The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (11 page)

“Henri! Are you upstairs? Come, visit.”

I asked the unlikely and heard the improbable. She was crossing the kitchen; in the background a tea kettle whistled. “We buried Isaac two weeks ago, and here I am leaving to sit shiva with Jacob’s wife? God isn’t kind.”

She had plenty of evidence for that.

“It’s true, Jacob survived Drütte. He and Tosha talked about it all the time. But Isaac? You know he wasn’t a talker. When I asked Jacob to tell me how he knew him, he said ‘Ask Isaac.’ Some kind of agreement they had, that he wouldn’t say. It was that way for thirty years, Henri. I would go to Isaac and say, ‘Tell me about the war, what you saw.’ And he would say, ‘Why, so we can compare whose horror was more horrible?’ He wouldn’t do it. I could never get him to talk, aside from the fact that I was his second wife and that he had children once. Sons.”

She waited. “Visit, Henri.”

“You know I will.”

“Give me a few weeks. Tosha wasn’t a well woman even when Jacob was alive. I may need to stay.”

P
IGEONS
ROOSTED
in the rafters of the station and pecked at trash in the train beds. Businessmen folded papers beneath their arms, waiting for the first-class coaches to open, and suddenly I felt both alone and scared. The years collapsed and I saw these same men and women in winter, yellow stars sewn onto their coats. I heard orders and harsh, guttural shouts. Truncheons fell. Old men dropped. Soldiers pushed and clubbed hundreds into trains meant for cattle.

Someone tapped my shoulder. “Are you done? The phone?”

The possibility that Isaac had worked alongside Jacob Zeligman at Drütte, making steel for Otto von Kraus, struck me dumb. Had they occupied the same square of German soil at the same moment? I found myself wishing that Kraus was the hero his biographer made him out to be. Never mind that his steel was turned into Hitler’s tanks and bombers. Von Kraus was part of the Nazi apparatus, but he could also have been one of the righteous who saved Jews at great peril to themselves. These people existed, and I desperately wanted Liesel’s father to be one of them.

Zeligman could no longer help establish that; nor could he tell me Isaac’s story. But others from Drütte, the witnesses who signed the affidavit, could. I decided to find them.

seventeen

T
he noble metals do not degrade in the presence of air and water. A chemist would explain by saying they don’t oxidize easily. That’s why jewelers prefer gold, silver, and platinum over steel, which rusts, and copper, which turns green. Find a gold necklace in a 3,000-year-old crypt or salvage a saltwater-soaked guinea from the
Lutine,
and the gold will shine sun-yellow. Or spray a thin layer of gold or platinum to connect circuits on a computer’s motherboard and the circuits will transmit electrons faithfully for years until some other part of the board fails.

I understood the risks Anselm’s assignment posed the moment I accepted it. My strategy would be to use great care in pursuing two extraction techniques: a chemical approach using acids and salts and, more promising for production at larger scales, electrolysis— running a current through a chemical bath to release metal ions.

The chemical supply house delivered my order the day after my visit to Stuttgart, and I spent the remainder of that week assembling shelves and directing the small army of plumbers, electricians, and carpenters that Anselm had made available to me.

I had claimed one corner of an otherwise enormous, vacant warehouse located in the suburb of Dachau, by a train yard. Kraus Steel owned ten of these warehouses and had converted one to furnished apartments for employees cycling through the Munich headquarters from the far-flung corners of the empire. My situation was ideal, with a comfortable apartment and a four-minute walk to the lab. I took a long-term rental on a car and settled in for work.

With Liesel in Uganda for at least two weeks, I had no obligations other than building the lab. At the end of the first week, given all the assistance I received, the only missing piece was a proper ventilation hood. This would arrive the following Thursday and, in its place, I bought two box fans that I set in the windows to draw fumes from the workspace.

I was proud of my effort and took photos with my trusty Minolta as proof I had built a serviceable lab. In neatly labeled trays were my pipettes, graduated cylinders, stir plates, and beakers. I had purchased carboys for hazardous waste. I set up a desk with a lamp and a phone. I read everything I could about the extraction of gold from mixed materials, a process that turned out to be relatively straightforward, though by all accounts dangerous.

