Murder Without Pity (17 page)

“You cunning bastard,” he muttered. For security, Pincus the thief had moved his paper armory from his studio in boxes the concierge had noticed to this cubicle, hidden within the labyrinth of others. Here he continued to work out what furies possessed him. Here he might have plotted a war.

“Monsieur Examining Magistrate.” Officer Leclair poked his head inside. “Should we start the inventory?”

He had forgotten about Leclair, Christophe, and the others until that moment. They did have that task as well as the duty to put everything under seal. He also had to inform the public prosecutor about this discovery and afterwards write a report on his search. But first he had to understand the secrets the German language held.

He tossed back the flap to his satchel and reached for his cell phone. He didn’t like being dragged deeper into the case. He had no choice, though. He wouldn’t relinquish any dossier to another criminal investigator. He punched in some numbers. “I’ve discovered a cache of documents that may help an investigation. I need a German translator.”

He received from the Palace of Justice a harangue. They couldn’t spare a one. Not now. Not for the foreseeable future. Hadn’t he heard about that slew of retirees from Cologne, caught in that terrorist blast? It was on TV, Monsieur Cassel, the stress from the bombings no doubt overcoming her decorum. Metro Saint-Paul? Everyone of them bawling like babies? The German ambassador demanding their care? she continued. The Palace had to contract with a translator from the Sorbonne to help with the load, in fact.

Stanislas overlooked her sarcasm and kept his tone polite. What about that woman who translated Russian? Wasn’t she studying for placement in the translator book on the German page?

Out with the flu, she snapped, followed by a pause. She must have realized her rudeness because she apologized with a suggestion. Did he know a language teacher or friend, fluent in his need? He could enlist that person as long as the stand-in took an oath and worked under his supervision.

“Anna,” he said, her expertise forgotten until the suggestion, to which the woman replied, “I’m sorry?”

“A friend of mine. She might help.”

Of course, Anna, he thought after he rung off. With her fluency in languages, including German, he felt certain, and knowledge of the Occupation, the obvious choice all along. This time he punched in numbers quicker, eager to see her again.

THE DARK YEARS

An hour later she arrived, breathless from hurrying. She stood silently beside him in the doorway, gazing at the boxes in a mysterious fascination, he sensed. From what he had explained on the phone, she appeared to perceive something beyond the material, something beyond his understanding and experience.

“My God,” she finally whispered. “Who would have believed?” Her voice was low and uttered to herself.

He motioned ahead, though he wondered if she noticed. “A chart in that book mentions Reinhard Heyrich and Adolf Eichmann. I’ve vaguely heard of them. It also shows a Théodor Dannecker—”

She broke toward the desk before he could finish. She sat at the edge of the chair without speaking, without removing her shoulder bag. She stared at the pages for a long moment. Then she caressed them like rare artifacts unearthed, and when she examined the book’s spine she pressed a hand to her lips with a gasp. “We must have privacy,” she demanded.

“I trust my police,” he said.

She glared at him. “Absolute privacy. Do as I say.” As she turned back, the fan blew a few strands of hair across her forehead. She ignored them, remained still except for her hand that caressed. Then energized by some thought she fumbled absently in her bag, still over her shoulder, while she continued reading.

Not finding what she wanted, she grabbed the bag with both hands and shook its contents fiercely onto the desk. With an exasperated sigh, she lifted her head to a coffee can in front of her crammed with sharpened pencils, when she noticed the old news weekly. She grabbed the magazine and shook it at him. “See this mutilation? Rwanda. This is how it is. The powerful keep saying ‘Never Again,’ yet allow slaughters like this to happen. It’s disgusting.” She tossed the publication aside. It fell onto the floor. She didn’t bother to pick it up. Instead she pinched out a pencil from the can.

Stanislas ordered his men to wait further back in the corridor and shut the door.

“Lock it,” she ordered, oblivious to his position.

For a second he heard a brusqueness in her voice he imagined she got from Gerti. This time he didn’t object and threw a bolt while he watched her.

“Both of them.”

Compelled by her urgency, he did.

