The Poellenberg Inheritance (14 page)

‘Madame Brevet,' Fisher began. ‘Not long ago you were walking down the Rue d'Auvergne and you thought you saw a man. A German officer who used to be in Paris during the war. Do you remember?'

For a moment there was absolute blankness. Paula moved a step nearer; it was useless, just as the police had said. The old woman was senile, she couldn't be relied upon for anything. The white head turned from Fisher to her and back again.

‘What German officer?' she said.

‘The one you said you saw!' Her daughter-in-law couldn't contain herself. ‘Jesus, you had the newspapers and the flics running all over us with that story! What do you mean, what German officer – stupid old cow!'

‘General Bronsart,' Fisher said. ‘You thought you saw him in the Rue d'Auvergne. Can you tell us about it?'

‘Ah, my God,' the old woman cried out. Suddenly her eyes were bright, her face alive with excitement. ‘That devil – I saw him, monsieur! I saw him as clear as I see you, walking down the same side of the street; it was him and I knew him, even though it must be twenty years …'

‘Thirty is more like it,' the younger woman said acidly. ‘Get something right, can't you. Old cow,' she repeated.

‘And you're certain it was him?' Paula stepped forward; she felt stifled with heat and anxiety. Her father's life hung by the thread of this old woman's credibility.

‘Of course it was, I recognised him, I knew him!'

‘When did you last see the General?' Fisher asked her.

‘Eh? I told you, a little while ago, I forget exactly when, but a little while …'

‘When you saw him again,' Fisher prompted, ‘had he changed very much? Wasn't he much older? How was he dressed, madame?'

She raised her head and looked at him. The expression was blurred.

‘In black, of course. They all wore black uniforms.'

‘I told you,' her daughter-in-law said. ‘That's all the police got out of it. But do you know, she went to the station round here and reported seeing this man! Can you imagine it? The crazy old cow.' She shook her head and humped the baby from one shoulder to the other.

‘I don't think this is any good,' Fisher said to Paula. He took her by the arm. ‘I'm sorry, but I think it was just a fantasy, reliving the past. We'd better go.'

‘Yes,' Paula said. The atmosphere in the little room was thick with heat and human odours. She felt sick. It had been a failure, and only now, faced with total disappointment, did she realise how much she had relied upon this interview.

The heat was suffocating. She took a deep breath and pulled off her hat.

There was a high, fierce little scream. The old woman was out of her chair and on her feet. One gnarled hand was in the air, balled into a fist.

‘The eyes!' she shrieked. ‘That's how I knew him! He was an old man and his hair was white, but I knew those eyes! And you have them – you have the same eyes as that swine who murdered my son!'

‘Yes,' Paula said quietly. ‘I am afraid I have. I am General Bronsart's daughter.'

With two quick steps the old Madame Brevet had reached her. With a forward jerk of her head, she spat into Paula's face.

‘Heinrich, where do you think this will end? If you interfere in this you can only do harm. Harm to Mother and to all of us!'

‘I should like to do Mother harm,' Prince Heinrich said. ‘It's time somebody injured her for a change. You will be here to hold her hand, why shouldn't I go to Paris? Are you suggesting that you'll miss me?'

His brother made a gesture of impatience. ‘You'll get into trouble,' he said. ‘You force me to say these things. You'll get drunk and it will be in the newspapers. Why can't you stay here – or go up to the schloss, if you're bored.'

‘A drunkard is never bored,' Heinrich Von Hessel said. ‘Or lonely. He swallows consolation for all his ills. I hate the schloss. I spent three months shut up there with a male nurse who used to punch me black and blue when nobody was looking.

‘But then nobody would have cared – so long as the family name wasn't damaged. And what a great name it is, eh? Making millions out of armaments, employing slave labour, financing the Nazis.' He laughed out loud. ‘I'm going to Paris, and I shall stand with a placard round my neck saying who I am, and I shall piss in the street!' His brother went out and the door banged. The Prince went over to the window; his mother's car had just driven up in the courtyard. In a few moments she and Philip would have a family conclave and discuss what best to do about him.

