The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (23 page)

“But you’re terrified of water.”

“I had a personal guide.”

“Dr. Gospodarek?”

He said nothing.

“What did you find?”

“I didn’t go into the sub. For a rookie, it’s too dangerous, too many cables and lines drifting around. But the divers tell me there are bones inside. It’s terrible, when you think about it.”

Alec had made some calls and discovered that Germany maintained a submarine base in Hamburg during the war, not even a day’s sail from Terschelling. Those subs left their pens for the North Sea en route to the Battle of the Atlantic with a mission to sink troop and supply ships. The sea lanes north of Terschelling must have swarmed with submarines.

“What no one understands,” said Alec, “is why a U-boat would get caught in such shallow water. A storm pushed the
Lutine
onto the shoal. There’s a category for that. But the sub would have to have motored in, unless she was disabled at sea and the tides pushed her.

“Geoffrey, our Brit, is on it. He’s contacted a German naval office with U-boat records. We don’t have a definitive ID yet, and the guys are still looking on their off hours. One team comes up from the
Lutine,
but instead of resting they get fresh tanks and go right back down to the U-boat. Meanwhile, there’s nothing but buttons and porcelain coming off the
Lutine,
and Hillary is the only one who isn’t pissed. Lloyd’s came and went with their film crew. They’re about ready to pull the plug if we don’t start hauling up gold within a few weeks. Which is fine with me. We’ve got plenty of other work now.”

Liesel, Theresa, and the children entered the conservator’s shed with Gospodarek. Schmidt remained on deck, watching crew members remove the sling from the railing they’d hauled up. He walked over to the pile of metal to inspect it, arms clasped behind him. He headed for Gospodarek’s shed just as the children emerged, running to him.

“Opa, we held a
gold
bar!”

Their grandfather made a show of excitement, but when we met at the crew’s quarters, the air had gone out of him. “We’re looking for something on the U-boat with an identifying number,” said Gospodarek. “The submarine lies about twenty-five meters east of the
Lutine.
We’ve got precise coordinates and are supposing the German navy will want to conduct its own dive. But we hope to give them a definitive ID so they can notify the next of kin.”

“The ID could come when?” said Schmidt.

She shrugged. “This afternoon. Or never. There’s no telling. But from a conservator’s standpoint, I hope we can nail this down.”

Schmidt was clearly moved by the pile of twisted metal. Perhaps he was recalling his own painful episodes thirty-five years earlier. I decided against asking him how he spent the war. On any side of a conflict, death had to be respected for the absolute, irreclaimable loss it was. Whether he fought with the Wehrmacht or my father fought with the Partisans, I imagined that cradling a dying comrade was much the same for any soldier. Blood is blood; and the mystery of where life goes when the body rattles is beyond our ken no matter which flag drapes the coffin. I figured he was a soldier and left it at that.

Friedrich was hopping in place with joy at having held real gold. “Pirates’ treasure!” he cried. “I held pirates’ treasure!”

In fact the gold wasn’t stolen and didn’t belong to pirates, but he didn’t need to know that. Dr. Gospodarek grinned and said nothing to change his mind. I liked her for it.

Before we left, Alec pulled me aside. “This Liesel Kraus. She’s all right.”

“Writing any bad poetry of your own?”

Dr. Gospodarek was laughing with the children.

“Very funny.”

“I mean it.”

“Then yes, as a matter of fact. I began something just yesterday.” He cleared his throat. “‘The man stood on the burning deck, his feet were raw with blisters.’ I can’t seem to find an ending, though ‘deck’ rhymes with ‘Gospodarek.’ What do you think?”

“I think spending two months in close quarters has agreed with you.”

He showed me a weather map.

“Henri, the sea’s calm today, no wind. Freaky calm. The barge feels like we parked it on the Champs-Élysées. But in three days, we’ll get a middling storm.” He pointed to a wavy line, a low-pressure system. “Next week, we’re looking at its big brother. To the west of that, in Greenland, there’s a system too large to fit on this map. Plus, I’m following three storms moving across the continent. If any of these meet up, I’ll evacuate.”

“You should.”

