The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (17 page)

Ten witnesses had sworn he was; but I didn’t know, and I didn’t think that Bieler knew or had even pursued the issue. The main thing was that Liesel didn’t know, not really, though she spoke of her father with the reverence one reserves for saints and lesser gods.

“Damn!” I heard her shout from the bedroom.

I found her shaking an upended suitcase, searching for something that clearly wasn’t there. “Oh, please! I left my birth control pills on the counter in Munich so I wouldn’t forget them. I forgot them! And now that you’re healing, I had such plans for us.”

“
That’s
a loss,” I said. I must have been feeling better.

“No, it doesn’t have to be. But there’s no pharmacy on the island. Did you bring any . . . protection?”

I hadn’t. When some very small, disciplined part of my animal brain managed to pause that first time beneath the pines and ask what we were doing for birth control, she managed a few syllables that both urged me on and told me not to worry. I dropped those concerns then and forever.

But Liesel wasn’t one to let a package of birth control pills back in Munich defeat our holiday. She removed her blouse and unsnapped her bra. She shimmied out of her jeans. “We’ll be creative,” she said, “but I’m keeping my panties on just in case.”

“Give me a little credit.”

She grinned. “You’re clueless. It’s
me
I don’t trust. I’m not taking a chance on children.”

It wasn’t the moment to ask. But I ignored the second, nearly dominant brain between my legs and said, “Why not?” Her hair tumbled across her shoulders. Her eyes, bright and playful, held secrets, though she’d not keep them for long. One curve flowed to the next: supple neck to shoulder, shoulder to flank to hip, the coastline of a continent I would never tire of exploring. I felt the sea’s thunder in my chest and my own rushing blood. I began pulling off my clothes. “I’ve watched you with Friedrich and Magda,” I said. “You’re brilliant with children. They love you.”

“Other people’s children, Henri. Not mine. I’m contemplating an operation, you know, because these pills are a damned nuisance. In any event, if I had children they’d give you competition for these.” She took my hands and placed them on her breasts. “Stop talking.”

T
HAT
SUMMER
, I personally brought out the worst in the North Sea. The evening before we planned to motor out to the platform on
Blast Furnace,
my aching calf predicted violent weather. Sure enough, a low pressure system out of the south forced us to delay the trip, which hardly broke my heart. Alec and I spoke by phone; he urged me, again, to visit Buenos Aires even though I explained my plan to mail a revised set of specs and save the Argentine government money.

“You don’t get it,” he said. “They
want
to trot us out before a general or two.” He laid out all the reasons it had to be me, and while I made no promises, I told him I’d reconsider.

The good news was that the conservator, Hillary Gospodarek, had confirmed the frigate beneath the barge was the
Lutine.
Apparently, Alec had lost his patience and took a hammer and chisel to the limestone accretion on one of the cannons. Before Gospodarek could stop him, the limestone fell away to reveal a perfectly cast fleur-de-lis.

The team was over the right ship, but the
Lutine
wasn’t yielding much in the way of treasure: a few handfuls of coins and a gold bar or two. Besides that, the divers had found beads and crockery, nothing much to set anyone’s heart thumping.

Alec had a keen sense of marketing, and he tried out an idea on me that I thought was brilliant. From a commercial standpoint, the
Lutine
expedition was shaping up to be a failure. It had cost Lloyd’s at least a million and was yielding trinkets. Alec read the situation and suggested they turn the dive into a BBC documentary that would interweave a bona fide treasure hunt with the nearly 300-year history of the venerable insurer.

“Lloyd’s should send a film crew,” he said. “Win or lose on the gold, they could tell a first-rate story. They could call it
The Last Grand Salvage.
People will eat it up.” And he was right. He made the call, and a week later Lloyd’s got back to him with news that they’d hired a production team. More than a century earlier, salvagers had found the
Lutine
’s bell, which Lloyd’s rang in its underwriting room on learning news of the ships it insured—once for bad news, twice for good. The documentary would open with a shot of the bell, they said, then plunge into the sea after one of the divers for a shot of the ballast pile. As conservator, the well-spoken Gospodarek would take a star turn. Alec would get a cameo.

