The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (2 page)

Everyone loves a treasure hunt, but I had been working so long and hard on the
Lutine
platform that I’d steered our conversation in other directions. I didn’t want to hear another word about the wreck. Yet I was eager enough to talk this time, for unless I was mistaken, she had taken an interest in me.

“We expect it’s the
Lutine
,” I said. I explained how the summer before, divers working for Lloyd’s had found a ballast pile: rocks on the seabed laid out in a line at roughly the same latitude and longitude noted in the logs of previous salvage attempts. Liesel was right, these were difficult waters. Storms covered the wreck with sand in some years and uncovered it in others, which explained why the water’s depth changed from one salvage to the next. Our divers were reasonably confident in naming the wreck, but not at all clear on how much sand we’d need to remove to get at her. We would know more when we started hauling up gold. Or not.

I had set the camera aside, but she continued watching me.

“Isn’t the world strange? My brother Anselm and I grew up dreaming about the
Lutine.
It’s one of the great stories of the island, you know. Papa brought us out here for summers when we were children, and we spent half our time digging up the beach, searching for treasure. There’s a mass grave for the
Lutine’s
sailors on the island. And now you turn up, an honest-to-god treasure hunter. Anselm’s going to love this.”

As Liesel and I talked, the flood tide was creeping over the mud flats. In thirty minutes, the seabed would be covered. In two hours, the Wadden would be deep enough for ferries to haul passengers and provisions from the mainland. The café was a tiny place with a dozen tables and large terra cotta planters overflowing with geraniums and impatiens. By a spigot outside the kitchen, two Norwegians howled as they hosed caked mud off each other. At the table beside us, one of the trekkers, three beers gone, began to croak a folk tune.

“What do you do?” I asked. She avoided the topic the day before with as much determination as I had avoided the
Lutine.

I waited. She offered nothing, and she must have realized I wouldn’t be filling in any blanks to make it easy on her. Finally, she spoke. “I help my brother with a company our father started after the war. Our parents died when I was young. Anselm’s fourteen years older. He raised me. When I completed school, I joined the family business.”

It was her turn to wait and watch. I talked about work, how Alec was the more natural manager and how I traveled in search of new contracts—and in fact would be leaving for Hong Kong in a few days.

Out of the blue, she interrupted me. “Come to a party with me tonight.”

I sat up.

“It’s Anselm’s birthday, and he’s hosting . . . an event. Some people are coming. I bought him a sweater, like I usually do. But you’re working on the
Lutine!
The two of you must meet, and I’ve been figuring a way. You’d make a much better present than a sweater.”

The color rose in her cheeks when I asked if she wanted me to wear a bathing suit and jump from a cake.

“No, it’s not like that,” she said. “You’d be my date. I’m afraid Anselm invited one of his friends. I’ve met this one a few times in Vienna, and I don’t much care for the man. But my brother’s persistent. He’s trying to marry me off to an über-industrialist. German, if possible. One after the next he brings them home. He says it’s time. You’d be—”

“Your excuse!” I slapped the table, grinning. “Better still, your
French
excuse. I’ll do my best to uphold the honor of my nation.” I thought it would be great, good fun. “I accept!”

But that very instant my spirits sank as I recalled Alec’s parting instructions:
five forty-five.
I couldn’t not show for the first dive on the wreck. I told her, and never have I regretted two words
—I can’t
—more. She looked disappointed, too, as if my company that evening might have meant something to her. “I can’t,” I added, “unless you can get me onto the dive platform at daybreak.”

Liesel stood. “My brother or I will motor you over. You’ll sleep at the house tonight. We’re back in business, Henri! I’ll introduce you as my French experiment.” She smiled and held out a hand to close the deal.

It was a moment that has stood in sharp relief to the forgettable details of everyday life. I knew it even then. Her outstretched hand struck me like the blank signature line of a contract I hadn’t thoroughly read. I was in the habit of being more careful than this. But there she was: smart, athletic, exotic (I’d never dated a German woman), taking a chance on me. And there I was, lightheaded from beer and, I admit, feeling the onset of an adolescent crush. My goal in setting out that morning had been to reverse the normal curve of my life, if only for a few hours, by acting more and thinking less. So I agreed and shook her hand. “These are my only clothes,” I said.

