The Schirmer Inheritance (5 page)

BOOK: The Schirmer Inheritance
7.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

He sat erect and very stern, his big hands grasping the arms of the photographer’s chair, his head pressed hard against the back of it. The lips were full and determined. There was a heavy, strong face beneath the beard. The silvered copper plate on which the portrait had been made was glued to a red velvet mount. Beneath it Hans had written:
“Mein geliebt Vater, Franz Schneider. 1782–1850.”

The only other document was a thin, leather-bound notebook filled with Hans’s spidery writing. It was written in English. On the first page, elaborately decorated with ornamental pen-strokes, was a description of the book’s contents: “An Account of My Beloved Father’s Heroic Part in the Battle of Preussisch-Eylau, fought in the year 1807, of His Wounding, and of His Meeting with My Beloved Mother, who Saved His Life. Set down by Hans Schneider for His Children in June 1867, that They may be Proud of the Name They Bear.”

The Account began with the events leading up to Eylau and went on with descriptions of the various actions in which the Ansbach Dragoons had engaged the enemy, and of spectacular incidents in the battle: a Russian cavalry charge, the capture of a battery of guns, the decapitation of a French officer. Obviously, what Hans had written down was a legend learned at his father’s knee. Parts of it still had the artless quality of a fairy tale; but as the account progressed, the middle-aged Hans could be seen perplexedly trying to reconcile his boyhood memories with his adult sense of reality. The writing of the Account, George thought, must have been a strange experience for him.

After his description of the battle, however, Hans’s touch had become surer. The emotions of the wounded hero, his certainty that God was with him, his determination to do his duty until the end—these things were described with practised
unction. And when the terrible moment of treachery came, when the cowardly Prussians had abandoned the wounded hero while he was helping a stricken comrade, Hans had let loose a torrent of Biblical denunciation. If God had not guided the hoofs of the hero’s horse to the farmhouse of the gentle Maria Dutka, all would certainly have been over. As it was, Maria had been understandably suspicious of the Prussian uniform, and (as she had later confessed to the hero) her humane instincts had been all but overcome by her fears for her virtue and for her ailing father. In the end, of course, all had been well. When his wound was healed, the hero had brought his rescuer home in triumph. In the following year Hans’s elder brother, Karl, had been born.

The Account concluded with a sanctimonious homily on the subjects of prayer-saying and the obtaining of forgiveness for sins. George skipped it and turned to Mr. Moreton’s diary.

Mr. Moreton and an interpreter whom he had engaged in Paris had arrived in Germany towards the end of March 1939.

His plan had been simple; simple in intention, at all events. First he would retrace Hans Schneider’s steps. Then, when he had found out where the Schneider family had lived, he would set about discovering what had happened to all Hans’s brothers and sisters.

The first part of the plan had proved simple of execution. Hans had come from somewhere in Westphalia; and in 1849 a man of military age had had to have a permit to leave it. In Münster, the old state capital, Mr. Moreton had been able to find the record of Hans’s departure. Hans had come from Mühlhausen and gone to Bremen.

In Bremen, a search in the port authority files of old ships’ manifests had revealed that Hans Schneider of Mühlhausen had sailed in the
Abigail,
an English ship of six hundred tons, on May 10, 1849. This had checked with a reference, in one of Hans’s letters to Mary Smith, to his voyage from Germany.
Mr. Moreton had now concluded that he was tracing the right Hans Schneider. He had gone next to Mühlhausen.

Here, however, a baffling situation had awaited him. He had found that, although the church registers recorded marriages, baptisms, and burials as far back as the Thirty Years’ War, none of them covering the years 1807 and 1808 contained any reference to the name of Schneider.

Mr. Moreton had brooded on this disappointment for twenty-four hours; then he had had an idea. He had gone back to the registers.

This time he had turned to those for 1850, the year of Franz Schneider’s death. The facts of his death and burial had been recorded, and the location of the grave. Mr. Moreton had gone to inspect it. Now he had had a most disturbing surprise. A decaying memorial stone had supplied the confusing information that this was the resting place of Franz Schneider and his much beloved wife, Ruth. According to Hans’s Account, his mother’s name had been Maria.

