched Ava Bauer’s name to the Billion Graves website, which had proved useful to him many times in the past as it often listed other family members who were buried together in the same plot. It made sense to Tayte that he might find reference to a child born to Johann Langner and Ava Bauer on such a website, but the date of birth shown against this particular Ava Bauer meant that she would have been too young for marriage during the Second World War.
He followed the further results at the bottom
of the entry, clicking on a link to the Genealogy Bank, but that only led him to a newspaper archive containing a birth announcement in 1987, which was too late. There was another link to a service called People Finders. It was a US based service, but as Tayte couldn’t rule out that Ava Bauer hadn’t wound up living in America after the war, he thought it worth a look. There were a few listings, although the current ages of the women he was looking at were all too young, mostly in their sixties. If Ava Bauer was still alive, Tayte knew she would be a little older than Johann Langner.
Thirty minutes passed while Tayte followed links to one dead end after another, and Jean’s silence told him she was having about as much luck as he was. He stood up, collected his laptop, and sat up on the bed beside her.
‘No luck?’ he asked her.
Jean shook her head. ‘Nothing. If Ava Bauer lived long enough to meet the social media revolution, I expect she’d have been too old by then to care about it.’
If she lived long enough … Tayte thought, his mind wandering back to the art gallery and the conversation with Rudi Langner. Clearly something had prevented Johann and Ava from being together after the war, something Johann didn’t like to talk about. Tayte wished he knew what it was, but as he didn’t, he decided to keep an open mind for now. All he did know was that Johann and Ava seemed to have fallen very much in love.
Chapter Twenty
Munich. August 1942.
Having arrived home for a short period of leave the previous evening, and having spent almost every waking hour since in the close company of Ava’s parents, with whom Johann was staying, he and Ava were alone together at last. They were balancing awkwardly on Ava’s bicycle, running an errand for her father, Gerhard, who had been forced to sell his motorcar in order to provide for the family’s essential needs. His Beckstein grand piano, the one thing that Gerhard obstinately refused to part with because he believed it would help get the family back on its feet again after the war, had a broken hammer shank that could not satisfactorily be repaired. He had managed to locate a spare that belonged to the family of a former pupil who lived on the other side of Munich, and Johann, tired as he was from battle and an inherent lack of sleep, had readily agreed to go and fetch it, glad of any excuse to be alone with Ava.
It was late in the hot afternoon and Ava was giggling in his ear. ‘Slow down!’
Johann was freewheeling the bicycle down a hill, Ava on the seat behind him as he stood on the pedals. He didn’t want to slow down. The faster he went, the tighter Ava held him, and he wanted that feeling to last. They were on the outskirts of Munich, travelling along a lane that ran parallel to a farmer’s field, which was tellingly devoid of the wheat Johann imagined would ordinarily be coming into harvest. They reached the bottom of the hill with the summer wind rushing at their smiling faces, and that simple pleasure made Johann so happy that he wished the war was over so he and Ava could stay like this forever.
‘Hold on!’ Johann called, squeezing the brake levers as he turned off the lane, still carrying enough speed to solicit an excited squeal from Ava.
There was an opening into the field and Johann took it, sure that they had plenty of time to spare before Ava’s parents would begin to worry about them. A sunlit patch of bleached grass to the side of the field drew Johann towards it and the bicycle bounced over the rough, baked earth, which was so hard he could feel Ava bouncing in the saddle. Just before they reached the grass the wheels caught in a rut and Johann lost control of the steering. They were carrying little speed by now, which was just as well as they were thrown off onto the grass. They were both laughing as they rolled together, Ava landing on top of Johann who had momentarily had the wind knocked out of him. The bicycle clattered to the ground a few feet away.
Johann sat up with Ava still in his arms. ‘I thought we could stop here and rest a while,’ he said with a grin, as though tumbling off the bicycle was all part of the plan.
Ava laughed at him as she straightened her hair. ‘If I’d known we were coming out for a picnic, I’d have brought some Schnaps.’
‘I didn’t think you had any Schnaps.’
‘Papa has a bottle. Volker gave it to him the last time he called.’
‘Volker’s a good friend. He’s been looking after you, hasn’t he?’
‘Yes. He brings Mama food every now and then, and Papa says he gave him a very fair price for his motorcar. I think they’ve both grown rather fond of him.’
‘He can be very charming.’
‘Yes, he can.’
‘Is that so,’ Johann said, fancying that he saw a glint in Ava’s eye as she spoke. He smiled playfully and reached an arm around her. ‘I hope he hasn’t been too charming with you,’ he added as he pulled her to the ground and began to tickle her.