Their trouble was, he thought, that provided he stayed within some bounds of sobriety, there wasn't much they could do. His last severe bout was only two months away; the accident with the car had happened before that. He had recovered and was soaking at a steady rate. He staggered, so to speak, but didn't fall. And unless he fell, there was no restriction his family could place upon him. He had a private fortune, inherited under a family trust which his father had been unable to break, and he couldn't be certified insane and put away without the scandal coming out.

That had always been his safeguard and it still was. He could move about with freedom and thereby torment his mother with suspense and fear. And he had told his brother Philip that he meant to go to Paris, partly for the pleasure of alarming him and partly from a sense of irresponsible curiosity. He had a juvenile habit of listening in to telephone conversations and looking in other people's drawers. He spied on his mother with a sharp degree of drunken cunning, as he had spied on her all his life, partly for self-protection and partly from malice because he knew himself to be excluded. He had discovered that Fisher was in Paris and that he had the General's daughter with him. And during the night when he woke up to have a drink, the idea came to him of going there and making himself known. It would convulse his mother and cause his upright brother many anxious hours. They couldn't stop him. He could take his valet with him, who had acted as a private nurse for twenty years, and book in at the Ritz Hotel. He need never leave his suite unless he felt inclined. Or he could amuse himself by meddling, by indulging one of his infrequent bouts of self-assertion, like ordering a Ferrari motor-car and driving it himself while drunk.

He had no recollection of killing the child. He remembered nothing till he woke up in his own bed and saw his mother standing near him, looking much older. They had bribed and cajoled him out of a charge of manslaughter and kept the newspaper coverage to the minimum. He had accepted what was done, at the same time resenting it because it placed him under obligation, and gratitude was not within his capability. He hadn't been on a trip for months; when Philip suggested he was bored he had denied it, but he realised that it must be true. He was tired of his surroundings, inhibited by his family's presence; required to be on parade, as on the occasion when the detective came and he had stood behind the sofa, trying not to sway about and then locked in his bedroom because they were afraid he might stumble downstairs; at other times banished out of sight with the discreet connivance of his valet. He liked his valet; there was an understanding between them. Prince Heinrich paid his salary and gave him extra money when he felt in a good mood. The valet took orders from the Princess in a crisis, but from day to day he set out to please the Prince. He had made up his mind. He was drunk as usual but by no means incapable. He was going to Paris. He rang for his valet, gave him the news and instructed him to pack.

Downstairs his mother and his brother Philip were in conference as he had imagined. ‘I won't allow it,' the Princess said. ‘God knows what he'll do when he gets there; imagine the Ritz if he has one of those drunken rages and begins to smash things!'

‘He won't do that,' Philip tried to comfort her. ‘The clinic cured him of those impulses. He simply drinks now, Mother. I tried to persuade him not to go but you know how obstinate he becomes if you argue with him.'

‘You're too soft,' the Princess said angrily. ‘You always plead and make excuses for him! I'm going to have him put away – I've borne enough from him! I'll get him certified and committed. Then we can have peace!'

‘You can't do that,' her son said quietly. ‘Heinrich's not mad; you can't do that to him. I won't agree to it. And you know it would leak out. We've covered him all his life, and you said yourself he hasn't long. You mustn't think of that solution. It's impossible.'

The fierce glare turned on him like a light beam. She looked old and cruel with anger. ‘Nothing is impossible to us,' she said. ‘As we have proved once already. It came to the Von Hessels and the might of Adolf Hitler's Gestapo and we survived. Never say to me that something can't be done.'

‘At a price, Mother. But the days for paying it are over too. We have power and we have money. We no longer have the right to abuse either of them. The old world permitted it, the new one won't, whatever you think. We hid the killing of that child because we set the parents up for life and moved them five hundred miles away to Frankfurt. But we can't put Heinrich into a lunatic asylum and hope to get away with it. He has trustees, and he's nominally head of the family. You don't want the scandal over the Salt to destroy us; this would be almost as bad.'

‘You have the new conscience, don't you, my son?' She sneered at him, standing at her full height, with the force of her patrician contempt for ordinary moral standards beating against him. ‘You talk like a bourgeois. You forget who we are.'

