Keeper of Secrets (9780062240316)

by Thomas, Julie

  Again there was a silence. Rafael put down the photo and picked up the group one: a tall, beautiful woman, a shorter, round, laughing man, and four children, taken well before the dark clouds of war.

  “And your mama and Rachel?”

  “We know only sketchy details. After a short time in a displaced persons’ camp, I was sent to London, to Levi. We waited a couple of years, and then we went to Berlin to find our old house. It had suffered some damage but was habitable and there was a family living there, a military man of some sort. We asked if we could have a look and they were very nice. They let us take the mezuzah and we have it now, on this house, and I said there might be a box in the attic, could I look for it? They agreed and there they were! Seven violins, the property of Amos Wiggenstein, still wrapped in the sheet music. You know, the ones we’d rescued the morning after the Kristallnacht?”

  Rafael was fascinated.

  “What did you do with them?” he asked eagerly.

  “Brought them with us, to New York. We lived with our uncle Avrum for a while, and I went into banking, followed in my father’s and my uncle’s footsteps, I suppose.”

  Levi spoke for the first time.

  “And I went into interior design and window dressing. Had my own company.”

  Simon took a deep breath.

  “When we were in Berlin, we found Maria Weiss. Mama and Rachel had gone to her on that night. What we didn’t know then was that she was a remarkable woman, on the fringes of the Berlin resistance, such as it was. They tried to get us out of Dachau, but the authorities wouldn’t agree; it was too late. And she tried to find Sarah, our aunt, but her house was looted and she was gone. We learned later that Mordecai’s whole family was hidden for ten months by the Grajerks, the Polish family of a teller in our bank, then betrayed and sent with them to Bergen-Belsen.

  “But Maria knew people, and those people got false papers for Mama and Rachel. They lived quietly for a while as Catholic Germans, with friends of Maria’s. But these people were also involved in dangerous endeavors, smuggling and hiding Jews and passing German secrets to the Americans and the Russians. Rachel lived with a glamorous young couple, Harro Schulze-Boysen, a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe Ministry, and his French wife, Libertas Schulze-Boysen. They were spies, part of the Red Orchestra network.

  “In 1941, Mama tried to go to Switzerland and then on to Levi in London, but her group was stopped at the border and the Gestapo didn’t believe their story, even though they had all the correct papers. Eventually one of them broke, and the Gestapo shipped the whole group off to Auschwitz. Rachel had decided to stay in Berlin. She was madly in love with a resistance fighter, a handsome young lawyer called Hans, according to Maria. When I last saw her, she was fourteen and the idea of my little sister being madly in love with anyone still astounds me. She did important document work for her friends—she was very good at drawing and copying—and I can imagine what sort of work she did.

  “In late 1942, the spy ring was infiltrated and they were all arrested. Many of them were tried and executed in prison, guillotined, but when they discovered that Rachel was a Jewess they decided the blade was too good for her and sent her to Auschwitz. By that stage of the war they were killing twenty thousand a day and the average life expectancy of a Jew in Auschwitz was four hours—”

  “Oh my God!”

  Rafael’s reaction to Simon’s words was instinctual, almost visceral. The old man smiled sadly.

  “I know, Maestro, that place was an efficient killing machine. People arrived and lived for as long as it took to process them.”

  Rafael shook his head. These men had seen human nature at its worst, such savagery and brutality, and yet they remained above it.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Horowitz. I’d hoped very much for a happier conclusion.”

  “I survived, and Levi’s is a happy story. That’s more than many families can say.”

  Rafael turned to Levi. “I was going to ask, what happened to you?”

  “I don’t talk so much about it. I left home in November 1938 on what we thought was an official exit visa, but I’d been set up and was arrested at the border. You must understand that there was corruption everywhere in those days. One of the border guards tried to shoot me but the gun jammed, then I fought back and escaped. I fled on foot to Switzerland and, eventually, to London. I had the precious things my father had given me and that meant I could pay for my passage to freedom, so he did save me after all. I was in an internment camp for a while, and then I worked on the land, for a farming family in Somerset. They had sons in the air force and they were very good to me. They knew I hated Hitler more than they did.

  “After the war, I went back to London and got a job in a soft furnishing store. I designed pieces of furniture and I learned upholstery. When the Red Cross told me Simon was alive, I applied for him to come to London.”

  He’d kept his head down and his gaze fixed on the table throughout his short speech, and something told Rafael that he felt uncomfortable talking about himself. Then he looked up.

  “Compared to Simon I had a very easy war.”

  “He is the master of understatement when it comes to his war, my brother.”

  The men exchanged glances, and Rafael could tell it was a subject over which they had made peace long ago.

  “So what happened to the violins you brought with you?” Rafael asked in a moving-along-now tone of voice.

  “We sold them, all except one.”

  Simon got to his feet and went into the hall. He opened a large cupboard and lifted down two violin cases.

  “This is the one we kept, a Cremonese violin from around 1810, and this one.”

  He opened the case and lifted out a full-sized violin with a lovely honey-gold glaze and one or two obvious tiny cracks. The strings were loose.