“It’s been a shitty summer for weather,” he said, grasping my hand. “But hey, the
Lutine’s
just about played out. Lloyd’s has its raw footage for a documentary and a few gold bars for a display case. Hillary’s got her buttons and brass fittings to study. I’ve got Hillary, you’ve got Liesel, and the divers have their U-boat. I’d say it’s time to get the hell off this barge.”

I
N
BED
that evening, Liesel propped herself on an elbow. “
Now
I know why my brother is so impressed with you.”

“It’s my personality. People say so all the time.”

“It’s your brain,” she said, poking me. “My brother and Viktor are both tickled you used our steel as anchors. You say the barge rides up and down on them?”

“At the four corners, that’s right. Looped with chains.”

“So the barge could just float off the anchor beams?”

“In a Biblical event, it could. Short of that—”

I threw a sheet over me and propped myself up. Ever since finishing the biography of her father, I’d been puzzling over something. “It must have taken a lot of money to start the steel mill,” I said. “I know the Reichswerke survived the war, but it was idle for two years. Where did your father get the money to fire up the furnaces? The fuel and the ore alone must have cost hundreds of thousands. Maybe more.”

“Why are you so interested?”

I shrugged. “I was just thinking about it, driving up here.”

“Viktor.”

“Viktor?”

“Papa knew steel and Viktor had money. They formed a business—a two-thirds, one-third split in ownership. Otto tinkered with new processes and won contracts. Viktor managed production and labor. He’s still in charge of that, the labor end of things. He hasn’t done such a good job, has he? Anselm’s speaking with him about that.”

We kissed.

“The children love you,” she said. She laid her head on my chest.

I combed her hair with my fingers. “It was a good day, wasn’t it?”

The curtains lifted into the room, the sea sheet-glass calm.

“Walk with me onto the flats in the morning, Henri. Low tide’s at five. We’ll get out and back before anyone wakes up. I need to go. I want you to come.”

“How could you
need
to go?”

“I’ll explain when we’re out there.”

So we rose before sunrise and made straight for Terschelling harbor. When we reached the docks, a glimmer of light had lit the east and we could see that the Wadden had retreated to wherever it went at low tide, leaving an absolute wilderness of raw, muddy seabed.

“Just a short trip out and back,” she promised. “A kilometer each way.”

I could only laugh again at my first steps. My feet sank, and the mud sucked at me as if I’d offended it.

Liesel tuned her radio to a frequency monitored by the coast guard and placed a call. On a second radio, she raised the lighthouse keeper.

“Ditmar, is that you? Liesel here. Going out from the harbor onto the flats, due south off the ferry landing for a kilometer, then home again. One hour out, one hour back. Will check in every thirty. Out.”

“Enjoy the morning,” came a crackling voice. “And tell your brother he owes me a beer. The Dutch kicked Germany’s ass at the World Cup. Over and out.”

I followed her, struggling to keep pace.

“Papa insisted that Anselm and I be able to come out here alone,” she said. “We all went on hikes together, and when Papa died Anselm took over my training. I was thirteen when he brought me down to the harbor at low tide and told me to walk until we couldn’t see each other. My instructions were to stand out here alone for ten minutes, then return. A year later, I crossed to the mainland by myself. I study the maps every summer and recertify as a guide, even if I don’t lead any hikes. The tidal creeks change, you know.”

She adjusted the straps on her pack.

We hiked for forty minutes on a muddy version of the Sahara. But this desert emerged only at low tide: no trees, no grass, nothing but mud and sky and a thin line at the horizon in all directions. One could almost call the Wadden flats unworldly, but this was the point: it is very much of this world and all the stranger for it.

Liesel stopped and said, “This will do.”

She planted her pole, threw her arms wide, and turned a circle.

“Try it. But keep your eyes open, unless you want to fall.”

I turned a circle.

“Now, tell me what you see.”

What I saw was nothing. I said so.

“Exactly! I come when my brain’s full up.”

I counted the ways. Uganda. Bangladesh. Otto. Viktor and his toxic fairy tales. The Reich. “It’s magnificent,” I said.

“What it is, is
nothing.
Sometimes, I need as much nothing as I can get.” She turned a circle again. “All right, tell me which direction you’d walk to get back. The mainland’s too far to reach before the flood tide runs. Which way? And don’t look at our footprints. That’s cheating. In a fog, you’d lose them in minutes.”

My watch read six-fifteen. If we were still on earth, the sun rose in the east. I wanted north. I pointed.