‘I could never do that,' Philip reminded her. ‘I have lived and breathed the importance of this family from the moment I was born. I've watched you ruling our empire, Mother, and I've accepted all my obligations. But the times have changed, and even we can't put them back to what we were. We're powerful, yes, but we're no longer the feudal barons of before the war. We can't dispose exactly as we like, even of our own blood. Society won't tolerate us if we try, and I'm very anxious not to put it to the test.'

‘That's not your reason for protecting that drunken maniac.' The Princess turned on him. ‘It's weakness!' She was so angry with him for this determined thwarting of her will, that she was capable of saying anything to punish him. She loved him, as she had loved his father, but she loved her power of domination more than anything else. He was a Von Hessel, but he was of weaker stuff, with a silly conscience and a set of tepid morals that filled her with disgust. The temptation to tell him so came upon her, but she conquered it. Only a fool pulls down the house because a door squeaks.

‘He's a danger and he's bad,' she said coldly. ‘I've always known he would bring some dreadful tragedy upon us. Let him go to Paris, then. Let him meddle, let him blunder drunkenly into this hornets' nest, with Fisher and that woman. It is your responsibility if anything goes wrong.' She turned her back on him and walked out of the room. Prince Philip watched her as she left. His mother's anger lasted for days; she would ignore him until he came and abjectly apologised. She was a woman who, when she once established contact, never let go. He felt her influence even when they were separated, the force of her affection, the pull of her will-power.

And he admired her for the superhuman strength of character that had kept the Hessel factories in the face of government attempts to seize them, that had fought the accusations of Nazi sympathy and gathered the loyalty of thousands of workers to herself. She was like iron; the rock upon which he had leaned since his infancy; the old Prince died when he was still a little boy.

She hated his brother Heinrich, as only a woman of that determined cast can hate a weakling of whom she fails to rid herself. It would have surprised her to know that the feeling was returned; she thought the sodden, drink-distorted personality of her son incapable of a coherent emotion or of a sensibility that could be wounded. And if she had admitted it, Philip knew she wouldn't have cared. Heinrich had disappointed her; he embodied everything she most despised. Lack of self-control, whether it was lying in a coma with his own vomit on the floor beside the bed, or flying into violent tantrums when he broke the furniture or drove a car at lethal speed on the wrong side of the road. He had a keeper, a valet who was trained to clean up after him, and nurse him, armed with a hypodermic when he fell into DTs. He lived with them and yet he had an entity and freedom which his mother had been powerless to take away from him. He seldom baulked her, but when he did, as on this occasion when he had decided to go to Paris, its effect upon her was alarming. Her solutions were the sweeping variety that suggest themselves to those with too much power. Put him away. Shut him up forever. But the terms of an old trust formed by her sons' great-grandfather made this impossible to do without the maximum publicity. Philip wondered whether his brother understood the factors that had saved him, or whether he would capitalise still further to embarrass his family if he did realise. In any case it didn't matter. What did matter was this intention to go to Paris and involve himself in Fisher's activities. He would attract attention, because their name was like honey to a swarm of bees where the world press was concerned. Heinrich would be followed and photographed, and the old rumours of his illness resurrected, to be followed by veiled suggestions of what their exact cause might have been. Nervous breakdowns. Tuberculosis. That had covered a six-month stay in a Swiss clinic after a violent outburst which luckily took place in the Schloss Würtzen, far enough from the public eye to be disguised. Unmarried. The world's most eligible bachelor. The wealthiest recluse who seldom left his hotel suite.

Philip had seen the press cuttings his mother kept of the reports over the years during the early days of the war when Heinrich had got loose in Europe, for the second time. The efforts of his valet had brought him home without a major breakdown, or the disclosure of his real malady. Alcoholic degeneracy. He had said Heinrich wasn't mad. Clinically this could be argued. He was the result of centuries of overbreeding, an unhappy genetic accident which he, Philip, had escaped. Knowledge of his own good fortune made him guilty in relation to his brother. He insisted to his mother that it could have been his burden instead of Heinrich's to carry through life the sins and intermarriages of his ancestors. He sighed, and pushed the blond hair back from his forehead. It too was a genetic gesture, from the father who had died in a blazing Stuka over the English Channel. If Heinrich was determined to go, then he had better follow him. That might placate his mother, and give them some safeguard against the future. Because the future could turn very dark if the detective's latest report was right.