She became quiet as she returned to reading. Sometimes she jotted a word or phrase on a pad. Other times she murmured to herself, as though communing with ghosts. Mostly she read. She traveled the pages, checked the index, reached to the shelf to grab some volume along with Boucher’s and Dannecker’s files.

He watched her finger trace each word in the index in deliberate slowness. “Anna,” he asked, liking the sound of her name. “What is it?”

She raised her hand for silence; she needed to think. She turned another page without looking at him and moved her finger down the index again. Would she stop at the
Cs
, he feared, and find “Marcel Cassel: pamphleteer, demagogue, and traitor”? Would he finally hear a harangue? But she passed to the
Js
, then into the
Ks
without any comment. At last she brushed back the wisps of hair across her forehead. When they blew back, she didn’t bother with them again. She appeared to have forgotten everything, he sensed, detached herself, and slipped away as she interpreted the meaning beneath the words. He stood aside, once more an outsider to a mood that had gripped her.

A typewriter lay on the make-shift desk. He pulled it forward, and its underside rasped against the splintered wood. Anna turned another page. He brushed away dust that powdered the top and lifted the case off. The keys appeared well oiled for they jumped smartly when he tapped on a few. He hit them hard. They whacked against the paper Pincus had left rolled in and left sharp, mean tracks. Anna shifted to a pile of clippings from the Dannecker file. He tilted the typewriter up and spotted a plate screwed into the bottom. It was an ancient Royal, he noticed, a throwaway Pincus might have bought at a flea market and turned into a weapon of war.

Minutes passed. Then many more. And then: “Our Léon, what a beautiful man.” Anna finally roused herself from her trance in the middle of some thought. She glanced up and saw he stood beside her. Her eyes were teary with happiness. “I can’t believe it, Stanislas. What brilliance with research. These telegrams and typed reports and office logs, a lot that I see here, primary sources. They’re worth more than diamonds. My God in heaven, if I live another fifty years, I won’t believe it. Look at this.” From a stack she had gathered, she waved a plastic packet that looked like those used at a crime scene to preserve evidence. “An original handwritten note. Notice the German word in the margin?
Ausrottung.
It means ‘tearing up by the roots.’ By the green pencil used to write, I’d say Himmler must have scribbled it in thinking about the Final Solution. In this same packet, some Nazi party membership files from the Berlin Document Center. There, on that third shelf, extracts from German Foreign Ministry records. Maybe stolen from the same archive, too. And this, an original handwritten page of Vichy cabinet minutes from our own National Archives.” She laughed at her discoveries, and her laughter smoothed away the wrinkles on her cheeks.

“If he had wanted money,” she continued, “the Bank of France wouldn’t have been safe. What a beautiful, beautiful man.”

She stood and started to pace off her excitement. “I wish I could have met our beautiful man. I’d have made love to him daily. He was quite a thief. Oh yes, certainly. He knew what to steal and how. I think cunning, Stanislas. Yes, I’m sure of it. Cunning was one of his weapons. That’s how I’d do it, if I were him. Maybe our beautiful man accidentally took a book home from an archive without checking it out and got an idea. He returned the next day, replaced it, and you know what else he might have done? Stolen telexes or something else restricted.” She pushed the volume into the case and smiled at him. “After that, he displayed these telexes or whatever he had and said to this careless guard in that archive’s section, ‘See what happened on your watch?’”

She spoke quickly, reaching into primal experience beyond his years, he realized, to explain her intuition. “Suppose this guard reported him?” he asked.

“You’re right. It was risky, this if you-tell-on-me, I-tell-on-you blackmail.” She slipped into a Yiddish word and with a laugh explained it meant brash. “Our beautiful man gambled with his freedom. But see for yourself. I think it paid off. You mentioned a Dannecker. I remember. You wouldn’t believe how I can go away and still be here. He was a howling madman. He killed my family. He killed thousands during the Occupation with the swipe of his pen. A murderer without pity, that’s who he was.”

He recalled their luncheon when she had fled their table after discussing that period. This time though, something she had found had lifted that burden. This time she invited him back, deep into her territory, the German and French bureaucracies during the Dark Years with their landmines of memory for both of them. This time her eyes burned with an ecstasy that made him flinch. And he had no choice except to follow.