“Not bad. But you’d still miss the island by two degrees and drown. If you ever come out here, bring a compass.” She reached into a side pouch and gave me her spare. “Here, put it around your neck. When you leave the jump off—it was the ferry landing for us this morning—take a bearing. Memorize the compass point of where you start, or write that down. That’s your line home.”

“Got it,” I said.

“You’d better. You won’t outrun the tide otherwise.”

“I’d hardly come alone.”

She shrugged. “You never know. And now for the best part.” She raised her arms again. “You can scream here, really scream, and no one thinks you’re crazy because no one can hear. I want you to love the flats, Henri. I’ve never told anyone why I come alone or what I do. You’re the first. I’m going to scream, and you’re going to hear me. Is that okay?”

I grinned.

“I’m full up,” she said. “I need to scream like the world’s going to end. Scream with me, my love. Scream!”

thirty-one

T
he first thing I learned in my undergraduate statistics class is that correlation does not imply causation. No better proof of this law exists than a dog-mangled calf that aches at, is correlated with, the approach of bad weather. Sometimes, as much as a day in advance of a rain-lashing storm, my calf muscles seize up, causing me to limp until I work out the knots. Much as I may have wanted to claim super powers as a child, even I knew that my knotting muscles didn’t
cause
storms. Still, I enjoyed turning logic on its head every once in a while and pretending otherwise.

Thoughts of Eckehart Nagel continued to trouble me. The trip to Buenos Aires confirmed that unless my memory had altogether failed, I’d seen him in Vienna when I’d gone to meet Aaron Montefiore to ask about the affidavit and about Isaac. Nagel was lying, and the question was
why
. Though it was a violation of logic to think so, I connected his presence in Vienna to Montefiore’s death from a heart attack. It made no sense, and I wanted to be wrong. In the interest of proving I was, I returned to Bruges to test a grim hypothesis.

I stayed on in Harlingen when Liesel and the others left for Munich, explaining that Alec and I needed time to talk through our new contracts. This was only a partial lie. Alec took the morning ferry to town and we met over coffee to plot our strategy for hiring new engineers. When he returned to the platform, I rented a car and headed south.

I met Zeligman’s widow in the courtyard of her apartment building, very near where Jacob fell. Caretakers had finally scrubbed the stones clean, but we both found ourselves staring at the spot. She looked older than when we last met only weeks before. Without a shopping cart to hold her up, she could barely cross the courtyard to the stairwell.

Tosha wasn’t going to last long in that apartment. I asked if she needed help moving. She said she couldn’t possibly leave Jacob. We climbed the stairs, and she ordered me to sit while she prepared tea.

Zeligman’s chair remained by the open window. When alive, Jacob enjoyed a view across tiled rooftops and canals to the bell tower at Market Square. His wife had sewn a black ribbon from one frayed, upholstered arm of the chair to the other. On the seat cushion she’d propped a photo of him clutching a cap and standing on the sidewalk before their dry goods store. Tosha kept to a low-backed wooden chair positioned beside Jacob’s.

We drank tea on a sweltering day and didn’t say much.

When the time came, I showed her the photo Liesel had left with me from the Terschelling ball: a Liesel sandwich, with Hofmann to one side and Nagel and Schmidt to the other.

“No,” she said. “I’ve never seen these men. But the
Deutsch,
she was with you?”

“Think, Tosha.”

“How is Freda?”

“The same as before. Lonely.”

“Let me get you another cup of tea.”

“Please,” I said. “Think back to the day Jacob died. Might you have seen one of these men? A neighbor said she saw a deliveryman that morning, after you left for the market. Maybe you passed someone in the courtyard?”

I knocked on every door in the small apartment building with my questions and got the same vacant stare in response. I was hours at it, walking ever-wider circles from Zeligman’s apartment, presenting the photo, asking strangers if six weeks earlier they’d seen anyone who looked like the bald man dressed in a suit or, possibly, a deliveryman’s uniform.

I had come to Bruges to prove my theory wrong, and I had. Eckehart Nagel was not Menard Gottlieb. He hadn’t pushed Zeligman to his death. And Zeligman had called out God’s name, not his murderer’s, as he fell.
Good for Jacob,
I thought. Perhaps he’d seen Glory after all.