The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (10 page)

This was true.

“Alec,” I said. “There must be better ways.”

“This is not a discussion, Henri. I asked about it, they answered. It’s a fucking
cultural
expedition. You’re going. Charm them, accept the check, and come home.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“No, you’ll do it. And now for some truly alarming news.”

I sat up.

“You left some notes here . . . on one of the procedure checklists. Three lines that you crossed out a half-dozen times. It’s a goddamned poem, Henri, and it’s awful. It
is
your handwriting. Don’t deny it.”

“That was supposed to be private.”

“Why?”

Liesel straddled me. “What’s supposed to be private?” She had leaned her head against mine and heard him.

“Are you there, Henri?”

“With a friend, yes.”

“
That
friend?”

The best way to take a friendly beating is in public, all at once. I held the receiver up so we both could listen. “Full disclosure,” I told her, “is the foundation of any relationship. Liesel Kraus, meet Alec Chin. Alec, Liesel. Speak up, Alec. We’re all just dying to hear.”

He cleared his throat. “No title. Here goes:

The festive ballroom.

Sunlight and shimmering birch.

I see her. Liesel!

“A haiku? Ms. Kraus, you’d better take care. He’s known you two weeks, and already he’s writing bad poetry. It’s a very bad sign.”

You didn’t.
She mouthed the words.

“Alec, it’s not that bad. It sounds better in Japanese.”

“You don’t speak Japanese.”

“It’s Sunday. Don’t you have something better to do?”

I hung up.

“Shimmering birch?” she said, kissing me. “I
like
it. No one’s ever written me poetry.” She pulled the sheet over us, then slid onto the floor.

“Your knees,” I said. I passed her a pillow.

“No, not that one. My mother embroidered it when I was born.”

I looked, but the string of letters didn’t add up to her name. A B L v K.

“The
A
is for Antonia,” she said. “I like Liesel better.”

“And the
B?
”

“My mother’s maiden name. Shh. Sit back and close your eyes. I’m busy.”

I
T
WAS
the best Sunday of my life. We lounged and made love and napped throughout the day. When we were hungry, I shuttled between the street vendor and the apartment, carrying bratwurst and sodas.

I endured one odd moment, though. Before breakfast, I left Liesel sleeping to investigate noises I heard coming from the living room, where I found a young woman in a maid’s uniform dusting furniture. I’d forgotten that Liesel told me to expect Dora. As I pulled the bedroom door closed behind me and introduced myself, I was the more bashful one. I’d thrown on a robe Liesel had left and, bare legged, nothing beneath but the suit I was born in, felt all but naked before this stranger. I was embarrassed for another reason, too. No one ever cleaned my apartment but me. My parents cleaned their own apartment. With Dora standing there in her black dress and white apron, I felt suddenly, strangely, like apologizing.

“Good morning, Sir. May I get you some coffee?”

I started to plump pillows on the couch and straighten papers.

“No, no. This is my job. Sit, please. Coffee? Will Miss Kraus be up soon?”

Her frankness was disconcerting. She knew what I was doing there. I knew she had a job to do. No doubt, she needed the money. But it was no easy thing for me to sit and let her tend to me. Finally she disappeared—to wash the kitchen floor and wipe down the counters.

I settled down to read the biography of Liesel’s father, which lay conspicuously on a coffee table.
Steel and Service: The Life of Otto von Kraus
was a hefty book with plenty of photos, some of Liesel and Anselm as children. I’d been at it for thirty minutes when the bedroom door opened and a yawning Liesel found me. She wore a silk robe cinched loosely at the waist with the Kraus logo at its breast.

She nodded at the book. “What do you think?” Without even looking to the kitchen, she called, “Dora, coffee, please. And grapefruit juice. Not the bottled kind. Fresh squeezed, if you would.”

In fact, I had formed an early opinion of the biography, having read fifty pages. It was a puff job written to make Otto von Kraus look heroic. Insider histories generally make founders into saints or geniuses. Still, the Kraus story intrigued me. Even allowing for exaggeration and the smoothing of rough spots, Kraus Steel had played a role in saving Europe from Soviet domination after the war. Without his tens of thousands of girders and beams and trusses at good prices, Europe could not have been rebuilt. Without durable buildings and bridges, no postwar economy could have put people to work. And without work and at least a dream of recovery, no idea would have been potent enough to resist the communist vision of the greatest good for the greatest number. Stalin would have won.