“Everything’s preliminary at this point, Stanislas. A strong hunch, that’s all. But from the little I’ve glimpsed, this is how it might have happened,” she continued, after they had sat down. “First, a German, Friedrich Kleist. According to an original page from the Berlin Document Center our beautiful man stole, this Kleist, who was homeless in 1930s Berlin, joined the Blood and Fear Gang as a teenager. Criminal outcasts, this gang, like other bands—I know for a fact they were from my readings—and they robbed and beat up as way of life.

“In the summer of 1934, Kleist and other hooligans vacationed at a hostel in the Black Forest, and there he met another traveler, your Monsieur Boucher. This is also fact. I can’t stress that enough for what I think would happen later. Here, look.”

She held up the contents of one of the plastic packets. He could see through the transparency a photocopy of the hostel’s registry with a crest at the top and “Fredi Kleist” squiggled on one line. In the space below, Boucher had scribbled his name with a flourish and added his sentiments, “A French youth salutes the New Germany!!”

“You see? Fact. A year later, Kleist joined the Hitler Youth attracted by who knows what, and afterwards the Nazi Party.” Once more she referred to the Berlin Document Center as her source and jotted down Kleist’s party membership number. “Notice how low it is. He joined when the Nazis were just starting and on the fringe.”

“A believer?”

“Oh yes, exactly. Another fact. Kleist and Boucher kept up a correspondence because they met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I saw a packet here somewhere with copies of some of their letters.

“Then there’s this. We know from our own Interior Ministry records about
Book B
. Any historian of the 1930s, worthy of his title, knows about this list of traitors, at least in the eyes of the French state. Guess who worked as a young civil servant on it, compiling categories of so-called reactionaries? Boucher. I can show you later, if you wish, payroll stubs with the man’s name on it. Well, things start to get interesting.”

She darted her eyes past him. “What’s that?” She leaped toward the door, rammed back the bolts with a loud clink, and peered out. Satisfied after a long moment no one was spying, she bolted it and returned to her chair, without a trace of embarrassment. “I thought I heard something. Considering what’s here, we cannot be too cautious. These documents are priceless. Historic beyond belief. Now where was I? I remember.

“Our France fell in 1940. Germans occupied our lovely Paris and needed assistance running it. Who could help? French functionaries, who knew their way around. Collabos in varying degrees.”

She reached down and pulled out a bottle of mineral water from a carton within the crate. “Now the very day our Paris fell, Stanislas, a certain man arrived.” She twisted the top around, breaking the seal, as she continued gazing at him, and took a quick sip. “Helmut Knochen’s this man, and he brought a small contingent that looked like military police. Only they weren’t. With Knochen as chief, they were there to enforce party ideology, to hunt anti-Nazis, Jews especially.

“So they visited the police prefecture because that held a gold mine of German refugee files. Knochen’s Occupation activities are textbook knowledge. We won’t waste time on him. What’s fascinating is that Kleist accompanied him into Paris. I’ve never, in my many years studying this period, heard of this Kleist—he called himself Friedrich Kleist now—until our beautiful man uncovered him and made him another fact.” For proof she motioned to several yellowed Paris-to-Berlin telexes, preserved in one of the plastic bags on the desk.

“Who should work at the city’s police headquarters now?” She flipped through several pages of a thick notebook until she came to a letter slipped between two plastic sheets. “See for yourself.”

He reluctantly leaned forward for a better look. The left side page, he noticed, contained a letter from a police functionary to some ranking Interior Ministry official, requesting he loan “Monsieur Louis Philippe Boucher for a period indeterminate.” The civil servant had replied under that bureaucracy’s letterhead with the date, 1939, stamped in the margin. “We have the honor to fulfill your request,” his typed reply began in an ageless formalism Stanislas knew bureaucrats sometimes hid their true intentions behind.

“Thanks to his
Book B
work,” she explained as he continued reading, “Monsieur Boucher already knew hundreds of names and residence-and-work addresses. So Interior okayed him to those central police.”

She must have realized she had raised her voice for she began whispering. “We have then Kleist officially working under Knochen and Boucher moved to the police prefecture.”