The real mystery of the dive was turning out to be the rusted metal the team had been hauling up from the seabed. More and more, the curved bulkheads and fragments of a steering mechanism suggested a military vessel, possibly a submarine. They hadn’t found the main wreck, though it had to be near.

“I don’t get it,” said Alec. “The water’s too shallow for a sub to be anywhere close. Anyway, it’s good entertainment. A solid month of finding shards of glass hasn’t exactly lit the place up. Go to Argentina,” he advised, signing off. “And to tell you the truth, stay away. Every time you get within a hundred kilometers of this platform, the weather goes to shit.”

twenty-four

I
knew Bruges from visits as a child. Each August, for fifteen years, my parents would pack the car for a holiday by the sea, and we’d stop overnight in the old Flemish capital. These annual visits had a comfortable rhythm. We’d stroll along the canals of the old city, making the usual stops at the chocolatier’s and lacemaker’s. At the one, I would gorge myself as my parents debated which was the superior chocolate, Belgian or Swiss; at the other, my mother would watch the women at their lace tables, their hands a blur of motion as they worked the wooden bobbins and pins. Each August she would purchase a doily that she’d tuck into a drawer and never use.

Because I was so fond of Bruges, I made a point when starting out in business to pursue Requests for Proposals issued by the city or companies in the area. Happily, in 1977, the city’s public works department issued an RFP for consulting engineers to manage the ongoing maintenance of stone walls lining the canals. The mortar was in constant disrepair, and the town budget, already distressed, had money enough to hire a consulting engineer but not new, full-time staff. I made the trip from Paris to plead our case and was rewarded with a modest contract. When the dive on the
Lutine
ended in September, I planned to live in Bruges and direct three construction crews. I would have full authority to reinforce canal walls and bridges with steel, as long as all modern touches were faced with stone and continued to
look
old. Alec, meanwhile, would travel to Hong Kong and oversee the project for our client in Stuttgart.

On our return from Terschelling back to Munich, we turned west at Cologne. I found a hotel with a car park on the rim of the old city center and walked arm-in-arm with Liesel to our first stop, Dumont Chocolatier on the canal by Saint Anne’s Church. With its striped brown and white awning, Dumont’s looked no different than it had twenty years earlier. When we stepped inside and the smell of cocoa and butter hit me, time collapsed. I had pressed my nose against these very same display cases, studying which treats I’d claim as reward for enduring a long car ride. The shop was little more than a narrow, brightly lit corridor that opened in the rear to a larger working kitchen from which escaped the rich, simmering smells of chocolate ganache.

Anton Dumont, fourth-generation chocolatier, charmed Liesel and astonished me by saying, “I know you.” It was a friendly, preposterous greeting reserved for his out-of-town customers. But then he added, “All you Frenchmen come rumbling through here in August. You were on crutches one year. Is it true? I have a good memory, you know. And you remember me, perhaps?” He patted his ample belly, his apron smeared with that day’s confections. He
had
remembered. That was the summer I recuperated from the Rottweiler attack.

We bought far too much chocolate, and I introduced Liesel to the same café where my parents and I would sample each other’s selections. Pancake flat, old Bruges was timeless with its churches and canals and crumbling bricks. A carillonneur sat at his console in the playing cabin at the tower in Market Square, ringing his bells, first practice scales and then “Ode to Joy.” Our café table wobbled on the cobblestones, and I folded a matchbook cover, as my father had, to steady it. A bargeman waved to the chocolatier, who stood at the door of his shop surveying a scene that hadn’t much changed in centuries. People lived in Bruges as if on a stage set. I had come and left and returned, and the illusion was complete: I had aged, but the city hadn’t. My life was unspooling, and I realized I no longer wished to live it alone.