  “This is the violin both my father and I played in Dachau. I don’t play it, I just keep it. I haven’t played a violin since the last time I played for the guards.”

  “May I?”

  Rafael held out his hand toward the violin, and the old man handed it over.

  “Certainly, sir.”

  It felt rough, and the cracks caught under the skin of his fingers. He turned it over and over and studied the beautifully tooled scroll and then handed it back.

  “Thank you very much for showing it to me. I have one last question and before you answer, I want you to know that it is not at all my intention to stir up old hurts, not at all. I want to help your grandson to reach a place where he needs to play the violin again. It’s now more obvious to me than ever that these violins are a vital part of his family history and Daniel inherits his extraordinary gift partly from you, yes? It would be a tragedy for him, and for us, his public, if he never plays again.”

  Both old men nodded their agreement.

  “So is there anything more you can tell me about the Guarneri and the Amati violins? Anything at all that might help me to find them?”

  “And you do this just for Daniel?” Levi asked.

  “Absolutely. They are his legacy. It’s an unbelievably hard thing to do, but if we don’t try, we’ll never succeed, yes? I believe that if we could find even one of them, he would want to play it more than anything else.”

  Simon nodded slowly.

  “The Amati may be in France. There’s a list of instruments we read about in an old French magazine, oh, it would be ten years ago now, and it mentioned a 1640 with a very light tone and a lovely dark varnish. That sounds like our instrument. It’s in a private collection. I doubt we could get it, because we can’t prove it’s ours.”

  “And the Guarneri?”

  He felt guilty about pushing them, but they were as open as he was ever going to find them, and sometimes elderly memories need a helping hand.

  “It had the most amazing oil vanish; it shone. It was a red-tinted brown an
d there was a flame in the maple on the back and there was a wolf note—”

  “That’s not what he means!” Levi cut across his brother’s description. “He means is there anything to identify it. The answer is no.”

  Simon turned him. “It’s for Daniel,” he said firmly.

  “We don’t know anything, Simon. That Nazi thug took it away, and we know nothing more.”

  “But if he doesn—”

  “We promised Papa. We swore a solemn oath and I won’t betray his memory. Besides, that was long before the war. It can’t mean anything now.”

  Levi was suddenly agitated, and Rafael could hear the stubborn desperation in his voice. They were hiding something but he had no idea what.

  “You can trust me, gentlemen. If something happened to the violin, you know I’ll keep your confidence.”

  “We don’t have anything more to tell you, Maestro. I’m sorry if your journey has been wasted,” Levi said with finality. Again there was silence, but this one was more uncomfortable.

  “Yes, we do.”

  Simon turned to Levi and touched his arm.

  “He’s my grandson, Levi, and I want him to play. He is the last Horowitz in the line, and there may be no more. His great-grandpapa would want him to play again. He would want us to find it, and if the maestro doesn’t know, he’ll never succeed.”

  He picked up the violin and gave it back to Rafael.

  “Look inside this violin. There is a label; you can just glimpse it. That’s how we would tell our Guarneri, by the date of manufacture.”

  Rafael looked into the f hole. There was something stuck to the inside back of the instrument, but he couldn’t see what it was.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Simon gave a deep sigh.

  “Years ago, before the war, Papa could see what was happening to us, to the Jews. He was concerned that the Nazis would make an excuse and try to take our possessions. He worried that we owned things the Nazis would say were too precious, too valuable to be owned by a Jew. He couldn’t do anything about most of what he owned and he knew that if they took the house, they would also take the bank, so the vault was not the answer. So he took the Guarneri to Amos Wiggenstein and paid him to make it less valuable. That way the Nazis wouldn’t care so much about it and they might, one day, give it back to him. And he would know it instantly when he found it again.”

  The two old men exchanged glances again. Levi was obviously angry but silent.

  “So Amos changed the date on the label?” Rafael asked incredulously.

  “Yes, sir. Amos was one of the best luthiers in Germany. My grandpapa had come from Frankfurt to bring him violins when he was young, long before we moved to Berlin, so he’d cared for them for many years. He was an old man, but he was very, very skilled.”

  “So although it is a 1729, it wouldn’t read 1729, now?”

  Simon hesitated, and Levi gave a deep sigh. “No, sir, it would read 1729, now.”

  “But it isn’t?”

  “No, sir.”

  Something was beginning to stir in Rafael’s mind, a wondering, an excitement, a feeling of amazement, mixed with a strong sense of dread. His mouth felt suddenly dry.

  “Do you know what it should read?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Oh, yes, of course. It should read 1742, and that’s why the famous last one has never been found. It’s out there somewhere, disguised as something else.”

  It was one of those you-could-have-heard-a-pin-drop moments, as Rafael reflected and turned the old violin over in his hands. Such a circle of coincidences, but then perhaps it wasn’t coincidence at all; perhaps it was fate, or perhaps it was the strange karma that Simon had spoken of earlier. Roberto di Longi was right, and Rafael was in a bind deeper than he’d ever experienced before.