So despite the writer’s too generous use of
visionary
and
bold,
the Kraus biography had something to say about the mood of those years and the reconstruction of a devastated continent. Yet as I skimmed the book, nowhere did I find an honest accounting of Otto’s direct involvement in the war, nothing to suggest he’d gotten his hands dirty making steel for the Führer. Even so, I would read it through and find something good to say.

Dora arrived with the coffee and juice on a tray, with toasted muffins and jam set on fine china. “How are your studies going?” Liesel said.

“Very well, Ma’am. Thank you.”

“Henri, I’m paying Dora’s college tuition. Her parents worked for my family for years. Way back when, sometimes we played together, didn’t we?”

Dora was, perhaps, twenty. She smoothed her apron as Liesel spoke.

“Dear, please clean the toilet in my bedroom before you leave.”

I watched the young woman step into the bedroom and through the open door saw her picking up my boxer shorts and pants. I cringed as she folded them over a chair. At last she left, and Liesel and I fell into each other’s arms again, ransacking the freshly made bed. I drifted in and out of sleep, wondering if, and how much, Liesel knew about the breaking yard in Hong Kong. I said nothing because I wouldn’t dare risk ruining our day.

As it turned out, a phone call did that for us.

It was late afternoon by that point, the shadows creeping across the Englischer Garden. As Liesel listened, I watched her expression slide into something hard and focused. She reached for a pencil and paper. She said
yes
several times,
I understand. Of course.
She hung up.

“One of our iron mines in Uganda. An explosion and cave-in, with thirty men trapped. Anselm wants me to go out there to meet with government ministers.”

“You were just there. Did you have any idea?”

“That’s my brother’s end of the business. He does mines and blast furnaces. I do schools and clinics.”

“And you . . . you’ll be the pretty face.”

She paused. “He uses me like that sometimes.”

I could see, in fact, that she felt used; but she wouldn’t take me into her confidence just yet because I hadn’t earned that. Her eyes flashed as she packed her bags. Night fell, the streetlamps blinked on. Neither of us was happy when the driver arrived.

“Stay,” she said, heading out the door. “You’ll get the apartment in Dachau set up tomorrow. But stay tonight. It would make me happy.”

She gave me a key and left.

sixteen

T
he next day I met with the senior management of Steinholz Precision Auto Parts in Stuttgart, an hour’s train ride west and north of Munich. The Hong Kong contract needed some fleshing out, so after moving to the apartment in Dachau and inspecting the warehouse space that would become my lab, I took a ten o’clock train.

The trip to Stuttgart proved doubly useful because I’d be visiting the chemical supply house Anselm had recommended, not a ten minute walk from the Steinholz headquarters. It had been a while since I stood over a lab bench. Notwithstanding my concerns about how Anselm would ultimately put my work to use, I was actually excited to begin. New projects always get my attention. Anselm had already delivered eight personal computers, all new, to the warehouse. These were to be the patients on which I would perform a caustic surgery.

Even without conducting research into the chemical extraction of precious metals, I knew the process involved dissolving the metals into a solution with acids and then crashing them out of the solution with salts. I’d be working with a pantry full of nasty materials, and I made sure to put protective gloves and goggles on my shopping list.

As the Munich-Stuttgart train rumbled along, I continued to read the biography of Otto von Kraus, written by A. Bieler, an historian at Hanover. The
von
in Otto’s name was an old-world salute to nobility that Liesel and Anselm had dropped. There were
von
Habsburgs and
von
Rothschilds; apparently Otto was one of them, which I didn’t quite understand, given his humble origins. But I supposed great men have a habit of surprising.

My opinion of the biography didn’t change for reading more of it. Still, I enjoyed a middle section of glossy photos, especially the image of Liesel flanked by her brother and Otto at the lighthouse on Terschelling. The caption read 1960. They each held shovels for the groundbreaking of Löwenherz. Liesel, twelve or thirteen, all arms and legs with short wavy hair, wore fisherman’s boots that reached to her knobby knees.