When I had nothing left to read and no shelves to build, I prepared for my trip to Buenos Aires. I copied our designs for the dive platform and made notes for likely alterations. The Argentine wreck, the
Preciado,
sat at the bottom of a river, unlike ours at the bottom of the sea. They would need a barge with a shallower draft, which affected both the size and capacity of the crane they would use, as well as the number of sheds that could be built. I re-spec’d the barge and prepared a presentation.

By the following Monday, I had nothing to do but wait for the vent hood. All that was required was that I be patient. I could have devoted my days to walks in a park or reading a novel or technical journals. But I’ve never been one for sitting idly. So I set to creating a supply of aqua regia, one part nitric acid to three parts hydrochloric acid. The “king’s water” is a solution strong enough to dissolve most noble metals.

I knew full well what a mistake in mixing these acids would mean, and I believed in safety protocols. If I checked my lists another dozen times I couldn’t have been more prepared. I slipped on my goggles, my flame-retardant lab coat, my rubberized apron, and my nitrile gloves. I turned on the box fans for exhaust.

I did everything according to plan, except wear a gas mask. The man at the supply house had forgotten to mention I might need one, in addition to the ventilation hood, or I had forgotten to ask. Either way, my sworn enemy couldn’t have planned a more potent attack if he’d shot a canister of chlorine gas into my lab from an opposing trench. In my haste to begin work, I inadvertently produced a weapon of mass destruction.

All by myself.

I mixed the acids too quickly or overlooked a drop of water in one of the beakers. Whatever the cause, when I poured the nitric into the hydrochloric, the mixture fumed. The first whiff knocked me backwards, the chlorine blistering my throat and lungs. I collapsed in a fit of coughing, but not before dropping the beakers into the steel tub, which had enough residual water to create a billowing, yellowish-green cloud.

I clawed my way across the warehouse floor. I reached the wall and flung open a window. Breathing seared my lungs. I hacked into the sleeve of my lab coat and saw phlegm and blood. My eyes burned. Had I not worn goggles, the gas would have blinded me.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I sucked down ragged breaths and stared across the tracks to a stand of trees, grateful that I could see them.
Stupid.

W
ITHIN
THE
hour, still spitting blood into a handkerchief, I fashioned a makeshift mask, wrapping wet towels around my mouth and cinching them in place with my belt. Protected, barely, I vented the chlorine and neutralized the acids. Within an hour, I could feel my lungs clearing and decided against a trip to the hospital. I staggered, instead, to my apartment and took a hot shower.

As I gulped down the cleansing steam, I could imagine no likely scenario in which Anselm’s salvage of circuit boards would leave his laborers unharmed. I’d had protection, and look what happened. They would have none, and they would be maimed or killed. Unless, that is, I reported faithfully on the dangers and convinced Anselm to take precautions. I made a conscious choice to continue my work and deliver the report he’d asked for, but with a detailed appendix titled “Safety.”

Still, I imagined the worst. The men who’d work at an electronics salvage yard in the People’s Republic of China would be desperate to feed their families. They would sign whatever document Kraus Steel waved in front of them for the privilege of navigating a landscape of chemical filth. Anselm was going to create a dead zone more toxic than his ship-breaking facility in Hong Kong.

I showered until the water ran cold. I damn near cried from exhaustion and from anger at my stupidity, both for having injured myself and for having accepted the job. The physical symptoms would clear in a few days. Weighing more heavily was the question of what to do with what I’d learned.

Alec would have told me to shrug my shoulders and get over it, that business requires the occasional bending of one’s finer instincts. My father would have lectured me on the dangers of doing business with Germans, even thirty years after the war. I couldn’t confide in Liesel because I had spent no more than a handful of hours, albeit intimate hours, with her. What would I have said, in any event? That I suspected her brother of a crime he had not yet committed?

I fell asleep spitting blood and phlegm into a handkerchief.

eighteen

I
had no business returning to the lab before I could mix aqua regia with a steady hand. Each time I coughed and tried to clear my lungs, I’d risk splashing hydrochloric and nitric acids. I’d had enough of that. With Liesel gone for another week and no compelling reason to stay in Munich, I left for Stuttgart, where I would sign the revised contract with Steinholz Precision Auto Parts.