  When he eventually looked up, he could see the relief of a long-held secret, finally shared, on both of the other men’s faces. Rafael felt deeply sorry for them and yet humbled by their resilience and their courage. They’d told the story because he’d asked; they didn’t expect, or want, his pity. How could he ever begin to imagine what they’d gone through? How could he make any of it up to them? Could he restore something so precious, such a link to the past, to those loved ones viciously torn away from them? And, at the same time, could he reestablish a musical dynasty? His gut instinct told him that success in this would be more important than any other part of his legacy.

  “Gentlemen, if your Guarneri is, indeed, a 1742, then I know where it is.”

  Possession

  Part Three: Sergei Valentino

  1945

  Chapter 29

  Berlin

  Late April 1945

  The bullet whistled past about three inches above his left ear. In a desperate reflex action, Willi Graf threw himself behind a pile of rubble and lay very still. He couldn’t hear the blood thudding in his head because the sounds around him were too loud, but he was aware of his heart hammering in his chest. The artillery shells landing in the next street made the ground vibrate, and his nostrils were full of the stink of smoke from the fires raging in bombed-out buildings.

  About three hundred meters earlier, he’d finally given up on the brown box, it was slowing him down, so now he held nothing but the violin case, clutched to his chest. It was covered in a fine powder of dust from the rubble, and almost instinctively he brushed it clean with the back of his hand. Very slowly he raised his head above the jagged chunks of brick and peered around. Large craters crisscrossed the street between the debris, and he could see several bodies lying where they’d fallen, some missing limbs. The sharp cracks of rifle fire, the deep boom of artillery, and the low rumble of tanks over cobblestone echoed through the city like a death rattle. Berlin was falling, and street by street, building by building, the great Red Army was getting closer to victory. There would be no rescue from German troops outside the city; all was lost and it was time to leave, to melt into the crowd. He knew he should feel something, anger at the incompetence of a high command that had allowed things to get to this, fear for his family or even for himself, shame or humiliation when he considered the past few years. But for the moment the only emotion coursing through him was a strong sense of self-preservation; he knew what he had to do to save his own skin and secure his future and that took all his mental capacity.

  Up until a few weeks ago his war had gone very well. As a stabsmusikmeister, Willi Graf had enjoyed a position of rare privilege. He was part of the M-Aktion team and had spent the last seven years evaluating and cataloging precious musical treasures for the Sonderstab Musik, the führer’s special task force for music. Their instructions were to prepare the collection for a music university to be opened in Linz, Austria, after the glorious victory. Graf had traveled all over occupied Europe and handled wonderful musical instruments and original manuscripts. In 1942, he’d been in Paris, helping compose a nine-page list, an inventory of the cream of the violins they’d found so far, including ten Stradivari, three Amati, and at least four gorgeous Guarneri.

  But in January he’d been recalled to Berlin. The war was not going well, and his orders seemed less confident, more confused, every day. He knew there were lists of instruments in Berlin, Leipzig, Amsterdam, and Brussels, but he also knew that they’d probably been destroyed when the enemy bombs hit the administration buildings. This meant there were now very few people who knew where the most valuable treasures were hidden—and he was one of them. The führer himself had commanded him to guard the knowledge with his life so that when the army came and the Reich was saved, the plans for a music university could continue.

  This morning he’d decided it was time he made his escape, so he’d dressed in civilian clothing and donned his long, black leather coat to keep out the spring cold. Before packing the box, he’d caressed its contents one last time, lingering over the curves and marveling at
the beauty of the varnish. Nothing in his life mattered as much as this, his constant companion.

  His plan had been to make his way on foot to a garage on the southern outskirts of the city where he knew he’d find a car, fueled and ready for the journey to the Swiss border. Then, after a couple of quick stops to collect some possessions, which he’d carefully hidden away for just such a “rainy” day, he’d be on his way to freedom and a life of luxury.

  Now he admitted that he’d severely underestimated the danger on the streets, and the journey to the car was far more complicated than it’d appeared from the relative safety of the führer’s bunker, but Graf had survived so far on his nerves and his cunning, and he wasn’t going to give in to some stupid Russkies.

  Slowly he uncoiled from behind the mountain of broken bricks. Snipers were his immediate problem, German riflemen hidden from view picking off people not in uniform. Case clasped to his body and bent low, he sprinted across the street into the deep shadows created by the shells of the buildings. Two streets from the garage, the gunfire sounded farther away, and he dropped his guard a fraction, rounded a corner, and walked straight into a raised Russian Tokarev semiautomatic rifle. The patrol was miles from where it should’ve been. In desperation, he surrendered and tried to explain that he was just a German civilian, but they hauled him away, still clinging to the violin case.

  Chapter 30

  General Vladimir Mikhailovich Valentino sat behind a temporary desk and studied a wall-mounted street map of Berlin as he stuffed tobacco into his pipe. He was a heavyset man, six foot four and over two hundred and eighty pounds, with thick glistening black hair slicked back from a high forehead, a large mouth under a hooked nose, and an impressive downward-drooping mustache. He sighed deeply and lit the bowl of the pipe. On the desk in front of him lay a report detailing a sector his division had “liberated” the day before: how many German soldiers killed in combat, how many taken prisoner, how many supplies confiscated, how many civilians shot, and so on.