‘Stop it!’ Ava started screaming with laughter. ‘Of course he’s not been charming with me.’ She screamed again. ‘Stop! You know I can’t take it!’
Johann let her go. He rolled back onto the grass and Ava lay beside him with her head on his shoulder, each gazing up at the drifting clouds, which Johann thought were one of the few constants that remained unchanged by and oblivious to the war raging beneath them.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve given much thought to where you’d like to live when the war is over,’ Ava said. ‘I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind, but we can’t live with them forever.’
Johann didn’t care to think that far ahead. ‘With you,’ he said. ‘That’s about as far as I got. As long as it’s with you, I really don’t mind.’
‘I’ve often thought how nice it would be to live in the mountains. I know the winters would be cold but we’d keep each other warm.’
‘How would I make a living?’
Ava shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought very far ahead, either. How do you want to make a living?’
The question stumped Johann. In many ways he felt as if he’d been a soldier since the day he could walk. His father and the Hitler Youth had seen to that. Soldiering was all he knew.
When he didn’t answer, Ava rolled on top of him and said, ‘Would you like children?’ With Johann having been away so much since their wedding the year before, she hadn’t raised the question before. ‘Please say you would.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Johann said, smiling. ‘And you can teach them all to play the piano.’
‘And a dog?’
‘I doubt you could teach a dog to play the piano, but you can try.’
Ava slapped him and he laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and a dog if you like.’
Lowering her head onto Johann’s chest, Ava asked, ‘Do you ever think that if you imagine yourself in the future then that future will come true?’
‘What an odd question. How do you mean?’
‘Well, I’ve been picturing us living in the mountains after the war, with three children and a dog. I think if I keep imagining you there then you’ll come home to me when all this is over and we’ll be happy.’
‘I thought we were happy.’
‘How can I be truly happy when I worry about you so much? After our wedding, when you went back to your soldiering, I cried myself to sleep for weeks. I still do.’
‘I’m sorry, Ava,’ Johann said. ‘I wish it could be different. I wish this war had never begun, but then of course, we might never have met.’ He wrapped his arms around her and held her close as his lips found hers. And in that moment the war became so distant to him that he lost all concept of the fact that he had to return to his unit in just two days. When at last their kiss ended and reality caught up with him again, he added, ‘I’m going to survive this, Ava. I’ll survive it for you, you’ll see.’
‘I believe you will, Johann.’
He felt Ava’s warm breath on his neck as she spoke, and he just held her in his arms. She seemed so fragile to him—so vulnerable. His gaze returned to the clouds, and he wished with all his heart that he could be with her always, to love and protect her, and while he didn’t think it would do much
good to imagine any kind of future against such cruel uncertainty, as he closed his eyes he pictured that house in the mountains Ava had spoken of, and the many children he hoped they would have once the war was over.
Chapter Twenty-One
Present day.
Sitting up on the bed in his hotel room next to Jean, having exhausted the limited research he felt they were able to conduct into Ava Bauer, Tayte put his thoughts about her aside for now, in favour of more certain odds of finding some new information useful to his search.
‘Let’s move on to Volker Strobel’s marriage to Trudi Scheffler,’ he said. ‘Without access to Ava Bauer’s vital records, we could be chasing our tails all night looking for the right person. At least Strobel’s and Scheffler’s marriage was notable enough to get a mention online. Supposing for now that Karl had come to believe Strobel was his father, for that to be true Strobel had to have fathered a child. Given that he’d married Scheffler during the war, there’s a good chance she’d be the child’s mother.’
Jean brought up one of the web pages she’d saved from previous searches. ‘There’s a bit about Strobel’s marriage to Scheffler on this website about the world’s most-wanted war criminals,’ she said as she scrolled down to the pertinent information.
Tayte edged closer to get a better look. He scoffed as he began to read. ‘That’s quite an infamous guest list,’ he said, noting the names of some of the more prominent Nazi Party members to have been invited to the Strobel family Schloss for the wedding.
‘I read somewhere that Heinrich Himmler was a friend of Volker Strobel’s father,’ Jean said. ‘There can’t have been many German families as well-connected as the Strobels during the war.’
‘What’s that further down?’ Tayte said, pointing to a section about Volker Strobel’s parents. ‘Suicide,’ he added.
Jean scrolled down so they could better see the details.
‘Suicide pills taken as Berlin falls,’ Tayte read aloud. ‘So, given that Volker Strobel vanished after the war, did Trudi Scheffler inherit the Strobel fortunes?’
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