She reached for her pack. “It’s a fancier party than that, in any event. You can borrow one of my brother’s tuxedoes. He’s a bit taller, but I can hem the pants. Shall we go?”

Tuxedoes.

Two cars waited in the parking lot: one a rusted Citroën, an island junker, and the other a Mercedes roadster, top down with gleaming grillwork. I watched her approach the cars, betting which was hers.

I was wrong.

four

T
he convertible flew down the backbone of Terschelling headed east, past fields as green as any I had seen in Ireland. The wind roared. I counted windmills and farmhouses, but not sheep. There were too many to count, thousands dotting the pastures like woolly, fair weather clouds.

“So . . . what’s the family business?” I yelled.

Again, hesitation.

“Steel.”

Ten minutes earlier, as I helped Liesel stow our packs, she’d removed her guide’s jacket with its many zippered compartments to reveal arms as long and pale as those of the marble nudes I pretended to study at the Louvre as a twelve-year-old. I tried not to stare.

I cut angles through the wind with my hands. I considered how the barbed wire framed the pastures as if they were paintings. I watched everything but Liesel because what I wanted most was to study the sweep of her neck to her bare shoulder and the hollow at her collarbone.

“You’re shivering,” she said. “I’ll draw you a bath when we get home.”

Draw
me a bath? I added up what little I knew until I felt certain of my hunch and said, “Kraus Steel.”

She did not deny it. Her auburn hair was flying.

“Do you know,” I yelled over the noise, “that I used Kraus steel on the dive platform? I looked everywhere for marine-ready steel. You’re
that
Kraus!”

She shrugged, then smiled.

Now I could look. What an excellent coincidence it was. Liesel explained that she ran the family foundation, and I guessed— correctly—that she gave away more money each year than I would make in several lifetimes. She talked about her work, then stopped and pulled the car off onto a modest rise, little more than a mound that brought us to all of twelve or fifteen meters above sea level. On an island as flat as Terschelling, that offered a sweeping view to the east.

I wondered why we stopped until, gaping, I looked beyond her. “No way!” I said.

It made perfect sense.

“My family’s summer home.”

In the distance rose an estate built on dunes rolling down to the North Sea, as strange in that setting as the Emerald City rising over a field of poppies. The main house formed a massive gull’s wing, with a pair of two-story corridors angled east and west that met at a central, turreted tower: an arrowhead, essentially, fronted by a stone turret. I had seen this tower, an old lighthouse sitting atop a promontory formed by the letters K R A U S. It was the logo burned into every piece of steel I received while building the dive platform.

I counted seven fireplaces and, connected by a series of boardwalks to the main house, a dozen freestanding, single-story cottages cut into the dunes like satellites around a mother ship.

“Löwenherz,” she said.

My German was passable: “Lionheart?”

She nodded. My eyes followed a long stone jetty to a dock, where I saw a boat that serviced three yachts moored offshore.

Liesel removed her sunglasses and turned toward me. “I want to tell you something and ask you something.”

Before she began, she hit the hazard button with her fist and pointed. “This is what you’re dealing with. I need to get it out in the open because I’ve been around too long not to know that my family’s wealth screws things up. Half the men I meet see Löwenherz or my apartment in Munich and run because they’ll never make as much money as I do. The other half think they’ve hit the lottery, and I kick them out because I can’t stand them getting fat on bonbons and calling the staff at two in the morning for sandwiches. And this is good German stock I’m talking about. Which sort of man are you?”

It’s not a question often asked on a first date, and I didn’t walk around with a ready answer in my pocket. What kind of man was I? My father was a civil servant, an analyst for French naval intelligence; my mother, a university biologist. Our family read books, attended the symphony, and camped most August holidays in the mountains or at the beach. I owned a twelve-year-old Peugeot with torn upholstery. I owned no summer home and never knew anyone who
named
their home, summer or otherwise.

I told her this and said, “Does poverty disqualify me?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Not unless money disqualifies me.”