From the photographs I could see that Otto Kraus was a pugnacious man. With his beefy hands and thick forearms, he had the look of a dockworker one would do well to avoid in a bar. Yet by the time this photo was taken, Kraus had moved well beyond fighting with his hands. By that point, he could pay lawyers.

Good for him, I supposed. He had waltzed into the lucrative business of steel fabrication after the war, anointed by the German, Flemish, and Dutch governments to be their provider of choice. How he had managed that was anyone’s guess. But the more contracts he won, the more furnaces he built, the cheaper his steel became, the more demand he created. All he had to do was deliver a reliable product, which by all accounts he did.

I saw in these photos the supreme self-confidence of a man who understood his advantage and would yield it to no one. Anselm had more refined edges, a university education that gave him a high-caste vocabulary and manners. But whatever toughness Anselm possessed, and I guessed it was plenty, he had learned from Papa. And Papa had learned on the farms and in the foundries of Lower Saxony. I read this:

Otto von Kraus was born in 1902 in the village of Beddingen, which after the municipal consolidation of 1942 became the town of Salzgitter. His parents farmed, but with iron ore deposits in the district, he worked autumns and winters at the local mills. These were the crucial years in which von Kraus developed his passion for steel.

Kraus’s rise had been meteoric. Prior to the four-year run-up to the war, the Reich depended heavily on iron ore shipped from suppliers beyond Germany’s borders, which Herman Göring regarded as a strategic weakness. A solution lay close at hand. Known since the 1300s for its low quality but plentiful iron ore, the mines of Salzgitter could provide for all of the Fatherland’s needs if a new method could be found to work that ore into usable steel. Kraus devised such a method, and Göring chose him to lead the new Reichswerke. Berlin invested millions, and Otto Kraus, the local man who knew the district and the mines, prospered.

Not without a cost, however. Kraus took what his biographer called “the necessary but unpleasant step” of joining the Nazi Party. He contracted with the SS for labor: Jews from the east and Slavs from the north—all from conquered territories—and express-shipped in cattle cars to the newly constructed Drütte concentration camp. In a triumph of efficiency, the SS built the camp inside the gates of the sprawling steel mill. Bieler noted that Otto was sickened at the necessity of working men like animals.

I had had enough. Between Bieler’s wretched mythmaking and the rhythmic shaking of the train, I was nodding off as I thumbed through the final section of the biography, devoted to the postwar triumphs of Kraus Steel. It was titled “Ten Witnesses and a Clean Slate.”

Many who directed the factories that supplied the Reich with war materiel faced prosecution for their use of slave labor. Of those, dozens escaped justice by passing as refugees and escaping the country. But Otto von Kraus, a principled man confident of his innocence, did not run. As would be expected, the Americans arrested him on a charge of war crimes. Yet one month into his captivity, and prior to his scheduled trial, military prosecutors received an extraordinary affidavit stating that von Kraus had acted honorably during the war. Within the areas of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring that he controlled, von Kraus treated workers with humane consideration. Indeed, he opened an infirmary on the factory grounds where the sick and the most seriously injured could recover.

Von Kraus could not change the deplorable conditions at the Drütte concentration camp; but even there he demanded that the SS increase food rations in order to give his laborers the strength needed to make steel for the Reich. The sad fact remains that many perished at Drütte, a loss that von Kraus mourned deeply the rest of his life.

When news spread that Allied forces had arrested Kraus, ten survivors of the camp approached a military judge and swore to the following:

1. Otto von Kraus resisted Nazi barbarism.

2. He treated workers the best he could in terrible circumstances.

3. He saved lives.

4. We know him to be a good and honorable man caught up in evil times.

As sworn to and attested by the undersigned in the presence of Col. Richard Starr, military judge.

I scanned the names and sat bolt upright as I read the last one:
Jacob Zeligman.

“Stuttgart,” called the conductor. “Stuttgart is next.”

I didn’t walk far along the station platform before finding a pay phone and calling Freda Kahane. The phone rang.
Pick it up,
I muttered. I reached into my pocket and held Isaac’s medallion.