Mr. Moreton had returned to the registers again. It had taken him a long time to work back from 1850 to 1815, but by the time he had done so, he had had the names of no less than ten of Franz Schneider’s children and the date of his marriage to Ruth Vogel. He had also learned to his dismay that none of the children’s names had been either Hans or Karl.

The idea that there must have been a previous marriage in some other city had soon occurred to him. But where could this earlier marriage have taken place? With what other towns had Franz Schneider been associated? From what town, for instance, had he been recruited into the Prussian army?

There had been only one place where that sort of question might be answered. Mr. Moreton and his interpreter had gone to Berlin.

It had taken Mr. Moreton until the end of March to cut
through the swathes of Nazi red tape and dig far enough into the archives at Potsdam to get at the Napoleonic war diaries of the Ansbach Dragoons. It had taken him less than two hours to find out that between 1800 and 1850 the name of Schneider had figured only once in the nominal rolls of the regiment. A Wilhelm Schneider had been killed by a fall from his horse in 1803.

It had been a bitter blow. Mr. Moreton’s entry in his diary for that day ended with the despondent words: “So I guess it’s a wild-goose chase after all. Nevertheless I will make a check search tomorrow. If no result, will abandon inquiry as I consider inability to link Hans Schneider positively with Mülhausen family in records makes further efforts pointless.”

George turned the page and then stared blankly. The next entry in the diary consisted entirely of figures. They filled the page, line after line of them. The next page was the same, and the page after that. He flicked the pages over rapidly. With the exception of the date hadings, every entry in the diary from then on—and it continued for over three months—was in figures. Moreover, the figures were in groups of five. Not only had Mr. Moreton decided after all
against
abandoning his inquiries in Germany, but he had thought it necessary to record the results of them in cipher.

George abandoned the diary and glanced through the file of photographed documents. He did not read German with great confidence even when it was printed in roman type. German handwriting of the traditional kind defeated him completely. These were all handwritten. Careful scrutiny of two or three of them revealed the fact that they referred to the births and death of people named Schneider, but this was scarcely surprising. He put them aside and opened the sealed envelope.

The photograph “handed to R. L. M. by Father Weichs at Bad Schwennheim” proved to be a dog-eared, postcard-size
portrait of a young man and a young woman sitting side by side on a professional photographer’s rustic bench. The woman had a certain fluffy prettiness and was possibly pregnant. The man was nondescript. Their clothes were of the early 1920’s. They looked like a prosperous working-class couple on their day off. There was a painted background of snow-covered pines behind them. Across the corner of it was written, in German script:
“Johann und Ilse.”
The photographer’s imprint on the mount showed that it had been taken in Zurich. There was nothing else in the envelope.

Charlie, the janitor, came in with a piece of adhesive plaster on his forehead and another load of parcels, and George got back to work on the claims. But that night he took the contents of the deed box back to his apartment and went through them carefully again.

He was in a difficulty. He had been asked to check on the claims to the estate received by the former administrator; nothing else. If the deed box had not fallen and cut the janitor’s head, he would probably not have noticed it. It would have been moved out of the way of the parcels of claims files and then left in the vault. He would have worked his way through the claims and then, no doubt, simply reported to Mr. Budd what Mr. Budd wanted to hear: that there were no outstanding claims worth discussing and that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could go ahead. Then he, George, would have been free of the whole wretched business and ready to be rewarded with an assignment more suited to his abilities. Now it looked as if he had a choice of two ways of making a fool of himself. One was by forgetting about the contents of the deed box and so running the risk of allowing Mr. Sistrom to make a serious blunder; the other was by plaguing Mr. Budd with idle fancies.

High political office and the presidencies of railroads seemed very far away that night. It was not until the early hours of the
morning that he thought of a tactful way of putting the thing to Mr. Budd.

Mr. Budd received George’s report with impatience.

“I don’t even know if Bob Moreton’s still alive,” he said irritably. “In any case, all that this cipher stuff suggests to me is that the man was in an advanced stage of paranoia.”

“Did he seem O.K. when you saw him in ’44, sir?”

“He may have
seemed
O.K., but from what you show me it looks very much as if he wasn’t.”

“But he
did
go on with the inquiry, sir.”