I worked out a math problem on the palm of my hand with an imaginary pencil. “I may be wrong,” I said, looking up. “But if half the men in your life run and the other half get bounced, you’re talking one hundred percent. This would mean there’s no man in your life. Currently.”

My hopes soared.

“My brother’s getting nervous I’ll die an old maid, if that’s your question. Which explains Anselm’s friend from Vienna. He comes from the family that owns Bayer Pharmaceuticals. You know, the aspirin people. Their summer home is larger than Löwenherz, and they call it a cottage.” She rolled her eyes. “There’s something else,” she said.

I waited.

“My father ran a steel mill during the war. In the late forties, factory owners all over Germany were being tried and sent to prison for using slave labor. Not Otto, because he saved people’s lives like that man Schindler. Ten witnesses came forward to vouch for him. They signed an affidavit, and he was never charged with war crimes. But he was a member of the Nazi party. Some people, some of the men I’ve met, can’t get past that. You should know now.”

I knew her father’s story, more or less, the instant I learned she was a Kraus. A few years earlier, there had been a boycott in Paris of products from German companies that profited through business with the Third Reich. The action was meant to force the companies to examine their wartime dealings, publish accounts, apologize and—if warranted—compensate slave laborers. The biggest names were easy to recall: Krupp, Siemens, and the I.G. Farben subsidiaries, including Bayer, which splintered after Germany’s defeat. Kraus Steel was mentioned, which I had reason to recall when ordering beams for the dive platform.

“Do you understand?” she said. “My father wore a swastika lapel pin.”

How could I understand? My father fought in the French Resistance. I was born in 1950 and had no direct memories of the war, though I may as well have lived through it for all of the stories I’d heard about the occupation. So, no, I couldn’t understand Liesel or the German view of things much beyond this: that as a child, when I asked my father what he did during those years, I got answers that made me proud. When Liesel asked, she got news of affidavits and proofs of innocence. She had inherited a heavy burden along with that mansion in the distance.

“I enjoy your company,” she said. “You liked me well enough yesterday, when I was just a guide. And today, in town and on the flats. You liked me, didn’t you?”

This was true.

“Well, then.” She hitched a thumb over her shoulder, pointing to Löwenherz. “Perhaps you could like me, even with that. But I want to make sure you understand. Hitler shook my father’s hand. My father held my hand as we walked on the beach or in the city. At the café, I shook your hand.” She fell against the seat as if she’d pushed a boulder up a hill, fully expecting it to roll back down and crush her. “That’s it. That’s all my monsters. I’m thirty years old. I was born in 1948, three years after the war, and sometimes I feel like I’m running from
my
Nazi past. It isn’t fair.”

It wasn’t.

“I’m no German industrialist,” I said.

“Thank God.”

“Your brother won’t be pleased.”

“Sure he will. You work on the
Lutine.
That trumps everything.”

Yachts rode their moorings as the tide ran. Farther out to sea, sails leaned into the wind while under the platform, a lost ship waited to yield her secrets. The broad Terschelling sky held it all: Liesel’s burden and Liesel’s beauty, honest work for my young firm, and the memory of a war that would not let go.

“I do have a question,” I said.

She turned, her eyes red.

“I know we’re playacting tonight. But will I have to kiss you?”

five

T
he estate buzzed with guests and staff preparing the banquet hall and ballroom. Anselm had run a bus service from the ferry landing that afternoon, and some thirty couples would be staying the night. I nodded my hellos to several as I made my way to the beach, where, after the promised bath and a change into borrowed clothes, I walked the tidal line.

Not five minutes later, I saw a boy, seven or eight years old, running with arms spread wide, making airplane sounds. He buzzed in and out of the dunes, onto the open beach, then back again making
eerrrrrm,
zooming noises. When he saw me, he banked right with a long sweep toward the sea, then back to his visitor. He was flushed and sweating when he arrived, his hair matted with sand.

This could only be Anselm’s son. Liesel had run through the family I’d be meeting, and only one eight-year-old with wavy blond hair was on the roster: Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Kraus. He’d blown through one knee of his pants and stained his otherwise white shirt purple with a juice of some sort.