Liesel drank her coffee, and I avoided saying what was plainly in my heart. It was too soon for such words, so I said nothing even though our visit to the chocolatier’s marked an anniversary of sorts. We were one month strong. I could imagine years, but I said nothing.

“Are you certain you want to meet her?” I said. “I could ask about Otto for you, and about her husband and the affidavit. It should take an hour, then we’ll spend the day here.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I
want
to meet her.”

“Liesel.” I chose my words with care. “I’ve talked with many people about the war. I’ve spent years trying to fill in the blanks about Isaac and Freda. Something ugly almost always crawls out from beneath these rocks when I turn them over. It’s seldom uplifting or pleasant. Get another espresso, and I’ll meet you back here.”

“Stop,” she said. “You’re upsetting me. I’m going.”

F
REDA
HAD
warned me that Tosha Zeligman was a nervous, fearful woman. “When I left her, she was all in pieces,” she’d said. “Maybe this isn’t such a good time to visit. Tosha’s been rambling, talking about Jacob as if he’s still alive.”

“Did you discuss the old days?”

I could hear Freda in the kitchen, the water running. A pot clanked in the sink.

“No, no. She was hardly ready for that. Isaac took over a year to die. We were ready. It was sad, but he was suffering and I prepared myself. Jacob was gone in an instant. Tosha left for the store, she returned, and he was dead. She was never exactly a stable woman, Henri. But this? Who can deal with this?”

I had called from Terschelling. Liesel was on the beach, in her sun hat, the breeze lifting the edges of her skirt and blouse, the surf pounding behind her. I stood at the rail of the balcony, in her apartment. She turned and waved.

“Henri, what is it you want? What do you expect Tosha to tell you?”

“What Jacob knew.”

“Boychick, I would slap your handsome head if you were in this kitchen. It’s the same story for anyone who survived. We suffered, we lived. What exactly do you need?”

I had no answer other than the medallion.

“Isaac wanted me to know,” I said.

And she: “Leave it. If he wanted you to know, he would have told you.”

“I can’t leave it, Freda. I’m sorry.”

“Then be careful. And it’s not you I’m thinking of. Tosha breaks easily.”

Z
ELIGMAN
’
S
WIDOW
left the door to her apartment unlocked, with a note that I should ring the bell and enter. We found her sitting by the window where Jacob had fallen to his death. I presented a box of chocolates. Liesel offered flowers, and we waited until Tosha was willing to speak.

“He was reading here,” she said, swaying, dabbing her eyes. “In this seat, his chair. I left him sitting, reading his newspapers like always. On Thursdays and Mondays, I pushed my cart to the market. We waved to each other. I was there—” she pointed to a spot in the courtyard. “He was here. And when I got back, I saw police in the courtyard and upstairs, leaning out our window. They carried him off in an ambulance.”

I held her hand. Liesel stood at my shoulder.

Freda had told me that for nearly three decades the Zeligmans ran a dry goods store down the street from their apartment. Not more than a year ago they’d sold it to a young family and retired. “She’s a crier and a worrier,” Freda warned. “She’ll drive herself mad before long.”

The widow looked well on her way.

They were originally from Poland; but having lived in Belgium for decades, the Zeligmans also spoke a reasonable amount of French and German. The note on the apartment door had been in French, so that was what we spoke. She had remembered me when I called the week before, and said she would make a friendship cake for the occasion, like in the old days.

In person, she didn’t look capable of baking or much else. She stared into the courtyard, where her husband’s blood had stained the flagstones, moaning, “
Vey iz mir
.” Woe is me.

And then she was up, insisting on serving tea. She worried over our cups, which were dainty, undersized things decorated with Flemish landscapes. I could imagine Jacob attempting to negotiate a proper tea with his wife and throwing his cup against the wall in frustration. Tosha added sugar to her tea, then milk, then more sugar before making a face and pouring it all into a potted plant.