“What if he did?” Mr. Budd sighed. “Look, George, we don’t want any complications in this business. We just want to get rid of the thing, and the sooner the better. I appreciate that you want to be thorough, but I should have thought it was very simple, really. You just get a German translator on these photographed documents, find out what they’re all about, then check through the claims from people named Schneider and see if the documents refer in any way. That’s straightforward enough, isn’t it?”

George decided that the time for tactful handling had arrived. “Yes, sir. But what I had in mind was a way of speeding up the whole thing. You see, I haven’t got through to the Schneider claims yet, but, judging by the volume of paper in the vault, there must be at least three thousand of them. Now, it’s taken me nearly four weeks to check through that number of ordinary claims. The Schneider files are certain to take longer. But I’ve been looking into things and I have a hunch that if I can check with Mr. Moreton it may save a lot of time.”

“Why? How do you mean?”

“Well, sir, I checked through some of the reports on that case he fought against the Rudolph Schneider claim and the German government. It seemed to me quite clear that Moreton, Greener and Cleek had a whole lot of facts at their disposal
that the other side didn’t have. I think they had very definite information that there was no Schneider heir alive.”

Mr. Budd looked at him shrewdly. “Are you suggesting, George, that Moreton as administrator went on and established beyond doubt that there was no heir, and that he and his partners then kept quiet about the fact so that they could go on drawing fees from the estate?”

“It could be, sir, couldn’t it?”

“Terrible minds some of you young men have!” Mr. Budd suddenly became jovial again. “All right, what’s your point?”

“If we could have the results of Moreton’s confidential inquiries, we might have enough information to make any further examination of all these claims unnecessary.”

Mr. Budd stroked his chin. “I see. Yes, not bad, George.” He nodded briskly. “O.K. If the old chap’s alive and in his right mind, see what you can do. The quicker we can get out from under the whole thing, the better.”

“Yes, sir,” said George.

That afternoon he had a call from Mr. Budd’s secretary to say that a check with Mr. Moreton’s former club had disclosed that he was now living in retirement at Montclair, New Jersey. Mr. Budd had written to the old man asking him if he would see George.

Two days later a reply came from Mrs. Moreton. She said that her husband had been bedridden for some months, but that in view of former associations, and providing that Mr. Carey’s visit was brief, Mr. Moreton would be glad to put his memory at Mr. Carey’s disposal. Mr. Moreton slept afternoons. Perhaps Friday morning at eleven o’clock would be convenient to Mr. Carey.

“That must be his second wife,” said Mr. Budd.

On the Friday morning, George put the deed box and all its original contents into the back of his car and drove out to Montclair.

3

T
he house was a comfortable-looking place surrounded by several acres of well-kept garden, and it occurred to George that the financial fate of Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek had not been quite as disastrous as Mr. Budd had implied. The second Mrs. Moreton proved to be a lean, neat woman in her late forties. She had a straight back, a brisk manner, and a patronizing smile. It seemed probable that she had been Mr. Moreton’s nurse.

“Mr. Carey is it? You won’t tire him, will you? He’s allowed to sit up in the mornings at present, but we have to be careful. Coronary thrombosis.” She led the way through to a glass-enclosed porch at the rear of the house.

Mr. Moreton was big and pink and flabby, like an athlete gone to seed. He had short white hair and very blue eyes, and there was still a trace of boyish good looks visible in the slack, puffy face. He was lying, propped up by cushions and swathed in a blanket, on a day-bed fitted with a book-rest. He greeted George eagerly, thrusting the book-rest aside and struggling into a sitting posture in order to shake hands. He had a soft, pleasant voice and smelled faintly of lavender water.

For a minute or two he asked after the people at George’s office whom he had known, and then about a number of men
in Philadelphia of whom George had never even heard. At last he sat back with a smile.

“Don’t ever let anyone persuade you to retire, Mr. Carey,” he said. “You live in the past and become a bore. A dishonest bore, too. I ask you how Harry Budd is. You tell me he’s fine. What I really want to know is whether he’s gone bald.”

BOOK: The Schirmer Inheritance
7.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Husk by Corey Redekop
Triple Shot by Sandra Balzo
Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante
Murder of a Bookstore Babe by Swanson, Denise
Birchwood by John Banville
Fox Island by Stephen Bly