My pallid color and cough alarmed my friends at Steinholz, who accepted my explanation that a bad allergic reaction had sickened me but that I was on the mend. We clinked glasses and agreed to break ground on the new Hong Kong facility the following April, after Alec and I worked with their architects on a design that would maximize workflow. We parted company with earnest hopes all around: for Steinholz to save on labor costs and for me to ensure that its laborers didn’t lose in the deal, as they did with Kraus. The Steinholz manager seemed a decent enough fellow. Then again, so did Anselm.

I made a day of it in Stuttgart. Just north of the city lies the town of Ludwigsburg, home of the Zentrale Stelle, the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. I went in search of contact information for the nine remaining witnesses who, after Zeligman, might have known Isaac Kahane—possibly at Drütte. I assumed that if the Allied military authorities had contemplated a case against Otto von Kraus for the use of slave labor, the Nazi archive at the Zentrale Stelle would have a file. The original affidavit might have recorded the last known address of each signatory. Without these, I would never find the remaining witnesses; without the witnesses, I had little hope of reconstructing Isaac’s life during the war. The Zentrale Stelle would have answers, or not. It was a slender connection, but a connection. I boarded the local train to Ludwigsburg.

The Archive was located on the site of a former women’s prison. Set behind tall stone walls, the main building was a three-story behemoth retrofitted with bulletproof glass and security cameras. In former times, the keepers wanted to prevent prisoners from breaking out. These days, they defended against former Nazis and neo-Nazis intent on destroying evidence of war crimes. For the Archive stored millions of records and photos neatly filed on metal shelves, waiting for prosecutors to dig, discover, and bring charges. Extremists would have counted it a banner day to see the building burn.

I had called the day before requesting research privileges. As I stood before a steel gate, I announced myself by speaking into a call box, then looked squarely into the lens of a security camera. A guard buzzed and pointed me down a long hallway to the office of Gustav Plannik, the director. Off this hallway I found numerous small rooms, former prison cells.

Plannik sat in a double-sized cell, bent over a desk stacked with black and white photos. He waved me over as he held a magnifying glass to one and positioned it so that I could see a German soldier posing beside a gallows occupied by six corpses. Plannik taped that photo to a sheet on which was typed a place, a date, and a name.

He rose from his chair. “I’m glad to meet you, Herr Poincaré. Names to faces,” he said. “It’s what we do, attach one to the other. This particular crime occurred outside Lyon. In the Klaus Barbie years, the hanging of partisans, and worse, was commonplace. If by markings on the uniforms or, sometimes, a staff car, we can identify the unit, we can sometimes identify a perpetrator. We Germans have kept very good records, even when killing people. It makes my job easier.”

Tacked to the walls of his office were maps of occupied Europe, a pyramid detailing the chain of command in the Gestapo and the same for the SS. The fourth wall had a double-windowed view of a courtyard and an apple tree. The window was open, and I could hear birdsong and the chattering of squirrels.

“Drütte,” said the director. “After you called, we pulled together files on the camp for you. It was one of the eight sub-camps of Neuengamme.
Vernichtung durch Arbeit.
Do you know the term?”

I apologized for my German.

“It’s peculiar to the war. It means ‘extermination through labor.’ The workers lasted on average four months. There are some stories of survival, of course, but these are the exception. We’ve set up an office for you with several hundred photos and fifty or so files. We’ve also included a sheet to help you with our reference system— a series of colored index cards. Files lead to other files lead to others. Pay attention to the color markings. Making copies is no problem.”

As the Archive’s founding director when it opened in 1958, Plannik wore three hats. He was a conservator who preserved documents, a librarian who indexed documents so historians could find them, and a jurist who supervised prosecutors as they conducted preliminary investigations into war crimes.

Plannik was a balding, fleshy man with a heavy face and black-rimmed glasses that magnified agile but tired eyes. He eased himself into his chair. “Here at the Zentrale Stelle, we maintain one of the largest catalogs of misery ever assembled. It’s a peculiar but necessary sort of treasure, Herr Poincaré, and you’re very welcome to dig. My office door is open.”